Jumping off from the IQ thread: it is my assertion that the movie Waiting for Superman is rubbish, as are the standards of No Child Left Behind. I believe that no matter what they do in terms of closing schools down, reopening them as charters, reorganising them, firing teachers, taking over by the states, whatever, it will not move test scores in those lowest performing schools up to the median or even close to it.
I believe teachers unions are a good thing, and that the vast majority of teachers do a good job for moderate pay.
Before anyone cites–that is, cherry picks–one of those charters that has the claim to massive improvements in test scores, let me first note that most of those success stories involve self selected individuals or families that sign up on a waiting list. Show me a consistent pattern of improving neighborhood schools where parents are little concerned with what school their kids go to…and then you’ll have my attention.
I’m a very strong defender of public education, and I’m pretty lukewarm on charter schools. But I think it’s unfair to say that inner-city schools aren’t failing inner-city children. Some inner-city schools are great, but others are terrible.
My basis for this claim is my reading of Jonathan Kozol, a guy that’s worked for decades with schools in impoverished areas of NYC. The people living in those neighborhoods are well aware of which schools have principals that treat education as a sacred trust, and which principals see themselves as a feeder program for the prison system. With the same basic population of children, different schools achieve different goals.
If you are a teacher at one of the terrible schools and you are a good teacher, the chances are pretty good that you’ll look for a transfer: a difficult population combined with a cynical administration is going to be too much for you. You might transfer to another high-poverty school, but you’ll want to find one with an active, engaged administration. The result will be that the worst schools will be left with the most cynical and most ineffective teachers.
And that’s a real problem, one that we should work to change.
I’m also on record saying that the best thing we can do for public education is to drastically reduce poverty, and I stand by that. But until we get a political party with the backbone of an LBJ, that’s not feasible; and we need to look at improving the schools we do have.
What are ‘the standards of No Child Left Behind’? What ‘wrongs’ has it done to inner city schools? Do you even know what it is/does or did you just use it like you’ve heard others use it?
I am a huge public ed advocate, but this blame NCLB thing is pretty silly.
I may be missing something here, but I don’t see how the text of your post addresses its title.
Indeed, you imply that low-performing schools are well below the median and it will be hard to improve them - which seems to support the notion that these schools are not serving their students well.
He thinks the students can’t be expected to do any better because, being black, they have low IQs and simply can’t perform any better than they are. SlackerInc made that clear in the previous thread but chose not to make that explicit in this one.
I also would like to know how you justify this title. There are inner city schools were the drop-out rate is over 75%. There are inner city schools where virtually no graduates go on to college. Would you classify these as successful?
Surely you’d agree that such families deserve the best education for their children that we can provide. If charter schools provide the best possible education for those families, then those families should be allowed access to charter schools. All such families, not just a few chosen by lottery.
The “War on Poverty” hasn’t been taken seriously by either major party for at least 15 years, and realistically it’s more like three or four decades since we’ve seen a genuine concerted effort to end poverty in the United States.
But for you to ask whether poverty has been reduced by the War on Poverty is to show serious ignorance of what things used to be like. Give me a specific “War on Poverty” program to discuss, and we can look at what conditions were like before the program, and what they’re like now. Would you like to look at childhood malnutrition? Deaths from exposure to the cold? Homelessness?
Yikes. In case it’s necessary, I’m gonna say that that’s nothing like what I’d argue. But I will say that a kid who’s raised in (for example) a food-insecure household, in a crime-ridden neighborhood, with parents who themselves are functionally illiterate, is starting her school career with three strikes against her.
And I agree with you that everybody likes to bash the schools without discussing other factors (or talking about success stories). It’s not just on the schools and the teachers. But as we can see in the other thread and dozens of threads just like it, the IQ thing is garbage.
I’m going to take some time to respond to some of the other posts; but before people start getting the wrong idea here, I want to point out that I am a strong Obama supporter who donated to and worked for him both in 2008 and 2012. I consider our greatest president (before Obama) to be Ulysses Grant, for sending federal troops to take on the KKK and generally supporting the civil rights of “freedmen”. And I consider John Brown and Thaddeus Stevens to be two of the most heroic figures in American history.
