Lash, I personally believe you are going into a profession that provides both challenge and frustrations. The federal mandates have taken away much in the curriculum control of what is to be taught in each class to prepare students to pass the standards tests.
The good schools still provide a greater number of subjects and challenge classes for the over-achievers. It's those who are having difficulty with the basics that suffer. Not all students are capable to meet some subjective "standards" established by the Department of Education in Washington DC. Struggling students need to have the opportunity to pursue other career fields that provides internships like plumbing or construction. I understand that Germany has such a system.
Trying to put a round plug in a square hole fails to succeed. Our educational system needs to change what courses are offered to meet student demands; not the other way around.
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If we agree that minority students are as capable as others--why are they having so much trouble?
Lack of familial pressure to do so brought upon by generational ignorance
The key is to break the cycle, but how when so few of the current parents are supportive of efforts to do so?
I hope you get paid what you're worth, so few teachers actually are...
Cycloptichorn
Lash, There are many examples of minority schools doing as well or better than some schools with majority of whites. I believe it has to do with expectations, and providing the right kind of environment for any student to succeed. I also do not believe that minorities lack the ability to learn or do well in school
On the same token, not all Asian students excel in school. I barely graduated from high school unlike my siblings. They were over-achievers, and I was always the "black sheep" of our family.
I was the last to earn a college degree, but the first to retire. Not bad for a "black sheep."
Anyone remember Oscar Lewis and his Culture of Poverty? I know there was a batch of stuff against that, but some of it made sense to me. I didn't read his key book, whatever it was, just read Culture of Poverty.
I don't know what that had to do with the masses but I see that book in myself.
cicerone imposter wrote:Lash, There are many examples of minority schools doing as well or better than some schools with majority of whites. I believe it has to do with expectations, and providing the right kind of environment for any student to succeed. I also do not believe that minorities lack the ability to learn or do well in school
I agree with your assessment here.
On the same token, not all Asian students excel in school. I barely graduated from high school unlike my siblings. They were over-achievers, and I was always the "black sheep" of our family.
You did your job breaking stereotypes, CI!!
I was the last to earn a college degree, but the first to retire. Not bad for a "black sheep."
I'm sure your family was very proud of you.
Cyclo--
Thanks for the nice thought. Literally, I don't think you
can pay a sincere, devoted teacher what they are worth. A teacher has got to place a great deal of value of intrinsic rewards, I'm guessing. Sort of like other public servants, who take risks like cops and firefighters. Their check never comes close to what they deserve, imo. I sort of feel like I'm signing on for something quite different than a job.
There are programs for people with Bachelor's degrees to become teachers pretty easily because of the need.
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:wink:
Lash, Teachers are definitely underpaid. Here in Silicon Valley, local communities are building apartments to be sold to teachers to attract them in our high cost of living area. This area is attractive to live in, because San Francisco is only 40 miles away, we're close to the ocean and the mountains, and we have wine country, Disneyland, and many other attractions in our state. The starting pay for teachers are abysmal. It takes dedication to become a teacher in our country.
BTW, when our valley suffered the tech bust in 2000, many engineers went into teaching math and computers after they lost their jobs. The tech industry is beginning to pick up again, but I'm not sure how many have returned to high tech. The current unemployment rate in our area is supposed to be about 4.4 percent.
cicerone imposter wrote:Lash, Teachers are definitely underpaid. Here in Silicon Valley, local communities are building apartments to be sold to teachers to attract them in our high cost of living area. This area is attractive to live in, because San Francisco is only 40 miles away, we're close to the ocean and the mountains, and we have wine country, Disneyland, and many other attractions in our state. The starting pay for teachers are abysmal. It takes dedication to become a teacher in our country.
The apartment idea is really great! I hope it helps. Here, if you teach in a "needy" area, your student loans are forgiven. There are appealing incentives. They just need more--because you're correct, I think. A determined, devoted teacher is worth a decent salary.
Osso, as I recall the principal critic of Oscar Lewis' notion of the Culture of Poverty was Charles Valentine. He argued that Lewis was "blaming the victim" by asserting that their "decadent" way of life (i.e., culture of poverty) was the cause of their poverty. This was, I think, a gross misunderstanding of Lewis' intention: he was trying to show how people adapted to chronic poverty both in Mexico, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Actually, he was showing the cleverness with which they dealt with extremely oppressive conditions. Some argued that Lewis' "culture" of poverty indicated that economic assistance was money wasted since the poor's persistant culture or way of adaptation to poverty had to be overcome first.
But that's another subject.
