{"id":313458,"date":"2017-06-19T04:49:41","date_gmt":"2017-06-19T03:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/heres-an-idea-guarantee-every-child-an-excellent-education\/"},"modified":"2017-06-19T04:49:41","modified_gmt":"2017-06-19T03:49:41","slug":"heres-an-idea-guarantee-every-child-an-excellent-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/heres-an-idea-guarantee-every-child-an-excellent-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s an Idea: Guarantee Every Child an Excellent Education"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Let\u2019s get one thing straight: there are plenty of things wrong with America\u2019s school system. But they almost all stem from one major error.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t guarantee every child an excellent education.<\/p>\n

Instead, we strive to guarantee every child THE CHANCE<\/strong> at an excellent education<\/a>. In other words, we\u2019ll provide a bunch of different options that parents and children can choose from \u2013 public schools, charter schools, cyber schools, voucher schools, etc.<\/p>\n

Some of these options will be great. Some will be terrible. It\u2019s up to the consumer<\/a> (i.e. parents and children) to decide which one to bet on.<\/p>\n

In many places this results in children bouncing from school-to-school. One school is woefully deficient, they enroll in another one. One school closes suddenly, they start over again at another.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s terribly inefficient and does very little good for most children<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s because it\u2019s not designed with them in mind. It does not put the child first. It puts the education provider first.<\/p>\n

It is a distinctly privatized system<\/a>. As such, the most important element in this system is the corporation, business, administrator or entrepreneurial entity that provides an education.<\/p>\n

We guarantee the businessperson a potential client. We guarantee the investor a market. We guarantee the hedge fund manager a path to increased equity. We guarantee the entrepreneur a chance to exploit the system for a profit.<\/p>\n

What we do NOT<\/strong> guarantee is anything for the students. Caveat emptor<\/em> \u2013 \u201cLet the buyer beware.\u201d<\/p>\n

Imagine if, instead, we started from this proposition: every child in America will be provided with an excellent education.<\/a><\/p>\n

Sound impossible? Maybe. But it\u2019s certainly a better goal than the one we\u2019re using.<\/p>\n

And even if we somehow managed to do it \u2013 even if every school was excellent \u2013 that doesn\u2019t mean every child would become a genius. You can only provide the basis for an excellent education; it is up to the individual learner \u2013 with help from parents, teachers, and other stakeholders \u2013 to take advantage of what is put before him or her.<\/p>\n

That is not a crazy goal to have. Nor does it mean that education would necessarily become stagnated.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t matter what kind of school students go to \u2013 it matters that each and every school that receives public funding must be excellent.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean they each must be excellent in the same ways. One wouldn\u2019t expect them to be carbon copies of each other. Students have different needs. One would expect each classroom and each teacher to be doing different things at different times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, there are some things that are universal. There are some principles that are just better than others. Here are four:<\/p>\n

First, it is better for schools receiving public funding to have to spend that money openly<\/a>. They shouldn\u2019t be able to spend that money behind closed doors without any public scrutiny or accountability.<\/p>\n

Second, it\u2019s better that the majority of the decisions made about how the school is run are made in public by duly-elected school board members<\/a> drawn from the community, itself. That is much more preferable to political appointees who are not accountable to the parents and community.<\/p>\n

Third, it is better if a school cannot deny a student enrollment <\/a>based on that student\u2019s special needs, race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, academic record or other factors. If the school receives public funds, it should not be allowed to turn anyone away.<\/p>\n

Finally, it is better if a school teaches material that is academically appropriate, generally accepted as mainstream core concepts of the subject<\/a> and Constitutional<\/a>. Schools funded with tax money should not teach religious concepts like Creationism. They should not teach history and science from a Biblical point of view. They should not teach racial, sexual and religious discrimination.<\/p>\n

None of these four principles should really be controversial. But each of them is violated by our current education system.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Some voucher schools violate the latter proposition. The other three are often violated by charter, cyber and voucher schools.<\/p>\n

The only type of school that does not routinely violate these propositions is traditional public schools<\/a>. Yet that is also the type of school being consistently undermined by most of our current educational policies.<\/p>\n

So if we start from the idea that every student should get an excellent education, we start with the proposition to support and renew our public schools.<\/p>\n

In doing so, we would need a national commitment to bringing every public school up to snuff.<\/p>\n

Many of them already are \u2013 Hint: they\u2019re found in rich neighborhoods. The ones that struggle are almost always found in poorer neighborhoods, and that\u2019s no accident. It\u2019s the result of savage funding inequalities.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019d need to do is ensure schools serving impoverished students receive equitable funding <\/a>compared with schools serving the middle class and wealthy kids. Impoverished students must by necessity receive as much funding as the privileged ones. In fact, given the deprivations and increased needs of impoverished students, they should actually receive more funding. Middle class and rich kids have academic advantages over poor kids before they even enter kindergarten. They have more books in the home, more educated parents, better nutrition, better neonatal care, and often more stable home environments. If we really committed ourselves to making sure even these kids got the best possible education, we\u2019d need to start spending more money on them.<\/p>\n

Next, we\u2019d need to do something about school segregation<\/a>. Our public school system is now almost as segregated \u2013 and in some places even more segregated<\/a> \u2013 than it was before the landmark Brown vs. Board decision 50 years ago. The only way to guarantee everyone an excellent education is to make it increasingly difficult to hurt some students without hurting all. There is no separate but equal. When we keep students apart by race or class, we ensure inequality among them.<\/p>\n

And perhaps most important is this: we must remove the profit principle from education<\/a>. We cannot allow decisions to be made based on what is best for corporations. Academic decisions about how to teach, how to assess student learning and how to assess teaching <\/a>should be made by professional classroom educators.<\/p>\n

This means no more high stakes standardized testing<\/a>. No more Common Core<\/a>. No more depersonalized computer-based learning<\/a>. No more value added measures used to evaluated teachers. No more union busting<\/a>. No more Teach for America.<\/a><\/p>\n

We need to start valuing teachers and teaching again<\/a>. And we need to pay and treat them as one of the most valuable parts of our society.<\/p>\n

These measures would not be easy to accomplish, but they would have an immense impact on our schools.<\/p>\n

This would require a substantial outlay of additional funding<\/a>. We could save money by discontinuing costly practices that don\u2019t benefit children (i.e. testing, charter and voucher funding, etc.). But make no mistake, it would cost money. However, we\u2019re one of the richest countries in the world. We spend a ridiculous amount already on the military. You\u2019re telling me we can\u2019t find the money to spend on our children? If we\u2019re not willing to spend on our future, we don\u2019t deserve to have one.<\/p>\n

It requires only a change in focus, a reevaluation of our priorities and goals.<\/p>\n

Education should not be market driven. It should be student driven.<\/p>\n

We should no longer guarantee business a class of consumers.<\/p>\n

Instead, every student in this country no matter if they are rich or poor, black or white, male or female, gay or straight, religious or not \u2013 every student should be guaranteed an excellent education.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really that simple.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Via Common Dreams<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s get one thing straight: there are plenty of things wrong with America\u2019s school system. But they almost all stem from one major error. We don\u2019t guarantee every child an excellent education. Instead, we strive to guarantee every child THE CHANCE at an excellent education. In other words, we\u2019ll provide a bunch of different options […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":313406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-313458","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}