As a Sunday Eagle article by Roy Wenzl showed, many boys are being left behind in schools and failing in life. Why?
The data is disturbing: Boys have a 30 percent higher chance than girls of dropping or flunking out and are five times more likely to be labeled hyperactive.
The changes under way in our schools are part of the problem. The No Child Left Behind law, with its mind-numbing emphasis on rote learning, note-taking and test-taking, rewards skills at which girls tend to excel.
We argued in an editorial Wednesday that schools and parents must hang in there with struggling boys and work harder to reconnect with them.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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117 Comments
Ever since we ended the draft (circa 1973,) we began to stop teaching our boys to grow up and become men. They’ve lost all sense of duty, destiny, or fate.
Derbok, while I’m not sure I agree that the draft is the answer, I agree that boys, especially white boys, have taken a side swipe by the overwhelming interest in any child who ISN’T male and white.
But there is more to it. Our public schools, and society in general, no longer value the very things that once made this country strong.
There was a time when we held up the achievements of our Founders because they were strong, motivated, and their ethics were unquestionable. It was a measure of achievement that children were held against.
No longer.
Now, our liberalized schools value ‘diversity’ over achievement. Diversity, in and of itself, has NO value. The only way it can be judged is by the result of its implementation.
We can sit around and pat ourselves on the back for having a forth grade classroom filled with every color child under the sun – but when that class has to slow down its progress…just to accommodate the children whose parents came here illegally and these little ones can’t follow the teacher because they don’t understand English, what has that done to the learning level of the entire class?
Our schools are trying to mainstream children who should be in SEPARATE classes. I taught ESL to Vietnamese students in Middle School for awhile. But how many public schools pay for specific ESL teachers? Not many. So the kids sit in regular classes, and slow them down.
Boys, if they are not jocks, are often shoved to the side. Our schools promote basketball over mathematics – and the result is obvious. We have kids who can shoot hoops but can’t balance a checkbook.
At this juncture, parents need to stage a MAJOR revolt. After all – it’s their children who are going to suffer.
But for those who are tired of fighting a losing system or just don’t want to fight – they need to pull their kids out and put them in private schools, or home school. Either choice is better than the public schools.
If it were YOUR son who was not learning up to his potential – what would YOU do?
Would you just continue along the same road? Or would you take responsibility for his education and change course?
I would say it has more to do with urbanization and also its transition to other settings as copy cats in smaller towns. Even when I was a boy, neighborhoods started to degenerate because there were too few things to occupy the boys constructively and too many things to occupy them destructively.
How this affects learning is simple. The options for enjoying life as fun in the eyes of a boy has become over whelming slanted in what media dictates. That is, there are fewer positive male role models willing to step up and lead.
This leadership has been affected by the media in that adult males who used to get involved are either apathetic because of using the Internet, TV, video games and video music as baby sitters and electronic mentors.
The problem with this type of media is that it isn’t interactive in a positive sort of way. Sure, it keeps them occupied but it also fills their heads with scenarios not necessarily the best in use for their setting whether it be urban or small town.
This carries over into the classroom as teachers represent to this generation and those before it as some sort of jailhouse monitor that is there to keep them rigid and at attention for the time during school hours.
Resistance by the boys is obvious and predictable. And I firmly believe that the lack of focus because of this type of scenario has caused reliance on the all too much attention deficit disorder as the blame for everything.
The simple role model examples as visits to the Fire Station (or other places) to learn about respective duties or trips to museums, nature walks, collection projects and other things should be added to the curriculum so the male student can learn to be more interactive with learning.
With so many distractions, todays male youth look at learning in schools as being warehoused.
There are of course many other factors, just an observation from my point of view.
gsheridan………you are mostly full of shit.Don’t blame public schools for the screw ups PARENTS send to them. What you are seeing with “boys being left behind ” is a result of the class warfare in this country instigated by the right beginning with the Reagan puppet presidency. Encouraging parents to pull their kids out of the public system or go the “home school” route will only make the situation worse. Who will be able to attend private schools? Who has parents who have the background or financial resources to home school correctly? Not the poor, and it is the POOR who actually has the highest male drop-out rate. Like I said, Republican instigated class warfare. Yep, let’s blame the public school system for the screw ups of the repugs.
Here’s a novel concept, force parents to be parents. Turn off the TV, take away the i-pods and video games. Make reading a priority in the home. How many parents take their children, especially their sons, to the library REGULARLY?
Uncle William – I agree with most of your points, but I would like to expand upon the lack of young male activities – to include a total lack of respect for what young males once looked towards as goals.
Maybe society is changing – in fact, I’m sure of it, but our male youth, as you pointed out, have no role models. They have sports figures – but those aren’t real role models. OJ is really something to look up to….sheesh.
If a boy isn’t sports-oriented he has very few avenues to pursue with the same respect that comes from being a ‘jock’ in school.
The winners of the State BBall tourney grace the front page – the Debate Team winner is lost somewhere on a back page. The values are gone.
When I worked in the Middle School, I watched so-called ‘top’ teachers come down on good kids for minor infractions and let the ‘touchy’ kids get by with murder. There is no discipline for the unruly, and those who want to learn must abide disruption after disruption.
But in private schools, discipline is a given. The kids know it – and they excel.
GS you are so right on in what you say. Schools are spending money to insure diversity in our schools and not enough attention to educating them.
In a country where more money is spent per student that anywhere else, we have worn out the argument that by throwing money at the problem it will be solved.
When teachers are paid according to the success rates of their classes we will have taken a giant step forward. Home schooling is a very good option for many families.
Academic excellence is not recognized enough and athletic excellence is stressed to much. This is completely backward to what is needed to succeed in the grown-up world.
The basics of reading, writing and arithematic need to be stressed much harder. Social engineering needs to be removed from the schools. When the biggest worry our state board of education has is whether an alternate theory for the origin of the species can be mentioned in a classroom, we have a problem.
Our priorities are all screwed up. Apophis you are right in that parents should be responsible for their children but your point that we should “force” them to do better just won’t work.
Teachers must do a better job of teaching, they can’t expect to be able to design a school cirriculum around children that neither speak nor understand english. We are administration heavy in our schools. Put more money in the classrooms and less in the district offices.
We have all the resources to turn this around. We just need someone with the backbone to identify the problem and fix it.
ksgrm,”When teachers are paid according to the success rates of their classes we will have taken a giant step forward.”
Same should apply to everyone.
If crime goes up police get a paycut.House burns down firemen get a pay cut.Patient dies hospital doesn’t get paid.Stockmarket goes down brokers get a pay cut.
The average teacher in Kansas makes $1,000 per week. That’s success enough.
morg when a teacher becomes tenured then they no longer have an incentive to improve teaching techniques. I am not using a broad brush to paint all teachers like this but can you name any other position where you can hold on to a job when your preformance is below standard. There are many good teachers in our public schools but there are also many teachers who are barely literate themselves (as proven by the test scores when teachers in Arkansas were tested). These teachers should not be teaching. How can they possibly help an under achieving students?
“but can you name any other position where you can hold on to a job when your performance is below standard.”
I’ll bite,President of the United StatesCorporate CEOThe SenateCongressI will agree if they are a bad teacher they should be fired and it is possible to do so.
Also what’s this social engineering you speak of?
Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple says it best.
“In a speech on Friday, the chief executive officer of Apple and Disney honcho declared: “I believe that what’s wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way.”
The problem with unionization, Mr. Jobs argued, is that it has constrained schools from attracting and retaining the best teachers and from dismissing the less effective ones.”
My point exactly. He went on to say:”What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?”
It is next to impossible to get rid of tenured teachers as Steve Jobs knows.
The social engineering I speak of is anything that takes away from the basics of education. Teachers should teach, parents should instill values and principles in their children and not have this usurped by educators.
“is that it has constrained schools from attracting and retaining the best teachers and from dismissing the less effective ones.”So your beef is wth the union? Average tenure for teachers now is 5 years. It’s a stressful job with a high burnout rate. My wife did it for ten years. I wouldn’t do it.What is it that you think the schools are teaching children that they shouldn’t be?
I think much of the problem could very stem from the fact that parents generally seem to want to be be less and less responsible for raising their children.
For instance, if a kid kills a cop its the fault of a videogame that was played. Maybe it is because parents aren’t watching closely what their kids are doing or make the assumption that the kids know the difference between videogames and real life.
Which then ties in nicely to school. If I don’t be actively involved in teaching my child(ren) the importance of learning and only assume that my child(ren) will understand this on their on, I’m being foolish.
Too think this stems from only one side or another(politics) is foolish. Democrats, Republicans, everybody in government is probably equally at fault here. From less government with no safety nets to government in every aspect of our lives.
Do I have a solution? Yeah, parents take some responsibility and be parents. I don’t know if that means taking a kid to a library or helping with homework, or just reading to the kids, or playing with the lego mindstorm kits just to see if something neat can be made to do something. Seriously, spark some imagination in the kid and do something with them.
I guess my point in all of this, parents are the key to making any of this work. And if parents aren’t going to take responsibility and just blame others, then it’s a hopeless cause.
So… vouchers wouldnt cure this problem? heheheheheh
Seems like vouchers are the only solution wingnuts ever propose for improving education.
“Officer Kimberly Warehime, the school resource officer for Hamilton Middle School, will chow down on fried worms in answer to a challenge to keep young people out of gangs.”
More feel-good claptrap.
KFG,I’m at the point where I think we should give them the vouchers say rock on and when they F**k it all up they got no one to blame but themselves.
morg- I dare you to let us. The NEA won’t have it. Never forget, the teacher’s union is for the benefit of the teachers, not for the benefit of the students.
Seems like more union bashers than people who really care about education.
At least they are consistant. They are anti worker all the time. They think unions are the worst problem in this country? hehehehehehehehe
six impossible things before breakfast
fleet the nea doesn’t control the ballot box. The nea is a national agency. Schools run at the state level vote it in.
I kinda agree morq, but really, it will be ALL of us that have to deal with the fallout from their phucked up kids after they put them through “jesus camp”.
Being anti-NEA and pro-student education are consistant.
My son is two. We read at least two books every day. He knows his alphabet, he can count to ten in english and spanish (his father is hispanic and I have encouraged the learning of spanish as a part of his heritage, not because i feel he should have to) And I am very concerned about the type of education he will get when he is ready for school… After much soul-searching and discussion, he will be attending parochial school through at least the 8th grade… This was a hard decision to come to, as I myself attended public school and felt that it was good education… but i worry now about the ability of him to get a good education, at least here locally – I can’t comment on the state of schools in other parts of the nation as i have no experience with them…
You all are so off the mark it is patently ridiculous. You are certainly products of public education. I raised three sons who went through the public education system but want better for my grandkids because of the hidden agendas of the NEA. One son home schools his kids and holds down a full time job as a engineer.
Homeschoolers are tested each year to evaluate how well they are being taught. His oldest, a fifth grader last year tested at eight grade level on geography, 10th grade on math and reading skills. These tests are not given by the parents but by accredited state employed testers.
If a part time teacher can do this at home in 3 to 4 hours a day – why aren’t our teachers doing more?
