Progressive Education: Early August, and Kids Already in School
As I pick up the DeKalb Neighbor from my driveway on August 4, 2010, an oppressively hot and humid morning, I notice a front-page article about the new school year. Three items draw my attention:
1.) Classes begin the following Monday. Students in Decatur city schools have already started.
2.) Various high schools have enjoyed renovations. Tucker High School, at a cost of $54 million, now features a new “media center, gym and parking deck.” Cross Keys High School enjoys a $16 million renovation featuring the “cafeteria, media center, administrative area, counseling center, gym, the band and chorus rooms, and the heating and air conditioning.” The photo accompanying the article features LaShawn McMillan Ph.D., the new principal, who “discusses the new computers that will be in every classroom,” according to the caption.
3.) I notice that LaShawn McMillan holds a Ph.D., and my jaw goes into lockdown.
Start dates have been moving forward incrementally since my own son was in kindergarten in 1992. In Cobb County, students are being encouraged to bring water bottles to school. On school buses, windows and roof hatches are opened to prevent heat stroke. Air conditioners in classrooms are contributing to peak energy use.
In Rochester, New York, where I grew up, ever since I can remember schools have started after Labor Day. Like many parents, I had a short window of opportunity for visits to relatives when my son was growing up.
Every parent I’ve ever talked to has wanted to wait until after Labor Day to begin the school year.
But never mind what the citizens want or what makes sense. Administrators tinker with calendars and other non-academic matters at taxpayer expense, obscuring what’s really wrong with schools: that most teachers don’t know their subjects. Education majors are asked to “think deeply” on pedagogy written by Marxist theorists who tell them children are able to “construct” their own knowledge. They come up with variants on the Ebonics proposal of the 1990s. I still remember the outrage that the mother of my son’s friend expressed about bringing the language of the ghetto into schools.
As education schools produce ill-prepared indoctrinators, educationists insist that more money needs to be spent on computers and new facilities to “enhance” learning and to “motivate” students. Computers replace books in “media centers,” where students, unable to discern valid sources of knowledge from invalid ones (thanks to their teachers), surf the net, amalgamate passages from online papers, and play games. As if they already didn’t suffer from attention deficits because of their own electronic devices, they will now have these blinking temptations in front of them in every classroom. Coddled by teachers who are taught that their primary role is to be emotional coaches, students boisterously roam gleaming new halls of buildings that look more like high-scale shopping malls or spas than schools.
LaShawn McMillan holds an advanced degree, which in the field of education usually does mean Piled Higher and Deeper. Dr. McMillan may be an exception to the rule, but advanced degrees indicate a deeper trek into the Marxist thicket of theory. The idea of “sharing” the wealth, which is already done when students are forced to pool and redistribute the school supplies their parents have bought, is extended to academics. Brain power is shared as children are put into groups, with the smartest one carrying dead weight and wasting his time getting his “peers” up to speed. The collective status is more important than individual merit.
Then politically correct curricula are enhanced by outside groups and consultants who come in to waste time on discussing “feelings.” Since educators are failing in academics, they now focus on “social and emotional intelligence” and welcome in ideological groups to conduct “anti-hate” sessions.
But the Ed.D. and the Ph.D. can expect to enjoy higher salaries of about 30 percent, into retirement.
Coincidentally, a few days before my DeKalb Neighbor newspaper hit my driveway, my tax notice had arrived in my mailbox. I live in an area that, according to a study by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has decreased in value 50 percent since the housing bubble burst. Yet my property taxes have increased 30 percent since I bought my house in December 2003. Like other Georgia taxpayers, over 60 percent of my property taxes will be going to produce graduates like the ones I have taught in college: undisciplined, narcissistic, and semiliterate. Renters also pay for this product. And we all pay through our state and federal taxes that are used to end “disparity” and to enforce federal mandates.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s vision for “21st Century Community Learning Centers” was released in a document titled: “A Blueprint for Reform — The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.”
Duncan is taking his Chicago project to the national level. For Chicago, he outlined a plan for 14-hour day schools that offered health clinics, homework help, and potluck dinners. His “blueprint” announces “competitive grants to states, school districts, and community-based organizations to leverage models that comprehensively redesign and expand the school day or year, provide full-service community schools, or provide services before school, after school, or during the summer.”
You can bet that grants won’t be awarded to conservative evangelical groups.
The document also claims that “all programs will focus on improving student academic achievement … and providing enrichment activities, which may include activities that improve mental and physical health, opportunities for experiential learning, and greater opportunities for families to actively and meaningfully engage in their children’s education.”
I doubt that E.D. Hirsch’s core curriculum will be employed. If I had to take an educated guess, “mental health” activities will include anti-hate indoctrination and “social and emotional learning” consciousness-changing sessions.
I predict many grants going to groups like GLSEN whose members Obama met with at the White House in June, while he broke presidential tradition — instead of attending the annual National Boy Scout Jamboree on the occasion of their 100th anniversary, he chatted with the ladies on the View. I see the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, who are in tight alliance with the teachers unions, offering anti-hate programs.
I eventually see beds in the “community learning centers,” as the state simply raises our children. In the meantime, we’ll be working 12-hour days to pay for it all.
“Social justice” education, taking up all of kid’s time to keep ‘em away fromt their unenlightened families… thank you, Bill Ayers.
This is a truly wonderful article. I made an index of my blogs on the takeover of public education here: http://clarespark.com/2010/07/15/index-to-black-power-blogs/. You will find two blogs on Arne Duncan as featured in the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Fall issue of ED, 2009. The coordination of policy in the field of education and in the media quite rivals Goebbels plan of Gleichschaltung. It wasn’t a conspiracy, but the result of “progressive” educators trying to co-opt rowdy movements from below.
See also http://clarespark.com/2010/07/04/pacifica-radio-and-the-progressive-movement/, for another index to my memoir and history of the Pacifica Foundation, an important institution conceived by left-liberals that both reflects and shapes public opinion regarding the educational policies that Mary Grabar so effectively criticizes.
Working 12 hr. days to pay for it??? What jobs???
Great article. My wife is a math teacher at our local community college and her chief complaint is that students with high school diplomas show up in her classroom every year with no clue about how to add, subtract, divide, or multiply fractions. These same high school grads have no understanding of such complex notions like; signed numbers, square and cube roots, and the transposition of simple formula. These are things kids of my generation had down cold by the 7th grade.
A visit with a high school teacher, (member of our church), reveals the source of the problem, she’s as dumb as her product.
“A visit with a high school teacher, (member of our church), reveals the source of the problem, she’s as dumb as her product.”
At my local golf club there are 7-8 teachers from the mid and high schools that golf regularly in the summer (must be nice to have a couple of months paid vacation).
At any rate I find them to be mostly humorless – less than imaginative – and tend to get a bit riled when asked about their areas of expertise – especially when I start asking specific questions about their particular subject. One is a world history teacher. To say that he doesn’t know much about history is an understatement. We were discussing the horrors of WWII one day – he attempted to correct me on when it started – seems my recollection of Sept 1st 1939 didn’t jive with his version which was ‘somewhere in late 1941. What a bozo. The a**hole couldn’t even recall Dec 7th 1941 – much less the ‘real’ start’ – when Germany invaded Poland. I guess it could be argued that the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria and Czechoslovakia with a feckless France and Britain looking the other way could be marked as the real turning point towards war but those events were in 1938. He couldn’t recall either events with any clarity. History major? I think not. What do they teach children these days?
To be honest I can’t think how these dumb as a red brick dimwits managed to pass college courses – much less get a teaching certificate. And calling them dimwits is being kind!
“History major? I think not.”
From inside the history field, there is major disgust over the education system’s handling of the subject. Most history teachers don’t major in history, they’re education majors. The serious ones minor in history but stand little chance of serious employment. Ever heard the joke: How do you spell history teacher? C-O-A-C-H There are few true history classes; most go under the label “social studies.” Big difference.
I’ve always said that there is too strong a focus on knowledge and not enough on wisdom. We want our citizens to be intellectuals and so give undue importance to math and science; consequently our humanities suffer. I cannot stand to hear high schoolers, or heaven forbid, college students who have trouble reading. I once went ballistic at hearing college sophomores attempting to figure out which war was depicted in Mel Gibson’s The Patriot (I can forgive War of 1812, but the American Civil War?!)
Intellectuals are more often than not pretentious and utter dumbasses. This has been my problem with the Obama and his Democratic cronies from the get-go. There is nothing more offensive than being told by your leaders that the people don’t know what’s good for them. I’m working on my PhD right now, but I tell you now, I would never in a million years claim to be any better than the mechanic down the street. Politicians go to Ivy League schools yet stutter when the economy falls after mountains of spending – it doesn’t take a genious to know that one should always spend less than they make.
