Tuesday, August 24, 2010

$578M school? You have GOT to be kidding me

I saw this in the newspaper this morning and it about blew my mind.

Yes I still read an actual newspaper, I'm kinda old school.

Yahoo News linkage.

Now most people that know me know I'm going to school to be a public school teacher and I substitute in public schools currently. I'm all for improving education, but L.A. is doing it wrong.

From the linked article-
"New buildings are nice, but when they're run by the same people who've given us a 50 percent dropout rate, they're a big waste of taxpayer money," said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education. "Parents aren't fooled."
I certainly hope they are not fooled, especially after reading this -
The pricey schools have come during a sensitive period for the nation's second-largest school system: Nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed. The district also faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing.
Am I wrong when I say this is like slapping some bling on a rusty old beater that barely runs and overheats on the way to the corner store?

Did I just say "bling"?

These "Taj Mahal" schools as they are being called make even the colleges I went to look like slums and I would be hard pressed to believe the children attending them are going to get anything close to the education I had. Even if they did, that still doesn't justify the price.

I think the money could have been better spent on several smaller, simpler schools. Schools with relatively small classroom sizes. Better yet they could take it a step further and on the high school level have career specialized schools. Something like one for the arts, another for trades, another for science and engineering and so forth. These are just ideas that are bouncing around in my head that seem to work pretty well in other parts of the world where the schools don't have massive atrium's, parks, food courts, and buildings that resemble modern art masterpieces.

Here's a really radical idea in education. No text books, no computers, none of the modern "Taj Mahal" school things. Teach the way it used to be done, through lecture and have the students take notes. As archaic as it sounds, it worked great at one of the colleges I went to - Cambridge University. I learned more there than at any other school I attended and I was there the least amount of time, just a summer. I retained most of it too. I was hearing it, seeing things on boards, slide shows, pictures, diagrams and the like and writing it down all the way. Filled up 3 notebooks while I was there! In addition to that I also hand wrote 5 research papers, each about 2,500 words in length. My research was done the old-fashioned way - in a library with books. Part of that was in the same library that Newton calculated the speed of sound in, but I got myself permanently banned for reenacting his experiment.

There's a point to be made with such a radical, yet very ancient, idea. Students to not need all the expensive things that "Taj Mahal" schools have to learn. These things are nice, but are not going to do diddly for education. If I were a taxpayer in California, I would be totally fucking outraged. If I were a teacher in that school system, I'd switch to a private school if not open up my own. With 3,000 teachers laid off, it wouldn't be a bad idea for them to band together and show their former employer how it should be done.

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