Proposals for an Educational Renaissance
In the first four parts of this essay I touched on some of the things that are wrong with the American educational system. (And I only scratched the surface, really — one could make a career out of documenting endemic flaws in our schools.) But focusing on the negative and complaining doesn’t solve problems. So let’s get constructive and figure a way out of this mess.
This final post in my five-part back-to-school essay is all about solutions: How can we fix education in America?
Below, I will outline my vision for a new paradigm in education. Realistically, I don’t expect all — or even any — of these proposals to be adopted anytime soon by the entrenched powers-that-be. But we’ve got to start somewhere, so let the edu-renaissance begin.
No single approach or solution will solve the multifaceted deficiencies in the way our children are currently being educated. So we must attack the problem on several conceptual levels simultaneously. Hence, it may not be necessary to implement every single one of the proposals outlined below, but if even just a few were adopted, it would be a significant step in the right direction.
Most of the proposals below are not original to me: Some are already gaining widespread support, while some are excellent new ideas just beginning to get traction. And a few are fresh concepts I came up with to help stimulate a rebirth of American education.
Readers of all political persuasions are encouraged to propose and discuss their own ideas — and to critique mine — in the comments section.
Educational structures
• Introduce competition into the educational marketplace.
This is a no-brainer. Parents across America are already clamoring for a voucher or tax-credit system whereby funding follows each individual student to any public, charter or private school of the parents’ choosing.
The more competition there is in the educational marketplace, the greater the pressure will be for schools to excel. The only way to attract students would be to create an outstanding school. If parents have options, they can take their kids out of bad schools and put them in better ones.
If free enterprise works for the economic system (demonstrated by explosive economic growth over the last 400 years), then why not for the educational system as well?
A national voucher or tax-credit system would allow thousands of exciting new charter schools and commercial/private schools to pop up in every community across America, leading to a revolution (the good kind of revolution) in school excellence.
Until the public school system is fixed, we should emphasize school choice — which would not only foster the creation of new schools, but also put great pressure on existing public schools to shape up, lest the competition steal away all their students.
Furthermore, the wider the variety of choice, the more satisfactorily each parent will be able to find a school to match their ideological, political, educational or religious preference. Everybody wins.
• Encourage homeschooling
Homeschooling to this day remains a rarity in America. It is generally perceived as mostly the domain of religious parents who want to save their kids from the horrors of secularism in the public schools. Because of this, homeschooling is stigmatized in mainstream culture as the province of extremists. But as more parents wake up to the pervasive radical politicization of many public schools, homeschooling to save kids from political indoctrination is likely to grow more commonplace, as it should.
The time has come to lift the stigma against homeschooling, which instead should be actively promoted as a way for parents of all stripes to customize their kids’ educations. Want your kid to focus intently on math and science with no political content whatsoever? Create the curriculum yourself. Want your kid to read all the great classics of literature? Get out the books and start teaching.
Homeschooling should be included in any voucher or tax-rebate scheme. It should be normalized as a standard option in education, and no longer be viewed as offbeat or bizarre.
Homeschooling teacher-parents should develop cooperative networks through which they can share resources. If one parent has personally developed an outstanding lesson plan for geometry or spelling or Cold War history, there should be a mechanism through which he or she could share that curriculum with like-minded fellow teacher-parents. If one parent has a special skill which his or her own child has already mastered, and another parent has a different skill, then kids can “trade parents” for several days and learn new skills. For example, if one parent is fluent in Mandarin and another parent is a computer whiz, they can trade places for a while, maximizing the educational horizons of both families.
Expanding on the concept further: Home-teachers with unique talents can begin to hold group classes in their homes for several homeschooled students at once. For example, in a local network of 30 homeschool families, one parent-teacher can teach pre-calculus to all students in the network, and then on a different day another parent-teacher can teach them all conversational Spanish. Think of it as an educational potluck.
This system would also remove one of the other main concerns the average American has about homeschooling, that kids will become isolated and not sufficiently socialized through interactions with other children.
Municipal homeschooling associations can band together and take all of the city’s homeschooled kids on field trips as a group, fostering the sense that the homeschooling community is itself a “virtual school,” increasing bonding and friendships among the otherwise isolated children.
Homeschooling should take its proper place as equal in stature to public schools, charter schools, or private schools.
• Break the monopoly of public education, but keep it as a safety net
Public schooling will always have its flaws, mainly because it necessarily must be geared to the lowest common denominator. Even so, we cannot get rid of it entirely, for three basic reasons:
- Most parents do not have the time, patience, expertise or interest to either homeschool or spend a lot of effort choosing amongst a panoply of confusing small-school options. Large public schools will likely continue to be the default fallback option for many students.
- Some parents prefer that their children attend large public schools to help with their socialization and to increase their life experience as early as possible, and to prevent the potential isolation that sometimes accompanies homeschooling or specialty-schooling.
- We don’t want to revert to the era before public schooling when education was restricted to the wealthy elite. Public schools should remain as a safety net to ensure that all American children get an education, however underprivileged or dysfunctional their home lives may be.
That said, we need to break the monopoly of publicly financed mass-education. Attendance at large public schools should not be compulsory, or even encouraged. Charter schools, private schools, small schools and homeschooling should be considered the preferred way to go, and students should only be sent to large public schools as an emergency fallback if no better options are available in that area or neighborhood, or if (as occasionally happens) the local public school is outstanding in its own right.
Curriculum
• Get back to basics
Political and religious bias in our school curriculum have spun completely out of control and contaminate every aspect of public education. Schools should jettison anything even resembling politicization and focus instead on nailing down basic skills, formerly known as “the three Rs”: Reading, writing and arithmetic. Too many students are cruising through school and even getting high school diplomas while remaining partly illiterate and lacking basic math skills. Enough! First teach every child how to read and write at an adult level, and have decent math/logic skills, and only after that is achieved should we even begin to worry about or argue over the issue of political bias in later grades.
• End the practice of mass-adoption of a few major textbooks
Textbooks are so 19th century. Printing is so 19th century. The textbook wars (detailed in the first four parts of this essay) can be avoided entirely by encouraging and fostering the district-by-district, school-by-school, or even class-by-class adoption of customized, individualized or small-scale instructional materials catering to local standards or teacher preferences. We don’t need to be arguing about the content of one-size-fits-all textbooks with print runs in the millions, because there shouldn’t even be one-size-fits-all textbooks. Screen-based instructional materials (i.e. for computers, Kindle/iPad/mobile-device platforms, etc.) can be distributed to students at a fraction of the cost of traditional paper-and-ink textbooks, and each school district or teacher can choose their favorites and not conform to stifling, dumbed-down, politicized or out-of-date textbooks.
• Form centrist national pressure groups to make textbooks indoctrination-free
Fantasies of customizable digitized instructional materials are nice to dream about but realistically are still several years from implementation. Until then, level-headed citizens should form pressure groups, think tanks, PACS, and/or lobbying groups to demand the removal of any whiff of indoctrination or political bias (left or right) from the curriculum. We need an uprising of angry citizens — the educational equivalent of the Tea Party — to strike fear into the hearts of those who push their agendas on our kids.
• Get politics and religion out of science classes
No more religious ideology masked as scientific skepticism. No more politics in the guise of truth. No more esteem-building piffle. Stop! Science classes should be pure science and nothing else. To get specific: Eliminate “intelligent design” in biology or anthropology classes; stop the politically-driven focus on anthropogenic global warming in high-school science; and no more multicultural tokenism in the history of science. Science education needs to be totally free of any indoctrination or politics, left/right/whatever.
• Introduce and popularize “skills survey” courses
Too much of our school curriculum is totally disconnected from the skill-sets needed to succeed in the real world. Even students who get good grades in history, art, social studies and science can graduate without a clue about how to get a job or what they even want to do with their lives.
Not every student is going to become an academic or have a liberal-arts-based career. To correct this glaring deficiency in our educational priorities, I propose that all public schools introduce a new type of required course in which students are briefly exposed to a wide variety of realistic careers and skills to help them decide what they may want to do upon graduating from high school or college. These skills-survey classes should always be not graded but instead be given on a simple pass/not-pass basis — students pass just for showing up and participating. No tests, no quizzes, no assessment — just observation.
The purpose of the class is exposure — to let students sample real-world careers, and get a taste of skills unknown to them. Even if a student doesn’t ever get a job in any of the fields covered by the course, he or she will learn how the world works. Each section can last anywhere from ten minutes, to an hour, or a week, or any level in between — just enough time to explain and demonstrate the basics. Examples of skills or careers covered by the course can include (but are not limited to):
• Retail skills, such as how to operate a cash register, order products, keep track of inventory;
• Carpentry and basic home repair;
• Basic contemporary computer skills, such as how to send an email, set up a blog or Web page, do simple programming, etc.
• Business and entrepreneurial fundamentals, such as how to identify an untapped market, found a small company, deal with government regulations, etc.
• How to effectively win an argument, or engage in an adult-level debate; a brief survey of logical fallacies;
• A visit to a hospital to learn the basics of nursing skills, and see what doctors do in real-world settings;
• Car repair; and the briefest explanation of how engines, carburetors, transmissions, etc. work;
• The basics of electrical circuitry, and what an electrician does;
• Plumbing, and how the plumbing system works;
• Gardening fundamentals, and how to grow your own food;
• Data entry (formerly known as “typing”);
• Any ideas or field trips which teachers can arrange, such as: visiting a local airport and sitting in the pilot’s seat of a small aircraft; going behind-the-scenes at a local television studio; going on a ride-along with the police or fire department; etc.
• …and so on; the options are limitless.
In each case, the exposure will necessarily be brief and very incomplete, but that’s OK; the goal is not to master every skill covered, but rather to be exposed to a wide variety of skills and careers that may spur interest for later pursuit.
Pedagogy (methods of instruction)
• Group students by ability, not age or ethnicity; bring back “tracking”
One of the problems I didn’t address earlier in this essay is the issue of “tracking,” or grouping students according to ability, rather than by age or other factors. Many districts in America still practice tracking, but many others (especially in “progressive” areas) decry tracking as elitist/racist/discriminatory. The issue often comes down to this: Schools in wealthier neighborhoods are often much better learning environments than schools in poor neighborhoods. This happens even in districts where the funding is legally required to be equal for each school; the better schools in wealthier neighborhoods spend their funds to improve learning, whereas schools in impoverished areas necessarily spend their money on discipline, security, repairs, etc., to the detriment of learning. Hence there will always be more poor parents seeking to send their kids to schools in better neighborhoods, than vice versa.
There’s no universally satisfactory solution to this dilemma. The “progressive” solution is to equally distribute the good students and the disruptive students into each school throughout the district, through bussing and/or a random lottery system. The problem with this approach is that a small number of disruptive students can destroy the learning environment of an entire class or school. It’s foolish to sprinkle each classroom with equal numbers of disruptive students and attentive students, because even one disruptive student in a classroom can spoil the learning atmosphere for the rest of the class. What’s the alternative? To group all the good students together so they can learn well together, and then in a separate school or class place all the disruptive or struggling students together, so they can receive special help and/or instruction customized to their needs. But you already know where this is headed: In those districts where there is racial disparity, and where that racial disparity reflects economic disparity, you may end up with what appears to be racially segregated schools or classes, even though the segregation was not based on race but rather was based entirely on disruptiveness and academic performance.
The time has come to shake off the ghosts of the past: Students at all levels would be better served if they were grouped according to ability, rather than by age or by ethnicity (to satisfy the shallow demands for “diversity” at all costs).
• Have “small schools” or “departments” within large high schools
A new trend in urban high schools is to divide each campus into departments, or “small schools” as they are sometimes called; in other words, to model high schools after universities, whereby students can choose a “major” or area of focus. I think this is a good idea.
This way, parents and students can select the political bias of their choice, rather then be subjected to school-wide indoctrination. It also allows for local standards to prevail without making them compulsory for every student. Thus, for example, a school in a left-leaning area such as Berkeley High School (which already has a “small school” system on its campus) allows students the option of signing up for the “School of Social Justice and Ecology” — which is generally advertised as being overtly leftist — while other students can choose less-political “small schools” or stay in the general population. At the same time, a high school school in a conservative area can have its own on-campus “department” with a decidedly right-leaning or patriotic bent, which students can voluntarily choose or avoid as they wish. This allows the political bias to be concentrated in self-selected enclaves within each school, and allows the general school environment to remain more politically neutral. Each school can have departments that reflect local politics and standards — just so long as they are voluntary and honestly advertised.
I wouldn’t even mind departments based on religious or cultural identities; a “small school” in Waco, Texas could teach Christian morals; a small school in Dearborn, Michigan could offer Islamic studies; a small school in Kiryas Joel, New York could focus on Judaica; all publicly funded. This way, the remaining non-Christian/non-Muslim/non-Jewish students won’t be forced to endure a school-wide religious culture which would make them feel excluded, whereas the religious students wouldn’t be compelled to learn in a thoroughly secularized environment. I view this as a potential win-win solution, but it remains to be seen if it could be implemented fairly and withstand legal challenges.
• Allow teachers with creative ideas to be idiosyncratic
It’s hard to not be inspired watching the brilliant and quirky teachers depicted in films like Stand and Deliver, Up the Down Staircase, and more recently Precious. But in the real world such teachers are few and far between. We should encourage creativity on the part of enthusiastic instructors by freeing them from the regimentation of national standards and a rigid curriculum. Forcing every teacher to be an identical drone teaching the identical mediocre lessons in the identical way is a recipe for failure. Idiosyncratic methods should be encouraged, not punished, and the way to do that is by decreasing reliance on stifling national standards.
Transparency and Independence
• Parental notification
Parents have a right to know what their kids are being taught. Too often we hear horror stories of politically biased teachers or administrators enforcing a “don’t tell your parents” rule in which students are discouraged from discussing controversial classroom lessons at home. This needs to end. “Parental notification” should become standard practice for every class, whereby at the start of each semester parents are given a full list of of all texts and assignments. The more parents know about what’s happening in school, the more they can participate in the process and demand sanity.
• Break the teachers’ unions
Teachers’ unions have become a major hindrance to decent education in this country. They prevent the firing of bad instructors, impose political orthodoxy on curricula, and in general resist any reforms which threaten their own power.
Furthermore, the teachers’ unions have been the driving force behind the Gramscian control of education (as discussed in Part IV of this essay), and are one of the reasons schools are politically biased in the first place.
I have no idea how to diminish the power of unions, so for now we’ll have to file this one under “wishful thinking.”
• Bring back competition and individuality
The de-emphasis on competition and push toward “group assignments” (discussed earlier) have numbed American schools. With no winners and no losers, and little reward for individually being the “best” in the class, students slog through a grey educational landscape with no motivation to excel.
Bring back competition. With a vengeance. Glorify individual achievement. This is what makes school exciting and helps push every student to try harder.
Got your own ideas? The world wants to know! The national conversation about education is hereby declared OPEN.
Part I: Ideological War Spells Doom for America’s Schoolkids
Part II: What’s the Matter with Texas?
Part III: Indoctrination Nation
Part IV: In Pursuit of Cultural Hegemony
Part V: Proposals for an Educational Renaissance
Well done, Zombie. If you ever decide “to return to the world of the living” and to stride forth with a name, educational reform is an endeavor you should pursue. You would be promoting the mitzvah you have begun in these fine essays.
I know, not so much time for lunatics in the trees or enormous scrota, but presenting sensory images, although it gets our attention, is not the final step on the path to reform. At any rate, Berkeley will always be Berkeley; no redemption there.
Zombie has once again done a fantastic job of articulating the groans and frustrations of many a lover of truth and honesty. As a future history teacher I am appalled at the backwards, victim-based, racist, and ineffective crap I am expected to employ to keep my job. One of my education courses required I write lesson plans for different ethnic groups because “color determines perception”. I was of course publicly called a racist and a pawn of the white man (I’m Hispanic for whatever the hell that’s worth) for insisting that the better course would be to know my material well enough that I can adapt to my students’ learning styles without resorting to racial stereotypes. Apparently it’s now racist to call color a non-issue. God help us.
Treating non-retarded children as equally capable of learning the material can only be called “racist” in a place corrupted by Wonderland logic.
“As a future history teacher…”
Cool.
So what’s going to happen?
I too have been called racist for insisting that every child I’ve ever had in my classroom, regardless of race, had a brain and was equally capable of learning the material. I also said that I have noted that often the limiting factor is the attitude toward learning of the student and that they seem to get that from the home environment.
I was called evil, racist and one woman was insisting I was the biggest problem in such rude language I left the conversation without making any further comment. I was shocked at the ugliness although I think I should not have been.
All because I stated the obvious truth: Race is irrelevant to the ability to learn and attitude toward learning is generally acquired in the home environment. Duh!
‘Curriculum
• Get back to basics
Political and religious bias in our school curriculum have spun completely out of control and contaminated every aspect of public education. Schools should jettison anything even resembling politicization and focus instead on nailing down basic skills, formerly known as “the three Rs”: Reading, writing and arithmetic. ”
First.. that is the three R’s ..Readin’, ‘Riten’, and ‘Rithmetic. Now add one more “R”… Riflin’ and we can agree.
Also I am glad you are down with “The money follows the child, and the Parents decide the school”. Kudos.
However the rest of your ‘curriculum’ is decidedly biassed in your belief system. There are no centrist.. no moderates. Ideology does not a linear flow chart from left to right make with your self professed “centrist oligarchy” some well reasoned position. There are ‘extremist’ of every flavor, with moderate extremism you seem to embrace being.. mayhap, the most dangerous of all.
Beware! I am the Oligarch of the dreaded Moderate Extremists!
But seriously, I don’t consider myself a “centrist” in any sense, despite being compelled by linguistic insufficiency to use the word “centrist” in one entry above.
There is no existing word to accurately characterize my political stance, though I know that there are millions of people like me out there.
I don’t consider myself to even be on the “left/right spectrum” — I’m off on a different axis altogether, perhaps the imaginery-number axis in the 11th dimension.
I agree with some “conservative” positions, and a few “liberal” positions (but mostly conservative ones, to be completely honest). But not so much that I find myself identifying with either side.
It’s been at the top of my “To Do List” for several years to write an essay explaining my political identity, but the project is so intimidating that procrastination has always won out. Maybe soon I’ll get the gumption. (Ah, to dream…)
Until then, you can just think of me as a secular, rationalist, anti-communist, socially laissez-faire hyperconservative nonviolent pro-war hippie.
Or, the Oligarch of the Moderate Extremists — as you see fit.
I only read the last part but loved every bit of it. Have watched two homeschooled kids the last few summers and can attest they have skills unlike their public school counterparts. Breaking the back of the Public School Monopoly is something that has been long overdue. It’s become Standard Oil of Ohio on steroids.
