Liberal Ideology In It’s Purest Form
Massachusetts Board of Education is debating the very difficult problem of what to call schools that suck.
The board has spent parts of more than three meetings in recent months debating the linguistic merits and tone set by the terms after a handful of superintendents from across the state complained that the label underperforming unfairly casts blame on educators, hinders the recruitment of talented teachers, and erodes students’ self-esteem.
While many educators support the largely symbolic changes, others call them sugarcoating and unnecessary, feeding into the sentiment that children are coddled. Debating the terms, they say, wastes time when the board should be coming up with a plan to fix the state’s 114 low-performing schools. Changing the labels seems to be intended to appease overly sensitive educators, critics say.
I’m guessing the sissy boys whining about being called ‘chronically underperforming’ didn’t like the movie Incredibles.
Seriously, as if the fact that public education is an infinitely growing money pit that fails to actually educate large swaths of students wasn’t enough now its a matter of public discourse what labels should be given to incompetent schools. This is one more reason to favor privatizing education. Namby Pambys that prefer to have their children, and more importantly their administrators, coddled can select schools that will do just that. By privatizing education, a citizen has way more control over how much coddling administrators get then when its is determined by a simple majority. Private markets provide way more control over education then a democratically elected school board.
March 24th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
And I’m sure that these private schools that aren’t as good are going to be calling themselves “The School that Sucks.”
I mean USAir objectively sucks as an airline (customore satisfaction, ontime reports, etc.), but that isn’t reflected in their advertising. In fact they ask us to “fly with us.”