The State Of Education In America: Go To An Elite School Or Else?
from the getting-better-or-worse? dept
Clearly, education is one of the big issues facing the USA -- and reports on the current "state" of education have been very mixed. The general sense is that teachers these days are being pressured to teach to various tests, rather than actually teach, and resources in schools are rather lacking. However, a News.com reporter who went to check out schools has found that many do seem to be adapting. Of course, it does sound like most of the evidence is anecdotal -- and he isn't discussing the local public schools that have to accept students. All of the schools he's talking about are ones that students have to apply to get into (public or private). At the same time, however, there does seem to be a lot of emphasis being placed on what schools a child attends and how they perform at the age of four -- which seems to be a bit early in deciding what sort of life someone is destined for. Schools are one important element in a kid's future, but not the only one. That doesn't mean that the school system doesn't need to be improved -- it clearly needs some work. But, focusing only on the school system isn't the answer either.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Asianization
Or is it more desirable to become a post-industrial, burned-out country like Japan, where the majority of kids do not know fairy tales, college students do not know basic grammar, nobody understands anything?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Asianization
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Schools
A four-year-old may be tested for readiness for kindergarten. She/he is not undergoing career testing.
If we really want schools to improve, we need to increase teachers' salaries significantly to attract talent to the profession. It takes a great deal of intelligence and talent to teach masses of students effectively. Right now, we're not paying for that.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
The problem is who they have to teach. Our test scores are brought down by hungry non-english speaking children of illegal immigrants who oftentimes come here way behind where they should already be. Let's separate the non-english speaking scores out from the english-speaking scores, and I bet our average in California shoots WAY UP.
And don't claim this is racism. It isn't. It is common sense to anyone paying any attention. Getting a classroom full of non-english speaking varied culture and background hungry students would OF COURSE make it difficult to attain good test scores compared to having well-fed, well taken care of kids with similar backgrounds and communication skills.
Those kids are in private schools now because their parents, who would NEVER DARE comment that they don't want their kids going to school with a bunch of non-english speaking poor kids, are sending them to private school!
Public school (k12) = welfare for the poor. The answer is not to pay teachers more, it is to lower our expectations for what these "disadvantaged" students can learn.
Let's stop bashing our school system for doing so poorly and start questioning whether in fact it IS doing so poorly. California in the 1950s and 1960s was considered to have great public schools. What, did we lower all the teachers' wages since then? NO. We opened the borders and let anyone in who could crawl under a fence or through a tunnel. THAT is the difference between now and then.
Fed up.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
Educating the masses, with their diverse languages, is inherently ineffective. There is no cure for this with an acceptable level of fairness.
I was educated in California in the 1950s and 1960s, and the education was very good. My father was a teacher in California in the 1950s and 1960s, and we could afford a decent house on his salary, only because he worked extra jobs, and did summer work in grocery stores, etc. We really had to scrimp.
Education spending in California plummeted in the 1970s and 1980s, in relation to costs. I was there, and I know the politics behind this. Spending was cut. Property taxes rolled back.
Think about it. The problem is very hard. There is no cure. It takes a great deal of effort, dedication and expertise to do the job effectively, given the circumstances. I know many former teachers who were extremely talented, but just couldn't take it anymore. They jumped ship and moved into more rewarding careers.
I'm not a teacher. I can't afford to be one. Teaching is not on my children's career list because of the low pay. This is not the "party line", this is reality.
You can't export the problem.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
The guy above that mentioned that teachers make more per hour than anyone but docters is full of it clear up to his eyebrows. For every hour you spend in class you spend a half an hour outside of class grading papers, preparing exercises, dealing with parents etc... If you divide their salary by their hours you get about $25 per hour. Maybe that's a lot in a third world country but it's nothing here. My rent in a townhome in the suburbs is 20,000 per year. That's 50% of my income which is way below standard.
Teachers get paid too little, have too little power, have to babysit instead of teach, have too few funds, and too many students. Anyone who disagrees is disconected from the school system. Ask someone who's there.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
So does this mean that the rest of the countries schools are great because they don't have this problem? They're not doing any better. Remove the variables and you only have one thing left - a bad education system.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Schools
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
Values?
Morals?
Standards?
Ethics?
Responsibility?
Culture?
Respect?
...?
Oh wait, all of this on top of every other core subject you had in school. Not to mention that because parents don't do their jobs in raising their children to not be a classroom distruption, a teacher becomes more and more the disciplinarian rather than the teacher, what they're being paid to do.
The biggest issue I have with education is the parents. Send your children to school. Dress them properly. Make sure they're not bringing crap they shouldn't be bringing with the. Be an active force in their lives so they know how to sit in a classroom and learn so that the teachers can do their jobs.
Maybe people should stop reproducing all these behavioral disorders or start teaching their children how to act before you put this all on the teachers. No wonder why so many teachers leave the field after a few years. They have their own lives and don't need to pretend to be the parents to your children.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
Not only are teachers responsible for educating, but they are now responsible for teaching basic social skills: how to listen, how to share, how to show respect, etc. So much time must be spent disciplining children within the class room, and compensating for parents who aren't helping in the child's education outside of the classroom, that the quality of real education has diminished.
What is especially damnable about it, is that the parents and the government then come back and complain about the quality of education, and expect to fix it by making greater demands. "Little Jimmy's four years old; why isn't he reading?" Or, "your school only had 25% attain a passable score on this mandated test." So, teachers are stuck meeting ever-increasing demands with ever-eroding support.
Money does not solve problems like these. Educational techniques and methods do not solve problems like these. The solution is for more parents to assume their responsibility to be actively involved in their child's education.
