Uneducated, unemployed, criminals, given the much higher unemployment rates for those less educated.
Anyone with grown kids has probably gone through a short phase where they see money from even the crappiest job seem like a fortune as compared to their allowances. This phase ends (for most) when they discover the true cost of living on ones own.
Spot on about no tolerance, fads and the like. Spot on about teacher incompetence coupled with high salaries courtesy of the taxpayers verging on bankruptcy and fleeing the state.
But no “community involvement”? “Ghettoization”? You do realize that the entire world out there follows these practices and does just fine? These are simply more examples of the “fads” that you mention. If you have dumb or non academically inclined students in your class, no amount of community or age mixing or anything else is going to make them any smarter. It also wouldn’t make them to believe an obvious lie - that mastering the academic curriculum is somehow advantageous for them. If they know what jobs their parents hold and what jobs they themselves are likely to hold and that these jobs require no academic credentials, telling them “education is our future” means telling them a lie. And surely they are smart enough to appreciate that. Heck, have you heard about level of hiring of recent college grads lately?
I’m a teacher too. I teach calculus and physics at a private school and I wouldn’t switch to a public school if they paid twice as much. (That’s not a theoretical statement; they do pay twice as much.) But I’ve spent some time observing the wreckage that is America’s public school system. We used to have a public school system that was the envy of the planet. Now it ranks close to last among industrialist countries by most measures. So what went wrong? Bad parenting? Why would American parents be doing any worse than those in Japan or South Korea or Europe? Anti-intellectual culture? Self-esteem movement? Educational fads? Other countries have managed to deal with those things and still teach kids how to read and do math.
What went wrong is that in America, power was taken away from individual teachers and administrators and vested in state legislatures and, all to often, the courts. So the decisions about what happens in school are very often made by people who haven’t been in a school for decades and who are, in the case of judges, immune to public opinion. So they can just make up whatever stupid law they want without caring–and sometimes without even knowing–what the consequences will be in the classroom.
What you describe about not being able to require them to have school supplies sounds like an example of exactly that. A judge or politicians might think it sounds like a great idea. How could we possibly require the poor little poor people to buy school supplies for their kids, when we can just have the schools provide them? But there are unintended consequences.
Likewise, in some places, it’s illegal for teachers to take cell phones away from kids, on the grounds that the kids might need the phones for a medical emergency. So if a kid chooses to play games on his phone all day long, the teacher can’t do anything to stop it.
Likewise, the law saying that if any special ed. kid gets a note from a doctor requiring the school to obtain for some special equipment, the school must get it, even if it runs to tens of thousands of dollars per kid per year. Sounds wonderful and compassionate on paper, but it drains money away from classrooms in practice.
Some people will keep insisting that whatever the problem is, the teachers just need to solve the problem. But public school teachers no longer are allowed to control their own classrooms, so they can’t solve problems.
Really? That’s the goal of our education system now? No wonder America does so poorly against nations that treat their educational system as being about education instead of indoctrination.
As for the OP, I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I attended a high school that had multiple housing projects feeding into it, ‘minorities’ were the distinct majority with all the stereotypes of minority dominated school in full display. I would have dearly loved to see half the students kicked out. It would have meant the other half could learn something for a change, or at the very last not have to go through metal detectors. So based on personal experience, I agree strongly.
OTOH, when a kid leaves school at 14, what’s going to happen to him? He’s going to remain part of the poor class, he’s going to have difficulty finding a job, he probably won’t keep a job since he’s already shown he doesn’t have a sense of responsibility. We would be, basically, just shoving the problem from schools to the streets. Which is no solution at all.
So I don’t know the answer. I do know what we’re doing now, and have done for decades, doesn’t work well. We need to change something. The problem is complex enough that I have no idea of what though.
Here is a question:
Why aren’t they kids learning?
Why don’t they see a future for themselves?
Why can’t we motivate them to seek an education, which is proven to improve not only their lives, but the security and prosperity of our country as a whole?
These are the problems we have to solve. Something is wrong not in our schools, but in our society. Whole swaths of people feel like they are left out, like even the most basic path to prosperity is worthless for them. The schools are just a symptom of it. And no, I don’t think it’s because some kids are just better than others.
Until we fix this, all we can do is move the problem around. But it will keep coming back. It’s not going to leave us alone. Sure, it’s a lot harder to tackle, but we are an awesome nation and I’m sure we can do it.
In Missouri (not sure about other states) a student can drop out of school at age 16. At that point neither parents nor school boards can force them to continue attending. For that matter, it’s also a lot easier to try them in court as adults, if it gets to that point.
