🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Zd_tb.1302$5Y6.89@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>,
Roger <rogerfx@hotmail.com> wrote:
>"joe" <joebird_11@netzero.com> wrote in message
>news:bp99h0$54v$1@news.wplus.net...
>> Roger, you know as well as the rest of us that it's highly unlikely that
>the
>> school board would have the guts to tell the principal he was wrong.why?
>the
>> unions would presure them not to, Yes we elect them but, once a person
>gets
>> elected the odds of a chalenger winning is pretty low it's sorta like
>> congress where people always say ''throw the bums out, except our bum he's
>a
>> good guy''

>Principals are management. They aren't in unions.

>If the system doesn't work, lobby to get it changed. Don't throw away a
>whole system because the people with a better idea of how to fix it are too
>lazy to force a change.

I have posted that it would take at least 20 years to get a
good public school system, if it wanted to change.  Others
have considered me to be highly optimistic.  

The public schools, and NCLB reinforces it, take what should
be an obviously stupid position that children should be with
their age group instead of learning at their individual rates,
and often in their individual manners.  THIS could be changed
rather quickly, if the powers that be wanted to, and there 
are some private schools which will not say that a particular
child is in a particular grade.

Nobody whose children are in the public schools, or even
not yet in those prisons, can expect to get significant
changes made in time for them.  We cannot replace the
majority of teachers by those who know their subjects, but
who have not been brainwashed by the educationists, in a
few years.

What is harder to change is the belief that concepts cannot
be learned directly, but only through gradual development.
There is considerable evidence to the contrary, and in any
case, we do not have the luxury of waiting till adulthood
to teach basic concepts, assuming that we have not already
destroyed the ability to understand them.  Many of those
who had to "learn" to read by the whole word method were
unable to discard that and learn to use the alphabet in
an intelligent manner.  The "new math" fiasco was worse.

I see this at the graduate level; those who have learned
by getting more and more manipulations do not seem to be
able to learn the concepts as well as the students did 
decades ago.
-- 
This address is for information only.  I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@stat.purdue.edu         Phone: (765)494-6054   FAX: (765)494-0558