Education Reform by Edwards? Pre-K, shouldn't we get k-12 right first

But ... it will get him 300 more votes from those who don't look beyond a campaign promise.

Has Edwards ever been ready to lead?
To fix the broken system, first you'll have to remove the Teacher's Unions, then replace the heads of every school board and about a third more or less of the teachers and staff of each school. Then you'll have to go through every text book and like Ghould said remove the plagiarism in them and get them up to acurate information.
Quick patches like this are not actually going to help much, as it will take a major over haul of the education system to fix the problems.

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Dan is right on. That's the kind of reform we need. Hmmm. Edwards plan means the government could start brainwashing our kids at an even earlier age.

Or, we could scrap pre-K and Kindergarten altogether and work on grades 1-12. There used to be no grade before 1st grade and when our son was "required" to go to kindergarten, he learned nothing and was bored silly.

This is ridiculous. You're right about it being tax/spend. He needs another $400. haircut to get rid of a few more of those 'wild hairs'.

Mr Edwards is evidently not aware that the Federal Government does not run our schools. A better proposal would be to eliminate all Federal mandates that affect education.

Did you know? --- Montana rejected the "No Child Left Behind" program as not needed in our schools. We don't leave our kids behind like Bush seemed to think.

Government has no place in school administration or what they teach. Dictators and other totalarian governments do that not a free society.

What with his Tax and spend Health Plan and now this I have to wonder why some people still want this moron as President.

All of education should be left to the states. There should not be a federal department of education, period.

Creating a federal pre-K program would only make it worse for the states because along with these mandates and funding come restrictions and arbitrary regulations. Keep education within the states purview.

I think it sounds ridiculous, and I have not really read up on it.
I can not imagine that someone sitting in Washington DC or someplace east coast will know what the schools in the NW will be needing.
It pretty much reduces all schools into nothing but figures on paper and not a real place with real people trying to teach and learn.

I honestly think that school and classroom reform needs to start with the state officials making a 6 month tour to all or most of the schools in their state, taking notes and toting a video camera around with them. Interviewing teachers, staff, parents, and students from different grades. Look over each schools stats in a seperate fashion instead of looking over state averages and district averages.
I believe that then some of these officials may get a clue as to where things need to start changing, and MIGHT start making better decisions with the allocation of the funds and help that they handle and can send where it is needed.

Lots of good points, especially Dan's.

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Education is not a one-size-fits-all situation. There are basics needs, yes, there are benchmarks needed but there is no single checklist that can guarantee every child an education. All we hear about in Maryland is the expenses incurred by the "no child left behind" program - and yet, the people in Baltimore revealed that four years ago, six people in the superintendant's office were drawing six figures and that included the super, the body guard/driver, the executive secretary/admnistrative assistant and three other high-level assistants. When a million dollars is considered just the beginning of the pay assets of a group, how can anyone expect education to rate up there with monetary enhancements? The possibilities of taking the monetary resources of a system dedicated to education are myriad and with discretionary spending not frequently tested or reported a person can heap atrocities upon a section of it which is only discovered after someone gets greedy and reports the original offender because he/she did not get the same opportunity to goudge the system at the same level. And, it is a revolutionary idea but what about asking educators and not politicians to set the minimums?

No kidding! White its great to "prime" kids for the school experience when their emotional state will allow for it at the age of 4, it's certainly not going to impede their development or scholarship to wait until they enter kindergarten!
Thanks for the article! *From A Fellow Breaking 3000 Member*

Both pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programs serve the purpose of being a more relaxed atmosphere for preparing kids to function and learn as part of a larger group. In addition both help make up for the failure or inability of some parents to teach their children rudimentary things such as counting and the alphabet which they need to know to begin tackling learning arithmetic and reading skills.

Mandating such programs also can serve to eliminate the crap I was faced with when I tried to enroll my daughter in kindergarten many years ago. She was small for her age and the teacher in the public school concluded she was not ready for kindergarten. I came up the money and enrolled her in a private school instead. Within a couple of months both her teacher and I became aware that a child who supposedly had not been ready for kindergarten was already reading on a third grade level and doing second grade math! Between my reading to her at home and a group day care environment she had taught herself what she obviously was ready and wanted to learn.

Not all children have the abilities my child was fortunate enough to have but those that do should neither be forced to wait until kindergarten or first grade to have someone teach them nor have someone determine what they already know and the level at which they should be being taught.

As for how these programs should be funded that is another matter, but there is the problem of equitable funding and poorer communities simply do not have the money to fund their educational programs at the same level that wealthier communities can. Unless we are willing to accept a public education system which provides children in wealthier communities with a better education than is provided to children in poorer communities the problem of inequitable funding must be addressed.

We can either spend the money to give the children in all our communities the tools they need to become productive and responsible adults or wait and spend our money to support, and perhaps incarcerate the the adults who are the products of our shortsightedness.

I think my idea for high school is pretty good. We say high school is to prepare our students for the "real' world, then lets prepare them. Start school at 8 in the morning, until 3 pm, 1/2 hour for lunch, and 2, 15 minute breaks. Then run a second shift of both students and teachers. This will reduce class size and accommodate students and teachers with a more flexible schedule.

