School or Scam
 

I'm at the verge of thinking that schools are the "Dow-Jones" of the government. Politicians invest tons of money in them (selected by general school-wide grade) so the teachers try all the harder to make students pass a test instead of making them learn for a future

examples are

>longer school period(summer school, some even have year-round school

>more programs for the gifted (actually is just increased amount of work)

>more expectations to students per year. ({to kindergarten kids} Ok, kids. today we are going to learn the planets in space.

>Etc.

I will agree with the notion that standardized testing just causes teachers to "teach the test" and screws over everyone but the lowest common denominator...

But by that same token, "more programs for the gifted" is actually a really, really good thing as far as I'm concerned. They're not just more work, or at least they weren't in the schools I went to, and they definitely enabled me to avoid sitting through any more basic arithmetic "practice tests" every year.

The pressure to get the kids to pass standardized tests is enormous. I think there is a place for these tests, but too much emphasis is being placed on them.


My biggest fear with public schools is the government treating kids as a target audience that can be sold to big businesses.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...27/lo_vv/53014

Children today are bombarded with millions of commercials as it is. School should be free of this pressure to become happy little consumers.

There is a lot to be said for the idea that that is all that public school is for anymore.

Agweed
 

In public schools nowadays, i know from experience since I'm a high school senior, kids are unknowingly taking part in a new trend of "flash learning". They learn and absorb the information just long enough to pass the test/class/quiz what have you. Then, by the next month, 70% of all the knowledge they supposedly attained is lost because they ahve no reason to keep interest in the subject. From talkin to my grandparents, back in the day they knew that they had to get as much out of their schooling as possible because they had seen what kind of road you can go down when you become just another person in the ignorant masses.
Many kids these days just want the peice of paper that says "Hey you've let the info go in one ear, stay long enough to pass, and out the other" otherwise known as the diploma/degree.
I also know from talking to many college students that all they want is to get a good job and they don't really care about what they learn.
Basically what i'm trying to say is that we need to do somthing fast in order to save these kids from failing themselves. They have the potential to be so much more, but the only motivation they have is to get the grade and end with that.

That sounds like a very dispiriting environment to try and learn in .

Well, I think the fact that they keep lowering the test standards for kids who don't bother to learn english, or attend class sucks. The government is taking Dumbing Down to an art form.... School isn't SUPPOSED to be so simple you can take a test while sleeping. You're supposed to LEARN, not be given the answers.

Sidhe

Ah ah ah! *wags his finger* No child left behind!

I don't have kids, but if the info coming from the news media is correct, public education has become a joke. Little kids are being suspended for "sexual harassment" and expelled for bringing cold medicine into a "zero-tolerance" drug-free zone. Meanwhile, preteen girls are parading their shit around like Britney and boys are wearing their pants around their ankles like someone's prison bitch. They bully each other into committing acts of violence while their teachers hand out condoms and generally spend all their time trying to keep from being sued by the so-called "parents". That is, those teachers who aren't molesting their charges. As a result, X% of high school seniors can't read at a 6th-grade level or find their hometown on a map.

Conservative pundits say public school is a liberal social experiment gone wrong, that the left isn't interested in education as much as preaching tolerance and eco-friendliness and equal grades for all kids, regardless of their performance (can't have "competition" you know).

Liberals say conservatives won't give up their blood-for-oil money for more internet workstations and decent teacher salaries. In fact, conservatives would rather see free school lunches disappear than have to cut back on Star Wars.

Who's right? Maybe all of em. All I know is, I'm home-schooling my future kids if I can't afford to send them to private school.

There is no excuse for refusal to learn. You don't wanna work your brain, then eat my dust, D-boy! :p


I mean, on the serious side, what's the point of studying your ass off if Dickie Dum-Dum is going to get a decent grade because the curve is so extreme that you could NOT take the test and pass...or because the teacher doesn't want to hurt his feelings by failing him. We're rewarding intentional stupidity and laziness.

...All this talk about how it'll damage his self-esteem if we give him a bad grade...It SHOULD. A person SHOULD feel stupid for not studying. It all comes back to responsibility for one's own actions. Those who work their asses off should be rewarded. Those who don't, shouldn't be.

