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Helping Some Students May Harm High Achievers
palegray.net writes "According to a new study performed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, increased emphasis on helping students with a history of lower academic achievement results in lower performance for high achievers. This trend appears to be related to the No Child Left Behind Act. Essentially, programs designed to devote a large number of resources to assisting students who are deemed to be 'significantly behind' leave little room for encouraging continued academic growth for higher-performing students."
Well, sorry to say it but DUH. Anybody who has ever gotten decent grades could tell you this. Not really new news.
It's all about finance really. If you pay more teachers to teach smaller classes, most of these issues go away. The other thing is that children with learning disabilities get taught by themselves or in small groups because they are a special case. I would say the same should be available to gifted children.
Story of my school's life. I don't know what kicked it off, but in 1999 a group of parents got together to stop the awarding of best-in-school awards to the top students, because it had the effect (they claimed) of causing all the other students to feel they weren't as good at school. The idea being that three students would end up awarded for excelling, and seventy others in the same year would be indirectly labeled as inferior.
Within two years we had academic success awards removed, and all kinds of other awards, including ones for one total misfit who'd been caught multiple times shitting on the bleachers. He got an award for exemplary social behaviour or some such, because he went a couple months without taking a crap on school property.
Now the smart kids go without awards, but the dumb shits get an award for not smearing their own feces all over the place. Mediocrity ftw.
No Child Left Behind is equivalent to No Child Gets Ahead.
This has always been blatantly obvious.
I think it is more important to make sure the whole population is well educated and informed than distilling every year's Nobel prize winners while leaving the masses in ignorance. The "success" of the current president is a terrible reminder of that lesson.
As a teacher in a results factory, can I just say: No Shit!
I work in the UK education system, which is governed by targets and league tables.
The focus from management is on the "borderline" kids, those who might just fail (below a C). There are lists put out, constant checks on their progress and their photos on a wall in the staff room.
Our Gifted and Talented program consists of going to the local university to "raise aspirations" once a year.
This is what happens when you govern by setting targets without any thought over the actual outcome. Train your teachers then trust them to do the job that they love.
I thought this was obvious, and why everyone ridiculed the No Child Left Behind silliness..
This is an expected consequence of the one-size-fits-all government education we have.
Derek Greene
Why does it take 'study' to reach this obvious conclusion ?
Build a system that ties funding to test scores, and you'll get a process that produces test scores and not much else.
ummm... Duh. Is this really news worthy. limited resources devoted to the failing projects in a company is considered a bad idea. but great idea when the goverment does it. resouces to help underachevers in a company usually go to waste as the underacheaver brings down the whole productivity of the group. survival of the fittest/smartest..... oh forget it. file this article under " no shit?!"
In norway we've practiced "no child left behind" in the lower grade schools for the last 20 years (up til high school). I've never read any official studies about it but I can confirm that teachers are indeed spending a lot of their time getting the "slower" students through the curriculum.
It's interesting to read that the lack of attention indeed slows down the high achievers as well. I would be interesting to know how much attention they would require to achieve what they are good for. Optimally you leave no one behind and you make your bright minds excel!
In other news, cows shit, grass grows, and pigs still in aeronautical R+D stage.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Let us feed the high achievers with the tender meat from those hopeless dull kids. The good ones will grow both stronger and smarter without their annoyance
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
Siphoning away resources for "no shit sherlock" studies leaves little money for studies that would have provided some insight or solved some dispute.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you have to compromise (and with limited resources, you do), then you support the worst off, and try to bring them up to a basic level of competency - because the smart kids can help themselves.
My Journal
Socialistic policies lead to uniform poverty. Story at 11.
I wonder if China and India similarly punish people for wanting to get ahead. Last I checked, our finest graduate programs are admitting higher and higher percentages of foreign high achievers due to a frightening lack of domestic ones. When are schools are more concerned with teaching junk science (global warming, polar bears, spotted owls), junk politics (socialism, marxism), and how to be spineless cowards, than they are with teaching math, science, history, and other factual subjects, it's not a surprise that we're falling farther and farther behind on the global scale.
Interestingly, these sort of braindead policies never seem to apply to sports in schools. The focus is definitely on pushing and supporting the most athletic and physically skilled students, while those who are not good at sports are left to flail around and just do time. This makes a lot of sense, since not everyone /needs/ to be a hot football or tennis player.. but for some reason society feels that "everyone" has to be of average intelligence, which is just wrong (and totally impossible statistically).
I know no one actually RTFA, but it actually says that scores have gone up for all levels of students. Scores have gone up HIGHER for lower students, but they've still gone up for higher students as well. It's just that raising the very top is much harder than raising the bottom, so there's been more progress on the latter. There is NOTHING in the article that says top students are WORSE off now than before NCLB (as asinine as the law is in other ways).
Make cheese not war 8:)
Most highschools have AP classes for their brighter kids to help them get a leg up in university and hopefully get a few credits. As shitty as my school was with most things they did do one brilliant move that helped make up for a lot.
Dual enrollment. My highschool allowed us to take classes at the local community college that would count for highschool while simultaneously they would count as college classes. Since we had such a small school we actually managed to get the professors to come out to our school and teach a few of the classes so we wouldn't have to rearrange our class schedule or even drive over to the community college.
This obviously is only a feasible for junior/senior years but it's programs like this that I think can really help to allow the high achievers to challenge themselves and prepare for university in a meaningful way.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
this is why, as a teacher, I only focus on the top students in the class.
I'm sorry, but if you aren't going to try your best, then I would be a fool to waste my time trying to reach you. bugger off. Go and fail in life.
I'm a teacher, I'm in charge of teaching. The 'learning' part is your job.
If you are making an effort, I will do everything I can to help and support you. But you still suck after getting extra help, I'm not going to sugar coat things or give you an 'A for effort'. Some kids are just dim. parents need to learn to deal with it.
I'm sorry for sounding so grumpy and uncaring in this post. It's been a long 2 weeks of solid speaking/listening tests, and I just failed 75% of my 1154 students, because they can speak absolutely zero English, even after 7 years of Education.
Then I was told to make my questions easier, because if a student gets less than 40 points, they have to repeat the year, and the school administration doesn't want to deal with that, so we prevent them from failing by lowering standards.
Then I learned that my "zero" I was giving my students is actually being entered in the books as a 15 out of 20.
that's right...if you absolutely nothing, if you are complete failure as a students, who has learned nothing after seven freaken years of school, you STILL get 75% on your test. pathetic.
-I only code in BASIC.-
I teach English in Japan and this is a problem that I see every day. I have students in their third year of studying English who cannot speak or write a basic a basic declarative sentence such as "I am a student" as well as students in their first year who study outside of school and have much higher ability than that.
The lessons are purposely designed to be slow, supposedly so that students are able to follow along without difficulty, but what this really turns out to be is the good students being bored out of their minds and, thus, unable to focus and having their English studies fall behind, and the poor students still not doing a thing to improve themselves. And by their third year, why should they? It is virtually impossible for them to catch up in school and so unless they go through a lot of effort outside of school, which is made quite difficult by their 7-6, and sometimes weekends, schedules.
An obvious solution is to separate the students into higher ability students, in which I can teach them more difficult material, and lower ability students, to whom I could review the differences between the words "I", "me", and "my". But this goes totally against the Japanese "everyone must be carbon copies" principle and so will never, ever be implemented. (Maybe not never, but it would literally take an educational revolution.)
As I see it, not only do the good students suffer, but the poor students do not gain anything because even if I slow down to a turtle's pace, they still cannot catch up because I'm halfway through the marathon and they're passing the 1st mile marker, so to speak.
Coming from Canada, I can tell you that while I was in the lower elementary grades, I was, for lack of a better term, a lazy individual. My grades were often below the passing mark (the passing mark being anywhere between 50% and 60%) and I was more interested in anything other then school. Now, according to the plan being tossed around here, I should have been shunted into a class with all the other "low achievers" which would have likely put me in the "applied" stream in high school, which would have seen me rejected from university, if I even had the inclination to go.
What happened though was tough love. I attribute a lot of the transformation that took place over a single year to my mom and the teacher I had at the time. He was a teacher only part time and a farmer the rest. He didn't coddle me, or send me to take psych assessments, or see the guidance councillor, or whatever else they do these days. But he did police me, constantly challenged me, and showed me that learning could be fun.
Where did that get me?
Within a year I was getting Bs. By the next year, straight As. High school, I graduated as one of the highest scoring students in the province. University, 4.0 GPA.
This isn't to boast, because frankly, the only thing that I have to boast about is that I had both a parent and teacher who cared so much that they were willing to give me personal attention. And I know for a fact that that teacher often took many hours after classes to help work with many students who he saw potential in, even if he wasn't paid for it.
I think *that* is the problem with the education community. Yes, classes are underfunded, yes the class sizes are exorbitantly large. However, I see the real problem as treating academics as a field of psychology and science. Constantly shifting the curriculum and doing "activities" to try and best determine what kind of a "learner" the child is. Children are smart. They can figure it out.
Splitting up the class based on performance is a bad idea. It means that those lazy students will be surrounded by like-minded individuals, hardly inspiring top performance. It also means that from an early age, a child's career will likely be plotted out for them. Not a top achiever in grade 8? Guess you're never going to university, son!
My 2c.
The worst thing about not challenging the top end of the bell curve is that those people don't get pushed enough to get good study habits and thus be able to do well in college. I barely studied for anything in high school (even taking only AP classes my senior year) and had a hard time when I did need to study while in college. The only reason I did well in high school is because I could mostly do it without studying and because I could avoid a lot of the homework and still do well (>A average). At least I got some work ethic having to deal with 5 AP exams in one year. I'm scared to think how I would have turned out if my school did not offer that many AP classes.
The major question that the US needs to answer is do we a) prioritize the high end of the bell curve to push the really smart kids or b) prioritize the low end of the bell curve to at least establish a minimum education standard. In an ideal world, the parents should be pushing their kids to at least be at the minimum and schools would not be afraid of saying "You fail". Unfortunately, in the US this is not the case and thus the question remains.
If we do want to prioritize the high end, that means really pushing kids and funneling money into college level course availability (and not community college but actual hard classes). This would, in an ideal world, make sense because the parents should be able to help get their kids to a minimum level but they shouldn't be expected to know enough about advanced topics. But, this would require hiring many teachers who are much smarter or at least more advanced than the teachers today which means that any attempt to push the boundaries will never work.
You are incompetent, unprofessional and immoral. You should be fired. Your teaching certificate should be yanked. Of course I'm not sure you aren't just a troll pretending to be a teacher.
/. won't let me do two posts in the time available:
Having said the above and because
Teachers have always spent 90% of their time on 10% of the students. In that respect the good students have always lost out because they aren't the ones getting the attention.
For the last few years I have taken my cues from John Mighton. http://jumpmath.org/ He shows how to teach math to every student in the class. With every student actively engaged, the discipline problems go away and the teacher can concentrate on teaching.
Those of us who have lived through these policies and understand how detrimental they are to the school system will be able to support change in the school system. I for one would rather my child be segregated so that he can get the attention he needs. Whether he ends up in the low end of the system or the high end. As long as both systems get the same funding then it shouldn't be a problem.
Your post implies that any government is a corrupt government, and thus any government must suppress critical thinking to continue existance. I have significant misgivings with this outlook, and I'd like to discuss them in a thread where it isn't off-topic. Drop me a line.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
As I personally see it, your "exelence" in highschool and lower levels of education matters shit.
Sure you may need a little catching up when you go to college, but the geniuses out there end up being geniuses anyway.
Start teaching quantum mechanics in kindergarden, and see if you end up with a bunch of hawkins. From my perspective, it doesn't make sense that way, to an extreme degree his carrier was pushed by his own interest and facilitated by his capability, not the other way around. You rarely hear people say "I became a particle physisist even though I don't care much for the field, but I was good enough to get in so...."
Maybe with lawyers it's more like that because all the money driven idiots who think they are godsent because they can both read and remember, but who wants more lawyers in the world?
As many others have pointed out, this was very much to be expected. It requires exceptionally skilled teachers to be able to motivate a whole spectrum of students at the same time.
In a traditional classroom, communication has a star-shaped topology with the teacher in the center. The teacher is a very scarce resource, and although broadcasting is available, the broadcast can be tuned to either low-bandwidth or high-bandwidth students. If only low-bandwidth broadcasts are used, those which could go faster will get bored real quick.
There are all sorts of proposals out there to break the star-shaped topology and get students to collaborate and motivate each other; however, the teacher will still be a scarce resource, because all proposals require a level of coordination which will itself require time&effort.
Proposed solutions (all of them well-known):
- More teachers = more time-per-student
- Better teachers = greater student motivation, broader spectrum
- External support (from parents, society to teacher's efforts) = motivated students and teachers
News at eleven...Cor, that must have been a tricky topic to research. I don't know how they come to such magnificent conclusions.
More importantly, teachers and students have been telling people this for YEARS.
Think about the effort used to get one lazy kid (kids don't have to be smart, but they should put in some effort) to pass a simple test when they're not interested in doing so. Work in a school - all you ever hear from such kids is "My dad'll get me a job" and you'll have teachers and teaching assistants basically doing the work for them multiple times over to get the right figures into the brackets that the school/government wants.
Meanwhile, all the bright kids who finished within ten minutes are bored to tears, have to wait for them to catch up, are getting no attention and so they play up. This wastes EVERYONE's time.
It's not an intelligence issue, it's an effort issue, spawned by a culture where hard work isn't rewarded and no or little work *is* rewarded - they see Daddy sit at home on benefits and affording all the latest toys and they want that for themselves. Every school I've ever worked in - the kids who win the awards/trips/treats are those that behaved/achieved for a week when they never normally would while the ones who do behave/achieve all the time are ignored and denied such incentives.
This was true twenty years ago when I was at school and is still true today. Don't bother to work and you get dozens of staff clamour round you all day long every day and try to "help" you, whether you want help or not. You get out of "normal" lessons, you get all the same breaks, treats and incentives (if not more) and you don't have to do much at all. Then, when you do bother to show that you can add two and two, you get a reward and magnificant praise, while the rest of the class are working away and being shouted at for dropping half a point on the top-level test.
There's a point at which a child is old enough to sort himself out. When that point is reached, it's up to THEM to motivate themselves. If they want to storm out of a lesson - goodbye, don't bother coming back for the rest of the day, week, term. The trouble is that this is propogating down to younger and younger kids and you get primary-school children who do nothing all day but roam corridors, have screaming fits, throw chairs and then get rewarded when they STOP.
I blame it partly on bad parenting, partly on the schools need to provide good results across the board if they don't want to get shutdown/taken over, partly on stupid inclusion policies that don't consider the effects for anyone but the problem child and partly on "politically correct" child management (never punish, only reward, except you end up only ever rewarding those who are suddenly do what they should have been doing anyway).
I work in schools but I don't teach *precisely* because of this. If you don't want to learn, I wouldn't want you in my class distracting people who do. But, in modern times, it no longer works like that.
A society is measured by how it treats it's disadvantaged.
A disabled person uses a lot more resources. A premature child a lot more than a normal birth. You guys have to figure out how to do things efficiently. These kids are part of your society, so either put them in a box or put them out there and deal with it
G
This is a classic conflict in public education. Who is the target student such that the level of difficulty can be set?
If a teacher tries to keep the slower students up to speed it always hurts the better students.
