What's the Problem With US High Schools? 1095
GrumpySimon asks: "ABC News is reporting that High School kids are dropping out of high school in 'epidemic proportions', with an estimated 2,500 kids quitting daily. What's wrong with our school system that so many kids prefer working 40 hours a week instead? How can this be fixed?"
It seems to be an America truism that "things get better after High School," and it wouldn't be surprising if most of you readers feel the same way. However, why does it have to be this way? What's the big problem with American High Schools where more and more children are feeling that it's better to risk the "real world" than to continue on with their education? Of course, another question that should be asked is: Is High School really the problem, or is it America's Educational system as a whole?
This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Informative)
This doesn't mean that isolated cities (such as Detroit and Baltimore) that have experienced serious economic problems and urban blight are better than 30 years ago, they are likely worse, but to characterize the problem as a national "epidemic" is completely ignoring the truth. Our school systems, teachers, and local governments have been working hard to raise graduation rates nationwide. And the data supports their assertion that they are seeing some success. Sure, there are MAJOR shortcomings to our public school system, but there has been major progress that shouldn't go unrecognized.
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I have traveled to foreign countries, I always find it amazing that the average foreigner seems to know far more about American culture, government, and history than the average American. This isn't just a reflection of our schools, but of our society and families as well. I also believe the problem has gotten so bad that our leadership in industry and technology cannot possibly be maintained unless we make a large-scale concerted effort to fix education, not just concentrate on statistics such as dropout rates.
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As far as the U.S. leadership goes, kiss it goodbye no matter what, there are 5.5 billion people not living in the U.S., the numbers will catch up with us sometime.
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, I don't know if we can predict future world leadership just by population figures. By that measure, countries like Germany, Japan, and South Korea would have never achieved the industrial and intellectual lead they have/had enjoyed over much of the world (outside the U.S. that is). Sure, we probably won't be the #1 in terms of GDP in the future, but we certainly could make a concerted effort to regain the lead in per capita income and quality of life measures that we endanger by allowing the rest of the world's quality of education surpass our own.
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"The world needs ditch diggers too"
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Funny)
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These days high school kids are having trouble finding jobs (at least here in Texas) because there basically are none for unskilled young people. There was a time when you could graduate high school and work your way through college...but unfortunately that has changed. Now you have to get a full ride on a scholarship, student loans o
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if we could enforce the laws on the books, to where if you cannot prove you are a US citzen or here on a work visa...that would disqualify all the illegals taking the labor jobs, they wouldn't be pouring over into our country, and the locals that didn't want an education could make a living as they did in the past.
Not a good one, but, they could do it like the ones in the past did.
Of course, I don't expect the Dem.s in power now to have any more backbone on this issue than the Reps. did....
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Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Interesting)
We solved the problem by hiring an entirely immigrant (spansih speaking) kitchen. Productivity went through the roof, quality went up, cleanliness was impeccable and they came to work every day - usually early.
Whether they were illegal or not, I could care less - we did the proper paperwork to cover our butts so it was irrelevant. What I learned was true americans did not want the jobs, heck even I hated mine at the time. Another truth is many of the american employees were lazy, unproductive, had low self esteem and took little pride in their work.
While I may have had some work ethic and maybe you do as well, not everyone does. Even tho I hated my job, I did it and I tried to do so with pride. Maybe I was brought up differently and others are or were not instilled pride in themselves - I don't know. The fact is these immigrants came to work, were happy to work and did their jobs well, something my american counterparts failed to do.
So the next time you get a Big Mac or a Whopper in an understaffed restaurant and it tastes like crap and looks even worse, consider the fact that the kitchen is filled with stupid lazy people who really don't even deserve the jobs they do have. Go find somewhere who uses immigrants and enjoy your meal...
Just something to ponder.
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't surprise me at all. A lot of places I visit have a fair amount of hispanic workers. They seem to have twice the drive and work output of the equivalent native. Sad, really. That, and they actually say "you're welcome" when I say "thank you." That's more than you can say for a lot of Americans in low paying jobs.
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because you paid them $6 an hour, in a job that has essentially no benefits and is only full time if they're willing to put everything else off and make that half-assed job a career.
There are fast food joints around here that have terrible service, and those that have great service. The ones that have great service aren't populated with spanish-speaking migrants (yes, we get illegals even in Upstate NY), they're staffed with English Speakers who are paid enough to make the job worth their while.
In fact, the fast-food place that's best known for its service is also the one that's best known for employee benefits. And the ones that can be ran by "managers" who hate their jobs are the ones with the worst customer service.
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Go to a decent sampling of good restaurants and peak in the kitchens. The joke is that in the US, all food is Mexican food. Ask a chef for career advice, and one thing you will be told is to learn Spanish, because all your best staff will speak Spanish. Unlike a lot of others, Mexican kitchen staffs see cooking as their careers, and train themselves and each other intensively.
The best ramen house in the Bay Area I know has Mexican cooks working under a Japanese chef. All the good Italian restaurants in San Francisco have Hispanic staff. Same with continental. Go to Gary Denko's in SF, or the French Laundry in Napa, and most of the kitchen speaks Spanish.
I remember reading a biography of a chef in which he actually went back to Mexico with members of his kitchen staff to try to find out how they all learned to cook so well... and met their mothers.
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I think this depends on the area of the country. In california, it was hispanics in the kitchen when I lived there. In Kansas, whites. In the south, blacks. It just depends on who has the go-get attitude and the largest percentage share of the labor force.
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, you guys should get out more. It's a huge and interesting world out here, much more so than many imagine.
You're (on average) rich, you can afford to. My personal opinion is that there's few things more worthwhile to do with your money than experiencing the incredible variation that this world has to offer.
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:4, Interesting)
At any rate, the average Japanese person does not know more about American history than the average American knows. I'm also sick of reading and hearing about how crappy American schools are. They aren't.
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Interesting)
The one place where Japan excels is in their elementary school system, due of the various number of activities, clubs, and trips they get the kids involved in. Lunchtime and cleaning are a group activity. Lunch takes place in the classroom, with the kids taking turns serving the food. Cleaning the school is a student chore as well (no janitors!), with every performing an assigned task.
