Is our education system broken beyond repair?
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Anonymous
+1. In the French case, you have a side order of racist and post-colonialist attitudes that mean the "lower tracks" are disproportionately kids/teens of African and Middle Eastern descent. The lack of opportunities for those folks led to actual riots a few years back, but I guess the "France is great" OP missed that NPR segment. |
Anonymous
That's not a problem with tracking itself- that's a problem with implementation. The solution should be ensuring that tracking is not being implemented in a racist way. That's the same for both the US and France. |
Anonymous
And another +1 |
Anonymous
| Illegals and low income are running it. They need another support system and it should be independent of public schools. Public schools should be education not social justice and free daycare |
Anonymous
Curious about your opinion on SpEd? |
Anonymous
Are you suggesting "separate but equal" schools for a sub-section of kids? |
Anonymous
NP I agree that schools should just be focused on education they aren't equipped to handle anything else There should be community centers run by social workers that cover basic needs In many cases these two systems should be collocated but they require completely different skillets and outcomes. A teacher isn't a social worker |
Anonymous
| I think wrap-around services are important, but that is expensive. There are more services than when was in school thirty years ago. |
Anonymous
This. Plus expecting teachers to manage umpteen IEPs. |
Anonymous
Having lived in Japan, the spread between rich and poor is much closer than it is in the USA. Strangely if there was ever a place where communism would work, it would be in Japan. The concerns of the Japanese school system is to raise someone to be Japanese. Companies provide a ton of on the job training, and students don't learn much in college. Students prep like heck for admission to top high schools and colleges, but companies there care less about your degree. They care where you went, and will then train them to be whatever cog they need. Japan and Europe have no issue with tracking at all, and less issues with trying to pull everyone up. Japan's issues with immigration are completely the opposite of our own. |
Anonymous
The legal history of tracking has been that it has always been racially biased in the United States. In fact, even gifted and talented programs have been racially biased, which is why certain jurisdictions, like MoCo, have been reforming their screening procedures for G and T. We all have implicit bias, and it’s impossible to separate that bias from student evaluation. That’s why any permanent, inflexible groupings of children are bound to be beset with racial issues. |
Anonymous
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What I’m seeing in the original post is that part of the complaint is that, compared to other developed countries, the United States spends a lot to achieve a lackluster outcome.
While I too have worried about the quality of our education, there are a few things that make this an apples-to-oranges comparison. Many of the services the US provides through schools would not be accounted for or provided as school-based services in other countries. As an example, we feed a great number of children breakfast and lunch in our schools. Other countries feed fewer children and account for it differently on a national budgeting basis. In countries with national healthcare, they may incur lower in-school costs for diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities. They may also account differently or provide differently for the services that we give through in-school social workers. Then there are quirks that are unique to culture that we can’t yet explain. As one example, native English speakers are much more likely to have dyslexia than speakers of other languages. We don’t know why, but we do know that this can add to education costs and explain testing outcomes. As well, the US has a fairly high number of emotionally traumatized children, as compared to other developed countries. These children have fewer cognitive resources available for learning, as their attention often shifts to their emotional needs, so they are likely to have lower test scores and consume more resources. Additionally, we have structural costs that are different than other countries. Our education costs include teacher healthcare, disability, and retirement benefits. These are nationalized in many other developed nations, so they are not costs of the education system. |
Anonymous
There is truth to this, but it's also true that some of the "soft skills" you are taking for granted, like a firm handshake and knowing how to be on time, are not necessarily things that children learn in all households. For families facing housing insecurity, circumstances can make it very difficult to show up reliably on time for their jobs, which means that their kids also don't learn these skills. And it's difficult to learn what an appropriate grip for a handshake is when you don't have any member of your family who has worked in a white collar/office setting where this kind of greeting is the norm. I don't know the solution, since I also think that public education should be about educated children to be informed citizens of a democratic society...but I think it's important to recognize the pressures that many of our cultural and social failures to reckon with extreme income and racial disparity place on public education. It's not clear to me that public schools should be forced to teach basic hygiene, nutrition, and life skills...but in some cases that is the only stability a child has. How do you balance these disparities? |
Anonymous
I don’t take those soft skills for granted, but I think they were markers of a middle class upbringing and that’s really all that was needed to access many of those entry level jobs of yore —particularly if you were white and male. I do think schools should be forced to teach basic hygiene, nutrition, and so on. They used to. I’m a third generation teacher on my mom’s side of the family. Among my grandmother’s tasks was teaching kids to bathe, brush their teeth, wear clean clothing, and trim their nails. She taught at a time when the war industry brought a flood of rural people to the city as workers. Many were unaccustomed to indoor plumbing and laundromats. Hygiene was seen as not on considerate, but vital to keeping people healthy and public health was of concern during WWII. Students sometimes arrived on their first day not just smelly or grimy, but with skin outbreaks that could be malnutrition or communicable scabies. Many of my students don’t know basic ways to protect themselves from illness, including proper nutrition. Others have no clue that clothing snaps can be replaced easily and cheaply. There’s a lot we can teach them to improve their lives right now, not just as adults. |
Anonymous
| Let’s look at number 2 on that list. I frequently wonder about this. Why DO we have so many children with some issue or another? Allergies, “sensory,” behavior, attention, what gives? |