Ugh. Enough of my ranting.
Sounds like sour grapes
Pot calling the kettle black ?
I need a paragraph in a teaching statement my university requires of everybody up for tenure. A paragraph devoted to my efforts of contributing to diversity as my university is pondering a requirement that everybody has a special portfolio devoted to diversity issues.
I want it to be a moving story of redemption as it gives me a chance to be covered in our weekly “Spotlight on faculty innovative teaching”.
Here is my first draft:
I grew up in a country where about 20% of students were admitted through the so-called “rector’s list” (rector is a president of a university) and I witnessed a lot of favoritism and corruption there. After immigrating to US I swore I will treat all my students equally. The first time a black student approached me about losing a scholarship due to a low grade in my course, I did not give him a full force of what I could do. Instead, I sent him to one of his own (our Black Cultural Center has its own tutors). It turns out his own did not do anything for him, so I started to think about the whole episode and it occurred to me that it is not the issue of blacks vs whites, it is the issue of those who have and those who have not. The student did not lose his scholarship and now I give the full force of what I can do to anybody with a scholarship they can lose because of low grades in my courses.
Priceless!!
I live a couple of counties away from DeKalb in Cherokee, probably as conservative as DeKalb is liberal. On August 4th, the date that Ms. Grabar is writing about where she began her countdown to start school again, my daughter was already in school. I, too, grew up in the northeast where the first Wednesday after Labor Day was the “big return.” And we’d suffer through to the third week in June…sometimes the fourth.
At first it was very weird but Cherokee also has a full week vacation in September, in November for Thanksgiving, two weeks at Christmas (oops, winter holidays), February and April. Plus we get out before Memorial Day. All in all, not so shabby. The kids actually take a break from the school year (as all kids want) and come back a bit more refreshed after these quickie vacations. Plus we as a family can get reduced rates at vacation destinations in September due to being “off season.”
As to the quality of education they’re receiving, well, I think that the general rule is that nothing is as good as it once was. But at the same time, it was good enough that my son received an academic scholarship to college and my daughter’s honors and AP classes give her the challenge she both needs and deserves (and actually thrives on).
DeKalb has its fair share of problems to be sure and for those who do not know Atlanta politics, DeKalb can be considered one of the more, um, challenging places to be with an incredible disparity of income; perhaps more than any other county around here save Fulton (Atlanta) and whose political bent has sent such stellar folks to Washington as Cynthia McKinney and Hank Johnson.
The education establishment is out of whack nationwide in both conservative and liberal districts because of the left-wing agendas of the education departments of most colleges and universities that she writes about. See the movie “Indoctrinate U” for an inside look at the sausage factory. The school calendars are a minor point. The amount of time out of the classroom vs. in the classroom has remained about the same, 180 days, give or take a few.
Ms. Grabar has larger problems living in DeKalb than the schools, too numerous to list in this reply. My problem in Cherokee is how to get rid of “The People’s History of the US” out of my daughter’s AP US History class! That will be the biggest challenge to me this year.
I’ll take the weird calendar; I’ll work around the politics at home.
I wish we had a full week in September to go to Disney! We’re just outside of Augusta, and I can’t find a long break in the school year for my kids outside of Christmas, Spring Break, and summer (shortened exactly as Ms. Grabar described). I’m just grateful we found a home in a good school district; so many around here are terrible.
My only problem with your writings Mary Grabar, that I know the things you say and write about are true and reading them again further depresses me.
This country is headed for a calamitous train wreck. and November 2, 2010 is not going to stop it, I fear.
Well written. Thank you for spelling out my concerns. How do you ever get a rational thinking person into the administration in a school district? The progressives have an iron grip on the administrative positions in education. When I approached our local superintendents about how ridiculous our “reform math” curriculum is, they acted as if my engineering degree did not give me the math background necessary to complain about the math program. I am just a dumb mom to them -government is the answer, in their eyes. Many parents have also complained about the calendar. It is a huge waste of taxpayer money to aircondition so many school buildings during the hottest month of the year (August is extremely hot in Georgia).
Union drone teachers have dumbed down generations of Americans. They are now dysfunctional citizens. The hoi polloi are movie-TV-texting trained mouth breathing robots. The intellectual class has neither class nor intellect?
Therefore, NO ONE
Union drone teachers have dumbed down generations of Americans. They are now dysfunctional citizens. The hoi polloi are movie-TV-texting trained mouth breathing robots. The intellectual class has neither class nor intellect.
Why would you expect they’d demand anything but climbing walls and parking decks from the freeloaders and looters who man the school boards and planning commissions?
I am a “non-traditional” student trying (good Lord knows why) to be an educator. What-ever was I thinking? That someone with real experience in instructing, (on-duty (USAF 22 years) and off) that likes to work with those pesky tweens and young teens??? I am getting VERY FRUSTRATED with “the system” as it is currently set-up (indoctrination of YOUNG adults, and practical indentured servitude until or if ever tenure).
Since I am in a “non-traditional” program, I have to find (with only a little bit of assistance) my own “indentureship/internship” a.k.a. “student teaching” gig. I’m trying to be hopeful, but with so many budget cuts and retirements, there is a lack of teachers wanting to take on additional UNPAID work…
Besides, it is not easy, when you are white, over 50, retired military, have a science degree, and will “question authority” when that authority has only “book knowledge” and not real world experience. Every time I think I can reach my goal, another wicket is placed. So I tutor kids in the neighborhood, I volunteer at schools and “grit my teeth” or “bite my tongue” and “try to play along” in my classes.
Until you eliminate the “Progressive” indoctrination that occurs in the traditional 4-year programs, and at the higher levels, you will NEVER have a “fix” for what is wrong with schools today.
Of course they want the children to see the world the way they do, and that requires they be dumbed down. And don’t forget, they love Paris in the spring-time. It’s much better than the Jersey Shore in August having to mingle with the unwashed masses, the very distasteful products of their education.
They want your children to be a reflection of what they think of them just as they want your children to despise themselves worthy of nothing more than vulgarity and hedonism. I think you should admire their great success. Hot fun in the summer time.
“Duncan is taking his Chicago project to the national level. For Chicago, he outlined a plan for 14-hour day schools that offered health clinics, homework help, and potluck dinners. His “blueprint” announces “competitive grants to states, school districts, and community-based organizations to leverage models that comprehensively redesign and expand the school day or year, provide full-service community schools, or provide services before school, after school, or during the summer.”
Not going to happen. It’d be an absolute nightmare from every possible angle – biggest one is renegotiated contracts with employees and how it’ll be paid for long-term. Then there’s staffing issues, supervision, student transportation, logistics…it’s BS.
They’d be better served getting the economy going so these kids – when they eventually leave high school (I don’t say “graduate”) will have some chance at a living wage.
Oh, right…I forgot their Big Plan.
The more I read articles like this the more I am resigned to finding some way to home school should the wife and I ever have kids.
You are absolutely right. Home school the kids, and forget about sending them to school to learn crap like “we are all the same” or “compare Capitalim vs. Communism” in 6th grade. If you are around kids ages 10 and up discuss openly the Marxist Theory to them and tell them ” when Julie gets a C in math, the whole class gets a C so that Julie’s feelings doesn’t get hurt” That is the way these parasites want to educate our future. SO when the grow up to be a Doctor, they will not cure us but kill us and thus the Earth will be saved from the savage human race….
I wish you lots of kids, love them, home school them and educate them early on about the danger of Marxists and environmentalists.
Look at a 2010 calendar. My state requires 180 instructional days of school. Half days don’t count (nor should they). If school starts the day after Labor Day, and ends the Friday before Memorial Day (you don’t intend for school to extend until the middle of June, correct?), there is room for 9 days off in order to meet the 180 day requirement. That’s 2 days at Thanksgiving, 6 at Christmas, and 1 for MLK Day.
If you can’t find any parents who prefer an earlier start date, then you’re talking to the wrong parents. My kids went back to school on Aug. 2. About half of the parents I’ve talked to prefer it that way. Many of the rest don’t care either way.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m as critical of Big Education as the next guy. There are many things which need to be changed or eliminated. School start dates, decided at the local level, isn’t one of them
One reason for the early start in my neck of the woods is that if the buses can’t safely operate on certain percentage of the district’s roads due to weather, the entire district shuts down for the day, even if the vast majority of children can make it in because they live in one of the county’s towns and not off on a remote mountaintop. Each year they seem to build more weather days into the schedule by starting classes ever earlier in August. Then they use every single one plus a few more! Last year school was closed for a month in total days from November through March.
