Thursday, July 5, 2007

Current Chaos Manor mail

Current Chaos Manor mail: "A good friend, who was once on the school board (and the only totally sane SB person I've ever known) told me that 'We can't, in six hours a day, make up for what happens with the kids during the other 18 hours.' And yet, NCLB and the state level testing require them to do so, or pretend to do so, so what we get is a system that is rigged to show the 'results' mandated by these bad laws."

Hmm, interesting. To me and my friends and the people we know it is more like "we can't in 18 hours a day make up for what happens in 6 hours of school." Though in reality it is often less then an hour after homework, chores, dinner (prep, eat, cleanup), sleep and all the rest. Wasn't there a study not long ago showing most parent end up only spending 20 minutes with there kids a day?

Obviously there are goals in conflict here. 

Many parents say they want the best education for their children, but aren't sure what "best" is and don't have any time to figure it out, and looking at problem is like looking for a book in a library without a catalog, just too big of a problem. So they just go with the default the school has and try to get into the "good" schools but good isn't exactly defined either.

School bureaucracies  seem to try maximizing the amount of money they bring in. More money is more pay. Makes sense. 

A big problem is what is vitally important to parents in New York is completely irrelevant to parents in Idaho. A nationalized education system is just not able to work, much as we may hope for the best that way. 

Each local school should have a school board made up of parents with children in school. The results will be a lot more consistent that way.

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