Thursday, March 28, 2013

TAB's Education Misinformation



Bill Hammond, Texas Association of Business' (TAB) President and CEO, wrote that, “Schools are broken, not broke.” In the editorial he clearly demonstrates a need to walk in the shoes of a public school teacher. Please, Bill, feel free to take an unpaid leave from your current job to become a school teacher for five years, at a school teacher's salary.

I dare you!

Teachers get to raise and educate every kid, without regard for how prepared or supported they are at home. A Dr. (of what is not reported) Eric Hanushek's testimony during the current court case, the most recent in over thirty years of court cases about financing education in Texas, was that we need to remove the bottom 8% of unproductive teachers... To have a Doctorate degree and demonstrate such a lack of understanding suggests that the Doc should also invest some quality time on the other side of the lectern.

Why aren't plenty of private schools available? Why has educating the masses always been done in public institutions?

The answer is simple, unless (like Bill) you're actively trying to avoid it.  Educating everyone is not easy or inexpensive; doing it really well is even less so. Yes, it costs money, because it requires you pay enough to get, and retain, great teachers (folks who can best convey what they know to all others)! It also requires you provide proper environs and supplies for classrooms.

Testing and testing, when you've demonstrated repeatedly that you're unwilling to do what is required to educate students, is as big a waste of time, money and effort as one can imagine! Also, trying to hide statewide taxation, even insufficient quantities thereof, via locally collected property and sales taxes is just plain fraud!

The TAB is one of the groups that have shown, time and again, that they aren't willing to do what is needed, while criticizing the current education system and its results. Serious consideration about investing for education is available at: UT, A&M and Rice Universities, here in TX. Also from the dedicated souls who have done their best, with what they've been provided, in the public pre-K through secondary schools of Texas!

Bill, and his ilk, are entitled to their opinion, but there are others (at the sources listed above) who are actually trying to effect working solutions. Bill Hammond, and company, are some of the anchors that keep us standing still.

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