Parents hate it. They don’t get a day off work because a few flakes of snow fell somewhere in the county. There is often a mad scramble to arrange some sort of babysitting after the call goes out of No classes today. The irony is that the families who live on the bad roads at the higher elevations that cause many of the district wide closings almost certainly have vehicles better equipped for ice and snow that the district’s buses! But when they closed the community schools in the consolidations many years back the burden was shifted. Parents had been responsible to get children to rural schools that were seldom more than five to eight miles away from home. Now the consolidated school district is responsible to get them to classrooms that can be as much as thirty and forty miles away.
1. Not all teachers are unqualified. In many cases, the PARENTS are unqualified. The kids who are successful are the ones with parents who do THEIR jobs, and the ones who fall behind are the ones with parents who are too wrapped up in their own worlds to be parents. They want to be ‘cool’ rather than effective.
2. In the south, our kids have (as long as I have been around) started back to school in August, although typically closer to the end of the month.
3. We have bats, bugs, a sketchy HVAC system, and even a rumored ghost in the school in which I teach. Are you saying that our kids wouldn’t benefit from a healthier environment? As it is, I keep my inhaler close at hand to continue breathing while working in a school with poor air quality.
4. If you don’t like all the electronic devices that tempt and distract the kids at home, that is, again, something to take up with PARENTS. These kids don’t NEED cell phones, XBox games, Ipods, etc., but the school didn’t supply them. If using the computers will get the kids to research and write, then that’s what we have to do. Parents would be raising pure and immortal if little Johnny failed because he didn’t write his paper, and he certainly isn’t going to write it by HAND. How DARE you SUGGEST that? It would be the teacher’s fault, of course, because it couldn’t POSSIBLY have anything to do with parenting.
You obviously like to blame others for the woes of society, but please place your blame where it belongs.
“Not all teachers are unqualified. In many cases, the PARENTS are unqualified. ”
If you’re so sure about that, endorse universal school vouchers. Let the unqualified teachers go unfunded, and the kids whose parents are unqualified will at worst stay kids whose parents will be unqualified. In fact, make the vouchers half of what the state pays for a kid now, and and keep the rest in the system.
“Problem children get a lot more funding per capita, and I bet education improves for the rest.”
If you’re right the falling chips will fall your way.
I can’t disagree with you about parents. But when you take a hard look at the budgets of these schools — and this takes real work, and it should not — there are layers upon layers of waste and fraud, compounded by an astonishingly bloated educational administration hellbent on imposing their politics throughout the schools.
While homeschooling may be an individual solution, it does nothing to solve the problem. The voucher movement does challenge school standards, but nothing will change until we take back these institutions from the people who are burning our hard-earned tax dollars in order to cushion and disseminate their ideological views.
Which isn’t teaching.
If the parents are the problem, why capitulate to the parents? Let Johnny fail if he doesn’t do his work. Holding the rest of the class to Johnny’s level only compounds the problem.
Teachers blame the parents. Parents blame the teachers. Stop the blaming, accept the responsibility, and do something.
“semiliterate”
I have a learning disability. English class for me was crossword puzzles. In 10th grade I started in a real English class for once, the teacher never talked to me. After seeing my first assignment I was sent back to crossword puzzle class. I dropped out 4-5 months later and went to work.
If I ever have kids, I’m homeschooling them. They’re building peons, not citizens. If this is “21st-century education,” then I’m a proud Luddite.
This crap has to stop.
A couple of years ago I was on a Motorcycle Ride from Wilmington to Portland. I somehow got hooked up with a retired school teacher. He had been a principal in a high school here in New Jersey not far from where I lived. We got to talking and he told me how proud he was that after many years he finally got the town to put in a swimming pool for the students. (“What”, I thought, “No science Center?”) Times have certainly changed since I was in school. We have no one but ourselves to blame. WTF.
Nicely written piece. The utility of all the expensive government school tinkering is disproved by the effectiveness of Catholic schools. For over a century, Catholic schools have remained true to the tradition that fads aren’t the way to teach children. Many Catholic schools are using facilities that government schools would have replaced 3 times over but they continue to produce top quality students. Obviously other private schools around the country demonstrate the misguided approach to public schools. But Catholic education is the single largest alternative. If you are tired of dealing with government education, the teachings contrary to your values, the politics, then opt-out. Either send your childred to a religious school, a Catholic school, a private school, or home school. Government education is a failed mess, not matter how much lipstick they dress it up with every few years.
Exactly. My two nephews attend a Catholic high school. The alternative is the local gang, drug, and violence-infested high school. My sister works her hiney off to pay the tuition. The elder boy graduated and is highly skilled in English, math, Latin (the linguistic backbone of science), and science. He’s now a junior in college and doing well. The younger boy is struggling but gets help and discipline at school and at home.
As to start times, Michigan recently passed a law requiring all its public schools to start after Labor Day. It makes sense in Michigan because lots of families are still vacationing in August, the state’s second-best month in its all-too-short summertime.
As a retired publc school teacher I can say that spending more time under the control of the government educational institutions does not add one iota of knowledge or learning to a child. The schools are all about indoctrination and anti Christian rhetoric; if you believe in traditional families and Chrisitianity be afraid, very afraid; your children are being brainwashed. I recall that this epiphany struck me back when I was teaching when we received instructions from the New Jersey State Education commisioner that it was strictly forbidden to mention Christmas before the “winter holiday break” and teachers were instructed that it would be a serious infraction if they allowed students in class to wish each other Merry Christmas; in that same year the principal proudly went on the PA system to read Ramadan greetings to the moslem students, the new rulers of the former USA.
Thanks for another good, animating, insightful article.
The disintegration of education, planned and executed by the Left, is one of the most profound and denied phenomena of our time. As the mother of 4, who considered her children’s education to be her (and her husband’s) responsibility, I was enlightened as to the social and intellectual cesspool that our schools have become while serving tirelessly as HR mother, parent advisor, PTO board member/president,etc.,for 15 years. I met some good teachers as we moved with my husband’s job from New York, to Pennsylvania, and on to Florida. Most of the teachers and administrators I encountered were, however, mediocre or very bad.
When we discovered homeschooling, we pulled our younger 2 out and began a new and superior lifestyle. It’s an interesting perspective, being homeschoolers, because school personnel and many parents feel judged by my lifestyle choice and they become immediately defensive, even before I’ve uttered a word. Why do you suppose that is? They know I’ve tried and rejected their product, and I believe in their heart of hearts they know their product is seriously defective. As of this October I will have 9 grandchildren. So far not one of them has attended school anywhere but at home. Save the children, don’t send them to school!
This makes me very angry and I am glad someone else feels very passionately about this issue!
Good Lord! I’d love to be paying only 60% of every tax dollar for education! Here in my small town in Maine the percentage just rose to 72.7%! Our $ insatiable black hole of a school district continues to extract by force every single buck that it can “for the children” despite declining school enrollments and a 11 to 1 teacher to student ratio. Even with that ratio the teachers still complain that they’re overworked and stressed. What a pantload!
If the truth be told, the fault lies primarily withthe voting population who display unforgiveable apathy that allows the budget to pass each year.
At budget voting time, the majority that show up to cast their ballots are teachers, aides, & administrators along with their relatives and families. “For the Children” my @ss! The greatest beneficiaries of a passed budget are those (UNION THUGS) who are lining their packets while using “the children” as human shields. Until the remainder the community wakes up and takes a stand against this kind of robbery, nothing will change. WAKE UP AMERICA!
I graduated from high school in the mid-90s and I had observed this trend even as a student. Every year we seemed to start school earlier, to the point that we had barely even cracked August before the first day of school. Being an actual student, I was all too aware of how much of my time at school was spent studying real subjects vs. fluff and political indoctrination. It was pretty clear that the school year was growing so as to accommodate newfangled social engineering, because let’s be truthful, core learning (math, civics, science, English, etc) was being competently taught decades ago and they did not require bloated school years to accomplish it then. Why do we need bloated school years now? I also suspect the unions are involved, in some sort of make-work scenario not unlike in a unionized warehouse where the far more efficient use of conveyor belts and forklifts has been prohibited, so as to maintain a need for manual labor. Concomitant with the expanding school year seemed to be a growth in “optional teacher work days” and such. Basically I can see the writing on the wall – “we’re having to work a lot more than we used to, we need higher pay”.
