The Floggings Will Continue Until The Test Scores Improve Published by Mike Tikkanen on July 17, 2011 Read below:
While Americans are spending great sums building schools and supporting education in Afghanistan (to rebuild a different nation), our own schools are being dismantled, educators pilloried, and students cast into the exploding world of technology & change without the basic tools to make a productive life.
Our teachers are denigrated by politicians for their failure to fix under-resourced schools filled with at risk children from poor and often troubled families.
The problems facing educators are many and complicated but must be addressed if we are to stop this nations slide to the bottom.
More than a few U.S. states already look like Afghanistan when comparing the health and well being statistics of their children.
The rest of the industrialized world understands that education is the engine that drives society. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the 23 other industrialized nations treat children, daycare, & early childhood programs as important parts of their societies. We don’t.
These wise nations know that children need skills to function as contributing citizens while America (in a growing number of states) spend more on prisons than schools, lack affordable daycare and early childhood programs, and sell Ritalin, Prozac, and Zoloft to children instead of providing healthcare.
Subsidized daycare has thousands on waiting lists in Minnesota (I was forced to take children from a working father only because he could not afford daycare when I was an active volunteer guardian ad-Litem).
Daycare workers in the U.S. are paid about as much as food service workers (the lowest paid profession in the nation). American daycare is underfunded, under-trained, and misunderstood.
The high school I attended is now a decrepit old building with fewer extra curricular activities, larger classes and fewer choices. Teaching is not the attractive profession it was when I graduated from college and thought seriously about being an educator.
To politicize the education of children (our future citizens) is the very definition of how to insure the destruction of a democratic society.
As Pliny said 2500 years ago; “What we do to our children, they will do to society” As always please feel free to comment with your views on the article.