On Education

Today, my little, elementary-school brother had his "state fair" at his school today; each student had to pick a state and do a poster board on it, along with bring in food, design a sculpture, and do other tasks. And the question arose: why aren't they doing this all the time?

In the Bushworld society we live in, we can foresee three things: death, taxes, and poor education reform. Due to No Child Left Behind, the public education system is deteriorating. Just as the Bush administration wants it to. Here's what's happening:

• Due to change in funding set-up, the schools who are doing well-because they have money-are getting more money, while the schools not doing well-mainly in the inner city, because they have no money-get nothing.
• Schools and states have to spend more money for the materials for standardized-tests needed to get federal funding, supporting capitalism and big business.
• High-schoolers, due to NCLB, unless an opt-out letter is signed, will be phoned, e-mailed, and snail-mailed information on recruiting, closing in on their right to privacy(it's not military recruiting that's bad; it's the way that the recruiters are doing it).

Education is quite an important issue, one issue that people focus on every year, right up there with the economy and national defense. Why isn't anyone standing up for this? Now, with high-stakes testing, principals teach to tests, creating a lack of curricula for rote memorization and learning processes in math, science and spelling. Now, with high-stakes standardized testing, arts and sciences are taken away year by year in favor of test prep upon test prep. Why can't we have both? Here's what we can do:

• Give the funding in reverse order: worse schools get the most, best schools get the least.
• Have teachers, and not corporations, create these standardized tests.
• Allocate funds from the war in Iraq, taking up almost a trillion dollars in our budget, and put it in education.
• Decrease class sizes and build more schools in the inner city; small class sizes are proven to raise grades and increase learning.
• Finally, make test-prep extracurricular, while keeping the arts and sciences in the curricula.
  

No post Friday or Sunday. Saturday: On the Constitution and its Shrinking civil liberties. On Monday: A lesson on Chris Dodd.