And then there is the real mode of teaching from which our concept of "High School" flows. Instead of being concerned with individuals the school decides to consider society. Therefore the trick is to teach at a level of difficulty such that a few of the brighter students, who have no difficulties, can not, after making great effort pass the courses.
What was done in Europe years ago at about the end of the sixth grade there was a sorting out. People of normal abilities were assigned to industrial arts such as cooking. Those courses were not a joke as they usually are in the US. For example a cook might receive training from seventh grade on up to about two fulls years of college and then after all the years he has already been trained be assigned as an apprentice and finally declared a chef.
More academically able students were then assigned to college type paths which were rigorous to the extreme. The one flaw in that mode is what do you do with the youngster who finds he has reached his level at the end of the "High School" when his path was academic. They ended up in the military as common soldiers or in the mines.
It could be summed up that one could almost judge the quality of the university by the number of student suicides each semester. If the kids are being pushed hard enough and they are all the A student types then the proof of the university is the number of students that crack like an egg.
When sharing a cake, if you give more to the hungry students the portions for those who aren't hungry have to be smaller
Teacher/trainer here again. Best solution is to share responsibility with the top of the class to teach the slower ones. "Top achievers" learn social responsibility and become even better in their subjects. Class spirit stays more healthy when everyone is taking care of the cowboy next to you. A message from a country where individualism not as high as in US acording to Hofstede's.
What should be the job of a public school?
Well, presumably you do a little bit of both. But the former is far more important. Furthermore, you have to ask yourself -- who is best equipped to help themselves succeed? While we all like to imagine ourselves as millionaire geniuses who really just "fell between the cracks", actual millionaire geniuses manage to succeed without a lot of hand-holding.
As Sean Connery said in The Rock, "Losers always whine about doing their best. Winners go home and **** the Prom Queen."
I'll put it out there, I'm an advanced learner, and here's what I've seen through my old learning "career". It was an excellent program at first, but over the years things really dropped off.
In the second grade, while attending John J Blair Elementary in Wilmington, NC, I was tested in the top percentile of the school. This allowed me to go every Tuesday on a bus to a special learning center downtown where we were taught logic puzzles (you find a dead body hanging from ceiling, pool of water under him, how did he die?) how to work with C64 computers and how to perform basic coding. That was 1987, and I was 8.
Then, a school restructuring took place in the districts. I was moved to Blunt Elementary, half an hour farther away. This was a very poor school, but due to the increase of advanced students coming in, they hired an A.G. (Academically Gifted) teacher. We met twice a week for a few hours to work on basic Latin, mind puzzles, logic, etc. I was in that program from 3rd to 5th grade.
I then moved to Leland Middle School, in Leland, NC. Things were dropped another notch. There was a similar A.G. structure there, but just for math and English. For Math, we basically met privately with the Math teacher of the next grade up and learned their topics. For English, we had a dedicated instructor that taught us in a outside structure next to the special-needs room. There we learned writing skills, more advanced Latin (and how to use it to break apart words and sentences). Budget cuts came along, so much so that the school implemented half days every other week. Instead of having a dedicated Math and English teacher, we simply attended the classes of the next grade up with those students. In 8th grade more budget cuts came. With no where to send us, they had us just sit through normal Math and English courses with the rest of our grade... relearning information we already knew. The administration was defensive and noted that it would help us build our skills by helping the others in the course - pure BS. We sat, bored, for the whole year.
Family issues arose, and I attended high school in Woodstown, NJ. There was no program in place here; it was a farming community. They had their 4-H, and that was it. There was no support for those who broke apart from the norm. As such, as a teenager, I rebelled and made life Hell for those around me. I was stuck, bored, relearning material I was taught years earlier. After three years of fighting, my parents and I convinced the administration to let me attend college courses at night. From what I hear, it's now an official part of their system for the advanced students.
Over the years I've seen how budget cuts and overall lack of caring has changed curriculum and delivery styles through the school systems. At the end, as the "smart" students, the administration felt that we were best left to our devices while they focused on getting everyone else up to par. Even worse was when they forced us to help them teach the other students, sometimes forcing us into mentorship programs, and buddy systems where we would have to call our buddies each night to ensure they did their homework correctly.
Luckily, I grew up to be a teacher... but not for schools. I develop and teach computer forensic techniques. But, I remembered my lessons from growing up. Every exercise I teach is built with multiple difficulty structures, and there are layers of hidden material that I push the advanced students to find. Having one single system to train all students will not work, as the teachers will just focus their attention on the students falling behind. There is a whole generation of very smart and advanced children, many of whom do not have the support they need at home (I was lucky to have a father that bought me QuickC for my 11th birthday). These kids will grow up bored and frustrated. They will lash out and adults will assume it just to be because of angst or the need for Ritalin, when the kid just wants to learn.
I guess we need to look at it from a broader perspective. For any society to progress requires that the people that make up the society moves forward as a whole. Enabling just a small group to race ahead doesn't really built a healthy society. While it looks logical to enable the bright students to race ahead and leave the others behind, it will not help in the overall progress of the society.
The answer to this sort of thing is to remind yourself that state school is a prison for the young specifically intended to cut them off from society for at least 8 hours every day.
Then you could reflect on how successful all of those privately educated children are.
I am a lecturer. I attended a selective state grammar school in the seventies which became comprehensive (I am sure this neo-stalinist word cannot be properly turned into a verb in English, but I await suggestions!) about half way through my time there.
When it was a grammar school you won a place there by achieving a high score in the state IQ test - wealth was not a factor. By the time the first wave of lumpen-proletariat had reached second year, Latin and Greek had been abolished and you could only take 2 science subjects for higher grade. You had to choose an arty farty activity instead of a third science subject. This way everyone achieve a grade in finger painting at the very least.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Next from Thomas B. Fordham Institute: "Newer Study Than the Last Wastes Money Investigating The Pointlessness of New Studies Which Investigate What We Already Know"
"If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting the results you've always gotten."
Seriously, this is retarded. I find it hard to believe people didn't understand this from the get go.
I love when Slashdot continually says stuff like this, and then a study comes out later which proves it.
Even from my own experiences, I was sick of high school by year 9 (2 years into high school) because when I wanted to do more, I couldn't, when I would ask more questions, there was never time.
Hell, I remember the only kids in our high school that were given laptops and allowed to use them for work, were the kids who were struggling.
After Primary School I didn't learn anything that I had to forget/relearn in Uni.
High School in Australia now a days is more like day care, it's just the place you send your kids so you don't have to look after them while you're at work. (This was in a regular public suburban school)
Nothing useful happens there, I wish I had of dropped out and gained entry to Uni other ways.
(Maybe someone else has had a better experience)
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
rant /rant
As we can gleen from some of the fine outraged replies above, there seem to be a lot of people out there who like falling in line and doing what their told. And if head honcho throws them a bone (read: award) they celebrate that as excelling and brilliancy.
To quote an earlier post "Well duh!".
Of course kids who just don't pick the stuff up and learn it need more help! Some kids just learn and get good grades without effort. Others need to work hard and get good grades. Still, some need help to just learn the basics.
It's much better to put some effort into helping the latter group out early than support them through our prisons and social programs for the rest of their lives.
If you want to help those who don't need so much help, raise school taxes and hire more teachers!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Just give both Ritalin - sorted!
... the intelligent kids have fewer and fewer excuses with places like MIT offering their challenging courses for FREE - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
I'm getting tired of the "all the intelligent people are victims", what really needs to be done is to have good guidance counsellors and to know about these internet resources, many intelligent kids can get the help they need from professors on the net and whatnot now. They have all the ability, what they need most is to have a map to be pointed in the right direction.
does it matter? The kids with decent to good grades are going to go on in life and be successful. It is worth pointing out however that they will be at a competitive disadvantage to students at schools where the focus is exclusively on excellence. It may be a bit harder for them to get into Harvard, Stanford, or Yale.
In the social democracy I live, we have never helped talented students. The idea being that since they are so damn great, they will get ahead in life anyway.
I ought to be grumpy about this since I was a talented child, but I did indeed get ahead anyway.
So I have mixed feelings about it. I prefer to be a smarter person surrounded by educated people before an erudite übermench surrounded by idiots.
But I would also have liked to have had a platform that would have sent me even further.
As somebody else said, part of your job as a teacher is surely to get the kids interested. In lower school (aged 8-12ish) I wasn't very interested, and didn't really try very hard. With minimal effort I could coast through, and was happy doing it.
Then we sat a government test. We generally weren't given the results, but I came top in my school. My teachers were amazed and promptly moved me into top sets for various subjects. I had just enjoyed the test. I was then challenged by my teachers and started to enjoy learning. I now have a PhD in physics and work as a university researcher. If it wasn't for that one blip on the radar, followed by some interest from my teachers, I'd probably be working in the local supermarket.
Posting AC because this isn't meant to be a brag. The point is that it's easy to miss good students because they don't enjoy school and aren't challeneged by what they're doing. That is where a really good teacher makes all the difference - they can stop a student going away and failing in life.
Please, go and find another job.
Sound a lot like the Dutch (and mostly the European) educational culture, we tend to favour equality over performance. On the other hand there is an important difference. High school in the Netherlands is segregated into different classes, preparing either for practical crafts, college or scientific education. This allows teachers to give all students equal attention, but at their own level.
Um,no. This is a result of "mainstreaming" and social promotion, both of which have existed long before NCLB.
I saw the same thing back in school and I graduated in 1986.
This is just more Busch bashing.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I just started teaching this year. I'm not young either. I gave up my programming job to teach English to Japanese students.
/. we love to complain about bad programmers who can hide in a large organization, spewing out horrible code while management gives them raises. But think about teaching for a bit. Here you have a profession where the success of the students (and hence the teacher) can literally be manipulated by the teacher. You can intentionally give them questions they can't answer (because you never taught them) or you can give them all the answers to the test the day before.
Here on
So to combat this you get standardized testing. If too many people fail the standard tests, then the teacher is bad. But what does that do? It means that the smart teacher will teach only what's on the test. And they will ensure that each student can score well on the test, ability be damned. It's all about the test.
This creates a curriculum which is meaningless. Just a bunch of hoops to jump through in order for the teacher to get their bonus (they get bonuses here in Japan... Does that happen other places?) Got a bright student that actually wants to learn something relevant? -- "Shut up kid. Talking to you costs me my bonus. You can already pass the test." Got a student struggling that needs to understand? -- "Just frickin' memorize this damn thing, OK? I don't care that you can't use it in real life. You only need it for the exam. Got it?"
The gaming potential here is enormous. I'm actually surprised that my school doesn't operate like that. Although we are one of the lowest ranked schools in the prefecture. So perhaps lack of need to achieve test results makes life better here. Most of the teachers are amazing, actually.
But it really begs the question. How the hell do you measure the success of teachers? They hold all the cards and there's no obvious objective measure that I can see....
First of all, high achievers are just that, and even without teachers they will achieve their goals, as long as they are motivated. We don't need to give them extra attention, we just need to give them the information and possibilities to go further while the teacher concentrates on people who can't follow... Ofcourse they could go faster if the teacher concentrates on them... They could go even faster if you give every one of them a teacher of his own... Reading teachers comments here who give up on students because their grades aren't as high just sickens me... I had the same problem (low grades), and teachers didn't care about me anymore, I dropped out before the end of high school... Problem was that I was just demotivated, not 'dim' nor 'stupid'. had the teachers concentrated a little more on me, they would have noticed, and they might have been able to motivate me. Luckily for me, I had my father and some other people who wouldn't let me go, and now I'm a consultant for a Linux company (most of the time I do the programming..). Why? They were able to motivate me, point me in the right direction... They didn't need to teach me, I'm autodidact (they didn't even notice that in school). I always said to myself that 99% of people are made for school and that I'm in the 1% that isn't made for school (I actually love working, while I hated school), but reading the prevaling mentality oozing out of this discussion I'm starting to believe that it wasn't entirely my fault that I dropped out of high school...
... the intelligent kids in the Boston Area have fewer and fewer excuses with places like MIT offering their challenging courses for FREE - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htmYou clearly didn't grow up in the God-fearing countryside of these United States.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
This is one reason why school vouchers are so important, so that parents of smart kids can rescue them by putting them in a proper learning environment, regardless of their economic situation.
So, while there is a major effort to get struggling kids better scores, which is very good, this goal of NARROWING the gap can only be achieved if the top students don't get even better scores.
Artificial selection messes natural one. Film at 11.
You've got a finite pile of money to spend every year on educating your children. Why is it considered smart to spend a proportionately larger piece of the pie on those who will do less, so that they can achieve something slightly below the norm, instead of greatly below the norm? Doesn't it make more sense to spend that bigger piece of pie on those who will do more with it? Won't society achieve more?
Darwin was supposed to weed these individuals out, why are we fighting it and calling it "Advanced" Society? Since when is fighting natural evolution (yeah, that thing all those smart people espouse because it makes them feel better than the creationists) in the name of superiority?
If they were allowed to test out of working in class and spend that time on something appropriately useful (such as MIT Open Courseware), it would make a gigantic difference in their lives. If you expect them to go home and turn on MIT Open Courseware after eight hours of drudgery and boredom have cultivated an extreme hate for learning in their minds, you're expecting too much from the average kid. "Gifted" is a misnomer - a higher IQ does not mean perfect, and other positive traits may well be lower.
The educational equivalent of socialism.
Imagine if Bush had to put *that* in his pipe and smoke it.
--
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
No Child Left Behind == No Child Allowed Ahead
At my age (I'm 44), I am one of the few people who experienced the public education system in Canada both before and after this type of policy (NCLB) took effect. I was always a high achiever, and despite getting a late start in kindergarten (I was almost 6), I quickly learned the work and accelerated several grades. I was still 6 in grade 3.
Sometime during grade 4, I noticed something going on with the curriculum. Rather than the steadily more challenging books I was expecting, reading began to be taught using a series of cards with the simplest of prose on them. Suddenly, the reading skills being taught to grade 4 students dropped to the "run Spot run" level. And stayed there.
By the time the new curriculum had become entrenched, I was in grade 6. My teacher in that grade was obligated to spend most of his time teaching the troublemakers in the class and really had very little time left over for anyone else, especially high achievers. Since this time, it has been declared that mentally retarded (sorry, NOT developmentally delayed, NOT differently intelligent, NOT developmentally challenged, mentally retarded) must be placed in regular classrooms also, along with autistic children and almost any other child not capable of learning at a normal pace. I can only imagine what effect this has had on actual learning in school.
I was very fortunate in that my parents, firmly in the middle class, were able to find a school with excellent academics that catered exclusively to gifted students and scrape together the tuition for it. Suddenly I was learning Latin, and Shakespeare, and actual geography and history. And this school was not afraid to kick me out for lack of academic performance.
It seems obvious to me that with a policy such as NCLB, schools will focus on getting the maximum number of students to a certain level of mediocrity. Under such a program, this is the maximum result (funding wise) for the minimum effort. And as this generation of children moves up in age, results of this policy will be easy to see. We can see them now in fact. Look at the comments on social networking sites et.al.: "like i dint no u r gonna b workig their omg that is sooooooo cool".
Just think: this is the next generation, the one that is going to have to meet the competitive challenge from India, China and others in the global battle for power and influence.
Looks like we've had our day in the sun.
