There are interesting education stats in this Washington Post article, taken from the 2006 Condition of Education report published by the U.S. Department of Education. Some examples:
The percentage of children ages 3 to 5 who attended early childhood care and education programs increased from 53 percent in 1991 to 60 percent in 1999. It then decreased to 57 percent in 2005.
Between 1972 and 2004, the percentage of racial or ethnic minority students enrolled in the nation’s public schools increased from 22 percent to 43 percent, primarily because of growth in Hispanic enrollment.
Total expenditures per student increased 23 percent in constant dollars, from $7,847 to $9,630 between the 1995-96 and 2002-03 school years.
From 1972 to 2004, the rate at which high school graduates enrolled in college in the fall immediately after high school increased from 49 percent to 67 percent.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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152 Comments
Our society is slowly developing a better trend towards education being very valuable asset in our culture.
It still has much to go, so we cannot relax and say “everything is fine.”
We still have an antiquated Soviet style approach to primary education of youth in Public Schools. It’s changing a bit, but needs massive reform, such as school choice and the dismantling of the teachers unions.
Anybody listen to the Seattle School case brought to the Supreme Court? It was on C-Span this weekend. Very interesting case indeed.
Joe Williams, you are a FASCIST! What is this crap about “dismantling of the teachers unions”? First of all, the BEST teachers are generally members of their professional organization. Second, the “dismantling” of any union or trade association is totally un-American. Third, there is all ready “school choice”. You just have to live in the chosen school’s area.Confess it Joe, what you really want is public tax dollars to pay for private and/or religious education and you don’t want the NEA or AFT in the way.
I’ll Confess! I have no problem with parents using their portion of the tax paying kitty to choose the school of their choice. Either it be a public school, private, or religious.
I have no hidden agenda. I think the teachers unions are detremental to the education of our kids. I’m no facist! I default to freedom and liberty all the time. What’s wrong with choice?
If you don’t believe in choice, freedom, and liberty, such as yourself, Apophis, then you are a facist!
Stupid in America!
Confess Facist Apophis, you only believe in teacher unions for political purposes. They have nothing to do with the education of the children. We have a facist system of public education now.
Stupid in America!
How can teacher organizations NOT have an interest in the education of children Joe? Please, no “out of context” quotes from the now deceased Al Shanker. You hate the teacher’s organizations solely because they stand in your way of spending public education tax dollars in the private sector.
Isn’t it about time for you to start quoting some asinine John Stossel piece?
Also, it is a pointless discussion, the NEA is now the largest union in our nation. You or your kind will never be able to counter its influence. What you really cannot stand is that for the vast majority of students in this country it is a positive influence.
(old guy voice) Theaats the way it was back in the good ol’ days and theatts the way it is now. Seniority, that’s the ticket. Kid’s don’t need good teacher, they need an experienced one! Them pipsqueaks spoutin’ new ideas got no real idea how to edjacate. Ya gotta stick them kids in a cookie cutter! Trim off the edges. They’ll come ’round in time. Make ‘em think what the teachers union wants’ em to think. Everbuddy knows it’s for the best. The NEA wouldn’t be so big if it twernt so.
“I’ll Confess! I have no problem with parents using their portion of the tax paying kitty to choose the school of their choice. Either it be a public school, private, or religious.”
Joe???
Isn’t this a collectivist idea that you so frequently rail against? How is this consistent with your free market ideas?
Oh, I see, free market when it suits your purposes and collectivist approaches when it serves your purposes… If I did not fear that it would cause FDR to roll over in his grave, I would tell you to join up with the Democrats…
Before you blow a cognitive dissonance gasket, just think about it.
Joe Williams<<<
outlander<<<<
I can’t think of much to say yet on this thread. But since that did not stop Joe or Outie, I won’t let it stop me!
Huh,
So much for creativity.
After the little arrows next to Joe and Out it was supposed to say”known hater of unions”.
The rest of my post is as intended.
Someone please explain this to me: while we continue to spend more and more every year on education, we also continue to see fewer and fewer positive results.
What needs to be fixed?
“Someone please explain this to me: while we continue to spend more and more every year on education, we also continue to see fewer and fewer positive results.
“What needs to be fixed?”
I think one explanation for the increased costs comes from the fact that the public schools are asked to take on a greater public welfare role with students who in the past never would have darkened the door of a public school.
The ruling that all students, regardless of handicap, deserved a public education (P.L. 94-142) came to us under the administration of Gerald Ford.
Should schools serve as the primary soical service agency for poor children, the state hospital and mental health clinic for children with psychiatric distubances, the primary enculturating force for children of illegal immigrants?
I could see arguments on the above questions, either way, having merit. But if we expect the schools to take on more social service and even legal duties, we can expect the price tag to go up.
I don’t see the private schools clamoring to get into the social service market — so I am not sure what the privatization push would do for the cost problem.
I think the Catholic church private schools have made the effort to reach out and include English as Second Language children into their school systems. They would be an obvious exception to the private schools backing away from kids with special needs. I don’t have data, but I imagine that the Catholics are successful in serving this group of kids.
But, I am aware that the Catholic schools in Wichita at least get some of their special ed services from the USD 259. I think cooperative programs like this are good for all concerned.
I don’t think it will reduce cost. I’m just up for choice.
You asked if having vouchers for parents to pay for a school of their choice is a collective ideology. The answer is no!
What it does is foster competition and parental involvement. Sure! There are quite a few parents out there who don’t care what school their kids go to and only want to go to the closest one. That’s their choice.
But collectively we collect the tax dollars from every property owner in the state, either it by an individual or company, which is then redistributed to a public school system. Many property owners don’t have children going to schools or companies have nobody directly benefiting from them paying taxes. That is how it is set up. We are required by law to provide an education to children up to the age of 16. Private and Religious schools count as education.
Teachers unions are there to gain the system for their members, the teachers. There job is to reduce working hours and increase pay and benefits. That’s all! It has nothing to do with education themselves.
Going to a voucher system fosters competition, which is not in favor of unions. They love monopolies, it makes them very powerful. But since they collect massive dues from their members, a reduction of the membership would reduce their money they get to sue school district to force them to pay more. They don’t want that.
What is the aurgument against voucher systems and school choice when it comes to a child’s education? Less money? Hardly! It’s the same money, just being distributed differently.
Progressive countries in Europe and Asia do this. We are still stuck with an ancient model. Hell! We still base it off the agriculturial era with harvest season off. We aren’t progressive in thought I guess!
What I find funny is why do we need a union for Government employees?
It seeems to me that we have four primary obstacles (SSDD) that we keep tripping over:
1. Primary “basic” eucation (readin’, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic) is shortchanged in favor of the latest psychobabble and PC social awareness crap.2. Overpaid top heavy administration.3. Understaffed, underpaid, and consequently often, underqualified educators,4. Forced busing, or whatever they call it this month — “negative neighborhood facility adjustment”.
But defining the problem is the easy part. For the moment, at least, I’ll hand off the hard part to you all.
No Child Left Behind has hindered more than helped the education of our children.
rm, I agree with #1, but I blame society, as a whole, for the problem. I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and raised my kids in the 80’s and 90’s. 3 of my kids attended the same high school I did, so I could really see the difference in the education system.
#2…I don’t know enough administrators or the amount on their checks to comment. I do know that, like everything, there are good and bad administrators.
#3…Agree. I’ve seen good to excellent teachers let go and poor ones kept for eternity. I’ve also seen a school fall from excellent to mediocre because of the community.
#4…At the time busing was created, there was a need for it. I can’t say that it has hurt any student to have to learn to get along with others who are different from them. OTOH, some students have to bear a burden that is totally unfair–early morning bus rides comes to mind.
I’m not sure there is an answer to any of this. The entire system needs an overhaul, but there’s no one around I would trust to do it.
It would be easy to blame the teachers union for these woes, but I’m not so quick to do so.
As I’m sure you all know, I’m militantly anti-union. The only workers the unions truly “help” are the substandard, under-achieving workers. Quality workers are not not rewarded, lose motivation and subsequently become less productive. (You don’t have to believe this, but I did an entire masters thesis on this topic. I’m pretty well-versed on the facts.)
If the teachers union were to blame, I think we’d see more fat-n-happy teachers. I’ve yet to see a single one, and I have three kids in the public school system. I agree that our schools have become providers of public welfare, and I also agree that schools have become babysitters for behaviorally-challenged kids (read: troublemakers). Forced bussing is a 60’s notion – no longer applicable.
Overpaid, top-heavy administration? I don’t agree. Principals aren’t over-paid, and superintendents are completely necessary. If they’re not effective (paid too much for the value received), then get someone else in there.
My solutions:1. Parents MUST be involved. Schools should have REQUIRED parental interaction activities – and have them frequently. Once a week is not too often.
2. Troublemaking kids are kicked out. Invoke the three-strikes rule. If a kid gets two strikes, then a parent has to come to school with the kid for a week.
3. REQUIRE standardized testing to move up a grade. If the kids aren’t learning, we’re not doing them any favors by simply moving them on to become another teacher’s problem.
4. EVALUATE teachers based on the successful learning of their students. And make those evaluations public information. If a teacher is consistently turning out kids that don’t perform, there’s a problem.
5. REWARD successes. Have monthly covered dish dinners (cost = zero) for the top performers. Invite kids to make presentations / displays to show off positive results. This facilitates #1 – get parents involved.
The possibilities are endless. Bottom line: Measure everything. “What gets measured – gets done”.
And don’t put up with any BS.
RD: I’m not sure there’s an answer either, unfortunately, save a top to bottom overhaul …. and let’s not kid ourselves, that “ain’t gonna’ happen”! And yes, there are good administrators and poor ones, like every other profession. My basic premise there is that there’s just too damned many of them. Why, for example, does one high school in Wichita that I know of personally, with 1200-1300 students need a full-time pricipal and 3 full-time assistant principals. And, I understand they’re considered administratively understaffed compared to some of the others, but that part is heresay. I don’t have firm numbers on the others.
And, no, the school system(s) cannot and should not have to shoulder all the blame. For example, it sure as hell isn’t the systems’ fault that the halls must be patrolled by full-time armed police officers because many of these kids have never had an iota of disipline at home before they could even spell “school”. And we wonder why they still can’t? I don’t. I think I’ve got that much figured out. Anyway, thanks.
Dropping in from the “real world” of work for a moment, and find this thread.
I have posted some of my thoughts earlier. I have many more, and, time willing, will post some later.
One issue I have with the “voucher” concept is that, by and large, private schools have admission criteria; thus, for the great many students who do not meet these, vouchers are an empty promise. I submit that if the public schools were allowed to only “educate” the students in the top quartile, they would do extremely well as measured by outside groups, et al; but hey, the public schools are just that; public. All students who are eligible for attendance, due to age and other restrictions, must be admitted and dealt with.
I don’t recall who posted that the obligation of the schools ended at age 16; in Kansas, the compulsory attendance law extends to age 18, with an exception for those at least 16 who, with a parent’s permission, and after a “counseling” session with the building principal, are allowed to “drop out”.
Gawd, I think I may have had a stroke or something. I’m actually agreeing with GNut this morning. And I think, he’s “kinda’, sorta’ agreeing with me! :)
http://www.act.org/path/policy/pdf/retain_trends.pdf
Above link to a pdf on the ACT website which shows that notwithstanding the increase in enrollment in college, graduation rates aren’t increasing proportionately. My read: the increased numbers enrolling aren’t prepared.
rm, isn’t that ok? I’m a reasonable human. Plus, you can’t believe everything you read about someone on a blog.
While I’m very passionate about my beliefs, I don’t resort to personal attacks – and you have to be able to separate the trolls from the real posters.
GNut: It’s better than good, friend. Believe me, it was written with a big smile.
Agreed. Maybe this will be the start of a movement toward civility on this board.
I’m all for it. =)
I’m not sure I have an answer. I’m not even sure we can agree on the problem, except that Johnny can’t read as well as he ought.The first real step in reform is to chip away at what is in effect the gov’t monopoly on public education.
NEA (I’m a former member) doesn’t really care about education, it cares about teachers. While there is a connection they are not one and the same. NEA tends to oppose any reform, or even experimenting with reform, which would be detrimental to the pay or working conditions of their members. That’s not necessarily a criticism, just a reality. They’are a union, looking out for the interest of their members. Certainly, any reform which requires more responsibility or substantially increased commitment of time and resources has to be supported by more pay.
I’d be for vouchers. However, for any private school to accept vouchers for education, a requirement must be that they accept ANY student who would otherwise qualify for the public school; they can’t take the dollars and pick and choose. If a private school won’t do that, then public dollar vouchers should not be permitted to be spent at that school.
More testing is not the answer, though a certain amount of testing is required. Two problems with testing is that 1) inevitably we will not teach knowledge, we will teach to the test. That means tailoring the curriculum to what is tested (not necessarily entirely bad, but quite limiting) and worse, 2) teaching how to take tests. Remember, tests really only test how well students take tests.
Just a thought, for now. Other thoughts, all?
Back for a quick visit…
GMC, totally agree on vouchers. On testing: can agree with your second point; on the first point, if the assessment (see, I’ve been taught the lingo :)) truly “tests” the level of knowledge expected within the designated subject matter, then is not “teaching to the test” truly teaching the students what they should be learning (think I’m agreeing with you, at least in part)?
Defining the problem is quite the thing, given the satisfaction of parents with their students’ schools reflected in the linked article. That, in and of itself, is scary.
I don’t have the answers; if I did, would I still be practicing? However, I feel some of the answers lie in rewarding competence in teaching (how to measure is a BIG problem); not expecting schools to be babysitters; untying the link between intellectual age and chronological age; rethinking the agrarian-based school year;determining what is the goal of education, i.e., college prep?, or basic skills for the workplace?, or teaching students how to learn?, or….Stealing an idea from a colleague who was a teacher at one point, might we consider establishing at least one “full service” high school per county/district, with attendance centers providing the mandated basics to those not interested in college, etc. (this assumes we might agree on what are the basics). The “full service” school would provide the AP courses, advanced music instruction, debate, art, etc., making it a matter of choice for the students/parents whether to attend there rather than the attendance center? I apologize for the “shorthand” nature of this, but have much to say, and not enough time.
Hopefully, this will encourage other ideas for when I am able to check back in about 3 hours.
GMC: You and Vaughn are saying the same thing about vouchers. Anything short of absolutely open admissions, such as private schools “best and brightest” qualifications, inherently and systemtically skew the results of any “we do better than you do” statistics. Of course, regarding statistics? “Figures never lie, but liars figure!” You can selectively “make” the numbers say whatever you want them to say. It used to be called “manipulation”, pre PC. Now it “post calculation numerical variability correction”, or somesuch, I’m sure.
But I, for one, at least, am open to just about any option, because what we have now is FUBAR of an educational system. It’s virtually daycare from ages 6 through 17. I’m not criticizing the educators. I’d be pissed offf too, if I had invested 4,6,8 or 9 years of education and a truckload of money (borrowed via student loans) to be a babysitter with a “title” — and then find out the sweet lady down the street that keeps five toddlers in her home five days a week is making more money, to boot!
If the NEA is doing anything about this situation, I say more power to them. Incidentally, anybody remember the AFT, back in the ’60’s? The American Federation of Teachers, I think was the full name. Is it still even around?
Vaughn: Back in the late 50’s or early ’60’s, VOTECH was set up at East High and taught auto mechanics and auto body repair, at first. It later expanded into other “trades”, like sheet metal fab, and expanded to, I think, North High, also. In any event, the whole point was to provide an education for people who DIDN’T want to go to college, DIDN’T want a degree, but who wanted to have a “trade’, with which to make a LIVING. It turned out to be quite a success and there are many of its graduates now comfortably retired.
In any event, in the early ’80’s, a female administrator with a plethora of degrees began a movement to make it a “college” — which was the antithesis of its roots and its function. Fast forward, we now have Wichita Area Technical College and some Aviation College thing in the wings. It defeats the entire scope, concept and purpose.
Anyone else see something horribly wrong with this picture?
rm, yes, this is terribly wrong. However, some blame lies with a change at the State level vis a vis vocational and technical education. The reaction of 259 is to get this function back, to some limited degree for the present, into the comprehensive high schools.
Some other things to think about while assessing the condition of education: first, as posted above, there is a disconnect between the several States’ “assessments” for purposes of NCLB, and actual attainment as measured by other forms of assessment; second, much of what is needed to be taught at the elementary/middle school level isn’t “fun”, but hard work: examples include grammar, to allow students to effectively communicate both in writing and orally; multiplication tables (through the 12s), certain fraction manipulation abilities (so that when the problem is set up on the calculator, the student understands why, rather than merely performing a rote task), spelling (spell checkers have limits, too), teaching reading through a phonetics approach ( I realize this works well for the majority, but not all students) with some “whole language” thrown in for good measure. Third, geography (what good does it do to talk about the world if the students have no idea where the countries are located); fourth, history (not just date memorization, but also contextual relationships between an occurrence and how that occurrence is important in a broad sense); etc.
