She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement.
These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.
I think she’s largely right. While the push to test and add charters in struggling districts may seem good at first glance, it’s certainly not working for a lot of students across the country. There may be a place for it, but at least in Massachusetts, it’s not the MCAS as it stands today — and it won’t be this new ed reform Charter bill just passed at the state house. Students have to become complete packages, free-thinking, fully rational beings, not just worker bees who know how to pick which ovals to fill out on the test.
She has some equally harsh words for charter schools, which she was formerly a strong proponent for not too long ago. She’s come to the realization that most of us have — on aggregate, they haven’t lifted the level of student achievement and mainly serve to bleed resources that the public education system badly needs.
There’s certainly some things to learn from both testing and charters, not all of them bad, but this warp-speed approach to get as much of each as possible, as quick as possible, is tantamount to an attack on the system as a whole, even if it’s a sneak attack, with results that won’t be fully apparent for decades ahead. Choice, accountability and more control given to teachers and systems are all good things to strive for, but it’s clear that neither charters nor standardized tests have accomplished those goals. Even one of the fiercest proponents of them has finally come to admit it — the only question is if her turnabout will have an impact on policy-making decisions as a whole.
Standardization will not meet the needs of any student more than one deviation from a theoretical mean.
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p>There are also varied learning styles. Visual learners. Auditory learners. Hands on learners. Degrees of dyspraxia.
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p>Education is NOT one size fits all, folks.
she points to Massachusetts over the past several years as an example of “what works.” she thinks the massachusetts curriculum frameworks are great, and that other states set the bar much lower than we do.
I also heard Diane Ravitch praise Massachusetts’ frameworks on NPR, but I wouldn’t extrapolate from that that she’s fine with Massachusetts’ high-stakes testing or charter expansion policies. I can’t think of another recent commentator who has been more clear or forceful in her condemnation of these policies. In her book, she writes:
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i just thought it was interesting.
how much do you wanna bet that she’d be all about interdisciplinary capstone graduation after her recent epiphany? I’d put money on it. We’re headed that way in my high school as well as to–GASP!!!!–standards-based grading. Although SBG is common in middle and elementary schools, the high school is the final frontier in this respect. The rumblings are already audible, too. We’re in Year 2 of our five-year “renaissance” plan. The SBG is slated for Year 5. Watch the place implode. lol. Pass the popcorn.
But that’s not what we’re discussing.
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p>And FWIW, the history frameworks are pretty much a joke. Not even lip service to the study of pre-European populations in North America or Australia, for starters.
for a different reason. i don’t think many teachers actually read these frameworks.
Teachers who have received decent professional development, and/or joined the field in the last 7 years, read them. Hell, many of us have memorized them.
I’m a science teacher – we’re required to peg our curriculum to the frameworks, and the science teachers in my district spend considerable time (way too much time) looking at how to connect what we teach to the state frameworks. So I’m pretty familiar with the science frameworks at least.
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p>Our evaluations also require us to show how what we teach connects to the state frameworks. I have heard that in other districts teachers are required to literally write on the board which standard each lesson connects to.
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p>Does this sound frightening to you? It should. I have no problem with a set of guidelines, and expecting that teachers cover those guidelines. But the degree to which we have become focused on these standards continues to erode the creative energy and passion that drove most of us to education in the first place. Is the amount of time spent on this endeavor worth it?
or the subset of frameworks covered on mcas?
The difference in Massachusetts is the content-based curriculum. Achieving this went largely against the grain of ed school theory, where critical thinking development independent of content is the goal.
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p>Pushing Massachusetts will lead you to be at odds with many positions you might otherwise believe in.
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p>The historical model has been content-based, a discrete body of knowledge, a set of facts, if you will, that the powers that be believed every American citizen should know. This is the period of education by drill & kill, by rote. This is the stuff of “ed school theory” you mention; critical thinking was nowhere in sight–until now.
