Whats wrong with Education these days..
 

Well this is something that has been on my mind for awhile. My husbands little sister came home from school with a sheet of paper that had all her assignments listed for the whole year ( this was right before her summer vacation). It was to show the parents what needs to be turned in. I couldn't believe it. She had over 100 assignments and about 30 were missing. The rest had the score of less then 30 out of 100. I remember when I was in grade school and less then 50 was a failure and there was no second chance, only make up work. I even remember getting an incomplete. Well anyways she moved on to the 6th grade. I asked her mom what this was about and she said that even in high school kids no longer got held back for not doing anything. She told me that after your last year in high school you take a test and you either pass or fail.

This was not at all how it was when I was in school. Is this how it is everywhere now a days? Or does it depend in the school district? Now I know that parents are responsible for there kids education and need to help them learn. But what about the teachers, why are the standards so low now? Maybe I have just been misinformed. I don't know anymore.

And so it is with the SAT's as well as the GED diploma. You can be a bright kiddo but really all school is now is a socializing experiment preparing you for adulthood. As long as you don't eat or sleep the last couple of weeks before taking the SAT, a bit of common sense will ensure you pass it.

Public schools stopped being about education at the same time standardized tests started being the yardstick by which we judge our public schools.







Also, the SAT isn't P/F. At least not the last time I took it.

I think it's a cultural thing too.
In Highschool, it's more cool to play guitar in a band than it is to get A's in calc (and we all know how much cool counts in HS :) ).

Teachers don't care, because they don't get paid well enough to...

Parents don't care, because teachers don't care...

Kids don't care, because their parents don't, and most of them are on drugs, anyhow...

Our school system is fucked, man.

those who can, do. those who can't, teach. teaching doesn't pay well, so the really good ones do other stuff, leaving those who aren't all that brilliant to hang out and teach kids.

also, if you have a class of 30 kids, and 5 of them fail, it looks very very bad for you, it shows you can't teach (even if you have tried and it's the kid's personal reasons that keep him from learning) so you sweep the bad marks under the rug and pass him on. its all about results, not the truth.

no child left behind. egalitarianism. since not everyone can increase their standards, they lower the standards so everyone can meet them.

so you are a young teacher who is gonna go out there and educate the world! you find out you are dealing with parents who are too busy or fucked up with their own shitty lives or just don't care, so you get no help from them. you got kids coming from fucked up homes, education boards breathing down your neck for results, you are not paid all that well, there are other factors involved, it all just breeds apathy. you do what you can but really, why bother to try hard, its just a waste of time.

everyone figures it's futile and not worth the hassle, and if you tell someone they fail you get in trouble for it and have to deal with irate parents etc. many many factors, and so the system collapses, and now school is a place for kids to hang out for a few hours of the day.

Or you have limited time and resources and you decide not to waste them on kids who are being difficult. Why spend your time and effort getting an F student to get a slightly higher F when you can instead get several B students to become A students? It's not always a reluctance to try hard, or a sign that you don't care; sometimes it's an effort to spend your resources where they'll do the most good. And some students, whether becuase of parents or culture or genetics or whatever else, will fail no matter what a teacher does.

Hey, thanks man.

I don't think that's it at all. There are a number of brilliant people out there who put other opportunities aside to spend their lives in a classroom. I consider myself fortunate to have had some of them as teachers. You are right in that the low pay of the profession is discouraging to some. Another major issue in regard to staffing is high teacher turnover. Young teachers are burning out across the United States at an astounding rate, largely because many teaching colleges fail to adequately prepare new teachers for the reality of a classroom in an American public school, and many schools fail to pair young teachers up with a master teacher mentor.

There are a number of problems with the education system in the United States today. One of the major ones is accountability. No Child Left Behind attempts to make schools accountable to a national standard, but the way it goes about it is abysmal; taking funding away from a school that's failing is ridiculous. It attempts to address the issue presented in the OP of social promotion, but it doesn't work out well in practice.

Part of it is that we've failed to teach students how to be accountable. We can address this in the early years by making sure that students are able to deal with routines, both at home and at school, and are successful in creating their own personal routines. We can educate parents so that they encourage positive scholastic habits in their children. We can work with children so that they are better able to focus and develop an inner locus of control, as well as a sense of self-efficacy in the classroom and motivation by intrinsic benefits. However, this takes more staffing that we currently provide, especially in the early years. 32 states fail to meet NAEYC guidelines for staffing ratios in early childhood education.

