Hektore

Some friends of mine and I were talking tonight about the structure of public schools. We felt pretty uniformly that the public schools we attended did not allow us excel as much as we could have because they were too preoccupied with teaching to the middle or lower third of the class so that every one could keep up. I know many other people feel that this is one of the major problems with public schools in the US and that this keeps our students behind other nations in terms of academic performance during high school years.

In our discussion about ways to solve the problem I came up with an idea that some of my friends thought was a pretty good idea. Radical restructuring of the school system such that the individual students control the pace of their learning. What we had envisioned is a school were the students work by themselves on the material they need to learn and the teachers would be there only as a resource. Rather than having a teacher lecture every day on topics, they would be there to answer questions and clarify and perhaps lecture at the students request. Then, instead of setting the bar at the level of the middle or bottom half of the class, the proficiency is set higher and you must achieve it to move on.

What varies in this system rather than performance is time. At the end of every marking period you would take a subject proficiency exam. When you score satisfactorily you can move on. At the end of their coursework there would be a final exam ensuring they had retained the knowledge sufficiently, if you pass that at the sufficient level then you can graduate. If you don't pass it you can be remediated in the subject you did poorly and retry.

This way, rather than have the students who are able to learn quickly stagnate and feel unchallenged, the truly gifted students can truly excel. Some may be able to finish their high school diploma's in a year or two and be ready to move on to higher education. I know this system will led itself to discipline and supervision problems, but these could be fixed by having some schools structured this way and other schools structured in the traditional way. If you are not mature enough to behave in a school where you police yourself you stay in the traditional system. There is a similar system now where youth who are trouble makers can be removed from the general public schools and be made to attend special schools.

I realize this will not work at all levels, but we were primarily concerned with the high school level (grades 9-12). Personally, I think it's a great idea (of course I would, it is my idea). This allows the students who want to, to truly challenge themselves, it may allow some high schools to teach more advanced subjects (due to the rate at which students can advance to them). I think would stop the vast majority of public schools who are willing to lower the standard to make sure that nobody is left too far behind. Most importantly, it would force students to be better students, which is what we are really after in the end anyway. I would love to have some feedback from the TFP on how they feel about the idea.

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Lady Sage

I would be willing to give it a go as long as one aspect of education I have been complaining about for ages is addressed as well.

Students need life skill classes. Teach them how to balance a check book, budget, apply for credit, buy a house, basic car maintenance... ect.

Book learning is great and can benefit a child/adult greatly. The world is a scary place and they need to learn the above so they cant be taken advantage of so easily and get lost in the fray as an adult.

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Supple Cow

My crappy public high school had that as a requirement in senior year... well, the balancing the checkbook part anyway. I'm pretty sure a lot of high school teachers don't even know how to do most of those other things you mention. And I'm pretty sure the 3/4 of my class who didn't speak English probably didn't benefit from it as much as I did.

Carno

^ Those things are the responsibility of the parents, not the school.

shakran

They tried this actually back in the early 90's. It was called Outcome Based Education and it was a miserable flop. The A students got their A's. The B students got their B's. The C students got their C's. The D and F students got to keep redoing everything until they finally memorized the test and got a C or even a B. Not only did this mean kids no longer had to actually learn material, but it mean the average and above average students were cheated because they were no longer competative against the D and F students since the final grade did not indicate whether you took the test 1 or 100 times.

What we really need to do is get away from this confounded notion that all children must achieve the same success. If a get gets an F, then he gets a damn F. Unless extenuating circumstances are involved (the teacher didn't actually teach the material, or the scantron sheet was keyed wrong) then the F should stay. Period. That's what he earned. If you let him redo the test then you are slashing the competitive advantage earned by the kid who did the work and got the A the first time around. That's not fair to the responsible / smart ones.

It's up to the teacher to teach and teach well. It's up to the student to learn it. If you hold his hand through the whole damn thing then he'll get out in the real world and wonder why he keeps getting fired instead of being given a 300th chance.

