Looming huge for school systems across the nation are unprecedented budget cuts. Teacher assistants have been slashed, classroom sizes have increased and other key personnel have had to go. In North Carolina, the legislature wants to cut pre-school and that is just plain stupid! Ultra-conservatives the likes of Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, think that pre-school is a form of governmental brainwashing and that children should only be educated by their parents in the early years!! I think anyone in public education knows without a doubt the importance of helping disadvantaged children early. We will never eradicate the inevitable “gap” between the haves and have nots, but early childhood programs have long been critical in at least helping to even the playing field. Hopefully between “The Judge” and our governor, funding will be restored!
The Teaching Fellows has been eliminated and this is so very shortsighted. The Teaching Fellows program has provided a high-quality pipeline of teachers for schools in North Carolina for over 25 years!!! Of course there are other cuts, but these seem to me to be the worst of the worst!
Then there was the “Save our Schools” rally in Washington, DC. It was like the “Woodstock” of public education!! Diane Ravitch, Jonothan Kozol and Deborah Meier, all of whom I have followed and considered to be among the best thinkers about education of my lifetime, were among the featured speakers.
The platform of the rally centered on public schools as the cornerstone of our democracy and with the changing demographics of society we must become more inclusive. It becomes imperative to differentiate education so ALL students can retain their right to free and appropriate education. Much was discussed about poverty as the root of the achievement gap……period! I could not agree more!
At the rally, advocates for doing away with high stakes accountability as we know it, were in full force.
Of course we need to be held accountable but we really have gone too far.
Look at the testing scandals that have been uncovered this summer. These blatant acts of cheating are a result of the culture of fear built by high stakes testing. And now we have the US Secretary of Education unilaterally overriding the federal legislation No Child Left Behind due to the fact that so many schools are failing under the recently upped requirements????? “The current law serves as a disincentive to higher standards, rather than as an incentive,” Mr. Duncan said. Come on Arnie, when you play basketball and keep missing the basket, you don’t move the net!! You must improve your shot!!!! (Well, maybe in light of all the cheating problems, this is just as well.) But is it the best thing for our kids? We are really jerking our teachers, kids and parents around in the midst of such political pandering.
But ahhhhh……fall is coming! Cooler temperatures and thinking may prevail! School will begin anew and the summer of our discontent will be over. And then you begin to discover that “….the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Sad, but true!
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