Diagnosing the Cause
Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 07:08PM Furlough Fridays, poor test scores, and low graduation rates are symptoms.
These symptoms capture our attention, instill within our hearts fear and anger and force us to take action. Unfortunately, most efforts by the BOE, DOE and local government work only to alleviate the effect. There is no action taken in regards to the cause.
Like a medical doctor who prescribes painkillers for a headache but fails to identify the brain tumor causing the pain, our state leaders are focused on only relieving the effects caused by a diseased public educational system; they are not focused on uncovering and correcting the true source of the problem.
Fortunately, the cause of our public education decay has been clearly explained in this MUST READ report by Randall W. Roth. He claims that the origins of our public education woes are:
(1) flawed assessments; (2) unions that are too politically strong; (3) inadequate funding; (4) deficient students; (5) inadequate system-wide leadership; (6) ineffective teachers and principals; and/or (7) a flawed governance structure. Although more than one of these may have some degree of validity, and some are interrelated, the author of this paper views the last category, flawed governance structure, as the primary and fundamental problem.
Please note that lack of money is not a reason.