Slashdot Mirror
Improving Education?
Shepherd Book asks: "Not long ago there was a spirited discussion, in the usual Slashdot style, about education, touched off by an article about the value of homework. Even more recently, there was a discussion about the value of grammar. This inspires the following Ask Slashdot question: What, in your opinion, would make primary and secondary education as good as possible? I have no experience of education outside the US, but I can say confidently that public education in my country sucks. And it may always suck. However, what can we do to make it suck less?"
"For the purpose of this question, the following are givens:
1. I know that there is a strong libertarian faction in this community, who might like to see public education disappear. Let's assume, though, that that isn't going to happen any time soon, and that there will be a public school system for the foreseeable future.
2. Similarly, many Slashdot readers are brilliant people who have educated themselves to a large extent. Let's further accept that most people are not capable of doing this, or at any rate need help reaching that sort of educational self-sufficiency.
Thanks in advance, folks."
1. I know that there is a strong libertarian faction in this community, who might like to see public education disappear. Let's assume, though, that that isn't going to happen any time soon, and that there will be a public school system for the foreseeable future.
2. Similarly, many Slashdot readers are brilliant people who have educated themselves to a large extent. Let's further accept that most people are not capable of doing this, or at any rate need help reaching that sort of educational self-sufficiency.
Thanks in advance, folks."
Do away with grade levels. No more of this fifth vs sixth grader crap. Students should be placed into classes that challenge their abilities at all times. For what is now grades 1 through 8 I would love to see 8 levels of math, 8 levels of english and so forth. That way students can be failed or promoted based on actual ability. Also schools need to start just failing students in general. I hate it when i hear people say that failing a child is bad for his self esteem and he should always be promoted to the next grade. Passing a child who is not capable is bad for society. Also, there needs to be more focus on sports in school. Not on the winning or losing but on participating, even if it is only a fun extra curricular league that plays a game a week or something. Too many kids don't know how to exercise and gym just isn't cutting it
As simple as that. Most people are made to remember in class, not to think. The best two teachers I had made do just that. One was extremelly brilliant, and he usually made a quiz BEFORE class. And all he said was "make your best effort." Too bad he was fired. I guess making people think was outside the rules. The other wasn't ignorant, but probably lacked the adecuate knowledge to give the class, so tried to learn TOGETHER with us. He got down to our and said: "Ok, let's try to understand this." Right now I'm in university, I can write a paper in 2 hours and get 8 out of 10. I can get into any exam and get about 8 of 10. Without any studing, just going to class and paying a bit of attention. No need to put any effort into it, no incentive to do it either. So I guess I have two points of view: 1- Force everyone to think, to at least try to solve really complex problems, that are outside of their current capabilities. 2- Keep a mediocre class, and an AP class, those who want to put in extra effort can do so and get a better education. The choice between those two depends on cultural situations. I live in a mediocre country (Costa Rica) but have also studied in the US. And in general terms is depressing. But then I guess I'm just babbling anyhow.
please excuse my apathy
This will probably be anathema to most Slashdotters, but I'd suggest that we strongly limit the user of computers in primary education (K-6). Have a lab, sure, and let kids use it if they want. But computers should not be an integral part of early education, because they do not encourage the kind of thinking patterns that children should develop.
Example: at the school where my mother works (as the school librarian) they routinely teach second graders to create PowerPoint presentations. This is completely ridiculous. PowerPoint, by its very nature, encourages summary rather than analysis. It forces you to reduce your topic to three or four bullet points per slide, which makes it all too easy to summarize a few high points while remaining completely unfamiliar with the bulk of the topic at hand.
Similarly, PowerPoint (and word processors, and basically every document-oriented program) makes it easy to worry almost exclusively about formatting instead of content. A report that takes 12 hours to prepare can easily wind up including four hours of research and eight hours of tweaking the layout and putting together fancy graphics.
Lastly, computers are purely visual and auditory experiences that make hard stuff easy. Kids need to have lots of experiences that engage ALL of their sense. That includes touch, taste, and smell as well, folks. I'm thinking of things like math manipulatives, finger paints, food projects (home made root beer, maybe). In the process, they need to learn to do stuff the hard way so that they're not completely dependant on the machine. It's easy to use computers as a substitute for learning basic math skills, for example. And hey, who needs to know how to spell when you've got a word processor that puts a squiggly red line under the incorrect words, and will even fix it for you if you just click a button or two?