Oh, well, back to the real world….
rm6046…………the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) IS still around. The United Teachers of Wichita is a merged local, affiliated with both the NEA and AFT. This makes this local teacher’s association very diverse and influential. This is why the anti-public education people on the WEblog hate it so much.
VT is right about college matriculation rising, but graduation remaining flat. Kids are getting some kind of message that they need to go to college, in increasing numbers, but K-12 isn’t getting the same message. Oh, to be sure it is supporting more applications, but it is not preparing kids for the actual rigors of college.
I’d like to hear from some readers here whose kids got through Algebra I and II with B or B+ grade averages, scored 23-25 on the ACT, and were placed in College Algebra. Because College Algebra is remedial high school algebra. The subject matter taught in College Algebra is tested by the ACT and SAT. These tests determine, “Did you learn the material in 8th-10th grade, or do you need to restudy the subject matter?”
On another thread, “Are Science and Religion Headed to War?”, I pointed out that not since 1962, when Ms. Marjorie French won the Kansas Teacher of the Year Award, has any Kansas math teacher repeated that feat. That’s 45 years folks (2007 winner has already been announced) since a Kansas math teacher was last awarded. That means that math teaching is disrespected by the public education corps here, who select nominees and vote on final awardees.
Let’s wake up. Ms. French represented “old school”, when our nation’s brightest women taught in schools. Public education, and other social factors successfully enabled these women’s daughters and granddaughters to take up career paths as doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, university researchers and professors, managers and even Fortune 500 executives. Our K-12 teaching corps has been severely weakened.
Many teachers say, “We’re doing the best we can, under the constraints that we cannot control.” That’s telling. It means they are taking what they can get, which they admit isn’t what they really want or need to do the job better. So, if they thought more clearly, they would admit, “We’re not doing a very good job.” As I said in the other thread referred to, we’ve gone, in the past 40 years, from 185 instructional days, with regular teachers covering almost all those days, to 170, and sometimes fewer days, with more substitution. Do the math: this represents a COMPLETE ACADEMIC YEAR LOST between 1st and 12th grade. Reduce anyone’s education time by one year, and what do you think the result is?
I’ve been going through my old Scientific American collection, culling my library in preparation for moving to smaller quarters. In the May 1999 issue, “New Brain Cells” discusses a study done in the early 60’s at my undergrad university, in which “rodents” (genus not specified) that were placed in very large cages with continually changing “toys”, mazes and other “exploratory” devices, demonstrated greater intelligence than those confined under normal lab-”rat” conditions. Research performed in the 1990’s found that such rodents had more neurons in the hippocampus, which plays a role in new knowledge acquisition, and studies showed that stem cells became neurons in an enriched environment. (The captive rodents may not be as smart as those living in the wild. They probably aren’t.)
Classrooms are devised after industrial principles. Personally, I think classroom teaching for 3-4 hours a day, as is practiced in tertiary and master’s-level education, and as part of multifactorial learning environments, is not unreasonable. But extending that to 7 hours has no scientific foundation, as a good way to promote neuronal proliferation. Many kids, particularly boys, find that it doesn’t work for them. They can’t articulate, “My neurons aren’t proliferating,” but they say, “I’m bored. I’m not being challenged.” Those two things are almost certainly synonymous.
heartlander, for those of us without your vast intelligence, could please explain how you get from
“Many teachers say, “We’re doing the best we can, under the constraints that we cannot control.” That’s telling. It means they are taking what they can get, which they admit isn’t what they really want or need to do the job better.”
to
“So, if they thought more clearly, they would admit, “We’re not doing a very good job.” “
heartlander: “Let’s wake up. Ms. French represented “old school”, when our nation’s brightest women taught in schools.”
You seem to be suggesting that we go back to the days when the only choices women had were to become teachers or nurses or secretaries. Am I misinterpreting you?
How do you propose luring the best and brightest back into teaching?
CSA, you expressed support for smaller classes, right? Without them, education is compromised.
Now maybe the press is misreporting when it says that educators, such as those who filed suit in this state to get a different funding formula enacted, plus more dollars, which the press reported that the court ordered. Suppose that the press reported accurately. If the districts filing the lawsuit exerted a claim for more money, are you going to argue here that they felt, “We’re doing a fully satisfactory job, according to our own standards, but we demand more money to do the same thing we are currently doing?”
You can read the arguments and court ruling, but based on my understanding or press reports, and I believe that what was said was districts like Wichita were being disadvantaged, i.e. their students were being disadvantaged. But such disadvantage didn’t just arise two years ago. It’s been endemic. So, educators here let thousands of Wichita children be disadvantaged for YEARS before taking legal action. Do you agree or disagree?
JoCo voters were willing to pay a tax premium to support their schools. Other counties’ districts sued to stop this. If the other counties’ districts felt they were adequately funded to do their jobs as well as they wanted to do, would they have sued? No. Because, if this was the case, they wouldn’t have CARED if JoCo wanted to do something unique, not any better than they were doing, but different, that cost more money. What they would have said was, “Those foolish JoCoers, they just want to waste money. Because we have proved that you can do an excellent job educating with less money than they want to spend.”
This isn’t rocket science. There are only two possibilities here: either the non-JoCo plaintiffs were just wasting taxpayers’ money filing an action that the court would find was meritless, i.e. “We’re doing just as good a job as they can do with more money, we just want to annoy them.” Or else they are arguing, “They will do a better job than they are currently doing, and that we are doing with current funding. And that is unfair to those districts that don’t have as much money.”
VT, a lawyer, will agree with my deduction here. The argument is not that JoCo teachers will receive higher-than-elsewhere salaries from the local tax, while children will receive an equal education, it is that JoCo kids will receive an “unfairly BETTER advantage”, is afforded elsewhere with lower funding. Which necessarily means the educators elsewhere KNOW they are supplying an inferior education to that which JoCo voters are willing to spend for their kids.
The only other conclusion is that JoCo has higher living costs, the surcharge would be paid to teachers there, and teachers in lower-housing-cost counties want to PUNISH JoCo teachers, financially. But that’s not what their complaint proposed,
There are high school teachers who have 120-150 students. That’s way too many students. But they haven’t struck to reduce the maximum to 80, have they? They have accepted an education-diminishing tradeoff.
CSA, your last thrust, regarding returning to reducing women’s choices, is sophomoric. You’re showing “teacher reasoning”, as when a 7th grade teacher caught me breaking some rule, a relatively innocuous act, and she challenged me, “What if EVERYBODY DID THAT?” What if EVERYBODY was educated to be a 7th grade teacher?
We have to deal with reality. We don’t necessarily have to raise teacher salaries across the board. Today, most families are two-parent-income. If a 40 year old teaching couple makes $80,000, perhaps even more from night and summer school teaching, or other summer work, that’s a comfortable upper-half middle-class income by Kansas economic standards. It’s not a road to riches, but the job is nearly termination-risk-proof, with good benefits, low-interest credit-union consumer loan rates, and a comfortable-retirement pension plan. The pay-and-benefits side of the equation is pretty darned good. If the working conditions are not what teachers want, that’s what they need to strike for, educate the public on, and make change happen so that teachers can enjoy teaching, and kids can enjoy learning.
heartlander, I heard somebody once blame the ills of education on the fact that women *do* have other options than becoming teachers/secretaries/nurses nowadays. I wanted to make sure this wasn’t your contention – that’s why I asked if I was misinterpreting you.
You haven’t proposed any solutions for helping entice the best and brightest into teaching. In fact, you’re ruled out any salary increase a priori, citing the fact that a teaching couple could gross $80,000 after a number of years of teaching.
But that’s not really an enticement, is it? “Hey, your salary can be a *great* second income!”
Not when, according to NCLB, all secondary/middle school teachers are required to have degrees in each subject area they teach. Not when college students (bright, motivated kids who *want* to teach) see their college classmates graduate in less time (no education courses or student teaching to worry about) and enter careers with far higher earning potentials.
Meanwhile, the kids who want to be teachers have to maintain at least a 3.0 GPA for teacher certification, compared to their non-teaching cohorts who need only a 2.0 GPA to graduate.
I’m not proposing that more money is always the answer. But put yourself in the shoes of those who want to become teachers: why should they work for better grades, pay for more classes, and endure much lower salaries to enter a profession that people like you vilify at every turn?
heart, a partial agreement with you on the JoCo tax issue. My understanding of the matter is that the foks in JoCo determined that under the school finance law then in effect (the one held unconstitutional in Montoy), their districts were receiving insufficient funding to produce the level of education they (JoCo residents) felt was needed. They then went to the populace and obtained support for the additional sales tax to support the schools, which additionally required legislative action to impose (much as the Arena sales tax here in Sedgwick County). Not only were they rebuffed by the legislature, they faced the litigation. The legal principle they were not able to overcome, whether legislatively or otherwise, was that established by Judge Bullock in the case that resulted in the 1992 school finance law, namely that irrespective of how characterized and raised, all funding for schools resulting from the imposition of taxes was, in fact, state funding, as school districts were no more than political subdivisions of the state. Thus, raising additional funds to be spent locally was in violation of this principle.
Up thread, someone (I’m too lazy to go look) asserted that schools were financed by property taxes only; however, under the 1992 school finance act, and the one passed in 2005, school finance funding is raised through a combination of property taxes and state income taxes, thus broadening the pool of both revenue and parties interested.
I am one who believes that an adequately educated populace is a condition precedent to economic development, especially in today’s economy. Thus, I feel that eco devo funds should be first devoted, in some per centage, to education; for without qualified workers to take the jobs, why would any new employers come to create them?
Finally, I hold as a core belief that while it is difficult, if not statistically impossible, to show a positive correlation between increased spending and increased attainment in education, cutting spending results in a reduction in education. The poster child for this belief is the State of California, once believed to have one of the best systems of public education in the country; after whatever that proposition was that froze the real estate values was passed, reducing the revenues available for education, the California system started to slide, now ranking, IIRC, in the lowest 5 states. I am aware that other factors may have impacted California, but the slide began before these were major considerations, again IIRC.
A final query to heart; you assert a change in instruction within Kansas over the past 40 years from 185 days to ~170 days. Again, from memory, the Kansas school year was, until 1992 school reform, set at 180 days; it has been increased statutorily to 186 days, as I recall. What is your basis for you assertion? I’m not saying that you are wrong; I’m just wondering where your numbers are coming from. I have a partial explanation; the ability to determine “days of instruction” on an alternative “Hours” basis, compared to an actual “Days” basis; this is optional, as I understand it, in Kansas, and a district may choose either. If one uses the “hours” approach, it translates into less than 186 calendar days as we understand them; but it does not reduce to 170.
A few more reflections on the condition of education here in Kansas, primarily but not exclusively directed to the results of the Montoy decision:
The trial court found and held, as was affirmed by the Kansas Supreme Court, that the existing funding statutes did not consider the actual costs of education in determining the level of funding to be provided the various districts. The applicability of this to USD 259 was, as simply as I can state it, that it costs more to educate low SES students, students for whom English is not the first language, and other “at risk” students, but the funding provided to districts with high numbers of such students, e.g., USD 259, did not reflect these additional costs. This has been partially addressed in the “new” finance bill; there still exist apparent political compromises on funding, unrelated to actual costs (as reflected in the studies ordered by the legislature, and then ignored to a great extent), but overall, it is my opinion that the Kansas Supreme Court gave an “attaboy” to the Legislature, wanting to dispose of the litigation and uncertainties thereby created.
I am always hesitant to make predictions, but I suspect this issue will be revisited by the courts at some point in the future, when new litigation is filed over what I fear will be politically compromised future funding; my time frame for this litigation is some 5 to 7 years out.
There are hard decisions to be made with respect to school funding. Contained in the A&M study, which has not been widely reported, was a suggestion that the number of school districts in the State be substantially reduced, which will reduce aggregate funding requirements, iff buildings are closed. Consolidation of administrations is a nice thought, but I am told it offers little in cost reductions in the absence of closing buildings. The fallout over the forced consolidations of the early ’60s is still reverberating in many small towns in our state, which after the consolidations found themselves with no local schools. I believe it clear that a new round of forced consolidation will be bitterly opposed by those most affected thereby, but realistically, the sooner the better; the longer we wait, the higher the costs.
While voluntary consolidations are to be encouraged, and the current finance scheme provides fiscal incentives therefor, there are likely to be insufficient numbers of these to make an appreciable difference. I am sympathetic to those small communities who lose a school, because this is often the straw that breaks the camel’s back in the survival of the town, but as the finance scheme is state-wide, so to speak, we as taxpayers have the right to expect economic efficiency; so, if, as I have been led to understand, the most “efficient” model for a high school is one with a total enrollment of 500 to 700 students, what justification is there for there to be a number of districts wtih high schools within a relatively close geographical area, the total enrollments of which total 500 to 700?
More later, as this has become too long.
Cut interest rates on need based student loans, increase Pell Grant maximum, funding for NCLB, and a bit more:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/12/12/democrats.education.ap/index.html
A few more comments:
Base aid per student, 2006 (Kansas): $4257.00. This is without application of various weighting factors. Proponents of vouchers have suggested this be paid to parents, in the form of a voucher, for use in any way the parent wishes (public, private, parochial, etc); if one checks with most private schools, it will become apparent that this amount won’t pay the tuition. If the family is of modest means, and cannot afford the differential, assuming the school offers no financial aid, the voucher is no more than an empty promise.
Hypothetical: Family A takes their voucher, adds to it enough to pay the tuition (assuming child is admitted) to the private school; at semester, Family A is called into the office, told by the administrator student cannot cut the academic mustard, will not be permitted to return for second semester. Family A cannot afford tuition, etc., at any other private school, so turns to the public schools. Problem: money is at private school, under its contract, no refund. How does the public school district, required under law to accept the student, obtain its financing?
Enough on vouchers. One of the major problems I see with the current status of education is the “average” student, that is, one who is not “gifted” nor a “special ed” student. In Kansas, the gifted program is handled under Special Ed. If the Special Ed laws and regulations apply, the student receives an IEP which, theoretically, is to be adhered to by the schools. I say theoretically, based upon some experiences; I am aware of the right to seek judicial redress in the event the IEP is ignored, etc.
Contrast that with average student. S/he has no particular legal rights to much of anything, separate and apart from occupancy of a seat in the classroom, and the school services available to non Special Ed students. So, assuming the school is making AYP under NCLB, that student has to take what is offered, no matter whether it meets his/her needs or not, no matter how good/bad the education, and has no right to enforce anything which might be particularly beneficial to him/her in court or otherwise. These are the students that, IMHO, are getting the raw end of the deal. My solution, costly as it may be, is for each student to have an IEP, or a contract, whatever one wishes to call it, which is tailored to the student’s particular needs. Until we can get to that point, I fear average student will continue to suffer through school, and not receive the educational opportunities which we, as a public, may well believe are there and want OUR students to receive.
Any thoughts on this? Or has this thread finally imploded?
http://www.aft.org/salary/2004/download/releases/SalarySurvey-KS.pdf
This is a pdf link showing that the average teacher salary in Kansas is more that $1,000 per week.Enough with the “teachers don’t get paid enough” tripe.
CSA,
I need to correct your misstatement that kids (kids=college students; methinks you have some gray hair like me ;-) ) need to maintain a 3.0 for teacher certification. At K-State and KU it’s 2.5, in the subject field of certification, for secondary teachers, which is what the students are supposed to be particularly knowledgeable about. For example, see:
http://coe.ksu.edu/Departments/CSPS/Handbook/SecProgReq.html#General
At ESU, students must earn a 2.75 in general-ed requirements and a 2.5 overall, which would translate into less-than-2.5 for secondary-certification subjects.
But even if it were 3.0, that would not be good. I don’t know of any college student who would ask a “B” student to explain something the first student didn’t get, if an “A” student was willing to share his or her knowledge. Affluent parents who pay out of pocket for after-school help, don’t hire “B” students for their kids. “B” means partial knowledge. Proficiency, in some, but not all topics. Far, far from deep subject understanding (mastery).
If you take a “C+” (2.5 GPA) or even a “B” average in subject matter for a young subject-certified teacher, and then inflict 100 to 150 students on him or her, that’s a recipe for mass-failure.
I’m reading Sol Cohen and Lewis C. Solmon (eds) “From the Campus: Perspectives on the School Reform Movement,” New York: Praeger, 1989. The editors and contributors were all faculty at the UCLA School of Education. They were public university people who taught public-school career people. Dr. Cohen wrote a chapter outlining how “the mental hygiene movement” gradually took over public education in the first half of the century. It is the seminal force underlying the “child self-esteem” focus of our own era’s public education ethos. ( KSU, KU, WSU, PSU and FHSU have copies. It’s an authoritative monograph, which is why most of our public university libraries bought it.)
