The Current Stylish Education Idea In Wash DC

For a number of years now we have heard politicians talk about the need to improve our educational system. As a teacher, I don't doubt the truth of this. But I think the people talking about this don't really understand the problem.

We hear endless comments that we must improve the training of teachers, as though teachers are the problem.

I don't think it is money or the lack of it. This may be true in some districts, but not in the district I teach in.

The main cause of many problems lies in the values and supervision of the students' parents. If the parents don't value education, and if they don't keep close track of what their children (our students) are doing, and if they abuse them, the students disrupt the classes so that a teacher has to spend an enormous percentage of the time on discipline instead of on course subject matter.

In my district, there would be a simple but impractical way to improve the education of a great percentage of students: remove the trouble-makers from the classroom. I admit that I don't know where we would put them. But if instead of just shuffling them from school to school within the district and placing them in different classes with students who really want to learn, they had no chance to disrupt classes, a lot more learning among the better behaved students would take place.

This, of course, is either a utopian or a dystopian idea, I'm not sure which. We cannot do this. We're stuck with the requirement that we must educate ALL students, regardless of how difficult this makes the process.

If we had something resembling the French system or (I think) the Japanese system, we would weed out the dead wood very quickly and only advance those who actually learned. The others would simply be cast out and left behind.

I wonder if in either France or Japan the high school teachers have discipline problems in their classes like the ones we have here.