‘Too much politics’? What does this mean? Schools should teach history – and more of it – and much of history concerns politics. Or do you mean that schools shouldn’t teach kids that it’s wrong to hate people who area a different colour/sexual orientation/religion/whatever?
I don’t have kids, and I never will. So the following are my impressions from what other people have said and what’s in the news:
Pwecious Widdle Snowflake Syndrome. How many ‘Students of the Month’ can a school have? It seems like every other fifth car has a bumper sticker proclaiming a child’s scholarly achievements. If everyone is a Student of the Month, then it doesn’t seem to mean much. I get the impression that there is too much emphasis on self-esteem. Every child can learn, but not every child can be a Winner.
Religion. Until you get into Philosophy, schools are about teaching facts. We need more emphasis on science, and less emphasis on magical sky pixies. Social sciences can teach morality and ethics, and real sciences are what are needed in the real world.
Money. Give schools more of it. Teachers should not have to pay for school supplies out of their own pockets.
Critical thinking. If more emphasis were placed on critical thinking, people would be better equipped to handle issues logically instead of ideologically.
Busting teacher unions lowers teacher salaries. Lowering teacher salaries makes teaching less attractive to talented people. Fewer talented teachers mean less quality education. Rather than blame the teachers and making them the enemy, perhaps the Republicans should reconsider their “every tax makes Baby Jesus cry” meme.
Not to dog pile, but what do you think you’re solving for by getting rid of tenure? Lack of tenure makes teaching a less attractive career choice. It also has the potential to be a popularity contest (let’s survey the parents and kids and see what teacher they like best) instead of doing what’s right. So, correct me if I’m wrong, but at first glance your teacher solution seems to be lowering salary/benefits and job security, which seems to be counter-intuitive to “fixing” the education problem. Your thoughts?
And sometimes, it’s not the teachers, it’s the students. I know many kids in my grad class who were from the “other side of the tracks”, and a lot of the guys wanted to get into the rap game, and were also heavy into drugs, and in trouble with the police a lot. Now, you can’t tell me that these kids, who spent more time slinging and smoking dope than they ever did hitting the books, secretly really gave a shit about their education.
This is a common complaint among people who don’t have children. It’s not a common complaint about those who do because they actually know the truth, and the truth is it’s not a very common problem. Most parents know damned well their kids aren’t perfect and need a kick in the ass now and then.
My reading on the subject are that the absolute #1 predictor of the quality of education is teacher quality. If you want better teachers,
Pay them more, and
Put even more emphasis on teacher education, e.g. teaching them how to teach. People often disparage education as a subject until itself and suggest we don’t need B.Eds, we need subject matter experts. Those people are ignorant.
I’m not sure Grade 3 teachers need “tenure,” which frankly is quite meaningless in that context, but it’s certainly true that making teaching LESS financially rewarding and stable will almost certainly make education worse.
There are many attractive careers without tenure: engineering, nursing, sales, law. I never quite got the reasoning that teaching had some particular thing about it that required tenure. The students’ education should be the number one priority at all time, not protecting teachers who may be marginal.
On the other hand, I’d like to see the salaries of teachers be more in line with other professions so that we attract the best and brightest. I’m in favor of spending more money on education, but we actually do spend quite a bit now to get pretty crappy results.
I’d like to see more emphasis on teachers’ working conditions. The stories I hear about administration are horrifying. There should also be more para-professional help. It makes no sense to waste teachers time on taking attendance, supervising recess and lunch, or even routine grading of homework.
We also need to have a longer school day and a longer school year.
Count me as ignorant. My experience is that there is a lack of rigor with regard to education theory. One fad after another with absolutely no facts to back them up: invented spelling, whole language, new math, etc. What in the world were people thinking when they got rid of phonics?
I presume you’re not talking about *teaching * politics - or civics - but rather that the educational system and education funding too often becomes a political football with the discussion producing lots of heat but precious little light. I agree, but as long as education is in the realm of the public sector I’m not sure how the politicization of education can be avoided. If everyone involved, from the state superintendent of schools right down to the local school board, could actually focus on working for the good of the students instead of pursuing their own agendas it would help. Schools are much too top-heavy in terms of administration, with insufficient emphasis on actually providing an education.
I also think schools could refine their goals a bit…stop trying to be everything to everybody and focus on the basics. And for goshsakes, de-emphasize the damned intramural sports. They could still have a viable phys-ed program and stop spending so much time and money and resources on the football team.
Teachers need job protection precisely because the schools are so politicized. They’re already performing professional-level work at a skilled laborer’s wage. Some of the things they need to do are unpopular…if they lacked job protection any grizzley mama who just happens to be a friend of the chairman of the school board could have them fired just for hurting little Johhny’s feelings. Or the local fundamentalist shaman could run them out for teaching evolution. Yes, there are some teachers that should find another line of work. But the district has the option of not hiring them in the first place, or of weeding the ineffectual ones out before tenure is acquired.
To be sure. Add to that, "parents who think the school is a glorified baby-sitter.
Yes, and possibly the most egregious example of this was G.W. Bush’s malapropriately-named “no child left behind” program, which virtually removed any responsibility from the school for judging advancement and forced them to “teach the test”.
