There is an enormous amount of evidence that American public schools are failing, and it’s been presented in many previous threads. The most thorough source that I know of is Mark Bauerlein’s book The Dumbest Generation. Bauerlein collects information from many sources to document the decline in American education over the past few decades. The chief source is the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), an annual report from the Dept. of Education that shows clearly that the amount of knowledge students have in all subject areas has declined steadily. This is backed up by many other studies and by basic facts such as the decline in SAT scores over the years. In addition, surveys show that students today read less, spend less time on homework, spend less time studying, and otherwise shun academic pursuits. Far more of the students entering college have to take remedial courses now than did a generation ago. And so on. The evidence is there for anyone who’s willing to look at it.
This is something I disagree with to a point. If you lower the salary you are only going to get people who have a true calling to teach children. If you load up their pockets and give massive time off you are going to attract people doing it for the money instead.
The system needs to change drastically from teaching all kids basically the same, to more of a guided mentoring system, where children select and are helped into certain disciplines and where older children help mentor younger ones as part of there learning.
Or busting the teachers unions will get rid of the incomptent, indifferent, lazy and useless teachers and allow principals to replace them with people who come in and want to actually do the job.
My niece recently graduated with a masters in Education to teach High School history. She’s teaching social studies in a Catholic Elementary school because there are no positions in the Public Schools.
Look, guy, throwing money at the problem hasn’t helped. Public Education spending has doubled over the last 15 years.
http://education-portal.com/articles/Public_Education_Spending_Has_Doubled_in_the_Last_15_Years.html
Yet the statistics on how kids are performing are about the same. 20% of high school seniors are functionally illiterate.
Salaries really aren’t the issue here. The issue is that unions make it next to impossible to fire bad teachers, especially if these teachers have “Tenure” like they are a philosophy professor at a college.
You’re teaching fifth grade math! You don’t need tenure!
Actually, technology is making kids dumber, not smarter.
WHy learn a language whenyou can look up the translation of Babelfish?
Why learn how to construct a sentence when a spell-checker will do it for you.
I think that we should stop using the schools to enforce political correctness and such. Like the girl who was disciplined recently when she said “that’s so Gay!” because that was insenstive to gay people. (Ironically, the homosexuals hijacked the word gay to describe themselves, and now the kids are hijacking it back to mean “lame” or “Stupid”.)
I agree with that. Next.
I’m kind of curious about that, since mentioning God in a public school will bring down the wrath of the ACLU.
As stated below, spending on education has doubled in the last 15 years, and frankly, results have not improved. It’s not that the money isn’t there so much as it isn’t being spent intelligently.
I think the thing is, that playing a videogame stimulates the mind more than reading a book does, and it’s easier.
Sorry, but I’m not buying this cite. This is from an article on a website who’s tagline is “Free Minds and Free Markets”, so they are ideologically opposed to the public school system. Also, the article isn’t footnoted in anyway, so there’s no way to check the “facts” presented therein. For all we know, the author (Steve Chapman) made them up out of whole cloth.
Another “iffy” cite, or at least an iffy conclusion you seem to have drawn from it. Perhaps you missed this part:
The money isn’t spent on students. Or teachers. It’s spent on what seems to be a bloated and incompetent administration, to wit:
Fix the problem of an expensive and ineffectual administration, get that money to the classrooms, and you might see better results; and the newly-in-charge Mayor might actually have the ability to effect the necessary changes in that regard; have to wait and see.
This is just incorrect. Public schools are not prohibited from teaching about religions.
:rolleyes:
Actually, Harvest time wasn’t until the autumn, but I am unsure where the three month summer break came into being or why anyone thought it was a good idea. But this is an excellent point. YOu have three months of these kids hanging on the street corners, playing video games, and generally forgetting a good deal of what they learned the year before.
The only advantage I see is that you can threaten kids with “Summer School” if they don’t keep up, like they used to when I was in. My Senior Year religion teacher tried to do that, when I was probably about five minute from declaring atheism to start with.
I think another area we can get rid of- teaching kids to write in Cursive. Now, admitably, my handwriting has ALWAYS been terrible, to the point where the nuns finally told me to block letter write everything, and even then my handwriting is unreadable. (I prefer to type out as much as I can, as I can type about 90 words a minute when I’m on a roll.)
Today, it’s an unnecessary skill, and we’d be better off teaching kids how to type.
A final point. When I was in school, they taught kids to read by teaching Phonics. Now, English has a lot of problems compared to other languages, such as the same letter combinations possibly having different pronunciations. (For instance, “read” can be pronounced “reed” and “red” and mean two different things.) Now they teach “whole word” reading, and I don’t think it’s as effective.
What do you think firewalls are made for? Sure they can be circumvented, but the student faces suspension for doing it. Paper and pencils are growing old. We already have eBooks. Soon, iPads and other tablets will be all there is while we let trees grow. Just because you want education to move backward, not forward, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Hey, alright, but I put my all my faith and trust in machines that think. With their help, we will only go onward and upward. I’m willing to bet you’re one of those people like ITR Champion, who’d rather see things go backward. I bet you also believe that when you build a machine to do the job of a man, you’re taking something from the man.
Aaaarggggh, not a quote from Star Trek:Insurrection!!!
