Via the AP: Edwards unveils plan to revamp education
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards rolled out a program for reforming primary education in the United States on Friday, proposing to pay teachers up to $15,000 more in high poverty areas and initiating universal preschool. Edwards detailed the proposals, which also include longer school years and overhauling the No Child Left Behind education law, in a speech at Brody Middle School in Des Moines.
After watching first hand (both in the way it affected teacher training and the way it has affected teachers such as my wife and sister) the impact of No Child Left Behind, I am extremely leery of another level of substantial federal interference in any aspect of K-12. As imperfect as public education is (and goodness knows it is imperfect in Alabama), these kinds of moves typically lead more to the further bureaucratization of education than anything else.
Edwards is basing his initiative on a critique of NCLB, which is fine:
Rather than requiring students to take standardized tests, Edwards said assessments that measure higher-order thinking skills must be developed, including open-ended essays, oral examinations, projects and experiments.
That all sounds good, but centralizing it and doing it as part of comprehensive policy is yet another thing entirely. These are issues that are primarily fixed at the classroom level, not through centralized planning.
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If politicians such as Edwards or Bush were so concerned about education policy, why don’t they run for local School Board?
Given the realities of education financing–the fact that public schools get most of their money from municipal and state sources–these political gestures are pandering at its worst.
I would have more sympathy if someone like Edwards said, “education in the US needs a Marhsall Plan-type of involvement from the Feds” and then proposed a policy to match. The NCLB-type efforts are pretty lame and not nearly as impactful as the politicos suggest.
Comment by Ratoe — Monday, September 24, 2024 @ 11:51 am
If politicians such as Edwards or Bush were so concerned about education policy, why don’t they run for local School Board?
Indeed.
The NCLB-type efforts are pretty lame and not nearly as impactful as the politicos suggest.
Yep.
Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Monday, September 24, 2024 @ 11:54 am
My niece and nephew have experienced schools in two European countries, and centralized planning has brought them such horrible things as foreign language, art, music, and sports, with pretty intense academics in between. All of those are now disappearing here, so it is not government per se. It’s our government.
Comment by Greg Weeks — Monday, September 24, 2024 @ 7:27 pm
Point taken.
I am simply saying that taking the current system and simply trying to layer on new requirements creates far more bureaucracy than it does education.
And, to be fair, many European countries are more comparable in size to US states, so it would depend on what we are comparing.
Additionally, my oldest son’s last two years were in a public magnet school, and he learned violin and classical guitar. It can be done, but it certainly isn’t being done universally.
Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Monday, September 24, 2024 @ 7:36 pm
It is also not appropriate to make generalized claims about what is and is not disappearing in American schools, particularly in comparison to Europe. As Dr. Taylor pointed out, these are small countries compared to ours, and some of them do better at education than others; likewise, in the US, some states do better than others, and within states, some districts do better than others. There is tremendous variation in the US when it comes to education so a sweeping assertion like that has problems.
NCLB and the Edwards proposal - like all federal K-12 initiatives - are an attempt to level out that variation, which is seen by some as a bad thing. Unfortunately these initiatives usually fail to take into account the reasons for variation from district to district, and try to treat the symptoms without looking at the disease. What’s worse, it treats them all the same way, when the problems that afflict one district or state and cause it to perform poorly can be very different from the causes of problems in another.
Federal bureacracy only puts in place rules that are further removed from the local causes for underperformance.
Also, in a nation the size of the US, I think we have to concede that there will always be some areas that will perform better than others.
Comment by Captain D. — Tuesday, September 25, 2024 @ 1:29 pm