Public education in America

Great Debates
1

Is anything wrong with K-12 education in America? If so, what is it? How do we know? What do we do about it? How do we know when we have succeeded?

I am not going to give my answers to these questions, because I think that I am uninformed in these matters and I don’t want to shoot my mouth off. I have asked these questions of a lot of people and I have gotten a lot of different answers and I feel that there was a lot of partisanship in those answers. So now I turn to the Dope with irrational optimism to answer these question in an apolitical manner.

Thanks,
Rob

2

The public school system is inherently rigged to reward incompetent teachers.

The curriculum is also dumbed down to teach kids the “right” answers to pass standardized tests.

John Taylor Gatto explains all the problems with govt schooling. I first read his book 5 years ago and it revealed all the brainwashing we are subjected to. I’m embarrassed to be a product of the K-12 system and I hope to keep my kids away from that system if possible… or at least supplement it with tutors to teach critical thinking.

3

I have heard this, but I haven’t heard the evidence for it. Do you know?

Thanks,
Rob

4

It’s called NCLB.

However, you can’t generalize about public education because it’s so localized. Yes, incompetent teachers often get an easy ride. But that’s not because the system is “rigged” for them. Usually the system is “rigged” so that the teachers who actually try hard and care can do their job without fear of middle management interference. The incompetents slip in between the cracks.

Private education is just as susceptible to incompetence. It just doesn’t get as much attention because the teachers are paid less. And Catholic schools aren’t “better” because their private. They just have fewer at risk students (i.e., poor) to deal with.

But I agree with what Gatto says.

5

Well, here in Texas, we have a standardized test called TAAS or TAKS or whateverthehell its name is this year. And teachers in public schools spend a large portion of the semester teaching the kids how to take the test and drilling them on past versions of it.

6

My two cents.

Yep, some schools can be really crappy.

But if you are a motivated student, or have parents that give a crap, you CAN get a pretty decent, if not good education pretty much about anywhere.

But, you have to take personal responsibility (gasp) for your education to do it.

Nobody else is gonna do it for you.

7

So, so much. It’s such a huge clusterfuck, it’s really hard to know where to start. I mean, literal books have been written about this, you know!

Let me briefly (ha!) hit a few of my own personal bugaboos with mainstream American education.

Age segregated education - Grouping kids by age instead of ability is ridiculous, stupid and damaging. Teachers end up having to teach to an absurdly low level so that the slowest kids have a chance at keeping up, which encourages the average kids to act up out of boredom and the gifted kids to lose their minds until their parents drug them into complacency.

Social promotion - linked with age segregated learning, social promotion is a horrible disservice and downright abusive, IMHO. If a kid hasn’t mastered the material, she should not be promoted to the next grade level. Period. Full Stop.

Lack of recess/break time - Kids just don’t have enough time to run, wriggle, jump and get physical exercise during the school day. With PE budgets getting slashed for money and recess getting cut in favor of more “educational time”, these poor kids are ready to jump out of their skin. They’re kids - kids generate a hell of a lot of ATP and they need to use it up! They’re biologically wired with short yet broad attention spans, and we fight that every step of the way instead of utilizing it to the best teaching advantage. Several short, physically exerting play periods during the day would go a long way to increasing attention span and reducing “ADHD”, IMHO.

Curriculums that are too advanced in the early grades and too lax in the later grades - Kindergarten is way too hard and sixth grade way too easy. Full-day kindergarten is abusive and fosters unrealistic expectations of kids who are essentially still babies. On the whole, 5 year olds don’t have the neurological development for reading and writing, and forcing them to do so creates “red flags” and gets kids labeled with developmental delays and disorders they wouldn’t have if those skills were reserved for later years when the brain development was ready for it. (Note: if your personal kid is ready to read at age 2, great! Show him how and enjoy! But most kids aren’t.)

The other side of this is the unbearable repetition of certain units grade after grade after grade. My son spent no less than 4 years on “The Founding Fathers”, and nary a semester on World War II.

Summer breaks - A ridiculous holdover from the days when kids were farmers. All they do is provide a huge gap of time where kids forget half of what they “learned” the year before. A full year system with one week breaks after every quarter makes so much more sense. I’ll even go so far as to endorse a two or three week vacation in the summer for families to get away, but 10 weeks is ridiculous.

School hours - School starts way too early and gets out way too early. Starting the day at 9:00 and lengthening the school day to accommodate more break periods and allow greater depth of education, not broader scope, would be more humane on teachers and students alike. I know you asked about K-12, but I’ll also add that making high school hours from Noon to midnight would be a fantastic way to work with teenagers’ circadian rhythms, instead of against them.

