Why is our public education system failing our students? Most of today's school children can barely read or write. They can't perform math problems without a calculator. It's pure and simple: today's children aren't coming out of school with an education.
Read more in Sojourner Truth paper:
We have overcome the old segregated schools of the Civil Rights Era, and yet our schools now segregate according to the students’ ability. One of the cruelest things public education has done is to implement the idea of segregating students by ability, or at least by what the school thinks are their abilities. That is a system of vicious labeling and does great psychological harm. How would you like to be labeled a “slow learner?”
In many cases we have overcome racial segregation, but segregation hasn't ended. We have severe economic inequality in the United States, and it's very evident in public school systems in Ohio. Some years ago the Ohio State Supreme Court ruled that school funding in Ohio was unconstitutional, yet the system has not changed. Legislators have had years to change it, but they are not held accountable.
Students have always been segregated by their individual ability. Placing a student into an accelerated or advanced class isn't beneficial to anyone, and it certainly doesn't benefit the student who will most certainly fail to learn. What happens is that public schools mislabel and misjudge students, then blame the student, the parents and the administration for their own mistake, which they may fail to correct. IQ tests are highly unreliable, as many (practically all) of these tests are heavily biased by culture. Various achievement tests prove little by way of academics, and in fact have more to do with funding and political agendas than student benefit.
I don't agree with your assessment of a racially based education curriculum. Any curriculum that provides basic societal skills for the vast majority of children is acceptable. I think the trouble is that the goal of education in grades 1 through 12 has changed to the extent that students successfully completing grade 12 may or may not have the skills necessary to function in the adult society.
To continue to teach in a system that has a staggering failure rate is to continue to get paid.
Allow me to finish this thought for you: ...get paid for contributing to that failure. Morally speaking, that's deplorable. Did I get it right?
I work next to a woman who has her teaching certificate, but who hasn't taught school in five years. When I asked what she was doing here instead of teaching school, she replied that when she graduated college she was idealistic, and was going to help make a better world. "You get a little older, and you learn that things are different." Her major complaints were that teachers couldn't paddle the students anymore. The teacher can set the line, and if the kids know that when they cross it they'll get a paddling, you won't have to resort to the paddle. These days they know that the teachers can't lay a hand on them, and so, being kids, they do as they please. Her other complaint was the parents who actually believed their gifted little darling could do no wrong, wasn't being recognized or was treated poorly just because the teacher didn't like her. Or him. The reality is that, often as not, the child is willful, lazy and not terribly bright. This doesn't make the child bad; it serves to illustrate that the child is a child, not an adult.
The politicians are doing what they want, when they want and how they want with no accountability to anyone, except how much money they can get in their personal pockets, at the expense of our children's education and future. The public-school industry – and that's what it has become – is too riddled with entrenched bureaucrats and too politicized.
You know, I could tolerate the former if these same politicians were producing good results, but maybe that's just me becoming desperate. I think you've struck the spike squarely on its apex. Education has become its own peculiar industry, but because no stock has been issued there will never be a hostile takeover, a bankruptcy or a leveraged buy out. Which is too bad.
I'm waiting for school vouchers to become the rule rather than the exception in the State of Ohio, and when that happens I think I'll open a school or two, kind of see how it goes. Toledo spends about $11,000 per student and has a high failure rate. I could do better, I'll bet.
madjack - why do you think that placing a child into an accelerated class isn't beneficial to anyone?
I think accelerated classes can be very helpful for students who are truly performing well above their grade level. (Though I'd agree that there should be some discretion used in making sure that the "gifted" child truly is gifted beyond his/her years, rather than taking every above average child and putting a "gifted" label on them.)
I could have sworn that we paid administrators and teachers to arrange how education is performed. If they want to try "ability segregation", then that's fine by me.
BUT! But they have to also try other things, if that one method is either not productive or can't be measured.
An advanced student has other options even when placed into a "commons" classroom. They can be issued different or more books. Different tests. There may even be segregated lectures in the same classroom.
And as always, advanced students have plenty of time in their daily lives for ability segregation that doesn't affect other students. Advanced students can be assigned a longer school day, and while going along in the "commons" classes, they can then go on to an advanced course (perhaps sponsored by our many colleges in town) where they can be with peers.
Let's have lots of educational options and let the administrators and teachers prove their mettle by organizing them. We have a literal ARMY of administrators in the TPS ... what else are they doing?
Mad Jack, we agree on somethings and we disagree on other things and that is perfectly fine. It would be a boring world if everyone agreed on everything.
Mad Jack, I believe that racially based education does exist in America! This is the very reason why in history class, we grow up hearing about Christopher Columbus and so many others, but yet we never hear much about our history. When I say "our history" I am referring to African history. The history of our ancestors. I say our, because after my extensive studies...I am convinced that we cannot seperate American History from African-American History. In fact, African History is American History! In the words of Malcolm X, "We didn't land on plymouth rock, plymouth rock landed on us!" I know....it's tight, but it's right!
