Towering over all these lesser scams is the college racket, a vast money swollen credentialing machine for lower-middle-class worker bees. American parents are now all resigned to the fact that they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid, un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation.
Similarly with “incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools.” Setting aside the fact that you are dealing with a line of work whose labor union is armed with thermonuclear weapons, even supposing you could establish a free market in public-school teachers, how could the worst schools—inner-city schools serving black neighborhoods—ever outbid leafy, affluent suburbs for those “best teachers”? And how many “best teachers” are there, anyway? As the Thernstroms point out, a lot of these prescriptions for school reform assume an unlimited supply of “saints and masochists”—teachers like those in the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program)s schools, who, Mr. Tough tells us, work 15 to 16 hours a day. I am sure there are some people who enter the teaching profession with the desire to crunch their way daily across the crack-vial-littered streets of crime-wrecked inner-city neighborhoods in order to put in 15- hour working days, but I doubt there are many such.
Via Flutterby [1], “ The Dream Palace of Educational Theorists [2]”
I found it to be a rather amusing rant against the current American educational system, because, hey, who doesn't like a rant against the current American educational system?
[1] http://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/9566.html
[2] http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=4844&sec_id=4844