A Rhode Island teacher’s union criticized President Obama for supporting efforts by Central Falls School District superintendent Frances Gallo to fire the entire staff of a school whose results have scandalously dismal. The President said
“If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability. And that’s what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests — 7 percent.”
The union faulted the President for refusing to understanding the difficult circumstances under which they were working and said that however miserable the statistics, they represent an improvement on the previous year. The problem, as the Economist notes in its special report on school test scores, is that the stats themselves may be made up.
The Economist argues that mandated performances by “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) act have caused school teachers either to falsify school performance, in order to keep their jobs, or to artificially teach to the test to produce graduates who can pass the exam, but do little else.
in 2009 13 teachers in Georgia were punished for cheating, including the principal and assistant principal at one elementary school. They changed answers on completed tests for fear that otherwise their school would not make “adequate yearly progress”, as required by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. A school that fails to do so for two years running must offer pupils the opportunity to transfer to better schools. Teachers and administrators can be fired, and the school can be taken over by the state.
And therein, say many education specialists, lies the problem: the immense weight that NCLB places on a single test. Teachers spend an increasing amount of time “teaching to the test”, because they know the results may determine their futures. A study of the Chicago school system conducted for Harvard’s Kennedy School found that the more weight given to tests, the more likely alteration becomes. Verdaillia Turner, who heads Georgia’s and Atlanta’s teachers’ unions, complains that the tests have turned teachers into “little robots. The best and brightest do not go into teaching any more.”
The Economist says that President Obama is going fix things. He and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, are going to mandate higher standards that the schools must meet in order to get federal funds. “Money is a great motivator,” the Economist says. But a motivator to do what? Things may now have reached the point where the educational system is run for the benefit of the unionized teachers; not an education program but a jobs program. If so then raising the standards means the principals are just going to have find more creative ways to report progress. As for the Rhode Island teachers, superintendent Gallo has relented. She’s agreed to negotiate with the teachers.
In a written statement, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the union was pleased that Gallo has agreed to go back to the table.
“The dedicated teachers and staff want nothing more than to continue and improve upon the progress they have made,” Weingarten said. “Real, sustainable change will only happen when all stakeholders work together.”
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The problem, as the Economist notes in its special report on school test scores, is that the stats themselves may be made up.”
This is most assuredly so. When you go after the symptom and not the disease this is what you get. The disease is progressivism. More specifically the desire of the state to be all things to all people even to the point of making your parents redundant. To paraphrase a quote by I think it was Pres. Wilson. “We need to remake the son so that he is totally and completely unlike his father.” And this is what the public school system has wrought. But this would not have been possible without the willing participation of PARENTS.
“Verdaillia Turner, who heads Georgia’s and Atlanta’s teachers’ unions, complains that the tests have turned teachers into “little robots. The best and brightest do not go into teaching any more.”
She is a perfect example of what is wrong. The best teacher is not the same as the best doctor. What she should have said is,” that through the machinations of the unions, school districts are hard pressed to weed out undesirable teachers so that precious resources are available to the truly dedicated teachers.” In NY school districts they have what are known as rubber rooms where teachers that are unfit to teach but can’t be fired due to union contract stipulations sit. They sit for the amount of time they would be teaching but they don’t have any of the extra duties that teachers with classes have. They get paid the same as those who are carrying the burden. There is a example of a guy who runs his real estate business from his desk while he is in the rubber room. The guy is worth over 3 million or so. Yet he continues to collect a check and benefits from the state for a job he does not do and is not qualified to hold…
I am very disheartened to see that Gallo has relented!
Obama’s reliable allies, the teachers unions, will see to it that Sasha and Malia will never have to share the same schools with the victims of their policies.
No choice for poor black students!
“The one thing no generation of parents can protect their children from is reality. No inheritance can withstand the foolishness of heirs. The harsh arithmetic on the frontier, the terrible outflow of dollars and cents, the gradual and then sudden loss of credibility as people see they are dealing not with serious people but with gilded fools cumulate their irresistible effects. In the end the gay parade of capering children enters a dark cavern and the entrance shuts behind them.
…those unentranced by the magic flute have an obligation to remember what happened; to keep the history books free of revisionism so that by shame and memory those pied pipers who led a generation astray can never return unchallenged to sound their witching tune again. But for the children already lost to the dark we can only wish that wherever they have gone, they’ve found what they were looking for.”
The Lordlings
We continue be thankful we homeschooled from K through 12.
From my experience, one of the number one issues with public schools (and boy there are many) is, for the most part, principals do not have the power to fire the people they hire. It almost literally takes an Act of Congress and 20 years to do this. The effects are demoralizing to those that truly work hard and do a good job, and damaging in a lifelong sense for the students that experience the bad ones.
I have had other teachers say to me that giving the principal the power to fire would be a bad thing because “then you can’t protect against bad principals”. My arguement to this was always the question “What are superintendents for?”
The central problem lies with the funding and administration of schools at a level higher than the school district. By injecting money at the State and Federal levels the governments have hijacked the education of our youth. School administrators have become more concerned with meeting guidelines for funding than they are with providing an education.
Some time about forty or fifty years back school districts stopped being a place that children went to learn and became an employment agency for “teachers” busy engaging in lefty indoctrination. The nonsense that I have heard from my kids teachers caused me to go to a Parent/Teacher meeting and demand my money back. The best part of it is when they are confronted with a non-pliant parent they become very defensive (they rather remind me of Warmists trying to defend the “consensus”).
I have heard all sorts of pious drivel over the years as to why the standards of education have declined despite ever increasing pay scale and declining class sizes (two things that were supposed to garauntee improvement in educational quality). None of them made sense. When I attended school there were sixty kids in my first-grade class, at the end of the year we all had learned to read and do basic addition and subtraction (I am still afraid of nuns however).
Too often teachers forget they work for us and assume that they are empowered to replace us.
Frightfully, far too many parents allow that to happen.
If I had to put my finger on the one thing alone that I consider has been the greatest problem in education, from K through PHD, I would have to say “tenure”.
The coddling of the lazy, the incompetent, the proselytiers, the bullies, and the simply mad has degraded the quality of education. The unions have made no effort at offering a “quality product” by policing their own and now we are confronted with the near impossible task of firing these boobs, or the hyper-wasteful tactic of “rubber rooms”.
But always remember; “It is for the children”.
If a standardized test is properly designed and actually covers important topics, then “teaching to the test” is the correct thing to do.
Badly designed or dishonestly administered tests are another matter, and these are common among public schools
The real problems of the public schools are two fold. First, you have incompetent, politicized faculties. The only way to cure this is to close the colleges of education and to eliminate teacher certification.
Second, the students themselves often come from highly disfunctional, if not depraved, communities, and they refuse to learn. The only solution for them is to exclude them from the public schools, which they degrade and disrupt, and to put them into special disciplinary institutions.
Not surprised that Gallo went back to negotiating – I’m sure this was her strategy from the start. Hiring a whole new staff ain’t easy, and there were bound to be as many jokers in the new deck as there were in the last one. Sometimes in negotiations you’ve got to find a way to hit the other side over the head with a 2×4, and after that you can have a decent conversation.
They didn’t think she could do it. Now they know she can. I’m sure they’ll be able to work something out now.
Conservatives have been pushing vouchers as a solution to American education problems for years. Its been a very slow battle. In various forms, publicly funded vouchers provide education for around 100,000 kids in the US.
Since vouchers tend to work, they aren’t talked about in the press very much. The purest system in the country is in Wisconsin, where about 20,000 kids get vouchers for private schools every year.
In the mean time, with a little bit of Republican support, charter schools have been gradually taking over the education system. I believe L3 intimately knows that world. Charter schools are essentially like public schools of 80 years ago. Each school has autonomy, and the interference from the general school system is nearly gone.
If you need to interpret Obama’s actions in this system. I would generally call it desperation. He’s desperately trying to fix the public schools, (Unions and all) before they are are made obsolete. Its a fools errand. And Obama plays the fool to a T.
James
anton said…
“Too often teachers forget they work for us and assume that they are empowered to replace us.”
—
5 decades ago, people took govt jobs that paid less than their private enterprise equivalents, because of the benefits.
Now, govt employees earn 30 percent more than their counterparts in the real World, and benefits have blossomed.
Attitude changes have accompanied these changes, as the well paid elite now regard that as additional proof of their superiority over those who pay their salaries.
There is a perverse set of incentives in teaching. The teacher is held accountable for the performance of another. It is perfectly possible for a child or a parent to say “You have to pass me and I don’t have to do a damn thing because it is your job on the line.” If poor performance by the student resulted in the parent being punished then that might get results. Teachers are evaluated by administrators who are not selected for their superior teaching skills or an ability to train other teachers. The primary difference between a Teacher and an Educator is that an Educator is someone who has gotten out of the classroom and no longer has to teach.
At the second best Board of Education High School in New York City I saw a select group of senior teachers, called “The Ressurectionists” review the Regents exams of students whose grades were between 55 and 65. Somehow points would be found, very rarely they might be deducted. No student was allowed to fail with a score between 60 and 65. If honest evaluations were desired then the examinations would be shipped out to another school for grading.
Publicly owned entities are bad at delivering services. They are good or at least adequate at inspecting the delivery of services. Public School Education should be replaced by a system of Vouchers and Inspectors. We need a flatter Management system with school based personnel spending more time in the classroom and a career path that ensures that Inspectors and Managers spent at least 5 years teaching. Managers should have prior teaching experience but should be hired in open competitions. Anyone with 5 years of teaching experience who went out and got an MBA should be able to compete for a job as a School Administrator. The position of Principal, originally called Principal Teacher, should be an in system coach and trainer, not a Manager.
6. bob sykes:
I agree, we have standard tests for lawyers, doctors, accountants and engineers, why not education? We have a vested interest in being sure that our children are provided with a standard education so that they can converse with one another from a common perspective (or in some cases, converse at all).
Allowing the educators whose product is being evaluated run the testing is rather like like letting a student grade their own papers; you can do it, but you will always be doubtful of the results.
I do like the point that Obama is pissing down their back and telling that it is raining. I am sure they will kiss and make up by election time. Is there anybody this guy won’t throw under the bus?
BTW; how bad was it before if 7% passing IS AN IMPROVEMENT?
Is it just my impression (or faulty memory) but hasn’t the degradation of U.S. public education coincided roughly with the level of federal government involvement and with vast increases in amounts spent per pupil?
And suppoters of ObamaCare don’t think anything remotely like this will occur when our health care industry is turned over to bureaucrats and unions?
Just to clarify a bit, the “table” the teachers are being invited back to is not a negotiating table but the one for designing the reforms needed at the school. It appears Supt. Gallo is not going to rescind her “fire” order until she’s sure the teachers are all in when it comes to reforming the school. She made clear in a radio interview this morning that she is holding out from rescinding her “fire” order until after the teachers take part in the planning process necessary to chart the path for fixing the school. She hopes to have that done in early May. After that, according to Gallo, then it will be up to the Board of Trustees of Central Falls (their version of the School Board) to decide if they want to rescind the “fire” order.
It is my personal theory and only based on observation that all 6 year olds are simply not “first graders” . . .or more specifically . . . not first graders in every area of the subject matter . . . some first graders may be very ready for one subject (reading for example) while another first grader is simply NOT ready. This has to do with the abilities of the individual. Keep in mind also that some first graders maybe spread across K through 3rd grade . . . exceptional reading skills and can not add 1 + 1 . . . does this make sense? Clearly if this is the case then trying to teach a child math when that child is simply not ready for math is an exercise in futility. Thus a standardized test may become biased because a specific group of students, due to many social and physical factors, may be below the standards established by the test. These sociological and physiological (cognitive abstract thinking) limits my make it impossible to impart the “stereotypical” knowledge to a large percentage of the group. I have used a first grader as analogy . . . I believe this permeates our education system from the earliest levels to the pinnacles of higher education.
Teachers are predestined to failure and at the same time significantly changed the perspectives that a voucher will get the child a better education . . . because there is a chance that the voucher will aid in the discovery of the students limits and thus teach to them at a level that is their actual developmental level.
Ultimately we have verified to a credible degree . . . even within the existing system . . . that education must be customized to the NEEDS of the individual. The more specific we can address each child’s individual needs the better will be the education that the child receives . . . to bad our system does not see this.
Why do you think the POTUS kids get private education?
Have any of the parents expressed opinions on any of this?
As a teacher, I recommend 1950s style kicking non-performing, disruptive, and dangerous kids out of the public school system. Either the good students leave and bad schools get worse or bad students leave and spread the problem around. I wish there were a better solution, I wish blami
ng teachers was an effective tool.
