After the deluge

Oflife

Yes. But only in cultures that have become dependent on socialist policies.

So, once enough of us entrepreneurs complain to the gov that the country is never going to escape it's fate unless it seeds a whole generation of intelligent articulate honorable individuals, then Gove will be given free reign. And that will enable the future youth (to quote a former US Marines catch phrase) to:

"Be the best you can be."

Richard

Superb article, Melanie. I've long since been convinced by this approach. State education is a mess and we should move to a Swedish/Danish/American approach.

Agha Ali Arkhan

Break the corrupt unions.

Ray

One down side to the dog eat dog education system we are moving into, is the marginalisation of Local Education Authorities. They were not perfect, but they had an overall control on who could teach in schools, particularly supply teachers. Now we have private sector teaching agencies who have come into the field. They underpay staff and overcharge schools. Plus, they do not always do the checks on staff that LEA's used to do as standard. Nor are all supply teachers, teachers ! A lot are are even more poorly paid and less qualified Cover supervisors. This is one result of the atomised education sector we now live with. And with the rise of Academies, this will get worse.

Mr. Mabutoh Afunfa

Some of the state schools in Britain were good before specially the primary schools but the labour government interfered and destroyed, they closed down the not so good schools and mix with the best ones, now there is no good ones, the labour and the leftist destroyed the good schools just like the way they destroyed everything else.

William Reid Boyd

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/26/new-orleans-s-charter-school-revolution.html is more cautious and nuanced.

Standards in New Orleans schools are still below average and of course we *know* that in practice, whatever brilliantly gifted intellectuals like Mickey Gove and newspaper columnists theorise, the reality is that free schools don't raise standards.

They just don't. That's all there is to it, it's a fantasy - ficta voluptatis causa sint proxima veris.

Mailman

William,

Dont be afraid of change...even if it takes time to be fully realised.

Mailman

Jojo Melone

The reality is that free schools don't raise standards. After all this tax we pay William Reid Boyd the schools are not so free in it?

Mr Adequate

A quote from the Newsweek article: "New Orleans schools are still performing below the state average on achievement tests, but according to Jacobs’s analysis of state data, the gap between New Orleans and the rest of the state has basically been cut in half."

So free schools don't raise standard?

Robert Bruce Lewis

Ms. Phillips, you and other proponents of so-called "school reform" always talk about "bad teachers," but never about the abominably politicized school administrators who are the true obstructionists to real change.

Once I watched an American news report regarding the "reforms" being made by the then-new teacher-sacking superintendent of Washington public schools, Ms. Rhee. A television journalist went into the classroom of a teacher marked down for sacking and observed his class. It was a higher level maths class, and, from my perspective as a high school instructor, the fellow appeared to be doing everything right: demonstrations on the board, questions to students, responding to students' queries, etc. However, there was one student on the side of the classroom, wired to his ipod and paying absolutely no attention, and gyrating to his music--but quietly. At the end of the period, the news reporter asked the teacher if he hadn't seen the boy who wasn't paying any attention, and, if he had, why he hadn't demanded that he join the class and heed the instruction. The teacher frankly responded that he had, indeed, seen him, but that he knew, from previous experience, that he wouldn't be given any support, by his superiors or by "that woman," if he tried to apply any "consequences" ("participation grades" for inattention, etc.), and that, therefore, he felt it'd be better to just let "sleeping dogs lie" and instruct those children who were willing to participate in the lesson, rather than "encourage" the delinquent to create the kind of disturbance that would disrupt the entire lesson.

Too many school administrators refuse to tell the truth and create the kind of "firewall" for serious academic study that is necessary to protect it from what is going on in an anarchic, barbaric and anti-intellectual culture. Instead, they tell the public lies regarding the efficacy of "standardized testing," the innocuousness of over-crowded classrooms, and the importance of the use of "politically correct" education-speak in the classroom.

Do you know what actually ARE the best-managed classrooms in America? Answer: those in schools presided over by Jesuit and Quaker administrators, who know that their leadership isn't permanent, that they will be rotated back into the classroom someday, and that they will never earn six or seven times what the best teacher in their school does. THOSE are the administrators willing to apply consequences to misbehaviour and to tell negligent parents that nothing serious can be done to help their children to learn unless they become actively involved in cooperating with their children's teachers. Too many of the "fly-by-night" charter schools you are so enthusiastic about are themselves in the business of offering gimmicks and facile solutions, in order to earn easy money from parents who are frustrated by low marks, but NOT by their children's refusal to discipline themselves sufficiently to earn good marks.

Peixe

As a parent that has children in a public charter school, although in a different state, I can vouch for what is happening in New Orleans. Our school was rated one of the best in the state after only three years of opening - this was accomplished despite being given much less per pupil, teaching out of temporary mobile buildings, no gymnasium, no cafeteria, no playground equipment, just an open field with four buildings. I love the charter system. The teachers union and schools districts are always screaming that lack of money is the problem with public education. The charter systems proves that entire idea false. That is why they hate it so much.

Ian G

Melanie,

I am with Robert Bruce Lewis. You cannot target teachers until you deal with administrators. Give me the best teacher you know, give me a standard comprehensive and allow me to adminster the classes and workload your teacher is given. I will break said teacher into a nervous wreck and provide sufficient evidence that even you will be convinced that the teacher should be sacked as poor and incompetent.

Bad teachers do not get sacked, they get promoted out of the classromm into various admin. positions including headships. Good teachers must keep their heads down and not rock the boat. If they protest they will be the ones sacked - or they will leave and do something else.