“This was a hard decision to come to, as I myself attended public school and felt that it was good education…”
wendy-Those were my thoughts EXACTLY some years ago. I went to public skool and I was happy with my education. We ended up putting our kids in Catholic skool (my wife is Catholic) and it has worked out very well. They do pay attention the the education of the kids (having involved parents is key). It’s was one of the smartest decisions we ever made. No regrets.
KFG,If they were serious they would have already done it. Then they would need a plan and find a scapegoat group when it didn’t work out.Wendy I wish you luck with your children’s education, like anything the quality of their education is equal to the effort put in to obtain it.
My thoughts EXACTLY, morg…. Which is why I spend so much time with my son teaching him things now like the alphabet… I told his father once that he can do ANYTHING he wants to do – BUT I am not going to force him into doing any of it… i.e. – If he decides he wants to play football and we sign him up for it, and he decides he doesn’t like it – he will finish out the amount of time we signed up for (because I don’t wanting him learning that quitting is the easy way out either) but we will not resign him the following year… I think that a MAJOR part of the problem is the lack of parental involvement – or rather, parents who get involved ONLY when they think things may be reflecting badly on them, and then of course it is NEVER their child’s fault… that is one of my concerns… and why my son will go to private school – because I know that not only will i be involved but the teachers will be involved as well… the only reason i disagree with homeschooling (outside of the fact that as a single parent it simply is not a feasible option for me) is that i don’t feel it gives children the necessary social interaction and social skills that a regular school environment does…
Wendy,You will do a wonderful job. You know your strengths and weakness and how to use them to your advantage. Already your off to a great start being a first class role model. Good work!
Wendy I commend you for the action you are taking for your son. Involvement is what is always needed. The social interaction was also a concern of mine but I was relieved to know that because of the large number of homeschoolers now a whole new block of sports, dance lessons, music lessons, swimming are open to home schoolers. My granddaughter is first seat french horn player for the middle school symphony band. She goes to the public school an hour a day for this. Not attending public school doesn’t disqualify her for this. Good luck with your sons education.
Thanks, Apophis
(also the name of a near miss meteor dubbed for an Egyptian god of death, hehehe)
You’re exactly right, she is full of it.
You notice the one thing the reich-wing WON’T do while they call for public schools?
PAY FOR THEM.
They could set up a model school in the worst part of town–completely private–and make us all marvel at the miracle that private enterprise can wreak.
Oh, wait. They already did that, and the Edison schools got ridden out on a rail . . .
er, call for a boycott of public schools . . .
The key here is the parental involvement (or lack thereof). From experience, I can say with assurance that not all parents with children in private schools are involved in the education of their students, which has always confounded me. If I’m paying the tuition that is charged, doggoned right I’m going to be involved; otherwise, it is just very costly day care, it seems to me.
One of the thoughts behind magnet schools (separating out, for this purpose, the “voluntary desegregation” effect) is that the parents of students choosing to attend such schools will be more involved; not necessarily so.
“want better for my grandkids because of the hidden agendas of the NEA.”
Thanks for confirming it really is about union busting, not about education.
BTW, if you want excellence in the public schools, you need look no farther than the IB program.
This is what happens when you standardize the curriculum (the exact thing that the “local control” conservatives don’t want).
Good point, Ksfrmgrrl.
How long has the NEA been in operation anyway?
Like 50 years . . . and all that time and all those Nobel Prize winners and engineers and physicians and prizewinning novelists later, the reason are schools are “failing” now is because of a union?
Heh, yup, that’s why they call it scapegoating.
“hidden agendas of the NEA.”
Just out of curiousity, just WHAT is the hiden agenda of the NEA and why did they let you in on it?
Capn, while not denying the success of the IB program perhaps as a result of its standardized curriculum, admission thereto is governed by certain testing as well. Kinda like certain private schools in this regard.
Bottom line: when the lower two (or three) quartiles in ability are not in the game, academic success is so much easier to obtain.
VT–
Yup, you’re right too.
They select for the very best both in achievement and motivation, so of course a good outcome is assured.
But still the IB framework provides a lot of guidance for letting teachers know what the expected result or outcome should be.
If we could have national curriculum like the IB has international ones, it would go a long way in keeping students all over the country at a uniform level of instruction.
What chance does a migrant worker’s kid have now if they’re in three different schools every year?
hidden agendas of the NEA.”homosexual agendaliberal agendadrive by medias agendafeminazi agendaDid I leave anything out?
Yup, Capn, you and I are in total agreement with the need for a national curriculum. As posted on a different thread some days ago, and amped up a bit here, the mobility of society as a whole makes the entire concept of “local control” archaic. There should be a universal standard out there against which to measure a high school diploma, some assurance as to what was offered to the students and that a diploma means something more than a student keeping a seat warm for four years.
I think you forgot the all purpose agenda. Encouraging everyone in amerika to get an abortion.
And is destruction of heterosexual marriage it’s own agenda item, or is it a subset of the homosexual agenda?
heheheheheh. Enquiring minds want to know….
VT–
Good points, well said.
Have you ever considered a career in law? Hehehe.
“And is destruction of heterosexual marriage”no that’s walmarts agenda you need two sets of dishes towels and appliances it’s a capitalist plot
as they say “thanks for clearing that up” morq!
VT I hope that I don’t sound like I think we should do away with public schools because I don’t. I do however feel that we have gotten to far afield in our goals for students from the base education and that they need to go further than high school in their education paths. I won’t argue unions, social agendas, or any other insane diversion. We have got to do a better job of educating our children. That is the bottom line. However we accomplish this will work for me. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey have had the opportunity to study our current system. They all agree that is isn’t working.
I’m just saying stop beating a dead horse and work to fix what isn’t working or go to another system that will work be it voucher, charter schools, private schools, etc…
All this talk about proper central planning of society. You do not have to look hard to find failure after failure of that model. The only way such societies even exist after long periods is through force, the proverbial police-state.
Look at the comments of one of the government educators on this blog:
“Here’s a novel concept, force parents to be parents.”
Is it not enough to force everyone to pay for the sub-standard product that you decide to give them? Now you want to reach into their homes to regulate TV, I-Pods, games, and reading?
What failures of central planning of society, PM?
Japan’s centrally planned curriculum in which every student is studying the same lesson at the same minute of every day?
Japan, in which a sophomore in high school knows more algebra than our college graduates do?
ksgrm, I did not feel you were advocating total abolition of public education, but others perhaps did.
I agree that our current system isn’t working very well for many, many students. The data are clear on this. What, then, do we do about it? That’s the $64,000 question, to be sure.
It has always been interesting to me that we, as a country, have determined, for better or worse, that everyone is entitled to the same education, as opposed to other “developed” countries that begin to put students on separate tracks early in the game. I suspect that this is due to the populist sentiment held by our ancestors, and a feeling of if I pay the taxes, then my student is entitled.
What is particularly disturbing is the achievement gap between the genders, which to my way of thinking is as reprehensible as the “minority” achievement gap. It seems to be a well-recognized problem of some duration, but doesn’t seem to improve over time. As noted in the header, the way NCLB works appears to be based upon a skill set more commonly held by female students as opposed to male students. While I don’t know if this has always been true, I know what the model was back in the day; lecture, note taking, rote learning; much as is described now. And, back in the day, we had drop out, failure problems which were more common among the males than the females. As I began kindergarten some 51 years ago, and graduated from high school some 39 years ago, one would think that by now this issue would have been addressed in a better way; but, the assembly line model of school seems to prevail, perhaps with some adjustments, but essentially not different from then.
Of this much I am sure; fixing the problem will be very expensive, both in time and resources. I am not sure that we, as a society, are willing to expend either.
Has anyone that has posted to this blog thus far taught in a public school classroom recently? Or have an immediate relative (brother, sister, mom, dad, spouse, child)that does?
After a solid background in basic math, science and communication what should we teach our children? Can anyone say for certain what skills will be needed in the workplace 10 yrs. from now?
Brian, I can say that I have not; the closest I can come to having immediate family teaching in a public school classroom is my elder daughter, who is completing a Masters in Education, and is doing her practicum this Spring in Minneapolis. From her description, it sounds like a war zone in general; she feels fortunate to have been assigned to a “school within a school” that is essentially made up of college-bound students. She did an observation during the Fall semester in another high school in Minneapolis that by her account was similar in makeup to Wichita East (without the IB); the frustration in her voice when talking with her about the experience was palpable.
dot, the most important thing to teach, other than the basic stuff to which you allude, is how to continue to learn (if that is, indeed, teachable). No one has a crystal ball as to workplace skills necessary in ten years; but I suspect that whatever these may be, those that have a solid foundation in the “basics” combined with an ability to continue to learn will be better served to master them.
Do I really have to list the failures?
U.S.S.R.CubaPick virtually any African Nation
All centrally controlled models. All ruling through force. All with an elite class forcing their decisions on the rest.
Brian, I’ve taught at the college level but not high school or below.
And VT and morq, when I was in the workforce development biz, there was a published and often used list of ten skills needed for the future, regardless of the job.
I cant find it now, and dont remember it all, but it was stuff like reading comprehension, critical thinking, communication, ability to work in teams, basic math, etc.
Some of the big corps like AT&T were using it to transform their workforce from a compliant group to a thinking group.
Yeah, I know. After all those years of forcing them into the compliance mode, then they had to RETRAIN them to think all over again….
Brian,My wife taught elementary for 10 years in Wichita. Can be a real stressful job.
brian – many years ago I taught as a part of a volunteer program in an inner-city hight school in Cambridge. It was quite an experience.
ksfg, the irony therein is just too much. This is where education should be; the ability to think critically, etc.
The schools do try to get students to learn to work in teams; however, as in anything else, the success thereof is limited. I’ve never been a good team member, I guess I just don’t play well with others, notwithstanding all that very special experience and learning that comes from being an athlete! (sarcasm intended) This has alway been a bit of a problem for me, as I tend to do a bit too much “one man band” stuff; not a good committee member, but one heck of a one-man subcommittee!!
BDP Fleet- If you say something I disgree with , then that makes a communist, too- is that how it works?
Sorry- wrong thread.
heheheh Vaughn. I have the same problem. That’s why I am an entrepreneur. I’m too mean to work for anyone other than myself.
And my friends mention frequently that I dont suffer fools gladly. That makes it hard for me to be a good team player.
heheheheh
I am aware of my own weaknesses just as you are!
I have been for 11 years. I have been in both low and high socio-economic schools and the biggest difference is parental involvement in their kids lives. Not just school, but oevrall.Can schools do better? Yes we can always improve.We need to teach the skills listed above, but it is hard to objectively measure much of that.The idea that school is an assembly line is silly. You cannot make a child learn especially at the high school level, but you can provide them the best opportuntiy possible. And as a teacher you should.
We aren’t producing widgets, but hopefully life long learners and they have to be a part of the process otherwise it won’t get accomplished.
By the way, where I’m at school is out for the week
hawkeye, thanks for the input. I realize the asssembly line analogy isn’t the best, but it seemed to me to fit with my experience.
I totally agree with your observation that you’re not producing widgets but hopefully lifelong learners. That’s what I feel should be happening. I also agree with the difficulty of objective measurement of those things that should be occurring in school.
Have a good weekend.
You are all right… No one is really wrong here…
As someone who is not even a decade removed from High School AND have two kids in public school (and one more about to enter), I think I can speak with some knowledge here.
