If so, how do we fix it. Or should we throw it away?
I think public education is integral to a democracy, and I don’t think it’s any accident that they’re in such sorry shape. Politicans are afraid of an educated public. I think we should require the children and grandchildren of all representatives in government to attend (or have attended) public schools. We would have the best educational system in the history of the world it the Bushes and Kennedys of the world had to send their own kids to PS382.
So moderators: (a) How come I can’t edit my own post, (b) How can I delete the accidental duplicate of this thread?
First of all, it’s not really broken. And what’s IS broken could easily be fixed by adequately funding schools and programs in poor communities.
Board rules dictate that one is not allowed to edit one’s own post, nor to delete extra threads.
Welcome to the boards, anyway.
I’d be interested in knowing what percentage of our elected representatives currently send their children to expensive private schools.
I think most school administrators and teachers are doing the best they can, and are given nothing but abuse for their efforts by the general public. People who complain about schools are rarely that knowledgable about what the schools are doing or why or what their situation is. So I’m inclined to agree that the schools aren’t really broken at all. But teachers are overworked, have limited training, and classroom sizes are too large. People continue to punish the schools by not passing levies and asking the schools to “tighten their belts,” when they don’t even have belts, they’re using rope they found in a dumpster (to elaborate the metaphor).
The schools in Minnesota, even in the “bad” neighborhoods of Minneapolis, are really pretty good when they are compared to schools around the country. But having gone to both private and public schools, I can say that even “good” public schools have nowhere near the quality of private schools in terms of quality teaching, high expectations, and good teacher-student ratios and relations.
Private schools have the luxury of filtering out students who aren’t smart or don’t behave.
It’s pretty easy to succeed when you have few challenges and small class size.
Our public schools do need fixing.
The first thing I would do is start with smaller class sizes, more teachers, smaller schools, better support services, higher taxes…
I would also institute social emotional learning into each curriculum. One of the best run third grade classes I’ve ever seen (in an inner city school), the teacher told me that her secret was that she spent the first month of school working primarily on social skills, relationship skills, emotional learning stuff. After that, the kids just learned more rapidly and the teacher was less fried at the end of each day.
High schools should start at about 10:00 am and let out closer to 5:00 pm. This would do two things: 1) give adolescents the amount of sleep they need, and 2) keep them occupied during the time of day when they are most apt to be unsupervised and getting pregnant/high/in legal trouble.
I don’t know if there’s any way to do it without raising taxes
Classroom sizes are too large. I keep hearing this and have yet to see any numbers on just how many kids are in the average classroom. I’m sure that’s because I haven’t looked though. Anybody got the figures handy? I remember, and I can verify this from my old elementary school yearbooks, that the classes I was in generally had around 30 kids in 'em. Is that more or less than the average today?
In response to Uncle Beer:
I teach remedial math classes at a public high school in Florida. I have pretty small classes – 20-30 kids per class. The higher-level classes (Algebra II, Formal Geometry) tend to have 35 - 45 students, and are very difficult to control. The Physical Ed/Personal Health classes tend to number in the 40s.
I’m at a small school (four grades, 900 kids). The larger high schools in the area have class sizes of up to 50 kids (according to the teachers who fled those schools to come to mine).
I don’t have cites or figures other than personal history.
I would say that our school system is most certainly broken, but I don’t think throwing it out is the solution. I agree with skutir in that most teachers are pretty good and doing the best they can. However, I disagree that most administrators are all that great. I think they’re generally overpaid, and more concerned with maintaining the status quo than with actually improving anything.
I think one important factor in our schooling system is the lack of competition. The administrators have absolutely zero incentive to improve. School vouchers would go a long way towards remedying this. If students start fleeing failing schools in droves, then maybe the admins will start to care a bit more. Nothing drives people to improve like a little fear of God thrown into them.
I also agree that teachers are generally underpaid, and in many cases you get what you pay for. Pay crappy wages, and you’re going to get a lot of crappy applicants, leading to a shortage of qualified candidates. If we cut the Dept. of Education (which is a bloated beaurocratic waste of money if ever there was one) and funneled that money directly to the states (by allowing them to raise taxes) people would be paying the same amount overall, yet there would be more money to play with. Use that savings to fund teachers’ raises.
