Jay Mathews is a writer for the local Washington Post and he wrote this post as a response to the heated conflict over common standards for our public schools. The title of the article is “Great common standards battle: ho-hum”. Ho-hum? It’s really kind of disheartening when our national journalists give such a passive and light hearted response to such an important topic in education today. Granted, this post is really just an opinion to the battle, but he still says that this is “still a big bore”. Maybe he is right, this is a big bore. Having those in power of our decisions and path to the future of our nation’s educational standards not being able to come to a conclusion about what is truly best for our children’s education is a bore. Find someone who isn’t a bore, come together and find positive research to get the ball rolling forward, instead of around in a circle back and forth between politicians whose job is to disagree with each other.
One of Mathews’ points is that the coalition on “Closing the Door on Innovation” manifesto say that common standards are a blow to the creative competition between different teaching systems. Seriously? Having a standard creates competition in other aspects of our life! Think about sports, all professional teams have a standard of how the game is played and won, but there are a million creative paths they have to embark on to teach and create a winning environment. Having a goal in sight and specific standards to reach doesn’t mean that you all have to do the exact same thing to get there.
I am far from an expert but what I do know is that we need to make a decision and soon. Letting the current kids be in limbo because we can’t come to an agreement on what is really needed is truly unfair. If something is broken it needs to be fixed, and our current system? Broken.
No comments:
Post a Comment