The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

I read the fine article kindly submitted here and a great many of the comments here before commenting. First of all, the headline of this submission (which is the original article headline, and thus expected by Hacker News rules) is a misstatement of fact. The author of the submitted article is a Virginian who has been teacher of the year at his little-known high school, but NOT the "Virginia Teacher of the Year."[1] The exaggerations go on from there.

The author writes, "But public education is painted as a career where you make a difference in the lives of students. When a system becomes so deeply flawed that students suffer and good teachers leave (or become jaded), we must examine how and why we do things." Well, yes, but he could have asked different questions, and come up with the different answers earlier reached by John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year decades ago.[2] Teachers should never kid themselves about how much the school-system-as-such is designed to enable learners to learn well. That has hardly ever been its main purpose.

Meanwhile, I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Virginia needs to catch up with all those reforms. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[3] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[4] You don't have to live in a wealthy neighborhood in Minnesota to have adequately funded schools in your neighborhood.

The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[5] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[6] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[7]

Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better. (P.S. Many of these school system reforms in Minnesota were sponsored and championed by supporters of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, but most are also supported by Republicans here too. Choice is good for everybody and helps schools have incentive to improve.)

[1] http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/recognition/

[2] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

[3] http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.php

[4] http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html

[5] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

[6] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...

[7] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...

Well, I wasn't saying Swedes in Finland are a problem; I was simply trying to head off the potential criticism that Finland is not technically homogeneous ;-)

> merely the symptoms of the deeper problem which is the US constitution.

I think the history of the US clearly shows that The Constitution isn't the source of our problems. We're not following it! Our elected leaders have stretched its definitions past the breaking point, and our judiciary has allowed those stretches to become law.

You allude to states having a veto because of the Senate, but that's precisely what was _supposed_ to happen, when the state nominated their own Senators. The popular election of Senators effectively took states out of the equation. A particularly awkward situation, given that the UNITED STATES was FOUNDED to be a nation of sovereign states. But that was the question answered by our Civil War: we became a single nation with what are effectively a bunch of local bureaucracies, instead of a federation of states, with a federal government that existed for the "common defense" and international relations. The relatively-recent show on Lincoln (I forget the name) was good at illuminating the Constitutional crisis created by the Emancipation Proclamation, and the authority ceded to the Executive branch has done nothing but snowball since then.

And don't get me started with the abuses of the "Commerce Clause." I defy anyone reading to give me ONE area (of SIGNIFICANCE) in their personal, DAILY lives that isn't legislated by the FEDERAL government. I've thrown this question out before, and one person gave me a good answer, but those examples are tough to come up with.

Two things are killing the US political system: our 2-party system, and campaign contributions. First, let's break up the DNC and the GOP into sub-factions to get the ball rolling. There's plenty of room in both parties. This should allow other folks from the Green and the Libertarian and the Rastafarian parties to run on more-even footing.

Second, all elected officials should get a set amount of money from the government itself to run a campaign. The money should vary according to state or federal levels, and on which seat is sought, but it should be the same for everyone seeking that seat. It can even be a lot of money! They don't even have to be particularly accountable for it! It still wouldn't even budge the budget needle. And then just get rid of PAC's entirely.

The money-for-votes system we have now has got to go. I'm like a desperate used car salesman on this point. "Any offer will be considered!" Any idea how to get special interests segregated from our system would be good. When you have top-level politicians admitting that they spend 80% of their time trying to raise money for the next election, starting on the first day of the term, you know something has to change. But, since "they" control the system, "they" are not going to allow anything to disrupt the process.

You seem to be praising "the Dems" for their efforts, and the ACA in particular, but you can't point to a better example of the inmates running the asylum that that piece of legislation, written by Congress-owning health industry lobbyists, and passed by a Congress without anyone having even read it. That's NOT how it was supposed to be done. That's as un-Constitutional a "thing" that has happened as anything in recent memory, and another perfect example of how campaign contributions (or the threat of their discontinuance) has broken our system.

Here is the non-mobile (and from what I can tell, original) article: http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom...

Lest anyone get the impression that DC has terrible public transit (it actually has very good public transit), San Francisco and Alexandria aren't directly comparable. Alexandria is to Washington DC as Berkeley is to San Francisco.

None of that makes amorphid's description wrong.