For a relatively rich country we really don’t seem to be doing all that well compared to less affluent countries in overall educational attainment, or making sure our children are prepared for life.
I would propose the following changes to the US educational curriculum.
Education beyond the age of 16 will be a privilege not right. If you are physically disruptive you can be tossed out of school and there will be no special schools safety net to catch you. If you want out of school the door will be open for you to leave. If you choose to be truant you can also be told to leave.
After the age of 16, if you choose to, you can take challenge tests and graduate early.
If you are convinced that high school is not for you, you can leave at any time after the age of 16.
All reading and test materials will be available online. A full digital copy set of all the books necessary for every subject in a standard high school education will be made available free of charge to all school systems in the US by the US government. If a school chooses to offer courses not in the US set that is perfectly, OK but they will pay for these books themselves and they will have to provide digital copies of these material online at their own expense.
Many US students are loaded up with absurd amounts of homework. Homework will be limited to 1 hour per night total for all students. How to parcel this out between subject areas relative to student ability will have to be worked out. Possibly only one subject area will be able to assign homework per night. ALL homework assignments will have to be placed online and accessible by teachers and students.
Students may choose to take math courses focusing on practical business math without having to take algebra and still receive a degree.
Where practical all parents shall be emailed often with updates as to their child’s progress, missing assignments, etc.
One exercise class will be required daily for all students. You do not have to choose a sport, you can walk around the track if you choose. But you must exercise. If you are physically handicapped commonsense provisions will be made for your physical limitations.
So…we’ll have a less educated population of teenagers with more time on their hands? Awesome. Do you have another plan to address the increases in crime and poverty that would likely follow after your plan is put into place?
Most people who are seriously concerned about improving education want to raise the age students can drop out to 18, not discourage kids to cut out a couple of years earlier.
There is no US HS curriculum. The HS curriclua are set by the school districts, and in some cases by the several states. Most voters in the US like local control of schools a lot (and most of them like local control a lot more than they like adequate schools, but that’s a whole Pit thread on its own). Your idea is based on a false premise, and is a non-starter.
Just tossing out kids that are disruptive is a bad plan for the reasons elfkin477 mentioned. In addition, if we want these disruptive kids to someday be productive members of society, we need to educate them. Depending on the specific behaviors, and the reasons behind them, various disciplinary measure should be deployed. The kids may be moved to special schools for example. I do not object to suspensions and expulsions, but they should not be the first option, or the only option.
On-line copies of all education materials is still years away, even in my well-funded school district. You’ll end up hearing from the copyright lawyers for the textbook publishers. I doubt they will be any more charitable than the RIAA. You will also be shocked to learn that not everyone has a computer, or access to one. The “troublemakers” probably less so than most.
I could go on with the specifics of your thoughts on education, astro, but I must ask a few questions: When did you graduate high school? Did you go on to college? Do you have any children in school? Where did you receive your education degree?
I think our schools suck because parents treat them like daycares.
If schools required more active involvement from the parents, the parents might care a bit more about what their kids learn, and a little less about keeping them occupied for 7 hours a day.
Also, get rid of school bus stop signs, and teach kids how traffic works.
I am a university graduate, and have two children who have graduated from high school and are attending college.
Keeping physically disruptive kids mainstreamed in the same environment with the other kids is unfair to the kids that want to learn. By effectively locking these kids up in an environment where they have to be still most of the day you can pretty much guarantee they going to act out. This is not going to work for all kids. If kids absolutely refuse to behave or perform it’s foolhardy to think you’re going to institutionalize these kids somewhere else in an even more rigid environment, and they will come around. Some kids are simply not cut out for an institutional environment and need to be out and working.
Just as with the NCLB program huge efforts and monies are being spent trying to drag the back end of the bell curve over the finish line. This is not a wise use of limited education resources in these times of limited economic resources.
Re the digital aspect I’m not saying it should replace books entirely, but it should absolutely be in place. Kids without PC access or whomever desired them, should certainly have free books on these same topics available.
Re the copyright issue I am pretty sure you could get (either privately or federally funded) a complete, high quality, up to date set of instructional and reference works for 90% of all primary high school subjects for multiple ability levels written and maintained online for less than 50 million dollars. This is probably equivalent to a few hours time of our overseas military budget or a rounding error for the expenditures of the Gates Foundation.
A significant effort would be made to find them jobs, even possibly make work jobs. I am pretty confident the vast majority of these kids would rather be out in the work force vs being penned inside an environment where they cannot succeed.
