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You can get a lot of info about this travesty on the Rubber Room documentary website.
This is another great example of how destructive many of the current liberal policies are around education. The Teachers Union prevents bad teachers from getting fired. The Liberal social policies prevent good teachers from being authoritative. The Liberal culture tells Kids they are at the same time victims and as smart as adults and that no one can tell them what to do. You add a huge bureaucracy and corruption and you end with this.
I wonder what the Michael Moore crowd will think about this documentary. No Oscars here, I guarantee it.
Here is the trailer:
“As he entered public school, he displayed what his teachers called “immature” behavior. “In kindergarten I was told by his teacher, ‘Michael can’t sit still, Michael can’t be quiet, Michael can’t focus,’ ” recalled Ms. Phelps, who was herself a teacher for 22 years. The family had recently moved, and she felt Michael might be frustrated because the kindergarten curriculum he was getting in the new district was similar to the pre-K curriculum in their old district.
“I said, maybe he’s bored,” Ms. Phelps recalled saying to his teacher. “Her comment to me — ‘Oh, he’s not gifted.’ I told her I didn’t say that, and she didn’t like that much. I was a teacher myself so I didn’t challenge her, I just said, ‘What are you going to do to help him?’ ”
She will never forget one teacher’s comment: “This woman says to me, ‘Your son will never be able to focus on anything.’ ”
That is Michael Phelps’ Mom talking about the difficulties of raising an obviously ‘different’ kid in the American public school system.
I have seen this myself. People here are so concerned with teaching everything the same way to everyone that they completely ignore kids who need an extra challenge in some area. When you bring up these things teachers are incredibly defensive. Kids are blamed right away and the first alternative anyone proposes is medication. After all, it is much easier to ‘change’ one person (even if it means messing up your brain) than to change the system.
It’s another sad unintended consequence of allowing the state to control such a crucial part of a person’s life.
The debate about bias in public schools is always interesting. After all, if we all are forced to pay for something, it is only fair that we at least try to please all.
And even though this is basically impossible it should be clear to all that it is a goal to at least get close to it. The fact that bias will always be there should not be an excuse to accept bias in all forms and intensity.
The problem begins when people start to rationalize around intentional flaws. I heard some people saying that children are not really impressionable. “They are contrarians!”, so we shouldn’t really worry about this whole talk about bias. Ironically, these are usually the same group of people that say religion is a “dangerous meme”, that things like Bible Camps should be downright illegal and that capitalism only works because “it tricks” people into buying new stuff.
These people say that schools only need to worry about exposing children to all available points of view. So it doesn’t matter if you have a lunatic history professor that says “capitalism is evil, communism is good!” as long as you have another history professor saying the opposite. After all, “children are much more sophisticated than you think pal!”
Well, I could bet that most of these geniuses are not parents. Children are really, very impressionable at many different levels. They may try to emulate adults, and some might even look like adults at 14 but make no mistake: They are NOT adults, and should not be treated as one at least until they are 18.
The goal should be to limit bias as much as possible. If that is not agreed on, public schools should be completely eliminated or at least something one can opt out of paying.
A friend of mine is going back to college and needs some credits in political sciences. She decided to take “The United Nations”. You can see her options were pretty limited.
She showed me the book for that class today: An Insider’s Guide to the UN.
Here is what I’ve found in its acknowledgements page:
“…For their generous financial support, I’m very grateful to the UN Foundation … I also thank the Rockefeller Brothers Fund … In addition, I thank the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. I also express appreciation to my friends and colleagues at the UN, NBC News, and National Public Radio …”
Now, this is the equivalent of having a global warming book sponsored by Exxon being used in a college class. A public sponsored college class nonetheless.
Of course, you won’t hear any complaints about this. Who would complain anyway? You have radio, TV, politicians and professors all glued together in a ready-to-be-absorbed educational package.
It is amazing to me that lefties are not yet dominating the US.
Juan Williams, for the Herald Tribune:
“Let us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision. With the Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed.
…
Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.
…
In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision?
…
His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers.
He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools across much of America.
If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.
Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.
And today the argument that school reform should provide equal opportunity for children, or prepare them to live in a pluralistic society, is spent. The winning argument is that better schools are needed for all children – black, white, brown and every other hue – in order to foster a competitive workforce in a global economy.
Dealing with racism and the bitter fruit of slavery and “separate but equal” legal segregation was at the heart of the court’s brave decision 53 years ago. With Brown officially relegated to the past, the challenge for brave leaders now is to deliver on the promise of a good education for every child.”
Grande parte do problema em ter o governo administrando a educação do povo é a total falta de objetividade. Uma escola particular tem como objetivo equilibrar a equação lucro vs qualidade. Em uma Universidade pública, parte da equação não existe, e o sucesso da mesma não é facilmente mensurável (principalmente em disciplinas humanas).
Junte a esse problema décadas de “multi-culturalismo”, e chegamos na situação atual. O último exemplo do caos universitário foi esse do tal Dr. Kamau Kambon, que durante um seminário na Howard University em Washington DC (a Howard é uma Universidade aonde a enorme maioria dos alunos é negra), disse que “a solução para muitos dos problemas encontrados pelo povo negro é a exterminação da raça branca da face do planeta”.
Não, isso não foi uma piada ou figura de linguagem. Não duvido que essa opinião seja somente um devaneio de um extremista, e li que mesmo no seminário da Howard muitos outros convidados repreenderam o tal loony. Mas numa sala de aula, aonde os alunos muitas vezes tomam opiniões como verdades, esse tipo de loucura pode ser altamente destrutiva.
Além de ser um antro para extremistas, o sistema de educação pública é altamente ineficiente e completamente injusto com a população mais pobre.
Antes de mais nada, quero deixar claro que diferentemente de alguns amigos libertários, acho que a educação faz parte da estrutura básica de uma sociedade, e o governo pode e deve facilitar o acesso da mesma para a parte mais pobre da população.
Mas as evidências mostram que o governo não tem competência nem capacidade de administrar escolas de qualquer nível. Deveriamos deixar essa tarefa com a iniciativa privada, e deixar que o governo ajude somente no pagamento de mensalidades para os que realmente precisam. Esse estudo do CATO mostra clara e objetivamente como um programa de voucher seria muito mais eficiente e barato.
São números públicos, incontestáveis. O sistema atual não somente carrega o fardo de educar mal as crianças, mas também traz um peso enorme na iniciativa privada. Poucas famílias conseguem pagar duas escolas ao mesmo tempo (os custos das escolas públicas são obrigatórios).
Isso sem falar em outras unintended consequences. Um dos motivos para o crescente aumento do preço das casas em certas áreas aqui é que as famílias competem para morar nos melhores distritos escolares. Quer dizer, o custo de cada escola é muito maior do que os impostos mostram, e no fim das contas, os pobres acabam ficando com as piores escolas de qualquer forma. Além disso, essa concentração artificial de moradores de maior renda em pequenos ‘oásis’ prejudica imensamente o desenvolvimento de outras, o que consequentemente leva o isolamento desses outros bairros, diminuindo os investimentos e os interesses politicos nessas áreas, piorando ainda mais o círculo de pobreza.
Mas como todo grande programa social, acabar com as escolas públicas seria uma tarefa monumental. Muitos dizem ser politicamente inviável. A retórica populista seria violenta, e os enormes (e poderosos) sindicatos e grupos de interesse lutariam como nunca pela própria sobrevivência.
Enfim, mais uma bela idéia que na prática só criou mais problemas.
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