Paul Jacobs writes daily columns on Common Sense.
Last month he wrote about The Bad Lesson. The Los Angelos Times published data on how well public schools and teachers were doing in educating their students. The unions got upset.
They were upset that the data was published.
Why do people object to relevant data being made public? Given that we are paying taxes for these government schools I think we have a right to the information.
Paul Jacobs conludes with a call out to homeschoolers:
"Is there any way to bypass the dilapidated and authoritarian educational regime altogether? You homeschoolers out there: Any ideas?"
Homeschoolers are showing by example that children can be taught outside government schools.
2 comments:
My girls attended public school up until June 2010. Now they are homeschooled because we were quite upset by what we saw going on and coming home from public school. My girls are thriving in a relaxed environment.
I have always heard (& experienced) that when one person is stressed, other people absorb that stress. The stress that is put on teachers in government schools by the whole standardized testing nonsense is passed to the kids...and no one learns as effectively when stressed.
In Australia we have one major standardised test, it's done in grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 and is the same nationally.
When there was talk of, for the first year ever, giving the school vs school average results so parents could see how one school stacked against another, teachers in my state went on strike over it. There was a recent case at one school involving a principle, a couple of teachers, and a group of students, cheating on the test to raise the school score but getting caught. One school I personally attended claimed absent days on it's worst students, or didn't allow them to finish the exam, rather rediculous really as they didn't give the assigned help to disabled students which would have hurt their score much worse (I am entitled to 1/3rd extra time on exams, which is outlined in a letter directly from the queensland education department, I also was supposed to have access to a scribe for the essay portion, neither happened at that school, and they wondered why their score was so bad)
The idea is we might actually judge teachers based on their competency just like in every other job out there is judged on competency, and we can't have that can we. Same thing happened when our government actually did make moves to give an achievment based payrate, teachers of classes with good test scores would be paid on a higher tier. There was a lot wrong with their system of implementing that, but there was a lot right with it as well. The teachers went on strike over that one too (I think we have had a teacher strike once a year for the past 3 years now)
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