"DEFEND ARE VETERAN'S"

[MANative]

157. I agree that there are many contributing factors...

but when I see the vast differences in performance for children in wealthier communities where education is supported by a healthy tax base, and poor communities which spend so much less per capita, it leads me to conclude that there is a strong causal relationship between the spending and the result. That so many of these communities are also in the south, where Republicans and their complicit cronies in the Religious Right have pushed "faith" over "elitism" for decades, it seems clear that it's no accident.

I grew up all over the country - my father was in the US Army for more than twenty-five years - but got my foundational learning in Massachusetts, which continues to rank at the very top in academic achievement. I was always head and shoulders above my classmates in Georgia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Texas, to the point that they kept trying to move me to the next grade-level so that I wouldn't be bored silly. Now, I know I am blessed with a good brain and natural curiosity, but my brothers also excelled in comparison to their classmates, and were considered middle-to-high-middle of the pack once we returned back home.

Having left the public education world nearly thirty years ago, I can't speak directly to all of the changes during that time, but I do have numerous friends who are current teachers, and it's very clear that the basic mission is "teach to the test" rather than for development of learning skill. Functional skills (job-specific things that tend to be more "concrete" in nature) seem to be taught at significantly higher levels than abstract skills (professional/managerial skills such as delegation, training a worker, counseling, etc.) aren't touched before college, if the student is lucky enough to ever get there. Teachers who are able to find ways to inject those bigger goals into their learning strategies seem to be rare.

My business now is focused on teaching individuals and companies those abstract skills like leadership and employee management. I can't even tell you how much time I spend on remedial work with people who are supposed to be managing large work groups and complex processes and systems. To add insult to injury, companies have slashed their training budgets so that this very necessary work is going undone, to the great detriment of the future growth of businesses and their executives. Only the "elite" who can afford private learning (read "MBA&quot get to experience this kind of development today. And don't even get me started on how crappy some of those programs are!