How to fix our crisis

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If the SAT isn’t rigorous enough then why do so few students get a perfect score ? Why do students who are focused on humanities need to be required to take calculus in high school?

Almost a thousand kids get a perfect score every year.
That number used to be closer to a dozen.

When was it a dozen? Back before they dumbed down the SAT?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Making calculus a graduation requirement and not guaranteeing a high school diploma would fix a ton of our issues

How ridiculous. Unless one is going into a STEM field, calculus is completely unnecessary - and useless.

Calculus has been a benchmark for a student's ability to handle academic rigor for at least the past 50 years.
If you can't handle calculus, you can't handle a lot of things.

I can handle 30+ students in a classroom but definitely not calculus. Not every job requires the same abilities. Can you handle my students day in a day out? Most parents come in for a day to chaperone a field trip and say they don’t know how we do it.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Making calculus a graduation requirement and not guaranteeing a high school diploma would fix a ton of our issues

I agree about not guaranteeing a HS diploma - we should force more kids to repeat grades as they do in France, for example.

But I am not convinced every HS grad needs calc. How about starting with the knowledge to pay taxes and killer arithmetic and algebra skills?

Why do people always put the responsibility of taxes on the school? That’s a parenting issue (and a reading skills issue, it is incredibly easy to file unless you’re obscenely wealthy or own a business). I do not think schools should be a ”Parental Failure 101” drop off. Also, at our local high school there are two personal finance classes, and the instructors emphasize that students say they want “life skills” until it comes time to actually do the work and learn. Many kids do not care.

+1, I guarantee you the students will not listen to Financial planning lectures.

DP. My kids did. They learned a lot from those classes, in addition to my spouse and I teaching them about personal finances.

You need to understand how many kids out there have parents who don't care about their kids' education. They send them to school and that's the end of their involvement. Many aren't even getting them to school (and that's an entirely different issue!). They aren't teaching their kids anything. That's the role of schools. I have many, many students with MIA parents. They could be incarcerated, dead, generally disinterested in their kids, living with relatives, addicted to drugs/alcohol, etc. Even the ones who aren't in these categories don't see themselves as educational role models for their kids as many never finished school. If nobody at home ever asks to see your report cards or asks about what you are learning at school, even the best student won't care about school by MS.

I agree, but not sure what this has to do with anything. All the more reason to offer these classes at school.

When your parents don't care, very few kids will care about school and learning. They are lost by MS. They don't give a crap about a financial literacy class. They often read far below grade level and don't hand in work. They don't attend school regularly because who would if your parents don't care and don't make you go.

So are you saying that because of these particular kids, classes like financial literacy shouldn't be offered? I'm sorry, but no. We don't pull everything down to meet the lowest possible standard. And I would also argue that a lot of the kids you describe find school to be a lifeline, without which they would NEVER be exposed to any educational concepts at all. Again - all the more reason to offer these classes at school.

I never said they shouldn't be offered but it won't do them any good. They are not in class, sleeping through class, on their phones/laptops, etc. My DH teaches these students and they mostly are done with school by MS. By HS, they are years behind in reading and math. Many of them have missed 50+ days of school beginning in kindergarten. It's no wonder why they are so far behind. I teach them in kindergarten and you can often see the trajectory at age 5/6. The LEAST number of days of school my kindergarteners have missed is 14 (I have 24 students). Nearly half of them were considered chronically absent (missing 18 or more days of school) by the end of the 1st quarter.

What is it, exactly, that you would like to see happen?

Here is a good start:

1) Free, quality childcare from infancy for all kids whose parents work and make below certain income limits. Sliding scale after that limit.
2) Qualify food for kids in daycare-high school. The "food" the students current get is mostly total crap.
3) A much better home and parenting situation. Something similar to the resources in the Harlem Children's Zone in NYC.
4) Paid sick leave for everyone.
5) Paid parental leave for everyone.
6) Free and required annual checkups for all kids (not just them getting shots at shot clinics). We are seeing a lot of issues in our 5 yr olds that should've been caught before this (vision, hearing problems, autism, speech issues, etc). If early intervention is key, early detection is needed.

Let's see what's wrong here ... Tax and spend even more! Every single suggestion made here is an ignorant liberal "we need to do more" argument that will resultonly in more taxes and more useless programs. And, yes, we're already $320 trillion in debt due to irresponsible attitudes like this. If you want socialism or communism (which what you are arguing) I have a few countries. to suggest.

Like Scandinavian countries? They seem to know what they’re doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Making calculus a graduation requirement and not guaranteeing a high school diploma would fix a ton of our issues

How, exactly.

Where is a diploma guaranteed? I dispute the premise of that statement

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As much as we talk about the difficulty of college admissions, American high school students are not learning enough content to compete in a global market. The SAT is not rigorous and barely tests at a pre-calculus level. Our students are dropping out of STEM programs like flies, and students aren’t graduating with the skills needed to compete in the entry level market. What reforms should we make?

