Quote Originally Posted by SoonerDave View Post
In my opinion, there is no fix for Oklahoma's corrupt, broken educational system. The only choice? Flatten and reload. Scorched earth. Start from scratch - everything from funding to organization to bureaucracy.

I am more than ready for some out-of-the-box solutions. I *firmly* believe in mandatory consolidation of school districts and elimination of duplicative administrative positions. I am firmly in the camp of eliminating the absurd layer of bureaucracy that seems to have run amok in our school system in general and gives entirely too much power (and too much of the limited funding) to administrators and PhD's who are so far removed from the classroom that they've turned the whole educational process into a perpetual petri dish of abstract pseudo-educational experiments. Given where we are, I wouldn't object to eliminating the grade structure, putting the kids into classrooms, and handing out McGuffey Readers and going back to rote math table recitation. Bottom line - let the teachers teach. Let the teachers discipline, too. Let the PhD's go experiment...somewhere else.

And until we let teachers discipline again, and stop excusing bad behavior as a perpetual byproduct of chronically damaged self-esteem, the druggable emotional disorder du jour, or merely to avoid hurt feelings, we'll never, ever restore to the classroom the simple respect necessary to establish the teacher as the authority, and the student as the - guess what - the student.

The funding model is so thoroughly broken I don't even begin to know where to fix it. Consdering the OK education budget is, what, something on the order of $3.4 BILLION, BILLION, it to me the very height of asininity that we cannot find a way to pay our teachers and fund the school systems in a manner that garners some practical, real-world benefit - not merely hands kids a scroll when then turn 18.

Okay, okay, rant mode off.
As a teacher of six years, a recent PhD in education, and someone really involved, I disageee with a lot of this. First, I taught in a great school students and teachers were incredibly successful. Talking about the education system as simply "broken" with the need to be "fixed" she was a real misunderstanding of our schools.

What experiments are PhDs doing in our schools? I know a ton of education professors in Oklahoma and almost all of them favor empowering teachers, not micromanaging them are telling them what to do based on suppose it experiments. If there is something wrong then please be more specific about it. But I would say our education professors are maybe our greatest strength in the state. I think Farmor blame falls with legislators and in some cases administrators who micromanage. I could go on but I don't have time to address everyone of your ideas.