1) Schooling doesn't need to be centralized. We waste a tremendous amount of money bussing kids around and paying for giant buildings, when it'd probably be more efficient and less traumatic to simply have schools in every neighborhood.
2) Oi. Smaller schools *might* mitigate some of this problem. I recall from my own schooling... the pressure to conform was on a gradient with the size of the school. In the public schools I went to, it was intense. In the tiny church middle school I attended (12 students in the combined 7th-8th grade, from very different backgrounds) it was nonexistent-- I think because with such a small group we simply dealt with each other as fellow human individuals, and not as groups. The atmosphere was almost family, and from the classmates I've been in touch with as an adult-- we all remember the place with sweet nostalgia (from what I hear, middle school in the US is horrible for most people-- we lucked out). Maybe when you have 1000 students in a school, that's just more than our primate brains can handle and you're *forced* to split everybody up into subgroups just to function socially.
3)As I pointed out in my last overlong post, abysmal pay isn't *necessarily* a bad thing. It's a disaster when you combine it with a four-year degree plus a master's in education, and student loans. Then what you get is a large pool of professional teachers made up largely of people who aren't intelligent, ambitious, or talented enough to get into a more lucrative profession, enthusiastic young people who think they love kids until they're in loads of debt, 2nd year in a classroom, and realize that actually... no, they hate kids. But now they're stuck because they've got loans to pay off and they can't afford to go back to college for a different degree... and fourth graders at their school are going to suffer for it for the next thirty years until they retire, because they're NEA members and can't be fired.
What if the problem isn't pay, but rather credentialism? What if pay remained modest, but the employment process could be re-worked so that suddenly, teaching is a great and accessible job for people who've just retired from good careers, or bright young folks destined for better things? Bring back teacher exams! We should have *more* temporary teachers. More people who have either racked up a lot of useful career experience in other fields already, or are on their way to other careers. I mean, yeah, there are some awesome career teachers out there-- but think about your own schooling. They're a minority. Make more room for people who *aren't* going to make a career of it. I mean-- there used to be people in the US who could say that John Adams or Louisa May Alcott or Robert Frost (or even Roberta Flack!) had been their schoolteacher. The job used to be a stepping-stone. Let's make it that way again.
4) Given the difference between what the public schools spend per child, and how much it costs to send children to a modest private school (substantially less)-- a lot of this disparity might be resolved by whacking out a ton of admin and shrinking campuses (how much does it cost to maintain that football stadium? That bus fleet?), and perhaps by making "school board" a volunteer post again-- each board in charge of just one school. This would also make individual schools far more accountable to parents.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2022-11-07 02:45 pm (UTC)1) Schooling doesn't need to be centralized. We waste a tremendous amount of money bussing kids around and paying for giant buildings, when it'd probably be more efficient and less traumatic to simply have schools in every neighborhood.
2) Oi. Smaller schools *might* mitigate some of this problem. I recall from my own schooling... the pressure to conform was on a gradient with the size of the school. In the public schools I went to, it was intense. In the tiny church middle school I attended (12 students in the combined 7th-8th grade, from very different backgrounds) it was nonexistent-- I think because with such a small group we simply dealt with each other as fellow human individuals, and not as groups. The atmosphere was almost family, and from the classmates I've been in touch with as an adult-- we all remember the place with sweet nostalgia (from what I hear, middle school in the US is horrible for most people-- we lucked out). Maybe when you have 1000 students in a school, that's just more than our primate brains can handle and you're *forced* to split everybody up into subgroups just to function socially.
3)As I pointed out in my last overlong post, abysmal pay isn't *necessarily* a bad thing. It's a disaster when you combine it with a four-year degree plus a master's in education, and student loans. Then what you get is a large pool of professional teachers made up largely of people who aren't intelligent, ambitious, or talented enough to get into a more lucrative profession, enthusiastic young people who think they love kids until they're in loads of debt, 2nd year in a classroom, and realize that actually... no, they hate kids. But now they're stuck because they've got loans to pay off and they can't afford to go back to college for a different degree... and fourth graders at their school are going to suffer for it for the next thirty years until they retire, because they're NEA members and can't be fired.
What if the problem isn't pay, but rather credentialism? What if pay remained modest, but the employment process could be re-worked so that suddenly, teaching is a great and accessible job for people who've just retired from good careers, or bright young folks destined for better things? Bring back teacher exams! We should have *more* temporary teachers. More people who have either racked up a lot of useful career experience in other fields already, or are on their way to other careers. I mean, yeah, there are some awesome career teachers out there-- but think about your own schooling. They're a minority. Make more room for people who *aren't* going to make a career of it. I mean-- there used to be people in the US who could say that John Adams or Louisa May Alcott or Robert Frost (or even Roberta Flack!) had been their schoolteacher. The job used to be a stepping-stone. Let's make it that way again.
4) Given the difference between what the public schools spend per child, and how much it costs to send children to a modest private school (substantially less)-- a lot of this disparity might be resolved by whacking out a ton of admin and shrinking campuses (how much does it cost to maintain that football stadium? That bus fleet?), and perhaps by making "school board" a volunteer post again-- each board in charge of just one school. This would also make individual schools far more accountable to parents.