Is our education system broken beyond repair?
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Anonymous
Many of your points are antithetical to the fundamental conception of public school in America which is core to our democracy. Sure it's a mess, but the alternative is entrenched class systems. |
Anonymous
I'd love to see a correction in #4. I'm not from this country either but the amount of disrespect that is happening in the classroom is unacceptable. In other countries, kids actually respect their teachers. The US needs to wake up and start expecting decent behavior from students. I think it's a cultural thing though. Where I'm from, kids are raised to respect their elders. Here, questioning your teacher is seen as independent and leadership behavior. |
Anonymous
Finland doesn't track nearly so aggressively and they do quite well. |
Anonymous
| Two countries could not differ more than the US and Finland, please! |
Anonymous
they're starting to have vocational/career programs at the HS level in MoCo which is good. |
Anonymous
Finland = 5.5 million people. Not multi-cultural at all. |
Anonymous
| I would just like to note that college vs career prep is not the only reason for public education, basic capacities and knowledge for citizenship are important too. |
Anonymous
France differs from the US a whole lot too, and no one objected to France being brought up. And France doesn't even outrank the US overall (though they do in math, where we genuinely suck). See here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading Point is, extreme tracking a la France and Germany is not necessary for good PISA results. |
Anonymous
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I took the same NEA survey as another poster. I was stunned at how focused it was on the elections and the Democratic Party. They are not even remotely considering endorsing any candidate who isn't on the Democratic ticket. I took screen captures I was so surprised at the slant on the survey. Disgusting.
Until groups like the NEA realize that their focus needs to be on education policy and best practices, as teachers we're doomed. |
Anonymous
In the US, parents often don't respect teachers, nor do other adults. Many people think that teaching is easy, that anyone could do it, and they don't respect the work that teachers do. In other countries, it's a respected profession that attracts high performers. Here, the stereotype is that an Ed degree is easy and meaningless. |
Anonymous
| Respect begins at home. Parents need to teach their own children first. That is not happening in many cases. I've seen some absolutely horrible, out of control behavior on the part of students and their parents. |
Anonymous
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I'd like to add that back in the old country the parents know what their child is learning at school every week. They also have the materials and can help their child.
My mama went back some 30 pages in my textbook to see how something was done (we both forgot), so she could help me. She did say that it was teacher's job and it usually was, but every once in awhile it was ok to ask parents with homework help. My oldest is in middle school and I have no idea what he is learning and in what order. I find the order is very important. I feel like he is all over the place. He isn't even sure when the percentages are begin taught if any and I ended up teaching him. He thanked me because he said percentages were on Parcc test in grade 6. |
Anonymous
I think it is broken and it will be hard ot repare, but not impossible. I am hoping the teacher frustration will be the tipping point. People who are called to teach are amazing. But their job as it exists now is impossible. I am an American and have attended schools on 3 continents and lived on four. I think that you are missing a few key points in your understanding the context of public education in America and also our commitment to diversity and inclusion. The first point is that education is critical to the effective functioning of our government. Our citizens need to be educated enough to thoughtfully understand the issues of the day and elect the appropriate officials to represent their perspective. This commitment to the public good and not just educating the wealthy and letting them run the country is important to understand in terms of the vision of the founding fathers. (Note that I do't think we are doing a very good job of this.) The second point is that we are a diverse nation and seek to continually include more groups. Most prominently from an education perspective we have had women's suffrage, the civil rights movement and the disability rights movement. These are all works in progress and there is a lot more to be done, but we are trying to live up to promise made to all of our citizens. Your post is full of disdain for individuals with disabilities. I am not surprised since you apparently came from countries who are less supportive. We all benefit when people with disabilities are more fully able to participate in society. But it is true that disability inclusion/ special education is really not working well. This is in part because the federal government has never fully funded IDEA. And school funding is ties to property values (as another poster had noted). Without funds, schools aren't meeting the needs of kids with disabilities appropriately and they can have behavior challenges. You can look at the statistics on the number of people in prison with dyslexia, as evidence of the number of kids we aren't teaching to read and who are often dismissed as "bad kids" because they are acting out. In reality, the schools are the bad actors because they aren't figuring out that kids have dyslexia and teaching them to read appropriately. We are terrible at teaching kids to read in this country. The colleges of education have jumped the shark on their race to the bottom in ignoring the science of reading and chasing reading program revenue for their faculty (Reading Recovery/ Fountas and Pinnell). You can see how our scores have been dropping since so many programs moved to whole language instruction and abandoned phonics first. Schools need to use research-based programs to teach reading, those will work for all children and so are more effective. Interventions for kids with reading disabilities like dyslexia are then aligned with curriculum and are more effective. And children with mild reading disabilities can be supported with minimal intervention. This is important because roughly 20% of children have dyslexia. It seems like the rate is increasing because in our older, smaller classrooms if there was s olid phonics program the kids who had mild dyslexia were able to learn. Our class sizes are way too large for effective instruction. In K-3 classrooms, there really should be at most 15 kids, ideally with 2 adults. This allows for individualized instruction to support the natural unevenness of children's development. Class sizes can increase gradually with age, but there should never be more than 25 kids in a high school class. These larger calls sizes exacerbate any behavior challenges as it is less teaching than crowd control. So any child who "acts out" is referred for discipline or considered as having special needs. In many cases, these are children who have experienced trauma and who need connection with trusted adults so that they can recover and engage. With smaller classes, teachers can build these connections which improve the resilience/ coping skills of children. Our standards are not developmentally appropriate and our classes are set up with too little movement and too much silent sitting required. In order to develop the hand muscles important for writing, you need to do things like play with clay. But there is not time for that in K anymore as we are expecting those kids to read. It used to be we had 2 recesses a day, but now there is only 1 short recess and lunch is as short as 20 minutes. And that lunch is often silent so that kids focus on eating. SO there is very little time to develop social/ emotional skills in an unstructured setting. The focus on standardized testing has introduced a level of anxiety to schools that in unprecedented. Even if the tests aren't "high stakes" for the students themselves, they are often "high stakes" for the teachers and the school. So naturally the children feel pressure to excel and a lot of instruction time is spent preparing for these artificial events. We see a lot of correlational research on the connection between technology/ social media and the increase in anxiety in tweens/ teens. I wonder when the research will come out linking the increasing prevalence of high stakes tests to the same issues. And to me the worst part of all of this is that NCLB and ESSA were created to address the disparities in school investment and achievement by race/ disability and socioeconomic status. But they have really had no effect exect to enrich test companies. The wealthy, mostly white, families send their children to private schools or homeschool them to get a better learning environment. It is like seeing the segregation academies reborn. I am hopeful we can do better, but it will take money and a commitment to the long hard effort to change. And parents today will have to know that our efforts won't help our own kids. |
Anonymous
Because the people running the NEA have been around long enough to know that the only interest the GOP has in public education is dimantling it. They privatize public education, create charter schools that are siphoning off public monies and are completely unaccountable, and worse. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer, and the GOP wants none of that. |
Anonymous
+1 where would you rather send your kid to public school, a red state or a blue one? |