They are already heading down that road, but some don’t know it
GPS car navigation units are great. Can’t read a map? No problem – a GPS can give you step-by-step voice directions to get you to your destination. It can even nag you if you make a wrong turn.
It’s too bad there isn’t an 'education system GPS,' because the editors at the Courier-Journal clearly need one. Their local school system is already headed down the wrong road, but the editors don’t even know it. They need an ‘education GPS’ nagging them that an hour-long school bus ride for a five year old is just too long when other options are available, and the resulting loss of education readiness in that child just too high a price to pay.
Here are just a few of the ‘danger ahead road signs’ the editors missed in their Sunday editorial:
• Two out of three students in Louisville now must ride a bus to get to school, which is throwing a lot of education dollars out of school bus tail pipes instead of into classroom improvements.
• Because of the diversity plan, children attend schools sometimes over an hour away. That includes kids as young as five.
• Kids as young as five have to negotiate bus changes in transfer yards that reports indicate are more suited to herding cattle. Kids are held on the bus in those yards without water or rest facilities until the transfer bus arrives.
• The Courier prattles on about “giant strides” Kentucky has made in education. Really? The editors must have missed my blog, “TEK Task Force talks up Kentucky education progress: Really?” and this graphic:
If this is all the proficiency we can demonstrate now, exactly how much progress could we have made in the past 20 years?
• Finally, the Courier talks about how those outside Kentucky highly regard Louisville’s school system. That is a bunch of ‘sellers talk.’ After going down in defeat twice in Race to the Top, I think most sober people in Kentucky are finally realizing that the state is no longer considered an education leader. The Courier is living in some sort of KERA anti-bellum haze.
To finish, diversity is a worthwhile goal, but not if it is pushed to an extreme.
After all, most of the eastern counties in Kentucky have virtually no black kids. If diversity ‘a la Louisville’ is the key, why aren’t we busing kids all the way over there?
The answer is that there has to be some balance in this program or else it winds up undermining education. Clearly, the folks at the Courier have gotten lost on this road to bad education, and so far they have not had the courage to ask for help to get back on the right track.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Courier needs a GPS to avoid the road to disaster
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