14. Tallgrass: I concur that each student is different, sometimes wildly so. I have five kids and the youngest one is a sophmore at High School. Thanks to an aggressively involved Parent Association the schools where I live are pretty good (not without problems, but pretty good).
Getting the teachers to treat the students as individuals is a persistent problem. This is not helped by the Liberal insistence that all students be “mainstreamed” and that “there is no such thing as failure”. When teachers are forced to teach to the lowest level in a class the rest of the students are bored to tears, this inevitably leads to problems. Oddly the teachers unions have pushed just this arrangement.
15. Paul Milenkovic:
You hit the nail on the head, lazy parents are the second biggest problem after tenure. Too many parents want the school to be a stand-in for them, as with all Fed or State “top-down” programs it becomes a case of “let the nanny do it”.
Nice, Mark. Gallo is even sharper than I thought.
Once you’ve got ‘em by the short hairs, never let go until you get everything you want. Although making them say “Thank you sir may I have another???” would probably be over the top.
It’s a complicated issue. It’s not always the fault of the teachers and the administrators – schools in poorer districts tend to have much less parental involvement/concern; that is very difficult for teachers to overcome. Part of the problem is that schools/school districts that don’t meet the “No Child Left Behind” goals lose a lot of flexibility in what they are allowed to do as far as arranging students, curriculum, etc. Then that ends up making the situation worse. I believe that ultimately the solution is to give the administrators (principals) more power within the schools, and parents more choice over which schools their children attend. That will help, but won’t address the children whose parents don’t care that much. And in some parts of the country, illegal immigration adds significantly to the problem. Addressing that would help quite a bit.
bob sykes@6,
bob, I think you’ve got it backwards. We can’t demand better performance, fire the teachers, ban the worst students, close schools, or refuse to fund this sinkhole. Forty year sunk cost = 100+ million students systematically deprived of survival skills, and spending over $400 BILLION/year to fail at an ever faster rate.
But continued funding of this “turnstyle” overhead (like the justice system described a few threads ago) seems unlikely. Public eduation (K-Phd) can not be salvaged.
Realistically, if one wanted to salvage all those wishing to be, then the opportunity would dictate removing the volunteers, with parents who care, from this poisonous environment and serving up a better experience, with demonstrably more skills transferred. And this is possible, whereas trying to fix the current situation is not.
Charter schools will naturally attract and recruit the best teachers away from the increasingly bereft public systems; thereby hastening and assuring the collapse.
Charter schools are discovering the means to deliver quality education, in direct opposition to the objectives of the bureaucracy, while attempting to comply with an endless stream of restrictive rules, codes, directives, regulations and laws implemented by that bureaucracy at ever faster pace.
Virtual learning (distance teaching) is the toolset. And a deliver-education-on-demand mechanism we need. Think Katrina, or any other natural disaster. The ability to educatie should be able to be up and running immediately anywhere; not years later when the shool is rebuilt.
It seems to me that for far less than the cost of an “Avatar”, many studios could produce an interactive educational experience far superior to what students get today. Captivating. The deliberately-obscured (by the education community) advantages proven to-date include:
- paced to the individual student’s capabilities/interests/ambitions .
- immediate feedback/remediation .
- the students are voluntarily captivated, as with gaming.
- infinite patience. Try again. In fact, in many exercises large numbers of different examples/questions can be presented to each student. No cheating and far more accurate tracking of individual progress.
- THERE IS NO TIME CONSTRAINT! Take as long as you need and do it anytime.
- the answer to any question, near real time; eg, you and me and thousands more can sit in and contribute. Even whiskey; B^)
- unlimited and growing free content; plus all the old school texts since Horace Greely to draw from;
- currency (up to date) <impossible using textbooks, eliminating that expense and lightens backpacks;
- school/district/state/nationwide social networks for every subject-grade level;
- multi-lingual;
- worldwide reach;
Plus, plus, plus.
Shouldn't we start offering X-prizes? $10 million to the winner for each K-12 subject. $2 million for 2nd and $1M for 3rd. Call it 300 prizes. Unleash CGI. Let the parents vote. Take 3 years. And, it’s not like the losing contestants’ courseware would not be available. This is a one-time expense producing at least three different approaches to each K-12 subject, which can be constantly improved.
And, the virtual students’ progess (in class and remote) can be precisely compared to those left behind. And the Dept. of Ed has not sponsored this program, why?
In the 1960′s the public first began to hear phrases like “The New Math” and “Whole Language” or “Context-based reading skills”. By 1955, the Leftist-Progressive social experimenters were sufficiently embedded in the US educational system that Rudolph Flesch was prompted to write the milestone book “Why Johnny Can’t Read – and What You Can Do About it.”
The original article describing the book, from a March, 1955 issue of Time Magazine, quotes author Flesch pointing out the essential weakness of the drift away from teaching students to read by learning to sound out words from the letters and syllables:
“We have decided to forget that we write with letters, and [instead] learn to read English as if it were Chinese.”
The article eerily captures the present looniness of the public school blinders-in-place mentality, recounting Flesch’s assertion that “…U.S. educators by and large refuse to recognize the word method’s shortcomings. Reading failures are merely blamed on ‘poor eyesight … or a broken home … or an Oedipus complex or sibling rivalry.’”
Fifty-Five years on, and the pathetickers running the massive open running sore of public education are still smearing dung on the wound instead of draining and cleaning it.
Diane Ravitch has rethought the vouchers and testing themes now used. Here is a WaPo interview with her:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022505543.html
One of my best friends teaches in a charter school, and we’ve had many conversations on this and related topics. It seems to both of us that charter schools have one enormous advantage over public schools: They can kick students out. He explains it to parents, “We have low tolerance for misbehavior. We literally have 50 students who are waiting for the opportunity to take your child’s place.” Of course such an environment attracts the best teachers. Of course student performance will be better. It’s not that the student population is inherently superior, but the parent population is inherently more supportive of education. And those parents understand that parents themselves have the primary responsibility for the education of their children. It is not something they can or should abdicate to any school. Clueless and unsupportive parents are largely selected out of the pool.
“Verdaillia Turner, who heads Georgia’s and Atlanta’s teachers’ unions, complains that the tests have turned teachers into “little robots. The best and brightest do not go into teaching any more.””
Come on now. When did the ‘best and brightest’ ever go into education? Especially primary education.
Next, what is wrong with ‘teaching the test’? The only difference here is that the test being taught is a universal standard of performance instead of an individual teachers personal view. Especially the view that a passing grade based on an idividual teachers standards is even more suspect than teaching to a standard test.
Sorry educators, you lost my support 30 years ago.
This is not rocket science.
In order of importance:
Cultural values that stress the importance of education, a strong work ethic and the necessity for the individual to meet reasonable family expectations.
Parental involvement that supports the aforementioned cultural values.
Good teachers.
A supportive learning environment.
All the money in the world and all the good teachers in the world and all the innovative teaching methodologies in the world…can’t make Johnny learn.
Being raised in a supportive family with high expectations and where high achieving cultural values are honored is the way to raise test scores.
Nothing less will suffice.
There’s a simple reason why Asian immigrants succeed despite the same (if not greater) social/monetary ‘obstacles’… and their success has nothing to do with native intelligence and everything to do with parental expectations based in culture.
You want to improve test scores? Improve the family.
This is O’s sister souljah moment. But no one noticed.
@21. The whole subject of reading is really fascinating. It’s totally obvious that the way to teach English — which is a phonetic language — is through phonics. Any other notion is close to insanity. Yet this is what happens in many places. English is taught as if it were an ideographic language.
There is a school of thought that the explosion in dyslexia in fact stems from this way of teaching. Dyslexia more or less didn’t exist before the “new reading” teaching methods. Nor did illiteracy for anyone who was schooled. If you went to school, you learned how to read. Period. That’s no longer the case because of HOW reading gets taught.
On the dyslexia front, it makes perfect sense. If I learn to sound out a word, then “dog” can only be “dog.” It can be nothing else. But if I’m just taught that “dog” is a set of three random symbols in a sequence, then it becomes very easy for my brain to spell “dog” as “odg” or “gdo” or whatever. They are all equally meaningful, or equally meaningless, as the case may be.
Imagine trying to read that way! Now if I tell you that “xib” means “dog” and “bix” means “God”, and the only way to know this is to recognize the patterns, how likely are you to confuse “xib” and “bix”? Very likely (remember, you are given no inherent reason why they sound different, you’re just told to remember it). But if you know that “d” makes the “duh” sound and “g” makes the “guh” sound, you can’t possibly confuse the two.
If you wanted to deliberately design a way to mess people up and insure they’ll never be good readers, you couldn’t do any better than sight-reading and whole language.
The root of educational failure comes from stupid pedagogical ideas. Same with math. You learn math by doing math, but doing it over and over and over. Those educated properly will recall sitting in school and churning through dozens and dozens of the same kind of problems. Then doing a few dozen more for homework. Until the light bulb goes on in your head and you realize how it works. Then you move to the next topic. But no no, that’s not “fun” or “intesting” enough for the little dears, because education must be FUN and RELEVANT to student’s lives. So instead of doing a few hundred addition problems and actually learning it, you get a “relevant” math problem like “Mohammed has five apples and Jose has three apples. Li Peng eats one of Mohammed’s apples and brings another one home to one of her two mommies. How many people in this problem love President Obama?” Answer: all of them!
The list of educational insanities is so long that I could rant about this for days on end. But I’ll let it go at that. With the final note that the best instant improvement in student behavior comes about from uniforms and dress codes. Teaching adolescent boys and girls in the same room is deranged. And on the teacher front, one of the biggest problems has been the absolute feminization of the teacher. Where are the male teachers, esp in the early grades? They have vanished.
Oh, and smacking students on the ass with a ruler is an exceptionally effective tool. Something that was once clearly understood.
In order of importance:
Cultural values
Parental involvement…
Good teachers.
A supportive learning environment.
All the above can help a child reach his full potential but will not overcome the one thing we can’t talk about in the West: a low IQ level.
There’s a simple reason why Asian immigrants succeed despite the same (if not greater) social/monetary ‘obstacles’… and their success has nothing to do with native intelligence and everything to do with parental expectations based in culture.
But the successful Asians in America come from groups with high average IQ levels. The same cannot be said for Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in the UK. (No, it is not due to Islam. There are plenty of successful Muslim groups).
The West is just like the USSR in that we cannot discuss what we see right in front of us.
Add Education Colleges to the list of the usual suspects. These tend to be of low academic status in the university pecking order and at one time were the place where the jocks were stashed. They are prone to fads as there is no real core. Philosophically they tend toward Deweyism – sort of a crude materialism. The profs are under pressure like all profs to publish, so they often fix what isn’t broken by coming up with loopy ideas like whole language or look say [Chinese] reading instruction. Result = a couple of generations that cannot read/write properly and vote for Obama. The antidote to this particular nonsense is Rudolph Flesch per post #21.
The antidote to the problem in general is competition with little/no government interference. You have dozens [maybe hundreds] of tv’s to choose from but only one public school? This is nuts.
Furthermore teaching should not necessarily be looked upon as a life time profession. Having young energetic teachers with real degrees not ed degrees is a good thing. Let them teach for a few years and then move on to something else. Let others move into teaching from other productive careers and then teach for a few years.
As a final thought in this rather random rant, when I see an organization that is failing I look at the leadership at the top. Failure begins here usually in the failure to confront problems, set expectations, unwillingness to ruffle feathers, etc.
We have home schooled – I believe in this as an option. Have daughter in Catholic school now and she is having a good experience. I went years ago – like poster #4 anton there were 60+ kids in my first grade class and 1 nun. We all learned to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. However, I always try to avoid the penguin exhibit at the zoo.
@28 All the above can help a child reach his full potential but will not overcome the one thing we can’t talk about in the West: a low IQ level.
That’s very true, and certainly every child can’t grow up to become President (well…) or a doctor or a lawyer. But pretty much everyone except the genuinely retarded can acquire basic reading skills, basic math skills and get at least a reasonable grounding in basic science, history, and civics. But we don’t even achieve that much anymore. The fact that America can’t achieve a literacy rate of 100% for any student educated here is pathetic.
The following is an example of what must never be told to children.
“Engineering and technology have been major drivers in the global economy. It’s not surprising that other countries emerging as new economic powers are those investing in the promotion of engineering and science to the youngest generation. Unfortunately, the U.S. is experiencing a cultural lack of interest among young people. National studies have reported a drop in the number of high school graduates who plan to study engineering, a lack of preparedness in math and science among potential engineering students, and a declining interest in the field among young women and members of underrepresented minorities.”