The other question to ask is what really happens to these kids we send to “special schools”. From what I’ve seen they learn little to nothing academically useful in these environments, not beacuse it’s not offered, they are just not wired to learn stuff while locked into a building all day, and they generally bolt as soon as it’s possible for them to leave. This is (overall) a giant waste of resources. Getting them into a productive mode ASAP is far preferable to institutionalizing them.
I like a lot of aspects of this plan. Unless you are on a college track, you probably aren’t advancing your skill sets greatly in the past the age of 16. And in the modern world I think that majority age should be reduced to 16 (ideally, but there would be more problems than just schools in doing that).
For many of these kids, education is rejected by them starting at an earlier age, but it’s clear by age 16 which students resources are being wasted on. If they’re not literate by age 16, two more years of school isn’t going to help. If they really are interested in obtaining an education, they’ll follow reasonable rules voluntarily to do so (and this should continue past the high school level), and we currently consume a lot of resources on keeping kids in school who just don’t want to be there.
BTW: I think high school sports programs are a major contributor to this problem. We still have a lot of kids in high school and colleging majoring in sports. And it’s not just sports either.
Wow, for only $50 million, there would be no one able to earn a living writing and publishing books. In very rough Wikipedia numbers, there are 62 million kids from 0 to 14, so faking an even distribution, let’s say there are 4 million 10th graders who need 10th grade biology books. You’re talking a paltry $12.50 per book, and that’s just one subject for one grade. No way in hell you can do what you propose for $50 million.
OK, then, You have multiple clues. You are not just talking out of your hat. A welcome change for discussions on education!
One of my family therapists was also a vice-principal at a school for kids that acted out physically. They had good success over the long term with these kids. That success included teaching the kids consequences. I think my therapist had to call the cops to arrest a kid for threats or actual assault on at least a weekly basis. Sometimes talking the kids away in handcuffs was what it took. I would rather have these kids ultimately become productive members of society than have them become disconnected drags on society. If they can’t do what a teacher says without acting out, how are they going to fit in any workplace?
Sometimes perp-walking these kids is not enough. I’d like to save as many as we can before we toss them out of the educational system.
As I type this my autistic son, a high school senior, is on a college visit. There is not a font large enough to display how huge this is. My AUTISTIC son made it to his senior year of high school ON SCHEDULE and will be going to COLLEGE next year. He’s also getting GOOD GRADES in MAINSTREAM classes. This is huge. Astronomical, really.
Are you suggesting that the educational resources that were spent on him to help make him a productive member of society were a waste? Compared to the resources necessary to keep him institutionalized the rest of his life, even warehoused in Bedlam?
BTW, I think we agree about NCLB being a massive waste. The obvious conclusion of this trend is to have 100 standardized tests for each student in the US, every year. Each states’ students must place first on one test - to prove to the legislature that the schools are worthy of continued funding. But each states’ students must place last on one test - to prove to the legislature that more funding is required. 50 states * 2 tests/state = 100 tests. The other 80 days of the school year can be spent on test prep for each states’ tests. The politicians can brag, the schools get their money, the testing-industrial complex gets a metric crapload of money - everyone is happy. Except for the students, parents, and future employers of these kids - kids who only know how to fill in scantron sheets. I hope to every deity there ever was that I’m joking here.
There is some effort on “open source” textbooks, and some effort on digital-only textbooks. My kids’ school has a couple of classes that are piloting the digital-only textbook effort. Fully on-line texts is still a few years away at best, and may not solve all problems. The “open source” textbook movement is interesting, but again years away even in the sciences (which don’t change much from one year to the next). It’s not just the texts, which themselves must meet the various state and local curricula. It’s the all the supplemental materials that have to be developed: teacher guides, samples tests, answer books, grading keys, alternate materials for kids with different learning styles, not to mention braille, ESL, Spanish, etc.
It’s all quite do-able, but it’s not as fast or easy or cheap as one would hope. I don’t know off-hand what Virginia’s budget is for its open source science textbook effort, but I strongly suspect your $50 Meg estimate is very low for a US-wide hypothetical curriculum. I understand that some South American nations have made great strides here - Peru comes to mind - at a big costs savings. Those countries probably have national curricula, which gives a lot of leverage to the project. I also suspect we US-ians could get those texts for our own kids who are primary Spanish speakers. We should be nice and pay the countries that developed the materials. After all, if learning Algebra is hard, imagine trying to learn in in a language you do not understand.
There are also great on-line resources available now or soon: Khan Academy, MIT lectures, etc. More college level than high school and below, but the future is visible on the horizon. It just ain’t here yet.
