On Mar 22, 2008, at 3:12 AM, Byron Jeff wrote: > This in fact shows the point that I'm trying to make. When a market > exists > to serve the public good, then a level of accountability, a > standard, is > established to make sure that the safety of that product is > acceptable. > Houses cannot be purchased without inspection. Meat is inspected. > Drugs > must be approved by the FDA. Electronic products must get UL and FCC > interference approval. Cars are tested endlessly. The list goes on > and on. You can still get a bad house that's falling down, meat that will poison you, drugs that will kill you, electronics that will hurt you, and cars that are unsafe. The only way these inspection processes work is that they CONTINUE after the product is sold, and products can be pulled from the market. This doesn't work very well with education and human beings in society, so you can't use those models to build schools! People are not "products" in that sense. They ARE however, "products of their upbringing" and that leads to comments below about how poor a job parents are doing in this district you used to base your discussion on, in Georgia. > So while the consumers of these products are not necessarily up to > speed on > the details, they have a reasonable assurances that the product is > safe. This is also a horrible analogy, as James' and other stories of ENGAGED parents have shown. Education is a life-long process of learning and the love of learning that must be taught as a valuable thing to the child from an early age, and reinforced over time. Parent's can't and never will be able to just drop off the kids at "McSchool" one day and get back a well-educated child by sitting around pretending they can not be involved in the process and shipping kids off to school for "education" to be "installed". Some of the most brilliant people in history that did amazing things, had parents or grandparents who were completely uneducated but instilled in the child the NEED for education. Even thinking about saying a responsible parent of any child would EVER be "not necessarily up to speed on the details" of their child's education shows the REAL problem... and it's sickening. But you can't fix that in the schools. That get fixed in society as a whole. Perhaps let's grade the parents and factor in the community involvement as a multiplier against the standardized tests the kids have to take. Embarrassment is a good motivator. Public scores of community involvement in each school would sure be interesting in the newspaper. > The same goes for schools. School systems must be accredited in > order to > function. The county that I work in, Clayton County Georgia, just > had their > systemwide accreditation revoked for gross system mismanagment by the > school board. Their students can no longer get into colleges, cannot > receive scholarships, and the like. It's the kiss of death for a > school > system. Sounds like the system worked as is should have. Bad for the kids, but the parent's weren't responsible citizens of their community, if it got that far. The parents WERE NOT ENGAGED in those districts if it got all the way to the point where the district lost accreditation!!! School Board meetings are open to the public, and if there was "gross mismanagement" going on, look to the citizens and parents of the area for not doing their duty to monitor their Board and vote off the jackasses that were running the district into the ground. I'd say EVERYONE involved, adults anyway, are getting EXACTLY what they deserve and the kids are caught in the cross-fire. Sad, but -- hey... again... Where exactly were all of the parents during this "gross mismanagement"? Certainly not engaged in the running of their own local communities, that's for sure! > So even if there is an educational free market, accreditations are > used to > ensure that schools, and systems, meet a standard. Now the > discussion may > be if the standard is sufficient. But that's a different discussion. > >> The answer is simple: if you're like most people, you go on the >> Internet and >> read about the product, talk to your friends, try it out to see if >> it fits >> your needs, et cetera. > > But all with the underlaying presumption that the product has been > inspected and found not to be a hazard to public safety. We're talking about their CHILDREN here... if they couldn't take the time to ride herd over the School Board and straighten it out BEFORE the accreditation was lost, they DON'T CARE ABOUT THEIR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION. The question then becomes... just how much can the rest of society outside of the local area really do for those kids, if their own community is so messed up that it can't deal with running schools? And no school system, let alone a community -- will survive that level of indifference, no matter how good the schools. If people in the community are paying that little attention, they're screwed. Thus, that community is not a good sample/example to use in a general discussion about the U.S. schools as a whole. That community's adults have some very serious attitude and prioritization issues to go deal with in their lives, before they can hope to help their kids. > I've always approached this discussion from the perspective of the > parents/kids who do not have the critical thinking skillset required > to > make informed decision. A while ago you talked about the grandmother > with > the 3rd grade education pushing her grandchildren to succeed. But > she had > to trust the public school system to educate those children. > > So any school that's accepting public funding is going to have to be > subject to accountability standards. There should also be accountability standards for the parents. But "testing" isn't the way to do it. This type of adult accountability USED to be handled by society and social pressure from neighbors, local shopkeepers, whatever... if your kids were screwing up, EVERYONE knew it in a small town, and the parents HEARD about it. Society has changed subtly to where the parents don't have time or don't WANT to be engaged with their neighbors, or have friends that will SAY something to the kids if they're screwups, or even evaluate and tolerate such statements from strangers, even! In fact, chastising someone else's child in public has become a social taboo nowadays... even if the child is completely out of control. I'm good with kids... if they're doing something bad I can usually engage a conversation with them and stop the behavior, but people freak out if you talk (even nicely) to their kids these days. They watch too much TV, and think every stranger is a freak with a van that has "Free Candy" pained on the side, I guess. In an awful lot of areas, no amount of "education reform" will help, until the so-called adults/parents grow up and take responsibility for their own local schools and school Board's actions. -- Nate Duehr nate@natetech.com -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist