Cross-Examining the Solutions

Inspired by the questions I posed here, my dad, Douglas T. Bates, III, responded with his thoughts.  My Dad is not the guy to generously hand out compliments so it meant the world to me when he first responded with: "What a great great ending.  I will write some thoughts.  I have never read anyone who asked the threshold question like you did...Dad."  I get both my sense of community and my boldness to ask the big questions from him.  

A little background...
Daddy is a small town lawyer with the values of a small town applied to the country he served (not by draft), which included a tour in Vietnam,  and whose bill of taxes he never once complains.  Daddy thinks it is a honor to pay taxes, to support local schools (and her sporting program) and a duty to care for the society as a whole. I think it is fair to say that both the conservative right-wingers and the unpatriotic liberals disgust him. 


His thoughts on education are provocative and realistic.  Why are not more Americans dealing with these issues? I hope to help us start conversations like these.

By Douglas T. Bates, III

I have read, watched, and listened to a great deal about the state  of education in America in the last few years and everything I have been exposed to have left me aware of the angle of the person speaking but none of it clears up for me what the problem is. Since I cannot figure out exactly what the problem is,obviously I do not know what the solution is.

Here are some solutions to problems which people try to say exist. which I have rejected

1 vouchers. 

How does it help a poor family to give them $9000 in vouchers when they cannot afford the other $1000. I get that idea-its to give rich people a break;they save the $9000 and can afford the $1000.

2 testing. 

While I am sympathetic with the goal here and while I am not unaware that many teachers want to be able to slide by and not be accountable, still this technique seems to me to destroy the creation of the creative mind and the analytic skill set.

3 No child left behind. 

This is so patently absurd that no thinking person can defend it.

4 Charter Schools. 

This is a wonderful solution but for only a very small number of students. 

I am not sure I can say what I really believe about education in America but this is close:  Schools do much more than educate students. They are repositories of a sense of community. When a culture loses that sense-as we certainly have: witness our aversion for paying ANY taxes-it shows how crummy our schools are and our schools reflect how crummy our sense of unity is. I would argue that "good schools" in affluent neighborhoods which turn out selfish, self-centered graduates are just a bankrupt as "poor schools" in poor neighborhood which turn out illiterate graduates. Both of those groups are worthless to society as a whole.

So, if I am right (and I really do not know whether I am or not) then the problem lies in the hearts of our citizenry. No infusion of money, no test, no union, no government program can help. Somehow we as a people-in Detroit, in Richmond, in Memphis, in Centerville -have to regain that. And perhaps if we do....

I know this-we must ask big and honest questions like Sarah did in her last blog. I hope these big, these gigantic questions will be asked and then answered by wiser men than I .

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My goal for this blog is to start discussing honestly these questions. I want to give you a fair look into the lives of a family experiencing public education, to provide an honest disclosure of an average teacher doing her job. I want to share my heart and mind because at the core, educating our youth is an endeavor that must come from our hearts and our minds. And not just of the hearts and minds of  educators, but of the citizenry mentioned above. 

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource. ~John F. Kennedy

Next week, I'll feature two women from mid-America (Iowa and Utah) with their questions and thoughts about unions.  They are both mothers from my generation with some thoughts I'll try to tackle pragmatically.


Thanks for reading...Sarah Bates King, teacher, mother, and American citizen