The thread about Obama's address to students, which apparently includes a question about how he can make things better, got me thinking: How can we improve things?
I'm a little out of the loop on education, since I left the public education system 14 years ago and my son just started public pre-school. Most of my opinions at the moment come from things I've heard from teachers (I seem to know a lot of them...they're all in my book club).
It seems to me that politicians are not going the right direction on education change. Recent changes seem to have made things worse for students and harder on teachers. NCLB being the best example of this. Honestly, I can't figure out why that hasn't been repealed. I don't know anyone who thinks it was a good idea.
But call me crazy...I think the federal government might want to stop doing nationwide experiments with our schools. I'd like to see less federal control and more state and local control over education. This is so people directly involved get a bigger say and also so that when school systems try new things, everyone else can watch and learn rather than getting sucked in.
Anyway, just a few thoughts I had. It's just the tip of the iceberg, of course. I'm really curious what other people think the big problems are. I've heard complaints about homework (though I haven't seen it first hand). There were some people complaining about increased demands for kindergarten compared to a generation ago. Then of course, inner-city schools have their own universe of issues. My husband has lots of complaints about rural schools (since he was educated in one). He says the kids from inner-city schools who made it to college with him here more prepared for it than he was.
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
When I went to elementary school, I had almost no homework until grade six, when I had (much) less than an hour a night until grade 9. I certainly had no homework in Kindergarten. I was in England until I was ten, so that might make a difference.
However, grades 4-6, there was certainly an increased amount that my sisters (six and thirteen years younger than me) have had to do.
One thing I noticed while volunteering in schools is that below a certain age, homework doesn't usually get done spontaneously. It requires the parents to sit down and do it with the child or, at the very least, say "do your homework". You can tell who's had help: the kids who come with it nicely written or even typed have had help. The kids who have done it themselves (if they managed to) are doing it at school, on a scrappy bit of paper. This is especially true of take-home projects, when some parents take their children to the library, watch over them while they right it, buy them bits of cardboard, help them spell words correctly... etc.
I know I'm not a teacher, but observing this I felt that the homework thing was screwing over kids with busy and/or inattentive parents. Some kids come with brilliant projects, but you know what the kid's capabilities are and you know they had help. They get As and Bs, because how can you mark them down when they've fulfilled the rubric*? And why shouldn't they have help? That's how they learn.
The kids without help, however, are producing half-finished, mispelled, hand-scrawled, internet-researched (poorly internet researched) projects. They're getting Cs and Ds, or even Fs, but they're doing it themselves.
Even putting self-esteem issues aside, each project widens the gap between the parent-helped and the parent-abandoned kids. Each project, the parent-helped kids are learning how to research, how to use a library, how to spell, write, put together a project. All useful knowledge that the parent-abandoned kid is not learning. Kids are copy-pasting from the internet (which is a terrible resource for kids who read poorly, esp. without any guidance), they're using only words they know already etc.
Homework benefits those whose parents have the time and the inclination to help their children. It screws over those who don't. You could argue that at least the kids aren't playing video games all evening when they have homework but in fact, if they don't get ordered otherwise, they are-- they're just doing their homework (or not doing it) before they go to school.
I think, therefore, elementary school homework, when given, should try to even the playing field. Simple math questions, reading, that kind of thing. At the very least, it can be done without parental involvement (although the likelyhood of it getting done is lower).
This does not even go into free time, because a lot of these kids are playing extended amounts of video games anyway.
* I also have observed kids working exactly to the rubric ("I need one more character trait... er...hm... smart!"), which I think is a small problem.
Posted by theamazeeaz (Member # 6970) on :
A lot of the problems with schools start with the people who go to them. The kids from the worst areas have unstable home lives and the parents don't care. School isn't a privilege, it's a burden. Meanwhile, these kids are stressed out because home is awful and they act out. If the school system is very economically and socially mixed, the best kids are taken out by their affluent parents and put into private schools. These same parents probably would have gotten involved in the school that their kids didn't go to.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Christine: I think the federal government might want to stop doing nationwide experiments with our schools. I'd like to see less federal control and more state and local control over education. This is so people directly involved get a bigger say and also so that when school systems try new things, everyone else can watch and learn rather than getting sucked in.
Amen!
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
*points to the post by theamazeeaz*
That's what happens in my school. Five elementary schools feed into our middle school. Yet, we have significant dropoff in the number of students coming from the elementary schools. There are far more fifth grade students in the elementary schools than we get as sixth grade students. Most of the students who leave (by either moving or going to private school) are of a higher economic class than those who stay.
Parental involvment is basically nonexistent with the exception of the athletic or band boosters. I can't even get parents on the phone, because the information they supply to the school is either not correct or they have moved several times since the beginning of school. I have kids who tell me they don't know if they will be at their mother's house, aunt's house, grandmother's house, or dad's house that night. They can't remember what house they left their literature book in.
If their home life is so unstable, is it any wonder they have trouble focusing on schoolwork?
Of course, I have met parents that care deeply about their kids' education. I have had parents come to the school to meet with the teachers even this early in order to assure us they want their kids to stay out of trouble and to please let them know if anything goes wrong. But in middle school, the opinion of peers matters more to most kids than does the opinion of parents (and certainly teachers). And most of the kids there do not value education. They blatantly refuse to do school work and dare us to fail them - knowing we can't. Probably 80% of my students should fail right now...given that they haven't turned in work and have failed what few quizzes I've given. I can't fail 80% of my students...it's not feasible. But I also can't make them sit down and do work either, if they refuse, then what recourse have I got if the school nor the parents back me up?
Posted by sarcasticmuppet (Member # 5035) on :
Why can't you fail them? Is it pressure not to hold them back?
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
The difficulty with giving power to local school boards is that a lot of them will insist on teaching creationism, mandatory prayers, and for all I know anti-vaccination in health classes.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
If I held back 80 students and there were 80 more students in the 7th grade next year, PLUS the incoming students who are in sixth grade now that would necessitate the hiring of an additional 7th grade teaching team - where would we get the money for that? Where would we get the additional classroom space?
How do you think students come to me in the 7th grade unable to read? Because there is pressure at every level to "find a way to pass them."
Posted by sarcasticmuppet (Member # 5035) on :
Note I really don't want to minimize the work that you're doing, because I think you work really hard to try and give these students as much of an education as possible. But passing students who do not meet even the most basic requirements for a passing grade is just teaching them that their choices have no consequence. It sucks that there really isn't a way around it, but if it were enforced, I'd like to think that it might give a few of them a needed wake up call.
Plus, if x number of students should fail, wouldn't they all be in different grades? It would cause an overflow at the lower levels, I'd think, which might be cheaper to hire teaching staffs for. Or there's an alternate certification -- evening or summer school. But it does take resources, hence the problem.
Really really, I don't want to pretend to know what I'm talking about. Teachers are awesome at doing as much as possible with as little as they get. I'd hate to be in that situation.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
Teachers at some point get hit with a tough choice - do what you think is right, or keep your job. I am a first-year teacher without tenure. If I fail more than half my students, I won't have a job next year - it's that simple.
But it won't even get that far, as soon as I turn in my mid-term progress report with that many F's the administration will step in and tell me to do something about it.
I've seen it before, as a student teacher and a pre-service teacher. In one school the principal told all the teachers too many kids were failing because of zeroes, so they instituted a no-zero policy - teachers were prohibited from issuing zeroes in their gradebook. They had to let the students make up all work and give them some credit for it. No matter what. Even if the studnet never turned anything in, they still had to get some credit. Now my school has not issued such a policy, but if I started failing a bunch of kids for not turning stuff in, I could see it happening.
You think students aren't smart enough to pick up that teachers can't fail them? Where is the incentive to do any work at all?
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
The no-fail policy is a complaint I've heard from a great many teachers from a wide variety of districts, even middle-class suburban districts. I've often wondered at the complete inability of teachers to truly serve out consequences for no work or poor work. I sometimes wonder if that's part of why a high school diploma means so little now.
One other thing I wonder about our school system is that I think it may be that our goals are misplaced. We train all of our students in exactly the same way -- a basic liberal arts education as if everyone is going on to college. There are a few tech schools and the like, but I never felt that these were given a lot of clout. It always seemed strange to me that we graduate 18-year-old adults (17 in my case, but close enough) with no employable skill set. They've been in school for 13 years (k-12) and for all that time...what?
Now we have to go on to college, and in many cases get a graduate degree, to really have a career.
Don't get me wrong -- college has its place. It just amazes me that there aren't some career paths -- many, in fact -- that can't start with a basic high school diploma.
Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
I imagine the smaller the class, the less likely to have mob-mentality jerks ruining the class. I went to a private school so I was very lucky to have 13 (general English lit) be a large class, with my smallest class at 4 (AP French).
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
What I think we should do at the secondary level is heresy for a secondary teacher to utter...but I see no problem at all with ending high school at age 16 and letting the junior colleges step in for those last two years of education.
That way people could graduate at 18 with a 2-year associate's degree in something...an RN for example, or a paramedic license or degree in fire science, etc. They're much more employable.
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
That's what they do in England. It's no magic bullet.
Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
I think there's definitely something to be said for having part of high school- or even a seperate strata of high schools- devoted to trades. The assumption that high school is preparation for college and nothing else seems to be doing a disservice to a lot of young people.
There's a lot in our education system as a whole that could use a second look. Our grade system purports to tell those who look at its records- be they universities, graduate schools, transfer schools, parents, employers- the academic prowess of the student represented. But this encourages otherwise competent students to steer towards fields they already know they excel in and avoid challenges, rather than to stretch, learn new things, and pick up the skills they need to overcome problems where the tools aren't readily at hand. A student who got a "C" in calculus and a "D" in a college-level Physics course may be far more ambitious and hard-working that another student who got straight "A"s but never took anything more challenging that advanced algebra, but scholarship advisory boards don't tend to see things that way. It would be wonderful if we could create a system that makes it easier for students to skip past classes that are trivial to them and give them more time, when they need it, to deal with the things that make them struggle. To stop treating failure in students that are trying hard and success in students who are doing things they find easy as permanent descriptors of overall worth.
As far as the "state/local" level thing- I want to agree, but we run into the brilliant folks that keep popping up wanting to remove evolution from the textbooks, or get offended by images of men doing domestic chores, or think because their precious baby is never ever going to have sex that no one should learn that condoms could save their life. We certainly don't need more standardized testing, and I agree that the closer you get to the community the more likely you are to have a sense of what the individual student body needs. But I also think that some standards from on high are probably necessary, if only to prevent a situation where students from area "x" coming out of high school are considered ready for college while students from area "y" graduating are questionable on everything from long division to literacy.
[ September 07, 2009, 06:05 PM: Message edited by: Sterling ]
Posted by lem (Member # 6914) on :
I have been working in the school system for several years now. I am not a teacher. I don't really see schools failing kids. This "big crisis" I hear about all the time is unseen by me.
There are problems to be sure, but not a crisis. The district is good. However I live in a district where every teacher has a smart board and we have a gigabit backbone for the district network, all secondary schools have a gigabit backbone, and the elementary schools will be getting it soon.
Every school has multiple classes with enough computers. Several schools have COWs (computers on wheels--a giant portable laptop cart) and there are multiple computer labs. My school alone has 3 classrooms with complete labs, 2 school labs, 2 COWs (equaling 36 laptops), and a library with around 50 computers. This is not even taking into consideration the mini-labs for reading or yearbook, special education, or the small math labs.
We have resources.
I think the biggest problem in education is how funding is allocated. Schools get a lot of money based on property taxes. More affluent neighborhoods tend to have more resources at home to support students and their schools have awesome resources.
Disadvantaged families tend to have less resources at home to help students. If you are a single parent mom with 4 kids and 2 jobs you can't give the attention to your kids that someone in a solid middle or upper class family can give to their kids. Usually these families are more poor and live in less expensive housing that results in less resources for schools. Add on top of that the demographic that poor families tend to have more kids and you quickly get school districts that are failing their kids.
Is it really the schools fault tho? Or the parents? I think we need a better system of distributing resources through different districts at the state level--and then let parental donations go the extra mile.
Doing that would create a political backlash because well-to-do parents would see their kids loose resources in their schools and go to students whose parents chose to have 6 kids they couldn't afford. I don't know the solution, but I think the problem has as much to do with resource allocation as parental support and quality of teachers.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:But call me crazy...I think the federal government might want to stop doing nationwide experiments with our schools. I'd like to see less federal control and more state and local control over education. This is so people directly involved get a bigger say and also so that when school systems try new things, everyone else can watch and learn rather than getting sucked in.
I can't say this is a good idea. There are too many intransigent and toxic forces in education that would love nothing more than to remove themselves from federal standards and accountability so that they are pressured far less for reform, may continue down their own path of self-serving waste, or may open up new opportunities to inject politics and evangelicalism into their curriculum. What would states like OK, KS, or UT do with their biological curriculum? Their sexuality curriculum?
The sad fact of the matter is that in many parts of the country — those most distinctly requiring reform — the administrators and the unions have become pervasively self-serving and toxic entities. They have become agents of a system that protects their interests over the well-being of the children that the schools are supposed to serve. They no longer address issues to education in ways that do not primarily service them. They will, in fact, exacerbate educational issues in order to protect themselves and their own interests. It's a web of survival mechanisms layered over systemic incompetencies, which create the need for more survival mechanisms that do not address the incompetencies and let them grow and fester. A vicious, pervasive cycle.