There is an inherent issue with public schools. When the kids are younger and in a single classroom environment the class pace is dictated by the slowest person in the class. When I first started school, that was solved by the teachers/schools would make resources available to assist the “slow kids” either during or after school to catch up. These days, some teachers try, but there are just so many of them that there aren’t the resources to cope so the entire class suffers as a result.
The language thing is major. There should be separate classes for “immigrant” kids who can’t speak and comprehend English at the same level as American’s can. These kids should be put on a very hard schedule so that they can be at the same level as the other children by the time they get to middle school.
Ok, I know that some of you are now saying; well that’s what the parents are for. Yes this is true, but you will always have the parents that WON’T do it, therefore it falls onto the school system. Unfortunately if the school system does nothing to educate and let these kids fall thought the system, the system will suffer later as they are more likely to commit a crime or live on welfare.
Back to it, when the kids get older into middle school and high school, they start getting into multiple classes and teachers. THIS is where I believe the school system its self inherently breaks down. Starting in 7th grade, we started switching classes with multiple teachers. This is where problems start, each teacher treats each class and each person the same. People such as myself struggled in English but excelled in Math and Science. So, I was confused as hell in English and got little help and was board out of my brain in Math and Science. This happens all thought out high school. The school dictates that you have to have X number of Science credits, X number of English credits, etc… but there are still the exact same classes for everyone.
There needs to be different levels at which we teach. This is where my Tract plan comes into play. Each person can choose from a program plan that they wish to follow, the one of a ultra smart academic, a standard academic, a trade learner and an advanced trade learner. This way it keeps everyone entertained and learning something.
Now, the argument of Unions comes into play, I understand both sides but I will side with the against a Union side. I have seen tenured teachers every year of my school days that were morons. Most of the time, I challenged them and won. I even got a few to quit or get fired. My point is that I do agree that SOME teachers start to get lax about their studies, their classes and attitudes after a number of years. I also understand and agree their sides that they have too much work and don’t necessarily get enough pay for what they do. So its an interesting balancing act. I think there should be a way of removing poorly performing teachers, just don’t know how yet…
Now, I also think we should abolish all current ways of funding schools and go to a European formula (wow, I know I just lost a few people here… Say Europe and they jump ship). The money follows the kids, the schools are required to take students up to their maximum capacity with no segregation. Anyone living in their “districts” gets first shot at open seats and than others from anywhere else are allowed in after. The money would be allocated every semester so that in the event there is some issue, the student can move at the break if need be.
This plan could easily be incorporated into the existing infrastructure of our existing school system. Over the years it would sort itself out and in my opinion make the community/country a much better place.
Well, that’s my long winded version…
I find the excuses for “Boys Gone Wild” in today’s society just laughable. I have two children. My oldest has a masters in education from KU. She teaches 7th grade English in Richardson, Texas; one of the ’snob-hills’ of Dallas. What she tells me of the attitude of kids and parents that frequent that junior high is enough to make you gag! The boys, mostly WHITE are pampered beyond comprehension. They whine about being pressed to study, won’t follow rules and are constantly on their cell phones or playing video games in class. The girls, for the most part are no better. This crap about White boys being sidswiped by those other than white is garbage.My son is a junior at KU. NO, he’s not an athlete. His major is computer science. He was taught early on that rules are made to be followed and that it was up to him to complete his homework AND to do the chores around the house. Both of us worked while they attended school. Some say it was remarkable that they both made honor roll every year in the public schools considering that one of us worked days and the other nights. But that did not give them an opening to cut up. Now, or daughter is 25 and doing well in life. Our son will soon turn 21.Maybe we were lucky. But couple that luck with good parenting and we have two great young adults who know how to succeed in life. Giving boys an excuse by blaming the schools, blaming another culture or sex only adds more fuel to a raging fire.White boys need to understand that this world is NOT fair. Get them off the couch, get them away from the video games, the hot cars and trucks the parents of these boys will find out how to bring them into the 21st century!!!
Whatever happened to parental responsibility? My husband and I raised two children and both are well adjusted, successful people. One of them is a preschool teacher. From what she tells me, the biggest problem with all kids is their behavior (yes, even in preschool).
She has been told by her superiors to not tell the kids ‘no’ and to reward them with candy if they do what she tells them to do – even after the 5th time of telling them. Is this really what we need to be teaching these kids?
It seems like kids today expect everything and at the moment they want it. Parents are being told that their kids can have breakfast at school, lunch at school (both meals maybe free), free transportation, which I’ve been told includes taxi rides for some children. And now there is a program for backpacks filled with food being sent home with the kids for the weekend. Do you really believe that backpack is not grabbed by the adults in that kid’s household the minute he/she gets home?
And then the matter of single parent households. It is sometimes better financially for the mother to be single and she would probably qualify for all these free programs that I mentioned above.
But where is the father of the children? Where are the grandparents and other extended family members? Society has dumbed down parenting so bad that we now are reaping what we have sown. The boys failure to thrive in the eductional setting is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion.
I have heard that the teachers are being told to not use red ink when grading/correcting papers. It’s too harsh.
That red ink is probably the same theory that my daughter is to not tell her kids ‘no’. It hurts their self esteem.
Lucee, parental and family responsibility is needed, no question. As to free breakfast/lunch, that is, IIRC, a federal program which in USD 259 is called “Free and Reduced Lunch”. The free transportation is dependent upon whether the student is more than 2.5 miles from school (state statute), a result of the deseg consent decree, or is in special education (the “taxi” rides, in some instances where there isn’t a “Special Ed” bus available). The food in the backpacks is, again IIRC, a volunteer thing for low income students eligible for free/reduced lunch. I do not recall the income guidelines at the moment, but I know that there are many students who come from two-parent households who qualify therefor.
By the way, for anyone interested, the transportation money comes from a separate fund than the general fund money used for school operations. The transportation funds for special education students is, I believe, a part of the special ed budget, again not a part of the general fund. While 259 has, in the past, due to the level of federal and state funding for special ed had to transfer substantial money from the general fund to special ed, due to the large number of students here, including many with very high costs, there was little it could do about it, as special ed is a federally and state required program (although the feds don’t fund it as was promised when the act creating it was passed; I’ve been told, but don’t specifically know, the feds were to provide 25% of the cost, but generally provide around 11-15%).
While red ink is or was the standard for grading, “back in the day” I recall receiving homework, tests, etc., graded in green, red, blue, and in one memorable case, black ink; guess the teachers’ red pens had run out.
I know the food programs are federal and I have no problem feeding hungry kids. My problem is that it sets up the parents to not be held responsible for making sure their kids are fed before coming to school A what incentive is there to better yourself with your job if you would lose your eligibility for these free programs?
My parents were responsible and considered it their job to raise their kids to be self reliant. What happened to those general rules of parenting? I raised my kids to be responsible adults and now they are paying for other people’s lack of parenting skills. How is this benefiting our country?
Well, lucee, both parents working at minimum wage jobs would, IIRC, still qualify their student(s) for the free/reduced lunch program.
Yes, parents should be sure their children are fed before they come to school; but, it might be that even though they are working, the food runs out before the next paycheck comes in. This is not to excuse anyone from their responsibilities, just an observation. And, in anticipation of the “get a higher paying job” response, many of these folks are bluntly not equipped to so do. Yes, it well could be their fault; but, at one time, high school dropouts could obtain a job at one of the plants at a good hourly wage. Those days are long past. Does anyone else remember the stories of the Boeing employees not being rehired by Spirit; many of them didn’t finish high school (yes, they should have) and went to work as soon as they could. Not saying these folks have students still in K-12, but it is an example of early mistakes coming back to haunt.
OMR, your daughter’s observations are, unfortunately, on a par with mine. Without going into details, I have observed similar behavior among white boys and girls in middle school here in Wichita, and the alibi parents are a big part of the problem. Coupling this with an overwhelming desire on the part of a few parents that their sons (usually) spend more time trying to achieve success athletically in pursuit of that athletic scholarship so dad & mom don’t have to pay for college (even though, in most cases, they can afford it) is mind-boggling, to say the least.
What comes through loud and clear to me by your post is that education and hard work to achieve the same were valued in your home, your children understood this, and you and your husband made sure they did. Were that others believe/feel the same, it would be extremely beneficial to their offspring, together with those forced to inhabit the same classrooms with them.
Nice post, vaughn. It is my experience that kids (boys) do spend much time trying to get better at a sport in hopes of the scholarship, which will never come. If the parents are paying attention and if the skools have a solid grade requirement (to play), then they should still get at least passing grades. Sometimes, the sterotypical “dumb jock”, is all too true, but I believe in the carrot theory.I’ve coached basketball for many years and know that basketball is just a game. In fact, it’s an instrument to teach the kids the life lessons the need to know (don’t tell them that, it would ruin everything). The carrot is you can play, but your grades have to be in order. For the dumb jock types, it may be the motivation they need. The funnel theory is that the higher you go, the narrower the funnel gets. Everybody plays in the lower grades, some play in the higher grades, almost none of them will play in college. Grades first, play second.
Cuba?
Actually ProudMan, if it weren’t for our crushing economic embargo, they’d be doing pretty well . . .
The US has to make sure than any other model besides hegemony for giant multinationals fails.
If Cuba’s economy is really so bad, why do we have to embargo the life out of them?
Free market Haiti, btw, is in a lot worse shape than Cuba, and it gets a lot more help . . .
Fleet,
>I went to public skool and I was happy with my education. We ended up putting our kids in Catholic skool (my wife is Catholic) and it has worked out very well.
School!
I’m all about misspellings and bad phrasing, but c’mon!
I hope you people solve schools scholastically, its a couple of years before I have one to four if its possible.
Next generation should have better school programs where its unreasonable any child can’t get an education.
It has to be affordable, first thing. Schools supplies should be free for grade school kids.
I hope the parents aren’t using the money they save in a plan like that to drink, get high, or abuse the kids because they can’t be a real parent.
Parenting is a problem with some kids bad behaviors. But lazy kids don’t do their class work too. Lazy kids because both parent or one parent has to work long hours.
Kids should have uniforms in public school so they don’t worry about clothes to wear.
Breakfast, recess, then lunch should be offered.
School until 5:00 possibly might work too.
Pushing sports and after school programs outside until later in the day when its a little cooler during the hot months.
I like the focus on schools more than anything else to really help a community improve. I see the need for new schools still to be built because housing has extended on edges of the city.
Older schools continue needing to be improved. People have to support in any way, the schools in their community.
mrage-
Surely, Shirley, you have a better sense of humor than that.
I even went to the libary and axed how to spel skool, and that’s what they sed two due.
Interestingly, fleet, the NCAA, in its own way, has added to the need for grades with the Prop 48 (I know it’s different, now) requirements of grades in required courses (required by NCAA) combined with SAT/ACT scores. I find in my discussions with students who aspire to compete post-high school that many of them are unaware of this, although their coaches/ADs surely do.
Sort of unrelated, but perhaps a tangential one: on the sports call-in show on KFH the other day, I heard a caller decrying the fact that many of the HS players from ICT end up in Junior Colleges, and questioning whether they are receiving adequate coaching.