Yes, JL. While it's been a long long time since I read Culture of Poverty, I also didn't take it the way you describe Charles Valentine as seeing it.
I just remembered: the Oscar Lewis book I didn't get around to reading was La Vida, and I'm not sure I knew about one set in the US.
As to financial help, the apparent success of the small business loans mechanism started by the fellow who recently won the Nobel Prize is a testimony that behavior isn't set in concrete - though I might see that some cultural groups might be less able to bounce from being mired down.
A tangent from a tangent - I just finished George Packer's article about Lagos in the New Yorker. Speaking of poverty and energy..
Haven't seen anything from Dys lately and the subject seems to have expanded beyond education to the plight of the relatively poor.
A couple of observations.
Human beings, even uneducated ones and those who don't write books on sociology, are generally very adept at figuring out how to efficiently meet their needs - particularly in the short term. Thus well-intended government benefits designed to meet temporary and urgent needs, and put the recipients on the "right path" to social & economic improvement usually fail. These programs are necessarily administered by a bureaucracy in accordance with a set of fairly rigid rules, and as a result quickly become co-opted by the needy recipients, morphing into a fairly steady source of income, and finally a positive disincentive to employment and the behaviors required to lift the recipients out of chronic poverty.
There are many factors that contribute to poverty, ranging from general economic conditions to education, some cultural influences, elements of injustice and - it must be acknowledged - some elements of individual choice (directly or otherwise). Some people overcome great obstacles to escape poverty - immigrants in the U.S, often provide great examples of this. Others respond positively to improved external conditions and government programs. Many others, sadly, do neither.
One can argue about the degree to which a government should, or can long sustain, income redistribution programs to help the poor. Western European governments provide a good deal more of this than does the United States. In many (not all) respects they appear to suffer less of the ill effects of poverty than do we. However, a consequence of the associated labor market regulation is that they are less successful in assimilating immigrants and enabling them to find productive economic roles in the society. Moreover their ability to sustain adverse economic effects of these levels of income redistribution is problematic -- most are having to face these unpleasant tradeoffs right now.
It is very hard to argue with certainty just what is the best course of action in a situation so dominated with the side effects of human behavior.
here's dys recently; back in the '80s the republicans in my state decided that the cost for foster care was getting out of control so they created a new program diverting $ from foster care budgets to "foster care alternatives" which they defined as means to prevent foster care in situations involving child abuse/neglect. The de facto result of their legislation was the creation of a new industry of "foster care diversion alternative family counseling"
which neither reduced the need for foster care" nor reduced the number of/ or cost of foster care for children in foster care but more imporantly improved the situation for children who where victims of abue/neglect. The end result was that the republicans actually increased the cost to the state because both the foster care cost and thier newly created foster care diversion program ened up cost 50% more than was expected. They ment to cuts costs but raised them insetead by short-term logic.
I would also like to off some simple ideas/suggestions re reworking of the education issues but only without trolls as it isn't worth my time to work around them.
Too long posts like jp's need to be broken up in order to be taken seriously.
First answer to his statement that he doesn't want to subsidize certain life styles. Neither do I. I hate Big Oil and the gas guzzling cars the marriage of Big Oil and the American automotive industry produced as well as the buses that replaced the cleaner, more efficient trolleys.
I hate it when people use fossil fuels to do work that ought to be done with muscle or wind or sunshine, like drying the laundry.
I hate all the cold sorority sisters who just must work to support their mcmansions then procede to fill them five ugly kids that they never read to and that they expect the schools to install personalities in.
I hate the scientifically ignorant and/or the militantly lazy who made certain caring about the environment is nor chic and who prevented the intelligent and the caring from making the prevention of global warming a national priority.
jpinMilwaukee wrote:So cyc,
How is mandated standards and more money spent per student than any other time in history helping our students now?
I hope you realize that some of that money -- in fact, more than goes for teachers' salaries -- is used to maintain and heat buildings.
jp also wrote about the truancy rate. That's the parents' doing . . . or rather, they're not doing.
Lash wrote:
CI. The three schools where I've spent time in the classroom observing and interviewing teachers all report significant improvement across the board with student test scores and graduation rates.
That's a bald faced lie. Try correlating those state test scores with SAT scores. You'll see that some states are making their tests sufficiently easy to be worthless.
Lash wrote: Why do you blame the NCLB? I've witnessed successful schools--bad teachers are being weeded out, salaries are attracting better teachers, students basic understanding of reading and math are improving. I'm seeing it where I am.
Maybe some of those good teachers simply sleep with their principals.