So THERE. *sticks out my tongue* nyah, nyah, nyah....;)

Last Fall I tutored a 5th grade girl who was having trouble with math. One day she brought home a note which read as follows:

"Congratulations! Your scores in math have qualified you for Paradox Elementary's after school math program. You will be staying after school each Tuesday and Thursday for one hour to work on exciting math projects!"

This kid was getting an "F" in math and she knew it. She couldn't figure out what they were congratulating her for, though. That was one perplexed little girl!

And for all the after school "enrichment" she was supposedly getting, no one had figured out her basic problem - she didn't know the multiplication tables! She was a bright kid, but this lack had kept her stalled for both the 4th and 5th grade. Our education system has become a pathetic joke.

Don't try to tag on little kids, though...they don't know any better.

Admittedly, my sample size is very small, but all signs indicate that public schools are a waste of time.

At the moment I'm pulling a 3.83 or so GPA at the <a href="http://www.uoregon.edu/">University of Oregon</a>, having spent a sum total of four years (half of K, 1, 2; all of 4, 5; half of 6) in public school. The rest of the time I took courses at the community college extremely part time (maybe one a term, mostly personal-interest computer graphics stuff) or was "unschooled" (slacking off.)

Only if the government of the day is so idealogically opposed to spending money on furthering the goals of ordinary workingclass kids that schools are underfunded and disregarded.

There is a very easy way to make schools do better. Spend money on them. Pay teachers enough and pay enough of them that their morale is high. Fund the shcools heavily enough that even the poorest ofthem holds to a high standard of equipment and available tuition. Make sure enough funding is put in that the schools are not oversubscribed....It really isnt that tough

I have had this argument with a friend of mine in th states and been told that " Money has been poured into the education system and it does no good. The money gets wasted"
In that case America must have a different definition of what constitutes pouring money but because last I looked there simply wasnt the same level of funding going into state schools in the States as there is in much of Europe.

Now I dont hold up my country's schools as the way to go. We send our kids to school too early here , and we start teaching them to write before their litttle hands are fully able to manage a giant crayon, and alas we have fallen into teh trap of setting up league tables which are driving some schools into a sinkschool state whilst the better performing schools get even better, but the difference between state schools and private schools is not as vast as I imagine it is over there.

On the continent, Germany and France have better schools. But then again they spend more on their state education than either America or Britain.

Tax your people. Spend the tax on providing services including decent education for your citizenry.

It doesn't apply to little kids....little kids usually LOVE to learn.

Ssshhh!!!

Radar might hear!

There is no corellation between the amount of money spent per pupil and test results. There are dump truck loads of data to support this assertion.

The absolute worst public school system in the US, the one in our nation's capital, spends the most money per pupil. I could go on and on. Its not about teacher's salaries, its about cirriculum, pitiful textbooks, sorry-ass parents, ill-conceived psychology, political correctness and a eggregious misstatetement of the goal of education.

Our school system together with our cultural climate has taken away our children's natural yearning to learn. And our school system's answer is to substitute the conveyance of information for the process of "education." Education, it seems to me, has been reduced to so many topical sound bytes some of which may appear on the standardized test that determines who is "smart enough" to advance to the next level of educational sound bytes.

Hey! Don't be hatin' on my alma mater! It wasn't that good, but I doubt it's the worst. My brother's a teacher in NYC, and my sister's a senior in DCPS, and things sound much grimmer up in New York.

Of course, with the new "No child left behind" travesty, the best high school in DC could be closed because their attendance isn't high enough. Not enrollment - attendance.

Actually, I think the best thing for education might be another draft - some of the best teachers I had became teachers to avoid the Vietnam War.

I guess part of it is that you have to decide what the goals of the educational system are. Are we training kids to grow up and have a well rounded base of knowledge and exposure to a wide variety of subjects or do we want to equip them for a lucrative career. The two should not be in conflict, but the sad truth is that they are. Maybe the world is just too complex to understand it all, but we’re becoming more and more specialized. What I see is that most successful people that I come into contact with are very knowledgeable about their own specific area, but clueless about anything outside of that. Maybe some people just lack a natural curiosity and love of learning. I don’t know, but I do know that when I brought a Starry Night mouse pad in to work and said that my nephew had given it to me for my birthday, several people asked me if he had painted it. These are not stupid people, they just are not into art.

