I have some 13 years of my own experience in the public school system in the US, and both my children went through the same, so that’s the limit of my experience, but based on this, here’s what happens.
A kid in high school is a pretty good ballplayer, so goes to college on an athletic scholarship. He has to take classes, but because he’s busy playing sports, he can’t take a difficult curriculum, so ends up with a lot of classes called things like kinesiology. Let’s be realistic, he majors in jumping jacks.
He’s not good enough to go pro after graduation, but needs a job, so takes one as a gym teacher. The last thing he is is an educator, and he actively resents the students in his charge as a reminder of his lost potential, so the first chance he gets goes into administration.
The elected members of the school board, impressed by the modicum of success he has had playing college ball, rapidly promote him to principal, where he spends the rest of his career dumbing down the curriculum and blaming low test scores on the teachers.
Do you think that firing this guy and replacing him with a person with the same set of skills will make a nickel’s worth of difference to the educational outcome? The school board picked him, they’ll pick the same guy next time. Let’s fire the school board instead.
Modern education is so complex that allowing the general public to elect the school board is as stupid as if they allowed the public to elect the surgical staff at the local hospital.
That is a physical achievement based on size and strength and cannot be taught to midgets. When it comes to mental achievement the playing field is much more level. It may take one child longer to achieve something but that time exists on a much broader scale than a sporting event where seconds count.
That’s a fabulous list of excuses. You might want to read up on people like Abraham Lincoln who helped support his family as a kid and rarely went to an actual school. His “ipad” was a piece of wood on which he wrote using charcoal. He had far less in the way of material wealth as a child than the poor do in the United States today. I bring him up because he gets a lot of accolades as a result of his principles and deservedly so. But he wasn’t a giant among men and history would have been less kind to him had he served out his term in office.
You’re close. America doesn’t have a poverty problem, it has a social poverty problem. The poor in the US have it much better than the poor in China or India (financially). The difference is the social structure that expects achievement.
I come from immigrant grandparents. Their backgrounds were rough. My father was an illegitimate child raised by his grandparents. My maternal grandmother raised 8 children in the depression without much support from her husband. She could hardly speak English but insisted her kids meet all the standards set in school. That was before “grading curves” existed so and “A” was an actual mark of achievement.
My parents were never rich. I’m not going to say they were poor (as adults) but I was the youngest in the family and we were still using TV trays as end tables. So I’ll describe them as lower middle class. We had food on the table and a roof over our heads. I bring them up because they represented an entire generation of socially balanced adults who were well educated coming out of high school and socially adept at raising children. They expected a certain level of achievement and worked toward that goal. I lived in a neighborhood that was close to the national average when it came to racial percentages. Many of the families were military so the social structure was intact down to the lowest household income. There was no demographic drop in achievement based on race or financial status. If you looked at school reunions you’d see a clear indication of the amount of effort put in and the level of success achieved.
Actually every school could be in the top half of performers. There just wouldn’t be a “half” in the conventional sense.
The huge educational gap in America is a result of a number of factors. Grading curves that obliterate actual measurement of achievement. Parents who are not engaged in the process of education. Social cultures that blatantly reject education. The result is truancy and ridiculously high drop-out rates. It would make a nice book title “how to succeed at failure without really trying”.
This in a nutshell. My father coached a soccer team when I was a kid. He literally didn’t know a thing about the sport. He went to the library and checked out a book. We had a winning season. We had the rattiest uniforms and had to make our own nets. We beat out teams from wealthier districts with coaches who had a reputation for winning.
He never went to college. His HS education was the engine that drove his life achievements. We had a house of our own because he built it, And again, he did that by going to the library. He didn’t know squat about building a house. He was not an over achiever in his generation. He was the guy next door.
I don’t think Jaime Escalante was one in a million. He could have been anybody from my parent’s generation who had a motivational streak in him. I’d call him 1 in a 100 and I bet he would agree with me. 1 in 100 is about right for a school administrator. We need to stop thinking it takes a rocket scientist to do this job. It doesn’t.
One of the most relevant posts so far. If you can’t fire a teacher then it’s a pointless exercise to fire the principal. Teachers are a significant part of the process.
