What’s wrong with our schools

Let’s be brutally honest for a moment. The state of affairs in our education system... sucks. There’s no better or nicer way to put it. We suck. The easiest thing to do from here would be to blame the government, all the way from Federal initiatives like No Child Left Behind to local school board idiocy... there’s plenty of (rightfully earned) fault to pass around.

Blame is fun and all but it rarely does anything other than implicate the source of conflict; it doesn’t fix anything. How can we fix the long list of deficiencies in our schools? Look in the mirror. Until we can reflect and point our collective finger squarely at ourselves, revamping our education system is a crapshoot at best, a complete waste of time at worst. We owe it to society (and ourselves) to send our kids to school ready, willing, and able to learn, and that is just not happening. The devaluation of education is staggering.

I originally broached this subject in September of 2006, but the story remains the same today. We live in a society that coddles the lazy and rewards the undeserving. We are blessed to be so fortunate as to suffer from this dilemma, but looking back at this documentary forces me to believe that if we had to deal with the conditions that the rest of the world faces, we’d have “potty trained” society’s underachievers long ago.

Make no mistake, our system is broken and it needs to be fixed, but by in large the repairs will mean nothing if we don’t get our kids ready.

My 4-step plan for improvement:

1. Change the culture that aspires to fantasy celebrity instead of hard work (i.e. musicians, athletes, or anyone else glamorizing a something for nothing/easy money mentality)

2. Put educators back in charge of education (not political cronies or tap dancers... real, qualified, credentialed educators with experience and results to show for it).

3. Make our elected officials accountable for their decisions and somehow insure that those folks making multimillion-dollar decisions are doing so with accurate, unbiased information (this goes for new school construction, capital purchases, or anything else really).

4. Hold parents responsible for their children’s failure. This means enacting a plan for success with the student, the parents, the teachers, and the school, outlining each party’s responsibility and the consequences involved when a particular duty isn’t completed.

Parents, it’s time to do your homework.