Since everyone is on their soapboxes now, I'll drag mine from the corner and start ranting.
The education schools are a big joke, even 30 years ago when I was in college at UT, the curriculum of the education school was famed for it's ease and lack of rigourous scholarship. The textbooks were full of half baked theories and semantically null buzzwords based in interpretations of brain research by people who had absolutely no scientific background, but had a political axe to grind. All in the name of equality of results, not opportunity. A little research showed me it all went back to John Dewey and his Marxist ideological background. Dewey and his acolytes slowly took control of the education schools and have ruined our nation's primary education system.
It used to be that anyone with a BA/BS degree could teach in a school, but the Deweyistas took control of the federal education bureaucracy early on in the Roosevelt administration and forced the credential system on everyone as the Federal government slowly took control of local school systems over the next 20 years. You had to have a certificate from an accredited education school to be able to teach, and they controlled the schools. The last step to this came about as a result of the Sputnik scare in 1957. The Marxists never let a good crisis go to waste. In the name of "catching up to the Soviets, they threw "free" federal money at all schools, but had majr strings attached to the cash, the biggest of which was surrendering local control to the state and federal bureaucracies.
At first interference was minimal, but as school districts became dependent upon the largess of the state and federal governments, the strings were drawn tighter. marxist lawyer groups set up strawmen using "poor" school districts to demand not just equality of federal and state funding, but total equality of ALL funding. Sympathetic judges who would interpret laws concerning government funding equality stretched this to all funding. Other legal groups got rights never meant for minors extended to undermine teacher/administrator discipline, especially in high schools where teenagers need very strict guidance to get past the pitfalls that the sudden hormone influx creates in teens. Then in the name of equality, the brightest students are shortchanged and in some cases pushed down. Most funding was aimed at those whose contributions to society will be minimal. Effective teaching methods, especially for math are abandoned, given names like "drill and kill" and "rote memorization", and given upin the name of "creative thinking", etc.
If we want to make the schools better, give up all federal funding, abandon the education schools, and let the local parents get back in control.
/rant
