I was talking to a young teacher just this friday night and what she says is a classic example of how a principal can and does sabotage a school.
She was teaching a class of 2nd graders and was on the verge of quitting. Why? The class she was teaching were the kids from hell. They had gone thru 5 teachers last year (yes, 5 teachers in 1rst grade). The first one was from “Teach for America” and left after just 3 days.
So, bad move #1 for the principal - she kept that class of kids together AND dumped them on a newby teacher fresh out of college.
Then, bad move #2, to make things worse, she refuses to support my friend. She isnt allowed to send “bad” kids to the office.
Then, bad move #3, principal made the decision that 2nd graders would not have recess. So no chance for these kids to blow off steam.
A significant part of the reason your friend wants to quit is because the principal thinks school is more important than fun? Please tell me this is a whoosh!
Can you think of a way to work merit pay that doesn’t boil down to giving good teachers incentives to teach in nice neighborhoods and avoid poor neighborhoods?
A hundred years ago, we didn’t send as high a fraction of kids to school. When you see old tests and standards purportedly showing how smart the kids were at literature, foreign languages, and mathematics, you’re dealing with the equivalent of today’s AP students. The academic achievement of those kids outstrips their equivalent from the past. When I graduated high school in 1977, the highest math class taught was pre-calculus. When my relative graduated in 2012, two semesters of calculus were offered.
We *are *holding kids to standards. Higher standards than we used to. Some kids meet these standards. Invariably, these kids have some combination of family support, initiative and native intelligence.
And some kids don’t meet the standards. Why not? As others have proposed, it’s likely that their family doesn’t value education like the families of academically successful kids. Firing principals (or teachers) won’t change this.
To continue the analogy to baseball, there’s no question that the caliber of major league play is higher than in the past. There’s also no question that the vast majority of the population could never make the majors.
IMO, part of the problem is that we’re setting ridiculously high standards for kids who in the past would have dropped out at 16 and gone to work as dishwashers and ditch diggers. A kid that age who can’t multiply six times four *should *be learning to make change. Often as not, they’re taking up space in algebra class. Why? Because one more warm body in a higher math class makes some idiot administrator look good, by meeting a “standard”.
Speaking to people who get raises, the last time you got a raise (and congratulations, though it may have been a long, LONG time ago) which was more? Your raise or your “merit raise portion”?
Nobody has ever had a job where the review increase based on performance was tiny “and nobody is allowed to have above THAT level of performance”?
This is just boiler plate union-busting verbiage designed to further the conservative agendas. Break the unions, lower pay to fast-food level, and justify bringing in private consultants, who will change millions for doing Nothing.
We all know that bringing in [del]Privateer[/del] Private Consultants is like having large construction equipment sitting idle on the sides of state roads, dropping traffic down to two lanes with no work being done,
while charging the state tens of thousands of dollars a day in rental fees. Fees that taxes have to be raised to cover.
Cue the construction company that has billed the state millions in rentals to bellyache about “high taxes”. :dubious:
My mother was a teacher for 40 years and always advocated for a “teered” system. Some kids should not make it to college, we’d be better off educating these kids for a realistic career. There should be high school to prepare you for college, and high school to train you well as plumber, cook, secretary, etc. then you have a country with the world’s best plumbers, and more money to invest in the future doctors and engineers.
Where her plain failed was at the point in which a) parents recognized their kid wasn’t cut to be a brain surgeon, b) everyone earned a living wage, so it was OK to be a hairdresser and not an architect, and c) each kid was afforded the same opportunity to prove themselves regardless of their family income (free, egalitarian education).
etv, you have a lot to learn about developmental psychology before you become a teacher. Recess-unstructured play time–is pivotal to a child’s cognitive and social development. Children use this time for creative play–which includes everything from pretending to be magical kitties to reenacting scenes from Diablo to bickering over the rules for football (seriously, if you’ve never listened to children debate blitzes, you have no idea what creativity looks like)–and for experimenting with social interactions. Piaget did a lot of research into the benefits of play, which I encourage you to read up on.