Carol,

I do not disagree with your comments but my problem is we do not do K-12 correctly yet. Why should we add more to the plate. Even if we were able to help kids get a better start we would throw them into the failing K-12 system and lose whatever advantage we create. Reform has to be complete top to bottom and it needs to be done quickly.

denny B. has a good idea, not all students are morning people. There are jobs available that also, have second shifts. It would make the classrooms smaller , instead of building more schools.
I have never liked the fact that it is mandatory for children to go to kindergarten, some children are advanced enough to start school at age 5 , but not all of them. Some kids dont have parents to teach them before they start school, these kids are thrown into classes with kids,whose parents did take the time to teach them. The children whose parents taught them, will be ahead of the other students. I think, each child should be placed according, to what they know. The slower ones need to be with kids who are the same as them. The faster students need to be in classes that apply to them.
I dont think that averaging all of the grades in each subject should determine the whole grade. If you get a c in reading, then a c it is, dont average that c in with the other classes where the student may have b's. A c should keep the child off of the honor roll. If you average all the grades, it will bring the c up and now the child is on the honor roll.
Test all the teachers to see how good of an educator the teacher is. The GPA should be really high to teach school in any state. The classrooms need to be smaller and there should be a no tolerance rule for any disruptive students and harsh action should be taken against students who are not there to learn.

MDP = K-12 education has its failings but has many successes. Does anyone think that the children of the elite who attend public schools are failing. I promise you that they are not. They are thriving and will be around to take care of us when we are in the nursing home. The idea of pre-K is wonderful and should be implemented but at the state level - not federal.

Many of the "elite" like you call them are not thriving in our current K-12 system. There is little choice and many of the more gifted are not challanged. We need to prepare our children better for the future. There is much research done by a lot of indpendent groups that says we are failing our kids. Just look at how we stack up against other nations. We are declining and that is not a debate its facts. While I think that Pre-K is a good idea we need to reform the whole system and Pre-K at a state level seems like an excellent addition to the total reform package.

Well, I would say that Mr. Edwards' plan is more of the same, and I would expect as much from yet another victim of American compulsory schooling. Gee, since the system is failing our students in thirteen years, the obvious answer is to give it more time? Ironically, the system is actually succeeding. It is doing exactly what it was intended to do. It is impossible for me to believe that so many well intentioned people involved in education could end up so far astray, unless the charted course does not lead to the desired destination.

http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

I encourage everyone to read the cited article by Mr. Gatto, and if that's not enough for you, read his sources. No system will ever be perfect, but American answers to problems should promote LIBERTY! Why would we choose to model for our educational system after one that was developed in Prussia in the 1820s? Of course, we know what happened in Prussia about 110 years later, eh?

As far as I'm concerned, the place to start toward solving our educational woes is simple. Remove the compulsory from education and liberate the system. Liberate the students! Liberate the parents! Liberate the educators! An education is among the greatest gifts that can be given. Such a grand gift has no need of the force of law. While we're at it, liberate the bound periodicals, too! (smile)

I agree completely with Mr. Gatto's assessment that "genius is as common as dirt." I can't recall a time when I've met a stupid child, stunted perhaps, but not stupid. For me it is clear that the reason that our classrooms are dulling sharp young minds is not because of teachers, teacher's unions, or even administrators, but because that was their insidious original purpose. Hmmm...

The High Federalist disciples of Alexander Hamilton, "progressive" Republicans and Democrats, have almost completely succeeded in crushing our American revolution by dividing "we the people" into malleable voting blocks. American compulsory schooling is among the tools that have been used to do that.

It is amazing with so many issues in the school system regarding teaching programs andyour global education standardsl problems that he would pick this segment to use for a crutch in his campaign.

Something I just posted in another thread. We are all forgeting, they are "all" just salesmen, selling us their agenda.

We should "never" take away education from children.

I think they will say anything to get elected.

See, if he had half a brain, he would have made this about expanding an existing program, like Head Start. Hillary is using the SCHIP program in a similar way, to advance her Hillarycare agenda from the '90's. Chalk it up to lack of experience, I guess, but he's a real lightweight. I guess Kerry wasn't the guy to learn from.

Right now, as my son transitions to high school, he is taking a class where 40% of the kids flunk it and this a BASIC, not advanced, class. I have been helping with homework and it is NOTHING like the 9th grade classes we took.

Here are issues I have, based simply on the work, not the teachers, some of whom are quite nice and doing their best in a flawed system:

1. There is NO space to write complete answers on some of the required worksheets. Even if the curriculum was simple (and it is not), this is silly, stupid, insane.

2. The information is so dense and is being taught so quickly that only the top students can learn it. We work on homework after school till long past a reasonable bedtime and I'm sure there are parents who probably just DO their kids' homework for them....and they call that EDUCATION?!

I'm sorry but I don't get it. 9th graders can only learn so much. If the goal is truly to create citizens who can't function at some basic level, pay their bills, balance a checkbook or whatever...they aren't even doing THAT much!

Truly, the system is being one where people have to put their kids in private schools or take what they get -and what they get is failing them.

Interesting. Our daughter graduated from high school in 1999 in a top quartile school and was never challenged. She had a lot of homework but it was almost all busywork. Math teachers gave multiple choice tests that used Scantron answer sheets. She took six years of Spanish, starting in junior high, and never read a novel or anything else resembling a book. I had to teach her to write a paper because her English teachers concentrated on teaching them a rote formula.

Public schools and public libraries are two of the most important things in a free society. How else can we have an informed electorate? We choose not to fund them. I don't get it.

I believe in increasing teacher's pay for teaching in lower income areas because these are places that few teachers want to teach in. I commented on Dan's article before reading this one, but in that comment I mentioned my friend who taught and was athletic director at Inglewood High School (within "the Hood" of Los Angeles County). He went back home to Indiana in the middle of the last school year because yet another student he became emotionally attached to got gunned down. I was proud to have him as a friend because of the fact that he taught at Inglewood. He was part of the solution. He probably still would have left if he was making $15,000 more a year, but it certainly is a different job from teaching at Beverly Hills High School who Inglewood competes against in all extra-curriculars.