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No Child Left --- To the Left By Ron Hart
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
It was a lovely day recently in Atlanta. The school kids were out playing in Piedmont Park, and some were diving for murder weapons in the park's lake. It was a scene Normal Rockwell might have painted.
I was enjoying a nice breakfast at Chick-fil-a, the only restaurant where the staff and the food look the same as in the commercials. They have free papers there, which is still too high a price to pay for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I took a peek to see if the AJC was running its weekly rehash of the Emmitt Till story. Or perhaps the paper would employ its exhaustive investigative liberal journalistic skills proving that a man serving life in prison might have been wrongly convicted of 2 of his 86 murders. It's what the AJC does, which is why no one reads it anymore.
The AJC was reporting on a story which first broke in 2009 about a massive, ongoing, cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public School System. Gloria Love of the Northside Neighbor wrote that a "report found 178 educators, including 38 principals, participated in cheating during the administration of the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests." In short, for years teachers were changing test answers for their students to make them look better.
If teachers are doing the cheating for the kids now, how will the kids ever learn to cheat for themselves when they grow up?
There have been reports of test changing "parties," where teachers met to correct the answers on their students' tests. Even more troubling, this practice was so pervasive that teachers who did not go along would be bullied by the system and forced to cheat. The report said there was "a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation." Good teachers, and there are many of them, were bullied by their leaders to conform to something not good for the students. In short, the teachers union, the sole province of the left, was doing its job.
For this fine work, Superintendent Beverly Hall, the darling of the edu-crat world, received the National Superintendent of the Year award. She has since resigned, got a similar job and was recently spotted vacationing at a posh Maui resort.
Obama delivers grandiose speeches on not taking the low road and cheating in schools; his words, written by someone else, would resonate better if he did not read them from a teleprompter hidden in front of him. Obama says he wants to train thousands more math teachers. Perhaps they could help him better understand what his $4 trillion in deficit spending -- so far -- means for the country. Sadly, the kids already good in math and the metric system (converting ounces to grams and back) are making great money right now in our school system.
In the great documentary Waiting for Superman, even liberals agree that the monopoly held by the unions and government schools is a problem. Vouchers or school choice are torpedoed at each turn by the teachers unions and their beholden politicians.
For the past ten years, we have spent 32 percent above the rate of inflation on education, with bad results. If the Atlanta situation is as pervasive as I imagine, even the results we do have may be fraudulent.
In government-run education, there is no consumer choice and no competition; no one is held accountable for the results. I would like to say "You get what you pay for," but we do not even get that. No amount of good money after bad will improve the situation unless we break the monopoly control of the government and the teachers unions.
Money is not the answer. I could teach math scratching in the dirt with a stick. My poor hometown did all it could to teach kids with the money it had. I am pretty sure my high school football coaches saved the school money by teaching driver education and sex education in the same car. We did what we could.
Atlanta's embarrassment confirms what we know: we cannot take small corrective measures with a education system that is fundamentally flawed. As Albert Einstein wrote, the definition of "insanity" is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. And, as these kids will learn, Einstein was a smart man who made lots of money with his bagel stores.
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© 2010 Ron Hart
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Arnold Ahlert | ||||||||||||||||||
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