I’m also annoyed by the emotionalized use of education (i.e. “for the children”) in trying to shame taxpayers out of yet more of their hard earned money. Every few years it seems like there is another education bond on the local ballot. They are almost always rubber stamped by the voters. This country shovels more money into the gaping maw of public education, per capita, than almost any other place on Earth – including places with far more effective education than we have here. I’m sick of hearing about a need for “computers in the classrooms”. They have been bleating this for 25 years now! The article rightly states that this is nothing but a claptrap. Technology is a great thing, but it should be used to augment traditional scholarly methods, not replace them.
I think the salient point is, our public education systems are not there to produce academically competent graduates for the overall benefit of society, they are there to produce the new type of citizen desired by the progressive elites. We don’t live in a society where the citizens decide they want to change the makeup of government; we live in a society where the government decides it wants to change the makeup of the citizens.
Everything you write about here is right in line with what I experienced in public school. Having graduated in ’94, I came away from middle/high school with absolutely no meaningful experiences and no education of real value. School was like a constant nightmare, a prison that I dreaded visiting every day. Political correctness, liberal progressive feminism, and minority pandering ruled the day. City police were camped out in the parking lots many days after school to help quell gang violence and other disruptions. My parents were not aware of how bad the situation was, they trusted the public system. Thankfully by the time my younger sister came along they were able to afford to send her to a private school. I’ve come away believing that education in the home must be the way to go. Just need a wife and kids to get started.
Amen, Mary, amen. After graduating top of my class at a good state university, I opted to get a teaching certificate because the state required it as a precondition to teach anything. I lasted one week. It was the most absurd, pointless, idiotic drivel ever foisted on me in my time enrolled in college (and that’s saying a lot). It should have been called” “indoctrination in post-Marxist, lit-crit claptrap,” except that I recognized that the very worst students in my earlier classes were all there with me applying for teaching certifications as they were all education majors (read: no knowledge of any particular subject), and were far too stupid to indoctrinate. I came away with three key facts about schools: one, the university teachers college is just dumbed-down, bad theory cribbed from the European academic self-loathing of 40 years ago; two, the education major isn’t a real degree or a real discipline, just a way for a lazy moron to get through college and get a paid job and a pension at the end of the line; and lastly, no real progress in educating children is possible as long as both the first and second facts are true.
And good luck getting rid of the muli-billion dollar barn of horseshit called the education racket; Hercules would have killed himself trying to shovel that out of existence. It’s bad from theory all the way down the line, it stinks from top to end, and the whole place is crawling with job seekers, overpaid educrats, hand-wringers, and parasites of every stripe and color. You couldn’t get those people out with dynamite.
BTW, most plans like Arne Duncan’s are really about the state codifying the state as the surrogate family for bastard children born from single mothers from multiple, invisible dads. Illegitimate birth rates at 70%? Fine, just create a tax-funded family out of specialists and PhD frauds from our various schools of social work and education to minister and facilitate and enrich whatever’s handy.
Somewhat related to the new media centers and computers, I can tell you where the loneliest place on campus is: the library. I did not have a laptop in college; I had a pen, a notebook, attended class, took copious notes, and spent my free nights at the library.
I read a survey somewhere a few years ago that contained some rather telling information. Education majors have on average the lowest SAT scores as incoming freshmen; education graduate students have on average the lowest GRE scores. I have made no real effort to figure out whether we’re looking at leading or trailing indicators here. Does the education discipline attract weaker students from the start, or do the weaker students find themselves being funneled in that direction after sampling other disciplines? I guess it doesn’t really matter once the rubber meets the road.
I can echo your point about the library. At my university I could go up to the 6th or 7th floor of the library, where most of the science books were, and have the place virtually to myself. I preferred to study with books and a pencil, and I was a computer science student no less. Many of the fundamental algorithms and concepts in computing are much older than what we now think of as “computers”, so if you can’t master it with pencil and paper you’re just wasting your time sitting at a keyboard. I also think this qualifies me to judge rather harshly this repeated notion we hear about schools needing more computing resources. Bollocks to that. What they need are students who can put together a coherent sentence, let alone a formal argument from premises to conclusion.
Duncan is one of those guys that wouldn’t know a real school that hit him on the head. Just go back to the 60s & ANY school there would have nearly all of their students out performing today’s little mush heads.
We taught overseas in an Embassy school for 3 years in Communist nation in the 1980s. 1 administrator-namely the principal. I taught my combination 7th-8th grade class of kids at a high school level and most of them did very well. We had 3 kids-2 Japanese & 1 Greek students in my class that spoke NO English. Within 3 months they were nearly fluent in English & writing papers just like the other kids. Why? The ESL teacher spoke only English to them. It worked.
In the early 1990s I taught for a school district in CA. Frankly, I was shocked at the low level of kids & what passed for “discipline” by our principal. I spent about 1/3 of my day playing cop to young furute hooligans that had no interest in school at all-other than to screw around & recruit future gang members.
One year I had a kid that was functionally illiterate in the 6th grade. No way he would be able to promoted to 7th grade. After seemingly endless meetings with the school psych, the principal, the resource teacher & the parents, it was decided to retain said kid. They parents were all for it so he could actually learn something.
After filing the retainment papers, my principal very conveniently “lost” the papers & the kids was promoted to 7th grade w/o my knowledge. Next year, the 7th grade English teacher called me up & asked why he was promoted as he could not read or do math. I was shocked.
I asked my principal about it & she admitted to the “lost papers.” The REAL reason she tossed out the papers was so that the Ed Dept. in Sacramento would not get any negative news from our district. It must have worked VERY well as she won principal of the year, for that year, in CA!
This is what teachers have to deal w/ in public schools in CA. Wild houses could not drag me back to teaching there or cause me to enroll my kids in any CA public school!
And what, pray tell (a little joke), could the perspective of “conservative evangelical groups” possibly contribute to improving English, history, math and science education. Such groups can fill churches, but far too many think man walked with dinosaurs, during what they assume was our brief 6000 year sojourn on this planet. Though I worry about what passes for sound research in in graduate programs in education, it terrifies me to think of some ranting creationist being allowed anywhere near a science classroom. And once again, Mary, I see that your teaching ratings are amongst the lowest I’ve ever seen. Before you or some other commentator comes to your defense claiming some deficit on the part of your students, the really interesting student comments relate to how you try to give a questionable evangelical spin to material where such a perspective is inappropriate. Many students are being cheated out of a good education because of questionable fads in education, but a conservative, evangelical perspective informing the teaching of history, science, math, and literature is certainly no alternative.
some things need to be on on paper. but the web also give them access to sites like wikipedia and you tube witch are great sites for learning any thing history to science to music check them out some time
Maybe American children would have received a better education in the old Soviet Union.
Hooray for you, Mary Grabar. I too have a DeKalb County / Decatur zip, read the Dekalb Neighbor and pay 60% of my property taxes to educate illiterates AND pay private high school fees so my kids get a decent education provided by Ph’D's in their field: science, math etc. I am part of the generation of males who, in the late 1970′s and 1980′s opted out of a teaching career fearful of harassment suits and baseless accusations to which males have been subjected over the last 30 years. A male C- student in my high school class, always a supporter of leftist causes and a multiple also ran political candidate for same, went on to get the requisite degrees and has just retired to a comfortable educator’s pension. So who had the world figured out circa 1975? Not me. I’ve been paying and paying and paying for a load of other people’s hogwash. Don’t forget the forging of the universal test results which occurred in DeKalb county, GA too.
Why should there be a public, i.e. government, education system in the first place? Re-privatize all of it and individual school-businesses can decide for themselves, based on customer feedback, all of their policies.
The problem is that the government is involved, period.
RE Albert
It is interesting to read the mind set of the neo Americans like Albert. The are completely unaware of the reality in which we live; first Darwin’s theory is a THEORY and a theory is not a proven fact. second Global Warming is a theory a THEORY; spending more money than you have is a recipe for disaster not for fiscal sanity; worshipping an American politician because his followers say he is a god is more questionable than any of your complaints about Christians. Public education in America today is run by union thugs and Left wing goons whose sole purpose is to proselytize for their Left wing agenda; they have no interest in improving anyone’s mind even their own. If the Alberts and the neo Americans succeed in destroying the country we used to call the United States then we will see hell on earth.
Come on now, I’m about as conservative as they come, including being an AGW skeptic, but the knee jerk bashing of the basics of evolution, which has *vast* coherent amounts of evidence in its favor, even if certain specifics are somewhat arguable (and real science is about getting better approximations of the ‘truth’ about the natural world), is a big loser.
