Pessimism or realism?
You can find a different take on George Will’s column over at The Quick and the Ed. The author, Kevin Carey, is a very detail-oriented guy, but one wonders if today he hasn’t missed the forest for the trees.
It’s no secret that George Will’s writing is less than confident (realistic, perhaps?) about the future of public education, but is Carey’s assertion that Will “believes that public education is irredeemable, that efforts to improve it are basically useless” correct? One can’t know what George Will thinks, but one can know what he writes, and his article today is simply a clear evaluation of the “reforms” that have predominated in the k-12 sphere. Like it or not, they’ve largely failed. Whether or not Will thinks the whole operation is “useless” and “irredeemable” is never stated, and it isn’t all that important, anyway.
Carey nitpicks about some of the least important parts of Will’s piece, and he doesn’t like Will’s harsh tone. Yet, Moynihan (who is mentioned in the column) did not soften his tone when deriding the more-foolish strategies that run amok in America’s schools, and neither does Checker. But beyond all that, can Carey truly argue with Will’s larger point: that dumb ideas have taken public education in the wrong direction?
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Hey! Some love for the edublogosphere...
First, I wanted to say I’m very glad that y’all exist. Most of the edublogs I subscribe to have a clear bent (one that I agree with, which is the problem). To read someone write “nice George Will column on education” and then nothing else is eye-opening. Like someone saying, “nice Bill O’Reilly show last night.” But maybe it takes a teacher to see a line like
“After 1962, when New York City signed the nation’s first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students’ scores on standardized tests declined.”
And think...hmmm...I’m not statistician but I think it unlikely that collective bargaining made kids dumber. Maybe if teachers got paid less, students would learn more...
It’s also hard to see what Will wants us to do. If schools can’t counteract social upheaval are we then supposed to say, 1/2 the money we spend on school and pay families to stay together? Move all the schools to Montana?
Still, I do think the idea of National Standards is a good one; it just surprises me that a Federalist would be down with something like that.