For these reasons, I believe we should remove computers from elementary school curricula. They're doing more harm than good at that point. Computers will play an important role in later education -- say, starting in seventh grade -- but for the very early years, they're neither necessary nor helpful.
Eliminate American Anti-intellectualism.
This is problem number one, and I firmly point the finger at pop culture in America. Success in school is not rewarded with prestige in our pop culture. In our TV programs, you don't ever see the stock character of "the popular kid that's good at everything." Popular kids in American pop culture are very rarely acadmeic success stories, while good students are always unpopular.
It didn't start with our entertainment though, and so it can't end there. Politics and religion in America has long had an anti-intellectual tendency dating back to the Dark Ages in Europe through the lineage of Puritanism and our down-to-business focused work ethic. An intellectual was seen as an idle person and often was a person who defied the Will of God by questioning dogma. While this attitude has weakened over the past few centuries, it has still left its stain on the philosophy of blue collar America.
Asian countries have been fortunate to have had Confuscian philosophy as an influence. A virtuous man is a studious man in Confuscian philosophy. Asian religions also have rarely held onto a dogmatic streak in their worship -- though they have been just as capable of putting believers of other religions to the sword. They have been more encouraging of questioning and seeking which has overall led to a culture that prized education more than the West.
Even so, many European nations have shaken off the past and gained a far better attitude towards education. The problem runs deep in our culture, and until the public attitude towards intellectuals and education changes, no amount of shuffling about the cirriculum will help. However, I think we've been sliding backwards on this since the 60s. I don't forsee any significant improvements in my lifetime unless a major political and philosophical land change occurs.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I spent a lot of time this past school year tutoring 11th-grade New York City public school students on the SAT. These were bright kids who were genuinely interested in learning and very much wanted to attend college, and they attend the school system with the highest per-student expense in the entire USA, but their vocabulary was terrible, their writing was at about the level I'd expect to find from a middle-schooler, and they didn't even know how to use fractions. You can try to attribute this to low teacher salaries, bungled administration, or lack of funding, but when a smart kid can take a decade's worth of math classes and still not know how to work with fractions, I think the problem goes well beyond any of that.
The fundamental problem as I see it is free riders. Compulsory public education means that a sizable percentage of students in any public school will be uninterested in learning, with parents who are equally uninterested in their children's educations. These kids will contribute to a culture of disinterest and a lack of respect for education which can pervade the entire school. I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters can remember sitting through math classes where most of the time was wasted trying to get a few disagreeable kids to sit down, shut up and try to learn something.
Private schools work better because they cater to a self-selecting group: most of the parents who send their children to private schools are at least a little bit interested in making sure that their children get a good education and go to college, and will provide the reinforcement at home to make sure that they actually do study hard. Well-funded suburban private schools work similarly, because families move to areas with higher property taxes in large part because of their superior schools, and because (unfortunate but true) people with the money to live in those rich suburbs tend to have college degrees themselves and are more likely to appreciate the importance of getting their children well educated.
So in spite of being a Democrat, I think school vouchers are a good idea, not because private schools are intrinsically "better" (they're not) but because the extra effort and expense of sending children to a (voucher-subsidized) private school will weed out a lot of the less-devoted students and parents, while keeping private education within the means of moderate-income families. And even for bright but lower-income students, vouchers can help bridge the gap between merit scholarships and tuition fees.
At the same time, by shunting off a lot of the college-bound students to private schools, vouchers allow public schools to focus more on the needs of the remaining students. It may seem a bit radical in the face of American schools' constant focus on college prep, but there are some strong arguments to be made for adding more of a trade-school focus to public high schools; there are certain professions, nursing for example, that are badly in need of workers, and providing some of the training for those jobs in high school can fill the gaps and provide a much better career alternative than Wal-Mart.
This isn't about "giving up" on public education, it's about appreciating the reality that not everybody is going to college, and doing the best we can for them based on that.
Your other ideas were OK. But honestly, no homeschooling?
No parent can be an expert on everything. But neither can teachers - that's where good textbooks and other educational materials are impoortant. But far more important than a textbook is interaction with the teacher. It's a given that with homeschooling, you are going to get a lot more interaction with the teacher.
