Maybe it’s because we’ve seen what the Democrats have done to the public education system over the past 50 years. Spending more money isn’t the answer. It’s like giving cash to a junkie. In many places, the teachers’ unions are in bed with the Democratic Party, supplying funds and campaign labor to help preserve a dysfunctional education system.
I don’t blame the teachers. For the most part, the public has got what they asked for, and deserve. They prefer comforting illusions over reality.
Adventure on the high Cs. 
The state of public education today is a deplorable mess, and it’s getting worse.
If I ever hit the lottery, I’m opening up my own private high school. Classes will be taught at least 1 - 2 years advanced; ie, 9th graders will be taught at 10th or 11th grade level. Juniors and seniors will be taught at collegiate level. Passing grade is 80, not 60, and to graduate, the student has to score…oh say about 650 minimum on each phase of the SAT.
It’s a nice dream. And if I ever get to make it happen, I’d have parents lined up for blocks to register their kids so they could get a decent education.
This would be great. In my situation, I have tried to really challenge my students. My course is very tough. Fair, but tough. I know the kids can meet the challenge if given the chance, and the right amount of guidance, but many parents don’t want to put in the time and energy. They just want their kid to be happy.
At first, it was only the parents who complained. Then other teachers were telling me (when I went to them for advice) to just tone it down–give more extra credit and “participation” points so that grades would go up. My principal confronted me, and told me that I HAD to increase the number of students who were going to pass my course. I told him that more students would pass if they started actually working. He told me that that didn’t matter.
Keep everyone happy, and you’re a “great” teacher these days.
Ignorance truly is bliss.
I’m rather confused about this. I don’t know about your area Newport Beach, CA, but I haven’t seen any Republican-caused problems here in East Tennessee, a heavily Red area. The No Child Left Behind Act was more about ensuring testing and accountability than anything - ideally if not directly against the kind of soft-stepping described in the OP. Come to think of it, education simply hasn’t been on the important list in the last few years. I’m not sure the NCLB doesn’t violate the theCommerce Clause, but the courts have been ignoring on that one forever
Republicans mostly have a hard-on for kicking the teacher’s union. The schools they want to do better. Used right, the NCLB is a very good thing. SInce I come from two states which already had standardized tests, we’ve had no problems with “teaching to the test.” I went to two good but ordinary schools, did well, and my teachers never patronized me. Both were very solidly Red.
There’s something wrong with the idea of teaching to the standardized tests. But these tests are neither hard nor arbritrary; students should be able to pass them easily unless they have serious problems or really awful teachers. I submit that JustAnotherGeek’s real beef should be with the Massachusetts Dep’t of Education, not the NCLB.
Sure, the NCLB isn’t the saving grace of the planet. But it’s a darn good tool for finding out where your schools rank. That’s all it’s supposed to do. It’s a starting point, not the finish line.
Actually, noting Testy’s experience, I’ve heard that U.S. schools overseas are amazingly good.
Anyway, this is one reason why I support things like Charter Shcools and vouchers., Simply put, we can no longer trust the public school system in at least half the U.S.
One of my major issues with NCGA is that it is all hype, no substance, and no good leadership. Instead of the Feds coming up with a good plan (or seeing a good plan and recommending using it), they said to the states “go create your own assesment standards.” The federal DOE is also not fully funding all of the changes they are requiring. Last I knew, Delaware told da man that they would rather lose all federal funding so that they wouldn’t have to comply with the new NCGA laws, which would cost them more than the Feds give them in total.
You are right, however, in that I am in awe at the inneptitude of the Mass DOE (and their inability to create a decent standardized testing system). Believe it or not, but I am actually in favor of subject based standardized testing as requirements for graduation. I just cannot stand the trainwreck that is the MCAS. (Of course, it is no surprise, coming as it does from the trainwreck that is the Mass DOE.)
I (again) completely agree. One piece of advice that I can offer is to have some flexibility in your curricula (if that’s possible). Basically, I treat the first 80% of my curricula as the fewest possible number of topics that I will get to in a year. 90% is the standard, and 100% are for those few rare years with top-notch classes. That way, I move at the pace that best matches the students. I have yet to teach the same class the same way in two different years.
