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The American public school system: What gives?

Discussion in 'General Discussions' started by Baraka_Guru, May 11, 2013.

  1. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    Making standardized testing a measure of teacher/principal performance, questions of quality, problems with budgets, creeping privatization, etc. The American public education system seems in crisis, and fights are now brewing.

    What's more, on the front lines, you get reactions such as this one:


    View: http://youtu.be/3bYv2AKPZOk

    This video was posted a few days ago, and it has gone viral. It now stands at over 1 million views.

    It highlights some of the fundamental problems with the way the system currently works: looking at how to squeeze out quantifiable results. Quality seems to suffer when educators take standardization to its logical extreme.

    Is education about producing students capable of passing tests, or is it more than that?

    Rifts deepen over direction of education policy in U.S. | Philadelphia Public School Notebook
     
    Last edited: May 11, 2013
    • Like Like x 1
  2. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member

    So, the problem isn't necessarily the standardized testing. It's part of the problem, but the problem is exacerbated by a variety of factors. One, teachers may be teaching a class of upwards of 30 students. If they are teaching 6 classes, that's 180 students in total--at the minimum. That's a lot of grading to do and a lot of feedback to give. It's very, very difficult to give constructive feedback in a timely manner that benefits students when teachers have to mark that many papers. So what's the solution? Give less work? Well, that doesn't work either, because we know students need ample opportunity to practice skills, whether that is via in class work or homework.

    Two, many teachers don't know how to teach, or they don't know how to manage. Both of these are major issues. The lady in the video clearly had both problems if she isn't able to generate interesting content and has a student who is disrupting the whole class; her response shows her lack of ability to manage the room. Also, she shouldn't be behind her desk. That's just stupid. I only sit at my desk when we're watching a video. Otherwise, I am circulating around the classroom, checking in with students and working with students individually. That is also something that takes a lot of time and why it would be good to have small class sizes.

    Three, many of the older teachers don't know what to do with the standards. They're VERY overwhelmed by the change that's come about since the move to standards-based education. They feel like someone is telling them what to teach, when that isn't the case at all. Standards are the map that show me my destination; they don't tell me which route I have to take to get there. It's up to me, the teacher, to generate interesting content that hooks my students, motivates them, and makes them want to learn more. They don't squash curiosity--teachers who don't know what to do with the standards do that.

    Four, teachers have to handle students with special needs within their classrooms, and the training needed to work with these special populations is relatively new. My school district is just rolling it out, and many teachers never received it if they graduated before 1990 (when the first Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed) because prior to that, many students who are now mainstreamed would have been exclusively in special education classes. Even in my Master's program, there is one class that will likely touch on working with students with exceptionalities; it looks like that information is rolled into a class on development. I believe that in this day and age, every classroom teacher should have a full term of study on students with exceptionalities, working with them, and working with the laws that govern services for exceptional students. Additionally, needs are diverse in a variety of ways in a modern classroom: talented and gifted students, students with learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, English language learners, and students who receive services under Section 504 but might not have an IEP (this is becoming rarer). I have one class with SIX kids who have IEPs. In the size of that class, that's 25% of my class. There are literally days where I am so focused on teaching the kids with IEPs that I can only hope the regular kids are getting the information--and this is despite having paraprofessionals to help.

    One of the problems that does lie with standardized testing is the amount of time it takes. We have to pull kids from class to take it, and then we may have to pull them again for a retest if they don't pass. We also have to spend class time on the performance-based assessments the state requires in math and writing. Standardized testing is also inherently flawed in a variety of ways, but I would rather focus on what teachers can do to improve themselves and their abilities. We need more support, not less, and that is one of the problems with relying on standardized testing as a metric for teaching performance. However, I do believe that there are some really crummy teachers out there, and that's a problem I don't know how to fix.
     
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  3. My youngest son is a teacher. He absolutely abhors teachers who pass students just to move them on. He teaches in Indiana and also supports standardized testing used as a basis for performance pay. The big problem is when he gets stuck with uneducated students that do not know how to learn. He is seeing that first hand. Students come into his class who have been allowed to advance but are nowhere near the level they should be at. And now the pay for the teacher of those students is based on performance. Will they perform? Not a chance. As I said he supports performance based pay because he knows in time this will remove dead weight teachers and he is also very competitive. He knows he's a good teacher and this is how he can get ahead.
     