I’ve no qualm with putting schools in every Foggybottom, but competition is utmost. I can get from my house to LA for about the same fare on different airlines. Can’t help but think students can go from stupid to educated at about the same fare with competition. Oh, to think what they’ll have stashed in the ‘overheads’ upon their return trip. Is this country ready?
I’m glad you have threatened to lay out your political philosophy. Can I encourage you to do so? I find myself following several people online–yourself, Krauthammer, Glenn Reynolds, the guys at Volokh, even the Sensuous Curmudgeon and James Lileks–and while there is a great deal of similarity, one really can’t place them in uniquely in the modern political landscape. Libertarian conservative is as close as I can come, but even this often implies religious affiliation or Paulian quackery.
Please help us Zombie. You’re (one of our only) hope(s)!
Whatever I write, I know that it likely will end up infuriating and alienating plenty of folks, while exciting others. It’s a daunting process, like going “politically nude in public,” with nothing left to hide.
One of my main sticking points is coming up with a name for my “orientation.” Contemporary political verbiage does not contain a word to encapsulate my outlook. Once I settle on a name (I’ll probably end up having to coin a word), I may take the plunge.
I very much look forward to this! Could the disaffection from one direction or another be somewhat avoided by libertarian principles? I.e., “Our policy is to take political power and then aggressively leave you alone.”?
Zombie — How about, “Omniveracity” as the encompassing term?
Conservatarian?
As for myself: FWIW, I like both “ideoskeptic” (skeptical of all ideologies) and “engineerist” (coined by Steven Den Beste when he was active).
Engineers care first of all about things working, and second (if at all) about them fitting any doctrine/theory. They are conservative, moderate, or radical depending on the context.
The conservative instinct is reflected in “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitudes w.r.t. tried and true values and societal structures.
The radical instinct surfaces when things are catastrophically broken: an engineer will be more willing to try something completely different then than the average person.
The moderate instinct comes up if it’s a situation in between: something needs changing but it’s not catastrophically f***ed up. There an engineer will prefer thoughtful, controlled, incremental improvements over “change for the sake of change”.
well, how about calling it Zombism? Followers would be Zombists, Zombians, Zombiers, Zombicans or Zombicats?
Evidently, Shane, there are a LOT of us out here! What ARE we, anyway? My darlin’ husband calls it “Libertarian Lite”, but that doesn’t really cover it. Some flavor of Libertarian Lite/Moderate-conservative? For a long time I’ve wondered if *I* was a “radical moderate”. However, I can understand Fantom’s p.o.v. that maybe that’s the most dangerous of all — but I think unfortunately we’re quibbling semantics here. I think we’re just plain ol’, good ol’ Americans, with all that implies, including [gasp!] patriotism.
how about Republican with Libertarian Leanings or Democrat with Libertarian Leanings, or Centrist with Libertarian leanings?
I always tell people I have Libertarian leanings but don’t agree with the Libertarians on too many points to join them.
At the same time, I like the written Republican platform but honestly, how many Republican candidates actually hold that platform? Most of them seem to give it a nod for elections and then go off and serve whatever special interest is currently in vogue. The Democrats seem to follow their party platform closer but I find I do not agree with that in any way at all.
Which generally leaves me scratching my head at voting time since I’m simply guessing which candidate might actually serve my best interests and what I see as the common good.
How about de Tocquevillian?
Excellent, Zombie.
To address one small point, there has been great resistance to digital books. If you can download a book for $2.99 suddenly the $100 + textbook becomes obsolete. Suddenly publishers are having a tizzy fit as well as the “educators”, especially the arrogant professors who insist on a “new” version for each semester whether there have been substantial or any changes in content.
If schools can give every student a cheap laptop, there’s no reason why they can’t hand out cheap readers. (There are rumors a $50 reader is going to be released by Christmas from a company in India.) If traditional publishers are already having the vapors over fiction and nonfiction going digital as well as authors not needing them any longer, the educational publishers will experience an even more massive earthquake.
It’s nice to think about Howard Zinn being backlisted.
It’s all part of their scam. Education is a monopoly that should be smashed.
To anyone who objects to tracking, here’s a compromise: at my old high school, I took Honors Analysis and Trigonometry (aka Precalculus) as a Freshman. Some of my classmates were Seniors, gearing up to take Calculus in the Second Semester, prior to graduating. You took the class when you were ready to take it, with no restrictions on the level based on your prior experience, only the caveat that if you took an Honors/AP course without recommendation that you couldn’t drop the class later, so override at your own risk.
Teachers can attempt to sequence the curriculum in such a way that a highly motivated and talented student can work through it at an accelerated pace.
For the past several years, I’ve had a small number of students who wanted to do (and were able to do) the second year of the language quickly, and get on to the 3rd year curriculum (mostly reading texts) as soon as possible. They have to pass both sets of exams, and they earn two credits. I’ve had students who did this so well that they were able to do a really good job in the Advanced Placement level the next year–three years total time, from beginning the language through getting a 5 on the AP exam. Not many kids can do this, but if they’re capable of it, and will work at it, it’s a nice thing for them.
I agree.
Ask the nay-sayers what would school sports programs look like if the sports-talented couldn’t “work through it at an accelerated pace”?
If schools can do it for a less-than-top-priority activity (sports) then schools should be expected to provide an accelerated pace and along with specialized coaches for the high-achieving students who are academically talented.
I heard an intriguing statistic a few years back. I don’t remember the exact context but the gist of it was something to the effect that 99% of the money spent on teaching is to help slower students catch up and only 1% is spent on the students with higher capacities to let them take advantage of their extra gifts.
While I can certainly understand why the slower students need and deserve the bulk of the help, it seems unfortunate that more isn’t done for the gifted students. It seems pretty likely that those gifted students are going to produce most of the scientific, medical, and technological breakthroughs in our world so investing a little more in them may well pay back many times over. Perhaps one of the gifted students will even find the way to help the slower students do better….
That is an interesting idea. Academic Coaches rather than teachers…if the content for an education is on computer to be learned at one’s own pace and projects are interspersed that are geared to the ability of the student and facilitated by the Academic coaches it could be a very interesting system.
Zombie I like your essay. I’ve been teaching physical education in high school for twenty years, in the inner city of LA. Many of the things you mention are up front and center at my school. #1 is discipline problems, the school refuses to take the problem out of the classroom and place it in what I call old school study hall. I’m not talking about taking them out of PE, because we have our own ways of dealing with discipline (take them to track is one example) but I have taught in the classroom as well and I must say to keep the discipline problems in your classroom the whole semester is a tragedy. The good kids lose out. I like the tracking idea, but you better get a strong teacher in the low performing classroom or all hell will break loose in the high school setting. Finally, yes, competition is needed again in our schools. Kids need to learn that you don’t always win, but if you work hard you just might get that win.
Zombie:
“I have no idea how to diminish the power of unions, so for now we’ll have to file this one under “wishful thinking.””
I DO, so let me help you with this.
Abolish the “closed shop” by instituting National “Right To Work” legislation, and not just for teachers,(but for every worker on a government payroll).
“Right To Work” allows workers to individually “fire” their unions, but keep their job, if the union in that worker’s individual view, is not sufficiently protecting and promoting the worker’s interests.
Also, banning single-union workplace monopolies would enhance competition. Right now, a school district is either AFT,(American Federation of Teachers) or NEA, (National Education Association), but it cannot have both unions representing the same bargaining unit because of Article 20 of the AFL-CIO Charter,(the “No Raiding” clause).
While this may seem counter-intuitive at first, I can tell you that as a 20 year rank and filer of Seafarers, it would irk me no end to see my PAC donations used to agitate for minimum-wage workers benefit…none of whom were union members.
You might be surprised at how many in the rank and file feel as I do…oh, and giving the union its “walking papers” results in a raise for the worker…since he no longer pays membership or working dues and PAC contributions.
The fact of the matter is that RTW makes unions “earn their keep” with their own membership…and that’s why the Labor Bosses absolutely detest the very idea of RTW, them lousy bums!
Once people are free to join, and to leave, unions as it suits them, then workers will be better represented because the union will be less free to dabble in politics.
And the political dabbling is where most of the trash gets shovelled in which ends up dumped all over the students.
I agree wholeheartedly!
Right to work is essential for all people! It should be a given in our laws that every individual has the right to work and nothing, no program, no laws, no unions, no guilds, nothing and nobody should hinder the free expression of the right to work!
That said, nobody has the right to force someone else to hire them either–I want the best skilled employee with the best work ethic no matter what and quotas hurt that.
Bilgeman,
I am a teacher who works in a system where I have no choice but the join the NEA. The dues are taken out of my check regardless of whether I have other representation. I used to work in a right to work state where we had three options for union membership and if we preferred, we could get independent malpractice insurance. I agree that “right to work” was a much better system for all stakeholders.
Zombie,
You make some interesting points. You gave me something to think about.
Eli:
“I am a teacher who works in a system where I have no choice but the join the NEA. The dues are taken out of my check regardless of whether I have other representation.”
I’m feelin’ ya. The “Dues Check-off” is a mechanism near and dear to the Labor Bosses’ hearts…from their POV, it’s “money for nothin’”.
You DO have options, though. You can become an Agency Fee Payer:
http://www.teacherssavingchildren.org/national/unionoptions.html
If you’re not familiar with it, this means they have to account, to you individually, for every dime of yours that they spend, and then they have to issue you a refund for the amount that is not related to representing you and your interests.
Believe me when I tell you that they absolutely HATE having to divulge where YOUR money goes, but that’s the law. Try reading a Department of Labor LM-2 form sometime.
http://www.dol.gov/olms/regs/compliance/rrlo/lmrda.htm
This way, if they want to play politics, they can do it with their own cash not yours.
And if they drag their feet about coughing up the paperwork and your refund, then there are organizations whose sole purpose in life is to take corrupt and criminal unions down:
http://www.nrtw.org/en/free-tagging/forced-union-dues
A++++
There is another issue in our education system you did not address. There are parents who consider their “little angle” incapable of misbehaving. These are the worst offenders and need a good spanking – My first grade teacher – Mrs. Roy – wouldn’t have stood for any misbehaving, but of course those days are long gone. Spanking should be allowed back – and parents must back it up. My son’s teachers are shocked (you can see it on their faces) when we tell them to send him to the principle if he takes one step out of line. (Apparently, this is the harshest punishment allowed now – and not something most parents demand).
When my daughter was 11 years old, she wanted to try “public school” (this was something I always told her she had a choice to try) so I allowed her to give it a go. She hated it. The children were unruly and she could never get a word in edgewise to her teachers. Her teachers thought she was brilliant but they couldn’t control their classrooms enough to give her the time and effort. GOOD teachers are stymied by the current ‘system’ of ‘anything goes’.
Three months later, my daughter begged me to home-school her again. I removed her from the ‘system’ and did as she asked. I’m so glad she had the chance to ‘see’ how it really was so that she didn’t feel ‘deprived’ of anything. It was a very REAL learning experience for her [indeed].
Disruptive brats should be ousted permanently from public schools. Do you think the scumbag parents of the ‘children’ even pay taxes towards the schools their children are ‘taught’ in? Highly doubtful.
I think it would be great if everyone could and would home-school and let the “teachers’ union” chips fall where they may.
An uncle of mine tried a teaching job at one of the high schools where we used to live. He could only deal with it for a day. The disciplinary system was “Call the cops,” and he had a different form that needed to be filled out every hour of the day. Even if he had been able to simply dismiss all the students who didn’t want to be there, he couldn’t have taught anything because of all the bureaucratic paper work he had to fill out every time he turned around.
We’re talking a real live rocket scientist, who did propulsion control systems for NASA before he had been laid off, too.
*smacks ‘Downie’ the ‘Downer Cow’ on the knuckles with a wooden ruler*
Where, precisely would we put the 6.5 million unruly brats, as you put it.
Competition breeds contempt for the weak.
Why should weak people allow strong people to use their children for predatory practice?
I wonder
Your handle wouldn’t happen to be a reference to a certain congenital disease that you have, would it?
The only thing wrong with your comment is that the unruly kids ARE the predators and competition has nothing to do with that.
Exactly right, Michael. Those unruly brats don’t go to school to ‘learn’ diddly squat. They ‘go to school’ to make trouble or sell drugs or ‘score’ chicks.
Ahhh, a product of “public education” shows up.
I’d deconstruct your little effort in foolishness but you wouldn’t understand it.
This angle, it would be acute, right?
Sounds more like it was obtuse…
well, one thing always annoyed me. The liberal persistence to call anyone who disagreed with them stupid, as in the case of George Bush, one of our greatest presidents. Not only is it a fallacy to attack an argument on the basis of the intelligence of the speaker, but it does not bode well for discourse, either. If you are going to measure the validity of an argument based on intelligence all you have to do is keep testing, every time you come to a disagreement the smarter person wins. Then we simply change our opinions based on current test results. Also you are putting forth the premise that intelligent people can’t be wrong.
Competition does not create competent people, it creates competitive people. Also competition is as consistent as rain or sun.
Just because you did better than me doesn’t mean you did well, it only means you did better than me.
No – sangredulce has it correct. I meant “little acute angle”.
Fat fingered that one.
Nowadays teachers aren’t allowed to hit students, but there ain’t no rule that says you can’t make a kid hurt using his own body. The solution is to force kids who behave out of line to do a set of push-ups. Who knows, maybe we’ll trim some waistlines while we discipline students (strength training doesn’t use up much energy, but building muscle uses a lot of fat both for energy and for raw materials).
On a side note, the Homeschooling thing is already going on, with quite a bit of networking via the web.
My daughter is 23 years old now. I was a ‘rogue’ back in the day by home-schooling her. I’m so glad more people are finding the idea of home-schooling perfectly acceptable rather than some ‘freak fringe’. I was more than happy to give up certain luxuries so that she had an education that *I* felt happy with (and was RESPONSIBLE for).
I teach composition at the college level. Without exception, every single home-schooled student I’ve ever had (and there have been more than a few!) was head and shoulders above their classmates in writing capability and overall scholarship. And they were just as “normal” as the other students; clearly there was no lack of so-called “socialization”.
Beautiful post. Thank you so much for that. It really cheered me up!
Yes, indeed. Most reasonably well-populated areas already have the co-ops, group activities, and classes Zombie describes. Also, in my state at least, kids can take courses at the local community college as early as age 14, and some private schools let home-schoolers take single courses.
One thing state and local governments could and SHOULD do, IMO, is allow home-school kids to participate in the sports and arts programs of the public school that they would be assigned to if they weren’t home-schooled. The coaches and fans want that; the ordinary parent, teacher, and student don’t object; but the unions, solely out of hatred for home-schooling, will fight this to their last breath.
If the public schools are going to be considered a school of last resort or safety net then they will never get better, never get the funding required to make them better. The better students will leave and the only ones left will be the most disruptive students. Every class will be a behavior management nightmare. NO EDUCATION WILL TAKE PLACE!!! But I guess that is the idea — make them so bad that they either close or turn into junior prisons. I thought a public education supported by taxpayers was something unique about the USA. Or do you want taxpayers to support every tom dick and harry charter school with no rules, no curriculum no oversight getting all of the money and the one that gets the most taxpayer money wins. Sounds like graft to me — Which is what most of you accuse the teachers of trying to do.
I agree that a lot could be done with public education — But just handing the money over to ANYONE who says that they are running a charter school doesn’t appear to be helping. Any student at a charter school gives them trouble — BOING – back to the public school they go — to ruin someone elses education.
Bad charter schools such as you describe will very rapidly lose all students and hence all funding, and will mercifully disappear. That’s the whole point behind school choice! Only the best survive, and the better you teach, the more you thrive.
That pesky invisible hand of Adam Smith reaching over into the educational world — beware!
Xactly, Zombie! Bravo!
The biggest danger I can see of public schools as the last resort is that they will become dumping grounds for all the students the other schools pick over. The ones with learning and physical disabilities, behavioral problems, and poor home lives will concentrate in the public schools. As a result any uncorrected measure of performance is going to make the public schools look worse, which will drive parents of “normal” students to move their kids somewhere else, which will increase the concentration of “high-effort” students and further depress performance.
Perhaps this could be solved by adding a “kicker” onto the tax dollars attached to a high-effort student, or by adjusting performance scores based on student population.
So it sounds like your answer is to highly encourage better students to attend poor performing high schools so as to give them better performance…. now that MAY help the poorer performing students because they may have something to shoot for, but what about the higher performing student? This whole situation is the reason parents are pulling their kids. Instead of the whole group being brought up to higher standards, the higher performing students aren’t being challenged as they should.
And even kids who aren’t performing are being yanked and put into charter schools, homeschools, etc., becuase their parents care. Let’s not make the assumption that every kid that leaves is a higher performer. That is not necessarily the case.
Schools need to compete; if they can’t, maybe they will be shut down. But, if there’s competition, someone / group will step in and start a new school. There will be growing pains no doubt, but there’s a lot of pain now with kids not learning and the whole system starting to implode.
My point was that we cannot forget about the lower-performing students. There are many reasons for a student’s poor performance, the vast majority of them can be fixed by an appropriate application of resources. Unruly students would benefit from a higher level of discipline, Dyslexic and Autistic children would need specially-trained teachers, etc. As long as schools can choose not to take students, and as long as each student brings with them the same amount of money the rational choice will be to reject students that require more resources. This will result in “problem” students concentrating in public schools which cannot reject students, or in schools set up to cater to their problems. Either way we’d end up with a stratification where certain schools develop reputations. I see this as leading to an underclass ripe for exploitation by a demagogue. Like it or not we’re all in this country together.
I’m not opposed to the idea of school choice, I just see it leading to problems that should be addressed. I’m going to retract my suggestion that test scores be adjusted based on special-needs population, that’s not going to solve the problem.
It sounds like you want to sacrifice good students and their education to help public schools. That has been a failing recipe for the last 50 years.
The public schools are already the dumping grounds. No private school is going to accept a student who hates learning and enjoys disrupting the classroom.
Teachers unions prevent the leaders in a school to just dump poor performing teachers, and parents are the primary educators of their children and create the monsters who disrupt by their failure to teach them to learn.
It is a problem. So are sub-par textbooks with errors in them, and lack of exercise. Fat sluggish children do not learn well. It would be nice if a health and longevity based exercise program were in place. Also, nutritionally GOOD meals rather than the carbohydrate heavy stuff I see coming out of the lunch rooms and lunch boxes.
Sure. The only prob. is that the time for improvement will be much longer than student’s school carreer.
