I have. When I got my teaching degree (biology education) in the early 80’s, there wasn’t an enormous difference between a straight biology degree and a biology education degree. The teaching-specific courses I can remember taking:
Educational Psychology- not too different from the psych 101 course I also had to take, but with an emphasis on people like Piaget and Maslow.
History and Philosophy of Education- more history than philosophy…the life and works of Horace Mann, among others.
Educational Tests and Measures- essentially statistical analysis as applied to test results, especially standardized tests.
Instructional Media- a practical course in how to operate (and repair!) things like 16mm movie projectors, mimeograph machines, and the other “high tech” stuff that was still in wide use when I started teaching.
Teaching Science in Secondary School- this was really the only methods class I took. Mainly, we taught each other sample lessons and critiqued each other’s techniques.
Professional Practicum and School Law- all the things you can be fired over and why you shouldn’t do them. (actually only a 1 credit required seminar).
Student Teaching- 14 weeks full-time in a classroom with a cooperating teacher. Mine basically gave me the grade book and seating charts on day one and said “See ya!”
I can imagine teachers at church-based schools who are parishoners there work partially out of a sense of devotion–to say nothing of nuns. How do non-religious private schools compare?
I think your suggestions are reasonable enough. But you place a lot of emphasis on the quality of the teachers, which I don’t think we’ve established as the main problem. And isn’t there a slight contradiction between making teachers harder to hire/easier to fire, and greatly increasing their numbers in order to reduce class sizes by as much as you suggest. Paying them more will attract more candidates, but that multiplies to a sizable budget increase.
You don’t think we’ve come a long way in valuing education since Laura Ingalls and Little House on the Prairie?
Sure, there will be some parents who can’t afford to send their kids to school. So why can’t we implement a policy similar to people who can’t afford to buy food? Just because there are some people who can’t afford to buy milk doesn’t make the grocery stores giveaways. There are food stamps and WIC, safety nets to make sure people don’t starve.
I think people value more the things they have to pay for. If Miss Single Mom has to pay $40 a month to get Johnny into school, don’t you think she’s going to make sure her $40 are well spent? Any more than Mrs. Neurosurgeon is going to make sure her $400 a month is well spent on little Madison? You don’t think they’re both going to make sure the homework is done and the tests are studied for and the projects turned in?
The reason private school tuition is expensive is because there are fewer private schools, little competition. The private school my kids attend won’t care if I pull my daughter out tomorrow…there’s six more behind her, waiting to get in.
Are we going to educate every single child if we eliminate public schools? No. But we’re not educating every child now.
Burundi said it well. A voucher system will pull good students, good families, and good money out of public schools, making them worse and worse.
And it wouldn’t spur improvements via competition, because the lack of motivation on the part of administrators appears not to be the problem. Principles are not wedded to their schools the way entrepenuers are to their businesses. If you dump all the blame for lousy students on them and demand they do more with less, they’ll just quit and go work for a corporation.
There are some legitimate concerns about school vouchers, and I don’t necessarily support them, but there is an underlying fact here that should not be glossed over or denied: schools that have to compete for tuition dollars will, on balance, over time, be better and cheaper than schools that do not have to compete for tuition dollars.
[Doc Brown] You’re not thinking fourth dimensionally! [/Doc Brown]
Right now that seems like a real problem, because private schools tend to be very expensive, for the obvious reason that they only cater to families that can afford not to use the public education system. However, if you dumped billions and billions of education dollars into the market for the education of lower to middle class kids, private schools at all sorts of price levels could afford to spring up, and would. All of a sudden, there would be a viable demand for cheap private education, and if it wasn’t as good as other nearby cheap private schools, it wouldn’t be able to stay open and ruin more childrens’ educations.
A valid concern, but it seems cruel to make the majority suffer so that the minority (troublemakers, special-needs, etc.) can have somewhat better schools. And besides, it’s not like that’s (necessarily) an insurmountable problem – again there’s no reason that there shouldn’t be a market for decent, low-budget special-needs education.
Also, a lot of people have come into this thread and pointed out that the biggest obstacle to quality public education is the inability to get rid of disruptive students (of one stripe or another). Well, why is that a problem? If you have to educate even the kids who are extremely slow or disruptive, wouldn’t the obvious solution be to take those children out of the regular classrooms? Yet I hear lots of horror stories about public school administrators hand-stringing their teachers and forcing them to teach kids who should obviously be seperated from the general student body, for the benefit of all. Wouldn’t a competent school that had to deal with free market pressures make this change, even if it was somewhat more expensive in the short term? The kind of inefficiency and mismanagement described in this article, if accurate, is just horrifying.
