Welcome to the School Matters Foundation
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All our current woes connect to the K-12 education system.
Young adults born near or after the millennium have been significantly influenced by a broken education system that thrives on facade.
When No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001, our public schools began a downward slide toward a morass of bureaucracy. The mainstay of NCLB is something called
Adequate Yearly Progress.
This is assessed through student test results and school improvement plans.
The testing bureaucracy is its own quagmire:
The results can lawfully be altered by exemptions such as
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new to the school, homeless, or F & R
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Special Ed [Many students who are not learning-disabled are staffed into the SpEd program for both the testing caveats and the funding.]
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behavioral or psychological issue
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non-SpEd low performer
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non-English speaker
It takes a lot of documentation and reports filled out to make the above exemptions a reality.
Why is it important to manage test scores that must be reported to the DOE?
Because NCLB ties funding to them.
Included in that is the School Improvement Plan, a nebulous ingredient supported by mounds of paperwork.
Public education wants us to believe their primary mission is to provide a quality education to the nation's children.
Not so.
Based on the evidence,
their primary mission is to perpetuate a bureaucracy.
When teachers are consumed by bureaucratic requirements to keep their job,
they are not focused on teaching.
And what have the students in their classrooms been doing while the teachers are not teaching? They are often online, "researching" independent projects assigned by their teachers.
What began as a mandate to crack down on lackadaisical teacher and student performance in 2001 turned into a fiasco unforeseen by our politicians. We have built a house of cards on a foundation of facade. Americans in the under 30 demographic have been deprived of a quality education because paperwork became more important than instruction.
This has created a cracked infrastructure of human capital, and it is an issue worthy of your attention.
Read the full story in
CHAOS in our schools...our flagship exposé
FREE on Kindle Unlimited.
Also available in hard cover and paperback.
Our flagship book:
Chaos in Our Schools
The provocative expose of how mismanaged our education system is. Available now on Amazon.
We can fix the problem, but we need an overhaul in how we view and manage public education.
​
Reading this book is a good start.
The paradigm of education has shifted over the last decade. Documentation and data collection have eclipsed teaching as the mainstay in a teacher's career.
On Education:
John F. Kennedy,
35th President of the United States.
Credit: Shared via Mark Cohen
on LinkedIn
"Regardless of whether it's indigenous issues, economic failures, shortages of fuel, food, or freedom of rights. It is time to learn from the past, let the negative emotions go, and make better decisions for the future."
-Michael Zeidenberg
Notable Viewpoints
Why Differentiation
Doesn't Work
"Differentiation is a failure, a farce, and the ultimate educational joke played on countless educators and students. By having dismantled many of the provisions we used to offer kids on the edges of learning, ... we have sacrificed the learning of virtually every student."
- Dr. James Delisle, in Education Week
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
Albert Einstein
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle
The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.
B.B. King
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
