I benefitted from an “angry parent’s” action, so I can’t agree very much with the OP. When I was in middle school, I was placed in remedial classes TWICE for absolutely no reason. The classes weren’t labeled remedial on my class schedule, but if you had any sense, you knew which homerooms were good and which ones where bad. And in both 7th and 8th grade, I got assigned to the bad ones. My mother complained so loud I got pulled out. She was probably obnoxious about it, but I’m glad she stuck up for me.
I remember there were kids in the bad classes who were not remedial, but they became remedial by the time high school rolled around. And by then, it was almost too late to catch up. If they had had parents who were vocal enough to say something, their lives would have ended up differently.
I do agree with the OP that schools are just way too competitive nowadays. Few parents seem to really care for their kids to be challenged. They just care about the prestige of being elite and being special.
If I remember correctly, they took a school district that went on a lottery system and compared the kids that got into the better schools to the kids that ended up in the crappy schools, and predictably, the kids in the better schools did better.
But, if they compared the kids who went to the better schools to the kids who were in the crappy schools, but had applied to and been rejected by the better schools, most of the difference disappeared. In other words, if the kid came from a family that cared enough about education to try to get their kid into a better school that kid had a good chance. It was the kids whose parents didn’t concern themselves with the school that did poorly in the crappy school.
You’re right, the parents should always lose…they have no idea what’s in the best interest of their own kids. :smack:
Why even try to get kids into honors classes when they could just coast with standard or remedial math and english classes. Why be challenged and get B’s and C’s in honors classes when you could just kick back in basic math and get an A and then just cruise through Bumfuck Medicore Community College? Why even try to replace an aging technical/scientific workforce when you could just get a minimum wage job or strive for mediocrity as a floor manager at Wal-Mart or if you line up your ducks just right, Costco?
:rolleyes:
[anecdotal rant]As for someone who was stuck (because my parents weren’t able to request my moving up to an Algebra class) with the WORST math teacher in 8th grade; who finished 6 pages of “busy work” in 10 minutes, only to spend the remaining 45 minutes fighting off boredom while the teacher had his head in a newspaper…EVERY MOTHER FUCKING DAY…only to turn around and beat the pants off of every 8th grade student in a city-wide math competition because my accuracy and speed that was second to none due to virtual rote memory of basic math skills, I still felt I lost a whole year of expanding my math skills which would have advanced me a full year in high school and college…because of this idiotic teacher and his inability to teach and challenge or even recommend that I be kicked up into an Algebra class that had the same students that I kicked their ass later that year (even when I was not taught Algebra); I feel that my kid (who’s currently in 6th grade this year - that’s middle school in our district) has every right to be challenged if his ability remotely warrants it, and it is my duty to see to it, because I know that I cannot honestly depend on anybody else to make that decision for my child. I’m pretty sure there are many other parents who experienced such mediocrity in their lives and want to make sure it doesn’t happen to their own kids as well.[/ar]
To say a “large amount” of these parents are idiots/PITAs tells me more about the teacher(s) than the parents themselves. Part of the job of being a teacher is communicating to the parents and to understand what’s in the best interest of the child…NOT the teacher’s best interest. Good teachers find ways to make this happen, other teachers can’t and don’t want to deal with it. Just like students, teachers come in all different sizes, shapes, color and most importantly…ability. Same goes with parents…just learn to deal and adapt and everyone will be happy.
Yes. We went to Open School Night or whatever they call it (sorry, this is the final kid in a long line, I’m exhausted) and my kid is in the honors program. The teachers were telling us, all night, as we went from room to room, “Wow, this is the biggest turnout of the night. Gee, it looks like everybody’s here…Let’s put a few more chairs down.”
Some of us have also nagged the school (not about getting my kid into honors, but about things like giving a kid lunch detention because he’s late to lunch–WTF, who cares if he’s late for lunch? They aren’t allowed to leave the campus! Maybe he had trouble working his locker! And no, it wasn’t my kid.)
When we went to parents’ nights, the teachers would tell us that the seats for honors classes, where there were seldom issues, were full while hardly any parents showed up for the less advanced classes. Our neighborhood is by no means poor, and not every kid of parents with money is in honors, and honors classes have lots of kids whose parents aren’t rich.
If parents aren’t going to spend an hour or two at parents night, are they going to spend the time to supervise homework or read to the kids? Not likely. I know for a fact that there are parents with plenty of money who don’t give a crap about their kids education.
BTS Night for us is next Thursday. I’ll report my numbers, but I’m willing to bet that my AP Euro class or my Debate class has more parents in attendence than all 3 of my Government/Economics classes combined.
I know for a fact that some companies recruit most heavily from the best colleges. I know that going to a best college got me a good research position in grad school. I also got into a good, but not best school, which happened to be free, but I went to the one I did because of the better facilities - and I was absolutely right.