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p>Because the body of knowledge is too vast, the trend–and rightfully so–is toward skill, not content knowledge. The prime mover and shaker in this “ed theory” is the stuff coming out The Partnership For 21st Century Skills. Indeed, Massachusetts is one of 14 states which have adopted 21st Century Skills as the basis for their new curriculum. The current frameworks in Massachusetts are all being rewritten to emphasize project-based learning, critical thinking, and productive collaboration. Training teachers to stop being the sage on the stage, which is basically what you have to do in skill-based learning environments, is a long process. Now the skillful teacher is coach and mentor, not didactic figure in front of the room.
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p>So, in short, you are right only if you reverse your statement. The acquisition of a discrete body of knowledge that baptized citizens as “informed” is no longer relevant; a student’s ability to get an answer for him/herself, to manage his/her own learning over an extended period of time, and to collaborate with peers is where we are today. My role has changed immensely in the classroom, but I still find myself falling back to sage status on occasion. Old habits are hard to break, but the times they are a changin’. And that’s a good thing.
If this is the way we are going then scores will begin to fall again. The 1993 ed reform which inaugurated the state’s climb in academic achievement was based on ED Hirsch’s idea of cultural literacy — accumulating (boring) facts and background about the subjects so you understood what you are being tested on.
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p>Education of critical thinking without any cultural basis is in line with blank slate theories of human development which are vaguely in line with liberal goals (ie if we get to kids young enough we will make them like things they traditionally distrusted). This is the state of public education in most of the country outside of Massachusetts and that’s why those places are doing so bad on the tests.
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p>Instead of giving in to them and blowing it, we should just encourage them to follow our example.
People that can think critically don’t become knee-jerk conservatives.
I have seen the effects of a skills-based curriculum — it makes stuff a lot harder. It breaks the tasks of writing into discrete bits with a logic base and no cultural base, because this is supposed to be better for those with a weak cultural background. In fact it is worse for them.
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p>When it comes to math, computation and memorization are reduced in favor of ten different logical approaches to the same problem, none of which work because there is no number sense or computational sense. The kids have no idea whether 100 or 1000 is closer to the right answer.
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p>The effort to break away from a cultural core was supposed to make it easier for the disposessed to get the proper rewards by eliminating the middle-class Western standards (like “kitschy E.D. Hirsch”) by which these people were unfairly judged. In fact what happened is it put the power even more firmly in the hands of the rich overlords, who could now define what was good or bad independent of traditional definitions of quality, for their own purposes. I oppose it on all fronts.
Do you have an examples of either the effects of a skill based curriculum (perhaps specifics on “stuff” it makes harder) or of it transferring power to the overlords?
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p>Otherwise, you seem like just another paranoid hack.
I can’t believe that any adult would utter such nonsense, but I’ll take it at face value. As for the rest of your comments, let’s see:
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p>Beginning to fall? Uh, hello? It’s the increasingly skill-based approach that accounts for most of the gains we’ve made.
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p>Are you really suggesting that our entire contemporary instructional model is based on the kitschy concept of cultural literacy by ED Hirsch? Where did you get this?
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p>This is gibberish.
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p>Okay, for a moment I thought you understood something about pedagogy and instructional technology & methodology but were just a little tangled up in your articulation. Now I see you that’s not the case. Massachusetts has, BAR NONE, the finest schools in the nation. If you want to shit on them, go right ahead, but you look like an ass in the process. Massachusetts is and has been in the vanguard of instructional reform for years. The highest achieving schools in this state use a skill-based approach, not an old-school content-approach, and they’ve intuitively used a skill-based approach for years.
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p>For a moment there you thought our schools were good. Now they suck because you find out they’ve actually been increasingly using a skill-based instructional strategy versus content-based. How convenient. How doctrinaire.
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p>Our example is and has been skill-based. Good grief. Given your 180 here, you could use some critical thinking skills yourself.
I don’t like Seascraper’s tone, but you DO need to start with a basic grounding in facts before you can critically think about much of anything. These things are not only not mutually exclusive, they are very much mutually inclusive. Facts are required as the basis of informed opinion and analysis.
But, part of a critical thinking background is knowing you when you don’t have enough facts to make an informed comment.
Now which one of us is going to tell that to the “tea party” crowd?:)
Do you really think I’m suggesting we teach no content?