So, by the OP’s reasoning, the upper grades of high school (11th and 12th grade) should be higher achieving and better behaved, because the unmotivated students presumably quit when they turned 16.
Not knowing exactly how to phrase my search terms to sift through the thousands of studies out there, I’ll throw the question to the Teeming Millions. Does anyone know of studies comparing achievement of 16-18 year olds and those <16?
I wrote a 40 minute reply only to lose it when the board logged me out for some reason. Gah!
I will try to piece it together again, later.
Bummer about losing the post. Here’s something I do after writing up a long message that has saved my bacon a couple of times: hit <Ctrl-A> <Ctrl-C> before submitting. <Ctrl-A> will automatically select all your text and <Ctrl-C> copies it to the clipboard for easy retrieval.
You might also be able to hit the back button. Firefox seems to be pretty good about holding onto your text and you may be able to submit it again.
Oh yeeeeah? Your dog ate it? God, I cant stand Dopers who dont show motivation and will make up lame excuses.
Yes, Admins, I am joking.
Hmmm, well, as a parent who Unschooled my son until he chose to enter high school (where he excelled, was very popular with both peers and teachers, took several AP courses, served as Features, Photo and Editorial Editor of the school paper and was a star of the Drama Club…he’s currently an 18 yr old full time university student) I have lots of opinions on compulsory, public education and its potential drawbacks as well as with good experiences with it.
I also have an 11 yr old daughter in public school currently…she entered at age 7. While she is doing well (but already not being challenged enough) I wish I could bring her home and give her the time and real-life education her brother got, but as a widow back at University FT myself, that’s difficult. Maybe I will try to work it out so she can skip middle school and just do high school and/or college and get the best of both worlds.
FTR, I was also a preschool teacher for about 15 years, my first degree being in Child Development, so I also know a bit about running a classroom (albeit one of 13 3-4 yr olds…yep, gotta stay on top of those supplies and make sure they wash out their brushes;)). Also have worked in the public system as an individual, special needs assistant.
My actual views are that compulsory education is, overall, a negative. But that because we have chosen (or ended up with) a society in which work/home/education and damn near every other aspect of our lives is specialized and professionalized as opposed to integrated, most have little choice in the matter, even IF Unschooling or schooling at home is legal in their state. I happened to be able to stay home/work at home or at my own business and so keep my son home/with me and do things like zoo, museum and other trips and social get-togethers with other Unschoolers and others in general. Yes, I sacrificed finacially to do it, but for many, it is not even an issue of sacrifice but of impossible (though some have formed co-ops and worked it out regardless). Fact is, public education in the U.S. functions largely as a free child care which allows parents to be employed in settings outside the home and for others.
That being acknowledged, the way we fund public schools is insane. One, we base the funding for individual districts on the property taxes of those areas, resulting in HUGE discrepencies between the education of children from poor areas and those of wealthier ones. One of the most common argument in favor of free public schooling is that it provides an equal footing for everyone, regardless of background. Bullshit. The rich kids go to schools with the best resources, often best teachers and parents who have the time and money to be involved. The poor ones go to schools with leaky ceilings, textbooks from the time of Kennedy and parents with far less free time and money to spend. Segregation by class and/or race is still the norm.
The school supply list gets longer and more costly every year. This last year, I bought everything on the list EXCEPT the 2 reams of copy paper. That paper is for the OFFICE to use, not the class, and adds about $10 to a $30 list…I couldn’t afford it and feel that the taxes we all pay should cover such funding issues (even as a renter, I pay them, in my rent). I don’t have an issue with having to buy far more than my child will actually need to cover the needs of those whose parents can’t afford anything (even though as a widow on SS and student loans and Pell grants, I can barely afford it!) but for certain items, my daughter does…she picks out a pencil box or notebooks or pens and wants them to be HERS. With a few such items, I say, “you write your name on it and keep it in your backpack”.
At any rate, to mandate any fee or cost to public education means that there will always be some children who will be left out due to the economic situation of their families. That defeats the entire (supposed) point of free public education. Instead, we need to be demanding that our taxes be used to fully fund the schools so that more and more of the out of pocket costs don’t keep falling on parents and teachers (who buy a LOT out of their own pocket just because they CARE and aren’t given the funds).
I spent a lot of years working with a lot of kids, many of them from poor/working class homes. As teacher, one has to set the rules and an example. We take care of our things because if we don’t, we can’t PAINT tomorrow (or whatever). I usually set it up so that a few kids were appointed to help with the cleaning up (and those positions were highly coveted…they looked forward to their turn!)
