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If we are not willing to cut anything and we are not willing to pay enough to support everything, then we are stuck with either balancing the budget on the backs of the employees (by lowering their salaries and benefits) or shortening the school year.

Personally, I worry that the "cutting" mentality also includes lowering quality, since many comprehensive programs don't work well when schools implement just the easiest/cheapest parts. I guess that leaves us with: whatever we do in public schools should be high quality and, when the money runs out, that marks the end of the school year.

posted 2 years, 10 months ago
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Because the special education procedures require a label before a student receives services, there is a LOT of time and energy (and money) spent on "getting a label." But people are all so different, just knowing that a student has "Asperger's" doesn't really tell a teacher how to set up a classroom or teach reading. I think we would be better off if we spent more time figuring out how to match student needs with services and less time arguing about this label or that label.

posted 3 years, 3 months ago
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I'm a retired educator and the idea of giving more discretion to local districts really scares me unless we are VERY clear about what outcomes we expect from those local administrators. Just recently we saw when "No Child Left Behind" require higher standardized achievement test scores, some of the local ideas for meeting this standard included:

*schools encouraging poorly-performing minority students to drop out (so their scores did  not appear on the test report

*staff changing student responses on the test sheets to remore wrong responses

*eliminating critical school activities that did not directly improve test scores

*using untrained/minimally trained personnel instead of fully trained employees who have reached a generally recognized level of competence

Thus, when faced with a demand to report, some schools responded by unethically bending and breaking rules in order to "look good on paper." (There are sterling exceptions, of course! But my point is it's not the reporting itself so much as it is the value of and the use of the report results.)

Also, I think we tend to forget that ultimate goal of the public schools is to socialize youth into responsible adults who know how to participate in our democracy. But it is soooooooo easy to measure progress by testing reading and math achievement, that we use that as our yardstick of progress and thus ignore essential co-curricular activities.

posted 4 years ago
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