And they have been doing this for decades, which is why we're in the state we're in.
The end result is that the good teachers we still have in the system are often forced to fight the system in order to still try to be a good teacher. Their bosses are not their allies. They don't help them. They actively hinder them. Belle's is a perfect example: the administration is taking heat for too many zeroes. The 'solution' is to force the teachers to be unable to grade a student with a zero. It's total "beatings will continue until morale improves" response. It, like so many innumerable others, is a policy solely designed by administrators to keep their feet out of the fire, by artificially nixing zeroes and shielding them from accountability. It will, of course, create larger issues in the long run, which will demand even more creatively indolent means by the administrations and the unions to shield themselves and their interests from the 'harm' of reform.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Samp: OK, KS, and UT haven't, until recently, had any particular federal curriculum involvement. What has kept certain things out of the classroom in the places that have tried to put them is not federal curriculum guidelines, but court cases.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
There are federal guidelines for education everywhere. All states have them. It's hard to count how many there are for disadvantaged children alone.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
One of the big things that's wrong with schools is the politicization (is that a word?) of education. So many of the reform projects are driven by political ideology (NCLB, School Choice, Intelligent Design, mainstreaming, busing . . .) rather than sound educational practice. Too many decisions about curriculum and pedagogy are being made by people who are far away from the realities of the classroom and are motivated by a political agenda that has little to do with the real problems in education. The best educational decisions are made by the people who are closest to the students (the teachers) and yet the politics tends to take all the choices away from them.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Samp: federal means the national government. By definition, if something is federal, all states have it (and generally have it the same). If the states have them individually, then they aren't federal.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
quote:Samp: OK, KS, and UT haven't, until recently, had any particular federal curriculum involvement. What has kept certain things out of the classroom in the places that have tried to put them is not federal curriculum guidelines, but court cases.
First, strictly speaking, it's not court cases in Kansas that are the battleground...it's the state board of education. That's how most people are aware of the 'conflict' between science and the creationist pseudoscience agenda.
I remember the first time the state board tried to de-emphasize the teaching of evolution in science classes. I heard the story from a local administrator...who basically said (rough quote, paraphrased), "If we teach the creation myth, then we have to teach the other creation myths equally, or we're setting ourselves up for trouble. This whole situation is ridiculous...we're sticking to the science."
We do have many intelligent, capable local leaders involved in education, who will not stand for stupidity.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Tstorm: definitely; I was just referring to ways the people Samp was talking about have long been prevented from doing the things he mentioned (yet without invoking any federal educational standards).
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tstorm:
quote:Samp: OK, KS, and UT haven't, until recently, had any particular federal curriculum involvement. What has kept certain things out of the classroom in the places that have tried to put them is not federal curriculum guidelines, but court cases.
First, strictly speaking, it's not court cases in Kansas that are the battleground...it's the state board of education. That's how most people are aware of the 'conflict' between science and the creationist pseudoscience agenda.
I remember the first time the state board tried to de-emphasize the teaching of evolution in science classes. I heard the story from a local administrator...who basically said (rough quote, paraphrased), "If we teach the creation myth, then we have to teach the other creation myths equally, or we're setting ourselves up for trouble. This whole situation is ridiculous...we're sticking to the science."
We do have many intelligent, capable local leaders involved in education, who will not stand for stupidity.
Exactly. And I wanted to further mention that every time the KS state board of education pulls the anti-evolution crap, they get voted out.
The trouble, IMO, is precisely federalization of our entire political system. You see, the Republican party consists of two forces -- one reasonable and fiscally conservative, the other right-wing religious nut jobs. These national values trickle down the party all the way to local elections, where they have no business existing. Frankly, I don't care if my local sewer district manager is pro-life or not. (Although the pro-life movement always sends me a list of pro-life candidates, from president down to dog catcher...they fail to realize where and how that debate, if it is important to them, needs to be fought.)
Here in KS, the republicans are largely rural farmers who have a fiscally conservative mindset. Kansas is not a Bible-belt state, although the very edge of the Bible belt hits the southeastern part and runs up here to the Kansas City area (unfortunately).
So what ends up happening is we vote in these leaders based on certain values but they turn out to be some bizarre federalized version of what we really want. It is further a problem that people often vote party lines (which I blame them for entirely), but to their credit, when this evolution nonsense gets passed through the state school board people vote them out.
So really, federalization is a far more complicated issue than just education. It is really a problem of core values being split in two, when in truth they need to be split in 50. We are each unique cultures who, at the moment, are not being properly represented.
And to tell you the truth, if a state wants to pass terrible rules for their school systems, then that's their business. You can always fight back or move. In the end, if their education turns out to be worse than their neighbors and their children are not competitive, parents will act.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:So what ends up happening is we vote in these leaders based on certain values but they turn out to be some bizarre federalized version of what we really want. It is further a problem that people often vote party lines (which I blame them for entirely), but to their credit, when this evolution nonsense gets passed through the state school board people vote them out.
A big part of the problem is that people tend to pay far to little attention to school board elections. School board elections tend to attract two kinds of people, a) competent professionals who are dedicated to education and b) people who have some sort of fringe personal agenda they are trying to push on the schools (wackos for lack of a better concise term).
Unfortunately, school board elections are so low profile that most of the voters know absolutely nothing about the candidates when they get the ballot. In the states in which I've lived, the school boards have been non-partisan elections so people don't even have party as a guide. They might as well pick the winners in a lottery. That means that the wackos have a fair chance of winning until they make big enough fools of themselves to warrant media attention and win some name recognition.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:What would states like OK, KS, or UT do with their biological curriculum? Their sexuality curriculum?
Why does Utah always make that list but not Texas? I know the obvious answer to that but its an unfair stereotype. Politics in Utah are strange but they aren't like Bible belt politics. To the best of my knowledge, Utah's never had a school board try to force creationism or ID into the science curriculum, never been sued for having school sponsored prayers and hasn't had religion classes in the public school since statehood. Religion certainly has its influence in the Utah public schools, but its an entirely different bird than anywhere else.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
Utah is on that list because of it being on a short list of states whose educational curriculum still to date still requires its students receive abstinence-only programs which closely track with the 8-point federal definition of abstinence-only education. In addition, the state continues to accept Title V Abstinence-Only funding in return for refusing to adopt comprehensive sex education as a replacement, and has some of the strictest sex education curricula limiters of any state. As a result, its sex education is trussed enough that a teacher is prohibited from answering a question like "should I use a condom instead of practicing the withdrawal method?"
It is a prime example of a state that is adamantly resisting reform to its sex education programs.
Texas has its own problems (partisan manipulation of approved textbook content, etc) so fine, put it on the list too. I'm an equal opportunity finger-pointer.
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Utah is on that list because of it being on a short list of states whose educational curriculum still to date still requires its students receive abstinence-only programs which closely track with the 8-point federal definition of abstinence-only education. In addition, the state continues to accept Title V Abstinence-Only funding in return for refusing to adopt comprehensive sex education as a replacement, and has some of the strictest sex education curricula limiters of any state. As a result, its sex education is trussed enough that a teacher is prohibited from answering a question like "should I use a condom instead of practicing the withdrawal method?"
It is a prime example of a state that is adamantly resisting reform to its sex education programs.
I would agree with you that this is not an ideal educational policy. My opinions on sex education are far more liberal. HOWEVER, as I don't live in Utah, I don't see how it's any of my business. It is even possible, arrogant though I am, that my opinion on this issue is incorrect and either way, the good people of Utah have the right to decide for themselves.
But think about what you're saying here...recently, we had a federal administration that favored abstinence-only education. Federalization of education only makes sense as long as the people you agree with are in charge of the whole country. When they lose power, you're stuck with a whole country doing things the wrong way (from your point of view, at any rate).
I'd vastly prefer not only to keep the power local, but also to keep shifting national-level politics out of my child's classroom.
Posted by malanthrop (Member # 11992) on :
Just read his speech...I think it is quite good. I'm no Obama fan but I'm totally comfortable with those words to my children. Too bad he can't speak the same about American opportunity and achievement in other venues and to other nations.
[ September 07, 2009, 08:40 PM: Message edited by: malanthrop ]
Posted by Launchywiggin (Member # 9116) on :
One of my biggest complaints:
Teachers have so LITTLE power in the classroom. Kids know this, and it allows a culture of apathy. It's popular to blame the "bad" parents for all the problems, but it's the over-protective ones that have castrated teacher authority.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:Teachers have so LITTLE power in the classroom. Kids know this...
This. This. I cannot emphasize this enough. This.
Posted by Launchywiggin (Member # 9116) on :
I love it when Tom agrees with me. It makes me feel smarter. Even if he only agreed with half my post. Posted by DDDaysh (Member # 9499) on :
lol... What Launchy said is half the reason why I quite teaching, probably more than half!
I'm not some kind of power hungry fiend, but when I don't even have the power to teach the 4 kids in my classroom (out of 20) that actually WANT to learn Algebra because I have absolutely no power to keep the other 16 from destroying the classroom and practically murdering one another, it gets a little old. I can't tell you how many times I'd sent a student to the office for SERIOUS offenses (hitting another student, threatening another student, or destroying property) and had them sent back in less than 5 minutes. Mind you, you weren't allowed to send them to the office without filling out a FORM - which is even more time you have to spend away from teaching and attempting to control the other students. It was a disaster.
I also faced what Belle was talking about. At the end of the second six weeks, despite being EXTREMELY liberal about grades and deadlines, more than 80% of my class was failing. This wasn't just me either - all the non-honors Algebra classes were like that. The principal called in all of the math teachers and said strait out that we could not assign more than 20% of our students failing grades.
We are talking about students who could barely multiply (hey, no problem, just give them a calculator) much less tell me the definition of a whole number, add negative numbers, or solve an equation! So, I thought - fine... You want them to pass, let me find something I can teach them that they will pass! I went back to fractions. Since 90% of my students failed the basic fraction assessment I'd given them, I thought "Ok, we'll see if maybe this will work".
Now, while it wasn't exactly a complete success, I did actually manage to get class participation up to about 75 or 80%, and had many fewer office referals. Yet, after only a week of that the principal called me in and told me that Fractions were not on the list of skills to be taught in Algebra I and forbade me to continue working from there. I had to go back to the stuff presented in the text book.
Now, can someone tell me how on earth I can teach a student to solve 4x+2=14 if they can't even add 1/2 + 1/2, and most of them couldn't tell me what 12/4 was without using their calculators.
The thing is, this wasn't an underfunded school. After Christmas, they issued every single student in the school a laptop! (which turned out to just be another major disaster). The problem with the school was just that the administration had tied teacher's hands to a ridiculous degree without coming up with an alternate plan to enforce discipline and encourage learning.
I also agree with some of the others that the "standards" for high school are pretty pointless. 20 years ago, students had the option of taking things like "Accounting", "Book keeping", "Typing", "Consumer Math", and "Basic Tax". All of those (except typing) could be used as a Math credit (in Texas) and all of them serve some useful purpose in life after school. Now, not a single one of those is offered as anything but an elective in Texas schools, and most of them aren't even offered as electives! Instead, Texas makes EVERY single graduate take Algebra II in order to get a diploma, yet utterly ignores the fact that most of them can't approximate the sales tax on their grocery bill or figure out how much to tip in a restaurant. It makes me furious!
I don't think that vocational programs are a "magic bullet". There are alot of things we have to correct. However, I think there are MANY kids we could save if they had an educational option they actually saw as doing them some good. Many kids these days realize they "suck" at the school thing. They don't WANT to go to college, so what incentive is there to even graduate? I can't count the number of times that I heard, "Miss, I don't care if I fail. I'm not gunna graduate, I'm just waiting until I'm 17 so I can get outta here". Yes, kids actually SAY that, and MEAN that, and not just a few of them! They come to school just enough to keep the truant officers of their backs (if that often) and try to amuse themselves to the best of their abilities at other times.
The worst thing is, some of these kids have real talent and real abilities. I've seen some kids in my home town that are utterly useless in high school but do AMAZING things. They are so dedicated to their families that they build whole extra rooms onto overflowing houses BY THEMSELVES because they were bored. They do things to cars that can't be easy, and even though I can't imagine why they WANT to do them, it still takes talent and dedication to get them done. It's not like all these kids are just lazy losers... we just aren't giving them any options they see as actually achievable. That, IMHO, is extremely negligent.
Posted by malanthrop (Member # 11992) on :
My kids go to a public school that is quite exceptional. They have special knuckle cracker teachers for the disrespectful students who disrupt the learning environment. My daughter has shared numerous tales of the disrespectful student who amazingly is moved to another class. I think this is a good way to handle it. The kids who want to learn can and the ones who need special attention in simple behavior principles can get that.
Some people are just destined to be ditch diggers.
Posted by Parkour (Member # 12078) on :
quote:Originally posted by Launchywiggin: One of my biggest complaints:
Teachers have so LITTLE power in the classroom. Kids know this, and it allows a culture of apathy.
It's true. Bad parents are one issue. The system is a worse issue. Like Belle's students who can not be given a zero for work they did not do. They know it!
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by DDDaysh: I also faced what Belle was talking about. At the end of the second six weeks, despite being EXTREMELY liberal about grades and deadlines, more than 80% of my class was failing. This wasn't just me either - all the non-honors Algebra classes were like that. The principal called in all of the math teachers and said strait out that we could not assign more than 20% of our students failing grades.
