Feb 082018
 

Double Standard: Traditional Education vs. Wells Fargo

Double Standard: February 8, 2018

Wells Fargo, put pressure on their salespeople to open new accounts and they responded without ethics, by opening up new accounts, for folks, without their permission. Heads rolled along with public outcry,  remumeration, firings, penalties, loss of reputation and loss of trust. I’m certain traditional educators held this up as an example of the demon that is capitalism (even when the demon that is capitalism funds traditionalidn’teducation)

Double standard: The DC Graduation scandal parallels the Wells Fargo scandal, in that there was outside pressure to improve. These educators also took the easy way out, by cheating, rather than improving, but this horrific behavior was somehow treated differently by these educators in the article. Take away: Cheating is okay because we choose to blame everyone and everything else, but ourselves, even though we are the paid experts – go figure.

Worse yet, the education, authors didn’t identify the root problem.

Their third solution suggestion kinda-sorta dances around the real, root, problem:

“Third, rather than focusing on policies that set an arbitrary threshold for how many days a student can miss before the student loses credit for a course, educators and policymakers need to focus on more effective ways to keep students engaged and feeling safe in school”.

The goal of education is to provide relevant, student success outcomes, FOR ALL STUDENTS. By not doing this, the education gap is created. Students left behind, by a flawed system of instruction, either graduate with no relevant skills, or drop out. Both these unfortunate realities cause unemployment and underemployment for these folks, which ultimately causes, poverty, substance abuse, crime, violence and incarceration for these folks. These are individual and societal problems that cost BILLIONS of additional dollars.

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Due to the cultural cancer within traditional education, along with a 20th century, one size fits all method of teaching, not only is the education gap and its consequences enabled, the intelligence to fix the root problem is lacking.

ALL the research says the root problem is one size fits all teaching, that teaches to the middle and kinda- sorta provides mediocre student success, for some of the students, (the middle) and essentially fails everybody else – the education gap.

The fix is not to defend and enable a flawed, mediocre monopoly, or to artificially and unethically manipulate the numbers to be inline with acceptable.  The fix is to align the root problem with the proven research and best practices, that provides relevant, sustained, student success, FOR ALL STUDENTS. Traditional educators don’t seem to know this. Takeaway: If you want to fix traditionaal education don’t talk to a traditional educator.

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But educators habitually focus on single issue subsets of the root problem, that divert attention from the root problem and if these single issue items were fixed, they would not fix the root problem.

Educators are demanding to be paid and treated as professionals, but they are not acting as professionals. This behavior of habitually defending and maintaining the flawed status quo, to the direct disadvantage to the students and the funding public is criminal and needs to be treated as such.

Lets put the blame where the blame should be:

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  • An unchanging, flawed, traditional education system that tries to fix every single sub issue of the root problem, but can’t see to fix the root problem. Do you see why traditional education goes through the motions, but doesn’t fix what’s wrong? Their desire is to maintain a mediocre monopoly
  • Teacher absenteeism: Add to this working part time and getting paid for full-time; substitute teachers, who essentially are baby sitters; a gross amount of paid sick days and paid holidays also contributes to the problem. Add to that society’s inability to rid education of the most incompetent, cancerous, employees exacerbates the problem.
  • Traditional educators don’t engage and correctly implement proven research and best practices, but suggest to the public that they have done so

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  • Following and implementing wrong solutions, which simply deliver one size fits all teaching faster: whiteboards, technology (just tablets, laptops), one size fits all video, one size fits all elearning

Educators must collectively take ownership of education and be directly accountable for measurably advancing, relevant, sustained student success, for all students. it’s what we pay them to do.

Our students deserve much better, relevant, student success for all students, outcomes from our educators.

We need more professionalism and less diversionary blame from our public servants. More big picture, strategic thinking and less single issue, myopic thinking

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