Quote Originally Posted by dankrutka View Post
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.
I equally don't have the time to list the kinds of nonsensical things that my wife - a teacher for some 15 years - has had to go through because it was the latest "new educational paradigm" that someone cooked up and had to be implemented - only to find a year or two later, some new leader comes in and says, in effect, all the old stuff was wrong, and in comes the latest batch of petri dishes, and the cycle repeats. I've been stunned by the byzantine abstractions for teaching children things like reading and math, or the imposition of expectations that teachers can reasonably assess are or are not realistic for some or all of their students - to say nothing of their personal family issues that might constructively make such goals impossible to achieve under any circumstances.

And, in all honesty, it is dismaying to hear from someone who even argues the idea that public schools aren't broken. Funding is broken. Expectations are broken. Results are broken. Social promotion is rampant. Kids are graduating that can't make change without a calculator, spell without an online dictionary, or construct a coherent English sentence, yet don't find it out until they hit a college-level composition or math course.

A system that pays teachers a garbage salary AND expects them to buy supplies for the classroom while paying administrators six-figure salaries is broken. A system that has among the highest number of districts per capita, yet shudders at the notion of consolidation due to political chicanery, is broken. A system that brings principals and teachers to tears due to overwork and micromanagement is broken. A system that is driving teachers out of state so rapidly that it has created a legitimate professional staffing shortage is broken.

Are there exceptions? Are there a few good districts and schools? Of course. In this case, however, those are the exceptions that prove a very ugly rule. We know there are good principals and good teachers, but I hear from my own wife how many of them have just given up that OK schools will ever get better, or treat their teachers any better. They've changed professions to stay in-state, or simply moved out of state.

That's a broken system, no matter how you slice it.