My mother often ends up having to fight the school's administration when she fails students who have never come to class.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:As a result, its sex education is trussed enough that a teacher is prohibited from answering a question like "should I use a condom instead of practicing the withdrawal method?"
I'm having a hard time imagining a situation in which a teenager might pose that question to a teacher seriously. I'm not coming up with anything. I can see it happening as some kind of joke intended to embarrass the teacher or the girls in the class, but no I just can't see it being asked as a serious question.
I'm no fan of abstinence only education. I think all teenagers, even those in Utah, should receive complete and accurate information about birth control. But I'm pretty familiar with the Utah culture and quite confident that an open discussion of contraception that would allow questions like the one you posed would be impossible in a Utah public schools regardless of the laws. I can see comprehensive sex ed in Utah working if it was done in writing. The students would be given written, accurate and comprehensive material about contraception and then tested to make sure they'd read and understood the material. They could even be allowed to submit written questions to the teacher or schedule a private meeting with a councillor to ask questions but and open class room discussion would simply not work in Utah culture.
Anyone else whos lived in Utah want to comment?
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:One thing I noticed while volunteering in schools is that below a certain age, homework doesn't usually get done spontaneously. It requires the parents to sit down and do it with the child or, at the very least, say "do your homework". You can tell who's had help: the kids who come with it nicely written or even typed have had help. The kids who have done it themselves (if they managed to) are doing it at school, on a scrappy bit of paper. This is especially true of take-home projects, when some parents take their children to the library, watch over them while they right it, buy them bits of cardboard, help them spell words correctly... etc.
At the elementary levels, we need a mentorship program. Every child would be required to have an official adult mentor. Adult mentors would be required to spend an average of 15 to 20 min with the student doing activities assigned by the teacher. These projects could include things like reading with the child, going over spelling lists, checking homework, working on projects and so forth. Teachers would give specific assignments that were to be done with the mentor, ideally these would be tailored to the needs of each individual child. Mentors would also be required to meet quarterly with the teacher to discuss the child's progress and a attend a training session at the beginning of the year.
Many, probably most children, would have a parent or other adult family member as their mentor but in cases where the parents weren't able or willing to meet the requirements or simply thought it would be good to involve someone else in their child's education, mentors could be assigned from a pool of community volunteers. Perhaps space could be provided in a local library or after hours at school where mentors could meet with kids. College students, retired professionals and so forth could make excellent mentors for inner city kids who don't have a stable family situation. In an ideal world, the mentors might even be paid for their time but I don't see that happening in the US anytime soon. Perhaps mentors could come from Obama's program that offers financial aid for community volunteering.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
That's a pretty good idea.
Posted by Coccinelle (Member # 5832) on :
Given Utah's culture, I cannot imagine most parents appreciating anything more than an abstinence only curriculum. But- all other reason aside, numbers speak loudly in this case. Utah is ranked #45 in the nation for their teen pregnancy rate as opposed to Texas which is #5. (Numbers thanks to the Guttmacher Institute)
While Utah may have a conservative curriculum, it certainly isn't causing an increase in their pregnancy rate. Texas on the other hand... now we definitely have issues here.
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
quote:Originally posted by Coccinelle: Given Utah's culture, I cannot imagine most parents appreciating anything more than an abstinence only curriculum. But- all other reason aside, numbers speak loudly in this case. Utah is ranked #45 in the nation for their teen pregnancy rate as opposed to Texas which is #5. (Numbers thanks to the Guttmacher Institute)
While Utah may have a conservative curriculum, it certainly isn't causing an increase in their pregnancy rate. Texas on the other hand... now we definitely have issues here.
And even were this not true, I fail to see why everything needs to be the responsibility of schools. Whether or not schools should be responsible for preventing teen pregnancy at all is highly debatable and, once again, a matter for local politics and culture. Let's not forget that worst case, we can all teach our own kids the values we hold dear. Were I living in Utah, where my children would apparently get no exposure to sex ed, I promise I would give them a thorough grounding at home.
In fact, that's another weakness of schools -- the fact that they keep being assigned tasks that are out of their designed scope.
Every failing of every child is not on the school's shoulders, nor should it be.
Posted by DarkKnight (Member # 7536) on :
In most cases, teachers do have little power in the classroom, and are not given adequate reasons because of the Admins in charge. School districts do have enough money. The amount of waste and mismanagement is staggering. For example, teachers have old and/or not enough textbooks because of the way the district's administrators setup the line item budgeting. If a school needs to spend on average $50,000 a year on books, the Admins will create a line item in their budget called Books (or something similar) and place $30,000 in it. The district may very well have enough money to fund all of those books but it chooses to spend the money on other unneccesary projects, or hoard it somewhere in it's many many bank accounts. Admins do this because they want to be seen as a 'poor' school district with insufficient funds, no matter how affluent the district. Plus they can truthfully say there is not enough money to buy books because in the line item for books there is not enough money. Admins get thier gold stars by bringing money into the school district, not from solving problems, or taking care of students needs. Politics inside of school district are beyond measure. Everything boils down to how do I look. Bad test scores are always spun to be 'someone else's fault' and certainly nothing to do with the school district, especially not the Admins. We have children in our district for 12 years yet when the graduate they cannot read or write. In 12 years there is no way to teach a child the basics of reading and writing? Really? Again, this fault to me lies with the Admins and not with the teachers in the classroom. Teachers do what they can with the resources they are allowed to have. Granted, there are bad teachers out there, and removing them is impossible, but that again is a problem that results from the Administration. In my state, teachers are not rewarded for working hard or for educating children. They receive more money for years taught and how many credit hours they have earned. In other words, it is what a teacher does OUTSIDE of the classroom that will earn them a bigger check. Why would a teacher be motivated to do a better job when you are rewarded more for doing less? If a teacher just coasts and does the minimum they have less stress and if they use the extra time they can get their Masters or Doctorate and end up making quite a bit more money than a teacher doing the best they can to teach. It is human nature for a lot of people, probably most, to do less if they are not held to a standard.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Were I living in Utah, where my children would apparently get no exposure to sex ed, I promise I would give them a thorough grounding at home.
I don't know what the situation is now, but when I was a student back in the 70s, there was sex ed in the Utah schools. We had a "maturation" program when we were about eleven. It was held in the evening and parents were invited. Programs for boys and girls were held separate and the changes our bodies would go through in puberty were explained . Of course my mother had explained it all long before that. We also got taught the basic biological facts of coitus and pregnancy in both junior high and high school health classes and we had to watch various films about VD (now STDs).
We didn't get information about birth control, or learn the word organism or talk about masterbation, oral sex or anal sex, but it also wasn't "no exposure to sex ed". Incomplete? Definitely. Non existent, definitely not.
Posted by Tresopax (Member # 1063) on :
quote:You think students aren't smart enough to pick up that teachers can't fail them? Where is the incentive to do any work at all?
Is "not failing" the only incentive that will get a student to do work?
I'd think that if a student's only motivation for doing any school work is to avoid failing, then failure has already occurred.
Posted by scholarette (Member # 11540) on :
When my husband taught, the lowest grade he could give a student was 50%. He had a lot of students who would have had 0s. But with the lowest being a 50%, it was a lot easier to move the students up to D then if they had 0s.
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit:
quote:As a result, its sex education is trussed enough that a teacher is prohibited from answering a question like "should I use a condom instead of practicing the withdrawal method?"
I'm having a hard time imagining a situation in which a teenager might pose that question to a teacher seriously. I'm not coming up with anything. I can see it happening as some kind of joke intended to embarrass the teacher or the girls in the class, but no I just can't see it being asked as a serious question.
I'm no fan of abstinence only education. I think all teenagers, even those in Utah, should receive complete and accurate information about birth control. But I'm pretty familiar with the Utah culture and quite confident that an open discussion of contraception that would allow questions like the one you posed would be impossible in a Utah public schools regardless of the laws. I can see comprehensive sex ed in Utah working if it was done in writing. The students would be given written, accurate and comprehensive material about contraception and then tested to make sure they'd read and understood the material. They could even be allowed to submit written questions to the teacher or schedule a private meeting with a councillor to ask questions but and open class room discussion would simply not work in Utah culture.
Anyone else whos lived in Utah want to comment?
I wish I could, though I live in Utah I got my sex education from a private school in Hong Kong funded by the Lutheran Church.
Interestingly enough it consisted of, this is precisely how sex works, these are contraceptives (we had this awesome Jewish mother of one of the students proceed to show us every kind of contraceptive under the sun along with their pluses and minuses) lets stop giggling at words like penis, vagina, and orgasm and actually use them straight forwardly, now lets talk about STDs as well as some of the myths surrounding them, oral sex and anal sex don't prevent their spread, the end.
Mind you this was long after my parents had already sat me down and given me the facts of life talk. I was abstinent until I got married, I don't see how increasing my ignorance would have made that goal easier.
edit: Reading this thread is depressing me. I get the feeling that here in the US we have rendered our teachers powerless, that is so wrong if that is the case. I loved my teachers growing up, but I also knew who was the boss. My parents were very involved in my education and had good communication with my teachers, class sizes were not too large (about 30 to a room). I wish I knew how we could stop children in the US from being cheated out of such a potentially wonderful educational experience.
Posted by Alcon (Member # 6645) on :
This article gives a very clear idea of one of the primary things wrong with our schools. We can't fire bad teachers.
quote:In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
quote:Originally posted by Christine: Were I living in Utah, where my children would apparently get no exposure to sex ed, I promise I would give them a thorough grounding at home.
In fact, that's another weakness of schools -- the fact that they keep being assigned tasks that are out of their designed scope.
The problem is a lot of people down the line see the results when neither the parents nor the school takes any sort of initiative in this area. Someone has to do it, and it's a lot easier to hold a body like a school accountable.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
I have a slightly different perspective on teacher power. When I was in school, a teacher could (in increasing order of severity) shout at you or bang a book on your desk; send you out of the classroom, or to the principal's office where you would get a Severe Talking-to; get your parents to take you home; give you 'parade', that is, you had to turn up an hour earlier the next day, or - the final argument - have you suspended from school for a limited period. (By that stage both parents and principal would have been involved, so strictly speaking the teacher couldn't do this on his own.)
Now, these reactions are conceivably a bit stronger than what an American high school teacher has, I don't know. But it does seem to me that they do not add up to a real power of quelling genuine rebellion. If a teenager is really determined to buck the system, what does he care about being suspended? Sitting in the hall instead of a classroom is not a strong punishment for someone whom the classroom bores beyond endurance.
No, I think that what actually kept us in line was the culture. The schools I went to got people from all over the socio-economic spectrum; there were people like me who had "college" written all over them, but there were also working-class children who hadn't been able to get into the vocational schools and as a consequence were just sitting out their three years and receiving their 2s and 3s. (The grading system is 1 through 6, 2 being the lowest passing grade. Anything below a 4 means real trouble for getting into college, with the possible exception of PE. And, before you ask (he said with dignity) I had a gentleman's 4 in PE.) There were drugs being passed around, there were girls who got pregnant at 16 (and their feckless boyfriends, obviously), there wasn't necessarily a scrambling determination to get into college.
Nonetheless, even among those who didn't get 5s and 6s themselves, there was admiration for those who did, and an overall understanding that the purpose of school was to learn and that the ones who were best at that had a claim to respect. I once saw a girl cry over receiving a bad grade on a math test; partly perhaps in fear of what her parents would say, but also I think because she was bright enough in other subjects and plain frustrated at being unable to do long division, or whatever we were working on that month. (I must admit I have no clear memory of exactly what math I was taught at age 14. Presumably I learned something, if only to sit still and not complain while the slowpokes caught up. Fractions? A quick Google: Looks like a bit of big-number multiplication, decimals, fractions, some constructive geometry, basic histograms. Nothing very interesting. But I digress.) My point is, even among the children, there was an impression that learning things was important, and that the teachers were within their rights to yell at you if you were being noisy. It wasn't that we never whispered or passed notes or leaned back in our chairs or threw paper balls; it was that we knew that these were breaches of the rules, and that the rules were important; and so we stopped when the teacher took notice. Usually they didn't even have to raise their voice very much. (Although some of them, I'm fairly convinced, took positive joy in sneaking up on children engrossed in a private conversation and SLAMMING a book down on their desk. You can get a hell of a startle reflex out of most kids in this manner.)
I don't know how such a culture can be re-gained once lost; but I'm not convinced that additional powers for teachers will do it. It's certainly possible to impose a forced quiet and overt obedience by stringent measures; and that might well be an improvement over what exists now. But in the end, discipline is self-discipline or else it's useless because it ends when the constraints go away. It's easy enough to say that the parents must be involved, and probably true as well, but how are you going to do it? Paddlings for adults who don't measure up?
Posted by natural_mystic (Member # 11760) on :
I agree with KOM.
At my school the headmaster also had the authority to flog children using a bamboo rod. My general impression is that this had little to no effect in the righting of wayward youths. Perhaps it was cathartic for the teachers.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Were I living in Utah, where my children would apparently get no exposure to sex ed, I promise I would give them a thorough grounding at home.
When I first read this I missed the 'ed' in "sex ed". Posted by Darth_Mauve (Member # 4709) on :
One measure I would love to take, but don't see it being politically viable, is to break down any school district with more than 3 high schools.