Seriously, I have no problem with machines assisting in work. As a buyer, I have to do calculations all day, and I usually use calculators and spreadsheets rather than doing them longhand.
But I also know I wouldn’t be any good at my job if I didn’t understand the basics of the process. Kids today aren’t learning the basics.
As I’ve stated in many previous threads, I think it’s a mistake to try to send all (or most) kids to college.
We should have a better vocational training track - too many of the for-profit schools are just conduits for federal loan money.
With more viable vocational careers, K-12 schools could focus on preparing the college-bound for college, while ensuring that students not headed for college have good basic skills. A 14-year old who can’t multiply a pair of two-digit numbers shouldn’t be learning set theory, or even algebra. Better to teach him how to balance a checkbook, or calculate sales tax.
One obstacle to this is an irrational desire on the part of many parents to see their kids in higher-status careers, whether or not they should be.
Incidentally, it’s misleading to compare standards today with those from the past: a much higher percentage of the population today attends high school, so when you hear how much smarter school kids were in 1940, it’s partly because a lot of the slower ones weren’t going to school.
Why? Is there some evidence of this? I actually think lengthening the year might make sense but it seems to me that eight hours of school a day is enough, especially when combined with a couple hours of homework or more.
I think one of the biggest things we need is a shorter summer break, but that’s not the same thing. I think it’s been posted in other education threads here, and plenty of people including Malcolm Gladwell have written about it. The worst performing students with the least parental support in school do almost as well through the year but then backslide when they’re out of school during the summer. As a result, the beginning of each school year is trying to get them back up to speed while the students with support from their family are already advancing. Shortening the summer break would presumably help minimize this problem. I don’t think the vacation would have to be eliminated. It could probably be spread through other times of the year.
‘Enforcing Political Correctness’ sounds like a code phrase to me. Elsewhere on the Internet I’ve read plenty of posts where parents and grandparents bemoan the ‘liberal’ bent of schools. In Arizona, in a school district with a large Hispanic population, a law was passed prohibiting teaching of ethnic studies because it puts past American actions in a bad light. There have been protests against teaching that yes, there are homosexuals in the country; and no, they’re not ‘destroying America’. Schools are (or should be) about learning, which requires information from various perspectives instead of just the White, Christian one.
Lawmakers in many areas are pushing for the teaching of ‘Intelligent Design’ in schools. ID is not science. There are people who demand that evolution be taught as a ‘theory’, and thus is not necessarily true. Evolution happens. The ‘theory’ part is how it works. I have heard IRL of students who rejected what is being taught in biology classes because it conflicts with their beliefs. I have heard of teachers who get around the prohibition on the establishment of religion by teaching evolution in a cynical manner. If a teacher wants to push his or her religious agenda, let him or her teach Philosophy in a college; not present ID as a valid alternative to impressionable children.
Indeed. Tenure is only a job benefit for people who are worried they’ll get fired. I have a different plan for not getting fired: I plan to not get fired on account of being awesome. So I just got tenure last month, and sure, I’m not gonna turn it down, but if they’d given me a choice between tenure and a coupon for a free pizza, I’d have had to think about it.
People who plan to not get fired on account of awesomeness need other job benefits to keep them in the profession. #1? Money. Sure, teachers in some places are paid well. North Carolina isn’t one of those places. In my fifth year teaching, I’ll be earning roughly the same as in my first year, due to constant budget cuts. We’ve dropped to 49th in the nation in per-pupil fundraising.
And yes, capital-L Libertarians adore the corrupt Kansas City school-board for providing such an excellent anecdote about poorly-used extra funds, but the lessons they draw from the anecdote are foolish. Throwing money at a problem won’t solve it, but spending money wisely often can solve it. You can’t look at situations in which incompetent or corrupt administration received extra funds and mismanaged it and conclude the problem was with the extra money; the problem was with the incompetent or corrupt administration.
Pens? Notebooks? Bah, smash that technology! If cuneiform was good enough for the Sumerians, it’s good enough for me.
Unlike you, I’m a teacher that uses technology. I use it to prep lesson-plans that allow me to put objects on the board instantly. I use it to manipulate numbers in ways that a whiteboard doesn’t allow. I use it to show short clips of videos. I use it to check the weather with students. I use it to make quick graphs to represent learning. Students use it to create posters and brochures about what they’ve learned, and sometimes to create movies about their learning.
Yes, there are stupid uses of digital technology, just as there are stupid uses of printing press technology. A Luddite approach is just ignorant.
No. What you get are:
- The single saints, people who have a calling and who are willing to take a vow of poverty;
- The doctor-spouses, people who don’t need the money and do this to pass the time;
- The burnouts, people who think they’re #1 but who form a family, realize they literally can’t afford to do this job, and go somewhere else; and
- The schmucks, people for whom teaching really is the best money they can make.
If you raise the salary, you’ll keep the people with a calling, transferring the burnouts into their category. And the quality of your schmucks will improve dramatically.
I’ve known all four groups. #1 and #3 are great. #2 may or may not be great. #4 is pathetic right now.
When the OP talks about “fixing” education, he means fixing it like a ball game, not fixing it like a lawn mower.
Currently it’s been fixed like a puppy.