The place where Japan loses is in their tiered secondary education system (high schools.) They require a proficiency test for placement, and once you've been put in a low-level school, they treat you as if you can't learn anything. Worse, they expect you to behave badly and ignore the dress code, too, etc. There is almost no discipline system in place, with punishments ranging from a severe talking-to (assuming you show up), morning clean-up duty, or simply expulsion. The one good thing, regardless of level, is that pretty much every Japanese student gets to travel abroad at least once. This puts them one up on Americans, who are lucky to get to travel even out of state (distance is a factor, yes, but international flights are just as expensive in Japan, and yet the parents still pay for them to go.) On the downside, they have to pay for their high school tuition as well as uniforms; public schools are not completely supported through taxes.
The Japanese borrowed the tiered idea from Germany, but the problem is, they're not German, and obviously missed the point: German low-level schools are not prisons for the stupid, but rather vocationally oriented Realschule (welding, carpentry, etc.) The students graduate at the end of their second year so that they can then go out and get jobs with the benefit of a high school degree. Having been a student in America and Germany, and a teacher in Japan, I have to say that the Germans win on this one, with America doing well on the secondary school system and the Japanese excelling at the primary level.
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From all my personal experiences with meeting up with German/Europeans, Japanese/Asians and American kids. I will say that American kids flatout don't give a flying fuck by a large percentage. You want to know how to fix this?
Split the kids up into 2 group. "I care" and "I don't care". It's ok to mix kids of different intelligence as long as they both care. And watch the group that care excel like you wouldn't believe. For the group
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There's *nothing* a Hauptschuler is more qualified for doing than someone with Abitur, it's basically a school where the stupid kids go and learn less, and the split is very early, around 12 years or so ?
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The reason for that is not because the degree is worth less but because there is less opportunities to go around. Our whole economy has been sold off to the god of "global free trade." Of course there is nothing free about it, it's just a catchy name.
Uh huh. Try looking at some silly things called facts [census.gov]
Real median income has been on an almost uninterrupted ride up since 1967. Meaning, if you took every person in America and lined them up from poorest to richest, and then followed the guy in the exa
You get what you wanted all along (Score:5, Interesting)
- Disruptive students cannot be easily removed from an otherwise productive classroom
- Suing the schools for any perceived slight (such as having a dress code dictating no long hair or earrings for males)
- Basing school budgets on how many children can get federal handouts via school lunch programs
These are just a few of the reasons that schools are less about learing and more about jobs and promote more dropouts.
School lunch programs are a prime example, if the child would starve or be less than properly fed without a school lunch program, then shouldn't the child be removed via child protective services from the parents during summer because the parents admit that they cannot feed the child and need schools to provide free food.
Many states education programs are funded by:
- how many students attend school each day (daily attendence)
- how many students are on school lunch programs (federal per student subsidy)
Re:You get what you wanted all along (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I feel for the special-needs kids who require the extra attention, but the burden they pose on the educational system cannot be overlooked.
Oh, and I may be in a minority here as well, but back in high school, my school spent more money on our athletic teams (uniforms, coaches, facilities, etc.) than they spent on any kind of specialized education materials or programs. When it comes to education, they want all kids to be "equal" so that no one's self esteem is hurt, but god forbid they apply that same criteria to their precious sports teams.
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You might be a minority, but Copernicus, Galileo, and Pasteur never had the support of the masses eithe
Re:You get what you wanted all along (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about the quality of work a volunteer effort produces compared to that where the workers were enslaved into doing it. Do you think the quality, not productivity, of one is most likely better than the other?
This is why supporting the athletic teams because they make money is a bad approach in my mind - it is an efficient improvement, but entirely in the wrong direction.
Re:You get what you wanted all along (Score:4, Insightful)
Before school, I was hot for Weird Math - I ate up all the Martin Garnder "Mathematical Recreations" collections I could find, loved playing with all the concepts. Then I went to school. My main memory of math in school is sitting out in the hall in third or fourth grade with an exercise book of dull, dull fraction drill stuff I'd gotten the hang of forever, because I was way ahead of the rest of the class, and disruptive due to being BORED BORED BORED.
I barely know a damn thing about math nowadays. By the time anything even remotely interesting got introduced I'd completely lost interest.
Some years later when the boring, slow, dull math concept of the moment was square roots and the immensely tedious process of calculating them by hand, I was so bored I just plain refused to bother with them. We got a friend in the neighborhood - a structural engineer of some kind, IIRC - to give me some idea of when they might be used, and show me how to do them, including faster ways than the show-every-boring-bit-of-work methods the school textbook had.
I would like to say I still remember how to do them, but, well, I've really never needed to do one by hand since.
Smart kids need one-on-one education as much as any other "special needs" class. They just need a really different kind - one that can keep them INTERESTED, one that can call in esoteric specialists to help them pick up whatever path they become fascinated with, and can use this to slide in other curriculum elements outside of their speciality...
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The problem with America High Schools is essentially how they are connected to college admissions. They have been geared so tightly to college admissions that real not college career work like Auto Service etc have been completely passed by. As such the people who don't want to spend their entire life bonded to a computer or in some arts and parties program are left out of the picture. This makes high school worthless for about 1/2 of its attendees.
The other problem is one of the US Government who has se
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Of course that's the way it should be. Everyone should pay for his own education, and buy the service that he thinks is best; in the case of kids of course parents would take care of this. And don't think for a moment that a gi
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Entitlement is learned from parents (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't act up at school because I knew what would happen when I got home. I didn't want to disappoint my parents, and I also knew there would be consequences for my actions. The parenting I had dictated my actions at school. If parents did real parenting, rather than leave it to the schools, you wouldn't see these problems.
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Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Insightful)
I was going to say -- the use of words like "epidemic" without a shred of context tells you at least as much about the problems with education in America as the free-floating numbers do. I'm not even going to get into the ironies of "Of course, another question that should be asked is: Is High School really the problem, or is it America's Educational system as a whole?"
Stinky Farty Smelly (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering there are about 16+ million high school students ( http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p20-533.pdf [census.gov] ), it should not be surprising to hear that an estimated 1 or 2 students don't make the cut out of a 30 student class. That was certainly the case when I was in high school over a decade a ago. Moreover, is anyone really -that- surpr
Re:This is disingenuous Media spin (Score:5, Funny)
Even tommarrow they just announced that instead of the traditional half-day off before Thanksgiving they are having a full day and I'm not even sure why.
If the burocracy is eleminated then the children will have a better chance of graduating and heading to college then droping or bearly graduating and going straight into the workforce.
You are entirely correct the teachers do pass anybody. Oh the irony!
