A couple of questions for the teachers out there

Aside from having to "teach to the test" resulting from NCLB, what do you believe to be the core problems in public education? Where do you think we went wrong, or did we go wrong, or has it always been wrong? If you could wave a magic wand to make things better, what would be the first two or three things you would change?

(I am not a teacher and I don't have kids, so consider me pretty clueless. I DO have some insight into public higher ed, and there I see politicians with no college/university administrative or curriculum experience introducing laws that make no sense whatsoever -- but cost alot of money. I perceive similar issues in K-12 education, but I truly don't know.)

And, are you familiar with the New Tech project-based learning schools? What do you think of them?

Thanks.

EOTR

I say "had" because we closed it this year.

For kids with a good foundation of skills, project-based learning is really great. It's relevant, teaches cooperation and coordination of skills. But our kids were just too far behind to be able to self-direct much of their work. So it didn't work for us.

What do I think is wrong? I've talked about it before many times. I believe the major failing is that our communities do not own the education of their kids. They believe when a school is "failing", it's the fault of those inside the building. But that's silly. When a school is failing it's a statement about the entire community.

People often point to Goeffrey Canada and the Hope Academy/Promise Neighborhoods as evidence that schools can be turned around. The entire RTTT language is geared around replicating his school. The problem is . . . Canada first focused on changing his NEIGHBORHOOD. He quickly realized the school played a critical role, so he started Hope. But that's not where he started.

If we want to improve schools, we have to start first with the community.

My brother, with 35+ years as a math/science teacher, is moving to a New Tech school this fall, and I wondered how others felt about it.

The community involvement issue sounds hopeless to me, sadly. Generally, we don't place a high value on education in this country (certain areas excepted, of course), and now we've abdicated community responsibility to national policies.

We want ALL our students to comprehend the present lesson before we advance to the next. Unfortunately with time restrictions, we are forced to move on before all the students "get it" whether it's math, reading, or social studies. And the kids left behind sometimes don't catch up. You encourage individualized tutoring, afterschool help, etc. and your advice isn't taken. And the result is this discourages these kids from feeling successful and as smart as their peers. Very frustrating.

Now with NCLB, there is no time for teacher-student discourse which develops critical thinking. We only have time to "teach the test".

And with programmed lessons on computers, teachers are not as necessary as we used to be. Less interaction with the kids.

I had that problem with Algebra I, only to be turned around by a great TEACHER for Algebra II.

Does your system provide any vocational ed? Do you think it has value in secondary ed? There doesn't seem to be as much vocational ed now as there was back in the day. If you get the chance, let me know your opinion on this.

I only wish that every child has an adequate ability to read and to comprehend. And to problem solve. Everything else can be learned by these skills. And more critical thinking in academic and vocational programs.

We found out that we could influence the next generation through education. We discovered that education was important to our society and our economy. So we decided that education should be able to do these things for all children, regardless of their parents or home situation at all. If things at home weren't good, we'd be able to counteract that at school. Bad nutrition? School Lunch program. Homework issues? After school care program. Child abuse? Forced reporting by school employees. Poor reading skills? Remedial programs for students.

All sounds good, but it rests upon the assumption that teachers and schools and sufficiently counteract the effect of bad parents, absent parents, or no parents on the raising and education of a child. Study after study suggests that the #1 influence on a childs education is a parent.

Schools can't "fix" parents. And they can't raise children. They educate them, but it requires the cooperation of the parents. Parents often don't cooperate as much as the delegate unfortunately. When they aren't abdicating that is.

The way we fund out schools is atrocious and uneven. First of all, at the local level, school districts are funded based on the local tax base, property taxes. This works well in suburban school districts because they have an adequate tax base. But in inner city schools and rural school districts, the tax base is much smaller, meaning that the property taxes for schools are low.