Same way I set the example by being all shocked to find the books scattered about…“OMG! Look at all our lovely books all over the place! We’d better pick them up, they might get torn up and then we won’t have them and/or the library won’t let us check any more out next trip!”
Of course, individuals were expected and encouraged to clean up their own messes…part of my function was to catch when they didn’t and remind them.
See, kids can easily learn different sets of rules. At home, it may be OK to break things, leave messes, hit, whatever, but AT SCHOOL, it’s NOT. They get that really fast. And I’ve worked with some kids who came from such impoverished or dysfuntional homes that they’d never HELD a book or paintbrush or nice toy and had to be taught how to handle them. Also my job.
I learned a long time ago that we should never judge or penalize a child for the faults of their family of origin. Children are amazingly adaptable and full of potential and they all deserve the same “nice things” and oppourtunities in life. Maybe they never had any at home, but that only means it is all the more important to make sure they have some at school/elsewhere in life, so they can learn to appreciate them and grow to their full potential. JMHO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phouka
I wrote a 40 minute reply only to lose it when the board logged me out for some reason. Gah!
I will try to piece it together again, later.
This rocks.
ETA I actually had a paper that my cat SHIT on the night before I had to turn it in…needless to say, I re-printed it and didn’t bother trying that excuse, however true (I could have brought her the evidence) on my professor. 
Oh, and it got an A…shows what that stupid cat knows.
I think the underlying issue here is the difference between education and schooling. Schooling is something imposed on you. Something others do to you. Getting an education is an internal process, something you go out and get for yourself. The US system is much more about schooling than it is about fanning the flames of education. Everything from the rigor of sitting in a classroom for seven hours a day to the increasing trend of teaching to the test screams of things being imposed on the student. Instead of providing a place where the students want to go to get their natural curiosity satisfied, we force(literally) them into a place where they are confined, and exposed to what we want them to learn, at a pace as rapid or slow as we can manage with our huge adult bureaucracy in place, and call it education. The children aren’t stakeholders in this process, they’re subject to it. This is not a new or novel take on the subject of the public education system. In fact a hundred years ago Mark Twain said “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” And more recently, Albert Einestein remarked “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” Even further back David Hume wrote an essay where he talks about the wonders which have been accomplished by the elite group of learned men, but laments “learning has been as great a loser by being shut up in colleges and cells, and secluded from the world and good company.”
The American educational system is free, universal, and compulsory. I think this has pretty much inevitably lead to imposing something of no value on everyone.
Enjoy,
Steven
Elementary age - She sees about 200 students - once a week for an hour. Don’t you think if they had teachers reinforcing these ideas throughout their entire time in school, you’d be getting high school students who respected other people’s property? A lot of these kids probably see their teachers more often than they see their parents.
I would like it if teachers who didn’t want to teach at public schools all taught in private schools. Teachers who don’t want to teach at public schools should not be forced on students they despise and don’t want to deal with just so they can collect a fat paycheck, essentially being on the public dole. They should go off to private schools or be unemployed. Unlike school students, who are minors and can’t make rational decisions for themselves, teachers who hate the rigors of public schools are adults with bad attitudes that poison the minds of the young children they are not willing to deal with on a come as you are basis.
It is the teachers who have a choice where they teach or not teach at all who are inflicted on students who have no choice in being there. The teachers are adults who can make their own decisions and should choose not to be there if they are so much fucking better than the little “snowflakes”.
I’m with you, Second Stone. This year I’m going through a really rigorous process called National Boards, basically sending in about 120 pages of evidence that I’m an effective teacher, plus videotaping lessons and sitting through hours of exams. A very small percentage of teachers tries for it. Fewer than half the teachers that try for it make it in the first year of trying. The application is basically shaping my curriculum for the year (in a good way, I think). The money for it comes out of my pocket ($2,500).
It’s worth doing because of the 12% pay increase I get if I succeed. I don’t know if I will, but I generally would rather try and fail than not try and wonder if I would’ve succeeded. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
My point is this: I think all teachers should need similar qualifications. Or, at least, all teachers should be required to go through something similar before achieving tenure, or if tenure is eliminated (something I cautiously endorse), before being hired for their sixth or seventh year of teaching.
As it is, we pay beginning teachers very little, put them in untenable bureaucracies, watch a truly dismaying turnover rate, encourage guidance counselors to steer smart students away from the profession, and then wring our hands at the state of our schools.
We need better teachers. And then we need to treat them better: more autonomy, more respect for their skills, more pay. Consider how we treat nurses, lawyers, and other professionals; use that as a model for teaching.
