Rafe Colburn points out and comments on Steven Den Beste's piece on school vouchers which I had missed for the moment.
The crux of the piece is that some people plain don't learn as capably as others. That doesn't really sit well with me, but I can't argue. I've had it easy when it comes to that, and sometimes have attempted to teach people things--and they appear to be a fundamental inability to actually think things through, but that's just how it appears to me. These are people who can certainly converse intelligently.
I also had the benefit of a very good high school, with teachers who challenged us to think and learn. Of course, I was in all the honors classes; we also had a "House" class that was half administrative homeroom and half time finagler so the school could have the time and space to feed lunch to the burgeoning student body. Since they weren't (to be honest) segregated by genius like my other classes, some of them were hell. I disliked one of them sufficiently that I had mine changed.
The year after I left, the school system started doing its "magnet school" program, so as I understand it, all the good teachers were moved to the math/science or whatever schools. The situation I imagined is exactly as the described result of school vouchers: the best teachers and promising students are segregated in particular schools that will have high test scores, and all the other schools devolve into Sequoyah Vocational School where (reportedly) the "students" harassed teachers, smoked and spat (as in chewing tobacco) in the halls, etc.
On tenure, I'm paranoid enough about The System to worry that teachers and professors could get caught up in it and squished, and tenure seems to be one check against that--but as it works now, it makes people like my Government "teacher" who showed us Animal Farm because it was a cartoon movie to shut us up for a few periods, and (oh, yeah) was somehow related to the curriculum. There's a need for some mechanism to keep the educational flavor of the week from reigning supreme, but tenure causes undesirable slack too.
