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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Fwd: [SSfS] restore decision-making power back to the parents, the teachers they employ, and the students
  • Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 07:55:04 -0700

*********** BEGIN FORWARDED MESSAGE ***********

On 1/7/2003 at 6:45 AM Dale Reed <dale-reed@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

>http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1130
>Another Central Plan Fails
>By Jeffrey Tucker
>[Posted January 3, 2003]
>
>For at least two decades, the conservative wing of education experts has
>touted one magic bullet (apart from vouchers): high-stakes testing. The
>idea
>is to subject students (and teachers too) to a standardized test that would
>create incentives to learn the basics, compel curriculum committees to toss
>out the fluff, yield reliable data for assessing performance, and inspire
>students and teachers to keep their noses to the grindstone.
>
>In state after state for the last ten years, these tests have become the
>leading avenue for education reform. The trend began in Texas and spread.
>Now millions of students begin their first day of classes with a profound
>awareness of the impending make-or-break tests, to be taken at regular
>intervals from the first to the twelfth grade. On the face of it, it seemed
>to work. Curriculum committees threw up their arms in despair, teachers
>started teaching math and stopped teaching so much fluff, and everyone had
>a
>sudden sense of accountability.
>
>A conservative victory? The Bush administration thinks so, which is why it
>is working toward the supposed dream of a national testing system. New
>data,
>officials say, can be generated that allow for a comparison between states,
>build proof of success, and otherwise allow for a better national system of
>education. The "No Child Left Behind" legislation uses carrots and sticks
>to
>impose high-stakes testing on states that do not currently use the system.
><snip>
>
>The whole subject of education and the institutions that support it needs
>to
>be rethought, away from the still-surviving Deweyite-Progressivist model
>and
>toward the ancient tradition of private tutoring now being revived in
>homeschools across America. All schools can learn from the experience of
>homeschools, with their attention to individual needs, the flexibility that
>allows students to develop in unique ways, their privately run and funded
>character, their employment of localized knowledge and resources. These are
>the elements that make for good institutions of all sorts, whether it is
>commercial businesses, charities, civic institutions, or schools.
>
>In short, the answer is not to adopt yet another central plan. It is to
>disempower the planners altogether, and restore decision-making power back
>to the parents, the teachers they employ, and the students. Testing and
>better data will not save education in America. A wholesale repudiation of
>all educational centralized planning will.
>--------
>Jeffrey Tucker is vice president of the Mises Institute. Tucker@mises.org.
>
>

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  • [Livingontheland] Fwd: [SSfS] restore decision-making power back to the parents, the teachers they employ, and the students, Tradingpost, 01/07/2003

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