Thanks for the comment!

I agree our educational system is broken. However, I don’t agree with your defeatism:

There is no way to fix the system until parents and society are held responsible for themselves.

We don’t say this in other areas of policy. It is an excuse for failure.

I would like to know more about how the Japanese education system differs from ours.

Talk to any teacher in Japan and ask them how many hours a day they actually teach… much less than in the US. They have time to plan, meet with other teachers, prepare and grade projects and tests. They go into other teacher’s rooms and see what they are doing. In the US, teachers barely have time to use the restroom during the day… think about it.. they can’t just leave the kids in the classroom by themselves.

Thanks for the comment!

The recent reauthorization of NCLB was designed to address that problem. Nebraska responded to NCLB’s increasd testing requirements by repurposes its STARS assessment-training system to serve that purpose. [1] This generated district-level data judged by the districts themselves, however. The NCLB reauthorization essentially put the kabosh on that sort of thing.

I would not want to be a primary or secondary school teacher under NCLB. It is turning education into an industrial activity, and teachers into industrial workers. It does not sound fun.

[1] http://www.nde.state.ne.us/STARS/STARSSummary.html

At more local levels, my Aunt Lisa is considering early retirement from elementary teaching in part because her school district keeps coming up with new rules and accountability requirements without finding out first whether she needs them or not. Dress codes too often have the effect of asking teachers to be fashion monitors in addition to teachers–and are seldom set by the teachers.

In short, education rules are too often enforced and executed by people who don’t need them, don’t understand them and/or don’t have the resources to enforce/execute them properly without sacrificing something of equal or greater value to their core mission. At best, this reduces efficiency; at worst, it creates a culture of corruption in the very industry that’s supposed to teach kids how to be productive members of society.

Or, to continue the factory analogy, I’m not saying that the teachers should run the schools (that would be a disaster). There has to be a clear hierarchy. What I’m saying is that the teachers should get to choose their own tools, in the same way that a factory worker might be given a Snap-On-Tools catalog and told to order “whatever you want under $xxx”.

Thank you for the clarification.

I think this is the direction No Child Left Behind (NCLB), probably using the OFLA (Obscure Four Letter Abbreviation) we will be hearing more of under Obama — STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) [1]

An industry shifts to an industrial engineering model when it is no longer able to pay for the labor needed to make professional, judgement-called baesd work possible. Education is surely in that state. Communities and states are consistently against the tax levels that would be needed to pay teachers on the same level as professionals. Likewise, there’s no indication that district-level officials are particularly great at their job.

As tests become better and more central, the microresponsibility model you advocate (teachers held to teaching, and allowed to do what they want within a range) should progress.

We can be thankful that Sarah Palin is not in a position of prominance, because the desires of the SpecialEd lobby typically work against this.

[1] http://www.myrecordjournal.com/site/tab1.cfm?newsid=20198774&BRD=2755&PAG=461&dept_id=592709&rfi=6

I mean real “worker-control” of education, in that you bulldoze the district offices (or as much as you can anyways). The current funds instead of being wasted are then distributed 50% between the principals and the individual teachers on basis of the number of students.

Amazon would be the best example of this. Imagine if each teacher instead of having the $250/classroom/year they typically have to spend on teaching materials had $5,000/student/year in an account on Amazon. From that account they could then buy whatever they needed for the classroom: Textbooks, books, desks, film projectors, whatever. Principals would basically have the same amount of money to divvy up as needed, perhaps new teachers would need a larger budget than more experienced teachers.

In other words, more of a return to the one-room-schoolhouse myth of the local schoolmarm being given money by the town fathers and using that on the kids directly.

Meanwhile, the kids are tested twice a year, (start and end) and the results reported to the parents, comparing their kids to the classroom, school, state, and national averages.

I’m advocating something that radical.