Almost all of the problems that crop up later on in school could be prevent with better early childhood education and better parental education. Parents need to be empowered to hold their children accountable for schoolwork, to reinforce positive scholastic behaviors, and to know how to effectively use positive discipline to address problems.

All of these things are barely the tip of the iceberg. There are more problems than that, but the school system is like an onion--one layer after another: the federal government, the state, the local area/municipality, the school district, the school itself, the classroom. All of these things affect each situation, and they all do so in a unique context and combination of factors.

This is a scapegoat...

Any kid is capable of succeeding. Those super moldable minds and all... To say some children will fail no matter what demonstrates the problem with our education system, the unwillingness of the schools to find a way to interact with all students on the level they need it.

I know this isn't in whole the teachers' fault, or even the school system's. It's the lack of proper governmental funding, which is a complete joke, because our shitty government is just going to get shittier as they continue to not educate properly...

I digress. The ironies of our government is a whole 'nother tale...

The point is, more funding leads to more and better paid teachers. This leads to smaller class sizes with teachers that give a fuck running them. This leads to interaction with every student, and that's the goal, because then we won't have to use "some children are just born incapable dolts" as an excuse...

The sad part is, so many people see this as so far-fetched. It's not. It's quite easy, actually; take some funding from somewhere else and give it to education!

Really, what the hell is more important than education?

Money is a scapegoat. Other countries who outperform us spend less than us per student.

The important part about money is at 6:55 but the whole video is worth a watch, although long at 40 minutes.

Stupid in America

I think you missed my point - when a large array of forces come to bear on a student in such a way as to discourage him from succeeding, a good teacher (or even a group of good teachers) may lack the capacity to overcome this influence. A teacher can't always turn a shitty parent into a good parent, or change a community's values, or convince the government to increase funding, or remove an extra chromosome. They're teachers, not social engineers, and it doesn't make sense to require them to sacrifice the quality of their teaching to make changes that are the responsibility of parents and community leaders.

I reread your post, and, you're right, I did miss your point a bit. I kind of jumped on the one line, and I apologize for calling you out in the manner I did, but my point is that children do need more one-on-one interaction. That's up to the teachers to provide.

I only watched about ten minutes of the video you posted. I plan on finishing it later, though, as it has sparked my interest.

I don't think money is necessarily a scapegoat, but it isn't being used properly by the administration. The money needs to be used directly towards smaller class sizes and more resources for the students, not new buildings that aren't even designed for student use.

Try teaching sometime and tell me it's fucking easy. This is so beyond insulting....:mad:

What the fuck do you know about teaching? Or doing, for that matter?

I'm sorry to inform you but everything you know came from a god damn teacher. Maybe not in a classroom, but they (presumably) educated you whether you believe it or not.

How about "Those who can, do. Those who CARE, teach." Get off your high fucking horse for one minute and you'll see that teaching ain't easy.

Teaching doesn't pay much, but I don't think it is fair to say that this means people with not many options teach. My younger sister is going to college to become a teacher. Now my sister is an artist. She draws the most amazing pictures you could ever see. She is so talented. My parents think that she is wasting her talent on wanting to become a teacher. My sister is the kindest person you could ever meet and all she has ever wanted was to make a difference. And she believes becoming a teacher is how she can do that. Now I do think education is lacking these days, but we cant just blame the teachers. Its the budget and also parents need to participate and make sure there kids are getting the most out of there education.

i taught formally in a schoolhouse for two years. i trained people for 15 years, which, oddly enough, is teaching. so please, shut the fuck up. i've done shit you only read about. you have no idea what i've seen, done, lived. have you even been outside of the country? let me guess, you went to europe or some other clean safe "foreign" country where you had to "rough" it. so please, go get insulted somewhere else. i said it before, i'll say it again. how about you just don't read anything i post. it's better for you.

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-+-{Important TFP Staff Message}-+- I highly recommend taking things down a few notches, gentlemen.

I think the biggest problem with education is a loss of accountability at all levels.

Teachers (particularly those in unions or tenured) aren't accountable to anyone if they pass along a failing student, or give a student answers to 'help' them pass. Nobody checks to see if the kid can actually do at the work, the administrators look at the numbers, see very few kids failing, the kids who are usually doing well continue to do well and everything is hunky dory, it doesn't matter that the kid can't actually do the work as long as the paperwork checks out.