Gotta be the age (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a lot of the reasons things "get better after high school" is because of the age you are when in high school. I didn't know who I was, took people's opinions of me too seriously, and couldn't get the girl I liked to notice me. I was definitely excited to get out of high school because of how glorious college was made out to be. I didn't read the article, I'm sure it got involved to level at which i just wouldn't care, I assume that the kids they're talking about dropping out aren't then enrolling in college but it just seems like a lot of those feelings stem from puberty and the social environment created by forcing kids of those ages to interact.
Re:Gotta be the age (Score:5, Insightful)
That above is my complete summation of everything good from my HS experience.
12 years since graduation and I've flirted with college, work for a major semiconductor company in R&D and am overall happy.
The wife is a stay at home mom, polishing her masters degree in the next year and a half, with a plethora of other degrees in her wake (4 AS/AA, 2 BS).
Why drop out of high school? Because you can teach yourself better. The classes are taught to the lowest common denominator. That means that the bright kids who are not quite bright (or lucky) enough for AP classes get shafted. It's mind numbing and detrimental. My grades sucked because I was bored to tears with my classes. Had our school system taught to grade levels commensurate with Japan or Germany I would have had good grades because I would have been engaged. I don't care if half the class fails every grade, we need to step up our expectations of everyone. Race? BS!, Family status? BS! Income? BS!
I understand there are a handful of exceptions to each of the above, but tough, life is not fair, the sooner that lesson is taught the better.
I'm willing to bet that in only one generation the USA would be back on top in the education field if "tough love" were implemented in grading.
-nB
on a side note, I knew no-one at my 10 year reunion. WTF? People knew me, but I was so dis-engaged from school I was like "Who are you? Oh! wonderful (still don't have a clue) Uh Huh
Then you were failing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then you were failing at something that school is also supposed to teach you along with reading, writing, and 'rithmetic: Self-discipline. If there's one thing that school, both high school and college, taught me, it is that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do in order to be better off later on. Hopefully you had a parent or two that drilled that into your head where your school let you down.
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In what sense do you mean they are stupid? Do you mean that they make poor decisions? If so, how does one go about making a good decision? By being informed? And how does one become informed? Oh, by getting an education, either through formal schooling or self-guided study. So, they fail because no one has shown them the value of an education.
Is there any direct correlation between success in high school and, as you say, "lo
Re:Gotta be the age (Score:4, Insightful)
Had our school system taught to grade levels commensurate with Japan or Germany I would have had good grades because I would have been engaged. I don't care if half the class fails every grade, we need to step up our expectations of everyone. Race? BS!, Family status? BS! Income? BS!
Well, what a LOT of Americans don't know about the German schools is there's three "tiers", and you get put into one of the tiers after age 10. I forget the actual names, but I've termed them "professionals school", "secretaries school" and "ditch diggers school". (My GF spent her sophmore year in HS in Germany as an exchange student in the "professionals school", so she's told me a little about the educational system there). The "professionals school" goes 13 years and is of course filled with the top students and is geared towards university preparation. The "secretaries school" goes 10 years and is more of an office worker track (not college track). "Ditch diggers school" goes only 9 years, and obviously doesn't provide much education. I think you can do some kind of job training after attending secretaries, or ditch diggers school.
So while the top students in Germany certainly get a better education than most Americans, it's at least partially at the cost of the people who get put into ditch diggers and secretaries schools who get a worse education. I don't think anything like this could ever fly in the US where where we have a strong belief in equal education, opportunity, etc. Being an American I think it's irresponsible to not educate all your citizens, especially the people thrown into the ditch diggers school.
Also, one of the dirty-little-secrets of all those "US students behind students in Country X" is that at least in Germany, they take the scores from the "professionals school", and compare that to US High Schools (completely ignoring the ditch digger and secretaries schools).
I have no knowledge of the Japanese educational system, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar.
Re:Gotta be the age (Score:4, Informative)
It's also possible to transfer to a university even if you went to Realschule after you prove yourself in a Fachhochschule (like a university but more practically oriented).
4 Year Prison Term (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:4 Year Prison Term (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:4 Year Prison Term (Score:5, Interesting)
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If I was home sick (or, more commonly, if I dozed off in class), the book was completely useless in ac
The world needs ditch diggers too... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The world needs ditch diggers too... (Score:5, Insightful)
Studying at a college campus has yielded some insights. I noticed foreign students breezing through our classes like nothing, and that always amazed me. How can someone with English as their second language do so much better in class than the rest of us? I naively assumed it was because they were the "best and brightest" in their country and were "privileged" enough to come to the US to get a real education. It seems however, that the truth is much simpler and the solution much easier.
These students learned calculus while I was drawing triangles. With a more advanced math background you can go much more in depth with physics, and understand how formulas were created rather than be given a function to plug numbers into. You can understand why taking the derivative equal to zero of a function can yield the maximum of a trajectory, instead of being given a formula to find the apex. After you get through these particularly boring subjects you can have enough math to touch on some basic quantum, just so that you know there is more to physics than pushing blocks around and conserving momentum.
Now of course I'm biased towards physics and math, but even with the other subjects the issues were similar. English seemed more to me like vocabulary memorization and forcing students to read books instead of teaching them how to appreciate the literature. We were given no background on why we would ever want to learn a foreign language, but instead were asked to memorize yet more words. Had I known that learning German would open up doors to engineers and physicists alike I would have been more motivated.
So yes, while the world does need ditch diggers and this work can be rewarding (I worked construction through high school), the world needs competent and innovative scientists and engineers more than anything. The educational system as i've seen it in the US is dry, unchallenging, and unmotivating. Major change needs to be implemented to keep our competitive edge.
Three words (Score:4, Insightful)
What's really sad is a lot of recent grads won't understand either the math or the implication of that statement.
Re:Three words (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I see it (working in state education for 5 years so far) Friedman was right, we need to comercialize education to make any headway in the states. Since the countries who tend to kick our ass still institute corporal punishment, we've only got 3 choices:
1. Stay the same, and suffer
2. Re-institute Corporal punishment and all the other negative reinforcement measures that have been barred from touchy feely public schools
3. Deregulate and make schools accountable to a paying public. (essentially some sort of universal voucher program)
Unfortunately it's not up to those who care, it's up to those who spin. And the Dems don't want to cut off their supporters from the trough, and the repubs don't want to appear hard on education. So #1 is probably what will be the case for years to come.
read this book (Score:5, Informative)
John Taylor Gatto argues that American education fails to properly educate because it was not designed to educate. It was designed to create good consumers.