I agree that the solution is not lowering the standards. I think that part of the problem is that you have to teach 1154 students. Maybe if part of the money the government uses in "defense" was employed in education the students/teacher ratio would not be so bad. With such a number of pupils the school administration do not want the students to repeat, and teachers have to focus their effort.
PARENTING. Your kid may be a rock or a rocket scientist, but without good parenting, they will never reach their full potential, figure out what their particular gifts are, or 'learn how to learn'. Whatever ones' opinion of No Child Left Behind and other well-intended public policies, no policy has anything close to the impact of good parenting and good teaching. The study and its implications are not relevant to the individual family - good parenting is.
The heart of the problem seems to be that NCLB and similar programs do not distinguish between children who underperform because they are socially disadvantaged, and those who underperform because they are less intelligent. It would be a fine thing if we could ensure that every student had the opportunity to reach his full potential, regardless of his skin color or how much money his parents make, and ostensibly that is the goal of NCLB.
Unfortunately, in the current educational climate, it is no longer even acceptable to suggest that some kids are less capable. I have seen people raked over the coals simply for asking questions about this. We should probably avoid calling anyone 'dumb,' because that is and always has been hurtful, but (as other posters have noted), there will always be a normal curve. There are children who are not 'special needs' but who still fall to the left of the curve, and that is just a fact.
Of course, the real purpose of NCLB is to bring education into the sphere of federal control, where it should properly be a state/local issue . . . .
im sorry i couldnt withhold myself that long. everything americans suffer, are brought upon themselves by that shitty understanding of 'let "losers" sink, let the rest fight it out and "winners" win'. this reflects in every aspect of your life :
starts from high school. you are indoctrinating children with that 'winner/loser' syndrome early in life, causing them to take on emotional distortions and distresses for the rest of their life. there can be only one winner in a competition. everyone starts to see anyone apart from themselves as 'others' who they need to compete with and beat to 'win'. they become socially aggressive, emotionally distant, less emphatetic towards anyone, even their family. then school shootings happen. teenage crimes happen. gangs happen. and you people ask 'why'.
you let this shit get ahold of your political scene too. the republican party in your country, which is the american placeholder for cutthroat, self-interest conservatives, preach that its better to nullify government and let everyone 'compete' for everything, and those who 'cant make it' die. why ? oh because its more efficient ! but before you know it, it also brings the fact that big buck eventually suppress and destroy small and medium businesses, and eventually whole country, entire sectors rest in the privileged few mega corporations that their owners had funded the republican party with. only distinction here is that this is not specific to america, it happens in every country through conservative parties.
you let those who cant make it fall to streets, and crime happens. whereas norwegian external affairs minister can drive a fucking bicycle to his office without fear of anything happening, the rich even in your mildest cities has to take excessive security measures and evade all districts and neighborhoods but few. talk about being the king of the hill that is standing in a plain of shit.
the early indoctrination to 'winner/loser' syndrome also affects social life. people are more emotionally distant, therefore it is difficult for them to bond with their later partners in life, children, relatives, friends, colleagues. you end up with a society that has many problems just because of that winner/loser syndrome and cutthroat competition logic. divorces happen, more mobbing in the workplace, problematic relations and so on.
you may be still brainwashed with the competition thing and be stupid as to think that it provides success. not as such. it would be true only if japanese werent on the face of the earth as an example.
when i was studying industrial engineering, on an occasion about skills and employment and eventual success(regarding the competition between usa and japan in engineering matters) someone has given me a very short but clear insight into the matter; americans tend to be overly competitive, and those who make it to the top of the pile are very talented and successful people. but they sorely lack in cooperation and coexistence. japanese on the other hand think that if someone is excessively specialized, s/he is probably lacking in some other field. instead they cooperate. cooperation of many people who are less specialized and experts but highly inclined to cooperation beats the hell outta experts in low number. this is why they used to say if you single out japanese in a negotiation, you can deal with them easily. but if you let them come in group, you get dealt with.
we know the success of japan after ww2. a thoroughly devastated, low population, almost no natural resource country have made it to the top of the world as an economic power. all the while americans were 'competing' between themselves and outside, japanese have been cooperating. we know what the result is.
Read radical news here
I've always thought the bulk of the kids in the middle are mainly ignored even before the Bush administration. The dumb kids get extra help, the smart kids get mentored for greater things. While the middle kids get ignored and not incoraged to improve
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Thanks to Blackcobra's Fabulous Head-trauma-forget-o-rama (patent pending), you TOO can become a drooling idiot! Just a few swift blows to the head and you will FEEL that knowledge slipping away!
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
My wife is a teacher and this stuff has been going on for quite awhile and it has nothing to do with NCLB. The "at risk" students get far more than the successful ones in terms of resources and leniency. The concept of "inclusion" forces kids with significant issues into normal classrooms where they either have no chance to succeed or cause significant disruption due to behavior.
The list of problems with public education is long and diverse, but the biggest problem of all is people not properly raising their kids, or having more/any kids when they cannot provide for them.
The most troubling part: the ones at risk/with issues are breeding faster and earlier than those who will go on to lead a productive life.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
Money for special ed. The "gifted" are already doing just fine so screw 'em.
I'm not sure the conclusion is that it's the "fault" of No Child Left Behind. Maybe what we need now is a _second_ program: No Gifted Child Ignored.
I'm not generally a government basher but I get the feeling education could be more efficient with resources. The word "linux" comes to mind for a start.
I've always called it the "No Child will excel" program
Ideally, yes, we'd all like our academic and working lives to be challenging, interesting, and to mesh perfectly with our interests and abilities, but working life isn't actually like that. If you can only be bothered to put forth effort when the work is interesting, how much use are you to an employer who knows that work will often be routine and unchallenging?
You have to prove that you can still apply yourself, still act like you give a damn, even when the work gets boring and you don't really see a point to it. They are, after all, paying you. College is a screening process to see if you have what it takes to actually work in a real job.
Or so my theory goes. It's the only explanation I could find for 80% of my IFSM classes. I wish I was better at math, but then again I'm not sure that computer science would've been all that different.
Yes, I know the standard answer is that, if my current job isn't fascinating, challenging, heck if I don't reach self-actualization every single day, then I should quit immediately and go find something I love, but I don't find life to work out quite that simply. The people I've worked with who bailed as soon as they got bored basically were flakes who couldn't be depended on anyway.
It's a point of view that people have hammered in their head these days, mostly from liberals. It's not ok to excel. It's not ok to make a lot of money. Look around. This is what is being pushed on the children so of COURSE we don't make it so the brighter kids get challenged. We're too busy making sure the future burger flippers don't get 'left behind'. News flash - most of them will get left behind no matter what you do. The real problem is the kid that doesn't get into harvard. In any case, BOTH sides should get helped. And teachers should get tested just as hard as kids - and when they fail they should be suspended. But noooooo...teachers unions won't allow anything like that.
I was fortunate to be in a good school before this political crap got a strangle hold. My child will be in private school due to this crap - that and the liberal agenda that is forced down their throats.
Think I'm wrong about a liberal agenda? My buddies kid ( 7 years old at the time ) came home from public school about 5 years ago. His homework was to write a letter to President Bush telling him how war was wrong. Excuse me?
Look, I don't care what you think of Bush or Clinton or whatever, but you do NOT teach push one side or the other in school. Teachers should keep thier political agendas to themselves and this particular teacher should have simply been fired, no questios asked. You do not get to use my child as a political pawn.
EK
Perhaps that law should be renamed "No Child Allowed To Progress Faster Than The Slowest" :-)
Well then, let's separate the Alphas from the Deltas .That's the answer, right?
Hardly. The whole point of inclusion and keeping a broad mix of achievers in one classroom is to show everyone that society is mixed and we must treat each other with respect.
Students can challenge themselves. In that way, aren't they learning discipline and motivation?
And heaven forbid the parents actually try to supplement their children's education and GASP! be involved!!
This was known for at least a decade, that extra resources would better serve "society" by helping the advanced kids move along better than it would making sure a busboy is qualified to be a night watchman.
It long preceeds NCLB, though that would, of course, exacerbate it.
Young grasshoppers, you are learning the difference between "what sounds good", which is what gets you elected, and what actually works, which is science.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Children are not robots. They don't work 100%, all the time. They make mistakes, they fool around. As a teacher you need to get the best result from EVERY child you can, not ignore the majority. This includes the best kids down to the worst kids - but NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF THE BEST KIDS is what this article and thread is about.
To simply not bother with some pupils is mirroring their behaviour - if YOU as their teacher don't give a toss about them, why should they?
Very bad teacher. Ignorant, arrogant and mistaken. Maybe you need to re-examine why 75% of your pupils fail?
In my middle school we had a gifted program. The program separated the students into three categories: Gifted, Above Average, and Normal. Because of scheduling the History class was composed of Gifted and Normal (no Above Average). The Normals in that class did better at history than the Above Average in the other History classes. I should note that it was the students who figured this out, the Non-Gifted ones at that.
The conclusion was that interest, more than anything, governed success and the enthusiasm and interest of the Gifted had infected the Normals. Allocating resources will only go so far but spreading interest will do more. Sadly NCLB leaves little room for a teacher to do so.
Have we considered the possibility that the lower achievers (if there is such a thing) might be lower achievers simply because they aren't as hungry?
Hmm. Hungry for what is the next question.
And I'm not sure attention is always good for promoting either good grades or getting smarter.
Oh, and there are a couple more questions we might be letting go begging.
New study shows that using more of a limited resource on one thing makes less of it available to other things! News at 11, only on CONN - Captain Obvious News Network.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This is why I plan on homeschooling. I can monitor my kids' progress, and I don't have to put up with idiot bureacracies and juvenile malcontents and stupid parents.
There's a lot of assumption in this thread that testing well means you actually _are_ a 'superior' member of society, and will inevitably lead to your becoming an adult who contributes more to the whole than those with lower performance levels -- and thus, of _course_ we should be focusing on those children. Aren't they the ones who will make the world better for us all? But is that really true? It leads very quickly to two questions I'd ask: First, how much of a correlation is there, in the end, between high marks in school and success in the life that begins after graduation? Is there no way you can become a success if you didn't test well? Second, what _is_ a success? If you teach a bad-tempered child who had a poor family life to become an adult who yes, holds a low-paying service job, but does it well and builds a caring, compassionate life for their famliy -- is that a success or a failure? There's no doubt that a teacher who was able to devote the necessary attention to a child in that situation can make a difference.
I'm not sure how I feel about splitting classes.
Letting the smart kids help the kids who don't pick things up as quick helps everyone. (The smart kids learn a lot by teaching, the kids get more points of view, and the teacher can free up some of his/her time to handle the toughest issues.)
If the teacher will let it happen, of course. If not, then, yes, split the classes.
I actually had to deal with this a lot, I tried to be the over achiever but my anxiety got me stuck in 'Special Education', which was supposed to be divided into Emotionally Disabled, Physically Disabled, and Mentally Disabled, but a kid that was put in either one was treated crippled, stupid and crazy.
It was a 'free ride', I didn't really have to do anything to get along, but these classes always had textbooks from at least 4 'grades' below me and the teachers seldom knew anything besides reading the book and answering the questions and letting kids fool around without going too far.
This would have been just fine if it wasn't so frustrating for me to not feel like I was learning anything. No one could seem to understand why I was bringing in my own encyclopedias to read.
Even though I was supposed to get the attention of my 'IEP', or 'Individual Education Plan', it was always 'coping with other students better' and 'being on time for class'.
Trying to force me to learn social skills was a futile attempt, all I needed was my nose in a book that was actually interesting instead of carefully phrased for someone half my age.
This was all before the No Child Left Behind bit, and I don't know what it might have done for those classes, but those classes were the ones that needed the funding instead of the scrapings from the bottom of the pot.
So if what this article suggests is true, I would have been damned either way.
I think it's more the case that no child is getting the education and attention they need. It's only more obvious now that the students that give a damn about their education are getting hurt too.
What the education system needs is more educators and smaller classes and some actual regard for individual needs instead of the varsity segregation clique garbage.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
What we need to fix the education problems in America (eventually) are some big hit TV shows that glamorize the life of a teacher.
I remember reading this survey years ago wherein they asked recent law school graduates what their original inspiration to become a lawyer was. Something like 90% of them said L.A. Law. Thanks, TV producers, we didn't have enough lawyers.
A lot of people naturally gravitate towards one career or another, but I get the feeling that there are still a lot of smart people in each generation who could be successful in a lot of different fields but whom will gravitate towards whatever career is seen as exciting or prestigious. I think if we can just find a way to make teacher that profession, over time the average quality of teachers will increase and the quality of education in this country will improve. Currently, since teachers get little respect and little money, it's a career of either people who really love to teach and are willing to do it despite the downsides, or people too lazy or unqualified to make it in a more challenging field. Imagine the quality of teachers if it instead was the field of those who love it, but also of driven achievers instead of yahoos who want the summer off.
Back when I was at primary school (in the mid 70s) in the UK, this kind of stuff was rampant.
A quick note to all of you guys that say "Well, the bright guys will just teach themselves".. That doesn't work, for exactly the same reason you say the less academically apt (not necessarily less skilled; just their skills aren't academic. Live with that, as I'm less skilled in the non-academic skills than countless others, and I value them as much as they value me). Kids, being kids, haven't seen enough of the world to know what's on offer.
On the reading side, I lucked out in that my folks taught me (read LOTR by the time I was 5 1/2). All the basic Math I picked up on no problems. Then, for the next 4 years in that place, I had to keep reading the 'Peter and Jane' books in big letters. I wasn't allowed to use the time to get my own reading material in at my level. I had to sit in class with this one children's book with a reading age at least 10 years below my abilities, and dutifully trot up to the teacher to demonstrate that I could read this little book, despite many complaints from me (and my folks) that I should be allowed to read my own stuff, or at least have my own book in class. Denied.
Not quite so lucky on the Math.. My father worked late (ran his own business, so couldn't spend loads of time with me), and my mum just wasn't a math person. I learned what I could from what I was introduced to, but had problems working out what the progression was from there. And speed went at the pace of the slowest (no kid left behind). Result of that (which went on right though the years 'till age 11) was that I got private tuition to get me through all the things my school hadn't taught that were subjects on entrance exams for the good schools. I picked it up no problem, but NOBODY had ever previously told me what to look for next. I'd picked up math books myself, but, lacking the theory that was assumed, it was hard to find a book at the right level for me to learn properly.
Even the "Academically Inclined" don't teach themselves. They need to be shown, and guided. Encouraged, not held back.
From where I am now. I'm successful, and have done pretty well for myself. However, I know enough to know I'd have been able to better myself even more, if I'd been able to get more of the basics done at an earlier age, giving me a more thorough grounding to spend my later time concentrating on the more advanced topics.
And simply saying "I could have taught myself".. Well, in a lot of things, I did.. But it cost time to work out how to do it, where to find the information (pre internet, and honestly, you don't always get the right answer from google), and sometimes, you can just miss whole topics (or misunderstand something that a teacher with the right knowledge could put right in minutes).
It's not a disaster, but it's an irritation, to know I could have been better with just a little bit of time and encouragement (or even just the words "You may want to try this book in your own time", rather than the "This is what we teach, and we don't move on until the class is ready").
