Sunday, November 8, 2009

JOSE DE LA ISLA: The Hoover or Roosevelt of education » Standard-Times


JOSE DE LA ISLA: The Hoover or Roosevelt of education » Standard-Times:

"This is no small question. Marc Tucker, in the same publication, points out that the United States has one of the highest-cost, lowest-performing education systems in the industrial world. He focuses on better teachers being put in charge, in a similar way that doctors run hospitals. He champions a new system that is, mercifully, not called “reform” but “redesign.”
The old matrix of looking at how much money is to be spent is a deceptive measure because we allocate twice as much to secondary education.

Measuring high school graduates, we slide to 18th among the 36 industrialized nations, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But why expect anything different when our public education was intended for an industrial society that is passing from the scene? Tucker calls it a “dysfunctional design.”

Many Latino advocacy groups and individuals have been either on the wrong side of this debate or they are not up to speed with cutting-edge thinking. This matters because they will soon be invited to the policy casino and asked to turn their nearly 70 percent vote for Obama into chips to play administration poker."