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And more! (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't worry: My generation is retiring soon, and they will start letting the prisoners out early to earn money and pay the taxes necessary to support us old folks (who might have to depend on the Medicaid/Medicare/Social Security plans that have been so mismanaged by the government). Then the "dropout rate" will be encouraged rather than disp
Re:read this book (Score:5, Interesting)
hmmm, kids waking up to reality (Score:5, Insightful)
* single-classroom style -- many students learn in ways that do not work with a single classroom and oral lectures, which is the style almost all high schools use. Almost never are students allowed independent study, and even if they only learn from reading, they are still required to sit in class, which is a complete waste for them
* forced attendance -- by forcing people to attend, there is no motivation to make the most out of it. There is no real opportunity cost to being in the classroom, making a high percentage of people there unmotivated to learn.
* low pay -- financing education on the local level means limited funds to attract highly educated and highly functional people. While most high school teachers are extremely motivated and devoted, the simple financial reality is that jobs that pay 20-40K/year do not attract top quality people. This is part of a larger issue of simple limited resources put on education
* separation of teaching from learning -- mostly in real life, people become experts and learn things when they turn around and teach others. Almost never are high school students given the chance to teach what they learn, and almost never are their rewards for them in teaching others.
* national curricula -- teachers have almost no flexibility on what they teach or the ability to customize lessons for what students really need to learn. Learning is an interactive process that drawn a person to a new understanding from their current one. Set teaching standards eliminate the ability of teachers to understand what their students know now and customize the lessons for maximal learning.
* lack of content applicability -- most lessons in high school are useless and disconnected from real world applications. They are abstracted and meaningless for students who dont experience how to apply what they learn. Mostly, high school has become a babysitting exercise to keep people out of the work force as long as possible to remove competition for existing workers.
In sum, kids dropping out makes sense to me. High school is not helpful to them. This situation will only continue as virtual communities continue to form and become more organized and effective.
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With a degree in Comp Sci in my area the median salary for a Level 1 is about 55% higher than the starting teaching salary for a teacher in the same area and is roughly 20% higher than the average. There is a substantially reduced incentive to go into teaching for anyone with that degree (or a related
Re:hmmm, kids waking up to reality (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Stopped paying you.
2. Started giving you pointless tasks with arbitrary deadlines, and discarded or returned all of your work without accomplishing anything with it.
3. Demoted you so that even the janitors and rent-a-cops were your superiors.
4. Instituted security policies forbidding you from leaving the building for any reason between 9 and 5, and requiring you to get written permission from your manager to leave your office.
5. Ran 8 55-minute pointless meetings per day, in which you were only allowed to speak at the discretion of the bored middle manager running the powerpoint up front, who would almost certainly dismiss your input because it didn't fit into their prepared slides.
6. Instituted random timed competence tests every week or so, that involved filling in a form full of semi-relevant questions.
Would you still want to work there? Even if it would look *really* good on your resume if you stayed there another 4 years?
School isn't about "working", or at least it shouldn't be. School is supposed to be about LEARNING.
My throughts (Score:5, Interesting)
I graduated in 2001 from a private Catholic high school that I actually liked quite a bit. However, there were still "problems". Let's ignore the obvious social stuff (which, to a very large degree, can never be fixed) and the fact that I just like smaller schools better.
What was there to hold my interest? There was a Drafting class that I found fascinating, but Drafting 2 was never offered because they couldn't get enough students. I got up through Physics 2, and we had Calc. But I liked computer and the only computer classes were typing, how to use office, and a very basic C++ class (all of which I knew by that time by teaching myself). The rest of the classes tended to bore me (except the ones on the history of the Church, because that was stuff that I hadn't heard before). The only other class I remember really liking was the Econ class because the teacher did a fantastic job (but most other students though it was boring... it was Econ after all). I kind of liked Psychology, but the teacher for that was terrible and while he seemed to be interested in the subject, he wasn't an enjoyable professor (quite dry, by the book, do this, do that). Some other teachers were just terrible (the Calc guy was as stiff as a board and just about killed my interest in Math). There was also Accounting and Business Law which appealed to me. But nearly every one of these classes I liked had a good teacher (important and hard to control) and was optional or had other more common substitutes (so if you didn't go looking to take it, chances are you wouldn't).
There wasn't much in the way of arts classes at all that I remember. If they were there they were purely optional. You had to take Gym. They did offer some interesting things (like Ballroom Dancing, which I regret not taking).
I didn't have nearly as much problems in College because I got to take the classes I was interested in (CS) along side requirements (some of which, like Sociology, I found interesting). High schools have become VERY focused on getting you into college (and every grade before on getting you into that next grade). My HS was college prep too (they advertised that). To a certain degree, I wonder how well anyone who goes through a decent American HS is prepared for the world. They seem to be like middle school now. It's EXPECTED you'll go to college. If you don't, you're either in a no skill job or you go to trade school. How about offering a metal shop class? We didn't have that, but it would have been fun. We were too college prep for that. No wood shop.
I'm not going to claim I know how to fix 'em. It's complex. But I know they did very little to encourage independent learning in the core classes unless you had a FANTASTIC teacher or you already liked the subject. Otherwise, it was "strictly business". And the less advanced your school (like a poorer one), the worse that all might be.
Students have no voice. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was a junior in High School, about 10 years ago. One day I had intense nausea and a sharp pain in my back. I went up to the nurses office to seek assistance. I was promptly denied any assistance, as I did not have a "hall pass".
Realizing my situation required medical attention, I left. I proceeded towards my car in the parking lot, with the intention of going to the hospital to get the care I needed. I was intercepted by campus security. I ignored their pleas for me to return to campus, and continued towards my car. Eventually I was physically stopped by a mid 30s campus cop, a female about 5' 4" with very short hair. I told her I needed to go to the hospital, and that I was leaving.
The officer beat me up (as in a fistfight), kicking my knee out and using her baton. I was incapable of fighting back in my condition, and made no effort to do so. She dragged me back to campus, where I was made to sit in the office until the end of the school day. No one ever spoke to me or the officer regarding the incident, but she did stay nearby to insure I did not leave. No medical care was ever offered, despite my requests that they now call 911.
After school was released several hours later, I went to the hospital and was treated for a kidney stone.
What is wrong with our schools is that this can a) happen and b) get blown off completely; as it is obviously my fault for seeking medical attention and since I was a student, I must have started the fight with the rent-a-cop.