Now, I’m not involved with high school athletics here in 259, but of the few trumpeted D1 types lately, it has been my understanding that even though the young folks had D1 talent, they lacked the necessary combination of test scores + grades. I place at least part of the blame for this on the high schools for not informing them/keeping them informed of what they need to do. One memorable moment as a parent: several years ago, the younger, as part of either the Duke TIP/Northwestern Talent Search program was at WSU to take either the ACT or SAT as a middleschooler. About 10 minutes before the exams were to begin, in walked what appeared to be an entire HS basketball team, dressed in their warmups, accompanied by a coach, to take the test. In talking with one of the young men at the end of the morning, he told me he was a senior, and this was his fourth try at the minimum scored needed for a schollie. As no one from the area received a D1 schollie that year, I always presumed he didn’t make it. It was, however, remarkable to see the young men in their warmups there on a Saturday morning.
Vaughn,
Kids need more access to what their future might be. Walking on a college campus with a parent. Having college books on the shelf at home in whatever is interesting. Taking a “college class” in some way. Could be in grade school, more often in high school.
Testing happens but its not life defining.
An 18 year old doesn’t pass the SAT or ACT but has credits to graduate, is fine. Sports doesn’t have to be an instant career. It could take years to be an athlete in college or professional. 18, can’t pass a test, by age 20 he or she might be able to.
It takes maturity in some cases. The distance from high school life helps.
Kids have to learn what their good at, instead of being bad in all their classes.
Kids who take drugs, drink out of control, vandalize and steal AND gets bad grades are a society problem.
Other kids do those bad things in the street on occasion but still get decent grades in school to pass.
No child is perfect, everybody has flaws, makes mistakes.
Adults can’t limit kids to a better life, but saying you failed a test, that’s it. That’s all you can accomplish.
Coaching in sports has to teach players that. It may take some year to achieve your sports dreams. A lot of the time that doesn’t mean athletic abilities.
It means achieving a balance, with the mental decisions in life. Exercise the brain, same as strengthening a body.
The truly sad thing is that the one kid out of hundreds has the talent to get a scholarship, but can’t get it because of grades. There was a break down somewhere. Of course, the kid may not have it, skool-wise, and no amount of tutoring can get it for him, but the adults should try. On the other hand, the high skool coaches are under pressure to win and may look the other way. That’s where the administration should step in, but they have there own problems (skool image and all). A complete lack of doing the right thing. Those coaches know that basketball is a tiny section of the kid’s life. The parents should know it, too.
For those of you who think teachers have such a great life and job, I have only one question for you. WHY AREN’T YOU TEACHING?If it’s such a sweet gravy train then I’m sure some of you naysayers would love to get in on it. I did it for several years and there is no way you would get me back in the classroom as a teacher again. The students were bad enough but the parents were impossible!
On the IB program,
Trent Wetta was an IB student. He was given mostly B+’s, despite being a slacker. Not representative of a rigorous academic program requiring diligent study to get through.
IB is PRIVATE. People need to get informed. The International Baccalaureate Organisation, headquartered in Geneva, is an NGO. Most IB programme schools around the world are PRIVATE, developed for overseas-stationed businessmen and diplomatic-corps persons, to enable their children to receive an education qualifying them for admission to First World universities. The other options are British, French and American (private) schools in many international-trade-based large cities, or boarding school enrollment in First World nations.
USD 259 is purchasing a PRIVATE VENDOR’S product. IBO provides the curriculum, trains public teachers to deliver the curriculum, reviews teachers’ and schools’ performance and even governs class grading. For example, under contractual stipulations that USD 259 has agreed to comply with, IBO can overrule teacher-issued grades in a class order to maintain statistical concordance between teacher-issued grades and IB test scores. East High teachers can say, “My class grades aren’t overruled by IBO.” That’s because private-contractor IBO has trained them to give “the right” grades over the past 25 years, and teachers have learned “the rules” just as other teachers are complying with NCLB test-score-achieving “rules”. So much for East High teachers’ professional independence as knowledge conveyors and evaluators.
The irony here is that public educators don’t complain if the public school system purchases a private-sector education programme, but they don’t want parents to make that choice, vis-a-vis parent-empowering vouchers. Hmmm. Interesting situation for the public to judge. Private-program education is okay, if the “public authorities” choose it.
The same odd thinking applied to the BOE’s decision, under the previous Superintendent’s urging, to turn a few schools over to private-contractor Edison.
The IB programme is not a bad product, but it’s not equivalent to Advanced Placement, which is not actually sold to public or private schools, under rigid-conditions contract, but which only provides as much or as little voluntary RECOMMENDATIONS as is requested by teachers and schools. The College Board does not say, “Here is what you MUST teach.” It only says, “Here is what we SUGGEST, according to data that shows what helps students achieve high AP scores.” IBO, in stark contrast says, “Here is what you MUST TEACH, UNDER OUR BINDING PUBLIC-SCHOOLS/PRIVATE CONTRACTOR CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENT.” Which is tantamount to saying, tacitly “In coming to us, YOU ADMIT that you don’t know how to prepare students for university study. If you did know how to do this, you would not be coming to us to purchase our product. Therefore you must follow our regimen exactly, or else, you’re going to undermine our programme. So you must submit to our rules, and make us your programme overseer (boss).”
So how good is this programme? IBO doesn’t do the analysis that the College Board does in university/college achievement to evaluate special programs’ ULTIMATE performance. In AP’s case, the students admitted to AP courses are above-average academic performers in high school, so the data reflect this, but they have compared data to similarly-performing high-school students from non-AP-course offering schools, such as rural schools and IB schools. But IBO DOESN’T EVEN GIVE A WHIT to review its graduates’ university/college performance. Interesting dichotomy.
But we have some reasonable data, nevertheless. At KU 33% of IB Higher Level courses are given university credit (12 of 36), for sufficiently high IB test scores (6-7). In stark contrast, 94% of AP courses (32 of 34) are credited (qualifying scores 3-5). Which is better, 33% or 94%?
A top-scoring 7 student for IB Higher Level English gets 2 semesters of regular English composition credit, but has to take 3rd semester English comp. That’s not bad, eh? But top-scoring 5 student in AP English Literature and Composition gets 3 semesters of HONORS ENGLISH credit, completely fulfilling the university’s English comp requirement.
KU is a College Board member. Is it prejudiced because of this? NO. KU wants to see as many students as possible graduate, and do it in 4-5 years, rather than see students drop out or take 6-7 years to graduate. It has analyzed IB students’ university performance, and found that it (the university) CAN’T grant advanced credit for 67% of IB Higher Level courses, even for students who earn top-level IB exam grades, because past-credited students’ university performance has demonstrated they haven’t taken university-level courses in most IB Higher Level courses. AP courses have been found, with only two exceptions, to be equivalent to university-level courses, according to student performance when students have been placed in second- or third-semester course as first-semester freshmen.
Increasing numbers of public school students are earning four or more AP course credits–occasionally eight or more. Increasing numbers of kids are taking AP courses starting in 10th grade, and rarely, but increasingly, in 9th grade. For IB, Higher Level courses cannot be taken until 11th grade, and college-creditable course completion is limited to THREE Higher Level classes for public schools like Wichita East, although private IB programme schools are allowed to enroll kids in FOUR college-creditable classes.
This distinction reflects the fact that parents and often their employers are paying $15,000-22,000 for PRIVATE IB education, and the parents are among the social elite, whereas the public version was created to help inner-city minority students. The original operant theory for public IB was that if, in the successful private model, kids from Africa, Latin America and Asia could learn subjects taught in English or French, and qualify for Euro-American university admission, the programme should be applicable to African-American and Latino students in America. Unfortunately, the children of well-educated people of color, who work as diplomats and business managers, are not equivalent to the inner-city and rural children of uneducated janitors and farmworkers.
It’s impossible to know whether formal IB curricula differ between public IB and private IB schools, because IBO, as a private European corporation, doesn’t have to publicly reveal this data. But if one looks at the published teachers’ CVs in Web-reporting private international schools in America, it is very clear the private 4-Higher-Level-cours schoools do not employ primarily employ teachers who have public teachers college bachelor’s degrees.
In essence the private IB schools are allowed to hire teachers on the same free-choice basis as other independent schools, i.e. teachers do not have to meet public-schoolteacher licensure requirements. Interesting dichotomy between private-IB-schools and public-IB-schools.
So, IB is a two-class system. The largest IB school in America is the UN school–tuition $22,000. The second-largest is the Atlanta International School, whose high-school tuition is $17,000. Nations that give education VOUCHERS to their diplomats, and international corporations that do the same, and parents who pay these levels of fees out-of-pocket, are receiving a different kind of education than is provided in public IB schools. The former can teach an extra Higher Level course. They can hire teachers who have independent-school credentials. To put things in context, their tuition is far higher the tuition at Wichita Collegiate, Wichita’s most expensive school, $10,000, and at the Independent School, tuition $8000.
If Wichita East is spending $15,000+ for each of its students, which is implausible, where is this fact publicly revealed? Wichita East is a public school. So why can’t we the public see the expenditure data? Apophis says I a want to destroy public education. No, HE does. Because he isn’t supporting public-expenditure transparency. Unless he is arguing that public high school education is federal “national security”-equivalent “black program”. Right.
It is worth pointing out that approximately 400 public schools in America have IB. Approximately 11,000 PUBLIC SCHOOLS have AP. That’s a 1:28 disparity. In the private sector, the numbers are 30 vs. approximately 3000 a 1: 100 disparity.
AP is a product of the College Board, i.e. America’s colleges and universities. (KU, KSU and Baker U are CB members.) IBO has ZERO connection to ANY American college or university. If you want your kids to be prepared for admission to American universities and colleges, and succeed after admission, which program would you select: one specifically designed to intercalate with American university and colleges, or one NOT designed for such? I would call this a “an obvious choice” but maybe some people don’t “get” the discrepancy.
ZERO Kansas private high schools offer an IB programme. Several dozen offer AP courses.
AP’s stated mission is to provide high-level academic preparation for college. IBO’s stated mission is to promote “a more peaceful world”. Academic vs. social goals. There is nothing wrong with the former or the latter. They’re just different.
It is not that AP is failing to promote minority students’ success, and therefore their future opportunities to do very well in life as adults. AP has shown success in teaching minority students in integrated classes. In fact, a higher percentage of all African American students nationally score 5’s in AP Physics C than white Kansas students, and every year minority-student AP participation increases, so the program is working for minority students nationally. You can fulfill admirable social goals through rigorous academic preparation of ever-increasing numbers of minority students being enrolled in AP.
IB is essentially “Baby Steps” college prep. Unfortunately, USD 259 is “hemmed in” due to concerns about “segregation” complaints”. If East High were greenlighted to offer 20+ AP courses, as top public integrated academic magnet high schools in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Denver and KC do (some of which also offer IB as an alternative—two choices within a school), there could be possible complaints by African-American parents that white and Asian students were enrolled in AP courses, while African-American students were denied places, and consigned to “second-tier” IB. “Segregation within a school”.
If the district allowed Northwest High to offer 20 AP courses, you’d have “white flight”, actually Asian flight too, but Asians are somehow not considered to be a minority, because they do very well in school. Actually better than whites, in math and science. The fact that Asian parents have very low divorce rates, and they highly value education and hard work, may have something to do with this.