Lady Sage

If the parents have never bought a house and have no clue they should force their children to not know how? My parents may not have been mechanics, how are they supposed to teach me to change a tire?

We pay schools to teach our children things so that they can excell above and beyond what we the parents know. So if a parent is ignorant of something the child should be forced to remain ignorant as well.

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spectre

This would never have worked for me in high school. I was barely motivated then to do the work with a rigid structure in place. If it had been left to me like that, I would've flunked out. Now that I'm in college, it's different, I can handle that kind of responsibility and would do well with it.

I think what the schools need is to ensure that kids don't get promoted past their current grade unless they actually pass the class to some sort of academic standard. Moving kids up in the system without them understanding the material only lets these kids down more and guarantees that they will continue to fail throughout their lives. As you allow these kids to move to the next grade without knowing the material, you're ensuring that they will never learn it and that the kids around will suffer as they learn less because they're forced to wait around for kids who shouldn't have moved up now hold them back. It's an endless vicious circle that benefits no one and hurts everyone.

And I agree, there should be life skills classes that are taught.

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Randerolf

An interesting idea, Hek. There's a lot of complaining about schools, but not a lot of talk about new solutions.

Lady Sage, whats the best way to learn life skills that your parents didn't give you?

Gilda

The system you describe is similar to the one used at Sarah Lawrence and a few other liberal arts colleges and universities. There's one lecture a week, but most of the instruction is done in one-on-one meetings with students, who in turn take a strong hand in guiding where they want their education to go.

It's a remarkably effective way to teach a liberal arts curriculum. However, it requires a high level of motivation and dedication from the students, a very small teacher-to-student ratio (6 or 7/1 at Sarah Lawrence), and isn't very effective at teaching the subjects that have a concrete knowledge base that requires learning certain specific skills in a specific order, like math.

Public high schools typically have 25-35 students per class. Individualizing instruction to the degree that you suggest here would require a much larger teaching staff to reduce class sizes to a manageable size.

A better approach would be to offer supplemental classes or more advanced classes to those capable of taking them, honors or AP classes in most schools. Some schools do this and do it well. Many don't have the budget or personnel.

At the school district I worked at in California, this was called Life Skills and Family Planning, and was a requirement for all 8th graders, with parents able to opt their children out if they objected. It was a combination of sex ed, consumer science (home ec), consumer math, and psychology/sociology. It was taught by a team of teachers with a coordinator. Car maintenance wasn't included, mostly because we didn't have an auto shop.

I agree with you, by the way. Kids need these skills.

First, I think you've gotten the wrong idea about outcome based education. At its heart, all it means is that what we teach should be based on what we want our students to know and be able to do when we finish the lesson. That's it. Start with the desired result, and teach to that. It makes perfect sense, a whole lot more sense than teaching without a specific goal in mind.

What you describe is a different technique called teaching to mastery, which involves reteaching the same information until its mastered at a certain level before moving on to the next one. It has its proponents and opponents, and there are situations in which it is appropriate, but applying it everywhere isn't very productive.

Think of outcome based education this way. A person is learning to fly. What are the desired outcomes? She needs to be able to operate the radio. File a flight plan. Taxi safely. Take off. Fly solo. Land safely. Those are outcomes, and the purpose of instruction is to teach so that the knowledge and skills needed for those outcomes can be demonstrated at a high enough level.

Another way to think of it is as a map--it's nothing more than planning where you want to go before you go so that you can decide the best way to get there.

Some of the ways outcome based education was initially implemented were ineffective to say the least. Sometimes the outcomes chosen were vaguely defined or poorly chosen, and there was a bloat that occurred very quickly, with teachers and students being responsible for more and more every year, resulting in less and less depth for anything covered.

It hasn't, however, gone away. Nearly every state has a statewide curriculum that is defined by objectives (ie, outcomes) that schools are required to address.

