How the airline industry ruined education

Gather around children and let me tell you the story about how the air line industry ruined education.

Not so long ago a faceless man who worked for the state government who has never been in a classroom and didn’t particularly like kids while waiting for a plane read an article on data driven classrooms. It was undoubtedly written by somebody perched high up an ivory tower of academia who also undoubtedly had either never been in a classroom or it was so long they might as well have never been in a classroom.

A light bulb went off over the head of our intrepid public servant and he hatched upon the most dangerous of things for people of his ilk, an idea. When he got back to his office after all the lobbyists and special interests left he then wrote a memo titled “Data Driven Classrooms, what is needed to save education.” Pretty much he googled the original article, cut and pasted it and threw in a few grammatical errors for believability’s sake. When he was done he then went home to his 2.3 children and even though it wasn’t the second Tuesday of the month made love to his wife, after all he had just saved education.

The memo eventually made it to a state senator who also had never been in a classroom and didn’t particularly like kids, first they don't vote and second if he did he wouldn’t have been part of the government that cut education by 1.3 billion dollars over the last four years. And in between stuffing his pockets with campaign contributions and planning tax breaks for companies or people who didn’t need them, realized he hadn’t done anything in a while that would give the little people, or what he liked to call “the voters” back home the impression that he cared. So he decided to act upon the memo.

The memo became a bill which the rest of congressmen and senators none who also had never been in a classroom or particularly liked kids, because if they did they wouldn’t have been part of a government that funded education at the lowest level in the country, that’s fiftieth out of fifty, liked what they read. They too felt like they hadn’t showed the people back home much love and that they cared about the fates of them and their families even if they weren’t lobbyists or special interests. Also with elections fast approaching something had to be done to justify their continued employment. Since this was the case the bill easily past and landed on the governor’s desk.

The governor who had never been in a classroom and who didn’t particularly like children himself, who was also part of the administration that only spent a total of 3.1 percent of its resources on education saw the bill and thought, this has a good chance of making people think I care so he signed the bill into law. He knew that he needed the people to think he cared if he wanted to be a United States Senator one day.

The faceless man, all the people in the state legislature and the governor then went to their homes and made love to their wives despite the fact it wasn’t the second Tuesday of the month after all they had saved education. It didn’t matter that they had never been in classrooms and didn’t particularly like children. Now this is where the story really gets going.

A copy of the bill then went to the superintendents in their ivory towers of academia throughout the state, none of whom had been in a classroom for quite some time and in many cases so long it was as if they had never been in one. They passed the bill on to the principals and with a wag of thier fingers commanded make it so. The principals none who have been in a classroom for a while, having left some time ago then told their vice principals and administrators all who had chosen to work in education but not with children to make it so.

They then went out into the classrooms and asked well how can you know if children are learning and how can you know which students need extra help without data notebooks and don’t give me that, you work directly with the children, you have gotten to know them and that combining that with how they do on their assignments tells you how they are doing nonsense. The bill passed by the state legislature says it’s impossible to know that stuff without a data notebook and thus it must be true.

They then said, you must spend untold hours gathering information and putting it in volumes and where I can’t officially tell you to do it on your time but with a wink and a nod you know what I actually mean. If you don’t your evaluations will suffer, your jobs will be in jeopardy and worse of all it will be impossible for learning to occur.

What none of these people understood or if they did, they didn’t care, was that the creation of massive data notebooks wasn’t going to save education. At best the data notebooks would give teachers the same information they would receive if they spent just a few days with the typical student or just reviewed their cumulative file and previous report cards or talked to their former teachers. At worse it was going to interfere with the learning process because it was going to create many more hours of unpaid work for teachers to do. Teachers would now be forced to be away from their friends and families and instead of working on tasks important to the teaching process, like say actually teaching. Now teachers would have to concentrate on creating cumbersome data notebooks instead. Like I said none of those people understood or if they did cared

And that children is how education was ruined by the airline industry and exactly how it happened too.