Who said this? An Egyptian Muslim dean of an engineering school at an American public university. That school’s electrical engineering department is stacked with Arab Muslims and his previous laboratory in the electrical engineering at another university was stacked with Arab Muslims. Is it any surprise that he would be using rhetoric designed to keep Americans from getting interested in math, science, and engineering? This is one of the reasons why Bantu Education was so loathed in apartheid South Africa!
That dean can get away with his dispiriting propaganda because of political correctness.
Just to add to the information on Central Falls. The teachers there make on the order of $70k a year. Low teacher pay is not the problem. The median family income of the town of Central Falls is between $20-30k. While there is an ESL problem in the town [Portuguese, I believe], by the time they reach high school they are at least able to communicate.
Superintendent Gallo’s original proposal, which was flatly rejected by the teacher’s union, involved the high school teachers working 45 minutes more a day; split between eating lunch with the students [teachers apparently avoid all contact with the students outside of required classroom time. ], tutoring, and counseling. For this extra time they were to be paid at the rate of $30 an hour. When they finally came back with a counter offer, after the initial reaction, they wanted $90 an hour. After all, if they are getting a whole 7% of their students to pass the test [OK, maybe 1-2% before cheating] their time is obviously more valuable.
In my town, we have a charter school based on E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. It gets half the funds of the public schools per student, and the teachers are paid less than the public schools. We have standardized testing here. ALL, literally 100% of the charter school’s students pass or well exceed the state standards. It started K-3 and moved up in grades over the years until they graduate from high school at the charter school. Before they expanded to grade 12, the kids had to transfer to regular high school to graduate. When they got there, they kicked butt and took names academically.
There is a waiting list for teachers and students at the charter school.
Of course it isn’t hard when our high school’s priorities are Sports first, and Auto Mechanics second. Academics are a distant 3rd. My kids got an education despite our school system, not because of it.
[One daughter was the first kid in our county to ever qualify for FBLA Nationals. She ended up scoring 12th nationwide in her events. Not even a mention in the school paper. Our Auto Mechanics team went to state. They shut the entire school down for half a day for a pep rally and send off.]
Subotai Bahadur
I think the biggest problem with the American educational system is that too many teachers and principals are more interested in ranking children than in educating them. We should not see it as a problem that parents with a good education teach their children what they know. We should also not play the expectations game where children are expected to do poorly because they happen to come from a poor background.
We should not expect children to be neither better nor the best. We should expect children to be good and the best they can be. Most of all, we must expect children to learn. A dumbed down curriculum does children no favors, particularly poor children.
Infants get attracted to whatever their parents do. When parents read books for fun, an infant gets the idea that books are fun. Likewise, few things are as exciting as a teacher who is passionate about the subject matter he or she is interested in. Teaching shouldn’t be seen as a job; it should be seen as a calling analogous to joining the ministry.
Man, do I want to leave a comment on this thread. Work is crazy today, however, so it’ll have to wait until later tonight.
But the thread is off to a great start. Lots of good stuff here. Important stuff.
Later,
L3
peterike writes: “If you wanted to deliberately design a way to mess people up and insure they’ll never be good readers, you couldn’t do any better than sight-reading and whole language.”
My kids have been whole-languaged for the most part, narrowly avoiding disaster, it seems to me. I taught my daughter to read by using with her the classic “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.” It’s written by the unfortunately named Siegfried Engelmann. BC’ers might enjoy perusing the 534 customer reviews at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985
The book relies on phonics, but not as discrete units. In reading, apparently, a person’s eyes sees a letter, which the brain interprets as a sound, not a “letter.” Development of skills in mere letter identification are not as valuable as developing the letter-sound identification needed for reading. Engelmann starts lesson one with the sound-letter “mmmmmmm.” You get to the alphabet somewhere around lesson 60.
After completing the book with my daughter, I had to agree with Engelmann that anyone can learn to read by age five. Engelmann says that any child with an IQ above 60 (if I remember correctly) can learn to read, if the sound-based method is used. It’s a mechanical thing, not really related to intelligence.
Teachers generally dismiss Engelmann. Parents love him.
This is not just a teacher problem, although I will say that it is entirely too easy to become a teacher where I reside.
Obama could help matters more by 1) outlawing union activity and tenure protections in the public sector. By 2) raising the standards by which teachers get certified and by requiring ANNUAL RE-CERTIFICATION. 3) Further, mandate reductions in admin staff, bussing, etc.
More of the same: throwing money at the issue; is just no longer acceptable. We should cut costs with the above – dramatically.
We have too many lazy parents & kids due to 60 years of prosperity. They will need to buckle down with the coming hard times.
The only question: Is it too late? Have we squandered our future in too many ways.
My tummy hurts!
This is not just a teacher problem, although I will say that it is entirely too easy to become a teacher where I reside.
Obama could help matters more by 1) outlawing union activity and tenure protections in the public sector. By 2) raising the standards by which teachers get certified and by requiring ANNUAL RE-CERTIFICATION. 3) Further, mandate reductions in admin staff, bussing, etc.
More of the same: throwing money at the issue; is just no longer acceptable. We should cut costs with the above – dramatically.
We have too many lazy parents & kids due to 60 years of prosperity. They will need to buckle down with the coming hard times. These problems are really a reflection of a depraved culture. Money can’t buy it better.
The only question: Is it too late? Have we squandered our future in too many ways.
My tummy hurts!
Intriguing ideas, Geoffgo! I salute your suggestions. Gotta find someone like Raymond Orteig or Peter Diamandis
If they can’t be made to stop strangling and enfeebling children given to their care – if we don’t soon see them truly improving the system and actually educating kids – the educational bureaucracies of the Federal and State governments will go extinct.
The only question is whether the country will survive long enough to undo the crippling damage these idiots have inflicted.
(29. think of the penguins frolicking…)
24. michaelhoskins:
Come on now. When did the ‘best and brightest’ ever go into education? Especially primary education.
You are correct that for some time the ‘best and brightest’ haven’t gone into education. In previous generations, when nursing and teaching were the main professions for educated women, teaching had quite a few of the ‘best and brightest.’ One of my math teachers was woman who was a Phi Beta Kappa in math, but not a good teacher. I also had male teachers who were high level, such as two who later got their Ph.Ds in English. I had an English teacher with a Masters who had had learned Chinese from the Yale Language Institute, and had used that language skill in the Army. I had a Music teacher who had played his instrument with the Dorsey Brothers. But that was many decades ago. This was a public high school. The degradation of discipline in public schools, due to political correctness and the decline of the two-parent family, is at least one reason why brighter people do not go into teaching, or stay in it.
“Teaching to the test” is a term used in different ways. It sometimes means drilling over and over again on practice tests, which is a total waste of time. “Teaching to the test” needs to be done interactively. Teach an objective, such as decimals, and give a short quiz to see what the results are. Teach then according to what shortcomings need to be overcome. Which is easier said than done, given the variety of levels a teacher deals with.
Regarding standardized tests, I am of two minds. Having seen high school seniors of ordinary intelligence who couldn’t deal with decimals, a skill taught around 6th grade, I see the need for standardized testing to make sure that such neglect doesn’t occur. On the other hand, there are those in the education establishment who maintain that every student needs to learn algebra, which IMHO is nonsense. Even in the high level high school I attended, about 20% of the class took general math instead of algebra. Nearly all of these graduated from high school and had successful lives, without having taken the standardized tests.
You folks have no clue what is going on education, and to just rip teachers is garbage.
I am a former teacher, my spouse is has taught for over 30 years in one of the poorest school districts in our state. Every year this school gets the highest test scores in the district, but it did not make a big enough improvement to get AYP. In fact, a paperwork foul up caused the school to not get AYP last year. Now the whole staff from the principal on down is being run into the ground, even though it is still the highest performing school on tests in the district.
These teachers don’t cheat on tests, they stay after school long hours, and spend all kinds of time in meetings while others rip them up one side and down the other because they did not make AYP. Usually the problem is trying to teach kids who have no skills or limited skills to learn, and then try to do things like teach advanced math to kids that most of us were not even introduced to until 9th or 10th grade. If you knew the garbage these people go through to even try and teach kids these days it would amaze you. And it would not be a surprise to you to find out why many people do not go into teaching any more.
I have seen my share of awful teachers, who have no place in a classroom. I could go on and on with things I have heard and seen in schools. I will say this, before you stuff everything that is a problem on the back of classroom teacher, you might want to add more than a few groups on the list first: An education bureaucracy in the state and federal governments that has no clue about education, but sucks up money for no good purpose, other than to make rules and push teaching ideas that are crap. Then you have education professors and universities who put out so much garbage as supposedly education theory, which is nothing but worthless paper.
Then you can add society in general, who have decided to say it’s okay to have kids born to single mothers and parents who have no clue how to raise their kids. Or have families who would rather drink their beer at night then read books to their kids during the day, or put messages out in the modern media that destroy the family unit, or any real sense of a shared vision of morality.
So many decent parents are bailing their kids out of public schools now because they have been destroyed by the liberal part of society that is now trying to destroy the rest of it. Unions are part of the problem. But there is much more wrong with schools than a few union bosses and dweebs who can’t teach.
The simple and easy thing to do is just blame teachers for all the problems in public schools. It is the intellectually lazy thing to do to. And as usual, the lazy thing is not the right thing.
36. Enscout:
This is not just a teacher problem, although I will say that it is entirely too easy to become a teacher where I reside.Obama could help matters more by 1) outlawing union activity and tenure protections in the public sector.
This a good idea. Public employee unions have a stranglehold over the rest of us, as they vote. They have bankrupted California. Unfortunately,pigs will fly before Obama would do this. Who was it who visited the White House the most often? The head of SEIU.
#40 wee ice mon: Clearly for a former teacher you have a reading comprehension problem . . . read mon, read mon . . . many of the posts give due credit to the teacher and provide insight into the challenges of the profession, not necessarily pointing fingers at teachers. Sorry that there was a paper work screw up and that your people suffer because of them . . . did you ever think that the paper work screw up is perhaps due to the drastic increase in “administrative persons” to “teachers” that exists in education today? A teacher suffers because of the administrator, period!!!
Thank you for being a teacher and showing such compassion to do an outstanding job. I am sure that if you have truly been at the job as along as you indicate . . . that your success is already evident in the product you have contributed to. My kudos to your wife too.
Oops: sorry for (almost) duplicate posts. Someday I’ll figure this thing out.
LL3: Can’t wait for your insights.
#40: It’s not all the fault of the teachers: Agreed. My wife works in an elementary school. A few of the teachers there are literally the most dysfunctional people I’ve ever met – bless their hearts. I truly believe that just a little life experience in the private sector jobs’ market would be a huge benefit to them. But Pub. Ed. allows them to live in their pathetic bubble. Obviously, others among them are truly dedicated & remarkable teachers.
Pity their lot because, as we’ve both intimated, this is a societal issue that bleeds over to education. But the best of them are also in a position to make a difference in results beyond what they teach in classrooms. I wonder how many of them go to local BOE meetings and express their concerns. I’ll bet not many.
Wee ice mon: I don’t think anybody here would contest that government involvement and education bureaucracy aren’t a problem! It’s not just dumping on the teachers, though they deserve a good deal of it (not so much from the individual teacher level, but the level of the teacher’s unions and what they will and won’t agree to). Teacher’s are also wildly mis-educated in education schools. Not that they aren’t sincere or committed or hard working, they simply have no clue how to teach a subject because they’ve been fed a pile of gunk from the education professoriate, possibly the biggest group of idiots this side of Congress.
In any case, with education as a topic, the list of problems is so vast that you can’t possibly target everything in one post.
One major problem teachers face today is working for districts so underwater on NCLB scores they require virtually continual testing to measure “progress”, plus they also demand “teaching to the test”. This is insanity. If you are testing – and grading – every week or so, and teaching just for that test, how much time is available for real teaching? Yes, that’s right. Zip.
I agree pretty much with #10. Lifeofthemind: Flatten out the administration of each school system. Hire a site manager, not a burned out non-teacher turned “educator” to manage each school. Farm out testing and only allow formal testing once each semester/quarter. Stop the madness where the monkeys fiddle with exam scores while they run the zoo.
