He blows the myth of school's needing more money right out of the water.
There's no doubt we have very good people in the teaching occupation...this is really not about them. It's about out of control bureaucracy...at some point we have to look at doing something different when decade after decade more money is poured into the education system...and keeps getting worse.
Regardless of your political affiliation, some of these quotes from Stossel's "Money Is Not What Schools Need"
should be an eye opener...if you're looking unbiasedly without your preconceived notions:
quote:U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently claimed: "Districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh and into bone ... ."
When normal people hear about a budget cut, we assume the amount of money to be spent is less than the previous year's allocation. But that's not what bureaucrats mean.
"They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year's spending," Coulson writes. "What they're doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initially dreamed about having."
So if a district got more money than last year but less than it asked for, the administrators consider it a cut.
We should remeber this for any government program when we hear "cut". The spending on public education has skyrocketed in the last 40 years:
quote:"Back in the real world, a K-12 public education costs four times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars)," Coulson says.
Stossel then takes the example of California's American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland that has turned their school around without additional funding:
quote:It was once a failing school, but now it's one of the best in California...Chavis' experience exposes the school establishment's lies for what they are. Nearly all of Chavis' students are considered economically disadvantaged (98 percent qualify for free lunches), yet they have the fourth-highest test scores of any school in the state.
"In Oakland this year, on the AP (advanced placement) exam, we had 100 percent of all the blacks and Mexicans in the city of Oakland who passed AP calculus," Chavis said. "There are four high schools, and we're the only ones who had anyone pass AP calc."
Yet Chavis accomplishes this without the "certified" teachers so revered by the educational establishment. His classes are as big as, and sometimes bigger than, public school classes, but only a quarter of his teachers are certified by the state.
Chavis's school may have done well in math, but looking at this quote, he missed a few english classes...but you've got to love his attitude:
quote:Money, he insists, is not the answer. "My buildings are shacks compared to their schools, but my schools are clean, and we'll kick all their asses."
He scoffs at the establishment's solutions to the education problem, such as teacher evaluations.
"I don't do no teacher evaluations. All I do is go into a class, and if the kids ain't working, your ass is fired. (Most principals) sit for hours and say, 'Is he meeting this goal, is he meeting' -- I just go to class, and if the kids are not working ..."