Have Policymakers "Cut And Run" On Education?
Credit to Assorted Stuff (and Schools Matter) for pointing me to these powerful lines from a recent Bill Moyers speech that suggest that schools should not be expected to do what society and the rest of government cannot, and that politicians -- including Democratic ones -- have essentially "cut and run" on education:
"Teachers now are expected to staff the permanent emergency rooms of our country’s dysfunctional social order," says Moyers in an excerpt from Assorted Stuff (America 101). "They are expected to compensate for what families, communities, and culture fail to do. Like our soldiers in Iraq, they are sent into urban combat zones, on impossible missions, under inhospitable conditions, and then abandoned by politicians and policy makers who have already cut and run, leaving teachers on their own."
UPDATE: Over at The Chalkboard, Joe Williams goes deeper into Moyers' speech and calls for a student revolution (Cutting and Running).
"Teachers now are expected to staff the permanent emergency rooms of our country’s dysfunctional social order," says Moyers in an excerpt from Assorted Stuff (America 101). "They are expected to compensate for what families, communities, and culture fail to do. Like our soldiers in Iraq, they are sent into urban combat zones, on impossible missions, under inhospitable conditions, and then abandoned by politicians and policy makers who have already cut and run, leaving teachers on their own."
UPDATE: Over at The Chalkboard, Joe Williams goes deeper into Moyers' speech and calls for a student revolution (Cutting and Running).
posted by Alexander Russo at 11/09/2006 12:37:00 PM
2 Comments:
This comment relates to this post and to your comments about Ed Sector below. In my opinion, educational progressives are about ready begin asserting themselves again. The centrist, Ed Sector approach has tried to do to education what the DLC tried to do with politics in general--insist that the middle way is the only way and that those on the left are completely out of touch with reality. So they favor test- and market-driven reforms and work with Fordham and Gene Hickok and say that education defies the usual political rules. But I think there's a pretty large group of people that sees that the current reform agenda is helping McGraw-Hill and its kind way more than it's helping children. I may be wrong, but I expect them to awaken soon.
In Mass, our departing chairman of the Board of Ed still says we have to "Stay the Course" with an AYP system that will hit "high" in two years, "very high" in four, and go off the top of the charts in 2012 and 2014.
THe board, days before the election, approved new regulations that essentially put AYP findings and restructuring on autopilot. No more pesky reviews or fact finding! And solving, in one fell swoop, the problem of a Department of Education saddled with running several hundred local schools!
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