School Teaching - Which is it?

Listening to Thom Hartman's interview with Ralph Nader on February 13, 2007 on KPOJ in Portland this AM I caught only a few minutes of it before the interview ended but it was an interesting observation that Ralph Nader's DAD made way back when.

After a day at school Ralph came home and asked him the routine question of what did you learn in school.

The follow-up from his dad is more to the point

 

"Did you learn to believe or did you learn to think?" 

 

School systems (and it is a system) are more into teaching BELIEFS and rote learning and NOT thinking. Few teachers remain in schools when the system is geared for political correctness and indoctrination of students and not teaching them how to solve - think - problems out.

Add in the need to teach to the tests - since they get money based on scores - so anything that takes away time from the students from getting a good score on tests is NOT important.

 

If teachers are rated on how well their prior year students do on tests then it is only natural you TEACH the test so you can retain your job and get bonuses.

 

I know of no profession when they would go into an low achieving school and try and teach an all around education when their whole career is based on how well a student does on a standardized test so they MUST teach only the test to retain their job.

 

President's Bush idea of grading teachers and performance pay is fatally flawed in this respect. As are most performance plans - people will then only do work that helps them meet that goal and forget anything else.

 

Look to corporate bonus plans and see how successful those are. A company losses 150 million dollars and the CEO gets 30 million for meeting the goal of raising the stock 5 dollars. He worked to raise the stock since that HELPS him - and the company loosing 150 is not important to HIS goal. And if he fails and gets kicked out - he walks away with 20 million. Regardless, the company is out of 170 or 180 million since HIS performance is NOT tied to the overall health of the company.

 

Teachers would behave like a CEO - if the overall education of the kid suffers that is NOT their problem - they taught the TEST to them so they can get a good grade.