“I have seen my share of awful teachers, who have no place in a classroom. I could go on and on with things I have heard and seen in schools. I will say this, before you stuff everything that is a problem on the back of classroom teacher, you might want to add more than a few groups on the list first: An education bureaucracy in the state and federal governments that has no clue about education, but sucks up money for no good purpose, other than to make rules and push teaching ideas that are crap. Then you have education professors and universities who put out so much garbage as supposedly education theory, which is nothing but worthless paper.
Then you can add society in general, who have decided to say it’s okay to have kids born to single mothers and parents who have no clue how to raise their kids. Or have families who would rather drink their beer at night then read books to their kids during the day, or put messages out in the modern media that destroy the family unit, or any real sense of a shared vision of morality.
So many decent parents are bailing their kids out of public schools now because they have been destroyed by the liberal part of society that is now trying to destroy the rest of it. Unions are part of the problem. But there is much more wrong with schools than a few union bosses and dweebs who can’t teach.”
—
Amen to that, but it is the Teacher’s Unions that form the largest Army of liberal footsoldiers.
It is teachers and professors that require children to be exposed to liberal pap, along with the MSM, Hollywood, and the ACLU.
In Hawaii, more than half the public school teachers send THEIR kids to private schools!
Not as bad as DC, where virtually all Dems send their kids to private schools.
I brought an apple every day
I tried so hard in every way
I read my lessons, learned them well
I even tried to learn to spell
Arithmetic I couldn’t get
That’s why my mommy got upset
And history I always failed
Who cares when that Columbus sailed
My teacher gave us all a test
I failed it just like all the rest
But teacher gave us a good grade
No matter what we really made
I graduated top of class
Though not a subject did I pass
I think my childhood they did rob
Because I cannot get a job
You are bad for my Self-Esteem, Walt!
—
Star Parker says that over 65% of employed blacks have Govt jobs!
…and we wonder how the Dems have such a lock on the Black Vote!
Star Parker: We need green money, not green jobs
By STAR PARKER
So now *Van Jones* has new jobs at Princeton University and Washington’s Center for American Progress. And, to seal the public rehabilitation, he was awarded the NAACP’s Image Award. Van Jones is important because he uses environmentalism as a new platform to welcome poor blacks onto the government plantation.
The West is just like the USSR in that we cannot discuss what we see right in front of us.
Now that is an insightful and pregnant comment from somebody who did learn how to think in school, or at least did not have the ability bored out of him.
The teachers and unions reaction may seem puzzling to the public. But they are merely using the techniques that have worked for decades all over America.
But this time the magic did not happen. And the believers are perplexed and worried.
What happens when your TV remote stops working?
Answer: You install new batteries. Your neighbor is not involved, bothering him is not considered.
Similarly, a unions position will be that if a school stops working you must install more money. But bothering the educators cannot be considered.
There is nothing really wrong with American education. Exclude Blacks and Hispanics, and White and Asian students score near the top of every category, including Math and Science, compared to the rest of the OECD nations.
While on the margins PC and the rest have made instruction worse, the same basic system successfully educated the White middle class since the early 1900′s. It is not broken.
The Black and Hispanic underclass is broken. While it is true that a few exceptionally bright, motivated, and high IQ Black and Hispanic students can achieve great things (Jaime Escalante gets the best of the best in terms of IQ and simply motivates them), the vast majority of the non-White underclass has the following against them (that cannot be addressed in any way by the educational system):
1. Single motherhood, i.e. illegitimacy as the norm, and the social pathology it breeds. In the Black urban ghetto this reaches 90% or more.
2. Anti-education bias, i.e. Black/Hispanic culture finds education a waste, effeminate for men, and “White.” See Berkeley High School and “Science is White.”
3. Functional illiteracy, among single mother parents. This means no books or prospect of them in the home. Children in early childhood are passed around to a wide network of casual acquaintances and have little structure or organization as they develop cognition and social skills.
4. Average IQs are about one and half standard deviations away from the White mean. This means that the general population of the Black and Hispanic underclass is dominated by lower IQ cultural concerns that have as their core, low future time orientation, low discipline, low ability to handle cognitive skills.
The implication for this is profound. This average IQ (which of course implies both geniuses and morons in the population) being significantly lower, around 85 vs about 99 for the White population, means that the instructional methods used to educate middle class, average IQ White kids will SIMPLY NOT WORK on a ghetto or barrio kid with an 85 IQ. This also means that while the lower IQ ghetto or barrio kid CAN LEARN, the system in which he/she can learn will be PROFOUNDLY DIFFERENT and the amount of academic achievement he/she can accomplish WILL BE LESS.
Secondarily, this also means that high IQ kids from the Barrio and Ghetto (and they DO EXIST) must be both lucky and possess exceptional wills to overcome the cultural barriers in their environments hostile to learning. Theodore Dalyrmple described this in the White British Underclass in ‘Life at the Bottom’ so it is not exclusive to non-Whites.
Thirdly, this also means that there will be significantly LESS smart kids among the barrio and Ghetto than in the White Middle class, and Asian (Asian populations from NE Asia have higher average IQs than Whites, about 105, in nearly all surveys done).
This means trade-offs. Limited funds means that the most “bang for the buck” is educating the smart kids found in the White and Asian populations (where the most smart kids will be found), then identifying and having separate tracks for smart Hispanic/Black kids (who will be smaller in proportion to their population than first Asian then White kids) and finally a “maintenance” educational aimed at providing optimal possible outcomes for the ghetto/barrio lower IQ kids.
As a rational thought experiment, it is unlikely to ever produce results by spending lots of money on a kid who came to the US illegally from Michoacan, or the child of a guy and gal who came there, being functionally illiterate in Spanish, having almost no English, and with an IQ of around 85 or so. A few super-geniuses from this general class will exist, and are worth identifying and spending money on. But you cannot raise someone’s IQ.
And it is time to be honest, not self-deceiving or selling pretty lies, about fundamental differences. No one is upset at a nearly all Black NBA, an all Black (from West Africa) Sprint events in the Summer Olympics finals (there has not been a non-West African descent finalist in the last 40 years), a nearly all-Black (70%) NFL, and other athletic events/positions/sports. Because society acknowledges that while individual prodigies may exist (Yao Ming, Wes Welker), on average Blacks have superior athletic ability in many areas.
No one is screaming about the need for White affirmative action in the all-Black NBA. Quotas for White players, or the need to make NFL corners and safeties more “White” (since no White players are at those positions). People accept these differences. They know they come not from discrimination but from the innate average differences working themselves out at the elite levels.
It is time to accept the real differences, understanding that different is not “better” or “worse” simply different, and adjust our expectations for educational outcomes, on the same order we have sports.
A proper educational system would provide vastly different instructional methods to those with significantly different average IQs, expectations of outcomes, and results. This does not mean warehousing, or failing to treat different people with human dignity or respect, or lack of an equal place in society or lack of a path to life success.
But it does mean being honest about differences. Because we are indeed, all very different.
whiskey, I am certain that there have been white finalists in sprint events in the Olympics for some if not most if not all of the last forty years – because I remember remarking on seeing them, time and again.
winning, might be another matter.
I leave myself open to refutation being too lazy to google for the facts.
–
however, you do make many points about IQ and education, that I do agree with.
“Things may now have reached the point where the educational system is run for the benefit of the unionized teachers…”
Whadda ya mean, “may”?
Get rid of the teachers unions.
Get rid of the poor teachers.
Get rid of the kids who don’t want to learn.
Force parents whose kids are not in school to pay a peanlty: Higher tax, cut in food stamps, etc.
5 years ago I decided to change careers from the chemical industry to teaching at my local failing high school. (My school grades out at D or F every year.) I, like most BC’ers, have a conservative philosophy and had always assumed that the vast majority of problems in low performing schools was due to the fed, state, and local bureaucracies as well as the teacher’s unions and poor teachers. I decided to put my money were my mouth was and I would help make a difference.
From my direct experience I lay the blame not on government bureaucracy but on the Great Society programs which changed(destroyed) the social structure of Black America. We are simply reaping what the cultural revolution has sown.
It is not that my students are unintelligent, they are quick learners. They have learned from the state that “failure is not an option” by never being allowed to fail. We must give them grade recovery, we must never shame them for their apathy, we must do all we can, because they won’t. They can’t and I am now beginning to believe this to be true.
My students are ruined. Chaos, apathy, easy money, something for nothing, hustling, ho’ing, cheating, cursing, drug money, single mother, multiple baby’s mamas, style over substance, hanging out, pants-on-the-ground, hooker heels, tardiness, absenteeism and a whole host of other cultural memes permeates their hip-hop culture. It has now been indoctrinated into them and I don’t see a way to evolve their culture for the betterment of society.
The state can’t force parents to live and raise their children a certain way, but it certainly allowed generations to live in a manner where they are not responsible for their lives.
We need not do the easy thing and replace the entire faculty and admin of a school, we need to replace an entire culture.
Josh:
Valeri Borzov – Munich 1972
About 1990 a friend I’d met while teaching at a state university in Cincinnati invited me to a fund-raising dinner to help him run for Congress. I didn’t know from Libertarianism at that time (to use the Midwestern phrasing) but I knew he was a good guy.
Hearing him speak about education really made me a supporter. He pointed out – with much detail – that the NYC public school system had approximately TEN times the administrator to pupil ratio as the parochial schools, but the public students test and performance scores by any criterion were only a small fraction of those of the parochial students.
A year later I’d accepted a job in Chicago, and discovered the joys of WBEZ, which had some of the most lucid talk shows on politics I’ve ever found. As I neared the first anniversary of my move, autumn was approaching, and it was all over the news that public schools were out of money, and wouldn’t be able to open unless the legislators in Springfield voted a special budget increase. Sure enough, the schools didn’t open on time.
However, certain news items began to surface that there were a number of crooked “sweet-heart” deals with contractors who just happened to turn out to be cousins or brothers or in-laws of various members of the School Board and Public School administrations. The Superintendant of Chicago Schools, who’d been hired with much ballyhoo the year before announced he was resigning. The information came out that his annual salary was $900,000, and that it included a severance package guaranteeing that same level of income for several years regardless of the reasons for his departure.
Since that time, Mayor Richard Daley has managed to convince the Legislature to give authority to the Mayor of Chicago to manage the Chicago Public Schools organization. This means he gets to appoint the CEO and the entire Board of Directors , for starts. Nice setup, eh? No possibility of political graft there, eh?
CPS comprises almost 670 elementary and secondary schools, employing almost 44,000, enrolling some 410,000 students in all grades. Nine of the high schools are “selective enrollment” – competitive application process, emphasis on high academic standards. (Chicago High School for the Arts is in addition to those, the only school with audition-based enrollment.) Also there are nine middle schools in the system using a similar competitive scheme for admission. Finally, there are five public high schools modeled and operated on the model of military prep schools, and nine as “Career Academies.”
The downloadable Citizen’s Guide to Understanding the Chicago Public Schools Budget for fiscal 2008-2009 indicates on the second page a total yearly budget of $6.2 BILLION. (What’s that? $15,500 per student?) It’s worth skimming through this document.
Sorry, it’s been 17 years since I lived in Chicago, and I don’t know anyone who can give first-hand account of the public school situation.
- – - – -
Whiskey, I worked with a guy who’d learned and refined his art skills “tagging” with friends in the Chicago Barrio. He came to work always dressed very professionally. One afternoon, we stayed talking out in the spring evening on the lawn of a Naperville company where we were doing computer graphics for an international computer educational group. When he got up to leave, he started changing back into his regular street clothing – so he wouldn’t be singled out by his friends as some sort of traitor, he explained.
Jeez-o-peez.
You want to fix the schools? Fix the cultures of the populations they serve. There are no more bad teachers than there are bad doctors, mechanics, or ditch diggers. There are some, sure – but look to the parents if you want to know the measure of the kids.
You want to fix my classroom? Easy – give me the power to eject students who cause me problem. I can pick 1-2 in every class that generate 80% of my grief. On days they are not there, everything goes well and actual learning happens. Other days, I spend more time dealing with discipline issues than teaching.
You want to fix schools without necessarily overhauling the population they serve? Get old school. Simple rules, rigidly enforced. Put more power at the local level. Require that parents get involved somehow.
Re: “Things may now have reached the point where the educational system is run for the benefit of the unionized teachers; not an education program but a jobs program. ”
This was true at least 15 years ago when my son’s school principal casually mentioned that his first responsibility is to teachers, not students. And this is more so now.
It seems like my S key is sticking, and I didn’t notice. That’s always embarrassing to commit typo errors as a teacher… ;D
Re #58 TX TEACHER: “You want to fix my classroom? Easy – give me the power to eject students who cause me problem.” Sure, define the problem.