The biggest wastes of precious resources I've witnessed is when political wanna-be's get on the boards of large school districts, and play "The Kingpin" to their hearts content.
Washington DC's district.
St. Louis MO's district.
East. St. Louis Mo's district.
Los Angeles school District.
Houston TX School District.
and many other's I've heard about on the news, all have people playing power politics without caring about the kids.
That's how you get requirements that 80% must pass, or no new books, but yes to the new football stadium.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
quote:Originally posted by DarkNight In most cases, teachers do have little power in the classroom, and are not given adequate reasons because of the Admins in charge. School districts do have enough money. The amount of waste and mismanagement is staggering. For example, teachers have old and/or not enough textbooks because of the way the district's administrators setup the line item budgeting. If a school needs to spend on average $50,000 a year on books, the Admins will create a line item in their budget called Books (or something similar) and place $30,000 in it. The district may very well have enough money to fund all of those books but it chooses to spend the money on other unneccesary projects, or hoard it somewhere in it's many many bank accounts. Admins do this because they want to be seen as a 'poor' school district with insufficient funds, no matter how affluent the district. Plus they can truthfully say there is not enough money to buy books because in the line item for books there is not enough money. Admins get thier gold stars by bringing money into the school district, not from solving problems, or taking care of students needs. Politics inside of school district are beyond measure. Everything boils down to how do I look. Bad test scores are always spun to be 'someone else's fault' and certainly nothing to do with the school district, especially not the Admins.
I would submit that this is not the case in all districts. There are districts that are short on money because of declining enrollments and shrinking tax bases. The money is not always being 'hidden' by evil administrators. It's also worth pointing out that in many cases, the school boards must approve administrator's budget proposals. Frankly, I think that this viewpoint of administrators, which I've heard many times, is a gross generalization and is extremely disrespectful to many hard-working school administrators and school boards.
(Everything about your local district, I'm leaving alone...you know it better than I do and I won't presume to dispute your knowledge there. )
Posted by DarkKnight (Member # 7536) on :
Tstorm, I did have some qualifiers in the start of my post because I know not every district is the same. I do believe that poorly run, politically charged school districts are the norm and not the exception.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
I saw your qualifier on "most cases, teachers", but I must be missing the qualifiers on all the other claims...?
I find it sad that you believe that, because I believe that in my area, most schools are not poorly run, even if they are politically charged.
Posted by DDDaysh (Member # 9499) on :
In my experience (and coming from a family of teachers, I have a decent amount of it) MANY school districts are run VERY badly. However, on the surface it seems like the amount of scandal that can be "gotten away with" increases in direct proportion to the school size. Oh, sure, there are PLENTY of things a sucky superintendent can do (and is doing) to screw up my little 1000 student school district (yes, that is K-12). However, it's easier for people to nail down when he's lying to them than it is when you're talking about a school district with 100,000 students.
See, in small school districts, the members of the school board are still just average Joes. They are parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles of kids that are ACTUALLY IN SCHOOL! They can know the issues that the school is facing and can know a large enough percentage of the other parents to understand what is important to people in general. Even if you get a corrupt Superintendent or other administrators, even if you have one or two corrupt school board members, the others are there watching them and it doesn't take long for the news to filter back into public view.
Contrast that to the HUGE school districts where even the regular school board members are true politicians who get paid vacations to conferences all over the world... It's hard for any parent or parent group to know where to even start approaching a system like that to try and bring about change. So, maybe there is something to this idea of busting up big school districts!
As far as the sex-ed thing goes, Texas has what is known as an "Abstinence First" curriculum. That means that they stress abstinence as the only 100% fool proof method, but do discuss other forms of protection and contraception. The thing is, many, many, MANY of Texas's teen pregnancies are NOT accidents. These girls WANT to be pregnant. They want three or four babies before they even turn 20 - and the reason behind that goes back into what we were discussing about the education system. These girls don't see their future in education. The system has failed them. They see their future in a baby bump and the unconditional love of an infant.
So, see, when you teach them in Sex Ed about condoms and birth control, what they're really thinking is "Oh - I need to stay FAR away from that", and "Ok, so I can get the pills, but just skip taking them for lots of days a month, and my boyfriend won't know so he won't use a condom, and then I'll have my BABY". They don't need sex ed, they need a few crash courses in practical economics and a stable place to turn to for love and respect.
Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
Of course, it also might help if we stopped allowing people to get away with villifying academics, intellectuals, and "smart kids".
Posted by DarkKnight (Member # 7536) on :
quote: I find it sad that you believe that, because I believe that in my area, most schools are not poorly run, even if they are politically charged.
I find it sad too, I am very curious to what general area you do live in though.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sterling: Of course, it also might help if we stopped allowing people to get away with villifying academics, intellectuals, and "smart kids".
Agreed, that would help. But, to be completely fair about it, the vilification goes two ways. There are a lot of academics, 'intellectuals' (and let me note that one of the few OSC opinions I share is about literature departments in colleges) and smart kids who look down their noses at the kind of people who shop at WalMart and keep guns in the house. I'm not immune myself; Wal-Martians really are a loud, obnoxious lot - more so even than middle-class Americans, who as a general rule have not been taught the concept of an indoor voice. But the savage contempt and really biting jokes, by people who don't seem quite aware that they are not talking about fictional characters - it's not helpful in maintaining respect. Respect travels two ways, or it is mere touching of the forelock to the squire. (And the squire, for all his flaws, at least spoke to his tenants once in a while!)
If academia wants respect, I think there are several steps it can take on its own side, which will be a lot more useful than any reform aimed at the working classes. The workers resent attempts to improve them, especially improvements in the direction of forelock-tugging, and who wouldn't? But they respect, or at least they have respected in the past, genuine knowledge that doesn't, on its side, despise non-intellectual work. So, my three-step plan for increasing academic respect:
Throw out the English, "X studies", and philosophy departments, and do considerable amounts of cleanup in sociology. The 2% of these departments that is actually useful can be accomplished without separate departments producing 98% dreck.
Stop trying to form the entire nation in an academic mold. It seems possible, although unlikely, that we do in fact need 50% of our workforce to have a college education. But the plain statistical fact is that for college to mean anything, you need to be a sigma or so above average, and that means that at most one-sixth of the population can get a meaningful college degree. Trying to shoehorn the remaining five-sixths into academicians will not produce college degrees in the sense of people who know how to think, it will produce pieces of paper saying "University of Attendance Checking". With, more than likely, a major in X Studies. This is not useful, it's just the Brahmin caste trying to shoehorn the Vaisya and Kshatriya into its own mold by exploiting its mystique and supposed command of otherworldly forces. It won't work in the long run.
Stop the dang sneering. Ok, you don't personally want to keep a gun in the house; there's no reason to assume that those who do are low-browed Neanderthals who enjoy taking potshots at neighbours. Same for shopping at Wal-Mart. So you have a college degree, good for you; tell me, how sure are you that it's not a piece of paper? And the reason it might be a piece of paper is that the previous generation insisted on this kind of sneering - and their degrees, to be fair about it, really did mean something. Then the unwashed masses decided that fine, they would prove they could do college too, dammit. They stormed the doors of the universities, who weren't about to turn down tuition-paying customers (especially since, with lots of scholarships granted by politicians voted in by the new college-determined masses, they could turn up the tuition without any particular student feeling the pain) but found that, oops, these people couldn't be taught anything approaching a real liberal arts degree. But no matter, they would pay just as well for pieces of paper saying, in good calligraphy, "University of Attendance Checking attests that this Wal-Martian has faithfully attended classes in X Studies, and therefore has the right to sneer at those who haven't." And, more to the point, not to be sneered at by the actual ruling class, a convention you'll notice I'm not paying much attention to, here.
Again, it may be helpful to have a look outside America, to see how other nations deal with this kind of thing. My experience is with Norway, so that's the example I'll draw on. First, let's note that Norway, like most of Europe, has a tradition of, eg, University professors being an extremely high-status position. Case in point: My father is 'dosent', roughly equivalent to a teaching professor, of mathematics at the Naval Academy in Bergen. He was hired in 1981, and his appointment had to be confirmed by Royal Order of the King in Council - roughly speaking, the equivalent of a Cabinet meeting, or perhaps a Senate confirmation. (Except that they didn't actually have him turn up in person and answer questions; the actual procedure was a bit of a rubber stamp. It was just a holdover from older days.) He can only be fired by impeachment, requiring a simple majority of Parliament. Now, this is a dreadful anachronism, and in fact the custom was discontinued shortly afterwards; these days the Naval Academy hires and fires like an ordinary school. (Indeed, my father was the last teacher there to be appointed by Royal Order.) But it demonstrates the tradition of respect and the seriousness with which academics are treated in Europe. There had been a time when this was the procedure for every university professor in Norway. (Which is, fortunately for the guy with the rubber stamp, rather fewer than in America! But notice that there was also a time when no rubber stamp was involved.)
That's one example; another is the way our secondary education is organised. There is no assumption that secondary education is preparation for college. At 16, you choose whether to enter the academic track or a vocational track. If vocational, you get a bit of theory - the people taking these tracks tend to complain that they get more theory and academic stuff than they actually want - and considerable practical education. For electricians, you spend say ten or twenty hours a week fiddling with wires; carpenters, a similar amount knocking pieces of wood together; and so on. Then you get an apprenticeship (while technically still in school) and are off to work. These tracks are very popular and not at all un-prestigious; in a slight irony, they are over-subscribed and you need good grades from your 13-15 education to get in. (There are only so many apprenticeships.) The academic lines, on the other hand, will take anyone who breathes, so they get a mix of college-bound overachievers and the working-class overflow from the vocational tracks. (Which occasionally makes for some odd social dynamics, but I digress.)
I don't say that this approach would solve every problem of America's schools, but it does seem to me that it would be a lot better than what you have now. Get the people who are bored by academics out of the academic setting where there is nothing they can do to shine, and let them work with their hands doing something useful. I think a lot of high-school problems are down to primate instinct, and this would alleviate that. A human male of age 16 to 18 is, biologically speaking, ready to be a father, a hunter, and a warrior or even a leader of warriors. When, instead, we put him in a classroom and tell him to sit down and listen, he interprets this as "My tribal status is low", and his natural instinct is to either lead a bloody coup against the tribal leaders and take all their women for himself, or else to strike out into the wilderness with a small band of followers. Neither is very practical today, so you get all the familiar litany of high-school dysfunction instead. (I write about males because that's the set of hormones I'm familiar with, but I imagine there's a similar effect for women, who biologically are ready to be mothers and food-providers at 16. But female status games tend to be a bit less violent.) The exception to this is the people who do well in an academic setting, and can gain status and prestige by listening to the teacher. And notice: Here is a set of people against whom the non-academics can viably rebel, and by god, they do!
The obvious solution is to take the non-academics out of the academic setting and give them prestige for something they can actually compete at. Few people find it unpleasant to be low-ranked in something they can see the point of. A man might chafe at low grades for literary analysis, when he loathes the meaningless chatter of the books he's given to read and hates writing about them. And who can blame him? But if he does badly at electrical wiring, at least that's an activity he understands the purpose of; it's meaningful to him even if he can see that he's not that good at it.
Posted by scholarette (Member # 11540) on :
DDDash- For a lot of those kids, nothing the school system does is going to help. My husband had many students who wanted to have babies. He was shocked that the kids were proud of getting girls pregnant or the girls of being pregnant. But they were very strongly raised to believe that this was a good thing. Their parents reinforced it daily, as did their friends and the community. Even though the school and the teachers were trying to show the kids how stupid pregnant at 14/15 is, a few outsiders (and every teacher was considered an outsider if only because of race- the school was 90% Hispanic with maybe 3% of the teachers/counselors/principals as Hispanic. And yes, I know Hispanic is not a race) did not make a difference. While race is not supposed to matter, I do think the kids would have been more motivated if there was a higher amount of people in authority of the same race as them.
One disastrous policy that a lot of the schools seem to be going with is fire the bed teachers. A bad teacher is anyone whose students do badly. The year my husband quit, they fired nearly the entire math department (like 6 teachers) because the kids had too low of scores and those teachers did not have tenure or seniority enough to protect them. This meant that the teachers with 1-3 years of experience were gone, replaced by teachers with 0 years experience. The principal got a promotion to superintendent for her efforts, leaving the next principal with a huge mess. And everyone familiar with the district who knew what the last principal had done refused to take the job. So, not only was almost half the math department brand new, the principal was also new to the district and the area.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
Northern Kansas...quite rural. The town I live in has a school with a K-12 enrollment of just over 1000.
Posted by T:man (Member # 11614) on :
quote:Originally posted by Tstorm: Northern Kansas...quite rural. The town I live in has a school with a K-12 enrollment of just over 1000.
I live in a suburb and there are more than a thousand kids in my year alone!
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
There are quite a few schools with fewer than a 100 students, in their entire high school.
I went to an average sized school for this area, and my graduating class was the largest in the district, by far, with 75 students.
Back to the subject...
Kansas has a history of running a decent education system, but that appears to be facing some difficulty. It's the largest expense in the state budget, and we currently have quite a ridiculous crop of legislators attempting to cut funding. It doesn't help when the recent funding increases were handed down as a requirement by the state supreme court, which found the funding formula was inadequate and unconstitutional. May we live in interesting times...
