An excerpt from an article by John Stossel:
...Gena's begging eventually got results -- just not results that helped her son. What the school bureaucrats did was hold meetings to talk about Dorian. (Bureaucrats are good at holding meetings.) At the meeting we watched, lots of important people attended: a director of programs for exceptional children, a resource teacher, a district special education coordinator, a counselor and even a gym teacher. The meeting went on for 45 minutes.
"I'm seeing great progress in him," said the principal. "So I don't have any concerns."
Well, Gena still had a concern: Her son could barely read.
Was Dorian just incapable of learning? No. ABC News did see great progress in him -- when we sent him to a private, for-profit tutoring center. In just 72 hours of tutoring, Sylvan Learning Center brought Dorian's reading up more than two grade levels.
In 72 hours, a private company did what South Carolina's government schools could not do in over 12 years.
President Bush's answer to school systems that pass students like Dorian on to the next grade year after year was "No Child Left Behind." It demands that states test students, and it establishes consequences for schools whose students consistently do poorly. Teachers in at least one South Carolina school responded to the pressures of the law by giving some students the answers to the test in advance, said Dale Hammond, grandmother of one such boy. "They were teaching him to cheat!" she told me...
How much longer are we going to put up with (and continue to pay for) this outragously expensive and extremly inefficient government monopoly?
You can read the rest of the article HERE.
5 comments:
tri houked on fonix, it werkd for me...
One of the reasons why most of my siblings homeschool and send their kids to private school.
When I went to 1st grade in the '60s, I was taught to write and spell phonetically, before they taught me real world spelling. My mom said I had great trouble spelling anything after that, because it so confused me. Why they did that, I don't know, I just had to re-learn writting and spelling all over again. Thank goodness for spelling checkers:
"Eye kin spell, this eye no, may spelling chequer tells me sew".
;)
Chas, I just read the whole article, and I am STEAMED! This particular problem is something I've been preaching about for years. I have a lot to say about it, but I won't take up all your comment space. I'm going to do a post on my site, and I hope you approve.
I hope you do post about it, it's a real problem. When I started my blog, I didn't realize I would be posting about education so much, but I have come to see that so many of the problems our our country are connected with our crumbling and inferior education system.
When socialist countries offer their citizens more school choice, and encourage more school competition than we do, and their results are so much better, it means we are doing things seriously wrong, and need to make big changes.
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