Every president and most governors feel obligated to “reform” education (aka blame/spend/fail). The problem is they will not admit the real root issues are the awful cultural decay/sorry parenting, the growing loss of teaching time to discipline and the pressure to inflate grades (avoiding reality to keep parents happy). Graduation rates often reveal this rampant grade inflation pressure.

The players in the education game are the students, the parents (who have kids 16 hours a day), the local school administrators and the bossy state/federal governments. Guess which one is always the goat? Education is properly a local function, never was a federal or state playground.

There are eternal myths in “reform talk.” One myth is that tenure is a lifetime job guarantee. Tenure is there only to prevent local political figures from firing teachers without due process or political reasons. Tenured teachers have been and will continue to be fired.

The tenure issue surfaces only because school districts often lack a well-qualified staff of instructional supervisors that observe/evaluate, but instead have usually have principals which cannot be competent across so many areas. It’s like a welder evaluating a pipe fitter. Teachers may have the best class in years or the worst, but must “make bricks without straw” as if all classes are the same. I wonder why a basketball coach with no player over 6 feet tall gets excused after that losing season.

Then we have the arrogant federal government with its quota/diversity police requiring fantasy ranges of “permitted” failures or suspensions. It’s like some college board demanding the football coach play 60 players every game. Those bellowing politicians never wonder why teacher college enrollments are way down and some districts must get foreigners to teach.

Until local districts are allowed to discipline and grade students as reality requires (we actually did this for generations) these “reforms” will continue to flounder.

 

Doug Schexnayder

Retired educator and Vidalia resident