Monday, September 20, 2010

The Fruits of Their Labor

The Washington Post has an interesting profile of Louisville's continued efforts to keep their schools integrated after the Supreme Court's Parents Involved decision. The short story is that what was originally a rather popular and cost-effective plan is now more expensive, more convoluted, more difficult to administer, less effective and far less popular.

But hey -- at least Chief Justice Roberts got a pithy quote out of it.

6 comments:

joe said...

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."


Pffft. Then I eagerly look forward to the Chief Justice's advocacy of strict pacifism, applying the same reasoning to use of force as to discrimination.

sonicfrog said...

From the WP:

"But school Superintendent Sheldon Berman, who started his job days after the 2007 Supreme Court decision, said he is convinced that a school system cannot be successful for all children without diverse classrooms. If Louisville's plan is more costly and complex, he said, it is because of a flawed and doctrinaire court decision that ignored the consequences."

Convinced by what? Where is the long term studies that bolsters this POV??? This is simply one of those ideas that sound great, so it has not only become "common-senseical", but has no basis in pedagogical reality. It's just another classroom cliché that keeps any real improvement from happening in our schools.

It's no different than the misuse of Gardner's Intelligences by the education establishment. Teachers have been wasting their, and the student's time, going out of their way trying to design lesson plans that cater to as many intelligences as possible. Turns out there is no scientific proof that it helps.

Another thing that drives me over the bend it the issue of "Self esteem". Studies show that kids who have higher self esteem tend to be better learners over all. OK. No problem there. But in the world of education dogma, this has been twisted into "if you, the school, the teacher, (insert educating position here _______________) raise a students self esteem, they will do better". This is used to justify all sorts of stupid education policy that only worsens the situation. School administrators are discouraged from separating students into classes based on their abilities. Instead of having students placed in classes based on their abilities, the high achievers in classes with other high achievers, students with average skills placed with students of similar abilities, they are all mixed together in a single class room. Why, because (and this is one of my instructors talking) if you separate the students based on their abilities, then the students who are of lower skill sets will think they are not as good as the higher level students, and that will hurt their self esteem.

While visiting a high school for a field trip, the principal flat out told us that they do not fail students here, period. Though not stated quite so forcefully in most schools, there is great pressure to pass kids to the next grade, because failing them will hurt their self esteem.

The people running and controlling our education system are the problem. They would rather keep the status quo rather than scrap the things that don't work in favor of thing that do. This devotion and worship of all things "diversity", that it is the end all to our education woes is simply stupid and needs to be done away with.

The whole system needs to be torn down and started from scratch.

sonicfrog said...
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sonicfrog said...
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sonicfrog said...

The deleted posts were the same one. For some reason blogspot was saying that my comment wasn't posting, so I kept making changes to try and make it happy.