What was wonderful about it? Why was it labeled a bad school?
Because it was my father’s school? And the kids were cute and well-behaved?
Because most of the children couldn’t speak English and you can’t hide this on a standardized test.
How about not doing an inferred ad hominem attack and say why we should just pass those kids.
Failing kids should be a huge indicator of where resources need to go but I know in my state vs. getting more resources in the community and the school they just dropped the required score.
BTW, most non-English speakers may have challenges but outside of the Hispanic group they are actually doing better than Native English speakers on whole in my area of the world.
I don’t think we should do the former, but that’s definitely happening as a result of NCLB. I think the underlying educational philosophy–get every kid up to a certain minimum standard, no matter what–is fatally flawed. Instead, the standard should be to challenge every kid to fulfill their academic potential to their fullest. Every Child Zoom Ahead, not No Child Left Behind.
And yes, we need to set expectations for kids. Part of that needs to be setting expectations for parents. If a kid isn’t sleeping at night because mom and dad are partying all night long, what exactly can a teacher do to make that kid stay awake during class? The whole “it takes a village” thing is something I fundamentally believe in, but sometimes people forget that the parents are a big part of that village.
This blog review of Waiting for Superman may be a little on the hyperbolic side, but it pulls out parental responsibility in a way that I think gets neglected too often in educational debates. I’m not talking about the responsibility of parents who take responsibility; I’m talking about the ones who are falling down on the job for whatever reason, be it drug use or mental health issues or basic selfishness or whatever. An excerpt:
There is a cultural component as well. I have two middle school students. Neither is terribly disciplined when it comes to schoolwork. And we don’t push it. We don’t want them to have childhoods full of math books. My son already dislikes reading, pushing him to do more of it isn’t a solution to get him to love books.
There are American Tiger Moms (I worked with one, and her son did end up at Stanford. I’m friends with another). But most of us are trying to balance homework schedules with sports schedules and afterschool activities with plenty of time for our kids to play Modern Warfare 2 and make YouTube videos. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have parents who didn’t much like school themselves and aren’t sure their kids need college anyway.
Our son is an AVID student. When we went to a program orientation to make sure we as parents supported this, there were a number of parents there who didn’t, and others who didn’t respond to the invitation. You can get your B or C student into a program that is going to put him on a college prep path and you turn it down because he won’t get shop?
My understanding is that this is less common in some other developed countries - where it is more common to expect academic excellence, or at least effort.
And that’s it for me, I need to go make sure my son finishes the 150 pages he has to read before the end of the tri…
You missed the joke, I think: he was teasing you about how you say we should set standards for education in a sentence that uses the nonstandard “us” in a place where “we” is standard :). Simple mockery, not an implied (not inferred) ad hominem. Standard Straight Dope fare.
No ad hominem implied or intended. I thought you were making a joke when you said:
On edit, thanks LHoD. 
Ah fun with Dysgraphia, I know how it is to have a language disadvantage in school
I though you were inferring a raciest intent, sorry, I do not believe in the concept of “race” outside of a silly way of people to put people in buckets for little to no reason.
The reason it works in Finland? THEY’RE FINLAND! The never have been. never will be, the most powerful, prosperous natiion on Earth.
Or Special Ed for that matter. BTW, monstro I completely agree that “white flight” is another factor.
Fundamentally, the problem in the US educational system is a lack of parental and community involvement and concern and expectations for the students in poor performing communities.
There’s a reason that white kids from the suburbs do well on average; their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends, friends’ parents and even their friends take a greater or lesser interest in their academic performance and hold them accountable. People talk about where you’re going to go to college- it’s not seen as anything special to graduate high school, and going to college isn’t seen as anything special either. It’s expected. Nobody wants to be considered a “fuckup”, so they put in some effort not to be seen like that.
In the poor performing community, there’s less stigma to dropping out, making bad grades, or doing other dumb-ass things like knocking chicks up or getting knocked up. Going to college is generally kind of strange and alien, and definitely not expected or discussed.
In short, low expectations breed low performance. The real question is how to get the poor performing communities to value education and expect higher performance, because it’s doubtful that it’s anything other than a lack of expectations and community value of education.
I also suspect that Finnish society is much, much more homogenous than the US, and probably values education as a whole much more like the high performing communities in the US.
Dangerosa-We need MORE “Tiger moms”, NOT fewer! We need to get their kids away freom TV and video games, and to do more, harder, homework, and into AVID programs, make sure they realize they probably won’t be professional athletes or muscians.
Tiger Moms are scary, though.
Yeah, and? :dubious:
Could you explain the connection between “successful educational model” and “power and prosperity?”
If their system is SO great: 1. Why haven’t we adopted it or 2. Why aren’t they the ones leading all the military operations saving Western Civilization?
So . . . their system works because they aren’t a major military power? 
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Because Americans are a divisive, cynical, selfish bunch of people.
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Because Finland loves its people more than it loves power. Not does it have a persecution complex or an unhealthy obsession with murder, death, kill.
Why don’t we adapt the South Korean model, one that has public and private schools? After all, SK scores higher than Finland in reading and math, so obviously their model is the bestest.
To quote something I said earlier:
http://asiasociety.org/education/learning-world/south-korean-education-reforms
Sorry, but foolish strawmen aside, Monstro, the fact that Finland does things one way doesn’t necessarily make their way the “right” way. Countries higher-ranked than Finland do things differently, countries lower-ranked than the US use the Finnish model.
The issue is more complicated than saying “This one way is the best as demonstrated by one small, culturally and ethnically homogenous small country, and that’s what EVERYBODY needs to do!”
And I think this point is truer than many people want to realize. A while ago I put together a spreadsheet, based upon the reading scores, of all 14 countries that score higher than the US because I noticed that the countries that score higher than the US overwhelmingly have the following characteristics:
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Much smaller - The average OECD country ranked higher than the US on the reading scale was 7.9% of the US’s population, with the largest being 40% the US’s size (Japan) and the smallest being .1% (Iceland.)
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More culturally and racially homogeneous. The average country is 83% racially/ethnically homogeneous (Japan is #1 with 98.5% of all citizens being Japanese, Belgium is 14th with 57% of the population Flemish (though the Walloons, 30% of the population, are white people of W. European extraction.)) The US ranks 13th on the list with 63.7% of the people being “white.”
It makes it easier, far easier, to have “world-class” education scores if all your students come to school with the same cultural assumptions.
(Let me know if y’all can’t see the spreadsheet - this is the first time I’ve uploaded something to Google docs and shared it with the web, so I may have made a mistake.)