My son was permanently ejected from advanced biology class for drawing picture of his teacher when the teacher took a day off and was substituted by some “baby sitter”, so kids socialized. Nevertheless the teacher considered it to be an awful “problem”.
To restore my kid back in class took a threat of a lawsuit and interference from a district’s director of secondary education.
He later was the only one from this class who got 5 on Biology Advance Placement Test.
Probably due to his absence from the class for few weeks.
However, I do agree that educational problems are mostly demographically determined. Plus idiotic curriculum in elementary education.
A prior poster indicated that we are spending about 15K per child in our current system. I think if we gave parents 12K a child to educate their kids in the private sector or at home everyone would be happy. Sure some parent would drink the money away but we can use the other 3K per kid to enforce some basic standards. I bet on the whole educational attainment would increase.
GET THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF THE WAY!
What we have overall is another case of a centralized authority/power getting and reinforcing positive feedback.
Negative feedback is the force that enables corrective actions to be taken and undesirable procedures/results to be corrected.
NCLB is a great example of reinforcing positive feedback and keeping negative feedback from working.
Abolish the Department of Education in its entirety. Reduce each state’s authority to a small oversight board.
Then appropriate money to the Independent School Districts via a popularly elected School Board. Appropriate money on the basis of number of school-age children in the district and not on the number of children actually enrolled. This will cut way down on the tendency to dumb down curriculum to the level of those who ought not to be there. As it is, the district loses money if they do not so dumb down. (Thanks to T. R. Fehrenbach for this insight.)
Then you let the school boards decide how to best spend the money. Some will do well. Some will not. The failures will in due time result in a new and more astute school board getting elected. The newcomers will emulate the successes, not the failures. Negative feedback thus achieved and then reinforced.
This is no utopian scheme. It will not result in any form of perfection. However, I consider it actuarily certain to result in a reversal of the current pathology and the re-establishment of the better system of yesteryear.
It’s upthread in close resemblence (see #25) but should be repeated: the 3 key factors in child education:
1. Parents
2. Parents
3. Parents
I will also make a nod to cultural values – if education/understanding (not certificate claiming as is our current culture), work ethic and integrity is truly honored and rewarded by the culture then parental priorities are reinforced (or compensated some if the parents are lax).
In Washington State I was involved in the early homeschooling community and nearly all the homeschoolers tested in the upper quartile. Some liked to attribute that to the parent’s education level and ability to teach and or individual attention. My conclusion was the effect of family priority. If you homeschool, there is a significant allocation of family resources, time and attention to “school”. If public school parents invested even close to that level of focus their kids would achieve at the same level.
So, my bottom line – it’s the parents and schools should encourage that. Instead, the Educational Industrial Complex (Education Academia, Teachers Unions and Gov’t Education Admin. and politicians) proposed a grand bargain: give them lots of money and influence and they will handle the education and socialization of your children.
How’s that working out for us?
The natural white HS graduation rate is about 25% (This was the rate in 1941, at the time of the WWII draft). Probably no more than 35% of white students can do legitimate eleventh and twelfth grade work.
The entire edifice of NCLB is based on lies, lies piled on top of lies. To measure “success” in a “high school” where the average IQ is 85 requires constant deception, and a staff of deceivers. Some are better at this than others.
Mandatory public education should end at grade 8. The fraction of the population able to go on beyond this shrinks every year. By tenth grade, most nonprogressing students should be out of school, permanently.
I thought that this Cato Institute study of the “Kansas City Experiment” (the KCMO schools got crazy money for years to try to improve their performance – it didn’t work) was a real eye-opener:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.pdf
Re Wretchard’s comment “Things may now have reached the point where the educational system is run for the benefit of the unionized teachers; not an education program but a jobs program”, pages 14-15 of the document mention exactly this about Kansas City. From the study:
“In Kansas City the two largest employers of
middle-class blacks were the post office and the school
district. Just the rumor of a dismissal sent tremors
through the entire black community–there was no other place
to go; the community needed the jobs. At the same time,
school district employees were the mainstay of the black
churches. (Kansas City mayor Emanuel Cleaver, a Methodist
minister, had 200 teachers in his parish.) The black
preachers closely monitored the district’s hiring and promotion
practices, with the result that the district essentially
couldn’t fire anyone.”
“Money is a great motivator,” the Economist says. But a motivator to do what?
Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov nailed it forty years ago in their descriptions of the Gulag economy. It is a practice called ‘tukhta’, wherein the gang leader (in this case the teachers union leaders) invent production statistics that keep the iron discipline of the Gulag administration off their backs, and keeps the bread ration coming.
‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us’.
gokart-mozart,
Mandatory public education should end at grade 8
On occasion I have called for the abolition of the 12th grade. In NY now a student can stay in the public system until they are 21 years old, or they get caught. This is undoubtedly a source of education for the 15 year olds they are given access to but serves no larger good. It would be better if everyone after their 19th birthday was issued a certificate listing their actual level of attainment in every subject, such a certificate being more meaningful than the current diploma anyway, and if still not graduated directed to a GED program affiliated with a nearby Community College.
My scheme also includes six months of basic military, citizenship and disaster survival training after the 17th birthday. Among many other benefits that would provide a clear and universal bright line demarcation between childhood and the responsible adulthood of an enfranchised citizen.
Your numbers seem a little extreme but I do believe that the percentage of graduates has not changed significantly over the last hundred years. What has changed dramatically for the worse is the quality of the education that the secondary school diploma represents.
gr,
If the Teacher wants to expel your intelligent and well mannered child then youu should be free to take your business, and your money, elsewhere. Right now teachers are instructed to be careful to encourage students to remain in class for at least the first three weeks, two weeks for Summer School. That means that the first examination usually happens at the end of week three. The reason for that is that funding is based on reported attendance during that period. Think of it as like a form of Sweeps Week for determining television advertising rates. When the local news is running stories on teenage prostitution you know they really care how many people are watching. In a real Voucher system they would lose your money on the day you withdraw registration, but keep it otherwise.
Teachers should be empowered to order a disruptive student out of their class. Now they can expect the administration to put that same problem right back in their room. Students know about Respect, they care about it. When you ask why someone got killed after stepping on someone’s shoes they will say “He dissed him.” When a disruptive student is returned to a classroom the entire school knows that the teacher has been “dissed.” That destroys the teacher and reduces them to a hack just going through the motions to pick up a paycheck.
Administrators do that for a few reasons. First to establish their enormous and arbitrary power over the teachers. Second to curry favor with confrontational parents, senior administrators who track suspensions as a metric held against the Principal, and outside activists. Third they keep the student around to keep the money.
In a good Voucher scheme the money would stay where the student is registered even if they cut school, although a student should be removed from the roll after three weeks of unauthorized absence, and the teacher could order the student out in the expectation that within reason the Principal will back them up. Obviously a teacher who tries to get rid of most of their students will not have a job for very long. If teachers in many urban schools was told that they could pick 5 out of 35 on their register who should be told to seek other opportunities that would be reasonable. In fact the Principals would try to reassign some of them first but any student who gets two strikes should be out. It is also true that an experienced teacher would use their judgment. Some problems may be so obvious that you would have to act in the first week. For other problems it may make sense to wait and not spend the valuable expulsion card in the expectation that the student is going to drop out anyway.
To be blogged under the title “Expulsion.”
On the dyslexia front, it makes perfect sense. If I learn to sound out a word, then “dog” can only be “dog.” It can be nothing else. …
Imagine trying to read that way! Now if I tell you that “xib” means “dog” and “bix” means “God”
Oh, this reminds me of my *favorite* joke:
Did you hear the one about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac? He lies awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog.
(*rim shot*)
On the role of parents who act as massive drags on their children’s educational chances, two articles guaranteed to make your head explode:
How I Joined Teach for America — And Got Sued for $20 Million
and
What’s Holding Black Kids Back?
Key excerpt from the second article:
Social scientists have long been aware of an immense gap in the way poor parents and middle-class parents, whatever their color, treat their children, including during the earliest years of life. On the most obvious level, middle-class parents read more to their kids, and they use a larger vocabulary, than poor parents do. They have more books and educational materials in the house; according to Inequality at the Starting Gate, the average white child entering kindergarten in 1998 had 93 books, while the average black child had fewer than half that number. All of that seems like what you would expect given that the poor have less money and lower levels of education.
But poor parents differ in ways that are less predictably the consequences of poverty or the lack of high school diplomas. Researchers find that low-income parents are more likely to spank or hit their children. They talk less to their kids and are more likely to give commands or prohibitions when they do talk: “Put that fork down!” rather than the more soccer-mommish, “Why don’t you give me that fork so that you don’t get hurt?” In general, middle-class parents speak in ways designed to elicit responses from their children, pointing out objects they should notice and asking lots of questions: “That’s a horse. What does a horsie say?” (or that middle-class mantra, “What’s the magic word?”). Middle-class mothers also give more positive feedback: “That’s right! Neigh! What a smart girl!” Poor parents do little of this.
The difference between middle-class and low-income child rearing has been captured at its starkest—and most unsettling—by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in their 1995 book Meaningful Differences. As War on Poverty foot soldiers with a special interest in language development, Hart and Risley were troubled by the mediocre results of the curriculum they had helped design at the Turner House Preschool in a poor black Kansas City neighborhood. Comparing their subjects with those at a lab school for the children of University of Kansas professors, Hart and Risley found to their dismay that not only did the university kids know more words than the Turner kids, but they learned faster. The gap between upper- and lower-income kids, they concluded, “seemed unalterable by intervention by the time the children were 4 years old.”
If Hart and Risley’s observations are in the right ballpark, then that means the “mental stunting” of tens of millions of underclass kids is pretty much a fait accompli before they even hit the school system. And this is an underappreciated (in society at large, anyway; I think conservatives already get it) factor in multi-generational cycles of poverty. The people least equipped to raise successful, self-supporting children — due precisely to their own deficits in maturity, sound judgment, education, skills & discipline — are the very ones given all the wrong incentives to do so by hundreds-of-billions $ Great Society programs.
I am the last person who would advocate giving the government power to “license” who can have children and who can’t. But for God’s sake the least we can do is stop using tax dollars to subsidize those who shouldn’t be having children but are. Then at least we’d be back to “normal” levels of underclass, and poor but hard-working & discipline-minded parents wouldn’t live in neighborhoods where their kids are outnumbered 10-1 by 4’5″ walking menaces.
engineer @ 29 wrote:
Furthermore teaching should not necessarily be looked upon as a life time profession. Having young energetic teachers with real degrees not ed degrees is a good thing. Let them teach for a few years and then move on to something else. Let others move into teaching from other productive careers and then teach for a few years.
It would be nice if enthusiasm, flexibility, thorough knowledge of one’s subject & a good head start on teaching ability were the requirements as opposed to a degree in education. Unfortunately, teacher credentialing in many states requires an education degree or at least an MA in another subject area. Some states are pretty insane with the credentialing requirements (*cough* California *cough*), which amount to mainly an industry racket to drive tuition dollars and warm bodies into the education colleges … NOT a baseline for determining pedagogical adequacy.
So the credentialing requirements, esp. in states where teachers’ unions have effectively locked competent non-ed majors out of jobs in K-12 classrooms, pretty much guarantee that teaching becomes, by default, a lifetime profession. Who is going to spend all that time and tuition money earning a degree or two for a job they will only be in for 5 or 10 years at most?
I don’t even think I agree with the premise that the paradigm should be teaching as a starter job. For the truly gifted teachers, it *is* a kind of calling and both they and their students are better off if they stick with it. Next to parents & grandparents, teachers are usually THE most influential adults in just about every kid’s life. I had many very good teachers in my 18 years of Catholic schooling, and a few truly phenomenal ones. One of them became my mentor and was a good friend until he passed away last year. His influence on my intellectual life is incalculable, but even beyond that he was a man of great integrity and I count myself blessed to have known him. Considering the thousands of young people he interacted with over 30+ years in the classroom, I can say that our corner of the world would be much, much poorer had he not dedicated his life to teaching. Best damn teacher I ever had, and I know I am not alone in saying that.
Teaching can be a clock-punching day job or it can be a ministry. What makes it unusual among professions is the role and presence of the teacher in the life of a kid. When you think how much good can be done through and with that role, it is frustrating (and angering) beyond words to see what a shambles so much of the public education system in this country has become.
Mandatory public education should end at grade 8. The fraction of the population able to go on beyond this shrinks every year. By tenth grade, most nonprogressing students should be out of school, permanently.”