Posted by theamazeeaz (Member # 6970) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men:
quote:Originally posted by Sterling: Of course, it also might help if we stopped allowing people to get away with villifying academics, intellectuals, and "smart kids".
Agreed, that would help. But, to be completely fair about it, the vilification goes two ways. There are a lot of academics, 'intellectuals' (and let me note that one of the few OSC opinions I share is about literature departments in colleges) and smart kids who look down their noses at the kind of people who shop at WalMart and keep guns in the house. I'm not immune myself; Wal-Martians really are a loud, obnoxious lot - more so even than middle-class Americans, who as a general rule have not been taught the concept of an indoor voice. But the savage contempt and really biting jokes, by people who don't seem quite aware that they are not talking about fictional characters - it's not helpful in maintaining respect. Respect travels two ways, or it is mere touching of the forelock to the squire. (And the squire, for all his flaws, at least spoke to his tenants once in a while!)
If academia wants respect, I think there are several steps it can take on its own side, which will be a lot more useful than any reform aimed at the working classes. The workers resent attempts to improve them, especially improvements in the direction of forelock-tugging, and who wouldn't? But they respect, or at least they have respected in the past, genuine knowledge that doesn't, on its side, despise non-intellectual work. So, my three-step plan for increasing academic respect:
Throw out the English, "X studies", and philosophy departments, and do considerable amounts of cleanup in sociology. The 2% of these departments that is actually useful can be accomplished without separate departments producing 98% dreck.
Stop trying to form the entire nation in an academic mold. It seems possible, although unlikely, that we do in fact need 50% of our workforce to have a college education. But the plain statistical fact is that for college to mean anything, you need to be a sigma or so above average, and that means that at most one-sixth of the population can get a meaningful college degree. Trying to shoehorn the remaining five-sixths into academicians will not produce college degrees in the sense of people who know how to think, it will produce pieces of paper saying "University of Attendance Checking". With, more than likely, a major in X Studies. This is not useful, it's just the Brahmin caste trying to shoehorn the Vaisya and Kshatriya into its own mold by exploiting its mystique and supposed command of otherworldly forces. It won't work in the long run.
Stop the dang sneering. Ok, you don't personally want to keep a gun in the house; there's no reason to assume that those who do are low-browed Neanderthals who enjoy taking potshots at neighbours. Same for shopping at Wal-Mart. So you have a college degree, good for you; tell me, how sure are you that it's not a piece of paper? And the reason it might be a piece of paper is that the previous generation insisted on this kind of sneering - and their degrees, to be fair about it, really did mean something. Then the unwashed masses decided that fine, they would prove they could do college too, dammit. They stormed the doors of the universities, who weren't about to turn down tuition-paying customers (especially since, with lots of scholarships granted by politicians voted in by the new college-determined masses, they could turn up the tuition without any particular student feeling the pain) but found that, oops, these people couldn't be taught anything approaching a real liberal arts degree. But no matter, they would pay just as well for pieces of paper saying, in good calligraphy, "University of Attendance Checking attests that this Wal-Martian has faithfully attended classes in X Studies, and therefore has the right to sneer at those who haven't." And, more to the point, not to be sneered at by the actual ruling class, a convention you'll notice I'm not paying much attention to, here.
Again, it may be helpful to have a look outside America, to see how other nations deal with this kind of thing. My experience is with Norway, so that's the example I'll draw on. First, let's note that Norway, like most of Europe, has a tradition of, eg, University professors being an extremely high-status position. Case in point: My father is 'dosent', roughly equivalent to a teaching professor, of mathematics at the Naval Academy in Bergen. He was hired in 1981, and his appointment had to be confirmed by Royal Order of the King in Council - roughly speaking, the equivalent of a Cabinet meeting, or perhaps a Senate confirmation. (Except that they didn't actually have him turn up in person and answer questions; the actual procedure was a bit of a rubber stamp. It was just a holdover from older days.) He can only be fired by impeachment, requiring a simple majority of Parliament. Now, this is a dreadful anachronism, and in fact the custom was discontinued shortly afterwards; these days the Naval Academy hires and fires like an ordinary school. (Indeed, my father was the last teacher there to be appointed by Royal Order.) But it demonstrates the tradition of respect and the seriousness with which academics are treated in Europe. There had been a time when this was the procedure for every university professor in Norway. (Which is, fortunately for the guy with the rubber stamp, rather fewer than in America! But notice that there was also a time when no rubber stamp was involved.)
That's one example; another is the way our secondary education is organised. There is no assumption that secondary education is preparation for college. At 16, you choose whether to enter the academic track or a vocational track. If vocational, you get a bit of theory - the people taking these tracks tend to complain that they get more theory and academic stuff than they actually want - and considerable practical education. For electricians, you spend say ten or twenty hours a week fiddling with wires; carpenters, a similar amount knocking pieces of wood together; and so on. Then you get an apprenticeship (while technically still in school) and are off to work. These tracks are very popular and not at all un-prestigious; in a slight irony, they are over-subscribed and you need good grades from your 13-15 education to get in. (There are only so many apprenticeships.) The academic lines, on the other hand, will take anyone who breathes, so they get a mix of college-bound overachievers and the working-class overflow from the vocational tracks. (Which occasionally makes for some odd social dynamics, but I digress.)
I don't say that this approach would solve every problem of America's schools, but it does seem to me that it would be a lot better than what you have now. Get the people who are bored by academics out of the academic setting where there is nothing they can do to shine, and let them work with their hands doing something useful. I think a lot of high-school problems are down to primate instinct, and this would alleviate that. A human male of age 16 to 18 is, biologically speaking, ready to be a father, a hunter, and a warrior or even a leader of warriors. When, instead, we put him in a classroom and tell him to sit down and listen, he interprets this as "My tribal status is low", and his natural instinct is to either lead a bloody coup against the tribal leaders and take all their women for himself, or else to strike out into the wilderness with a small band of followers. Neither is very practical today, so you get all the familiar litany of high-school dysfunction instead. (I write about males because that's the set of hormones I'm familiar with, but I imagine there's a similar effect for women, who biologically are ready to be mothers and food-providers at 16. But female status games tend to be a bit less violent.) The exception to this is the people who do well in an academic setting, and can gain status and prestige by listening to the teacher. And notice: Here is a set of people against whom the non-academics can viably rebel, and by god, they do!
The obvious solution is to take the non-academics out of the academic setting and give them prestige for something they can actually compete at. Few people find it unpleasant to be low-ranked in something they can see the point of. A man might chafe at low grades for literary analysis, when he loathes the meaningless chatter of the books he's given to read and hates writing about them. And who can blame him? But if he does badly at electrical wiring, at least that's an activity he understands the purpose of; it's meaningful to him even if he can see that he's not that good at it.
There are vocational high schools in America. I don't know how prevalent they are outside of my homestate (RI), but when I was in eighth grade, the folks from the local vocational high school came, gave a presentation, and told folks to apply.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
quote:Originally posted by malanthrop:
Some people are just destined to be ditch diggers.
And even more end up digging ditches regardless of what they could have done because of attitudes like this.
The problem is that some people shouldn't be teachers, and if one of those people is your child's teacher they might end up in those types of classrooms regardless of where their talents lie just because the teacher doesn't want to deal with them.
It happened to my nephew, who was a huge problem in classes a few years back. A lot of the problem WAS his fault, but it all started with some of his teachers attitudes about him. He didn't see any point in trying, because every time he did hew as basically told he was a piece of crap.
He went to a chool for kids wiht learning difficulties, and now gets all a's and B's....and not because of watered down classes, either. He just rejoined the mainstream classes, and his grades are even better THERE than in the special needs class.
Why?
In the other school, there were 10 kids to a teacher. It's amazing what "ditch diggers" can accomplish if their dyslexia gets treated and the teachers get to spend quality one on one time with each kid.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
I graduated #256 in my class, and was in the top third. We rented the Pontiac Silverdome for your graduation, no joke. By graduation, we had about 780 kids left. We had started about 3 years before that with over 1000.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:There are vocational high schools in America. I don't know how prevalent they are outside of my homestate (RI), but when I was in eighth grade, the folks from the local vocational high school came, gave a presentation, and told folks to apply.
Sure. America is so big that you can find an example or two of practically anything. But in Norway, every child is asked to choose between vocational and academic tracks, and there is nothing unusual about either choice. There are vocational high schools in the US, but you can't tell me they are the norm; they are an addition to the system rather than a part of it, and the kids have to make an unusual effort to go to one. The middleof-the-road, path-of-least-resistance teenager - and this describes most teenagers - will not go to a vocational school. In Norway they will.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:In the other school, there were 10 kids to a teacher. It's amazing what "ditch diggers" can accomplish if their dyslexia gets treated and the teachers get to spend quality one on one time with each kid.
Quite so, and have you thought about how well this model is going to scale? There are only so many teachers and so many hours in the day. On the scale of a nation the size of the US, you just cannot do this sort of thing for every child. In fact I rather suspect you can't even do it for all the children with special needs.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
I have my reading intervention class for a block period (1.5 hours) PLUS another regular period that is 50 minutes long.
And that's not enough to address their reading problems. They are 20 of them, and 1 of me plus an exceptional ed teacher who is in there with me. Two teachers - 10 kids per teacher.
But it's not enough. It sounds good to say we need more one on one time but KoM is right - it doesn't scale. I have over 100 kids. That's actually pretty good - if I didn't have my reading intervention block class I'd probably have at least 130-150 students per day. High school teachers routinely see 180-190 students (six classes of 30-35 students).
Besides my reading intervention class (which has 15 kids with special needs in it - out of 20) I ALSO teach an inclusion class where out of 26 kids - 14 have special needs. In those classes I have a special ed teacher in there assisting me but that still means she has to split her time between the 14 students who need her help. I wind up spending a lot of my time assisting her with the students who have special needs and my other kids get the short end of the stick.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
quote: It's popular to blame the "bad" parents for all the problems, but it's the over-protective ones that have castrated teacher authority.
Over-protective is just a different kind of bad parent.
When I was a teacher I could give zeroes on assignments, and although I couldn't give less than a 50% on a report card, I could include (it was a preprogrammed choice in the grading software) a note that said "actual grade is less than 50%.
I would go one step further than saying that control over educational content should be decided locally: Educational content should be decided by the students themselves. That is, especially at the beginning of middle school, students should be give choices as to what track they want to take, and what specific courses they want to take. So much of what is wrong with education has to do with how powerless kids feel, and how irrelevant the material is to their interests.
quote:Some people are just destined to be ditch diggers.
quote: And even more end up digging ditches regardless of what they could have done because of attitudes like this.
Don't dismiss it. I think it's important to pay attention to the kids that want to be ditch diggers (or whatever). Make sure that they have access to the best ditch digging technology and training available.
As far as attitudes go, it's really important to recognize the validity of what people want to do. We need ditches dug, and society would be a lot better off if ditch diggers got some respect, instead of being treated as an example of some kind of subhuman.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Like so many things, I think a lot of the problem is an over-reaction to a previous problem. There was a time when a lot of bright, academically inclined kids didn't get into college because they couldn't afford it, or didn't have the right connections, or whatever, and they had to go and be ditch-diggers. And this was a genuine tragedy! I might even call it worse than the current case where non-academically-inclined kids are made unhappy by being forced to read Moby Dick, or whatever. (Although possibly my own Brahmin-caste origins are showing through, there.) A lot of human potential was wasted this way. So as we got richer, we decided to fix that, and by dog we did! Whatever other flaws the system has, I think a bright kid who would do well in college would have to work pretty hard, these days, not to get a degree, if he wanted one. Unfortunately, in saying "Every kid who can benefit, should get a college degree", we went a bit overboard and made that "Every kid we can lay hands on, will-he, nil-he, suited for it or not."
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
Yes I have. Which is why I think we need more teachers, and to pay the ones we have better.
Glen, I wasn't vilifying anything, nor was I suggesting that every child go though a Masters Program. My sister went to a Tech college, and now works for that same college because she believes it is a better education for a lot of people than a standard 4 year college. It was wonderful for her, and gave her both the education and the confidence she needed to succeed, and she is actually doing far better than I am.
I myself and retraining in a Vocational program, a 1 year long LPN course, and doing well in it. I could handle the full RN course, no problem, but this allows me to work as a nurse while continuing my education.
I happen to agree.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Yes, yes; you can solve any problem by plain throwing money and bodies at it. If you want badly enough to get into orbit, build a really big pyramid. But this does not address the problem of what is possible within the constraint of not using 50% of GDP in one dang sector of the economy.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Yes, yes; you can solve any problem by plain throwing money and bodies at it. If you want badly enough to get into orbit, build a really big pyramid. But this does not address the problem of what is possible within the constraint of not using 50% of GDP in one dang sector of the economy.
Thanks for the example of a strawman argument, and for the continued example of the very arrogance you described above.
English departments everywhere thank you. LOL
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Well then; tell me, which of the following options would you like to use to fund your extra teachers and more pay?
More taxes
Cutting other government spending
Borrow and pass the problem on to the children whose education is being funded?
If you choose to cut spending, please specify what you are cutting and by how much, then estimate how many extra teachers and/or extra pay that will cover.
