"Maine has dramatically increased spending per student with more administrators per student, on far fewer students to achieve less...The problem lies in administration, school boards, and policies that are deterring from basic educational functions."
Education is being driven by people who are not interested in educating children, but using them as a mechanism for money, power, and policy experimentation.
Those people are allowed to do that by people who feel powerless, and politicians who are disinterested as long as teachers union contributions and campaign volunteers continue.
Great article and very much agree the fundamentals are important (although emotional intelligence is also very important as well - no point having good technical skills if one then goes and makes bad decisions - ADM King in the 1940s is a great example of a high performer who could have been exceptional but for better emotional intelligence). In case useful, some things I'd have found helpful would have been:
- Whether the spend figures were real or nominal. It would be particularly helpful if the spend figures were compared against change in costs for what was required to deliver an education (ie, do part of the increased costs since 2000 reflect more capital required due to IT and similar? They may not - computers were very much in schools by 2000, but I'm not sure if things continued to intensify after that point).
- Teacher to student ratios - administrators are important of course, but if there had been a decreased student-to-administrator ratio but teacher-to-student ratios were unchanged (or worse) that'd indicate another issue (declining per-capita administration of teaching).
"Maine has dramatically increased spending per student with more administrators per student, on far fewer students to achieve less...The problem lies in administration, school boards, and policies that are deterring from basic educational functions."
Education is being driven by people who are not interested in educating children, but using them as a mechanism for money, power, and policy experimentation.
Those people are allowed to do that by people who feel powerless, and politicians who are disinterested as long as teachers union contributions and campaign volunteers continue.
Great article and very much agree the fundamentals are important (although emotional intelligence is also very important as well - no point having good technical skills if one then goes and makes bad decisions - ADM King in the 1940s is a great example of a high performer who could have been exceptional but for better emotional intelligence). In case useful, some things I'd have found helpful would have been:
- Whether the spend figures were real or nominal. It would be particularly helpful if the spend figures were compared against change in costs for what was required to deliver an education (ie, do part of the increased costs since 2000 reflect more capital required due to IT and similar? They may not - computers were very much in schools by 2000, but I'm not sure if things continued to intensify after that point).
- Teacher to student ratios - administrators are important of course, but if there had been a decreased student-to-administrator ratio but teacher-to-student ratios were unchanged (or worse) that'd indicate another issue (declining per-capita administration of teaching).