  4. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member

    And this is what's great about the Common Core. We've agreed what students need to know to move on.
     
  5. Ironically the above is exactly why the following happened in Indiana...

    Bennett was exceptionally aggressive on education reform. Teachers hated what he proposed. We have lots a friends who are teachers. Too much, too soon for many. Teachers unions targeted Bennett in the election. It was contentious. Not sure if Ritz Be all that effective. She's the lone Democrat at the state level and won't be getting much bipartisan support. Her background was a library media specialist in an elementary school, she never had any administrative experience.
     
  6. ASU2003

    ASU2003 Very Tilted

    Location:
    Where ever I roam
    Way too much money involved, and the results aren't what they should be. What is the desired outcome? Is every student the same, or should some be able to learn on their own, some students don't need to know a few topics, and then other real world skills aren't taught that should be (personal finance, healthy living).

    I don't have the answers and I don't know how to fix broken schools, while keeping good schools working well. And the quality of the students has to play a part in this, and what do we do to improve that? I like the concept of unschooling and immersive learning for myself though.
     
  7. fflowley

    fflowley Don't just do something, stand there!

    If the entire federal education bureaucracy disappeared tomorrow would anyone actually miss it?
    What if all that money stayed on the local level instead?

    And what about the role of parents in all this? I see kids the same age as mine (5) who are already "behind" because they aren't read to, and aren't disciplined, aren't learning self control etc. It's awful thinking that a 5 year old could already be in a deep hole but that's what I see in our community.
     
  8. Charlatan

    Charlatan sous les pavés, la plage

    Location:
    Temasek
    The one thing I am sure of is that the privatising the education system is *not* the answer.
     
    • Like Like x 2
  9. redux

    redux Very Tilted

    Location:
    Foggy Bottom
    Privatization is certainly not the answer. Nor is eliminating the federal role or federal funding for education or core national standards, all of which are prominent in the industrialized countries that outperform the US.

    Our funding mechanism needs fixing (away from being primarily based on local property taxes), our process for developing and tracking core standards needs fixing (No Child Left Behind failed), our commitment to pre-school development needs to be greater (to foster better early learning skills) and our teachers need help (not just from parents, but from school boards that wont impose an ideological/religious agenda, from local businesses to help match educational skills to jobs).

    Easier said than done.
     
    • Like Like x 1
  10. Raghnar

    Raghnar Getting Tilted

    Let me understand this: there are teacher that on a common basis do not teach but simply give rationalized assignments and let the class do the job while they have a coffee and maybe a look of the morning newspaper?

    IMHO, for my background (obviously vastly dependent on the type of high-school, social environment, peculiar problems and so on... but as a general counterpoints to the guy's rantling):
    Having High school classes with 30 students is normal. They are at high school, not at junior school, they don't necessary need one-on-one training. The next step is the college with students even in the order of hundreds.
    Having teachers with 6 classes (or even more) is normal (depending on the heaviness of the teaching). Since you teach one or two arguments and not the whole program like in junior. The next step is university professor, with students in the order of hundreds and researching as main activity.
    Having teachers behind the desk all the time is normal. Depending on the teaching style and arguments obviously. Guys are not kids anymore, they should behave and manage to listen lecturing without having pointless showing to "get excited" all the times. People that age should progressively learn how to study and learn without being mouthfeeded al the time with excitation and blue ribbons over the homework. Getting the passion from a good argument explained in a clear way, not with pointless overdoing just to get even the more dumb and television-style accustomed student get some spark of brightness.

    Classwork are a natural part of the evaluation of classwork as nation-wide tests are natural part of the evaluation of schools and school-systems. That cannot be the only parameter, otherwise is like evaluating a student just from the point of view of written performance. There are also oral, class behaviour, extra work...etc... In the same way school evaluation should consider the results of the test as just one experimental point in the determination of a phenomena: to be corroborated with other correlated but non-directly related measurements. The social condition of the surroundings, the amount of previous fundings, the particular combination of skills of teachers, even the focus of preparation on test or on soft-skills should be taken into account in the evaluation. In the way that the preparation for the tests doesn't get too much in the way of the teaching.
    In Italy we are introducing just now school evaluation with nation-wide tests, that before was just on gossip-level talkative tradition, or just experimental, and funding distributed in exactly even way between schools, and experimenting forms of "objective" evaluation.

