No, what happens is that parents who care, and who network, make sure their kids get the good teachers, while the clueless parents have their kids wind up with the bad ones.
BTW, who is a “bad teacher” is not an obvious thing. Our older daughter had someone we thought was terrible for English. Her grammar was bad and she never commented on papers. My daughter (who always got As) started putting gobbledy-gook in the middle of her papers to see if it got noticed. It didn’t. We did complain.
Well, our younger daughter had the same teacher for German three years later, and she was wonderful. It turned out the school forced her to teach English, which was not her major area. So things might be not quite what they seem.
Doubtless correct. Ny daughter’s 10th grade biology teacher is no longer in the profession, for reasons not necessarily unconnected to her behavior during conferences with me and my wife.
Also true that in schools with lots of parental involvement, the teachers discover that a certain level of performance is not optional. If you send home a test and it is marked up incorrectly, and by the next morning you have received five or six phone calls pointing this out and requesting improvements, teachers will remember that the next time they grade a test. Schools where parents do not notice if their children are doing well or not, much less so.
This is a common NCLB meme, but it simply isn’t true. Schools that fail do not get their funding cut. None of the ‘punishments’ of NCLB are funding cuts. Please show me schools that got their funding cut because of NCLB…
[ul]
[li]Recognize parents with kids who improve the most. Improve, not have the best scores, since the good parents will have the top spots locked up.[/li][li]Provide a place to go after school to do homework. This should be mostly for elementary school kids. Let them play first, then have them do their homework with someone there to help like parents should be doing. If you get young kids into the habit of doing homework, they will continue on when older, and less likely to stay. Parents should love this because it cuts down on afterschool care costs.[/li][li]Get Opal to help. [/li][/ul]
I don’t think there are a heck of a lot of “bad” teachers, I think they just become indifferent.
And this happens in any job, once people get very dissatisfied with their working conditions they just no longer care, so they don’t try as hard as they once did.
I know a lot of people who grew up in the projects of Chicago and they did just fine, with the same public schools that a lot of other people I know came out of. Why did one do fine and the other fail. They had the same school, the same teachers, it was outside influences.
Some kids took the easy way out, some got into drugs, some have parents or homes that are unacceptable. Yet I have even known some people with those backgrounds that overcome it.
It’s not a question you can simply answer. It’s a combination of teachers, students and parents, and the motivation each one has. If one gives up or become indifferent, the other two side must try that much harder or it won’t work.
That’s right, you CAN’T change the parents they go home to. We can change their learning environment.
Coming from a poor neighborhood I can say without reservation that good teachers make a difference. I feel they made a difference in my life even if they were not able to make a difference in the lives of every student they had. They made a significant difference at the margins. Sure there were some kids that were simply doomed by an extremely bad home environment or mediocre ability/drive (mediocrity is not as easily overcome by poor children as by middle class children), but some of them were doomed by having bad teachers.
Everyone I know from a shitty neighborhood that ended up making something of themselves credit not only their parents but their teachers. We recognize that things might be entirely different if we had been taught by crappy teachers.
I had plenty of teachers that struggled, visibly struggled every day trying to get figure out how to overcome the crippling effecdts of poverty in the classroom. Paying for student activities out of their own pockets being driven near tears by the frustration of students who had parents that didn’t care. Then there were the teachers who didn’t give a shit, they may have cared once but years of operating in a system that provided lots of job security but no support bled it out of them.
You can’t fix the parents. However, you can consider creating a learning environment that assumes that there is no parent support. You would need to take all of the students who have no parent help put into a different program that focuses on having only education in the classroom. You would only offer homework if you had an onsite after school program. You would rebuild your lesson plans assuming that no reading takes place at home, no homework is done at home, no essays are written at home, etc.
In many ways it’s not necessary about what the parents do or don’t do. Research has shown a correlation between future academic ability and simply the mere presence of printed materials in a child’s household. This was independent of any action on the parents’ part. The fact that there are printed things in the environment–books, magazines, comic books, whatever–regardless of what the parents do, contributes to future success with basic and advanced literacy.
If we extend the implications of this to the other, more imposing, factors in the child’s environment–especially crime–it’s just so obvious that it’s ridiculous to expect a someone (who’s effectively a stranger) to work miracles by being a “good teacher.”
year round school. Students lose an amazing amount of ground over the summer, enough so that the first six weeks of school are often devoted to reteaching what was lost. That’s a sixth of the school year lost.
smaller class sizes. Twenty to thirty kids? I wish. My district is so poor this year, classes are maxed out at 39 kids per class. In many classrooms, we don’t have enough desks or chairs for them. 173 quizzes takes a hell of a lot of time to grade, so if I don’t want to end up getting back problems and lack of sleep, I have to switch over from open-ended, higher learning skill based questions to close-ended, recitation questions. My students get far less one-on-one attention, quiet-but-failing students fly under my radar for longer, and disruptive students cause a lot more damage.