“The world needs ditch-diggers, too.” - Ted Knight in Caddyshack (c) 1980.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’ve made millions as a finance professional. I did take AP Calc my senior year but blew it off before heading off to HYP. I got a 3. I can confidently say it made no difference in my life. The idea that it should be mandated is ridiculous. So basically 5 pct of the population will graduate from high school.

AI is about to do everything anyway.

Conversely, I got a 5 on my AP calculus exam in high school, used calculus a lot for my major in college, and decades later I’ve yet to make more than 5 figures. Calculus has no bearing on anything either way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Making calculus a graduation requirement and not guaranteeing a high school diploma would fix a ton of our issues

Do your kids go to public high school?

Let’s talk about the math teachers.

I have a handful of kids in mcps (or recent grads), and most of the math teachers were subpar.

Two of the teachers were born in different countries and speak with such heavy accents that they keep an American aid in the room to basically interpret.

The problem actually begins in elementary school where they no longer group by ability and cycle through groups instead of receiving on-level instruction for the entire block.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Making calculus a graduation requirement and not guaranteeing a high school diploma would fix a ton of our issues

Do your kids go to public high school?

Let’s talk about the math teachers.

I have a handful of kids in mcps (or recent grads), and most of the math teachers were subpar.

Two of the teachers were born in different countries and speak with such heavy accents that they keep an American aid in the room to basically interpret.

The problem actually begins in elementary school where they no longer group by ability and cycle through groups instead of receiving on-level instruction for the entire block.

That's just your school, that's not everywhere. My schools do not do this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As much as we talk about the difficulty of college admissions, American high school students are not learning enough content to compete in a global market. The SAT is not rigorous and barely tests at a pre-calculus level. Our students are dropping out of STEM programs like flies, and students aren’t graduating with the skills needed to compete in the entry level market. What reforms should we make?

One party continues to gut public education and use public money for parochial education that focuses on religious studies and not the 4 R's.

This isn't hard. America was great when people had a chance to succeed and then reward the country that made the conditions for success with taxes to bring others up with the same opportunity. The GOP has been gaslighting the middle and lower classes and consolidating wealth in the 1% and is now going to fight to bring in skilled labor from other countries so they can control those workers with their visa's while native born Americans become chattel in an increasing dystopian world.

The way to break it is to get private and foreign money out of our elections and limit or eliminate gerrymandering.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As much as we talk about the difficulty of college admissions, American high school students are not learning enough content to compete in a global market. The SAT is not rigorous and barely tests at a pre-calculus level. Our students are dropping out of STEM programs like flies, and students aren’t graduating with the skills needed to compete in the entry level market. What reforms should we make?

This is almost all false. No reforms should be made. All working well.

[Anonymous]

The conversation has been so heavily focused on HS and college, when fixing the crisis really begins in early childhood.

Universal Pre-K for starters and then stop social promotion. It may feel too close to tracking, but clustering kids of similar knowledge levels and/or ability in the classrooms. I know there's a lot of concern that it disempowers kids of color or boys, but focusing on foundational skills should be the educational priority. There will always be some students at the top and some lagging, but the baseline of literacy (including grammar and writing) and mathematical skills shouldn't continue to be lowered.

[Anonymous]

Add lots of migrant kids, get rid of high-level math so some kids aren’t embarrassed, lots of multiple choice tests, bullcrap extra credit & exam re-takes so everyone can get an A. I’d say Democrats & teachers unions are doing a fine job with our public schools, wouldn’t you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Stop teaching so many courses. We could consolidate many ap English and history courses to a series of Humanities courses- literally call them Humanities 1, 2, and 3. Make them rigorous general education courses on US and global history, English Literature, and potentially add in some philosophy/sociology in the later coursework. Increase and normalize the “fast track” where Algebra 1 is taken in 8th grade across the country; then, by senior year have students choose between a project-based stats course or calc.

Stop making students take every class under the sun for elite colleges and have them tested across these two courses: Humanities and Math to free up space for whatever electives they want. If you wanna take Humanities, Calc 3, Physics, Bio, and Chem with a language, do it. If you wanna take Humanities, Stats, Latin, Advanced European history, do it. No reason why we have to take so many classes across the spectrum that we don’t care about.

If my child doesn’t immediately take to the water in swim lessons, that doesn’t mean learning to swim is a waste of time. Learning how not to drown is an important bar, and it is not the only benefit from the process.

[Anonymous]

This site is a perfect example of why things are going down.

1. Instead of taking the time to research anything, go to the internet and ask strangers for advice.
2. Take anything posted as the gospel truth.
3. Spread misinformation or at least be heavily influenced by it.
4. Never stop to do critical analysis or use critical thinking skills.
5. Set this example and your kids will follow.

Result: a society of non-thinking, lazy people who somehow feel entitled to the best things in life.

[Anonymous]

I didn’t take calculus in high school and stumbled with it in college. Yet, somehow, I have managed to be successful in life. I am a lawyer and never use more than basic math. I’m not at all worried that my kids struggle in math. They excel at writing papers, are great at sports, social and will know how to network and navigate life much more successfully than many of the mathletes.