Letters to the Editor
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eh
The article was a nice summary of the show, and did a decent job of exploring the human side of the subjects. What it didn't do was talk seriously about the policy and procedure critiques. There is so much content in the 'Wire', so artfully inter-woven with the stories, that it would take a much longer essay to fully explain them, but I was hoping for a bit more than I got.
The challenges Carcetti faced in getting elected, and then governing; the utter obsurdity and detrimental effects of 'No Child Left Behind' and standardized testing in general; the sysiphean struggle of municipalities to fund education with no real help from the federal government. Passing mention was made to the compromises politicians make everyday, at the expense of their constituents, to preserve their own careers.
I have always felt that Salon is for some reason afraid or unwilling to dedicate themselves to the discussion of education policy. This lightweight submission on one of the most severe, adept, and unforgettable contemporary critiques of our government at every level, and especially in regards to how we treat our children, only reinforces my opinion.
Education is the silver bullet for crime, poverty, drugs, intolerance, and the much resented social welfare programs that deal with the aftermath instead of addressing the cause. Standardized testing is the single largest failure in public education since its inception, a fact put into sharp focus by NCLB policies and outcomes. If there is any universal testing that coud help our children, it would be intelligences testing at an early age- identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each individual child, adapting cirriculae accordingly, and tracking and testing progress throughout their school career.
I also agree with our British friend about age/class separation. Lev Vygotsky's theory of the Zone of Proximal Development supports a class structure that includes a range of ages and ablilities. Simply put, there are things one can learn on their own, things one can only learn with the help of a more knowledgeable other, and things that are developmentally impossible for a person to learn. By arranging classes according to ability, and minimizing the emphasis on age you remove the stigma of being 'left back a grade', or even 'skipping' a grade. There are many other benefits, including the socialization education children gain by observing not only their peers, but their elders as well. Instead of dividing children by the irrelevant metric of age, we should be grouping them by the unifying metrics of ability.
I hope Salon can make the effort for a more insightful analysis of media like this- it may be the only effective education tool the underprivileged masses have left and its importance should not be dismissed so lightly.