It's not a bad idea, it's the execution that often leaves something to be desired.

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Bill O'Rights

How is it even possible to teach without a specific goal in mind? Now, I'm certainly not the brightest bulb in the box, but even I can determine that that concept is doomed to failure before it begins. I don't even tie my shoes without a specific goal in mind.
I should hope that the progenitor of that plan (or lack of a plan) was formally stripped of his/her teaching credentials in a public ceremony.

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"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

Gilda

It wasn't so much that there were no goals, it's that they came bottom up instead of top down in the planning stages.

In other words, I might assign an essay to my students, grade it, mark errors, and return it to the student. I might have them learn to diagram sentences with the goal being to learn how to diagram sentences. The assignment becomes the goal. The students are going to learn something, but not as much as they could.

Now, instead, I might look at my goals and see being able to write clearly, with good paragraph formation, clear transitions, using standard spelling and sentence structure, editing and proofreading to improve. I take this and I start designing lessons around meeting these goals, and in doing so, I realize that there is no outcome that benefits from sentence diagramming, so I don't have to use valuable class time on that.

In social studies or in studying a novel, the bottom up approach was even worse. A teacher would teach a unit on, say, the Civil War, with the goal being to learn about the civil war, and decide when it was test time what needed to be on the test as she reviewed the material. In a goal oriented approach, you'd start with a list of specific things you'd want students to know about the Civil War, such as being able to identify the economic and cultural factors that led to the start of the war. In a novel, let's say Holes, an outcome might be for the students to be able to draw parallels between the three storylines presented and explain how they're connected to each other.

It's a difference between "We're going to study the Civil War and have a test and there are some cool, fun projects we can do" and "Students need to be able to demonstrate knowledge of X, Y, and Z concerning the Civil War and this is how they're going to do that" and then planning activities and instruction around that outcome. When done right, it focuses instruction on the most important goals and avoids wasting time on those that aren't as important, and allows the teacher to emphasize those points from the very beginning to maximize the students' later performance.

Teaching to the test isn't a bad thing, it's actually a very efficient teaching strategy if the test is a good one.

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Ch'i

I've never understood why schools never teach teenagers how to properly prepare and pay taxes. It would be perfect for highschoolers.

smooth

Gilda, would one problem with "teaching to the test" be that you then concentrate on teaching factoids?

How would you formulate a lesson on the civil war that led the students to employ critical thinking skills to tease out the economic and cultural factors for themselves...or even better, to tease out that those two domains were relevant and then sift through the ramifications of that.

Would doing so encourage critical thinking skills whereas "teaching to the test" might leave them with an ability to retain information while lacking the ability to parse out the important information?

Loewen writes in Lies My Teacher Told Me that many of his students were unable to critically analyze many historical events due to the way in which they learned the facts. He attributes some of this to the mistruths given in piecemeal to students, but he doesn't place all the blame there. He also discusses the teaching format, where students read series of facts without a larger context to work those facts within.

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Lizra

This reminds me of the Montessori method......maybe it would be better to have a separate (jr/sr high) school that offered this style off teaching to those who were motivated enoughto qualify for it with good enough grades and perhaps a paper/project or two....not every student would be well served with this, but the ones who were bored out of their gourds by high school (myself) would have a new lease on teenage years.
I just wish I could afford private school for my son..... Of course, in this country....you get what you pay for.

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Grasshopper Green

There is an elementary school here that does something similar to this, and my dad has suggested that we put my son in it when he starts first grade. His cousin is in the program and is doing really well.

I took honors and AP classes in school because I was able to and did well in most of my classes. One of the best aspects of these classes was lack of disruptive kids who would hamper learning for everyone else. It's a shame that these programs aren't available in all schools.

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Brewmaniac

Your right on here most people don't even know how to cook a basic meal. So it's take out or hamburger helper or something else prepared and prepackaged, costing a small fortune. They should know how to make a whole turkey or chicken, how to cook the bones down to render a stock for soups and flavor enhancers. How to cook a pot roast so it's tender and good, how to use left over food into recreations, not to just throw away left overs. Simple things that will be remembered for a life time!