$40 a month for private school? On what planet?
Seriously, how much could competition reduce the costs of running a school?
Cite?
But hey, if people like me who don’t have kids can get our property taxes slashed, maybe I could go along with your plan.
Come to think of it, this could be a great way to lower the birth rate.
Ivylass,
There are too many parents now who send their children to school_at public expense_only because we force them to do so. We have kids who skip school with their parents’ connivance! The kid comes in, eats the (subsidized) breakfast, and then there’s a phone call to the office from the home, stating that the kid needs to be excused. The kid goes home, and because of the way the attendance laws are written, it doesn’t count as an absence. The kid still gets to spend the day watching TV, wandering the streets, or whatever, and the parent avoids a trip to the magistrate for truancy hearings.
If it starts costing them out of pocket, the number of kids not in school is going to go up, not down. These folks come from the lower end of the economic ladder by-and-large; this can be seen by checking drop-out and truancy statistics. For various reasons, they just don’t see schooling as important. They are usually poorly educated themselves. Eliminating the public school system is a good way, I think, to swell the size of an uneducated economic underclass.
Again, how much more cheaply can schools be made to run? It’s not like Wal Mart where everything is bought in huge bulk from China. It’s more like health care–you’re getting hands-on services from professionals in a fully-equiped facility.
I agree with you! And what does it take to deal with something that’s more expensive? More money!
If we reduce class sizes, more classes can be set aside for the bad students.
Did your training do its job? Meaning, did you at least have a basic grasp of what to do and how to do it? Or did you really just have to learn on the job?
The media class, the methods class, and the student teaching were worthwhile. The other classes were largely a waste of my money. However, nothing really prepares you to be in charge of a classroom full of kids, responsible for an assload of paperwork, and the other real-life parts of teaching where you are the one one ultimately responsible for what is going on. Many people complete their degree and student teaching, then quit the profession after one year or less.
I wonder if programs like “Teach for America” have higher or lower retention.
‘Somewhat’ more cheaply. Of course there’s plenty of non-elastic start-up and maintenance costs, but there’s also a not-insignificant amount of bureaucratic waste in state-run institutions that is generally not equalled by private institutions. Even aside from the often notorious lack of accounting oversight, there are state and federal guidelines that all public schools must pay to meet, but that are not necessarily applicable to all (or even most) of the schools in question.
When I said “cheaper,” I didn’t mean $500 per student per year. I meant that there’s usually no inherent reason for private schools to have tuitions of $10K-$20K if the market is not serving primarily affluent parents, and there’s no reason that privately run schools would not be expected to have a lesser amount of waste than public schools.
There’s no way this is just about a lack of funds. According to many sources, this is problem numero uno, and according to probably most sources it’s at least problem dos or tres. There isn’t some way to take this off the back burner at the expense of, say, a new paint job, or an extra round of standardized tests? Private schools have both more freedom and more incentive to make necessary improvements like this, and the ones that do the best jobs of balancing their budget and allocating their resources will generally flourish and be copied. That kind of innovation is virtually impossible in a state run institution (or, if possible, it is at least slowed to a crawl and generally misapplied).
Class size reduction is one way of dealing with both disruptive students and those that perform poorly. With more special needs classes these kids get the individual help they need and don’t slow down the progress of kids without learning disabilities. And classroom control is much easier in smaller classes, if you’ve only got one or two trouble-makers and the rest of the class is willing to (or at least resigned to) learn.
Class size is seen as such a fundamental improvement that Florida voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to reduce class sizes to certain levels (not even very strict ones at that, I think for the higher grades it’s like 25 students per class, although much smaller for elementary school grades). These voters were outraged when Jeb tried to delay or prevent the implementation of this plan (because it was “too expensive”). I’m sure most of the voters realized that smaller classes = more classes = more teachers needed = more money. Throwing money at the problem is not always effective, but in this case it seems so obvious- smaller classes make it easier for teachers to teach, and easier for students with special needs to get the help they deserve.
