On the topic of carrots and sticks, a reader writes:

Carrots and sticks have nothing to do with what education needs-it’s about honesty-and oh yeah, a good pair of hedge clippers. Policymakers, in collusion with the “reform” industry had been searching for an opening for their attack on public education, and the financial crisis gave that to them.They tried the approach of “we are being outperformed by other nations” since the time of Sputnik and most notably in “A Nation At Risk”. The textbook/workbook/testing and standards industry began to boom, and despite the fact that this nation was built into the greatest nation on the planet without those things-schools became our biggest threat. Over the decades since, standards and testing have been reworked repeatedly,and the results/grading criteria were usually arrived at in a process kept secret from students, teachers and schools. I remember a year when a brand new state writing test was administered to 5th graders. The students did very well! So then they made it a test for 4th graders. After working in a system like this, as mandates and expectations increase and funding is taken away-dangled somewhere or shifted to “regional councils” or training centers to help schools do more with less….Well, it starts to appear as if failure is imposed so the stick can be swung. The testing industry proves how much we need them when kids do poorly on the tests.

Teachers could show how well students can do, the successes we can help them realize, in measures that don’t necessarily involve bubbles/boxes/or a computer monitor (but might, depending on the student) we might help kids get the carrot. Or the apple, or the broccoli-whatever! If this new wave of “reform” was HONESTLY about children, experts that truly understand children and how they develop would be involved and explain much better than I can here: people are not standard, neither are their skills/aptitudes and destinies, parents in conjunction with educators are best able to maximize student potential. Which brings me to the hedge clippers. I sometimes feel like that psycho-dad played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining-chasing that kid foolishly around a hedge-maze someone else created. <<>>He dies from exposure and the kid gets away. Okay, the kid shouldn’t have run into the maze. Jack, if he really wanted to catch the kid, shouldn’t have run in after him.

This is the problem with private interests being allowed to insinuate themselves more and more into the education of children-controlling education and the debate. They will never admit that, for them, it’s about money first. Valid data gathering shows that students with resources allowed to learn in more nurturing supportive settings (NOT TESTED ENDLESSLY) do well.The most powerful know little if anything about kids NOT born into privilege and security, yet they have been allowed to create the hedge maze I have to chase students through-hoping we make it to a predetermined end. They couldn’t guide a roomful of hungry, tired, challenging kids to a place that would be success. I know some people who could. All they need is to be turned loose with their hedge clippers and get protection from the fools with sticks.