You might think that play time should be after school. However, a lot of kids don’t have this sort of play time after school. After school may involve watching television, playing solo computer games, or reading books–all activities with great value, but not activities that have the same value as unstructured play time with peers. And that’s not even getting into the health benefits.
School isn’t more important than fun; that’s like saying that supper is more important than deliciousness. School constructed well is intensely hard AND intensely fun for most of the academic time, and allows children the developmental opportunities only available through unstructured play with peers.
No, but firing principals for what amount to parenting failures isn’t exactly doing anyone any good either.
If we look at OneCentStamp’s list of reasons that a student from a low SES background may not thrive, not a one of those is something that the school district can or should have primary responsibility for. They can do things that mitigate the effects, but in the end, the parents aren’t living up to their end of the bargain.
Ultimately, like you said, it’s a poverty problem, but there’s a real vicious circle going on in terms of attitudes and behaviors that keep people in and exacerbate their poverty. Until that circle’s broken via some method of changing the attitudes and behaviors, principals put in the position of educating those communities are bound to be less successful.
I think the hard thing for people to wrap their heads around is that attitudes and behaviors come from somewhere. People don’t have attitudes that don’t value education because they are just bad people. They have those attitudes because what they’ve seen and experienced reinforces the idea that it’s not worthwhile to invest in education.
In my experience, if there are jobs, people will move hell and high water to get the education to get those jobs. But if people don’t see jobs, they aren’t going to bust their butt for nothing.
LHoD: I suspect Developemental Psych is in my future. While I agree 2nd grade is early to instill this attitude, if you don’t instill it eventually, it never happens. I also completely agree our system steers unqualified kids to college, a discussion this board has had before. To the poster who argued TV and PlayStation were worthwhile pastimes: WTF is wrong with you?!
Rather, that the poor in India and China are not educated so it’s an apples or orange comparison to look at the US which does attempt to educate everyone and those countries which do not. Do you seriously think that all Chinese kids are included in the international standard tests?
Actually, this is the issue. If there is a social contract which says that hard work in school will result in a jump in income and social status for the children, I believe that there would be a lot more motivated parents, even those who are living in poverty now.
My father grew up dirt poor in a shed converted into a house, but no running water or toilet, with a handicapped mother and two sisters. They lived off of welfare and whatever his scraps his stingy grandfather would toss them. By the time he was graduating from high school, he could see WWII vets going to school on the Vet Bill so he looked around and decided he could get a university education by signing up for the army and went that route.
He was also white and a Mormon in a Mormon state, so once he was in school it was easier to break into the middle class.
I wonder how much of that social contract exists now? I recall reading an article a long time ago about young black males in Oklahoma City and the limited paths for getting ahead.
I wonder if it’s less the problem of just poverty but the lack of a better system for moving people out of poverty.
I grew up lower middle class in a small West Virginia town. Neither of my parents went to college, but they stressed the value of education. A lot of my peers were truly puzzled at the time, money and work I put into working my way through college. One electrician I had worked with told me, upon hearing that I was halfway through engineering school, that I was just “spinning (my) wheels”, and suggested that I go back to wiring up houses. He wasn’t being malicious or jealous. But if you’ve never known anyone who benefitted from education (or, like me, grew up hearing its benefits stressed) it will probably look like a waste of time.
This is absolutely ignorant, dude, and if developmental psychology is in your future, not your past, you’d be well-advised to quit pontificating on matters of developmental psychology, for the same reason that I have little to say about quantum physics or regulation cricket.
Resarch shows not that second graders ideally have recess once daily, but that they have recess twice daily. Their tiny bodies function best when given regular occasions to run around and to exercise–say it with me now–unstructured play time with peers.