You say all this as if no one has ever even tried to fund the public school system. The reality is that the public system had an effective monopoly for a very long time and received a very VERY large amount of funding from tax money over those many decades. From the sound of it, that money has NOT assured a great educational system. I think we’re at the point – actually, we’re long PAST the point – of wondering if it is worthwhile to keep throwing good money after bad.
I think it’s high time that other approaches to education got serious attention. I suspect that there are a lot of possible solutions out there and if we make half an effort, we’ll find them and refine them to the point where they are AT LEAST AS GOOD as the existing system, possibly much better. Let’s unleash some imaginations and creativity and see if we can find some other ways to educate our young people.
The problem no one is talking about, and which Zombie does not address is that much of the configuration of our present educational system is the result of an increasingly litigious society. Paperwork, documentation, strict curriculae, etc., are all about increasing the level of accountability.
Are we really willing to let that accountability go? I think not.
Here is an idea. Give each teacher a set of clear standards and objectives to meet. These should be written in kid friendly language so everyone understands what is expected. They should also reflect skills students need to be successful at the next level. Next have each teacher or team of teachers develop their own curriculum based on a set of standards agreed upon by the powers that be (local school educators, colleges, and businesses … people who know what gaps students have when they leave the school system). Finally, the teacher gathers evidence of what was learned by his students and keeps a portfolio for each student which contains evidence that the student has met standard. At the end of the year, the teacher fills out a detail report card and as a professional, certifies whether a student is ready to move on, essential giving his or her stamp of approval. If a parent has a dispute, he or she has the right to review the student portfolio and challenge a teacher’s decision, be it pass or fail. A board of qualified educational professionals then reviews the portfolio to determine why a student failed, or why the student passed even though he is not demonstrating understanding at the next level.
This would mean radical realignment of how we do business, but it would hold teachers accountable, give everyone a voice, and eliminate the ridiculous practice of determining a student’s knowledge based on one high stakes test. It would also limit the useless paper work and allow teacher to focus on individual weaknesses. Weak teachers would be weeded out because they will not do the work they need to do to “cya.” What do you think?
“If the public schools are going to be considered a school of last resort or safety net then they will never get better, never get the funding required to make them better.”
If it’s a voucher system they’ll get all the money per student the other schools get, and they’ll stop holding the rest of the country down.
“The better students will leave and the only ones left will be the most disruptive students. Every class will be a behavior management nightmare.”
So. People get what they pick for themselves. You have a problem with that?
“NO EDUCATION WILL TAKE PLACE!!! ”
Compared to the money we’re pouring into the public school systems, not enough is taking place now.
“But I guess that is the idea — make them so bad that they either close or turn into junior prisons.”
No, that’s what you teachers have made of too many of them now. We want actual improvement, you want a more comfortable stasis.
“I thought a public education supported by taxpayers was something unique about the USA.”
Then your own education has a drastically large hole in it. Physician, medicate thyself.
“Or do you want taxpayers to support every tom dick and harry charter school with no rules, no curriculum no oversight getting all of the money and the one that gets the most taxpayer money wins.”
What on earth do you think you are talking about? It seems that you are the one screaming about being asked to change the way you do business, you are screaming about being asked to live up to society’s rules. BTW, in a voucher system, every school would get a fixed amount per student, so only the effective schools would grow. You sound like you are someone who is certain they will not measure up to becoming a part of an effective school.
“Sounds like graft to me — Which is what most of you accuse the teachers of trying to do.”
If vouchers are graft, then is has the distinct advantage of being meritocratic graft–that alone means it should be put into place despite the plaints of the current graft recipients such as yourself.
“I agree that a lot could be done with public education — But just handing the money over to ANYONE who says that they are running a charter school doesn’t appear to be helping. Any student at a charter school gives them trouble — BOING – back to the public school they go — to ruin someone elses education.”
I am unaware of it hurting anywhere, and the last I heard on the topic was how DC shut down a meritocratic school of some sort as a payoff to the teachers union.
In sum, go screw yourself as hard as you’ve been screwing the rest of the country. Here’s 10 cents, go buy an apostrophe.
High School Teacher – maybe a really radical idea, but bring back child labor. It may sound strange, but we have been for about 100 years in the US been living in an unusual sitiuation where the under 16 population didn’t have to work and except for the post war periods (and maybe some time in the 1920s and the 1945-1965 time frame) women were in the work force also. It was prior to 1900 farm labor, unpaid, but adding to the life style and living of the family. Feeding chickens, making cloths, harvesting grain, etc All these things were done inside the family units, and therefore things that didn’t need to be purchased.
Anyhow my point is perhaps incentivising learning through labor. Nothing got me back to college each september like working construction during the summers for 12 hours a day. If each of child (and parent) is given the option of ‘work or school’ and that being suspended from school for aperiod of time means joining the work force. And before you ask, I DON’T know what labor a 5 year old could do, I do know in the past that they did it, but our means and ends of production have so changed that those tasks have long gone away. Anyhow something to think about.
The ‘funding’ to make them better? Public schools routinely get per student sums that private schools can only dream about–yet the private schools, with less money, turn out better educated children. Why?
I disagree — Poorly funded Public schools will be filled with poor performing, class disrupting students who will fail any academic measure that is asked of them. Any students who are even marginally OK — will be in charter school land getting a good education with fully funded schools. Any student that doesn’t measure up behavior wise or academically will be funneled to public schools to be warehoused until they age out of the system. You are just trying to get more good students out of the public schools along with their public dollars and leave the public school to pay for the difficult, costly and genuinely lower functioning. No school wants to deal with difficult and costly students but to mask that desire as some kind of new idea is disingenuous.
I think you have just described JAIL.
Um, public schools as warehouses–that’s a problem already.
Maybe our school system should be mandatory K-8 and OPTIONAL 9+ (high school). The “optional” would also be conditional on behavior–that is, hell-raisers can be kicked out, no revolving doors. That way students who want to learn something would have a much better chance, and the school systems can save big bucks by not having to deal with “warehousing”.
If we are going to insist on personal responsibility, then we must hold the parents accountable for teaching their kids to behave. The consequences of no/poor parenting would be a kid who gets shown the door–let the parent, not the entire school, deal with the consequences!
“Poorly funded Public schools will be filled with poor performing, class disrupting students who will fail any academic measure that is asked of them.”
Then expel them. Forcing the motivated and capable students to share a classroom with the disruptive loser in ANY school is abusive and counterproductive. Kick them out of the system and focus your attentions of educating those who are actually willing and able to learn.
“You are just trying to get more good students out of the public schools along with their public dollars and leave the public school to . . .”
Stop right there.
Educational funds are NOT “public dollars.” They are OUR money. This is the foundation of the voucher system. If I have a school-age child, I OWN that child’s education. You do not, High School Teacher, and that goes double for your union. And since I own that child’s education, I also own the money that pays for it, which comes directly out of my pocket in the form of taxes. I will decide what form of education is best for my child, and I will award that money to the school that, in my judgement, is best suited to provide that education.
Your problem, High School Teacher, is that you believe that our children’s education belongs to you, and that any funds not directed to your public school system are somehow being “stolen” from you. This attitude of entitlement is offensive to us, and you’d be well advised to get rid of it.
The children are not yours; they are ours. Their education is not yours; it belongs to us. You work for us, not the other way around, so WE will tell YOU what is best for our children, not vice versa. And the money that pays for it all is ours, not yours.
Sundog,
Thank U, Than Q, Thanx!
We homeschool, but our kids were in public school for many years. The public school officials and teachers had an inappropriate sense of entitlement to our children’s and family’s time, and they did seem to believe our children were “theirs” to mis-educate, neglect and even abuse at will.
The public schools desperately need a reality check. They need to be reminded that their students are our progeny, and the money they squander is ours too. They need to get serious about service.
I think High School Teacher is describing the situation that exists today.
In the public high school where I teach, the best-performing and motivated students are in Advanced Placement classes and (in pre-AP subjects) honors classes; the disruptive and disaffected students tend to be in the lower tier of classes, though they are increasingly in honors classes, too. (The requirements for “honors” classes are not what they used to be.)
Public schools should go the way of the dinosaur.
NY Teacher Jail ring a bell?
Pathetic.
As much as I hate Huffin’Stuff:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/new-york-teachers-paid-to_n_219336.html
I knew this was gonna be a grand-slam. Superior work Z.
- Introduce competition into the educational marketplace.
Obviously #1 is a no-brainer, and #2 is a tactic to achieve the same end. #3 will be the fruit.
- the homeschooling network is a very intriguing idea which should stir and mull. This kind of out-o-box thinking we need dearly imo.
I flinched on:
- Have “small schools” or “departments” within large high schools
I like the idea of, wish I could have taken, shop, but beyond that I balked. Like ITT-Tech for HS? premature stratofication?
- Allow teachers with creative ideas to be idiosyncratic
yes but, isn’t this part of the problem and isn’t it contained/resolved within #1.
- Parental notification
parent night (for each term) should and often does hand these out, no? did in my school. I think parents should be allowed to sit in if desired and not extraordinate. Mine did.
- I have no idea how to diminish the power of unions, so for now we’ll have to file this one under “wishful thinking.”
hmmmm, I think you had it under numero uno “Introduce competition into the educational marketplace.” or are we not on the same page?
–
Thank you Zombie and PJM.
Nice work by Zombie.
As a matter of fact, this is the best series I’ve ever read that was authored by a member of the Undead.
Well here is a complaint: there is no strict separation of science, religion, and politics in education. Darwinism as science leads to philosophical principles that form the basis for a political program. Do not take my word for it- read John Dewey (1910) “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy” yourselves. Likewise, Platonism is a religion, a science, and a political program- and flawed, but fascinating. Hell, if you teach math correctly, you will lead students down the road of Plato…
I do agree with homeschooling. Teach what you believe to the next generation. Of course, what you teach is what they will rebel against.
Nope. WRONG.
If the youth of the nation all rebelled against the ‘libtard brainwashing’ in pub schools, they’d all be ‘young republicans’.
Nice try, fucktard.
Darwinism implies nothing philosophically other than that meritocracy is the norm. I know of no reason a conservative should fear it, and I don’t know why Dewey should be taken as an authority on it any more than Marx should be.
Zombie
In a real bell curve (and IQ is one such) half of the population is below average. Vouchers won’t fix that. They can’t. The best teachers who ever lived can’t make Johnny smart. Johnny is still below average, even if he’s in a charter school. Charter schools and vouchers etc are typically nothing more than a way to justify xenophobia or place blame on Johnny’s lack of ability on teachers, schools, leftists, and other bogeymen. Worse, these are also championed by the far right types who think Johnny could have been a success if not for (e.g.) an insidious Darwinist conspiracy undermining true teaching (feel free to substitute any other happy flag/mom/apple pie witless canard here, singly or in varying combinations.) At no time is it acknowledged that Johnny just ain’t that bright to start with.
Two thoughts:
First, as another poster noted, schools were biased in the 50′s just as they are now. Bias isn’t the problem. The primary and most obvious difference between then and now is simply the lack of discipline. This needs to be fixed, and it can be.
Second, it’s one thing to bemoan a lack of discipline that will let Johnny get enough education to be useful and productive in life in a trade. Plumbing is respectable, good paying, and honest work. Johnny can do this. It’s quite another to imagine that college is what all of the Johnnys need. Realistic expectations (paying attention to the bell curve and what it implies) would go a long way here, and vouchers would mask this. It seems that everyone supporting vouchers does so in the belief that all kids can be above average. A below average Johnny isn’t going to be a physicist. Ever. And it isn’t going to matter what school he goes to.
The “BELL CURVE” is raaaaaaaaaaaaacist.
Next!
/sarc
Education needs to be appropriate to the kid. Kids who are below average on the bell curve need more explicit instruction and more practice than kids who pick up concepts faster. And there is the issue of developmental readiness. We label as learning disabled some children who simply haven’t matured yet. (I’m thinking of all the dyslexics who were probably on a trajectory normal for them.)
We need for some form of tracking but tracking conflicts with our democratic desire to have all children together in one classroom.
One of the advantages of homeschooling is the ability to let a young child work at their own pace.
“In a real bell curve (and IQ is one such) half of the population is below average. Vouchers won’t fix that. They can’t.”
So?!
Who’s asking them to change that? I think a voucher system would be more nimble in responding to demands than the hidebound public school system of today, and so would better serve Johnny whether he’s above or below average on the IQ bell curve.
Yes, half of the students will be below average. However, the average student can be more intelligent.
Your statement that half of the students will be “below average” is a mathematical fallacy. Just saying.
Suppose I have 10 apples, Joe has 2 apples, and 6 other people each have 4 apples. That makes 32 apples for 8 people, with an average (arithmetical mean) of 4 apples per person. In this case the mode (most common holding) and median (the holding dead center in the series) will also be 4, although in many cases mean, mode, and median will vary. But clearly in the example, no matter whether you use mean, median, or mode, one half of the apple-owners are not “below average.”
With IQ tests, the “average” score is more modal (based on what is common) than not, that is, it is determined by the top section of the bell curve, precisely the section where a hefty plurality of people score.
Except your example isn’t a normal distribution, AKA “bell curve”.
Sorry to nitpick, but 10 + 2 + (6 x 4) = 36, and the average would be 4.5
In a real bell curve (and IQ is one such) half of the population is below average.
In a real bell curve, the bulk of the population is AT ‘average’ hence the top of the bell. Another large chunk is a little above or a little below.
Good ideas, Zombie:
Charter or private school organized by parents are a good idea; I wonder if teachers have ever tried organizing such schools? The teachers who are free from union control and interested providing in quality education should be encouraged to organize and start non-public schools.
Expat
Zombie, I could live with your proposals. Most are radical and necessary improvements.
A few tweaks though may be needed, or the wheels could fall off.
First, a universal core curriculum in the Three R’s at least. External and objective testing, whether for kids who are streamed through public, private, local or home schooling. Perhaps half of the total syllabus should have external metrics associated with it. Texts and Courses outside the core should have associated testing materials to ensure that a kid who gets credit for the course actually knows it well enough to meet that standard.
Second, something based on my own experience regarding political indoctrination. At my High School, we had guest talks, sometimes to individual classes, sometimes to lecture halls filled with kids, from various people.
Gosh, we eviscerated that old-style Stalinist that lectured us once, in the Q&A afterwards… I felt rather sorry for the poor guy. His Holiness Bhaktividanta Swami, founder of the Movement for Krishna Consciousness (the Hare Krishnas) got a more sympathetic reception, though one even more sceptical.
What I’m saying is that in addition to exposing kids to a smorgasbord of careers, one should consider exposing them to a similar pot-pouri of religious and political ideas.
Reforms, I reckon, must begin at the universities wherein teachers are taught. If a high-school teacher cannot explain grammatical rules, because she never learned them, she is unlikely to teach them to her own students. In my time at my local university’s faculty of education, I observed that the majority of women—for women constitute the vast majority of “pre-service teachers”—are extremely poorly educated and ill-read, yet many of these semi-literate females have proceeded through their high-school and undergraduate years always receiving top marks. Not only are the students who intend to teach English woefully ignorant of the classics of English literature and of grammar withal, but so too are the lecturers. The textbooks also are poor: one textbook on grammar, listed as an essential text at my faculty, had at least one grammatical error on every single page, as well as scores of basic errors throughout of punctuation, logic and history.
Pre-service teachers are taught (at my University, at least) that John Dewey (blessed be his name) is the supreme thinker of educational theory; they are taught that the object of schooling is to inculcate democratic ideals; they are taught that group-learning is superior to individual learning; they are taught, unfortunately, the modern, fallacious, self-contradictory principle of subjective reality; they also learn that, to gain a Master of Teaching degree, they must compliantly agree with the official paradigms and keep any criticisms to themselves.
John Dewey, bad as he is, is still better than Paolo Freire–about whom they are actually still yapping, in the ed schools I’m sorry to have had to become acquainted with (since I live in a state where it’s not easy for people to teach without acquiring the ed school credentials).
I learned a lot from reading E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need-for reviewing what was so disastrously wrong with the whole progressive movement in education (for most of the 20th century).
Thanks Zombie, I’ve been following your series and it has helped crystallize a chain of thought I have been following for a while. I have two main suggestions:
1. Make logic and rhetoric a core subject. You gave it a line, but make it as important as literacy and numeracy. Citizens of a free democracy are bombarded every waking hour by people trying to shape their perceptions, from political parties to advertisers. The ability to evaluate an argument is a key skill for responsible citizenship. Four R’s; reading ‘riteing, ‘rithmatic and rhetoric.
2. In science, concentrate on the scientific method. Karl Popper, Karl Popper, Karl Popper. In science knowledge is provisional, much of what we of what we teach as fact is already obsolete by the time the textbook is printed. Once the method is understood, say “This is what we know and this is our best understanding of what it means.” It will undercut the ID proponents “just a theory” line. Emphasize the difference between science and philosophy.
Science is important, but is only applicable to a limited subset of human experience. It can try to answer “what,” never “why.” Part of the problem is that people have transferred much of their trust from politicians and religious leaders to scientists. This is the reason behind the fuss over Texas school books and the total intellectual corruption that is “climate science.”
If these changes were instituted a lot of people from ideologues to marketers would be very unhappy. That’s probably a good thing.
Leaving the “disruptive” kids or “slow learners” in the classroom is not the problem. My school had all of us lumped together; the key was discipline. On the elementary and middle grades, you got spanked if you misbehaved badly enough; at the very least, you were made to sit in a “special” seat – in the days of the bolted-down seats, it was usually the very first one, the one that had no desk. Latter versions had a seat that was right next to the teacher’s desk, or perhaps in a corner of the room – but facing the action, not the wall, so the student still had the chance to learn. Junior high and high had detention that was every kid’s nightmare: You couldn’t read or talk, you could just sit there and do nothing for the required time. A true time-out. At the very least, you sat there and did lines.
As for the slow learners? They were given the same caveat at the beginning of the term as the rest of us: Do the very best you can, and that will be acceptable. I know it sounds naive to today’s ear, but trust me, it WORKED! Especially considering the fact that you were given a separate grade for EFFORT in each subject.
Reintroduce classroom competition: Amen to that! First and foremost, throw out those letter grades and bring back number grades. Report cards were handed out in the classroom for us to take home, then bring back the next day signed by one of our parents. One of the most exciting and fun things about report cards was comparing them with your classmates’. Even as little as a one- or two-point improvement in a score was a cause for celebration for most of us. With letter grades, each letter represents a point span, meaning that all B’s (or A’c, or C’s, or whatever) are inherently NOT equal, and the kids know it. Because those grades are based on numbers, let’s have the numbers, for crying out loud!
