11/13/98

Opelika * Auburn News
* THE NEWSPAPER OF EAST ALABAMA*
11/13/98

Letter: Working together good for kids

The Alabama education crisis has been around for some time and probably will not be resolved soon or easily. We can expect the current debate to continue indefinitely, and a major reason is that the education establishment, 32 percent of whose staff never see a student and seldom see a school are not involved with students directly. They toil in district, county and state offices, where their main concern is making reports, designing experiments, attending meetings and proposing "improvements . " They are members of a bureaucracy that, like any normal bureaucracy, is concerned mostly with self preservation. What is more, it is a bureaucracy set up to indoctrinate,. not to educate. Too many things are working against the system for it to be a success.

In seeking an answer, consider the operations of one more successful corporation. AES is a profitable company that works around the world and does not follow conventional management practices. With 10,000 employees, it is the world's largest privately owned generator of electricity. It has no personnel department, its legal department consists of one lawyer, its finance department has one treasurer and it has no public relations staff. Its negotiations with environmentalists, like all its activities, are handled by line staff, the people involved in day-to-day operations.

Imagine what our teachers and our children could accomplish if this was tried in our schools . Imagine small schools with responsibility assigned to teachers, with teachers reporting directly to parents and with no intervening state or federal regulations. Not only would costs go down, but learning would go up as teachers and parents came to know one another and as, working together, they discovered what best suited each child.

George Crispin
Auburn