Just because a few obnoxious evolutionists like Dawkins insist it proves their atheism does not make it so — there is plenty of room to say that evolution is how God creates (and he could easily ‘nudge’ it here and there).
And frankly any ‘young earth’ creationism is the worst sort of willful ignorance — some of the same physics that underlies dating the earth and stars also underlies nuclear power and weapons, make the GPS system work, and the semiconductor electornics that power the computer you are using to read this.
You say that those who hold to the young-Earth theory, as well as those who are creationists, are closed-minded, yet are you not guilty of being closed-minded for dismissing their views?
The fact of the matter is that most in the science field teach theory as fact. While I would never belittle the accomplishments of scientists throughout history, pride is the folly of their field. There was a time when medical “science” treated STD patients with injections of ink. People honestly believed that the brontosaurus existed until it was revealed to be a hodgepodge of different fossils. How about global warming and Y2k? Science makes mistakes, no doubt about it, so it should be no surprise that some people oppose teaching theory as fact.
That being the case, why all the fuss about teaching dissenting views?
It reminds me of the Japanese history textbook controversy. Japan does not make mistakes. So, when a reporter once asked a group of Japanese students about their feelings towards the US despite a past war, they went silent, with one asking, “Japan was at war with America? Who won?”
As I said before, AGW is crap corrupted ‘science’.
FWIW, Y2K was a very real issue (though not at all apocalyptic as many ‘evolution is just a theory’ types claimed it was the End Times). It was dismissed later, erroneously, as nothing but hype, but it turned out to pass ok precisely *because* it was taken seriously by govt and industry and they fixed software. I know firsthand, as I was an engineer in an industry that spent a couple years making sure we had all our ducks in a row.
Evolution from common descent (which is in itself *not* the same as the ‘everything was random’ view of how it happened) is the overall theme that helps make biology — and, yes, increasingly, human medicine — have some coherence and make sense with its explanatory power and a framework for formulating and testing more specific hypotheses and predictions. Without it, biology becomes nothing more than description and cataloging.
Any potential replacement framework must be able to do a better job.
One of the problems many religious people have with ‘science’ is that it does not try to deal with the supernatural, but here’s the key: if science does not focus on the idea that natural phenomena can be explained naturally, as a sort of working assumption, then there is no good way to distinguish between something that is supposedly inexplicable/supernatural/miraculous and something which we just don’t understand *yet*. Again, with that mindset you would not have your computer, and a quarter of your family may have been dead without vaccines. Regarding ID, I think it *should* be discussed in the classroom to show there is nothing being hidden from students, but that discussion should include my point about useful hypotheses being testable, something which ID is very weak in for the reason I mentioned above.
What’s utterly crazy, the formation of the universe with natural laws that allows life to exist actually *is* sort of ‘miraculous’ when you learn — via science — just how interconnected everything is, and its kind of unlikely that we’re here at all. There are plenty of scientists open to the idea of some creator or Designer who set things in motion — thats every bit as valid an explanation as that of the most militant atheists. SO I don’t see why people get their backs up about evolution-in-general so much.
Regarding ‘young earth’ nonsense (and it is), no, I am *not* just taking it on ‘faith’. I have degrees in engineering and computer science, and I’ve done the physics and the math (and the astrophysics) from the ground up, on which estimates of the age of the earth and universe depend. I have actually done laboratory *experiments* on radioactive decay as well as studied the evidence.
If it was grossly wrong we would have precious little of our modern technology.
Once I took a college course in which one of my fellow students was a high school science teacher, and the course we were in was about history of science, one of the most enlightening fields around that most people don’t pay any attention to. I was absolutely shocked when this HS teacher and our professor admitted that Newtonian physics was accepted not merely because it was good theory or scientific fact but because Newton played hardball politics with his rival theorists in the Royal Academy and had their theories repressed. The same phenomenon was at work with Galileo and the Catholic Church since the pope at the time had a competing theory, and Galileo’s was inconvenient to have around. Also, it was discussed in that class that there were theories back in the ancient world that had wonderful astronomical predictability but that proved in the end to be totally false. So the lesson is that science isn’t as settled as one would want to believe, no matter how much it seems to work practically. This is especially true of theories that cannot be directly observed or tested in a laboratory, which evolution and global warming cannot.
The Republicans have been talking about abolishing the Department of Education since 1979. Thats 31 years. When are they going to actually so it?
Seriously. When? Remember this: they have had ample opportunity to get rid of this unconstitutional hive of incompetence and ideology, but they keep it. Or, as in the case of W, make it bigger.
Can you actually imagine the upcoming Republican Congress doing this? Can you actually imagine them CUTTING the Federal Budget?
Starting to feel discouraged? Me too. In a perverse way, I don’t think the Republicans haven’t been in exile long enough. I don’t think things have gotten bad enough under the Democratic Socialist Party. I think that Obama was simply so incompetent that he made the Republicans look palatable by comparison.
I am as opposed to the destructive pursuits of the Left as anyone, but come on, anti-intellectualism is no avenue to take either. Theory is not the same thing as hypothesis. Gravity is “just a theory” too, in that it is a systematic explanation of observed phenomena and has not been shown to violate any known scientific laws. That’s what a theory is. A theory is not the same thing as a wild ass guess. Rational inquiry and the scientific method are hallmarks of the Western tradition, that same tradition that I believe most of us are interested in protecting from the Left’s assaults no?
Personally I believe that Darwin’s theory is incompatible with a belief in God only if you really insist on it, but that’s JMO.
Agreed. It’s religious right stuff that’s going to scare aware the center. That fact is the greatest impediment we have to retaking washington and restoring the 10th amendment.
We have all been asllep at the wheel for decade regarding education. The Schools of Education are probably the least disciplined of the our academy. They are followed very closely by lannguage departments, especially English departments. These are places where gender studeis and black studies and all of the other divisve politcally correct BS has been fostered. I might also add that these folks are non productive in terms od providing economic comfor to society but they are also not useful as in fact village idiots. I lament the decline of family time driven by these arrogant self lovong agenda driven folks. Education in the mian fails most students, many do survive but some are killed by the process and wind up living lives of udneremployment. I often ask of K 12 educators why can’t we train pumbers and electricians, carpenters and mechanics, programers and Chefs in programs? Why is we have college prep and college prep light? I think it is beccause the administration of most school districts are runn by folks who are clueless, tey were trained by folks who were clueless. So what happens we get reasonable sounding things like more time in schoool and smaller class sizes to increase performance. Never reported is the inconvenient knowledge they neither in fact impact performance. WE also allow schools to move into that area which is family. Those educators who do this should be held to account and should be severlyt punished. They wantt heir agenda drilled into young heads, this is called indoctrination. We neeed to tear down the system and rebuild it. We need to severly punish those who brought us to whwere we are. A good place to start would be the destruction of the University based schools of education followed the denial fo funds to those who fail to broadly educate based upon our Western Civilized traditions. But then, I am appaled at the number of folks who do not kno who Shakesphere was. If more of us had read Socarates we might well have known thiswould be the end purpose of an orgainzed system of education.
As a former language major in the early 90′s, I have to refute the idea that language departments are among the least disciplined. Actually, among the Humanities at the time I was in school, they were less tainted by ideology and agendas than subjects like political science and philosophy, more like engineering departments in that you were focused on things about the subject matter itself, like grammar, writing, morphology and syntax, though some literary study was involved. I actually went through my major fairly unaware of alot of the leftist stuff going on in the rest of the university and had quite rigorous training even if it wasn’t up to the level that I had wanted it to be.
The Communist Youth League knew how to do all this in proper fashion.
Dont bother shuttling the kids back and forth on a daily basis to a home
that will only undermine or distract from state indoctrination. Simply
take the kids away into a completely controlled environment, and indoctrinate
them with no interference, teaching them nothing but “progressive” thought
and voila..you will have generations of reliable soldiers, bureaucrats,
scientists, and writers who will automatically enforce, defend, administer
and write about the Brave New World of the state. During the education process
the kids can be returned to the parents on holiday intervals..for brief
periods of time..in which neither party parents or children understand, or
even care much for each other.
There are many problems with education in the United States, but if you are looking for root causes, it is this. The American public, in general, believes the following three myths:
1. Teachers are underpaid and overworked.
2. The NEA/state education union reprents what is good for education.
3. Teachers go into education because they care so much about children.
Lets face it, almost every school in the United States is run by school boards elected by the citizens of the district. We are getting the insane compensation, rules, and RESULTS because this is who we elect to make the school decisions.