I remember a television interview of a teacher on strike. This was many years ago. She absolutely butchered the English language. This stunned me because I went to both public and private schools and teachers in every class would correct a student’s grammar. If the teachers suck then it’s a house of cards.
Scholastic achievement requires a social environment that demands it and an educational system capable of delivering it. If one side of that formula is weak then the other side has to pick up the slack. So the Jaime Escalantes of the world CAN make a difference if faced with a weak social environment but it requires a base of teachers capable of delivering it.
Look at the size of that galloping herd of anecdotes! Isn’t it hypnotic to watch them move through the landscape? At times, they almost look like data!
Of course, the best course of action would specifically be libertarian socialism (of any sort), where the workers run the schools themselves. With that said, there’s one big caveat: What might a workers’ council of teachers and staff in, say, Oklahoma teach in science, history, etc., even if they were radical enough to defy capitalism and the state?
Slack standards and stupid, lazy students, parents and teachers vs the social context of your upbringing and a dash of Abe Lincoln bootstrapping may be fun hobby horses to ride but your reasoning is pure gibberish with respect to actually grappling with the issue. What you describe as your “getting by” uphill both ways social context (we also used TV tables that way) *was *the middle class then and you performed to expected standards, The middle class now is performing (generally) to expectations. Today, here and now the issue is that most of these under performers are not middle class or even lower middle class and are coming from the bottom of the barrel in economically struggling, poorly educated, high stressed single parent households.
Whether they are entrenched in the underclass through multi-generational poverty, bad decision making, dysfunctional attitudes toward achievement or just being idiots that’s where they are. This will not change for them unless you are going to go in and force each of these single mothers to marry good, caring men you will dig up somewhere, force the families to be more diligence re scholastic involvement and performance, force the employers who pay these people minimum wage to pay a living wage so they are not chasing 2-3 jobs.
Your “We were kinda/sorta/maybe like this and we succeeded why can’t they?” thinking isn’t magical it’s delusional. Intact two parent families will make a huge difference. That’s not what you have here and NO one has the power to change that. You have a multi-generational entrenched group of relatively poor underperformers with dysfunctional attitudes that are beyond all the usual social rah-rah. Do you continue to expect magic will happen if only you get the right superhero administrator on board, or do you accept the reality of the circumstance and adjust your expectations?
I don’t really understand this post. You aren’t really refuting any of what Magiver said; in fact, the general sentiment of both posts is the same: what is needed is a change in attitude toward educational expectations. His post was making precisely the point that we *don’t * need “superhero administrators.” We need parents to give a damn and not expect a well-educated child to be handed to them without any effort on their part.
Quite frankly, if that means fewer mothers buy into this nonsense that “raising a child in a single-parent household is exactly the same” then maybe we can start to expect some level of parental participation in the education of their child. Somewhere along the course of American society, parents decided that simply sending their child to a school for 8 hours a day is a suitable replacement for actually raising him or her to be good, intelligent people.
These are more questions than they are suggestions. If we have several examples of educators who were able to overcome the social dysfunction of young students and successfully create an atmosphere conducive to learning then why can’t we spend more time trying to objectify their methods and put their methods into a teachable transferable format that doesn’t require a “special” person to implement them. Simply giving a child an opportunity to successfully complete something, anything for that matter can be an important step in associating something positive with learning. Spending more time and money if needed exposing children to a variety of potential opportunities for success would seem like a fair starting point. Recognizing creativity as an individual accomplishment not comparable to any set of rules or guidlines can help to level an educational playing field on at least that level and could help to serve as a springboard for other accomplishments.
My main issue with his scenario (and apparently yours as well) was his point that being raised in a striving, achievement focused, lower middle class household was in some way instructive toward dealing with the current entrenched problem of underperforming students coming from multi-generational, poor, single parent households and all the social dysfunction that brings to the table.
Unless you have a magic wand to correct this dysfunctional cluster of welded together social barnacles I’m not clear of what you intend as solution. More caring teachers? Most teachers care too much, not too little. More parental oversight with single parents working multiple jobs? OK you tell us how to make that happen. More intact families? OK we await your solutions.
