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I wrote this
vitriolic condemnation of the educational system in 1982 in response to
what I considered the rape of children by the schools. I still agree with
90 percent of what I wrote. In the paper I state that the business community
may be the only hope for the system. I currently believe that the business
community may be as screwed up as the educational community and can't
be relied on for much more than do-gooder deeds that lead to poignant
photojournalism and self-serving PR. I also don't totally agree with what
I wrote about tenure. This change is based on some of the dirty pool that
employers have played in firing people who have benefits so they can hire
folks who don't have benefits.
The bottom line, however, is still the same. I have personally worked
with over 200 schools that have achieved excellent performance, far above
the mean of schools with comparable demography. NOT ONE WAS ABLE TO MAINTAIN
THIS LEVEL OF PERFORMANCE. A new superintendent, or a new state framework,
or a new epiphany about how students learn have ravaged these programs
so that after a few years, the school population returns to the pre-intervention
rate of failure, and nobody, including the business community, says one
word. The process is like those magic drawing boards that whisk away what
had been drawn and keep no record of the earlier inscription.
Cathy Watkins wrote an article that impugns an even larger group of participants
in education (Project Follow Through: A Story of Identification and Neglect
of Effective Instruction, Education, July 1988). Her version is
more thoughtful than mine, but I found mine to be curiously timely today.
Ten years after
I wrote this article I wrote a book that goes into much greater detail
about the abuses of the system: War Against the Schools' Academic Child
Abuse.
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