The administrators aren't held accountable when teachers don't do their jobs, again, so long as the paperwork checks out. As long as the school is scoring proficiently on the standards tests and has a reasonable graduation rate - nobody bothers to check to see if those students should really be graduating. (I realize the standardized tests are supposed to assure us of adequate quality of graduates, but this isn't the place for the do/do not argument).

The students aren't held accountable by the school because it doesn't matter to the school if the student can actually do what he's supposed to, it only matters that the school can produce a paper that says s/he can.

The teachers are also in a losing position because they cannot hold students accountable. They have less power over their classrooms than ever before. And if they exercise the one power they do have - grades - and fail a bunch of students it only makes them look like a poor teacher, when it could just be they have a classroom full of assholes (in my high school I'm pretty sure this is how they sorted the classes).

And the reason there isn't any accountability is because the state and federal education boards are too busy playing politics to actually get down to brass tacks and do something about it - because actually getting off your ass and doing something might make you look bad on teevee.

And we as a voting body seem to have such a short memory that we can't seem to boot these worthless do nothing politicians out on their asses when they fail to accomplish even a single item on the agenda of the platform they ran on.


Ok, sorry, I was just ranting there...moving on.


Anyway, the idea behind generating some competition within the realm of education (particularly between schools, in the form of say money directly attached to the student) is then the accountability problem takes care of itself. It's built into the system - if a school is shitty, has bad teachers and lazy administrators then nobody or very few people will send their kids there. Eventually the school closes from a lack of funding and all those lousy employees are out of work, like they ought to be.

I apologize for this post in advance. I was never particularly articulate to begin with and I have been drinking.


I don't think that the problem with the educational system is teachers, funding, standardized testing, etc. And to say that "Those can't, teach" is akin to saying that those serving as police and military are just a bunch of knuckle-dragging idiots who had no other options in life.

I believe that the problem is a general feeling of apathy and entitlement on the part of both students and parents. Too many parents think that their kids academic development is something that school is solely responsible for - they don't take an active part in overseeing their childs education until he/she's in danger of not graduating. The parents then blame the system rather than hold their kids responsible for their grades. If little Johnny is in danger of failing the 9th grade because he dicked around in class and didnt do his homework, it's the schools fault for not accommodating his "special needs".

On that same note, by not holding kids responsible for their failures, parents are setting their kids up for failure by instilling a sense of entitlement. Little Johnny sees that he can fuck around in class and Mommy and Daddy will come to his rescue because, Goddammit, he is a beautiful and unique snowflake!

It's easy to place the blame on apathetic parents, children and educators but all three are mere symptoms of the fact that education as a whole isn't an important enough issue to Americans and as a result has deteriorated at all levels. We're accustomed to cases of high school students who ride the social promotion train all the way to graduation and do so lacking in basic skills but I'm sure that many of the forum members who hold hiring positions can attest to being similarly unconvinced by undergrad degree holding applicants.

I see it largely as a racket and an indoctrination apparatus that not only fails children and adults alike but ensures that they develop into Good Americans - compliant, apathetic and sporting a fair amount of debt. There really aren't any simple solutions because it isn't a simple problem but I'm starting here:

Teacher rage


/spectate

Parents are the main problem. Ultimate responsibility for raising and educating children is the parents. Don't blame crappy teachers ( they are crappy by the way ). If you want your kids to be able to read, teach them to read. My daughter was reading at 3, at a level above what I saw her classmates had in first grade. I was a working dad, and I read to her every chance I got, and even some math. We need to value education more as a society.

Wow, I find myself so mad about our educational system, that I can't think straight enough to continue...... I'm going to go curse now

I agree with this.
Children with parents who take their education seriously will be more highly educated. Those parents will encourage critical thinking in daily life, teaching outside of the classroom and encouraging a love for learning. When those parents feel their command of the language or their understanding of science, mathematics, or art is not sufficient, they will find a tutor or will make the effort to hunt down free tutoring services. A parent who is focused on the education of their children will never assume that their child is learning everything they need from their schoolteachers.

Our failing education system is an extension of the failure of the American family. Over-burdened, hard-working parents who do not find time for their children are more to blame than the school system itself.

If parents were to volunteer their time en masse to help in the classrooms of failing schools, you would see a near-immediate turn around. Class size wouldn't matter as much in elementary education if you could break it down into small focus groups led by volunteers. High schoolers wouldn't be as ill-behaved if they had more volunteer parents at work as hall monitors or willing to tutor those who need more individual attention.