The average voter could not come within 40% guessing the actual overall compensation for a teacher or the number of hours they work. They truly believe that all teachers are academic stars that made a “sacrifice” to become teachers. And, when it comes time to vote for school board members, those citizens that actually do vote, will predominately vote for the candidates endorsed by the NEA.
It’s obvious your article hit an already throbbing nerve with all of us. Here are a few more points to consider:
1. Among developed/developing countries, the average school year is 193+/- days. In the US, the average is 180. That means students outside the US receive an additional 153 days of instruction (nearly one full US school year) over the course of 12 years. South Korean students spend 225 days in school each year, so by the time they exit high school, they’ve completed 3 additional school years when compared to US students.
2. Thanks to the progressive agenda, US K-12 teachers obtain degrees in education (measuring learning, making learning FUN!, learning theory). Meanwhile, their mastery of their own subject or specialty is often deplorable. Luckily, they’re unionized professionals. (Can they spell “oxymoron”?) Before those trends occurred, teachers mastered a subject area, took an education class or two, and then mysteriously managed to teach us to read, write and speak English, do basic math, and acquire sufficient learning skills to (yep, you guessed it) continue to learn as we moved on to college and out into the world.
3. A local public school principal (who btw worked well into her 70s) was asked how year after year, her tough, rather shabby but super-clean urban school produced such a high ratio of graduates, with many headed for college on scholarship. Life was about setting the bar high and working to overcome challenges, she said. She set demanding standards for students, teachers and parents, tolerated no excuses, and as a result produced many bright, educated young adults.
4. A friend decided to leave her teaching job and join the “more lucrative” business world. She claimed the first few years almost killed her. She’d never worked so hard in her life: evenings, weekends, no breaks, no time for vacations. She once asked me why business people worked so hard for what turned out to be less pay and fewer benefits.
5. In spite of the recession, many local teachers will receive pay increases this year, while at the same time they whine about working a 6.5 or 7-hour day, five days a week for roughly 36 weeks a year. Gee, that does sound rugged! (In contrast, small business owners like me regularly work 10-14 hours a day, 5-7 days a week, 50+ weeks a year. Instead of raises, EVERY small-medium business I can name has slashed salaries and expenses by 20-30% or more, but nobody’s whining. We simply don’t have the time or energy.)
6. Want to see some heart-stopping numbers? Check out teacher salaries for your school district. Teachers who work a full 8 hours a day for 180 days clock 1440 hours a year. Now calculate the hourly rate. If you have a full-time job, you’re clocking roughly 2000-2040 hours in a typical year. What’s your hourly salary?
7. If you can still function, put 911 on standby and check out faculty salaries at your nearest publicly funded college.
8. Our local school district is quite good. It’s traditionally been generously funded by hefty property taxes. This fall, the district hopes to pass a new funding proposal. I will vote no.
I agree with the your article entirely, except for the part about school starting in August.
Starting in August allows for the semester to get finished before a two-week Chistmas break, with the new semester starting fresh after New Year’s. Er, make that winter break. Someone had better fine me or raise my taxes now for impolitic speech. (Is it still okay to say New Year’s? Perhaps there is an Islamic calendar somewhere that insults.)
I live in this area, and this is better for kids and teachers alike, in my experience.
Alana,
I’ve heard this logic before from my sister whose kids started on 2 August this year.
My sister says it helps with the testing if the students take the tests before Christmas break rather than having to remember the info into January. She said it also helps them get more material in before the standardized tests in the spring.
If the students can not retain info over a two week break at Christmas, isn’t there a bigger concern here?
I have never thought of any testing angle. But simply put, yes, it is better to have tests over by Christmas.
As an A student myself, way back in the day (though not in the area where we live now), nothing could ruin Christmas as much as a big paper being due right AFTER the Christmas vacation. Regarding exams, it’s less a matter of general retention than it is a matter of a very high level of detailed preparation that must be maintained for performance on a test. Sort of like getting ready for a meet if you are in sports. You’re simply going to have to put in a lot of hours directly before the event if you want to do well at it.
Ditto with my own kids (now in their twenties). It’s hard to “have Christmas” when stuff is hanging over you like this, and indeed, a lot of it was before they started having the semester end before the break.
The only down side of it that I have seen is that it means grades for the semester come back to the kids in January. Depending on the kid, that can mean a nervous time of waiting.
Overall, though, I think most kids are happy to have the semester behind them and fully enjoy their break. I know that was true for me as a parent.
Edit: By “the area,” I mean, the Atlanta area; specifically, in Fulton County.
The general debate about public education is so polarized I’m going to pass on whether longer school years or unions make for better public schools. I did want to dismiss the misconception left in your piece, though, about the public investment in Cross Keys HS.
“… featuring the “cafeteria, media center, administrative area, counseling center, gym, the band and chorus rooms, and the heating and air conditioning.””
I do not know your source for this misinformation but I would like to correct it.
The $16m invested does not provide one single new functional use to the 52 year old building. This renovation replaced equipment and fixtures that have been in service since 1958. It removed mold-encased duct work and ventilation from the building. It corrected faulty drainage and sewage handling. It replaced ceiling tiles, added additional lighting, new wiring, ADA compliance, and other code-related items.
In short, the renovation simply brought this half century old building up-to-date. Surely clean air, water, and adequate lighting and ventilation are not controversial. I tried to post links to pictures of the school here earlier today so folks could see for themselves what the conditions at the school were, in fact, before and after the renovation.
For those who want to accurate picture of what public funds did in this case, simply google “Cross Keys High School Renovations Pictures” and look for a pikasa site link to the “before” pictures.
By all means, feel free to bash the public system but do so without mis-representing what took place at Cross Keys HS. The kids and the faculty deserve every penny of the work that was done. No swimming pools or parking decks here …
I can relate. As an EE major in the 1970′s, my calculations were done with a slide rule, a #2 pencil, and a Big Chief tablet.
There were no “cheat sheets” of formulas allowed, we were actually expected to learn those tidbits of knowledge. I can still recite from memory the important factors of magnetism, capacitance, and inductance.
It was members of my class which developed the PC you are now sitting before. Think about it,,, could you do the same?
Wait until when/if they extend the school week and possibly school hours to enhance the indoctrination. Schools are becoming more and more about control and conditioning while being less about education.
I failed to mention another egregious error in the piece:
“The photo accompanying the article features LaShawn McMillan Ph.D., the new principal, who “discusses the new computers that will be in every classroom,” according to the caption.”
I realize you are quoting the article from The Neighbor newspaper. However, this is completely false. There will not be new computers in every classroom. There will be new computers replacing the old computers but this is FAR from putting computers in classrooms.
Again, I simply wish to debunk the “straw man” you used to set up your opinion piece. Nothing wrong with your opinion – just completely wrong information in the setup.
Interesting comment. If The Neighbor misquoted McMillan, I certainly hope he will care to correct them. And if he does not, there’s the question of why a school principal would exaggerate or misrepresent this information.
I don’t see a lot of difference between the outcome of having new or old computers in each classroom. Except price, of course, a price artificially and wildly inflated by the practice common in Atlanta and elsewhere of purchasing computers through politically-connected faux “companies” or “vendors” who merely push some paperwork into the space between the actual retailer and the district — these people are inevitably relatives of school district employees or local politicians. It’s a giant racket, and it hardly stops with computers. For example, a headline from today’s paper:
“2 fired over DeKalb school books; Principals terminated, 2 other demoted for spending district money on own books . . . Yvonne Sanders-Butler, a “principal on assignment” filling in for schools with principal vacancies. She is being terminated from her $105,615 annual salary position. Between 2002 and 2009, she sold $63,184 worth of copies of three health and nutrition books she has written — $11,494 of which she authorized herself while serving as principal at Browns Mill Elementary School. Sanders-Butler’s sister, Rainbow Elementary School Principal Annette S. Roberts . . . She purchased $14,184 worth of copies of her sister’s books for Rainbow. [Ralph] Simpson and Miller Grove High School Principal Selina Carol Thedford. They were demoted to assistant principals and had their salaries cut. Simpson wrote an autobiography, titled “From Remedial To Remarkable.” He sold $15,260 worth of copies to six DeKalb schools. Thedford purchased $9,680 worth.”
So at least several principals are profiting from their own self-publishing of “inspirational” literature for emotional interventions in the schools (if it was so important and inspirational, why didn’t these educators just . . . teach . . . this stuff?). Their defense is that this practice isn’t limited to them — everyone’s doing it. What a damning illustration of all of Mary’s points. Do request a copy of your district’s vendors list. See where your tax dollars (local and federal) really get spent. It’s a roadmap of the activism that keeps the schools what they are today — activism, nepotism, and political back-scratching.