This is a fabulous idea with a couple of tweeks.
1. If a student wishes to enter a college preparatory program. They should have to test their way into it.
2. Those that don’t wish to go to “college” but desire a technical skill or a trade should be able to test their way into a school designed and staffed to produce such graduates.
3. Those that can’t or won’t do 1 or 2 should suffer the consequences of their actions. Because believe you me that ditch aint gonna dig itself…
I think if we revisited Mr. Franklin’s opinion on poverty and it’s causes and cure. We as a nation would be much better off.
All these comments are telling, and useful for edification. I’m particularly grateful for the book from #35 Mark, and will investigate this.
In June, God willing, our first child will arrive. There are two things that terrify me about this prospect, and have for years:
1) Education–particularly public education
2) Legal and social attitude (ie. Statist attitudes) toward parents and men in particular regarding children
Point 2 is of course a whole other topic, and I won’t digress there.
I, my older sister and younger brother were all home-schooled to a lesser or greater degree. During this process we learned to read “phonetically”, learned grammar with a thoroughness comparable to military rifle-stripping exercises, and learned math by massive repetition until we “got” it. I have not been familiar with alternative methods of teaching these basic things, but obviously there are.
My sister did extremely well. I did well. My brother never responded to home-school with the level of discipline needed to excel. Ultimately his education was finished through private schools. My sister finished her’s with grades 11-12 in a private school, to get an accredited diploma. I finished mine with 12th grade in a public HS, for the same primary reason.
I had previously concluded that the differences in responsiveness to home school was due to personality differences, however our family’s experience and our relative performance also track with the amount of time our mother had to provide personal, focused attention to our education. About halfway through my grades, she began working from home with increasing hours. By the time my brother was in middle elementary grades, he was officially enrolled in distance-education programs that graded his tests and the like, with our mother monitoring his studies rather than teaching directly.
The implication here is the same as that for parents who choose to use the public education system: child performance tracks with parent involvement and reinforcement of lessons (or supplementation in many cases). Secondarily, parents should be in the best position to evaluate–with data from surrounding observers–what situation or measures are needed to maximize their child’s capabilities at a given age (not grade).
Whether or not our child is home-schooled, I intend to teach him the following basic skills from age zero: reading, grammar (writing), math, and critical-thinking. This last one is perhaps the saddest lack in today’s education system, and by the time we’re done I hope to be a little better at it, myself.
–JC
But it does mean being honest about differences. Because we are indeed, all very different.
No kidding. Some of us aren’t Jim Crow segregationists who think the only place for Negroes is picking cotton, washing clothes, and sweeping the streets.
Even if you take out the Negroes, you’ll probably find that Swiss students perform better on math tests than “Caucasian” students from Arkansas.
For that matter, if white students from Minnesota and Wisconsin consistently perform better than white students from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, does that mean white people from the Upper Midwest are congenitally better than white people from the Deep South? Does it mean we should revere the Nordic blood of the Upper Midwest as opposed to the supposedly inferior Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Scots-Irish blood of the Deep South?
Excuse me, but culture is a big part of education. The tradition of public education in Lutheran and Yankee communities goes a long way. In contrast, the South’s commitment to public education is more recent. And it does make a difference. When communities in East Texas care more about the racial complexion of the cheerleading squad of the local high school than whether any learning gets done, there is a problem.
If you care about ranking, consider that the rankings by that Egyptian dean may actually be accurate. His comments are counterproductive, but it isn’t because they aren’t true. It’s because they create a misleading impression that American students are somehow inherently inferior to Korean, Chinese, Swiss, and Danish students.
Culture can be changed. It isn’t easy, but it can be changed. Let’s not take the attitude that “Negroes don’t need math”.
29. engineer:
Furthermore teaching should not necessarily be looked upon as a life time profession. Having young energetic teachers with real degrees not ed degrees is a good thing. Let them teach for a few years and then move on to something else. Let others move into teaching from other productive careers and then teach for a few years.
Guess what: these days teaching is not a lifetime profession, for the most part. The forty-year teacher is fading into the sunset. Thirty years ago one could find schools well-populated with teachers over 55. Today they are a rarity. Moreover, according to the NEA, 46 percent of educators abandon teaching within their first five years. Neither young nor old are staying in the profession.
Undoubtedly ed schools are full of doofuses masquerading as professors. Nonetheless, whether there are ed schools or not, knowledge of a subject is not sufficient to teach it. Some sort of pedagogy is needed. I say this as someone who taught for two years. Unfortunately, the “diversity..inclusion..political correctness” mantras of the ed schools fall fall short of preparing beginning teachers for the classroom.
The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting article on Teach For America:What Makes a Great Teacher?
Well, with the kids and wife in bed, and my workout done, it’s time for a little slumming with all of the fine folks here at the BC…
Ah, where to begin?
First, the education problem is a systemic one. There is no one cause, and therefore no one solution, no “magic bullet.” Think of the education system as a big machine with a bunch of levers – pulling on a lever changes the system’s output. But the tricky thing is that all of the levers are interconnected, so pulling on one changes the others. This tends to make change extraordinarily difficult, since making logical changes often produces counter-intuitive and counter-productive results.
The major levers are pretty easily identified. I will list what I believe to be the major ones. I’m sure there are others, but this is as good of a starting point as any. The order is not important since they’re all interconnected:
Now, think about how these levers are interconnected: Low funding levels will, on average, decrease teacher quality, since good teachers can change jobs or industries. Bad teachers tend to undermine parent involvement and student commitment. They also require additional administrative oversight, and undermine a culture of achievement. This results in poor results, which puts pressure to water down the evaluation system. Low funding also decreases time on task, since you can’t afford to pay teachers to teach longer. Less time on task also leave more unstructured time, which leads to more vandalism and violent crime, creating a hostile physical environment. And so on.
You can try to change any one of these things individually, but you can’t sustain it. Imagine you have a really dysfunctional school in a really crappy building. Now take the same families, kids, teachers, administrators, etc. and move them into a brand-spanking new, beautiful building.
Within a year, the place will be a dump.
The way I think about this, there are multiple settings of the levers that can create a stable equilibrium for this system. Once you’re in an equilibrium, pulling a lever doesn’t effect much change; the other levers move and basically offset the pulled lever.
We have been in such an equilibrium for several decades. Let’s call the current equilibrium the One Best School System. The OBSS approach is this: let’s have one single school system that provides the best quality education for all children. We will take the “best practices” from all around the country, and apply them to our OBSS.
This sounds great, doesn’t it? Hey, we can provide every kid with the best education, and we’ll be able to have a single, efficient provider – a school district – that can deliver that education. No wasteful duplication, a single, streamlined back office, apply the best approaches we can find; it’s a beautiful dream.
Hey, but wait! Our current system is an OBSS, and it’s a mess. What went wrong?
The problem is the first letter: O, meaning One. The problem is that a school district is a monopoly. This fact insures that all the levers will eventually move to an equilibrium which is really dysfunctional. Here’s where the levers will be:
The problem now is that this equilibrium is VERY stable, so that makes change hard. Teachers’ unions protect bad teachers, while pushing for more funding. Collective bargaining requires more and more expensive central office staff, and demands that promotion be based on tenure, not results. This means watering down the evaluation process, and restricting work hours
The good news is that there appears to be another equilibrium, another way to set the levers that will dramatically improve outcomes. The bad news you have to move all of the levers to get to that new equilibrium. And pull them real hard.
(More to come.)
L3
(1) The whole idea of “college” was for education for the gifted, not for everybody.
(2) When you lower the standards down for college admission so that anybody can get in there is also a tendency to lower the standards for graduation. If you grade on the bell curve this will happen. Its a mathematical certainty.
(3) If getting a degree in “Education” is the easiest thing to do, the least talented will gravitate toward it.
(4) Those who receive an education from the least talented will receive an inferior education.
(5) If you put it into a loop, in computer terms, the iterations will ultimately get the educational level to zero, or so close to it that you can’t tell the difference.
If you’re not allowed get rid of incompetents you’re in trouble. If you’re not even allowed to identify incompetents you’re buried beneath two feet of quicksand and sinking fast.
The other equilibrium is one that we might call a System of Schools. The SOS approach is very different from the OBSS. Rather than having a single provider, there are multiple providers: districts, charter schools, virtual schools, etc. (You can throw private and parochial schools in here if you wish, but they’re not necessary for an SOS to function.)
Parents must choose where to send their kids. There is no “default” setting. The students must make a commitment to that school to be accepted. No school must take any child, but the funding follows the student. A kid who moves from PS 121 to PS 143 takes his money with him (at least the portion not kept by the central admin function). So schools need the kids to stay in business, but the kids need to go to school to stay out of trouble. And parents make the decision, and that choice increases their commitment.
The key here is FREEDOM. Parents are free to apply to any school (but are not guaranteed acceptance to a given school). Teachers are free to work in any school (but have to deliver results or parents will leave, taking their funding with them). Principals are free to hire and fire any teacher at will (but have to attract and retain talent teachers, or else they will not be able to deliver the results demanded by parents). Administrators are free to do as they wish (but have to attract and retain great principals, which means giving them authority and resources, which puts downward pressure on overhead).
How does SOS look with our levers:
Now, there is no SOS in the US. But it starting to emerge in some places, including my hometown of Houston.
What we’re seeing now is that we’re in an unstable place between two equilibria: OBSS and SOS. We have district monopolies competing with charter schools for students in low-income neighborhoods. High-performing charters like KIPP and YES Prep will continue to grow. Last year, they had over 9,000 students on their waiting lists, for about 2,000 entry slots. That’s a lot of demand. That’s a lot of despair.
Something will have to give. Either the districts will start competing with the charters, or they will try to undermine them and drive them out of business. The first means we’ll move to an SOS, the second means we’ll return to a OBSS.
It’s like we’re standing on top of a ridge on the Continental Divide. We can’t stay up top forever, and we have to choose whether we’re going to the Atlantic or the Pacific.
I think this is why the education reform community is start to splinter. You have people like Diane Ravitch who are standing on the ridge looking East and saying, “You know, things are such a mess right now, they used to be better, and maybe we should give up on our dreams and move back to the way things used to work. Things weren’t all that bad, right?”
On the other hand, there are folks like Checker Finn, who are looking West saying, “We have to blow up the current system. It’s not fixable. We can’t go back to what we once had; the world has changed and we have to change with it. We have to move forward, into the unknown, but in the right direction.”
(I apologize to both if my paraphrase is too crude. But I think it captures the essence of their conflicting visions.)
What we will see for the next few years are many more dramatic events like the mass firing in Rhode Island. There we see a system that is just not working. 7% pass rate? And that’s the state exam; I wonder what their NAEP results look like…
So, desperate to move away from the current equilibrium, the district tries something dramatic. But it probably won’t make an impact. Why? It only addresses a couple of levers. It’s like jerking the 4th and 10th levers as far as you could, and then giving up because even though you pulled them all the way, the machine didn’t really change. So you let go of the levers, and the move back to the original equilibrium, while you slink away, exhausted.
If they really want to change to a new equilibrium, they’re going to have to do more. A lot more.
Now, in my next comment, I’ll discuss the impact of SOS on teaching quality. It is interesting both because teaching quality is a very important driver of student performance, and because it is very counter-intuitive, so people often think about it the wrong way. (I know because I used to too…)
L3
L3,
I wish you had a school around here. I’d like to run your History Department.
OK, last post for the night. I’m already running out of steam. But this next one is important, I think.
Question: What is the worst education policy adopted in the past 40 years?
There are many possible answers. Here’s my response: the push for small class size,
You may be thinking, “What? Small class sizes are bad? That must be a typo. Aren’t small classes better than large ones?”
The short answer is: not really. Small class sizes are terrible for public education. In fact, I am prepared to say the push for small class sizes is the worst education policy of the past half-century
It is that most insidious of all policy blunders: the self-evident conventional wisdom that happens to be self-destructive and unwise. Like the drive for universal home ownership. Sounds great, but that was what lead to mortgage meltdown. but I digress.
Here’s why small class sizes are bad.
Imagine a situation where you have a school district with 200,000 kids, and you have a student-teacher ratio of 20. This means you must employ 10,000 teachers.
Now, think about the supply of teachers. If you’re the district, you want to hire the 10,000 best people to teach that you can, subject to your budget constraint. Let’s say you have an average employment cost of $50,000 per year.
If you pay everyone $50,000 per year, let’s say there are 15,000 people who wish to teach for that wage. You will try to pick the best 10,000 out the 15,000 person pool. Let’s assume you’re reasonably successful at doing so. This leaves 5,000 unemployed teachers, but they are the least capable of the group.