The special education system is bogged down by students who are not physically or mentally disabled but rather "emotionally disturbed" due to chaos at home. They are dealing with post-traumatic stress from a sibling's gang-related death, or they're dealing with the emotional scarring of parental abuse.

We need to remove poor instructors, yes.
But we need to train our instructors to deal with the war-zone that is our public education system.

I actually thought this was a great post. I've seen this happen before. Parent had a shitfit because their daughter was failing Spanish, administrator told her that her daughter was failing Spanish because she had failed to turn in any of the work and spent most of her Spanish class socializing, parent then withdrew her daughter and sent her to a private Christian school.

There's not much talk here about the cultural or social values of education in America. It's my understanding that what's largely at play is a kind of contempt/jealousy amongst peers for those who are intelligent or do well or work hard in public education.

This isn't anything new on it's own, but it seems that perhaps the problem has gotten worse. How is the ideal student viewed by others around him or her? An avid reader, always doing homework, always getting As, always keen for a challenge, always challenging others, etc. These are the students who are often ridiculed or otherwise sabotaged. It isn't "cool" to be that kind of student. School is more of a social game or social hangout than it is a place to educate oneself. A lot of that goes on here in Canada too. Even at the goddamn university level.

Does it shock you that in other parts of the world, the opposite is true? I mentioned in another thread that there are places in India where the "ideal" student is the cool one. Those who excel, work hard, and go places in the education system are sometimes idolized. They are viewed as someone who is going places in life. Maybe even to America to make their fortune. They look at these students as something to aspire to. They are role models. They are respected.

This is a huge difference and has a profound impact on the culture of education. I'm willing to bet the top schools in America are ones that have a similar culture to the one I described in India. Whether they instill respect for accomplishment or an environment of competition, either way, it is far more conducive to learning than what we see in the average school across the nation. I'm sure funding is another important matter, but sometimes the two go hand in hand.

This is a huge issue, I agree. I had not thought of it in relation to the present argument. My brother was ridiculed constantly, then beaten senseless in junior high because he was a good student. After that experience, he made it a point to only ever get a C. He would skip assignments or purposefully fail a paper - anything he could do to get that perfectly calculated C. He wasn't beaten up again, but he also didn't continue on to college.

Oh, no doubt, Baraka. We often discuss many of the things you brought up in my education classes. Japanese schools are frequently mentioned as a counterpoint to American schools; this term I have a Japanese lady in two of my classes who has been a great resource in illustrating cultural differences between the two educational systems.

The cultural value of education has an enormous impact on how education is treated in the United States. As much as we love to spout off about education as a great equalizer, our schools are failing to produce results consistent with that ideal because we don't value them and don't fund/staff/supply them properly. I think a large part of it has to do with a larger societal contempt for those that are "too intelligent." Look at our last few elections--the more cerebral candidates got lambasted for being so--even Obama.

I've learned to thumb my nose at that idea, but it's still there. We should celebrate intelligence, not despise it, and we should support an educational system that promotes intelligent, rational, and critical thought. Unfortunately, it seems to me that we're scared of all of those things.

Grade A Truth.

...

How many Columbines does it take for the US to figure out the "law of the jungle" zoo culture that is public education needs to be given a serious enema?

Snowy, why don't they promote it? Reward the kids with good grades and even go as far as giving them ridiculous amounts of recognition/appreciation? If we do this and THEN cut down on it once the others start performing accordingly perhaps the system might get a response?

If we were to protect the good kids from the poisonous shit heads who like GG illustrated earlier perhaps that might actually work?

Factor in real life issues. Such as working ... you only get paid bonuses if you exceed your goals. If you perform just the right amount to meet deadlines and make up what you need to not be fired, that doesnt help at all. Meeting as well as presenting challenges is what gets you paid in real life, why has this not been applied to kids in school?

Pretty much all the blame comes back to the parents, hands down, no question about it. Teachers may decide whats taught in the short term, but parents have always decided how things are going to be in the long term as well as being the core movement behind the funding.

That is what I believe too. Something that I needed to mention when I started this thread is that my husbands parents are not involved in there kids education, well not as much as they need to be. The problem is that parents only step up when it is an issue and by then they show there kids that it is ok to mess up, my parents will fix it. That is the wrong message.

