KADmom, many people on this forum have bad experience with their schools and districts. But what you are describing in this and your other thread
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....4861/What_s_happening_in_early_educ.htmlis in a
completely different league.
The people running your schools are severely wacko, and someone needs to shine a spotlight on these bizarre practices. You
have to go to the media about this and bring the intense scrutiny this deserves.
Well, while having NO adult in the classroom (as reported in the first post in this thread) is certainly beyond the pale, everything else is stuff I was playing Cassandra about two years ago with Pearson's takeover of Connections (my DD's school).
There is so much rigidity and so little understanding of what education even
is in this model that it is
crazymaking. Truly crazymaking.
The people running this show from the top-down
honestly believe (or they've drunk the Kool-Aid, anyway) that "education" can be "optimized" by mechanizing the process and removing the pesky "inconsistencies" produced when one allows individual teachers to script or interact with children and curricular objectives. Teachers are (I'm really not kidding here) seen more as a potential liability (a source of human error) than anything else, and curricular goals/benchmarks ARE the ultimate goals in the model.
It's not education that they are seeking-- it's efficient operant conditioning.
But you can't say that. Well-- you can. But there is nobody listening. The only people who
can hear that message are just as powerless to respond to it as we parents are.