You can’t blame parents for a school ethos that deliberately holds back gifted children. Even if you do, don’t forget that the parents are 4th generation products of public education. It isn’t their fault if most Wichita parents can’t help their children do algebra or geometry problems, because they never learned how to do them in their own public-school upbringings. They were not taught to write English-literature essays, for that matter.
There’s a remarkable public middle-school teacher who has a small 7th-grade class of gifted geometry students, who wants to teach them Algebra II in 8th grade. He’s facing strong resistance from the high school math teachers who feel he is encroaching on their “turf”. His opponents DO NOT UNDERSTAND that neither KU, KSU, WSU or any other Kansas or American public or private university or college INSISTS ON SEEING “Algebra II” on a student’s high school transcript. To wit, if a student’s high school transcript shows “Precalculus” for 9th grade, “Calculus” for 10th, and more-advanced math in 11th and 12th, the university and college admissions committees KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS. It DOES NOT MEAN to them, “GEE THIS STUDENT IS DEFICIENT IN MATH.” What it does mean is a ticket not only to fast admission, but if the parents have limited financial means, generous grant-based financial aid that reduces, and often completely eliminates, work-study and student-loan burdens.
So why would PUBLIC high school teachers want to shoot in the foot a dedicated and extraordinary PUBLIC middle school teacher—a professional colleague—and his dedicated and highly-talented PUBLIC-SCHOOL students? Until this question can be answered, and until counterproductive anti-high-academic-performance attitudes can be corrected, too many public educators are undermining public education.
VT supports both public and private education. He has a lovely wife, who is an administrative assistant to a middle school principal, with whom I have interacted many times, but only recently “made the connection” about their relationship.
His oldest daughter attended private Carleton College, and is now enrolled in a public university master’s program.
I have a son who spent four years in a private college just south of Maine, who’s interviewing for NYC program that would put him into a public classroom, while helping him get a master’s in education to earn a regular public teachers license. He tells me that NYC is breaking its system into small specialized-curriculum schools. These are essentially charter schools.
For example, Harlem has a maritime-careers school, and a performing-arts school. African-American students are being challenged, and are rising to the challenge.
Maybe the USD259 BOE and Superintendent should visit NYC.
Cuba? Cuba is a great example of a successful planned society?!? I suppose once you get past the death squads, lack of freedom, and the multitudes who would rather risk death on the open seas than life in Cuba it’s a great place to be from.
But hey, communism has only killed 100,000,000 people. Let’s give it another chance.
Well, PM, obviously I’m not trying to bring back communism. That would be insane.
But it’s equally insane to say that gov’t can’t do anything right and we shouldn’t use it to solve problems.
BTW, every thing you said about “communist” Cuba holds equally true for free-market Haiti and Mexico . . . and they aren’t subject to a crushing embargo.
How do you explain that?
Once again, you don’t even know what your own position is. You are advocating centrally planned societies. That’s communism, where the state tells you what life is. It’s also a dictatorship and totalitarian.
But don’t let that stop you from constantly empowering the government.
Lastly, learn to differentiate a free-market from a free society.
Government does a lot of things well. We wouldn’t have modern medicine without it. Who provides the vast majority of doctors’, nurses’ and other healthcare providers’ training? More than 90% is provided by public institutions of higher education.
The drug industry would be selling little more than patent medicines today without the tens of thousands of public-educated Ph.D. scientists–including private-university graduates who could not have gotten their degrees without National Science Foundation stipends, who learned how to do advanced-technology science while training in National Institutes of Health-funded biomedical research projects–and bachelor’s degreed technicians it employs, not to mention public research knowledge, particularly basic, that has given humankind the understanding of good-health- and disease-causing processes, particularly of bio-molecular mechanisms that drug companies have been able to freely use to make effective drugs. (And make billions of dollars annually, selling these drugs to the public at exorbitant prices. At least in the good old U.S. of A.)
We wouldn’t have PC’s without government. Intel wasn’t founded to sell microprocessors to businesses and consumers, it was founded to develop small and light electronic devices for military aviation and NASA space vehicles. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit working on a government aerospace project.
The Internet, as we all know, was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to preserve military communication in the event of a nuclear war.
Social Security must be changed due to a fast-rising retiree to worker ratio, but it worked well for many decades. Talk to 80 year old Republicans. How many of them are rejecting SS and Medicare benefits, standing firm on the principle that it is their obligation to help shrink government expenditures? Maybe elderly Libertarians shred their checks and pay out of pocket for all their medical care. Probably some do, if they are multimillionaires or billionaires (a lot of Libertarians are not).
Public education needs to be reinvented. Private education too. It has been known for decades that in general, boys tend to have stronger math and science proclivities than girls. Girls have higher verbal and written language propensities than boys, in general.
It would not be “evil” to accelerate mathematics and science education for innately talented students in elementary school, and if natural selection tended to fill gifted classes with 80% boys and 20% girls, or even 90% / 10%, while reverse ratios occurred in accelerated reading and writing classes, this would not be bad.
You can’t go wrong by identifying children’s interests, and feeding those interests. If you have a math class and the top student is a girl, that’s great. If she’s the top math student in the city, that’s wonderful. But if half the math classes in a district’s elementary schools, or even 10% of them have girls at the top place or #2, this means that mathematics is being improperly taught.
To achieve this means teaching “math” that is either not real mathematics, or else it is real mathematics, but is paced so slowly, with repetitive assignments, that girls are artificially “promoted”. Most girls who quickly figure out what is required to solve a certain type of problem are happy to do 10 of these problems, and feel good about getting them right. Most boys who quickly figure out the nature of the problem feel great about solving the first one, and are happy to do one or maybe two more, but strongly resent having to do NINE more. Girls have greater tedium tolerance.
Boys are more exploratory and adventurous than girls. Video games, and TV and movie choices show this. Hollywood is totally clued-in here. How many teenage girls want to see the next violent-adventure, special-effects extravaganza, coming to a theater near you this summer?
We see young women doing snowboarding and surfing. But I remember going to the beach in the 60’s. There were no girls on surfboards. It wasn’t that they were prohibited, it was that surfing was then experimental, and essentially, anyone who tried it had to figure it out on his own. Experienced male surfers ran over young male “grommets”. But some male grommets persisted and eventually became expert surfers. Many more quit. Girls weren’t interested in entering this “male competition ritual”.Similarly for snowboarding. In the 80’s, I lived in a ski town. Girls were all over the place on skis, and I’m not embarrassed to say, some were better skiiers than most males, including this one. But snowboarding was exclusively male, and teenage-male at that, because it was experimental.
Once the performance methods became defined, and surfing and snowboarding schools were established that said, “here is what you do, A, then B, then C…”, girls joined the boys. They want to have fun too, but they want guidance, whereas boys are more interested in doing “frontier” stuff, i.e. trying untested things, and seeing if they work or not.
Boys tend to be greater risk-takers. There are women who surf 10-foot Sunset Beach. (They learned because their expert-surfer fathers and brothers protected them from the “barbarian” boys and men.) Most male surfers worldwide can’t ride these large and very dangerous waves. Women who ride Sunset would rank among the top 2% of the world’s male surfers. But they’re not taking on 25+ Waimea. No woman has surfed 60+ foot “Jaws” in Maui, or 40+ foot Maverick’s south of San Francisco (which killed one of the world’s best Hawaiian Big Wave surfers a few years ago). Someday this will change, but the boys will always lead the way when it comes to pushing the envelop of extreme performance. Look at the X-Games.
Schools are not about risk-taking or adventure, or charting untested waters. They are primarily places of routines-ingraining. Schools are artificially promoting girls’ natural proclivities, and punishing boys’ natural proclivities.
In AP courses, girls are artificially being encouraged to take them over boys, at a 54% to 46% clip–the same differential as for college and university enrollment.
But here’s the funny thing: boys statistically significantly outscore girls on AP tests in almost every subject.
The AP test-grading scale is essentially a numeric form of F-A, i.e. 1-5. 3 is passing, and most colleges and universities grant credit towards graduation for this score (equivalent to a “C”).
The problem is, thousands of boys who could score 3 (”C”) and to a lesser degree 4 (”B”), are being excluded from AP classes, while girls who score 1 (”F”) and 2 (”D”) are being disproportionately enrolled. (This is a matter of statistical measurement: boys’ scores distributions are “top heavy” relative to girls’.) Why? That’s a $64,000 question. I personally can’t believe it is because parents want their daughters to pursue advanced academic coursework more than their sons. I think it’s more likely due to public-education “social engineering”, but that’s an unproven hypothesis
What we can be certain of is, a non-college-creditable AP test score in a college-level course means that the student gets a “leg up” in college preparation, because the student will essentially see the subject matter a second time in college/university, whereas the same-qualification student who didn’t get to take an AP course will be seeing it in college/university for the first time. Guess who will more likely succeed in the college/university course, the person who is seeing the material for the very first time, or somebody who has some prior exposure, i.e. the person who has twice as long a time period to learn the subject matter?
The deck is being stacked against boys. It isn’t that they can’t do anything. The problem is schools don’t allow boys to do what they are best at.
I see heartlander can’t resist bloviating again. It would be different if you actaully had a CLUE about what is actually going on in USD 259.
For one thing, I have never heard of an “administrative assisstant” to a middle school principal. Do you just make this shit up? For another, East HS DOES offer AP courses.
Is heartlander even a taxpayer in USD 259? If not, he has no business criticizing anything about the district.
heartlander just hates public schools, this much is obvious.
Speaking of communism, have any of you read the loony Letter to the Editor in today’s Beagle? It’s from Pam Unruh from Towanda. Here is a sample…..
“If we were on guard, socialist presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could not even enter the race. ”
That is the rational portion of the letter. Read the whole thing and then ponder on why Kansas is the laughing stock of the nation.
Pam Unruh from Towanda must be heartlander’s twin.
Apophis, I live in the Andover district. The state and County of Sedgwick get my property tax money and the state apportions my contribution as part of aggregate state-collected revenues to 305 school districts statewide. The money does not get disagreggated, ala “This property tax check came from a business or home within the USD 259 district, so 59% of it goes to USD 259.” It doesn’t work that way and you know it.
How do we know you know it? Because YOU specifically posed an exortation to WEBlog readers last year to join the USD 259 caravan to demand an additional $25 million from the legislature beyond its planned payment to USD 259. Are you claiming amnesia?
So, I’ll leave it to readers here to make their own conclusions as to whether you have become temporarily forgetful of USD 259’s funding mechanisms, or whether you’re mounting another demogagic attack against me, and if emotions can be swayed by readers’ ignorance of the tax-and-expenditure laws, that’s a good attack tactic, in your mind.
You may think you are a science teacher, in your mind, but if polemic such as you exercise here suffuses your classroom, I feel really bad for children who must listen to it. Maybe it’s people like you are are pushing boys to tune out in class, and for American students to be falling far behind the leading nations in math and science knowledge. Have you ever thought about that possibility?
Vaughn;I’m glad to see there are some that fully understand the value of parenting among our young men.Having said that there is a correction that I have to make in regards to your post. You see OMR is a man. That’s right I amd the husband and the father of those two kids I mentioned. I’m sure you meant no foul. And I take it as none. However, I can see why you man think I was a woman because most men, especially black men fail to see the value of teaching their young men through tough and rigid rules and morals. My son was taught early on that he and only he is responsible for what goes on in his life. Sure, we all make mistakes. But we have to pay for those mistakes. One thing we never did was pay him to do the chores around the house. That makes no sense to pay for something he has to do when he owns a home. Those things have to be done. Now he fully understands what we taught him. He hated it when his roommates didn’t follow through helping with chores in the apartment. Now he lives on his own and appreciates those learned skills. Hopefully, he will continue with those skills in addition to those learned at KU! I am proud of him and his sister! I am proud of the way his mother and I brought them up!!!