Tina, I don’t think it is that the reporter mis-quoted the principal. I think it is a loose paraphrasing by the reporter that mislead us more than it informed. I have been interviewed and quoted by newspapers and television reporters who literally have put complete sentences in my mouth that never were spoken by me.
In this case, they most likely took an off the cuff comment that was stated in a conversational way and printed it with no context as a paraphrase. When things are printed they take on special powers of truth none of us would detect if we were listening to the actual spoken word. A good reporter would have said, “In EVERY classroom?” the minute they thought they heard that – it doesn’t even make sense.
I’m not too hyped up about this except to say that this entire subject of stupid and wasteful public educational governance was introduced by completely inaccurate information. This faculty and the kids they serve have been teaching and learning in what was the most discrepant and disgusting facility in all of DeKalb County (and if you know our County, that is saying something!). The fact they now have a bright, safe, and cheerful place to continue working is not fodder for “public education is a waste of our money” arguments.
As a teacher in the public schools….Thank you!! The things the “higher ups” decide we should do is just ridiculous! And then we are criticized when kids don’t learn, but we are required to spend so much time testing, we barely have time to teach. Race to the Top is a waste of time and money. Arne, who has never taught in his life, is in charge. Ughhhh. Nobody ever asks the teachers what will help….
Great article.
If teaching is so easy and so lucrative, one would think that the market would dictate that smarter people would gravitate to it and eventually change it by their mere presence. People claim that they are put off by the whole culture in the education of teachers, but if someone is practical, tough, and smart, he/she will do what they have to and then change things as they get more clout. Believe me, this is possible, but why do so few do it?
There are many reasons, I’m sure, but for one it is an oversimplification to say that teaching is easy. Yes, the hours are decent and the vacations are long, but the act of being in a classroom with 100-150 students a day in a high school or middle school takes a skill set/endurance set, which beyond the academic knowledge may include scar tissue, an ability to control, then nurture for many students, some of whom need the exact opposite approaches, which bring us to special needs kids. A parent who can successfully home school their student at a marvelously effective level, might well be helpless and frustrated in the face of the demands of the system, 150 students with their own needs, parents, and cultures, etc.
Yes, the educational establishment is predominantly liberal, but it also values smart and competent people; however they must have people skills and know when to spout, and when to shut up, if they hold unpopular political views.
Until proven otherwise, until I see more conservatives becoming teachers and changing the system from within,(not to mention getting the supposedly lucrative and easy job) I will assume that there is something in the conservative temperament (assuming there is such a thing) that simply cannot do public school teaching as it has evolved in society. There is a focus on individualism conservative thought, that simply has to be de-emphasized when you are trying to get a group or commnity to move in a certain direction and that group thing tends to be more liberal than conservative. So you need conservatives who can effectively work with groups and communities. You don’t have to give up the value of individualism, but you do have to make groups and communities function. Teaching is not sexy nor high-status like finance, law, medicine, or business, but as the economy worsens, more top people may see it as a reasonable choice and improve it from within.
Obviously, you are not going to be able to ban education, because most parents, liberal or conservative care a lot about their kids and their education and a majority of people with children in the schools will vote to support education, a much higher per cent than would vote for a 10% tax increase to support the military, let’s say. If you truly want change, you can spout, or you can do something about it….or at least, both. But teaching is one job, where if you spout, word gets back to mom and dad pretty quickly, so you better spout judiciously.
Poor baby!
Try a real job and see what stress really is.
Teachers and lawyers. Neither work. Both whine.
Cute line, but it in no way responds to my question that if teaching is so easy, and so lucrative, why don’t better, (read, more conservative,) people do it? I’m not hearing an answer from you here, rather, just snark. Evidently, you have no answer; got it.
Dwight,
It’s neither the teaching nor the students that keep me out of the classroom. It’s the administration and the curriculum directors and the state and federal mandates.
I substitute teach on my days off from my regular job as an engineer. I run an after school science club. I can handle the students. I can handle the materials. I can handle the hours. Reality is I would LOVE the hours for the pay.
As long as the goal of the administrations is equality for all, which puts the top students at a disadvantage while catering to the “special needs”, the former “top students” will avoid the field. Many of us who worked hard throughout our school years to become the top can not abide the current system that strives to eliminate excellence (but they word it as “everyone above average” which is impossible.)
My feelings exactly, but I remember too many young adults coming in to work for me (after basic training and technical school) that had NO math skills beyond add and subtract. I had a difficult time myself but with the help of my parents and grandparents, got though high school, and with a few patient friends got through college. However, it was in my final three mathematics classes that I learned that there is “something” more to it and had my “eureka” moment!
I have worked as a volunteer with kids in middle school and have helped more than a few ‘get it’ as well. That’s why I want to teach kids, and your reasons and those of avannr and others do sometimes scare me.
Dwight, I don’t want to keep fighting battles over and over; there is “group think” and there is “community.” I learned about community in both Scouting and the military, and about “group think” in my “educational theory” classes. I’d rather teach “community” than “group think” and be employed where real results, not comparing apples to oranges to grapes statistics matter.
Then DO it. I am not telling you that it will be easy. Either you have it in you or you don’t. When Jesus said, “Be ye therefore, wise as serpents, and harmless as doves,” he was giving a good proscription for teachers. Every assignment you give, every paper you grade, every lesson plan you make can be terrific, or cause a disaster. That’s just how it is.
If you love to shoot your mouth off (as most people here, including me are wont to do), though, you’d better get a grip, because while you are “sharing”with your charges, there are always potential mine-fields out there. If you are fair to the kids, usually (not always,but usually) they will sense your fairness. Of course, being good and fair is best of all.c Who knows, maybe you would be. I was pretty sure that I as as person a click or two (acording to SAT’s and college acceptances) above the average intelligence of teachers could do it, and I could, but it wasn’t easy.
Most to the bad things said here about teacher here ARE true somewhere, even in many places, because there are hundreds of thousands of teachers out there. There are thousands of good ones too. My system, a high income suburban community could compete with the privates academically and blow the parochials out of the water at the AP level and higher college prep level, to a lesser degree. As to the lower levels, the privates wouldn’t even take those kids and I’m not sure about the parochials.
OK, there’s your excuse, but if you want to make it happen, you can. It takes a certain touch, but once a teacher shuts his or her classroom door, for better or for worse, you can move things in the direction you want it to go, and if you have the judgment and skill to cover your ass for your moves (knowing the limitations of one’s situation is called reality training,) you can do good things. No one is perfect at it, but you learn, you get better, and you make good things happen, or you whine and b#tch, like most people here who (just taking a wild guess here) could not teach their way out of a wet paper bag with today’s students.
Well, Dwight, I did it AND I did it for free. The principal at my children’s elementary school couldn’t afford an art teacher. I was already doing seminars in my son’s 5th grade class and so the VP asked if I would take on a whole school program. I completely designed and implemented an art program for over 1000 students and I ran it – teaching in every classroom – for four full years. I spent my summers planning the program and purchasing materials. I did this while raising 4 children. Sorry Dwight, but teaching is one of the easiest jobs out there. Especially considering the immense vacation time and short work day. There are teachers who can’t even spell or do math, teaching those subjects. Nowhere in the real world could you keep your job with that level of incompetence! And I don’t know one single teacher who could do my husband’s job – they couldn’t stand the stress or the long hours because they’re too pampered.
Teaching art in elementary school, eh? OK, I will grant you that that job is probably pretty easy. Satisfied?
“Yes, the educational establishment is predominantly liberal, but it also values smart and competent people”
Total and utter BS.
My wife is in her 22nd year teaching in a public elementary school that is ‘diverse’ but very well regarded, though not a magnet school.
She gets rave reviews/evals from her principals over the years, has been ‘Teacher of the Year’ 2 or 3 times, and is usually the most requested first grade teacher.
She does not make one penny more than the burnouts, slackers and affirmative action beneficiaries with the same time in service.
Without getting too far into the politics of the issue, the article is the first I’ve read that attempts to address why schools, particularly southern schools, start so early. My recent observations of Tennessee and Alabama have me questioning why, in the hottest, most humid areas of the country, they should pick the hottest, most humid month of the year to start school. I would think millions in energy costs from air conditioning could be saved with a later start; an early start isn’t a very “green” one. From a practical view, the attraction of a week long fall break, with the corresponding Disneyworld opportunities, appears to be the best explanation why this would be tolerated. The rationale of make-up days for bad weather seems less plausible, although the sight of a single snowflake is enough to send a school bus full of kids into a skid in numerous place south of the M-D line. As to a vast left wing conspiracy, I doubt today’s liberal educators have the physical durability like that of the Viet Cong needed to endure an August in the South. But as long as stimulus dollars are there to keep the AC going, maybe….