a different philosophy of assessment. Yes, a report card showing all As or all Fs gives you a pretty good idea as to what kind of student your child is, but it says nothing about the material covered. And, once it’s covered, that’s it, whether the child mastered it or not. Curricula should be based on what skills a student masters and what knowledge they learn, and that rate of mastery of learning and mastery should be accurately reported to the parents. (Juanito has mastered the ability to put words in alphabetical order. He also knows all of his colors and has memorized every word of the Preamble to the Constitution.) Grades should be defined by what a child has mastered and what they are currently working on, not what age they are.
physical activity. How many studies are out now that show that the lynchpin of both physical and mental health is physical activity? Yet, we arrange schedules to drill test skills and keep the kids inside all day long, sitting on their butts. We need recess and PE back, and PE shouldn’t be the same mindless competitive sports drills but a variety of exercises and activities that include every child.
nutrition. For God’s sake, fund the breakfasts and lunches for every kid who needs it, and don’t base the food on whatever agricultural interest has successfully lobbied Congress. Check blood sugar levels at the door if you have to. If they don’t have the glucose necessary to think, they aren’t going to learn a damn thing.
stop coddling the kids. I have high schoolers who have not had to face a real consequence in their entire lives. The parents scream, the administrators fold, and as a result, I have a kid in my class who thinks nothing of disrupting an entire period, because the worst that’s going to happen to him is a yellow piece of paper, a short talk with an assistant principal and MAYBE a Saturday school. Negative consequences should be as close to instantaneous as possible and have some real teeth.
Also, I want a Marine drill sergeant in every classroom. But that’s just me.
Sure you can. Several programs like Head Start, and the Harlem Children’s Zone project have attempted to do just that. Obviously, they are not perfect programs, but it is possible. The question becomes, why do we not focus on these approaches rather than eliminating “bad” teachers.
Right, so the answer is more (proportional) money for teachers–for more teachers, relative to the number of kids, not necessarily higher-paid teachers.
My own feeling is that too much of our total schools budget is consumed by facilities and administration.
A recent book, ‘Bad Students, Not Bad Schools’ makes this point. Weissberg suggests the following formula. His weighting on page 3 is quite different to what he describes as the more liberal weightin on page 9 (Weissberg attributes more to intelligence & motivation, compared to the other factors):
Academic achievement = intelligence x motivation x resources x pedagogy x instruction.
Not only no one in this thread, but also nobody on the planet, AFAICT. I get the NEA’s magazine, and it’s regularly got an article or two about how to improve bad teachers or get them out of the field. And the AFT also is working to streamline the process. This is a ridiculous canard that the right-wing likes to throw out. I can’t ever tell whether they’re serious in the absurdity, or whether it’s a covert attack on the idea of public education.
An economist might look at the problem as one of incentives:
We’ve lowered incentives for children to excel by refusing to fail children who should be failed, by raising their self-esteem whether warranted or not, and by dumbing down the curriculum.
We’ve eliminated the incentive for teachers to excel by instituting tenure and unions that make it impossible to fire teachers, and by removing merit pay and status for the best teachers.
We’ve eliminated the incentives for cost containment through public funding and politicization of educational issues. There is no competition, no incentive to attract the best students or to raise the scores of the poor students. Good teachers are not rewarded. There is no upside potential for taking a risk.
We’ve lowered incentives for educational excellence by providing easy funding for higher education for children who do not qualify for scholarships, and by lowering admissions requirements and dumbing down college.
We’ve lowered the value of college education by pushing through too many kids so that a degree no longer signals quality to prospective employers. This also reduces incentives to stay in school or to graduate with high marks.
We’ve culturally lowered the status of education choosing to value sports heroes and movie stars instead of scientists, engineers, and doctors. We demean people of high income, which is also the educated class. We also demean science by pushing intelligent design and socially validating all sorts of pseudo-intellectual claptrap.
We’ve reduced incentives to succeed by creating so many safety nets that failure is not nearly as painful as it used to be.
We’ve reduced the incentive for parents to be involved because the public system allows them to offload responsibility. Many private schools simply will not tolerate absentee parents.
In the worst neighborhoods, the incentives are completely screwed. When dropping out of high school actually improves your status and income, you’re going to have a bad school system no matter how good the teachers are.
Do you know why Asian kids do so well in school? Because they have to. The incentives are massive. A kid who excels can live the equivalent of a western middle class life in any of these countries. The kid who doesn’t study and flunks out will be living on $5/day doing hard menial labor. The gap between the educated and uneducated is large, and not just for the child; getting one kid through school can lift up an entire extended family and change the standards of living of all of them.
Is it really a surprise that they might study harder, and that their families might work hard to help them and support their educational efforts?
As long as the western educational system exists in a culture with weak educational incentives, it will under-perform. Educational reform is necessary, but it needs to be massive reform. You can’t just shuffle the deck chairs around, create a new program here or there, and think you’ve solved the problem.
