A Radical Fix for Schools?

NOW on PBS, PBS by David Brancaccio | May. 1, 2009 (Special Report)

Do we need to gut our public schools in order to save them?

(Video) How is Secretary of Education Arne Duncan going to spend $100 billion in stimulus money—almost twice the education budget—to fix our nation's schools? During his seven years running Chicago's public schools, Duncan went head to head with the teacher's union and skeptical parents by closing down low-performing schools, getting rid of all the teachers, principals, even the janitors, and reopening them with new staffs as "turnaround ... Full Story »

Posted by Fabrice Florin

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2.5

by John Gillette - Jun. 23, 2009

PBS distributes a great deal of information to the public that I am a frequent consumer of and sometimes use as a resource. Unfortunately, this piece distorts reality by reducing the sample size to 1 and limiting and editing the perspectives shared to those ideologically on board as so many "investigative journalists" do. Many assumptions about effective teaching methods are represented as culturally standard and counterarguments to Arne Duncan's assumptions, of which there are many, have no voice in this journalism. As a teacher and selective consumer of media, I am disappointed that PBS has adopted the reporting style of private news corporations that oversimplifies reality by shaping stories to fit a preconceived argument; all for the sake of viewership and catering to "not-for-profit" companies, such as AUSL, that help undermine education in general who are motivated to compete with the school system for funding instead of to share education strategies for educational progress and improvement.

I do believe teachers (parents and the surrounding community) should be held accountable for children's education as a publicly funded entity but I do not think this should be implemented on the basis of test scores as they are not a fair representation of the reality of learning. Additionally, what basis, other than profit motive, is there to take jobs away from teachers with one type of training just to give those jobs to teachers with another type of training. Couldn't the same training be given to teachers already in place to change school cultures and, thus, avoid the restructuring process? It's in our best interest to make schools responsible but not to siphon our tax resources to private industries. That model educates our children to value profit over human and natural resources.