This seems to be a national trend. My school district just joined the we got taken over club.
The obvious question is… Why would a bunch of state bureaucrats do any better than a local school board? In theory, the school board knows the local principals and teachers. They know who’s lazy and who actually cares about educating kids.
There is a major problem in our school district. Six schools failing basic academic standards. They had to tell the teachers to dress properly for class. Basic stuff like wear your damn underwear and no cut off shorts. No flip-flops. Pretty pathetic that a few professional teachers were showing up to work inappropriately dressed. Apparently that’s just how bad its gotten. Not just in my school district. There’s several mentioned here.
Typically state governments do this where there is a entrenched (sometimes corrupt) local bureaucracy that refuses to implement required changes or budgetary constraints. For an extreme example, look at Detroit, which required a genuine Roman-style dictator for a couple years. Things are looking up for them now.
I’m familiar with several of the failing schools. They are in bad parts of town. One of the elementary schools has a large immigrant population with kids that have to learn English. The parents of the best and brightest kids placed them in private schools. Its going to take some really dedicated teachers to turn things around.
First they need to fix the buildings, improve the labs and equipment. Bring in a tough principal that can support the teachers.
Is it state bureaucrats or professional educators and education administrators who happen to happen to be employed by the state?
I hate to tell you this but, at least around here, the “school board” is just a bunch of bossy local people who bothered to put their names on ballots and had enough name recognition to get picked over the other guys. You don’t need to know how to run a school system or how to properly spend school funds to be on a school board. You just have to show up regular-like.
I probably did give the school board to much credit. I’m very glad they kept Suggs. He was just hired last year and is very passionate about educating kids. I think he’ll turn things around if he’s supported and given the needed funding & authority.
This. To make matters worse school board elections are the one place that dedicated groups of crazies can band together to gain control, so you often have board members who have agendas that either don’t consider or are actually opposed to students actually getting an education.
The fact is, if the school board was actually capable of doing its job, you would not be *in *this situation.
Typically here in Texas, districts aren’t run by the state, they’re just shut down entirely, with the students being absorbed into adjoining districts, or the district becoming wholly absorbed by another adjoining district. It’s usually in response to terrible academic performance and/or political corruption and graft.
So I think the prevailing attitude around here is that the state doesn’t know better than school district people, but the state does know when the school district people in question suck.
Oh, I just realized… This is that school district you’re talking about. The one that made a dress code rule that all teachers must wear underwear. I just saw the news articles about that this morning for the first time.
If the rule is that underwear musn’t be visible, how are they going to know who’s wearing “foundational garments” and who isn’t? Did they have underwear inspections? I mean, they aren’t coming to school in kilts, are they?
I’m not a fan of dress codes. But theres usually a handful of employees who think they can roll out of bed and throw on anything that touches their hands. They can’t be written up because there’s no stated dress code. Management creates a dress code and everybody pays the price for the few bad apples.
Little Rock has hot weather. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a few idiots wore tank tops to work and left their bras at home. That’s not acceptable clothing in any professional work place. Not even on casual Friday. Teachers are professionals and they are expected to dress and act accordingly at the workplace.
I’m confidant 90% of the teachers already dressed professionally. It’s always the few idiots that ruin a relaxed work policy for everybody.
We made a point to buy a home in a small town school district. I always got involved with PTA and helped with my daughters with homework. I tried to pay attention to what they were being taught. I’d suggest they read certain classic authors like Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a few others. They had pretty good history books. Sometimes I noticed something missing and we’d research it online. I was able to help less in their high school classes. By then it was better to support their teachers and be there for any homework questions.
Both my girls are in college now. thankfully, a state university. Dad’s money tree is getting a bit bare.
These days researching an area’s school district is a must before renting or buying a home.
Was looking at some local school photo’s from the early 20th century here. All the girls are wearing shoes, none of the boys are.
Personally, I was barefoot all the way from year 9 through 4 years of college, and I don’t remember anything much about the way my teachers dressed: I don’t regard it as an important criteria for teachers.
I realize most guys trying to check this will fail theil roll against boobies, but in general said organs do behave differently when properly constrained and when not.
I don’t remember details about the way most of my teachers dressed, other than most fell under “normal”, PE would be in trainers, and nuns/priests would wear lots of grey (lots of black for the Jesuits). I do remember that teacher who needed to be told that bra-less is not generally considered appropriate, but I don’t know whether the fact that her white T-shirt was old and thin enough to count as see-through also got mentioned.
Not true. Neighborhood association boards tend to attract the same sort of people: Self-justifying busybodies who think the appropriate model for civic governance is a Nazi Gestapo unit.
You really, really want your state to have a mechanism by which the school board can be pushed out of the way if things get too far off kilter.
I thought the plot line in those movies is it’s a just-turned-18 yo cheerleader who gets sent to the principal’s office for attire inspection, usually after school when no one else is around. :dubious:
I’m very glad they kept Suggs. He was just hired last year and is very passionate about educating kids. I think he’ll turn things around if he’s supported and given the needed funding & authority.