True educational reform:
Market-based education as the main source of schooling. Private schools should be on an even footing with public schools by transitioning to a system where education is privately operated with funding provided by the government through the student. Government schools should only exist where the private educational market has clearly failed or won’t start up.
No national educational standards. This is killing innovation in education and preventing the use of local knowledge. America has a big advantage in that it is made up of 50 different states. That allows experimentation, competition, and a more dynamic culture. The cream will rise to the top, then be copied. You don’t have to design an educational system from the top down - you can allow people to choose, and allow the best educational system to emerge from the complexity of human interaction over time.
Adding back incentives by requiring more personal contribution to your own education. Student loans should be harder to get. A general reduction in property tax could be used to provide partial education vouchers, with the parents being forced to pay out of their own pockets for part of the education of their children.
Take the money saved from student loans, and create a large variety of educational scholarships and bursaries. Push kids to be excellent if they want the cash.
Reduce social benefits for all. If the fall from education is harder and more painful, fewer will fall from it.
Of course, that would make for a tougher, harsher society. So you have to decide if it’s worth the cost. Kids will flunk out. The best students will ‘win’, leaving others behind.
Maybe the bottom line is that our educational systems are under-performing because we are now the kind of people who don’t care as much about education as others do. We may say we do, but down in the gut? Maybe not.
Ugh no. I think we do need year round school but just as an additional optin There are kids who need year round school, adn then there are kids who do well under the summer break method.
Another thing. Maybe a good idea might be to encourage kids with disabilites to attend schools specificly for their disabilty so they can actually be TAUGHT and ACHIEVE!
This is just… I don’t know what it is, but I guarantee it will have the opposite effect.
My wife teaches at an inner-city high school. The problems for students and their education that poverty and crime and drug use cause are legion, and you think the solution is to make it worse for them as an object lesson? Pour encourager les autres?
How about instead we increase social benefits to alleviate the problems children have because they weren’t born to the right parents? How about we not use children as examples of what crappy parenting or difficult circumstances create? There’s a reason school lunch programs survive, Sam: Because wherever they’re tried there’s a very clear correlation between children getting the nutrition at school that they don’t get at home, and their test scores.
I’m holding my tongue because we’re not in the pit.
Bad parents cost money also. Schools get funded based on pupil days. Parents who let their kids skip school are costing the school district money - not to mention the cost of summer school and retaking a grade.
Got any facts on the actual extent of this problem? The school district my kids went to in NJ had a pre-first program for kids who went through kindergarten but who weren’t quite mature enough for first grade. Not that this is a problem having anything to do with bad teachers, the subject of this thread.
Now, I have to agree that conservative state school board members, like in Texas, not only dumb down the curriculum they moron it down. My kids had tougher junior high math than I did, and I was in honors classes. However, none of this has anything to do with the subject of this thread.
I went to school in NY from 1956 - 1969. Tenure and public funding were both in operation. I went to great schools with great teachers. Now, how could that be? In fact, the so-called glory days of American education happened with tenure and public funding.
College in California is a lot more expensive than it used to be. It hasn’t gotten any better, though. And, if you have 40% of kids going to college instead of 20%, dumbing down is inevitable.
If you look at the statistics for college dropouts, you will see that actually getting a degree still shows persistence - and employers know good schools from bad ones.
And no one in the 1930s or 1950s idolized movie stars or sports heroes, right? Back then they idolized the rare scientist, like Einstein, today they idolize the rare geek, like Bill Gates. In fact I think there is a lot less idol worship of movie stars today, because with the death of the studio system their warts show up at every supermarket checkstand.
singing We need a man like Herbert Hoover again.
Again, no different from the way it was when I was a kid. In fact, we were far more involved in the school than my parents were. This is definitely a function of the socioeconomic level of the parents. In the school system in NJ, parents taught guest classes about their specialties. When there was a meeting about the GATE program, the place was packed. As for private schools, in a fully private system will kids with uninvolved parents get tossed on the trash heap? Will the police come to drag the parents to teacher conferences? But, at least you seem to agree with the OP that there is a problem with parents here.
Hardly different from the way it was 50 years ago, except that we may see it as a problem now.
Asian kids do very well here, and I assure you that the kids in our district are not going to be doing menial labor if they flunk out (which means not getting into Berkeley where I live.) No, there is a whole social philosophy of education and the importance of school, very similar to that of the heavily Jewish neighborhood I grew up in. (Where being a drop out meant not becoming a doctor of one sort or another.)
Rest of the normal conservative glurge deleted. How it has anything to do with the OP is beyond me. So, are parents more important than teachers or not?
Did anyone else notice how, once you get to college and the usual 15-18 hour weeks, you end up covering the same material in half the time? If college is truly so easy that it’s like a high school education, and yet you learn more in less time, why not move the model down?