Re: sincere debate?
Aspeck, There are so many issues in education that it is hard to isolate one over the other and in fact they seem to just overlap with each other. I speak only about what I observe as a teacher and administrator in the state of Montana, but some of issues are not unique to other states. Considering the fact that our state has less than 1 million people and our rural schools can have 3-4 children some of the problems we see are maybe unique. It is not just the government interference that is the problem, I feel that it is our attitude as a society in general. Of course we have some excellent teachers, but then as everyone knows we also have some real "sicko's" that prey on children and we have others who are in the profession for all the wrong reasons. One of the problems, which will lead to other issues, is that because, maybe due to the lack of trust in our system, is that a number of folks do not support our educational system. I can remember we I was in school, if you got in trouble at school then you got into more trouble at home, except in my case--I got into trouble in school, at school by my dad (also a teacher) and then again at home, you would think I would have learned, anyway, today in a number of instances the first and only blame is on the teacher and the school. Additionally, it seems that we see a lot of parents who get mad at a teacher, for whatever reason, to hard, not hard enough, etc. they pull their child and go to a different school. When the same thing happens in that school they end up homeschooling. This leads to another issue which goes is that, and I am not saying homeschooling is bad, there is no accountability for homeschools. In some cases we have seen parents pull their child out of school, homeschool them, refuse all services offered by the school and not do anything with their child. The child comes back into school a couple of years later at the same level at which they left, and then we have one year to bring them up to grade level or we don't meet AYP. I could go on, but will stop for now. Thanks for listening.