The American public school system: What gives?

And this is why people hate the Common Core.
Badly designed tests with poorly thought out testing procedures.

New York state ELA tests: Sucking the love for learning right out of my students.

 

You're all failing to grasp one key point about the american public school system: It's working exactly as intended. The goal of our school system isn't to educate, it's to do the opposite. K-12 is designed from the ground up to breed ignorant and obedient authoritarians and provide a "school to prison pipeline" for anyone that would be more profitable in a corporate run for-profit prison cell.

 

I'm honestly not sure if you're trolling right now, and I honestly hope that you are.

...

Standardized testing is one big bone I have to pick with the current way that schools are set up. It was my experience in growing up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood/district in Michigan that quite a few teachers aren't really teaching to have the students learn anything; the curriculum is set up such that districts/teachers are rewarded for high test scores, whatever that means. So a lot of districts (including mine) would simply teach you the stuff you needed to know for the standardized tests instead of giving you a well-rounded education, particularly as you got closer to 11th grade (ACT year in my school). There's a pretty good amount of stuff I would have liked to learn and classes I would rather have taken but was unable to due to curriculum restraints ("You can take that computer programming class after you take your ACTs (ie, senior year). Oh, what's that, you also want to do other extracurriculars like band? Sorry, you don't have time for both.")
Really frustrating for people like me who like to think outside of the box and, as a result, don't really do too well on standardized testing.

/blah blah blah my needs.

EDIT: Had a feeling I was re-stating the obvious by writing this post. Turns out a lot of my concerns were answered by Snowy during her first reply.
Frustration still stands.

 

Sure thing Snowy let me go and log in to Sagepub so I can export a copy of "Our Evil Master Plan" from the journal Authoritarians R Us. Nice subtle way to sneak in some ad hominem against my character without actually having to say anything of substance.

Look at our schools. The reason we're falling behind is because instead of teaching independant thought, creativity, and nurtering intelligence we care more about beating authoritarian obedience into our children. The billion and five standardized tests aren't about measuring anything, they're just free money for the for-profit corporations behind the tests. It's not a crisis of funding, we're plenty competitive in spending and some of our worst performing states have some of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation. Yes school board and administrative greed and corruption is a problem, but a much bigger one is the School to Prison Pipelinethat's decimating an entire generation of students. Is anyone even fazed anymore by stories of ludicrous expulsions and arbitrary punishments so excessive the police refuse to cooperate? It's become routine to the point of banality to hear about yet another honor roll student expelled and ruined by some arbitrary rule or another.

Everything about our school system from start to finish rewards one thing: Accepting and regurgitating what you are given along with blind obedience to capricious exercises of authority.

 

The scary part is how so many states want to tie teachers salaries to the results of the tests.
So you can be dealing with these horribly designed tests after teaching your kids to love reading or having built their math skills back up after years of neglect and you next raise depends on how your kids do.
Is it any surprise that teachers teach to the test?

 

I didn't see any ad-hominem in Snowy's response, just a request for some documentation to back up what you're saying. If anything, I think you took her response a little too personally. But then, that's my belief, take it or leave it.

You won't find any argument from me on this. From what I remember (and from what some of my parent friends tell me), things are only being taught one way, instead of embracing the different methods that people learn.
For example, most of my schooling even well into college was verbal, with only a little bit of other types sprinkled in. I, for instance, am extremely physical and also very aural in my learning; I actually have to do the thing, physically, to prove to myself that it works (and sometimes normal run-of-the-mill homework assignments aren't enough to get me to fully wrap my head around the concept). Sometimes, during test taking, you'll see me flicking my pencil around to a beat; that's because I've taught myself a musical mnemonic to remember a certain method of doing things.
Also, just because we're spending the most doesn't mean we're spending the wisest. It's not really a secret that the US (in parts and as a whole) tends to have weird motives in terms of how we spend our money.

I've not heard any of these such stories, or rather, I can't think of any offhand, honors students being punished for no good reasons (unless they did something to warrant them). Any chance you can link me to some examples of such instances?

 

My wife worked in one of those schools that had so many of the problems you talk about.
I'd say corruption on the part of administration is a lot worse than you realize with plum jobs being created for friends, mayors for life appointing school boards who hire school administrators who somehow manage to retire with two pensions, money for extracurricular activities disappearing into the system and teachers getting fired when they bring up that fact.
That's the stuff I have been directly involved while Jadzia was doing union work, there is so much more.

As for decimating the generation of students the problems you are talking about have been around for a long time.
Back in the day they just kicked the kids out when they turned sixteen and didn't think twice about it.
Hell, if you read part of the Little House on the Prairie books in Farmer Boy he talks about the boys from the wrong side of the tracks who routinely beat up their teachers and scare them away (until one of them uses a bullwhip, no ideas now snowy).

The kids who do graduate actually do pretty well.
Many of them get jobs working at the hospitals or in other lower middle class jobs and start working towards the dream.
It's the kids who get walked over, left behind and abused.
And you know why that is?

