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I'm intrigued by this sentence at the very beginning of the article: "Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world."
I assume Thomas and Wingert are referring to the 1950s through the 1960s, the era when the U.S. was putting men on the moon, fighting the Cold War with new technology, building consumer products here inside the country, developing the computer, etc.
Now, I was around and in school during some of those years and I recall taking one "standardized" test that lasted about an hour per year. I remember teachers as valuable, respected members of the community (maybe they weren't paid enough, but teachers in those days were loved). But I also remember that teachers then had almost total control of their classrooms -- heck, even the principals kept their distance.
In those days, the local school board was almost totally accountable only to the local parents and voters -- and the community expected educated students be produced. There was minimal top-down, heavy-handed mandates from the state government or the federal government. Parents got involved in governing school districts because their involvement really, actually mattered.
That's not true today or especially for the last decade that NCLB and the 'standards and accountability' scheme has been rising. Parents and teachers have been marginalized by state and federal government mandates and technocrats.
So, my question for the likes of Thomas and Wingert, and Obama and Bush, and Duncan and Spellings is ... why not review what worked in the past, ie., teachers allowed to teach in the classroom and local control -- instead of trying to build this new soulless, mean-spirited, semi-privatized, teacher and parent blaming, 'nationalized' schooling system?
How perverted is it that the newest 'big idea' in education is firing teachers and closing schools?
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