One of the other things I came to realize is the the abilities of the students in my classes don’t follow a linear scale - it’s logarythmic. That is, the kids who can get the high ninties are about ten times “better” at it than the kids who get, say high 70’s. (Or some such…) I know that the kids who routinely don’t work are the bane of teachers who actually try, but the courses as I teach them are not designed for those students (see previous rant). I have no problem justifying in my mind a sliding scale for tests / assesment. Work grades, OTOH get no such scale.
Oh, piffle. Eye R a chemistry teashur. Y’all r’ lucky ewe kin and erst end mi attoll! 
1.) “Logarithmic”
2.) I should clarify what I teach. I was nominally hired to teach Chemistry (with a BA therein). But I have been teaching Earth Science, Physics and AP Physics (C: Mech), as well.
-Geek
OH, and NCGA = No Child Gets Ahead
When you tie funding to passing the test, it becomes the finish line, good intentions cast aside.
These schools exist. They are college-prep private high schools. My oldest is starting to look at high schools and, despite having extremely high opinions about my precious’ abilities, I came away from a recent open house intimidated–first place in the state math contest 5 years running, 20 or so national merit seniors, award-winning student magazine, newspaper, theater program, band, etc., 80% of faculty with advanced degrees, etc., ad nauseum.
You have to test in. The pressure, the positioning going on among parents, was palpable. Is my kid as smart as that other kid? “Well, my kid is in math club and chess club and he has 400 service hours helping the homeless.” People are hiring coaches and tutors to assist with the entry essay, acing the test and/or getting in on athletic merit.
I am sure my son will get a top-notch education if he goes to this school.
I feel kinda sick inside thinking about it.
Just an anecdote from the other end of the spectrum.
Also, if you believe Steven Levitt in Freakonomics, if you give teachers and administrators enough incentive to cheat, some will - not the kids, the teachers and administrators. Tie their jobs and their funding to passing and passing may not mean kids have learned anything.
Two comments:
First, I agree that the mollycoddling approach is turning out graduates who simply won’t be able to cope with the real world, and I can’t imaging a worse lesson than “if you fail, Daddy’s lawyer can fix it for you.”
Second, it’s not the same everywhere. When I went to school, the grading curve was 90-100% = A, 80-89% = B, 70-79% = C, 60-69% = D, and anything under 60% was a fail. In my son’s school (a Montana public school), I went to a teacher conference and noted that his 93.5% grade in math was a B. I asked the teacher how much he’d have to bring it up, and the teacher didn’t know. Huh? The math teacher doesn’t know the numeric cutoff between an A and a B? And since when is a 93.5% only a B anyway? It appears that in his school, anything under 65% is failing. The grade requirements have gone up, not down.
On the other hand, those higher grades to seem to require less work than they used to. Eighth grade math is teaching adding and subtracting of fractions? My son is pulling a 93.5% and he has to ask me for help on adding and subtracting fractions? We got that in grade school 30 years ago!
I’m curious – when parents threaten to bring in a lawyer because their child got a bad grade, what exactly will the lawyer do for them? Do they expect to go to trial to have a judge impose a higher grade? Or do they make up a slanderous charge against the teacher, hoping to get the teacher fired? Do they say “we’re victims because you gave my child a bad grade, and we deserve to be financially compensated for the experience”…?
I’m trying to understand what the ultimate point is of the lawyer.
I’d also love to hear from any Dopers who have made a threat to call their lawyer because of their child’s grades, and what their justifications were.
My daughter is only 3 but we already have a lawyer on retainer for that type of thing later on. For now, I just practice by physically intimidating her pre-school teachers. I insist on the best for her and the school system will stop trying to pull that “B” shit after the first couple of grades if we are consistent. You aren’t a good parent unless you do what it takes to make sure your childs gets that edge.