Are we leaving no room for the possibility that parents are dropping off undisciplined, angry, ill-prepared kids with no respect for adults or authority, and that the best of teachers with the greatest of intentions is wasted on being a warden?

My wife teaches 1st grade at a private school, and there are students who flat our refuse to follow any instruction she gives, who are being trained by their parents that if they scream loud enough, they’ll get to keep playing with their toy, or watching TV, whatever. How do you solve that with money? She is a very driven and gifted, highly trained teacher, but this will be her last year of teaching. It neatly coincides with her getting finishing her master’s degree. She wanted to be a teacher, not a parent to 22 kids who apparently haven't had one.

My dad was a math teacher at an urban school for 35 years, in the trenches of education. By the time he left, it wasn’t because he didn’t love teaching; it was because he wasn’t able to teach. He spent his whole time on classroom management, and it was on things like “Don’t smoke week in my class”, “Stop copping a feel with your girlfriend in my class”, “Please don’t knife another student in my class.” How do you solve that with money?

I’m not that old. I’m not old enough to be saying things like “Kids these days, grumble gumble grumble”. But it’s true! Our culture has lost their ability to raise up their children, and the fruit of the poisoned tree is ripening in our schools.


-sm

And basically we have a culture that does not value education. It is a very anti-intellectual time in the US. (I voted for Gore the nerd rather than GW the jock.)

Education is to be suffered through, and valued only as a tool for employment and income- if a kid cares. School cuts in on the fun. People dont go to college to learn. They go to college to get a job. Maybe somewhere in college there is an A-HA! moment, when a person actually starts to learn a bit more deeply, and the drive to learn more rather than the dangling, arbitrary grade offered becomes the motivation. As it seems with everything, there is a growing polarity. Within education, disciplines turn on each other- which is most important? valuable? timeworthy? A consideration of well rounded experience and thinking is overlooked.

The ongoing economic shift- built on information- may start to change that. ?

What you say is so true!

Schools would be a thousand times better if more of the children's parents cared more about their children learning something. What makes things worse is that the children with the most problems- academic or behavioral- are almost always the ones with the parents that really don't care. And it only takes one or two problem kids to take what could be an excellent learning classroom and turn it into a disaster.

And its not just parents, as you say it is the whole society that is negative on education.

edit:added last sentence

GW was a jock? I thought he was one of the alcoholic preppies...

He was a cheerleader.

Seriously.

I wasnt really talking about an improvement in test results, I just meant that schools need as a foundation better funding than public schools in America seem to be given....I dont really consider that we in the UK got the balance right either. I think we spend way too little on our state schooling system.

Nor do I think that money and money alone will make schools do better by their children. Teacher's need to be better supported and children need to feel they are valued as pupils and young citizens. If Kids see that very little is spent on their schools and the paint is peeling off the walls, or they dont have enough books to go around ( which is a little like the state school I went to) It compounds the notion that education is not valued. Difficult for a teacher to get a child to value their education if at a meta level they are getting a conflicting picture on that.

Theres also the sociologist's answer to this which is to look at the social conditions of the children who make up the State school intake. Are they more or less likely than the children at the feepaying school to be living in conditions conducive to study? Are they more or less likely to be from homes where parents are working more than one job and are therefore less likely to be able to spend time helping their child with homework ? Are they more likely than the children in the fee paying school to have pressing issues at home that might distract them from their education or are they more likely to engage in a subculture which denies education as valid or desirable or simply discounts it as something for other people ?

Is it possible that having been exposed to a culture which seeks to mythologise the athlete and the soldier but which places the historian or the poet into the fool's role many children of today have learned to disregard learning for learning's sake? If thats the case and children are being taught to see their education in terms of what exams they can pass in order to get a good job, is it also possible that there are children who take on an identity of failure at a young age and therefore begin to see success in life as something which simply doesnt apply to them and exclude themselves from the learning process accordingly?

