Schools have lost their way

 Schools have lost their way

 

People don’t seem to know how to act!  At least that’s true of other people not us.  What is really frightening is that our politicians are screaming about what they need to do to save democracy, yet they seem to be hard at work to undermine democracy at every turn.

The famous (or is that infamous) Blueprint for Education in Maryland is pouring billions of U.S. dollars into education over the next ten years.  But almost all of that money is going into teaching reading and math and raising teachers' salaries.  Meanwhile the Blueprint insists it is preparing kids for the next generation.  Concentrating on reading and math is last generation in No Child Left Behind the legislation that promised to have every child at grade level by 2014.    That didn’t work and this won’t work either.

Sure, children need to be able to read and do math.   Having 23 schools in Baltimore City in which not a single student was proficient in math is totally unacceptable.   And it is also unacceptable that in a democracy only about 35% of the citizens are taking the trouble to vote. Even though they take all the trouble they need to complain.   While the Maryland legislature has increased opportunities to vote, many states are doing whatever they can to make it more difficult to cast a ballot.

Publically funded schools were originally funded to prepare the masses for participating in a democracy.   That establishing principle seems to have long forgotten.

We do not put sufficient emphasis on civics, our responsibilities as citizens to our community and how the democratic system works.  We worry that kids can’t pass algebra 2, but lose no sleep over the fact they don’t know where to put political pressure to get guns off the street.  Politics has stopped being about choosing the leader who most reflects your values and now is all about the leader pandering to whatever will get him/her elected.   The political values shift with the latest poll.

We are not preparing our students to decode what is in the press or online.  It is wonderful if the reading level improves but what good will that do if having read the passage is designed to manipulate the reader but the reader can’t tell that.

We are not educating future citizens; we are too busy working on headlines for test scores.

Schools have lost their way from the original purpose for spending all this money.  We will continue to throw money at the problem and wonder why nothing changes.