We need a Secretary of Education who has classroom teaching experience beyond grade 5 and has administered a middle or high school for at least a couple of years or so. This experience gives teaching faculty a chance to understand and tell us a little bit about a candidate’s supervisory style. No need for a particular ethnicity or race or gender. We’ve tried using all these sociocultural criteria, especially in our major cities. But no criterion has worked for most kids.
Are recent nation-wide riots, looting, and arson all in large part expressions of our frustration with and rage at seemingly failed or ineffective educational institutions? We haven’t tried yet to make other institutions or agencies for public health or safety responsible for educating the nation’s children. We need to try, because it is clear that public educational facilities are no longer capable of educating our young or producing productive citizens.
There are several questions we should ask ourselves to try to understand the basis for the many waves of rioting in our major cities in recent years, most recently Portland, Oregon.
- Why haven’t our educational institutions found effective remedial strategies for low-achieving students by now—over 50 years after the first federal grants to low-income schools and communities in ESEA in 1965?
- Do schools in undeveloped or under-developed countries produce similar or lower levels of performance on the TIMSS, PIRLS, and PISA tests given to comparable children of low-income parents in this country on these tests? These have been the chief international tests available for our states to participate in.
- What are the average scores for each demographic group in countries with many non-dominant population groups as in the USA, Australia, Canada, and Singapore?
Maybe education researchers have looked at the wrong things or not asked the right questions, such as:
- How much reading or other homework have teachers assigned their students in K-12?
- How many parents check the time their children go to bed every night and how much they read or practice every day?
- Why have pre-schools on average, or after-school programs extending school teaching hours, failed to create equity among demographic groups in the K-12 school population?
- Why has the use of literary texts and curriculum-aligned textbooks whose subject matter and vocabulary have been reduced in difficulty (such as in recent Afrocentric curricula like 1619 ) failed to boost minority scores?
Who could be recommended for Secretary of Education? Perhaps all parents would agree that such a CONTINUE READING: Hoping for a Stronger Focus on Public Education in 2021 and Beyond | Truth in American Education
