Category

School decentralization

• 06.19.08
  Slay the yellow monsters
  School decentralization (0)

  The Wall Street Journal reports on what fuel prices are doing to school transportation budgets. The yellow buses are taking money that would normally be spent on teachers, roofs, and "enrichment" programs. Not a word is breathed about the possibility that it's time to reverse the consolidation mania that has created these abominations. For example, the Gull Lake Community School District here in Michigan covers 100 square miles, but is not very compact in form. It has a long east-west axis and a not-so-long north-south one. There are about 2900 students. The elementary school ...
  
  
• 10.04.07
  An inconvenient centralized command structure
  School decentralization (0)

  The judge made a reasonable decision, I suppose, but what business do judges have in making such decisions in the first place? These are judgment calls that could reasonably be decided a number of different ways. Wouldn't it be better for local school officials to be making them? And what would be so terrible about them not all making the same decision? Why do all the schools have to march in lock-step? So long as local principals and teachers have to watch their backs for fear of what local taxpayers and parents say, ...
  
  
• 09.29.07
  Inconvenient youths
  Environment, School decentralization, Schools (0)

  This photo is dredged up from what once was a web site of mine, circa 1995. I got it to go with an article in the Weekend Edition of the WSJ, titled "Inconvenient Youths." Here are samples: In households across the country, kids are going after their parents for environmental offenses, from using plastic cups to serving non-grass-fed beef at the dinner table. Many of these kids are getting more explicit messages about becoming eco-warriors at school and from popular books and movies. and Some parents object to what they see as proselytizing by their kids' schools. Mark D. Hill, ...
  
  
• 09.27.07
  School buses, again
  School decentralization, Welfare-police state (0)

  Buckle up on buses?  The Kalamazoo Gazette asks whether Michigan should require seat belts on school buses. A better question would be why we have such abominations as school buses in the first place?  Someday people are going to look back like we now do on child labor in factories, asking what kind of brutish people those were who could make their own children waste hundreds of hours of their childhoods on those things. I wish I had back all the time I spent on school buses during my high school days.  (For most of my elementary school, I usually walked to ...
  
  
• 08.06.07
  Doomed to spend $100 million on history
  School decentralization, Schools (0)

  It's not often that there is anything good to say about Julie Mack's articles in the Kalamazoo Gazette, but here's an opportunity: Those who study history are doomed to spend $100 million. She raises some good questions, and does it in a gracious manner, too. It's good that school superintendents are making waves over this sort of thing. And it's interesting to hear that Sen. Robert Byrd got us a federal law requiring schools to teach about the Constitution on September 17. He seems to have an interesting notion of what the Constitution is about. Maybe we ...
  
  
• 06.12.07
  Julie Mack’s Consensus on ISVs
  Bash the Messenger, School decentralization (0)

  Finally, after years of remarkably good behavior for a Democrat, Jennifer Granholm may be letting her true colors show. The following headline is from the lead article on the front page of the Kalamazoo Gazette (Sunday June 10, 2007): Bureaucracy or efficiency? Granholm would expand role of intermediate districts; critics say they are a waste. That could be the article that launched a thousand blog posts, but let's start with this paragraph. There is general consensus that Granholm's proposal is a move in the right direction. But educators question the idea of mandatory collaboration, saying flexibility is needed. General consensus? Perhaps ...