If you favor hiding evidence and quashing open inquiry with regard to public questions of the most urgent interest, what does that say about your philosophy of education?
Teachers’ union officials in Los Angeles have been in a tizzy because the Los Angeles Times, a liberal bastion, published a detailed series casting controversial light on the quality of public school education in the city. The articles include a database of scores assessing — gasp! — the effectiveness of teachers.
This is a disturbing development for union reps demanding ever greater pay and job security for even lackluster instructors. To be sure, it’s not the negative evaluations that most intensely disturb them, nor even any debatable aspect of the methodologies used to assess effectiveness. It’s that the data has been publicized and discussed at all. The Times should not have published the database, complained one union official, Randi Weingarten. Another union honcho, A.J. Duffy, even called for a boycott of the paper, as if it were morally turpitudinous to give parents even an inkling of teacher performance.
Slate.com contributor Jack Shafer concludes that the Times has “done its readers a great service” by exposing Duffy and his cronies as “enemies of open inquiry, vigorous debate, critical thinking, and holding authority accountable — essentially the cognitive arts that students are supposed to be taught in schools.”
Is there any way to bypass the dilapidated and authoritarian educational regime altogether? You homeschoolers out there: Any ideas?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
2 replies on “The Bad Lesson”
If only liberals would demand separation of school and state, as they do for church and state.
Their position shows they really aren’t interested in freedom, and instead are interested in using government to enrich themselves (the teachers and administrators) rather than living in a free society. Their idea of freedom, is free schooling, something that actually reduces the liberty of people by making them pay for it, whether they want it or not.
Yes, there is a way to bypass the educrat regime. And it could be done with the support of homeschoolers, private schoolers, and public school families. If parents who wished were given half the money spent per child in their school district to educate their child as they wish (no strings attached, kids already out of the public system get phased in over 5 years), the public schools would have less students and more money, and the public schools would improve due to the competition. This would be best for students, best for taxpayers, and best for state and local government budgets (it would save lots of money in school construction costs).