Not prepared by any official Tea Party, these proposals are presented to all Tea Parties for discussion and hopefully approval.
Background: many people have become cynical. They think the Education Establishment is hopelessly corrupt, driven by far-left ideology and old-fashioned greed, and no improvement is possible.
But times they are a-changing. Many conservative are being elected. Let's think about how they might use their power to save the public schools.
Imagine that a governor like Chris Christie wakes up tomorrow and decides to fix public education in his state. What should he do? In general, which policies should Conservatives, Republicans and Tea Party people insist on?
Here are the Big Eight:
1) Encourage and strengthen charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling, and all types of private schools, because diversity and competition is a sure way to have improvement.
2) All teachers must major in the subjects they teach. Just as nurses have degrees in Nursing, biology teachers must have degrees in Biology. (At present many unprepared teachers are told to teach subjects they know little about. Ridiculous.)
3) Support fast-track alternative credentialing. If smart, educated people want to leave other fields to be teachers, all they really need is several months of classroom training. Grab these people and put them to work as soon as possible.
4) Make schools safe and secure. School boards and principals must be held responsible for eliminating violence from schools. (There is far more violence in public schools that most people realize; and it seems to be tacitly accepted. Zero-tolerance seems to be a cynical ploy to distract people from the real problem, which is children committing acts that adults would be jailed for. A pill in a purse is not the problem. Assault and battery is the problem. INTENTIONAL physical injury is the problem.)
5) Teachers must not be required to join a union. The power of the NEA is a major problem for reform. This union uses enforced dues to elect political allies, almost always Democrats. (The NEA's incessant political activity should be reined in, especially if dues are enforced, as many teachers are paying for politics they oppose. How can that be legal?)
6) Repeal, rescind, or scale back Race to the Top. This was always a stunt by the federal government to impose its will on local education. We want to go in exactly the opposite direction. There's no mention in the Constitution of a federal role in education. The states should be encouraged to innovate and compete with each other, not submit to the absurd pretenders who have done all the damage so far.
7) Cut the Department of Education by half. And then do it again. This thing should never have been created (it was a pay-back gift from the Democrats to the NEA). Similarly, cut in half the role of schools of education. These places take two years to impart two months worth of information.
8) Try to dismantle all the sophistries and gimmicks introduced by progressive educators in the last 100 years, for example, Sight-Words, New Math/Reform Math, Constructivism, Self-Esteem, Multiculturalism, Fuzziness of any kind, Group Learning, etc. Instead, there must be a renewed emphasis on foundational knowledge and basic skills, with mastery of both.
At least, here is a list to shoot for. Suppose even half of these items became real. Any four. The power of the Education Establishment would be much reduced. We would see real improvement.
The need, broadly speaking, is to get people informed, engaged. and enraged. Make people confront this astonishing fact: we had politicized educators so heartless they would deliberately keep children from learning to read (by using a method such as look-say). These so-called educators came up with instructional tactics such as New Math that were, I believe, deliberately engineered not to work. (We know for sure it didn't work.) The amazing thing about our Education Establishment is they debase the public schools in plain sight. If people grasped all the deliberate destruction, they would have total contempt for our so-called educators.
Rudolf Flesch wrote a bestseller in 1955 telling everyone why Johnny couldn't read. Did the Education Establishment change its ways? No, the Education Establishment doubled down on what didn't work. Obviously we need a whole new kind of people in charge of education.
The coming year may see a tilt of power and momentum for the Conservatives. Why not use that power to take education away from so-called progressives whose major concerns always seem to be regressive and repressive? Enough with the social engineering. Let's try something new: intellectual engineering. You know, we teach kids a lot of stuff and make them as smart as possible!
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Bruce Deitrick Price writes about education, culture, and language on Improve-Education.org.
(For more analysis of why education is in decline, see Improve-Education.org, for example, "41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt.")