So if you’re going to look at my posting history, please look here and here and here as well. I am not coming from a position of anti-black animus, but as a progressive supporter of teacher’s unions (although Dubya would surely say I am guilty of the “soft bigotry of low expectations”, to which I’d plead nolo contendre).
Wouldn’t our greatest President still be Lincoln and Washington? Admittedly Grant is quite underrated.
Anyhow, on the main topic, the best bet is to impose a Finnish model of education with equal federal funding of education which will end the inequality of funding stemming from cratered inner city property values (who of course have far more infrastructure besides schools to maintain compared to suburbs) and banning private schools from charging tuitions or have a higher criteria of admission than public schools which will prevent white flight from innter city districts. The presence of the children of middle classes will provide an example for poorer children to emulate and thus be a leavening element. In the long-term white flight from city to suburb (which fortunately has been reduced somewhat) should be countered by policies restricting sprawl, improved and cheaper public transportation, and possibly determining which school children go to by lottery.
My wife is a special education teacher in a Title I public school, and I have read extensively about the “school reform” movement. So, no: I would not say my sense of NCLB is anywhere near as superficial as you are imputing.
Specifically, I am referring to Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP (per Wikipedia):
The consequences for “failure” are severe, though they are in most cases looming rather than already having been carried out (not that this reduces the stress on teachers and administrators much). To wit:
Emphases mine, to point out how the sword of Damocles hangs over the teachers and administrators of these schools. The message is, clearly: “raise scores significantly, or it’s your ass on the line”.
Here’s Diane Ravitch, who has flipped sides on this reform debate after seeing the futility of taking the “reform” approach:
Ravitch again, on NPR last month (again, emphases mine):
Read between the lines of that last point I bolded. Test scores and graduation rates for the country as a whole may be flat or declining. But if you look at each ethnic group, they have risen in every one: it’s just that the lower-performing groups have become a bigger piece of the pie. (This is not so dissimilar from the observation that if Romney had an electorate that was as white as the one Reagan ran in, he would have beaten Obama.)
I taught in inner city LAUSD including a school where that was as bad as any you’d see in terms of gangs and poverty and drugs and danger to students and teachers. Think to your job. How many times a year do you lose a someone in your company to gang violence? How many times did you have to face physical violence or even death by doing your job? I’m not going to lie to you and say it is everyday, but I bet for me it was more times in one year than you in your entire career. So yes you get some crappy teachers but guess what, they would do a disservice to any student in any school. The teachers that are there for the most part want to be there and are not looking to transfer.
So let’s start out with a simple fact, inner city schools look like shit and don’t have supplies due to theft and vandalism. End of that discussion. People think inner city schools don’t have money because it looks that way. Those school often have more money (look up Title I) but they have to pay for new sprinkler lines when the old ones are broken so we can have a flood on the second floor (which is paid for be the school) or new lockers when the ones we just bought are broken into by thieves during class time.
Second, inner city youths have different priorities than the teachers have for them. Yes I know that I should be preparing the students for college but they’re more concerned with survival - literal survival - and taking care of their families or living the thug life. Let me ask you this, how do tangents and gerunds help you survive? But here is the horrible irony. If I don’t do my best every day to prepare every student for college knowing 30% of my class will drop out and not even get a diploma and that’s a higher rate than students that will go to a 4 year college, if I teach down to them then I am doing them a disservice.
So what would you have me do? Teach to the 80% that are going to live and die in the hood who are lucky to have a diploma and who maybe, just maybe will realize at 19 with three kids that they do want to take some college classes or would you have me teach to the 20% that know they want out of there and are going to a university? And is teaching that 20% doing a disservice to the other 80%?
Probably nothing. We can improve things marginally by changing education funding and taking other steps like those Qin laid out; but the paradigm that all kids, and all schools, can come up to some decent level of proficiency is fundamentally flawed and in fact a pernicious idea that does lots of harm as it needlessly churns up the education system, not to mention the body politic.