IME, we also need to improve the classroom management component of teacher education programs at colleges. I had more than one professor tell me that if a lesson is sufficiently engaging, there won’t be any discipline problems. I want to go back and kick those professors in the shin: it’s nonsense. We need teachers to go into the classroom ready to deal with privileged students whose parents excuse their loquacity by saying, “Oh, her moon’s in Gemini” (true story), as well as ready to deal with students who come to school with a belt mark across their face, as well as students who are constantly chewing up markers and eating thumbtacks and turning cartwheels in the room because their parents don’t believe in ADHD.
Should we allow 14-year-olds to withdraw? I’m all in favor of an age of majority: at the age where we consider a person old enough to make their own decisions, absolutely let’s let them vote, join the military, drink, purchase firearms, get married without parental consent, and drop out of school. But if they’re not old enough to make life-changing decisions, then the grownups in their lives are responsible for making those decisions for them.
And it’s very nice to suggest that parents are the responsible grownups, but that’s simply not true for a lot of kids. Unless you’re going to start issuing a Parent License that someone must earn before they can breed (and believe me, I’ll vote for that proposal in a heartbeat, as will most parents), you’re going to end up with the parents who show love for their kids by believing any stupid lie about why homework wasn’t done, or the parents who show love for their kids by beating them, or the parent who hate school herself and so refuses every to show up for a conference. And we gotta educate their kids, too: we gotta give those kids the best chance in life we can, despite their shitty parents.
What makes you think the children of the wealthy are going to public school?
In any event, your pretty universe has little bearing on the actual univerise. I’m willing to bet that taken as a group, children who grow up in more affluent families tend to perform better in school than those from poor families.
In my experience, you’re absolutely correct. It’s not to say that there are no problems with such kids, but the problems are different.
And Chessic is, very slightly, onto something. There are ways of speaking and acting in our society that, for better or worse, lead to your getting a lot of money. There are ways of speaking and acting in our society that, for better or worse, consign you to poverty. Parents tend to teach children to speak and act the same way the parent does. So parents with money tend to teach their kids to act and speak in ways that get money, and parents without money tend to teach their kids to act and speak in ways that don’t get money.
Of course that’s horribly unfair: the kid didn’t choose which family to be born into, and that parental instruction that begins at birth is very hard to overcome. Some do it, of course, but many more do not.
And that’s why mandatory public education is so vitally important. It can help offset some of the more destructive lessons that kids learn at home.
It seems to me that all the problems in the OPs post are about the implementation of free mandatory education, not the actual concept itself.
In particular a lot of those problems would go away simply with more funding. Smaller classes would give better results, improve behaviour and dramatically improve teacher-pupil relations. Everything else would follow.
Really? Which nations are those? And what do you base that thought off of?
No argument it is very very difficult for you to do your job if you do not have parents working with you, and fairly easy to do your job if you are in the position to reinforce the values that students are getting at home, if not from parents, then from other significant forces in their lives.
And true enough, some families provide those role models and that support. And those families are more likely to have their kids in better schools, paying for it if they need to, moving neighborhoods if they need to. They get the best teachers and those best teachers get the kids who are easiest to get interested and to get to achieve.
Kids without those role models and without that home support tend to be in the schools that also have the least resources and often not the very best that the teaching profession has to offer. Not always. Some amazing teachers choose to work in the most difficult conditions. But more of the best would rather work in a less frustrating environment … and can choose to do so. And while the better schools get some crappy teachers too, they tend to have fewer of them and fewer that have burnt out in year three or four.
It sucks to have to try to motivate kids who have not gotten the message from home that school is valuable, who don’t have a stable household that makes sure they do their homework and who are unable or unwilling to check their kids work and help explain things they don’t get, who have not socialized their kids in ways that lead to success at school and in the future working world.
But no offense, suck it up. If you went into that job thinking that children were all going to come from functional households and give a shit, then you were delusional. This is what you signed up for, not just teaching the ones that are easy to teach but dealing with those who it is, to put it mildly, a tremendous challenge to teach as well, and if you were not prepared for frequently failing in that task against all that is stacked up against you, and yet trying again with the next group of kids just as hard, then maybe you choose the wrong job.
As to the idea of the op - let kids who think they don’t want to be there quit at thirteen … None of my kids were mature enough at thirteen to make a rest of their life altering decision like pulling out of school, and one who wanted to that? Even less so.
As long as sucking it up doesn’t preclude bitching about it on the Internet, we’re good :).