Furthermore because homeschoolers have the freedom to tailor education on a per-student basis, you can get a lot more depth in subjects of interest than in public schools (where they simply cannot tailer education to a per-student basis).
I was homeschooled from the end of gradeschool until college. Where there were subjects my teachers were not as familiar with, ew leaned more heavily on the textbooks. But also we had study groups with other homeschoolers that would help, like chemistry labs. We also had team sports that played with other school leagues.
There simply is no basis to think that a parent can not do as good a job overall as the average teacher can do, and improved family relations are a pretty big benefit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
2) Make it easier to be a teach, but weed out the bad teachers. We have a overwelming lack of good teachers and a overwelming number of bad ones, why? Cause right now it takes more work to become a teacher than to make good money in a related field of work, so that only the diehards who REALLY want to teach (who are few and far between), or the people who have nothing else to fall back on do it. Pay better money, make it easier but at the same time make sure you get rid of the bad ones before they get tenure.
3) End standardized testing. Its a joke, shows absolutely nothing but the person is a good test taker, and truthful give a false readout of if the students are doing well or not. I know great testakers who are total morons, and I know people who did horrable on the SATs yet could mentaly do the calculations for perfect satalite trajectories.
4) Stop comparing the US to other countries. Im sorry the fact that other contries are smarter or not is bullshit and anyone who actually reads the numbers will see that unlike other contries, the US is the only large country that requires attendance to high school. Most countries dont even send their children TO high school, they take tests and then are forcfully placed into what their job will be based on those tests.
5) Stop treating college as the end of school. High school should be where most of your life skills are learned, NOT college. Right now High schools teach as if kids are going to college, and not as if these students will be entering the workforce. In this buisnesses who refuse to higher qualified high school grads over a unqualified college grad based soley on a peice of paper are directly responsible and should be made to blame. College is ment to further your enducation, not complete it.
Kick out the bad seeds. Make them do labor and send them to special schools. 90% of most school problems can be directly atributed to less than 5% of the schools population. In the future if people start listening to suggestion one and actually parent their kids, this might be able to be removed. But at the moment there is just to many wasted humans who need to sadly be forced to stop being asshats thanks to their parents that schools just cant cope unless you have a special program for it.
START FUNDING EDUCATION! You want people to be smart start actually put money into the schools instead of saying it and then screwing the books so that schools actually get .5% of what you promised. No Child Left Behind was great at this as they promised money to support the program and have yet in 5 years to hand a cent out to anyone but the government buddys.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I had a theory that NCLB is really designed to take money out of the public school system. I'm just a teacher though and have little knowledge/decision making authority about education policy so I didn't put much weight in my theory. Last summer, though, I took a class in research methods and was surprised to hear the professor (a man of 40 years' standing in many levels of public education) advance the same theory as though it was pretty much common knowledge.
Do you know, for example, that students with severe special needs take the same tests as everyone else? How many specialists does that take, and how does that affect teacher-student ratios in the rest of the building? Staffing funds are not unlimited. Do you understand how much emphasis is placed on testing and Adequate Yearly Progress on high stakes tests? I've been reading some of the other posts about how to improve education and they all seem to rely on abandoning high stakes tests. There are many ways to evaluate progress and tell if someone should pass or fail a class, and if they fail I'm all for them having to repeat. It can be done without reliance on tests that determine (sometimes all by themselves) whether you pass or fail, and were created by people who haven't taught in years.
Many of the changes proposed are more like what happens in private schools which have less detailed oversight than public schools. Increase the federal and state government's role in schools to the point where education is impossible (we're not there yet) and people will get fed up and look to private schools (hello vouchers) as the answer. Maybe rightly so kids don't get 2 tries at their formative years.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
-Get rid of grade inflation: Bring back the bell curve. I've seen people get A's in high-school level American History who can't tell you who can't name 5 presidents...including recent ones. How can you tell if kids are learning if ALL of them get A's? This is worse than social promotion...at least if you pass the kid with a D he knows he's not performing...if you pass him through with a B he thinks he's "above average" (according to most schools' grade scales).
