Department Of Education

First I want to say that I believe public school teachers in the United States to be the best in the world. Unfortunately, we have turned our school system over to a philosophy that defies reason. We require that our teachers be certified, and then allow management of these teachers to be the responsibility of school boards consisting of either automobile dealership owners or dentists. Also, the career administrators who live very well by doing reports about progress well away from children are doing untold harm to our kids since they are so far out of touch with what goes on in classrooms. I know I am not saying anything that isn’t said or felt 100 times a day in most public sector teachers’ rooms throughout the country. And, the sad thing is that there are so many great educational alternatives in the United States that are completly frozen out of the public sector because in order to work with public school children, an organization or private tutor must agree to do EXACTLY what the public sector wants, that is, do more of the same kinds of things that have made our schools just terrible. As a parent, I am told so often by education boards that OUR school district or campus (or whatever) is AN EXCEPTION. Any kind of good news, like going from the 13th percentile to the 15th percentile nationally is enough for administrators to year after year say that we are improving and it is just a matter of time before that 15th percentile will become the 99th percentile. Of course, that never happens because everyone is so lost in the current system. States like Connecticut, for example, pay a fortune for their public school activities, but all of them are what I call top down institutions. With the kind of genius existing in the student bodies of the State of Connecticut, they should be among the top achievers in the WORlD. Instead, Cennecticut’s best public high school students are ranked 19th on international tests compared with the best students of the industrialized world. In addition, the “accreditation”” system that we seem to have adopted in the United States requires and enforces a top down one size fits all system in the name of equal opportunity. That is