Augustus

If the system works so well, why doesn't Michael Gove pay a visit over there and see how it's done?

Augustus

Every child deserves a decent education. 50% of students in any high school have an IQ of under 100%, so the last thing a school district ought to do is structure its curriculum for only half of the students. When there is a top-down imposed curriculum by the state or local
community in which each school is trying to outdo the others in academic excellence, they forget about the not so bright,
and end up with a situation in which you have academics trying to impress academics pushing only that which they understand:
Academia.

Schools need to have a minimal curriculum, and parents and students need options. Teddy may want to go into computers;
Sadie into foods; Bill into academia. The answer lies in minimal standards and a variety of options. Not everyone needs high standards geared towards college. Think of schools like supermarkets, there may be anything from three to six different stores that one can go to. If one hasn't got what you want you go to another, But they all seem to be busy and prosperous. That's how schools ought to be.

Margaret Muller-Johansson

Augustus, think schools like supermarkets, I like that
but some people want to study only engineering, finance and computers when there are several other things in the supermarket.

Yrr

As one who has just started a new secondary school, allow me to scream out YES to Melanie's article. I am just stricken by the system that has handed me a group of youngsters who are unable to read, whose minds are wondrous but who have been lost in the maelstrom of beurocratic number crunching. These children never stood a chance, and were lost in the muddle whilst incompetent schools told parents your child has need of strong pharmacutacles or special remedial teachers. Anything to get the child out of the way. Now we have to pick up the broken shards and try to piece them together. in the States there is a new experiment called "School for One" which focuses on each child and not on preconceived guidelines that work for administrators. It works ... And we should start thinking in terms of the kids and not those who seek to become engrandised by false numbers.

David Booth

The Education system has lost its focus of providing education for children and drifted into a job creation scheme for middle class malcontents who would be virtually unemployable outside of the class-room.

Tony Allwright

A most encouraging story. When you combine it with the extraordinary work being done by Washington DC's new education chancellor, Michelle Rhee, we are perhaps viewing the early shoots of a complete educational revolution in the US.

For the sake of children, may this spread eastward across the Pond as quickly as possible.

Kepha

As a professional swindler--oops, an American public school social studies teacher--I read this with a great deal of interest.

Too many schools are under the thumbs of an utterly corrupt system where secure sinecures are more important than the education of kids or the transmission of knowledge.

Robert Bruce Lewis

Michelle Rhee will be sacked just as soon as Washington, D.C. has a new mayor. Most people there doubt that she has any real interest in doing her job, and is just a publicity-hound, and think that she'll be on the talk-show, book-signing, "Tea-Partying" circuit just as soon as she loses a job she has little interest in.

Campbell Gray

Yrr: Beurocratic? Pharmacutacles??
Engrandised???

What is it you teach exactly?

Carlos Mahinga

Michael Gove can't help the education system he could try but I don't know how he can succeed, the British State schools in the inner city areas are the worst schools in Europe, even some of the expensive private schools are not doing well, before we talk about students we should look the parents of the kids they are too liberal, they don't discipline, they don't clean them, they don't talk to them, they don't feed them right, parents are not discipline as well, the middle class white liberals are the worst, remember education is not only from the school but also from home.

James Hodson

Augustus: by definition, 50% of children will have an IQ below 100.

Augustus

James Hodson - Yes, and maybe 30% of those drop out of high school when standards are increased. School becomes irrelevant to them, they are taking classes which are not related to their needs in any way, and are being pushed to learn things most of them will not need in life. We have all been born differently, endowed with different abilities, and with different ways to contribute to the world. Our human potential is wasted when liberals try to make us equal. Not everyone can play first violin.

Campbell Gray

Augustus: First violin? - indeed not, but everyone should be given the opportunity to find out don't you think?

Any education system which makes the best resources available to children only on the basis of their parents' ability to pay and makes no attempt to adjust the balance, is, on purely Benthamite utilitarian grounds, a wicked waste of human resource.

It is a misrepresentation to say that liberals want to make everyone equal - such a desire is too obviously a nonsense. What they do try to do, however often they fail, is to make sure that the opportunity to develop whatever skills we have are as widely and fairly available as possible and not to prejudged on the basis of wealth or background what those abilities might be.

Augustus

Campbell Gray - I am certainly not advocating pre-judging childrens' development on the basis of parents' wealth. In England at least wealthy parents can pick and choose from
many independent establishments which are probably amongst the best there is. But equality of opportunity should not be confused with 'everyone should have the same amount of stuff to learn', and in the process dumb everyone down to new 'pass'
levels. A sort of college sausage machine. The only people who benefit from that are
public officials at re-election time, but that doesn't help education as a whole. You can't have a successful state system where there's no choice but to hope that the school where John
or Sally goes might be good, or it might not. More important than any standards (which are admirable in themselves) geared
towards further college education, is recognition of diversity and the minimal standards and variety of options.

Mr. Mabutoh Afunfa

Campbell Grey, everyone should be given the opportunity to find out don't you think?
And who is going to pay for that opportunity? Is it you going to pay? we are all human beings but we are not all the same every human being is unique but the left liberals are trying to put us together in a one house and say we are all the same. No thank you.

Archie

Quite so, Miss Phillips,and the sooner someone of the distinct qualities of Michelle Rhee - prepared to stand up to the abysmal teachers' unions and sack hopeless teachers - appears on our scene the better.