Also, while the pursuit of smaller class sizes is noble, it’s given more hype than is really due. One teacher worth $50,000 teaching 40 students is going to yield better results than two teachers worth $20,000 each teaching 20 students. There have been studies performed that show that a dollar spent raising teachers’ salaries yields many times the performance increase in students as a dollar spend reducing class size. In fact, of all methods of improving performance, reducing class size is the least efficient. Yet for some reason, it’s the mantra of the teachers’ associations that class size reduction is the be-all-end-all of performance boosters. The cynic in me suspects that job security factors in there somewhere, but surely self-preservation wouldn’t be a driving force in something so noble as the teaching profession.
Jeff
I don’t think that vouchers are the way to go, because they funnel money to private schools that could go to public schools, thereby cutting public education off at the knees.
My personal observation is that schools aren’t run for the purpose of educating kids, they’re run for the benefit of adults. Education today is so badly political (from both sides) that it’s hard to winnow out the truth. A very vocal, active minority can take over a school board and require that certain subjects be taught; creationism is one such subject. In Texas, that same minority holds very powerful influence over the content in textbooks, so a few people effectively control what kids all over the country are learning from their textbooks. (Texas is one of the largest single buyers of textbooks; what’s published for Texas ends up nationwide because publishing textbooks on a state-by-state basis is too expensive.)
I also think the point of education is lost. Learning English, history, math, science, et cetera, is not about learning hard facts. It’s not important that I know every preposition, for example. It’s important that I know what a preposition is for, and where I can find them. Education is supposed to teach people how to think critically and to apply the hard facts to life. And, sadly, the schools aren’t doing that.
Scary story: This evening, when I was at the grocery store, two girls were looking at a recipe on the back of a package of chocolate chips. One of them asked me how many ounces in a pound. (I recognize that some memorized facts are useful; this is one of them.)
Robin
Or as Lucy once told Charlie Brown, “Did you know there are 16 ozzes in a lib? I learned that in school today.”
I’m against vouchers.
I’ve heard about the Texas thing – just recently, in fact, from the professor of the class I’m currently taking on Contemporary Approaches to Instruction and Assessment (I’m an M.A. student in Education).
so, how many ounces ARE in a pound?
Why am I anti-voucher?
Well, first and foremost because it takes money away from public schools, and creates a situation where the middle-class now subsidize the private educations of the rich at schools they cannot afford to send their own children, even with the subsidies. Since private schools don’t have to accept everyone, taxypayers would be subsidizing exclusive and even elitest institutions where not everybody is welcome or allowed even to compete for entrance. In any case, there’s not room for everyone, so most students would still be compelled to go to a public school, now with less funding. It would be even more of a two-tier school system, because the likelihood is that the kids with more involved parents are no longer there and it’s only the average-below average students left in Public Schools.
Then there’s the church-state issue. Many, maybe most, private schools have religious affiliations. Tax money has no business funding a religious institution.
To deal with Jeff’s positions, I find these to make presumptions that I do not accept. One is that, by and large, teachers and administrators are coasting and need to have “competition” to do better. Even if they were coasting, since it’s presumed they aren’t interested in quality of services now, why would they now feel compelled to do better? It’s not like the public schools are going to be “put out of business,” since private schools can hardly take everyone, and all of a sudden? Isn’t it as likely they will coast even more, since they would consider the kids left to be second-rate rejects anyway, who wouldn’t be able to use a quality education if they had one? Either scenario is conjecture, though I am tempted to ask Jeff: Has competition from UPS and Fed Ex made the USPS more efficient?
But that’s just speculation and argument to show a reasonable doubt in cause and effect, because I am regularly in contact with teachers and principals, and I think most or all are hard-working (much harder working than I am!), deeply committed to quality, and spend a lot of their own time and money on professional improvement. True, maybe these are just the ones I meet, and there are laggards in all walks of life, but I prefer to think that this is the norm.
Finally, there is the basic question of “how.” If we decide teachers need to do be better, we need to help them get the training and resources to BE better, we can’t presume that they know how to get better and just need to be bossed into it. Most teachers really want professional development time, but this is hard to come by, and at times poorly done (the teachers I know get tired of sitting through half-day seminars that don’t give them any ideas on how to be effective teachers). This would mean more money, not less.
One more thought on class size: I think an ideal class size is 15-22 students. If classroom management becomes an issue, then there’s less time to teach. I would be interested in seeing links or citations to methodologically sound (rather than anecdotal) studies that indicate class size does not make a difference in learner achievement and teacher satisfaction.
Re: school vouchers
“if students start fleeing failing schools in droves…”
Fleeing to where? Private schools? What happens when the “good” schools are full? I would guess that the good schools would only accept the good students, or the ones that can pay the most (or, more likely a combination of the two) leaving us with the same problem we have now, only the students who don’t fit the mold are even more hosed than they are currently.