One size does NOT fit all. Tests are NOT the answer to everything. You CANNOT have everyone with the same academic education. People are different. Education should be about finding someone's talents, and nurturing those talents to the best of the kid's abilities.. For all that I'm pretty good academically (though yes, I do know quite a few that blow me away in that arena), without people doing the non-academic stuff really well, I'd be royally screwed in any job I did. We need all kinds of talents, and they all need to be trained and worked on.
Otherwise, China and places like that, where they do compete to try and keep up in every area (so the brightest from each set of talents gravitate upwards faster) will walk all over us in technology and science in the very near future. Have a good look at history, and you'll see the results of that course writ large.
I'm a glorified teaching assistant in Japanese schools. They call us Assistant English Teachers.
I'm watching the system here every day. About all we can learn from it is that it's just a variation of the push-everyone-down-to-the-same-level approach.
Oh. And standardized tests are way too one-dimensional.
Violence? I stopped a homosexual rape today.
Damn if I type this a thousand times.
Compare any big city school system, take the total dollars spent and divide it by the number of students. For some reason many consider that unfair and want to reduce the dollars used. Do the same for some county schools. If its anything like where I live the city is nearly 3x the cost per student and the grades are worse.
Why?
Admin and feel good people. In other words not hiring teachers but hiring more cronies of friends of politicians, family members, and feed good skill sets that have no bearing on real education. Some places have more grief counselors than nurses! Look at their class sizes compared to the county schools. If they are higher in the city and they are spending more money per student then start asking questions. Considering the disrepair some city schools are in its hard to believe it gets eaten up by building maintenance.
Then we hit the fairness wall. Its not fair to give the better achieving students more, let alone let them be separate from those who cannot or WILL NOT learn. Throw in lots of zero tolerance rules about scissors, aspirin, and the like, and money is diverted to troubled schools who have more students than ever before. In some systems its not fair to celebrate the high achievers! It also isn't fair to test some students now because of race. Apparently race makes people incapable of being tested, I never knew math could form allegiances.
NCLB isn't the problem. The problem is school systems who game the system. They divert money and attention from where it should be.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
... smaller class sizes and more varied curriculum. But that might cost real money, maybe even as much as a couple fighter planes!
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Any government that does not have recognition of the inherent freedoms of the (individual) citizens as one of its fundamental principles is already corrupt, and is primarily interested in perpetuating itself.
The only governments that can truly last are governments that do not attempt to perpetuate themselves.
And this is on topic because public school systems beyond third grade are always a tool of governments that have abandoned the principles of freedom. (Or beyond sixth in Japan and China, perhaps, because of the large number of characters that have to be learned before a child can properly bootstrap his or her education.)
you are absolutely correct.
the way a person writes on teh internets is the best way to judge their grasp of the language.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Until the teachers can recognize that, until the schools can properly support teachers who try to respond to the gifts in each student, I'm not sure it's a good idea to give too much attention to those who do well on standardized tests on a few specific subjects.
You need manpower, sure, but unless a substantial portion of a country's citizens have access to education and can dedicate time to advancing the state of the art, and then communicate their results to others, only very, very rare innovations will trickle out.
Without education, the hurdle to contribute something is huge. Standing on shoulders of giants is way easier than becoming an even bigger giant yourself. And without communication, discoveries made by such giants may well be lost.
I am from India and I can pretty much assure you that we are firmly going the same way. At high-school level, we 'Board' exams, which are extremely hyped-up in media, as they can make or break your career.
There are usually a spate of suicides around the time these exams are held and their results declared. There is a huge media campaign to 'dumb-down' the exams, so that everyone passes with 90+ % marks. The only problem is that there are not enough college seats to go around, so securing even 90+% marks is meaningless.
The questions asked in the exams mainly involve rote learning and printing text-books out verbatim. All this in the name of equality of course. We also have huge 'social justice' lobby, which wants affirmative action to ensure that candidates from supposedly underprivileged background are graded with a different lower benchmark. Recently one of the IITs was in the news for kicking out some such students on account of poor performance.
Rest assured, you will not be having any competitive challenge from India any time in the future.
Would you think its time to think about something else than accelrating the battle for power and influence?
As a high achiever who graduated pre NCLB, I found high school to be extremely boring, lacking in challenge, and in general focused on getting as many morons degrees as possible.
I had the credits to graduate 2 years early from high school, however, because of required english courses which the school refused to allow me to take early, I was forced to slumber and completely waste 2 years of my life.
That being said, I found college to be at least as bad. I attended 2 universities over 3 years, I never once met a professor who cared about my development. I actively pursued opportunities to get more involved with various projects, but was always turned away as I was not in upper level courses yet. I was bored, and constantly felt like I was wasting my time. This only got worse after 2 years of C++ training, when the university changed everything over to Java.. which meant another year of writing hello world, bubble sort, quick sort, etc.
In the end, I was offered a job that made the opportunity cost of University prohibitive... I'm happy where I'm at now, but even before NCLB school was a waste of time for true over achievers.
Being from the middle of nowhere Nebraska, I wonder when I read stuff like this. We had schools with all 12 grades in a single room.
We all know, if you really want to "master" a subject, teach it. Having older students teach younger students forces both to learn more.
The younger students get a different perspective than the teacher provided.
The older students learn more, like patience, mentoring, social interactions with subordinates, kindness and the satisfaction of knowing that YOU TAUGHT someone something. That's the best. It didn't matter if they were bright or not so bright. Everybody has something to offer.
When my family moved away to a city of 20,000, I got placed into a an advanced program at a public school - whatever that meant. In that program, we were segregated away from average students for all but 1 class - PE. I'm prejudiced against stupid people now, thanks to public schools.
The things I learned teaching others while in 6th grade is really the foundation of my mentoring techniques that coworkers received the last 10+ years.
Society will not be saved by making burger flippers better able to count out the change they hand out. It may, however, be saved by a few gifted children.
I know where I would put my tax money.
But this isn't a problem created by No Child Left Behind - this shit has being going on since God only knows when in American Education. Stupid kids get all the attention and smart kids get to sit quietly and wait... the worst part of it is the mediocre kids get no attention and they're the ones who truly should get the most. They don't have to be mediocre they could improve.
I don't know when American Education started striving for mediocrity but it's clear that's what's going on. Any of us who were bored out of their skulls in school can attest to that.
This
Now I did this as a youngster in the Santa Clara County school system in San Jose, CA. I was in the gifted and talented program there and one of the things that me and my fellow over achievers did was tutor the under achievers. Why? Well, we learned how hard it is to teach others, but we also learned the material better as we were immersed in its teaching and the under achievers actually caught up faster. Also, made some additional friends along the way that helped us not get beat up so much on the playground! I continued the practice well into high school even though it wasn't sanctioned or supported by the Prince William County school system in Manassas, VA (where I completed grades 6 - 12). It does work quite well, and can even get you girls! Ahhhh, high school. :-)
Many things seem obvious... after a study has shown them to be likely.
I know several teachers here in Canada, and we have our own version of the 'No Child Left Behind' idea in my province. And the concensus among the teachers is that it translates to a nobody fails policy. So basically, no matter how lazy you are, or how few assignments you hand in... it's nearly impossible for you to fail. If you only hand in one assignment all year, your grade is weighted onto that assignment. If you refuse to do any work, or you skip the exam... the teachers practically gift-wrap extra credit work for you to do instead.
One girl was flagged as 'special needs' in that her only obvious special problem was that she refused to study for anything. As a result, the school decided they would help her with her problem by letting her bring her notes to every exam, even going so far as to allow her to type her exam on an Internet connect computer while the teachers turned a blind eye if she happend to open a web browser.
The result of this is that laziness or attitude has not concequences. Children with true disabilities or difficulties are just ushered through like cattle rather than given real help. And the students who could actually do great things- get discouraged by the sight of their peers getting free rides. They aren't pushed to do their best.
It's an utterly failed concept, bringing everyone down, and turning schools into a joke. But, god forbid you speak out against it... because then... *gasp* you must WANT children to be left behind!
*sigh*
This comes in light of a recent special edition of National Geographic that I read all about China- where school and studying hard is almost a religion over there. We're all going to be out-educated by miles in the next generation.
an oft-used educational maxim:
"A rising tide may lift all boats, but it doesn't do a blessed thing for jet planes."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
There were special ed classes where the kids with learning disabilities and other severe physical handi-caps went to class, and then the gen pop went to normal classes, the over achievers went to AP classes and that was that. To my knowledge the normal kids in regular classes that were the classic lazy under-achiever, read today as ADD, were just primarily left to their own designs in class and only received help if they asked for it.
This method worked well, we had plenty of scientists, engineers, and other highly skilled individuals coming out of schools, or those motivated by learning to set on the road to becoming something along those lines.
I've said for a long time, if a child that has special needs, and yes this is gonna sound like "get off my lawn" but, the curricula should not be dumbed down to make any one child feel better about themselves, it makes the other 30 children in the class suffer by getting a lesser education.
My daughter is by no means a genius, yes I am a dad and I said that, but it's true I think she is average. She gets A/B honor roll every term, and next year is taking 3 AP classes and beginning Japanese, she is in 6th grade. My fear is that because, "no child gets left behind", her education is suffering for it.
Everyone is entitled to an education, a good education, not a half-assed, atta-boy heres your gold star for the day. In the long term, it's our kids that suffer, and ultimately we as a nation will suffer.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I know from experiance most of my teachers were unwilling to teach me things unrelated to passing exams. However this taught me arguably greater skill of finding things out myself. I had one particularly useless teacher for one of my uk GCSE exams that I actualy started ignoring him totaly, yet a still managed to get an A without any real effort. I am actualy quite greatfull for his ineptness now as my self study has lead to my current choice of degree and interests. Without him I probobly wouldn't have been as succefull as I am.
If anything, this is a calling for bigger Special Education departments. Remember, talented and gifted students are part of the Special Education program as well. They need...they DESERVE a special curriculum to suit their needs just as much as those low achievers.
Better yet, let's get over our petty insecurities about equality and go to a tiered education system like they have in Germany--separate the academically gifted from the destined-for-factory-work kids in the adolescent years.
(disclaimer: M.A. Education...slashdot needs more threads on education, especially my area--computer education).
I have a son just finishing the first grade. Before he started kindergarten he could read, write, add and subtract any number, do some basic multiplication, and knew all the US states and capitals. When first grade started we were sent a list of all the things that would be covered during the year - he had already mastered most of them. We had him tested and the results were a 140 IQ, and where the scores were broken down by category he scored above the 99th percentile in all. Armed with all of this information, we went to his teacher and asked "what can you do for him?" The answer was that she could give him extra work but only more of the same. Why? The teacher is not allowed to teach the kids anything that will be taught in a later grade. She wasn't allowed to read Charlotte's Web to her class because it is part of the 4th grade curriculum. And even though my seven year old is ready for 5th grade math, she can't give him any assignments or class work that deal with those concepts because they will be covered in the 5th grade. All she can do is give him another sheet of single digit addition problems. Whee.
I think the public schools are designed to handle about 80% of kids. There's tons of resources available for kids in the bottom 10% who need help but next to nothing available for kids in the top 10%. People treat the gifted and the parents of the gifted like they won the lottery. Why should lottery winners get anything extra? They're going to be fine no matter what - they won the lottery! That may be so, but unless we figure out how to pay for private school, right now it looks like winning the lottery means my son spends the next 11 years being forced to sit in a classroom for 6 hours a day being "taught" concepts that he mastered years ago. He's so lucky.
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
When you tell every student, no matter how they perform academically, that they are special ... you are really sending the message that no one is special.
.. to get into better universities .. so essentially most of lower education is spend learning how to ace the exams. This of course has NOTHING to do with actual learning, or learning that is required to produce innovative and imaginative minds anyways.
The Japanese school system is the perfect example of where we are headed. They study and cram for exams, granted
In the past 20 years, there has been a huge rise in suicides, and what we might be considered odd and violent behavior. Japanese children are burning themselves out, and from time to time someone snaps spectacularly, murders their parents, an entire classroom of students etc. etc. etc.
No child left behind bears striking similarities to this process. Students schools are granted (or withheld) funding based on their schools test scores. So teachers are expected to teach to the tests, instead of the curriculum. In the end it makes dumber kids, who can't handle higher education, with the added benefit of ignoring the high potential children's growth.
So, in order to give a kid who is not mentally apt enough, an almost infinitesimal shot at becoming a doctor, we ignore the group of children who could become very GOOD doctors with only minimal additional effort.
Square peg, round hole syndrome. In the end of the day we either have NO doctors, or a few very very unqualified ones. [You only need a C to pass!]
Can someone explain to me how this makes the employment base of our non-manufacturing country stronger ??
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Perhaps it is time to stop accelerating the battle for power and influence. I have seen that we in the western hemisphere are tending towards this, even though the pressures for corporate quarterly results and the crush to get into the top ivies suggest otherwise. The trouble is that the "up and comers" such as China and India are still playing for the crown we are thinking of abdicating.
It is difficult to determine a middle path between the intensifying global competition and the mature and sustainable economy we are trending towards. But I am certain that that middle path does not include raising a generation of marginally literate children at the expense of throwing the talented and intelligent few to the wolves.
Time will tell how this plays out. My guess would be some form of global meritocracy with a strong technocratic component.
Which is why I've pulled out my kids from the public eduction system and educate them at home using a classical curriculum.
And guess what? My kids are not especially intelligent -- pretty average when they were in the school -- Now my 10 year old reads at a 7th grade level, does math at a 6th grade level. My 6 year old is in third grade all around. And my 4 year old just finished kindegarden.
I'm not pushing them beyond saying we have to do something of each subject every weekday. They pursue the academics on their own and at their own pace.
Now everyone whines at my about socialization. Public schools gave my two kids negative socialization especially the 10 year old. He was getting into all kinds of trouble. Now we socialize in two different homeschool co-ops which other kids with similar experiences. The two oldest also do swimming lessions and other kinds of team based sports so there is plenty of socialization.
My favorite parable. It begins the book Soar with your Strengths by Don O Clifton's the past chairman of Gallup who died in '03. I met him as senior in high school. He was an incredibly gregarious and his energy was infectious. His views on the subject and this book have had a profound effect on me.
"Let the Rabbits Run", a parable from the book: Soar With Your Strengths
Imagine there is a meadow. In that meadow there is a duck, a fish, an eagle, an owl, a squirrel, and a rabbit. They decide they want to have a school so they can be smart, just like people.
With the help of some grown-up animals, they come up with a curriculum they believe will make a well-rounded animal: running, swimming, tree climbing, jumping, and flying.
On the first day of school, little rabbit combed his ears, and he went hopping off to his running class.
There he was a star. He ran to the top of the hill and back as fast as he could go, and, oh, did it feel good. He said to himself, "I can't believe it. At school, I get to do what I do best."
The instructor said, "Rabbit, you really have talent for running. You have great muscles in your rear legs. With some training, you will get more out of every hop."
The rabbit said, "I love school. I get to do what I like to do and get to learn to do it better."
The next class was swimming. When the rabbit smelled the chlorine, he said, "Wait, wait! Rabbits don't like to swim."
The instructor said, "Well, you may not like it now, but five years from now you'll know it was a good thing for you."
In the tree-climbing class, a tree trunk was set at a 30-degree angle so all the animals had a chance to succeed. The little rabbit tried so hard he hurt his leg.
In jumping class, the rabbit got along just fine; in flying class, he had a problem. So the teacher gave him a test and discovered he belonged in remedial flying.
