The Value Proposition of K-12 Education: a failing proposition. New York City shows why - Granite Grok

The Value Proposition of K-12 Education: a failing proposition. New York City shows why

Recent news: “Officials: Most NYC High School Grads Need Remedial Help Before Entering CUNY Community Colleges” (reformatted, emphasis mine)

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — It’s an education bombshell.

Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system. The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2?s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday. When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn’t make the grade.

They had to re-learn basic skills — reading, writing and math — first before they could begin college courses.  They are part of a disturbing statistic.

Officials told CBS 2?s Kramer that nearly 80 percent of those who graduate from city high schools arrived at City University’s community college system without having mastered the skills to do college-level work.

Hmm – not much value there, is there?  More like Public Education has a “dereliction of duty problem” on the order of “Do they even know what they are doing”?  And those of us that went through primary school through high school before the mid-70s (when the hippie / draft dodging / New Left schooled radical” teachers gave us limitless opportunities to make sport of cashiers that can’t make change in their heads or cannot string three complex sentences to save their lives.  Grokster Steve’s recent post on how homeschooling is illegal in Germany and how NH Dems have worked hard to do the same here too (either de jure or de facto): Do NH Democrats Want To Pass A Law Like This One In Germany?  It has accumulated a fair number of comments.  Hunter Dan – a government teacher that comments here (and to whom, we have been trying to better educate) – left us a comment here in response to a comment by Susan on a monopolistic stranglehold on “public education” by the teachers unions:

you must think that the public sector is supposed to run exactly like the private sector. When we all know that’s not true.

Private Sector = supposed to make a profit

Public Sector = not supposed to make a profit.

My response (slightly edited here) was to point out that both are to supply the same thing – just by different paths, and that Public Education isn’t doing so:

 What you MISS, Dan, is that both are supposed to provide Value. If a private company does not provide Value for the cost of their product or service, they will not achieve a profit and will go out of business.

 The Public Sector, in Education, is also supposed to provide Value to taxpayers. What is supposed to happen is that the profit motive is supposed to be replaced by elected officials who are put into office to oversee “the Value proposition” of public services – and that the public Trusts their officials to carry out their duties carefully.  Instead, Govt has become its own (and biggest) special interest group and affects the outcomes of elections. Thus, the Value Proposition oversight has become distorted and has become of little use, especially in Eduction.

 The fact that you see families yanking their children out of public schools at an ever increasing rates proves that the Trust factor is crashing – Govt is no longer being trusted implicitly except by those in the Political Class that depend on Govt.

 Go back to the above example of the job that New York City’s schools are doing – given the explicit responsibility of properly educating children, with all of the money poured into that system, even students with diplomas can’t do the job correctly.  Other larger urban cities show similar scenarios – money is not the problem as California and Chicago teachers are amongst the best renumerated in the Country, yet have amongst the worst results with respect to student outcomes.

Glen Reynolds, law professor and Libertarian blogger / proprietor at Instapundit has a new book out concerning the upcoming implosion in our primary education system as parents are showing dissatisfaction with the Educational-Industrial complex as now constructed and that the E-I Complex is about to become the next victim of the disruptive technology that is the Internet; he has genius of Bill Whittle to explain what the “what” is:

People are unhappy with the “Status Quo

(H/T: Instapundit – video for Glen’s new book, The K-12 Implosion)

Homeschooling, self-taught,  charter schools, Internet based schooling, bringing back the education model of apprenticeships – the future is not going to continue to be the 1800’s Industrial Education model that was, as the video states, simply to churn out job slaves.  Just as in Manufacturing where the trends are to turn out Mass Customizations based on marrying advanced IT and cutting edge manufacturing techniques, we can do the same in Education once the deathlock of the unions and mindset of public officials is broken.

It was a bad day in Education when “Public Education” meant solely education given in government owned buildings with public sector unions that demand tax payer monies as THEIR entitlement.  Never should the shift have ever happened that giving money to adults is the equivalent to “it’s for the children”.

“Land of the Free and home of the Brave”; it is time to break free of the Monopoly of our current educational system – the true definition phrase “public education” has been subverted and abused – how can it not be when 25% of all students never graduate from high school overall (and perhaps only 25% actually graduate in the urban areas)?  Public Education must return back to have the true and only emphasis on the student up on the stage and not all of the apparatchiks swarming around the child that have assumed the center ring in the Educational circus, relegating the average or “diffident” child to the cheap seats in importance.

Every child does NOT deserve a public education; rather, every child deserves a publicly funded education.  Yes, a new model may well be aborning where the child and the parents are the empowered ones and having the Freedom to choose what is right for that child and no longer the bitter clingers at the taxpayer teat.  It is time for the educational field to become more varied with more options to fit the individual needs and interests of a single child instead of being shoehorned into a classroom whose model is 120 years old.

It is time to Progress (heh!)

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