Get rid of the school boards

They are the reactionary and expensive elements of the education system. Give Principals the authority to shape schools to meet local interests and provincial standards.

Far too many experiments already.

Too few results.

sorry we are all alike

So a kid living in Vancouver Island north should get a different education?
Like he is going to stay in that district?
Standardization makes more sense, because we live in a society where the average family moves every 5 years.
We need uniformity and yes, we need input from every district for the good of all.
In any event we are far too top-heavy as is; schoolboards for instance is filled with people who seek a stepping stone position in their road to glory.

Stale education system

At least we could move away from the current "teach students how to do well on tests" format of education...
maybe making SOME topics localized and geographically specific would benefit students.
Also, a little bit of leeway in personal interest might also inspire teachers to actually care about the subjects they are teaching which would (theoretically) inspire students to care about education.

Reducing education to a series of endlessly repeated sub-routines and conditioned responses makes robots, not an actual educated populous.

Enough Experimentation Already

There's been demand lately to reduce summer vacation time to maybe four to six weeks, because students, particularly lower income, lose a lot of what they learned over two months.
Now that's an idea worth pursuing not more tinkering with the curriculum.
We need to get back to basics, the building blocks whereby all else flows.
I agree with Alive -- standardization makes sense for our mobile culture. I went to four different schools within one calendar year and it was hell, not to mention that I completely missed science.

A naive proposal

Trying to get a local PAC, school administration and aa group of trustees to work in a co-ordinated fashion is, in reality, a pipe dream in most cases. Teachers with seniority, looking towards retirement, vigorously resist any innovation that will demand more work, or a new approach. School administrators deflect requests of innovative programming to keep their jobs simple. PAC members change annually, and seem to be characterized, in many cases, by being big on vision, and short on volunteers who'll actually implement it, or they make programming demands that are impossible. Mostly, though, they're run ragged with endless bake sales and fundraising drives, and don't have time to formulate radical programming innovations. Trustees? A revolving door that rarely works in concert: one trustee is elected to oppose reconfiguration, another to maintain it, another wishes to purge the library of 'offensive' books, another to stall sex education...and somehow, this bag of cats is supposed to concieve, propose, oversee and implement novel regional programming?

Just Wait

The clear direction for the future from the Campbell cabal aims to eliminate local and district school boards and run public schools directly from Victoria.

The BCLiberals were moving in that direction already and I expect they'll make the necessary legislative changes in the next session...they won't change anything about the way private schools are run - except to increase the more than 200 million dollars they get annually.

How about a Reach for the Top program instead!

I'm with Ramona. Ix-nay experimentation.

Dumbing down standards and shrinking class size at the pleasure of the almighty teachers' union is a recipe for failure, as extensive U.S. tests have shown. Everybody knows now or should that students achieve with quality teaching. Period. Why not make funding commensurate with student performance as it is in most of the U.S. via the Reach for the Top program?

Teachers, not surprisingly, dislike remuneration based on student achievement, and we're all painfully aware of how aggressively they pooh-pooh any kind of standardized testing in B.C., but unless we take steps to improve quality control in education, we'll be doomed to remain nothing more than hewers of wood and drawers of water in a world that measures success by the ability to add value to raw resources!

Time to take back the classroom. Parents: are you with me?

Here's an overview of public education in B.C. today - http://www.askbiblitz.com/ib.php - and this is as good as it gets, I'm afraid.

I'm With You Askbiblitz

I'd love to take back the classroom but it won't happen.
Look how many gullible parents followed teachers orders and had their kids excused (for no good reasons) from taking FSA tests.
Yes, excellence isn't part of the BC Education recipe. Instead, it's Grade 5 curriculum at the Grade 7 level. When students graduate, they're at about a Grade 10 level compared to two decades ago.
Shame on teachers, school boards, administrators and the government.

An ongoing flaw

in schooling is the attitude that what goes on in the classroom is supposed to be a chore, some kind of heavy obligation, instead of an opportunity. Thus for example, reading, which should be an adventure, gets transferred into being an "assignment".

Going to school, and sending one's children to school, is a tremendous act of faith. In a very artificial environment (concrete boxes for rooms, desks in rows or work groups), children and parents wait for the magic moment when the agglomeration of chips (all those individual activities and tasks that constitute schooling) becomes a recognizable mosaic pattern of overall meaning (a more or less well-educated person). School is made up of thousands of trees, most much alike, but it takes a long time before participants see the forest.

Children are not unable to face big questions, provided these questions are treated as the true mysteries they are rather than as knowledge chunks "solved" by some dogmatic theory or another, and provided that children's approaches to these, however naive or inexperienced, are treated as legitimate starting points of inquiry. When pupils and students are moved by curiosity (Why are we here? How have peoples around the world organized their lives and cultures? How has science altered our lives and experience? What are reasonable rights and obligations with respect to one another? and so on) they will co-operatively seek out the bits of knowledge that address these questions. Instead, we focus on the chore of memorizing bits of "knowledge" and turning a measurement students' success at addressing such tedium into a measure of personal worth that is supposed to function as a kind of mental cattle prod, motivating ever greater efforts.

