Usually, when you hire someone to do something, and they don’t or can’t do it, you do not then give them more responsibility or reward them with additional revenue. But let’s say you do, and they fail again and again. At what point do you stop rewarding failure?
In my town of Merrimack, the school system is swirling the drain. Proficiency scores are not great and, in some cases, not even good. The message here is simple. No matter how much money we spend, they cannot teach the kids to read. The other subjects aren’t doing any better, so what does the school do? It asks for more money to play therapist to your kids.
Social-emotional Learning is public school head-shrinking as an on-ramp to full-blown in-house mental health services.
This is a school with teachers who, after decades of practice and an exponential increase in fiscal resources, are less able to teach all the kids to read to grade level than they did with more students and less money. In what world does that justify more funding for anything, especially an expansion into mental health-related surveys, sessions, or actual one-on-one engagement?
None, and asking for it is looking in the wrong direction. Public Schools that don’t cherish teaching kids to read, write, add, and subtract have failed not just the children but also the parents and taxpayers funding them.
You can decide when academics stopped being a priority or even a function of public education, but the idea wasn’t born yesterday, and neither, I hope, were you.
Do not reward schools that can’t teach kids with new things they are even less capable of doing, especially when the odds are high that the only reason a child might need such services is because the school that wants to offer them screwed up your kid’s head in the first place.
