>>>"Now the towns are going to have to share the wealth w.r.t. public school funding. The wealthy towns are not at all happy about it."
Oklahoma looked at doing something like that several years back. Oklahoma City and Tulsa quickly put a stop to it. Rather than being enacted by the court though it was proposed by a consortium of rural business leaders, educators and rural legislators in the house. The house members backing the bill where senior members and the bill seemed to have a good chance for short while, but as soon as term limits were enacted the senior members were out and rural Oklahoma lost any voice it ever had and therefor chance at getting the bill enacted. It is my contention that this bill and bills like it were the main reason term limits were enacted in Oklahoma. Simply put, Oklahoma City and Tulsa didn't want to give any deference to rural Oklahoma.
>>>"Are you saying that your state is not an intellectual mecca?"
With some notable exception, yes. Most people around here seem to think it's far more important to pray around the flag in the classroom than to learn about it's history.
>>>"If Oklahoma seceeded from the U.S., it would become a cowboy version of Afghanistan."
No, all the cowboys are dead or in the old folks home. I'm afraid it would be much less interesting than that, more along the lines of a W.A.S.P., SUV driving, 5 to 10 acre ranchette - mortgage paying, Fox news quoting, type of Taliban regime.
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I want to redress something I said earlier in this thread.
I said, "I have a little bit of an ethical problem judging the performance of one person by the performance of another."
I gave this some more thought since I posted this yesterday and have come to the conclusion that my original statement had more credence than I gave it at the time. The similarity has been made that a teacher like other employees produces a product, in this case an educated child or young adult. Therefor, that teacher should be judged by the quality of the product delivered, as most employees are.
It is my opinion that this chain of reasoning is flawed. In what other profession is the end product so dependent on outside factors such as the willingness of the student to be taught, the environment the student must deal with, and perhaps the greatest limiting factor that of disinterested parents. As I see it, it's unfair to judge a professional by the receptiveness or imperviousness of a given group he or she is trying to reach.
Here is an example of how standardized performance evaluation does the teacher a great disservice. A few years ago a local elementary school teacher, with a class of twenty eight, received whatever the lowest performance rating is after their class took the March standardized tests. The majority of the class preformed horridly on the test but the standardized report takes in no account as to why that might be. It just becomes a black mark on the record of the teacher. The reason the class did so poorly is because of one student. A nearly psychotic 7 year old who along with a couple others took all the teachers time. the child should have, without question, not been allowed in school but it took the child taking the teachers scissors off the teachers desk and stabbing the teacher with them to finally get him kicked out of school in February (keeping in mind standardized testing took place in March.) The teacher had tried everything, as far as I know, to get the child the help they needed and short of that out of the classroom or out of school. To that end, the parents of the child, by all accounts, were more concerned with the stigma of having a child with emotional issues than they were concerned about the rights of the classmates to get an education or, worse yet, than they were about the mental stability or the child. Incidentally, since schools are regarded as little more than government funded baby sitters the child was back in the class within a month and half of stabbing the teacher. After all, "He's only seven.", or so the refrain goes.
The point of this is the teacher received a big ugly black mark by their name, due to the bureaucratic standardized test, that will remain there always - without explanation. It is true that the teacher did not loose their job or anything like that and that winning state Teacher of the Year the year prior countermands that mark. But, it hardly seems fair that the teacher is faulted when it was the inherent requirements of the system that failed. Granted this is an extreme example but the idea also applies to teachers who have a couple of hell raisers in their class that should be in there and because of that the teacher is little more than a baby sitter.
Finally, this brings me around to what I think a teacher is or at least should be, that is an engaging purveyor of knowledge. In reality though, a large part of society, by virtue of their actions or more to the point lack thereof, seem to view a teacher as a baby sitter with a degree. While they have made, or at least allow, the job about baby sitting they want to measure the result of the job as if it were education. We must not ask a teacher to baby sit a three students in a class of twenty-eight and expect conveyance of knowledge to be the prime directive of the class, all the while excusing the distracting children as being, "only 7, 10 or 16", "the teacher having it out for them", "innocent clowning", or the all time best, "My child wouldn't do that." It seems teachers are baring the brunt of the blame when society is mostly at fault.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying teachers are infallible. What I am saying is that the performance of the teacher should be evaluated by a conscientious administrator privy to all the facts about that performance. In this case, above most others, I don't think it's fair to gage performance on standardized test read by far-off disinterested bureaucrats who a serving a public who's actions directly conflict with the agenda they espouse. That is they want their kids educated but they also want a baby sitter to their seemingly infallible kids. (Should I duck? :wink:)
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In this vain, the upper echelon of the federal government has proposed standardized testing for college and university students to verify, supposedly, whether or not the professors are doing their jobs. This testing would apply to any school that accepts student who are receiving any kind of federal help, such as a Pell Grant.