    My personal experience was in a very demanding high-school, when I was there they even tried to heighten the pitch to reach the top-something of Italian institutes (but sadly with the result of off-scale suicide rate). I was in class in 28 at 1st year, 24 in the 5th, with some merging and some departures/rejecting (if I remember correctly 14 people were rejected or fleeing the class after few weeks from the beginning of the year). Most of the ones that made to the end have now a Master degree. Some even doctoral level (me and two physician and a psychologist that I know of).
    Some of the teachers were teaching behind the desk and obtaining attention as they were death faring machines (latin-italian, I have the shivers and nightmares even now, but as a result I can translate colloquial latin on the spot, even 9 years later my stretched 6/10 in latin translation), some others were jumping across the blackboard and not obtaining the minimum engagement (like the physics teacher, in 4th grade the principal authorized me to give lectures in the afternoon since the class were so behind schedule and behind training... The next year they changed us teacher).

    In general I'm fairly intolerant and rude to high school teachers whining about tests and being evaluated. Should be the fact that as a post-doctoral researcher I often get much less then an High School teacher (the contract that was offered me at Yale was lesser than the payment of 85% of High School teachers at New Haven. Even the payment of a professor in physics at Yale was not too different from good-level high school teachers at New Haven! Now in Germany is much more even being 10% lesser than the starting payment in the public school) even though I have few-years contracts and being constantly evaluated and I am accustomed to this type of working habit. Evaluation is part of work, if you think that there is something wrong with the evaluation system point it out, but not refusing to be evaluated at all!
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2013
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  11. rogue49

    rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

    Location:
    Baltimore/DC
    Education will go all online.
    I hate to say this...and I don't think it's the best route, but it will happen sooner or later.

    Politicians are cheap, they don't want to pay for staff or infrastructure. (or retirement plans...)

    I can think of only 2 benefits of this, the inadequate teachers will be non-existent
    and the education can be standardized without negotiating many locations, levels and areas.

    Special needs and individualized tutoring will likely be supplied in certain locations, but these are much smaller infrastructures & logistics.
     
  12. redux

    redux Very Tilted

    Location:
    Foggy Bottom
    Education is a cradle to career endeavor. But the best opportunity to influence a child’s interest in learning and capacity to learn as well as socialization skills and thus educational outcome occurs before a child enters school and is developed in elementary school.

    My priorities would be on early childhood development/early education -- pay those teachers more and enhance the learning environment (reduce the class size, and upgrade/modernize the school facilities) and you provide the base for improving the likelihood of ultimate success.
     
  13. snowy

    snowy so kawaii Staff Member

    In European schools, depending on how the school is scheduled, teachers may have more free periods, depending on what days they teach which classes; in the United States, teachers generally teach all of their classes every day, unless they're on an alternating block schedule. Sure, if high school teachers were only expected to lecture (which is documented as the least effective teaching method), then there wouldn't be 180 student papers to mark, possibly every day. Additionally, while American teachers may have 1 period per day to prep for the next day, they may not. That prep time is something a lot of teachers have had to give up in the face of all of these reforms; those reforms require lots and lots of meetings that American teachers aren't getting paid for.
     
  14. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
    • Like Like x 2
  15. Raghnar

    Raghnar Getting Tilted

    In Italy a full-time professor have 24 hours lesson hours per week. The number of classes he teaches then depends on the teaching arguments. For Italian-Latin-Greek (one teacher teaches relatively broad arguments) professor (we call them professors) in a Classical High school there can be even two classes (4h/week each, even 5 for latin some years, more usually they prefer to take 3 classes with only 2 arguments per class), for a Biology professor in a scientific high school can be 8 classes.
    Then there are meetings and extracurricular activities (8 hours, more or less) and then lesson prep...etc...

