End of Dept Ed

[Anonymous]

No child left behind ended up leaving all of the children behind.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Public education has been ruined for years. Let it crash and burn and we’ll start over.

OK, so what happens to the tens of millions of kids who need school today while you gleefully sit on the sidelines and watch it "crash and burn?"

Only 9% of US children are in a private school in any given year. What are you going to do with the other 91% of children?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public education has been ruined for years. Let it crash and burn and we’ll start over.

This. I began working in the schools when my own kids were in MS/HS after years SAH. It has been so eye opening. If I knew when they were younger what I know now, we would have done private K-12 and I plan to pay for my grandchildren to do just that.

Without major reform, public schools will become just for poor and special education students. Even middle class families will find a way out.

And I work at a “highly rated” school in a wealthy area with an active parents community. It’s still atrocious and the parents don’t seem to know. I didn’t back then.

What does any of that have to do with the FEDERAL Dept. of Education, which does not control local curricula, hiring practices, or anything else that you think is wrong with public schools? The current state of public schools is primarily a local issue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public education didn’t just “go bad.” There has been a systematic attack on it for over 60 years after they were forced to integrate. Would it benefit from reforms? Yes! But destruction has been intentional.

Good luck America

The cause is the GOP undercutting public education reform and pulling public money out of public education and into parochial and "charter" schools.

PP here yes I should’ve been more clear. Once schools were forced to integrate. The GOP was so mad they started destroying the schools. It’s the same with anything that was forced to integrate. White people chose to fill their public pools with cement rather than share with people with a different skin color.

[Anonymous]

Years of underfunding in public schools yields poor conditions and results. It really doesn’t matter anymore because only the rich are going to college with the upcoming cuts to student loans. If you can’t pay for your kid to go to college, they won’t be going.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public education didn’t just “go bad.” There has been a systematic attack on it for over 60 years after they were forced to integrate. Would it benefit from reforms? Yes! But destruction has been intentional.

Good luck America

The cause is the GOP undercutting public education reform and pulling public money out of public education and into parochial and "charter" schools.

PP here yes I should’ve been more clear. Once schools were forced to integrate. The GOP was so mad they started destroying the schools. It’s the same with anything that was forced to integrate. White people chose to fill their public pools with cement rather than share with people with a different skin color.

Yes republicans hate minorities in class with their kids. I’m constantly amazed at the vitriolic comments about ESL kids too. Having grown up in AZ with many ESL kids in my class, the comments here are wrong and deeply ignorant, which is what the GOP pushes.

[Anonymous]

This has nothing to do with the Department of Education, and it is not just a funding issue. In general, dollars spent per student does not correlate highly with educational outcomes (look it up). Just throwing money at the problem (even if states and cities/towns had money to throw at it) is not the solution.

[Anonymous]

Next democratic president will just issue an EO and it will be back at full funding.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This has nothing to do with the Department of Education, and it is not just a funding issue. In general, dollars spent per student does not correlate highly with educational outcomes (look it up). Just throwing money at the problem (even if states and cities/towns had money to throw at it) is not the solution.

They have the money it’s just used in the wrong places.

[Anonymous]

“Those who can’t do … teach”

“Biology teachers are people who couldn’t get into medical school”

“Nurses are just people who couldn’t get into medical school”

“Federal workers have cushy jobs that do nothing”

Steady removal of drama, music and arts programs from public schools. No more civics classes teaching about how government actually works.

These have all been intentional campaigns to denigrate entire professions that should be considered essential.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Public education has been ruined for years. Let it crash and burn and we’ll start over.

The plan is not to start over. It's to create even more stratified access to quality education. Greater distinction between the haves and have nots.

[Anonymous]

The Department of Education provided grant funding for some of the worst and most damaging educational “research” imaginable, including the failed Lucy Calkins reading method.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:“Those who can’t do … teach”

“Biology teachers are people who couldn’t get into medical school”

“Nurses are just people who couldn’t get into medical school”

“Federal workers have cushy jobs that do nothing”

Steady removal of drama, music and arts programs from public schools. No more civics classes teaching about how government actually works.

These have all been intentional campaigns to denigrate entire professions that should be considered essential.

They all teach to the test. I noticed that public schools didn’t have standardized testing and people were better educated. Also it would be interesting to see if the bullying problem is tied to cramming down academics into kindergarten, instead of k programs being play-based.

[Anonymous]

Things have only gotten worse, by any objective measure, since the Dept. of Ed was created. Good riddance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public education has been ruined for years. Let it crash and burn and we’ll start over.

This. I began working in the schools when my own kids were in MS/HS after years SAH. It has been so eye opening. If I knew when they were younger what I know now, we would have done private K-12 and I plan to pay for my grandchildren to do just that.

Without major reform, public schools will become just for poor and special education students. Even middle class families will find a way out.

And I work at a “highly rated” school in a wealthy area with an active parents community. It’s still atrocious and the parents don’t seem to know. I didn’t back then.

Interesting. Would like to know more. From your perspective, can you name three phenomenon or issues (system-wide ones, not 'Principal Smith is lazy' or whatever) that a) led you to believe this and b) that you believe exist across school (not just the ones you mentioned.)

Not challenging what you said, but would like to understand the problems.

PP here. Just off the top of my head:

-Canned curriculums that are forced on teachers and most materials are predetermined and dictated. Kids, even kindergartners are leaning from slides not even made by their teacher. Even if a teacher wanted to expand on this or teach it in a different way, she really doesn’t have time without falling off the pacing guide. Maybe this raises up terrible teachers a little, but it really blunts the effectiveness of good teachers.

-HUGE variances in ability levels and knowledge among students. It’s literally impossible for a teacher, even a great one, to meet the needs of most or all students. You are either way ahead of your low students or boring your high students to tears. We have kindergartners who don’t know any letter names or sounds and kindergartners who can read complete long sentences. This only compounds with each new year. We brings me to…

- kids are not required to master any skills or knowledge to move on to the next grade. You don’t have to know X, Y or Z to move from second to third grade. You just go up no matter what. It has to be SO egregious for a kid to repeat a grade.

- too many special education students for the amount of resources schools have. Too many students are pushed into a general education classroom, which most often sucks a ton of the teacher’s time leaving even less for the rest of the class. Kids are also routinely exposed to poor behavior, and because this is tolerated due to the IEP, I’m convinced that this, plus permissive parenting, have made ALL the kids behave worse because they can get away with it. Parents would be shocked to know how many times their child has to be told to get our their math notebook or put away their Chromebook or step talking to their neighbor or stop roaming around the room during the lesson. Not IEP kids.

Overall, just the standards and expectations for both academics and behavior are so low. Average and above average students are not remotely challenged. They are given way too much time to do classwork (I guess in the hopes that the lower kids will be able to finish?) that even a slightly above average kid with the ability to stay on task is going to finish every assignment very early and have tons of time to kill waiting for the end of that block. Ie: Reading is a 50 minute block. The whole group lesson takes 15 minutes. The assignment given takes a typical student 15 minutes, so they have 20 minutes to kill every single day. Repeat this for each subject. Then you have students who couldn’t or wouldn’t finish the assignment if you gave them all day u less you sat right next to them and spoon fed them every answer and prodded them to keep going.

If you could just take the top half students of every class, and give good teachers more autonomy, the experience would be unrecognizable.