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p>Really? Do you think that? Did you have to say to me we need some content because I would advocate an educational strategy that included no content?
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p>Sometimes I don’t think you think your comments through very much.
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p>Obviously content is necessary, as huh points out, in order to employ critical thinking. Seascrape is suggesting something entirely different.
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p>I should think that goes without saying.
I was just making the other point. Our emphases are a little different. I tend to very much be a names, dates, places, facts person, though usually in pursuit of being able to think critically about these things – very Jeffersonian it seems. Why is it that making a comment about education with which you don’t 100% agree so easily brings out a nasty attitude in you? That’s been a trend I’ve noticed.
Let’s recap.
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p>What Seascrape is actually advocating is an educational philosophy that centers solely on the memorization of facts (content) and rejects instruction in critical thinking. This is the model of the early- to mid-twentieth century. He mistakenly thought this was the current approach; I corrected him. I assert that content-only instruction is inadequate instructional practice that fails to meet the needs of contemporary society. I assert that current successful practice resulting in the gains we’ve made involve a heavy emphasis on instruction in critical thinking, not “the old-school content approach,” i.e., solely facts, a discrete body of knowledge.
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p>You then respond by asserting we need “both,” and then elaborate:
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p>From this, I can only surmise that you are suggesting that I’m advocating only “one,” the teaching of critical thinking absent “facts.” I respond that of course we’d teach “both” because “facts” are “content” and then further assert that nowhere in my comments do I suggest content-free or fact-free instruction.
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p>So, yes, I’ll admit some frustration with you, Christopher. This is not the first time you’ve not understood the discussion but commented anyway. Your “opinion” that facts matter is not and has not been the issue. No one is arguing we stop teaching content, least of all me. But that is what your response suggests. As a result, I can only conclude that you did not read the exchange carefully or are determined to attribute assertions to me that I do not make so that you can offer a different opinion.
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Look at the ratings record too. I gave you a 5 and Seascraper a 4. Responses aren’t always opposing arguments and I didn’t really disagree with you above. I was just adding my two cents to the exchange, which yes, I did read. So maybe both of us overinterpreted the other’s comments in that we both thought that the other was taking a more extreme position than intended, but if you think I misunderstood something you said, just kindly explain it to me rather than jump down my throat. I’m sure that at end of the day we both want the children of MA to have the best possible education so kindly don’t treat me as the enemy. Sometimes simple memorization is required (multiplication tables come to mind), but I’m sure we’re close on a lot of things. “Huh” also responded and that exchange went just fine.
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My middle school headmaster was a big fan of Dorothy Sayer’s “Lost Tools of Learning,” particularly the theme introduced in this passage:
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p>One of the most notable things about the differently winged on this site is their scorn for these building blocks, logic especially. As Ms. Sayers says:
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p>It’s almost like she foresaw the blogosphere…
I teach a Public Speaking elective, and this year, for the first time, I’m actually spending time trying to teach kids to think about WHY they believe what they believe and HOW to actually argue. I’ve been inspired by Michael Sandel’s Justice lectures at Harvard to try to move my high school seniors to a point where they, too, can articulate why and what they believe in an informed and respectful manner. This is a HUGE undertaking.
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p>Example: during Thursday’s class we brainstormed ideas for Oxford-style debating after having a watched a full debate on Intelligence Squared. The usual suspects came up: SSM, abortion, etc. But the most interesting topic that emerged from that discussion was the efficacy of spanking children. Knowing the kids as I do, it was fascinating to watch them speak up in this regard. What a great day.
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p>I serve on the largest school committee in the entire Commonwealth. It is excruciatingly painful to endure the discussions (or what passes for them) when 20 people representing five towns are around a table. I’m horrified most of the time. I have been reading and following Sandel’s work, and I have to say I’m wholeheartedly convinced that he is right. We’ve lost ground because of our inability to articulate what we believe and why. Every American should be able to do that in a thoughtful manner. Much work is needed.
Here’s some examples of the problem…
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p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
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p>(embedding wasn’t available)
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p>These people assert that they care a lot about this issue but clearly haven’t really thought about it – about what exactly it is that they believe and why. It can be demonstrated by watching the cognitive dissonance when you walk them down the path of the logical consequences of their asserted beliefs. I blame authoritarianism.
