Leave no child where?

From my reading of this thread and my personal experiences with my own children's schools I have become disheartened.

I see school boards with the responsibility of educating our most precious resource become side tracked into cooking tests and results so that the main objective is to work towards a refined ability to "Lie With Statistics". Which prompts me to ask: To what ends?

My State of residence also has standards, which are required to be met by 10th graders about halfway thru that grade. School administrators give a week's worth of classes to these kids so as they are more likely to pass the test. This seems inherently fishy to me. I tell my wife and myself it is so that if any discrepancy in past schooling shows up then it can be corrected. But these actions seem to beg the question: Should not any failure to meet academic standards be met on a continuing grade-by-grade basis (standards for 1st grade must be made before attending 2nd grade etc.)? Extrapolating into further specificity, should not this demonstration of academic viability be apparent on a test-by-test basis within each grade level (if Johnny can't add then remedy this before trying to teach him its opposite of subtraction)?

Can anybody give me a good argument against school vouchers or teacher performance evaluations upon which compensation would be partly based? If so instituted how might we structure such a reimbursement plan? Should this reimbursement program include adminstration officials? Any comments or info about the Edison Inc. educational experiment in public schools? Uniforms for some reasons are loathed by the PARENTS in my district. Why?

Respectfully,

JM

Hi JM, I don't know about uniforms, I know I would not want to wear one myself or have my children wear them. But I believe the school vouchers are an excellent idean. It works experimentally in some districts and the public schools really had to shape up for they kept loosing pupils. Denmark has the whole country running on them and results are excellent. the way it works is the parents get a voucher for a certain amount of money - they can spend it in entirety towards a public school (and pay nothing) or pay the difference between the amount on the voucher and the tuition in a private school. Private schools thus become far more accessible to average folk and it boosts up competition in the quality of education tremendously.
Teacher evaluations however do not work, they can never measure true competency of a teacher. scores change year to year, even tests change year to year. plus if you teach in a poor area, it is unfair to compare achievement of your students with those of some teacher in beverly hills.
tests get generally more and more difficult since kids are required to cram more and more information into their heads. thus if you follow the test scores you may be alarmed that they go down and thus think the level of education is plummeting, but in reality the kids *may* know a whole lot more than a few years ago - because the test was made more difficult. teacher evaluations are to a large part based on the performance of the students, i don't believe they are informative about the quality of the teacher much.

Why not? Surely we can test whether a teacher knows and can effectively convey the content required by the curriculum. If he or she does not know it, he or she cannot convey it.

It's like this student-to-teacher ratio garbage. It posits the absurd notion that if you give a terrible teacher a small enough group of students he or she will do a great job of educating them.

I think evaluations are more or less directly related to grades. I used to get evaluated after the grades were posted (I have no idea why NYU used to do it that way) and inevitably the handwriting in the worst exams matched the handwriting for my worst evaluations.

This is a great subject and I hope it continues with more really great posts. I'm going to sit back and enjoy for a while -- except I want to add that my own assessment of the way students are evaluated is that the system stinks, doesn't work. Forget standardized tests, get some intelligent teachers who know how to assess students in there. Bring them in from other countries if we can't produce them.

Jespah, the teacher evaluations for K-12 are not compiled the same way - it is not the students evaluating the teacher. Rather teacher gets evaluated by his/hers students' grades/scores, which I believe is not accurate. Scrat, perhaps there is a better way how to evaluate a teacher's competency, I don't know it though, I only know how it is done presently and tend to believe it is not a fair evaluation.

I spoke to Christine Rossell via email on the topic of MCAS just now, some may know the name, she is a public policy analyst, somewhat of a famous figure in Massachussetts - especially due to bilingual education, but this is what she replied via email re MCAS:

"MCAS is not strictly speaking a standardized test. It was created to rank order children in terms of the extent to which they know the standards set up in Mass. by a committee. It is, however, correlated at about the .9 level with standardized tests so it is very similar. Children who do well on standardized tests do well on MCAS and vice versa. If everyone did well on MCAS, the test would be pronounced too easy and redone. So you are right in the sense that MCAS tells you nothing about how well children in Mass. are being educated. The test was designed by human beings, not by God, and designed to rank order children. See attached article on subject."

she attached an article on the topic as well, funnily enough it's the same one i linked above. after all, she was my professor, seems i learned a thing or two, ha.

