RTI (Response to Intervention)

Jerry Kohn on RTI (Response to Intervention) and School!!

Some excerpts:

• As for learning, most adults I know have forgotten most of the subjects they allegedly learned in school (even those they got A’s and B’s in), and what they do remember is usually politically correct nonsense.
• Unfortunately, it seems the only thing students actually do remember from their government-provided education is the government’s propaganda.
• We teachers tell ourselves that we are preparing our students for adult life, but nothing about our schools even remotely resembles mature adult life. At school, students are segregated by age and ordered about all day given little choice in what they do, when they do it or how they do it.
• As for the failures, we teachers generally blame the failures on bad parenting or on social and economic ills we, of course, played no part in creating. Schools take credit but never accept responsibility.
• Instead, students must learn to evaluate their own success and failure and to adjust their efforts and direction accordingly. Finally, schools must end the practice of age segregation. School must afford children the opportunity to interact with and learn from people of all ages and not just spend time with their age-group peers and adult authority figures. In short, schools must be a secure microcosm of the real world where children are afforded rights while still being held accountable for their actions.
• Our public schools are long past sick, and they are incapable of reform. They have become brain-eating, spirit-killing zombies operating not for the benefit of their students but for the benefit of those who work in them and those who profit by doing business with them. The big teacher’s unions, educational bureaucrats, education professors, teacher colleges, textbook publishers, and educational testing companies all profit from the status quo.