Beyond this his point about current slack grading and standards is 180 degrees wrong. State testing standards are tougher than in the recent past and have been getting more rigorous for some time now to meet national standards. You even have several states complaining claiming the new standards are too tough. These attainment standards and the failure to meet them by some schools are what is driving this whole argument.
I would dispute this as an absolute rule. Plenty of great things have been accomplished with a profit motive. No family was ever created for a profit. Profit was not the motive for winning the American Revolution, the Civil War, or World War II. Churches are not run for a profit. Great works of art have been created with no eye on profit. There was no profit in going to the moon. Our legal system is not seeking a profit.
So profit can be a powerful motivating tool. But we need to recognize that it’s not the only way that gets things done.
I appreciate Magiver’s anecdote because it offers hope.
But then I remember that ours is a different economy than it was when my father escaped small town Rust Belt poverty in the 60s. In those days, if you had the right connects and looked halfway clean, you could drop out of high school and get a good unionized factory job. And even if you could only get a minimum wage job somewhere, well, the cost of living wasn’t so high that you couldn’t have something of a reasonable life.
It didn’t matter that your high school didn’t offer calculus or AP history back in those days. Because you were just competing against the folks in your town and city for jobs, and those folks were given the same kind of education that you received. The newspapers didn’t publish rankings of all the schools being based on how the student body did on some test. School buildings weren’t required to wear scarlet letters of shame if they did poorly.
We are living in a global economy now. With the internet, companies can hire anyone who has an email account and who’s willing to travel. My father’s generation worried about other countries turning commie and bombing us. But they didn’t have to worry about people from those countries queuing up for the same jobs they were applying for.
My father grew up in a small town. He was a dirt poor colored boy, but he was educated with the white middle-class kids from the other side of the tracks, and he was able to reap the benefits of this. But we’re living in a time when the stakes are so high (or perceived to be so high) that wealthy school districts are enclaving themselves away from poor communities. School districts are also dropping their bussing programs, and making it so that their “best” schools are reserved for lottery winners or those who can afford test prep. The inequalities will just grow deeper if the current trend continues.
It is easy to blame to poor people for lack of educational attainment, whether politely as Magiver seems to be doing or more judgmentally as other conservatives do. And I’m not so bleeding-heart liberal to think that poor people–or any other group of people–don’t have any responsibility for anything at any time. However, just a little reading on the subject can jolt someone out of this “If only the poor people would do X, Y, and Z” mindset real quick.
I think we’re lumping together the problem of poverty with the problem of poor support systems.
If you live in poverty, it’s more likely that you’ll have a poor support system, but that’s not always the case. I’m with Magiver that if the problem was only a lack of income it would not be an insurmountable problem. Difficult sure, but our teachers could handle it.
I know anecdotes are not data, but how can you test whether someone has supportive parents? Until someone does, we’re going to have to live with anecdotes.
Magiver had a supportive immigrant parents, and guess what, I did too. My mother was dirt poor in her country and still got good grades. When we came to the USA we were still dirt poor but my mother never let me use that as an excuse.
I went to a school that’s now shut down because it could not improve its grades two years in a row and because it had a fourth year graduation rate of 51% (below the 65% average). It was located near the housing projects and as a result it had to take in a lot of poor students. Out of all the problems I’ve seen there, the problem of lack of money was the easiest to solve. The books were free. Lunch was free. We had computers with free internet access, and we had after school clubs if you needed a place to do your homework free of distractions. And we had teachers who were used to dealing with poor students and could be flexible if money was a problem.
What teachers couldn’t deal with was a student cursing at the teacher in the middle of class. Or threatening to kill another student in the middle of class. Or a student who got pregnant and had no one else to take care of her child. Or a student who joined a gang to protect himself from the other students in gangs.
You see more of these problems in low income areas, but they are not really problems of low income. It’s a problem of children without any support except maybe the teachers at school, and more times than not the teachers can’t do what a hard ass immigrant parent can do for a child. If you want to deal with this problem then teachers have to become almost like surrogate parents. From what I’ve seen of teachers in general, this doesn’t seem possible. There are a few good teachers, but only a few. Out of the teachers I had, 95% were terrible to satisfactory. I cannot imagine any one of them being an adequate role model or providing adequate support for a child who doesn’t have it.
