Cowboy's Corner

About The Author Cowboy's Bio Previous articles by Cowboy Tricks Of The Trade "An Established Religion!?!?" Do We Have Things Too Good Y2K Get Tough On Crime The Kennedys Propaganda Hiroshima Clinton's Kosovo Stratgey A look at the bill of rights - " Never trust a liberal" Quick fix City2 E-News Home	Robots In 1999, a team of students from Chicago's Roosevelt High School placed third in a nation-wide robotics competition. Roosevelt's students are mostly immigrants, with 46 different native languages. I recently had the pleasure of meeting two of the three teachers who inspired this project. Guess what? Neither one is at Roosevelt today. One is teaching in a well-to-do suburban school, and the other is working as a substitute in another suburban school system. Neither moved for the money—they were run out of Roosevelt by the principal! (By the way, this principal, who had opposed the project, took all the credit, and gave no recognition to the teachers who made it happen.) Big city public schools seem to expect failure, both from students and from teachers. When the occasional success comes along, the reaction of the brass is defensive—get rid of the troublemakers, or face the expectation of producing positive results regularly. The bureaucrats stifle the good teachers, and reward those who go along with the program and don't make waves. (After all, a good teacher can be hounded out of the school, while the union makes it almost impossible to fire a bad teacher.) Is it any wonder that many big-city school systems graduate kids who cannot read, write, cipher, or even think? The politically popular solution to this problem is to raise taxes and give the teachers more money. Maybe a more realistic solution is to get rid of the entrenched administrators and bureaucrats with their six- or seven-figure salaries who discourage innovation and stifle creativity (which is what education is supposed to be all about!) One great thing about sports teams is that, after a losing season, they fire the manager or coach. In most other pursuits, the 'players' lose their jobs, while the incompetent management stays in place to corrupt the next crew. Maybe we should take a hunch from the sports world, and dump the idiots running our schools. In many school systems, we couldn't do any worse. Cowboy Columnist & Contributing Editor City2 e-news ©2000 All rights reserved