EDUCATION IN LOS ANGELES….The LA Times dedicated its Sunday Opinion section to education today. Here’s what I learned:
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Karin Klein: Universal preschool is a stupid idea.
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Naomi Schaefer Riley: The back office operations of most public school districts are woefully inefficient and don’t operate like profit-making enterprises.
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W. Norton Grubb: Finland, a homogeneous country of 5 million with a strong social welfare system, seems to have pretty smart kids.
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Catherine Seipp: LA parents are idiots, especially well-off liberal ones.
And, finally, one lonely little piece that actually suggests a way in which education might be made better:
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Wendy Kopp: If we insist on high standards, both research and experience show that low-income parents will respond.
Why couldn’t this have been done the other way around? How about four pieces focused on ways in which education could be improved, leavened with one piece about problems? Maybe I’m being too earnest about the whole thing, but what’s the point of an op-ed section that spends 80% of its energy whining without really proposing much in the way of interesting solutions?