Posted by Parkour (Member # 12078) on :
That's going straight from a strawman to a false dilemma. You could also reduce educational costs by cleaning up inefficiencies in schools and otherwise renovating their bureaucratic overhead. Or you could even let schools be empowered to remove bad teachers again. That would give you plenty of room to start reducing class size and freeing up more for special needs students, and it's a better approach than abandoning them to cut costs.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Would you like to estimate just how much removable inefficiency there is in the school system, and how many extra teachers that will fund? Bearing in mind that the removing will be done by the same government methods that got us into this mess in the first place? As for removing bad teachers, that's certainly a desirable reform, but I don't see how it reduces class sizes.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
Some of the best paid teachers are also those who should have been fired years ago, but for tenure.
There are several studies that show how to improve performance by lowering class sizes, and how to restructure schools so that they can afford to do just that.
Considering some of the tax rates that fund some school systems, raising taxes a bit is a valid way to pay for it, and I would gladly pay an extra $30 a year to improve my kid's education....yet parents in this area voted down exactly that much of a raise in the millage recently.
I am not saying every kid should be in a class with 9 others...but I AM saying that one of the BEST ways to improve a child's education is to reduce the class size and allow teachers to award the actual grades earned by the students. Not grades based on a quota.
Considering the amount of cash we spend on stupid things in this country, asking for a better rate of pay for teachers isn't unreasoonable in my mind.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
I don;t think that class size is the only thing that needs to be addressed, and I know that it isn't a "magic bullet", but it seems to be a good place to start to me.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
quote:Some of the best paid teachers are also those who should have been fired years ago, but for tenure.
No denying that teachers' unions are powerful entities. I've experienced tenured teachers who should've been chucked out the door long ago. I've also recently witnessed the attempted removal of a non-tenured, high-quality instructor because of a personal vendetta. I guess my feelings are mixed. The unions exist for a reason, but as with any sort of power, it comes with responsibility and abuse, unfortunately.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Would you like to estimate just how much removable inefficiency there is in the school system
a phenomenal quantity.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
The way I see it - in the schools...not so much. At the board level - a huge amount.
There's no one in our building that doesn't work extremely hard and isn't needed desperately to keep things running from every one that works in our lunchroom to the assistant principals.
But....if you look at the number of people that work at the board of education you'll see tons of people with titles like "deputy assitant superintendent in charge of one of two programs".
The system where kids attend (not the one I work for) had an assistant superintendent that recently left to take a superintendent's job. They announced that he wouldn't be replaced - that his workload would be absorbed by existing employees due to the economy. I bet there are tons of positions just like that at boards of ed all over the country that could be eliminated and that money for salary and benefits could be given back to the schools so that maybe I wouldn't have to pay for copier paper out of my own pocket.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
I've been led to understand that the increase of school costs is largely due to increased entitlement to special ed services. Kind of like the 80/20 rule, where 20% of students create 80% of the cost increases.
Yes special ed kids need special services, but I think it's getting out of hand. We have a number of bus drivers in our district whose job is to drive a single student to a school that can provide the services the parents demand. Some of these schools are in a different state, and since it takes the driver more than an hour to get there, they just sit and wait for the end of the school day to bring the kid home.
In the most extreme case that I know of, a kid is airlifted to a school several hundred miles away, and given round the clock support along with room and board for each weekday, and then brought home to his parents on the weekend.
I'm sorry, but a free public education just shouldn't go that far.
Posted by DDDaysh (Member # 9499) on :
I hate to be the one to say it, but another way to get out the waste is to allow that ole "voucher system" (or something similar) that got shot down years ago. Schools that function for profit have a remarkable ability to cut down on administrative overhead. There was also an example (in Kansas I think, but it was something presented years ago in a class so I don't have a link) of private companies who have come in to run schools and managed to improve education (based on test scores and parent satisfaction) while decreasing costs.
As for ditch diggers - I think they need WAY more respect than they get. Besides, it's a perfectly valid and even respectable career choice. There are TONS of valid career choices out there that do not require a college education but could benefit from some good training (welding being the most lucrative example I can think of off the top of my head). It's just that, as a society, we've sort of rejected those people. No one wants to have to be the parent of a kid who is going to go to work driving the garbage truck after graduation, or running the pumps at the water treatment plant, or any of a variety of extremely important positions. Heck, even in my little rural town, people are starting to look down on others who do farming and ranching as an occupation instead of just a hobby!
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
quote:The system where kids attend (not the one I work for) had an assistant superintendent that recently left to take a superintendent's job. They announced that he wouldn't be replaced - that his workload would be absorbed by existing employees due to the economy. I bet there are tons of positions just like that at boards of ed all over the country that could be eliminated and that money for salary and benefits could be given back to the schools so that maybe I wouldn't have to pay for copier paper out of my own pocket.
You'll probably only be able to accomplish this if you manage to simultaneously convince the state and federal governments to cut their administrative requirements. All that legislation everyone likes to pass, under the guise of "accountability", generates paperwork requirements...as I'm sure you already know.
quote:I hate to be the one to say it, but another way to get out the waste is to allow that ole "voucher system" (or something similar) that got shot down years ago. Schools that function for profit have a remarkable ability to cut down on administrative overhead. There was also an example (in Kansas I think, but it was something presented years ago in a class so I don't have a link) of private companies who have come in to run schools and managed to improve education (based on test scores and parent satisfaction) while decreasing costs.
I'll call it when I read it. I've seen enough 'waste' by private companies that I won't be swayed by this argument. I'd rather have accountability delegated to a locally elected school board than to a private company that's focused on profit. Maybe it's my cynical nature at this point, but I don't trust for-profit corporations to make proper decisions regarding the education of children.
(And I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a voucher system in Kansas. That's one of my 'get the heck out of here' triggers. There might have been private companies running schools, though.)
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
The voucher system is only a preferable option out of dire necessity. As in: school systems which you cannot reasonably expect to reform themselves within a matter of decades.
Vouchers create a great short term benefit but they are an ultimately hazardous coping mechanism that vampirize districts and create a heavily tiered educational system.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
*nod*
And that's leaving aside all the questions of constitutionality, too.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
:blinks: Constitutional questions? Does the Constitution have anything to say about education?
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by King of Men: :blinks: Constitutional questions? Does the Constitution have anything to say about education?
One of the biggest problems with our schools is that virtually everyone and his dog thinks they know more about education, what's wrong with it and how to fix it than the professionals. Mothers who read one article in readers digest, lobby principals and school boards to adopt a new curriculum. Politicians legislate that school must have a class in "X". Media pundits report one isolated anecdote so many times that people think its become the norm. Preachers tell jokes about how principals would rather have crap games in the halls than prayer groups. If there is any problem in society, some one will blame the school system for it and propose some half baked education reform to fix it.
The second biggest problem in the school system is the misguided notion that everyone can succeed academically. Certainly there are some people failing who have the ability to succeed, but there are many people who don't have the native intelligence or drive to complete a high school degree let alone a college degree. As long as we insist that everyone should be able to complete high school and get into college, the standards for doing those will remain low.
Some people seem to think that policies that prevent teachers from flunking too many students are solely a reflection of bad administration. They don't seem to recognize that it is ultimately the community attitudes that drive this kind of policy, and not the schools themselves.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:The system where kids attend (not the one I work for) had an assistant superintendent that recently left to take a superintendent's job. They announced that he wouldn't be replaced - that his workload would be absorbed by existing employees due to the economy. I bet there are tons of positions just like that at boards of ed all over the country that could be eliminated and that money for salary and benefits could be given back to the schools so that maybe I wouldn't have to pay for copier paper out of my own pocket.
That is an incorrect assessment. I know of several specific instances where administrative positions have been cut and the idea that their loss had no adverse impacts is simply wrong. When administrative positions are cut it means that programs are cut or the duties are passed along to already overloaded teachers in the program.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
While there are plenty that are issues of community attitudes, There are many, many policies of that stripe which are pretty much a reflection almost entirely of the administrations. They're cover mechanisms. The vast majority of the issues my mother has presently are administrators of the school acting in self-defense. Except in the cases where you have a manipulator parent (the kind that constantly assaults teachers and counselors with demands that their children be passed and/or shown special favor) it's not much of a 'community' issue; these are an individual school or district attempting to cover their asses with an artificially inflated pass rate.
In these circumstances (these many circumstances) it is not ultimately the community attitudes that drive the policy, it's an internal compensation mechanism utilized by those in administrative posts.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
I have watched school budgets decline in real dollars for three decades. When schools are facing inadequate funding, dedicated teachers and administrators bend over backwards to cut things that have the least direct impact on the classroom and the kids. That means that teachers and administrators pay the price so that the financial troubles are least visible to people outside the school system. If budget troubles are short term, this is a good thing.
But unfortunately, in recent years communities have interpreted this as an indication that the schools were wasting money in the first place and a justification for not adequately increasing funding during good economic times. Over time, the cost of these cut backs accumulates as teachers and administrators burn out, resources get strung out, programs die out and facilities wear out. But because dedicated teachers and administrators are doing their best to keep that from happening, it happens gradually and not promptly after a budget cut back, so people don't connect the deterioration of the system with the decreasing funding.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
Inner-city schools tend to have an even more delayed degridation in response to cuts, because they tend to be able to stall the decline by chewing through and spitting out Teach for America recruits, like a grinder chews through meat.
Those poor guys : (
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: While there are plenty that are issues of community attitudes, There are many, many policies of that stripe which are pretty much a reflection almost entirely of the administrations. They're cover mechanisms. The vast majority of the issues my mother has presently are administrators of the school acting in self-defense. Except in the cases where you have a manipulator parent (the kind that constantly assaults teachers and counselors with demands that their children be passed and/or shown special favor) it's not much of a 'community' issue; these are an individual school or district attempting to cover their asses with an artificially inflated pass rate.
In these circumstances (these many circumstances) it is not ultimately the community attitudes that drive the policy, it's an internal compensation mechanism utilized by those in administrative posts.
Sam, I don't know what systems you are looking at or what specific administrative policies you are looking at, but I'd like to know what you think motivates administrators to make these policies. You say its coverup. What exactly are they covering up?
Over the years I have seen numerous attempts to institute a minimum competency exam for high school graduation (in several different locations), usually initiated by the state legislature of the local school board. The first one I'm familiar with was tried in the 70s when I was in high school. In every case, the first round (which was often a trial round) found that a large percentage of the kids couldn't pass an exam that was around 9th grade level. Then there was an uproar by both parents that were outraged that their kid, who had completed all the other high school graduation requirements, wouldn't be allowed to pass and by the community as a whole who were flat out unwilling to tolerate the failure rates. Ultimately what happens is the test is dropped as a requirement for High School graduation in one way or another.
I guess how you interpret that depends a great deal on what you see as the cause of the very high failure rates.
I suppose that if you believe that the failure rates are the results of poor administration, then it would be logical to conclude that the administration is covering up by reducing the requirements to pass. But in this case you are using circular logic. You use the policies that reduce the requirements for passing as evidence that the administrations policies are what are causing the low pass rates.
If on the other hand, you believe that factors in the homes and communities of kids are the most important factor in their academic performance, then you will come to very different conclusions. Why would administrators be trying to cover-up that up? It makes no sense. If the schools adopt a policy like for example, kids must turn in at least 80% of homework to pass, and 70% of the kids flunk for that reason -- where would you place the blame? Based on what you've said, you'd most likely put it on the kids and their families. But you can bet that if that were to happen (70% of kids in a school fail), that it would be front page news and people wouldn't be saying -- those kids should work harder or we parents should be making sure our kids do the homework. No way, they'd be saying the teachers overload the kids with homework, asking why kids who pass the tests shouldn't pass without homework and ultimately asking for the administrator's head on a platter. So school administrators who want to keep their jobs, don't allow that kind of policy. An individual teacher in the system is likely to chafe at such a policy because they are fairly insulated from the politics of education. But you don't get to be an administrator with out have a finger on the pulse of the community and you don't stay an administrator if you allow policies that will cause a community backlash. That may be part of a vicious cycle that drags the standards down further and further, but that doesn't make administrators the root of the problem.
In America, high school graduation has become an entitlement. We think everyone should have a high school diploma and it has become common practice that everyone will get one unless they disqualify themselves by dropping out. That is a status quo that is very hard to change. Failing to get a high school diploma is a big black mark on your record. Raising the standard for passing, means that there will be people who get that black mark on their record next year who wouldn't have gotten last year and people aren't going to accept that easily.
[ September 11, 2009, 04:18 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
quote:In America, high school graduation has become an entitlement. We think everyone should have a high school diploma and it has become common practice that everyone will get one unless they disqualify themselves by dropping out. That is a status quo that is very hard to change.
This. This. This.
Today our school board announced that they will phase out our graduation exam. My students today were laughing and cutting up in my room telling me that no matter what happened, they knew they were graduating now.
Thanks state board of education. You just made what I'm trying to teach them even MORE irrelevant in their eyes.
Posted by Sala (Member # 8980) on :
Belle, it amazes me that a graduation exam would be discontinued in this age of test, test, test and accountability and NCLB. Wow, how are they going to get away with that?
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sala: Belle, it amazes me that a graduation exam would be discontinued in this age of test, test, test and accountability and NCLB. Wow, how are they going to get away with that?
It shouldn't. They've been pretty much done away with in one form or another in most states. The exams are still given, but you get some sort of High School Diploma whether you pass or fail.