The grading curve. Oh, the DARNED curve. No matter which way you look at it, it’s not necessarily a good thing. For one, it gives students a false sense of performance: You get an 85, when, based on pure percentage points, your score probably should have been in the 70s, or even in the 60s. Excelling is actually discouraged, because it throws the curve off. On the teacher’s side of the equation, too many failures in a class, and a teacher could find himself on the unemployment line. That’s not such a bad thing, either, is it? If a teacher can’t teach effectively, he doesn’t belong in the classroom, period, end of conversation. But the unions will never allow that; that’s why they’ve blocked every move to ensure that teachers actually know the material they’re supposed to teach!
Once upon a time, I was a union supporter. My father, a construction worker, belonged to a union, and I could see the benefits day by day, especially when he became disabled and the government pension wasn’t enough to support our family. The union pension, in addition to that, saved the situation. But that was many, many years ago. I’ve since learned that his union was an exception. In education, they’re a disaster, perpetuating mediocrity to keep a teacher at work, no matter his knowledge (or lack thereof) or effectiveness. And make no mistake: A teacher can know his stuff inside out and STILL not be effective in the classroom! This brings us back to the curve: Throw the darned thing out!
#17 finally an honest answer. Until the public accepts this and finds a way to educate our kids based on this then all other solutions will fail the lower IQ students and the drop out rates will continue to rise.
Zombie, Do some research on homeschoolers and then write another article.
I appreciate your support for homeschooling. Like you, I see it as a hope for the future, preserving good education. On the other hand, most of your suggestions for homeschoolers are things they are already doing. One recommendation most of us would not want is inclusion in state programs such as vouchers and tax rebates. These would doubtless come with strings such as standardized curriculums and tests. Many homeschoolers do so in order to avoid these things (for reasons too complex to go into here).
If you do get acquainted with some homeschoolers, consider their socialization. Are they less well socialized than kids in public schools? the same? better? In my experience, doubters who meet homeschooled kids are impressed by how well they get along with others. Then think about how children in a class of 25 with one teacher are being socialized by kids as ignorant as they. Consider that bullying has become a big problem in schools. See if you can find it among homeschoolers. (I’m sure it’s there somewhere but I haven’t found it.)
Thanks for your thought provoking article.
Thanks for your comment.
My proposals for “normalizing” homeschooling and for funding homeschooling with vouchers is in conjunction with the elimination of standardized curriculums and tests (see “End the practice of mass-adoption of a few major textbooks” and “Allow teachers with creative ideas to be idiosyncratic”: “… by decreasing reliance on stifling national standards.”)
Wouldn’t all the homeschoolers be able to use all that extra money (that would come with vouchers) to improve the homeschooling environment?
As for socialization, I didn’t say that the homeschooled kids were anti-social, only that there is a general stereotype held by the public that homeschooled kids didn’t get socialized properly. My statements in the essay were more a reassurance for the people currently nervous about homeschooling.
Re vouchers for homeschoolers: Yes, of course we could use more money because someone in the family is foregoing paid employment in order to teach the children. But the lesson of history is that government control always follows government money.
Once a family figures out how to have a person in the home to teach, it takes surprisingly little money to homeschool because so much can be done by swapping resources with other families, using the library, and the internet.
Where I live families sending their children to school are required to buy paper, glue, scissors, and other classroom supplies. It’s a bad joke that I could homeschool for the year on what they spend. That’s in addition to the $9,000 – 10,000 of public money spent per pupil.
I USED to work as a construction superintendent, primarily building new schools and additions to existing schools, way back when South Florida School Boards were actually building new schools, as opposed to doing the ‘bare-bones’ minimum repairs that they could get by with and still keep the schools open. In this occupation; I had a lot of contact with administrators and teachers.
Most folks have no idea of the of the misconduct prevelant in public schools today. Elementary school teachers are afraid of some of their students and with just cause. In South Florida students as young as eight years old have been found with loaded handguns in their backpacks! They now have police officers, metal detectors at school entrances and every student gets their packpack searched before they are allowed to enter.
Teachers are only ALLOWED to teach at the pace/level that is comfortable dumbest and most ignorant of students!!! We wouldn’t want anyone to get their delicate little feelings hurt, now would we???
Home Schooling of your children’grand children is the only way to go if you have any feelings for them at all!
Great article and suggestions.
Zombie, though I have been critical of your own bias concerning natural selection which we will never agree, I do want to compliment you on the proposals and the research concerning this series on education. All of the articles were interesting, thought provoking and well written.
I do want to address one myth about our public school systems. And ironically, I just read an article this morning in the local rag (seems it was Robert Samuelson) that challenged the necessity and continual academic demands of lowering the student/teacher ratios, as if somehow this the missing ingredient and heart of the problem. Anyone who was a product of elementary public education in the 60s and early 70s recognizes this is a fraud. We had far larger class sizes and far better test results then than now.
One obstacle that education can’t address but more often than not has the most profound effect in the classroom. It’s the reason I know throwing more money at our educational dilemmas won’t fix the problem (Lord knows the we’ve tried).
Loving and caring parents in a stable family that recognize their child not perfect and the adults rule the roost. Doesn’t matter how good the instructor is if the classroom is not conducive to learning.
My two cents: 1. The administrations of many if not most public schools are politicized. This means they sway to the wishes of the community. If a certain racial community cries racism because the school is expelling or suspending more black students than white students, then no students are expelled or suspended. Therefore the problem of disruptive students remains.
If grade inflation is “needed” to make black students and the less intellectually gifted students feel good then the truly gifted students suffer. In a way what I am saying is that schools must teach and parents must parent and the two shall only meet when necessary. If education continues to bend to the wishes of each parent it suffers.
2. Mainstreaming has got to end. Many of today’s disruptive students are maintained in class because they are an IEP student. Many of these IEP students have exclusions and exemptions in their program of study which prevents a teacher or principal from suspending or expelling them for their behavior.
The truly disruptive student knows that schools cannot touch them literally and figuratively. They are free to do as they will.
Mainstreaming of the lower functioning students in classes has got to end as well. While I am sympathetic to their plight, they pull the class down both in behavior and learning. Students with learning problems need schooling but not in with students with no learning disabilities. Classes and lesson plans should not have to be designed to meet the learning capabilities of the lowest performing student-those with learning disabilities. It stifles the average and gifted students.
3. Something near and dear to me is the way principals and superintendents hire teachers. I have been unemployed for two years and the reasons why I have been given for not being hired are simply laughable. One principal said I was not progressive enough; one said I had too much experience (they were hiring 0 experience teachers); another said they were hiring an in-state teacher because he knew the state standards-implying I could not read them myself.
The answers: 1. We need more alternative schools for the habitually disruptive student. Here they learn the basics of how to live. They get a certificate of graduation and some job placement prospects. If they fail this or are removed from here, oh well, too bad. Join a gang. We have got to get away from this all students deserve an education crap. Education is a privilege not a right. We must allow schools to suspend and expell students who are destroying education.
2. End mainstreaming of behavior students. Discontinue to allow them to get away with disrupting school because they have an IEP.
End the mainstreaming of learning disabled students in classes. That SCOTUS ruling in the 70s led to many of the problems we have today in schools. The learning disabled deserve an education, just not in tradtional classes. Okay it may take hiring a few more teachers but isn’t that preferable to having them languish in classes where they have little chance of really learning. Of course those who can keep up should stay mainstreamed. So tracking should be reinstated. Integrating students of diversely mixed ability does not good for either the gifted or the poorly functioning students.
3. I don’t know how you un-politicize school administrators. I’ll leave that up to someone else. While we advocate parental input there must be limits of that input. Teachers getting threatened, the NAACP suing teachers, teachers getting fired because of a parents input have got to stop. I am not talking about egregious and illegal acts-but things like not giving a student an A so he can play football, or being forced to give a student a C after catching him plagarizing a report, or failing a student for never participating in class (I too taught PE)… Or wait how about writing up a student for fighting only to have the principal write me up for writing up the student for fighting-the student was black and that was a no-no.
4. End the Dept of Ed in Washington’s control over education. Return education to the states.
I think that many of your concerns here are valid. I saw that if teachers have to spend an inordinate amount of time responding to any one or more students IEP’s that they could hardly be expected to do as well with the rest of the class. Usually, one can make a semi-nominal, good faith attempt to make some accomadations (I am allergic to that word, and still cannot spell it) and get by, but every so often you get the nutty parent of a special needs student, whose whole life has become monitoring, insisting, harassing etc.,and the school system spends inordinate amounts of time dealing with this ONE student, but even more, the student’s semi-crazed, certainly obsessed, parent. Society has decided that special needs students should get a first class crack at things and these services are inordinately expensive in ways that we have not even diwcussed here. This is one of the major, but hardly the only problem of attempting to teach all Twenty-First century children on a large scale.
Certainly there is a lot of semi-goofy, get rid of tracking, teach mostly minority and female literature, mainstream everyone in the same class etc impetus in the public schools, and one needs to be IN the schools with intelligence and common sense to help sort out some of this stuff. Some of it has evolved in response to earlier inequities; I was certainly deficient in not providing more female authors and female protagonists to my classes in my first fifteen years of teaching. Alas, most of the conservatives I hear, do not have the patience to get in there and fight the good fight, because that is exactly what it is. As other jobs get more scarce, one would assume that more clear-eyed, a least semi-hard-nosed people would figure out how to make a public teaching job work for them. But you have to get in there, understand the environment to some degree, and then work for intelligent change, as opposed to bluster and blather.
I grew up on a farm in Nebraska and attended a one room country grade school with 26 kids. I am 61. Out of the grade shcool of 8 grades came doctors, two bankers, several succesful business people, several successful managers, several successful farmers, several successful teachers and generally 26 successful well balanced humans. It was more or less a Montessori of it’s day where older students taught younger students with the guidance of one grade school teacher
The answer for me to eduction has always been why don’t we look back at the time when education actually worked in this country even in big city schools. Yes I know it has changed technically and that society has changed, but there was a model 40 years ago that worked and it could work again.
In my day the educcation pyramid looked like this: At the top the teacher a professional and well respected member of the community, then the administrator who listened to and backed up the teachers, then the parent and finally the student who was at the bottom of the heap and at the center of the adults desire to educate them.
Today that pyramid looks something like this: At the top is the student who knows he/she is at the top and often games the system because of it, then the parent who knows they have power to game the system cause their children told them so, then the Administration who runs around willy nilly creating curriculums based on self esteem (or ‘self of steam’ as a student recently said to a teacher with complete seriousness)and warning teachers to not offend Johnny or his parents or we might get sued and then of course at the bottom of the heap the hapless teacher who in many cases has become a baby sitter. IT is very depressing.
I know Administrators with PHDs who have spent little to no time actually teaching in the classroom, but are running the school. This is insane. NO wonder young inspired selfless college graduates come into the school system, take a look see and run.
Some Solutions:
1. Limit Lawsuits by law.
2. Get back to 3 Rs and gym class
3. Bring teachers back to the top of the pyramid where they belong as respected and honored professionals in society, which they no longer are.
4. Eliminate 50% of the administrative bureaucracies that serve no useful function except as paper trail machines.
5. Let teachers have creativity in what and how they teach under broad guidelines.
6. Bring back real discipline where there are actual consequences to bad behavior. Expel the worst or put them in alternative ed schools but do not let them disrupt the rest of the class.
7. Close the Dept of Education and put education back at the local level.
Got more, but won’t tire you out.
Just a Grumpy Old Guy
28. Larsky::
I have had the same experience; seen the loss of the objective in the scramble of experimentation answers in ‘education theory’ that walks right by the obvious:
- teachers to teach how one can teach themselves – what a concept! not a chaotic ‘system’ of interlocking extortion.
When I went to school it was an extension of my parents and an extension of the community — as a formal organized presentation of all that could be transferred and each of us was expected to learn and not interfere with the process for the person who was trying to do the same thing.
Industriousness and productivity rather than lethargy and entitlement.
All to contribute to the machinery and well being of the family and the community — shop class in automotive and aircraft mechanics, electronics, sheet-metal and woodworking. It included domestic and office skills as well; the three Rs, art and science, history — the list is long and totally meaningful.
All that went away years ago, to solve problems no one can remember now because the situation thus created is close to overwhelming and politically driven — brought to us by such ‘administrators’ as those whose PhD thesis was in cafeteria management.
Bottom line: neither the students nor the parents are well by serving a figure as awesome as Moloch, dominated by the self-serving.
In its failures can sometimes see that some do escape with an education.
But the lowest common denominator methods have given us what we have for leadership today in the public square who cringe from those who have even the slightest glimmer of self-determination inspired by their teachings and rejecting authoritarianism in any of its forms — as was commonly seen in an earlier America.
What I have just read, even from those who are still groping their way, suggests that there are good reasons to think soon we will take out the garbage.
Perspective. That’s what we really need. And there are so many places it can be applied. When you look at the wars that go on to protect textbook manufacturers and the leftist bend in the educational system it is easy to see that it is time for THE 300 interested people to start a revolution. With Kindle and other ebook technologies there is no reason we can’t developa curriculum that teaches and dividing that collection up amongst 300 real educators to store the knowledge that belongs to all of us seems like a small, but lasting, step. As ebooks, any leftists can leave out what they want, any home school can do the same. The core of educational attainment, the three R’s, shouldn’t be in dispute. Knowledge is power. Eductional establishments that argue about what the publisher will include are not working for students or society.
Zombie does not realize how deeply his thinking is afflicted with the centralization he dreams of escaping. Government schools and government thinking have as much to fear from his prescriptions as the left does from a Republicans takeover.
The following is an excerpt from an email I sent to K-12, Inc., a provider of on line Kindergarten- 12th grade curriculum, a few weeks ago. It is an outline of a vision for a new type of school where the high touch component is local and the high tech curriculum component is standardized. I believe it offers the advantage of being an incremental change that uses existing resources and could spread widely if successful. As I am contemplating pursuing this as a venture in two years when our youngest goes to college, any feedback would be much appreciated.
The “school” I am envisioning is a “shell school” that would wrap around K-12′s academic program and provide parent friendly operating hours and extracurricular activities. From a marketing perspective it would look to the parent more like an extended day flexible private school than home school. It would combine the superior academic aspects of K-12′s individualized program with the social benefits of a physical facility full of familiar faces. Costs will be mitigated by hiring a staff paid as child care workers rather than as professional teachers, though having the staff very familiar with K-12 program themselves would allow them to assist students as necessary. It would be licensed as a child care facility, if necessary, not a school. The accreditation would be for K-12′s program, not for the facility.
I foresee this as being a potentially popular concept in single parent and two earner neighborhoods where use of child care is already high. These families typically won’t use anything like your existing K-12 programs because public schools are not just learning for their child, they are child care. But public schools are inconvenient child care since they operate on very fixed schedules and typically end their days well before most parents are done working. This second fact has led to a whole industry of activity centered child care like gymnastics and martial arts centers that sometimes even have their own buses to pick children up from public school and take them to their activity centers.
A private shell school would enjoy an advantage that public schools don’t easily have, the ability to select students to enroll and “deselect” students who are disruptive to others’ learning. Ideally, specialized shell schools would be developed in order to better serve those students that require extra attention. Students at the school would be recognized for academic purposes by where they are in K-12′s curriculum, not by age group. This should create a culture of excellence as students strive to achieve and be recognized by the school and their peers.
Traditional sports and extracurricular activities will be fully integrated into existing state organizations, so age grouping will be used for those activities. Non-traditional school activities like gymnastics, martial arts, rock bands, etc. may be offered by the shell school on an ala carte basis to the parents. The shell school could be operated as either a for profit or non-profit entity. I envision several prototypes then a franchise style roll out of the concept nation and world wide, with schools starting as K-4 and growing into K-12 grades. The shell school would operate year round and parent’s vacation choices would only be limited by their child’s choices of extracurricular activities. Children would have access to their K-12 program at home as well as on site, so they could keep up when home sick or desiring to accelerate their learning.
The shell school would be financed by school choice funds and parental fees. Initial locations would be in places with strong support for school choice and/or places with high private school enrollment that could use some price competition. Off the top of my head, New Orleans is probably a good candidate. This plan may require K-12, Inc. to rebate a substantial portion of its fees received from government entities to the operators of shell schools, but K-12 should profit from each student since K-12′s marginal cost per student is low and shell schools will be serving a market that K-12 would otherwise have a negligible presence in- families that use school for child care as much or more than education.
To gain support for your idea, I think it would help to first describe it in the simplest terms so that people understand exactly what you are proposing. Let me see if I got this right:
You propose establishing a new type of educational institution which is essentially a “homeschool away from home” — a place where students whose curricula are either determined by their parents and/or who are taking online courses can go to study. Thus, students can go to your facility and engage in their own individually-determined and individually-directed course of study, while in a safe facility. This would allow employed homeschool parents to take their kids out of mass public schools, and either enroll them in an online curriculum, or have a homeschool curriculum, but allow the kids to study in your facility rather than at home, so the parents can go off to work during the day while your employees watch over the kids, but do not technically “teach” them. Furthermore, your facility is open extended hours, to accommodate parents’ work schedules, and offers supplemental activities to fill off-hours and provide exercise.
Right?
Personally, I think that is an excellent business model and one that could very well be successful, if done in conjunction with the growing popularity of homeschooling.
One issue that would concern me is one of liability and lawsuits and insurance. If you are going to have people’s kids under your care for long periods of time every day, all sorts of mishaps can happen, and if your facility gets blamed, the liability situation could become a nightmare. Make sure your legal ass is covered.
I’ll spot you Intelligent Design if you’ll accept teaching Darwin as THEORY with possible flaws
From Part II of this essay:
“If you quibble about the meaning of the word “theory” without knowing its definition in a scientific context, then you unintentionally have disqualified yourself from the conversation.”
Zombie, I’m new to reading your work and I’m a bit surprised by the lack of blowback from ID proponents. Is that due to your having lost their interest long ago in this “conversation”…or do you actively delete what they write?
I don’t delete any comments from ID proponents. I think mostly that everyone is just tired from the online arguments about it that never end or come to any conclusion. They know my position (as outlined in Part II of this essay) and I know theirs, and we both know that the other side is not going to budge. So, I suppose, out of weariness, the argument peters out. (Though there were plenty of angry comments from IDers in the Part I and Part II comment sections.)
Thank you for the answer.
If people understood where our public schools came from, they’d be radically altered if not disbanded overnight.
When Napoleon whipped the Prussians at Jena in 1805, it brought on a crisis of confidence. It resulted in Johann Gottlieb Fichte designing an innovative school system for the express purpose of creating soldiers who will not disobey orders, citizens who will not revolt, workers who will not strike. This was the volkschule, for the non-elite 92 percent not allowed into the very different realschule for the children of the aristocracy.