~Rebecca
Re:Students have no voice. (Score:5, Informative)
It is easy here on Slashdot for you to believe me, 10 years after the fact. Just the fact I remember it with such vivid detail lends credibility or I am at least a quick creative writer to make up the whole thing so quickly.
At the time however, things were a very different story. I was a high school kid who had left class without a hall pass. The officer said I started the fight, and I was in the process of committing a crime (truancy). It was easy for all the adults at the time to ignore my requests for medical assistance, in their eyes I was just a whiny kid making excuses. There was no room to make a valid case on my word alone.
~Rebecca
Re:Students have no voice. (Score:4, Insightful)
~R
Re:Students have no voice. (Score:5, Insightful)
I look back on that day with the most extreme of hatred. I try and imagine a situation where I had the strength to fight back, could I have defended myself? What if I had brought a gun to school? I would give up every bit of money to a charity for home schooled kids if I could see that rent-a-cop go to jail.
If we can really be honest with ourselves -- I am a product of that prison of a school. Still to this day and probably for the rest of my life, I do not believe that anyone in any position of authority will assist me in any fashion. This may have been an extreme example, but it wasn't isolated. The purpose of high school is to break your spirit and turn you in to a drone who doesn't question authority. No amount of intelligent knowledge or discussion can change the fact that that is how I feel inside now.
~R
Looking for problems in the wrong place... (Score:5, Insightful)
While there is plenty, at least arguably, wrong with our schools, the most likely reason people would drop out of high school to work is that there is something wrong with our economy where increasingly families can't adequately provide for children while they are in school; the economy that has been doing well in aggregate terms hasn't been doing well in distributional terms.
It's not about the education (Score:5, Insightful)
In high school you are surrounded by people who either a) don't give a shit, or b) are spineless fools doing whatever necessity to get marks. The a)'s should be allowed (if not encouraged) to leave, and the b)'s are a product of the education system gone wrong. In their eyes, something is right if it is marked right, and vice versa. The actual truth is irrelevant. Neither the a)'s nor the b)'s care about learning.
High school is more about social control than anything else. "Do as we say or you have no future," is what is told, and there's sadly too much truth to it. The people who simply want to learn away from the fast majority of idiots are pretty much SOL.
Why assume the school systems' fault? (Score:5, Interesting)
- Maybe some people are just stupid and would rather do meaningful work then spend time being spoon-fed academic work that won't use anyway.
- Maybe it's PARENT'S faults: not holding their children to standards such as completing their homework and actually understanding the material, which in turn makes the kids' grades lower and makes them despondent about school.
- Perhaps the parents aren't being very involved and interested in the children's school work, and the kids are taking the hint from their parents regarding how important school is.
My general point: If the roles of all parties involved were clearly defined, it would be meaningful to discuss who's screwing up. But the idealized roles aren't clearly defined - there's no known single formula for successful public eduction. So it's not rational to assume the schools are the parties with the problem.
Lack of Respect (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the big problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
When you show up and work 40 hours a week and try to do a good job, people actually appreciate it. They'll even thank you for being helpful and doing a good job. It's rewarding and satisfying. Work is an accomplishment. And they pay you.
No one thanks you for going to school. You're forced to go there. No one appreciates your contributions. There are no rewards. School is a process that a person goes through. No one cares about you at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the process.
I don't think a big increase in funding so the teachers can have a lower health-care co-pay is the answer.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's not one thing, it's everything. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a special time for everyone because media ubiquity is reaching a head. It's possible now to find out things happening anywhere in the world just a few minutes after they happen. In many ways it shrinks the globe.
I'm a Generation-X'er, sandwiched in between the days of the baby boomers and unending patriotism (I call these the "my country right or wrong" days) and the Generation Y types (as in "why", as in "why bother".) Generation X is the first generation to grow up with computers and all that they entail. We have the distinction of being the first generation that can program a VCR, but we also are the first generation to grow up in disillusionment. We grew up knowing that the CIA imports cocaine and that our government sells arms to foreign countries and then goes to war with them a handful of years later. X is the first generation that doesn't believe [statistically] that the government has our best interests in mind.
Generation Y, then, is the product of our cynicism. It seems to be a generation of depression, while the Baby Boomers are the generation of ignorance and hypocrisy. Most baby boomers are still in denial about their role in handing over our freedoms to corporate america, and are busy blaming it all on the permissive society X'ers are trying to build. Y'ers don't much see the point in, well, much of anything. They're even more disillusioned than we are; at least X'ers didn't grow up in a time of utterly prevalent school shootings.
That's the overall societal issue that I think is increasing the dropout rate, but there are several other extremely compelling reasons why school is a sad joke and why kids don't want to be there.
One of them is that the economy is in the toilet. Things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better, and let's face it, while kids are easily led, they aren't necessarily stupid. Besides, the average adult is easily led as well. I know that when I was in high school, I too dropped out and got a job. In my case, it was because we were poor, and if I wanted money, I had to go out and earn it. This is a pretty minor reason but it occurred to me early on.
Another is that school's purpose is not to teach you, it's to train you. The scholastic benefits of school are utterly secondary to the primary purpose. Our school system was designed to produce factory workers. Once upon a time, that was what we needed, but now we have less and less factory jobs (although, go back a point; we may have more of them in the future, though our quality of life will be next to nothing compared to what it is now) and we're still producing factory workers. Think about the qualities that get you through school with the least effort: you should be a conformist, because the nail that pops up gets hammered down. You need to get up early and show up early, or you get in trouble. You need to do precisely what you are told or they will kick you out, send you to an alternative school, and basically put you on the fast track to incarceration. The school system is designed to erase as much individuality as possible. Kids are getting wiser to this sort of thing as time goes by and they get access to more and more media at earlier and earlier ages.
And of course, the administration is complicit in the whole program. They want things to run smoothly and their primary goal is to avoid problems. Meanwhile, programs like "No Child Left Behind" are so obviously designed to produce mediocrity that it's almost unbelievable that no one seems to have noticed. I mean, I was in GATE as a kid and even THERE they told me that I couldn't do certain things because I wasn't old enough. Now, those kids who are most likely to excel will get even less attention than they always have, because the time must be spent with the children least likely to succeed by teaching them skills that they will never even use effectively. The system is designed to produce automatons.
So, why are so many kids dropping out? M
Where do I start? (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem I see these days with the US educational system is the fact that students are graded upon how much work they do, rather than how much they know, or how much effort they put forth to learn.
All too often I've come close to failing in my classes because I didn't do some useless assignment, and yet, still I have a perfect grasp of the concepts that were "taught". That's not right. Theoretically, if I failed, I shouldn't know the material, right? Wrong.
