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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KonKilo who wrote (43616)	11/21/2007 10:12:21 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540741

In the smallish towns where I taught, the pig farmers and florists who comprised the school boards had ultimate authority over the educational professionals. A serious flaw in the educational power structure, if you ask me. I based that argument on the several schools our kids have attended, on some recent visits back to the small town I grew up in in central Texas, and on talks with colleagues. That is the sameness of core curriculum; not how much sports to have. In, for instance, the little Texas town in which I grew up, sports, particularly high school football are very large high school items; whereas the final NJ suburban school our kids attended those were simply one more among a host of activities. And the quality of teaching was quite different. But the core was remarkably similar. The other experience was for me more telling. I was asked by the local superintendent of schools to participate in a long term planning process. Soup to nuts, as they say. Budgets, curriculum, technology, buildings, etc. He had lots of community folk, board members, teachers, and a few school administrators. Fascinating process. One of the things I came away from that with was the irrelevance of the school board and state agencies to the actual delivered content of the curriculum. The teachers were extremely aware of what they were doing even when they were nicely but deliberately skating around school board regulations or state ones. The paperwork all looked fine; but the practice was not. No doubt that's not true in every school. But my impression was, and I'm generalizing it, like college administrations, the school boards had less power over the content of the curriculum than they thought. That the critical variable was just how strong the professional associations were.