Self-esteem is critical to children’s lives. But telling them, “You did well in algebra this year,” when they only learned enough to *retake* the course in college, is fallacious “self-esteem building”, IMHO.
Public education is foundering, not because people want to destroy it, but because public education completed its 1870-1950 mission, with superb aplomb, but has since not been reinvented for an evolving economy. It is a once-useful institution that has become obsolete.
More to follow
One thing that shouldn’t be ignored is the Teacher’s Union is to protect the teachers, not the students.
Teachers expect a full year’s salary for a non-full year’s work.
Man, that would be sweet ……if I lived on Fantasy Libland.
“Public education is foundering, not because people want to destroy it, but because public education completed its 1870-1950 mission, with superb aplomb, but has since not been reinvented for an evolving economy. It is a once-useful institution that has become obsolete.” – heartlander, December 12, 2006 at 4:53 PM.
heart, I could not agree more. The issue then becomes what are we, as a society, willing to do to reinvent education.
Regarding your comment concerning College Algebra. This is, as I recall from reading a number of college catalogues throughout the years, a basic graduation requirement for many colleges and universities. Of course, one’s major may well require a higher level math, but if not required by the major, this course must be completed (or the student is deemed to have met this requirement by high school course work, ACT/SAT math scores, and thus is excused). I am intrigued by your description of the course as a remedial course. Displaying my ignorance, how is a graduation requirement a remedial course? While I can believe and argue that no student should possess a high school diploma unless he/she has completed Algebra II with grade of C or better, that, for the present at least, is not reality. Thus, if the incoming student has not completed, e.g., Algebra II, how is College Algebra remedial?
I’m not vilifying teachers. Public education, needed a new vision three decades ago. It needed to be fundamentally retasked then to have the 70% of today’s kids who want to go to college *ready* to succeed in that challenge, and the 30% who don’t want to go to college, ready to succeed in alternative career pathways.
The fact that we didn’t make this seachange is all of our responsibility. The question is, how do we, belatedly, generate a new vision for education that will serve our 21st century’s societal needs (which arguably should be multiple visions in service of diverse goals and interests)? Secondly, how do we implement the vision?
I have friends who sold a house in San Diego, and pocketed several hundred thousand dollars in profit. They moved to Montana. They could have bought a house in the most expensive part of their new community, but decided to live modestly, relative to their means, in a comfortable, non-pretentious middle-income neighborhood whose residents include several teachers. My friend started a medical practice that was projected to quickly generate a $300,000 income before they decided to relocate, and it rapidly grew beyond initial projections. So they could have afforded a house in the chi-chi neighborhood.
So, here is what happened. School A is where most of the doctors, who live in chi-chi-land, send their kids. Top school administrators send their kids to School A.
School B, which serves my friends’ neighborhood is being ruined. The administration, whose kids attented School A, decided to bus mobile-home-park and other poor kids (the vast majority white so we aren’t talking about achieving fairness for minority student) to School B. Not School A.
My friend’s third-grade son has a teacher who previously won accolades with small classes, attended by good students. Not rich students, but kids who loved learning in the classroom. But now, instead of having 18 kids in his class, all of whom were from this middle-class neighborhood, now has 8 new kids who are highly disruptive. He is really depresssed. He can’t teach the kids who want to learn. He can’t teach the way he wants to. If he leaves, he will be replaced by somebody who can tolerate a poor learning environment. That’s tragic, isn’t it CSA?
My friends are both very involved in school affairs. But they’re getting depressed. Their main option is a Catholic school, and, even though they are not Catholic, and don’t look at this as optimal, they are being forced to consider it. They’ve even thought about experimentally trying out the old-world-affluent-class model of hiring an at-home one-on-one tutor. Because they have a child who has enormous gifts. Somebody who could potentially make a better nation, if not ruined and turned into an underachiever.
Education professionals consider themselves to be experts. They are. But here’s the rub: they are experts in a mass-education scheme that was specially designed for an industrial/consumer-goods-producing economy. They are experts in a standardized regimen, which is why a KSU College of Education graduate, who is certified here, can go to Montana, or Texas, or California, or any other state and readily get certified there. It is why Winston Brooks was qualified to take up a superintendency in Florida or Oregon a few years ago.
Despite arguments about “local control”, schools nationwide use the same essential content-bearing textbooks. No district buys math textbooks that don’t conform to National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards. There are no teacher in-services or workshops or summer continuing education courses in Kansas that can’t be found in 49 other states. Emporia State calls its education division, “The Teachers College”. That title, like generic “teachers college” monikers, copies the “Teachers College” title at Columbia University’s affiliated education school. In New York City. The emulation reflects a national education *control* scheme.
Expertise generally has useful consequences. But it can also have deleterious ones. Donald Rumsfeld and his neocon associates had high-level expertise. They received in-services from expert high-tech weapons makers. They were confident that the U.S., using a small manpower force employing the world’s best high-tech weaponry, could defeat, and pacify a mid-sized Third World county, and shift it from a non-aligned status to a U.S. satrapy. But it turned out, the expertise guiding matters was insufficient to achiev this dream.
In my friends’ case, the people running the school district in Montana are experts, whose teaching and administrative credentials would readily be accepted in Kansas, if they wanted to relocate. But their scheme is messing up third graders and a terrific third-grade teacher.
CSA, you would agree, I think, that fewer students per teacher is a wise proposition. Before the Industrial Revolution, no one put children and young adolescents into 25 student per teacher ratio environments. This was an Age of Machines invention.
So how can we lower student-teacher ratios, cost-effectively? We can pour more money into teacher-training programs, as we are doing, but that’s not necessarily going to work. Over the next 6-10 years, we’re going to lose some 2 million senior teachers to retirement. We’re putting more young college students into the teacher-training pipeline as replacements, but close to half of them are “dropping out” (of teaching jobs) in their first five years.
What are potential answers? I took a jc carpentry class in the early 90s. This was during the post-Reagan-administration Southern California recession (massive defense-spending cutbacks under GHWB). A German master craftsman who made a comfortabl fortuine in the 80’s doing high-end remodels in Newport Beach decided to teach two classes to blue-collar kids, one in general carpentry, the other in cabinetmaking. A doctor and a wealthy 80’s Realtor, decided to take a class with people half our age.
It was awesome taking a public-education class under an expert, and it was fun working with tools and wood.
Our schools could be places where young people, with guidance, build their own educations. They could be places where engineers and scientists, university professors, nurses, doctors, artists and corporate people teach academic and vocational courses. At UCLA, which Ben Huie knows something about, they have nighttime extension courses (now more than 1000) taught by people from the community.
I think great teachers should be paid more money. By great, I mean the kind that many adults look back and judge, that teacher changed my life (for the good).
But we really don’t have that many great teachers. If we proposed paying them more than average teachers, you know the union would quash the proposal, because it would crack union solidarity.
BTW this is perfectly understandable to me, and I readilu admit that it has beneficial attributes. I can also see how it represents a quintessential political compromise of competing goals and interests, and can be categorized as utilitarian (greatest good for the greatest number of people, in this case school workers).
But it may not be appropriate today, in this context: today’s students are NOT going to enter unionized careers, at least not the vast majority. They will enter a competitive milieu and have to think for themselves. There will be very, very few employment opportunities to work for a single employer for 30 years, receive steady cost-of-living pay increases, employer-paid healthcare, and guaranteed pension payments.
Teachers are working under a very different set of conditions than the vast majority of their students will experience. If you live in a cocoon, it’s hard to prepare young people for a different life than what you live. Education has become unhinged, in the sense that, for most of humankind’s history, children learned things, from their elders, skills that the children would use as adults.
If you create language arts classes that teach fictional stories, how many children are going to make a living in that field, say, writing fictional stories, working in the publishing industry, or writing book reviews, or teaching fictional literature? Or writing fictional-scenario software, or working in the TV and movie industries?
Millions of people read fictional stories, play video games and watch TV and movies–for recreation, not to make a living. So, should fictional literature be a cornerstone of language arts teaching? I think this is misguided, at least as a compulsory component of young people’s education from age 5 to age 18. I am not saying eliminate it, but rather for those who want it, it should certainly be available, as an elective experience.
I can’t speak for girls, but most boys want to have challenges and do difficult constructive activities. But the traditional academic-subject regimen doesn’t meet their goals. It punishes them for poor performance, and at the same time doesn’t provide alternatives that connect with and cultivate their talents.
During most of my pre-college classes, I was thinking about my explorational and experimental projects that I had worked on and was going to continue working on after school let out. I like to read the bios of Nobel Laureates in science. Some of the most brilliant didn’t have very good school records. But were they just sleeping? No. They were thinking about the stuff they were going to do after school let out.
So maybe we should let kids out earlier, or let them do productive things in the morning, and come to school in the afternoon.
“Zach, what did you do this morning, before you came to school?”
“I went to the pond near my house, collected some water and put a drop under my microscope. I saw six different organisms, and am reading to figure out what they are.”
“Nice job Zach. How about you Jonathan?”
“I went fishing for walleyes. They’re smart fish. I’m trying to design a new lure, based on things I’ve read.” “Jonathan, Mr. Pedersen, a history teacher, loves to fish. Why don’t you talk with him?”
The seventh-grade teacher releasing some students at noon: “What are you going to do this afternoon Jeremy?”
“I’m going to the Wichita Center for the Arts to take a sculpting class, and then go home and work on my own.”
“Good for you. We’d love to see your work, if you’d like to bring some of it in.” “How about you Steve?”
“I’m building a go-cart. I’ve downloaded plans from the Internet, and am about halfway done.”
“Sweet. When you finish, bring it in for a blacktop demonstration. Brandon, what did you do?”
“I rode the biggest wave of my life, 10 feet. Tomorrow, I’m going to the surf shop to learn how to make surfboards.”
“Awesome, dude. Jason, what did you do this morning?”
“I worked with Habitat for Humanity, and helped frame a house. Tomorrow, I’m going to learn about plumbing.”
“Keep at it young man.”Public education, as we understand it, was designed for an Age of Machines economy: extremely well-designed to serve it. There is so much more to life than what this scheme was designed to achieve.
heartlander…..get your meds adjusted, you are hallucinating again.
VT, College Algebra is remedial, because the ACT, and new SAT, challenge students to show their knowledge of Alg I and Alg II content, that is taught in college algebra courses. For example, remove square roost from the denominator of problem:[( square root of 2) -2] divided by
[(2 times sq root of 2) + 2)] ,
That’s an honors 8th grade algebra I problem. It’s a regular-algebra II problem.
So is this:3/ (2 + i). Convert this to the simplest expression that doesn’t have i in the denominator.
If you have completed regular algebra II course, but can’t solve these problems, or many other similarly-difficult problems, on the ACT (score 27 or less), you get to retake algebra to meet university graduation requirements. That’s remedial, either because you didn’t take Alg II, a high school course, or you did take the course that ostensibly taught you how to solve these problems, but you can’t solve them when you take the ACT.
I stand corrected; according to http://www.fhsu.edu/cert/policy/a.shtml#2a, only a 2.75 GPA is needed for certification, not a 3.0 as I’d been told; however, this is still significantly higher than the 2.0 GPA needed to just get a bachelor’s degree.
I’m glad you agree that teachers have a higher GPA than the minimum required for graduation. I agree that teachers should be drawn from the higher-achieving pool of candidates.
heartlander, you also stated, “There are no teacher in-services or workshops or summer continuing education courses in Kansas that can’t be found in 49 other states.”
Do you have evidence for this statement?
There may be some local-community-specific in-services and workships, but Wichita isn’t “doing its own thing”. It can’t. For example, as a Title I district, it has to adhere to U.S. Department of Education requirements in order to qualify for continued federal funding.
Under NCLB and AYP, only small percentages of schools are experimenting. Most are following the common-sense notion, “Do what everybody else is doing. If we succeed, great, if we fail, we are going to be a member of a huge group. Then we can get this stupid law voided.”
All of Kansas’s ed schools are accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. They are taught a nationally-standardized regimen, which is why Kansas graduates can get jobs in Texas.
I perused the WSU summer catalog last year. The continuing education courses ( for licensure renewal) had zero local-peculiar titles or descriptions. 2007 summer-school course listings will be posted online starting in February. Read their course descriptions.
You can’t have in-services and workshops that teach teachers non-conforming subject matter, whether it relates to course content or filling out forms submitted to the building principal, who sends them to the district office, that processes the data and submits it to KSDE.
Thank you, heart, for clarifying what you were saying. I was misinterpreting your use of the term “remedial”.
A quiet congratulations to Northeast Magnet High School (the one which has been foolish enough to allow me to be on its Site Council for 13 years) on being the only high school in 259 to meet the “Standard of Excellence” in both math and reading for the testing year ending in May, 2006. Not bad for a school, the demographics of which mirror closely the overall 259 demographics, where admission is determined by a lottery and not admission testing, etc. Shows what can happen when all students are held to a high standard, with assistance provided those who have difficulty meeting the standards. Things “unique” to NEMHS; a modified 4 X 4 block schedule; math (all levels, nothing below Algebra I offered) taught 95 minutes/day all year; no sports (interested students may participate at their “base schools”, the school he or she would have attended had the student not enrolled at NEMHS); and, perhaps as important as anything else, an enrollment of ~540 students.
Oops, forgot a few other features of NEMHS (would be flagellated with a wet noodle if I didn’t call them out): annual projects in the magnet areas (if anyone is interested, the Fall projects fair is December 14 at the school; there are many highly interesting things done, and some that are, well, not so good); the Digipen courses; the split in the so-called “Science Magnet” between the pre-engineering ‘track’ and the more traditional ‘natural science’ track. All students, irrespective of magnet area, are expected to complete 4 years of math, exception being if a certain ACT score in math is achieved following the Junior year, the students in the Art magnet and the Law magnet are excused.
Link to NEMHS website, so you can find out all the other stuff I may have left out above:
http://northeast.usd259.org/
For those who might still be paying attention, and wondering just what the devil is Digipen:
http://northeast.usd259.org/digipenpage.htm
heartlander…………….you obviously know NOTHING about current re-licensure requirements for educators in the state of Kansas. With a Masters degree,an educator doesn’t have to take what you call “continuing education” classes. We can choose what we want to take in the way of professional development that we individually need to be better professionals. Before you start shooting your mouth off, why don’t you actually become familiar with the state regulations.
VT and CSA,
In my library culling, I found a keeper yesterday that stopped my work as I felt compelled to read it. It’s John Merrow’s “Choosing Excellence” (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2001). John Merrow is a former teacher cum Peabody-winning journalist who was NPR/PBS education correspondent and producer of the televised education-examination series “The Merrow Report”. Two of his children are public teachers. The book includes interview-snippets of several dozen ed school faculty, district administrators, and teachers.
Mr. Merrow is a passionate supporter of public education, done excellently. He cogently critiques public education’s faults, but describes sound reform strategies, based on practices that excellent schools have shown to work.
For example, small schools. Merrow quotes analysists who have judged that high schools should have between 300 and 600 students.
He describes Harlem’s pioneering development of small high schools in the 1980’s. One attribute of excellence, according to Merrow is that teachers know all their students, which requires limiting teaching loads. It’s expensive, but the goal is to ensure students’ success, and this requires deep student-teacher interaction.
In excellent schools, teachers compose their own tests. Their students use computers not as practice-drill-devices, but as tools of exploration, knowledge discovery and even knowledge creation.
He makes compelling arguments against high-stakes machine-scored multiple-choice testing, because this turns talented, energetic teachers into test-prep automatons, and robs kids of real subject understanding.
He favors fewer classes, but longer, with fewer topics in any given course, but deep investigation of the topics.
He favors more alternative certification, having been hired originally as a Dartmouth history grad by a New York public school that couldn’t find an ed school graduate. He cites Teach for America’s success, as well as a New York program that has attracted doctors, lawyers and other highly educated professionals who are giving back to their communities. (In San Diego, there’s a retired nuclear sub commander who teaches physics. Who wouldn’t love to be in his class? Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak taught middle school math for several years in Santa Clara, after making his fortune.)
Merrow points out that our nation’s ed schools produce more than enough young teachers to meet the need, but the problem is a large exodus: recruitment is doing fine, but retention is abysmal.
He talks about schools that have courses for parents, so that they can feel comfortable helping their kids with homework, and by their own example, convince their kids that education is important.
There are many more topics than I have room to describe here. This book is a real page turner. It should be read by all teachers and parents who realize that fundamental restructuring is necessary in order for public education to survive in this century. If things are done well, public education has the potential to thrive.
heart, thanks for reminding me about the Merrow book; it had been earlier recommended, but I never got around to reading it.