What an object lesson. Thank you so so much for this! I’ve bookmarked this for future use.
That was riveting, like watching a car wreck. I had to watch it once myself and again with the whole family.
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p>Thanks very much, Mr. Lynne.
I know it’s been useful to me in the past in illustrating that many people have strong opinions on abortion without having thought it through.
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p>I find abortion as a topic is excellent in illustrating the phenomenon. Before I found this video I used to go through a different abortion thought exercise.
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p>Ostensibly, most opponents of abortion stand on the ground that it constitutes murder. Setting aside the arguable nature of blastocysts and fetuses, standing on this ground really should leave no room for compromise in the cases of rape or incest, yet many in this camp still hold such exceptions as valid.
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p>What is interesting here is that if one holds these positions simultaneously it demonstrates that there isn’t really a coherent position on abortion, but rather the behavior that creates pregnancy. This is demonstrable thusly: Given two examples of otherwise identical abortions where one pregnancy was caused by rape or incest and the other by consensual sex, then a different judgment for each case could only be based on the one criterion that differentiates them – the nature of the pregnancy, not the abortions. Strictly speaking this isn’t proof that abortion isn’t salient to someone who holds those premises simultaneously – just that it must be less important than the sexual behavior that differentiates the cases above. This, of course, leads to the conclusion that one is more concerned with sexual behavior than with murder – a conclusion that most people would disagree with, even those who hold that abortion is murder and wrong but hold exceptions for rape or incest.
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p>The way I was taught to go through these kinds of exercises is to assume the premises of a model and then explore their logical consequence thoroughly. If you come to a conclusion you can’t live with (incest and rape is worse than murder might be one example) then you must revise the model. In ethics I’ve seen this technique used to dispute moral relativism – If morals are relative then one logical consequence is that might makes right – and many moral relativists pause at that notion because that’d mean that the only thing Hitler really did wrong was lose the war.
in the video squirm when asked, directly, to explain what the punishment should be. Only one individual went so far as to suggest–perhaps–that life in prison might be appropriate. I think she may have realized the problem with her initial position and didn’t want to concede, either overtly or tacitly, the point. I have a hard time believing that she would send an 18-year-old to prison for life for having an abortion, but then again, you never know. Zealots come in all shapes, sizes, and ages.
The Citizen Ethics Network has published a 60-page PDF called Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis. It’s a compilation of political and moral philosophy pieces by a variety of people with an real interest in these issues.
And, I daresay, more relevant than you might think. The epistemology of anti-abortion activists is derived, as the video points out, from what they are against (‘murder of children’) rather than something to be in favor of (justice, consistency, etc..) Todays public schools can be traced to similar shortsightedness.
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p>The rise of public schools tracks evenly with the decline in child labor (and the adoption of both strong child labor laws and stringent enforcement of same) and anti-child labor activists advocated for public schooling. That is why we adopted the agrarian model: children working on a farm were not viewed as ‘child labor’ and were needed for the most work intensive portion of the farming year. The debate, much in the same way as the abortion debate, centered not around education as a public good but on child labor as an unnecessary evil: public education was, more or less, a gilded warehouse; a compromise afterthought to keep the urchins off the street once their exploitation was outlawed. In much the same way as the people in the above linked abortion video were at a loss for the consequences of their thinking, the anti-child labor activists didn’t quite think through the public education dilemma and so it was birthed misshapen and left to the whims of politicians. Because of the massive shift in the economy (some several million children moving from wage-earners to tax liabilities) funding mechanisms had to be, more or less, concocted ad hoc and since been institutionalized.
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p>Todays proponents of the traditional public school model, though often quite earnest, also don’t often face the fact that public school system, as conceived in this country, was broken from day one: it was implemented to protect children from exploitation not from ignorance. Furthermore, efforts to improve the system have, more often than not, been at the mercy of politics and shortsightedness: NCLB is a wet dream of micro-management and fiat and, when seen objectively, probably couldn’t be made any more deleterious if one tried.
