Posting Towards Gomorrah

baltassoc · 10-30-2006, 05:16 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Spanky
In California we had a move to smaller class sizes. We had a Republican governor (Wilson) who pushed for a limit of thirty students up to the seventh grade. That was pushed through. The idea was to limit all classes in California to thirty students - in other words move the rule up to Junior High School and High School) but the new Democrat governor (Davis) decided not to push it through the upper grades. They just decided to increase spending (which they did dramatically) but let the bureaucracy decide what was best, and so the class reduction effort was stopped. So now in California elementary class sizes are limited to thirty but not so in Junior High and High School.

Of course the increase funding didn't improve anything. The new Republican governor, the Governator, tried to push tenuring of public school teachers back to four years from two years and the teachers association put together a huge war chest and defeated his efforts.

In California the single biggest block to good education reform is the California Teachers Association and their Democrat allies.

30? Wow. Decreasing class size is a laudable goal. I didn't realize it was that bad in California. It would appear that California needs to hire about half again as many teachers (dropping to 20 students per class). Good luck with that. (Alternatively, I suppose, they could just kick out a third of the students.)

I think that one has to step back for a moment and consider what each side's objections really are. I can't speak for the CTA (and wouldn't want to), but my problem is not with standardized tests (which I think are important) but rather with what is done with that information. Low performance is punished, not fixed.

Think of it this way: you have a school that's doing badly. Its scores are going down, not up. So you slash its funding. Now it's going to get better?

In private enterprise, underperformers wither and die and are replaced by more efficient market entrants. That doesn't quite work with public schools.