The counselors in the school my kids went to actively discouraged kids from applying to stretch schools so they wouldn’t be disappointed. I went to a good high school in Queens, a while ago, and worked in the college office, and that kind of crap never happened there.
Sure, people go to really good colleges and never make use of the opportunities. I guess if all you’re going to college for is a diploma with minimal effort it doesn’t matter. But you can go further in an atmosphere of intellectual rigor and excitement.
BTW, as a former high school debater, my thanks for teaching debate. My MIT interview was all about my debate experience, nothing about science. I do a lot of speaking, and it has helped my career immensely, and I credit my debate experience for helping me think on my feet.
No kidding! We didn’t have a team, but I took debate as a class, and it did more to improve my writing than any writing class I took. I still drone rotely to my kid (and my husband, who’s a writing teacher!) “Tell 'em what you’re going to tell 'em…tell 'em…and then tell 'em what you told 'em. Statement, support, support, statement, support, support.” I mean, that’s it! Internalize that framework and it covers 98% of non-fiction writing OR public speaking! So, yes, thank you to you and to all debate teachers out there. It ain’t a sexy career, but it’s a greatly appreciated one.
Thank you for debating! Coaching doesn’t mean anything if the students aren’t into the activity. Glad you found the skills useful. (I always thought it was the most important class on campus, but I am a voice in the wilderness. )
(Minor brag: One of my students finished 3rd in the state last year in LD.)
Hi, there! I’m the parent of middle-school students, and I care about my kids getting a basic education and having toilet paper in their bathrooms, and until you can accomplish that (which in my experience, you haven’t) I don’t give a shit about how content your wife is in her job.
I’m a little upset, partly because I’m already expected to purchase basic supplies like chalk, copy paper, hundreds of pencils my kids will never see sharpened, rulers that will be confiscated for general use (but never returned at the end of the year) and other art and desk paraphernalia that I am expected to buy and donate to the school, books that used to be purchased by the truckload for pennies apiece (say, Romeo and Juliet or The Pearl) that are now required to be bought by parents for eight or ten bucks per, and again never returned, and in general being held up for expenses that should have been covered (and according to the budget, was) in the original school budget.
I’m also not real thrilled that my daughter’s science teacher told his class that global warming couldn’t be real because the oceans wouldn’t rise if the arctic melted because melting ice cubes didn’t raise the level in a glass. Or that my son’s English teacher told her class that Dante was French. Or that the school day now includes an extra few hours wherein my kids are not being taught, but have to perform clerical work for the school, or that a teacher who has been teaching, say, algebra for twenty years, suddenly needs a few extra hours a week to “prepare” to recite again what he has been repeating in his sleep for more than a decade.
I’m likely to be a huge pain in the ass, and if your wife’s job is to stand between me and fixing the obstacles her school has placed in the path of my kids’ education, too bad for her. It would be nice if she wants to be part of the solution, but if she regards her paycheck as compensation for being part of the problem, then she just might have to earn it.
I’m sure she’s in all other respects a nice person. So, sorry, a little.
I bet your wife would really hate my aunt, the woman who harrangued her school district and, so far, has produced one M. Sc. and one doctoral candidate.
When my extraordinarly intelligent cousins approached kindergarden in their definitely mediocre grade school my smart, stubborn aunt found a loophole and, for the next 20 years (from the time her oldest of two started school until the time her youngest graduated) became a permanent headache and thorn-in-the-side to her small school district’s administration.
I forget the exact title of the loophole, so I’m just going to call it the Specialized Student Improvement Plan.
The SSIP was intended to address the needs of disadvantaged children - those with mental, physical, emotional, or cultural issues - but was written in such a way that, technically, any student was really eligible for it. As long as the parent fought hard enough.
While parents of mentally disabled children passively accepted the school district’s assessment and placement of their 10 year old child in a 2nd grade reading class, my aunt fought tooth and nail to get her five year old sons placed into the 4th grade reading program.
Perhaps your wife would prefer it if parents weren’t at all involved in the educatino of their children?
You do realize, wanagasan, that what you’re describing sounds like an abuse of the Special Education laws? And such abuse is one of the reasons for the spiraling costs of education in our country, while resources for the general population of students keep drying up, because people like your aunt are insisting that school districts spend two or three times the amount of money educating their precious darlings - and to Hell with anyone else.
My sister has a Special Ed. degree, and sees a lot of this, where parents are insisting that their seemingly normally functioning children need an interpreter, or coach to help them on all their schoolwork - often working to get a decidated, individual tutor for their child. Who also needs a full salary. With benefits. (And even more frustrating, the parents of students with what she believes are real, obvious, and treatable special needs - if addressed soon enough - are denying that anything could possibly be wrong with their children, their parenting, or their home lives.)
