[lug] BVSD Windows vs Mac craziness

[Bear Giles]

Nate Duehr wrote:

>(Additionally, teachers would also lose things like "tenure" in
>situations like this, but the best teachers would be rewarded monetarily
>just like in the standard workplace.  Top performers get paid.  Mediocre
>performers can usually survive and make a decent wage.  Poor performers
>leave the business.)
>  
>
... and nobody will touch "career-death" struggling students.

We're all humans here, and nobody can foresee that the C- student will 
win a Nobel Prize or that the straight-A student will spend most of his 
life driving a New York taxi.

The business model for schools does not work.  Correction -- it does not 
work unless you are a corporatist who sees people as nothing other than 
interchangable cogs that are only begrunglingly entitled to the same 
cash investment.  I'm a humanist -- students have different needs and 
"one size fits all" solutions will not work.  Bouncing the question to 
parents is even worse -- how many kids would be denied a minimal science 
education because of their parent's religious beliefs?  Or an arts-rich 
education because their parents expect their kids to also be lawyers or 
MBAs?  (Not that our current schools are particularly arts-rich, sadly.)

(N.B., that doesn't mean I think our current system is ideal.  But I've 
had discussions with teachers and librarians and there is uniform 
concensus that NCLB has been an unmitigated disaster for everyone 
involved since it's reduced all education to "teaching to the test" lest 
draconian penalties be triggered.)

BTW I think this is a very rich metaphor for the Windows/Mac/Linux 
debate.  With the corporatist viewpoint there is absolutely no doubt 
that the students and admins must use Windows and nothing but Windows.  
Windows, MSIE, Word.  That is what the rest of the world uses and it 
would waste everyone's time to futz with anything else.

Bear