It's not the school.
They're coming to school hungry.
They have health issues that keep them from concentrating, need glasses that they don't have, have mental health issues, or have parents with the same.
We don't have support systems for these people and there are a bunch of people who have decided to write them off.
My wife bought food, tampons, and school supplies out of her own paycheck.
She also would try a dozen different methods of teaching in one class to get through to them.
The schools have lunch programs and often the kids would come to my wife's class after school because they would rather be there than at home because their parent worked three jobs to pay the bills.

So if you want to badmouth the schools try to keep in mind there are a lot of people working their asses off to make them a good place for the kids.
In some cases they are the one safe place those kids have and they are a chance of the future.

 

I get that you're personally involved here but people like your wife and, yes, even snowy are like finding a clean snowcone in a cesspit.

I barely need more than one hand to count the number of teachers I had in K-12 that DIDN'T abuse me or anyone else they felt like yanking around that day. There's a reason that an emergency room doctor once asked my mother at 12am whether a horse had stepped on my hand, and as far as I know he still teaches PhysEd at the local elementary school. I've been smacked in the face, gut punched, dropkicked, bodyslammed into concrete hard enough to nearly get a concussion, pistol whipped with a radio, starved, almost sent to the hospital with a heat stroke, and had a limb permanently crippled... and that's just the physical abuse and just what was directly done to me with their own hands. We're not even getting into shit like being told I deserved an attempted rape because I "antagonized" my classmates (by being the wrong race after 9/11). If you expand it to include defending and helping other people the list balloons to include enough violence that the school district was forced to hire someone to follow me around as a bodyguard full time. A position which, predictably, quickly went from personal bodyguard to private bully.

My K-12 education took me through three different states on opposide sides of the country, it was the same pattern everywhere. The abuse of power purely for the sake of being able to do so. Power for power's sake, blood for blood's sake... or sometimes because I'm a "sand nigger", a "kike", a "murdering jew".

There mey be "a lot" of people trying to do good, maybe where you are, but there's at least an order of magnitude more gleefully working towards the opposite end. For every teacher like your wife, snowy, or the six teachers who treated me like a human being there's (in my experience literally) ten times as many or more who should be in prison. You want proof? I'll show you before/after's of my handwriting, if you're ever in Orlando you can hold my hand and see for yourself how damaged it is internally compared to the other... and that's AFTER over a decade of hard work to get where I am today. I might even still have xrays of it, police reports and pictures of some of the beatings.


Our school system is inherently corrupt, the very nature of Zero Tolerance combined with our rabidly authoritarian K-12 culture inherently attracts those sick minds diseased by greed and violence, and all the while it works ceaselessly to churn out people who think that kind of culture is normal. People who don't question or stand up to authority, who believe power is its own justification, people who genuinely do not understand the absurdity of charging the victim of an attack with violating the rules because once you get strangled by it you're then in "possession" of a weapon. Right now a child is being charged with felony wiretapping because he recorded proof of being bullied after the school refused to do anything without proof.

That's what's killing our schools. All of the tests and curriculums are just handout contracts to pad the profit margins of the corporations selling the material or test. They're a side effect.

 

I'm sorry to hear about the shit you've had to go through.
It sound terrible and I can certainly see why you would have negative feeling about the school system.
I really wonder where the hell the administration or DFYS (or whatever the mish-mash of letters the children's public services agency in your area), was during all this.

The kids my wife taught knew full well they could get rid of a teacher just by saying one touched them wrong and tried on a couple of occasions.
Other kids had to suffer while teachers were paid to take three month vacations while the investigations went on only to have the teacher finally be exonerated because the kid was lying.
I know all this because my wife was the union rep and I know the teachers personally.

My wife's solution when kids threatened her was to pull out her phone with the DFYS on speed dial and say "Here you go, give them a call. I could use a vacation."
They never messed with her.
But she called out a security guard who shoved a kid down so quick he was out of there in an hour.
So I'm a little surprised that it happened these days.

When I went to school it was a different matter.
I had long hair, John Lennon glasses and was way too smart for my own good.
The high school I went to was made up of rural farm kids also known as goat ropers.
They liked to call me faggot and commie.
I got beat up a lot and was told by the teachers and administrators that if I would just try to fit in better it wouldn't be a problem.
One time when they were trying to cut my hair, I say the football coach watching.

Like the man who was beat up by black kids so he's convinced that all black people are bad, your experiences with the school system are not to be minimized but neither are they proof that the whole system is falling apart.
This country was made great by the public school system.
There was a reason Franklin believed in it so strongly and it has made a huge difference.
It needs a lot of work but it should not be shitcanned.
It needs to be treated with respect and the systemic problems of poverty around the public schools need to be addressed so we can be a strong nation again.

 

Shadowex3, you posted a brief and bitter comment that needed some explaining and examples.

Which Snowy pointed out.

Which you subsequently provided.

Lighten up, you weren't being attacked.

FWIW, I'm the product of a large public school system. To say that my K-12 education was lacking and the overall experience sucked would be a major understatement.