P.S. I am not a crank

So, all the news today is about how wonderful it is that the Senate passed an education bill.  Not only did it pass, but it got 90% of the senate vote.  All the news analysts seem to think it's terribly important that the two parties have come together to do something, anything, never mind if it's what their constituencies want.  

Really, the only reason the bill passed is because both parties want to look like they are doing something about the "education problem" we have here in the U.S.  First, I'd like to argue about the way they are trying to solve this "problem", and then I'd like to go on to argue about whether or not there is a problem.

Based on what I've been reading, local school districts want the money without the oversight.  We both know they aren't going to get that, but the quantity of oversight is ridiculous.  Testing kids every year will give teachers much less latitude on what to teach and will likely cause harm to the schools that are "behind."  If teachers and schools are punished for the performance (or lack thereof) of their students, they will teach by rote rather than teaching children how to acquire knowledge.  Furthermore, financial punshiments (like the threat of being fired, for instance) will cause cheating.  In fact, it already has in Michigan, Virginia, Maryland, Texas and New York, all states that have adopted some sort of high-stakes tests.  In a system that encourages this sort of testing, the test results themselves will quickly become useless.

Next, the problem.  Is there a problem?  The government claims that our kids education is somehow deficient (based on test results) to that of other industrialized nations.  I'm not sure this is borne out by the evidence at hand:  we are the wealthiest nation on earth.  It's no accident that we produce 25% of the worlds goods and services -- our culture must be teaching *something* that has good results.  Obviously, this argument gives people no peace, but I've got another one:  we're comparing apples to oranges.

The rest of the world tracks students starting at a young age (tracking kids is an idea we eschew because of the wacky American idea that all children are potentially Nobel laureates).  The students that participate in these exams, the students we're comparing to *all* American children, are the academic cream of the crop since they have been separated from the other students around middle-school age.  The other students are not sent to something we recognize as a high school but rather to something more like a trade school, and thus are not part of the testing.  I would argue that if all the students were included on both sides, we'd come out much better.  Nevermind that most of what we're measuring is test-taking ability.

I think it's also been proven repeatedly that throwing money and time (via the elimination of summer vacation) at the problem doesn't fix it.  The money problem is not that the schools don't have enough money.  The problem is that the "failing" schools are full of children whose parents do not value education.  Getting a good education for your child within the public school system requires effort on your part.  Children of wealthy parents see the value in education (literally), and intervene and encourage when necessary.  Wealthier parents are also more likely to not succumb to the authority of a school when they feel their child's best interests are not served by such authority.  Worse than that, this helps make sure that poverty is a self-perpetuating system, but you already knew that, right?

I can further imagine that school districts will now need more administration (or so they will say) to look after this annual testing nonsense.  This is yet more money that will not go where people want it to go -- to the teachers and students.

It's looking more and more like our kids will have to be home schooled.