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Comment by scrubs

21 days ago

Good grief! The bush admin tried to getting better scores by standard testing ... as a scheme in some ways by-pass local control by trading improvement for cash or removing cash.

Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves.

I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years.

Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years:

- pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)

- focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town.

- maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters.

- withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too.

- contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids.

- put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.

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scrubs

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lotsofpulp  21 days ago

> - pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)

I would bet 90% of the problem is the attitude towards learning at home and among the peer group, who also get their attitudes from home. Doesn’t seem effective or fair to hold teachers accountable for that.

  • scrubs  21 days ago

    Right. But I covered that re: holding kids accountable. I'm a father .. believe me when I tell you several times I had to have a come to Jesus talk with my kid; teachers and school were fine. It's not 100% on the teacher. If the kid refuses to grow up I think he/she shouldn't matriculate in that subject. That means the kid is chiefly held responsible. I'll be applauding not scolding the teacher.

  • simonsarris  20 days ago

    Maybe, but then do we really need teachers with special degrees and other credentials that drive up cost for them and us? Maybe we can find a way to make education much cheaper if we're going to admit its limitations.

guywithahat  21 days ago

I was in school in Wisconsin when they got rid of the teachers union; schooling improved drastically. We had a physics teacher who went years refusing to write AP level physics courses when it was a union job, but suddenly found the motivation once the union left. Most substantially, at the state level the governor passed course options, which allowed high school students to take courses at local universities or other schools if their school didn't offer higher level courses.

Obviously unions aren't designed to protect students, they represent workers, however their negative impact on the quality of schooling students get is often quite significant despite being overlooked.

pixelready  21 days ago

I think there’s a lot of poor incentives at play here. Having to mash everything down into a handful of top line success metrics (annual test scores, attendance rate) is certainly one, alongside this obsession with one-size-fits-all age-cohort based schooling.

It is clear that public schooling in the US was originally designed to build obedient citizens and efficient factory workers. Horace Mann’s love of the Prussian model, the use of bells to condition timely synchronized movement between activities, the focus on testing and measurable output, etc… All other goals over the years were half-heartedly bolted on to that structure and it’s showing its age.

judahmeek  20 days ago

You talked about holding the kids accountable & the teachers accountable.

What can we do to hold the parents accountable?

  • zamadatix  20 days ago

    Blame is easy to assign to parents but if you do mean real accountability it is seemingly impossible beyond the most basic things such as student attendance.

    Even taking a non-cynical look at certain parents' level of interest/ability/care/etc, we go as far as taking students and teachers out of the rest of the workforce for the express purpose of being able to assign them accountability for education instead. There just aren't levers like that available on the parental side to try to trigger meaningful actions with, nor is there anything close to consensus on how those might be put into place to begin the debate on what parents should be made accountable for with them.

    The best chance I've seen to increase the amount of involvement from parents in their child's education is to try to have enhanced their own childhood education well enough to see why it's so important they be actively involved.

    • judahmeek  20 days ago

      I think you might be conflating accountability with enforcement or motivation a little bit.

      Maybe we should start by identifying metrics that enable us to measure the impact that a parent is having on their child's education?

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