Dear Commons Community,

In yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, Jonathon Rauch, a scholar with the Brookings Institute, reviewed America  in the Age of Descent by Edward Luce.   It is an insightful review with a balanced amount of caution and optimism about America’s future.

In one section, he compares the ascent of China and its potential to vie with America for dominance.  He refers back to the fears of the late 1970s and 1980s when some naysayers were predicting that Japan would be the successor to the United States for world economic dominance.  Rauch explores several reasons why this is not likely to be the case including a comment that the public education systems in both China and Japan rely heavily on “rote instruction, good for playing catch-up but not so good for taking the lead.”  I concur completely with his view.  However, someone should tell officials in the US Department of Education, the various state education departments,  the Gates, Broad and Walton Foundations,  that their agenda for test, test, test and teaching to the test is just a slight variation of rote learning  and one that leads our students to be exceptional good followers not leaders and not creators.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article today describing public education in Texas and how schools are coping with massive budget reductions.    Here is a sample:

• the Hutto Independent School District stopped providing bus service to students who live within two miles of their schools;
• the Keller Independent School District started charging parents for bus service ranging from  $185 to $355 per student per year;
• Northside in San Antonio eliminated 973 positions and made classes larger in a $61.4 million budget reduction.

Several lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Legislature have played down the impact of the $5.4 billion in cuts on schools statewide. In an interview in February with The Dallas Morning News, Gov. Rick Perry said he saw no need for a special legislative session to restore some of the education funding that was eliminated last year and said the schools were receiving an adequate amount of money.

We should be grateful that  Mr. Perry’s modest skills were on display during the televised Republican presidential candidate debates earlier this year thereby  ending his candidacy quickly and limiting his  harm to public education.  We sympathize with the children, their parents and educators of the Lone Star State.

Tony