Great series exposed the sickness inside
Please read Chapter 10 of the Pulitzer worthy series produced by the Daily Herald and written by Emily Krone. Buy the paper, gives copies to your friends and neighbors, especially those with school- aged kids.
The only improvement that I would make, is that this chapter ought to be labeled Chapter 11 -- to describe the intellectual bankruptcy of the public school system. The dragon that is Big Ed is hollow inside. The system is rotten and eaten away.
The series can and should be replicated by investigative reporting in every state of the union. This cumulative failure affects not only the future prosperity of the classes entering college or the work force. It affects the ability of the country to compete in a 21st century world economy.
In Illinois, the system has been propped up by politicians seeking re-election, the Illinois State Board of Education, which has dumbed down the tests and normed up the results to protect the system, the schools of education who hold the ISBE in thrall, the teachers who have controlled and bamboozled parents through PTA groups, the several state wide pressure groups (Illinois Associations of Administrators, School Business Officials et al), Ralph Martire and his band of merry pranksters, including the teachers unions and A+ Illinois.
All will attempt to state that all that is needed is more money. But for 30 years, money has not been the answer. It never was. Teachers are part of a closed shop industrial type union with monopoly control of the education function.
The same quality problem which affected our automobile industry in the 1950s delivered substandard vehicles. Only competition delivered a better product.
This is also, sad to say, the fault of overly trusting parents who send their children into this system and then turn to other matters.
An increasing part of the population no longer believes that education is either an economic or a social good.
This can only be reversed by forcibly injecting choice into the system. Only then will public education reform itself.
Pete Speer
Mt.Prospect