All student should learn not only cooking but home and car maintenance, first aid, CPR and winter-outdoor survival. Along with the the budget, home buying and credit management is a must!

I know it will be said that the parents should teach these things to kids and to a point they should but today things are different parents are working later they are teaching kids the things I'm preaching against like, take out and prepared foods.

If you plan a head you can cook at home quickly and afford it.

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Supple Cow

One reason I think these things ^ should be taught at home is because of what Lady Sage and Brew have already demonstrated - that the content of some life skills course depends largely on the values of the person designing it. Is some kid who is going to grow up to be a rich, important lawyer ever really going to need to know how to cook a bird? I bet that kid's parents don't think so. They are busy making sure that kid is in prep school and learning the classics, like all of Greek mythology and the Latin language. I believe knowing how to prepare taxes and cooking are important too, but I'm not sure they are essential in the day of the internet. I'm teaching myself how to do my own taxes this year and it's been a while since I left high school. I don't think my life has been significantly diminished by the fact that I didn't already know how to do it when I was 17.

Then you have to consider what else these things would mean in today's schools. If you had tried to teach that to me as a 15-year-old girl in high school, I would have screamed to high hell about the sexism inherent in that situation, because you can bet all the boys would be snickering and getting themselves sent to detention instead of learning to cook a bird, and all the well-behaved girls would be doing what has traditionally been known as her 'womanly duty' to cook a meal for man and family.

I thought that the point of taking away Home Ec was that it was reinforcing genger roles that we didn't want to adhere to anymore. Of course, my whole lifetime has existed in this world lacking Home Ec classes so I may be wrong about the reasons for it disappearing from schools. Still, that's what would have happened at my school. Even if the boys were forced to take the classes too, many of them would have found ways to get out of it. For instance, the football coach might have come to the administrators and gotten Home Ec scheduled at the end of the day when the boys usually had to leave for games. And for the ones who stayed, it would have been just another thing that they would be doing with a sideways glance at all the girls. I know we would have been hearing jokes like, "Hey, it doesn't matter if my chicken is dry, but you'd better be careful and learn this right or you'll never get a husband. I sure wouldn't marry you!" ...the kind of jokes that would put tremendous pressure on girls to behave within that traditional role again.

From what I know about the people I went to high school with, I think that would have gone further to stir the teenage sex pot than to give the teens valuable skills and a sense of self-reliance. It would just be the new way for a girl with low self-esteem to cater to boys in order to get their attention and affirmation. Just look at MTV. They'd find a way to make it cool, and 'cool' seems to mean hyper-sexualization for girls and jack-ass behavior for boys these days. I'm sure it's not just at my alma mater. Being a teenager was rough, from what I remember. It was hard enough to sort out all the different social pressures, let alone fight them and do all the best things to build self-worth the right way. In my opinion, home is a safer place to learn these things, because it would mean taking all the other boys and girls out of the equation.

(Jesus, if I ever have kids, I'm going to bone up on the right teaching skills and home school them.)

Vincentt

There is a high school program out here that is a five year high school. But, at the end of the five years the students have an associate degree.

Public schools need to help the lower end students more then the ones who are already doing well. The students who are getting A's don't need as much help as the students getting F's.

This falls on the parents, if they want the kid to do better they should send them to private school or help teach them at home.

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Carno

I would have been pissed if I had to take Home Ec or fucking Life Skills at school.

You know where I learned that shit? From my parents. My parents taught me how to exist in this world while I studied Calculus at high school. Unfortunately since there are so many shitty parents out there who don't really give a shit about their kids or even know how to properly give a shit about their kids, we have bullshit classes at school like Life Skills.

smooth

A lot of this seems really cynical, as in over the top. But I was in home ec classes (less than 15 years ago, I don't think they've disappeared yet) and they weren't like that at all. Now, perhaps it's because of a critical mass thing. While I have seen males be jackasses, they don't usually do it when they are vastly outnumbered by the females. Numbers of genders change the tone and interactions, in my experience.