Also, assignments should only be given as necessary. I have one particular math teacher who, even after every person in the class has shown that they get the material, still gives out work on it. If they've shown they can do it, then what's the point in giving out more work, and wasting time that could be spent on teaching the next concept?
Now let me move on to incompetent teachers. Any teacher who needs to rely on a book as a primary source of teaching, need not be teaching. If you can't teach the concept yourself, with minimal help from a book, then you need to go back and learn it some more yourself.
Why I should have dropped out of school... (Score:3, Interesting)
1) No real disipline....students are disruptive and can pretty much do anything (non-violent) that they please because the school district fears lawsuits.
2) Actual teaching becomes secondary because of the babysitting requirements.
3) What actual teaching is done is totally scripted by the administration (the teachers have a very narrow guideline to follow) and basically amounts to programming for the standardized proficiency exams.
4) All the students are treated as if they are university-bound. He feels that this leads to a swiss-army approach that does a marginal job at best.
My personal experience coming out of the same school in 1992 and going directly into an engineering program is that I was not prepared academically or mentally for what I ran into at Colorado School of Mines. Looking back at it now I wish I had worked several years (or done military service) before ever considering engineering, and considering what a job that school was doing then, I would have better off dropping out at 16 and working and getting a GED....the education (or lack thereof) would have been the same and I would have had at least some money and life experience under my belt before tackling engineering....
because public schools = government run monopoly (Score:3, Insightful)
Could you imagine if we had ONE government run auto company? Imagine everyone paid taxes and was provided with a "free" car from this government car company. The rich would say to hell with it and go off and buy a Lexus or a Mercedes, but the poor and most of the middle class would take the crap government car because they already paid for it. This is exactly what has happened to our education system and I'm always amazed more people aren't outraged. The poor go to crappy public schools because its the only choice, the middle class go to crap and mediocre public schools because they already paid for it, and the rich and some middle class send their kids to quality private schools.
The solution is to expose schools to competition... support school vouchers and school choice so that you break up the government run monopoly. The ROOT problem is the government run monopoly, and it must be addressed.
What is the Purpose of Public Schools? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do I have an easy solution? No. If I were put in charge of everything tomorrow, I'd probably do away with mainstreaming. We have schools for "gifted" students, why not schools to huddle the lower 10% together as well (excluding the truly special needs that are currently separated)? Get the top 10% the education that challenges them, the bell curve of the middle 80% will have them closer to together without the outliers, and the 10% that aren't as motivated or skilled will be put in separate programs designed to try to bring them back from the edge or at least get them ready for a vocation.
Which brings me back to something else that bothers me about the US. What's wrong with a vocation? There seems to be some stigma attached to trying to teach skills in high school, as if college is expected and that skills are taught there. There seems to be a decrease in automotive and shop classes in high schools. And there seems to be a stigma attached to someone that likes working with their hands. I've never understood that, but it is another thing that should change in the US.
Money? (Score:3, Interesting)
So if employers don't care about being a high school graduate or if there are no jobs which require a high school graduate, there isn't much point going on to complete your high school education and then go on to university to rack up $150,000 in debt.
The fact that jobs are being shipped overseas says it's hardly worthwhile .
p.s. why does it cost $150,000 to go through university? Seems like rather a lot, surely with that kind of income there would be lots of colleges, academies and universities springing up and competing to reduce the costs.
Liberal Viewpoints (Score:4, Insightful)
I know this is the wrong place to get any sympathy, but what the heck, it's only slashdot karma I'll lose. What's wrong with the high schools in the US is they are all too dang liberal. I remember in high school I had one conservative teacher, and he was the band director. Of course no one wants to be in high school! With all the liberal teachers I had, one encouraged students to share their viewpoints, while all the other forced all their dogma and beliefs down our throats at best, and worse case scenario penalized students for having "wrong" beliefs. There was a valedictorian girl at one of the schools in the district that wrote this great paper on the 2nd amendment and the right to bear arms, and the teacher gave her an F, so she played the teachers game and wrote a paper on Hillary Clinton, and ended up with an A. Don't tell me that's not penalizing students with differing beliefs.
The next problem is the teachers are mostly under qualified. Many a days in Pre-Calculus I spent correcting the teacher when she did a problem wrong, or going up to the board and solving the problem when she got so tired of my correcting her all the time. It was a joke! When other students had problems in the class no one dared ask the teacher to try to explain for fear of getting more confused than they already were. And don't even get me started on the A+ Certification course. The official teacher was Mrs. Huerta, but she knew nothing about the material. The above conservative mentioned band director, my friend Chris, and I ended up running that class. Even the Teaching Assistant couldn't grasp most of the concepts in the A+ Certification book we were going through.
Sam
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
To be a teacher today in the U. S. you have to have an education degree, you will be lucky if you get to teach the subject you have a minor in. So we have a group of teachers that supposedly know how to teach (highly questionable) but don't know the subject.
When I was in High School (class of '74) they listed the teachers degrees in the yearbook. Every teacher in my school had a bachelors in the subject they were teaching, some had a Masters in their subject. Most had a
What's the Problem With US High Schools? (Score:4, Insightful)
Graduation Bonu$ (Score:3, Interesting)
It costs over $30K:y to jail people. Plus the damage they did to go to jail. Plus the lost productivity from them both while commiting crimes and in jail. Plus their reduced productivity with jail on their career record. Plus the lost productivity policing, judging and jailing them. All deducted from their value producing even $30K:y at a job, without consuming justice system resources. By the time you account for the two parallel lives, we're probably saving at least $50K:y, maybe $100K:y, for every kid who gets a legit job instead of a criminal career, for probably at least 2-5 years per person. So every $1000 kid kept straight saves probably $300K - paying for 299 kids who got their bonus who would have stayed straight anyway. Those kids get to reinvest the money in something productive (except the tiny percentage who will spend it on crack).
We graduate about 3M kids from HS [72.14.209.104] every year in the US. Even if the stats in this article we're discussing weren't a 31% dropout rate just in "the nation's 100 largest public school districts", but nationwide, that means a maximum of under 4.5M kids getting a maximum of $1K each, which would cost $4.5B a year. The extra $9K a year more than dropouts that HS grads earn would pay back the $1K right away; if the dropout rate were lowered only 5 points, they'd still pay back the program in 7 years. And that's before counting the societal savings in working instead of going to jail.
