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How Do You Fix Education?
TaeKwonDood writes "Carl Wieman is the 2001 Nobel Prize winner in Physics but what he cares most about is fixing science education. The real issue is, can someone who went through 20 years of science education as a student, lived his life in academia since then and even got a Nobel prize get a fair shake from bureaucrats who like education the way it is — flawed and therefore always needing more money?"
The problem is easily solvable; it's just the NEA in California bought an election to kill it. Break the monopoly of the public school system and give parents real choice in education and values.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
For starters abolish/disband or otherwise un-empower the NEA that makes it next to impossible to fire bad teachers and reward and retain the good ones. No amount of curricular advancement/improvement/modernization or money dumped into school districts' coffers will ever have a significant impact on the quality of education if the teachers are poor quality and/or uncaring. The NEA, IMO, has done more to hinder education than any other cause.
And before anyone starts with "But teachers are underpaid and *need* the unions!" I'd like to point out that the NEA has been around for a few decades now, and teachers are still underpaid.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Get the government out of it. We need free market competition. Let failing schools fail. Let failing teachers get fired. Let failing students get expelled. Let schools compete to provide the best education for the lowest cost. Let voluntary charities choose who is most in need and able to benefit from education charity. Education is too important to let government continue to completely cluster f*** it. Won't somebody please think of the children?
Has it ever occurred to any of you geniuses that NCLB is doing exactly what its architects intended? And that the previous 30 odd years of Conservative hegemony (Always remember, both Clinton and Carter were very Conservative. Especially compared to oh say, Jack Kennedy, or Eisenhower, or LBJ). They hate public education. Hate it. It's dangerous. Effective public education means that people can succeed. That status can be based on achievement, rather than birth. Thus there has been a concerted effort to undermine, and ultimately destroy public education in the USA, and its working remarkably well.