Now I hear what you're saying, I just don't think that we should project what we've learned as adults onto fairly unsophisticated children. While it seems crass, the notion that males would interrogate gender roles to the extent that they would denigrate a woman's character or marriagability over it. I do agree that many boys woul get out of it, so there would a structural component that would reproduce traditional gender roles, but unless someone just had it out for a particular female, I don't think you'd hear the kind of statements you're fearing on a general level.

Probably a lot of farting and jocking about, but on the whole by the time I was in home ec I was old enough to "like" girls and being able to cook, sew, and type not only gave me easy credits but easy access! And while that's probaby going to make some gender equalists cringe, I'm going to claim my motivation was purely hormonal than social/cheauvanist And even though some of us snickered at the male cheerleaders, not 5 minutes later one of our group would say, yeah, but DUDE, seriously, I'd fucking dig it down there to be honest!

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"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

roachboy

i can see the argument for a "life skills" course.
and i also know that, thinking back on my high school self and how i was, there is no way i would have shown up for that class. ever. i would have thought the idea of it patronizing. but i was kind of a nitwit. i think everyone who looks back on themselves at 16 sees themselves at 16 as nitwits.
embarrassingly so.


geez.


i had the same question (basically) that smooth asked above.

one of the many problems with high school education is that no emphasis seems to be placed on teaching critical thinking--i have long harbored the idea that high schools really should be teaching philosophy simply because it provides the motivation for critical thinking and the tools to be able to do it--and these are transposable skills, so would have an impact on how other subjects are processed.

which is, i assume, the problem with that idea.

high schools have to perform a wide range of social reproduction tasks--they aren't in the main terribly good at them (lots of reasons for that)--so one way in which these features are balanced is by the relation to power that cuts across this level of education--schools want to be able to manage the population of the students, so it is in their internal interests to encourage a docile, passive accepting population. this has obvious political consequences--but mainly i think these have been unintended consequences of the priority high schools have to place on population management in order to function--no child left behind, however, is different in that it appears to be primarily about generating political passivity--schol funding levels are pegged to standardized test scores, so schools now teach the bloody tests--with these tests, a wide range of information is presented in the same way---history is like mathematics is like botany is like vocabulary--teaching the tests means teaching the procedures required for the tests in a wholly naturalized way--so political questions are like natural science questions--everything is processed in the same manner. the consequence of this: what is real is rational, what is is necessarily legitimate--education is now about thinking within existing rule sets rather than about them. memorization and repetition are therefore more important than being able to think critically about procedures/rules. memorization and repetition are more important than the abilities to parse information for political arguments passed off as factual, say.

the result is a vast field of mediocrity in approach and results.
it is really quite a foul piece of reactionary educational policy.
AND it is underfunded: it is obviously much more important to develop high tech ways to kill people than it is to train kids well.
AND it is a wholly anti-democratic approach to education. it will generate exactly the opposite of the kind of polity democracy in any meaningful sense requires.

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Supple Cow

You may be right on a general level, but what I described was almost exactly my own experience, though it happened in slightly different contexts (because we didn't have home ec). I am cynical about this for good reason, and if I am unable to wrap my head around how the majority of teenagers can rise above this, it is because I really don't see how this could possibly play out well. But maybe that's to be expected from a woman who was one of five girls that were targeted by boys on the football team multiple times. Getting my parents' house vandalized on multiple occasions and then seeing that somebody bought a full page ad in our yearbook with a proud picture of "the guys" about to throw eggs at something just out of the picture's scope has been scarring to some extent.