Let's invest $1000 in each grad. Or waste many times more on criminals.
waaaaah (Score:5, Insightful)
These are probably the people dropping out of high school. Grow up, people!
The standardized tests test for perfectly acceptable topics: basic grammar, reading comprehension, and basic math. The majority of the kids dropping out are most likely the ones who cannot accomplish these things. So if you are getting bored in class because the teacher won't teach "outside of the box", take it upon your self to learn these things, but don't quit high school! First of all, if you can afford it, you can simply switch schools. Second of all, even though you might be convinced you are a super genius, people hiring you will be a little less than convinced if you couldn't sit through four years of high school.
If your teachers or administrators are jerks, notify someone. Figure out exactly what they are doing wrong (say, not letting you leave for a medical emergency) and report them to the proper authorities. I truly feel sorry for you if you get a bad teacher that can't teach worth shit, but even if you go to a small school like I did, you'll get a different teacher next year who can explain things to you. Oh, I know, why don't expend some effort and go to a different teacher of that subject for help? When your teachers refuse to help you, provided you are putting forth an effort, go to the principal or the guidance counselor. If you don't like the way the system is being run, there are smarter ways to fix things than quitting high school.
Also, as much as you might put stock in the Great Sheeple Conspiracy, seriously, take off your tin foil hat.
I don't understand why people drop out of high school. It's free (unlike college), and it's only going to take away 1 or 2 years of your life. Even if high school is useless for you, I don't see what plans you could possibly have that would be ruined by your continued attendance in high school. It may suck, but seriously, that diploma is important.
Milt Friedman and education (Score:3, Informative)
On Charlie Rose almost exactly a year ago, Friedman drew this analogy: The government identifies a proper subsidy -- let's say, food. So does it subsidize the *producer*? That is, does it give money to farmers or grocery stores, and tell them to provide food to people who live within a certain geographic area? Of course not -- that would be absurd. It subsidizes *consumers*, by giving them vouchers (we call them "food stamps") that they can then use to shop around and look for the best value.
The entire model we have set up for education is terrible, from theory to practice.
Allowing a quasi-government monopoly to exercise near-complete control of our most precious resource -- our children -- is INSANE. The monopoly will try to do what ANY monopoly does: Freeze the status quo and defend it to the death.
We will never make any REAL progress in education in this country until we understand that our Public School model has some real problems of a systemic, organizational nature, that can't be solved simply by throwing money at them.
- Alaska Jack
Public school teached me nuthin (Score:3, Insightful)
During my sophomore year in high school, we actually took an entire day to learn how to read an analog clock. I didn't require school instruction to figure out how to read a clock... and... I had it mastered by age five. Every class was like that. Always scratching the surface of a topic over and over again... never actually teaching anything. So much of school is about trivial things like not talking to your classmates, being silent, and sitting still. I don't find it a very effective nor social environment.
I'm one of the few that realized if I want to learn, I'm going to have to do it myself... outside of school. As a taxpayer, I'm furious that we are forced to pay for something so broken. The states are literally lobotomizing our youth by wasting their most precious learning years. You don't need school or teachers to learn. You need an interest and a way to get answers. Period.
Or maybe something else... (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of preparing students for adulthood or college (yes, they can be -- and usually are -- different), we have assigned our public schools as the surrogate baby-sitters, keeping our children occupied, but not placing much more in the way of expectations on them.
This is a parental problem -- and by that, I mean a problem with the parents. There are parents who want to ensure that their children are prepared for college, and they are moving their kids to private schools, or home schooling them, or moving to homes situated in the better school districts.
However, that only prepares kids for college, and may or may not prepare them for adulthood. Especially an unimaginable adulthood.
It used to be that kids could get a glimmer of how to be an adult be emulating their parents, who in turn were following their parents down life's pathways. This includes a lot more than simply careers, things like social standing, moral behavior, and how to deal with life's challenges.
But when both parents are scrambling to make sense out of a world that is radically different from anything they were prepared for, it's no surprise that kids are set adrift in life.
I have no answers, I only understand the problem.
People outside the US can't imagine what... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile the teachers have been 'educated' by the same system. They care nothing about teaching the students but if, God forbid, one of your actions should appear (in their fantasy world) to be an infringement of their constitutional rights, they'll scream like hell about it. The teachers of course think nothing of dressing like hookers and wearing T-shirts with obscenities emblazoned across them. (Of course not, they work for a government establishment and so their freedom of speech can't be restrained.)
Every morning the students all chant the Pledge of Allegiance. And periodically through the day they're encouraged to chant bizarre things like "I must express who I really am", "I have the right to be whoever I want" or some such American-style psychobabble. You probably think I'm making things up at this point. Maybe my wife is making this stuff up when she comes home from work, but I doubt it. This is what it means to be educated in California.
I also do voluntary work with kids in the area, trying to encourage an interest in science. The sad thing is that there are plenty of younger kids who have great potential. But so many of these kids have next to no chance of going anywhere with that potential.
Of course not all of California is like this. I live near an enclave of rich white-skinned people whose education district seceded from the surrounding city. House prices are through the roof there because apparently you can learn things in the few schools they have.
Still, a lot could have happened in the last ten years. Maybe it's like this in Britain now.
Easy Answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Half of high school graduates go to college, and half of them graduate. And many college graduates get jobs that don't require degrees too.
Devalueing of Diplomas (Score:3, Interesting)
The American education system suffers from the lack of a saleable product.
In the past ages, having a high-school diploma really meant something - that you knew basic math, history, science and English. The courses took real learning to complete, and thus even a lowly high school diploma told an employer you had an education. Yes, the real point of school was still to produce good sheeple, but at that point job markets demanded reasonably educated sheeple.
Only smart and dedicated students went on to university, where the education would allow them to rise a full societal class in terms of income. The extremely dedicated students creative enough to do real research got admitted to graduate school. Normal kids started working jobs, making money and supporting themselves.
Nowadays, however, the high-school diploma has lost all value and the bachelor's degree has begun losing its. High schools teach no vocational or even financial courses whatsoever. I, at 17 years of age right now, shall have to learn banking and investing from my parents and grandmother (who, thankfully, all handle their money quite well). The expectation, rising ever since the GI Bill (though the GI Bill was a good thing), that everyone will go to college leaves no real incentive for high schools to educate. After all, they can blame their graduate's failures to win admissions to Stanford and MIT on underfunding, the envied magnet school next town over, poverty, the parents or even the students themselves, because the school is not accountable to the local job market.
