Education Changes . . . not so much

It amuses me that, on this day when many people are protesting things they don't understand, in ways they don't realize are funny, I have found something real to criticize.

Pros of this plan:

* Higher standards for teachers
* Higher academic standards
* Help for failing schools

Cons:

* Continued reliance on standardized testing
* Does not address major problems in administrative heirarchy
* Little change in basic errors in how schools are run and subjects are taught.

So, there are good and bad things. It is very good to hold teachers to a higher standard. This should start at the college level. The university where I teach freshman composition and G.S. literature has become a degree printing press. There are no standards for admission beyond "has high school diploma or GED". Which is fine if you are trying to make higher education available to everyone. But it also removes the onus of work from the students. I have had students who could read at a 4th grade level, but no higher; Other students come in without having written anything longer than a sentence; I took students over to the library this semester who didn't even know where it was. And it gets worse. Those students who are graduating are not, as far as I can tell, prepared for the outside world. This is, in part, because the school is not focused on teaching the students. Courses listed in the catalogue are not offered, and the Chancellor of the whole school does nothing more than give figurative blow-jobs to athletic donors. We recently recieved a breakdown of the cuts, and the Fine Arts college had ten times the amount of money pulled than the Athletic Dept. The school is run as a business, not as a center of education and higher thought. Pathetic.

I am also very glad to see that they want higher academic standards. This in particular pleased me:

It is a simple fact that far too many students are just passed along instead of taught. The idea of "pass them along and let the next level worry about teaching them" needs to stop.

Helping failing schools is neccessary. I would like to see something on how this is going to be done. It may be neccessary to close some schools and spread the students around to surrounding schools, but that would be a last ditch measure. But it brings me to my first complaint: Administrators.

Schools right now are run by bloated local beuracracies. Every little 100 student high school around here has its own superintendent and school board. These are the two most expensive wastes in education. These would work much better at a county level to just trim some of the fat. Superintendents, at least the ones I've known, don't have much to do, and would be better used as liasons between a local area and a state education officials. School boards need to be rethought: at best, they are a group of concerned citizens who know little about teaching or education; at worst, they are a group of parents with pet projects who will manipulate the system. This needs to be changed, but I don't know how, as school boards are political offices and anyone can run.

The next error is in using standardized tests. My only hope is that this will no longer happen:

Standardized tests don't work because there are no standardized students. It needs to be scrapped.

The last issue in the cons is sort of part of all of these. There needs to be a shift in how every subject is addressed in school. Even something as simple as teaching basic yoga in elementary school, and getting the student/teacher ratio down to a standard of 10:1 would make a huge difference. Pay enough to attract quality teachers who can live on their paycheck instead of needing a second job and watch the attention to students go up.

See? Criticism of the Obama administration. And I didn't even use a teabag.

I forgot to add that in addition to paying teachers enough, give the teachers a budget so they can get the classroom equipment they need to teach. No teacher should have to pay for their own chalk.

Good article Coyotemike, there are no standardized kids. While standards are certainly something to strive for, it is not reasonable to expect everyone to exhibit the same ability in reaching them. Education is a holistic process, an environment that helps foster interest in learning while meeting the different needs of students is just as important as the end result. By mandating a national program of success, I'm afraid that schools' curriculum will become too narrowly focused towards meeting these standards and will leave other disciplines outside the realm of reading, writing and mathematics behind. True, you can't reach the next step (say in history or science) without mastering the basics, however, such skills are indeed ancillary to having a well rounded education and not everyone learns in a linear fashion.

Standardized testing currently doesn't work, but there needs to be some sort of standard way of measuring that the minimum skills required post secondary school have been met. While we can't rely on Scantron tests for every student because of learning disabilities, etc., we need to find something.

Well, that depends on what graduating means.

If graduating means "he was a good student who tried hard", then yes.

If graduating means "he knows x, y, and z", or more accurately, that "he CAN DO x, y, and z", then standardized tests are a decent way of proving that.

What else (besides maybe history or economics) should the schools be teaching?

No, seriously, what should they learn besides math, science, and language?

And how would you certify that a student has mastered those disciplines?

