Save Me From the New York State of Mind
29th May 2014
Amanda Green doesn’t much like our school systems.
Schools today have abdicated their role as institutes of learning. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow process. I can’t even say where it started, not for the nation as a whole. Here in Texas, it started when state and federal mandates made it impossible for teachers to teach. Lesson plans suddenly had to be approved first by the department chair and then by the administration. Now, in many districts, lesson plans come from Admin and are filtered down.
Oh, the supporters of this say it is a way to guarantee all our children get the same education. The problem with this is that our kids aren’t all the same. They don’t learn the same ways and they don’t learn at the same rate. That, in essence, is the heart of the first problem of education. Teachers can no longer adjust the curriculum to meet the needs of the individual students. Oh, technically they can, but they have to go through so many administrative hoops that, by the time the deviation from the plan is approved, the harm as has been done. Either it is too late and the semester is over or the kid is so bored or so lost that there is no hope of getting him back.
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The food police rode in. Students are expelled for bringing peanut butter sandwiches to school because someone might be allergic. The First Lady has made it her mission to make all our kids into “healthy eaters”. I’m sorry, not her job. I repeat: That is not her job. I remember the days when my son wouldn’t eat anything but peanut butter or pizza or any one of several other items. If I didn’t have the option of sending what he’d eat with him to school for lunch, well, he just wouldn’t have eaten. He didn’t care if the First Lady said something was good for him. All he wanted was what tasted good and I guarantee you that wasn’t a salad or broccoli.