Any more attacks on me heartlander?
Why can’t you just admit that you hate the public school system? Could this be because YOU think are above everyone else?
heartlander, I will never deny that I have in the past and will continue to lobby in the future for adequate funding of our public schools. Our children deserve no LESS.
I do stand by my assertion that if you are NOT part of USD 259, you have NO basis to criticize this district.
Shame on YOU heartlander………., you claim to be a “man of science, yet you support teaching religion in the science classroom; SHAME ON YOU!
Heartlander;Are you saying that you pay school taxes to USD 259 although you live in the Andover district? If so I believe you’re in a category all by yourself. That’s legally impossible. Living in the Andover school district makes you liable only for USD 385 school taxes not USD 259. If that’s not what you meant then my apologies for getting your post wrong!
Apophis, nice hack job on me re associating my thoughts with those of Pam Unruh. It was especially nice that you didn’t let facts interfere with your diatribe.
Hillary can’t win because she has too much baggage. One. She refuses to concede that she made a mistake in voting to empower Bush to invade Iraq. John Edwards has honestly admitted he made a wrong decision. But Hillary has an “I can’t admit I made a mistake,” personality, like a certain President and VP we have come to know.
She may have had some good ideas about National Health Care, but we will never know, because she kept her commission’s membership and work secret. Foolish, foolish move. Her secrecy allowed the insurance industry to propagandize the public, while she wasn’t laying out her plan for the little people to examine.
She’s not a Democrat’s Democrat. Bill would have been happy to move back to Arkansas. She wouldn’t have it, because she had unfulfilled political aspirations of her own. She picked New York (she never lived in New York) the most expensive state in America to develop a senatorial campaign. You can’t win in New York without HUGE MONEY contributions from people who take limousines and helicopters, not the subway, to work. She’s an elitist.
Obama’s got populist charisma and conveys a sense of deep decency. But he can’t win next year. He doesn’t have the requisite leadership experience as a city, state and two-thirds of a term national legislator. He may be VP-qualified, but even that may be a stretch. If he runs for Illinois governor in 2010 (which nicely dovetails with his Senate term’s end), and wins, and develops a strong track record in that office as Illinois’ first-ever African American governor, then he’ll be very ready for a presidential run in 2016, having 6 years of executive leadership under his belt. He’ll be 55 at inauguration, a good age for a president.
Frankly, if Arnold were eligible, he’d get enough bipartisan votes to trounce his competition. At his State of the State address in January, he got standing ovations, repeatedly, from both sides of the aisle. You have to be an outstanding statesman to garner that level of approbation.
On three major issues, he credited Dem legislators for their proposals, and announced, “I can work with you on that.” He sent a loud message, “We in Sacramento must put aside our own self-interests to build a great state. This state is ALL of our responsibility, Democrats and Republicans, alike.”
So, these are my views. I’m sorry that Apophis isn’t interested in what I think, but prefers to scurriously label people he doesn’t like by spouting false inanities. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that when he does this, he undermines his own credibility.
ah, heartlander……….most people who frequent this blog understand that YOU have no credibility! How does it work out when YOU (who has NO credibility), accuses ME of having no credibility? What does a double negative denote heartlander?
So, Heartlander, Arnold would be a good president, according to you, because he has been Gov of California for twelve minutes or so, but Obama is too inexperienced?
Really? At least Obama has have a history of public service, whereas Arnold is best known as the Gropenator.
Hillary cannot win the presidency because she won’t admit that vote was a mistake, so what does that say about EVERY Republican? In case you have not noticed, there has not been a SINGLE Republican that has denounced the Bush War of Choice. Not one Republican has said that HIS vote was a mistake.
I find is disengenuos that Republicans criticize Hillary for her vote, but they take no responsibility for their own positions.
I’m sorry, but some of you don’t seem to understand school financing. When USD 259 joined several districts to get “fair share” education revenues, did they sue themselves? It may sound absurd, but this is the necessary conclusion of your positions. Either that, or they sued the USD 259 BOE for not raising the local mill levy.
They sued the STATE. The presiding judge then ruled that the STATE LEGISLATURE must correct inter-district and overall funding deficiencies.
But the State cannot allocate funding to schools without collecting taxes throughout the state. Where do you think it gets the money to disburse State funds to districts? If public education were exclusively a district-property-owner-funded matter, USD 259 would have had no one to sue on a complaint of underfunding, except the USD 259 BOE, which didn’t happen. Did it?
I might also add that I pay federal taxes, which are aggregated in Washington, and disbursed to many districts for Title I programs, districts, such as USD 259.
So, please decist your false and inflammatory demagoguery. One of the reasons I don’t post very often anymore,and don’t even read WEBlog daily anymore is that there are too many ad hominem attacks, and uninformed diatribes. The destructive impulses shown by some writers ruin what could be an intelligent-debate forum.
I could point out that “Apophis” has not given any reasonable evidence to establish he is a USD259 teacher. Three nics alleging that he is doesn’t create reality. Ten nics doesn’t. A hundred doesn’t. I’ve given up asking “Apophis” to identify himself and his school, and his credentials. Frankly, I realize it is fruitless, because I understand something: “Apophis” loves living on the public taxpayers’ backs, and judging OTHER PEOPLE’s CHILDREN, but he doesn’t want to be accountable TO the public who gives him a lifetime sinecure.
His accusations that I didn’t have the background I claimed moved me to identify myself by real name. Apophis then verified my credentials.
But he didn’t reciprocate. Ahh, that was enlightening. Get other people to surrender information about themselves, but don’t submit your own information. That’s not democratic, dear readers. It’s working behind closed doors. Apophis wants YOUR MONEY. He doesn’t want to let you know what he’s DOING WITH YOUR MONEY. Or mine. Or your kids.
In classrooms, teachers finagle all kinds of information from students about their families and home life. Not all teachers do this, but it has become a much more popular pasttime than when some of us went to school. But they don’t share their own personal information about themselves. Let’s get real. You parents, do you want strangers knowing a lot about you? While you know nothing about them?
“Apophis” may be an actual teacher. There is zero tangible evidence of this, but he MAY be a teacher. If he is, those of you who are parents have the right to reasonably ask if he is qualified to GRADE your children, and in the process decide what future educational, and eventually career, opportunities your children will have.
He may have the qualification to advise YOU because he’s teaching YOUR children. But he has zero qualification to submit grades and evaluation reports to another person who is a stranger to you, and aid, or quash your kids’ futures. If Jacob gets a “B-” in physical science (equivalent to a “C-” forty years ago), does it mean Jacob has no scientific potential? No, it doesn’t. It just means that Jacob is going to be tracked out of science. By people you don’t even know. People whose credentials in science are kept secret from you.
In public middle school, I had a “B-” average in math. Then I went to a parochial school. Funny that. I placed 3rd in the Monterey County Mathematics contest in 12th grade. Let’s see, first place went to an Asian-American genius who earned “A’s” in public middle school (#1 in the class). Second place went to the son of a Naval Postgraduate School mathematician who attended an expensive private school. Fourth place went to the son of two community college math professors, who also scored “A’s” in public middle school math (#2 in the class). I was the only student in the contest who was graded “a little above average” in public middle school.
Public school grades aren’t probative. But they are powerful, because the State long ago stole parental upbringing of kids, and took over their futures, and those of you parents who don’t want your kids, especially boys, mis-tracked, have to be alert, and pushy.
Which is hard, because public educators have created this illusion of “authority”. Nice trick, if you can pull it off.
WSClark, I don’t understand why you are rhetorically PRETENDING to be ignorant. Arnold has been governor of California for 4 YEARS. He’s gone from being pilloried as a mouthpiece for right-wing business persons by democratic leaders, to realizing he has to work with them to be a great governor. How do you calculate “10 minutes” from this?
You’re part black–the vast majority of African-Americans have white blood, use it to your advantage. Support Obama now? Go for it. But he cannot win the 2008 election. In 2016, he’s got a good shot, if he lays out his next 8 years well.
“Arnold has been governor of California for 4 YEARS.”
Four years is the sum total of Arnold’s public service experience, whereas Barack has been a state legislator, a community organizer and now a US Senator. When Obama is elected president, he will have had more experience as an elected official than did Abraham Lincoln when he took office.
Prior to having been elected to the Governorship of California, Arnold had never been elected to anything. Arnold does hold a college degree, but Barack Obama has undergraduate and law degrees.
Given the facts, I would choose Barack Obama for virtually any position over Arnold Schwartzenegger.
heartlander…………. Your diatribe about me was pointless. You are part of what I consider “A STUPID Minority” who actually openly identify themselves on the Internet. Because I choose NOT to do this does not discredit me in the least. I am simply not as foolish as you are in this regard.
So………….if you don’t like it, bugger off. As far as I am concerned you can leave this blog and not return.
The problem with K-12, and particularly K-10 teachers is that in choosing to work exclusively with children and younger adolescents, and often allowing themselves to settle into a single age group’s teaching for 20-30 years, teachers aren’t able to go through the psycho-emotional maturation processes of other smart, college-educated adults.
Some insightful teachers have talked about using teacher-speak, which is actually a complex, ritualized set of behaviors. It’s an authoritarian complex, necessary to manage two dozen children who would rather be doing something else than be in school. (How many kids are disappointed when “snow days” occur?)
In essence it is a learned set of traits, not unlike that developed by and for industrial managers who viewed assembly line workers to be incapable of thinking for themselves, and who needed to closely supervised and subjected to fear-and-stress incitement, in order to elicit productivity from them. In essence if the workers were not continuously “ridden” by their supervisors, the workers would slack off, and production levels would plummet. The factory system was not a system of trust, i.e. a system in which line supervisors could be absent for long periods of time, the workers being empowered to do their own problem-solving, keep production going smoothly and maintain the corporation’s desired product-quality standards. Think about how very different our society could have been if industrialists had told workers: “If you don’t do the job, you get fired, and don’t expect a rec letter from us. But we’re trusting you to build cars, without somebody breathing down your neck. If you need help, it’s available. If you think you have better ideas on how to do things, talk to your coworkers, and submit your suggestions. We don’t know everything. You’re down there on the line, we’re not. You’re assembly experts. We’re going to listen to you.
No one considered rotating people among jobs, so that they could be “lifelong learners”, and the boring tedium of doing the same routines day after day, month after month, year after year could be alleviated. Such a prospect was deemed “inefficient”. But after WWII, when Japan’s industrial infrastructure was rebuilt, this is precisely what Japanese automakers did. Workers were given rotating assignments. They learned much more about the complex processes of complete automobile construction. They were engaged in their work. They met new people, and they taught each other, as experienced craftsmen. The Swedes did this too at Volvo. It was discovered that this created a more-energetic, positive-attitude work-force. It also resulted in the production of reliable, long-service-life cars.