Posted by scholarette (Member # 11540) on :
In Arizona, at the school district my m-i-l teaches at, a student failed the final exam, which should have kept her from graduating. She sued, the district caved and the test became completely useless.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Sam, I don't know what systems you are looking at or what specific administrative policies you are looking at, but I'd like to know what you think motivates administrators to make these policies. You say its coverup. What exactly are they covering up?
Here is a perfect set of examples. all three of these have been chosen as examples I have witnessed as well as being very similar to many other cases as they are emblematic of problematic incentives on the administrative level (as opposed to problems on the teacher level and problems on the parental level, both of which also exist).
1. A high school's math department is failing a very high percentage of their students. The superintendent of schools is starting to take heat: if the students can't pass math classes, many more of them are going to drop out, dropout rates make schools look bad. The 'solution' is for the administrators to go to the math teachers who are failing large numbers of students and begin torquing them. Meetings are called. "The students are being failed because they don't hand in work," protests the math teacher(s). They aren't learning if they're not in class, they aren't passing if they don't hand in assignments. I have an approved curriculum, they say. I give all these students ample opportunity to hand in their work. If they're in attendance but don't have their work, they can arrange with me for an extension. But if they don't hand in their work, I can't pass them. The classes are not hard.
Yes yes, we understand all that, of course, say the administrators. But we need to get these students through anyway so our dropout rate goes down. Let's us work together to figure out a way to pass these students anyway. How about we give them partial credit for work they didn't hand in and call that a 'participation grade?' How about we give them the opportunity to do a 'work portfolio' nearing the end of the school year, where they write a paper or something about what they learned in math, or give them 'independent study' credits? Just something to excuse bumping their grade up to the point where we can just move them along without them having to repeat classes.
Math teachers are angry, are torqued more by administrators, eventually are cajoled or 'moderated' into accepting new school systems that allow the school to quietly move these students along irrespective to their ability to perform in mathematics. The dropout rate is "managed" somewhat, in a way which takes the heat off the district or the administration of the schools. In one particular school which got turned into an open enrollment 'dumping ground' as I watched, this was the method employed by the principal to forestall heat on her from the district for underperformance, for five years. It began to advance into the corrective management of math graduation requirements, by removing them. Five years! This was but one tool in her litany of defense mechanisms. She was not a good principal in terms of improving or even maintaining the quality of the school; she was a good principal in terms of being able to cover her own ass by engaging in programs that push students through and artificially manage dropout and holdback rates.
Compare this to Belle's stories. 'You are no longer allowed to give students zeroes.' 'We are no longer testing for graduation.' All pristine examples of schools or districts internally managing their problems, "solving" them by removing academic standards wherever possible.
2. The Dumping Ground system. Schools get extra funding for special needs students. I do not know what the national mean is as of this year but on average a school district was getting additional funding for about 12% of their students. While there are regulations on how this extra money can be spent, these regulations are rarely airtight; in many places these funds are either technically insufficient or too mismanaged to be able to provide for the actual educational needs for these students (sometimes both). In the too-common instances where these funds are simply mismanaged, it is because the schools are essentially acting to divert as much of the excess cash-per-head of these special needs students to 'fill out' expenditure elsewhere. One way or another, they are encouraged to minimize spending on these kids when they're having enough trouble with their overall student body to begin with; the special ed / special needs students are tacitly written off as something that is best deprioritized and 'coasted,' (see: 'lets just figure out a way not to fail them').
Sometimes it's not that blatantly crass, it's just that sufficient in-place systems and resources for these special needs kids simply do not exist and require major implementation costs to actually start, and the schools simply don't want to bother or don't think they could wrestle it through the bureaucracy. At any rate, the special ed departments in schools facing this practice often just accept this as a fact of life, something they are powerless to influence.
The end result is utterly insufficient special-needs departments in schools which do little more than babysit students and try to minimize the cost of managing them as much as possible. A favorite tactic is to pawn them off to normal classes as often as possible, since the less small-size classes they have to take in a day, the less resource-intensive these students are.
The contrast is overwhelming. Let's take the story of "sally," a very real special-needs student who travels between District A and District B when her mom moves to a new job. Sally is very autistic and requires a wheelchair to get around and is, for the most part, the kind of student which really is not capable of much academic advancement; she's more being babysat. She benefits from parapro involvement and small classes with teachers skilled at handling students with autistic spectrum disorders. In District A, which actively engaged in the proper management of special needs students, sally was provided most of this; her case management was a little bit of an overall loss for the district as a whole, but that was okay here; they had a functioning special-needs system and, present that functional capacity, they engaged upon it.
When sally was moved to District B, she was effectively transferred to a school that did not have funding problems but had still decided to coast on not establishing or maintaining an effective special-needs department; the priority was simply to pawn sally off to as many teachers of normal classes as possible (when sally is put in a standard-size class as often as possible, the school has to "waste" less on limited-size classes for her and all other special-needs students, which have to "spend" more teachers on less students).
As anyone who has recently come out of any school district that follows this sort of dumping ground strategy, schools have favorite classes to 'pawn' their special needs students off to. Sally is put in no less than three already overburdened Draw Paint 1 classes, because art classes seem like a great place to just have these students put to sit for hours on end (or in the case of moderately more functional students, perhaps to doodle and make messes). Despite the fact that these classes are already at full capacity, she is shuttled in there every morning, hustled into a corner where her bulky powered chair will only block two or three seats, and is kept away from artistic supplies (they would be dangerous to her).
The teacher of this Draw Paint 1 class is intensely frustrated by this, in addition to finding it tragic. Her position is that the student should not be in this class at all, for many reasons.
For starters this student has 'sat through' two draw paint 1 classes already, while there's tons of students lining up to get into this class because they desperately want to move up the art track.
She has her hands full already with a class of 30+ students, and it is difficult enough already for her to try to help out everyone in a class of that size.
Sally is disruptive and actually has to be occasionally kept from harming herself. She will, from time to time, start babbling loudly or thrashing in the middle of a lesson demonstration, wasting ten or more minutes as the teacher has to go track down today's wayward parapro. At times, she will start engaging in repetitive motions that will cause her to break her own skin, causing an even more urgent disruption, setting the class behind its syllabus schedule even more dramatically.
"I am not trained to," says the teacher, "nor should I be expected to have to deal with this student." She feels rightly that sally should not be placed on her as a management concern. When she is, the rest of the students suffer for it, but every year sally is hustled into a basic room with the expectation that teachers are simply going to babysit her.
Sally, a self-harming and disruptive student as a result of a tragic condition that requires very special attention, is managed incompetently; it seems to come with harm both to sally as well as the general student populace, and the true reason for this incompetence is not exposed for years until a particularly violent incident involving other special-needs students: a mentally disabled student with severe behavioral and aggression issues who should never have been kept at a standard high school at all went berserk and broke a parapro's jaw and tore off naked into the hallway in a dangerous manner before being clubbed down by multiple security guards. Suddenly this special needs student situation manifests as a paramount issue to the school board, who eventually learn that the reason for the systemic neglect was, essentially, to protect the district's 'bottom line' in spite of overspending in other areas, including a complete refurnishing of the posh district administration offices in the south of town. The schools had a decisive lack of realistically qualified special needs teachers, instead using the department as an excellent place to reassign teachers when they were not working out in regular positions but couldn't exactly be let go without a draining ordeal from the unions. Bad special needs teachers or parapros are really bad, since their students require such specialized management. In addition, when special needs departments are particularly mismanaged, there arises the issue of vastly disparate needs groups being clustered together into the same facilities. Students with relatively minor issues like visual impairment needs or dyslexia issues are, as a matter of course, put in the same classrooms as students with behavioral problems, drug-related issues and insubordination problems, and the severely mentally disabled, where they effectively receive no education. Talk to a number of parents with special needs kids who hail from these numerous districts and you will encounter many problem stories related to this sort of systemic neglect.
This whole situation, still not even completely managed to this day, to the best of my knowledge, was not the product of real financial necessity (though in some districts it is!) but was the result of systematic neglect and repurposing on the administrative level, for administrative interests. Cut spending in one area, you cover up overspending in others; in the most egregious cases, overspending on sports or executive concerns. Sally was eventually removed from district B to a special educational program provided for at private expense.
3. The third situation is one I will only describe very generally: it involves the administrators of schools in open enrollment/busing districts purposefully neglecting their ESL and english immersion programs in the hopes of driving down hispanic populations in their schools, working to prevent them from becoming a minority-clustering school in that district and to avoid ESL issues on NCLB testing (which must be taken in english for any student after three years) as well as to reduce the issues related to language IEP's. Scummy, but effective relative to the needs and wants of administrators.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit:
quote:Originally posted by Sala: Belle, it amazes me that a graduation exam would be discontinued in this age of test, test, test and accountability and NCLB. Wow, how are they going to get away with that?
It shouldn't. They've been pretty much done away with in one form or another in most states. The exams are still given, but you get some sort of High School Diploma whether you pass or fail.
I'm not a huge fan of the CAHSEE, and some of the court cases are still pending. But so far, it IS still in place.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
When I was in school, you could graduate with a high school diploma, and you could also get a regents diploma in a variety of specialties. I got regents diplomas in math and science.
It seems to me that the concept of grade inflation and social promotion needs redefining, or just better understanding. Students perform better when they are learning material that is easily mastered. That means that we should present material at the correct level for each student to understand so that every student should be able to average A's and B's. But when teachers (or schools) do that, they are accused of dumbing down education. To do it right, each student should be presented with material that is right for them, which doesn't mean that the curriculum is dumbed down. In a perfect world, every student should get straight A's, but it should be easily understood that an A in math for one student doesn't mean the same as an A in math for another student.
We take a diploma to mean that a student has learned a certain amount of "stuff". Employers don't look over your high school transcript and see that you completed algebra, but not analytical geometry, and make an assessment of your skills based on that information. They want a quick look at your diploma and then just want to be able to assume that means you have certain basic skill set. It would make much more sense to me to eliminate the diploma, and replace it with a transcript. "Here's what I learned," is much more valuable than: "I graduated."
There is a quote: "Education isn't about filling a bucket, it's about lighting a fire." I've seen students who couldn't read, but were enthusiastic learners. I've also seen students who could reel off facts that they'd memorized, but who hated school and did everything they could to undermine their own educations. It seems to me that prescribed curricula, no matter how basic, is just about filling the bucket. Education fails our students because forcing kids to learn some bureaucrat's wish list is guaranteed to put out the fire.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
quote:Belle, it amazes me that a graduation exam would be discontinued in this age of test, test, test and accountability and NCLB. Wow, how are they going to get away with that?
I don't want to answer for Belle and I'm not trying to...but I had to bite on this...
No Child Left Behind is one of the drivers behind, or a direct result of, the perceived 'entitlement' of a high school diploma.
Do you honestly think the people of your state, or this country, would stand for legislation that mandated a high school graduation exit exam, the results of which would be used to determine whether a diploma was awarded or not?
Schools are being held more accountable, all right. They're being held accountable for graduating all their students. That seems to be the legacy of NCLB.
Personally, I've become pretty liberal with my belief that some students should not graduate. I'm perfectly content with the idea that some students will fail to graduate from high school and some (perhaps even more) will fail to graduate from college. I'm not saying that we should remove all accountability from schools, though.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
They say they aren't making things easier for the students because they are replacing the grad exam with "end of course exams." The idea being, if a student takes biology in 9th grade, they'll take an end of course exam when they complete biology instead of taking the biology portion of the graduation exam.
What I have not determined yet, is whether that biology exam is standardized across the state or if they are just saying that any student who passes their final exam gets credit for the course and therefore gets a diploma. Having seen some of the final exams that are given, I can easily see how a person could be given a passing score on an "end of course exam" and not truly have learned anything. I've seen some teachers who make their final exams open book.
And Tstorm is exactly right. The NCLB requirements factor graduation rate into the adequate yearly progress rating. If your drop out rate is too high - you don't make AYP. I can almost guarantee this change is directly related to Alabama's high dropout rate - they figure if they make it easier to graduate fewer people will drop out and more schools will make AYP.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
Samp, Everyone of your examples support my point. Administrators create bad policies in response to unrealistic expectations from the community.
Take your first example, what were the administrators alternatives? He/she could have supported the Math teachers, kept the high failing rate and high drop out rates, but then they would have failed AYP and people would be blaming the administrator the high drop out rates. The administrator would be getting even more pressure from the school board and the legislature to do something about drop out rates and when he/ she couldn't fix the problem without lower the standards, he/she would most likely be replaced by someone who was willing to do that.
Ideally I suppose, the teacher and the administrator would come up with some plan to get more students to turn in the homework. But what tools do they have to accomplish that which they aren't already using? They can't nail the kids feet to the floor and pump math down their throats. Ninety percent of education has to come from the learners not the teachers. It the learners are not willing to do their part, the teacher is left with few if any options.
NCLB simply codified what the community expected from schools without actually providing any ideas about how schools should meet those expectations or providing them with any resources to do it. Its just one in a long line of examples of how the community expectations for schools are completely out of touch with the on the ground reality of teaching and learning.
[ September 12, 2009, 09:11 AM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
Posted by Sala (Member # 8980) on :
quote: They say they aren't making things easier for the students because they are replacing the grad exam with "end of course exams." The idea being, if a student takes biology in 9th grade, they'll take an end of course exam when they complete biology instead of taking the biology portion of the graduation exam.