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p>So when Diane Ravitch points out that the train is going the wrong way, she’s correct, but easily dismissed: after all that’s the direction the train has always been heading.
I’m not familiar with such details but the history you present here certainly seems plausible. Personally, I’ve always thought about public education as a public good – the kind of thing that benefits society enough such that we should all pay for it because we all benefit even if we all don’t benefit directly. Moreover, however it may have been ill-conceived from a practical ‘how to get it done’ point of view, a quick survey of other western democracies indicates that its certainly not crazy or irrational to have a public education system.
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p>I hope that I did not leave you with the impression that I hold public education to be irrational. I do not. Nor do I particularly decry the loss of that which it replaced, child labor, which is an evil. Nor am I particularly certain that other avenues, which I might consider more tidy or encompassing, were available to us at the time. I just wish to point out that what is, is. Public education is a public good. I’m sorry that I ever was insufficiently clear. I was just trying to point out similarities in the situations regarding shortsightedness: anti-abortion activist employ half-logic just like the rest of us.
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p>It is, in fact, not all that uncommon: tea-totallers in the 20’s went on a rampage against alcohol only to unleash a wave of criminality in the 30’s. Abolitionist northerners in 1840’s America lobbied against opressive fugitive slave laws with some success only to be met with widespread civil disobedience as press and clergy (yes clergy) began to push back. Even the founding fathers, after successfully throwing off the yoke of England had their ‘now what?’ moment…
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p>So, there is being against something without necessarily being for something else: but the history of most crusades throughout the world has been marked by this same shortsightedness: the crusade to end child labor suffers from this same shortsightedness.
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p>Charter schools are, in my view, the first honest, mostly unencumbered public attempts to treat education as the absolute good it is, rather than an institutionalized confusion cobbled together to deal with aftereffects of solving another problem… NCLB, for example, is centralized planning while charters are attempts at decentralization. That alone, I should think, ought to garner support. Medicare, that other great public good works precisely because it follows the decentralized model that says the professionals, in that case the doctors, know best. Can you imagine how good public education would be if we treated teachers with the same deference and respect as we do doctors? Wow.
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p>This is also, frankly, why I don’t think ‘innovation schools’, themselves a pale imitation of charters, will be successful: they remain part of the centralized institutional maze and will remain at the mercy of the politicians and administrators. Labor relations alone, as understood in this country, mitigate against just about anything else… But that’s a whole other thing…
… I think I disagree with you about decentralization. Your example of Medicare deferring to doctors as a net good is confusing to me – medicare is insurance so don’t do diagnoses. They have to trust doctors, except on pricing where Medicare will overrule doctors. So I’m failing to see the applicability here I guess.
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p>Also, with regard to education, I actually see local control as part of the problem.
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p>I actually elected not to go into teaching because of local control (as well as other reasons associated with pay). For music much of what local control means is that you have to defer your teaching desires in order to increase your visibility because a music program looks useless to parents without concerts. That is, as far as parents are usually concerned, a music department is for putting their kids on display. This means you forgo great teaching opportunities in favor of getting the kids ready for the next concert. Much of what I learned at my first couple of years at university could have been taught to me in high school, but there was no time or resources.
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p>I used to have talks with my professors and they’d remark on a phenomenon that can happen with parents of freshmen students – they still think they can and should exert control on the classroom with regard to their kids. It was then that I realized that these professors were free as educators in a way that primary school teachers are not. At that point I thought about teaching at university but money issues prevailed against me in that endeavor as well.
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p>So I often wonder how a school would operate insulated from it’s current mission of pleasing parents and institutions of local control and instead focusing on it’s real mission on teaching. Local control seems too often a distraction – more of a bug than a feature.
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p>I’m no expert but FWIW that’s my two cents.
Yes, the current academic calendar is a relic of the agricultural age, but the the concept of public education as a public good goes back to our country’s founding, and is especially strong in this state. I commend to you what the MA Constitution has to say on the matter and point out that the need for public education was one of just a couple of things the founding generation appeared to be unanimous on (the other being that the US was, in the words of the Treaty of Tripoli, “In no ways founded upon the Christian religion”.)
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