Alternative certification has interested me since I first learned of it years ago; one thing I wonder about is whether teaching is “in the blood” or can be learned, that is, are the successful alternatively certified teachers those with a tendency in that direction, or is it that highly educated professionals of various disciplines may become successful, even if they haven’t ‘felt’ the tendency to teach.
Awkwardly stated, I know; hopefully, there are those who can share their thoughts on this, inter alia.
A reason for the above query; our oldest daughter, while in high school, had an ability to assist her classmates with homework in various classes; she seeme to have a “knack” for finding alternative explanations, procedures, etc., to assist them other than that presented by the teacher/book.
Fast forward: now, thanks to the cutoff in NSF/NIH (not sure of which) funding for the research project in which she was, with others, engaged for her doctorate in Biomedical Engineering, she is taking a Master’s in said subject and a Master’s in Education. I believe she will be certificated, if that’s a word, in Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology at the secondary level.
She says her interest in teaching was piqued during the year she took off between graduation from college (B.S. Mathematics, Concentration in Biochemistry) and beginning graduate school. During this year, she was in Charlottesville, VA, working in a lab at UVA and, due to a series of events, found herself without a job; she was employed at a tutoring service, and found she enjoyed the experience greatly. Had the PhD worked out, her intent was to be an academic; she still may teach at a small college (her preference) not requiring the doctorate and post-doc work often required for tenure track at many institutions, but is also considering working at a high school while her husband completes his PhD in Physics. Her supervisor at the tutoring service made many flattering comments about her abilities, even though she was (IIRC) the only non-certificated tutor there.
Thus, the query: was she “born” that way, or somehow did she learn?
Apophis, I did read the regs, albeit a few years ago. IIRC bachelor’s holders have to take 150 hours every 5 years for bachelor’s holders. Isn’t it either 100 or 120 hours for master’s holders?
If you are saying a master’s gives a complete exemption from continuing ed requirements, then make sure you and your co-masters don’t use teachers are like doctors fantasy arguments in the future, because Kansas doctors have to complete 50 continuing medical education hours every TWO years. If they don’t, their licenses are suspended until they comply. And these are people who have, on average, 7-8 years of post-bachelor’s university education. Lawyers who have 3+ years of post-bachelor’s education use the term Continuing Legal Education.
You can use image-enhancing jargon (Professional Development), but doctors and lawyers use the term “continuing education” because that’s what it is. It’s not a pejorative term. As knowledge evolves and expands, professionals must be career-long students: they must continue their studies.
I’ve rechecked teachers license renewal requirements: 160 “points” for bachelor’s, 120 for master’s.
For renewal of an Accomplished Teaching License, one must earn a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards board-certification renewal.
It is interesting, doctors who became board certified after 1990 have to take bc-renewal exams every 7 years. That involves a lot of study. Plus these nationally board certified doctors still have to complete Kansas’s 50 hour/2 years continuing ed requirement: it is insufficient for them to show their board-certificate renewals. These are “Accomplished Physicians”. It thus appears that the K-12 education field is a bit less rigorous in the matter of continuing professional development requirements for relicensure.
Wah!!!!!!!!!!! heartlander…….I do know the regulations.Whether YOU like it or not, this is the way it is. It must totally piss you off that there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it. Obviously, someone other than you made these requirements. I hope this grates at you. Yammer all you want, it will not change the requirements. ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
VT, Merrow cites Pulitzer winning author and master teacher Frank McCourt’s view that teaching is in your blood or it isn’t. Good lawyers are teachers. They enlighten their clients on a daily basis. Good litigators enlighten juries and judges. They instruct their staffs. They mentor younger attorneys.
If your kids are curious as teenagers, enjoy helping others, reading, interacting with adults, and are considered by others to demonstrate maturity, you can conclude they’ve had some good teaching from their parents.
If schools would invite community professionals as course teachers–not just patch-the-holes after-school tutors– we could dramatically reduce class sizes, and in many cases at very low cost. (Congress could even legislate tax-deductions for teaching as charitable contributions, as a modest financial incentive that wouldn’t cost schools anything.)
“community professionals” are not teachers heartlander…………knowing content is NOT teaching. You said it yourself “teaching is in your blood or it isn’t”.
Do you have a life other than trashing public education?
Other professions that use the term continuing education for post-graduate knowledge-updating include architecture, dentistry, dental hygiene, engineering, nursing, and veterinary medicine.
UCLA Extension offers several hundred continuing education courses for adult professionals using, as instructors, community citizens ranging from veteran screenwriters to RAND research scholars. These courses enable students to pick the brains of experts, network with other students who have similar interests, and generate extraordinary knowledge expansion. The program has been a resounding success because it serves an advanced-knowledge-dependent economy’s needs.
You just babble on and on an on heartlander. Get a clue, nobody cares about the garbage you drone on about here.
Apophis, you are the reason that people scrimp and save to send their children to private schools.
If Apophis would read the cover story in Time Magazine, Dec 18th edition, He might find there are a majority of educators who agree something needs to be done to bring education into the twenty first century in this country.
Today’s children, whether big city or small town, are global citizens. They will have to deal with an ever shrinking world. Information will only grow in magnitude, and our kids will need to be able to digest that information; and be able to seperate the wheat from the chaff.
To deny our children the standard of education they will need to compete in the global marketplace is nothing short of abuse. The kids today will need language skills; they will need basic math, english and science skills far in excess of anything the NCLB demands.
JR stated “But as a parent, I am more inclined to hope and work in the direction that our nation will concentrate on saving itself instead of embracing globalism. I choose to HOPE we will not make our kids live down to the level of the rest of the world.”
If we don’t do something about the state of education in this country soon, we will be BELOW the level of the rest of the world.
We are creating a nation of service workers, and they will be waiting tables for the global citizens of tomorrow. We owe it to our children to give them every opportunity to suceed in life. Our current education system is denying them that chance.
As you will notice, Apophis, I did not refer to private, voucher driven, or secular education once. I’m talking about PUBLIC education. So, mrteacherofhtecentury, get with the program and THINK for a change. God knows, you haven’t done so in a long time. I would bet your favorite saying is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” You live that moronic creed.
Mine is, “The box is full of kitty litter; get out and smell the roses.”
I would bet you would teach kids, ” See Jane’s dog run.”
I would ask kids, “Why is Jane’s dog running?” Thoughts . . . concepts . . . thinking skills needed much more than, “See Jane’s dog run.”
I doubt you could understand that concept, though.
Interesting.
Just what nation would we be below in education? India? Japan?
I think I’m the only poster on this thread that actually has a kid in school. Aside from the considerable damage of “no child left behind”, I am mostly satisfied.
You’re looking at the problem backward. You’re assuming globalism is inescapable and desperately looking for a way for America and Americans to cope with it.
I say save a step and to hell with globalism.
Globalism only serves the interests of the corporate masters mining for workers who will work for the least compensation possible. I’ve no interest in embracing that.And doing so means the end of America.The only change in schools I’d like to see is teaching kids to fight for their rights and their individuality. Against the greed of the corporations, we need a new generation of working folks who will look the bean counters in the eye and say “not no but HELL no!”.
Many, perhaps most revolutions are unforeseeable by experts. Mass compulsory public education was invented in Prussia in the early 1800’s, in an attempt to catch up to England’s Industrial Revolution in rapid fashion.Its invention and implementation were possible in Prussia, but not here, because Prussian peasants were subjects of the crown, not sovereign citizens–they existed to serve the state, not the converse.
Compulsory school attendance had been legislated in the Massachussetts Bay Colony in the 17th century, on a limited schedule of 6 months attendance for 3 hours a day, from age 8 to 11, but the law was honored in the breach for the most part.
Horace Mann became the lead spokesperson for Prussian-system emulation in the 1840’s, but his campaigning didn’t go anywhere, until the nation dramatically increased the importation of soldiers and industrial laborers during and after the Civil War. This importation enabled the North to defeat the South, and for the U.S. to become a major industrial power. But there were unintendend consequences. Life in large cities for the laborers and their children was wretched. Labor unrest was widespread. It was believed that programming children could create a more tractable, manageable industrial workforce. This was the genesis of compulsory public education.
Notably, it took a century from its invention to achieve full implementation.
No one in 1800 could have imagined this watershed change in childhood upbringing, because children had previously been raised, educated and trained for adult lives by their parents, and people to whom parents voluntarily apprenticed their children to.
We have a new economy. We need a new education system for it. We probably are not going to reverse globalization. If we were to decide to do so, it would be extremely challenging. We would have to become energy independent, because fossil-fuel importation creates an enormous trade deficit, but we don’t have that much to sell that cannot be manufactured in Asia and sold cheaper to the oil nations than we can. If we developed a self-sufficient domestic economy, we might not be able to get many useful metals in large quantities from Asia, Latin America and Africa. We could afford some through sales of agricultural products, information technology, and other goods that the rest of the world desires, we could substitute composites made from our own fossil-carbon materials, and we could recycle most of the metal previously acquired, which is a large resource. We could manage, in all probability. But we’d need to produce a lot more scientists, engineers, and well-educated technical people to achieve energy independence and create new, sustainable-resource industries.
So, one way or the other, we will have to transform education, either to compete globally, or develop a relatively closed, but reasonably sustainable economy.
Envisioning and leading change is hardest for people who have strong vested interests in the status quo. At the turn of the last century, expert Army horsemen weren’t supportive of mechanized weaponry. In WWI, German tanks forced a major rethinking. Fortunately, there weren’t very many of them. Aircraft were employed, mostly for spotting and strafing. Small bombs were hand-dropped, usually to little effect. After the war, the visionary Army colonel Billy Mitchell pressed hard for the development of a new theory of air-based dominance, but when he was told to pipe down, he took his ideas to the public, and was court-martialed for insubordination and conduct unbecoming of an officer, and was drummed out. Twenty years later war was revolutionized, and Mitchell was vindicated. Jimmy Doolittle led the first air assault on Japan, flying B-25 “Mitchells”.
Atomic weaponry was inconceivable in the 1920’s. It hastened the conclusion of WWII, and changed the face of the globe when the U.S. and Soviets built astonishingly large nuclear stockpiles, creating “The Cold War”.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles were inconceivable to all but a few German rocket scientists in WWII, but barely more than a decade after the war’s conclusion the U.S. Air Force developed a strategic vision for these weapons, which was quickly implemented, along with shorter-range submarine-launched nuclear-tipped missiles, something unimaginable in WWII.
The personal computer was unimaginable to all but a small group of tech-savvy people in the mid-70’s, most of them young. They dreamed of a world in which computers could be in every home. IBM, the world’s leader in mainframe computers helped to birth PC’s for a short time, and then was rendered all but irrelevant, because it could only envision PCs for businesses.
Prior to WWII only about 10% of America’s young people went to college. Most blue-collar kids had to start working in their early teens. The vast majority didn’t even graduate from high school. The GI Bill completely changed that in less than 5 years, as more than a million WWII vets went to college, and once buildings were erected to accomodate them, and billions of dollars flowed in, the colleges and universities didn’t want to downsize after the vets graduated.
Watershed change is generally unforeseeable to people who are expert in the status quo. (Many universites refused to take blue-collar vets until being pilloried by public opinion for excluding men and women who had saved America.)
Change is disruptive. It appeals to people who are nimble thinkers, who relish great challenges and see in change new avenues of opportunity. Change is anathema to people who have their old acts down pat, and have no desire to do the necessary very hard work to reinvent their occupations, which requires reinventing themselves. Change is viewed as “impossible” beyond small increments to people who have only experienced this type of easy-to-adjust-to incremental-modification motif in their 20+ year careers.
Merrow makes an important indirect reference to this in schools’ slowness to adopt computer technology, and to use it to its full potential. He cites research findings that the most facile adopters are people under 30 (no suprise there) and *people over 60*. That rings true: my mom took two computer courses in her late 60’s and owns a laptop that she uses to compose music. My father-in-law quickly learned how to email and surf the Internet in his late 70’s.
So here’s the problem: the slowest adopters are 30-60 years old, precisely the age range of the great majority of teachers and education administrators.
Merrow recounts a statement made by a teacher in 1997, “We have to teach children about computers. After all, computers are the future.”He nodded sympathetically but realized, the teacher was wrong. In 1997, computers weren’t the future, they were the present. In 1980, computers were the future. Secondly, kids are what have been called “digital natives”. They don’t know a world *without* computers. And they can figure out how to use them on their own.
Merrow recounts stories of teachers who are attuned to this: they tell their students, “I’m struggling with this, why don’t you see if you can figure it out, and show me.” These teachers are letting *kids teach them*, which is a an acknowledgment of astounding reality of technology knowledge, one that we parents are readily admit, and take advantage of when we get stuck: it’s often a lot more efficient to get help from one of your children than to phone tech support.
Sure, kids need to learn more than “See Spot run.” But there’s a base of knowledge that kids need to have before they can start to use those critical thinking skills. We can’t expect kids to be able to differentiate basic functions if they don’t have a good grasp of multiplication.
VT, thanks for your information about Wichita’s Northeast Magnet School. The school is lucky to have a thoughtful, intelligent person like you on their site council. Interesting, that there are no school sports.
Mark Schooley, you recommended Merrow’s book; thanks for the tip, it’s on my wish list now.
Did you ever find any evidence to back up your statement that there are no teacher workshops offered in KS that aren’t also offered in all of the other 49 states? You wrote that you checked WSU’s catalog. I’m sure you’re aware that there are multiple entities in the state offering these opportunities.
Sorry, but when you make broad statements like that without providing evidence, it makes it tougher to accept other statements that you make.
The problem, JR, as I see it is we are a global nation now. That is not going to change. As such, our kids will have to be ready for it when they reach job market age.
Learning rote schooling is ridiculous. Kids have the internet to get any required info they need about history, geography, etc. What need to be stressed is problem solving, interacting with global business demands, along with a greater language requirement than NCLB demands. By language, I also mean foreign languages.
This ‘closed soceity’ you think we should be is nonsense. Imports and exports are the way the world works, and always has since the first caveman traded sea shells for coconuts. Our kids will have to be able to deal on a world-wide basis, because it is a world-wide economy.
Just what do you think your kids going to say to you when he’s waiting tables because you felt he didn’t need a modern education, “Thanks dad for limiting my choices? You think because you’re son is in school that no one else has a say in what the shcool system teaches?
The argument on bringing education to the twenty-first century has been going on for some time. It needs to happen, and happen quickly, or our kids will be behind “India and Japan.” What makes you think they aren’t already?
Your thinking this country needs to close up is about as ridiculous as it gets. Just the opposite needs to be done, and on a major scale. Because if America is going to compete in the world, it will have to know the competition, and know it well.
As for your corporate beliefs: I would tell you to stop eating, you are supporting a corporation every time you bite into a food substance; I would tell you to stop wearing clothes, they are manufactured by corporations; I would tell you to stop all methods of transportation and walk, because all forms of transportation, other than walking, are manufactured by corporations; I would tell you to stop posting because whatever device you are using to post is manufactured by a corporation. Hell, just by staying alive, you are supporting corporations.
“Globalism only serves the interests of the corporate masters mining for workers who will work for the least compensation possible. I’ve no interest in embracing that. And doing so means the end of America.
The only change in schools I’d like to see is teaching kids to fight for their rights and their individuality. Against the greed of the corporations, we need a new generation of working folks who will look the bean counters in the eye and say “not no but HELL no!”.”
Your son will be looking FOREIGN bean counters in the eye unless we change the face of education. JR, you are dead wrong on this one. Both you and apophis would rather see america as a vast wasteland of people unable to compete with foreign countries. You owe your son better than that. And this country owes its citizens better than that.
Yeah, CSA, no school sports; I’m not sure exactly why that is, but it had something to do with KSHSAA rules, and the decidedly high costs of beginning and maintaining the programs, not to mention that NEMHS is sited at an old intermediate school, which does not have appropriate facilities. Most parents and students do not consider this a negative.
What the school has is a discernible “family” feel; a lot of learning happens between classes, with the Seniors interacting with Freshman students in a positive way.
I know this will elicit some chuckles, but the chess team there is first rate; the Science Olympiad team is broadly supported; recognition is deservedly given to the students who enter and receive awards in the Scholastic Art competition; the Robotics team is trying to find its niche; its debaters have done well, and the Mock Trial team competes at a high level. As a magnet school, NEM cannot, and does not try to, offer all the extracurricular activities a “comprehensive” high school does. While many parents (including me and my wife) yearn for instrumental music, it isn’t going to happen soon, if ever; that is one of the factors which has to be considered in choosing whether one’s student might attend there. The other side of that bargain is a first rate, college prep education (although the students who are not college bound receive the same good education which seems to prepare them well for the military or employment). One additional benefit; due to its location, a substantial number of Seniors and some Juniors attend classes at WSU (as did both my daughters) as “high school guests”. True, these are paid for, at regular college tuition rates by the parents; the students get college credit therefor, and the classes may be applied to high school as well.