Among the radically new innovations were
* Bells to mark the beginning and end of class periods to teach that one’s time is not one’s own
* Rows and columns of desks to enforce a sense of functioning as part of a whole while nevertheless being isolated
* Grades to demonstrate that your work is done always for the approval of others
* Homework to accustom students and their families to state intrusion on home life
* No private time in the school day and place in the schoolyard not subject to scrutiny
The key though was not to teach the beginning thru end of any process. It was felt that farmers and tradespeople were too independent. They could resist authority because they had skills that allowed them to succeed on their own. Therefore, the curriculum should be a mish-mash, bits of this and that, in order to deprive citizens of any meaningful way to exist apart from the state.
When Horace Mann went to Germany in the 1870s, he admired the volkschules and brought the concept back to the US, without success. People much prefered our “Little Red Schoolhouse” concept. Finally he started going to state legislatures in the East and selling the scheme as a way to deal with immigrant populations. That worked. John Dewey and the progressives came along to make the system even better suited to cranking out dutiful cogs for the machine, and voila… our public school system.
Excellent history lesson for readers who did not know the German militaristic origins of public schooling.
Charlie’s informative post FTW!
From Charlie’s post:
I will only point out that Charlie offers a very particular (I would say, narrow) perspective on the development and purposes of Germanic public education, let alone on how it was translated into various aspects of the American state systems. Anyone interested in this stuff would need to do a bit of reading before swallowing Charlie’s version here wholesale.
It’s a post, hmi. Should I have to expand it into a book and defend it, I could. What you are probably commenting on is that most writers on the subject are themselves of the same political lineage as Fichte, Hegel, Mann, Dewey et al. Of course they see the bright side.
For a more thorough book-length treatment of what Charlie is saying, read John Taylor Gatto’s “The Underground History of American Education”. A real eye-opener.
Part of the system of which you speak is the “Carnegie Unit”. As part of our factory model of teaching, a student must sit in a chair for 50 minutes-a-day for 180 days to earn a credit. Graduation and admission to college are based on these units. Should a student master Algebra I in 150 days, too bad. Not even a letter from the Governor will get them out of Algebra I early. And if another should need 200 days, too bad. It is a 180 day course, repeatable in 90 day chunks. Screw up one unit of English 9, and repeat the Semester, not the unit in question.
Smaller high schools, say about 400 in 4 grades, would allow for the narrative transcripts which could replace Carnegie Units. But tradition favors Carnegie Units. In the early 1990′s the University of Wisconsin System devised a format for narrative transcripts, which are rarely used. They did it because the University System saw Carnegie unit based admissions as an impediment to reforming high schools. Bother.
I taught in a high school which had ‘academies’ for 9th graders: groups of 100 students who shared their math, science, language arts and social studies teachers. Instead of having the students take a computer applications course which taught word processing, spreadsheets and PowerPoint, why not have the computer teacher in all of the academies demonstrating the three applications. The teacher could make return visits occasionally. Then the classroom teachers could give assignments which would further develop the students skills with those applications. At the end of the year, an examination of each students portfolio would show they had mastered the applications. But since the computer teacher wouldn’t have a class list and give grades, and there wouldn’t be a class listed on their transcript with a grade, the idea wouldn’t fly.
What I’ve tried to do, to get around the Carnegie Unit idea, is to offer curriculum to the ablest and most motivated students in such a way that they can get through two such units in one year. My second and third year language courses work this way, for students who are talented and eager to work. (Not every year is suited to this kind of acceleration.) The toughest thing is figuring out what to do for the poor kids who might do well if they had, say, another semester to work on the course; but they’re forced to take the final exam at the end of the second semester. The only way to get more time would be to fail–but then, they’d have to start over at the beginning of the first semester. This system was not designed for the benefit of the students!
Your proposals, though admittedly a bit of a reach, are well thought out. In the second grade my son became somewhat of a discipline problem at school and his grades slipped. Testing suggested he possessed no behavioral issues such as ADHD and from an intellectual capacity he was truly gifted. I went in to observe his classroom in hopes of gaining some insight. What I noted was that even at this age many of the kids were woefully behind in basic skills, both educational and interpersonal. Sadly, it became my impression that these poor children were doomed to be lifelong underachievers at age 7. I blame this on poor parenting, not the educational system. If you are truly going to improve our educational system there must be a way of making parents more accountable. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? How can any educational system correct inadequate parenting? Should parents of poorly disciplined children be required to attend class with their children, even if this occurs at night when the parent is off work? By the way, I moved my son to a charter school which functioned as a type of tracking for gifted students. His behavior issues ceased and he excelled academically.
“If you are truly going to improve our educational system there must be a way of making parents more accountable. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?”
Sure. It’s not a silver bullet but a good first step would be the abolition of Social Security, the State scheme by which people expect to be provided for in their old age by taxes imposed on other people’s kids.
Two points: 1. Monopolies are best broken when the public can see the graft and corruption occurring at the highest levels…enough picking on teachers, focus instead on who the bureaucrats are that supervise the teachers, what they do in their job descriptions, how much they make in each school district in the country. This will reveal the cozy relationships between the district employees and board members and open political appointees to public scrutiny..something they won’t like as it will show the public the corrupt nature of many school districts, big and small. 2. Your skills survey courses, as written, are (respectfully) impractical. More practical is a return to vocational education tracks that allow those not college bound (at least, not immediately after high school), to gain practical, sell-able skills and networks that will introduce them to the workforce after graduating. Shop classes went away when tracking was eliminated; that was a disservice, and needs to be reinstated.
This is a great start, but you inexplicably left out the elephant in the room – tenure. And I’m speaking as a former tenured instructor, now a successful entrepreneur and business owner. Tenure is toxic to quality instruction. It breeds laziness, arrogance, and, over time, group think.
If competition is such a great idea for institutions (and indeed it is), it is doubly so for individual instructors. Replace the tenure system with long-term contracts of 3, 5, or 7 years (max), and require performance reviews prior to renewal of such contracts. Ditto for administrators.
“Educate well or perish” would be highly motivational for all concerned.
For the reason I listed above, we spent a quarter of a million dollars to send our three sons to Peninsula School in Menlo Park, CA. [search it] It had been consciously founded in 1925 on the Little Red Schoolhouse model, a Quaker communitarian approach in which nursery schoolers counted as much as eighth-graders who counted as much as teachers who counted as much as the director. Everyone was entitle to their own voice, and perhaps the biggest emphasis in the curriculum was learning to listen to and respect the voices of others while also learning to speak for oneself.
The only feature of the school similar to public schools was bells rung to mark the start of a period, only they were hand rung, and students who were otherwise engaged and preferred to keep doing what they were doing need not respond. No grades, no homework, no fixed curricula. There were classes however in clay, jewelry, weaving, woodshop, music, science shop, and pretty much anything students requested.
Furthermore, there was no academic criteria whatsoever for admission; yet, each year two to six of the students in each class of 18-21 went on to become national merit scholarship finalists. That is, 10 to 33 percent ended up in the top one-half of 1 percent according to the standardized SAT.
When the students moved on to the local high schools, they were hugely successful. They could talk to adults. They could stand up for what was right without being confrontational. They could promote camaraderie. They were engaged and participatory in class. They were spirited without being boisterous. They saw the academic side of school as a delight rather than a drudge. They were competent.
One local high school teacher coming to investigate the source of such great students, on seeing the bedlam all over the campus, burst out laughing and blurted, “I had thought this was going to be a military school. My students from here are so poised and respectful.”
And so I say, let’s get rid of our German experiment in education and go back to an American style of education.
Excellent posts, Charlie. Eye-Opening and (scary)!
I’m not sure whether the success you describe is a testament to the type of school and lack of “standards” you describe, or to the fact that any school that requires such high tuition effectively self-selects pupils from families that are bright enough to be making the kind of money required to attend the school?
I’m somewhat reminded of the kind of families that sing the praises of diversity in public schools from neighborhoods where houses go over $1 million, effectively guaranteeing that they will only have to live with “their own kind”.
Thank you for a great essay Zombie.
I’m thinking about your suggestion that homeschooling parents should exchange lessons. Is it legally an option? If a parent teaches other people’s kids is she considered then a homeschooling parent or a teacher who needs credentials and perhaps other permits?
There comes a point where I say what the government doesn’t know won’t hurt them. If I trade a few hours teaching children with some neighbors of mine, it’s no one else’s business, least of all the governments. And if there is any such law in your district, then repealing such laws needs to be near the top of the list of school reforms in your region.
Some great ideas presented. However, nothing can happen until and unless the Teachers Unions all across America are crushed and relegated the Reagan`s ash heap of history….
The problem with getting religion/politics out of curricula and keeping only truth is that someone has to decide where the dividing line is. We’ve had 24 comments so far, and I’ll bet we could come up with at least 15 different dividing lines on the major topics. (Or maybe 36 dividing lines if some of us are economists.)
I like the idea of competition. Our college level education in the U.S. is the world’s best, and it competes. It has problems, but it largely funnels students to the right slots and gives them the opportunity to learn. However, we college profs only have to endure the top third of students. The bottom two thirds don’t make it very far in our institutions.
How do we compete on the K-12 level?
1. Unlike college, nearly all funding will be tax-based.
2. Recognize that handicapped kids cost more to educate and fund their special schools at a higher level.
3. Recognize that really bright kids are cheap to educate and fund them at a lower level. This will create howls because those bright kids will have bright (read lawyers, connected business people, etc.) parents who want extra resources funneled to their obviously deserving kids. OK, let these parents, who are mostly richer than the mean, contribute targeted money to their kids’ own classes.
4. Now that we have tiered funding, let the mud-wrestling begin over the details. Do behavior problems generate more funding? How about science classes that require expensive labs? How about vocational ed classes that require expensive shops? How much exposure to those shops (or labs) is sucked away for kids on academic tracks (or on vocational tracks) who don’t need them for career training but do need them for general education.
I have a minor quibble with the notion that the funding should be national, as Zombie assumed above. I’d like to see the funding kept as close to home as possible, consistent with assuring adequate funding for all schools. For example, school districts are too small a funding unit because of the wide differences in tax base per student. We’d probably have to go to a state wide funding base. Utah might want to spend less than New York per kid because of lower costs, or it might want to spend more and get marginally more education per kid. The tax payers/parents of Utah and New York can decide at the polls. If the differences are too large for a New Yorker or Ute (Utahan? What’s the right word?) to stomach, moving to the other jurisdiction is a possibility.
Overall, I really like the idea of maximizing competition. It works for everything else. Why not education?
I disagree with the focus of your paragraphs about having “small schools” within larger schools. I believe that there should be no politicization in the schools. Having a far-left small school or a far-right small school in a larger school is anathema to me. This would just continue the indoctrination that is so rampant in our schools. If history is taught correctly, as it really happened, in a non-biased way, the philosophy of both groups will be apparent. As for religion and culture, I don’t believe that those subjects should be taught in a small-school way either. Every student should take a World Religions class and a World Cultures class, as I did in my all-girls’ Catholic high school back in the 60s. Knowledge of world religions and cultures contributes to being a well-rounded person. Kids should not be able to take a class that is exclusively about Islam, or Catholicism, or Protestantism, to the exclusion of other religions. This again promotes indoctrination and limited knowledge of world religions. This “small schools” model is way more complicated than things should be.
I’m a public school teacher, and I agree with ALL of what you have proposed. In fact, much of what you write about has been discussed in the staff room for years. The problem with the public school system as it exists that has not allowed for these types of innovation is that it is far too top heavy, and the union is too influential. Administrations do not listen to those of us who are in the battle (the teachers), and the unions make it almost impossible to weed out the bad teachers (fewer than the public believes, but definitely a damaging presence). Let me add one very important detail – parent involvement. In many schools, the parent involvement is almost non-existent; they have abdicated their responsibility almost entirely to the school, expecting the teachers to make up for what they are not doing, and we simply don’t have the time. I can teach your child to read and write, but I can’t teach him to care about why he needs to be able to read and write if you aren’t supporting my efforts (or are actively undermining them, which happens more often than the public might imagine). Without that personal motivation, there isn’t much a teacher can do.
Might I add (if it hasn’t been mentioned already — I skimmed this):
1) We need to do something about the curriculum and goals that are presently sop at the schools of education! We can fix the public schools all we want, but until we also address just what sort of lessons our teachers are being taught at college, then I’m afraid we are really no better off. School choice really means nothing if you are getting the “best” of a mediocre/barely capable lot. As for homeschooling: I can see the pros and cons (quite literally) — there need to be some standards set (I’ve seen some homeschooled kids who were educated quite above their public school peers, and then I’ve seen kids who were woefully deficit in learning…not every parent should be allowed to home school); the same can be said for some charter schools. It’s a subject that holds great promise as well as some serious pitfalls. I see the pros of a lot of school choice, but we also run into the problem of education Balkanization (which would be very bad for this country, as it could lead to social Balkanization, which we already have quite enough of) if we don’t have some set standards of curriculum and performance.
2)We need to address the discipline problem, and this extends to fast tracking failing students — even the best education and best initiatives mean nothing if the school administrations turn a blind eye to (or worse, actively promote) passing failing students and/or doing nothing to address unruly students. I’m afraid the problem is a legal one — we have to be able to protect students/parents from unethical teachers (that’s the flip side of this: it is far too easy for an incompetent or unethical teacher/administrator/coach to fight firing, etc.) but we also need to be able to protect our schools from overly litigious parents and ambulance chasers (bus chasers perhaps). If we do not, then we will always have issues with rules and standards not being enforced. Even private and charter schools can run up against this; home schoolers dodge the bullet, but I have seen some instances where even they can run into problems.
Zombie, I agree that public schools need ‘reform’, though I believe much of your jib begins at home.
I don’t have cable t.v. at home. The few times I’m exposed to it, it’s excuse after excuse for failing to meet standards, responses, good decision making, etc.,
The only source of most, if not all problems begins in the home.
I don’t care for the public education system AT ALL, though teacher’s (from all arrays) have their work cut out for them in this day and age.
Many parents haven’t the skills, the intelligence, the patience, understanding, unable/not wanting to make time, and to be frank – some just don’t care about their child’s outcome.
For a period of time, remove the Wii. The IPods. The 3-6 televisions from the home. The cell phones. The teen’s vehicle (unless they’ve paid for the vehicle of their own volition). Don’t resort to fast food/take-out for consumption.
Have a made-at-home, sit-down breakfast or dinner. Not only speak with your kids/family, but LISTEN to them as well. Make time. Do little cost/free outings as a family.
Perhaps public school teachers will see the difference, over time and ’86′ the Unions they cling to for ‘Insurance reasons’ rather than fooling themselves of ‘Unions assisting in making an educational difference’.
Children though more so parents NEED to own up to their own limitations/failings and right the ship.
Generally excellent, and represents a coalescing consensus of a lot of people on this. However, the bit on science, religion and politics is naive, because there is no absolute yardstick to determine what is in and out of bounds by your criteria. You’re essentially arguing that we can know what’s science and what’s politics (leaving religion aside for a minute, but it works the same way) by “consensus of the experts”. Is the problem with that not obvious?
The only way around this dilemma is to teach both sides of a controversy. The minute you cross that bright line between analysis and authority, you’re not teaching science any more; you’re teaching doctrine. And you’re also giving activist teachers carte blanche to engage in advocacy masquerading as science.
You don’t even, for that matter, have to explain alternatives. You just have to disclaim having a monopoly on the truth on the first day of classes, and make it clear that what you’re teaching isn’t the absolute truth handed down on tablets, but our best understanding at that point in time.
If no other lesson in science is learned, the lesson that nothing is ever absolutely settled should be. Mathematics is the art of certainty, science is method of stumbling upon bits and pieces of truth, only to learn that what you though was an elephant was really a giraffe.
I could rattle off a thousand examples, but an easy one is how taxonomy has changed in the past few decades. Thirty years ago, the consensus of experts was that hyenas were in the dog group. With new DNA evidence, it’s clear that they’re feliforms. A lot of taxonomy has been radically altered by DNA analysis.
This is a difficult dilemma, because the other side of that coin is the problem of people not recognizing hard limits; i.e. the law of conservation of energy is pretty well set in stone as an engineering principle, and perpetual motion machines are 100% fraudulent. It’s difficult to balance these two important issues; one the one hand telling school children that there is no energy Santa Claus, and on the other hand telling them that nothing in science is ever completely nailed down. Such is the nature of this beast, and it’s naive to think that you can just defer to authority and draw a bright line between what’s known to be true and what isn’t.
Sorry, Zombie but it’s just not that simple.
My reactions to Zombie’s view are complex. I looked over the standards of the Texas Board of Education, and did not see the tyranny or Christian right fanaticism described here (though I don’t deny that both the Christian right and the Christian left have real problems, and that Texas is not immune). I share some of the Christian disquiet about the current educational dogma embedded in much middle and high school education in the U.S., though I firmly support the teaching of evolution in the science classes (full disclosure: I am from Texas and proud of it). I have no objection to the teacher outlining the basic argument of Intelligent Design in a biology class, so long as it is pointed out that and how currently ID does not stand up to the rigorous scrutiny of honest scientific method.
As one who teaches at a top fifty national liberal arts college I would like particularly to direct attention to Habib’s post #20 above. While I have known some spectacularly bright and well informed students in our teacher’s training departments (esp. Education and Child Development), Habib could not be more right in his conclusion describing the philosophical mediocrity (to put it kindly)of the programs, the Dewey worship that is the mandated religion therein, and the utter, almost ferocious intolerance of any kind of independent thinking or, God forbid, questioning of the assumptions of the far left world view there imposed. The teachers make no bones about their view of contemporary America as a hopelessly diseased polity that needs to be deconstructed and reconstituted as a very red socialist state in the service of “social justice” as they define it (I’m not naive or jingoistic about this country’s chiaroscuro history, but I see what is good, even great in that past as well as the the wrong done by our forebears). Teacher training (and a number of other departments at our school) are so far gone that they cannot be redeemed, only replaced and outgrown. People who say that the Tea Party folk have no valid, tangible reasons to be mobilizing are either part of the problem or don’t know what they’re talking about.
Best,
Richard
Richard, thanks for reading my post. I should add that I write from Australia, wherein the theories and practices which are subverting your educational standards have an equally maleficent influence.
Without wishing to calumniate your President unfairly, I note that he and other well-known graduates from your (supposedly) better universities, though famed for being eximiously smart, seem (to this foreigner, at least) to be unable to write or speak with remarkable precision, clarity or logic.
“• Have “small schools” or “departments” within large high schools”
WHOA! That is going to shoot administrative overhead through the roof. This is exactly the problem in the Higher Ed Bubble.
