How Bureaucrats Are Ruining Education

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/education/how-bureaucrats-are-ruining-education

Last week the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the nation, opened its doors to more than 640,000 students for the new school year. The following story is a sobering tale of bureaucracy run amok, to the detriment of its schoolchildren.

When John Deasy took over the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2011, he promised a “world-class” education for all students. A cornerstone of his plan has been to tie teachers’ jobs and salaries to their students’ scores on standardized tests. For the past two years Deasy has driven his vision relentlessly from his 24th floor executive suite in the district’s downtown headquarters, through a half dozen layers of administrators, to nearly 900 Los Angeles schools.

But on July 2, 2013, a new school board was sworn in, and the majority seems skeptical of Deasy’s business model. Matthew Kogan, an educator who walked precincts for the board’s newest member, teacher Monica Ratliff, explained, “It’s a very narrow model and there’s a lot of hostile things about it towards teachers.”

Despite intense pressure from the district headquarters to boost scores, academic performance is shockingly low and it trails behind students in most other large California districts. Just 39 percent of LAUSD students are proficient in math and only 41 percent are proficient in English (though their scores have improved since 2010). Nearly four in 10 LAUSD students fail to graduate from high school, and African-American students are nearly twice as likely to drop out as whites.

[MichiganVote]

1. It's the stupid meeting poverty and then denying either exists

[chervilant]

2. Past time to stop this

egregious assault on teachers and public education. Past time to scrap this "business model," and the stultifying standardized testing that is intended to spit out factory fodder and service industry drones.

Past time to get Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee and their ilk OUT of public education.

Oh, and while we're at it, we should stop lying to our children, and engage them in the critical work necessitated by the corporate and political hedonists who continue to rape our planet for profit.