As this is “marketing” season, I close my NEMHS boosting with a request to those with students currently in the 8th grade: if NEM sounds of interest to you and your student, check it out. Even if it isn’t the right place for your student, you can make that choice based upon knowledge, rather than my spoutings and the annual report in the Eagle of state assessment scores.
Someone upthread referenced the December 18 TIME article on “Building a 21st Century Student” (I think that is the name of it), which I commend to the attention of anyone interested in educational “reform”.
It sounds like NEMH is a school where some key things have been done that need to be replicated. Frankly, I have a hunch that its science, technology and arts core faculty probably have a lot to do with that: people who think clearly as well as creatively.
Some time back Apophis said that he answered to administration, and IIRC KSDE. I think his perception is warped. When I’ve taught, I’ve answered to students. Learning is a partnership, and those with whom you work are your enterprise partners.
I believe that the skill of negotiation, fair negotiation is essential to human development, particularly in the adolescent years. Frank McCourt in Tis talked about starting out with an assignment to teach longstanding English course and its book list in a vocational high school.
It didn’t work. The kids were just tuned out. So he decided to drop the preplanned schedule, and talk with them for an extended period, to find out who they were, what their dreams were. Then he began a process of negotiating with them. He only covered part of the standardized curriculum, as his course was fundamentally changed. For example, instead of the class reading a play, the students were each assigned parts, and they acted it out. In essence, he taught them a play, as plays are written for: acting. Plus they studied the characters and plot, and wrote some essays.
Interestingly these were kids who were confident and productive in their shop, cooking and cosmetology classes.
For English class, their attitude was, “We don’t want to take this class. We don’t need to graduate, only complete the vocational courses we are interested in.” Rather than just view them as “hopeless”, and dispense perfunctory “C’s” or flunk some, McCourt, who grew up in abject poverty in Ireland, and saw characteristics of many of his own family and community members, was interested in his students on a deep human level. (During summer vacation he worked as a longshoreman.) The kids had strong personalities. Some were natural actors.
For his creativity and innovation, McCourt was eventually picked up by Stuyvesant High, America’s top college-preparatory public high school. There he was able to explore in greater depth with his students the literature he loved. But Tis shows that he also *loved* that first experience. He maintained relationships with those first students into their adult lives.
Merrow recounts teaching for a few years, but getting burned out. His students weren’t the problem. He had no difficulty connecting with them, teaching general ed track students how to write pretty well using three essay assignments per week. The problem was, as a true professional, he was grading papers until 3 AM, because he took time to write margin notes to explain things to students. The other teachers considered him foolish. They advised him to give multiple-choice assignments, with one essay a semester. That’s not how to teach kids how to write. The teachers didn’t use their union power to force the district to reduce teaching loads by 60%, so that the teachers could do an excellent job without killing themselves. Instead they sacrificed their students, and counted down the years until retirement.
Either you work solely for students, or you work solely for your superiors. You cannot serve two masters. And since the superiors were once teachers, teachers who abandoned their own students to enjoy higher status and incomes, is that an ethos that merits honor and obedience?
If the leaders of public education believe they can’t fight passionately for more funding to lower student:teacher ratios without risking their own positions, so they don’t, but instead dump higher loads on teachers, such as pushing more record-keeping on them, and often increasing class sizes, as well, what kind of excellent teacher would accept this egregious denigration of teaching?
Merrow also points out that tuition allotments for ed students (e.g. state portion of per-capita student payments) are treated as a cash cow, and diverted to other schools. Who in the education field is fighting this. Teachers-to-be are themselves getting a cheap education. It is true they are eligible for grant-aid, and forgiveness loans that reduce their out-of-pocket expenditures, but this is no reason to give them a cheapened education. If my kids were in school, I’d want them to have teachers who had been given a high-cost education, because it would not only be a much more interesting experience for students, it would demonstrate that we as a society highly value people whom we train to be teachers.
Merrow describes how ed school faculty are teaching young people to be K-12 teachers, but the faculty only teach university students and do research. They’re completely out of touch with K-12 teaching, pontificating from an ivory tower.Here is what I’d suggest: send 100 ed school faculty every year for to schools (500 every five years), and assign them to failure-to-meet-AYP schools teaching the students with the lowest NAEP and Kansas Assessment Test scores. Tell them they are going to repeat this “sabbatical experience” every five years until they come up with efffective solutions. Tell them that if they don’t come up with solutions after their second rounds, their university jobs are terminated. Make it a condition of ed school employment, “You will teach in K-12 schools one year out of every five.” At the same time, ensure that they can run their classes as they deem fit, and their assigned schools’ principals are not their “bosses”, so that they can creatively do problem-solving to devise methods of effective instruction. You’ll get people who LIKE working with children who will say, “That sounds very interesting. I’ll take it.”
Maybe we should also consider having “master teachers” whose contracts and paychecks (let’s say at $30,000 beyond their erstwhile paygrade) are directly issued by KSDE, not districts, and whose formal supervisors are not principals nor superintendents but KSDE. Let anyone who passes a comprehensive set of performance metrics, and has 3 years or more of teaching experience be issued a “Master Teacher” certificate. Moreover pay a Master Teacher salary $10,000 for every teacher he or she mentors who in turn earns a Master Teacher certificate, with a limit of 2 mentorees per year.
Under this condition, I think you’d have throngs of teachers vying to become Master Teachers.
You can do these things in public schools, using public taxes. They would constitute public education. Not the kind we are used to, but absolutely public nonetheless. Who says you need to become a principal per se to be paid more than “merely” being an outstanding teacher? That’s an outdated notion. (Note here, if you offered principal positions solely to Master Teachers, you could maintain the same pay grade he or she already has, and the Principal would be reasonably compensated. Or you could offer co-principal and co-vice-principal jobs to several Master Teachers, each dividing administrative duties, and have them still teach, but with reduced loads, at the middle and upper school level. Give them 3-year terms, and if others want to take a crack at the jobs, the faculty gives them the opportunity through election. That’s a democratic education institution. It would teach kids invaluable lessons. I firmly believe it would also encourage the public to fund it, if the public saw that their community’s children were being given an extraordinary education, totally unlike what the older generation received.
PS. Apophis, now you can call Berkeley and UC San Diego and ask if I graduated from these schools. Under federal law, unless it has been recently amended they are allowed to confirm students’ degree conferrals.
Mark,It’s the Apophis’s of the world that are keeping public education back in the 17th century. Their beliefs come from the same mold as those who thought if man were meant to fly, he’d have been born with wings.
They don’t believe in facts; they believe in whatever the boss tells them to believe.
Thankfully, there are many who believe otherwise, and are willing to buck the system and get these kids the education they really need. Hopefully, more will see the results for what they are, and emulate the thinkers.
heartlander (Mark Schooley LOL), I could care less you you claim to be. All of the degrees you claim to have do not make you an authority on education. That goes for JM Walker as well.
Here’s the funny part, I have recently shared my participation on this Blog with some of my professional friends. They too think you and your buddies are absurd. The biggest laugh comes when you label ME as a teacher who obstructs reform and progress. You do not know me too well. You let your blind hatred for the public school process taint who and what I really am. I’m such a bad teacher……………………… that must be why parents request(sometimes DEMAND)that their students have my class. I’m so bad that I get recognized by local, state and national organizations. I am so bad that I get invited to present at national conferences and symposiums.
I’ll some it all up in a couple of words……..screw you.
so Mr. Schooley…………Who did you vote for in the 2004 State Senate race, the Rapture Right candidate, Susan Wagle or the Pro-Education candidate, David Clark?
Your answer will tell me alot.
Notice the reaction of Apophis to criticism: insults and childish vulgarity. It is no wonder that our schoolchidren fall farther behind other nations’ each year. Yet, the public school bureaucracy insists on a government-protected monopoly on the financing and provision of education.
Why don’t you, Mr. or Mrs. Aphophis, if you are so confident of your teacing ability, open yourself to market competition?
I voted for DC. Susan used to live in my neighborhood. Are you sure she’s really Rapture Right? That doesn’t seem to square with owning a gambling business, does it?
Well J M walker I am noted for fighting for lost causes.
I’m a liberal in Kansas for pete’s sake.
You may be right. It may be too late to fight globalism. But fight it I do.
I haven’t bought a piece of electronics or much of anything new in more than five years. I buy second hand from an American seller because there are no more American manufacturers of……anything.
Reformed conservative that I am, I approach globalism with an eye to supply and demand.
What does the world or globe have in very high supply?
Poor people. Most of them so poor they’d do almost anything to better their lot. That means they will surrender their dignity, their self interest and even their lives just for another shot at a mouthful of food or a place to sleep for their family. Globalism means those who have will continue to exploit the many for the enrichment of the few.
Mine is the first American generation that expects its children will have it harder than we did. That is not just my opinion. That is a fact.
You advocate changes to education to address this. J M? Jobs at EVERY level and skill are being outsourced to the suffering folks I mentioned before. Education is not an answer. The corporation will HAPPILY educate people in other nations who will work for less.
No. We HAVE to fight globalism. Why embrace it? What has it given us? Cheap stuff? Who will buy the cheap stuff when America is reduced to a service economy? And those service jobs are gonna go too. There are a half a billion and more people just to the south all ready and willing to come do them for a pittance. Those same corporations I rail against are all to eager to welcome them.
There is only one thing that we truly need imported. But even oil addiction is surmountable, at least in the America I grew up in.
Stop beating on Apophis. We need to get to ideas for education that will work for the children of this century.
John Merrow has talked to thousands of educators across the country. He thinks that young, idealistic, passionate *young* teachers are being driven out of public education by outdated ideas and systems. The best education involves deeply personal connections. It’s not enough to connect deeply with one, or two, or three students. Because most students have some kind of gifts.
Public education is in a sense, speed driven. Short periods and short school years, convincing 70% of kids they are qualified for college, and only 40% them *finish* college, because there wasn’t enough time for them to acquire college-readiness skills. The other 30% just want to get out of formal education, but most of them lack above-minimum-wage skills. When we really consider human potential, we can do far better than this. We are trashing children as much as we are trashing our ecosphere. Not because we want to, but because we’re accepting manipulation that is pushing us to act thoughtlessly and destructively.
On schools, I think we should start some schools that are led by young people, free from constraints imposed by fuddy-duddies. Let them see what they can do. I didn’t think about this before, but when I went to elementary school in LA, there wasn’t a teacher over age 30. The school culture was young, idealistic, imaginative and energetic.
Apophis, I identified myself. If you have a thing called courage, and another thing called integrity, you’ll name yourself, specify your accolades, and the parties that awarded you.
For example, I decided to home-school, so I disqualified myself for awards. I had climbed my own mountains and decided to teach my own children how to tackle them. I knew they would find mountains different from my own, but I wanted to give them skills. My spouse, Dr. Katherine Schooley may be known to some of you readers here. In 8 years she provided critical-care life-saving services to several thousand seriously ill infants. She created Via Christi’s state-of-the-art Level III neonatal intensive care unit for Via Christi, under starting conditions in which Via Christi had no credibility in newborn critical care. Before she left, Wesley’s neonatal intensive care unit director Barry Bloom thanked her for the care she gave to his niece.
She won the Davis-Moore Kake “People on Your Side” award. She personally provided and coordinated medical care to the Hedrick sextuplets, all of whom survived and became happy children. She was interviewed by CNN, CBS News, ABC Good Morning America, and NBC’s Today Show. The Discovery Channel did a documentary on multiple births showcasing her work. Her work was showcased in a number of WE front-page articles.
These aren’t medical-field parties. My spouse has garnered medical-field-awarded accolades as well. Recently she did a small project, and a national medical body said, “We want to implement your work nationally.” But, she doesn’t seek attention. Several years ago, she saved the life of a 13 ounce infant, which was then the smallest baby saved in the world. She didn’t contact the hospital’s PR department to promote this feat. She just does phenomenal work and doesn’t think about publicity.
Elitist work? Thousands of Eagle readers have had children, have relatives who have had children, or have friends whose children’s lives my spouse have saved.
So how large is your sphere of accomplishment? Have you been on CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC? Has the Discovery Channel showcased your work?
Have you worked 31 days in a month, helping teachers in rural Kansas at 3 AM to save the lives of children? Have you gotten rural Kansans teachers’ trust to the degree that they’ve sent you students?
Your vision is limited. You’re myopic. But you’re not the problem. The problem is that the public education system recruited third-rate minds. If you were highly talented in science, university scientists or engineers would have picked you off to join them. They didn’t. So you have to live with an inferior status. You have never been Kansas Teacher of the Year. You haven’t won awards conferred by outside entities. You’ve analogically won beauty contests for girls who didn’t get invited to the prom.
On natural selection, I accepted the interpretation of scientific evidence. Until I was confronted with frightened patients and frightened family members, and I had to believe humanely, and not say, “Natural selection says you/ your child/your fatheer has to die.” When you actually do interventive human biology, your previous godless evolutionary beliefs must change. Charles Darwin, who was essentially a plagiarist (Maupertuis, Wallace), and Richard Dawkins, never dealt with saving human beings, nor encouraging them nor consoling them nor their families.
You’re a former *geology* major and *masters* degree student. How much has that informed you about REAL human biology? Zero, huh?
You started this fight by reading my comments, then replicating them as your own ideas a few weeks later, but then castigating me as if my ideas that you copy-catted were your originals, and opposite to my expressed beliefs as I had cogently expressed. In essence you said, “I wholly support Heartlander’s ideas, but I condemn Heartlander’s ideas.” You’re kindof a a really screwed-up guy arncha? You don’t know how to intelligently debate. I’m sorry, but you are really, really stupid, and the taxpaying public, nd parents need to bypass you.
But I don’t want people here to condemn you, because you’re just a dumb lackey. If you disagree, tell the readers how many human lives you have saved. People whom the odds said were going to die, and you defied the odds.
You’ve said parents have clammored to get their kids into your class. How many have done this? How many have not done this? What are the statistics? If you think scientifically as you claim to do, you should have the numbers at hand. Maybe you don’t really understand science if you don’t know the pro and non-pro numbers
You are pathetic “Doc”. Just because I won’t debate you on your terms doesn’t mean I don’t have the ability. A blog is a blog, not a formal debate. You go out on a limb with asinine ideas, I saw off the limb. You make it all too easy.
Oh, I am mildly surprised at you actually voting for Clark. Would you support him in another right against Wagle? (she is indeed part of the “rapture right”)? I have no other time for you today, I’m out the door on the way too work.
Mark, you did it again.
You labeled all science teachers as stupid when you said, “The problem is that the public education system recruited third-rate minds. If you were highly talented in science, university scientists or engineers would have picked you off to join them. They didn’t. So you have to live with an inferior status.”
Please show evidence that all school districts intentionally seek out and hire only the lowest achievers in science.
Please show evidence that *all* highly talented science students choose not to teach.
You’re painting with a broad brush again, and I’m disappointed in you.
Mark, you’ve indicated numerous times that you don’t accept the fact that natural selection occurs.
You have superb degrees and training – why don’t you do the research to support your contentions?
Get the data, and after you return from your trip to Stockholm you’re welcome to gloat all you want.
As far as teaching dogma . . . surely heliobacter pylori comes to mind?
Sorry for that last OT post. The evo wars should stay on other threads.
(But Mark *started* it here!) [/whine]
The apophis’s of the world will never be able to seriously debate any issue. They are stuck in believing they are right and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. They are unable to understand a concept where they might be wrong. They have been brainwashed by the very system they support. Kind of like the captured becoming enamored to their capturer.
They think rote memory excersizes are what make a good student. They think by knowing the capital city of each state, the student is fit for the outside world. They think by reading, and completing, a book from the recommended reading list, the student knows how to survive in the real world.
But where have they challanged the student to think outside the box? Where have these so-called teachers planted the seed that allows the student to think for themselves? They haven’t. Their curricullem doesn’t allow it. It doesn’t recognize individuallity; it only wants conformity.
“See spot run”! Okay, why is spot running? Who does spot belong to? Is his running a good or bad thing? Does the master plan allow these questions? I doubt it.
Apophis, if measured by your master plan, you are probably a loyal follower and a good teacher. But if measured by what these kids need to survive in an ever changing world, you are indeed a failure.
I will note that I have not written anything calling for the end of public education, only changing the face of it, which, in my opinion, is drastically needed. Of course, Apophis will say I am a lier and a public school hater, but that is to be expected from someone who hasn’t a clue.
JM, you asked earlier, “”See spot run”! Okay, why is spot running? Who does spot belong to? Is his running a good or bad thing? Does the master plan allow these questions? I doubt it.”
Doesn’t the kid first have to realize that Spot is indeed running?
