Education Part II

    So as I discussed earlier, America will never really tackle the home/student side of the teacher/student equation.  Our American ideology, based on individual rights, our economic system based on maintaining a large population of working poor and a culture that values entertainment over education ensures that the educational system can only really exist within the walls of the school.  Families have to value education in order for students to value education.  Families have to provide a stable environment for student to exceed.
    Its no mystery why parents of "A" students overwhelmingly show up for student conferences, while the parents of "F" are like ghosts, even their phones don't work.  Its no mystery why after spending 20 minutes looking at district test scores you'll find that high achieving schools are in the middle class neighborhoods and lower achieving schools are in low income neighborhoods.  Are those schools underfunded?  Not where I live, these schools get tons of federal funding.  Are the teachers bad?  No, not where I live.  I theorize that if you could exchange the people,  or transport the school, things would not change.  So are lower income kids dumber?  No, not where I live.  There are very smart kids who have distinct, and learned, anti-intellectual beliefs.  Their parents either don't value education or are not around.   More and more their entertainment instills their values, how many rappers value education over women, guns and drugs?  How often is education valued over physical power or attractiveness on TV?  How are smart people portrayed in our country?
    So we can't go into everybody's home, we cannot raise peoples children.  We cannot tell people what to believe.  So in order to do "something" our society hammers on teachers.   This will never produce the results we want.  Part of the political answer is to institute mandatory testing.  Not surprisingly, many of the deadlines race ahead into the future and many states, including Washington, have applied for wavers.  I believe that if mandatory testing was actually, and honestly, implemented our society would quickly realize that there is a huge socioeconomic problem.  Schools in low-income areas would struggle and society would question, why are these teacher failing our students.  They would never wonder why all the "bad" teachers magically ended up in the low income areas.  Or ever realize, maybe their not really bad at all.

Education

    The longer one spends in education the more new programs, state and nation wide initiatives, new curriculum, and new strategies you experience.  Moreover, each year teachers and prospective teachers have to take more classes and tests and evaluations to obtain and maintain their certification.  Yet, even after all of this effort society at large is still generally dissatisfied with the state of education.  You can hear and read reports about how America no longer leads the world in the education of its citizens.  The response to this state is the continual tweaking of the educational model in the hopes of finding the answer.  In reality, the root aim of these efforts is to increase the efficiency of the educator and the educational system.  Better teachers and better schools equal better students, it makes perfect sense right?  But it doesn't.  Even with the most scientifically awesome curriculum and several massive buckets of funding I believe that the gains would  ultimately be unsatisfactory.  However, we are assured that the new system will punch through the ceiling of student achievement.
    The problem is that a system can only become so efficient before the return in performance per dollar increase in funding would become minimal.  It would not be worth the expenditure.  The law of diminishing returns.  This though is not really a problem because education has never received tons of funding to begin with when compared to other government spending programs.  Yet, the politics of education demands that "something" is done so teachers have to continually prove and refine their proficiency or lose their job.  However, teacher proficiency suffers from the same law of diminishing returns.  No matter what we do we will never create the army of super teachers that can have an entire class of hard luck cases and petty criminals reading at grade level while paying wrapped attention, hanging on every word, running to class in order to start learning as soon as possible.  "But wait," you say, "I've seen _________ movie and read _________book where Mr/Mrs _________reaches those hard luck cases in the inner city, I cried, and we can all be teachers like that."  Bullshit.  These individual cases are the exceptions and not the rules.  It is a fallacy to believe these individual cases can ever become the norm.
    So the problem is that the politics of education works only one side of the teacher/student equation, the teacher side.  They work it and work it and wonder why the miracle never occurs.  Lets look at two schools (names removed to CYA).  School A is a school made up of mostly white middle class children who have no problem passing all state tests.  Using the logic of our system School A must have the best teachers.  Conversely, School B, made up of mostly poor Hispanic students, struggles to get their graduation rate over 50%.  Using our logic their teachers must be vastly inferior to the teachers at School A.  I think we all know what the real problem is.  It is the side of the equation that America is afraid to tackle, the place they dare not look.