It was funny here that millions of factory workers were the sons of farmers. The farmers were able to feed America, without onsite supervisors monitoring their every move. Raising crops to fruition was a lot more complicated and mentally-difficult than bolting engines to car chasses. But industrialists couldn’t add “1+1″, apparently.
In the 21st century, people will have several jobs, and even multiple types of jobs. Success in this milieu will require people to apply past-experience knowledge to new situations, and achieve good results. In Wichita it will mean some aviation engineers and craftspeople moving into the field of human-body-part prosthetics, taking their knowledge of composites and inventing completely new applications. This is kind of knowledge-crossover enterprise will be essential to America’s economy in this century.
Let’s then consider schools. We see large percentages of young teachers leave the field within their first five years. Is this a bad thing? No. They find other applications for their teaching skills. If they could not do this, they wouldn’t leave. They leave for many reasons, but one perhaps most often expressed is that the antiquated workplace doesn’t correspond to the inspiration they found in formal education in education. It would be like young modern-medicine-educated doctors and nurses going out to communities and finding “real world” practice to be what it was in the 1950’s—primitive and ineffective in healing patients.
The ed students are taught by the smartest people in education. People who want to be change agents. But actual schools’ management and workers, do not want to change. At least not spontaneously. They have to be prodded to change by higher-order dictates, like NCLB. Which, by the way is NOT A MANDATE. Any school or district can opt out of federal Title I funding, and be relieved of NCLB’s shackles. But administrators don’t want to deal with the problem of making operations truly more efficient, and cutting costs so that in-state tax payments are sufficient, and federal payments are unnecessary.
Education costs have outstripped inflation, but we do not see a commensurate improvement in the product. That’s a red flag. In other sectors, productivity has risen, and inflation-adjusted costs for most products have declined. (Of note, medical costs have greatly outpaced inflation, but medical care has improved enormously. We’re all concerned about the rising costs, but people want modern therapies, because they work a lot better than the old ones.)
In colleges and universities, you can’t find a dorm today that does not have either an Internet socket or Wi-Fi service. The ever-diminishing number of students who don’t have their own computers can use their roomates’, or other students’ living on the floor, or the library’s. This kids are “digital natives”. They were born after PC’s were invented.
In K-12 schools, computer implementation has been far behind the curve. In many cases, there are computer: student ratios of less than 1:10. But just as troublingly, even in some “showcase” schools that have installed 1 computer for every 3 students, they are abominably underused. Taxpayers funded the technology purchases, but it wasn’t implemented soundly.
Why? The vast, vast majority of teachers are not technophiles. They are what the tech industry calls, “very late adopters”. These teachers feel stressed to teach students how to use computers—because it is something they don’t know how to do. They don’t “get it” that they should be letting their students teach them. Kids, particularly boys who have natural exploratory instincts, figure out how to operate computers extremely rapidly. A middle-aged matron only slows them down, often giving incorrect instructions.
It may be that the old teacher-employment paradigm, with lifetime employment in one district, union-empowered benefits, and other Industrial Age trappings, is a trap in this new century. Certainly millions of boys view it to be such. It’s a trap for middle-aged teachers who don’t believe they possess the requisite skills to apply their school-teaching knowledge to other careers that if they took up, might reinvigorate them. Or they think, maybe they could reinvent themselves, but they’d lose their healthcare benefits, and face uncertainty in their future. No, better to maintain personal security. Better to maintain the status quo.
Even by staying within the public school sphere per se, how many 45+ year old 6th grade teachers think, ” I’m going to get a high school subject certificate and teach AP English? I’m good at what I do, I can do my classroom routines ‘automatically’, but I’ve always loved literature, and I want to broaden my horizons.”
We live in a time of rapidly-broadening horizons. A global economy. A knowledge explosion. Near instantaneous communication around the world. People traveling to places that their parents couldn’t imagine. People visiting friends and relatives living a half-continent or a continenent away, not just once or twice in a lifetime, but twice a decade, or even every Christmas.
Public education is an obsolescing holdover of a very different time in America. For example, how many Wichita elementary and middle schools employ computer-science-degreed teachers to teach children and young adolescents the astounding capabilities of computers? Computer science is NOT a NEW field. America’s preeminent research universities began offering computer science degree programs in the 1950’s. That’s over a half-century ago. By the late 1960’s all major universities, public and private, offered either CS degrees, or else math and electrical engineering degrees with a CS concentration. That was four decades ago.
So why don’t we have elementary and middle school education programs with a computer science specialty certificate? This will eventually come, but they should have appeared 15-20 years ago, when PCs were sold to schools (e.g. Apple II’s).
Children cannot succeed in the future if they are given a far-behind-the-curve education. Boys love technology. But if schools obstruct their interests and capabilities, then the boys themselves are scapegoated, because they decline to conform to schools’ archaic ideas and authoritarian rules, how fair is that? These boys’ real problem is they are just to darned smart in a dumb, too-slow-to-change system.
“Apophis”, you have no credibility. You don’t even have any insights about yourself. Maybe because you’ve spent so many years working exclusively with 12-13 year olds, and not under terrific conditions of connecting with a small number of youngsters one-on-one, because you are required to deliver a mass “blob” product.
You call yourself a science teacher. Let’s ignore your failure as a tax-sucking “public professsional” teacher to publicly disclose any professional data about yourself. Let’s drop it.
Let’s instead ask, where in WE Blog have you EVER presented a single scientific-subject-matter statement that most people wouldn’t know, which would give you some credence as a science-knowledgeable teacher? Never done that, have you? For all anybody here can determine, based on reasonable evidence, you could be a social studies teacher. Actually, a shoe salesman who has two sibs who are teachers.
You think you are “smart” getting me to reveal my name and credentials, while hiding your own. Is it really smart to prove yourself to be a COWARD? You probably don’t get this. But insightful readers here do. An anonymous “public authority”. That’ an oxymoron, given that it is not going to cost you your job if you reveal your identity, as if you were some unnamed informant to the press in Washington, D.C. who could be fired or demoted if his identity were publicized.
Who’s going to throw rocks in your house’s windows? Nobody. But if you, “Mr. Totally Terrific Science Teacher” disclosed your identity, SOME PARENTS might post statements here alleging that you were NOT a good science teacher to their kids. That might threaten to burst your hot-air bubble, eh?
Does anyone here deny that Ben Huie went to MIT and has a UCLA Ph.D.? I graduated with high honors from UC Berkeley, completing bachelor’s degree requirements in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Ask Ben how UCB compares to MIT. For an example, my department chair, Dan Koshland, was the editor-in-chief of the journal “Science”. Ask Ben if that’s a credible scientific journal. My oldest son earned a Civil Engineering/ Enviromental Engineering bachelor’s at UCLA. I was offered entry into Stanford’s Environmental Engineering graduate progam by the then-chairwoman of the department in 1990. Ask Ben if Stanford’s program is respected in the environmental enginnering community.
Oh, I’m bloviating. Sorry. You’re a self-proclaimed highly respected science teacher, who doesn’t reveal his name and position, who has never given a whit of evidence that he’s actually STUDIED science, who has never even discussed a scientific matter in WEBlog. These are FACTS.
But you are terrific in issuing factually-challenged ad-hominem attacks. That gives you A LOT of credibility. Not. Except to intellectually-impaired lovers of demagoguery.
I started posting on this blog just two weeks ago, primarily to find out just how well informed are bloggers in general. Most of us are considerate, thoughtful and make a lot of sense about what they write and think. However, there is one who, I believe thinks this is his own forum for which to vent his spleen. I have never read so much unfactual statements in all of my posting. This person believes that while living in one school district the school taxes he pays goes to USD 259. Nothing could be futher from the truth than that statement. Working for Sedgwick county I can tell you that the school taxes collected by Sedgwick county goes directly to the district in which you reside. The money derived by the state BOE come from taxes paid from income, sales and state franshise taxes. The taxes you pay collected through the county property tax system go to the school districts that you live in. For example, You may live in Sedgwick county. However, if you live in say the USD 385 which is the Andover school district those taxes tab as school taxes will go to USD 385! School districs do overlap county boundries. Sedgwick county has six or seven districts that serve it student population. If you want to find out just how and where your school tax money is dispersed all you have to do is google Kansas Department of Revenue. You should be able to find the breakout of all Kansas taxes and how they are dispersed. Don’t take someones word. It’s most likely he or she doesn’t have a clue as how the state’s taxing system works!
Old Manor Road………you have to just understand the heartlander is an elitist who thinks he knows everything there is to know in the world. I just dismiss him as an O’Reilley caliber bloviater. He hates public education, period. He labels me as a fake because I refuse to divulge my true identity here on the Internet. Truthfully, I could care less what he thinks. After all, heartlander claims to be an MD who doesn’t practice his profession. One might wonder………..? Anyway OMR, this guy will write lengthy diatribes on any thread when he can trash public education in general and science (remember, he claims to be an MD)in specific. Dismiss this guy as a elitist nut-case.
Do you live on North Old Manor Road or South Old Manor Road? I have a friend who is also a science educator who lives on South Old Manor Road who occasions the WEBlog. Might you know this individual?
Old Manor Road, thanks for the clarification. You’ve corrected my misunderstanding on the property-tax allocation.
You also realize that my income, sales and franchise taxes result in State funds sent to USD 259, and as I previously pointed out, my federal income taxes support USD 259’s Title I programs.
I don’t mind the criticism, and correction.
Apophis said,
“I do stand by my assertion that if you are NOT part of USD 259, you have NO basis to criticize this district.”
So, Old Manor Road, are you going to agree that given the fact that as I’m financially contributing to USD 259’s operation, that does give me a fair right to criticize the district.
How about you and other USD 259-knowledgeable people talking here about commendable things that the schools are doing?
VT mentioned some specifics about his daughters’ education at Northeast Magnet, including their taking advanced calculus at WSU. I applaud NE.
Channel 20 showed a 4th-grade class that invited musicians, including a Friends U person, to use music to help teach math. Cool idea.
It would also be a cool idea to bring in some local IT geeks to help elementary and middle school kids learn how to use computers.
It would be a really cool idea to bring in some aerospace engineers to help kids learn math by teaching them how to build flying model gliders, and discussing the basic mathematics of aerodynamics.
You’re more informed than I. Are any of the schools doing the latter things? If so, how many?
heartlander………………….isn’t great that many contributers on this blog are starting to see just how irrelevent YOU actually are?
Apophis, you award-winning science teacher, you. People are coming from Seattle, Miami, New York, LA, Oklahoma City, Denver, Dallas and Kansas City to talk to you and learn from you about how science should be taught. They’re coming here to learn how Wichita has become a stellar leader in science education, with you being a principal mover-and-shaker.
That’s why we’ve seen you on CNN, ABC and CBS.
Oh, maybe not. But KU, KSU, WSU and ESU’s science and ed school faculty are coming to you, wanting your expertise in designing science-teacher-training curricula, to be sure.
Oh, not that either. But middle-school science teachers in tony Overland Park, Shawnee Mission, and Topeka are flocking to you to learn how to teach science from a science-teaching master, right?
Oops, Not. Your reputation hasn’t spread very far yet, but it will eventually, because you’ve only been teaching for a few years, but you’re a strong up-and-comer who will eventually be recognized well beyond formerly science-destitute south-central Kansas.