So, some clever politician works with the local union chief to pitch a way to “improve” the system: decrease class size from 20 down to 16, a 20% decrease. The parents love this idea: more teacher time and attention. The union leader loves it: more dues-paying members, more clout; The politician loves it, because the parents and union leaders love it.
What happens? The school district must now hire more teachers. How many more? 2,500 – bringing the total employment to 12,500.
But where did those teachers come from? The pool of 5,000 rejects who were not good enough to make the cut before. You’ve just managed to lower the overall quality of the teaching corps.
This has a direct impact on students. Think of it this way: the new teacher, who was previously not good enough to be employed by the district, has a classroom of 16 kids. All 16 came from another teacher’s class, and each of those teachers was better than the one they’re now stuck with.
And that’s just the first order effect. There is an even more important impact: the result of district competition.
Our district needs 2,500 new teachers. Let’s say the neighboring district is about the same size, with the same goal of shrinking class size. Rather than going into their pool of rejects, they decide to make a run at a bunch of our good teachers. They’re a suburban district, which is an easier teaching job than our urban district. So they recruit 2,500 of our teachers away, so that now we need to go deeper into the pool of unemployed.
What basically happens is that, between the urban and suburban district, there are 5,000 new teachers needed, and they will all come from the low-quality pool. But in this scenario, all 5,000 end up in the urban district, dramatically lowering the quality of schools there, while having minimal negative impact on suburban schools. The achievement gap widens.
All of which flows naturally from the drive for smaller class size.
What needs to happen is for us to realize that great teachers can teach more students than lousy teachers, and should be paid for each student they successfully teach.
If you’re a great math teacher, if you’re willing to teach 30 vs. 20 students, this means that you’re generating $100,000 of additional funding (10 students at a conservative $10,000 per year). It would be very easy to design a program where teachers can make $100-150K per year – great teachers can teach big classes, and that kind of compensation attract great teachers.
The key is to pay great teachers more, and have them teach more students. This will attract more and better talent, and give better results. And if great teachers make a lot of money, you will be able to attract more teachers to entry level positions for less money, because they know they can grow into very good salary if they become a master teacher.
That’s enough for one night. Sorry if this is excruciatingly boring. I’m off to bed.
L3
L3 – Nicely put. Maybe shorter: There is no “one size fits all” solution.
I like the Heinlein quote and tend to think I can live up to this:
The hard part for the Utopianists is that they forget the Bell curve (Law of Averages) or Mean Distribution is immutable. When you say to someone “Half of all people are below average” and they do not give that small, knowing chuckle, complement them innocuously and move away smartly as they are either dim-bulbs, humorless naifs or pathological dysfunctionals of some type and therefore dangerous.
We have decided at some point after I left the basic schools (Grade, Middle and HS) that everyone had a right to an education. That is part and parcel of the problem. They have a right to access it but not necessarily complete it. After all, as someone said above, those ditches won’t get dug by themselves. Nor the burgers flipped and sacked. Not everyone is entitled to a good outcome, only those who work hard at it deserve it.
While I’m no big fan of Unions or Teacher’s Unions I don’t blame Teachers for the lousy rot that parents send to schools these days. Garbage In=Garbage Out. My sister has been a 4th grade Teacher for 15 years now and we’ve discussed this issue. Teaching to the test and specifically the NATIONAL test is a lousy idea. Academic Idiots and Politicians are always tinkering with the school system. Teachers are always unfairly blamed. Nobody dare admit they its lousy parenting and the breakdown of the family. THE PARENT is responsible for the education of the child. The education system is there to support. And BTW, i don’t think our school system is as bad as people crow about.
The fact is, our schools fail to educate compared to other countries, and compared to results in the past.
Fewer than 50 percent of students graduate in large school districts, such as Los Angeles and Detroit.
Certainly parenting is important, but prior to unionization and liberal dominance, when discipline was maintained, many students from dysfunctional homes became educated. Folks like Giuliani and Tom Sowell attended such schools and report that this was the case.
Doug @ 81 “The fact is, our schools fail to educate compared to other countries, and compared to results in the past.
Fewer than 50 percent of students graduate in large school districts, such as Los Angeles and Detroit.”
First of all, NO other country tries to send all 16-18 year olds to an eleventh and twelfth grade program. It’s absurd.
Secondly, why do you think ANY students in LA or Detroit inner city schools should graduate from high school? How many have mastered math through trig, a foreign language, English literature and composition, biology, chemistry, and physics, and American, California, and world history?
None, that’s how many. That the “graduation” rate is 50% is a scandal, all right – but the scandal is that it’s way too high.
Leo, I love your argument that small class size is a disaster. That’s exactly the kind of counter-intuitive statement that’s needed in the discussion.
I’ve always said that the best way to improve a school district would be to cut its budget. The thinking being this would force cuts in useless nonsense, in administrative staff, and so forth. But of course, that assumes those in charge have the interests of students in mind. They don’t, so all the cuts would come from the meat, not the fat. But in principle it makes sense.
Doug @81: Certainly parenting is important, but prior to unionization and liberal dominance, when discipline was maintained, many students from dysfunctional homes became educated.
Agree completely. The ghetto immigrant households in the early part of this century were often chaotic and rife with alcoholism and other dysfunctions. Yet many of their children went into school districts — and in the big urban centers no less — and came out educated and went on to better themselves.
The difference is that back then schools assumed a moral authority over children,up to and including the right to physically punish a disruptive child. School was a haven from the chaos at home. Now, school is just more chaos in a kids life. Even with that, many desperately cling to what little order their big city schools provide them.
Of course, there were much different societal tones as well. Children were expected to respect adults, and if they didn’t they’d see the back of a hand. The Doctor Spocking of America and the grotesque over sentimentalizing of children has had its effects as well.
Indeed, schools are kind of a black hole sucking in every pathology of the last hundred or so years.
gokart,
I will look into your “NO other country” claim, doesn’t comport to my view, would be interesting to hear from Wobbly Guy about Indonesia, but wonder also about South Korea, Taiwan, etc.
Would appreciate if you have any links to document that declaration.
Wrt current “scandal,” 50 years ago a very high percentage of students in California schools graduated from High School, and not by simply being passed on, as occurs today.
They actually got an education.
—
peterike:
“School was a haven from the chaos at home. ”
Boy, wasn’t that the truth!
I had no problem identifying with that feeling, especially when things were not going well, and remember accounts from survivors of severe dysfunction, who appreciated the order and security of sane structure and discipline
@ “the haven”.
no competition no excellence. See the result of the single payer system.
L3 – Great posts!
My children have been in the Chicago school system their entire life (ages 12, 10, 7 and 4). We lived in a decent area and went to what is considered to be in the top 5 of all elementary schools in the city. When we recently moved to a near suburb we discovered our children were behind in an average non-Chicago school. In Chicago, our kids were straight ‘A’ students and on the highest honor rolls. In their new school, the spent the first 6 months playing catch-up. They are adjusting and their grades are returning, but it was disappointing that our top level school program in Chicago was so inferior to an average suburban system.
78. Leo Linbeck III: Great point about small class size. Studies have shown -no- correlation between class size and achievement.
83. peterike: Kids got expelled when I was in high school, but it is very hard to do now. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court said that students (minors) had ‘rights’, so now every disciplinary procedure is quasi-judicial. Kids with disabilities are almost impossible to discipline, which means that a kid with ADD can bring a handgun to school and get away with it. And they know it. So most administrators/principals are quite reluctant to fight these time-consuming and often futile battles.
86. JoeB: I sent my kids to Catholic schools even though I am not Catholic. I could live with Heater has two mommies and such -if- the schools taught the kids to read write and cipher along the way. But they don’t.
My eldest decided she wanted to go to a public high school for her freshman year, even though she’d been admitted to the local RC school. She is a good kid but not a natural student. She was bored out of her mind; she was assigned books she had read in the 5th grade. Next year she went to the RC high school.
The public schools in my area are in the top of national rankings; for the $18k they spend per student they should be. But the ‘gifted and talented’ and the disabled get special teachers, and those in the great middle get what’s left.
Finally, ed majors are among the lowest scorers on the SAT. This is not the end of the world; you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to teach high school physics. It is more important, IMNSHO, that the teachers like kids. But teachers in specialties, especially in the upper grades, should be able and required to pass tests in their field of teaching.
Educational attainment, when not precluded by natural ability, is pretty much a product of values. Show me a kid who does poorly in school, and I’ll show you a family that doesn’t act like it values education (at least from the kid’s point of view).
Off topic other than tangentially, I think a movie folks at Belmont would really enjoy is “The Winslow Boy.” Based on a true story of a kid in England in 1910 getting kicked out of a military prep school for stealing a 5 pound note that he didn’t steal, and his family’s struggle to clear his name.
It’s a very mannered film (David Mamet), but beautifully done. And it takes you back to a time when people were impossibly articulate, impossibly civilized and impossibly honorable by today’s standards. Where has that England gone? It’s available for online play on NetFlix. Watched it for the second time last night. Totally G rated and family friendly too, though it is emotionally intense and well over the heads of younger kids.
The portrait of the young boy would shock today’s kids. He is scrupulously honorable. Where did we go wrong? A great movie to watch with your teenagers if they can take a film that’s almost entirely dialogue driven.
I’ve never taught, but this is my theory.
We have to change our expectations drastically. The very name of the NCLB law reveals the utopian nonsense that spawned it. Unfortunately, many Cs will be LB, and we can’t let them drag down the rest. What we should be doing is something like this, IMHO:
First, stop moving to the lowest common denominator and start rewarding excellence. Find out how many children in a particular shool district achieve some level of success, whether that is defined as going on to secondary education, passing a tough exit exam, or whatever. Give the schools in that district a reasonable goal, and reward / punish them appropriately.
If 5% are at that level, then maybe the goal is to get to 7.5% within 5 years (or maybe a .5% improvement a year indefinately, I don’t know). The bottom line is that we need our schools to concentrating on promoting excellence, not discouraging or ignoring it.
Recognize that there are many young people who are perfectly able to become productive citizens, but aren’t particularly interested in or suited for academics. Renew our commitment to vocational schools for these students. Let them learn something that they can use to become useful, self sufficient members of society.
Make a commitment to remove troublemakers from the classroom, and let the teachers restore discipline. Put children on different tracks based on their ability so that the less able don’t bore everyone else to death, and take up too many resources that should be devoted to higher learning. I would think that teachers would get behind this idea.
Stop the fiction that the teachers unions represent the students in any way. This assertion is laughable, but we constantly hear it, and many believe it.
Unions represent their members, period. If I was a member of a union that put the interests of others over their members, I’d be mad and want to fire the leadership. If you said the UAW was in business to look out for the interests of Ford or GM, people would laugh at you, but this is said of the teachers unions all of the time.
Bottom line, we need to do everything in our power to make sure that those students who have the ability and motivation are allowed to excel, the ones who are not academically inclined but are able to learn a trade do so, and the others are prevented from interfering with them. The others includes the teachers unions. Until we adopt this mentality little will change.
Very appropriate column:
http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2010/03/another-symptom-of-problem-detroit.html
Why Boys Fail
Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind
Boys are falling behind in school. The world has become more verbal; boys haven’t. Even in their traditionally strong subjects of science and math, boys are hit at a young age with new educational approaches, stressing high-level reading and writing goals that they are developmentally unable to achieve.
The gap between male and female achievement has reached the college level, where only 40 per cent of graduates next year will be male.
This doesn’t just mean fewer male doctors and lawyers, it also means fewer men in the careers that previously did not require post-high school degrees but do now.
“Why Boys Fail” examines the roots and repercussions of this problem and spells out the educational, political, social and economic challenges we face as we work to end it.
—
Claims Australia addressed the problem a decade ago.
Intro by DC Schools Superintendent.
Also addresses costs of dysfunction that results from aimless males with fewer choices.
jWarrior – (or anyone else..) I’m aware of those studies but no longer have the reference – could you point me to a citation, article or link? It would be so helpful to be able to forward a citation when I engage on these issues…
thx
Doug, dtmack,
Unfortunately, your plans and arguments are terrific, but irrelevant. The only reason everyone has an opinion about how people should be educated is because the government runs the system.
As Leo points out, change the system to create a market, and all the problems suddenly disappear. Arguments about what education should be like are like arguments about the Soviet Union 5 year plan. Maybe your arguments are good or bad, but the 5 year plan shouldn’t exist in the first place.