Re: Size doesn’t matter
I suggest ElJeffe try teaching 30-10 year olds something, then trying it with 40. Make it easier, try a birthday party with 8 kids, then one with 12. Look back on your own college experiences, did you get more out of the 400 person lecture hall or the 8 person seminar?
The numbers on this one don’t really tell the tale though. Think also about how large groups influence personal responsibility, intelligence, and anxiety.
The larger the group, the less responsibility each individual feels for his actions, and the less each individual’s actions are valued.
Large groups of people yeild stupid behavior. People in large groups do things that they wouldn’t consider themselves capable of if asked out of context. The larger the group, the stupider each member of the group.
Larger groups produce anxiety, which is inimical to learning. A person simply tends to feel less safe (in a large group there are more things that could potentially be harmful, less that can be expected), people don’t really learn well when scared.
Re: Higher pay
Find me a teacher out there who thought he was going to get rich teaching in public school. Call me when you do. Have me paged.
Teachers know what they’re going to get paid when they decide to become teachers. They become teachers because they want to teach, maybe because of a lifestyle, maybe because of a need for control, but certainly not because of the pay.
A pay increase only increases productivity short term, long term productivity isn’t affected by pay increases, all the studies I’ve seen point this way, although I’d like to see your cite ElJeffe.
Job satisfaction is big where money isn’t. If teachers say that smaller class sizes will help them, then they probably will; if for no other reason than that teachers believe that it will.
That teacher in that third grade class I mentioned earlier attributed her success to one other thing: her class had two less students than the other third grade classes in the school.
Pay increases: Teachers do not become teachers because they think they will be rich, but they may be under the illusion they can make a living. This is sadly not the case for many young teachers. Unable to realize simple dreams like buying a home or taking a yearly vacation, they become discouraged and become real estate agents, webmasters, and starbucks managers. The pay increase is not so they will teach better, but so they will stay.
Regarding vouchers:
You say that money going to private schools is money not going to public schools. Very true. However, that’s also more students not going to public schools, which means that there are fewer resources required. The average student in public schooling takes about $8000 per year to teach. The average private school costs $4000 per year. That means that we can give a student $4000 to go elsewhere, and the school will basically have an extra four grand kicking around that they can divvy up amongst the other students.
Regarding class size:
I never said class size isn’t a factor, just that out of all the ways that schools can improve performace, it’s the least efficient. I’ll provide some cites tomorrow, for now I’m in a rush.
Regarding pay increases:
Yes, right now the majority of teachers do so because they want to do good, regardless of how much they get paid. This limits the pool of teachers to those who are willing to work for peanuts. There are a lot of people out there who would make great teachers, but who know they can make more money doing other things. By raising salaries, we can attract those people.
Regarding competition:
It works in every other industry with viable competition. To say it wouldn’t work here is pretty obtuse.
Jeff
That competition model doesn’t work for reasons I illuminated above. You may ignore these if you like, but I do not find it “obtuse” to believe that public insititutions work on a different model than private businesses. For one thing, success in business is maximizing profit, not necessarily turning out the best product (in this case, an educated student body). For another thing, most businesses do not have government money to force a product (in this case, an education) on unruly and unwilling “customers” (children). With reflection you see the various ways this analogy falls apart.
What’s more, this has been tried – for a while, in a trend I hope is completely quashed, educational “management consulting” companies were coming into schools trying to use business management methods to decrease school spending and increase student achievement. The failure was tragic. Students were robbed of an education my being relentlessy prepared for tests that (the mgmt companies hoped) would show achievement. Teachers were bullied by overpaid efficiency experts who had never worked in a school. And the schools were fleeced by the management companies in exorbidant fees and plundered by dubious accounting methods. The capitalist paradigm for schools failed for the some of the same reasons capitalism itself is a failure.
Schools don’t need competition, they need support from the community.
Regarding vouchers:
Let me be up front. I pay $13,500/year to send my son to a private school. A school voucher program would only serve to reduce my tuition bill by an amount that possibly (according to the $4000 number above), is greater than what I pay in property taxes to the school district (~$2700/year). In fact, $4000 is close to the total property tax I pay per year(it went up 50% this year, btw). I’m sure it would eventually inflate the private school tuition accordingly(supply/demand type argument). There are waiting lists for every private school in Dallas, Texas that I’m aware of. There’s also something like 65,000 millionaires in the DFW area, so you better have a legacy or something. I can’t help thinking that my benefit from such a thing may be in more in line with what will happen.