Ahh, now I understand. We also use EOC exams here in Georgia instead of high school graduation exams. I was reading it as there being no exams, not a transfer from one type to another.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Samp, Everyone of your examples support my point. Administrators create bad policies in response to unrealistic expectations from the community.
Take your first example, what were the administrators alternatives? He/she could have supported the Math teachers, kept the high failing rate and high drop out rates, but then they would have failed AYP and people would be blaming the administrator the high drop out rates.
Considering AYP wasn't in effect when this began and that this condition was created by a school's administration trying to avoid accountability to the district's analysis, can't say you're right on this one. The administration was trying to cover up evidence of a dire math education situation in that school, one that wouldn't really be revealed until standardized testing for the state broke the issue.
besides, I wouldn't really consider "a school with a troubled math program should reform that troubled math program" to be an unrealistic expectation from a community, and that's pretty much what it came down to once NCLB was in effect, because now it was no longer sufficient merely to get the kids to cruise through.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
Well today I talked to a high school teacher who has heard more than I have and her understanding is that the EOC exam is actually the exact same exam they used as the Graduation Exam. The only difference is when it's taken - the Grad exam used to be given in the junior year and all subjects were given together - you'd take biology and reading one day and English and math the next for example. Now, the EOC comes at the conclusion of the course, which actually will work better for those students who take biology in their freshman year. They won't have to wait two years before taking the exam.
Looking at it in that light, it seems to be a logical choice and without any lowering of standards - the students still have to prove mastery of the same material. So if what I heard today is correct, I withdraw any objection to the change. Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Looking at it in that light, it seems to be a logical choice and without any lowering of standards - the students still have to prove mastery of the same material. So if what I heard today is correct, I withdraw any objection to the change.
It is better than I originally thought, but it does lower standards in a back handed way. The new procedure, tests what the students have mastered at the conclusion of the course. The old standard, tested what they retained a year later. Retention is an important aspect of mastery and they will no longer be testing that. Retention isn't 100% for anyone. Assuming the passing level is kept at the same point, this is definitely lowering the standard.
Since not all students take the classes at the same time, this procedure is arguable more equitable and possibly justified. But don't fool yourself into think it doesn't lower the standards.
Posted by TheBlueShadow (Member # 9718) on :
quote:Originally posted by Belle: Well today I talked to a high school teacher who has heard more than I have and her understanding is that the EOC exam is actually the exact same exam they used as the Graduation Exam. The only difference is when it's taken - the Grad exam used to be given in the junior year and all subjects were given together - you'd take biology and reading one day and English and math the next for example. Now, the EOC comes at the conclusion of the course, which actually will work better for those students who take biology in their freshman year. They won't have to wait two years before taking the exam.
Looking at it in that light, it seems to be a logical choice and without any lowering of standards - the students still have to prove mastery of the same material. So if what I heard today is correct, I withdraw any objection to the change.
I was still in high school when they started the EOC exams in Georgia. It was still in its trial phase; however, so I also got to take the Georgia High School Graduation Test. They were definitely similar to the GHSGT and were treated by the school just as any other standardized test. I don't recall particulars but I'd assume having the test at the end of each course allows for more questions on a single topic.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Considering AYP wasn't in effect when this began and that this condition was created by a school's administration trying to avoid accountability to the district's analysis, can't say you're right on this one.
Irrelevant. High drop out rates were considered a problem long before AYP. You said yourself that this decision to keep the school from looking bad. Looking bad to whom? If it was just the district, why did the district care about high drop out rates? School board pressure? Pressure from the legislature? If you keep following the line, it eventually leads the community, and the fact that most members of the community expect schools to keep kids from dropping out. It still boils down to community expectations.
quote:The administration was trying to cover up evidence of a dire math education situation in that school, one that wouldn't really be revealed until standardized testing for the state broke the issue.
That isn't consistent with what you said before. You said students were failing because they didn't turn in homework. How is that evidence of a serious problem in math education and why would a school want to cover it up. If students couldn't pass a standardized exam even after completing all work attempting all the work assigned in class, I'd agree it was the math programs fault, but you didn't say that was happen. You said the students were failing because they did not turn in home work. Was this the case or wasn't it?
You can't possibly hold the school responsible for the students not doing homework. Very few people can learn math without doing homework, I can't imagine any reforms that would have made it possible for most people to master math without doing homework. Do you really think it is the schools responsibility to force students to do homework? How can they do that? What tools do they have which they weren't already using? If the community expects that some minimum fraction of kids will pass math and those kids refuse to do the homework required for them to pass, what options do the schools have? They try harder to motivate the kids to do homework and if that fails, they either lower the standard for passing or fall short of the community expectations. The problem lies in the communities refusal to hold the kids and families responsible and placing the full burden on the schools. Its not a simple question of lilly livered administrators.
Policies that allow students to pass without doing the homework may lead to a vicious cycle that results in yet fewer students doing homework, but once again these policies are a symptom of the underlying problem not the cause.
At some point, you have to recognize the responsibility of the student in all this. No one can force kids to learn. If they don't cooperate and do their homework, they aren't going to learn. One of the biggest problems in American education is that we hold schools responsible but not kids. On of the biggest problems was with NCLB (and all similarly motivated programs that preceded it) was that it placed 100% of the responsibility on the schools for something that was not 100% in their control.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:I don't recall particulars but I'd assume having the test at the end of each course allows for more questions on a single topic.
Not if Belle is correct that the only difference is when the exam is administered. As I said before, this new system is arguably more equitable, but it is also clearly a lower standard since the old procedure required that students be able to retain material if they had mastered it, and the new standard does not.
Posted by DDDaysh (Member # 9499) on :
My favorite was on the TAKS (the Texas graduation exam) that first year. Students had to 'pass' the exam to graduate, but on the math section "passing" was a score of only 42%. Of course, many kids STILL failed, but even the ones that passed may not have known more than half of the material.
Another trick I saw played at the school where I taught - "homeschooling". I had at least 5 who I TAUGHT drop out of school, but at the end of the year the school recorded only two drop outs. How did they get away with this? They convinced the parents to "withdraw" their children and claim they would "homeschool" them. It was BS of course! One of the mothers who did this didn't even LIVE with her child. It was a pure cheat to the system!
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:At some point, you have to recognize the responsibility of the student in all this. No one can force kids to learn.
If you at all think that is either my position or my point, you're just talking past me now.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
Except, Rabbit, two years after you took biology, the school would re-arrange your schedule for several weeks and allow you to attend a "refresher" course with the biology teacher to get you ready for the grad exam.
One reason the state board said they made this change is to alleviate the interruption of teaching and learning that the grad exam caused. I think it might actually be beneficial. A significant amount of time was dedicated to remediating students who didn't pass the grad exam. Basically, you would make sure they passed by giving them multiple tries and having teachers doing grad exam prep before each try. This might actually save instructional time and be a more accurate measure of what students actually know, rather than what we've spoon fed them through grad exam "prep sessions" which is nothing more than teaching to the test.
I'm actually coming around to the idea that it's probably a good change.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary:
quote:At some point, you have to recognize the responsibility of the student in all this. No one can force kids to learn.
If you at all think that is either my position or my point, you're just talking past me now.
Then please explain yourself better. In the example you gave where the school administration forced teachers to wave the homework requirements in math, what was the school doing wrong in the first place? Why do you see the fact that so many students weren't turning in homework as a failure on the part of the schools math education program? What is it you think the school was trying to cover up? Was the school doing something that made it unnecessarily difficult for the students to complete the homework? Was there something they could have been doing but weren't which would have resulted in more homework being done?
So far what you have told me is that the students were failing because they hadn't completed homework. The administrators were concerned the low pass rates would be blamed on the school system, so they lowered the standards. You accuse the schools of doing this to cover up there inadequate math program but the only problem you've told me with the program was that a huge fraction of the students weren't doing the homework.
Can you see how that looks like you are holding the school responsible for something that should be the students responsibility?
Please tell me what I'm missing.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
For starters, none of my points are predicated on the idea that I think you can 'force kids to learn.'
These students who were coming into that school were a problem precisely because their earlier schools had sort of 'passed the buck' on their math education. Rather than represent this resulting lack of math performance or participation, the administrators instead opted for an artificially sustained graduation rate. They took a real problem and acted in a way which was for the benefit of the adults alone, not for the benefit of education.
Yes, I recognize the responsibilities of students. I can conversely say that you need to appropriate a fair amount of recognition for responsibility that lies on the schools, when it comes to districts and schools that are ultimately dysfunctional. There are plenty of adults behaving badly in these situations. Many of them are part of the system. Many of them are protected by the system.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by Belle: Except, Rabbit, two years after you took biology, the school would re-arrange your schedule for several weeks and allow you to attend a "refresher" course with the biology teacher to get you ready for the grad exam.
One reason the state board said they made this change is to alleviate the interruption of teaching and learning that the grad exam caused. I think it might actually be beneficial. A significant amount of time was dedicated to remediating students who didn't pass the grad exam. Basically, you would make sure they passed by giving them multiple tries and having teachers doing grad exam prep before each try. This might actually save instructional time and be a more accurate measure of what students actually know, rather than what we've spoon fed them through grad exam "prep sessions" which is nothing more than teaching to the test.
I'm actually coming around to the idea that it's probably a good change.
I didn't mean to argue that this was overall a bad choice. I can see many advantages to the system, including those you cite. On the whole, I think its probably a better system. But it is a lower standard, even taking into account refresher courses. S
Students who barely pass under the new system, will retain less of what they learned about biology after graduation than they would have under the old system. Retention is an important measure of mastery. The requirement that students remember the material at the end of the class is easier to meet than the requirement that they remember it two or three years later. It is a lower standard.
As for the problems of teaching to the test, this system simply shifts those problems from the refresher courses into the regular courses. It won't eliminate them. Remedial work will still have to be done for students who don't pass the test the first time. Poor students will still require multiple tries to pass the exams and teachers will still be required to prep them before each try. These problems can only be reduced if more students pass on the first try. That may in fact happen under the new system, but only because the standard for passing is effectively lower.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
Your point about retention is a good one, and you are correct that remediation will still have to occur. No doubt about it.
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
quote:Originally posted by Belle: Your point about retention is a good one, and you are correct that remediation will still have to occur. No doubt about it.
Thanks, and as I said, the new system has many advantages. On the whole I think I would support it. I just think its important to recognize the caveats.
Posted by Parkour (Member # 12078) on :
quote: The administrators were concerned the low pass rates would be blamed on the school system, so they lowered the standards. You accuse the schools of doing this to cover up there inadequate math program but the only problem you've told me with the program was that a huge fraction of the students weren't doing the homework.
Maybe you should read this sentence again. You name one problem, then say you can only see another one.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
Let me take a crack at this and see if I understand what The Rabbit is saying.
1. Students were not doing the homework. 2. Schools were concerned about the low passing rates being blamed on the schools instead of the students. 3. Schools lowered the standards to pass more students.
Assuming we're just talking about the math department in SamPrimary's post, I think I understand what Rabbit's driving at.
In Sam's example, the district 'managed the problem internally', which (if I'm understanding her position correctly) is a cover-up. In summary, the district lowered the standards for students, to enable more to pass. This does not solve the underlying issue, it merely hides it from public knowledge; hence, the cover-up.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but I trust Sam to let me know if I'm misrepresenting her position. That would not be my intention, here.
What other steps could the district have taken? Assuming that "take no action" results in public disclosure of the failing students and condemnation from the public that the school is failing. I'm interested in what other things might have been done. For the sake of the discussion, let's assume that there aren't infinite resources to tap.
Posted by Parkour (Member # 12078) on :
quote:In Sam's example, the district 'managed the problem internally', which (if I'm understanding her position correctly) is a cover-up.
And it's exactly what Rabbit *asked* for:
quote:Sam, I don't know what systems you are looking at or what specific administrative policies you are looking at, but I'd like to know what you think motivates administrators to make these policies. You say its coverup. What exactly are they covering up?
They had a problem they had to deal with, students unwilling or unable to do math work. Instead of dealing with it they instead create new problems (no real academic standards) to cover up the issue so they do not have to put themselves at risk tackling the open issue.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by Glenn Arnold: When I was in school, you could graduate with a high school diploma, and you could also get a regents diploma in a variety of specialties. I got regents diplomas in math and science.
That's because you (clearly) went to high school in New York State.
While I have some issues with the NY Department of Education, the Regents Exams are one of the things about NY that I think should be used as a model for more states.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
In NY you can no longer just get a high school diploma. You have to get a diploma issued by the state, and as a result of state testing.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
I know. That has been true for quite some time -- 15-20 years, IIRC.
Posted by ken_in_sc (Member # 12072) on :
Back in the 1970s, as an enlisted Airman, I applied for the Airman’s Education and Commissioning Program. You had to have 60 hours of college credit to qualify and then you had to complete CLEP (College Level Examination Program) tests to prove that you had learned something in those courses. After that, you still had to pass a local board interview and compete with everyone else who had applied. Success meant a full Air Force scholarship to complete your degree and a shot at Officer Training School. After two tries I made it. My point is that testing by itself is not bad. It has to be backed up by actual course work and not just test prep—as seems to be the practice today.
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By graduation, we had about 780 kids left. We had started about 3 years before that with over 1000.
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