Who do You Blame Most for our Crap Public Education System?

@hawkeye10,

I think we should use innovation as our yardstick.

Which country is the most inventive? Which produces the best ideas?

@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

I think we should use innovation as our yardstick.

Which country is the most inventive? Which produces the best ideas?

Then we are in a world of hurt. We lead only in high tech now and a lot of that work is done by people who came here from other lands to go to school and to work. We lost being leader of patents and science already I believe.

Here is a study that has us moving up to #5 in innovation from #10:

http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2013/article_0016.html

BTW: our patent law completely undermines innovation, there is currently a huge call to reform it because it is greatly damaging our nation. So much for the claim that innovation is the major thing, we let it get to this, and even now 8 out of 10 people have never even heard of the problem/dispute.

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

I think we should use innovation as our yardstick.

Which country is the most inventive? Which produces the best ideas?

Maybe we should use performance on standardized tests as a result. The innovation thing might just be a trailing indicator, but test results are conclusive evidence of teaching effectiveness.

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Evaluate teachers based on standardized tests, and teachers will spend more time teaching test-taking strategies in class and less time teaching kids the underlying principles of things.

Meanwhile, the long term effect of destroying unions, and with it job security, will be to stop smart young people from entering the profession.

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@Kolyo,

Kolyo wrote:

Evaluate teachers based on standardized tests, and teachers will spend more time teaching test-taking strategies in class and less time teaching kids the underlying principles of things.

Meanwhile, the long term effect of destroying unions, and with it job security, will be to stop smart young people from entering the profession.

Yes, by all means, let's eliminate that crazy testing from schools. Wouldn't want to impact the teachers' job security with evidence of failure.

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@Kolyo,

Kolyo wrote:

Evaluate teachers based on standardized tests, and teachers will spend more time teaching test-taking strategies in class and less time teaching kids the underlying principles of things.

Meanwhile, the long term effect of destroying unions, and with it job security, will be to stop smart young people from entering the profession.

We are right back to demanding the rote memorization to get high test scores that the education reformers of the 1970 spent huge amounts of efforts to dismantle. This is on par with americans spending 20 years ripping walls out of home because open floor plan was the ****, and now we are putting them back in. It is all fad, and the next on is always right around the corner.

The thing that only happened for a spit second though was a reform movement trying to change schools so that americans would learn to think for themselves. That went away fast. Bad. Idea.

You cant have too many Hawkeye10's walking around running their mouths.

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@Brandon9000,

So when an eighth grade teacher tries to instruct someone with a fourth grade understanding of the subject and fails, you would fire the eighth grade teacher? What about the teachers the kid saw at earlier levels, who may have pushed the kid through his exams by showing him some fancy tricks and contrived mnemonics, but failed to teach underlying principles?

1 Reply

@Kolyo,

Kolyo wrote:

So when an eighth grade teacher tries to instruct someone with a fourth grade understanding of the subject and fails, you would fire the eighth grade teacher? What about the teachers the kid saw at earlier levels, who may have pushed the kid through his exams by showing him some fancy tricks and contrived mnemonics, but failed to teach underlying principles?

Where did I say that I would fire this teacher??? I said that there needs to be some object measure about whether pupils are learning.

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@Brandon9000,

Quote:

I said that there needs to be some object measure about whether pupils are learning.

That gets tricky, but when I get HS grads who seem incapable of following instructions I conclude that we have a problem. I also see the the other side of the coin, HS grads who cant organize themselves to do anything without constant detailed direction.

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@hawkeye10,

That graph is no good. I dont see religion on it.

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@Brandon9000,

That seems to be exactly what the GOP is trying to do: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/testing-under-fire-113807.html

I wonder what FOX news is telling people to think about testing now....

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Testing is the main key to verify if the student has learned a topic. Some students are good in writing and other in talking. The tests must be performed on the best performance of the student.

On the other hand, the family status also have a great influence on the performance of the student. While some families send the student to school for learning purposes, other families send the student to school to have it used as a baby sitter.

A family where the father is a narc and the mother is alcoholic, living from social services, they won't care if the son learns something as long as the son attends school so they can keep him to collect more services. These parents won't care if the son passes grades without learning. The school teacher "smells" the trouble with the parents and play the game, this teacher makes no effort to be sure that the student learned anything.

A different scenario is mostly seen in private schools, where when the student can't learn at the same rate than the rest, the parents are asked to pull the student out.

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@carloslebaron,

Quote:

A different scenario is mostly seen in private schools, where when the student can't learn at the same rate than the rest, the parents are asked to pull the student out.

"learn or leave". Of course this is what tracking (by beginning 11 grade in either college bound, general or vocational curriculums) was all about, which is so politically incorrect that one can not even speak up for it these days. It used to be "keep up or else go down 1 level".

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late to the party, but parents. There is nothing wrong with the public school system. Parents have extraordinarily low expectations of their precious snowflakes and expect the world to be given to them on a platter. My son is aiming to be valedictorian of his 700+ class of 2016. That is because we expect that of him. We make sure his home work is done and checked before he gets to play on computer. We've raised a responsible young man despite his innate leanings towards laziness.

All the children that do well in school have a strong family and parents that drive them. They are always at the plays and performances, they are always helping with the sports and sideline stuff, they are always helping their kids achieve their goals.

Family is the strongest support structure a child can have and if that support is not strong, then neither will the child. (For the most part, for you pedantic's. There will always be exceptions.)

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Who do You Blame Most for our Crap Public Education System?

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