They also don’t have a very functional chain of command; nobody seems responsible for maintaining quality work or professional behavior at any level. Don Iglesias seems to be leading this dysfunction.

My high-school son was shown the news coverage of this issue as an example of something that seemed like satire, but wasn’t. Ha ha. Funny, but in a pathetic way. Only the latest in a series of “what a waste of money” stories.

you are obviously an exception, but we all know that as a rule “Educators” are seldom well-educated. The GREs have proven this if there was any doubt – Test scores for all sorts of educators are about 100 points below the average for all takers of the test. We all know the saying: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t even do that, administrate.”

As far as I’m concerned, the public education system in the U.S. should be completely scrapped, and most “educators” should be given jobs that they are better qualified for – such as dish-washing (if well supervised). That educators would feel so superior that they pay no attention to the opinions of non-educators is laughable – but we all know that fools are too stupid to even understand that they are fools.

Private schools in the U.S. are providing actual education (not just better, but actual education), usually at one third to one half the cost per student that is spent in the public system. That alone says volumes about value for money.

Whether the school system is doing what it is designed to do is another question entirely. Some people suspect that our current system is intended to actively prevent real education, and if that is the case it is certainly working as intended . . . though not as advertised. It is no accident that qualified persons are hesitant to enter the field in the public sector: lack of autonomy, bureaucratic idiocy, social ostracization for male elementary school teachers, and endless “certifications” that are useless and time-consuming are not selling points for the sort of people who are qualified to teach.

Not much for it but to tear down the old – but there is no political will to do what is necessary, and the people who might vote are getting more ignorant every year. At home I have a couple 4th grade readers from approximately 1880, and I suspect that the average college student today couldn’t keep up with what the average 9 year old was reading 130 years ago. (There’s no question that the average Educator couldn’t understand those books.) That’s our educational progress for you.

It sounds like you have a difficult job, so best of luck to you.

No doubt any bunch of high schoolers would have done a better job.

In education we don’t often do things the way you describe. We tend not to start with the things that we know will work and gradually scale up or improve over time. We tend to leap in full force, with little knowledge, expect miracles, forget to plan for evaluation and abandon expensive efforts that don’t live up to expectations (and carry the baggage of the failure for some time after). We are not about continuous improvement. In fact, I am sure some will offer stories of how they bought a continuous improvement package that was supposed to solve all their problems, discovered they didn’t have the personnel, or training, or commitment or data to implement it and have by now abandoned it as another useless experiment.

We have reinterpreted “data-based decision-making” as test preparation and ignored the concept of informing decisions of all kinds based on available data (meaning information, which would include in this case the cost, the amount of productivity required to make the thing pay off, the level of training required to produce the product using the machinery, upkeep costs, information about the target market and their inclination to purchase the contemplated product). Actually it might have made quite a project for a group of entrepreneurial high schoolers to explore.

Not to worry. We’ve got parents for basic classroom supplies. It is the least they can do after paying their school taxes.

It’s not like making pizza is very complicated, some dough, some ingredients on top, toss it in the oven. Now if the government ever got in the business of making something really difficult, like say automobiles, then we should be worried…

This makes me furious, just furious. How many of their teachers are out buying basic classroom supplies right now because they’re rationing paper, pencils, and the copier?

{sarcasm now /off}

This goes a lot towards explaining why it takes more than a quarter million dollars to school a class of 25 kids for a year.