Last bit of anecdotal data. I met my assistant principal from that school ten years later. We talked about the teachers I had and he told me most of them were insane (that’s the word he used.) From what I’ve seen I do not think he was making excuses. And when a child has no support from his parents, this is our plan B, the people teaching high school.
I don’t know that they are “objectifiable,” and I think that actually trying to objectify them is adding to the problem.
I don’t have any sort of degree in education or pedagogy, but I have a mom who was an award winning sixth grade teacher, and I was privileged enough to have several excellent teachers in my own life, and if they had one thing in common it was this: they did what needed to be done, whether it was the “correct” thing to do or not. They had the ability to improvise, to see their students as individuals with individual problems, and to come up with creative solutions to help each student - not the class, but each student - excel to his or her ability.
____ Anecdote break_____
My mom would have troublemakers come to our house and do yard work. I can’t see that happening today, because of liability worries and fears of molestation accusations. But these kids had energy and anger and we had a garden needed weeding. An afternoon a week spending time with your hands in the dirt with your teacher pointing out your great work ethic, praising your backbone and sneaking in a few stealth fraction lessons (“we’ll weed half the beans now, and then maybe another quarter after lunch…we’ll get the rest tomorrow. How much will that be, I wonder?”) and she literally turned around more than one young man’s life.
One of my best teachers in high school would write me passes so I didn’t have to go to AP History, where I was being badly bullied. I’d sit in the choir room feeling depressed and he’d quietly discuss strategies for dealing with the assholes in his own life. I didn’t find out until this year (I graduated in 1992) that he knew exactly what was going on, even though I never told him. I was close to committing suicide that year, until Mr. B. spent some entirely unsanctioned time helping me out with things that were more important than academics…which in turn let me concentrate on my academics.
My daughter has a great teacher this year. She’s in the top group in math, and still a bit bored with what the lesson plan is. So he gives her different homework than the rest of the class. It’s on the same basic topic, but more challenging. (Last week was area and perimeter of rectangles; the rest of the class got a page with the height and width marked on each side and had to find the perimeter and area, hers had only one of height/width and only on one side, plus the perimeter or area and she had to find the rest.) He has to create and grade extra work just for her, but it means she loves math this year.
End of Anecdotes_
How do you “objectify” those methods? Those methods defy objectification, because they are so individualized. They don’t apply to every student, they require an individualized approach, some creative problem solving and a willingness to take risks and say “fuck the administration, I don’t care if I get in trouble for this, the student needs me.” The exact opposite of a standardized curriculum, and yes, it requires a very special kind of person to have the intuitive sense of what will work and the balls to take a chance that it won’t.
Batting practice is taught regularly. Check the wiki. It takes work, but you can really change your HR average, even in the pros, even on bad teams, even with the kids born from illiterate immigrants.
Just shoot them up with steroids & keep the ones that don’t stroke-out and die… on the roster and in the game.
So why aren’t the batters on YOUR team hitting 73 each season? Why, why, why? I think we should keep firing team managers until they ALL hit 73, and regularly. It can be done, he proved it. :dubious:
I am reminded of an op-ed piece by a retired schoolteacher who (modestly) proposed firing policemen in districts where the crime rate stayed high. Surprisingly, none of my cop friends are on board with this.
Sure, and Barry Bonds made millions. Good public school teachers are paid the same as bad ones. Good hitting coaches make more than bad ones; why not the same for teachers?
There is no issue to grapple with beyond the obvious. Kids have been getting a solid eduction all through the last century if held to a standard of achievement. That’s it. That’s all Jaime Escalante did. No massive influx of money. No breakthrough learning technique.
The expectations died with the grading curve. It’s a minor miracle if a kid with 12 years of education can make change. Escalante is not one in a million. The kids he was in charge of were nothing special. They were held to a standard and they met it.
it’s not about money. The people living through the Great Depression didn’t get free phones or credit cards to spend as they like. they had less to work with and they did more with it.