In remedial flying class, the rabbit had to practice jumping off a cliff. They told him if he'd just work hard enough, he could succeed.
The next morning, he went on to swimming class. The instructor said, "Today we jump in the water."
"Wait, wait. I talked to my parents about swimming. They didn't learn to swim. We don't like to get wet. I'd like to drop this course." The instructor said, "You can't drop it. The drop-and-add period is over. At this point you have a choice: Either you jump in or you flunk."
The rabbit jumped in. He panicked! He went down once. He went down twice. Bubbles came up. The instructor saw he was drowning and pulled him out. The other animals had never seen anything quite as funny as this wet rabbit who looked more like a rat without a tail, and so they chirped, and jumped, and barked, and laughed at the rabbit. The rabbit was more humiliated than he had ever been in his life. He wanted desperately to get out of class that day. He was glad when it was over.
He thought that he would head home, that his parents would understand and help him. When he arrived, he said to his parents, "I don't like school. I just want to be free."
If the rabbits are going to get ahead, you have to get a diploma, replied his parents.
The rabbit said, I don't want a diploma.
The parents said, "You're going to get a diploma whether you want one or not."
They argued, and finally the parents made the rabbit go to bed. In the morning the rabbit headed off to school with a slow hop. Then he remembered that the principal had said that any time he had a
problem to remember that the counselor's door is always open.
When he arrived at school, he hopped up in the chair by the counselor and said, "I don't like school."
And the counselor said, "Mmmm, tell me about it."
And the rabbit did.
The counselor said, "Rabbit, I hear you. I hear you saying you don't like school because you don't like swimming. I think I have diagnosed that co
When confronted with that many mistakes, a literate person feels pain. It would take a teacher of the English language effort to write that badly. It's not so much a judgment of ability but one of habit.
Well, duh, indeed. If resources are limited, overall, putting more focus on one thing, means taking it away from other things. Pretty bloody obivous. If increasing total resources is not an option, it quite simply comes down to allocating the resources, to setting priorities. So is it a good decision to focus more on the "problem" students?
Well, that's the core of the debate, of course, but personally, I think, yes, it makes sense to shift the focus of education more towards the lower end. The most important reason is that domestic demand for mindless drone workers has decreased over the past two or three decades, dramatically. Those jobs - to a large degree - have either been outsourced or automated. "Producing" lots of people with real low qualifications means "producing" people who will never have a true economic perspective, ever. It means producing people who are - as harsh as that sounds - quite simply useless in domestic economy. Go figure, whether and how that is a problem.
On the other side of the equation, you can't ever have too many top-notch academics. But: I think we're really doing very well in that playing field, already. In some areas of expertise, we're even over-producing highly qualified individuals (who will later take a job in an entirely different field). Cutting back in that area is going to hurt, no doubt about that. But, I think it's going to hurt less than neglecting the severe problem we're facing on the "low" end of education.
So, yes, I think it absolutely makes sense to shift resource allocation towards the low end a bit. The upper end will suffer, but it will still be doing fine enough, overall.
It's obviously true. So what?
Anyone can fall behind. There can be any number of reasons why. The behind student today might be the ahead student tomorrow if there are resources that enable that student to catch up.
But if we devote most of our resources only to the ahead it's like saying "screw" anyone who is unlucky or ever had a bad day. That's what we call... evil.
In elementary school my teacher thought I was terribly behind in reading and should be put in special education. In High School I graduated as valedictorian. Maybe you think they should have taken the resources away from me and given it to the kids who could already read well.
I grant all that I write to the public domain.
hmm...a meaningful reply from an AC, I do wish you were posting while logged in.
Are you familiar with the phrase, 'good writing is rewriting"
generally, the 1st draft sucks, the 1st edit makes a big difference. By the 3rd or 4th rewrite, you're sounding fantastic.
I participate in about 3 internet forums, and I write proper academic papers on occasion, as well as a good number of lesson plans. I also re-write translations, essay corrections, documents, and essays for work.
in short, I do a metric fuck-tonne of writing everyday, and when I am participating in an interned forum, I just don't care. i don't proof read, i don't edit, and i certainly don't re-write. i like to just get the ideas out. quick and dirty.
generally, if someone attacks the presentation rather than the message itself, it is because they are unable to shoot down the message they disagree with.
-I only code in BASIC.-
And yes, I realize these don't make 'data'.
I was classified as a 'gifted student' back in grade school. This would have been in the mid 70's. As such we spent two afternoons a week out of normal classes and in the 'gifted program'. Given, I was in the first class they tried with this. So pretty much everything was trial and error. We did so more things that were along the lines of learning to learn rather than memorize and vomit back. So that's good.
And then it happened. One elementary school didn't have any gifted students. So they changed the school boundries so that four of us went to this particular grade school. We were prizes.
We still went to the gifted program classes but here's where the problem came up. Since the school administration considered us prizes we could get away with almost anything. Didn't do homework? No problem. We know they can do it so they don't have to do it. So much for study skills and work habits.
I spent the rest of my public school time unlearning the bad habits instilled in the three years they did this to us. Going from being so singled out in grade school to just being normal students in the junior high school was a blessed relief. A few teachers tried to expect us to be unofficial teaching assistants by helping out our fellow students but by then we'd had enough of it all and we refused.
Being smart is as much as a birth defect as being dumb. People don't realize that.
I do remember one teacher from junior high math class. He knew I was smarter than the class in general. But he was smarter than most teachers in general. He gave me extra work that actually challenged me. It wasn't required. He said he knew that I would finish first in class and I could do these exercises if I wanted. Things like "Make every number between 1 and 20 using 4 of the number 4". I still remember not getting three numbers but I learned some pretty advanced mathematical functions that year.
He was the only teacher I can remember who actually was able to keep me learning. And by tossing me challenges that had no bearing on my class grade. I learned how to learn from that. Sweet.
>You see these people on American Idle ...
That's just wonderful. Please tell me it was intentional.
Every one goes on and on and on and on about how teachers need to do this or teachers need to do that or that the school system is failing our children but at the end of day MANY of these issues can be resolved with a very simple solution: PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT. Maybe it's too easy, maybe it fails to take in to account real world hardships but parents should be the ones helping fill these gaps. It's tough to make a buck in this day and age but I remember my parents sacrificing a great deal in order to provide (not just money, but in the human sense) for my sister and I. They were the ones who assisted us in finding activities that pushed us; they were the ones making sure that we could meet our potential. Teachers helped out along the way but it started with mom and dad.
Life isn't black and white, not every family is a traditional family unit, not every child is as fortunate as I was to grow up with two loving supportive parents but the truth is we need to stop relying on others to do things for us. Nothing is free and public education will never be an end-all-be-all.
I've got some first-hand experience with this because my girlfriend recently finished up a "fast track" teacher training and certification program and is starting as an English teacher at a technical high school in the fall.
We'd routinely discuss the stuff that they were teaching her in class and I was appalled. It seems that "modern" Pedagogy is formulated more on the necessity of our current funding and education systems rather than what is actually most effective.
For example, the hot new thing is "differentiated instruction" which is newspeak for "put all the kinds in one class, regardless of ability, and let the teacher sort it out." Seems like this is a huge step backwards to the days of the one room school house. How can you expect a teacher to provide differentiated instruction to each student in a 9th grade class of 25 (and that's a relatively small class these days) when some are reading on a 3rd grade level and some are at a 12th grade level? It simply cannot be done.
I was fortunate enough to attend a high school that had 5 levels for most classes. Most of my classes were level 4 (advanced) and level 5 (honors) and the teacher was able to push the class so that most students were challenged and very few were truly struggling to keep up.
It simply isn't possible to challenge the top achievers while giving the low achievers the attention and help that they need to succeed and improve. When you mix the students like this, you risk losing the top achievers to boredom while being unable to keep the low achievers on task and everyone loses.
is not that everyone is equal, but that everyone has the equal right to achieve their fullest
how do you do that? you give everyone access to equal resources
the problem, of course, is that existing class structures means that those with more money get more investment, and so the idea of the meritocracy is defeated before you even begin
thus, you artificially adjust for that by giving more resources to those of lower socioeconomic background
because that's the real story here folks. this entire story is code words for ensuring that the socioeconomically deprived, lower achieving students, stay that way. everyone here is merely defending the class sturcture in code words. those who achieve less in school are so usually becuase of less financial resources, not brainpower
throw in the further hitch that the usual iq test tests for aspects of intelligence that are narrowly defined, and narrowly relevant to leading a good life. for example: the ability to manipulate 3D shapes in your mind figures prominently on most iq tests. this is wonderful if your career goal is structural engineering. but how many structural engineers do we need and is that mental ability really a valid maeasure for overall intellignece. for example: there is no test for social intelligence, charisma. charisma, obviously, has more bearing on whether you are a "high achiever" in life, than 3D shape manipulation, and is much more valid measur eof true intelligence
so i'm going to go completely against the grain here on slashdot to this story of more resources for underachievers and say: "bravo"
now mod me a troll, but i've stated my case reasonably and straightforwardly
the problem with a lot of the comments here on slashdot is not that they defend the "rights" of overachievers, whatever that is supposed to mean, but that they are insulted that their clique of higher test scoring peers seems dissed
well congratulations, you can manipulate 3D shapes on your head. that doesn't mean you deserve more than some other kid, who in fact may be smarter than you, but whose intelligence isn't neatly boiled down into existing tests. and, considering the code words here that are going on for the socioeconomically deprived, pat yourself on the back for defending the existing class structure in code words
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well of course when you dumb down the instruction, you dumb down the entire school. The next step in dumbing down America will have to be some sort of television subsidy program. Oh, wait...
If you read the executive summary the salient point is that "Children at the tenth percentile of achievement (the bottom 10
percent of students) have shown solid progress in fourth-grade reading and math and eighth-grade math since 2000, but those at the 90th percentile (the top 10 percent) have made minimal gains."
The article is attempting to spin this into FUD that helping the lower performing students is having a negative impact on the upper performers, when in fact the upper performers just aren't gaining as much.
There are certainly some things that can (and should) be done better, but the tone of the article (and most of the posts) seem to miss the actual facts here.
It occurred to me while reading this article that the goal of "closing the gap" between underachievers and overachievers has nothing to do with anyone performing better. It is a literal gap, and quite frankly the easiest way to close it is to lower the performance of the overachievers to just above what is considered acceptable. Let's face it, raising the scores of the poorest performers has never been the strong suit of the public education system, while stifling the potential of the bright and eager is basically it's trademark.
You can support your child's interests and pay extra for after school enrichment programs, but you're still forcing (as in "required by law") gifted kids to sit in classrooms all day where the subjects being taught may be things the kids mastered years ago. My 7 year old could probably fit into a 5th grade math class just fine, but his assignments peaked at adding and subtracting single digit numbers. Why? The teacher was not allowed to teach him anything that would be covered in a later grade. So I can teach him basic algebra, multiplication, long division, fractions, percentages, and we can memorize the squares of the numbers between 1 and 40 just for fun, but that doesn't change the fact that he just spent 6 hours in a room being taught stuff he knew before he started kindergarten. I don't expect the school to do everything, but I expect them to do something. At least $45,000 of my tax dollars have gone to the town's school system over the past ten years, but when my son is old enough to start using this resource, we discover that it won't work for him. I didn't mind paying property taxes (70% of our tax bill goes to the school system) before we had kids and I wouldn't mind paying if I thought he were getting a decent education, but right now I'm paying for a system that can't teach my kid by design. And my only recourse seems to be to pay even more for private school. Coming up with the money means less time with the family, a dimished financial picture, and more stress. Meanwhile, the school still gets my tax dollars without the burden of having to deal with my kid, so their situation actually improves.
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
Considering the fact that our leader (that is if you live in the U.S.) was a "C" student in school, I can understand why we are in this predicament. Personally, I think its stupid. Call me elitist if you wish, but I'm a firm believer that if you mix students with who perform academically well with students who don't you are going to generally lose both students. The high achiever is going to be bored and potentally goof off because he (she) is bored. The low achiever is going think the high achiever is a snob or ass-kisser, and both are not going to do well.
In otherwords, stop trying to put a square peg into a round hole. This is why they need to bring back vocational schools, not student is college-bound or college-minded. Some of the richest people in the world did not go to college. This is not to say education is not important. All students do need certain basic skills (reading, writing, arithmetic, some basic science, etc.) But kids who show an apitude for these subjects may be better on a college track than others. Some students need prodding others don't. But again, trying to force all students into the same learning mold is going to alienate more students than not.
Some people shoot for the stars, others for the moon... and some are just comfortable staying on the ground. There is places and opportunities for all three, and in our society one can overcome their status with their own personal drive and ambition.
Regards,
MBC1977,
What's the problem? Students who are genuinely intelligent can look after themselves. The people on here defending the 'improve the best, chuck out the rest' solution are clearly not intelligent, but just using this issue to prop up their egos. They coulda been a contender.
Just this last year my son (who is a bright student) got in with a teacher who only paid attention to the slower kids. He started acting out due to his bordom, trying to throw tests to be like the other kids (and subsequently get more attention), and hating school. This just about crushed his mother and I since he is only in second grade.... we can only hope that he recovers - at least next year he is slated for the gifted and talented pod at his school - hopefully he gets his interest in school back.
When I was a young child, I finished all the class assignments in almost half the time of other students. Because I then had nothing to do, I would get bored and goof off, prompting the teachers to tell my parents I was a troublemaker. My parents indicated that they should simply give me more work to do, and the teachers replied "That's not fair to the other students." And so, I was home-schooled until high school, where I received 4 years of high honors, and then went on to get a degree in Computer Science in college.
The concept of holding back high achievers in order to draw attention away from poor grades has been around for quite a while. Unfortunately, it's getting worse, not better. Our nation is quickly becoming stupider thanks largely to cowardice and greed.
Try getting a teacher to let you go to the computer lab and work on that instead of just putting your head on your desk quietly, while she goes over some totally elementary concept for the brazillianth time.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This has been true long before "no child left behind". ...
"gifted kids can take care of themselves", MOTS, "that's an elitist approach"
The usual local school board cares more about the high school football team than challenging TAG students.
(you could likely substitute any sport for "football" and the above would be true)
NB: Some of it may be due to the teachers being afraid of the kids. (what does it do to you when you have to teach reading to a class where a third to a half of the students have already taught themselves how to read)
MOTS = "more of the same"
TAG = talented and gifted
It would nice to have access to stimulating teachers and AP courses. But my high school didnt have these. I must have read just about every non-fiction book in the library, subscribed to mail-ordr science gizmos. Its a lot easier to edcate yourself these days with the resources of the InterNet.
I have a terrible memory, especially when it comes to my youth, but in first grade I remember sitting around a table where each of us had to read aloud.. My sentence was something like "The dog chased the cat with the ball" and I read it just like any literate adult would, only to be scolded by the teacher for not sounding it out slowly like "The d-d-dog ch-ch-chased the c-c-cat with the b-b-ball".. I actually GOT IN TROUBLE for being too ahead of the class and for not following the teacher's instructions. I was the only kid in the class who could read, and unfortunately for most of my education I was bored to tears, slept in late, did fine, but never felt challenged...
two points:
first is, your kid is not a genius. (chances are he's above average, but that's it.)
second, no child left behind should be called every child left behind. That's what it does. It makes the whole classroom work at the dummy's pace.
while they try to put all high achievers in the same class, they also place low achievers and ESE or special needs kids in the same classes with no teacher's aides.
so the whole class works at the slow kids' pace.
the whole system is just ass backwards. Schools funding is based on their overall test scores. lower scoring schools get less money. Teachers get a monetary bonus if their school scores high. This has led to taking measures to ensure the school doesn't count low test scores.