Actually, in NY, we used to evaluate the teachers (in my elementary school, 6th grade). We also had to give our own grades. Very bizarre system.

Let me rephrase that. We didn't grade ourselves, but we were asked which grade we thought we "deserved". Odd.

I just read this whole thing, have myriad thoughts. I have a master's in education, went to a rather experimental elementary school which made a big impression on me, and have been both a teacher and educational adminstrator. Just so you know where I'm coming from.

I don't know if there is any more complicated issue than the current state of American education. I think of mythical beasts, the hydra, the ourobouros (sp?) -- cut off one head and two more emerge, a ravenous circle with no clear beginning or end, no clear way to dive in and start fixing things. (I'm mixing my metaphors all over the place, bear with me.)

If I had to pick one single thing that would improve the state of the schools, I would say make it more attractive for excellent new teachers. I hope my previous paragraph makes it clear that I choose that one single thing with no real expectation that it would cure everything -- there are so many aspects which as so entertwined. But as I have said in many of these discussions, the life of a teacher is difficult, very difficult, in many ways. There is salary -- OK, but not great. There is autonomy -- often precious little. There is the fact that impassioned people on many sides think they know how to do your job -- parents, politicians, administrators. There are the ridiculous, curriculum-busting, nail-biting, soul-draining standardized tests (thanks for the link, Dag. Interesting.) There is the very low job security these days (see recent layoffs in California and Massachusetts, a teacher of the year being laid off, etc.)

Why oh why would the best and the brightest want to become a teacher? Guess what... they don't! The ones that will put up with the standardized testing, the mandatory scripts, the demand for conformity rather than using imagination and "teachable moments" are also the ones who do not teach well. Of course there are exceptions, especially in well-financed districts where the administration knows that if they want to keep their stars they have to look the other way, and since the kids score well on tests anyway, they're allowed to. And there are the career teachers, the ones who are not yet burnt out and are still fighting the good fight.

But I'm not currently a teacher. I don't particularly want to be one. If I do, it will be because I think it is my duty as someone who has been singled out as being an excellent teacher to give back to the community. I will hold my nose and deal.

I'm not the only one. Of the people I am still in contact with from grad school, very few have become teachers. They have gone into fields related to education, but not teaching.

This sucks. I don't know where to start with rectifying this problem, as it is so deep-seated -- better salaries, OK, but where does the money come from? More autonomy, OK, but how to separate the wheat from the chaff and figure out who can actually deal with more autonomy? Get rid of those damned mandatory scripts and stultifying curricula, OK, but how to convince parents and politicians that the alternative works? Etc., etc.

Quite a mess.

Dag - I took your comments to be claiming that teachers could not be accurately evaluated. I can see that this was not really what you wrote. My bad.

I'm sure this would be hard or impossible to do, but I found myself brainstorming on this and thought that a system that considered student improvement under a teacher's tutelage, rather than mere performance, might give some insight into which teachers were most effective.

all right you guys - I read a few replies - now I gotta go read it all.

Right, Scrat, if the grades were given out fairly. But teachers sometimes 'fake' improvement, they give worse grades one semester, better the next one. Does not mean the students improved. i don't know, perhaps a test should be designed for teachers to test their skills and approaches, but to assure it would have a comparable value, that it would be possible to rank-order the teachers on how they perform, would still be extremely difficult.
Also one of my most favourite teachers was math/physics teacher - i dreaded both subject, constantly had to fight for a 2 grade (B I guess), but she was a wonderful person and I learnt a lot about 'life' from her. much less about math or physics. how do you evaluate that in a teacher? it's very subjective and vague to grasp.

Perhaps the teacher teaching a child should not be the teacher evaluating that child.

Of course, this would not be an issue if we could count on them to act ethically.

Let's not forget that right through the '50's, we had an abundance of "slave labor" for schools: teaching was a respectable and acceptable job for clever,educated women who didn't "need" to be paid very much because they either had husbands with jobs, or no husbands/ families and therefore "few needs."

How much should a good sixth-grade teacher be paid? Ideally? Compared to what profession? Bonuses for what? Sabbaticals? Should the hours be more strictly kept to? Should teachers do administrative work, or have assistants? What should the ratio of the costs of education be to the costs of defense in the US?

