Edumacated...

The only good thing about being sick this past week has been February vacation. Thank goodness I didn't have any students. Other than progress reports, a cleaned out closet, and a vacuumed floor, I don't have much to show for the time without students, but it's way, WAY better than if I were trying to teach, collect papers, record grades, etc.

So it's fitting that on the last day of vacation I'm starting to feel better. I was so much better in fact that I joined in the book discussion with the teachers of the OTHER teaching program in our building. We've been reading "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" by Diane Ravitch. It's a policy intense book, which makes it hard to get through, but brings up some very important points about education reform in the states and our focus on testing as a teaching method.

An hour into our discussion and I started to wonder, as a nation, are we completely screwed? We definitely didn't stick with the Socratic method of discussion and the topics veered from Ravitch's assessment of education to the reasons that all of the problems with education were allowed to continue. We're a non-profit group dedicated to educating the traditionally undereducated population of the states.

So here are a few of our discussion points:

- There is no longer a job for everyone who wants to work, regardless of education level. The country doesn't actually *need* to educate everyone because some people will not get jobs. If people don't get jobs they will either live off of welfare or go to prison.

- Prisons are big business, and number of beds are calculated based on reading levels in 3rd grade. Prisons get an average of $35,000 a year for each prisoner. While that amount of money could have been spent in prevention and on education, the prison system is too profitable to get cut back. Investors make fortunes off of prison speculation.

- Without a manufacturing and agricultural base we are only concerned with college bound education. Not all students are destined to go to college and we are consistently loosing more middle class, lower class jobs. The divide between the educated and the non-educated is growing despite efforts to reform schools.

- We've shifted the focus of reform from student accountability to teacher accountability. Teachers are now being held responsible for how well a student is able to learn without taking into effect the student's home life, or current emotional state. The incentive for a student to learn, when that student is looking at a lack of jobs, is less than the incentive for teachers to teach. There has been an increase in teachers cheating for their students because of the pressure put on teachers to bring up test scores.

- We wondered where the missing money was. There are all kinds of cuts to programs, classroom sizes aren't getting smaller, schools are closing. Students aren't getting everything that they could at an expensive private school. However, the FTE (funding for each student) is something like $7,000 per student per year. While that's not quite the price of a private school, it's a significant amount of money. For a classroom of 25 (the limit in MA) the school should get 175,000. Seriously, we can't make a classroom work for less?

So basically, it was a pretty bleak discussion. And once again I say, wanna fix schools? Fix society first.