Writing state assessments that measure the higher-quality thinking skills is difficult, but do-able.
Of more concern are districts who repeatedly tell their teachers to concentrate on the tested items from the standards; everything else is waaaay down on the priority list, just as JM pointed out. But we can’t just ignore the fact that kids need to walk before they can run, let alone before they can race in the Olympics.
Apophis is passionate about his career, I’ll grant you that. He’s probably tired of weathering attacks against his intellect, his professionalism, and his motivations for teaching. I honestly can’t blame him for being defensive.
While apophis may be passionate about his job, his attitude toward any suggestions of change denys any relative, constructive discussion of the subject.
Closed minds are good for one thing; rote jobs. A closed mind has no place in a twenty-first century environment.
You comment, “Doesn’t the kid first have to realize that Spot is indeed running?”, seems to imply the student can’t recognize the fact the dog is running. “See spot run” tells the student that. Everything else is conjecture, and that is where the twenty-first century teacher needs to take his or her students. That is the basis of problem solving. That is what Apophis can’t seem to understand.
His inability to discuss things in a rational manner makes him the anitithisis of what a good teacher should be. He has brought this on himself, not the other way around.
As readers here can tell, I am passionate about the condition of education; becoming a parent kinda did it for me.:D
I agree that there must be changes made to public education to serve our students, and the general public, in the current centtury and beyond. When public education fails to provide an educated public, then our system of government, which I believe is dependent on an informed electorate, is doomed. Whether one is happy with globalization, it is a reality; thus, our students must be equipped to function globally, and compete, if you will, with those from other countries so equipped. I agree that mere “rote” learning won’t do it in these times; but, I submit, there are some things which must be learned, which for lack of a better way of expressing myself, are best done in a rote method.
The development of critical thinking skills in students is very important; the teaching of students to become life long learners is very important; I think most of us agree with these, the issue becomes how should we do them?
Someone (CSA?) upthread posited that state assessments could be crafted with the types of questions that test higher-order thinking skills, or problem solving, IIRC. The high school state math assessments (once given in the 10th grade, now postponed to the 11th grade) I saw in the early years had at least one “open ended” question contained thereon. However, it is my recollection that the same Kansas State Board of Education that sought to redefine the term “science” also caused these types of questions to be removed from the math assessments. I have not seen a “newer” math assessment, but I am told there are no open ended questions on them. Is this a purposeful dumbing down of the assessment to allow a higher level of performance at “proficient and above” to more easily meet NCLB requirements concerning AYP? I don’t know; I suspect the answer is “yes”. It is my opinion that if such questions were, in fact, removed, that represents a negative factor in education of students in the area of math. To use an overly-simplistic example, the assessment can ask “what is 9×6″; or it can ask “How would you determine how many square feet of carpeting is needed to fully cover a floor in a room, the dimensions of which are 9 feet by 6 feet, and how many square feet are needed?” In both cases, the student would reply “54″; but in responding to the second example, the student would demonstrate that to determine the area of a rectangular plane, one multiplies the length thereof by its width, and perform the computation.
More later; I need to go back to work.
How one can say this country is on the right path concerning public education is beyond me. The current text books are seriously out of date, and are usually so before they’re even published. Hell, kids can get a better education over the internet than they can via todays text books.
Schools should be geared more toward teching via internet classes. The information is more up to date, WAY more information, relative to the subject being taught, is available over the internet and the kids can expand their computer skills by using internet as the subject source.
Public schools can and should do this as a matter of principle for the simple reason the worlds information highway is the internet. With a public, controlled learning environment consisting of computers, internet and creative, problem solving skills, the students could well be on their way to a twenty-first century education. But it has to start someplace, and it takes creative minds to implement those changes. From some of the arguments, or rather bashings, in this thread, that will be very (unfortunately) difficult to do.
Well…
They do have lots of computers at my son’s school. What use of them they are making I am not sure.
Messing with education is a tricky thing. I’m not indicting anyone here but at least to MY perception most conservatives use a call to improve public education as a means to killing it.
TOO there are those with a vested interest in the status quo such that they cannot be objective.
JMW, there is active consideration being given as to if and how to replace the expensive bound textbooks, so often out of date in many areas, with better usage of internet resources within 259. Corresponding concerns related thereto include, but are not limited to, the expense of obtaining and upgrading technology vs. cost of textbooks; how to deal with the fact that there are still many families without the net, due to fiscal and other restraints, i.e., what practicality is there, for example, in supplying each student with a lap top in lieu of a book, if the student cannot access internet sources from home; the accuracy of sources; and other concerns such as these. Not at all insurmountable, as I see it; just a lot of hard work, energy and creative thinking to be devoted to the issue so a workable solution may be attained.
VT
I want to come back to something you mentioned a while back, that “teaching to the test” is not necessarily a bad thing.
I disagree, and I’ll tell you why.
Those tests are minimum standards; they represent generally the minimum what we expect a student to learn. But in practice, as the old phrase goes, “the minimums become the maximums.” If a teacher is to be evaluated as to how many of his/her students passes a particular assessment, that becomes her goal. She targets that assessment. And it becomes not her “minimum” assessment, but in effect her primary goal – her maximum.
That’s a sad way to run an education system.
I’ve been following the ideas, and there’s lots of good ones. I don’t have a clear fix, certainly. I do know that public education is such an entrenched bureaucracy that any real reform will be fought tooth and nail by those in the system.
Teaching the test has become a real problem since No child left behind.
Aside from what GMC said, remember that NCLB allows for the de-funding of schools that do not meet the arbitrary standards.
Well the result of that is obvious. I’m living it.
My son has always been a little slow. SO they kicked him to special ed. Then they kicked him to a special school. All because he would bring down the test scores and endanger the funding.
This is becoming one of the longer threads. That’s hopeful at least.
A parents observation?
Well first, thanks for caring. It’s a start.
GMC, I understand your position on my comment to teach to the test, and how the minima become the maxima. In light of how assessments are currently constructed, I agree with you.
My comment, perhaps not articulately stated, is premised on the following: if the assessment is based upon an ideal maximum, not minimum, of what the expected knowledge base in the area being tested is, then teaching to the test is not necessarily a bad thing. Thus, my thoughts on the open ended, problem solving types of questions, etc.
And, yes, the entrenched bureaucracy will make real reform very, very difficult.
The following is posed to you as a former teacher, not intended to be malicious, but to get your thoughts: Why is it that we entrust early (read grades K-5) education, especially in the areas of math and science, to those who chose the elementary education major to avoid somewhat more rigorous math and science requirements otherwise imposed in other majors? My question is based upon my experience with elementary ed majors in my undergrad days; most (not all!) of the folks, mostly women, I knew who were majoring in this area, were often self-described math phobes, who also avoided any science courses other than “Bugs and Boys” or “Rocks for Jocks” like the plague. If a sound basic education, in various subjects, is imperative in the elementary level, why do we trust folks with these attitudes with providing basic arithmetic and science education?
Acknowledging this to be quite a while ago, and that things may well have changed, I still wonder “why”.
I don’t know that I can answer that, especially as self-described “math phobe.” I note law school didn’t require any math classes (thank God)!!
Of course, I’m one who believes the single most important subject we teach is history, at least if taught correctly. It is how education fulfills it’s primary role, which is to pass on the culture. It provides the context and background for everything else we do and teach.
And JR, as much as we disagree, it is clear that you care passionately about your son and your community. For that I do respect you, even as I disagree with you about what is best for that community.
It’s considered acceptable for folks nowadays to admit to being bad at math, but few will admit to having trouble with reading.
Why the discrepancy?
There *are* highly knowledgeable science teachers. For example working scientists who decide to change careers in order to share their expertise with youth. Evanston Township High has a Ph.D. who worked in drug research at Abbott Labs for many years, and founded a biotech company.
There are excellent science teachers in public schools in the Teach for America program, who have research university science degrees, and who’ve done undergrad research projects.
Top-flight public schools such as the Bronx High School of Science, employ science teachers who did not attend ed school.
In my generation, there were thousands of European refugees who had “ecole normal superior” degrees, and sometimes Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s. We had an historic science-teaching talent base, an unintended consequence of the war, that greatly benefited our nation.
There are teachers who have strong scientific backgrounds in many private schools. My oldest son’s school’s chemistry/physics teacher had an an electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech, and a master’s in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon. CM ranks among the top 3-4 universities in the world in computer science. You don’t get admitted, much less earn a CS degree there unless you are an extraordinarily talented in science. My son’s science teacher was awesome.
Alas, the vast majority of grade middle and high school science teachers, who have ed school degrees, don’t have these types of experiences to bring to the classroom.
The ed school-dictated science curriculum cuts students off from the highest-level, most-challenging, and *most-interesting* science courses, for the “practical” reason that there isn’t enough time to complete a full-science-course regimen *and* the education course regimen in four years.
This problem reflects the unfounded prejudice that people can’t teach unless they have undertaken several teacher-preparation courses. The highest rated private schools know this is absurd. So do colleges and universities, whose professors have never taken ed school courses, unless they are former K-12 teachers, or are ed school faculty.
What do ed school administrators know about science? If they are semi-ignorant, they are not qualified to devise science-teacher-training regimens. It would be akin to people who aren’t aircraft pilots setting flight school training curricula. I say “would be” because non-pilots aren’t allowed to create such curricula.
My wife and I went to university with thousands of talented science students, most of them very talented, some of them extraordinarily talented.
We did laboratory research as undergrads. Why? Because it would have been nonsensical to us to major in biochemistry and molecular biology, if we didn’t want to deeply pursue scientific inquiry. The “preliminaries”, if you will, were very interesting courses, and you had to study long hours to do well in exams, which is to say you digested a huge amount of scientific information.
But, the subject-matter that these courses imparted was mostly well-established.
It was only by taking the next step of working on *current* scientific problems, and participating in their solution, and by doing library research and finding research-journal articles, and writing literature reviews, that we metamorphosed from standardized-curriculum-receiving students into young scientists.
We then went to UCSD, one of two U.S. medical schools that required students to complete a senior-year research project and write a thesis. We could have chosen another school, but the prospect of spending senior year doing research was appealing. Our theses were placed in the UCSD biomedical library and listed in the library catalog, alongside Ph.D. graduates’ theses. Actually we each worked on two projects. I took an extra year of medical school to work on my second one.
I’m not recounting these things to brag, but to give you a sense of what young people who deeply love science do in their higher-ed years. They make a choice to *do* as much science as they can wrap their brains and hands around.
When science teacher training evolves to the point of all students completing full science-degree regimens, including working on scientific research projects, and senior-year students earning high GRE Subject Test scores (e.g. chemistry, physics…) qualifying them for research university graduate school admission in their scientific fields, and when we see commensurate public school payscales that equitably reward these students’ talent, hard work and exemplary accomplishments, then we’re going to see science teachers being duly judged, i.e. highly respected.
That may not have been true 20 years ago, but Americans are waking up to the critical importance of science to our nation’s economy. This is a facet of the postindustrial Knowledge Revolution. It is time for educators to wake up too.
If readers will study my statements carefully, you will see that I am fundamentally protesting the skimpy, watered down, curtailed science curriculum that most science teachers have taken. It’s the ed schools that are denigrating science, and demeaning their own science-certification-pathway students. I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but it’s true.
This has consequences. If I have demeaned science teachers in a general categorical manner, it is only because I cannot fathom someone who is very talented and deeply interested in science, putting up with ed schools’ science-knowledge-curtailment shenanigans.
I must mention, as a probative example, the chemistry-certificate pathway’s inclusion of single-semester organic and physical chem *survey* courses, in substitution for the two-semester courses taken by chemistry and chemical engineering students. I’m sorry, but that’s a denigration of future chemistry teachers.
If some ed school students disregard the survey courses, and insist on taking the professional-grade ones, they’re on the right track. The survey courses require facts and formulae memorization and exercise. The rigorous courses are concept-based. For example, their students learn how to derive formulae, a skill that will enable some graduates to someday create original formulae. In the rigorous P chem classes, students study quantum and statistical mechanics. The rigorous O Chem classes’ students analyze nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography spectra. They do much more complex organic syntheses and purifications, and do procedures that are considered to be too dangerous for the survey course students. Explosions can occur if volatile solvents such as ether and acetone are mishandled. Explosions have occurred in O chem labs, sending hundreds of glass shards across the room.
So, I must ask myself, what kind of student who loves chemistry and wants to deeply understand the subject, so that he or she can teach it well, would accept the ed schools’ science-curricula’s dumbing-down?
On natural selection, that’s what I learned growing up. I accepted it as true. I wasn’t raised in a fundamentalist home.
Science is experimentation, observation, and evidentiary interpretation. Natural selection represents an interpretation of evidence. ID represents an interpretation of evidence. There are scientifically knowledgeable people who either support ID or are open to it as a possibity. Behe for example has a Berkeley Ph.D. in chemistry. Berkeley has the U.S.’s top ranked chemistry department, and chemistry is one of the two most difficult scientific fields, physics being the other. Behe is a serious scientist. This doesn’t mean ID is the correct theory. But it does discredit those who insist that only yahoos support ID. (Are Bill and Melinda Gates, whose foundation has given money to the Discovery Institute yahoos? Riight.)
Suppose that natural selection is an accurate interpretation of evidence. Does this mean that ID cannot be mentioned and discussed in school biology classes? No, it does not.
Here is what E.D. Hirsh told John Merrow: “Excellent schools value curiosity and rational persuasion. Suppose a student has some oddball idea like the Holocaust never happened. That should be discussable, but you would like to think that reason would prevail. It’s like the old Jeffersonian principle: we tolerate any error as reason is left free to combat it.”
An excellent science teacher is not afraid to face 14 year old natural-selection skeptics, and argue through reason why it is that the vast majority of research biologists have concluded that natural selection has generated all life on earth. The NAS and NSF have produced informative handouts to give teachers help in framing cogent arguments.
Teachers can even turn things around, and lead a discussion of why many citizens want ID to have some mention in biology classes. This controversy per se is a *social biology* issue. Why isn’t that issue examinable in a biology class?
I’d much rather see debate, than pure conclusions being fed in science classes. Science is a complex process. Debate is one of its cornerstones. If bio classes debated NS v. ID, it wouldn’t bother me if 100% of students came away believing that NS is the most compelling explanation for species diversity, including students who proposed ID and challenged NS. The students here would be engaging in one of science’s core exercises.
The real problem isn’t ID per se. It’s a fallacious larger notion that teachers are fountains of knowledge who dispense water that students are required to drink. Science is analytical.Transmitting scientific facts, and testing students’ reception (and issuing A-F grades) through multiple-choice, one or two sentence answer, and fill-in-the-blank testing are anti-analytical procedures. This means they are anti-science.
I think I’ve said enough to encourage people to think. I’ll be taking a “sabbatical” from blog-writing. Got a house to work on to get it ready to sell.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to you all.
Mr. MD, are you an ID supporter?
I’m already thinking and what I’m thinking is that our students have no problem asking questions and participating.We don’t need or want ID.It’s not science.
Old Lawyer’s Joke:
Why do so many people attend Law School?
There’s no math section on the LSAT.
I really have to go. But to me, ID is *interesting*. So is natural selection.
Yeah, it’s interesting.Bring it up in philosophy class where it belongs.
CSA, I don’t know; there appears to be something ‘funny’ about being unaccomplished in math, but ’shameful’ about not being able to read. I personally think that reading is the most important fundamental subject; if one can read, one can (hoopefully) learn the other stuff; but if one cannot read, it’s over. BTW, by reading, I don’t mean being able to look at the words and know how to say them; reading includes the ability to understand the context, think about what is being said, a bunch of other things I can’t bring to what is left of my mind right now.
Some very ‘radical’ suggestions on education reform; among them, ending high school after the 10th grade; paying beginning teachers $45,000; and more:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/12/14/school.reform.ap/index.html
A bit more on the link posted at 4:48 pm. The “ending high school at the 10th grade” applies to students who do not wish to (at least immediately) attend a 4 yr college, who take a test, and then perhaps go to community college. Other students who score higher on the test stay in school to prepare for the 4 year college experience.
The $45,000 starting salary for new teachers is based upon the current median salary for all teachers nationally.
Financing for some of this is proposed to come from abolition of the current pension plans for teachers, replacing same with a 401(k) opportunity, based upon public companies. Health benefits would also be treated similarly.
More money to be put into pre-K programs, ensuring better readiness for school.
Schools still “owned” by the states, but operated by independent contractors.
More there, but for those having difficulty linking up, the above are the highlights of the proposals of the commission.
For Apophis, JR, and a few others:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Education and business leaders urged an overhaul of the U.S. school system, including ending high school at the 10th grade for many students. Current teaching is failing to prepare young Americans for the global economy, members of a bipartisan panel said Thursday.
