Joshua's post got me thinking...

Note My wife is a teacher, so I obviously have some prejudices...

What do we ask our schools to do? Do you want a school to babysit children while they get old enough to start working? Do you want schools to be responsible for the moral upbringing of our children?

I believe that education is a priveledge, not a burden. I believe that schools are their to provide the opportunity for students to learn. Learning is an active task, you cannot force someone to learn something. You can make them memorize and parot back facts, but they have to want to learn.

Fundamentally I believe that most of the "problems" we have in schools todays are due to parents - not teachers or administrators or politicians. Parents treat schools as a dumping ground. They continually demand more and more special treatement for their children. The number of "Individual Education Plans" (IEP) seems to be skyrocketting (I don't have data on this, so I welcome any corrections).

Basically an IEP gives the parent the chance to tell the teacher the right way to "teach" their children. Give me a break! The problem is that students that refuse to learn, and the parents that don't value education enough. They either see education as some sort of right of passage or a tax to pay before getting into a high paying job. When you show up for work on your first day in a "real" company, I would love to see you give an "Individual Work Plan" (IWP) that specifies how many hours you will work and under what conditions.

Giving kids the unreasonable expectation that they will be catered to and can dictate the terms and conditions of their environment does them a huge disservice. Most teachers have 140+ students that they see in a week. How can it possibly be fair to each of those students to require the teacher to have a customized learning plan for each student - it just doesn't scale.

Then you have the whole moral issue. If a student is caught cheating, the most likely response a parent will give is "Little suzzie didn't mean to cheat"... or "Little Johny didn't cheat - he just copied the text of that essay from a web site". Parents defend their children when they cheat. Parents seem to require the schools to be completely amoral - never presenting a "right" or "wrong" - however when a moral situation arrises (like cheating), the parents don't step in and set the moral compas for the children.

Life is not fair. Education is a priveledge. Parents are responsible for their children.