{"id":775,"date":"2007-05-01T10:33:30","date_gmt":"2007-05-01T16:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/index.php\/2007\/05\/01\/something-we-must-avoid\/"},"modified":"2007-05-01T10:33:30","modified_gmt":"2007-05-01T16:33:30","slug":"something-we-must-avoid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=775","title":{"rendered":"Something We Must Avoid"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was listening to the audio of Keri Miller’s MPR “Town Hall” meeting, Is High School Obsolete<\/a>, yesterday.\u00a0 It’s worth a listen (although I have yet to find the audio online – I’ll let you know).\u00a0<\/p>\n

But toward the end, there was one bit that I thought needed a response.<\/p>\n

One of the panelists, asked what we should do about the problems faced by public high schools, says “we should treat it as a national scandal”.<\/p>\n

Oh, good Lord.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Don’t.<\/p>\n

The problems in education have been treated as a “national scandal” twice in my adult lifetime.\u00a0 The first was in the mid-late eighties, when the “teacher shortage” was the big issue.\u00a0 Recruiting teachers was made a national priority; thousands of college grads went into the field; pay and benefits increased (conservative cant aside, teaching doesn’t pay spectacularly well everywhere in this country, although being in administration <\/em>can be a nice payday).\u00a0 Then, between burnout (the teacher’s unions have turned education into a factory job in all too many ways) and a demographic drop bringing layoffs in many school districts, many of them left the field.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And again, early in the Bush Administration, dropping test scores and zooming expenditures left us with “No Child Left Behind”. Enough said.<\/p>\n

Calling something a “national scandal” causes politicians to pose for cameras and propose flurries of legislation to make it look like they’ve done something <\/em>about the issue.\u00a0 Is the “something” useful – indeed, is it better than doing nothing at all?\u00a0 In many cases, no.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But calling difficulties a “national scandal” is, in any case, not only exactly the wrong approach, but indeed due to the law of unintended consequences will no doubt make things much worse; today, it’d most likely cause politicians on both sides (because Education is the same third\u00a0rail for the right that gun control is for the left) to pour a lot<\/em> of extra money \u00a0into “saving” the current, in-my-opinion unsaveable system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was listening to the audio of Keri Miller’s MPR “Town Hall” meeting, Is High School Obsolete, yesterday.\u00a0 It’s worth a listen (although I have yet to find the audio online – I’ll let you know).\u00a0 But toward the end, there was one bit that I thought needed a response. One of the panelists, asked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}