Beating a dead horse?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

We all think it’s a teacher’s fault students are doing so poorly these days. That’s what administrators want us to believe, but from what I’ve seen, it’s just not possible because it’s the same lack of money and social acceptability within the teaching profession together with the same resultant lack of quality teachers that has been characteristic of the system for many years, ever since the advent of the factory schools in the 1950’s. So who is really to blame?

It’s the principals who hire the teachers; it’s the superintendents who hire the principals; it’s the school boards who hire the superintendents, and the school boards are elected politically. It’s the same in many places around the world, and it always ends up being a local, political horse race, where the winner runs the show all the way back to the barn, or in our case, the classroom.

In each school district, this top-down decision-making game is the way it has worked here in the US for decades. The argument I’ve been making, unheeded, inspired by personal experience, is that this is where the problem lies, and this is where it must be solved.

Unfortunately, such an archaic, easily corrupted system is easily ridden to ground on a track soaked with incompetence. All anyone seems to be able to do about it lately is to criticise our public schools for giving us a bad horse, one that likes to make equitable excuses for a poor showing. Others demand that we let private schools get in the race with their own, repurposed versions of old nags - as if our own horse gave a flip of the tail or theirs could actually do better.

Are there any real solutions coming down from the top today? Look around you: all-too many, supposedly great teachers today are being encouraged to tell our children to forget or rewrite our history and ancestors’ sacrifices to create new ways to imagine their sexuality while they throw out the good with the bad and destroy what we’ve been for its lack of perfection all in the name of building some new, immature, utopian world – this from folks who can’t change a car tire without a cellphone.

Worthwhile dreams are a must, but these foolish dreams, all this lack of respect for the teaching profession itself and this corrupt politicisation of our schools from the top down - all of it - we can change if and when we realise where the problem really lies, do something about it, and so re-establish a trust in education itself. Until then, with such poor management, aren’t we all just beating a horse we’ve starved, malnourished, and then expected to run an extra mile on a poor track?

ED MCCOY