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Obama Makes a Push To Add Time To the School Year
N!NJA sends in a proposal that is sure to cause some discussion, especially among students and teachers. Obama and his education secretary say that American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to other students around the globe. "'Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,' the president said earlier this year. 'Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.' 'Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. ... 'Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,' Duncan told the AP. 'I want to just level the playing field.' ... Kids in the US spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the US on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days)."
See if those little brats keep singing the praises to Obama after they find out about this...
Public schools do not have a monopoly. Private schools (and their students!) are thriving. All you have to be is either rich or smart and lucky.
Yet, a Chinese dropout can get a manufacturing job, make enough money in ten years to retire in the lifestyle they are accustomed to and call it a life.
Leave a kid behind here and they are done.
We should just send them to China.
Yes. That's the problem. It isn't that teachers are so overloaded with students that they can't provide any kind of individualized attention . It isn't that the workload isn't so heavy that the instructors are limited in their time and energy for lesson planning. It isn't that teachers constantly walk a tightrope between developing engaging lessons and potentially upsetting one of the 80 parents of their class of 40. It isn't that the the best and brightest teachers are leaving for other carriers.
It's clearly the incompetence, and the unions.
Seriously - one of my closest friends was a teacher who left the system to become a bus driver. I dated a teacher for several months, and was a guest instructor for her on a number of occasions. My mother used to teach and now drives a taxi. When I was in grade school, I was fortunate enough to be a member of a class with a reasonable student body. I personally used to teach martial arts professionally.
I think you may be a little out of touch.
America is quickly becoming the land of the dumb. Part of the reason is because people like you think there's no way we can't be number one. But, as a matter of fact, we are slipping in every measurable way behind the rest of the industrialized world.
More poverty. More prisoners per capita than even China. Least efficient transportation system. Least effective health care system. Worst income equality. And essentially, this is the result of a culture where intelligence does not matter. I'm not talking about anti-intellectualism, which has been part of our culture for some time, but a populace who cannot even name the branches of their own government, but can name the entire cast of Desperate Housewives. They can't solve simple math problems, or "become little calculators" as you like to say. Well, guess what. If you don't fundamentally understand what negative numbers are, how are you going to be able to comprehend anything having to do with math? If you can't look at a multiplication problem and know simply by looking at it that something is wrong, how will you ever know if the calculations you're receiving back are fatally flawed? Without a foundation of roughing out numbers in your mind, you can never use modern tools effectively, because you can't tell when the inputs or operations are incorrect. You simply won't know.
The focus solely on profits has lead to a nation of credulous, infantile football fans, who spend more time watching television than they do expanding their minds. This is because credulous people are more profitable. They are easier to take advantage of. As long as their basic needs are met, they are satisfied with whatever the TV tells them is the truth. There is a certain inevitable decline buried in this cultural norm, which cannot be addressed by pretending that it isn't a problem.
More schooling in our broken public education system will not help, but neither will privatizing them. Our society will have to arrive at the decision to make education a priority. The first step is admitting we have a problem, not sticking our head in the sand as you suggest.
When "No child left behind" passed, know what it did? It cut the schools funding even further, when they already didn't have enough money for books and other things.
No element of "No Child Left Behind" reduces funding for particular schools. It might require a failing school to develop a plan to improve, may allow students to transfer to non-failing schools, or may shut the school down.
Perhaps your school district decided to reduce spending. In which case, one gets what one expects from a socialist monopoly...
Never underestimate the power of denial. As a teacher of ninth grade on level students and junior AP students, the expectations of parents don't change much. You would be shocked to see how many parents of students who can barely put a sentence together want their children to take AP Language. Also, as politicians continue to cede power to parents, we end up with a system where any student can take any AP class regardless of ability. Of course this hurts both the student with lower abilities and those with higher abilities as the level of the class falls.
This is a complicated issue coming out of a society that wants every child in Little League to have a first place trophy.
An important change for education.
His proper place on the team is not as an engineer. It's only a warped
American view of self-worth that forces people into doing things they
really aren't cut out for for what ever reason. He should have been able
to make a good living at his true calling rather than being shoehorned
into a role that really wasn't his best fit.
This is the problem of treating everyone as identical.
We are all equal under the law. That doesn't mean we are clones.
The American notion of "equality" has gotten derailed with a heavy
does of mindless ambition, and a lot of greed and consumerism thrown
in for good measure.
The mechanics should be able to concentrate more on being good at that
while the engineers do the same.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.