Title: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It - The Atlantic
Headings: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
Successful schools don't have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts.
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Content: the school might get sued. Misbehavior and disrespect are met with weakness and resignation; teachers are trained to be stoics, tolerating disorder rather than running the risk of a "due process" hearing in  which the teacher, not the student, must justify her decision. Principals suffer a similar inversion of authority with teachers, who are armed with  hundreds of pages of work rules that prescribe exactly what teachers can be asked to do. Managing a school -- say, setting the hours, deciding how to  spend the budget, and deciding which teachers are doing the job -- is an oxymoron. Public schools today are, by law, basically unmanageable. Throw onto the legal pile a mono-minded compulsion -- complete with legal penalties -- to satisfy minimum standardized test scores. Recess has been  canceled, arts and humanities courses scrapped, and creative interaction replaced by rote drills -- largely because of one law, known as No Child Left  Behind. Another unintended effect of focusing only on the lowest performers is that all the all the other students get left behind. Teachers are  treated like machine tools, their personalities and passions extruded through rigid drilling protocols.