I’m a teacher. I have many immigrant students who tell me, “Miss, if I acted that way in my home country, they’d kick me out…no one acts like this back in __________.”
I say toss the perpetual troublemakers. Not the ADHD ones that drive you bonkers because they can’t sit still - the other ones. The drug dealers, gang bangers, violent ones, etc.
If you toughen up on discipline in every classroom and require exams to pass to the next level (but keep public ed open til age 20), you’ll see 4 zillion per cent improvement.
Typo Knig (haha), I agree that NCLB has done great things for SPED. But…it’s also created a few problems with admin and teachers because of the hoops we jump through that are sometimes unnecessary/underfunded/time-consuming/unfair (so now all IEP kids have practically the same IEP instead of it being actually individualized, or we have to keep a violent disruptive student in school b/c he is ADHD with an unspecified LD).
It costs A LOT of friggin money to pay for the schooling of: sped, behavior issues, dropout recovery, and (sometimes, depending on model) ESL.
The biggest strain on schools is figuring out how to pass kids who can’t read on to the next level/graduate because any dropouts will affect their ‘numbers’. Oooh, can’t do that! Gotta give Johnny with a 2nd grade reading level a diploma, even though he can’t add fractions! Johnny, of course, speaks English as a first language and has no IEP.
I’ve seen kids being over-diagnosed with stuff when imho it’s a matter of ‘haven’t been taught’, not ‘can’t learn’.
Your son, however, really did qualify for those things and (unfortunately?) he’s one of the few who have benefited from NCLB.
Here’s my idea. Combine the school and prison systems. Every kid gets locked up at age 6, and gets out at whatever age they can pass standardized knowledge and achievement tests. Otherwise they stay in and make license plates and do whatever other crap people hire prisoners to do.
The idea of a national curriculum or textbook terrifies me.
What would happen is that every four to eight years the textbooks would be rewritten to state, alternatingly, that:
Adam and Eve rode their dinosaur to church every Sunday, FDR ruined the economy, and Reagan set us on a course to prosperity.
We are the products of a genetic mutation in monkeys, FDR saved the economy, and Reagan set it on a course to ruin.
And before you say that this would never happen, remember that at the beginning of every Republican presidential debate the candidates are required to raise their right hands in response to the question “Do you believe in Creationism?” One of these people has a 50/50 chance of being our next leader.
Under the current system, we have to sacrifice Texas school children (and that is tragic), but at least some of us have the choice to produce reasonably educated children.
I think it is a mistake to think that the purpose of school is education. The main purpose seems to be to carry out the religious and social agenda of the people who get elected to school boards. Don’t like evolution? Replace serious biology by purely descriptive biology (aka stamp collecting). Don’t believe in global warming? Let’s water down all the science courses or they might teach people to study evidence and draw their own conclusions. You think, as my mother did, that science-fiction is escapist (what literature isn’t?). Use unreadable books to teach literature and guarantee they will not become voracious readers (as I did, ignoring my mother).
Now I would like to say something about a subject dear to my heart. Textbooks. As it happened I taught a lot of university level calculus. When I took calculus (in 1955) the text cost $5 and since it had been used for years with no revision (what, calculus is changing every year?) I was able to pick up a used copy for half that. Nowadays, calculus books have passed $150 and are rapidly heading towards $200. And a new edition every year to prevent students from buying used copies. This is gouging. It happens because the guys who choose the books do not have to pay for them themselves.
How to fix it? The first thing to observe is that calculus books are all the same. They copy shamelessly from each other. They can do it because no one has an original thought. Oh, they change the wording to prevent copyright violations, but that’s all. And, incidentally, the textbook companies enforce this sameness. I had a close friend who tried to write a discrete math book that was going to be seriously different from all the ones on the market. So he did and submitted it to a publisher. Who sent it to twenty five (that’s 25) referees all of whom came back with suggestions that amounted to: make it like all the others. He gave up.
To get back to calculus books, I could write one just like all the others and would if someone paid me, say, $25,000. Once. It could then be distributed either free online or for whatever it costs to print and distribute. (I once had a book reprinted. There were 800 copies made, a tiny run. The printer charged $7200 for printing and binding, which was a one-time setup fee of $3200 and then $5 a copy for a 540 page book. Plastic binding, but sewn in signatures on low-acid paper.)
As a minor issue, my 1955 calculus book probably weighed under two pounds. The current ones weigh 5 times that. Students are using wheeled suitcases to schlep all their textbooks. It is an outrage.
