* * * * *
                                        
           “Education is basically a series of rent-seeking rackets”
                                        
> 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

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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