Sunday, June 09, 2019

What Building Is Drab-Looking, Has Gates All Around It, with Bells Ringing All the Time?

I. What Building Is Drab-Looking, Has Gates All Around It, with Bells Ringing All the Time? (Hint: It's Not a Prison)

The 99cent Teacher or the $150,000 Teacher—Who Do You Want Teaching Your Child?

 Meet the Worst Teachers: The Parents 

 Would You Ever Question Your Child's Pediatrician? 

Since politicians control the way schools operate, it will take an honest-to-goodness political leader willing to give up power and transfer it to those who do the teaching: the three million public school teachers. That is one source of imagination and genius that largely goes untapped for its input. Even when eliminating the bad ones, the mediocre ones, the average ones, you are still left with a hefty number of gifted people who, because they actually go through the system day in and day out, have the best vantage point to drive the transformation. "Educrats," bureaucrats whose specialty is education, i.e., those who wield power in education and wish to maintain the status quo and thereby are out of touch with wish to maintain the status quo and thereby are out of touch with the reality of the classroom, enjoy freely referring to teachers as stakeholders or shareholders, but it's just a bunch of malarkey to make teachers feel good. Teachers have no real power. Educrats know it and they like it that way; otherwise, they would have no jobs.
• How should the buildings appear? 
• Is it okay for students to fail a grade and be promoted on to the next one? 
• Should parents pay for public schools? 
• Should good teachers be paid more than bad ones? 
• Is there any point to homework? 
• Should teachers work four days a week? 
• Should holidays be eliminated From the school year? 
• Is special education sucking away money from the rest of the students? 

• Should teachers unions be banned? 

By the title of this work I am not implying that all children are A+ students and that schoolchildren own zero accountability in the matter of their education. I'm saying that the system does not work and that young people could and should be achieving much more after thirteen years of education than they do now. They should be better prepared to enter society as contributing, responsible citizens who have future paths clearly "Mapquested." Yes, there are students who misbehave, who don't do their work, who are apathetic and don't want to be there any longer, as one-third vanish before the marathon race is over with. But it's the system that doesn't want to rethink itself. It's incapable of reflection, of looking inward.

In California, because of one parent's complaints that led to a 
landmark legal decision against the state in 2004, commonly re- 
ferred to as the Williams case, every school must provide sufficient 
textbooks for its students and a clean and safe facility. Imagine that. 
It took a lawsuit to guarantee that each student had a book and that 

each school had a properly running toilet. Wow! 

It took 61 years before  a Prime minister mentioned the lack of toilets in Indian Schools 

"On 15th August 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Swacch Vidyalaya Abhiyan, the Clean Schools Movement, and promised to build separate for 137.7 million boys and at schools nationwide within a year.
In this year’s speech he said: “It just came into my heart and I had announced (last year) that we would build separate toilets for boys and girls in all of our schools till the next 15th of August. But later on, when we started work, “Team India” (the government) figured out its responsibilities; we realised that there were 262,000 such schools, where more than 4,25,000 toilets were required to be built. This figure was so big that any government could think about extending the deadline, but it certainly was the resolve of “Team India” that no one should seek any extension. Today, I salute “Team India”, who, keeping the honour of our tricolour National Flag, left no stone unturned to realise that dream, and “Team India” has now nearly achieved the target of building all the toilets”."



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