Cultural relativism - in our attempt to teach that cultural diversity is good, we sometimes forget to teach that some things are unacceptable. Furthermore, we’ve gone so far with the love of diversity that too often White kids of European decent feel left out and not as interesting or valuable, or downright guilty because of what their ancestors did to the brown people.

The indistinct roles of parents and educators - Schools have gradually taken on more and more of the roles that parents used to reserve, in the interest of meeting the needs of kids who’s parents aren’t doing a good job. Driver’s Ed, then Sex Ed, now even feeding and health care. The reason the CPS schools NEVER close for snow days is that many of the students don’t eat at home. Either they’re so poor or their parents are so neglectful that the only meals they get are the free breakfasts and lunches served by the school. My son’s school is even open on Saturdays for students to come eat, be warm, study and use the gym. They also have a full service health clinic, where not only can they get bandages and ice packs, but vaccinations and STD tests. This is well and good when it comes to those kids who wouldn’t otherwise eat or get condoms, but we’re also moving in on moral development, and that’s where it starts to get dicey. Encouraging children to call the police if Daddy has a “funny smelling cigarette” is just too *1984 *for my taste. Parents are losing the privilege of transmitting their values to their children, and they’re being replaced by watered down relativist ones or no-room-for-dissent fascist ones, depending on the subject.

Poor communication with parents - Yesterday, I got in the mail a newsletter from my son’s school. It included some dates for parent-teacher conferences, a school play, some sporting events and some parenting classes I was really interested in. All of them happened before January 15. Turning it back over, I find that it’s the “Autumn Newsletter”, mailed January 21. How the #!&@ am I supposed to get involved with my kid’s school’s extracurriculars if I can’t find out about them before they happen?

Parental involvement, lack of - Of course, the single variable correlated most highly with student success is parental involvement at the school. Better communication, as previously mentioned, would go a long way towards fostering this. But I’d also like to see some sort of mandatory parental service hours - hours spent shelving books in the library, monitoring lunchrooms, making costumes for the school play, teaching special interest units in the parent’s field of expertise, anything. Just get the parents in there and get 'em visible, and that ALONE will increase student achievement more than additional funding, more educated teachers, or all the metal detectors in the world.

8

My wife is a public elementary school teacher and I think she would agree with a lot of what you said.

Ed

9

I live in Austin and I hear that complaint a lot (it is TAKS these days, btw), but it is something “everyone knows” is true. Also, given the complaints about standardized testing, how do we develop a metric to find out if school is effective?

I’d also like to solicit the opinions of the group regarding financing of education. Would it be fair to say that everyone is of the opinion that merely increasing funding won’t solve anything?

Thanks,
Rob

10

I think it would be more accurate to say that increased funding won’t solve everything. There will always be ways in which more money will allow a well-run school district to do some things more and better. On the other hand, there will always be ways in which a poorly-functioning school district can squander increased funding in ways that do not benefit the children.

11

In 1988 when I was in middle school we took maybe two days to go over the TAAS test. By the time I graduated in 1994 we were taking about two weeks to go over it in high school. Something changed over the course of those years and I’m not entirely sure what it was.

12

Twelve hours a day, 47 weeks a year? Tell me you’re joking. Here classes are 9-3 with breaks, 40 weeks or less a year.

13

The free (as in - everyone gets it) education is fantastic. The current model is great where it fits the locals.

We have lost the trade school parts in trying to get everyone ready for further education, which they do not need or want. When I was in school it was possible to take half of the day on the core (social studies, math and English) and spend the second half in vocational training. Friends of mine were able to graduate high school and already have a certificate in welding, or transmissions, or other trade skills for the career path they were going to. Telling them to take a language and drama would have been a waste of the teacher’s time AND the students. The students were not forced down that path, it was simply made easy for them to take.

Overly large school districts keep parents from being involved. The Los Angeles Unified School District is so damned large that there is no way for a parent to be involved. I have been part of very small, small, medium and large districts and I have found that the smaller ones are more responsive to real needs than the larger ones. Education is something where I do not think that there is much benefit from Economies of Scale.

Overly High Expectations of parents who expect all kids to go to college. Look folks - 30% will get a bachelors. Your child does not need, nor can he handle, calculus. Putting EVERYONE into it only hurts them. The bell curve exists - quit creating a curriculum for only the right hand tail, and the left hand tail, while ignoring the middle.

Too many distractions during the day. There is some great research done on how American school days are full of distractions and constantly changing subjects, making hard for kids to really understand any single subject. Our kids get 30 minutes at best on a single subject, once distractions are edited out of the day. This means visitors, announcements, moving classrooms, etc.

While I play a right-winger on the Dope (or at least am accused of being one), I don’t fault the teacher’s union. I just do not turn to the union for fixes - their job is to protect their members.

