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| Lord or Lady Postsalot |
Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2010 6:40 pm
Posts: 633
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Cloudy wrote: Rhino wrote: Cloudy wrote: Silence is consent, therefore I must assume that everyone agrees with me that the teachers' unions, and what they have done to our education system is the main cause of the dismal state that our public education system finds itself in today.
p.s. Got a feeling that nobody will challenge this. Teachers' unions have certainly done a number on state and local budgets, but are in only a tiny way (resisting longer hours and years) responsible for the legion issues in American education. The list there would prominently feature: Psycho-theocratic loons who have hobbled science education by insisting that fairy tales get equal billing, and that little Johnny and Jane should not understand the basics of human anatomy until they are 18. Well-meaning but faddish administrators who think that "new, holistic, user-friendly" methods such as new math and word problems are better than the ways everybody has learned math for many centuries - by being told how to do sums, then doing lots of them, then moving on to harder ones. Repeat. Touchy-feely "nobody should feel bad" sissiness that has caused genius kids to get bored, uninterested and rebel, and dumb kids to get lost, frustrated and rebel, because both are forced to go through subject matter at the pace of average kids. Not everyone is equal (a truth that is accepted with perfect equanimity on the playing fields from even pre-school years, but rejected with outrage in the classroom even in high school). Deal with it, and deal with them separately. A complete lack of shared discipline and authority that makes parents sue if someone so much as corrects their kids, let alone upbraids them or god forbid disciplines them. You don't need to whip a kid raw to instill respect for the authority of teachers and other leaders, but you have to let those authority figures do more than speak to them in a soft pleasant voice. Probably more than anything else, a rampant anti-intellectualism in US society unequalled in the developed world. No other nation so despises and demonizes academic capability, from childhood bullying and terminology like "nerds" and "geeks" to the over-glorification of and investment in school athletics (since when did high school debate, math competitions or trivia bowls get reported in the paper, shown on TV or have fancy facilities built?) And all of us support these biases with endless talk of things like "he's only book-smart" - as if there's any other kind; being able to fix a car, cook a meal or pick up girls are certainly useful skills, but are not measures of intellect. Even at the pinnacle of their success we talk about them as "eggheads in ivory towers" and proudly claim to be more "streetwise" and to live in "the real world", simply because we understand deep down that we lack the intellect to understand the world, and its strrets, as much as academic experts do. This is the really big issue. Korean and Taiwanese and Indian students are not kicking US academic ass up and down because they are inherently more intelligent, but because they are not worn down and demoralized and held back by being told all their life that it is weak, weird, socially unacceptable and even offensive to BE more intelligent than the norm. If we celebrated academic success rather than loathed it, we'd get more of it. How much teachers get paid and how much time they get off is pretty meaningless compared to that. Excellent points, and I think that I agree with what you have to say. Pretend that President Obama has just appointed you head of the Department of Education. What would you do to correct all of this bullshit that has brought the education system in the United States so low from where it used to be? p.s. Have you seen "Waiting for Superman" yet? Well that's tricky because the solutions are mostly either social mores, which are impossible to change at will and evolve over decades, or unconstitutional, but assuming we posit an unusually powerful and persuasive secretary who can overcome such things I would: Extend school years and days (set up for when kids all worked on family farms and businesses) to a minimum of 210 days of 6.5 actual classroom hours.
Standardize curricula properly. A set basic curriculum for the nation, not state or district, on a fixed/elective model. So all schools share math, English, core science, Spanish, history and civics/social sciences curricula and can choose from electives such as other languages, specific sciences, higher math, technical/vocational, music, art, etc as they wish - with the electives themselves also standardized. Tests also standardized in both content and time nationally.
Introduce a new standard curriculum called "basic reasoning". It should include the elementary principles of logic, critical thinking, argument, fallacies, etc. as well as real world applications such as verifying political claims, advertising, media spin, etc. Nobody should graduate without a couple of years minimum, with higher electives for financial analysis, beginning philosophy and so on.
Stream students into different schools if possible but classes if not due to population size, starting around age 10-11, based on high/average/low academic ability. Allow mobility between streams based on test scores, and allow each stream flexibility in both speed of completion and number of electives taken, increasing with ability. So maybe the higher stream does algebra in 6th grade, while the lower does it in 9th, and so on - so in the end the higher stream will get more courses completed, but the lower stream will have to finish at least the core to graduate.
Allow basic discipline in schools including age-appropriate corporal punishment, after-school detention and imposition of meaningful extra work both physical and mental as punishments.
Cease all social promotion. In fact with the new curriculum-based progression the very idea of "moving up a grade" will be moot as schools/streams will vary in what is done when.
Math, until you get way beyond secondary education, IS about numbers and rules and logical, linear problem solving; teach it that way. Oranges, passing trains, farmers ploughing fields etc are distractions not needed beyond possibly pre-K level explanation of numbers themselves. And for all that is holy stop the holistic shit and new math. Teach them arithmetic until they get it, then fractions, ratios, etc. until they get that, then algebra until they get that, then geometry, then trig, then stats, then calculus, then higher math (obviously the middle stream might stop at trig, lower at algebra or so).
Allow "team" projects only in higher level courses. Yes people need to be able to work in teams, but they need to be shown to be capable themselves first.
Leave elective choices available for non-academic subjects, especially for lower streams. It is far more useful and far less frustrating for both teacher and student to spend 3 months showing a kid with an IQ of 82 how to fix a small engine or frame a window than trying to get him to do quadratic equations. Such courses should be available in higher streams too, but will naturally become more a feature for those students who will never be asked in later life to calculate the intercept of a line, but may often have to fix a leaky toilet.
Keep athletics and extra-curricular activities such as band and theater available, but make them completely subordinate to education. The idea that little Johnny is excused a real class to travel to a football game should be what it really is - laughable.
Pay teachers appropriately, but hold them accountable for results like other professionals are. A 10 year engineer is judged on their design skills, cost reductions, ouput rate, etc. - and if a 5 yr engineer does better, then so be it. Tenure length is a terrible measure of ability for any job, and teaching is not an exception. Results of course are not the same as test scores, or no teacher would work with the lowest stream. Improvement in test scores and progress through the curricula however relative to teachers with comparable classes, are good metrics. A teacher who gets a gifted class through 4 units in a semester with an average grade of 82% may not rate as highly as one who gets a normal stream through 3 with 68% averages. Depends what others with the same material managed, and where the kids started. Other metrics matter too, like attendance changes, 360 evaluations including students, number of units which the teacher can demonstrate mastery of themselves, and so forth. Not much anyone can do politically about the stigma of academic ability in US culture, but results will slowly change perceptions, and establishing the primacy of academics above extra-curricular pursuits would be a good start.
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Please forgive any strange typos or grammar errors. I am typically using voice recognition software to enter text, and sometimes editing works differently from how I expect.
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Of course, I really know that silence doesn't mean consent.