Joanne Jacobs uncovered a brilliantly idiotic op-ed about how our children are too important to risk experimenting with, when "experimenting" is defined as "changing the public school system to something that might work better":
The NAEP data adds to the growing body of evidence that charter-school students do not outperform comparable students in regular public schools and should raise serious questions about continuing to employ charters as a sanction under the No Child Left Behind Act. More importantly in Washington, it should give us pause as we consider whether to approve or reject Referendum 55, on the November ballot, that would establish charter schools in this state.
Proponents of charter schools around the nation are crying foul. They claim that it's too early to compare charter schools to public schools. They claim that the American Federation of Teachers has an agenda. Data like this spurs debate. As it should. Without it, charter-school supporters can avoid serious discussion and continue to insist that charter schools are the solution to the problem.
...while charter-school supporters point to other studies and anecdotal information to show that charter schools can work, vying studies don't demonstrate who is right and who is wrong. They simply demonstrate that the possibility for success of children in charter schools is an unknown. Our children's education is too important to try experiments to see what works best.
Emphases mine. Leaving aside the fact that the authors, Darlene Flynn and James M. Welsh, don't cite too many of the "vying studies" to support their arguments that charter schools cannot work, I find the whole "we can't take chances" approach bizarre. I mean, wasn't the whole theory of "progressive education" that infested public schools in the 1970's built on the assumption that schools should take chances and come up with a Brave New World of education, one that freed children from the horrors of - gasp! - rote memorization? Aren't educrats supposed to be the ones that oppose the status quo, with its accountability measures, adherence to objective standards, test scores, and all those other pesky old-fashioned measures of education?'
But when a truly innovative concept appears, why, it's batten down the hatches! We must protect The Children from "the unknown." Sheesh.
Brian Micklethwait rightly pokes the educrats in their fearful bellies:
...there are a lot of public sector schools where parents would love it if the outcome was an "unknown", instead of the all-too-known that they are instead stuck with.
I think I know what these authors were trying to say with this amazing sentence, but the words they actually used show, I think, how out of touch they must surely be with lots of parents. They've said things like this to their friends and co-educrats so often, to such warm applause, that they truly didn't realise what they'd put. When they talk or write about "experiments", they, and their usual audiences and readerships, see evil right wing monsters inflicting cruel tortures on furry white animals and chucking defenceless kids off an experimental cliff. But lots of others will simply see them turning their backs on the obvious way (experiments) to make progress and to add to the store of human knowledge, in this case to the knowledge of how best to impart knowledge to the next generation.
Emphasis mine, again. It's obvious to us that the "progressive" educators of the past are now the ones most afraid of real progress.
Posted by kswygert at September 20, 2004 01:56 PM