To be sure, I rarely faced behavioral problems. Once I had a class of 150 engineering students that was unmanageable, but that was the only time. When I was in HS Philadelphia had three very highly regarded Voc-Tech schools that taught a trade (plumbing, car repair, that sort of thing). The main trouble was that they were hard to get into because the demand was so high. They were a good model, but I think they have been abandoned. It is certainly true that not everybody is cut out for academic work. I think that the most important parts of elementary education should be reading and an understanding of statistics. Elementary arithmetic is not done by anybody any more. I once witnessed a graduate student in mathematics having to multiply 75 by 8 pull out her calculator to do it. At that point I realized that basic arithmetic was dead. But so few people understand elementary statistics that that is well worth teaching and to everybody.
I get that, but I guess that to me, “digital content creation” includes securing the source material. For $50 million, you’re no going to be able to independently reproduce the content. You’re going to have to get the content from an already existing source, and it’s going to cost a lot.
You are seriously telling me I could not get a powerful server site up and running, and then get a full complement of originally sourced, high quality instructional digital texts and testing materials produced covering all relevant ability levels (remedial to advanced) for grades 9-12 in subjects areas covering math, science, history, English, Spanish etc. by the best educational instructional writers in US secondary education for fifty million dollars.
I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree. In fact I’m going to also bet a lot of what we need to fill that server already exists via various authors and could be bought outright for reasonable prices.
I would think that you could source the educational materials [IE hire authors to write for you] ad source testing materials [hire writers to create testing materials] and even come up with a programming staff who would make it digitally interactive. I believe that you could start up the whole program for the 50 million, but the ongoing server costs, maintenance and such would have to be funded somehow. You could manage this by working with the various homeschoolers organizations, and hiring your own programmers. Heck, I know a couple programmers who if offered a salary commensurate with their current salary and benefits would probably go for the idea.
The main sticking point is getting all the diverse educational systems to agree to allow the use of your digital education system. Try getting everybody to agree on every part of your texts is worse than herding cats, you have to deal with the asshats in the Texas educational system and the bunny huggy new agey educators elsewhere. Ever try to get one of each to agree on how evolution and sex ed are to be handled?
My personal take on the educational system is it needs to do 2 main things, which will never ever fucking happen in the US.
1 - go to the year round system. I loved the one school I went to that did that. No backtracking for the entire first month because everybody forgot what they learned in the previous year, and there was always a short vacation coming up to look forward to.
2 Go to the system where at about 12 you test the kids and track them to either university or trade school track. If someone doesn’t have the mental inclination to go to Harvard, track them into machine technology or plumbing or construction, they will make a good income, we will have a supply of blue collar workers. Not everybody has the mental acuity to become white collar.
I agree with this, up to a point. Those students who choose to leave school at 16 should be required to have an exit plan, either vo-tech training or a job of some sort, but they would have to demonstrate that they thought this through and aren’t reacting to short-term problems or family or peer pressure. They should also be held to this plan; failure to do so should trigger a mandatory return to school.
I agree with this, as well, but with the same requirements as above.
See above.
I sort of agree with this, up to a point. As Typo Knig’s example shows, and as others pointed out, some schools are providing digital texts. That said, however, the physical readers have to be purchased and replaced, and that costs money. You can, of course, argue that the savings of not producing paper textbooks will offset some of the cost, but you’d have to figure out ways to keep the cost of the equipment from overtaking the savings of digital textbooks. Manufacturers operate on a profit motive, and unless the government is going to make the readers, manufacturers would need incentive to keep making the devices.
Some teachers are moving away from traditional homework because it takes time to grade and because there’s often no benefit from it. Instead, they’re requiring projects and papers that require more time overall but which don’t involve work on a daily basis. Part of the reason for this shift is because teachers understand that some kids won’t do their homework, some can’t do their homework because of work and other commitments, and because most college professors don’t assign daily homework, so high school teachers are trying to model college. Besides, daily homework only makes sense in classes where drilling is useful, such as in math. Otherwise, it’s a colossal waste of time for all concerned.
Some schools are already giving students this choice, as well as Business English in lieu of traditional English classes.
The sprog’s school already does this. His teachers send regular progress reports along with information about missing work. (This has been a problem with the sprog in the past, so it’s something his teachers and I are watching for.) The school sends as much information as possible by e-mail and is actively looking at ways to reduce the overall amount of paper that comes home. I can also e-mail any of the school staff with issues or concerns.
I’d extend this to include lifestyle education. Of course, you’d have to extend the school day to include both, but that’s not even a bad idea.