But We're Americans!

Talking about schools I was reminded that the American way is not to rebuild, restructure or reform.  Oh, we give lip service to those ideas, but normally we tear down and build new.  Or sell to some lower income person or group, and build new.  

In other words, we might be able to fix our public schools if we had the will.  Intelligent, sensitive plans could be drawn up that would permit people to be held accountable at every level, from the School Board through the Superintendent, principal(s), teachers and teachers aides.  One example:  every teach should have a published rubric for every lesson and assignment.  Failure to do so would mean he/she would have to find another profession.  Each school board member could be held accountable for bringing certain decorum, intelligence, training, and sensitivity to every board meeting.  Superintendents would be held accountable for both fiscal skills and the quality at every level of the teaching learning environment.  And so forth.

But, you say, we can’t do that!  We might curtail academic freedom!!  With intelligent planning we might not, too.  But what about tenure?  Why have tenure if there are other ways of guaranteeing academic freedom to explore all aspects of thinking?  Tenure has become, in most schools, a way of protecting the lazy, the non-productive and the inadequate.  (I know of one preschool teacher who has been having her students to the same drills for 5 months now, stifling the quest for learning and growth in most or all of the 5 year olds in her charge.  Tenure helps her, but damages her students, and there is no process by which she is being help accountable at this time.) 
So, in the way that we do, we are in the process of abandoning our current failing public school systems and inventing charter schools, evangelical schools, magnet schools and so forth.  Don't repair, we seem to say.  Build new.

We are Americans.  As the General Custer character yells in the film, Night At the Museum “We’re Americans! We don’t plan!”

More tomorrow.  Happy New Year to you and yours.