Beginning teachers should earn more, according to the group, and money for this idea could come from the scrapping of conventional teacher pension plans in favor of other benefits such as 401(k)s.
“People have got to understand what we’ve got is not working. It’s not working for kids, but it’s not working for teachers either,” said William Brock, a former congressman who was labor secretary and trade representative in the Reagan administration.
The Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce was organized by people who launched a group by the same name about 16 years ago. That commission made a series of recommendations, several of which were enacted.
Under the new group’s proposal, students would finish 10th grade and then take exams. Depending on how well the students perform, they could go on to community college or stay in school and study for more advanced tests that could earn them a place at a four-year college. Somewhat similar systems are in place in other countries.
The report says that by not spending today’s resources on 11th- and 12th-graders and through other changes, the government could eventually save an estimated $60 billion.
The money could pay, for example, for new pre-kindergarten programs and higher teacher salaries, which the report said would help recruit top graduates into the profession.
The commission recommends paying beginning teachers about $45,000 per year, currently the median amount paid to teachers — meaning half earn more than that and half earn less.
To help cover the cost, the commission recommends moving away from traditional, defined benefit pensions to less generous retirement plans commonly found in the private sector.
Antonia Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, said teachers should not have to lose benefits in order to make more.
One other major shift would put independent contractors in charge of operating schools, though the schools would remain public. States would oversee the funding.
Cortese also was critical of that idea. “Blowing up the governance system is very drastic, and we don’t know what will happen in its place,” she said.
Chuck Saylors, a school board member and parent in Taylors, South Carolina, said shifting control to the states from the local districts would be controversial. “Mainly because we have done it the same way for so long,” Saylors said, adding that he was glad the group had put forward thought-provoking ideas.
The report notes the U.S. had 30 percent of the world’s population of college students three decades ago, but that has fallen to 14 percent. The commission also cites poor performance by U.S. students in exams when compared with students in other advanced industrial nations.
“We may want to wait to think about these changes, but quite simply the world will not wait for us to catch up,” said Thomas Payzant, a commission member who recently stepped down as Boston’s school superintendent.
The commission’s work was financed by several foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Among the initiatives from the first commission that the government enacted were a push for states to develop achievement standards and stepped-up training for high school graduates going directly into the work force.
The current commission includes former education secretaries Rod Paige and Richard Riley; former labor secretary Ray Marshall; former Michigan Gov. John Engler; and Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City schools.
There seems to be the presumption that pontificating on the blog equates with actually being instrumental in reforms to education. I have been repeatedly bashed because I challenge those who speak poorly of public education. So be it. I do like to throw in an occasional nasty barb or two; I generally do that just rile up some you who loathe me.Many of you will never give any credit where credit is due. There are many good things going on in our public education system yet you dwell on the perceived negatives. You lump all educators, administration and professional organizations together as the evil cause to all that is wrong with public education. I have and always will dismiss anyone with that type of attitude. Truthfully, I have seen some great ideas by even some of the people I consider my foes but I cannot accept the methods of implementation they propose. I found JMWalker’s idea of using the Internet as a alternative first source of information interesting. There are problems with that, especially the validity of web information. As he has been bashing me along with heartlander/Doc Schooley, my students are in the midst of just such a project. Of course they have described me as an obstructionist teacher who is stuck in textbook based, 18th century ideas. Contrary to the critics perceptions, a good number of teachers actually do provide students with higher order thinking skills type assignments. We use technology in a majority of our classrooms as part of the learning process. To some this up, many of the public education critics don’t have the foggiest idea what they are babbling about.
I also want to address the comment about “teaching to the test” and that test being the standard of curriculum delivery. I have never, nor will I ever teach to the test. Give that job to a computer. An well rounded education is the sum total of all the experiences and knowledge acquired by a individual.
One does not need a PhD to understand the process.
Apophis, a question, if you will: as a middle school science teacher, how much time, if any, is spent in your academic year preparing the students in advance for the 7th grade state science assessment, in the years the same are administered; or, the first question I should have posed, do you deal with 7th graders at all, then, if so,….
My position on “teaching to the test” is as follows: if the class is learning and has, in prior years, learned the information necessary to be tested thereon by use of an assessment set at the maximum knowledge of the subject expected at the level being assessed, then, there should be no need for preparation in advance of the assessment, other than the students getting a good night’s sleep the night before; teaching the subject matter will “teach to the test”, so there would be no need to alter delivery of information in the classroom; and, ideally, the students will receive the benefit of a rich and robust education in the subject matter.
You say you don’t teach to the test; great. That’s what I like to hear. Because as the current assessments are structured, if the teaching is to the test, much is missing from the education of the students.
I believe that NCLB is a disaster, as it is currently structured; IIRC, the original intent of the Kansas state assessments was to measure the education of Kansas students against a “world class” standard, which, if still true, makes the assessments a lousy vehicle for compliance with the goals of NCLB. With that said, I strongly agree with the concept of accountability inherent in NCLB, measured by something other than a particular classroom teacher’s grading of the students. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to accomplish this without resort to an outside assessment, the contents and scoring of which are without the control of the teacher. My mind remains open to other alternatives; I’d be particularly interested in your thoughts on this.
As a Department chair, yes I am part of the preparation of 7th grade students for the state science assessment. Here is the way I see it; with an aligned, spiraling curriculum there should be no extra time spent preparing for the state assessment other than test-taking skills. Anything else is essentially “teaching to the test”.
I agree that the accountability component of NCLB makes sense, but using one data point does not. Here is the insanity of the entire NCLB fiasco: there is an attempt to quantify something that is not quantifiable. An “education” is the sum total of experiences and knowledge acquisition. How can that ever be accurately quantified?NCLB is nothing but a ruse to move public education tax dollars to the private sector. Look who is behind it? I have no solution but to put the most highly qualified teachers available into the classroom. Contrary to what heartlander/Doc Schooley thinks, this does not mean engineers, scientists and the like. Number one, they wouldn’t put up with the crap in the classroom. Number two, teaching isn’t just about content knowledge. Anyone with a college degree can tell you that. I’ve had many excellent professors, but I have also had equally as many who couldn’t teach their way out of a wet paper bag.
Apophis, thank you for your reasoned response. I appreciate it.
As to your comment on college professors; totally agree. Frankly, one of the best instructors I had in college as an undergrad was a full professor who insisted on teaching the intro course (Chemistry) when he rightfully could have limited his “class time” to graduate students; one of the worst instructors I had in college was an eminent PhD in his field (Economics). Interestingly, the next on each list were grad students; the “best” was teaching a course titled “Quantitative Methods” (think Operations Research); the “worst” was teaching an intro to Sociology course.
Here’s what my daughter did today in her freshman physics class at the local high school: Students were given an assortment of masses, a stopwatch, and some contraption called an “inertial balance,” which looks like a couple of 3″ square pans connected by skinny metal sheets. It looks like one end was clamped to a table, so that the other end was free to move back & forth, kinda like a pendulum. The students put different masses in the pan at the free end of the pendulum, and timed the vibrations. They put their data into excel to look for a pattern, ran a linear fit, and found the equation of that best-fit straight line. Then, they had to time the oscillations of an unknown mass, and use that data with the equation they just found to predict the mass of that object.
Sounds like higher-order thinking skills to me. And just a few days before Christmas break starts, too!
CSA, good for your daughter’s school; still teaching, although the “winter break” draws nigh.
Freshman physics? Or is it physical science? Just wondering, as most freshman don’t yet have the math for physics. No matter; the “lab” you describe sounds like a wonderful way to experience the concepts being taught.
This is one of my hot buttons; when I was in school, we didn’t get to do “hands on” science until Biology, sophomore year; the dry texts we had to read in Junior High, with the end of the chapter questions that could be answered by rote recitation of the material in the chapter, caused many of my classmates to lose interest in science.
I tell the following story on myself, as I believe the appropriate statute of limitations has passed. High school chem lab, experiment, put a small quantity of metallic Na into a certain quantity of H20, record what occurs, figure it out, write it up, etc. OK, done with that; teacher is distracted; see some low molality HCl on the desk; metallic Na still available; obtain small quantity of each, tell lab partner to get back, put beaker with HCl down in sink, drop in flake of Na, “shock and awe”! All classmates trembling in fear as to what the H*** just happened; teacher runs down to my lab station, takes a look, asks just who is responsible; I accept full responsibility (3 days off is looking good); unfortunately, all I got out of the deal was another lab writeup, carried out with great gnashing of teeth, because hadn’t kept careful record of quantities.
Does the above story lead anyone to the conclusion why I really liked chemistry?
Vaughn, the class is called physics, although she’s in the honors sections which uses more math than the regular sections. They’re not doing trig-based physics, just algebra-based conceptual physics. We have a son in the senior physics course (called advanced, but it’s not AP), which seems to focus on trig-based work as well as some basic differentiation. Makes for good times around the homework table!
I also remember high school science classes as dry and boring and ridicuously simple.
And why you liked chem? KA-BOOM!!! Let me guess . . you put the MythBusters DVDs on your wishlist?
CSA, hadn’t put that on my wish list, but now that you mention it….
Sounds like you have two (at least) very bright young folks at the homework table. Good luck to them. Has your son determined where he’s applying for college (I know, making a gross assumption here)?
VT…………..I think you’re missing the entire point here. Your posts are usually quite thoughtful and intelligent. The real point is that you cannot judge the state of today’s education based on YOUR past experiences. The middle school experience in science you describe will be unlikely to happen today. Even the most “green” middle school science teacher has the tools to do more than just “read from a dry textbook”. I believe you have stated that you are involved with NEMHS. This is a great campus, with a special program. I personally know many of the science department. However, this setting does not work for the majority of high school students in this district. To say, as others have on this thread, that “school choice” is what education needs is naive. “School choice” is built into the system right now, you just need to live within the boundaries of a school, make application if it is of “magnet” status, or request a special transfer. That sounds like a load of choices to me. Oh, if you don’t like those choices, pony up for tuition money to one of the many private or parochial schools.
Let’s look at exactly what is GOOD about the present public education system. It is totally counterproductive to make assumptions about today based on what we saw as adolescents 10, 15, 20 or more years ago.
I’m back briefly. Apophis is now calling me “Doc Schooley”, which I like, because it has a real old-fashioned sound to it, and I’m getting old (feeling that way, anyhow). Maybe he called my med school or keyed in my name on the American Board of Medical Specialties website, and learned I wasn’t lying!
I love reading these blogs because *I learn stuff*. You bloggers *make me think*.
Apophis, I would ask you to open up to letting scientifically experienced non-teacher people give a shot at teaching in our schools. They aren’t going to bite your head off. Most of them will respect what you do, and, most importantly share their knowledge with you. For example you could have a weekly seminar for science teachers, with regular teachers and alt teachers having collegial talks. The scientist/engineer people can help you by shrinking your class size/numbers of classes you have to teach, giving you more time to think, study on your own and connect with your students. As senior people of “standing”, they can help you by campaigning the legislature for more money for public schools, generating press support, and helping you to do more things you would like to do.
Regenerating public schools for the emerging knowledge economy is going to be a very, very difficult task. But with smart people working together, it is envisionable, and if you can envision it, you *can* do it. You will sometimes see progress, and feel great, other times get frustrated and want to give up. But if you don’t give up, you’ll figure out how to surmount the frustrating obstacles, and you’ll accomplish some awesome things.
The crucial thing is, you’re living in an historic nexis. Which means you can be a watershed change agent for Kansas education, if you choose to be, because the forces for change are gelling. What I’m saying is, you can go for big targets that were impossible to envision when you became a science teacher.
As a union leader, you can do a lot by focusing on these new targets, and helping your members to see them. For example, suppose we talk about teachers’ salaries doubling. That’s not going to happen under the old paradigm, and very few current teachers can envision that for themselves, and they are right. But, how about teachers’ children? Set the goal for this. Why should teachers discourage their children from taking up teaching? Because of the crap you parents have to put up with? The crap can be eliminated. You can turn public schools into places in which teachers have the power to tell administrators what to do, public schools in which teachers give principals marching orders. As opposed to the Industrial Age-model of superintendents telling the principals what to do, and then principals deciding what crap has to be dumped on teachers to satisfy superintendents. Let’s call this *professional democracy*.
If you focus on kids, and do well by them, and at the same time use the media to inform the public of what you are accomplishing, and why, most of the public will support your efforts. A lot of your heretofore critics will say, “This is what we want. We’re dropping our voucher campaigns.”
I know you don’t want the federal government imposing high-stakes, machine-scored multiple-choice testing, and then judging you, as the teacher of your test-taking on this kind of simplistic, misleading metric. You don’t want to train your students to be sea lions, who respond “correctly” to simplistic commands and get a herring for their reward.
VT, you and your friends did your own “salt of the earth” experiment. Boys love stuff like this. I met an Idaho middle-school science teacher who was trying to make ammonium triiodide. Not a district- approved experiment, to be sure. I was thinking of relocating to take on a new practice, and was driven to this school, and the science teacher wasn’t threatened by my being a “doctor”, he just though maybe I could help him. His experiment wasn’t working. I gave him a vital tip. My tour-guide was a National Merit Finalist doctor (like me) whose husband was a National Merit Finalist *blacksmith/ welder*. He showed me what he did with hot metals. I did *not* think, “Oh, this is tragic, you’ve wasted your potential.” I thought, “Ooh, that looks really, really fun: shaping glowing metal into what you want it to be.”
Making explosions and working with fire, risk-taking and practical jokes (putting a droplet of ammonium triodide on a door knob and waiting for somebody to open the door) seem to be “hard-wired” into many males’ brains. Not so much in females, with occasional exceptions. Vive la difference.:-)
So heartlander, why have you let your MD license expire? It seems almost “criminal” for a person who has devoted his life to healing others to just stop. The INTERNET is wonderful for collecting information you know. However, as I’ve told my students while recently doing research on the WWW, not everything you read here is verified information? You could easily have grabbed a name off the web that fits the facts you claim. Nevertheless, for the sake of argument I will presume your truthful intentions. Holding an MD does not impress me as making you an expert on education. What you fail to understand is that content knowledge does not supplant teaching ability. It never has, it never will. Sure, you have posted some good ideas, but in the big picture of education these ideas are narrow minded. For example, how do you propose increasing reading comprehension in our students. Is your solution to bring in a prize winning author just because they would be classified as a “professional” in the application of reading/writing skills. If you’re thinking “what is the point of this tangent?”, dwell a little harder. Isn’t the ability to comprehend what you read one, if not the most basic skill students need to acquire to be successful in today’s or even tomorrow’s world? Is one of your vaunted scientists going to solve this problem? As you can see, YOU don’t have all of the answers.
I have wasted enough time this early morning, it’s time to get on what I got up early to do; that would be grading the web based research projects my students just completed last week. I spent a good 6 hours yesterday and will probably spend that much today as well. So much for your assertion that I’m stuck in the 18th century education mindset.
VT, although our son’s in the senior-level advanced physics class, he’s a junior so he still has some time to make college decisions.
heartlander, I didn’t think you could stay away long! Glad you’re back; although we disagree on some issues, you’re usually civil about it.
You should talk to more teenagers, though. There are more girls than ever interested in the traditional male fields, including practical jokes and drag-racing. Maybe girls need more female role models who are comfortable using technology, and fewer messages from a misogynistic society that claims they’re just not ‘hard-wired’ to do those things.
Kansas has an alternative teacher certification procedure in place for those who already have a bachelor’s degree. A friend of mine with a degree in biochemistry is nearing completion of the program to become a high-school science teacher. She says that the education coursework has opened up her eyes to the nuances of educating special needs kids, to the importance of aligning curriculum, and to the history and importance of educating each and every kid in this country.
So, there are ways for scientists to become teachers, if that’s what they want.
Apophis, can you explain why the “education experts” have presided over a long, steep slide in the performance of American schools, if in fact they are experts in educating students?
And then, tell us again just for laughs, why the education establishment insists on a government-protected monoploy in the financing and provision of public education?
It is very clear “n” that you are openly hostile toward public education. As you put it the “long, steep slide in the performance of American schools” is a perception for the most part put out by you and your anti-public education cohorts. Your mantra seems to be: “let’s only dwell on the BAD things in the schools, never the good”. The sooner the public understands the ulterior motives of your kind, the better our society will be. Your intentions are crystal clear with statements like: “government-protected monoploy in the financing and provision of public education”. It seems you want public tax dollars to go somewhere else other than public education.
By the way, who is this shadowy “education establishment”? Using phrases like this is the right wing way of attempting to influence the general public. You know, like the inaccurate term “death tax” that only really applies to the extremely wealthy.
So, Apophis, your response is to attack me and whatever motives you ascribe to me, rather than to deal with the issue?
You are right about one thing: I am hostile to public education. It’s the only reasoned conclusion anyone can come to if they care about the futures of our children.
