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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Public education has been ruined for years.  Let it crash and burn and we’ll start over. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

Thank you for the details and info. It's going back a long way, but when I was in elementary school (public), there were very clearly "streams" -- e.g., high(er) achieving students, middle, lower -- sort of the smartest kids, the middle ground, the slower ones and you could be in the "smart" class for English but the "dumb" class for math... am using the terms kids used then. Is it still like that (separate streams?) or is everyone mixed together?

[/quote]

No, that's called 'tracking' and is now considered racist. Everyone must be mixed together.

When I was in middle and high school,  those who needed more time had study periods built into their schedules. We never knew those kids. Now everyone has a mandatory study period where everyone is mixed together.[/quote]

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