I'm partisan to the suggestion for more respect, money and autonomy for teachers. These would go a long way to help the situation -- particularly autonomy. I'd work for a new value system and from it a more honest way of assessing a child's progress and the teacher's competence. It used to be true that a school had a reputation for good teaching -- teachers were chosen by the board for that school. Not a regional school board. Teachers in that school were held to the school's standard.

I also like vouchers, always have. I'd like to see each child in this country get a trust fund at birth of, what?, $250K plus interest on the capital? For educational expenses only, but lifelong, graduate school, any further education, job training, extension courses, additional degree at retirement just for the heck of it... Don't even try to convince me we can't afford it -- it's simply a matter of priorities. We could start with the 3 trillion the Pentagon can't account for this year -- or so it was just announced.

Phew! (out of breath from catching up) What a thread...
I think I agree with everyone here. And something must be done!

My own opinion: Privatize education. Anything the government does takes twice as long and costs three times as much.
1) Vouchers are one step in the right direction.
2) Schools and teachers competing with each other for tips and bonuses is another.
3) Support structures for home schooling.
4) Support environments for kids who WANT to learn.




My own experience: Public High School is nothing but glorified daycare. In high school, I got so fed up at all the dreary waste and mind-numbing hoops, that for one week I carried a stopwatch around and timed how long everything takes. So many minutes walking in the hall, so many minutes settling down in class, so many taking attendance, reviewing homework, reviewing old material, taking quizzes, chit-chatting. So many minutes of the teacher rambling about his summer Little League team, so many minutes sitting and waiting for who knows what. Turns out less than 5% of my time was spent on the real stuff -- the actual teaching.

School, huh? You want to learn something, you have to do it on your own time. When I studied things on my own I learned twenty (20!) times faster. And I had to keep it to myself, so people wouldn't criticize me for doing things that weren't assigned.

For so many years I was trained to sit quietly and zone out, that when I graduated I considered the diploma to be a Death Certificate. I shunned the prom and refused to be listed in the yearbook. I was stamped and molded, certified and crushed. All I wanted to do was learn stuff!

However much people want to turn their responsibilities over to the government, they just can't. It's still our responsibility to listen to our kids, know them, teach them, be with them and help them.

The teaching profession is currently a labor of love, performed under dire conditions. The abuse of teachers, long hours, and low pay prevent it from attracting anyone but the most dedicated or incompetent. The atmosphere of stress, overload, and hopelessness is contagious and spills onto the kids without anybody seeing it. A vicious circle occurs where the kids then don't want to be there, don't want to participate, and cause even more stress back into the system, and it just spirals.

Good God, why grow up in such a place? Get the hell out while you still can! Do anything, do it yourself part-time, join with other parents, find alternative schools, anything is better than public high school. If all you do is walk out the door, it will be an improvement.

Half the kids I went to school with could easily have taken some tests and challenged out of high school three years early, with maybe two months work. If they had been told about that option. And if their spirit hadn't been crushed.

I think the central issue is one that has been touched upon already -- how on earth do you quantify good teaching? If that were simple, so many other things would be simple, too. But it's not. An absolutely outstanding teacher might be cursed with a few hellions who really disrupt her class, while a middling teacher may have a room full of bright, motivated kids with highly involved parents. What kind of evaluation could show which teacher is truly outstanding and which is truly middling?

The only kinds of evaluations that "work" in this way are long-term, subjective, and "fuzzy" -- not at all the kind of things that the people behind standardized testing, for example, have the patience for.

In terms of vouchers -- sigh. I completed my grad school (education) in 1996, and at that time I was wholeheartedly against vouchers. I haven't really kept up as much as I should, but I have not read anything yet to change my mind. The brief reason is that I think the idea of public schools is a noble and good one, and that, in practice, vouchers tend to decimate inner-city schools that need the most help without truly offering viable alternatives, or by offering alternatives that are religious-based.

If some brave soul wants to start a thread on vouchers specifically, I'll do more research.

"Leave no child where?" Just a slogan to get votes and money to Corporation - not to be taken seriously by the humanities!

I'd love to! And I'd like to invite you to start your interaction there by offering me a single example of a case where a voucher program decimated inner-city schools.

Here it is:
Let's Discuss Vouchers!

Why does everyone always put the blame on the teachers? Why not blame the parents, for a change?

I count at least 4 participants in this discussion, not counting you, who have brought up the need for parental involvement in assuring a child's best development.

Why do we take for granted -- accept -- the concept of "inner city schools"?