Schools with more non-teaching “vice presidents” than professors in given major departments and in those offices more non-teaching minions for the VPs. Secretaries and support at the department level are left to make nothing or are just RIFfed out and the departments shift those duties to the teaching faculty. Free money to add new faculty that are needed? Sorry, gotta pay these new Veeps and their people competitive salaries. The difference between colleges and high schools is that good research departments can support their people and staff on soft money (research grants). High schools have no such thing.
BAD IDEA.
Zomie,
Nice try.
A few thoughts as I don my flack jacket and helmet… any parents who entrust one hundred percent of the education of their children to any school get exactly what they deserve. Don’t have time to talk with the kids about what they are learning, read some books, give some other substantive view points… don’t complain.
I pursued a book in a store some years ago by Murray (yes, that Murray) wherein he said that Coleman had been right, family is the most important indicator for school success. He suggested that we have an experiment, and set aside ‘enough’ money, a hundred million if necessary, where a random population of at risk students would be given “it all,” gold plated lunch buckets if that might make a difference and see how the results played out in performance. He suggested it would make an insignificant difference per dollar spent, and yes, since resources are not limitless, dollars spent have to be part of the equation. But of course Murray is naïve, if the experiment didn’t turn out as any given group didn’t like they would simple try to tear the parameters of the experiment apart and we would be back to where we started. Myself, I think he’s right about family.
Discipline, forget discipline, that is a nonstarter. Every few weeks a new school is highlighted in the news for making a nitpicking idiotic disciplinary decision and expelling some child or other. Have you forgotten that these rules came in because it was charged, quite rightly, that students of one race were disproportionately being expelled from school? Last I read some years ago the charge was being made that even under these blind, deaf and dumb rules those expelled were still disproportionately of one race. Holder is right, we are cowards and we do need a conversation on race in this country. Don’t hold your breath.
Zombie, how could you possibly think that changing the media will change the text books? Smaller groups, individual teachers? Who will write? Who will make available? Who will judge?
What books do you think a dedicated Wicca would choose? Or here’s a better one, I was told by a person in a bookstore once, who, by the way had a degree in American history, that I should purchase a DVD on George Washington, it had been on TV and it was great viewing. By some chance I happened to be reading “Washington’s Crossing” by David Hackett Fischer wherein he mentions that the author of that diatribe was not only a Marxist but a Stalinist!!!!!! And she was a history major.
How about one more. I used to meet a man frequently as we walked our dogs. We talked pleasantries and I knew he taught history in middle school so one night I asked him what he taught in class and was told proudly that some lessons focused on the fact that in the 1930s the United States of American came within a hair of being Nazi!!! Having had my say, rest assured that he avoids me now. I am avoided by a lot of people and as Abraham Maslow once said, “…and my day goes better for it.”
There is so much more but I have places to go before I sleep. But I will have to ask this Zombie, why no reading list for the folks, don’t you read or don’t you think they will or can? Has anyone read “Washington’s Crossing,” or the “Great Upheaval” or anything by
Winik or anything simply any book by Gordon Wood or anything? Did anyone notice the reading list on “American Interest” by Walter Russell Mead, did you read any of the books?
We live in the greatest country in the greatest civilization in history. In the Constitution we are privileged, privileged, to have the most prescient political document that has ever been written and very likely ever will be written—and I will point out it was written by white men. LOL
Televisions on sixteen hours a day, duties to the commonwealth on autopilot and then when things go wrong cries of oh, no, things have gone terribly wrong while I was watching football. Carlyle said every peoples have exactly the government they deserve, I think that would hold true for education too.
First. I loved this article! As a parent with children that recently survived the current educational system, I’ve been asking myself the same stuff for years. (Note – both boys, both “gift & talented”, and both dropped out end of h.s. sophomore yr.; both went on and got GED 1st try several yrs. later) And it IS time like-mined folks get together and demand better. However, I do have some questions and concerns.
1. VOUCHERS. I have a problem thinking my educ. tax dollars will be spent sending kids to religious schools. I’m all *for* religion, but think it should remain in the home and community at large, NOT in school. This goes along with Zombie’s point about teaching rigorous science, not intelligent design. There would be religious schools who made creationism their explanation for everything and anything.
I think this will be a moot point anyway, because I don’t see a way around the separation of church and state. You know the left will scream about this due to their making secularism their religion, and many conservatives and constitutionalists will voice the same concern, albeit coming from a totally different place.
2. VOUCHERS (again). Every day, I see more and more isolation taking place — call it “narrow-casting” or whatever, but if you only read or are exposed to more-of-the-same, it’s called “preaching to the choir” and isn’t particularly helpful. It almost goes against the grain of one of Zombie’s points of things that should be taught: “How to effectively win an argument, or engage in an adult-level debate …” How can one do that if one isn’t familiar with how that differing opinion came to be? We all need some basic shared things, and I don’t see that happening with narrow-casting. We’d be moving further and further away into our own little worlds.
3. Break the monopoly of public education, BUT KEEP IT AS A SAFETY NET. This inevitably means the public schools will be even worse than they are now. However, since I doubt vouchers will become the norm, private schools will still be too expensive for most, and homeschooling realistically isn’t an option for many families, public schools will still have the most students. That’s an awfully full “safety” net.
4. CURRICULUM. Yes! A return to basics is what we need — but with all the other stuff Zombie’s proposed (esp. “catering to local standards or teacher preferences” [shudder]), we also need a basic level of — sorry — standardized testing to insure all children meet expectations. Beyond the 3 Rs, anything else, such as real-life skills, is gravy. I doubt any employer cares how one “feels” about working!
Having said all this, hey, I’m one of those who’d like to have a serious discussion about ed reform. Right now it doesn’t serve anyone, except those pushing “revolution”.
“… we also need a basic level of — sorry — standardized testing to insure all children meet expectations…”
Yes. Basic tests of literacy and numeracy are a very useful metric, and I think national ones are a good thing.
But remember that national testing does NOT have to mean government testing. We have some good private testing outfits –Stanford, Iowa, ETS, etc. — that can be used. (indeed, those are what most schools now use.)
To anyone interested in fostering a return to a more classical education, I recommend “The Lost Tools of Learning”, by Dorothy L. Sayers
That’s a great essay. I haven’t read it closely yet, but the end is dynamite:
“We have lost the tools of learning–the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane– that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or ‘looks to the end of the work.’
“What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers–they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. “
Great recommendation!
There have been many excellent suggestions and observations here, both by the Undead One and the commenters.
One thing I must say. Any temptation to have NATIONAL standards or programs must be resisted. Federal subsidies, voucher programs, etc. mean federal control. The ONLY thing the federal government can do to improve education is to butt out entirely. DECENTRALIZATION is paramount.
Back in the 90′s I worked for the (centrist) American Textbook Committee. There was a movement afoot to have national standards in education and the ATC was in the thick of it. What began as a hope for reform in history curricula soon morphed into a desperate struggle against the extreme left, led by Gary Nash, the architect of California’s neo-Marxist standards. To make a long story short, the best that could be hoped for was to abandon the whole project of national reform. With a whole lot of effort, and with the help of Sen Nancy Kassebaum —not exactly a wingnut, BTW— this was done. For the time being, at least. (Obama, of course, is working national leftist standards into Race to the Top.)
If you think the left will not hijack ANY national curriculum standards, you are wrong. The best we can do is DECENTRALIZE as much as possible. (Zombie’s ideas about textbook decentralization, BTW, are spot on!) At this point we are fighting a rearguard action to contain the leftist poison and to create oases of resistance.
I have frequently wondered:
What is the explanation for the zeal of Evolution’s foot soldiers? Why is it an emotional and definitive issue for the evolution crowd? Sure, you’re right about evolution. So what?
Lacking any other explanation, it seems like “evolution” is mostly promoted as a vehicle for advancing bigotry against Christians. I’d like to hear any other explanations anyone might have. Zombie seems like the opposite of a bigot, but “evolution” is an important idea to him, out of proportion to the practical value of the concept. Why?
I’ll tell you why:
Evolution would be a TOTAL NON-ISSUE were it not for the lunatics trying to deny its reality.
Do you hear me or ANYONE fulminating about the need to teach theories of gravitation in school? About the need to teach quantum dynamics? NO!
And do you know why not? Because there is not an organized coalition of millions of people doing their damnedest to deny gravity exists, or that quantum dynamics is false.
But with evolution there is such a coalition. I, and just about everyone else who understands scientific principles, would happily let evolution remain as unmentioned and uncontroversial as any other scientific concept. It is not the scientists but the creationists who make a big deal out of it. And the scientists are only compelled to “care” because people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about are trying to force the teaching of lies in school.
If the creationist lobby would just accept that science is science and not believe bizarre propaganda that some obscure scientific principle somehow challenges their faith, then evolution would barely ever be mentioned by me or anyone else.
“Evolution’s foot soldiers” (i.e. people who understand the simplest of ideas) only get “zeal” when they are backed into a corner by those who DON’T understand the simplest of ideas.
You’re looking at this all wrong. The creationists started the fight, not the scientists.
That being said, yes, now that the battle has been engaged, there are scientists and others who will stand diligently by this point as a way to resist the religious influence in education, and because they don’t appreciate being shouted down by ignoramuses. But I for one would happily let the topic of evolution fade away into utter obscurity, given half a chance.
I still don’t get it. Lots of people disagree about lots of things. There are lots of true and untrue and questionably true things taught on every subject. Why does this one matter where the other ones don’t?
You are right about evolution. Why can’t other people be wrong about it? I don’t see people getting upset (or pretending to get upset in some cases) about everything every time someone is wrong and won’t shut up. People who are wrong and won’t shut up are everywhere. Many are intentionally lying, unlike the creationists. But this one is special for some unknown reason. Maybe it’s because of media coverage, but I’d again suggest that the media coverage is motivated by bigotry or political aims or both.
You characterize it as a “fight”. I’d characterize it as “who cares”? But I don’t feel the need to defend the purity of science either.
On one hand, I think it may be good to have a set of diametrically opposite and non-negotiable positions so we can correctly conclude that government education needs to be eliminated in favor of individual choices. On the other hand, the leftists don’t get it and would never accept a live-and-let-live compromise, preferring strife instead, regardless of the costs (no matter how tragic those costs turn out to be).
Zombie says that the creationists and certain other christians started the battle, by which I understand him to mean the attempt to teach creationism (or in some cases, intelligent design, which is something else entirely) alongside evolution in the science classroom. (As far as I can tell, Zombie has no issue with creationism being taught in a class on religion or philosophy.) And in a proximate sense, he is correct.
So why the battle? From what I can tell, it really started farther back, when certain philosophers made the fallacious argument that since there is, ostensibly, an explanation for biological origins that does not rely on the existence of a divine Creator (call him God), therefor there is no God. In fact, you hear many atheists spout the same nonsense today, under one guise or another. Moreover, it is historical fact that many an evil, from eugenics onward, was perpetrated, pointing to darwinism (in the broader sense) as its justification. And yes, it was specific to darwinism. When was it ever argued that because of what we know of quantum mechanics or celestial motions that we need to cull the human population of “undesirables” such as blacks and Jews? Note that this is not the fault of science (in the narrow sense), since science proper has nothing to say regarding ethics or morals. But more than a few scientists and philosophers of the day abused science to justify evil practices and programs, just as science is still abused today for political purposes, sometimes even by scientists themselves (climate science anyone?).
Now as a christian, I don’t buy this argument — that evolution means God doesn’t exist — even though I don’t have a problem with the theory of evolution. But I have met all to many christians who have bought into this argument, hook, line, and sinker. Understandably, they don’t deny the existence of God either. And in view of the evils that were perpetrated in the name of darwinism, a backlash should not be surprising. But rather than reject the fallacious argument, these christian friends buy the argument (perhaps this is where some education is needed) and reject the next most proximate cause they can see: darwinism, evolution, atheism, marxism — call it what you will. (See, in their mind these things get all conflated, just as some things do in Zombie’s minds as well, apparently.) So they go to battle. It’s not all that surprising.
I think you’ve just hit on one of the biggest holes in our current education system. Very few people know what science actually is, including many “scientists”. There’s this sense that science is what’s done by scientists, and you can tell a scientist by the degrees they’ve earned. This is most evident in the climate science field, but you also see it in creationism discussions where a creationist with degrees is referenced as an authority in the debate.
@Jeff Gauch: Quite true. A creationist with a D.Div. might be an authority on what the Genesis stories say, but that does not make him an authority on science. But then, contrary to what some people think, it is possible to be a bona fide scientist — even a lettered biologist or physicist or astronomer, published in scientific peer-reviewed journals and everything — and still be a creationist. Face it, what a scientist may or may not believe about human origins makes damned little difference in the day-to-day work of an astronomer or even a biologist if their specialty is not evolution-related, say, one who studies physiological processes in microbes. There are perfectly fine scientists who are also creationists, though probably not a very large number. The same can be said of proponents of intelligent design.
Does their opinion “count”? Well, I believe they are entitled to their say as much as any other scientist. Of course, if they are making scientific claims or critiques, they should do so according to the ground rules of science. And to the extent they have done so (and a few have), I don’t think they have made any arguments yet that are convincing to the scientific community as a whole. And there is where comes in what you say: the issue of what exactly constitutes science.
Many books have been written on that subject, and debates to go with it. There isn’t time in a school curriculum to spend much time on it, but I think in today’s political climate, it might be worth spending a unit of class time on. When I was a kid, science classes were taught from an idealized point of view, but if all students learn is that idealized image, they fall prey to supposed “experts” and “authorities”, or even worse, to Scientism.
On the one hand, students should learn about science, with a small ‘s’, the so-called scientific method: the cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation. But most scientists do not work in isolation, so part of science is sharing one’s results with peers (other scientists) so they can review it, hopefully repeat your experiments or similar ones, critique the work, etc. All well and good.
Then there is Science, with a capital ‘S’. Fancy degrees. Big universities and national laboratories. Journals of varying prestige. The minority of gatekeepers who determine who gets hired and published. Government grants and other big $$. Sympathetic ears in popular media. Nobel prizes. Invitations to speak to Congress and other governmental policy makers. Pressures to find the results that they want to hear. POWER STRUCTURES and power struggles. Attempts to silence opposing views within one’s field. Fraud in varying degrees and forms. I’m not saying that all of these are bad things. Many of them are inevitable. (Just try building a large hadron collider on a shoestring budget.) But they are aspects that go beyond basic science and provide temptation for abuse, and they sometimes work against the interests of basic science.
Kids are taught about science and much of mainstream theory, but they are not told much about Science, which is today’s reality, as fraught with human frailty as any other institution. They need to know about it. Not that science as a discipline should be tarred and feathered, that it is without merit. Far from it. Thank God for science (small ‘s’)! But we should be honest about Science’s weaknesses and how it can be (and is) abused.
You really don’t know why Christians who support Creationism are so vehement?
While the theory of evolution doesn’t speak to the question of whether or not there is a god, it DOES contradict the creation story in Genesis(and it has things you can touch that contradict Genesis). See? There may very well be a God–but if the scientific evidence is to be believed, it isn’t the one talked about in the bible.
Or, the bible isn’t the inspired word of God.
Either way, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all had their Creation refuted. The god who made this world is not theirs.
I’d be upset, too.
Everyone should read the 1983 report, “A Nation At Risk”. http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html
From the report: “…the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
“Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them.”
There’s a lot of Zombie’s proposal that I like or am at least willing to try. But here’s one part I disagree with: “Forcing every teacher to be an identical drone teaching the identical mediocre lessons in the identical way is a recipe for failure. Idiosyncratic methods should be encouraged, not punished, and the way to do that is by decreasing reliance on stifling national standards.”
The trouble with idiosyncratic methods is that they’re at least as likely to not work. We should use the most effective methods, whatever they might be.
I was born in 1951 and attended Catholic schools. The teachers, religious and lay, men and women, were almost all at least competent and presented material in standard ways. And there’s nothing wrong with that. (In fact, with people I’ve dealt with on and off the job, I’m relieved when I find a competent person.)
We went to the moon, invented computers, lasers, etc. without the help of interesting but unproven ideas like Zombies. Here’s what we must ask: What has happened between then and now that has made the original ways ineffective?
I think one element is school discipline. Without that you have continually misbehaving students, unfairly disrupting the education of students who really are interested in learning. I freely admit that deciding what discipline to use and how to apply it is the really hard part and I have no idea what can or should be implemented.
“We should use the most effective methods, whatever they might be.”
Yes. And as any competent teacher can tell you, the effectiveness of any particular method depends a lot on the individual personalities of teachers and students alike. So I’m not sure that your call for any effective method and Zombie’s call for abandoning stifling norms are necessarily contradictory.
I once taught at a very good private high school where teachers were given a great deal of freedom, by today’s standards, to use whatever methods they liked. I myself favored a pencil-and-paper, no-tech, old-fashioned style, probably much like what you got in the 50′s. Some other teachers were free-wheeling and “hands-on.” One approach doesn’t fit all teachers nor all subjects, and I think students benefit from being exposed to different methods.
What they try to do in public schools today is micro-manage every damned second of a teacher’s time. And please know that the norms that they impose are not by any means what you experienced as “standard” teaching. Far from it! They are more likely to insist that you MUST use audio-visual equipment a certain number of hours a week, you MUST use music and dance moves, you MUST have as many group assignments as individual assignments, you MUST have discussions of “opinions” (feelings, really,)etc., etc., etc.
It should go without saying that all of these rules imposed on lesson plans are set up and managed by administrators, most of whom are barely familiar with the subject matter that is being taught.
“I think one element is school discipline. Without that you have continually misbehaving students, unfairly disrupting the education of students who really are interested in learning.”
(Nothing to add. It just bears repeating!)
The one thing I do not see is making the delivery of money and requirements much more efficient, a pass through. Give every teacher a laptop, which could do all the reporting, which the teachers have to do anyway, all the way up the chain. So that eliminates staff at the school to collate from the teachers, ditto at the board of education, and really, at the county or even the state level. Yeh, I know, all those poor people without jobs, etc… But, since the goal is to teach, why not? Spend the $$ on kids, and teachers. When I was getting an MBA, we determined that it would be cheaper to rent rooms in the hotel, where we took classes, and throw away the books at the end of the year, and hire college professors to come in and teach, even grade school, rather than build the buildings, etc. And no pensions, house-keeping, etc. But to get to the school in the hotel or office building, the student has to make a effort to show up on time, do the work, be polite. Maybe the extra money could go to give all the students a laptop, a great leveler. work done on the computer could be graded, either electronically, or even by farming it out. Teachers/Professors would only grade the “written” work, not the true/false, or other fact checking type answers.