We have principals of elementary schools cutting out being a kid in favor of the bottom line. In my wife's classroom, there is one day of science per year, if its not canceled. There is rarely any social studies if ever. The kids don't watch movies or sing any more. They also don't have parties like we did. They were promised a party at the end of the year, which the principal canceled the day before. (after waiting the whole year). They also don't go on field trips any more.
These kids are supposedly learning only three things. Reading, writing, and basic math. They actually have kindergarteners learning to read and write now. while that's not an entirely bad idea, it completely removes the purpose for kindergarten. (that's where you're supposed to learn most of your social skills.)
Yep, you'd be nuts to let your kid go to public school like this. In Florida, the FCAT test has surpassed everything else in terms of priorities. They spend the entire year prepping to pass a test instead of learning curriculum.
They're using their grammar skills there.
We really don't need a study to show this... just go into any school and ask any teacher who is now completely teaching to the test because there isn't any time for anything else. They say this appears to be related to No Child Left Behind? Sorry folks, this is a direct result of that disaster. In some schools, we have gotten to the point where if it isn't a graduation requirement or directly assessed on the test, it's not being taught. And here is the kicker... the kids, at least the high school kids, are now at the point of asking if it is on the test or not. If it's not on the test, they really don't want to have anything to do with it. Sure, they will do the work and get the grade because they need it to graduate, but they are really just geared to the test now. Not college, not the world of work, not anything after high school... it's the test. This started with math, reading and writing. This year adds science and next year adds social studies. We are on the way to creating Stepford teachers and Stepford children. And all of this is name of improvement! Before NCLB we had one of the greatest educational systems in the world because we trusted our teachers and had true parent involvement. Now with fruits of the Reagan/Bush I reforms pushing outcome based education that led to NCLB under Bush II, we rank something like 15th. Outcome based education is interesting... you would think the outcome would be what the kid retains on leaving school and how they can apply to life. Not under NCLB... the only outcome here is how well they do on the test. Go figure... and yes... I taught.
Even when we try not to focus on scores, we focus on scores... WTF?
We are concerned that the dumber kids aren't getting the scores they should, so we spend more time with them. So that means less time with the smart kids, so they don't get as high scores as they should. Something seems oddly... right... about that.
If scores don't matter, and your a smart kid, you're smart, who cares if you got an A or a B. You have more opportunities open to you than the dumb kids. The social safety net is all about trying to help those who don't have the mental, physical, or monetary means to help themselves. That doesn't mean you ignore the smart kids, but that doesn't mean you have to spend time with the smart kids to make sure their grades are all A+.
I was a straight B student. I didn't ask for much help, and I even tutored to help others. However, I probably didn't apply myself as strongly as I could because of my personal comfort level. Now, 33, at work I'm one of the most valuable people in my company. I don't say that to my peers, but they all say that to me. I can consistently prove my high level of performance to anyone on demand. I'm not perfect, but who is. On the opposite side of the coin I know straight A students who were only straight A students because they were time in voluntary study groups or something like that? I'm just providing another angle here to think about.
I think the problem with no child left behind is that it's not focused on quality, standardized scores don't prove kids are any more valuable to society, and that it requires more work out of everyone without additional money or people. I know a few teachers who stopped teaching because No Child left behind tied their hands and made teaching miserable. Lets stop focusing on scores so much on both ends of the spectrum.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
The problem is that Europe is dominated by liberal politics. To quote from a column by George Will:
Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity. end quote
It even prompted a debate in Sweden under the title lagom samhaelet (the mediocrity society). Critics of this policy complained, "Where will our future leaders come from?" Sweden sent a team to climb Mount Everest. On the final day, instead of being told to give it their all, they were told orka lagom killar (make a decent try guys). They gave up just a few meters from the summit.
Paradoxically, after decades of this wrong-headed policy, Sweden seems very enterprising, very prosperous and well supplied by good leaders. I can't explain it.
The problem doesn't just sit with the fact that attention is a limited resource and that giving attention to underachievers detracts from over achievers... You have to consider what all this SAYS to the brilliant. You are telling some kids that you aren't good enough and telling the others you're too good. When you try to normalize one half of the spectrum you are going to normalize the other too. Kids who are smart aren't just being deprived of direction, they're being deprived of the motivation to do something. So far it appears the research on kids show that you need to help motivate them for quite a bit and this doesn't change until they are probably 15 or 16. If properly motivated up until that point, they generally become self-motivating and will actually become hindered if you try to motivate them because their self-efficacy is trivialized.
OK, I'm old (63). When I was of age to go to grammar school and high school I had the privilege of going to a boys' military boarding school. Yeah, not the best nurturing environment and that experience has left some marks. However, the philosophy was to teach to the top. That philosophy was made clear to all.
The environment was self selecting, at least by parents of the students. There was a high value attached to academic achievement. As a result, there was near zero harassment for having high grades. Even the jocks encouraged the real nerds.
Here's the kicker. In 1968 I went to CCNY. At the time I was an EE major. The curriculum required "Chemistry for Science Majors", not to be confused with the general chemistry course then required of liberal arts majors euphemistically titled "Chemistry for Poets". The required text for the Chemistry for Science Majors was the same text I had in high school. Two semesters of college chemistry was a piece of cake as a result of my high school experience. The same material at the same depth.
I've had a dim view of public education since. It is as if they have a captive audience. The various pressures on schools, such as NCLB, special education for the bottom, focus on sports, parental uninvolvement is a national disgrace.
I do not have an answer that democratic processes will tolerate, however. So, I'll just STFU now and go back to enjoying my retirement.
I've said it often and loudly:
A policy of no child left behind leaves every child behind.
When you have a large class and the intent to ensure that there is a minimum understanding between all the students, equally, you end up with a situation where teachers have to teach at the lowest common denominator. The end result is that all the high-achievers and all the mediocre students are all being dragged down to the performance levels of the meat-heads of the year.
The solution is obvious - the classes need to be split so that each peer group can have sufficient advancement so that every individual in their class feels challenged by the work. If it means that the kids at the lowest group could barely multiply by 10 without the aid of a calculator, so be it. It is important that every student feels stretched: Including the high-achievers.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
This article by Stephen Krashen sums up how politically motivated "reports" like this need to be dealt with. There is a peer review process for a reason. The Scholastic 2008 Kids and Family Reading Report: Why Scholastic's Researchers Need to Read More Stephen Krashen www.elladvocates.org/blog June 18, 2008 Scholastic recently released a survey on how much and what children are reading these days, interviewing 501 children, ages 5 to 17, and their parents or guardians from 25 cities (Scholastic, 2008). As is often the case, the Scholastic report was sent to newspaper reporters before it was released to the public. In other words, scholars had no chance to read it (or as they say these days, to vet it) before descriptions appeared in the press. This is in stark contrast to the way scientific knowledge has been traditionally disseminated: Research is first submitted to professional journals, and will only be published if it passes review by other scholars. The reviewers make sure the study is done correctly, and that there is a full and competent review of previous research in the area, so that readers can determine how the results relate to previous research. Acceptance of the report can take several months, and it could be a year until the paper appears in print. At first, it is read only by professionals, those who read the journals, who often debate the results and may attempt to replicate the study. In the field of educational research, all this has changed. Non-academic organizations (think tanks, government agencies, and private companies) with large budgets now produce their version of research, and utilize public relations avenues to send the report immediately to the media. Scholars can only read these reports well after descriptions have appeared in the media, descriptions written by reporters who may or may not have specialized knowledge, who are often unaware of other research in the area, and who nearly always have deadlines to meet. By the time the real experts read the report, it is already old news, the results have already been widely disseminated, and often stimulate important policy changes. When the cold fusion report was released to the media before being submitted to review by other scientists, the researchers were widely criticized. When this happens in education, there are no complaints. In fact, what happens in education is worse: The studies are now given to the media before scholars can see them, and reporters are not allowed to share them until they are officially released (they are "embargoed"). In the case of cold fusion, scientists got the information at the same time reporters did. This was the case with the Scholastic report on reading. Not surprisingly, different media reports said different things about it. Some reporters interpreted the findings as showing that reading is on a decline, e.g. WSB radio in Atlanta posted an article with the title, "Fewer kids reading for fun," and the Desert Sun in California ran the headline "Kids don't read for fun." But the School Library Journal headline was "Kids still wild about books." Actually, it is impossible to draw any real conclusions from the Scholastic report about whether children are reading more or less than they used to. The problem is that those who wrote the survey questions did it in such a way that it is impossible to compare the results with those done years ago. The Gold Standard of surveys is the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Unfortunately, Scholastic and NAEP asked different questions and categorized children into age groups in different ways. For example, Scholastic asked children if they read "never, once a year, more than once a year, once a month, 2 to 3 times a month, once a week, 2 to 3 times a week, 4 to 6 times a week, every day." NAEP asked if they read "never or hardly ever, a few times a year, once or twice a month, once or twice a week, almost every day." Scholastic divided age categories into ages 5-8, 9-11, 12-14, and 15-17. NAEP only asked questions of nine, 13, and 17 year olds. T
Same situation in Canada. They teach to the lowest common denominator.
When our son was one year ahead of his peers in math, my wife and I were called to a meeting with an Educational Specialist from the school. They suggected that our son sit out math for a year to give the other children time to catch up. Our responese was "If he was a hockey star would you sit him out a season to give the other players a chance to catch up?"
We ended up going to the Minister of Education, they overruled the Educational Specialist and moved our son ahead a grade.
You're a kid: Your goal is to get attention.
Will you;
A: Behave yourself, get good grades, and smile in satisfaction at your own skills by yourself.
B: Act like the kid with ADD who has the whole teaching staff helping keep track of him, fail a class for the extra focus, and just quit trying so everything focuses on you.
kids aren't hard to understand, especially on something as simple as this.
Some children need left behind.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
People underperform for different reasons, very few of which have to do with latent intelligence.
Ever see what happens to a kid who's parents are undergoing a divorce? Some may be able to handle it, but some kids aren't emotionally equipped to handle it. Ever see what happens to a kid who has no parents or poor parents? Without proper adult guidance, they're going to choose paths that may be productive but will probably be counter productive. Have you ever lived with the effects of poverty, may they be reduced nutrition and health or a limited world view that does not incorporate the middle or upper class' perspective on achievement? That's a good way to limit motivation, hence performance.
There is a (perhaps irrational) fear of streaming kids based upon perceived success in academics (or sports or trades) because there are so many ways in which kids can fall through the cracks. There are so many ways by which a child can be pushed down into poverty or be stuck in poverty. When an education system views its role as lifting people out of those situations, a few compromises have to be made. And if that means spending a disproportionate amount on under-achievers, then so be it.
As a student of "gifted programs" in the 80's, I was so thankful for the opportunities it created. That dissatisfaction can last a long time, guess that's why "big companies" don't move fast enough, and I hang out with startups.
Now my son is "gifted" - nothing less than 95 in any class, and math is a breeze (he's two grade levels above), and that's all the school can do to keep up (never mind the math, science, law, business, etc that he could learn). He's so discouraged going into middle school it's scary.
So I am building a rep-rap with this 11 yr old and generally doing what I can to "co-educate" the "real stuff" since schools do the median. Instead of playing games, learn flash programming (ie. toward AIR).
Change it to No Child Allowed to Excel (NCAE). The acronym for No Child Allowed Ahead was already taken (NCAA).
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Habit. You're not teaching the language if you need a rewrite to avoid making so many mistakes. Do you constantly rephrase in class? I am not attacking the presentation. I am just pointing out that it is inconsistent with the message. As far as I am concerned, you can write as badly as you want. If I find the message discussion-worthy, then I'll look over a lot, but I will not discuss someone's "if I were a teacher" fantasy if he doesn't write well enough to make it believable. If you are an English teacher, I pity your students.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I could pass any reading achievement test with a score in the 99.99th percentile by the time I was in 3rd grade. My scores didn't change from then until I was out of high school because the tests were too simple. My brother's experience wiht math tests was similar. Unless these tests are open-ended, those students who are at the very top have no way to show any improvement because they were already getting all the answers right.
It is hard to test the limits of ability - the only time I have had that sort of a test (in Spanish class), it took several hours and the questions just kept getting harder. Our instructions were to keep answering until we had done a couple of pages where we had no clue what the text meant.
I agree, partially. I'd love to have had the internet when I was a kid... But I fear I'd have spent a lot more time fooling around and a lot less learning.
For instance, I spent a LOT of time learning to program and playing around with that. While the internet provides so many excellent sources of information for that, it also provides a lot more games and time-wasters for free as well. I doubt I'd have had the self control to use it for learning instead of playing.
An effort to make these tools available away from the all the games would work much better. Parents that provided the wanted/needed information while limiting the use of the internet to an hour or so a day would enable kids to learn more on their own without the distraction.
Don't get me wrong, I'd have been seriously pissed about being limited to the internet. But I now realize it would have been for the best.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You hit the nail on the head. The problem is not the kid's intelligence. The problem is the lack of attention by his/her parents. Teachers are barking at the wrong tree.
I find myself in what could easily be considered the top 15%, if not the top 10% (my school stopped ranking because of going to 4 decimal places to figure out 10th and 11th place.)
I'm bored out of my mind in many classes, including my Algebra II class which I finished this year. This boredom led to me dropping a take-home test assignment, and what my teacher said after me and two other kids (two girls, I being a guy) all forgot struck me:
"We are doomed! The Chinese are going to take over!
You can't fool us. You say all this because like every other parent on the planet you're looking for any excuse to tell us how much better your kid is than everyone else's.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
My youngest brother is so bored in classes that he's failing some of them. He rarely studies and gets near perfect(A's) on every test, but never does his homework. I was a C/D student through school until I was homeschooled, finished high school with an A. I was told I needed to try harder from elem-middle school and parent-teacher talks were NEVER good about me. I was homeschool from 7-10th grade which consisted of never doing any of my homework and sitting around playing on the comp/wachting TV; went back to regular school for 11-12th and was an A student. Breezed through college with almost no studying and aced my major. Everything past middle school was almost a waste of time as watching tv/playing computer games raised me to an A student. Probably a lack of stress from my teachers pushing me. College was fun, you learn 2xs as much in 2 fewer months with 1/2 the homework and it's easier and you typically remember what you learned after.
That's nice for now, but eventually she'll end up having already (albeit indirectly) covered the curriculum for a given year!
Happened to me in early high school; got switched to "advanced" class right away, which was still far too lethargic for me despite being filled with studious geeks/nerds and goals, so I lost interested all-together and dropped out.
My school system also offered "advanced" classes which allowed a good portion of students go above and beyond the normal battery of schoolwork. Add in some fantastic teachers and our little public school did an amazing job with a good number of students. However one program I was involved in, the "Gifted and Talented" program, would of allowed some of us to take college courses while still in high school. Their budget was sadly cut and "special" students got more attention, their own room and equipment etc. Yes I am still bitter in some ways but I feel there needs to be a balance between helping everybody and letting a little bit of natural selection advance us as a species. I feel that the tax money spent on these "special" kids and later adults is much better spent on prevention.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
It was that way for me. After a living hell in school for several years, I went through a period of some years even after leaving when I refused to do pretty much anything academic. It was a couple of years after college by the time I really recovered.
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html
...where did we get the notion that "No Child Left Behind" was actually helping anyone?
Did I miss a post about studies proving this? Because from what information I have, the whole initiative is a failure all around.
If it actually succeeds in transforming a significant number of problem students into good students and eventually into successful adults, then maybe all we need to think about is what we should be doing, in addition, for the gifted students.
Otherwise, I say scrap the whole thing. It does more harm than good.
Squandering educational resources on substandard students long predates No Child Left Behind. The standard educational mantra is to "mainstream" dull and disruptive students. Classes are disrupted and it is the average students who are cheated out of a good education.
go read (or re-read) "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, it kind of addresses this issue. It's a short story and won't take you long. The story is about a society wherein everyone is created equal, literally. If you're smart, you wear a helmet that emits crazy noises to distract you, if you're strong you wear a suit of weights to hold you back.
I won't ruin the ending for you, and I hope our society never gets there.
And I have to tell you that it works separating kids by abilities. As long as as all classes have the same teachers for the same subjects and the classes are equally funded everything works. The smarter kids can finish the mandated curriculum faster and go beyond it. That way everyone stays in the same grade for the year but at the end everybody shares a base. In the end you can put on your diploma that you were in an advanced class. Sort of like College where you graduate "with honors" and what not. ... well you get the idea).
Life is unfair and we are NOT all born equal. However it is still up to you to capitalize on your advantages. I have known quite a few smart people in my life who have done exactly NOTHING with their lives and I have know people of average to low intellect who have worked hard and persevered until they accomplished more than most of you even dream of. (Heck, look at Bush - not saying he worked hard but
Trying to "level" the playing field only takes from the better ones to give to the worse ones so that EVERYBODY gets to perform at the worse level or maybe a bit better. Not the wisest move.
Conclusion, it is not enough for the genes to favor you.
Fourty-two!
"American Education" by Joel Spring, 13th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2008, considers the State role in various contexts:
... under the federal No Child Left Behind... and the cheating isn't coming from the kids..."
"State Control of Certification", p.247,326:
"... the professionalization of teaching moved from local control to the bureaucratic confines of state government. Nineteenth-century teacher were usually certified by taking an exqamination administered by the... school district or the county board of education.... By 1933 [there were] 42 states [which] had centralized certification or licensing at the state level...."
"State Control of Charter Schools", pp.197-198
"The No Child Left Behind Act provided $300 million in aid to local and state governments to support charter schools...."
"State Control of High-Stakes Testing and Academic Standards", pp. 224-229, 225, 227
"Student testing affects the evaluation of teachers and administrators.... Part of the answer is the argument made by the 1983
report A Nation At Risk...."
State Control of High-Stakes Testing and Academic Standards and Cheating", pp. 232-234
"An astonishing amount of cheating is taking place on the tests
State Control of High-Stakes Testing and Academic Standards and Disabled and English-Language Learners", pp. 229-231
"No Child Left Behind specifies that states must make reasonable adaptations and accomodations..."
"Effects of State Control of High-Stakes Testing", pp. 231-232
"there are contradictory research findings about the value of of high-stakes testing...."
"Overview of State Control of High-Stakes Testing", pp. 218-219
"... big business aspects of High-Stakes Testing in the struggle between SAT and ACT..."
"Overview of Home Schooling", pp. 209, 210
"Home schooling is one answer for parents who want to take charge of their children's education.... An estimated 1.6 to 2 million children are being taught at home by their parents...."
"State Control Increasing", pp. 223-224
"The requirements of categorical aid provided by No Child Left Behind expand the involvement of state governments in local school activities...."
"Legal Issues and State Control", p.326
Pierce v Society of Sisters (1925), Meyer v Nebraska (1923)
"Local Control and State Control", p.224
* establishing academic standards
* testing students for achievement
* testing teachers as part of licensing
* licensing of teachers
* laws on content of instruction
* providing funds to local school districts
"No Child Left Behind and State Control", pp. 183, 229-231, 234-236
"The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 increased the power of federal and state governments over local schools...."
"Private Foundations and State Control", p.239-240
"Private Foundations are an important means of nationalizing educational policies and practices...."
"State Control of Private Schools", p.325-329
"The issue of state regulation of private schools appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court case dealing with the conflict between compulsory
schooling and religious freedom.... In Pierce v Society of Sisters (1925), the Court ruled on Oregon's Compulsory Education Act (1922...)
"Revenue Sharing and State Control", pp.220-221
"Federal power over local schools seems out of proportion to the amount of financial aid it provides public school systems...."
"State Control and State Standards", p.288, 289, 290-291, 332-334
"Like many other areas of education, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 directly impacts national discussions of academic standards...."
"Student Violence and State Control", pp. 236-239
"There are many reasons why No Child Left Behind contains a section called the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act... to prevent violence in and around schools...."
"Teachers' Rights and State Control", p.343-344.
"Another concern is teachers' activities outside the school
My Kindergardener going-on 1st grader more or less taught himself to read (we read to him and sang alphabet songs etc. and the school sang more alphabet songs and encouraged reading)
He now has the opportunity to be in a mixed 1st grade + 2nd grade class next year. This is, of course, a cost saving issue (and I'm not against cost saving in principal) but it's being tacitly promoted as a "hothouse" for the chosen first graders and I'm not wild about the idea. My concerns are...
1) Are the 2nd graders that will mix with the 1st graders those have special remedial needs
2) What happens with the social ties he's been forging with other 1st graders.
I'm beginning to think that the academic content of school for him is probably not as important as the social content right now and would be very happy if the school could get him to be confident, happy, well socialized among his peers and to love learning.
Either he or I can teach him the academics - for a few years to come at least.
Nullius in verba
It was intentional.
As per usual, it's all about balance; I don't want to live in a society where "Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General" can shoot me for being smart and strong. But I also certainly don't want to live in a society which has an emperor and and empress to rule over me because they happen to be stronger and smarter than I am. Actually, when it comes down to it, the whole "Rule over me" thing is the offensive bit. To hell with 'social contracts'. I'm not signing anything. I'll let compassion and my own inner guidance system lead me. Everything else is a fear-based control system.
Thanks, Kurt.
-FL
One issue is measurement. What we measure = what we care about, and we measure crap. We need a more flexible system for tracing student information like the one this company is doing: Innovation Teaching. Unless we can track and measure, we cant hold teachers accountable for meeting the needs of high achievers. It allows teachers to measure anything that they can observe and categorize using bar codes. As the old saying goes "If it gets measured, it gets done."
Second, its about the stupidity of our statistical analysis -- our educational statistics are just pushing towards dumb. Our education statistics have no sensitivity to anything but the average. Even a slight change such as reporting to have sensitivity on what the distributions look like or would yield a change in how districts allocate resources.
Lastly, its about tests. We're measuring intellect as if testing ability = intellect, but as educators we know there are many forms of intelligence, and even more ways to show it. And the tests are dumb -- they don't adapt and can't challenge the higher range of talent and knwoledge.
It wasn't intentional. It was a nice Freudian slip though.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
from the stop-dragging-us-down dept should be changed to from the "We_told_you_so;_but_you_didn't_listen,_because_you're_the_dumbest_asshole_to_be_elected_president_in_US_history dept"
What a brilliant idea Mr. president. (Can't we just call him, Junior?) Let's divert our limited and precious resources (teachers time) to those who are either a) genetically predisposed to stupidity, b) don't give a shite, or c) from Oklahoma. What a great idea!!!
And, his puppets are surprised that by lowering the bar, our students aren't excelling?!? I believe most of our competitors (other industrialized countries) are doing just the opposite. They advance the higher potential students - kids that put forth the effort and have the ability to become great contributors to society.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since almost half of the country re-elected him. There really are a lot of morons in this country...
The only good news is that, given the eventual reduction in the population (as baby-boomers expire) and the relative ineffectiveness of our younger generations, Gen X's and Y's will be the predominant resource in our workforce for many years to come. Oh sure, there will be immigrants, but they'll stop coming over here once the word gets out how our standard of living has dropped below the level they have in their home country.
I'm only concerned that this will increase the social divide (haves vs have nots). If things get bad enough, we could be headed for another war (some would argue that it is already here). Guess I should start brushing up on several foreign languages, just in case I need to move my family.
What country has the best standard of living/quality of life right now? Any speculation on which countries will be the best places to go in 5 to 10 years?
Ah Slashdot. You're such a bunch of f'ing hypocrites. All socialized oil and medicine one minute, then you're all pissed off when the gubment tries to do something for people you see as below your station intellectually. Maybe you f'ers are better off not having someone polish your knobs for being so f'ing smart.
...strikes again.
When will people learn that it's the teachers that need testing, and improvement, not the students?
I went to a mix of public and private schools for my primary and secondary education. The private schools (not the posh, over-funded type, mind you) did more with less, and the teachers were all there for the "right" reasons. The public schools had ridiculous grade inflation and teachers who, on the whole, were not as good.
How do we solve the public education issue (in the US, at least). Focus on the quality of teachers (and, by proxy, instruction) and the whole thing gets easier. Here are some suggestions to improve public schools:
1. Increase tenure time to a reasonable level.
- It's 2-3 years, here in California. It should be more live 5-7 years.
2. Once tenure is achieved, reward teachers with "closer to reasonable" pay.
3. Continually evaluate teachers.
- 360 degree review...peers, students, parents...EVERYONE should be allowed to give feedback...the teacher's salary should be based upon a mix of performance review ratings and experience.
- Get rid of teachers that don't cut the mustard _before_ they obtain tenure.
- Allow for the possibility of tenure loss in extreme circumstances.
4. Offer decent and relevant continuing education.
5. Don't hold teachers to strict curriculums.
- No Child Left Behind is _terrible_ in this respect!!!
Again, the point is to focus on the teachers, not the students.
- hawkeye
"...The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders." - Erwin Rommel
Isn't that the purpose of outcome based education? Everyone is equally stupid? Nobody should ever be better than anyone else. Competition is bad. It's not how well you do but how good you feel about yourself. Bah!
She lucked out with a teacher who invested off-duty time in her, and a relative who paid for private high school. The person who tied her for the top SAT score in the state didn't have those breaks and disappeared into a swamp of poverty and abuse.
Anyone who denies a full education to a girl like her is stunting human potential and short-changing society as a whole.
I knew this fact just from anecdotal evidence back around 2004, speaking with a couple ex-teachers who had quit in disgust largely due to this fact. She said it herself, this No Child Left Behind bullshit was forcing her to spend 90% of her time on the one or two problem kids and everyone else suffered. It disgusted her to the point of feeling helpless and rather than waste her life in a hopeless situation, she quit entirely.
Let's face it, if a kid has learning obstacles, they need to be set aside to a different class where they can get the kind of assistance they need. Much of the time their grades and learning problems have NOTHING to do with how much time the teacher spends, and everything to do with other influences such as bad home, family problems, attitude problems, etc. Addressing these problems as part of a specialized learning environment is essential. To think you can just mix that into a normal classroom structure is ridiculous.
You can't win them all. :S
BTW: Statistics can be manipulated in anyway to make anything look they way you want to.
-Aegis Runestone-
Back when I was in elementary school, we actually had a really good gifted program. You had to take two separate IQ tests with different examiners and have a "sufficiently high" IQ both times to get in. The tests were several hours long apiece, and little toy puzzles were involved amid math and vocabulary. They never told you the results, but for several hundred kids here were only a handful of students in the program--twelve I think. It was a big deal when we got someone new. They were unbelievably bright and the program excused you from some classes to read books of your choosing, got you access to independent tutors (I learned algebra in third grade), and brought you to a number of quiz-style and little engineering competitions.
Then some parents complained, and they lowered the standards so that anyone could get in if their parents called and asked.
I eventually stopped going because the program became so prohibitively overcrowded with people who never wanted to do any of the high-level activities. They wanted to sit and talk. At that point, it boasted as many people that barely qualified at an average skill level much less a gifted skill level. Bottom line is, every parent wants their kid to be the a genius. Everyone can tell you that placing a below-average student in a room with geniuses will not make this a reality. I guess the idea is that if your child receives the treatment developed for the best of the best, or becomes friends with much brighter students, maybe your child will have some extra opportunities to improve. It's a large-scale prisoner's dilemma: if the better and worse students are separate and receive the training suited to their abilities, they both do better. If just one or two of the average students were mixed with the best ones, it might benefit them immensely. However, when all of the students are aggregated together, no one receives training best suited to their skill level and everyone suffers.
That's why I don't have much hope of this situation ever being rectified. In the prisoner's dilemma, everyone ends up uniformly crappy.
~Ben
>You know who exactly are poor, right ? It's the 10% lowest earners.
... ~10% of people are poor.
>And in a total surprise, everybody is totally shocked and utterly amazed
Since 1965, the US government has been basing the threshold for "poverty" on the Orshansky measure, which is based on expenditures needed for a minimal standard of living.
There are some problems with the way this is calculated, which may understate poverty: "The present system is based on a minimally nutritious food budget devised decades ago by the Department of Agriculture. The food budget is multiplied by three because back in the 1950's and 60's food was considered one-third of an average family's outlays.
Neither the food budget nor the multiplier have changed in all these years, although food is less than 20 percent of the average family budget today."
In this century the official US poverty rate has ranged between 11.3% and 12.7%.
And push it through congress all you "above average" people commenting here.
Obvious to most is the simple fact that taking something from somewhere leaves less of it for somewhere else. ( be it money or fertalize and niether are any good if thier not spread around ;)
However, less obvious is if , highly motivated, highly talented people not beings as well educated as the might be is a bad trade off as opposed to a general population of incoming college freshmen who can't find the united states on a relief map. There is a trade off being made and this study really doesn't address if it is a good trade off or not.
Lest someone think otherwise, I don't care for 'one child left behind act'. It is poor policy and takes control away from the people who should rightfully have control ( the parents). Actually I oppose fedral funding of public education. Education belongs funded primarily at the local level and possibly subsidised by the state, but that is a different issue.
My point is that the reason for the act is not addressed by this study , only one of it's effects.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Wow, can you detect some spin in that report? Let me just take a look at the data and come up with my own conclusion. The data says that high scorers gained 3 points while low scorers gained 16 points. Both groups improved from 2000 to 2007. The high scorers didn't improve as much as the low scorers, but they still improved. I wouldn't say (based on the data alone) that helping the low scorers _hurt_ the high scorers. The high scorers simply have less to improve in, because they are probably already getting most of the things correct.
No Child Left Behind = Every Child Held Back
A tip o' the hat, regardless.
One of the schools in our local district is considered a very successful school due to their standardized test scores. People on the other side of the county will drive their kids to that school because of its reputation.
How do they achieve their great results? Simple: the students with the lowest test scores coming in are put in classes where the student teacher ratio is 10:1. The borderline students are put in classes at 20:1. And the top students are put in classes at 30:1. Voila! A higher percentage of students pass their standardized tests.
Mediocrity will be strictly enforced...
I'm going to be a senior in high school next year and this is all definitely true.
I was homeschooled for the first few years of elementary, and my reading level was far ahead of everyone else when I started going to school. The first few years I went to a private school and everything was fine (the teacher was good, she cared about her students, and she actually taught us things), but when I transferred to a public school for fifth grade, things went down hill.
