SOME OBSERVATIONS TRANSCEND POLITICS.  Rebelpleb cross-posted to Common Dreams some observations about what makes for a successful school.

To be sure, teachers deserve higher salaries – on the order of 1000% raises – but if you asked teachers what they wish for, higher salaries would be the last thing they would mention. They would tell you that they want: 

• smaller class sizes, so that they can give more individual attention to their students and have fewer papers to grade, so that they can devote enough time to give students thorough feedback and assistance to help them learn
• more preparation time, so that they can devise creative and interesting lessons to enable students to learn and be engaged
• more autonomy, so that they can help students think critically instead of forcing the students to engage in rote memorization for standardized tests
• more support from school staff, so they can teach rather than having to do much administrative and bureaucratic work that is not connected to educating their students
• more social supports for students so they can devote their time to learning more effectively
• more time for their students to engage in art, music, and physical education
• and did I mention smaller class sizes?

Everything on this wish list relates directly to better education. While we spend money on new technologies and gadgets for classrooms, new books and learning programs which enrich the pocketbooks of corporations, we do nothing to enrich classrooms in the ways that teachers and students need most.

These observations generalize to the universities as well, where technology fads and administrative interference get in the way of teaching and scholarship.  The proper social supports might be subject to debate, and the nature of unproductive assessment and testing might be different.  But the misplaced enthusiasm of observers who see increased student credit hours per faculty member as enhanced productivity is the nub of the problem.

One quarter of our children live in poverty. We have a crisis of unemployment, joblessness, hunger, and homelessness that worsens by the day and deeply affects all of our school-age children. In addition, we have a cultural crisis in which superficiality and the spectacle of entertainment are revered beyond any moral and civic responsibilities to each other and to our communities. We have a crisis of technophilia, in which we are addicted to television, computers, iPads, iPhones, smartphones, etc., and lack important engagements in interpersonal conversation and true emotional attachment. And we have a crisis of society, in which the corporation has taken over all aspects of our lives, including our educational systems. Our schools have been reconstructed to train mind-numbed automaton serfs for the benefit of their corporate overseers.

Those mind-numbed serfs will be the undoing of those corporate overseers (what good is an employee who can't find the bathroom without a study guide?)  The preceding sentences, however, focus on the inability, whatever the cause might be, of the schools to develop the habits of industry; habits that are, in any event, rendered anachronistic by the superficial vulgar culture.  (Never mind the insurrections across North Africa or the breakdown of Japan, Inc.; a new Survivor is to make its premiere.)

Many poor students have obligations and burdens beyond their control which impede their abilities to devote themselves to their educations. To address the educational needs of these children, their social and economic needs must be dealt with first, and this larger, societal issue cannot be adequately addressed by teachers, though many try to do so.

But there is also another fact that most teachers will never speak of publicly – students are not all perfect angels, not by a long shot. Though I hate to rely on TV as a model, the show “Supernanny” depicts how poorly some children are parented and how spoiled and entitled so many children are now more than ever. These same children who throw endless temper tantrums, speak back to adults, and obtain everything they want in every way they want it are the children that teachers are supposed to manage and educate every day. Rather than support the authority of the teacher when problems arise, parents of these children back up their offspring and complain to administrators about teachers, rather than confront the control their own children exert over them.

The essayist suggests that the perceived advantages of charter and private schools in educating youngsters is an artifact of three things: smaller class sizes, fewer classes per faculty member, and students with more cultural capital. The generalizations to higher education are straightforward.