I would like to see more emphasis on the rights of the child and a recognition that the child is, after all, the consumer here, not the parents. It is the child who should be making the choices even from the very early years. It is the role of responsible parents to inform the child of factors useful in the decision but in the end the child should choose, thus enabling her to follow her passion (which might be something quirky like becoming a standup comedienne).
I homeschooled my son so he could follow his passion but I would have liked access to the schools for things like sports and science lab facilities. I like the voucher idea but it should be possible to use it partly for homeschooling and partly for specialised attendance at regular schools. (I’m in Australia and that is not an option here.)
My homeschooling program consisted of offering my son educational material and experiences from the standard curriculum. He said “no” to it all and I accepted that and obtained the educational authorities’ acceptance of that. He was saying “no” to make a point as he believed – and still believes – that student unions should be able to sack bad teachers and individual students should be able to walk out of any class that is boring.
He is now studying at university successfully without having done his HSC and he is influencing the university teaching staff toward his point of view.
Power to the students!
Glad to hear your son made it to university, but…
…is a recipe for disaster. Maybe your kid is a rare exception, but the vast majority of kids simply don’t know what’s best for them in the long run, and will often say “No” to all sorts of things — going to class, an inoculation shot, eating their vegetables — which wiser adults know are good for the kid.
Furthermore, kids are easily misled and influenced by people with nefarious intentions, using wiles beyond the child’s understanding. So the child may think he or she is making an independent decision, but is instead doing what the drug dealer/child molester/Gramscian educator has deceived them into doing.
Sometimes, parents and responsible adults simply need to tell kids what’s what, and what they need to learn. One of the very problems with American education today is exactly what you describe, that in some schools kids are allowed to “teach themselves” or “decide on their own course of study,” and most of the time it ends up a catastrophe.
I personally know someone who went to an avant-garde private school which followed this exact philosophy — the children are in charge — and when he graduated from that K-8 private school and entered public high school we discovered that he was totally illiterate and knew absolutely nothing about anything…because he had been allowed to say “No” to every lesson offered to him his entire life — which is exactly what he did.
One of the things that makes it difficult for me to wrap my mind around educational reform is that almost anything seems to work for someone and nothing seems to work for everyone. Meet some of the unschoolers or read their blogs. They work closely with their children, pursuing the child’s interests without coercion. The children learn the way preschoolers learn language, with the relentless urge to learn and master their world of the very young before school burns that out. Unschooling works but it’s not as simple or as blind as it looks to outsiders.
I follow a middle ground. We pursue my granddaughter’s interests. At the moment she wants to learn everything there is to know about wolves. That covers a good deal of biology, history, geography and arithmetic. When she wants to write something wolves, it is spelling, grammar, punctuation, and paragraph structure. She understands that the ‘price’ she pays for my aiding her pursuit of her passions is that I require her to learn some things I have selected. We are using E.D. Hirsch’s “What Your X Grader Needs to Know” as our curriculum guideline. It gives me a sense of security about the completeness of her education. We’ve just received this year’s book and will go over it together to plan the year.
I guess this sort of thing is done in schools such as Summerhill.
Re: the boy who learned his alphabet at age six. That is first grade. When I attended school that is when we all learned our alphabet and is actually on the early side. Many children are not developmentally ready. Dyslexics may not learn to read until they are 12. Take a look at the book Better Late Than Early.
Some children struggle and flounder. If they are homeschooled, it is easy to say they would do better in public school. But look at the number of children who struggle and flounder in school. A significant number of people who homeschool do so because the child wasn’t making it in school. Many homeschool long enough to get the kid over a hump of some sort and then go back to school. I would hesitate to judge until I’d walked in the mother’s shoes for a while.
Age six is EARLY for learning the alphabet?! WTF. All three of us (siblings) were reading fluently at age four, and none of us are geniuses. None of us were ever taught “the alphabet”, BTW — we just picked up reading by ourselves.
At least one of us (this writer) actually had a supposed “developmental disorder” (people invented the name “Asperger Syndrome” for those of us who aren’t touchy-feely all the time, and therefore must be “abnormal”).
For any skill that has to be mastered at the below-conscious level, the earlier the better. Reading, writing, and arithmetic, at least at their most basic levels, should be as natural as breathing.
Good luck continuing along the coercive path.
With all due respect, what may have worked for you, would probably be a disaster for most children. One of the problems we have (at least at the high school level) is too much choice in curriculum for the students. We have overstaffed schools filled with teachers teaching (and this is an example from the school my children attended) interior design arts??? Ok, I can see basic home economics being a good class for kids to take, but interior design??? One of the ideas that has come about is the idea of the school as an “educational smorgasbord” where students are free to pick and choose “what they are interested in”. What do you think that does to produce well rounded students who can go out into the world? How many students “choose” to take what they see as underwater basket weaving classes?
As for the homeschooled — this directly leads to my comment about some parents should not be allowed to home school. An example taken from real life: I know of one boy, a year older (nearly to the day) than my son (who is at public school) whose mother homeschooled him with the philosophy of letting him pick and choose what he liked to do…he was six before he had completely learned his alphabet! He liked video games, and so she rationalized that he was learning computers! To make matters worse, she did not encourage any sort of physical excercise (he liked to play computer games) and would use cookies and tasty treats as rewards. You can guess what I thought of her homeschooling — he would have been better off in public school, as flawed as it is, I think.
Jane, I do hope that you say the words ‘some people should not be allowed to homeschool’ with the same grain of salt, shall we say, that you might say the words ‘some people should not be allowed to have children’. Both the act of having children and the act of educating them are constitutionally protected rights and it isn’t anyone else’s business unless objectively provable harm is being done to the child.
The attitude that other people know better than parents is what got us into this unholy mess (see Dewey), and until we all learn to support parents instead of dictating to them from our superior wisdom, we will not be able to see our way out. Little will change until we get over our attitude that ‘public’ money should be used to educate children, and that therefore we get to decide that parents can or cannot use it to teach religious principals or any other subject of their choosing! That is what Homeschool Granny is talking about. Homeschoolers would love to have the tax money they pay to the schools to use in their homeschooling efforts, but for heavens sake, just let us KEEP it in the first place, and keep your nose out of our business! Yes there are many who cannot stay home to teach their kids. There are also many solutions to that issue that do not involve having the state (and Jane, and all you other readers who would like to tell me how to raise my kids) call the shots. Cast a wider net Zombie. Your proposals would help, but they can’t be achieved. Read John Taylor Gatto. Free your mind from the tyranny of state-run education.
No. I realize it is a constitutional right, and I would keep it so. However, I think that homeschooling has become “Camelot” to many people — they only hear of the success stories because that is what they WANT to hear about (and who could blame them? the public school systems are in ruin — who would not want better for their children?). There is a danger in that as well; not everyone who would want to homeschool would be a decent, upstanding American citizen or even competent…what then?
There is no such thing as a “gold standard”, there is no perfect — each choice has its strong points, but it also has some very bad consequences…and we must not turn a blind eye to them. We cannot.
Here’s my simple two step educational reform proposal:
1) Put a high school curriculum on YouTube with supporting tests on BrainBench.com
2) Fire all the teachers and administrators
The resistance of teacher unions and our ever mounting debt pretty much guarantees that this reform proposal will eventually be adopted. I’d just like to see us be a bit more proactive about it to mitigate the huge societal pain that this will cause.
Switching gears… Teacher led classroom education is regarded as the tried and true means of education. I think that’s wrong. I maintain that homeschoolers have more in common with Aristotle who was the tutor of Alexander the Great, than do current day teachers. Obviously, homeschoolers have to leverage educational resources to deliver a curriculum equivalent to what Aristotle might have, but that they are able to do so is one of the wonders of our age.
On my bad days, my daydreams of public school reform begin with: 1) send all the kids home; 2) fire all the teachers; 3) hang all the administrators and teachers union officials; 4) burn down the school building.
Homeschooling is the gold standard. Yes, there are isolated horror stories, and irresponsible parents who are not cut out for it but do it anyway, but for every such story there are dozens of worse stories in the public schools.
Regarding national standards, having read various discussions, I am with those who favor a battery of achievement and aptitude tests available from various non-government agencies. Looking at the big picture, we as a society no longer view purpose of schooling as inculcating education in the classical sense (an understanding and appreciation of our civic and cultural heritage; the ability to learn on one’s own; the ability to reason, argue, think critically). Instead, we view schooling as vocational training. Today this view applies to post-secondary education as well as K-12.
It used to be that a high school diploma indicated a certain minimum competency and set of skills. Today it guarantees no such thing, so many employers look to a bachelor’s degree as the next available proxy. This is bad news for everyone. It promises to be disaster if Obama gets his way and effectively FORCES more kids to go on to college when they have neither the inclination nor aptitude. Worse, it promises to dilute the bachelor’s degree to meaninglessness as well.
Let’s just be honest and remove the expectation that a high school diploma means anything. All most employers really want is some guarantee of minimum competence and skill set. So make a test for it, for crying out loud! Or a battery of tests, if necessary. (This idea is not mine nor is it new.) Heck, most states already have a high-school equivalency test of some sort. Have a basic test for the “3 R’s”, from some widely recognized testing service. A job applicant can show potential employers his test scores to show competence. If some employer wants assurance that an applicant knows how to properly put on a condom or holds politically correct views on (fill in the blank), then someone can design an appropriate test for that.
Every test can be narrowly focussed as need be on the knowledge and skill set of interest to some industry. Perhaps the public school system can pay the fees for each student to take some number of these exams once during their lifetime, for those who otherwise could not afford them. But do NOT make any of the tests compulsory. If the student and his parents are not impressed enough by the demands of the job market that they don’t feel a desire to prove his skills, then that’s their decision. No weeping or moaning or blaming the system, they just live with the consequences. Another upside: those students who excel can take the exams when they’re ready (i.e. early) and proceed on to the next phase of their lives without having to wait for the laggards.
Ideally, if most employers endorsed some reasonable set of commercially available tests (and there is no reason that there has to be a single universal test), then parents and students would have a crisp, clear set of goals to aim for. Combined with a voucher system, they would be motivated to find schools to teach to those tests. There should be no need for a school to accept an unwilling student. Disruptive students need not apply.
Note that I said “teach to the test”. Such special-purpose schools could limit their scope, and certainly would not need 12 years of the student’s time. You want extracurricular activities or enrichment? There are other kinds of schools for that. You want them to learn culture, or history, or your version of politics? Lots other options for that. What does an employer care?
But the employer cares if they show up consistently, and a test does not show that. Schools have requirements about showing up. Society, and this includes most parents do not want their kids running around or staying unsupervised from K-12. The aforementioned is almost too obvious to have to say, but discussions of how to fix education, one always gets some extreme, completely unrealistic solutions. For the most part, though, the discussion here has been reasonable, with more than the usual number of people showing that they understand the constraints of reality in the huge, unwieldy, and expensive business of teaching our children. Part of it IS expensive child care, and will remain so, unless so other segment of our society can take over the responsibility.
Even the people with an interest in education andtraining have no feel for how far the science of education has advanced over the last twenty years. I was involved in the automated training of submarine crews when a video disk was 14″ across. The contract specifications kept the state of the art training from being prepared then. Since then the understanding of the science has lept ahead but the products available have inched forward. It is time to burst the dam and flood the education systems.
What are the best experts on education alive today and are there any millionares or foundations who would be willing to award a hundred thousand dollar prize for the person who does the most for the technology.
Excellent proposals!
As a proponent of pure and outright competition for education dollars to include home shooling, I think that is one of the primary ways to help change the way we approach education and allows for outstanding work by home schooling parents to be noted, cited and analyzed to see what their techniques are that are yielding better results. Better teaching is not limited to schools and that is a notion we can do without if we truly care about education and not about keeping a status quo which is failing.
I would add in Jerry Pournelle’s favorites (and if you don’t read Pournelle for education, then shame on you!) of vocational schooling with special emphasis on it. Currently we have too little exposure to the manual arts and these should not be add-ons to education but should form the foundation of our educational system, at least to the point of exposure to them at a young age. Teaching the use of equipment for wood working, metal working, electrical wiring, plastics, etc. are tasks that the young (typically grades 6-9) can pick up. While currently considered ‘shop’ classes, they offer fundamental skills that help to give a hands-on understanding of how the world works and allows for immediate feed-back in the actual creation of items for use. For many students this is a viable life path option that should be supported: in the public venue via vocational schools and in the private via teaming with craft associations willing to create apprenticeship programs for the young. The 3 R’s are still a requirement, but that is a half-day or less of the educational experience and they gain direct application in learning how to implement projects that require instructions, measurements and calculations.
As for history and the teaching thereof, there is a plentiful supply of teaching plans going back to the 19th century, which include a number of textbooks that while out of print are in the Public Domain. Teaching history via what was taught in different periods in our own history (the 1890′s, 1920′s, 1950′s, 1970′s, 1990′s as examples) would then offer fundamental teaching of how this Nation has viewed its own history and allow the step-wise building of an understanding of civics and how history has been taught so that general high school age young adults have the ability to compare and contrast on the changing view of our history and have critical mental skills to back their analytical ability. Instead of unitary teaching to a common ‘plan’ use all plans and shift via grade level using the earliest in our history at the youngest age: if our children from the one-room schoolhouse era were able to handle such texts in the 1890′s, then we should be able to do just as well with children typical of grades 3-4.
Finally if you must ‘teach to the test’ then allow the student to take the test before they even take the class: anyone who passes gets to proceed without wasting their time. Students with a willingness to learn will do so, and not be bored out of their skulls by information and learning they already have. Further lacks that show up on a comprehensive test can allow for crafted concentration on areas of weakness. This is particularly useful in arithmetical areas, but also is useful in basic writing ability and reading comprehension. Students who demonstrate ability need to be rewarded on that ability especially if it comes before any class has to be taken. Moving away from unitized study (that is a unit of 9th grade math) and towards areas of concern and work within larger areas so as to have customized study and testing ability per student. This is the era of ‘mass customization’ of goods and services, in which you get items that are tailored to your needs via particularized specifications and education should be no different for this and should offer this as a strong point.
To get beyond the era of grade cohorts we must actually move beyond cohort analysis and allow for students to shine where they have strengths, identify areas where they have weaknesses, and offer challenging and intersting study based on those strengths and weaknesses. If you wish to remove ‘group think’ it is necessary to remove the group analysis and concentration on older schema of schooling and thought that backs it. This is also the era of ‘disintermediation’ and to do that for education requires eliminating the bureaucracy and holding educators directly accountable for what they educate, so as to allow those seeking an education for their children to understand just what the strengths and weaknesses of various educators are as seen from other parents and guardians. Performance matters not just for students but educators as well, and that requires getting rid of the group protection and cohort benefits of being a teacher and put forward that their skills as educators is paramount and that they are judged on their performance as well as their ability to teach children how to become good learners and critical thinkers. Yes the Unions must go. So must much of the bureaucracy at schools be removed to be replaced by parents and dedicated adults who wish to see better education for all children, thus making those who are the most concerned with education responsible for it… and they will not be graded on a curve, either, by their peers.
ajacksonian wrote: As a proponent of pure and outright competition for education dollars to include home schooling, I think that is one of the primary ways to help change the way we approach education and allows for outstanding work by home schooling parents to be noted, cited and analyzed to see what their techniques are that are yielding better results.
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I think we can say that the “technique” of having one or two free teachers concentrate on the education of one, or a few more children is a model that does not help much for educating twenty million students each year. It is clearly a question of working at scale, and alas, most of your proposals do not work well at the scale they would be needed. Every time a student is permitted to individualize, there is the potential to create a whole new class (with a teacher) for those students and the costs rise. Sure there are a lot of get-your-education-online programs, but the potential for shortcuts, cheating, pretending seem unlimited. Do the online educators really care if their students learn anything, or simply that they shell out their money>
I like the idea of students getting more “shop” life skills, and I would throw in woodcraft, camping, and gardening too, but there is already a huge smorgasbord of life skills (and sensitivities) on the plate. Maybe the whole direction of society will eventually turn away from college and college prep (and to a generally lower standard of living), but it will take a major economic disaster to bring that about. Who knows, that may be happening now, but it is more likely that we will limp along until the next bubble.
Then you conclude with: “So must much of the bureaucracy at schools be removed to be replaced by parents and dedicated adults who wish to see better education for all children, thus making those who are the most concerned with education responsible for it… and they will not be graded on a curve, either, by their peers.”
Again we are back to the volunteer? parents and adults who are going to do this? And THEY are going to sort out the needs of the twenty million? And they say that liberals are utopians.
That’s why I would like to see the public schools revamped — at their basic premise they aren’t bad; the foundation of public schooling in America was pretty good…it’s just the additions that have been tacked on to it and the neglect that have weakened the structure.
No more “smorgasbord” choosing: I don’t care who sets the standards, but streamline the curriculum (I would opt for reading/writing, math, science, social studies — which used to encompass the gamut from geography to civics, physical ed. — because it really is necessary to get kids active, the arts — which could encompass theater to industrial arts, and that leaves one elective. Make it K-12, with a bit more choice opening up at grade 7. Teach with a goal towards getting all students at a competent 6th grade level, and then from there they can start to diversify a little bit. I would say subdivide the classes with accelerated and remedial programs, but I don’t know if we’re ready to admit to that yet — still, it would be nice if they did (I heartily support the non-governmental testing for aptitude). Keep the extracurriculars, but reduce the number of them — it’s insane the number of special school clubs, teams, whatnot a student can be in, and it takes away from education (it also leaves people out — at my little high school there was no drama club; you signed up for the school play and the shop classes made the stages, the art classes decorated, and the home ec. made the costumes — now we have a drama teacher that hires professional light and sound, out of the school budget; it’s ridiculous). This was essentially what we used to have; it worked fairly well.
We need to reduce the power of the teacher’s unions; if not do away with it as it is altogether (I realize there are dangers to that too, but the situation has gotten ridiculous too — many teachers will tell you in private that the unions work only for themselves and that it has gotten very bad). We need to revise how we are teaching teachers and also how we go about accrediting them — in many states you can have a very mediocre, barely made C’s in their field people, taking education courses (which are beyond inane), paying the money, and they are licensed to teach. We need some of the A and B students…we need to make challenging education classes, so the lazy and inept would think twice before going into that field; we need to recruit people of ability and drive (which makes for good teachers). Most of the licensure anymore is just a big payoff to the state, not quality control. We also need to put the brakes on some of these school boards: many times the wrong sort of people are on those as well (but that is a personal/individual thing) — however, what I see are people who have the means homeschooling or sending their kids to charter/private schools (which is their choice) leaving those without the means (whether money or interest) in the public venue; which means they distance themselves even further from the public schools (except at tax time)…and the situation gets worse. But eventually, the children of homeschoolers and those who received a private education will have to live with their public school peers with all the attendant duties of adult life — like voting. Or will we let it get so bad that we will legislate a chaste system?