Seconded; also, etv78, remember that weekends as such may not exist much longer, if people in the US continue to vote against their own interests and thus lose everything their ancestors gained since the late 1890s. Also, more immediately, keep in mind that unstructured play time isn’t necessarily easy to come by on the weekends, thanks to things like “stranger danger” and a glut of scheduled activities.
However, LHoD, I also wonder why you espoused the benefits of screen time.
With all that said, I wonder if anyone else has encountered the sentiment that the reason “Asians are so smart” is because the kids’ lives are all work and no play. I remember some of my Asian-American peers referring to “Chinese School” that took up some of their weekends (sounded nightmarish, about as bad as the religious classes some kids went to), and, well, I can’t help but think of that lunatic Amy Chua, and situations where the only play involves piano, violin, or perhaps tennis.
The problem with both merit pay and firing principals/teachers for low performance (which are exactly the same thing, and if you get one, you get the other) is that it is extraordinarily difficult to come up with any sort of cohesive evaluation instrument. I am in the middle of watching such a system come on line, and the practical problems are well nigh insurmountable. On a very practical level, if you are going to base a teacher or principal’s pay (or their continued employment) on their performance in any meaningful way, you’ve got to go out and watch them not just once a semester for 45 minutes, but close to a dozen times. You need to pre-conference and post conference with them so that you have some context for what you see, so you can understand if they are being effective. You have to have a clear vision of what “effective” looks likes, and you have to perfectly, accurately convey this to people in advance because jobs and pay are on the line–you won’t be able to keep good people if they have no faith that they won’t be fired because an arbitrary, unexplained system fired them/keeps them at low pay. Unless you are literally going to fire an entire new set of professional evaluators, the man-hours this requires for administrators is simply impossible. It’s not like they aren’t already busy.
You’ve got to have some sort of consistent rubric that applies to literally HUNDREDS of radically different courses–not just elementary and High school, but special ed, music, art, PE, weird special topics classes that places have developed, etc. etc. It has to port across all disciplines, because you can’t really have a system where it’s easy for art teachers to end up with high wages but math teachers inevitably get fired after three years.
You can use test scores, but you want to measure growth, not absolute scores (or else it’s just a "fire everyone at poor school each year) but measuring growth is a nightmare: You have to figure out what tests–state standardized tests only cover a handful of subjects in a handful of grades. You can have district-written tests, but for everything? Can you write hundreds of standardized, multiple choice tests that you think accurately measure student achievement? Remember, lots of courses maybe have 100 kids district wide taking them, maybe all under one teacher–each is just one little weirdness, but it adds up to serious percentage of students and teachers. And how do you measure growth in some of these? You’ve have a tiny sample size, and often no predecessor course.
All these problems apply to comprehensive evaluations of both teachers and principals–because principal evaluations will just be a compilation of all the same data.
As an Asian who’s lived in Asia for 10+ years, I can confirm that the education system and culture in that region of the world is brutal. Balance is important, but that goes both ways. In Asia, education is too ruthlessly emphasized; in America, there’s too much of a slack-off, I-don’t-care attitude among students.
Well, I probably should have written “potential” in there, as in:
(I figure I’m allowed to modify my own quotes–if not, just remove the quote tags).
My daughter watches a lot of Magic Schoolbus movies and knows a lot about science from watching them. She also watches a ton of documentaries about sharks, because she’s a little obsessive. Sometimes she sits on my lap and plays Minecraft. It’s a bit of a hijack about why I think these are beneficial activities for her, for about half an hour a day, but if someone’s really curious, start a new thread and I’ll join in.
Indeed. While it’s by no means true for all African American families, entire communities in some places can see a world that’s not just the relic of past racism, but is the product of ongoing vicious racism, from policies that send disproportionate numbers of black adults (especially men) to prison, to housing policies that concentrate poor black folks in urban islands of limited opportunity. Ongoing social policies make it difficult for some parents to emphasize academic behaviors in their children in the way that middle-class parents tend to do. Comparing African Americans, who live in a society stacked against them, with immigrants, who don’t (at least not in the same way), is a bad comparison.