I remember one of the public schools I attended had maximum occupancy signs in all of its classrooms. Some of my classes exceeded those by 10 or more students. I’m sure the fire marshall would have been pissed. And at that school, that had recently constructed a new building to deal with the sheer number of students, was the only public school in my part of the county that didn’t have portables to deal with the overflow. Some of the older rooms were unused most of the time. So, it wasn’t a lack of space, but a lack of qualified teachers that meant some classes swelled to over 40 students per class.
For anyone who thinks that private school education is better than public, and private school teachers superior… you do realize that, in NY, all public school teachers have to have Masters degreees, but private school teachers have no such requirements? You don’t need to be certified, don’t need a Masters. And from what I’ve heard, private school teachers get paid about half what public school teachers make, and don’t have the pension and benefits that the state offers. I doubt they are getting the best educated, best prepared teachers from the available pool. Consider that.
I also have to give a big :dubious: about a private school that’s getting tens of thousands of dollars from a parent is going to be more willing than a private school to suspend or eject a “bad” student. There may be fewer street type thugs, but I bet there are plenty of rich, obnoxious, disruptive brats who have to be handled with kid gloves because Daddy’s loaded and gives tons of money to the school. Without a union to back you up in a dispute like that with a parent, what do you think would happen to the teacher?
As for the layers of bureaucracy that supposedly cost so much in public schools, all that is on the upper levels. There are 2 administrators in my school of about 700 kids and 60 or 70 staff members (estimate). That is just not a lot of management in an organization that size. It’s on the district level that the money seems to be getting squandered, and if I know anything about private businesses, it’s that you’re not going to get rid of those upper middle management types.
I think schools are underfunded for what they’re expected to do. Considering the money our government throws at far less worthwhile projects, that is.
Yeah, fuck the smart kids, let 'em wallow in the shithole of public education like the rest of us had to. Great attitude.
As a hardcore free market libertarian, even I don’t blame the school system on the fact that they’re not private. My issue is the “no child left behind” mentality that means we have to divert a humongous amount of resources to ensure the last 5% can keep up while neglecting the top 5%. Newsweek just ran a great article on this about a month or so ago; see if you can find it, I haven’t got the time right now.
We have to stop pretending that all children are created equally and start sorting them into different classes based solely on their individual abilities. Create environments appropriate to the children, rather than holding back the ones who know the material while their classmates struggle to keep up.
Magnet schools seem to be great tools for helping the gifted children excel. I have many friends who graduated from a local magnet school who thoroughly enjoyed it and call it a life-shaping event they wouldn’t change for the world.
Then let’s not turn them into shitholes by pulling most of the good students out of them.
I agree, but as RedRosesForMe suggests, separate them while keeping them in the same school, so the school as a whole remains a non-shithole.
Do whatever it takes to ensure our best and brightest are receiving a good education. I fail to see how removing smart children changes the teacher quality of the rest of the kids. Surely you wouldn’t have a problem with removing children with learning disabilities into a school more suited to their special needs?
Alternatively, prices for GREAT private schools could rise, since - particularly the already existing schools - have students willing to pay $12k a year. Give those parents a $5k voucher and that school can charge $17k a year.
vouchers = subsidies and subsidies throw the free market out of whack
I predict vouchers would create a bunch of really shitty private schools that can educate kids at a tuition just slightly above voucher level and still make a profit - but are able to appeal to parents for reasons public schools can’t or aren’t willing to. Parents who can afford to double the voucher amount and those lucky enough to find people running a school to benefit kids and not as a profit center might get a decent education.
Some of the smartest kids in my husband’s class come from disadvantaged backgrounds. They don’t have a lot of parental support and they live in a poor neighborhood, but, man, the raw material is there. I worry that a voucher system would screw these kids the most.
dangermom and jsgoddess, you make good points about teacher education programs. Part of the current problem seems to be that the current hoops aspiring teachers have to jump through have nothing to do with being smart or good teacher material. In my ideal world, education classes would be more challenging, but the program wouldn’t be longer. When my husband returned to college to get his teaching license, his classes were much like Manda JO described. There were a lot of them, but most of them were ridiculously Micky Mouse.
I’ve had teachers who didn’t know their subject matter at all levels; from the math teacher in primary school who got lost doing sets to the Department Director in graduate school whose research involved tunneling techniques but who couldn’t read energy level diagrams.
Maybe they were just bad at pictures.