Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I'm not American, and I've lived on 3 continents. I see a few reasons:
1) An obsession with all kids going to college. The idea that the average kid from Idaho should go to university is ludicrous in pretty much every country except the US. There's really no shame in it around the world the way there is in the States. Related to this, the idea that someone who isn't all that academically inclined must have a disability. In other countries, there are kids who are smarter and not so smart and it's just the way it is. Parents can accept that their kids can have different abilities to others.
2) A ton of special needs. Not sure what the US is doing that every second kid has ADHD or Autism or some type of developmental disorder these days, but it's just not what I see in other countries.
3) An obsession with least restrictive environment for those with disabilities. In other countries, you either keep up with the mainstream classes (with MINIMAL support, like maybe a dyslexia pullout) assuming a bit of differentiation (most of the time there would be core activities and advanced activities in any class) or you don't.
4) Way too lenient about behavioral issues. Not sure whether this is related to point 1 or 2 or 3 or some combination, but seems like every classroom in the US has some kid or kids with behavioral issues and that's really more the exception than the norm elsewhere. Teachers elsewhere can actually teach.
5) A ton of social problems. This is a can of worms so I don't even want to open it, but let's just say that this country has a lot of problems and they spill over into the schools.
6) Very limited illegal immigration elsewhere, and all migrants are expected to go to a special school to learn the language before being mainstreamed. No such thing as the teacher getting a bunch of surprise kids in 4th grade who can't keep up with grade level and have no idea how to speak the language.
7) TRACKING. This is a big one. Related to point 1 and 3, I guess. In other countries there is tracking and it's accepted as being the best for everyone overall. Sometimes exceptions can be made if a kid has particular passion but just missed the cutoff (whether that's up or down)... but that isn't related to how much the parents themselves push.
8) Teaching is a more respected profession. Higher requirements and also higher pay and expectations lead to higher results for kids and respect for teachers. Oh and parents generally stay out of it.
9) Greater respect for school property. A small thing, all things considered, but elsewhere I've noticed that school property (whether that's buildings, furniture, books and electronics and materials) seem to be cared for a bit better than I see here. I guess the cost of all of the damage and extra wear and tear adds up.
There are probably others, but they're the things I see off the top of my head.
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.
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