I'm convinced that this country is not really interested in integration. If you look at our history, for well over 335 years, if we were to start, say, at 1619, we practiced discrimination, separation of races. And then it wasn't until 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown case, that discrimination virtually was declared to be unconstitutional. But if you do something for 335 years, no matter what it is, you don't come to a screeching halt in 1954, whether it's the Supreme Court or any other court.
I think what our country is engaged in principally is making sure that we'll always have a segment of the population that's operating as second-class citizens. Because any time you have schools that are failing and underfunded, any time those schools are populated by students of color, whether they're Hispanic or African American, you know good and well that ensures that as adults, they're not going to be able to be equipped to accomplish and achieve the way others are, and they will remain in that second-class loop. It's been a continuum. And you have to wonder sometimes if it's not somewhat purposeful. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but you do have to wonder, because we know how to make the system work. We haven't had the will to do it.
Race and class remain the great barriers in American life. I mean, 80% of all the white children in America go to schools that are all white. Even middle-class blacks often have to send their children to segregated schools because of where they live. We have made--the country made a great decision with Brown vs. Board of Education, but we've retreated so much. We ended legal discrimination. We ended legal segregation. We have now segregation, in effect, that remains the great barrier in our society. We still have to fight to fulfill the American promise."
Today the right to an education is not in the Constitution, so we end up with 50 different state systems, 3,067 different county systems, and 20,000 different municipal systems, all separate, all unequal. Our children find themselves in the barrio schools, the ghetto schools, the trailer park schools without high-quality education. In some Los Angeles, some Compton, there are some school districts that ought to be like a Bel Air. In some Chicago--there's some Southside that ought to be like the North Side. In some New York, some Harlem, there ought to be a school like upstate New York. And so we have a separate and unequal system that can only be overcome by seeing education as a human right and only the Constitution of the United States can guarantee that.
First class > second class
White > Black
Man > woman
Native > immigrant
Married > single
College degreed > lesser educational certifications
Homeowner > renter
Money > no money
Employed > unemployed
Corporation > individual
No criminal record > felon
Drug avoider > drug user
Insured > not insured
Bish, I'm one of those second class citizens for half of these categories.
As for purpose ... of course these are largely purposeful exercises. Those in the first class largely seek to demonize and exploit those in the second class. The very least that happens is that the existence of the "other" class from the "acting" class creates a social dynamic whereby the actors redefine themselves as the first class, and then it only logically follows that the other class is assigned the second slot.
Not everyone plays this sort of game, true. It's not like all Whites consider Blacks as second class and hold them in such categorical contempt. But enough do, that forms the class system itself.
Thank you for sharing your ideas with us. I appreciate how much passion you show for bettering education for all. Some thoughts or points of disagreement:
First of all, if you define it narrowly, schools have always been failing students. That most kids graduating can't read or do math without a calculator is an exaggeration for effect, I'd say. There have always been large numbers of students leaving schools without the ability to read or do math ~ or not finishing school at all. (and the calculator thing - sit a number of adults down and ask them to do math without it, and I bet they'd struggle mightily) When looking at the performance of students on a national level assessment test, such as the NAEP or nation's scorecard, you find that students today perform equally well if not better than their counterparts 30 years ago. The scary thing is that what is required of students today is so much greater than ever before. Schools are probably the most unchanged aspect of American society of the past 100 years, and I'd say that we don't know how to fix that at all, so we focus on things that are easy to point fingers at and try to fix them.
I would also put forth that the poorest regions with the least amount of access to educational resources are in extreme rural America and areas such as Appalachia, with large white populations. Poor access to high-level education is by no means a racial issue alone. SES is probably the number one determining factor to access to quality education (outliers aside), which makes sense (and is tragically so sad).
I think one of the roots of problems with schooling is the very idea of what we consider "equal" education. When we call something standardized education, what we mean is McEducation. That a low quality product that fits the masses is what's best for preparing students for their future. The assembly line model for education (which is what todays schools were based upon) doesn't work in todays world. There should be strong diversity in educational opportunities. I don't think that the problem is differentiating based on abilities, it's that this differentiation is done poorly and frequently damns students to a track that marks them for their entire educational career. There should be wealth of educational opportunities for students to choose their paths, to follow their interests, to not be herded by virtue of their year of birth, to demand that students take more responsibility for their own education by helping to shape it, not just be responsible for doing stuff other "smarter" people say you should be doing.
As an aside, there have been many posting that not being able to physically punish students has led to a degradation of discipline. I have known many, many teachers that have existed in rough and tumble schools in Toledo, New York, and Michigan who have never for one second worried about not being able to subject a student to corporal punishment. They have had serious discipline issues, but there are a variety of methods of dealing with it that don't revolve around striking a student.
Again, thanks for a great post, and I look forward to more ideas to come!