The one point rarely raised is multi-generational feedback. If a kid has bad parents and his school makes him a little worse, then he will be a worse parent than his parents. The feedback drives the results to the gutter over generations. Once you get to the bottom (or the sewer where we are now), its no longer relevant whether the parents or the system is broken. They got that way together.
Likewise, if Leo is right (I bet he is) this group of kids only have to have enough good school to be a little better than their parents. Then they will be better parents for their kids and the feedback becomes virtuous over generations.
It took 4 generations of kids going through progressive schooling to get where we are. It will probably take at least 2 to get back out again, once education becomes a market again, and functions properly.
James
Walt,
”…I tried so hard in every way
I read my lessons, learned them well
I even tried to learn to spell…”
The problem is that too many yoots don’t….try. The ones who do, who read their lessons, learn to spell and keep trying succeed.
I know it and I’m not a poet.
—
L3 brought up class size. A class of 300 works OK with motivated yoots. A class of 10 is too large for a broken cabal.
My problem with vouchers is that I do not want to create a new entitlement. I know that is a losing argument.
Back to class size. Imagine you have a voucher for your child, is class size important? The communities with the ‘best’ students will never accept huge class sizes, nor do they need to. The broken communities will still fail -citation needed- even with a 2 to 1 teacher student ratio.
Broken communities produce broken schools. Period.
Free education should not be a right.
Free education should be supported vigorously, but it should not be a right.
(The debate about ‘class size’ makes me want to talk about how odd, yet how good, it is that the following random scenarios work well 1. fast food places, they all line up next to each other, 2. why do we have so many gas stations, they are everywhere, 3. this city has ‘way’ too many restaurants and pizza places, 4. Department of Motor Vehicles- one for each region is cost effective and efficient, we close at 4pm.
IMHO it is a big shame that Republicans haven’t made as much political hay from the education system as is available. The left has literally thrown millions of people down a rat hole to be found dead or in prison. Somehow they get away with it all while bearing little political cost.
If anyone has a great deal of money they would like to spend on this, I have a proposal.
Wisconsin has had a voucher system for 20 years. It isn’t comprehensive, but it started with 2,000 kids 20 years ago and has grown to 20,000 kids today.
This provides enough students to do a study. But the usual type of study is useless. Test scores have a high IQ component. When you match kids who received vouchers with those who didn’t, the voucher kids get somewhat higher scores, but its not dramatic.
My idea? Do a study that finds the kids a few years after graduation who got the voucher and who didn’t. Compare life experiences such as Prison time, single parent children, drug use, etc.
If their is a statistically significant difference between the two groups, you’ve got political gold. The ads write themselves. “Congressman X supports the public school system, which causes kids to grow up for prison and drug abuse. Are you going to vote for Congressman X?”
It would be an expensive study to carry out, but it might be worth it. If only because the usual suspects would (finally) face the heat from it.
Sorry for all the comments, but this is my favorite subject. So I’m using up all my comments on this thread.
Liberals often complain that using test scores as a metric for teacher and school performance is unfair. Different schools and teachers get different mixes of students. Teachers teach to the test which is not good for the kid.
I think the liberals are right about this. But they don’t follow through on the argument.
If testing doesn’t work, then what do they propose? Without testing, you are left with two options:
1) Don’t evaluate at all and just let the schools run with no metrics.
2) Let the parents evaluate and move their kid based on their evaluation.
The first option is what the liberals want – though they generally won’t say so. The second option is far superior, but they really hate that solution.
Conservatives have been pushing for a market in education for a long time. When they don’t get it, they fall back to a worse position – test the kids and score teachers and schools based on the results. This is a bad idea, as the liberals say, so conservatives have to defend the testing practice against all of its disadvantages.
The upshot? Once a market is created in education, the whole testing debate disappears along with all the other debates (certification, class size, political correctness instruction). The soviet 5 year plan is gone, all of its attendant arguments are gone with it.
I can dream, can’t I?
James said:
IMHO it is a big shame that Republicans haven’t made as much political hay from the education system as is available.
—
‘Well educated’ people (whatever that means) tend to like their schools. It’s some other school that is broken.
Broken communities produce broken schools. We should do everything we can to help broken communities and broken schools. That help must never be a right.
Like health care, education must not be seen as a right.
I’ve always said that the best way to improve a school district would be to cut its budget. The thinking being this would force cuts in useless nonsense, in administrative staff, and so forth. But of course, that assumes those in charge have the interests of students in mind. They don’t, so all the cuts would come from the meat, not the fat. But in principle it makes sense.
In principle. To cut fat, you need people who care about education at the top. I’ve seen it happen where educational officials will do the precise opposite of what they are told to do by elected officials. Fat exists for a reason.
One thing that adds to the level of fat in any system is too much reporting. The more information people at the top demand, the more time gets wasted compiling reports to people at the top and going to meetings presenting those reports, leaving less time to get any work done.
Moreover, whenever there are ideological disagreements between teachers and the local community, thick layers of bureaucracy proliferate to police the teachers and calm down members of the community. When parents are absent from the education of their children, teachers feel besieged and become increasingly dependent upon the bureaucracy for police work.
James – you’re correct about my post, to a large degree. I also think you’re correct that Gov’t run schools are a big problem, but I don’t see them going away anytime soon.
I’m a big supporter of Charter Schools, vouchers, and homeschooling. A move to support those things (on a State level) would help quite a bit. I think we’re moving in that direction, but since it’s really a State issue I want this addressed by the States, and progress will be very uneven. Vouchers for all students would go a long way towards solving many of these problems.
Even if we supported that whole-heartedly, gov’t run public schools will be with us for a long time to come. My post was simply an acknowledgement of that fact, and a rather utopian idea of mine on how those schools should be administered.
A couple of hours before I wrote this I saw on our local news that 10 Catholic schools, many with long histories, are planning to close after this school year. Most are closing due to underenrollment. I guess many of their students will be forced to go to our illustrious public schools, or in other words many are doomed.
That’s ridiculous. If we had a full fledged voucher system in this State, those schools would be turning students away. We’d also have many new schools being formed to deal with the overflow.
I’ve seen a couple of teachers posting here, and they seem to think this is all about teacher bashing. For me, at least, nothing could be further from the truth. Many have a very tough, frustrating job, I’ve no doubt. I’m sure that many would like to make improvements, but are just beat down by the oppressive system. There’s no doubt, however, that the labor unions that represent them are the main obstacle to reform.
Well, those Catholic schools deserve to be punished:
They made the union shops look bad by comparision of of results.
I have taught public and private school for over 23 years. I am interested in this story and dialog on many levels and wish I had the time to read every post in the thread. I support many of these ideas, and I am intrigued by far more.
I feel that I am a very good teacher, but my subject area (art) does not require students to pass standardized testing, so apparently, there will never be any way for an objective third party to judge the results of my efforts. The only way for someone to provide constructive critique is to observe my teaching first-hand by visiting my classroom in person. I wish there were video cameras in my classroom to post online so that the whole world could witness my efforts every day. I would welcome this.
As far as relying upon teacher-less classrooms – To teach what I teach without me being there (i.e. distance/virtual learning) to help confirm or correct a student’s effort at drawing a more realistic line, or to point out how to ‘see’ negative space vs. positive space in a subject, seems vague and ineffectual to me. I believe a good teacher is such because they are actively engaged with students in the classroom and provide acute subject knowledge in well planned lessons that guide the student through a well designed curriculum. I myself learn much better in the presence of this kind of “educational experience” than in front of a computer. Not that I can’t teach myself… I’ve done so for most of my life. In my lifetime, I’ve also worked: in a factory, driven truck, delivered newspapers, sold door-to-door, operated and programmed computers, worked in retail, cleaned bathrooms, painted signs, operated a silk-screen press, and run a photo studio. These kinds of experiences have broadened my outlook on what it means to work for a living. Teaching CAN be too easy for some who have never experienced anything other than teaching.
Finally, I wish there were no such thing as teacher’s unions, because teaching is the only profession I have ever experienced that doesn’t pay you for your expertise and experience. Teachers are rewarded for “staying put”. The teachers who reach the highest salaries are the ones who have never taught in any other district but the one they began in. I left one district to move to another part of the state. It did not matter how many years experience I had, or how effective a teacher I was….the new school could simply hire a recent college graduate at the lowest level of the pay-scale and save money. In order to compete with new teachers, I had to present myself as a highly qualified candidate (and I did, as judged by four administrators and one teacher who observed me as I taught an art lesson to a group of twenty-four students I’d never met before) at a competitive price in comparison to what they could hire at the bottom of the pay-scale. I wish I could be like the business person who can choose to move to a new firm and be paid MORE than they were in their last position because they now have more experience. The whole system of our education field discourages growth and progress and encourages stasis and stagnation…. while in fact, some really fine teachers choose to plod onward in the face of such obstacles and continue to do the best with what they have.
Doug@84,
So sorry for not keeping tabs on this for the past few weeks, but I was busy with work and choral performances throughout these two weeks!
I have studied, and taught for three years at the high school level, in Singapore, supposedly one of the highest rated education systems in the world (check out our world rankings for standardized tests). Strangely enough, at the public policy school (Lee Kuan Yew SPP) I’m currently studying in, education is something that my policy school DOES NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT!
What I have gathered from the Singapore experience is this – we get results, but they’re due to the following factors:
1. High average intelligence, aided by good nutritional habits
2. Intensive investment in human capital by society
In fact, I would strongly argue that many of the problems facing the US are also faced by schools in Singapore. The only difference is that while the US is worried about failing students, Singapore’s situation is that we think we’re not doing as well as we can! But the root causes are still the same.
I read with much interest Leo’s reply in 78, and I was quite gratified to find out from my country’s senior education officials several years back (a tea talk they had with us teaching scholars) that they were quite aware of this problem. However, the problem still persists – how do you try to maximise learning if you have a limited number of teachers?
My solution is different from Leo’s, because my country’s context is different. I also disagree with Leo in one respect: a great teacher can work with a greater number of students, but only if he is given support from his superiors, the parents, and perhaps most importantly, the students themselves.
I’ve seen crap teachers who stutter and mumble their way through lectures and tutorials do quite well because their students were so eager to learn, though a better teacher would have really helped them more. Give teachers the opportunity to choose their students, and vice versa, and you’ll see a whole new paradigm snap into place.
In the Singapore context, there are actually lots of competent teachers out there – but they’re giving private tuition, not in the public system. In fact, many of them were formerly from the public system. My solution is to open up the state’s monopoly, use a voucher system, and allow parents the choice to educate their child as they see fit. Essentially, replicating the teacher-student mutual consent that would allow for effective tailor-made education. Every child is different – the education sector has claimed that for years, but has never done anything to back it up with actions. This would enable it to happen.
So given a choice, a great teacher would jump at the chance to teach 20 bright students and push them to excel rather than drum the most basic skills and knowledge into 30 dull and troublesome ones. Pay is less, but there could be more gratification. Martyr types might think differently, but nothing wrong with that. And what’s to prevent lousy teachers from abusing Leo’s system to teach large classes ineffectively and earn more? Supervision from the top? Please.
And even then, back to the discussion you were discussing with gokart, “First of all, NO other country tries to send all 16-18 year olds to an eleventh and twelfth grade program. It’s absurd.” And indeed, I agree with gokart, it is absurd. Even with our supposedly better and smarter base, we can’t do it. Not every kid can handle that sort of curriculum. I don’t care how good the teacher is, there are limits to the base potential.
We split our 11/12th grade equivalent programs into three types – junior college (for the elite 25% who then go on to university), polytechnics (for the next 40%, where they graduate with a diploma and are ready to enter the workforce, or even to proceed to university), and then ITEs (vocation training for the rest, even more hands-on than the polytechnics).
The Singapore system can switch to a voucher/private/homeschool system quite easily, I think, because we use standardized ‘gateway’ exams at the ages of 12 (PSLE), 16 (O levels), and 18 (A levels). The A levels, depending on who you ask, can be the toughest exam you’ll ever sit for, or a piece of cake.
The Singaporean flavor adds in additional wrinkles in the form of AP-style papers, but much more difficult, pitched at 2nd year college levels (or even beyond!). The scary thing is, there are a fair number of students who can handle this. So the question for me becomes: why is the system wasting their time when they could have progressed much more quickly in a tailored curriculum that would get them to college faster?
Take a quick look at the Singapore syllabus, here. http://www.cjc.edu.sg/web/?page_id=122
I’m still figuring out how a free-market can determine standards, which is why for lack of a better option, I’m sticking to the current exam standard.