School or Scam

[Troubleshooter]

Originally posted by DanaC
Tax your people. Spend the tax on providing services including decent education for your citizenry.

Ssshhh!!!

Radar might hear!

[Beestie]

There is a very easy way to make schools do better. Spend money on them.

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.

[Happy Monkey]

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.

[TheLorax]

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.

[smoothmoniker]

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

[warch]

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. ?

[Slartibartfast]

Originally posted by warch
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.)

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

[elSicomoro]

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

[Happy Monkey]

He was a cheerleader.

Seriously.

[DanaC]

There is no corellation between the amount of money spent per pupil and test results.

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?

[Lady Sidhe]

Originally posted by smoothmoniker
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.

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?
Our culture has lost their ability to raise up their children...

-sm

And basically we have a culture that does not value education. It is a very anti-intellectual time in the US.

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

[Skunks]

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?

[Torrere]

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

[Lady Sidhe]

Originally posted by Skunks
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?

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


Sidhe

[warch]

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