the assumption of stupidity

I have been reading the guidelines written for school board members. Apart from those guidelines are told we need charter schools as an official state sponsored means to shake things up. (Because it is widely agreed that public education is not measuring up to expectations).  In the meantime, local school boards and schools where some meaningful shaking up could be most easily accomplished, are strictly held to the dotted i and crossed t. Evidently, among governmental policy makers, shaking things up is OK if done in a corporate board room, or by a major private foundation but not OK if done on the local level where it is probably true that people care about real kids.

After 13 years of schooling or more people are well trained to look beyond themselves and their own common sense for “expertise.”

This following is a description of the duties and responsibilities of a local school board in Arkansas.

Education as a State and Local Partnership:
Maintaining and operating a school district is, in a very real sense, a partnership between the state as parent and the local school board as offspring (or child?) Throughout the nation, this arrangement has proved its merits: It keeps schools close to the people, stimulates wholesome and creative flexibility within schools, allows for adaptability to local needs, and promotes working toward equitable opportunity without imposing uniformity that could stifle creativity and experimentation.

In my view, the constraints placed upon school boards, allowing them only to manage the financial concerns of the district, and whose only accepted duty is to hire and fire the superintendent is the cause of the situation than then provides justification for the charter school movement, which then takes public education out of the control of local school boards and puts it in corporate hands (that then do a very poor job of it). The key phrase above states that the local board is the "offspring" of the state.

Malcolm Gladwell and others have written about the 10,000 hour rule that proposes that it takes 10,000 hours to develop a particular level of expertise, whether in music, the  crafts or computer programming as was the case with Bill Gates. By the time students have been sequestered from the real world outside for over 10,000 hours of instruction, most will have become good at nothing. Nada, Zip, etc. unless they have been lucky enough to have become engaged in school sponsored athletics or in a school that breaks all the rules that must be adhered to in most public schools. Is it any surprise that when it comes to comparing high school basket ball games to conference night we find that parents show up for one and not the other?

I call for greater control at the much more local level over such things as curriculum development and measure of school success, allowing schools to be more flexibly responsible to the needs of each and every child. The Parent/child relationship should become more like when your child goes off to College… In which a responsible state steps back and asks only of local boards, “What can we do to help?” Instead, we have a educational system that assumes the local folks are unqualified to make educational decisions that affect the lives of their own kids.

Make, fix, and create...