Secondly, any school funding issue is put to the voters, which means that you have to persuade them that they need to raise taxes on themselves in order to fund schools. Worse yet, these school funding issues have to not just receive a majority in order to pass, but rather a supermajority, usually sixty percent of the vote. That's virtually impossible in many areas. For example, in my rural school district our local middle and high schools are not only bursting at the seams, but have insufficient resources to do an adequate job. For the past seven years the school board has put a bond before the voters, and while that proposition has gotten majorities all seven times, they haven't gotten the supermajority, since a minority of anti-tax, anti-school zealots have managed to get enough of the vote to block these bonds. So these schools continue to suffer.

On the state level, revenue is unevenly collected and distributed. In many states the revenues from gambling taxes fund the schools, and when those revenues go down, so does school funding. Furthermore, the funding formulas used by the states to distribute the money are skewed towards favoring the suburban districts rather than those truly in need, again, urban and rural schools.

Finally, at the federal level, politicians play all sorts of political games with school funds. The latest example of this is Obama's Race to the Top funding measure. In RTTT, schools have to implement more testing, merit pay based on those tests, and open up their state to unlimited charter and private schools.

All of this leads to uneven and inadequate funding of schools, and this has been going on for decades now.

Let's look at the top two countries when it comes to education, Finland and Japan. They pay their teachers well, comparable to doctors. This means that instead of having the best and brightest students going into other, more well paying careers (as in this country), their best and brightest go into teaching, because they don't have to make the choice between doing what they want to do and what they feel they can afford to do. Furthermore, these schools are all well funded, with the resources they need to truly educate their students, unlike the US where you have schools without running water in science labs, or using books ten years out of date.

It really does come down to money, and if we want to truly make education the top priority we like to say it is, then we need to fund it.

and inquiry-based instruction/learning. "New Tech" did not invent them, and schools don't need "New Tech" to implement them.

Both are valid and powerful methodologies. The reason you don't see more of this kind of thing going on is because of the focus of the "standards and accountability" movement currently mandating school practices.

Every methodology that requires deeper learning, higher and deeper thinking, and actual application of information is more powerful, and all of those methodologies share one drawback in the current system: they are time intensive.

In the "standards and accountability" system, we have mandated standards, mandated tests, and mandated "progress" on test scores.

Robert Marzano has pointed out that if we were to adequately teach every standard on the books, we'd have to extend the system to grade 22 to earn a high school diploma.

http://books.google.com/books?id=MVyhsp10SIgC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=marzano+teaching+all+standards+grade+22&source=bl&ots=HqD5tiG5X4&sig=XfRdIIejzVZbZZATleNWY12lrek&hl=en&ei=BO09TLjpC4jUtQPQ8MXaCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

With the top-down, authoritarian mandates comes the demands that we be "accountable" for teaching those standards within our school year by documenting every standard we teach; when, how often, etc..

Those mandates mean that curriculum tends to be raced through, trying to touch on, and document, every standard within the year. The result? LESS learning happens. Teachers know that the current "ten miles wide and 1/16th inch deep" approach to curriculum and instruction is counter productive. But if they want to keep their jobs, they have to comply anyway.

My magic wand? Documented often; here's the most recent:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=219&topic_id=26438&mesg_id=26493

I'll go back and read it.

I agree with most of your points -- most wholeheartedly with abolishing high-stakes testing and encouraging/rewarding teacher professional development.

Alas, abolishing poverty is hardly pragmatic!

but poverty is the #1 factor influencing student performance, and the cause of much human suffering.

Abolishing poverty would certainly be a worthwhile investment all the way around. :hi:

Want better schools? Fix poverty. Fund them appropriately and for at least a generation. We have yet to try that.

The majority of my students this past year had parents who were incarcerated. They were being raised by grandparents and the foster care system. And they were very poor. Some had nowhere to do homework. Some went home to empty houses because adults were not there. Some were at work but many had simply checked out on parenting children. Survival comes before doing what's right for kids. So fix poverty and quit throwing minor drug offenders in jail.

We have also never fairly funded our schools. We have thrown money at many for a few years, and complained when the growth in achievement didn't match our expectations, and stopped the funding. We should be spending the same amount on our children that we are spending on war. Until we do that, we won't see much of a change.