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Education is coming up next on the White House reform calendar. I must admit, I don’t know a ton about the subject or the battle lines of the coming fight. However, I did run across this item today in the Times:
Students who entered lotteries and won spots in New York City charter schools performed better on state exams than students who entered the same lotteries but did not secure charter school seats, according to a study by a Stanford University economist being released Tuesday.
Charter schools, which are privately run but publicly financed, have been faring well on standardized tests in recent years. But skeptics have discounted their success by accusing them of “creaming” the best students, saying that the most motivated students and engaged parents are the ones who apply for the spots.
The study’s methodology addresses that issue by comparing charter school students with students of traditional schools who applied for charter spots but did not get them. Most of the city’s 99 charter schools admit students by lottery.
I know Obama supports charter schools, and supports more accountability for teachers. None of these ideas strike me as bad, but I can also see how disasters like No Child Left Behind can be spun as improvements.
So, I’m curious as to what folks here think about education. Where are the problems in our system? What can we do to make things better? Can we hold teacher accountable for job performance without teaching to the test? Can we experiment with education without undermining public schools?
Your thoughts, please.
10 Comments
It is still creaming since it doesn’t count the students that don’t apply, and the students that do are probably from underfunded innercity schools. The problem is that our society is very socially segregated between the wealthy and the poor and charters do nothing to address that. Impoverished and poorly motivated kids get stuck in poorly funded schools because the tax base in their area is low. Middle class people move out because the schools are bad.
The way to address this is to give the top 10 or 20 percent of all highschool graduates free educations at the top 50 universities. This will give the middle classes an incentive to stay in the poorer schools. The schools will improve because they have more motivated students and because the tax base will go up, since the middle class will have an incentive to stay in poorer neighborhoods. We need to deal with class segregation. The charters will only make this problem worse.
Another way to deal with the problem is to close down failed schools. My sister worked in a charter for the very poor and it was just a new kind of warehousing. 40 to 1 student teacher ratios, when it is known that kids with behavior disorders need lower student to teacher ratios than other children. They didn’t have desks for the first month and the children sat on the floor. It is nighmarish, and the schools were not answerable to the school boards for their standards. The charters are just more unworkable corporatism.
Good topic for the first day of Fall.
Excellent idea, to provide scholarships to all graduates and keep the general public schools as good as possible. Also, teaching to the test has created massive cheating scandals in TX.
Jason -
In the interest of expanding the information base on education issues let me recommend the following links for news and insights, mostly from a more progressive perspective:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek…..fferences/
http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/
http://www.forumforeducation.org/
http://blog.coreknowledge.org/
http://blog.commoncore.org/
http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/
I’ve found them all helpful in gaining knowledge and awareness of education issues and news.
Thanks, that is most helpful! Going to add a few to my RSS…
One of the biggest problems in education is that for 40 years, the right has been consistently denigrating educators as somehow being zealously liberal and lazy. This was Agnew’s trope and unfortunately, many liberals will even buy into it to some degree. Nobody, including myself or my colleagues in education, profits from having bad teachers remain in the classroom. However, I contend that that phenomenon is not nearly as common as critics on the right would like us to think.
I have more than 20 years experience in the classroom, teaching all levels from pre-school to college, and can tell you that the lazy evangelizing liberal teachers are fictitious. It seems that now, Republicans are no longer content to denigrate educators, now they denigrate education itself. Witness the recent idiocy of wingnut parents pulling their children out of school so they wouldn’t be exposed to President Obama’s message to them about staying in school.
The No Child Left Behind act is the biggest waste of time and money in the history of education in this country. I have not met a single classroom teacher of any political persuasion that thought it was worth a damn. It does nothing but waste valuable classroom time and resources. The only people truly benefitting from this boondoggle have been the testing industry which ballooned into a multi-billion dollar cash cow nearly overnight.
When someone from the testing industry tells a politician, “We have a test that can measure the quality of education in your school system” a politician’s reaction is, “Great! Let’s start tomorrow!” When educators hear the same claim, their reaction is likely to be, “Who wrote the test, and can you prove to me that it actually measures what you claim it does?” Any fool can write a test and claim that it measures anything.
Our local high school is consistently voted one of the best in the nation. After a recent NCLB mandated round of testing, the high school was deemed to be lacking and was going to labeled as failing, thus risking funding. Why? Because of statistical errors in counting the tests. Upon a recount, the school went from failing to meet Adequate Yearly Progress to vastly exceeding it. Nothing changed in the quality of the education in either instance, it was merely how the figures were counted.
