8 Delusions About Public Education

[Modern School]

Like most parents, I want my child to get the best education possible. Like many parents, I am scared, but not for the usual, reasons like bad teachers, low standards, lack of accountability, greedy unions, or a system broken beyond repair. These are gross exaggerations. What I fear is that the fun and innocence of childhood is being traded in for the false promises of rigor and accountability. Many kindergartens have replaced story-time and recess with rote test-taking drills. Elementary schools are eliminating science to make room for more test prep. Middle schools have eliminated shop classes because they aren’t academically rigorous. Over the past 30 years, we have fundamentally altered public education because we were told it wasn’t working. We were told that testing would improve school accountability and student achievement, yet increasing numbers of schools are failing. If we want to see real improvements in education, we need to first cut through the lies and delusions that dominate the debate.

Delusion #1: Schools today are in crisis—Public Education is Broken:
Teaching standards today are more rigorous than ever. Teachers are much better prepared for working with diverse populations. The consensus in education has shifted from one that supported tracking students into advanced or remedial courses based on socioeconomic status (SES) and race to one that promotes equity for all students. So where did we get the idea that public education is so terribly broken?

In 1983, President Reagan’s Commission on Excellence in Education published “A Nation at Risk,” which falsely claimed that our schools were so terrible that it threatened national security. This myth, that the education system is broken, has been perpetuated ever since by politicians of both persuasions and their corporate supporters, terrifying parents, who worry that their children will languish intellectually, and taxpayers, who fear that today’s poorly educated students will be tomorrow’s incompetent doctors and police. Education bashing has become the baby-kissing of the new millennium. Everyone wants to be the “education” candidate, the hero who saves our children.

The problem with “A Nation at Risk” is that it wasn’t true.

For more, please read http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2010/10/8-delusions-about-education.html