I agree with all of this. Schools emphasize sports over education, and let athletes get away with murder. People who can't spell are graduating because they can throw a ball or run. They're setting these kids up for failure, because the chances of them making the big leagues is almost nil; and when they DON'T make it, they have absolutely NO skills to fall back on.

As to the brats who are being sent to our public schools today: parents seem to think that it's the school's responsibility to discipline their children, and yet they bitch when the school does. It's also led to this "zero tolerance" for aspirin, prescribed meds, and a kindergarten boy kissing a kindergarten girl (sexual harassment....riiiiiiiiiiiight).

Of course, our government is contributing to the undisciplined nature of the kids nowadays. If you don't discipline your children, they want to hold you responsible for the kid's bad behavior, up to and including fines and jail time for parents. However, if you DO discipline your children, it's abuse.

Schools are here to teach the three R's, not discipline our children, or advocate religion or sexuality of any type (those three are the parent's domain). The social-work group doesn't help any, either, by refusing to hold children responsible for their actions because it's easier to blame the parents, environment, or society. As a result, kids learn that they won't be held responsible, and will always find someone willing to back their claims that it's someone else's fault. Therefore, why NOT run wild?

Because of that, the increasing dangerousness of today's kids, people don't WANT to be teachers. They don't get paid enough to go into a war zone, to be assaulted, cursed at, etc. That's why it seems that teachers don't give a shit anymore. They're counting the hours till they can escape, and do you blame them?

It's time to let people whip their kid's asses when they get out of hand. A paddling is NOT abuse. It is discipline. If parents were once again allowed to take control of their childrens' discipline, I think we'd see a decrease in juvenile delinquency.

When I was a kid, I was way more scared of my mother than I was of the cops. She never beat me, and she only hit me ONCE in my life. But she followed through on her threats to punish bad behavior. ....back when you could still pop your kid's bottom without someone calling child services on you.....



Sidhe

I'm not sure "hitting people" is really the solution, given how you paint it as such a deep-set and broad issue.

Couldn't it be more that parents, in general, don't know how to parent?

Maybe people are spending too much time and effort on their careers and not enough time and effort on raising their children?

My mother only smacked me once; the rest of the time was lost priviliges. Whatever works.


Sidhe

Bush I think gets the stink of jock because he owned a baseball team.

It's always very dangeous to generalize about things like this. However, I am going to try.

One thing that has changed in the last 30 years or so is that many women go to work now. Parents aren't home with the kids. They are paying other people to raise the kids. Few people are willing to come out and say the obvious truth that daycare is usually worse for children than having a parent care for them. It's worse in a couple of ways.

1) Daycare centers and nannys don't care about a kid as much as a good parent does. They are less likely to be concerned about raising the child to be a good grown-up. Instead, what they want to do is get through the day with as little conflict as possible. They do not try to teach values and morals. They have activities, and when there is conflict between kids, they use distraction as a way of dealing with it. If a parent was present during conflict, the parent could use that as an opportunity to teach the kids why certain behaviour is wrong and how certain things are expected of them. They can instill values in the kid by strikign while the iron is hot, right after an issue comes up.

2) When the parents come home, they don't know what to do with their kids. They are less experienced than they would be if they were home with the kids all day, and they are often unsure how to deal with problems as they come up.

3) In the "old days" moms would often talk with one another during the day to get ideas on how to deal with kids. There was a shared knowledge. Now, most parents don't have that support group to turn to. They have to turn to books, which help, but are often not so good at giving a person the self-confidence and sense of camraderie they need.

Study after study have shown that the first 2-3 years of a child's life are the most important ones for child development. That's when the child learns how the world works. That's when the behaviour and personality is basically set in stone. (At least those parts that aren't determined genetically before birth.) A child that get lots of love and attention will learn that the world is basically a good place. They will be more likely to grow up well adjusted and with a respect for fellow humans. You are really laying the foundation for the child's entire life in those first couple years. Parents usually do a better job of it than the constantly rotating staff of a daycare center.

BY the way, parents include both women and men. Men can stay home and raise the kids just as well as women can.

