Set Our Teachers FREE!

All is not well in Georgia education

Well, Georgia schools are in the national news for all the wrong reasons. After all the turmoil on the west coast, with California schools taking flak and homeschoolers threatened with extinction, the news is bad on the east coast too!

The entire nation was riveted by the story of a group of 3rd graders in a small town in Georgia who plotted to kill their teacher. Although nothing nasty in our schools is as surprising as before, this story was shocking for so many reasons.

• The age of the students involved (3rd grade, Yikes!)
• The fact that these were Special Needs students
• The amount of planning and the secrecy involved
• Students worked as a group to smuggle duct tape, handcuffs and a knife into school
• The planning was so exact that there was even assignments as to who would clean up any blood spills, etc.
• Only two group leaders swayed the entire class into cooperation.

But Georgia has more educational problems.

As I started this post with a photo from one of Georgia’s tourism brochures, you can see that Georgia is a beautiful and scenic place. Because Atlanta has become such a metropolis, industry flocks to Georgia. The rural southern agricultural/plantation image of the pre-Civil War South (so vividly described in GONE WITH THE WIND) has almost faded.

Now Georgia prides itself on being part of a new urbanized south, technologically-savvy, fast-paced and moving forward with the times.

Uh! Oh! There’s a problem! The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools has threatened to strip accreditation from Clayton County schools on Sept. 1st, if they fail to meet nine SACS mandates.

First mandate on the list is to hire a permanent Superintendant of Schools, which according to reports, is going nowhere fast. Another potential candidate just withdrew his name from consideration.

I won’t bore you with the details, but it is interesting that a state that was touting the excellence of their public schools a few years back, thanks to the alleged largesse of the Georgia State Education Lottery, is now faced with losing accreditation in a major district.

“Longterm, systemic dysfunction” is how one candidate described the situation after removing his name from contention. And the situation is deteriorating even more, with anxious parents upset that the local school board will not discuss the issues with them.

Georgia was the site for the think tank that came up with The Knapp Commission, which I reported on in September 2007.

“The report was drafted over two years by the nonpartisan New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, chaired by economist and former University of Georgia President Charles Knapp. Knapp and former Cabinet secretaries, governors, mayors, business executives and state and local superintendents were charged with finding the best ways to re-invent k-12 education.”

All those brains! All that manpower! All that time! And what did they come up with?

“End high school at age 16. Take schools away from school districts and school boards and give them to hired private contractors, most likely liability corporations owned and run by teachers. Fund schools from the state rather (than) locally. Pay teachers $95,000 a year, but demand quality.”

The Knapp Plan said we get to save $60 billion dollars by eliminating 11th and 12th grade! Instead, we’re going to start children in school at the age of 3 years old! And this is in spite of the research that shows that early schooling is actually damaging to many youngsters. (Please see my post of July 26th, “Irresistable or Indisputable”.)

As a BONUS, everyone will graduate at the age of sixteen. Yep! Sixteen years old. See, this commission thinks that ALL of those students will then go on to college. Yeah! Right! Highly unlikely!

So all that brainpower, time and money went into developing a program that STARTS students too young and GRADUATES them too young! And will take fifteen years to implement, according to this committee. These are the solutions offered by some of the brightest minds in Georgia.

There WAS a statement by President Knapp that I agree with:

“It’s time for truth-telling on this issue. Education is not a train wreck about to occur, it’s a train wreck that has already occurred.”

How about a common-sense plan instead? One that is not only workable but proven to work in ALL schools, with students at ALL skill levels and students from ALL societal backgrounds? And, as a BONUS, the plan includes ongoing teacher-improvement and parental-skills training. A COMPLETE PLAN that takes the destructive societal issues that are impacting our schools and NULLIFIES
THEM.

Problems are nationwide in our public schools. From the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, schools are failing.

Will someone PLEEEZE listen?

Brennan

The Kingsland Plan

Save Our Schools

Filed under: Education News