If you had any dignity at all, you would urge the education establishment — teachers unions, education bureaucrats, politicians who love to exercise control — to forego the government-protected monopoly over the financing and provision of public education.
How does it make you feel, sir, when a family comes to the conclusion that they can’t use the product you provide because it is so terribly lacking in quality, and then they have to pay for it anyway, and the pay again for something else? Does it make you laugh? Does it make you feel righteous in some way? It is no wonder you have a haughty attitude.
If you feel you have been attacked that is because you know I hit the proverbial “nail on the head”. Your irrational assertions about the “educational establishment” make you look foolish. All of those entities you mentioned are actually working to make the education system better. Your intense dislike of the fact you and your type don’t control them is what your problem really is.
Do you consider yourself one of those hypothetical families that feel the schools are personally for them lacking in “quality”? If not, then your comments are pointless political attacks. Why isn’t part of the blame for the system not working to your standard partly falling on the families themselves? You do know that a successful education starts at home. No school, public or private, can do the job alone.
If you want to “feel the love” from me, keep it up with the anti-public education attacks. I’ll gladly rip you a new asshole anytime, any day. Oh, I’m not “haughty”, I am totally ARROGANT!
I have to wonder why Apophis suddenly started writing without all the name calling. From the start he has called everyone who evenly remotely suggested changing education everything from morons to assholes.
Now he seems to be agreeing changes are needed to bring education to the level neede for our kids to compete with the rest of the world.
That he teaches in a manner that entices kids to think for themselves is evident from his latest posts, but nowhere evident in his early posta.
Why the change? You could have stated so from the very beginning instead of slamming anyone who disagreed with you. Your dialog in the last two posts make me wonder if someone else is writing them.
Obvioulsy, with your latest, there is room for discussion. Why the sudden change in perspective?
JMWalker….if the shoe fits guy…………………..
Education is a classic example of evolution. It constantly changes. I have NEVER stated that change wasn’t necessary. All I have said is that YOUR changes are asinine. There has been no “sudden change of perspective”.
I think you kids need a referee.
One parents assesment?
Apophis is just a bit to provincial and protectionist for my liking. BUT that is undoubtedly the result of knowing that many who advocate improving public education actually want to kill it. For an example see the post of “n”.
J M Walker has good ideas but as I have said I think he is trying to address an outcome that need not be. That being America embracing globalism. I know of nothing this country cannot make or invent on its own. Let’s teach the kids to do that and make sure they have the chance to do that instead of competing with the third world.
heartlander has positively wonderful ideas. But his has been a position of priveledge and this has colored his perspective. Homeschooling and educational vacations are just not doable for the average family. The ideas he has would also work well in the one room schoolhouse of the past. But that is just not the reality now. I suppose if you wanted to put a school on every other corner his interacrtive ideas might be practical.
“All I have said is that YOUR changes are asinine.”
Obviously you have never given serious thought to any of my suggestions, or the above would not have been your answer. I have never, and will never, called for an end to public education. You have lumped me in that group more than once. It doesn’t take an education to know that if one doesn’t call for an end to public education, one doesn’t belong in that group.
I have given serious suggestions regarding PUBLIC education, and all have been positive, and all have had the education of the children at the base point. For yo to call ALL of them “asinine” leads me to believe you are so closed minded that serious discussion is beyond your ability. Your last post certainly does nothing to prove me wrong.
When you can dissect my suggestions in an intelligent way, feel free to do so. If your answer remains “YOUR changes are asinine”, than an intelligent discussion with you is impossible, as it is obviously beyond you to do so.
JR,Make no mistake about it: globalization is here and it won’t go away . . . ever. To deny it is to stay locked in the past, and attempting to keep your son out of the loop can only deny him what he will need to control his future.
There are many things about globalization I do not agree with, but I have to qualms about voicing them, and trying to get people into positions where changes to the better can be put in place.
I like most of what you write about, but on this point, we are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and on my end, I can see where and why you are wrong in both your belief it can be ended, and in your belief you need to segregate yourself from the effects. It can’t be stopped, and you can’t divorce yourself from it.
I’m not saying embrace it, but I am saying use it to your advantage, and especially your sons advantage. He WILL need to if he wants to succeed in the future. And, as a father, I suspect you hope he will succeed in whatever he chooses. As a father myself, I certainly hope he does.
JR
What the hell does this mean: “Apophis is just a bit to provincial and protectionist for my liking”? You got it correct in the next sentence though: “BUT that is undoubtedly the result of knowing that many who advocate improving public education actually want to kill it”.
I am providing a parent’s perspective as well. I have three children who were provided with a great educational experience here in Wichita. All three had the proper educational preparation prior to kindergarten thanks to the tireless hours my wife and I put in doing quality things with them. We have never had a video game in our house and actually going to the library has been a family activity. There success or failure would not be the fault of the education system. We, as parents hold the ultimate responsibility for our children.
JMWalker………your cry of “globalization” is analogous to bush/cheney using the word “terrorist and/or terrorism” is speeches around the time of an election. “Globalization” is just your current bogeyman. Do you think current educators don’t realize the expanding global economy? You are dismissed out of hand because of the radical nature of your suggestions, just like heartlander. Your ideas have very little research to support validity.
“You are dismissed out of hand….”
Sort of explains the first thing I said doesn’t it?
I’m sorry apophis. But my take is you are sitting on a pretty tall horse. You also seem to need a lot of invective to make your points.Note how J M and I disagree without the venom.
Imagine….J R peacebroker!
Hey I can brawl with the best of them but we are SUPPOSED to be trying to address and improve education. This requires working together with ALL who are trying to save public education. That includes J M.
Apophis if you can’t learn to tolerate the suggestions of folks who are NOT your enemy? The “n”s of the world are going to win and bust education in the thousand pieces that they want to.
J M. I have to tell you, I am not optimistic for the future of my son, myself, or my country if the stampede toward globalization continues. You can name any skill or profession and I can find you a country that will do it cheaper and with less rights and protections for workers and the environment. Education of any sort can not help with this.
Protectionism—-from the root word protect. As in protecting our way of life.
Isolationism—–Well what does one isolate themself from? Why from harmful or dangerous or unpleasant things. Like a massive third world work force that will engulf the American worker and drag him down to its level.
This is not the right place for this discussion. But unlike Apophis, I am interested in your opinion. How is it we can teach our way out of this? And I do not mean learning to speak the language of foreign masters. What can we teach kids that maintains the American standard of living?
Isn’t it interesting how the right-leaning folks claim that just a few examples of Hortio Algers working their way out of poverty shows that “anybody can do it.”
But the many brilliant and noteworthy minds, Presidents Clinton, Reagan, Carter, bazillionaire Warren Buffet, or Nobel prize winners who graduated from public school don’t mean that “anybody can acheive” in our school system.
No, despite the obvious statistical fact that there’s much more equality in academics than there is in the so-called free market (people born poor rarely become rich, although many poor people become successful because of school), it’s not our economic system that’s a failure.
Oh, my, no!
It’s the public schools of course . . .
The people who hate public schools are the same people who hate anything with the word “public” in front of it–public library, public park, or public pension (social security).
Sorry to burst your bubble JR, but educational reform isn’t going to occur because of discussions on a blog. I do sit on a pretty tall horse, I am a proud educational professional. I look out for the best interests of educators and their students. I am not one of those meek, mild, “try to be politically correct” teachers. For too long, educators have sat back and taken beatings because they don’t want to cause waves. A great number of us are different. We’d just as soon deliver a figurative punch to the mouth of our critics.
We are doing a good job and we get NO credit.
I will never back down to the anti-public education cartel. I will expose them for what they are. If that offends you JR, well that’s life.
CapnAmerica, I agree with you totally. This is all about money. The right wants all of the money in the world. They act as if it is their right.
apophis . . . showing your ignorance yet again, I see. Globalization IS here, and anyone who fails to recognize it is doomed to be left in the past. Your comparing me to Bush/Cheney and their terrorism crap had me chuckling. I would say your stand on just about everything reminds me of Taliban measures and their equally ridiculous beliefs.
Where is your car made? In the states? Canada? Maybe assembled here, but you better have both standard and metric tools to work on it. Buy anything made in the USA lately? Had to look to do so, didn’t you? Have any investments? 401K’s? Probably more than one foreign stock in the mix. Where was the peach you ate grown? More than likely south america, mexico. That steak you ate? Could be Argentinia.
Protectionism, isolationism, racism, whatever, they’re dead horses. They are good only in the minds of those who are afraid to see the big picture.
For example: How did Bush go wrong with his failed foreign policy, especially concerning terrorism? He failed to see that it is a world problem, and as such, needs the input and cooporation of ALL nations, not the invasion of some tinpot dictators country. That’s where globalization comes into play.
Sure there will be abuse; there is in any endeavor. Something called human nature and assholes getting together to subvert the system. But if it is recognized for what it is, than the leaders of ALL countries can do things to change the status quo. The United Nations has a chance to do that, but many changes need to take place there as well.
Not a perfect system, but the right people can make it work. Globalization is here and will stay her, so get used to it, or sell you computer and give up the internet.
Apophis, I am sad to say, you’re still an idiot.
Education is this country will not improve until as a society we put our money where our month is. Teachers are not valued and so are poorly paid. It is a disgrace that teachers are expected to have such a high degree of education and yet a 1st year teacher is lucky to make a living wage. Even after many years of teaching they still don’t make as much as others with the same experience in other fields. We treat social workers, nurses, and those in the mental health fields the same. Teachers should make six figures because they have the most important job in the world. They shape the children and our future
That’s not an answer to my question.
How do you educate a way to ensure the survival of the American standard of living?
Kiss my ass JM Walker.
Brenda Shull, go up thread and read the posts of those who attack public education. They all seem to have their favorite bashing tool. JM Walker’s favorite now seems to be that we (educators) are unaware of globalization. We are, we just have to put the whole thing in perspective. Walker offers no viable ideas.
JR, that is a wide open question that has no single answer. I reject the ideas of the anti-education thugs. They think the answer is to destroy public education. THEY are the terrorists we need to be concerned with right now.
The more you write, Apophis, the more you teach people how arrogant (that’s your word) the public education bureaucracy is. I will grant you, dear sir, that is one thing you are quite excellent at teaching.
The lessone we learn from you: Why we need an end to public education.
And, CapnAmerikkka, and end to social security would also be wise! How miserable and humiliating it is to be forced to buy and support a government-mandated retirement plan! It’s almost as bad as government schools.
Is there no area of life that we as individuals cannot manage ourselves? Must we be schooled by government, accept government retirement planning, and now, possibly, rely on government for healthcare? Where is our dignity as individuals?
n-Very well said. A thousand amens.
My take is that folks like “n” and golfnuts would like to remove government from everything.
Such as they would then be free to extort, and exploit and enslave at will. No thanks.
“Walker offers no viable ideas.”
Wow, I guess not in terms you can understand. I really don’t know how I can simplify it, other than doing so in monosylabic form.
JR, you ask how we can teach ourselves out of globalization. I say we can’t and shouldn’t. What we do is level the playing field by bringing the rest of the third-world countries up to our level. And that, my friend, is what changing the face of education is all about.
Such as they would then be free to extort, and exploit and enslave at will. No thanks.
Posted by: J R | December 17, 2006 at 09:22 PM
Yes because the Government has never done such a thing. (Sarcasm)
I too have given up on Apophis.
Apophis seems obsessed with one issue and a Quixotic battle against heartlander and anyone who would dare question Apophis. He is close minded to any but his own ideas.
That’s called meglomania.
J M?
You said this:
“What we do is level the playing field by bringing the rest of the third-world countries up to our level.”
We TRIED that. It was called NAFTA. Your own words show why that very noble idea failed.
“Sure there will be abuse; there is in any endeavor. Something called human nature and assholes getting together to subvert the system.”
It is as I said a noble idea to elevate those of the rest of the world. I wish it were so easy as you think.
With NAFTA as an example, we see that their are dark and greedy forces in America that are all to eagerly embraced by corrupt foreign governments.
I want to help those folks. Truly I do. But we cannot save them by descending to their standards. We have to save America first.
Kia
My experience has been that government has protected me against those who have used (employed) me. Government has guaranteed me rights, safe working conditions, a minimum wage and protection against capricious emloyers. My emplyers have shown me the back of their hand. I can elect or un-elect government. Before I struck out on my own I was not at liberty to fire the boss.
To achieve the greatest potential in education, we have to abandon our “silo” mentalities. Education should be viewed as a community-participation enterprise. I’ve mentioned bringing applied science and technology professionals to classrooms.
Apophis pointed out that subject expertise and teaching ability are not the same thing. In actuality, you can’t achieve leadership positions in applied science and technological fields without strong teaching skills. Moreover, the types of people who would relish giving a shot at school teaching would be those who have these skills. For the occasional incompetent entrant, performance monitoring would weed him or her out.
Instead of viewing outsiders as interlopers, you should see them as a valuable resource. If they help you to shoulder a load, and this reduces your class sizes and/or numbers of daily classes, so that you can spend more time engaging with individual students, and devising and running really cool science projects. They can get you material resources, and perhaps set up summer internships for students.
They can help you get more funding for education.
They can help you disband machine-scored multiple-choice high-stakes testing.
With better teaching conditions you will retain more young teachers, and probably convince many more older teachers to stay longer. “I’m 62, and can retire, but why would I want to? I’m doing what I love.”
“That’s called meglomania.” I Love IT. The more educators who become this way, the better!
I also love how this thread is progressing. Granted, it started out as the ongoing Apophis-heartlander dual as JR aptly pointed out, but it has forced a number of you to show your true colors! Your open disdain for “by the people, FOR the people” is sickening. It’s too bad that you hate our country so much that you would sacrifice one of our founding principles to satisfy you own personal greed. You probably call yourselves Christians too. Shame on you!
Doc, you said something I don’t think is quite accurate: “you can’t achieve leadership positions in applied science and technological fields without strong teaching skills”. Two thoughts on this. First, there is an alternative licensure process by which these individuals can actually teach in the classroom if they so choose. Will they forfeit the salary they can earn elsewhere to teach in the public system because they sure aren’t going to be making much more than a regularly licensed educator. Second, I think you confuse the ability to educate adults in a post secondary setting with the pedagogical process of teaching our youth. It’s a whole different animal.
Before I head off to work to start a 16 hour plus day, I need for you to know heartlander that I hate M/C tests. They give me little in the way of useful data about what my students know. I rely more on performance assessments and written examinations. The problem there is the perceived subjectivity of grading and the time it takes to process 130+ pieces of student work each time.
JR,NAFTA is a jole and needs to be redesigned from the ground up, but it will take some high-handed politics to do so. Giving up is NOT the answer; working harder is.
As for apophis: now if you disagree with him you hate america. Kind of reminds me of Connie’s saying we fear her. Arrogant or idiot. I rest my case.
Apophis, I guess my recollections were not clearly stated as being just that, and not indicative of what happens today. I hope what you say is true, that it wouldn’t for the most part happen today, as surely what was going on some 40+ years ago (in my case) has changed for the better.
I agree with something else you said; m/c tests are an abomination insofar as assessing what students know. I am sympathetic to you in the time it takes to properly grade non M/C tests, and submit the grades for end of term processing within the period allowed therefor. Yes, there are issues concerning the possibility of subjective grading thereof, but those may be overcome, I am sure.
Also, I am not against public education; far from it. There are things I perceive as happening within the realm of public education that I believe can be changed for the better.
One thing that has bothered me during my involvement with 259 is the number of “magic bullet” changes that are proposed, partially implemented, and then abandoned when state assessment scores do not suddenly increase the next time. Not enough time is allowed to see if the changes, in fact, work. IIRC, every change that has been proposed and adopted has come with a body of data showing the efficacy thereof in places where implemented. Something that has always, to me, been ignored is that the improvements attributed to these new programs have taken place over time; thus, when there is no immediate result, off to another. This has to be frustrating to the classroom teachers.
Apophis, I know you are extremely busy right now with the end of semester finals, etc. going on, so I won’t be offended if you don’t have the time to respond to the following.
Paraphrasing part of one of your posts above, you indicated that what NEMHS is doing wouldn’t work for the majority of students in the district. I have kind of figured out that apparently that is true not only in 259 but also in the myriad districts that have, in my experience, sent folks to NEM to see what it is which is going on and if it may be replicated. Should it be replicable? (I have more to ask, but will defer until later).
VT, when I said it wouldn’t work I mean that the NEMHS model wouldn’t be the school setting that is beneficial for all students. Should the school be replicable? Yes, but it isn’t for everyone.
Understand and agree. As much as I admire NEMHS, and the wonderful education received by both daughters, it is most definitely not the place for everyone; and while it would be my hope its success can be replicated at other schools, I am not naive enough to believe its model may be simply lifted and inserted into another site. Happy grading.