I have heard about something called IdeaJam, which is IBM software. It incorporates more technology into the classroom, and shifts control of education to the students, so that, instead of having one person disseminating knowledge, you have the whole classroom, a whole school, even, sharing ideas and thoughts and making each other smarter
I think more technology is the answer, and to be more specific, networking technology. Imagine for a moment that students are able to share ideas and information with other students and with teachers during school hours, faster than you can blink. You can keep the conversation isolated to your classroom, or expand it to the whole school, instead of droning on and on, spouting facts and figures. That shit’s boring. Kids become engaged in debates like we have here, and they express how much(or how little)they really know. Knowledge has a kind of domino/snowball effect. One discovery leads to two more, leading to five, leading to 10, and so on in an exponential fashion.
Decide what schools are FOR. Are we trying to maximize later worker productivity? Are we trying to teach people to be enlightened individuals and better citizens? Are we trying to form communities to socialize people, creating a sense of common ground and a shared culture? Are we trying to form a social safety net that catches kids as they fall through the cracks? Right now we are trying to do all those things, and we simply can’t, not for any amount of money we are willing to spend. Once we figure out what the hell education is for, we can reassess all of our programs in that light.
Recruit better teachers. In my experience, it’s really not tenure that keeps bad teachers in the classroom. We don’t have tenure in Texas and we have plenty of bad teachers. We keep bad teachers in the classroom because we don’t have anyone to replace them: for every suburban school where there are people competing for jobs, there are half a dozen urban and rural schools who just need a body of someone, anyone, who has the proper certification to fill the slot. Half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years, and the ones who stay are often the ones with the fewest other options.
How to recruit them? Pay them more or improve working conditions. I think the later would be cheaper than the former. This could be the paraprofessional help mentioned above, smaller student loads, less paperwork in general, and even just more general ass-kissing.
Find an effective way to deal with discipline problems. Too many good teachers have been driven out of the profession because of a handful of incorrigible kids who make their life hell. I don’t know why this apparently wasn’t a problem 20, 30 years ago, but in so many schools kids run wild: being told to fuck off and die on a regular basis and having no recourse is really draining, both to the teachers and to the kids who really are there to learn.
My mother is a well-respected international speaker and book author in primary through high school teaching methods. My stepfather is a business professor. It is interesting to hear them go head to head based on their different experiences.
I don’t have a problem paying teachers more but you can’t pay the same teachers we have more money and get better results if nothing else changes. Teachers complain about pay but it really isn’t bad at all in most states. In my town, teachers generally make well over 60K a year salaried plus benefits (including a generous retirement plan) and flexible summers. That isn’t wealthy by any stretch but it certainly isn’t poor either especially when the full compensation package is taken into account. I know they work outside of school hours. Most professionals do often for less money with no payed retirement plan and little job security. You have to establish a good comparison cohort and the appropriate one for most teachers isn’t Fortune 500 executives. Teachers in other states sometimes make much less but they are generally places that have a low cost of living as well. If you want to look at professions of poverty, public school teaching isn’t on the Top 100 list. Public school teachers as a whole do rather poorly on standardized college tests so it isn’t as if most of them could have gone on to something a lot more lucrative if their heart didn’t call them to teach.
What could be done is try to establish ways for teachers that might choose other professions because of the money a way to still earn it within teaching. That is a tricky one however. Rewards for test performance are problematic just because of the varying quality of the students between the districts. You simply won’t see a poor inner city school filled with kids whose parents are 1st generation immigrants outperform schools in the wealthier suburbs. You could set up meaningful incentives for rapid improvements within a particular class but that is prone to cheating and corruption. Some charter schools have good success but not all of them do. The full answer is difficult because truly innovative teaching techniques often aren’t encouraged and sometimes actively discouraged as an unnecessary risk by administrators.
I wish you could send a team of super-talented teachers into a troubled school and have them turn it around while earning big bucks for their efforts but the system isn’t set up to handle that right now.
Less busywork, fewer silly rules that just make you take longer (e.g. writing out complete sentences to answer simple questions), and not so many BS pointless activities (e.g. the teacher reading the textbook aloud to the class, or worse, having random students do it. Also see: gameshows and puzzles). Group work usually just devolved into everyone sitting around and talking. Watching videos/movies in class isn’t very helpful, although at least it represented a break from the monotony. But they didn’t really teach much, especially non-educational ones (how were those even allowed?). Gym and study hall were on the edge for me. Personally I found them pointless and a waste of several hundred hours of my life, but ymmv. Oh yeah, don’t have a gym teacher teach chemistry.
I shudder to think of the supposedly increasing use of computers at the middle/high school level in recent years, since those were near the top of the time wasting pointless activities. It’s like a force multiplier of mediocrity. At least that’s one mental ravaging the poorest students will be spared.
If this thread tells us one thing, it certainly tells us that there’s no consensus on how to address education in this country. For any approach that one person supports, another person is opposed to it. While finding the right solution answer is difficult, some answers are easy to classify as wrong.