-Scale back athletics and (somewhat) the arts. Sports are great, but gyms are for athletics, schools are for learning. When every teacher is a coach, that's just that much less time being spent making sure kids are learning. Personally, I'd like to see organized sports out of public schools entirely, but I realize that's probably extreme to most people...and that it would never, ever, happen. As for theatre and band, they aren't nearly as bad as athletics, because they have some educational quality...but they still take away a little too much focus from academics, which is bad for the kids who aren't going to go into acting or music.
-Teach the darn teachers: First off, my wife is a teacher, and I respect almost anybody who chooses to go into the profession. That said, the teaching program at her university (and I've heard this is not the exception, but rather the rule) is a -joke-. I've seen the classes she had to take for a primary education degree, and seen some of her fellow students. It frightens me. How can you teach what you don't know? Now I realize why I sometimes felt smarter than my teachers (especially in late elementary/junior high)...I think in some cases I WAS. And high-school teachers should be required to have a major in their field of focus, and a minor in education, not the other way around.
-Tracking: I'm a believer in it...simply having AP classes and normal classes isn't good enough. I went to two high schools, one that did it and one that didn't. Face it, some kids are smarter than others, and when the whole class has to go at the pace of the slowest student, everybody loses. The only requirement, in my mind, is that parents should be able to move their kids to a higher track on request, but perhaps have to sign a waiver saying the school is not responsible if their child fails...since nowadays failing a student can actually bring legal action, or so I hear.
The school I attended that used tracking had 3 different groups for each core class. One for honors, one for general college prep, and one regular (though really it was usually remedial) class. The idea being that not everybody is college material...and this district had a pretty decent vo-tech program to go with it. So you had 3 different American History classes, 3 different algebra classes, etc. Granted, this is only feasible in larger schools.
Bring back the basics: Okay, I love multicultural education. I love finger painting. But the first several years our kids spend in school have one (academic) purpose...teach them to read and do basic math. There's a reason it used to be called grammar school. Most of the problem isn't at the high-school level...you can't build on a crappy foundation. Kids are getting there without basic reading and math skills, partly due to social promotion and partly because they aren't a focus anymore. How can you read your history textbook if you can hardly read? So now you're failing English AND history. Great. By 8th/9th grade it's far too late...might as well just let them drop out.
Focus on Vo-Tech: Not everybody is college material. Especially university material. As soon as we realize this, and as soon as universities stop accepting damn near everybody (ever look at the freshman dropout rate for state universities?), we will be better off. We can start focusing on giving those that aren't going to get a bachelor's some usable job skills, or prepare them for some form of trade school. There is nothing wrong with being a mechanic...we need them, and
This is what drove my crazy this year. It was my first year as a substitute k-6 teacher, and I hated going to a class and seeing some kids that could barely recognize letters in a grade 1 class vs others who could complete math designed for Grade 3 children. I wish the education system was more fluid, particularly in the younger grades, so that children with the same abilities could be in the same classes. Nothing is more difficult than trying to teach kids on a topic when everyone is not on the same page. I mean why the hell do they need to stay in the same class just because they are the same age? In almost any other activity you partake in you are assigned a group based purely on your achievement level, not based on your age. Groups created that way are more fair to those learning, and to those teaching.
Damn straight. Not everyone is the same. Things that are easy for some people are damn hard for others. I have a twin sister. She cannot read a map. Period. You won't be able to teach her - for some reason the whole idea never worked.
Now my sister isn't dumb by any means, in many respects she is frighteningly bright. You would be lucky to read as fast as she does, or retain even a quarter what she does from what she reads, for example.
You can tell my sister a 30 digit number once, and mention that she should remember it. Don't mention it again for a month. Ask her what the number is and she will have it dead accurate 9/10 times.
But for some reason graphical representations of data leave her completely unable to comprehend the material.
She almost failed statistics entirely because the course was so reliant on graphs. Her professor for that course was completely unable to understand the source of the problem until we discussed it with him in a special meeting, and demonstrated literature showing the problem isn't unique to my sister.
At that point he allowed her to complete her exam without a time limit. That gave her the time to translate the charts into tables she could actually work with.
It took a long time for me to believe my sister was not faking it. I would have said that understanding graphs is intuitive - but here is a case of a very specific learning disability that proves me wrong.
So is it suprising that some students are better at math that others? Not to me.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
Homeschoolers exceed national average for 2003 ACT.
Sorry, couldn't find data for last year. Not sure how often this stuff is compiled.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley