The West Virginia legislature has passed an education bill after stewing over it for a long time. The teachers and their unions have been dead set against it and fought hard to keep it from passing. It may be one of the most important bills passed in a long time in West Virginia and hopefully so. After being in the lower end of the education quality, with WV ranked at between 48 and 46 out of 50 states, something had to happen. While the teachers and their unions fought to keep the status quo, the majority of the legislature fought to change education in West Virginia to something better than it has been for some time.
I started school in the first grade in 1943, as there was no kindergarten available. I was in a one-room school with three grades, and when I reached the third grade we moved to the other room with the fourth and fifth grades at midterm. We were bussed to the main high school for the sixth grade and then stayed there for junior and senior high school. The one-room school experience was wonderful because by the time you reached third grade you had already been through it twice. Reading and writing (both printing and cursive) were well ingrained by then, and then on we went to the other room where we experienced fifth grade three times. Those of us who moved to the big school were equal to or better than the new schoolmates we joined in the sixth grade, who had enjoyed single classrooms during their first five years. I went on to receive a degree at the University of New York and another at Syracuse University, which validated my time starting in a one-room school. There had been no homework to take home during the first six grades and no backpacks to carry every day. There were the state regents exams at the end of each year, starting in junior high school, which resulted in a state regents high school diploma along with the regular high school diploma. The regents diploma made getting into college much easier. Every student in the state of New York had to take the same regents exams, which made us all equal in educational achievement. Those exams still exist today and may be the reason that NY still ranks higher than WV in education.
It all started with the mechanical revolution and mankind’s ability to make living and working easier with the use of machines. The twentieth century brought us the washing machine and even a machine that toasted our bread. As life became easier, with no horses to feed and saddle and with automatic furnaces to heat our homes, it seems that those involved in education started to try to make learning easier for our children. This happened after WWII as we tried to make life easier for our progeny than had been experienced with the war and the Great Depression. New schools were built, and sports and other activities were increased with new facilities. The home economics classes were phased out along with shop and agriculture in the farming regions. It was math and science and college entrance only at many schools. My school had a business course, which many young women took, that offered them jobs right after graduation. They could type and take shorthand and understand basic accounting, which made them valuable to small offices. The agriculture classes allowed young men to take over their father’s farms and keep the farm in the family. These courses have been eliminated and nothing has been offered to take their place. The new education system only points students toward college although many skilled jobs are going unfilled because there are not enough trained people to take them.
As life got easier, the thought of learning becoming easier took root with new learning systems like the new math. Cursive has been eliminated—the thought of being graded on penmanship is abhorrent. I was graded on penmanship through the sixth grade and then graded on spelling through to graduation. We’re assigning elementary kids homework, and they start carrying backpacks in the first grade. I’m not sure why, but they carry them sometimes having to bend over to handle the load. What for? The teachers who signed individual contracts now belong to unions that care nothing about the children being taught but only about collecting dues. Teachers that work nine or ten months a year have personal days and vacations during those ten months even with two or three months off in the summer. My teachers never missed a day unless they were sick. There were no days off for teachers’ conferences; if they met it was after school or on Saturday.
When I went to college you had to pay your tuition and fees when you went, and there were no loans for education. I worked until I could afford another class and did this until I graduated. The idea of college loans was good because it would allow some people with limited ability to afford college to go. The problem with the college loan was that it was being given to teenagers who had very little knowledge of how to handle money. Soon the loan was being used for cell phones, TV cable and Friday nights out with the gang. One young lady told me that she had accumulated $85,000.00 in debt when her tuition was less than $4,000.00 per year. We then saw colleges and universities starting to raise tuition at a rate double and triple the inflation rate. It was not a problem because students could simply borrow more money. We now have graduates owing thousands of dollars, which they cannot repay because their education did not provide the tools necessary to find a job that pays enough to do so. The higher education system in the USA is broken, and it is using our young to finance their own whims with the politicians loving it because they can divert educational funds away from education and use it for other things like getting reelected.
West Virginia has taken a step toward trying to upgrade our education system. The next step would be to get the politicians out of the mix and get rid of the teachers’ unions that have no interest in teaching. Learning is hard work, and it is time to acknowledge it. Throwing money at the problem has not worked, and growing the size of the administrative side of education has been a complete misuse of tax funds. It would be better to get rid of half of the administrators and give the money to good teachers and some social workers. Administrators do not teach anything to anyone. Another necessity is to cap college loans to stop the misuse of our young people and to stop the ever-rising college costs. Capping loans at no more than $10,000.00 per year would make many universities reduce their tuition and get back to living on a budget as the rest of us do.
Learning is hard work, and we cannot make it easy for our children and we also cannot do it with more administration than teachers. We should reverse the pay scales and give the teachers the admin salaries and give admin workers the teachers’ salaries.
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