A New Southern Bobby Kennedy?

A young attractive humanitarian senator, does this sound familiar? John Edwards didn't get the nomination for president the first time around but he sure has faced adversity and has given back quite a bit to this world. He lost a 16 year-old son and stood by his wife through breast cancer. Since the Vice-presidential campaign he's been working as the director of the Center on Poverty, in North Carolina. He has helped push for minimum wage increases in six states. Edwards also traveled to Uganda recently with the International Rescue Committee, and is urging our current president to help end the killing in Darfur. Amidst all of this, he has authored an uplifting book titled Home, which shares the stories of 60 different homes.

Charter for Hope or Disaster?

The PBS program NOW [ transrcipt ] shows the reopening of Lafayette Academy in post Katrina New Orleans. It is one of the new charter schools that is comprising 60% of the schools reopening at this time. I was first excited to hear the news as I believe that charter schools are a possible hope for the future. So many districts suffer from bureaucratic waste these days and corruption.

After watching the show I was disheartened. They already have the challenge of students living in trailers and having missed so much schooling. Now they suffer from the same tragedy that took so many lives in the disaster-- poor planning. On the first day of school there were no books. In October, they were still waiting for books. Finally, in November, most of the books arrived. Is the federal government trying to set them up as an example of how charter schools will not work?

The site has two videos, the first is the program and the second is a supplemental experience of one student. What can we as a nation do to turn this experiment around? Perhaps we failed New Orleans in the disaster. Perhaps it is taking too long to rebuild the homes. But can we help rebuild the hope of these children?

Who Controls Education?

5 min. running time -- ** warning: uses the F word
George Carlin - Who Really Controls America

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This is a look at the glass half empty. Though it seems spot on and makes me wonder if there is a way to really control campaign contributions and lobbying. The First Amendment has been thrown out as a defense of these practices in former litigation.

Many of the teachers who have chosen to work in inner city schools have known Carlin's opinion about schools to be true. Public schools were formed on the industrial model of efficiency. They were never intended to graduate all students and certainly not make them all college ready. One incredibly uncomfortable moment I had in a grad school diversity class was when our guest speaker, who was an African American teacher, speculated that the system had an interest in under-educating some of its students because they made good drug dealers and prostitutes.

Those living in poverty have little chance of changing their lot in our current system. The only way to change it would be to give bonuses to teachers who chose to teach in schools with high levels of poverty. That might attract more experienced teachers, or it might be an incentive for teachers to stay longer and build experience. Right now these schools get the least experienced teachers who get burnt out and leave as soon as they can. The experienced teachers have no incentive to work there and if the state wants to pay them bonuses based on achievement they will definitely stay away from these schools.

One can say that money doesn't matter, but it is more work for a teacher to have 10-20 struggling learners instead of 2-5 in a more affluent school. The more affluent school usually comes with more parent volunteers and other support. The extra money might allow the teacher to pay for some house keeping services or other help so that she can spend those extra hours grading papers and planning intervention strategies for her students. Some young teachers, living in expensive cities, have had to take second jobs just to pay their rent. This leaves them with almost no time to plan for the next day's lessons.

The other possible hope for improving public education is to cut out the misappropriation of funds. If these schools could be turned into charter schools and the whole school community would be involved in overseeing the funds then they might have a better chance of getting the tools they need to get things accomplished. It takes commitment from a School Site Committee to oversee the school plan and spending but it's worth it for student success.

In general public education isn't very exciting for students. No Child Left Behind simply has to go. If we want time to develop critical thinking skills, we have to be freed of all that test prep time. I'm not saying get rid of all bench mark tests, but we don't need so many. Now we are testing children as young as kindergarten. Do they really need that pressure?

Also, how in the world are we going to get science and math teachers in our public schools? Are we going to start paying teachers more? Either our math and science literate students will only come from private schools or we are going to have re-haul the public school system. Giving teachers incentives, such as loan forgiveness for a few years and won't keep them teaching for very long. The difficult to live on salary and general lack or societal respect lures scientist and mathematicians to other fields. Garbage in, is garbage out.