Missteps in the American education system?

Okay, so I got a little ticked off when I heard posters on mediabistro.com berating the American education system.

As the wife of an educator and a sometime education writer for Texas School Business and The Dallas Morning News among others, I'd have to say most American schools and educators are doing a great job of educating a very socioeconomically diverse generation. In the U.S., everyone gets an education. Granted it's better in some places -- your tax dollars at work, higher concentrations of literate parents raising kids in print-rich environments, parents whose incomes enable their kids to go to school on a full belly in the morning and in decent clothes. Those are huge advantages, right there.

Someone protested on the same board about school efforts to teach morals. I say they're a sign of the times, perhaps, and maybe a response to some of the terrible news about bullies and kids without scruples. And if parents are falling down on the job or too busy to do it, the schools do need to step in.

Complaints about renewed emphasis on phys ed? Surely, reviving PE curriculum is a response, and not a kneejerk one, to American homes turning out chunky latchkey kids who sit in front of the TV/computer/video game in lieu of family involvement or good babysitter. And afterschool programs that keep kids active and supervised would be a big step in the right direction.

With all this, a protest that in some schools economics is being phased out or made an elective? While I'd definitely say economics is an essential, I'd also like to see SAT/standardized test prep courses essential for kids who are passing, and tutoring courses essential for those who are not.

For people with as much education as they have, teachers are not lavishly paid, as some retorted. And with an increased emphasis on accountability, administrators are under a lot of pressure and their salaries are modest for their doctoral-level educations, compared the huge amounts lavished upon their counterparts in industry.

That said, there are some real dud educators out there, and if school systems weren't so desperate for educators, those bad apples wouldn't find a place at the chalkboard, living proof that good teachers couldn't possibly be overpaid because they're in short supply.

Education aside, it is certainly the parents' role to teach checkbook management, morals, ethics, reproductive essentials, faith, love of reading, early literacy, and to help their child develop their gifts.

I had someone tell me recently that it wasn't normal for parents to do all those things, that is the school's responsibility.

I don't think so.

Here's the thread on mediabistro I'm ranting about: http://mediabistro.com/bbs/cache/t38970_1.asp

The Very Mean Big Sister, or How I Learned to Read

I still believe it was sheer bossiness that prompted my sister to play school with me. It was the only thing she’d let me play with her.
Laurel wouldn’t let me in the tree house; instead, she sat up in that massive cedar tree with my cousin Debbie, making up an imaginary language they could make fun of me. "Ishnakishnahaky Jackie," would be followed by gales of laughter. To this day, Laurel asserts that it was a genuine language. I'd say the test of a language is its usefulness, and ridicule isn't enough to recommend it.
She wouldn’t let me be in the Dog Club. I watched with longing from a distance. as she and her school friends pointed to the life-size chart of a dog and learned all its parts. She was that mean, I told my dad tearfully.
Laurel always pointed out in return, without much tact whatsoever, that I was a whiny brat. Okay, so I did give her doll Jane a haircut, exposing the secret place Laurel had written the doll's name in case she got lost. Jane, right there in neat printing, on her forehead. Touche. How was I to know it wouldn’t grow back?
But she let me play school – no, she MADE me play school, sitting me down in a chair and relentlessly learning me my alphabets until I could read. "I'm the teacher, you're the pupil," she ordered.
Secretly, the game pleased me, but I couldn't let her know that, or for sure she'd have suspended me from "school." I was displeased when my mother, for some reason, decided not to send me to kindergarten;I drew a large schoolhouse mural on the yellow wall of my bedroom.
The first two books I ever owned I got at about the same time. I’d had hand-me-downs, of course – my siblings’ vintage Winnie The Pooh books among them.
But my first two books, brought home by my mother from an out of town trip, were Easy Reader’s Barney Beagle and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. I read them over and over and dreamed of going off to school where there would be many, many more books to read.
When I had clearly mastered that material, my mother moved on to more challenging books. There was Robert Louis Stephenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and an odd satirical cartoon book she brought back from Expo 67.
By the time I did get to go to school in grade 1, I was eagerly snapping up every book I could find, and the teacher would have me read to the other children.
Books, I was to learn, were not just my best friends; they were my transit papers to other worlds.