I guess we get confused on terms. You're absolutly right. There do need to be standards, bare minimums of subject skills. Maybe what would work better would be to divide high schools like they divide colleges: students who are better at or more interested in this subject recieve more in-depth instruction on that, while recieving a more basic education in other subjects. Divide it up into broad topics that require similar base skills and spend more time on them. You could get away with 4 basic categories:

Math/Science (Bio, Chem, Physics, Trig, Calculus)

Social Science (History, Debate, Politics, Bio, etc)

Fine Arts (English, Art, Geometry, History, Music, Metal/Woodshop, School Paper)

Practical (English, Geometry, Metal/Woodshop, Cooking, Autoshop, Accounting, etc)

It might become more cumbersome, particularly as it would take more teachers, but it would take things to a student-by-student basis and each would get the skills they need to move on to the next, more narrowed, area of study.

The Scantron tests mean nothing. If I remember correctly from taking those, I'm supposed to be a chemist.

There used to be such a thing as vocational schools that focused on the "Practical" skills. My highschool had a College Prep path for those who wanted to attend college, and a general diploma for the more blue-collared group.

how about history, government, and economics? i specify those three since they are required for high school students in this state to graduate. if i recall my "mastery" was certified when qualified educators tested me over the material they taught.

edit: doing the dishes while replying means the person you're replying to gets to edit their thread before you post.

Vocational schools are a form of college, not high school.

...not to mention that practically every country that still "tracks" students when they're only 13 years old (or younger) faces lots of issues with classism. I think we have enough issue with classism in America without turning ourselves into a mini-Brave New World. We've already got the blind consumerism part down pat, now we just need to assort ourselves into Alphas through Epsilons.

I don't know if you saw what I wrote above about setting up individual programs for students, but I absolutly do not mean that to be a form of tracking. It would be a volunteer program for students who want to get a head start on what they want, not what a multiple choice test tells them they can do.

These are all excelent disciplines to be sure, and should be a part of any education. However, we didn't get to the moon with history or economics. And few jobs test your knowlege of government or history. We should not grauate students that are unable to compete in a global economy. One of my instructors is from Tiawan, and there they teach transistor theory in high school! Here, it's junior/senior college level!

That's funny, my dad attented a vocational highschool ...

Did he teach you to spell?

The only vocational schools I've ever heard of have been post-high school. There may be others. I don't claim to have all knowledge.

You want someone to compete in a global economy without any understanding of history or politics?

Bullshit. Out and out bullshit. It is only an ignorance of history that would lead one to say "we didn't get to the moon with history or economics."

The moon race was a component of the Cold War. The Cold War was largely (some would argue entirely) an economics matter. And it certainly was a historical matter. It wasn't some random group of guys who said "Hey! Let's use math, science, and language--and ONLY those disciplines--and fly a rocket to the MOON!"

Although global competitiveness is an issue, you don't magically fix that by restricting education. The biggest reason that many other countries outpace us educationally is that their kids go to school year-round. There are lots of historical, social, and economic factors at work here that you're not paying any attention to. Your point can be summed up in "other countries produce 18-year-olds that have an ITT-level education but don't know any history, art, or economics. We should totally be like that in the US!"

I typically only say this ironically, but "get informed."

you're shifting goalposts. transistor theory would certainly be left out of any school that focused on standardized testing.

you're right. we should not grauate students that are unable to compete in a global economy. the current method of standardized testing does not encourage curricula which prepare students to compete in a global economy.

You forgot to use bolds

Yes, the economic and historical side of the cold war was significant.

However, I don't think the engineers at NASA gave a rat's behind about an potential engineers mastery of history. You want a job? The employer only cares about what you can DO, not what you know about esoteric subjects like art or government.

You want proof? I know a guy with a liberal arts degree and an art major. He runs a bar.

The point I was trying to make is that other nations educate their students much better then we do. I agree, the current standardized tests may be poor, but they are better than none.

So, because you don't know the connections, they don't exist?

Have you looked at HOW those other nations are educating their students? Go look at the Belgian education system. Their high school students kick our college students' asses in nearly every category. Go see how they do it. Go see if they have their students doing multiple choice tests or if they have a different method.

Don't worry. We'll wait for you to get back.