Former (and disillusioned) special educator chimes in:
Instructional and testing modifications have been a hot button issue for years, and EJsGirl please don’t embarrass yourself by trying to construct this into a facet of our current Republican administration, since most of the real problems we see today were enacted in the 1990’s. There’s enough blame to go around with well-intentioned, poorly worded and implemented legislation like IDEA, 504, ADA, plans like Clinton’s Goals 2000, and (my personal favorite, being from NYS) the 1991 Compact for Learning (looked in vain for my copy, so bear with my paraphrase) which stated that every student will have access to the resources which are necessary to be successful in the school program. * The requirement is not equality of input, but equity of results.* Which pretty much exposed every district in NYS to a feeding frenzy of litigation brought on any parent of a failing disabled kid who wanted to claim that the failure was a direct result of not enough dollars being sunk into his child.
It’s absurd to blame NCLB for this. And it’s beyond me why it’s even mentioned in this thread. When forced to test for basic skills some schools turn pale and spend the entire school year trying to churn out good testers to compensate for the fact that they’re not churning out literate citizens who can master an easy fucking test. There are even some schools which will get behind efforts to identify as many students as possible in an attempt to gain Fed dollars which come with IDEA kids (not 504’s which are not technically special ed) and to manipulate safety nets and exemptions for students with disabilities. And you blame the folks making the standards? I repeat, absurd and completely irrelevant.
All that being said, I’m a strong proponent of appropriate mods for students with documented disabilities. But I’m also disillusioned, remember? For every appropriate testing/instructional modification there are hundreds of hacked up IEP’s with all the usual mods checked off just in case the kid needs the extra help. Once you check the box marked ‘use of calculator’ the child has a legal document giving him the right to use a calculator. If a teacher tries to assess him without one, he opens himself up to trouble. **And this kid has no math disability! ** Never had one. Never will. I’ts like giving a blind person a wheelchair just in case he gets tired of walking. No one seems to be able to properly oversee the current willy-nilly procedures by which we assign random modifications to students. Special education has a serious problem in this country, but no one likes to complain because, for the most part, we keep the difficult kids out of the mix.
I suspect that’s starting too* change now that our new buzzword is ‘inclusion’.
*that’s just to keep you on your toes mls
LOL
Aa a former teacher, I’m in complete agreement with many of the sentiments expressed. However, I’d like to note that IMHO the situation has never been perfect, or even approaching it. In the “good” old days, there were simply other problems. For example, dyslexic kids, before the syndrome was identified, were just browbeaten for being stupid and lazy. Those with problems of any kind usually failed and dropped out of school at their earliest opportunity.
[anecdote]My father, who is dyslexic, dropped out on the exact day he could, his 15th birthday.[/anecdote]
My sister occasionally is browbeaten for being lazy, even in this day and age. By a special ed teacher, actually. The thing with my sister is that she’s very smart. She got hooked on books-on-tape and is a huge fan of classic literature. She’s got an excellent vocabulary. Some teachers absolutely refused to believe that someone who can coherantly discuss Henry V couldn’t just “try harder” to read/write properly. Obviously anyone who, at 15, still misspelled their own name, was hopelessly careless and lazy.
My parents did have to threaten getting a lawyer once, actually. By high school, the only thing my sister still couldn’t really do was take an in-classroom written test with a time limit. With lots of time and extra paper (or a computer to type on) she could do it-- it just took SO much time and concentration for her to be sure she was getting the words/letters right. Better yet, give her an oral exam, something she excells at (This is how she’s handling tests in college). Or have her write a paper at home. Or whatever. Anything but the timed, handwriten test. Said above teacher who thought she was just lazy refused to accomodate. She told my sister (and then the principal, and then my parents) that no one had forced my sister to take a written test before, that she was using her disabilty as a crutch, and that if forced she could do it. If not, she deserved an F.
This is a lot like telling someone who’d blind that they could see if they just tried hard enough. My parents had to take it to the superintendant and make vauge threats about legal action before they’d transfer my sister out of that class. (Bizzarely, into mainstream English, as that teacher had agreed to give my sister oral exams. Turned out to be the best thing ever, though. That teacher researched her disability to better teach her, ended up becoming a mentor to her, and taught her how to function in a regular classroom. He’s certainly a large part of the reason she went to college)
Right. The information about educational testing in that book was fascinating.