There was something in place that was supposed to help high achievers. It was called GATE, for Gifted and Talented Education. Clever, huh? The only problem is that you had to test for in in (I believe) third gradel, so I was shit out of luck. I was stuck with the rest of the other students who didn't really give a damn.
That problem followed for the first year of junior high. For the first year (at my school) they apparently see if you were GATE in elementary and, if you were, they enroll you in the high achievement classes for junior high, too. Since I wasn't in GATE, I was stuck in regular classes.
When 7th grade came around, I was finally put into "advanced" classes. This is all well and good, but if the teacher is still crap then there's no difference. I was "lucky" to even have two great teachers that year who taught well, cared about their students, and didn't just focus on test scores.
That brings me to test scores. The state I live in, Texas, has a mandatory state-wide test called the TAKS (I know other states have similar tests). I won't get into the many problems with the TAKS, though I assure you there are many. You just need to know that teachers are evaluated on how many of their students pass TAKS.
Surprisingly (for me), my teachers (besides the aforementioned two) focused on simply passing the TAKS! They didn't care about actually teaching us anything! These are teachers of the "advanced" classes, mind you.
Eighth grade was like that, but worse. I didn't have ANY good teachers. Instead, all my teachers focused on TAKS scores for the whole year. One of my teachers was actually bad as a human being as well as a teacher, for reasons I won't get into. But it was bad enough that my parents withdrew me from school early (I didn't miss anything!) and enrolled in a private school for the next year. It was actually the same one I attended in elementary.
Here comes the first year of high school. And at a Christian private school, no less (which wasn't fun for me). Most of the teachers there were awful, but I won't say too much about this because I'm sort of focusing on public schools. Let's just say ninth grade was bad enough that I was able to convince my parents to let me go to a public high school.
10th grade was a lot like a toned-down version of seventh grade. I had some great teachers, but I also had some terrible ones (all for advanced courses) who, once again, focused only on the TAKS.
11th grade was a lot better. I had an overwhelming amount of GOOD teachers who challenged their students in a variety of ways.
What I've found from my personal experience is that even if there aren't mentally retarded students in the classroom, if the teacher doesn't care about actually teaching there will still be problems.
A final note about "equality" and fairness: At my high school's graduation there is traditionally special recognition for the top 10% students. They get their diplomas before everyone else. The administration wants to change that so other people won't feel "left out" and "less smart".
(Who the hell actually reads all this?)
Stay tuned, film at 11:00pm shows the world might not be fair after all!
First of all:
Inteligence throughout a population isn't always a normal curve, it could be two camel humps, or a straight vertical line.
First of all, we can't be smart and we shouldn't try to equalize, but normalize. We have a limited amount of resources (time, brain-power) and some physical tendencies (natural strenght vs. disability, photographic memory from birth, 20/20 sight vs blindness, etc.) which don't always limit you, but they always make certain paths easier and others harder.
Now we have to use this resources to grow in whichever way we want, so we choose to be high on some areas, average on others and low on the rest. How? Depends on your life experience, what you just are good at, etc. We can't know, since genes are a guide not a rule this means something simple:
Everyone deserves the chance to proove themselves by just wanting and having the best intentions out of it.
This is the rule where equality comes, everyone can choose to try whatever path they want, and is allowed to go as far as they can.
This means that they should be allowed to go way beyond others. This means that some people will want to go far, but they won't be able to for whatever reason.
This brings us to the next conclusion:
Just because everyone has a chance to proove themselves doesn't mean they have all the oportunities. You have to proove with result that you deserve something.
So that means fairness is freedom of choice and equal access to oportunity, but it is not equality of oportunity. That makes sense if you think about it. When you want to get a job you can try any company you want, and any career path you want, but you have to proove with results (aka resume and interview) that you deserve the oportunity. You have access to that oportunity, but that doesn't mean you deserve it or will have it.
So if everyone especializes in diferent areas and really people may choose to simply not do something how do we measure how healthy is the education? Well first, make sure it's close to a normal curve, and not just for academic knowledge, but also for social inteligence, for physical fitness, for streetsmarts, etc. You will miss areas because maybe they can't be measured effectively (sensibility for example), and you can't handle everything in school, but that's ok, it just means someone is specializing in something diferent(hopefully not gang-fighthing, but that's a bigger social problem). Those few that aren't choose not to be normally, they have the time and could grow if they wanted to, but loose hope in life, there is nothing you can do for them. Also check how big is the standar deviation, it means how drastic are the changes in the diferent levels of soceity. You want it to be small, because that means the system is being fair enought, but not too small as that'd mean that there isn't enought "basic" education and either people go way above average (they don't use the educative system as much) and many others lag behind (the educative system isn't helping them). Basically you want the educative system to push people to their limits. By doing this we push the average higher and push people further, but because the more to the "right" of the graph you are the harder it's to advance, people just cluster at the average increasing the SD.
Only then can we use average, in reference to other averages, to know if we've improved or not.
Still some issues are left: what the hell are we measuring? How? What other factors are being measured?
After all if I get a 85% in Algebra what does that mean? At 85 percentile? 85 of the knowledge expected? 85 of all the knowledge? 85% satisfaccion of work? 85% of all work?
So we find that this measurements break down on the individual. We don't know what they mean. We can't know what other factors influenced it. We aren't measuring all that a person does. We can't know if the guy is lying (cheating, or simply not doing the exam, just answering random giberish).
The problem with the NCLB is that it attempts to equalize the curve (whi
As a sixteen year old soon-to-be-senior, I'm surprised it's taken this long for a study to realize this. No child left behind has caused me endless frustration here in Florida, where when I should be learning about classical literature, or even during classes on networking or globalization, I'm instead forced to review basic grammar in the school's hopes of preparing all students (see: low-achievers) for the FCAT (Florida's "big" standardized test).
This is why I've long referred to the No Child Left Behind program as No Child Gets Ahead.
Give standardized tests on ALL students of the (country, or state) where teachers them self do not get the tests when they teach. Then here's good thing. Send exams to some central authority to check. Make exam so hard and large so nobody is expected to get full points, have diverse questions...
5% get lowest grade, 1% highest grade. 4% next, 10% every other grade.
Give teacher points based on AVERAGE grade of the students based on that grading.
PS. We have in Finland an exam that actually puts gaussian curve for high school students in their final year. 5% fail each exam, and 5% get top grade. Failing exam isn't show stopper. You can try again, or for some subjects, just ignore the grade and graduate with passing grades in other subjects.
©God
SPOT ON!!!!
The parents HAVE to get involved in one form or another...
If you have $$$
1) You don't have to get as personally involved because,
a) you can live in a high-tax area that has great school systems - Look at CT
b) you can send you kids to a private school
If you don't have $$$
-- Then you HAVE to get involved because you probably don't live in an area that has a great school system because that means higher tax rates.
-- If you CARE about your kids' education then you have to get personally involved BUT...
-- If you live in a poor area and work a ton of hours then your kids definitely have a steeper hill to climb.
I've personally seen this working in a local middle-junior high school system. Hopefully, I'll be graduating with my PhD in a technical field shortly so I, and my family, should be ok. We have these decisions to make as we relocate but I DID grow up poor with immigrant parents that _could not_ help with my education. They left a devastated part of Europe post WWII with little education.
I'm in a unique position, with my background, to help these kids and I hope to in the future. As for my kids, I intend to play an active role in their education.
The tallest blades must be cut back so they don't shade the shorter blades from the nurturing light of the sun.
So it also is with children.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
And how are students expected to have time to do such things in addition to the required work for their actual schools? When I dropped out of school and went to a university instead, it was because I simply couldn't handle the amount of work expected of me, due to the philosophy in many schools here that the easiest way to deal with smarter students is to give them more work without actually increasing the level of teaching, and the failure of many teachers to understand that higher intelligence doesn't necessarily imply an ability to think more rapidly or a heightened stamina for rote assignments. It wouldn't have mattered if MIT had been publishing their courses online at the time - I would have been too busy with things like listing and describing each of the few thousand metaphors and similes in some arbitrary novel, or finding the roots of a few hundred second-order polynomials by hand, without being allowed to use the quadratic formula.
this may come as a shock to you, but writing and speaking are actually two different skills.
at work, more effort goes into my writing. I check things over for obvious errors before submitting things. I don't bother to do that on slashdot.
I do frequently re-state things in class. students should know some different ways of saying something.
If i only teach my students about 'hello', they will be lost when someone says, "hey", "hi" or "whats up"
-I only code in BASIC.-
This topic is actually a no brainer. You probably not going to like this statement, but this dumbing down in our education system was one of the reasons many Americans did not want integration. We knew what the results of such a decision would make. We also knew and admitted to ourselves the lack of morals in certain races and what that result would lead to. Today, most girls of all ages are nothing more than free prostitutes. They don't even see any need for marriage. Shacking up is all one needs. This has led to further demands that we accept homosexuality as being just a personal choice. Forget or ignore the warning God gives in scripture as to the judgement that follows this acceptance. We may not endure as harsh a judgement as Sodom and Gomorrah due to the Christians in the US, but there will surly be a devastating event.
All this study does is show that the methods being used are in fact working as part of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
In Australia, esp South Australia, we have programs within secondary (high) schools geared at people who are not intending to go to university- programs like VET (Vocational education and training) and Futures connect. does the US have anything similar?
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
In the 80's and early 90's when I went to school, our teachers never did anything to help anyone out. It was lecture lecture lecture, the end. There was an extra class or two for the students with higher grades, maybe something to help the less educationally inclined too but I don't know because I was mostly in the middle.
Maybe things have changed since then. I don't know. I'm not really sure the study matters because most school teachers don't have the time or seem to have the inclination to give extra help.
On a side note, I'd personally prefer the help go to the people with the lowest grades. These are the ones who need help. I'd rather see a change in the system that encourages a student who is doing well to take their education into their own hands (with guidance of course).
The premise of this lead story is flawed: "increased emphasis on helping students with a history of lower academic achievement results in lower performance for high achievers".
Modern compulsory schooling has several goals. The goal is never to have an autonomous, intelligent population, composed of auto-didactics that can search for their own truth and happiness. So this Slashdot article summary is based on a false premise, that the "smarter students" are being short-changed by the focus on "no child left behind". It is much closer to the truth to say that school serves the purposes of subliminating individuals to an overly institutionalized society. We have to learn independent learning does not matter early on, that only curricular learning matters. We have to learn that our happiness cannot exist outside of an insitutional parameter; school kids who get bad grades are castigated in school but also get a repeated castigation in their own family when they bring home their report card.
Ivan Illich in "Deschooling Society" totally demolishes the institution of school. One of the main purposes of school according to Illich is to perpetrate a myth that everyone has an equal chance to compete for equality! So this is why schools focus on the "less gifted" because they need to be fooled that they had a chance to compete for equality in school, that they "failed" and deserve the short end of the stick in life, thereafter. This way you can satsify a hierarchial capitalist society where some work 40 hours and barely eke out a living, while there are a handful of billionaires, millionaires who get the rest of the stick, the beehive at the end of it and all the honey.
On the other hand, not spending enough money to keep these types out of prison produces people who don't pay any taxes and have to be locked up and guarded at the government's expense.
Which is exactly why just shifting around how the money is allocated will not fix anything. We need more teachers with lighter workloads so that they can give whichever students are in their care the attention that they need.Here's the question: We are always hearing politicians promising to "Put 100,000 new police offices on our streets". Where is the program to "Put 100,000 new teachers in our classrooms"?
We know that heavy workloads hinder teachers' abilities to properly help all of their students. We also know that higher pay attracts better talent to a job. So, if people really care about how the nation's youth are being educated, where's the cash? A police officer costs more than a teacher (though the job doesn't require much education or talent), yet no one complains about increasing the budget for more cops.
America has crap priorities, and until those priorities are addressed, the nation's education options will continue to fail at least a portion of the students, if not most of them.
I was flipping though a book on learning French just killing time, and cracked up when I found out that America used retarded as a euphemism, since it just means slow. Somewhat related, I had a cool time at a party talking with some Europeans and an Aussie, about how edible meat uses French words (beef, poultry, pork, etc).
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The fact is that American teachers have to contend with remarkable diversity in their classes. in Many rural Asian communities, the population has been practicing focused inbreeding for generations so that many of the students are practically clones. Additionally, the Asian approach to education is strictly teacher centered: The teacher lectures, the kids take notes. Adding a few more kids in that environment doesn't change the classroom dynamics at all.
Yes, but then they're still stuck for however-many hours in a day with absolutely nothing to occupy them. It's mind-numbing and painful.
Even worse: Politicians will promise then 100,000 new cops when we also need 100,000 new teachers, but then they will fire some of the existing cops and teachers instead of hiring any of the two, make a lot of dumb laws to create new criminals, and spend all the money on pork-barrel projects.
Sharing a cake - what a poor analogy. The path to mediocrity is guaranteed by spending more of a precious resource on those who are the furthest behind. Resources distributed equally across all gives each an equal chance to achieve to the best of their abilities.
I've enjoyed reading everyone's comments and opinions, but like with our public policy makers, the perspective of an actual teacher is missing. What everyone is forgetting in this argument over who to help, the low or high achievers, is that a teacher's job is to help both! Especially in elementary school, where everyone is lumped in together, and where all this "low achieving" starts. As a teacher, I cannot just focus all my time and energy on the high achievers, while some of my 3rd graders still don't know how to read. Nor can I ignore the increasingly bored high achievers. What is the solution? More time and more resources. I wish I could clone myself and give everyone my full attention, but that's not possible, so we need the $$$. We need reading specialists to combat illiteracy and overcrowded prisons. We need vocational classes/schools to combat dropout rates and overcrowded prisons. We need more teachers and smaller class sizes to reach more students and combat overcrowded prisons (seeing the trend here...) And last, but not least, we need enrichment programs for our brightest few, so that they can be the leaders in the the arts, literature, science, technology, etc.
Don't remember, other than that the Asian systems are no cure for any of the ills being mentioned here. And that I wouldn't call the Japanese system "better" in any sense at all.
Not even the test scores, and especially not when balanced against the suicide rate or the rate of lynchings at school.
However, I won't argue with you if you are asserting that there are no pat answers. Large classes can work if the parents are supporting their kids efforts to get an education in certain ways, and if the teachers know how to help the students learn by teaching each other.
No. If it were intentional it would have been American idiot.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This has been plaguing me for quite some time now. The problem seems to be that my previous employers either didn't know I existed or they liked my work so much that they wanted to keep me where I was, no matter how many times I tried to move within the company. This mainly appears to apply in the larger shops, where you are just a number. Unfortunately in smaller shops, you get bought out before you get a chance to get anywhere, so it seems like a no-win scenario. Add to that the lackluster job market, and it's a recipe for never getting anywhere.
I think the solution is finding just the right mid-sized company, preferably one that is large enough in its own industry to avoid being bought out or outsourced, yet small enough not to have all that yucky corporate red tape. At least that's what I am trying now. These few axioms pretty much sum up the reality of the industry:
1. Nobody cares what you know but WHO you know. I hate this since I have a very high intelligence, but just not the right connections.
2. The only way to move up is to move out. Always be on the lookout for what is out there in the job market on the rare occasion something does come up.
3. Company loyalty has not existed for decades, so do what is best for yourself, not them.