This approach has to contend with the fact that it’s been tried and failed. For example, in 1986 a judge ordered a massive increase in funds for Kansas City Public Schools. The results:
Anyone who still puts stock in expanded resources has to contend with the dismal experience of the Kansas City public schools, which got a huge infusion of money when a federal judge essentially took them over in 1986.
Facilities were radically upgraded, classes shrank, new programs proliferated, teachers got raises, and every school became a magnet school. But students didn’t learn any more than before. The schools got everything a supporter of old-fashioned public education could have asked for, and they couldn’t educate kids any better.
Another case study would be Washington D. C. Public Schools. They are very close to tops in the nation for spending per pupil per year. They are at the bottom of the nation in results. So the experimental evidence tells us that big spending doesn’t produce better education.
A curious thing to say, given that public schools in the USA are banned from offering religious studies or making much mention of religion in any other class. Meanwhile religious schools vastly outperform public schools and many other countries that have much better education systems are not so hostile to religion.
The best technology to equip teachers with would be a sledgehammer, so that we could smash any and all computers, laptops, cell phones, blackberries, tablets, iPods, etc… that we see in the classroom. For students, computers are a distraction and little more. A student with a spiral notebook and a pen may take notes and pay attention or may not. A student with a laptop is virtually guaranteed to spend class time on Facebook or YouTube or somewhere else that’s irrelevant to education. If we actually want students to share ideas and information, the right way to do that is by circling the desks and having a face-to-face discussion, not by doing it online where millions of distractions are only a click away.
First, shouldn’t we demonstrate that there’s anything wrong with education at all? My understanding is that the supposed “failing” of schools is just so much “darn kids these days” nonsense – literacy and general knowledge of folks of graduation age are pretty much at the same level they have been for the last five or six generations.
Not sure how you’re defining “religious studies”, but at my public high school we had a sociology class with an intensive unit on comparative religions. It went so far as having representatives of various religions come to speak to our class. These included a priest, rabbi, Mormon and a Hare Krishna (that was interesting!) among others.
Religion was also discussed in history. I remember going on and on about the Crusades in one class. I think there may have even been a Bible as literature class, but I didn’t take it. Later when I became a teacher I was never told there was any sort of ban on mentioning religion in an appropriate educational context, so I’m not sure where you’re getting that.
End of hijack. And now, my thoughts on how to fix education…
Some of you may know the reason we traditionally have the summer off in between school years. For those who don’t, the answer is: Farming. Back in the day, you needed all your kids to help with the harvest. And now, in our modern age of 2011 we still have summers off for agricultural reasons. This is one of many pervasive traditions in education that I’d love to leave behind. I’m a believer in public education in principle, but in practice things like this get in the way. I eventually left teaching because I found it too stodgy and resistant to change and because of poor administrators.
I’ve worked with some excellent principals, but as time went by I felt more and more micro-managed by administrators. For Christ’s sake, I had a master’s degree, ten years of experience and was a published author in my discipline. Do I really need an assistant principal who knows nothing about my subject area telling me the bulletin board was mounted too high on the wall?
I respect knowledge of teaching as a craft, but that was finding fault because they needed to put something down on the form. It was demeaning, unprofessional and ultimately resulted in a good teacher deciding there were better places to be.
Last time I flew on Southwest I asked the gate agent why all the employees seemed so happy with their jobs. He told me it was because the supervisors didn’t mess with them. He said they saw their role as enabling the workers to do their jobs, rather than forcing them to. I’d like to see that sort of attitude seep into school administration.
I think you and I have radically different ideas of what constitutes silly rules. For example, having students write out complete sentences gets them in the habit of communicating more effectively. Having students read out loud is a quick way to gauge whether or not a student is having difficulty reading and whether other students are having difficulty keeping up. Of course what’s appropriate for a group of 9th graders and what’s appropriate for a group of 3rd graders is probably different.
And a lot of times the incorrigable kids have “ADD” or something like that. In other words, they’re protected by the IEP. I’m NOT attacking special ed. I was a sped kid myself. It’s just that behavorial disordered kids seem to really screw things up…By BD, I mean kids whose problem is exclusively that they are BD. Yes, there are a lot of comorbid conditions. Hell, I had some issues myself, but a lot of those issues were due to my needs not being met. I know a couple of people who say that the quality of sped classes are good, but that it’s the BD kids who fuck things up.
In a related matter, revamp special ed! Yes, the LD and mild MR kids are getting a semi decent education. But, sped is too broad, and has a one size fits all approach. Meaning, say a deaf kid who needs more accomodnations then minimal accomondations, gets lumped in with those kids in the resource room who are just there b/c they are apaethic towards learning.
Teachers can’t use their abilities when they are constantly micro-managed by people who don’t know how to teach at all, and forced to “teach” to the next test. When they are given no power to deal with disruptive students (and believe me, the students will figure out the teacher has no power).
More money for teachers wouldn’t really work, if they were still left powerless.
What the money does need to be spent on is ways for dealing with disruptive students. You have students who have been seriously abused and need help, students diagnosed with conditions that cause them to be disruptive, and often there is simply no money to do anything about it.
More power (and the better working conditions that implies) would also attract more talented teachers.