This is what I think it all comes down to. Even if there is not that much funding for education, in the end it is the parents that need to step up. In the past the parents were it when it came to education. I'm not saying that people should take there kids out of school and teach them yourselves, I'm just saying that parents need to have an active roll in there kids education and not just when they really need it, all the time.

I know how to read and I love reading, but knowing how to do something does not immediately give you the skills to teach someone else to do it.

My kids love stories/books and my eldest (who is 5) can recognise all his letters, but recognising letters doesn't necessarily mean he knows the sounds they all make, nor the sounds of each when used in conjunction with others.

By your standards I'm a failed parent.

However, I do agree parents have a huge role to play in education - instilling values and skills (e.g. respecting others, listening etc.) is much more easily accomplished at home.

I'm getting a bit weary of the "underpaid" cliche when it comes to teachers.

My nephew just got a $40,000 per year job teaching high school his first year out of college. He has the whole summer off, every holiday imaginable, and the week between Christmas and New Years. Extrapolating that to a full 12-month year; he's making the equivalent of $53,333 annually. His first year out of college. In what universe is that 'underpaid?'

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of the way, I'll chime in with everyone else - parents need to make sure their kids are keeping up in class; teachers need to teach what's in the textbooks, not what's on the standardized tests; kids need to realize that school is for learning; it's not the weekday hangout.

I'm not a teacher, and I could be wrong here, but, last i heard, the average public school teacher in Utah makes around $18K a year...

That's poverty.

What your nephew was offered as a starting salary is nice, I'll give you that. However, the thing about summers in the sun, holidays, and Christmas breaks is often overrated. Most teachers work far more overtime than the average worker during the school year, and so it's a bit of a wash. My SO is an elementary school teacher. She's a type-A personality, lots of energy, what have you...but by the end of each term, she's a complete zombie. It takes her about a week or two of being off before she feels normal again.

So $40,000 is $40,000.

inBoil:

I think you have sized it up correctly. Now, what can we do about it?

Considering the number of hours your nephew will put in outside of the classroom, that's really not that much. Your nephew is better paid for a first year teacher than most places in the United States, but he will still only be making about $21/hr (before taxes) for someone with a college degree. Add in the ongoing cost of education--because every state has continuing education requirements for teachers that a lot of districts no longer pay for--and that number goes down. You have to consider his foregone wages as well--teaching does not pay well for the level of education it requires; in a different field, the pay may be better for a similar level of education.

By the way, I got these numbers with some help from my dad, who is a high school principal with 27 years of experience, and knows the ins and outs of teacher contracts and compensation.

there are structural problems that we, collectively, don't want to face. like the fact that educational funding is tied to local property taxes, which makes it an inevitable mirror of the class order; that the internal organization of school systems reproduces an outmoded class model; the ongoing reactionary political climate and it's effects on parents; inadequate funding or education as a whole which follows from a system-level choice to divert enormous resources into military expenditures rather than into creating and maintaining anything remotely like an equitable model of cultural distribution; a top-down political system that conceals it's nature by evacuating terms like democracy of any content, a fact that is nowhere more obvious than in education, which should be producing people capable of critical judgment as fundamental to a democratic polity, but instead runs away from this, preferring to imprint passivity and obedience because in the immediate run it's safer.

these follow from basically fucked up priorities which in turn follow from a basically fucked up view of the world, of politics and of people--particularly the latter. if you view people as a management problem and not as the center of what makes a system viable, you are producing your own collapse.

i think people focus too much on effects, on little things and pseudo-solutions tied to them.
greasing the wheel of implosion by being unable to think beyond what they're told the problems are.
yay.

The funding model you mention is not universal. In Oregon, the money for education is collected into one big kitty and then doled out to districts on a per student basis. Supposedly this makes the system more equal. Unfortunately, it hasn't really worked out that way in practice, because special education funding takes a huge slice out of everyone's per student dollar amount, regardless of whether the student is special ed or not.

My mom's friend's son is a high school teacher. He started out as a substitute teacher for 2 years before becoming a full time teacher. He would tell me awful stories on how he had to deal with disrespectful kids at times when he was a sub and the situation only became worst when he became full time. The low pay didn't help with the fact he had to deal with high school kids who just refuse to cooperate. Looking back, I was a good kid in high school but I had friends who were just total assholes to anyone in authority. The summer holidays would not come close to making up for the low pay and respect that a teacher has to endure in the public school system.

Does anyone know is the grass greener on the other side (private school wise)?