Already, despite your 30ish young age, they’re coming from Maize, Goddard, Cheney, Liberal, Ark City, Winfield, El Dorado, Newton and Salina to learn how to teach 21st century science.
Oh, not that either? You’re a middle-aged guy. But you’re one of Wichita’s only-recognized-in-town “best middle-aged science teachers”. So you know how it feels to be voted the prettiest girl who didn’t get invited to the prom. Quite a head rush, eh?
heartlander………….you sure spent a substantial amount of time typing your asinine insults of me and my abilities.
You still don’t get it.
I don’t care what you think. I never have and never will. All you’re trying to do is to goad me into identifying my identity on the Internet. That will never happen.
The issue with you is really never the “issue” of any given thread. heartlander, the “issue” is always about YOU. You are a self-centered elitist who hates the public school system. That is your lot in life. To me, and many others who frequent this blog, you are irrelevant.
Quite a head rush, eh?
Apophis, how about a truce? If I post statements that don’t mention your name, you agree to omit my name in your posts? Deal?
from heartlander: “Apophis wants YOUR MONEY. He doesn’t want to let you know what he’s DOING WITH YOUR MONEY. Or mine. Or your kids.”
Go to the website of your local school district. If the budget documents aren’t online, contact a school board member to get them.
from heartlander: “Public school grades aren’t probative. But they are powerful, because the State long ago stole parental upbringing of kids,”
Stole? Hell, most teachers seem to *want* parents to live up to their responsibilities. Check out any parent-teacher conferences; the parents who show up aren’t usually the ones who really need to visit with the teachers.
from heartlander: “In classrooms, teachers finagle all kinds of information from students about their families and home life.”
Evidence, please, that teachers are ‘finagling’ that information from students.
“You think you are “smart” getting me to reveal my name and credentials, while hiding your own. Is it really smart to prove yourself to be a COWARD”
No, Doc, you let slip your identity all on your own; http://blogs.kansas.com/weblog/2006/12/the_condition_o.html#comment-26540106 .
from heartlander: “”Apophis” may be an actual teacher. There is zero tangible evidence of this, but he MAY be a teacher.”
Apophis is under *no* compunction to reveal his identity. You don’t know me either, but yes, he’s an award-winning middle school science teacher who’s not afraid to go toe-to-toe in person with those who’re trying to destroy public education. And no, I’m not telling you his name.
Over the months, I’ve asked heartlander a number of times to provide evidence for even a fraction of his claims. Glad I didn’t hold my breath.
Thanks for the positive reinforcement CSA.I will be going to NSTA later in the month………….that’s been an interesting story. I’ll also be at KATS next month too. I hope to see you at one and/or the other!
Apophis, are we going to have a truce or not?
I don’t know if your last post was intended to give me the opportunity to find out who you are. I kinda sorta think that perhaps you either subconsciously or intentially wanted to throw me a critical little puzzle piece, and see if I was smart and dogged enough to use it. I did.
You know that I’m honest, so that if I talk about you in the future,you know that I will have no choice but to credit the fact that you’ve done some outstanding science teaching.
I will, absolutely. Now I appreciate where you came up with your nic: it wasn’t watching Stargate, it was participating as a field test teacher in a NASA classroom program on an asteroid explorer. That is so cool! You did some great JASON projects two years ago before coming to your current middle school. All right!
But it’s nevertheless a fact, that you’re accepting a teaching environment that YOU DON’T WANT, and that PREVENTS YOU FROM DOING YOUR BEST to reach kids who want to learn science and have the aptitude to do so.
This has been said about you:
“On Tuesday, at ****** Middle School, science teacher ***** ******* chewed out a dozen kids, handed half a dozen disciplinary conduct slips, kicked two disobedient boys out of class, and suspended a student for disobeying his order to sit in detention.”
“He teaches nearly 170 seventh graders…[His students] talk boisterously, they listen only intermittently to orders and instruction; THEY TALK BACK [emphasis mine]. The boys wear their jeans way down south, where belt-lines cling precariously to upper thighs.”
That is an awful science-teaching environment, isn’t it?
The article goes on to describe your observations:
“In a quarter century of teaching, he has become concerned with what he says are the real problems: Disrespect. Lack of support from parents. A decline in the intellectual ability of children.
“When he started out, he says, it was common to see a lot of middle-schoolers who could learn algebra. ‘That was the gold standard for advanced middle school students then,” he said. “You could always count on knowing that you could teach algebra to a group of middle-schoolers.’
“Now, he said, the gold standard is not algebra but pre-algebra. Intellectually, the kids have declined, whether from spending too much time on video games or spending too little time with books. Maybe the parents aren’t demanding as much, he said.
“These are problems not only for schools but for the future, he said. EDUCATORS [emph mine] and legislators are not doing enough to solve these problems; they seem to get caught up in tangents, he said.”
You suffer cognitive dissonance, between wanting to achieve excellence and egalitarianism, in a system that will not allow you achieve either. You’re in Gregory Bates’ “double bind”.
It would be far better for Wichita if you would lead a move to build a gifted math-and-science charter academy. A non-traditional public school. Train the best-and-brightest to be community leaders in a science-and-technology-driven century, and lure some of these graduates into PUBLIC teaching.
You’ve paid your dues in the current system, workingin the trenches. It’s time for people of your talent to build a new system. Training leaders to manage a 21st century economy that creates widespread prosperity, and looks out for the underclass, is not elitist. SOMEBODY HAS TO TRAIN TOMORROW’S LEADERS. Give them special resources growing up. Instill in them the ethos to “pay it forward”.
Poor deductive reasoning heartlander. You’ve got it all wrong, right from the start. I don’t know where you come up with your crap, but you’re WAY off base.
And NO, there will never be a truce with your type.
So, you’re not RM? Not just attending NSTA but giving three presentations. One of the best middle school science teachers in Wichita, named by KSDE to a leadership position, UTW leader, naming yourself Apophis, a newly named meteor, after working on a NASA classroom pilot project.
The only other possibility is AK. Right?
Perhaps KP. If you are not RM, AK or KP, somebody is pretending to be you. Only the three of you have a reasonable impetus to come up with the nic “Apophis”, being that no other Wichita middle school science teachers were field-test teachers for the Dawn project.
But RM has special expertise in geology. So does Apophis.
RM has the resume Aphophis has claimed, including, critically, a several-year hiatus from teaching, working in “industry”, mentioned several months ago on WEBlog by Apophis. The largest science-based industry in this town is aviation, and RM worked in it. You don’t have to possess an aerospace engineering degree to work in aviation. The oil industry utilizes geology, so this is an alternative, which would eliminate RM.
But I’m sticking with RM based on high statistical probability. I can’t totally rule out AK, or KP, or RM’s friend DC, but each of these is unlikely, without false career statements. PW? I doubt it, although I can’t completely rule him out.
Here’s how science works: it is an evidence-based inquiry. How many public middle school science teachers are there in Wichita? Assuming 4 per school on average, 68. How many of these have achieved special respect among their peers as especially good teachers? It can’t be more than 17 at very most, one per school on average (0-2 per school). How many Wichita middle school science teachers among these 17 have left teaching for several years, to work in industry, then come back, and are now senior science teachers? Almost certainly fewer than 6. How many of these school-industry-school returners are now in union leadership? Almost certainly only 1, or at most 2. How many of these specialize in geology? One.
RM fits the data perfectly. RM is a geology guy, but he’s also done rocketry–aviation related science.
Maybe one other person fits the data, but the accusation that I have “poor deductive reasoning…you’re way off base” is an anti-scientific statement. A 97-100% probability of correct deduction isn’t “poor deductive reasoning”. It’s REAL science. Apophis, if you aren’t RM, you need to take a statistics course.
Now if there’s an RM wannabe that has taken on RM’s career benchmarks as his/her own in presentations to WEBlog, I can’t do anything about this. Scientific analysis fails when false information is put into modeling equations: GIGO.
If somebody is submitting false information about himself or herself, i.e. RM’s career metrics, then he or she is not a science teacher. Such misrepresentation would mortify RM, and he would repudiate that person.
Most of this is focus on details that misses the big picture. Furthermore, many of the ugliest details are omitted. I’ve now been around long enough, and with a pretty good original education in both psychology and sociology, to understand that bigger picture.
The problem with men is that they were once boys, and women now do almost all the shaping of boys. The problem is NOT a “Men’s Issue”; it is a “Boy’s Issue”. Until men stop contemplating their navels and start screaming about their sons, their problems will only worsen. And the first place to start is with the bigoted education systems that are systematically failing tens of millions of our boys. I’ve been studying and writing about this issue now for fifteen years, and all it has done in that time is get steadily worse.
The biggest problem that American boys have is the almighty power of women and their enormously powerful self-interest lobby and propaganda groups. For example, if you try to find web sites on the subject of our failing boys in the US, you will come up with nothing but women “experts” and their interest groups trying mightily to “dispell the myths”, rationalize the problem away, or shift blame to the victims. But in Australia, Great Britain and New Zealand, you will get a flood of web sites, many even run by the government, that simply tell it like it is and then try to figure out how to fix the problem, equitably. In America the ONLY objective with this subject is to make certain that our infallable women are not held accountable for their sexist bigotry. So the whole idea in the US is to expend great time, energy and resources denying or hiding the problem – so as to ensure it never gets addressed. This is not difficult to do when American women now overwhlemingly dominate every single field associated with child development from before birth to after college, when over 98% of “education journalists” are women, when all the research money STILL floods only to women and their “issues”, and when all these women are reading off the same sheet of propaganda. It is truly telling that Australian, British and New Zealand women are not afraid of the truth, while American women are free to manufacture their own “truth”.
The best example of how the problem of gender equity in education is approached in the US is with the way women and their groups incessantly use Title IX to demand “equality” in sports programs, by drawing money from boys sports programs, artificially pumping up girls programs despite little interest among girls, or closing non-revenue generating boys programs to achieve the desired quotas. The problem with this approach is that Title IX does not even address sports. Title IX established federal law demanding equity in all American education. So the net result is that sports is used by self-serving women as a cheap tactic to draw attention away from the far greater ugliness that twice as many women as men are now getting college educations – prima face evidence of direct violations of the law.
Anytime you have one gender overwhelmingly dominant in any social field, you open the door wide to natural gender bias and bigotry in that field. This was the “irrefutable social law” which women used so effectively to advance their own cause (with the very considerable help of men like me during the 1960s), by first throwing out everything that came before them – totally discredited as the work of “self-serving” males. Today women overwhelmingly dominate in every single field associated with the development of children from before birth to after college. But they have now conveniently forgotten their own “irrefutable social law” and have now achieved absolute infallability. (Just ask them.)
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, commonly known as Title IX, is a 37-word law enacted on June 23, 1972, at the insistance of women, that states: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Since it is now blatantly obvious that women, including the mothers of failing boys, are never going to lift a finger to help them, to insist on equitable treatment and consideration, the ONLY way ANYTHING is EVER going to be done is if men start using Title IX on behalf of their sons to sue school systems under Title IX for their institutional sexist bigotry, while demanding the same quota system in classrooms, including in the enormously girl-dominated Advanced Placement programs, that women demand in sports. With some subjects and some people, you simply need the biggest club you can find to finally get their attention, and nothing is bigger in America than class action law suits – and their billion dollar settlements.
Are there ANY men left in America with both money AND spine?