i’ll tell you this, american children are in no way being drilled too hard.
Yes that is a better term for it. A little challenge and a little payoff.
Long story short: there’s no “right” way, and we’re still in the process of figuring it out. Pedagogy, as a science, just started around 1960.
However, to address the OP, there’s a fault in the underlying premise: education used to be better. In 1914, drafted soldiers were given literacy tests and 90%+ passed. In 1942, after the public school system was started by FDR, the number of literate drafted soldiers dropped to below 50%. This indicates the public school system we have today is seriously flawed.
Is pre-1914 the way to go? No. Back then, we were still a rural economy with farmhouse schools where all the grades were put into the same room. Schooling largely ended at 6th grade. The reason literacy was so high back then was reading was the only source of entertainment when living on a rural farm, and as children did 8-10 hours of chores, they would dream of going back to their room and reading a book instead of doing backbreaking labor all day.
Pre-Civil war, only rich white children or those living in the NE had a chance to get educated, and it wasn’t free.
However, I think Michelle Rhee in DC is on the right track. She is eliminating tenure, holding teachers accountable for failing students, yet rewarding them for good performance. In the past, this was prone to abuse and poor school districts. But, she is focusing on teachers as the key to a child’s education; not computers, not parents, not solar flares, but teachers. If you trace all the flaws in the US school system today, it all comes back to the teacher: teacher’s unions, teacher training programs, teacher salaries, etc. By focusing on teachers, I hope she can unveil everything behind them that is causing students to fail.
I don’t believe this. I believe the attitude of the families the students come from is the biggest factor in a “good” teacher. I’d be interested in cites to studies supporting the position that teachers are a more important factor than the students.
One more point: don’t knock the scores because it matters how they’re calculated.
Example 1: If you look at the top SAT scores, the states with the highest scores are the ones sending the least number of students. They understand that only a small percentage of students will succeed in college. On the other hand, every state who sends more than 50% of their eligible high school students to take the SAT has the lowest average scores.
Example 2: All schools (public and private) have “tracks” of students. Public school generally have: Honors, A, B, C, Special Ed. Private schools have a similar system, usually : A, B, C, D. Note that private school A is equivalent to public school Honors, B is A, C is B. Usually, private schools will not accept students who are in the C or Special Ed groups at public schools. The C track at private schools are generally children of alumni whom they can’t reject. When reporting scores, public schools are required to submit all tracks. Private schools, however, are not, and will only generally report A and B tracks. When comparing public Honors vs Private A (usually the top 10% of all students at either school,) the scores are comparable or, in many cases, public Honors is higher.
This is difficult to prove because if you compare an Honors student to an autistic student, it’s pretty clear that the Honors would outscore the autistic on any test possible. Also, Honors students tend to succeed no matter who their teacher is. Also, parents of Honors students tend to group their kids together in private schools or magnet schools, where parents of Special Ed kids have little or no choice.
However, if you look at autistic kids only, I think it’s pretty clear that some teachers try harder than others and those autistic kids will learn more with one teacher who actually tries to teach them rather than one who doesn’t. Imagine one teacher who doesn’t have special training to teach autistics vs one who does, and it is very clear which teacher will be more effective.
In other words, you can’t measure a teacher by ultimate attainment, but how much the student learns while with that particular teacher relative to similar students.
I had long argument about this with my friend’s mother (public school teacher.) Her point of view is that we should only be teaching the “good” students. My point of view is that a teacher’s job is to teach the “bad” students because the “good” students don’t need teachers at all.
Another interesting train of thought recently is the importance of education to income. Some of the richest people in the world today are largely uneducated. When parents are railing against education, it’s in the largely mistaken belief that education will guarantee a large income. All the numbers prove is that education will result in a higher likelihood of getting a white collar job, there’s little evidence to show that it will be a “good” job, and many Ph.D’s today in Humanities are largely out of work or out of the field.
There’s a study out there as well showing a child’s adult income is largely determined by the parent’s education, not the child’s. In other words, we should be sending parents to school, not the children.
I don’t agree with either of those views. Group them by ability, and you’ll be able to teach the “good” kids more, and go slower with the poorer students so they at least the basics of the subject. But you can teach both the “good” and the “bad” kids.
Don’t follow the news, huh? Michelle Rhee is gone, and her policies have not improved the Washington DC schools to a large extent. Furthermore, your declarative statement about teachers is factually inaccurate. Teacher quality is not the main factor in a student’s educational success.