I think he needed to own the baseball team primarily to make up for the fact that he was not a real jock.

That's usually why rich guys buy sports teams, anyway.

Does anybody know if Rich Lurie played football in high school, or was he too busy being president of the Accounting Club and the Mathlete Squad?

Do you mean Jeffrey Lurie?

corporal punishment in schools
 

I can see why spanking is outlawed in schools; there's too much opportunity for real abuse, and it doesn't really solve much if the kid isn't getting any discipline anywhere else. However, my dad had an interesting story from when he was teaching shop class in the 50s...

He was a new teacher at the school, and the class was called "Industrial Sciences" rather than "Shop", but the notion was the same. This particular class was made up solely of football players who, at this school, epitomized the movie cliche of "bad guy jock" - like Biff in Back to the Future. They had run the previous teacher off, and weren't interested in anyone's instruction, especially some glasses-wearing 20-something. They ran amok for about 2 days and dad gave them an ultimatum (something about cleaning up the scrap material after class was over). They decided to ignore him and all left when the bell rang.

The next day, when everyone showed up, he took attendance, then walked over to the door and locked it. He reminded them of his ultimatum of the day prior (my dad's very soft-spoken, I've only heard him yell a handful of times in my life) and told them he was taking charge as of that moment. They formed a line and got their 200-lb linebacker asses whipped with a belt wielded by a 5 ft. 9 in. teacher (albeit one who had just gotten out of the military and could have probably taken any of them one-on-one). No one complained, no parents sued, and the jocks were model students for the rest of the year because they respected the way dad stood up to them. That's just the way things worked in small Texas towns.

If that happened today, there would have been investigations by the FBI, calls for justice from the ACLU, public hangings, and million-dollar lawsuits for emotional distress. That is, if the teacher survived the asswhipping he got from students who knew they could get away with anything as long as they were on the football team. As spoiled as the jocks in my dad's day were, they knew their lives were essentially over if they laid a hand on an authority figure.

Like I said, in today's society spanking is a no-no. But teachers have to be given back the authority to discipline their kids. It's like Lord of the Flies out there.

edited for a missspellling

Yeah, that guy. I must have been thinking "Rich Asshole Lurie," which, IIRC, is his full name. Thanks. Fucking Eagles.

I dont think allowing teachers to beat students into submission is the answer.

So, what makes a school good? What do successful students need?

Leadership starts with a mission and stated values. Learning and respect and responsibility are core values. Policy extends from there. Admin with teachers with parents with kids. Bad, failing schools, first and foremost, have bad, failing leadership. Teachers cant jsut blame parents. Parents cant just blame teachers. Kids cant blame everyone else.

Another is a philosophy of employing a variety of teaching approaches- not just the classic verbal/writing classroom with rows of chairs. Creative teachers encouraged.

And you know I'm all arty, so I avocate for arts infused across the disciplines.

Small class sizes- 20 or less kids per teacher. 15 or less in grades preK-2.

A curriculum that teaches kids how to think not what to think. This kind of deep learning is harder to test for but much more valuable in real life.

Coursework that makes sense, is based in real live kid experience and makes kids curious, raises more questions than answers.
Ok I better stop my edubabble or Griff will call me on it.
:)

me... a sub?
 

with this talk, I developed an idea.

I want to be a substitute teacher when I retire. Because that way (as far as I am concerned) you can dicipline the kids as hard as you can and if they blame me, I will have the secret alibi that My compensation doesn't depend on the school.

however, Schools should give back the desire to learn. I believe society turned from those old, happy days when failing students got scholarships for a certain sport.

A person has the natural desire to learn. our Scientific name (Homo sapiens) says so (learned-ing man)

in fact, I wanted to learn so much that I learned the planets when I was five. And now I study Greek by myself.

Yet, I also have a class that I did not put into my curriculum, (business ownership: how to become an entrepreneur) and I have a 52 in it:

the culprit: too much work applied over little time (Ok, you have to do Ch5, sections 1 and 2, questions, vocabulary, key concepts, and self-test by tomorrow.)