Then you conclude with: “So must much of the bureaucracy at schools be removed to be replaced by parents and dedicated adults who wish to see better education for all children, thus making those who are the most concerned with education responsible for it… and they will not be graded on a curve, either, by their peers.”
Again we are back to the volunteer? parents and adults who are going to do this? And THEY are going to sort out the needs of the twenty million? And they say that liberals are utopians.
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This is statist thinking. No one has to sort out the needs of twenty million students. That is why we don’t need and should not have a Department of Education. Parents and other adult volunteers absolutely are the best people to sort out the needs of the children under their care. In a free market for education, they would be able to do just that, choosing the best combination of academics, life skills training, and extra-curriculars for each child’s needs. Of course there are always some parents who would rather allow others to make these decisions, but they are fewer than you imply. Witness the enormous response to voucher opportunities in Washington D.C. and New York City among a demographic that many viewed as unsupportive of their children’s educations. If you allow parents to take responsibility for their kid’s educations, you will find that most jump in to the role with both feet. Today’s public schools are designed to take away that responsibility, rather, they take away the ability of the parents to act responsibly in their children’s educations, while retaining their ability to blame the parents when they make a mess of it.
Here is an integration of the entire academic curriculum:
http://www.adwaitha-hermitage.net/rishikul/phenom.html
Here is a coup d’oeil of our system of education:
http://www.adwaitha-hermitage.net/reminisc/educate.html
Zombie:
I think you have a great recipe for restoring education to the role it must play to preserve our democracy and the future of generations to come. Please consider an essay that would explore combining a competitive school with homeschooling. The school can develop and help administer programs for homeschoolers, as well as serve as a central exchange for swapping ideas, talents, social development and just brainstorming in general. Such programs could compete strongly for homeschoolers, bringing another dimension to the element of competition. I must add that I disagree with you on the issue of intelligent design. It is very well developed science with a number of strong scientist advocates, such as David Berlinski, with doctorates in math and molecular biology, author, screen writer, translator of French and German, professor of math and logic at a University in Paris, France. You may want to consider the book, Signature In The Cell, by Stephen C. Meyer, Phd. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science. The book is a long, difficult scientific treatise with never a reference to religion or the nature of the intelligent designer. Exposing one’s self to a little more knowledge on the matter may even give you a stronger scientific basis for opposing intelligent design, but it will also broaden your critical thinking on the matter in the process. Keep up the very good work.
Thanks for the compliments.
Re: intelligent design, and my supposed need for reading books about it:
I have spent over 15 years studying every aspect of the intelligent design movement. I’ve read every argument, analyzed every viewpoint. I know much more about intelligent design than even most proponents of intelligent design.
My opposition to it is not based on my unfamiliarity with it, but rather with my deep understanding of it — and of the principles of evolution, of course.
There are no new arguments with which I need to familiarize myself — it’s been years and year since I’ve seen a new one. I’ve looked at those books you recommend — just more rehashing. In fact, just about every single “new” intelligent design position first appeared not anytime recently but was first articulated way back in 1859. Yes, that’s right, 1859 — within months of On the Origins of Species being published, the “intelligent design” movement had formulated all its talking points — and all that has happened in the 151 years since then is an endless endless endless endless endless repetition of those exact same points, either with the exact same words or dressed up in 20th-century or 21st-century terminology. And they’ve been conclusively rebutted an equally large number of times — which the creationists totally ignore, and start all over again.
No matter how the “intelligent design” approach is dolled up, it all comes down to the same thing, an objection that is not simply an “alternate viewpoint” or a “different theory,” but rather a metaphysical or religious philosophy based at its very core on the supernatural (or at least the supra-natural) — the polar opposite of science. Every flavor of intelligent design or creationism is just a restatement of the gut feeling that some ineffable and non-perceivable magical power controls the universe — which fundamentally negates what science or rationality even is.
So, thanks for the suggestions, but I’ll take a pass. And I won’t suggest that you study what evolution even is, and wake up that you’ve been tricked by religious ideologues into thinking a scientific principle challenges the basis for spirituality, because I know that you will follow my lead and not take my suggestion either. So we’ll just leave it at that.
Agreed with all your suggestions except one. As the owner of a small business what I need are employees who know how to brainstorm and operate collaboratively. I do not need people who are so competitive they spend more time stabbing each other in the back or trying to take credit for each others’ ideas than in moving the company forward.
Schools need to do far, far more rather than less to get students to work together in groups. Understanding group dynamics should be one of the top requirements for any teacher of eighth grade students forward.
I have had to fire brilliant people who just could not get along with the rest of the employees, and I am sure they excoriate me to this day for narrow-minded and limiting management style. Most of these people were the products of public schooling which gave them a totally unwarranted sense of their own importance in the scheme of things.
A person who cannot take pride in a job well done with the co-operation of others is practically useless to today’s businesses.
What you say may be true in a business environment, but I think you’re missing the point of what these compulsory group-assignment shenanigins are for in a school setting.
It’s not so much about teaching kids how to get along in a group, but rather finding a way to negate or minimize the contributions of the best students while assigning credit to the worst.
In most group assignments the teachers make sure that bad students are paired with good students. This way, it evens out the class performance, as the worst students and the best students must necessarily get the same grade. Either the good students do all the work and the group — including the bad students — gets an “A”, or the the bad students ruin the learning environment, and everyone in the group — including the good students — gets a “C” or a “D”. Which, actually, is the whole point — either outcome is acceptable.
Imagine in your company that instead of being able to fire the worst employees, you were compelled to assign two or three bad employees to each productive team, where they proceeded to either steal credit while contibuting nothing of value, or (more likely) undermine the ability of the others to produce creative solutions in the first place. And no matter how often or egregiously they do this, you still are never able to fire them, but instead must keep moving them around to every creative team, spoiling everything. Meanwhile, the actual good employees, seeing the nightmarish conditions, quit and go to work for a better company.
That is a better comparison between your business setting and the modern school environment.
But when the teacher assigns groups, he/she can change the configuration each time. You have it in your head that groups always have to work in the “socialistic” way you choose to define. Groups can be set up any way you want them, and one can get an individual grade and a group grade. Sometimes, just to shake things up, I would put the stronger students all in one or two groups; that is also a good learning experience for all concerned. In the more usual alignment, some of the pressure which the stronger (or harder-working, anyway) students bring to bear, or try to being to bear on the less harder working is also part of the dynamic. Those students don’t particularly want to do this “coaxing” work, (and may complain to anyone who will listen, about it) and the others often would prefer a free ride, of course, but it is all part of determining half-assed group work (let’s discuss Jennie’s t & a), from finely crafted, fairly closely observed group work, the teacher learning from past mistakes etc. I think that there is something in the conservative mind that is immediately, dare we say, naturally, offended by the concept of “socialistic” group work, but any good curriculum should contain some group work. Some things are done better in groups. It is part of a larger concept of using the resource of the students themselves, to make their education better. As with any educational strategy, it can be done well, poorly, or as most often, somewhere in between.
All of these strategies have to be held up against Dwight’s basic law that many, if not most students want to get their work done with the least amount of effort and the teacher has to keep their attempted shortcuts from devaluing everything. Homeschooling parents can watch a lot more closely; public school teachers have MANY students to watch and once the kid leaves the class, he/she is generally gone. An, of course, students often use the teacher’s real or alleged screw-ups to take pressure off themselves when talking to their parents; again, we are talking human nature here.
Anyway, I like the idea of these home schooling parents getting a chance to find out all this stuff as they work with their kids.
A technique that was successful at my son’s college (many years ago) was to require each group member to grade the contribution of each of the other group members, secretly of course. Each student’s grade was based partly on the others’ recommended grades. This probably wouldn’t work with young children and would have it’s drawbacks, but it would be worth a try.
Competition doesn’t immediately end up with people who cannot work together. Lack of ability to function as part of a team is a character development issue rather than a result of a competitive educational environment.
Another assumption I see in the comments against school competition is that forcing schools to compete and setting standards in academics is somehow an unhealthy thing which will lead to students who cannot function on a workplace team.
Public schools that group students and give the group the same grade seem to mostly result in one or two students doing the work for the group. I hear complaints among my college age friends that they now hate group projects because they cannot get the others in their group to get together to work; they end up doing all the work themselves because they need good grades to keep their academically based scholarships and so the group gets their good grade for no effort. This seems to be what the public schools produce.
As I see it, people who don’t work on workplace teams need remedial people and character skills, not more knowledge, but that the public schools don’t succeed in teaching either.
I couldn’t disagree more with this. Learning group dynamics is not education. Anyone can learn those at any time. And it’s just a personality/behavioral thing anyway, not a skill. We don’t need to pay teachers to waste time on such things.
Working as a group on anything that can be done individually is usually the slowest and least efficient way to complete the task. The exact same amount of work gets done, plus lots and lots of irrelevant talking. If one person misunderstands something, everyone in the group gets to stop being productive while the one person catches up. That’s why personell structures are a hierarchy.
Why don’t you just hire suitable people? The education system is for the students, not to personally benefit your business and your particular management style. Everyone has had to deal with jerks. It’s not something that schools can fix – especially these days, when advocating any kind of values or good behavior is considered something between being a Pollyanna and committing a hate crime.
What about using computer technology for part of the instruction. I think this has great promise as computers get more capable and teachers (apparently) get less so.
I think the comments are interesting, but still need to read more (lunch is over in a minute). The problem with vouchers is that many people who would want to use them probably wouldn’t be able to afford to send their childrent to private school, even with tax credit or vouchers. If everyone had the opportunity to go to any school he or she wished without worrying about finances, then I probably wouldn’t have an issue with this. On another note, there was a study that came out in July 2006 from the NEAP that basically said there is no difference (or marginal, at best) between private and public schools. What’s interesting is that this came out at the same time the Bush administration was publicly pushing for school vouchers.
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard//pubs/studies/2006461.asp
Our school in GA has a form of tracking. Kids who are serious about learning are placed in honors classes. My son, now a Senior, was in the general classes for health, Spanish I, and PE. He loathed it. He said that few paid attention, and the entire class was an exercise in futility. Taking AP and honors courses is how we get around the kids who are there for the attendance certificate.
There are many school districts in many states that cost taxpayers far more per pupil than is charged by private schools. Moreover, vouchers would encourage competition, inviting more private schools to open, including ones to fill price niches, making them more accessible for more people.
But even if it were the case that private schools were more expensive than public ones, so that vouchers only covered part of the costs and some people would still not be able to afford private schooling, why would that be a problem for you? Is is just plain envy or spite on your part?
No envy or spite. But what I think will happen is that the public schools will become nothing more than holding pens for the least among us – the least wealthy, the least disciplined, the apathetic, the ones who are most likely to lose their way. This has been covered in previous comments much more eloquently than I can do.
I think it’s in our best interests as a society to have the best educated people out there – when I say educated, I don’t mean college graduates, but those who can function in society and contribute, not be a drain. Children slip through the cracks now. Do you think a public school with almost only the dregs of society is going to do better?
Vouchers may encourage healthy competition, or you may get schools that are scams, who really aren’t teaching our kids jack. Do you want your child to take that risk? I’m almost done with the public school system, so it’s no longer going to be my personal fight to get the best education I can for my son. However, I have a vested interest in the society I live in. Therefore, I care about this issue.
So you have a government school that’s doing a bad job for the 10,000 children who attend. You introduce vouchers. Half of the children leave and get a real education. Now the government school is only doing a bad job for 5000 children.
How is this not an improvement?
All the arguments against vouchers end up being like yours. “It doesn’t immediately solve every problem for everyone. And I imagine it might lead to other problems. So lets just stick with exactly the system we have now and just let it continue depriving children of education and generally making the lives of Americans worse. Lets continue it forever.”
You don’t think there are any public schools doing a good job? I’m not saying the public school my son is in couldn’t do a better job, but he’s engaged, he enjoys his classes, and he’s looking forward to college.
One of the things I’m not hearing from anyone is the amount of personal responsibility from the parents. I can’t tell you how many teachers I’ve spoken to who say that (according to the parents) the kids can do no wrong. Everyone else’s child is to blame, not their own precious baby. One of my son’s teachers called us in when he was in middle school because my son was being disrespectful. The teacher thanked us at the end of the meeting because we didn’t give excuses, we didn’t blame the teacher or the other kids. Our son was required to write a letter of apology to the teacher for his actions. It was the first letter of that kind the teacher had ever received from a student in his 10-15 years teaching.
I am in no way saying that our schools couldn’t be improved. However, I don’t think vouchers are the end all and be all you seem to think they are. Where did I say ‘let’s continue it forever?’ Please don’t put words in my mouth unless they’re warranted.
I think some of the ideas presented by Zombie and others definitely have merit, and need to be looked at more closely. My problems with vouchers aren’t insurmountable.
Elizabeth:
Why did the 5000 children leave for the private schools if the government school was so worthwhile? If the government school is so great compared to the private school, then why bother leaving? That’s what individual choice does. It puts the decision in the hands of the people who know the most and who care the most about the outcome: the parents.
If some parents don’t care about their kids and leave them in the worthless schools, then those kids have a parent problem, not a school problem.
Since we don’t have vouchers, and since vouchers are an extremely difficult uphill battle against an entrenched power structure willing to sacrifice children’s futures for their own petty benefits, we need to stick together if any improvements are ever going to happen. “But it’s not perfect” is only a useful argument if you’re trying to muddy the waters and prevent reforms.
You may not like words put in your mouth. “Let’s continue it forever” might not be your intention, but it’s very likely to be the ultimate result.
Perfecting vouchers is a good plan for after we have vouchers. Perfecting vouchers now just means another grade-level of children get left behind for every year of delay while we wait for perfection.
Kohath,
The concept of vouchers doesn’t need to be “perfected” before we go to them. The issue is that if 5,000 students leave public school, you’re creating a subclass of kids who aren’t going to get the resources allocated to them that they need.
I think Zombie’s idea of survey courses is a good one. I think the idea of setting up apprenticeships for different jobs is another good idea. This could conceivably be done through a high school setting – maybe a vocational high school? I’m also keen on tracking – let’s put the advanced kids together, the slower kids together. It’s all well and good to try to mainstream the slower kids, but all this causes is the teachers to go at the level of the lowest common denominator.
Let’s make the parents accountable for the kids behavior. I think that in itself will do more to help the education system than almost anything else.
A big reason there are so many administrators in a school is to deal with all the parents that can’t handle their child getting anything below a B. If a child is disruptive, instead of allowing excuses to be made, the parent can be held accountable. and I’m not talking about inner city youth. this happens in the suburbs. If a teacher gives a bad grade, the teacher shouldn’t be strong armed into changing it to appease an angry and vocal parent. This happens a lot.
Let’s make these changes, see how it works, then look at vouchers again. I’m not saying that vouchers aren’t possible, but I think that’s an extreme solution. I think there are other fixes that can be put into place first before vouchers are put out there.
I’ll take a subclass of kids deprived of an education over EVERY kid deprived. Once we have another, alternate system, we can work on solving the problem with the old system or finding creative ways to help more and more kids escape the old system.
I’m not sure how many grade levels of children we have to sacrifice to give the current system more chances to finally start doing a good job. I would say zero. They’ve had far, far too many chances, and we’ve lost far, far too many children’s futures to their failures already. But I guess that’s extreme, and we should just try the 20th or 50th meaningless variation on the same old thing.
You’re saying all public schools are sub-par and cheating our kids? Why is trying Zombie’s other ideas before going to vouchers a “meaningless variation on the same old thing?”
Zombie, one thing you didn’t mention was the benefit of physical play in helping children maintain focus in the class room. Too often today’s young children have little chance for unstructured play between the time the school bus picks them up in the morning until it drops them off in the afternoon. In some places that can be as long as ten hours – way too long a time to expect any child to remain orderly and in focus.
I often suspect one reason for the success of small rural schools such as the one Larsky @ #28 attended was the pupils got much more exercise than many of today’s students. I am 57. When I tell today’s parents that my classmates and I walked as many as ten city blocks to and from school starting at age six in all types of weather they are horrified. It seems so dangerous! Those who lived within four city blocks were also allowed to walk home and back for lunch if they had a parent at home during the day. Those who ate lunch at school were given a noon recess outside. We also had mid morning and mid afternoon recess breaks outside daily unless it was pouring rain or bitterly cold, meaning wind chills well below zero. Those three 15 minutes breaks outside in the cold drained a lot of excess energy from even the most rambunctious boys.
Great ideas!
I do have to say, though, that the good public schools are not as few and far between as you might think. My school has averaged 80% of the students passing the state test for at least 3 years, and we’re hardly alone in the neighborhood! The difference is not in the neighborhood (outskirts of a major city), parent support (varying from helpful to psycho), or in the students (Title 1 school). The thing that makes the difference is the administration and the staff.
Thoughts on textbooks:
I agree on how politicized textbooks (especially Social Studies!) have become. However, I taught for several years with a locally developed Science curriculum. It was a fiasco that didn’t engage the students or scaffold their learning to higher levels of the subject. The first year we went back to using a textbook-based curriculum, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The textbook is rigorous, but it’s also structured, consistent, and engaging.
Thoughts on tracking:
When tracking students, you can’t just have a “high” class and a “low” class. If you did so, the lower students would rarely make significant gains because there would be few or no academic leaders in the classroom. The way we’ve done it is to put the students in the grade level into 6-9 groups according to ability, and then give each class a high, middle, and low group. That way, the struggling students are around peers daily who can provide role models of good academic habits. The disruptive students, we pretty much share equally. We’ve found that departmentalization at the intermediate-elementary level helps immensely with dealing with disruptions. The teacher gets a break by having the disruptive ones only part of the day, so her (or his) energy isn’t completely consumed by the “bad” kids.
Overall, I really liked many of your ideas. (Especially the one about the unions!) And you’re right; many of them are finding their ways into the classroom in today’s schools!
Zombie- Have you been following the LA Times articles about bad teachers being the key to kids low test scores? Thinking back to my school days, it makes sense. Teachers with control of the classroom and something interesting to say will hold the attention of even the most unruly students. Union rules keep teachers who can’t do this well from ever being fired.
Of course, educators in my state are now howling in knee-jerk fashion that this just can’t be right- They’re fighting doing “value-added” studies here because it might turn out to be true and we just can’t have that! All teachers are competent and try so hard!! If we just paid them more they’d magically work harder and be more effective! That’s the real key! Money, money, money!
make school uniforms mandatory
a no brainer
Nice article. Interesante!