14

No, I’m not joking. With such a short school day divided into so many subjects, nearly half the “teaching time” is lost to finding pencils, putting away books, getting into line, getting out of line, calming the class down and warming them up. Longer class periods, longer days (but with more breaks in them for stress relief) mean more time actually teaching and less time transitioning.

The twelve hours I mentioned were for high schoolers, not elementary age kids, and I meant it as the time period within which teenagers are at their best, not that the school day should span 12 hours. I think a 9 or 10 hour day, including 1 hour for eating and 1 hour for PE and at least 2 30 minute “sanity breaks” would be adequate for teenagers. An 8 hour day, again with an hour for eating an hour for PE and three or four 20 minute stress breaks would suffice for kids 8 and up. Kindergartners, IMHO, ought to be in school no more than 4 hours a day and most of that time spent on socialization and directed play, not “academics”. I think having longer class periods but fewer subjects covered in one day might help the older kids, too - I’d rather spend one 60 minute chunk on math 3 times a week than a distracted 30 minutes on it 5 days a week.

I see no reason why kids can’t go to school all year round, and plenty of reasons why they should. The fact that they don’t is a quaint custom from our agrarian forebearers, not something grounded in current research or societal need.

I also agree with Algher’s contentions, as well.

15

Could we also make every school in the country adopt plain uniforms too? (I think Japan does this, not 100% sure.) I know it sounds a little draconian but it seems like the morning ritual of fighting with your kids about what to wear is a total waste of time.

Kids should learn to differentiate themselves on their quality of thought & actions instead of the brand of shoes and clothes they wear.

16

I generally agree with WhyNot’s list (I disgree about what 5-year-olds are capable of). The interesting thing about that list is that when you go down that list, the thing that strikes me is that nearly all of the things listed as problems are things that are products not of misguided educational theory, but of administrative necessity. The drive to classify and sort students as numbers (age, test score, GPA) rather than as people is not the result of some dark plot, but from the natural, nearly inevitable consequence of telling an administrator that X number of students of diverse ages, backgrounds, ability and temperment will be arriving, and that he has Y number of teachers and Z number of classrooms. And that the parents of the students will all want their children to be treated “fairly” (as they define it), and will all have opinions on what should be taught. Add to that teachers who have their own wants and desires and need to be accommodated … and pretty soon you can see that nearly all the problems are inevitable.

Once you get above a small number of students, school administration presents an immensely complicated set of problems. WhyNot says that age segregation is a bad thing (and I don’t argue the point), but a classroom full of bright 10 year olds and slow 15 year olds has downsides, even if they are at the same reading level. And given that many kids are advanced in one subject but slow in another, how do you organize them then? (and speaking as a kid who did take some classes with older kids – I hated it). And how do you determine which kids are advanced, anyway?

Standardized testing gets bashed a lot, and with good reason. But it arose from a need on the part of administrators to assess progress and outcomes. Guizot doesn’t like No Child Left Behind, but the standardized testing called for by NCLB is an attempt to give an “objective” number to the reality that everyone knows is true: some teachers and some schools are incompetent. That number is the ammunition needed to kill them off.

I’d better stop before I get off on a rant; the bottom line is that all of the problems with education come down to one word: “School.” The instant you decide that “education” is something that will be done in designated buildings at designated times by designated people who are appointed by the government and accountable only to the government, pretty much all the problems discussed in this tread – or ones very like them – are pretty much inevitable.
All of which adds up to this: another recommendation for the OP to read Gatto. And Neil Postman.

I suggest starting here: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

17

Maybe, maybe not. There are first-amendment issues involved.

18

Yep. And the bigger any school…and then school district…and then school system gets, the more inevitable the problems. I think the best answer is smaller schools with more parental involvement. I really really like the idea of “homeschool” groups, where parents band together in groups of 10 or 20 to educate their children together. Whether they are the teachers or they hire private teachers, the small scale and greater flexibility of homeschool groups is the only way I know to get around the problem.

19

I have a family member working in American education, and he’s adamant that the smallest school districts are the least capable of tackling problems - they are least able to provide shared resources, to provide expertise at an advisory level, and so on. Holding up LA as an example isn’t fair, because that’s the other extreme, and only shows that there’s a preferable size somewhere in between.

Interestingly, despite the huge differences in the method of organisation, the level of central government involvement and so on, Britain offers examples of a similar problem of the smallest local authorities not offering as good an education in their dozen schools as the larger ones tend to.

20

Unfortunately, you do get into problems of economies of scale too. Smaller schools can’t provide as much because a higher portion of their funding goes to providing the ‘necessities’ (however you want to define it) and aren’t able to have as broad a range of classes. Whatever extras they are able to give, aren’t always done well. Nothing like having a political science teacher who doesn’t know a thing about the subject, because there’s no one else available who knows it any better. Smaller settings may let you give students more attention, but the range of things you can offer them is going to be smaller as well.