> Especially as your comment about things being worse "when teachers
>are only seen as workers" would seem to rule out the unions as a likely
>agent?
no. i would want revitalized unions--see _teaching in america_ for suggestions that i may or may not agree with given what i know to be jerry's thinking. but it's a start. when i say 'workers' i mean that are merely cogs in the system, asked to pump out a product. it's no different than being asked as a prof to focus on the goal of getting good evals, whatever that means, and the right bell curve distribution of grades. so i'd want unions and professional education changed, fundamentally.
And what will keep the current goofuses (I assume you refer to the
>administrators) from being replaced within the current structures, where,
>as you say about private schools, " the tendency toward corporate
>bureaucratization in the name of efficiency and profit " could and is being
>enforced?
eh?
>I'll look forward to hearing what more you pick up from your mentor or
>elsewhere.
ahhhh well i forgot he's vacationing in new england. used to lounge about with jk galbraith himself, even! so there's a hint as to the likely politics of _teaching_
but otherwise, k.m. this is the deal. public schooling needs to remain public. schools--children, ALL children--are our responsibility. that means dealing with all the messiness and unpleasantness b/c there are no easy fixes here. schools suck now. they're not going to get any better under a market model of schooling whether charters or vouchers b/c it's easy to see that we don't get what we need and want in the market and so that's not any reason to think it'll work for schools. the deal is, and brown v. b.o.e. recognized this, that WE are responsible for other people's kids because those kids live in this society and we depend on them--yes, we depend on people we will never know. OTHER people's children. being responsible for schooling means keeping it public. even adam smith knew that the moral logic of "let me keep my own and i will become, without ever thinking about it, my brother's keeper" was an ethos that ought to friggin stay in the market. why import and encourage such an ethos into the dang school system? schooling is supposed to educate for a vocation AND for citizenship. sure, it's a hollowed out, empty notion of what it ought to be--education for a calling and education for real, substantive democratic participation. but i don't see how we're going to get from here, capitalism, to there, socialism or what have you, by turning our schools into damn for profit corporations or NGOs.
kelley
>K.M.
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>Oh, yeah, mbs was:
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>>surprized nobody else blew up at my remarks about
>>parents. Guess few bothered to read.
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>I read, but didn't find the remarks remarkable. There are a lot of parents
>who don't get involved with schooling -- always have been.
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