Special ed requirements are, already, one of the reasons that talking about the per capita spending on students is such a misleading statistic. No cite off the top of my head, but ISTR hearing that on average a Special Ed student takes $24,000 a year in operating costs from the school district, compared to the more usual $6-8K for a non-special needs student. So, if your school district is spending, a seemingly generous $9K a year per student, on average, but they have 10 or 15% of the population being treated as Special Ed. students, with the difference in costs mentioned earlier - what’s left for the rest of the students?
Which is one reason that The King of Soup’s school district, and many others like it, is asking parents to pick up the slack they’ve got in their budgets.
You ought to see the abuse that goes into AP exams and SATs. Every student at some exclusive, expensive prep schools have IEP and Special Ed allowances that let them take basically unlimited time on the exams, while normal students have to deal with a time limit.
Silenus as bad as those things are from a stand point of fairness, and justice, they’re also relatively minor financial drags on the school systems as a whole. Or at least so I’d thought. If I’m wrong, feel free to correct me, please.
To put it another way - they have the chance to unfairly elevate the students benefitting from them, but they aren’t actually taking resources away from their peers, the way that the other abuses I’ve heard about can do.
ETA: Part of my reaction for my feelings about this is that on the AP’s at least, my memory was that if you had the knowledge the time alotted was pretty generous. If you didn’t have the knowledge, no amount of extra time would really help matters.
My cousins are right smart, but they went to a rural school where graduates were expected to either plow or weld for a living. My aunt, being a smart cookie herself, learned wayback that one-size-fits-all education systems results in one-size-fits-all graduates. She knew her kids were better than that and fought for a better-than-that education. The pathetic thing is that the entire time she was frazzling herself out trying to gain her children the education they truly deserved she was fully cognizant that had she lived in, say, Chicago or LA or New York, they could easily have gained scholarships to private, non-religious academies. Since the family didn’t have the luxury of moving 500 or 1000 or 1500 miles away from home she - and I know this thought may be shocking to some of you - did what she thought was best for her kids.
I mean, god forbid. What kind of parent would do that? You might as well put them in a microwave as actuallly care about the quality of their education.
I mean, seriously. She wasn’t asking for publically funded tutors. She just knew Ryan would be much happier in +3 grade level science/physics classes and Sean in +4 grade level math classes, and that both of them would appreciate +3 grade level reading classes more than “See Sally fucking Run”. Does catering to a kid’s innate intellect degrade current educational systems to the point of dysfunction? And, if your answer is “yes”, what does that say about our education systems?
I’m not saying she was wrong to try to get the best education she could for her children.
I used the word “sounds” there, because based on your admittedly sketchy details, it reminded me rather forcibly of some of the IEPs I’ve heard about that were set up to silence parents who were using the Special Education laws to get things like private tutors. I also used “sounds” because I meant to acknowledge that what your aunt did may well have been justified - I didn’t have enough details to judge beyond saying it “sounded” like a form of abuse I believe to be particularly pernicious.
If all your aunt’s efforts were directed at simply getting your cousins into challenging courses, I won’t condemn that - I applaud it.
I’m the last person to try to claim that the public education system in our country is all it should be. As I think some of my other posts in this thread have made clear.
Frankly, if it took an IEP to get your cousins into a challenging program, there’s something seriously wrong in that school. But, bragging about getting an IEP to fix one or two student’s education in a system as dysfunctional as the one you’re describing still sounds like abandoning the rest of the community to mediocrity. I can see where a parent would, especially if he or she is an outisder or newcomer to a community, end up having to accept that they can’t fix the larger problem, but I figure the windmill does deserve at least one good run up with that lance, first.
You have spectacularly missed the point of the OP. First…why would a student being placed in a class to which they are suited be a “loss” for the parent? Why is education a competition?
I never gave any example of students forced to sit through dumbed down classes for which they were over-qualified, to meet the needs of some educational bureaucray – quite the contrary: my experience is with students thrown in over their head to satisfy their parents ego.
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki…As I think some of my other posts in this thread have made clear…[/quote]
I haven’t read the whole thread, just the first few posts.
It wasn’t (isn’t) dysfunctional; just small, rural, and poor.
My own rural high school had some brilliant electives. The two that stick out are Agriculture and Industrial Arts, although if you really worked your schedule around you might have been able to take German.
But I want to get back to the OPs bitches as I know nothing about where he is from. There are perceptions and there are facts. I want to know if each and every middle school in jsc1953’s district offer identical classes in identical subjects in identical time frames. I want to know if each and every school offers biology right before lunch period…or if, maybe, three or four schools have 10 biology classes a day while the rest of them offer one single bio class that can only accomodate 20 students per semester.
An “identical” curriculum is most definitely not the same thing as “identical” accessability.
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