October 27, 2006

Can't get there from here

Here is the heart of the problem: American public education -- because of the way it is structured, administered, funded and understood by parents, teachers, administrators and taxpayers -- is incapable of delivering on the promises of NCLB. The root of the problem isn't in the law; it's in the American education system. It can't get there from here.

Today's public education system essentially tells parents: "This is the school your child will attend. This is when we teach, what we teach and who will teach." In short, it puts the system ahead of the child.

Eugene Hickok, a Bradley fellow in education at The Heritage Foundation, in today's WaPo.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ken - this is off-topic (email is down) - do you know whether Engelmann has written about "negative learning"?

Anonymous said...

My school doesn't even tell us that much ("when we teach," "what we teach," "who will teach").

We never see a syllabus, a topic matrix, or a scope and sequence.

We find out who will be teaching what on the day our kids go back to school - and then we find this out only for our particular child, not for the school as a whole.

Only the calendar comes out on a timely basis.