    I find daily marks in high school degrading for the students, unnerving for the professors, and definitely if not useless, at least not worth the amount of work needed.
    Even with our lecture-based system (documented where? but most importantly effective for what?) the problem of students is that they don't elaborate and assimilate enough, feeding with homeworks and following them every step simply get things works.

    During my PhD I was assigned to write the physics part test for admission to the scientific universities, so I studied a bit the argument and did some time in high school to understand the problem. The thing that stroke me most of the whole process was the fact that the highest difficulty questions were not the one that required a lot of previous knowledge, the "good" (to their professors) students answered them pretty easily, even the one that required almost "esoteric" knowledge (I define that when I cannot answer without referencing some textbook or internet, testifying that the student have at least a level of "geekiness" comparable to mine if not superior :p), but the most basic ones that required logical reasoning and lateral thinking.
    One of the "highest difficulty" question (rated after calibration over a series of preliminary tests) I have ever did was not about application of Maxwell equations or some other "intentionally difficult" question that I've devised, but something to do with "how many wax you need to cover a cube if ... and ..."
    And since I heavily rely (and relied) on logic and not much on knowledge for work and study, and that my supervisor was really pushing for it, most of my question were logical oriented and I was despised for making things too difficult while I was only trying to making them more broadly tackable even for the unlucky ones that had a bad teacher :p.

    I cannot imagine what happens in an assignment-based system if you give them something outside the one already given assignment... Maybe the things improve, if you have any references about that I would be glad to know, but my opinion based on my personal teaching experience, readings and tradition of the Italian school is that increasing assignments and reducing autonomy and personal study and elaboration would be catastrophic.
     
    Last edited: May 13, 2013
  16. redravin

    redravin Cynical Optimist Donor

    Location:
    North
    There are so many concepts to be addressed in this thread that I'm having a tough time knowing where to start but lets go with the Common Core.

    One of the biggest problems facing this country is a lack of continuity between schools when it comes down to curriculum.
    A student can move to another state and find himself with a completely different set of textbooks, classes, teaching methods, and even order of classes.
    This problem was part of the reason so many other countries kick our ass in math and science tests (I have my issues but that's a different post).
    For that matter he doesn't have to move to move to another state, he can move to another school district in NJ and have that problem in math.
    Jadzia ran into this problem all the time.

    Common Core was supposed to fix this problem.
    It isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but after years of work it wasn't awful either.
    What was bad was the implementation and the nutjobs who were certain that this was some kind of conspiracy to take over education by the federal government.
    Often the school districts would implement it in the worst possible fashion, with little training and no investment because of budget cuts.
    This is not something you can just throw into the mix and hope for the best, it has to be done carefully and well to succeed.
    Far too often schools take new concepts, play with them for a year or three and let them fall by the wayside.
    Common Core shouldn't be on that list.

    The other problem is the awful idea of tying teachers pay to student performance.
    So you want to tie a teachers pay to a badly implemented project where the kids grades are going to drop because they haven't been teaching the new method?
    Or as in Jadzia's case where the principal in a fit of revenge loaded her class with kids with IHPs (learning plans), had been held back - in some cases twice, or were major discipline problems.
    She taught more than 139 sixth graders math in one day.
    Some of them were gang members, a couple were pregnant, some were as old as 14.
    And they wanted to base her pay on that?

    They are trying to privatize schools to break the unions so they can control politics.
    One of two sources of money for political money that can counter the Koch brothers, big oil, and The Chamber of Commerce is the Teachers Union.
    If they can kill the public school system, they kill the union.
    That and they make a lot of money with charter schools that don't work as well or any better than public schools.

    This country grew strong on public education.
    We need to fight for it.
     
    Last edited: Mar 27, 2014
    • Like Like x 2
  17. Street Pattern

    Street Pattern Very Tilted

    Strongly agreed, especially with the quoted part.
     
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  18. Charlatan

    Charlatan sous les pavés, la plage

    Location:
    Temasek
    The main problem with privatizing schools is the inequity it will breed.
     
  19. Baraka_Guru

    Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

    Location:
    Toronto
  20. redravin

    redravin Cynical Optimist Donor

    Location:
    North
    This would have had Jadzia tearing her hair out.
    Seriously WTFis going on that we are paying for this crap?