We, the students, in order to form a better society, declare that we are not computers. information does not flow through our minds through dicipline, it flows through logic (of course you need dicipline in order to have logic{d'uh})

P.s.
 

oh, any people who think otherwise?

It may not be the answer but it is an answer.

It should be the answer when all other options have failed.

The problem is that the other options aren't working and the answer short circuits to corporal punishment instead of following the chain of escalating severity.

Punishment should be rated on three factors:

certainty, celerity, and severity.

The first two are the most important I think, because if they think it might not happen then they will be more willing to risk punishment. If it waits until they get home, then it looses the instructional capacity of immediacy. If you know that you are going to get punished as soon as you break the rules it will reduce the window in which they are willing to break the rules. Nothing stings like getting tightened up in front of your friends.

Severity is the most fluid of the factors. It should adjust for both the capacity of a child to understand as well as the severity of the infraction. Ideally, corporal punishment should decrease the older a child gets as their cognitive skills increase and other punishment options are available. Unfortunately, it seems it is the other way around with many parents and administrators.

The school should institute severe consequences other than beatings. If the school is a good place to be and the majority of the kids there want to be there, then suspension can work, isolation can work. If the place sucks, it wont, and no amount of beating will improve that. Smacking is for parents to decide.

Heres the other thing. There is a point when the biggest meanest baddest ass is not the teacher. Do we want teachers or bouncers? As a teacher I dont want to work there. (I have) Do we escalate to being armed? School cannot go back to 1955. I used to work with a music teacher that just happened to be a 6 ft 5 black man. He hated being the enforcer. The staff goon. Corporal punishment is not any answer for a school.

I was paddled by the principal of Monroe Elementary for getting into a fight at the bus stop. (self defense!) I thought that it was ironic, unjust, stupid and I was only 10. My ass hurt, but mostly I was just mad.

Grifftopian Education System

1) Parents who give a crap.
2) Teachers who know their subject area upside down and backwards.
3) Teachers who can differentiate instruction (deliver the material in ways meaningful to students of different learning levels and styles).
4) Professional teachers who love kids more than paychecks.
5) Clear-eyed administrators willing to be unpopular with parents and/or teachers.
6) Sports as an outlet or a reward not a reason for being.
7) Curriculum, teachers, and administrators that/who treat kids as individuals.
8) No agenda outside of teaching kids how to learn.

Forget what I said... According to Onyx

:rolleyes: To clarify, Nanner's post was about how teachers can be effective and role models, even in the present system. I told her that I agreed, but expected her to go in a whole different direction, so she edited the post. **sigh** She's in school to be a teacher, so I wanted her viewpoint, but I guess that's not going to happen now. Sorry.

although educators are part of the problem (granted, a large part) the biggest factor in the failure of public education remains the parents. i got my first degree in education but saw the BS while still doing my student teaching and said no thanks.

Many of the "good" teachers and administrators have left teaching because it just isn't worth it. not because of low pay, but because of the futility of trying to teach that don't want to learn and whose parents won't force them to toe the line. it is nearly impossible to fail a student anymore, because there is always someone willing to stand up and shout that their kid is being persecuted for XYZ reason. public education has been on the slippery slope of lowering standards since the late 60's because it isn't PC to toss a kid out.

the only way to turn it around is for the parents to hold their own kids accountable. 2 scenarios. A) little billy screws off in class and gets bad marks. mom and dad discipline and hold that boy accountable. B) little Billy screws off, get bad marks, mom and dad assume their kid isn't getting a fair shake and make excuses... (write letters, threaten lawsuits, etc...) in which case do you think little billy will buckle down and do better next time??? with the set of parents who will beat his ass if he doesn't, is my guess.

many people think it is all about the amount of money spent in schools. moeny is important, but not as important as parental concern. the reason that kids in private schools typically outperform public school kids is because the parents are spending$$$$ and are going to make sure their kid isn't pissing it away. broadstroke - families who send their kids to private school are GENERALLY going to maintain a higher level of awareness about how their kid's education is coming along. not because they have more money, but because they have to make sacrifices to get the kid there, which is generally not true in public schools.

now if parents start holding their pubicly educated kids more accountable then things may turn around, but until then no amount of testing will improve things.