Top it off with politicians taking this obvious issue and spinning through each excuse the schools make up for their poor performance, not only to avoid confronting the real problem but because each successive scare issue over schools allows the politicians to avoid confronting the economic change that underlies all of it. Generation after generation, white men in suits tell us what's wrong with our schools, so they can keep sending jobs to Mexico and India instead of educating Americans. Nowadays a high-school diploma shows nothing other than the student's willingness and ability to slog through endless hours of busywork for no real reason or profit - exactly what modern business and government want to see.
The bachelor's degree has only begun to lose value very recently, but it's still losing its value. As ever-more Americans attempt an education that can out-earn the dying high-school diploma, they flood the job market with bachelor's degrees. And what happens when supply exceeds demand? The value of the commodity in question - in this case bachelor's educated American workers - drops. In the process, "savvier" young folks start taking master's degrees and Ph.D's solely for their financial value. Someday these, too, will bring in only a little more money than lower education and will burden young people with much more debt.
One thing is clear: Advanced degrees cannot demand high salaries while the high-school diploma falls in value. A house with a decaying foundation cannot stand.
The solution? In my opinion, we should once again make public high schools accountable to the local job market, as well as to the state and national university markets. Most universities will eagerly tell an inquirer how much money their graduates make - even for specific departments or majors. Given that high schools teach only General Education, they have no excuse not to supply such data to parents and students. Indeed, the better public schools already enjoy bragging about which universities their graduates attend.
However, many public schools no longer serve a substantial labor market. I know that Bethlehem Central High School here in Delmar, New York, USA does not. On some level, we have to bring back the high-school diploma jobs that once existed in most towns and cities of the country. Right-wingers are
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Those aren't bugs, they are features. How else is school supposed to prepare students for life as corporate (or government) drones?
Learning is going the way of the Dodo (Score:4, Insightful)
Content aside, the problem is that actually teaching has become really difficult these days in schools. With the (non-funded) requirements put on schools by "No Child Left Behind", Bush has recreated nationally the same mess he made as Governor of Texas. Kids aren't being taught in school, they're being made to memorize, and they're trained to take a specific test, which hasn't even been proven a valid metric.
Maybe if the teachers were actually allowed to teach the kids, they could actually engage them appropriately and keep them in school.
Re:Learning is going the way of the Dodo (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a problem that stems not from the president, but from the institution that has been built by countless politicians and beaureaucrats, brick by brick, year by year. Forcing students to all take the same test is easy on the system, but destroys the point of education. You kill the drive in the gifted and advanced student populations while the special needs students drag behind, and the "average" kids are given no reason to try to get ahead, and teachers are given no reason to teach anything but what is on the test. It's a huge problem that needs a huge solution, one that I don't forsee coming from the White House, no matter who the president is.
This country's downfall will be its education system, mark my words. Without education, everything else falls apart.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nice strawman. Standardized testing certainly existed, but No Child Left Behind takes the idea to an absurd level [wikipedia.org], and goes to the extent of financially punishing schools that don't meet its requirements. Now, combine that with the fact that the act is only funded ~50% [aft.org] (which parent poster mentioned
Re:Why bother with college? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is isn't the schools, it's American culture. The schools reflect the anti-intellectualism of the culture. Our schools suck because parents and communities are willing to blame everything but their own disinterest in education, and therefore do nothing to fix the problem.
Re:Why bother with college? (Score:4, Insightful)
To be blunt (but hopefully not offensive) your comment appears to be based on an emotional reaction that is short circuiting your ability to think logically in this area.
Blaming religious beliefs for lack of school participation is a thin argument at best IMHO. Worse it distracts from finding a solution.
I suspect the problems are more likely a set of cultural problems that are being ignored.
Here is a little conjecture:
-If parents were more involved with the education of their children their children would see more success in academic efforts. This success would be more likely to lead to academic interest. (Cultural change: 'the teachers are supposed to teach my kids')
-If high school were designed to give children a boost into the areas of their interest we would see less wasted talent and a higher number of experts coming from our colleges. (Cultural change: 'worked for me')
-If teachers were paid better and given more resources the job of teacher would be more sought after and a higher degree of competent teachers would be the likely result (if at the very least because higher competition would allow administrators more choices therefore weeding out those who are poor teachers). (Cultural change: 'sports stars deserve a 50 million dollar contract teachers should be happy enough just teaching my kids')
-If research into improved teaching methods were well funded and the higher levels of academia were willing to teach the new methods we would see a greater number of kids 'getting it' in a given subject, which would be very likely to heavily cut down on dropouts.(Cultural change: 'it worked for me')
Those are my thoughts based on observation, problem solving and logic.
I would honestly like to hear yours.
(I apologize if the beginning is offensive to you, however I think
Thanks for your understanding.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If teachers were paid better and given more resources the job of teacher would be more sought after and a higher degree of competent teachers would be the likely result (if at the very least because higher competition would allow administrators more choices therefore weeding out those who are poor teachers). (Cultural change: 'sports stars deserve a 50 million dollar contract teachers should be happy enough just teaching my kids')
I have a few comments in reply to this point. First, the sports star that i
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
7th Grade: "Welcome to Science Class! Today, and all of this week, we'll be learning about the metric system!"
9th Grade: "Welcome to Biology! Today, and all of this week, we'll be learning about the metric system!"
10th Grade: "Welcome to Chemistry! Today, and all of this week, we'll be learning about the metric system!"
11th Grade: "Welcome to Physics! Today, and all of this week, we'll be learning about the metric system
Many private schools disprove this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, most of them paid teachers significantly less than public-school teachers. On paper, they should have sucked: non-union, basically no job security if you pissed off the wrong person, long hours, low pay. And yet, they routinely got more qualified instructors -- people who were actual experts in their fields -- and graduated students who went on to be more successful. Why is this? I don't have a totally pat answer for you, but I think that most of their success is because of the institutions themselves: people are willing to go and teach there, even though they're not unionized and the pay is lower, because they're good places to work. Class sizes are smaller, teachers get more freedom to plan lessons and curricula, and the perceived 'quality' of the students (interest, motivation, background education) is higher.
In my experience, unions and the job security that they offer don't do much to attract the best talent. If anything, they attract the mediocre, who are seeking a job that it's difficult to get fired from. Improve working conditions, and you'll probably find more people willing to work who really know their subject and want to teach it. Throwing money at the problem, which is what the unions generally ask for, is not a solution.
Re:Many private schools disprove this. (Score:5, Insightful)