From this educator’s perspective, the biggest single problem in education is lack of parental involvement. When I taught high school, I would be lucky to get the parents of three students to visit me on parent teacher nights. And they were inevitably parents of kids who were doing fine. The parents of the at risk students never bothered to show up or contact me for any reason.
The parents who go to the trouble of seeking out charter schools for their children are already showing a sense of advocacy for their children’s education that is not typical. Therefore the statement:
does not prevent the charge of “creaming” the best students. There is an extremely high correlation between parental involvement in a child’s education and the academic success of that child. If parents value education and expect their children to succeed and back that up by taking an active role in the process, that is the greatest predictor of academic achievement.
The biggest problem with our teachers themselves, I contend, is a lack of mentorship from seasoned veteran teachers with a proven record of success. Education as a profession has a very high rate of turnover as inexperienced teachers can quickly become overwhelmed. Teaching can be a very stressful job and few novice teachers really have any idea what they are getting themselves into. With a solid mentoring program, maybe we could keep more good teachers in the classroom.
Thanks Gasman, great comment. Might make a great diary if you want to write it up.
I could agree with this, but still, there are likely to be some teachers who are better than others at their job for whatever reason, as there are in any career. So the question is, is that rewarded in teaching jobs?
This I agree with to a strong degree. Parents I feel often blame the school and the teachers for failing students, when nobody has more influence over students than parents.
And a great solution. Again, thanks for this comment, a lot to think about.
I look at this from a bottom up issue.
If the problem is inner city school, white flight and low income familes, then you inject serious income into the poorer school. You give incentives and FREE education for those that want to become teachers.
You make school INTERESTING. My goodness, how come there isn’t a field trip or field study every one or two weeks?
More cultural exchange! We should be exchanging 10 students per class with the rest of the world. Our kids will feel better connected to others if they experience life in other people’s shoes.
The biggest problem with our school system is the constant doctrine of lies and bullshit they are force-fed, and the second biggest problem is the lack of focus on philosophy and religion.
For the first part- In many ways, our children are unprepared for the real world because of stupidity forced on them. They are not taught evolution, and are further not taught that evolution doesn’t mean your religion is going to disappear, which would greatly reduce the histrionics involved in that issue. They are not taught American history, except to be told that a bunch of Awesome (White) Guys got together, and this country plopped into existence. They ignore all the dead Native Americans, and they also ignore any historical facts- like that we were not strictly speaking necessary to win WWII- that are inconvenient for patriotism purposes. If our kids can’t shout it as a jingoist slogan, they aren’t taught it.
Secondly, we do not teach them enough philosophy or religion. Not nearly enough of that. We do not show them philosophies to change their lives, we teach Aristotle, and that’s lovely, but can’t we go past him? Let’s talk about Hobbes, Kant, and when they’re mature enough not to go lunatic thinking about it, Nietzsche. Let’s teach them about all religions, so that they have an idea what other people believe and are like- and let’s teach them the higher philosophers, thinkers, and writers of religion, to give them a higher basis from which to judge religion than “God hates Fags”.
That is the problem. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic are not what the world needs. It needs people who know the truth, first, and that think on a very high level, second. Teaching them philosophy, religion, evolution, and history would do that.
1. Education should teach people how to learn, add knowledge, and communicate. It should not merely be centered on “how much one knows.” Its academic end that is acknowledged with a degree should be seen as its formal beginning of an educated life.
2. The concepts of Real School, Pseudo School and Actual School should be employed to analyze the success of a system. Real: Ideally desirable. Pseudo: Ideally undesirable. Actual: What is – a combination of Real and Pseudo.
3. Students should teach students, because one learns by teaching.
4. Grades should indicate what to study, not merely what has been studied or how one has been punished.
5. Students should be able to re-take levels, courses and tests. The new grades should replace the old grades. For example, an 8th grader should be able retake 6th grade courses and replace C’s with A’s.
6. It should be possible for 100% of the students get 100% on a test, instead of impossible.
7. Courses should assign engaging work. As it stands now, courses are deadening. Students actually wanting to go to school would be the ultimate proof of engaging work.
8. Course work should be useful and relevant to our lives and other courses. Use and relevance should be implicit and demonstrated.
9. Have a place for parents to be at the school. Not the lunch room or gym, but a place truly dedicated for the parents to meet and talk on a formal and informal basis.