People need to learn that work is fun. It is jobs that usually turn into tedium and pain.

I commend Mr. Killian for his ideas, which may or may not work, given the chance.

Meanwhile we waste our lives fussing over standardized tests for standardized children in a standardized society where everyone is to learn his place in the scholastic and social hierarchy. Who was it who said, "Imagine is more important than knowledge"?

Birch,

Great post.

Political Opportunism

Hang on a minute here! More than one aspiring politican has used the school board as a gateway into "real" politics. With that being their primary focus, just how well DOES a trustee know the local schools?

ASKBiblitz.com And Ramona77

What you all are suggesting has been applied in the USofA. It isn't working.

Some of you want all the bricks to be the same. Hmmmm.

Alive – first off, your post is contradictory. If you really believe that families move around that much, then you should argue against a standardized curriculum. A curriculum that is dynamic and adaptable would be much more beneficial. In other words, the young person should be developing skills that will allow him or her to adapt to multiple environments. There is enough standardized curriculum as it is. Go talk to your kids, or your neighbor’s kids. They are all learning the same stuff at their grade level.

Ramona777 – You really think putting in extra time in the summer is going to improve the quality of instruction or retention of material? Do you think the best learning takes place in the classroom? Students should be working during their breaks at summer jobs – as there is a different level of accountability and set of conventions in the workplace. Working during the school year simply takes time away from the family or academics to simply pay for a cell phone bill or a car. Gain experience in the summer instead.

Ramona, you say “shame” on the teachers and government, yet you want children to spend more time in the classroom. Yes, parents should take back education, but education also takes place outside the walls of the classroom. We all want standards, but do we really want standardization?

Tim Horton’s does a great job at providing fast, “back to basics” and arguably healthy food at a reasonable price due to a standardized franchise model. However, there are some hidden and not so hidden costs of this model.

ASKBiblitz.com And Ramona77

You obviously have little grasp of the facts but you are stellar at ranting. You have a good reason to be angry, but put the blame squarely where it belongs: those who run the system. Teachers are the pawns and for the most part do as they are told. Granted, there are "bad" teachers, a tiny minority, but most work very hard and care deeply about their students. Until you walk the walk, try to be more thoughtful before you dump on teachers. There are many administrators and politicians who are paid big dollars to run an effective system.

Many teachers in the province are not happy with their union. Very few attend union meetings because their workload is heavy and they have disdain for the politics. If teachers can be blamed for anything it may be their lack of participation in their union.

Oh No!

Our school board are morons. We could only anticipate more locally developed garbage courses that do nothing to provide the basic skills.

The problem with the school system in B.C. is that there are no specialist educators teaching math, science and language in elementary and middle school. This results in kids that have no numeracy or literacy skills once they enter high school.

This will simply exacerbate the problem as the system expands the *All Things To Everyone Leading To Nothing To Anyone* approach to education.

This stupidity seems almost by design.

I'm in support

You're getting too much flak, Crawford, for what I think is a great idea. Letting teachers be entrepreneurial, with the goal of better academic performance and more engaged kids, could have real potential. If I read you right, you're not talking about more bureaucracy, you're talking about grassroots change of education by enabling teachers to do what they think will work.

I know that teachers are hungry to make things work for kids, but very experienced ones have seen a hundred "new" ways of doing things come and go. So they tend to become very weary when something is introduced from outside and called "best practice".

But I see what you're proposing as something different. It's about teachers coming up with ideas themselves and being able to act on their "if only"s. They get the resources so they can pour their energies into something they really care about. For the kids, any given idea just might work. And for the teachers themselves, it hits on one of the universal factors that makes a job motivating (a la Dan Pink): autonomy.

Take the following example (on my blog), where a teacher could spearhead a project to make sure kids are taught financial literacy (so simple! - spend, save, share) as early as the primary grades.

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/education/2010/01/08/moonjar-canada-partners-educators-support-children%E2%80%99s-financial-literacy

With a project like this - and it's just one example of many - how many billions might the province save 20 years later by having better investors, better savers, and more conscious spenders??

Failure of Our Public Schools

It is interesting that none of the editorials about BC's ailing public school system mentions the free-fall in boys reading and writing skills over the past 2 decades or more.By any measure boys are well behind girls in reading and writing skills. This is not because of feminism or any favoratism to improve the educational prospects of girls. It is a failure of policy makers and educational practitioners and is a form of educational malpractice.

Advocate 7

http://www.prosperityagenda.us/node/4357
"Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage"
Could there be a link between this article (and your observation) and the one posted above:
http://thetyee.ca/Life/2010/08/19/NewRemedyForADD/