So many events are connected by threads of old and recent history. This diary sounds a little like a brief episode from James Burke's Connections series, but without his erudition.
The key to fixing complex problems is to begin to understand what makes them complex and why they got to be that way. We all know that bureaucracies are part of the human condition and is one of our major frailties. Public education is so heavily insulated by so many layers that NCLB and similar stupidity was bound to happen.
Your comments will be appreciated because I clearly do not have all the answers.
I tend to look at seemingly disparate issues and try to lace them together to create solid solutions to problems. This is one of those times.
Colin Powell’s report on school dropouts a couple years ago pointed out that almost 50% of our children are dropping out of school for lack of interest. It didn’t matter to these kids that their lack of education would handicap their opportunities to be successful in an evermore competitive society. This lack of interest, coincidentally, came while the infamous No Child Left Behind legislation caused school districts to dumb down curriculum and close schools.
Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty hired the high-profile Michelle Rhee from Bloomberg’s education initiative programs in New York City to re-do D.C.’s abysmal schools. She promptly lowered the bulldozer blade and fired a couple hundred teachers and closed many schools. Some parts of D.C. showed a remarkable improvement in test scores, but other neighborhoods were nearly torn apart by the abruptness and breadth of these draconian methods. Now, Rhee has resigned after Fenty was defeated in the mayoral elections and has started StudentsFirst.org.
The Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border continues to be a war zone of drug cartels’ combating government and police as well as each other. U.S. Interstate highway 35 has been declared to be the "cocaine highway" for transporting all sorts of illegal drugs from south Texas to the Canadian border and parts east and west along its route. This drug war is a multi-billion dollar windfall to gun manufacturers and sellers. In Texas it is relatively easy to buy multiple firearms without vigorous investigation into their purpose. It is also a multi-billion dollar war in Mexico and the U.S. for drug sales and distribution.
These issues are related and joined in a circle of horror, death and wasted promise. Idle, ignorant children already swamped with instant gratifcation stimuli simply have to experiment with the "forbidden fruit" of drugs. They have nothing else on their minds because they dropped out of school before they learned how to establish their own value system. Instead, absent parenting and study-to-the-test schooling drove them to forming social networks based on illegal drugs, weapons, disrespect for the society in which they live and a hopelessness that must crawl inside their minds like a cancer.
Obviously, this ugly scenario pertains only to a portion of those school dropouts. After all, where would the "good" kids who dropped out get their money to buy drugs and guns? In many cases they earn it by becoming part of the drug trade.
Let’s see where we are. We require that we hold under-paid, under-trained, under-appreciated teachers accountable to their jobs by testing the kids with inconsistent, boring examination instruments. The kids lose interest, fail the tests, drop out and enter the drug trade, or just become idle parasites of their parents and the society. Since so many well-paying jobs are no longer here, there is an additional disincentive to prepare ones self for those potential careers.
The other 20-30 nations whose children score better than ours at every grade level in science, math and language have strong teachers unions, professionally paid teachers, national curricula, and recruit teachers from the TOP percentile of college graduates. These countries pay for these top achievers to become teachers instead of saddling them with debt. When we have tried this in places like inner-city Los Angeles, international test scores skyrocketed.
Many, many of our city schools are just plain awful and should be replaced with smaller, modern structures that limit class size and maximize learning environments. These fixes are not rocket science, but if we don’t do them, we won’t be educating any future rocket scientists.
Maybe worrying about DADT, tax breaks for the wealthy, a soaring national debt, corrupt government, greedy, unscrupulous business persons and crumbling infrastructure is more to your liking. Well, one of the most important parts of our infrastructure was an educated populace. With it we became the most significant economic and idealistic force in the history of man. With that part of the infrastructure crumbling like a neglected bridge, we are slowly crashing into the river of neglect and failure. What are you doing about fixing that?