I’m in Mobile on the Alabama gulf coast.
My wife teaches and they started early — and all the teachers hate it.
They do *not* get a week long fall break.
A couple days in the calendar make sense for hurricane makeup days, but far more days are wasted between trying to take every holiday the Post Office does, and ‘in service’ brain-deadening workshops for teachers (kids off).
One aspect is that the principals and, worse, central office parasites, are on 12 months (still with plenty of time off) so they don’t care about the kids’ and classroom teachers’ calendar. The true-believers want to indoctrinate the kids more, the opportunists see it as 1) a no brainer way to *look* like they are doing somethin to improve things, and 2) an excuse to pump up budgest, which means bureacratic power.
Mary Grabar — your article describes our experience with the schools to a “T”. My son studies geometry that no longer requires proofs, and is required to take classes on building his self-esteem.
Last fall my son had to stay after school for “sensitivity training”. The teacher who ran the session had no idea what “crime” had been committed by the individuals (to protect the kids rights), so the session was a general review of terms like racist, agism, heterosexualism, etc.
My son’s crime was that he called a teammate a commie. He called the kid a commie because the two had engaged in a political debate and the other kid believed communism was a better economic system than capitalism. The other kid called my son a capitalist pig, but that’s not considered an offense and does not require sensitivity training.
To be clear, my son was the 3rd smallest freshman at the school and has never been in a fight (he’d lose every time.) He is not a bully. Just a political junkie.
Even if you are not Catholic take your kid to Catholic school. The Catholic Churchs 2000 year history is behind Western Civilization.
It is the one and only institutional bulwark against the atheistic, social engineering
of state educationists. Your kid will immediately jump vast distances ahead intellectually, morally and spiritually.
While I can agree with much of what was written and the comments, the school start date issue is irrelevant. In our area of the country, school starts in mid-August and is usually out by Memorial day. We rather like it that way; yes, even when our kids were of school age. I realize it’s a different custom than many of you have — it differs from where my siblings live — but its something we like.
In order to be more successful at indoctrinating the kids, there needs to be more time spent with them…
Random thoughts on schools:
1. Teachers trained in CA (at least when I went there) major in their subject matter and then do an extra year of internship and ed classes. Not all teachers are union members — many of us would never give money to the NEA.
2. If people knew how really screwed up schools are, they would insist all public schools be abolished and start over with various private schools, geared to the individual, not one-size-fits-all.
3. The most important “dirty little secret” is that administrators insist disruptive kids stay in the classroom. You would be amazed by the chaos your child often puts up with.
4. Some teachers (yours truly) are fired for enforcing discipline in the classroom.
5. It is assumed most kids do okay. Much money and effort is spent on the misbehaving and disruptive student. Most “professional development” consists of BS workshops about social issues.
6. Once a student closes the door, she CANNOT do what she wants. Administrators insist upon their own ed theories (whatever’s trendy), not the practical methods experienced teachers develop.
7. Schools would always rather hire a teacher just out of school rather than an experienced adult, as they are cheaper and more malleable.
8.When students ARE “sent to the office” these days, it is often the guidance counselor, and they walk the students back with their arms around them, sympathizing.
9. You can rarely fail a student. Either administrators call you in or they change your grades when you get off in spring — or parents go to the principal and arrange for a “dressing down” of the teacher involved.
10. It is very common for parents to accuse teachers of “picking on my child” when they enforce discipline. You see, “all the kids {their children’s friends, who also disrupt a lot} say the same” about you.
Do I sound bitter? I guess I am. Most teachers leave the career within five years, and I’ve been in it for 11 (yes, only 11). I’m a conservative teacher, fighting the good fight.
Hear, hear.
Pay attention, Dwight. I had over 1000 students. Most teachers have 30 – 35 max. Art and music teachers have the hardest job because they have to teach all grade levels. And I still think it’s easier than a job in the real world rather than the insulated pseudo-world of academe. College profs have the easiest job of all.
“Art and music teachers have the hardest job because they have to teach all grade levels.”
What can I say? Evidently you have not had much teaching experience in academics in the core subjects which are most important on a student’s college application transcripts, or maybe no experience in secondary education, for that matter. If you are assigning and grading the appropriate number of papers for your high school students, giving grades, which the students often tend to challenge, if you are a tough grader, you have a different level of challenge on your hands. How much do you penalize them (and is it the same for every student) for sentence fragments vs run-on sentences vs overall coherence, fresh ideas? How do you assign topics which students cannot just copy off the internet? How do you run a discussion with older adolescents, who are on any given day spacey, surly,or suddenly motivated and ready to work, with a varying combination each day. I do not mean to denigrate either art or music, but the level of academic competition, parental challenges, decisions about which books to teach papers to assign, skills to test, high-stakes tests to be prepared for, is almost a completely different world from that of music, art, and phys.ed teachers, all of whom have huge numbers of students, but relatively low involvement (of necessity) with any one of their students, unless they happen to be (to use a little hyperbole) a genius or a criminal.
Hey, it is quite possible that your hubby is an exceptional hard-working, brilliant, entrepreneurial guy with a very special skill set and work ethic that sets him off from almost any “employees.” I assume that he does that, rather than teach, because he wants to, and also plans to make a lot more money in the process. Good for him; but is your point that there are millions of people like him out there, being disrespected by our society which pays its teachers, firemen, policemen etc. a moderate living wage?
I certainly do not want any of them abusing the pension system and believe that pension reform may indeed, be appropriate, but society does need people to perform the tasks mentioned above. I will simply repeat my main point which is that if teaching is such an easy, well-paying job, then take it. You, evidently were in a position where you could afford to be a full-time volunteer for years, which puts you in a category almost by yourself. Tough to extrapolate much from that. And if you had volunteered to teach five high school classes full-time for four years, you would probably be the only person in the country to do so…and I’ll go out on a limb to say that you could not have done it. I wouldn’t bet against you being able to do it in art, but, otherwise, I’m thinking….NO.
I certainly approve of any programs and strategies which get better people into the classroom, but the better people have to want to go there.
If the quality of education would go up and the level of participation [which is a HUGE problem] would also rise, we would not need to institute longer days and years. People get so touchy about wanting to “segregate” people because of what that word has meant, but separating children based on ways they learn and levels makes them learn faster… Just a thought.
America spends more money per student than any other nation in the world. Throwing money at the situation is obviously not the answer
After reading the article and most of the comments, I’m glad that we were able to homeschool our kids for the past 21 years.
The reason why school starts are moved up earlier is to get the fall semester done with by Christmas. The schools are probably out by mid-May.
August in DeKalb County, Georgia is a bit different than August in Rochester, NY. August in upstate NY is beautiful, August in Georgia is only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun. As a child who grew up in the South, I would have vastly preferred year-round school to having the most miserable months of the year off.
The fact that we are paying exorbitant taxes to fund a generation of illiterates is or should be clearly evident to anyone paying attention in America. I’ve decided to include a few thoughts from other concerned Americans who know a few things about this subject and who are of the same opinion:
“Physics, chemistry, and mathematics were now “taught to a shrinking proportion of students. Our standard for high school graduation has slipped badly. Fifty years ago a high-school diploma meant something. . . . We have simply misled our students and misled the nation by handing out high-school diplomas to those who we well know had none of the intellectual qualifications that a high-school diploma is supposed to represent—and does represent in other countries. It is this dilution of standards which has put us in our present serious plight.”
Arthur Bestor complaining in a U.S. News and World Report interview, 1958.
“During the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum . . . the western culture which produced the modern democratic state.”
Walter Lippmann shared this concern in 1940.
“40 percent of high school graduates could not perform simple arithmetic or accurately express themselves in English.”
The National Association of Manufacturers charged in 1927.
High stakes testing is the response to the lack of skills; a strong majority agree that students should be taught the skills and teachers feet do need to be held to the fire. “Teaching western culture” is a tougher nut to crack, since what gets taught in history-social studies evokes about as much consensus as any righty vs lefty brouha today.
Just out of curiosity, what should be “taught” about Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson? Both were extremely important in our history, but also had such dark sides that you can prove that either or both were messiahs or devils. Would we show how they followed the Constituition…or did what they damned well pleased? And why do I care more about both of them at age 64, than I did at age 24? Should I expect others to care more about them at age <24 than I did?
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