Whoops.. I think I accidentally downvoted you. Someone vote him back up, could you?
That's an interesting trend. I think it could be resolved by instead having the ones doing the teaching decide on what sorts of standards and tests should be used to appraise performance.
Some of my family members are teachers, and I hear more and more about how they are given less freedom to teach creatively and are instead forced to administer useless, rote-memorization tests that assess, well, nothing really. It's getting kind of ridiculous.
The problem right now is that the bureaucracy in place is a result of the CBAs of teachers unions preventing the firing of bad teachers or the introduction of regulations strictly for the sake of the student.
In almost every instance of a public service, the right-but-left or left-but-right mentality of Americans creates a bureaucratic Mexican standoff: "We'll stop regulating you when you stop being shits." "We'll stop being shits when you stop regulating us."
It's very easy to side with teachers as individuals, but teachers unions serve the good teachers and the bad teachers, and I would argue (without statistics, mind you) that teachers unions are just as much to blame for the current educational fiasco as incompetent bureaucracies, politics, ham-fisted regulations, and bad parenting.
Isn't this rather self-evident, that those who work to gain control of the structure gain control of the structure, and those who don't, don't? It seems to just be a wordier variant of 'use it or lose it'. Does such a self-evident law really require the appellation 'Iron'?
