I’m hearing right now on MSNBC that the superintendent was formerly the super of a charter school program. Figures; my admittedly limited knowledge of charter schools is that, at least in my area, they are (or were) basically dumping grounds for the worst kids, and the worst teachers who weren’t quite bad enough to fire.
And one other possibility: “This book-banning thing can be easily solved! Let’s just plain old close the libraries.”
Cutting the Gordian Knot never ends badly!
Is the Houston Public Library picking up some of the slack, or are their collections also disappearing?
E-books are less fun but also useful, except when users have to deal with DRM (OverDrive, etc).
Not defending Houston in any way, but I must say that there is a general disdain in modern K-12 education for the traditional libraries that many people grew up with. In our district, the library was turned into a STEM lab on the upper level, and a Media Center on the lower level. They got rid of the college trained librarian position and got a para to roam the hallways with a large roller cart with books. It strongly reminded me of the Clint Eastwood movie, “Escape from Alcatraz”. This year, they’ve shoved her into an unused classroom that could be seized and taken away from her if our primary enrollment exceeds a certain number.
STEM labs are great, but compared to the cost of microscopes, refrigerators, and reagents, is it that much of a budgetary problem to support literae humaniores? If it’s official policy (“a new Dark Age,” as the OP puts it), well… maybe all that hyperbolic discussion about how students are allegedly barely taught to write their own names on a piece of paper, let alone the Seven Liberal Arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, mutatis mutandis), was not completely irrelevant.
Perhaps enslaved?
Back to Houston school libraries. Making that a discipline center could do well if they where enticed to read. Maybe.
Forcing someone to read though does not work. Especially if they have a problem with discipline. And possible reading.
I had an 8th grade teacher that instead of class work, would read us Kurt Vonnegut one period a week. It was a social studies class. That man made me a reader. I couldn’t get enough of it. Perhaps the teacher was lazy and didn’t have a lesson plan, or perhaps he was brilliant.
Read?
No, the stacks won’t be available to students during the school day. The books will be available before and after school. And only for selected (read: primarily minority and lower income) schools. Non-flagged (read: more white and higher income) schools won’t be affected.
Students sent there won’t be ‘enticed’ to do jack shit, other than be flagged as ‘trouble’ students and kept out of sight. There will be workstations for these kids. It’s not about reading at all.
I’m not even sure where anybody gets the idea that school libraries should be for reading. /s
I vote brilliant~definitely brilliant.