Ever wonder why you don’t see very many failing schools in rich areas regardless of how the teachers teach. In fact, I am not aware of a single failing school in an affluent area in this country. Teachers’ unions also have little impact on the schools. Areas with no tenure, and/or merit pay do not perform better in the long term than places that do. You should read up on these things before you talk about what a great job Rhee and others are doing. Especially since a large reason her old boss (Adrian Fenty) lost his re-election was because of her actions, decisions, and behavior.
Couple points:
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There are special education schools in the richest neighborhoods in my area. One specializes in autistic children of the rich.
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You also don’t see many rich people who don’t send their kids to private schools either.
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Conversely, I know many dirt poor kids and immigrant kids who received massive scholarships for their work in public schools.
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If “rich parents” were the answer to education, it would be simple to solve. That it isn’t shows the answer is much more complex than we think.
Yes, giving more money to bad teachers does not improve results.
Actually, this is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine: young teachers become old teachers who become leaders of the union. Old teachers don’t want to go back to college to learn new techniques, and so they fight against change. By the time they retire, the next group of leaders are the young teachers who became old, and the cycle begins anew. As unions prevent change, teacher training programs are forced to teach the same thing year after year so that their graduates are hireable. No teacher certification program in the country would dare to teach their students what is not on the Praxis.
Most teachers in this country today still believe in and are taught Pavlov, Skinner, and Behaviorism, even though we know that they do not work in education, and in many cases are detrimental.
I run into this at the community college level (not with all students), and according to my colleagues at four-year institutions, they are seeing it as well. There is a contingent of CC students who feel that if class isn’t entertaining (the edutainment model), they’re not learning, and they get bored very easily and stop paying attention. If class IS entertaining, they’re so involved in the edutainment that they forget that they’re actually supposed to be doing things like taking notes and interacting thoughtfully with the material.
What is the relevance of this?
What would this “simple” solution be?
ETA: Actually, I don’t understand the relevance of any of your points.
One way I look at it is this: let’s replace “teachers” with “emergency room personnel.” Now, you have a choice of a hospital in a suburban setting with a low crime rate or one in an inner-city setting where drugs are rampant and gang wars are raging. Now, we are going to judge these emergency workers on how many patients die in their care. Which hospital would you want to work at?
And to pancakes3 who claim that American children are in no way being drilled too hard:
Because of high-stakes testing in our state, the principals are so worried about test scores that in my district they’ve eliminated P.E., recess and anything NOT related to math or language arts. They have students coming in on Saturdays for three hours every weekend. The teachers are so pressured to improve math and language arts skills that Science and Social Studies AREN’T being taught in classes any more because of all the emphasis on Math and L.A. And yet scores continue to be poor!
In my experience, as an elementary school teacher for the past 8 years, it’s that students ARE being drilled too hard and it’s NOT paying off because DRILLS are not the answer. Creative problem solving and critical thinking are! For God’s sakes, we have classes on how to freaking TAKE A TEST, so they’ll perform better on tests and guess what! Scores are still poor. Why? Too much emphasis on high-stakes testing.
As someone who’s mother works for our local school system, I may be a little biased. I attended the same high school at which she teaches. It has always angered me to hear how much the students don’t care about learning and how they treated her in class.
It’s a very small school, however, only about 200 in our graduating class. It’s also in the south, and I’ve grown up hearing how “northern schools are so much better!” (My parents are Yankees) I have to wonder if it’s regional attitudes toward education that influence the kids, as well as their parents.
My parents raised me with the “You will go to college,” mindset. “Education is a wonderful and the key to a bright future.” My mom has a master’s. My dad has a bacheolor’s.
A lot of the people I graduated with didn’t have that kind of support. I know some kids who made a point of saying “I don’t wanna go to college, so why the hell am I here?” They’d already made their decisions about their futures. They didn’t want to go on for higher education. Their parents weren’t college-educated.
I have a handful of friends who also had non-college-educated parents, but their parents drilled it into their heads that they could work their butts off and go to college. Their parents always wished they themselves had gone to college.
I really do think it has to do with how you’re raised and what the attitude toward education in the home is.
Sure they do. Not all rich people send their kids to a fancy private school. Either way, why are there no (few?) failing public schools in rich areas?
It is a complex answer, but piling on teachers, saying they are the problem without any empirical evidence is unfair.
You missed the point. The impetus for removing tenure is that you would be able to fire bad teachers more easily, thus improving schools and testing results. That has not panned out in places without tenure. Merit pay has also failed for similar reasons.
Do you have a evidence that this is true? I sincerely doubt unions put pressure on individual teachers to teach anything in particular in their classes. They just don’t have the time, resources, or inclination to do that.
That was a great essay. It was much better and less bitter than my approach. Thank you for posting it.