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The shortcomings of school bureaucrats

Thursday, February 8 at 3:59 PM

This Speakout has not been edited

By Daniel W. Brickley, Littleton

For the “Speakout” column The subtitle of Leslie Dahlkemper’s Speakout column, “Selling the school,” February 3, was “Changing landscape means educators must be better communicators.” That seems to be the only message in her essay. Yet, teachers, the people in classrooms with students, know the “landscape” is changing. Their landscape began changing two decades ago. But “educators” - administrators and bureaucrats of various ranks and titles, who never educated anyone and who are, in fact, the public schools’ nobility or upper class - have never mastered clear communication. For decades they’ve produced poorly written, jargon-jammed, platitudinous books, articles and newsletters about more or less impossible “ednotions” and, in this case, the obvious.

Why, even in sixteen paragraphs Dahlkemper says little more than that schools must market themselves. Only near the end does she say that “communication and marketing alone will not be enough” and that “schools must have something to market.”

Well, duh! And there is the problem, the aged, doddering problem that no one cares or dares to talk about in legislatures and that no one may report in newspapers. For it is forbidden here to claim that public schools – particularly high schools – are forbidden to have something to market – unless it’s a sports team.

Public high schools may not, for example, redesign themselves so as to compete with the anti-learning force many parents struggle with: the Totalitarian Instant Gratification Entertainment and Material Possessions (TIGEMP) culture, which freely and ruthlessly conditions many young minds to be restless, wandering and a bit arrogant without being inquisitive, focused, thoughtful, mature or tolerant.

Those schools may not escape the beloved financially enforced falsehood that class sizes don’t matter.

They may not require that students learn more than temporarily for grades and GPAs; for retention isn’t encouraged in Colorado’s Imposed System of Factory Highs (CISOFH).

They may not escape the semi-religious charades of CSAPpery, with its desperate conviction that standardized testing should not only ruin a school week or year, but also become the sole measurement of every school’s academic progress.

How can an eager high school faculty market its school when it is mired in political and bureaucratic B.S. that makes politicians look good and gives newspapers easy copy? How can a high school community redesign its school, so that it can compete in our anti-learning culture, when legislators and the public – and, especially, the Administrative/Edschool Complex - don’t want teachers, students and parents to get involved in capital “E” Education – that is, to leave their allotted lower levels in the hierarchy?

How can a high school restructure requirements and standards and build accountability into its system when there is no opportunity for a teacher or parent to urge such a course in the media or legislature? So, back to Dahlkemper: Communicate what? Market what? Why, still more of (Boom!) “We’re better than the-ey are because (Boom!) we’re better than the-ey are, and so Rah! Rah! Rah! (Boom, boom!) - we said: Rah! Rah! Rah!”

Public schooling has only been seriously broken for twenty-five years. Perhaps, with more ignoring of facts and with the pursuing of perennially pleasing platitudes from perennially political promisers we can make it thirty-five years.

Or forty-five.

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