Again, this is not a problem in all familys; there are plenty of parents out there that are working hard to be involved; homeschoolers are an excellent example of this. However, there are enough parents who AREN'T involved, that it is generally diminishing quality for everyone.
Unfortunately, the demands and priorities of today's society really make it difficult for parents to spend time with their children and still make a decent living.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Schools
I'm all for raising teachers pay, but have a big problem when nearly .50 of every dollar actually goes to "administration" and not the teachers in the classroom. I believe that every principle, vice principle, counselor, etc. shoud be REQUIRED to teach at least one class.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I home-school because of this reason
My counter-argument is the fact that kids go to school to learn, not socialize. Ergo if they aren't learning because they're distracted by a girl's low-cut top or from some kid with a cell phone in class, then why complain about the education system at all? Schools can't compete with all this crap. Not to mention the whole safety issue between school shootings and "normal" bullying.
So why not try something new? Whether it's charter schools, private schools, home-schooling, or even public schools that require uniforms (or at least a dress code), something different needs to be tried, because obviously the status quo isn't doing the job.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: I home-school because of this reason
Our public school teachers don't teach; they babysit. I see this as the big difference between private schools and many schools in other cultures/countries.
There are lots of ways to change this situation outside of just telling parents to back teachers better. I think vouchers, via the competition they would bring, would go a long way in solving the problem.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: I home-school because of this reason
To the responses in general:
I don't think the issue here is teacher salaries or their benefits. The biggest issues are, lack of help, early on, for children who need it (ie large class size, lack of people for the one-on-one support that might be needed), displine (you can thank your school board and legislatures for that), and lack of parential envolvment.
My wife did her student teaching in a poor inner-city school. When she would come home at night she would be so stressed because she couldn't accomplish anything because of the problems I mentioned above.
You don't like they way they are run, get on the school board and make some policy changes, how do you think they got this way in the first place?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: I home-school because of this reason
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: I home-school because of this reason
Kids don't need certified teachers to learn to walk and talk, and they don't need them for math or grammar either.
Every kid is different, and you can't expect superior results by warehousing kids by chronological age and hoping for the best.
Kids don't work that way.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: I home-school because of this reason
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Paradigm shift
So why, if Timmy was born on June 1 and is a nigh prodigy, and Tommy was on July 7 and is barely above the arbitrary definition for mentally handicapped, should they both be in the same class learning the same routine for their entire school life?
Only when someone is exceptionally bright or exceptionally dim are they separated from the norm - otherwise we all suffer through.
Maybe in the future school will just be a series of transatory 'classes', and once you've excelled in one, you move on to the next. Praps you have a 25 year old in PE class with kindergardeners because he just really sucks at kickball, but if we as a society can understand that there's no stigma attached to that (and by breaking this "your age should do this well" rubbish, we could), then what's the harm?
Each to his own ability - that would also give a great indicator for what careers a young person is really suited towards, instead of "standardized" tests (which seem to vary year after year anyways).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Paradigm shift
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Paradigm shift
Actually, in the US, we've done that only since the early 1900's. The first mandatory attendance laws were proposed in the 1860's in Massachusetts, primarily to make sure the waves of immigrating Catholics were taught proper puritan ethics. The whole school model was based on the the Prussian school system. It wasn't until around WWI that the rest of the country stepped into line, and that was mostly because the first school efforts were financed by the wealthy industrialists (Carnegie, Ford, etc) because they realized they needed mass numbers of employees to staff the factories, and forced schooling was the way to get them off the farms and re-educated for a life of closely supervised manual labor.
Public school has never been about education - its been about indoctrination since day 1.
It's all documented in http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Ahem, BULLSHIT.
1) If you really think that teachers have such a kooshy job, and are so over paid – why don’t you go an apply – there are THOUSANDS of openings, they will pay for your training, and unless you are a doctor, you will get a pay increase... Of course there are LOTS of professions that are better paid than doctors – AND teachers – so somehow your reasoning doesn’t quite apply to reality.
2) Home schooling is a great idea, and generally leads to significantly improved academic performance. Unfortunately the cost is socialization. The error that is made by home schooling parents is that success is not dependant on ability or knowledge, but rather on social skills and contacts. Not very long ago Techdirt ran an article about this very thing. How else can one explain W? It is sad, but true. Home schooled children generally grow up to be smart, frustrated adults. Blame society, and insist that it isn’t the way it should be, but that will not change it. Learning to deal with bullying IS a normal part of childhood development, because dealing with bullies is a normal part of life. If you don’t learn to deal with the ass hole who wants your lunch money in grade school, you will have no chance of dealing with the same ass hole in the board room.
3) I went to school in California, in the 80’s and 90’s. There were a lot of Hispanic kids in my classes, and one of my teachers even taught in Spanish – pissed me off, but I still managed to learn “somehow.” The thing is, none of the Mexican kids were hungry, what the fuck does that have to do with anything, other than simply being raciest, and demonstrating that you have no grasp on the issues at hand?
4) Arizona is notoriously backwards in the way it approaches just about any problem (I know, I graduated from Arizona State), so suggesting that you are an authority because you sat on a Phoenix school board is not that impressive. Suggesting that you are someone important because you are listed in “Who’s who” is not that impressive either, seeing as ANYONE who ponies up the $500 a year to be listed, gets listed. Me thinks I will avoid taking advice from someone who brags about getting suckered.
It is a simple fix: pay the teachers fairly (much much more) boot the trouble makers, and impose order, and kids will learn. But then we would have to stop protesting and see order as a good thing, or at least start raising our children.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]