The Maryland school board has bypassed local school boards in Baltimore and will be operating four high schools directly, according to an article in today’s NY Times.
Invoking the federal No Child Left Behind law, the Maryland school board voted today to take control of four Baltimore high schools with chronically low achievement and strip the City of Baltimore from direct operation of seven more middle schools.
This sounds wonderful–when junior isn’t doing the job, you bypass and handle it yourself–until you realize that they don’t have a clue either.
In the March “Reason” Magazine there was an excellent article , “The Agony of American Education”, by Lisa Snell, Director of Education Policy at the Reason Foundation.
The article touted the improved education statistics achieved by the San Francisco public school district, which pays so much to the schools per student, and lets the students go wherever they want in the school district. This certainly resulted in an improvement. When you tie rewards (payment of funds) to performance (improved grades, more students), you’ll always get an improvement of statistics.
Schools funded in this fashion had ample funds to hire enough on-site tutors so that even the most bone-headed students could be gotten through the materials and pass the exams.
Now imagine what results could be achieved if they actually had a technology that was useful in educating children. Of course I’m talking about the study technology developed by L. Ron Hubbard. I’ve used it for the last 35 some years, since first learning about it in 1971. I know from personal experience how well it works because I’ve used it every time I changed careers (too many times!) to get a jump start on my new career. It’s how I was able to learn web design, PHP, how to host websites, and so on. There’s no shortcut. The books about these subjects must be studied, and it does take some skull sweat to learn what you need to learn. But when you know HOW to study, it’s not agonizing and one can get through it successfully, despite badly written texts, incomplete data, and explanations that just seem to go in circles. All these things become familiar to you when you study using the study tech.
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