J. H. Snider, via a kind reader:
Consider just a few of the questions whose answers might help a community’s leaders and citizens make better decisions about how to improve their schools:
- What has been said and written about school start times in districts with comparable demographics and financial resources, but better student test scores?
- What is the relationship between student test scores and systems for electing school board members in comparable school districts?
- How do superintendent contracts vary in comparable districts?
Parents, teachers, administrators, and taxpayers have legitimate reasons to ask questions like these. But it has been incredibly hard for them to do so. One reason is that much public information remains locked in the file cabinets of America’s more than 14,000 school districts. Another is that even if the information is posted to school websites, it may be posted in ways, such as a scanned document, that Internet search engines cannot read. Public information that should be available instantaneously and at no cost, like so much other information now available via search engines, instead takes hundreds of work-lifetimes and a fortune to gather–if it can be gathered at all.
Well worth reading.
The listed questions and other issues raised in the article having bearing only in the world of cable chatter and fodder for the always useless opinion makers, as these issues have nothing to do with why Johnny can’t read or think coherently.
But, perhaps the useless questions do answer the more fundamental questions. Johnny can’t read or think coherently because there are no examples of their exercise in the adult world.