And I didn't grow up in the middle of nowhere. This happened in a Los Angeles public school just six years ago. It will take a lot more for me to not be cynical about this. If we're interested in keeping it more real around here - how do we integrate my experience into the idea of requiring cooking lessons in Life Skills 101 at today's high schools? If there were no safeguards in place for me and no authorities for me to turn to six years ago, how does adding cooking to the curriculum make this better?


This is why I think 'life skills' should be learned at home, or independently as adults. I have no problem with the idea that I am learning certain skills as I need them. We learn as we go, and the opporunities to learn are rife. That's what life is! I don't understand this view where we need to "train" teenagers as if they don't already exist in the real world, nor do I understand the suggestion that these kinds of lessons should fall on the schools to impart. Sure, maybe it's a nice idea that every graduating high school senior can cook a Thanksgiving turkey, balance a check book, change a tire and do their taxes... but isn't school were we go to learn chemistry and Shakespeare? Most parents have the resources to teach that "life" stuff when it is necessary for their kids to know it, but most parents don't have a science lab in their house, or the ability to teach their kid how to read literature critically. That's the kind of stuff teachers learn in teacher school, isn't it?

shakran

Well, that's all well and good, but when the schools turn that into "take the test as many times as you like - you can NEVER fail ANYTHING" then we're cheating the students who get it right the first time. And that, unfortunately, is precisely what the schools did.

It may be called teaching to mastery where you teach, but when I was encountering it, it was called outcome-based education.


Fine, but if a job opens up that's looking for the pilot that can learn new flying concepts the fastest, then OBE-based (or teaching to mastery-based if you prefer) flight instruction would hamper the chances of the good flight student because even though she passed all the checkrides 100% the first time, and her competition took 20 times to do it, that's not reflected in the final grade.

Bill O'Rights

Mine did...back in 1979.
It was Vocational Math. We learned to balance a checkbook, prepare tax documents, how to read and interpret the stock market report and other assorted such things.
In fact...our teacher gave us $100 immaginary dollars to invest. We had to track and chart our stock's performance. I used a significant portion of my $100 to buy Chrysler stock, much to the amusement of my classmates, before the government bailout. Once the government stepped in, the value of my "portfolio" went through the roof. Would but if that $100 had been real.

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"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

Hektore

I meant to put this into the original post, but it would be easy to have the grades reflect the time it takes you to finish. High schools in my area had pretty close to 40 week years. There are 8 marks from A+ to C (A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C) so you could have a letter grade drop every five weeks you are in the course. If it takes you all forty weeks(the whole year) to get through the course then you get a C, average. If you don't manage to pass in a year you continue the following year having 20 weeks to finish before you end up with an F. Whenever you do get through it you could get a P indicating you finished it just took you a long time, but for GPA purposes it would still be counted as an F.

Putting in a life skills class I think would be a good idea. My high school did have a required Home Ec. class but there was much more they could have added into it to make it more useful. I wasn't really aware there were schools that didn't have it at all. For us it was a graduation requirement, there was no getting out of it.

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ASU2003

I think it would be cool to have a school set up with small groups of 10 students that research topics and then give presentations to the other members. Some of the topics are assigned, some are broad topics (pick one battle in the civil war, pick one president, pick one modern technology and report on it), others are what ever interests them. You can also have debates between the groups. And the students that aren't presenting will have to come up with questions like at a press conference.

The teacher can give them advice on how to socialize and get along, how to do research, some basic information on the topic and how it is relevent to their lives.

I took Home Ec in Junior high. We cooked, baked, sewed. It didn't matter if you are rich or poor, it is good to know. You don't want to be a stupid rich person that depends on others to do everything. The school didn't teach me how to change my oil and neither did my parents. I taught myself, and I change my oil every time now. My Dad did teach me about money & taxes, but a teacher could easily bring him in and have him give an overview to the class. I would like to see child development/child pyschology classes in junior high/high school. Kids should know the basics to rising kids and to not f*&# them up. If that would get too many compliants, have the school put out a book of questions that the kids will have to ask their parents.