One thing I have to say is that I wonder how much value there is in trying to objectively measure school performance at all. What I’m getting at is there’s something people are noting about the NCLB tests: ensuring that every student passes is considered far more important than actually educating every student to the extent of their abilities. When so much is based upon passing a test and, essentially, trying to get every single child to show the most minimal standard of achievement, the majority of the students who could and should be learning something relevant end up ignored. Basically, by setting a finish line and tying a school’s funding to reaching it, the test disincentivizes encouraging students to achieve any more than that finish line. I know lots of teachers and administrations want to see students actually succeed, but look at it from an economics standpoint. No Child Left Behind sets up a perverse incentive to ignore students’ performance beyond the absolute minimum level. We’ve set up an economic incentive with the law that runs contrary to what we want our schools to do!
Why the fuck do all the freemarketists in the Republican Party seem to lack even the most basic understanding of economics?
I think the idea of setting up these objective measurements is basically a flawed one. There was a recent article in the Atlantic about how colleges game the U.S. News rankings, again at the expense sometimes of their educational goals. The trouble is that you can’t come up with an objective way to measure students’ success - how can you tell what each child at a high school actually learned during their education? So instead we use approximations: are most students capable of what we decide is the minimum standard? Do most of a teacher’s students improve according to a standardized test during the semester? None of these measurements, though, can actually measure student achievement.
So we come up with what we think are decent proxies to measure student achievement, and then tie them to very real consequences: losing funding if they fail, which in many districts is a problem when you consider that the students are starting impoverished, with bad homes, and all sorts of disadvantages. But even for districts without those problems, we’re attaching huge consequences to the results of these proxy measurements. Thus, we’re creating an incentive for schools not to actually encourage student achievement, but to encourage whatever it is that these tests measure. We create deliberate incentives for schools to focus on the very poorest students at the expense of the majority of them. We create incentives to encourage some students to stay home the day of the tests.
When we create an economic incentive to do something we don’t want schools to do, why do we then get upset when the schools do exactly what we’ve pushed them to do?
Of course, if we’re assuming that the schools are significantly worse than they were years ago, or that they’re worse than those of other countries, I don’t particularly believe either of those things are true. We hear both those things a lot, but we rarely hear any evidence to support them.
Of course, the big question is: How would we propose addressing the issues? People are (rightly) concerned that children should be literate, numerate, acquainted with the basic principles of science, and have some idea of at least their own country’s history, and that this too often is not the case. (We could add a long list of other desired knowledge, which would vary tremendously.)
We want to ascertain that school system X is actually using available resources appropriately. We want to see to it that children with learning difficulties for whatever reason are being taught in the most appropriate manner. We *should * want to be sure that all children are being challenged to be the best they can be, beyond the basics. It is in the interest of all of us that all children, regardless of their parents’ economic status or education, should receive quality education.
It is a given that in education, as in all pursuits, there are some who are dedicated and skilled, and some who are bumbling, useless ignoramuses (ignorami?). There are some places where systems that work well have been established; in others this is not the case. How, then, to determine which is which? And, if this can be accomplished, what should we do about it? Are the schools that are not doing well in this condition because they are in a low income area and need more money? Can they not attract good teachers? Or is the governing body corrupt? Or did the luck of the draw (or other socio-economic factors) simply place a lot of below average children in that locale?
It’s very easy to point out what’s wrong. What’s really hard is fixing it. Many of the problems pointed out in this thread are due at least in part to some well-meaning person’s or group’s attempt to improve education. Some of the real disasters are due IMHO to someone saying he had an easy fix: “Yeah, all we really gotta do is…”
Nope "inclusion: is SO 1990s (along with Multiple Intelligences and “authentic assessment” and “portfolio assessment”…and my favorites: Stakeholders and “site based decision making”)
Nope the NEW buzzword (as alluded to earlier) is ta dah!: Differentiation! Learn and know it…well at least for another couple of years.
When it comes to NCLB, the “in” buzzphrase is AYP, “adequate yearly progress”. Another buzz phrase is “safe harbor”, which essentially means that your test scores STILL suck, but they have improved enough that, for now, you’re not on THE LIST. (which of course has it’s own acronym, AEWS: Academic Early Warning Status. And still suckier =>AWS: Academic Watch Status)