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Reinventing the School

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Re: Reinventing the School

#31

Post by matula »

msluyter wrote: post #11

I'd love to pay teachers more -- if I were appointed Dictator of the United States, I would also (at least) double their salaries. But how would we actually go about achieving that goal in the actual world we live in? Well, we'd have to raise taxes[2], and a solid third of US citizens would veto any raise in taxes for any reason whatsoever, and another 50% or so would veto raising teacher salaries on tribal affiliati…

The problem with the AISD bonds was the school district getting cocky and assuming they could ANYTHING through. There were inconsistencies and vagueness throughout the proposals, and I think voters are finally getting tired of AISD's "just throw money at the problem" attitude, with no real plans for making low-performing schools better.

IMHO, if we want to fix our education system, we need to cut the ties between funding and property values. Also, Democrats in office should probably get over the hard-line "no vouchers" position. With vouchers, they could also increase schools' funding to give them a better chance at competing. Of course, Republicans won't allow for the increased funding or "robin hood" funding. So yeah... we're screwed.

Re: Reinventing the School

#32

Post by mathattack »

jerf wrote: post #13
thejteam wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but doubling the pay of teachers will only improve your results if you get rid of your current teachers. Which will be difficult to do. Otherwise you are just paying the same people more money and probably getting the same results.

The idea is that if you pay more, you may be able to attract more people who are skilled enough to make more than $52K in the private sector, and thereby hopefully duck around the "those who can, do, those who can't, teach", as, alas, there's more than a kernel of truth to that.

This is very true. I just don't like the idea of "Pay up because we idealists think it's urgent. It should be important like surgeons."

It's very hard to get to a social change to pay them like Singapore.

I think the means to this ends is via charter schools. Parents know who the good teachers are, and they fight to get taught by them. Charter schools have found a way in some cases to pay up. I think parental voting (with their feet) can be even better than test-based metrics, which are imperfect at best. (Everything not on the test gets neglected)

This is a very complicated problem.

Re: Reinventing the School

#34

Post by zanny »

dragonwriter wrote: post #28
SirSkidmore wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely true, if not implied. I just graduated from secondary school in the US. I want to be a programmer, but I never once took a programming class; my school didn't offer them. Most of my peers still have NO idea what they would like to study, even though some of them are paying $10,000-$20,000 to go to college. At least at my school (a small rural secondary school), there just weren't enough classes to to "spec…

> I just graduated from primary school in the US. I want to be a programmer, but I never once took a programming class. Normally I would say "that's okay, you've got plenty of time to do that in secondary school (middle/high school)". But then you go on to say this: > Most of my peers still have NO idea what they would like to study, even though some of them are paying $10,000-$20,000 to go to college. If you just gr…

US doesn't see middle / high as "secondary" school. Secondary school is college. Primary school is just the K-12 process because it is continuous with no breaks in between, besides maybe the divide between one year being led around hallways by a teacher and next going room to room on your own.

Re: Reinventing the School

#35

Post by SirSkidmore »

dragonwriter wrote: post #28
SirSkidmore wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely true, if not implied. I just graduated from secondary school in the US. I want to be a programmer, but I never once took a programming class; my school didn't offer them. Most of my peers still have NO idea what they would like to study, even though some of them are paying $10,000-$20,000 to go to college. At least at my school (a small rural secondary school), there just weren't enough classes to to "spec…

> I just graduated from primary school in the US. I want to be a programmer, but I never once took a programming class. Normally I would say "that's okay, you've got plenty of time to do that in secondary school (middle/high school)". But then you go on to say this: > Most of my peers still have NO idea what they would like to study, even though some of them are paying $10,000-$20,000 to go to college. If you just gr…

yeah, sorry, fixed. It's a Monday, can you tell?

Re: Reinventing the School

#36

Post by jbooth »

matula wrote: post #31
msluyter wrote: post #11

I'd love to pay teachers more -- if I were appointed Dictator of the United States, I would also (at least) double their salaries. But how would we actually go about achieving that goal in the actual world we live in? Well, we'd have to raise taxes[2], and a solid third of US citizens would veto any raise in taxes for any reason whatsoever, and another 50% or so would veto raising teacher salaries on tribal affiliati…

The problem with the AISD bonds was the school district getting cocky and assuming they could ANYTHING through. There were inconsistencies and vagueness throughout the proposals, and I think voters are finally getting tired of AISD's "just throw money at the problem" attitude, with no real plans for making low-performing schools better. IMHO, if we want to fix our education system, we need to cut the ties between fun…

The problem with vouchers is that they effectively de-fund public schools in the way they're implemented. Private schools will take the best students, hurting the school's funding next year and leaving them with a per-capita more expensive student base. Plus, the private schools create other burdens on the town without paying for them (parking, bussing, policing, etc).

Maybe democrats should be a little less hardline but just expanding vouchers willy-nilly won't fix anything about the opportunity gap facing kids today.

Re: Reinventing the School

#37

Post by zanny »

arethuza wrote: post #19
codva wrote: post #15

Instead of reinventing the school, I think we need to be thinking outside the school. The institution of school comes with a whole host of problems that are just systemic to the idea of everybody reporting to a central location and being primarily segregated by age. Not that you can't get a decent education in school, because many of us did. We don't need the best and brightest teachers. We need the most passionate a…

A quick question - when you say "where every kid could branch off to follow their interests" does this imply that kids in the US education system don't choose a set of subjects to focus on at about 14?

No, they don't. K-12 is strictly adherence to state standards education with very little room for "optional" coursework, and even where they is the option, the staggering monotony and disdain a student would have for the primary subjects they spend 80% of their time in they will have no energy or effort left to be truly passionate about a choice subject (usually).

IE, my 8-12th grades had strict guidelines : must finish algebra, must have a course in each of the 4 primary sciences, must have world and us history and government, must have literature classes covering 4 time blocks from early writing -> Renaissance writing -> new world writing -> modern writing.

Must have gym, must have a foreign language (after 6 years of Spanish, and 2 years out of college, I can't remember a word of it since I never used it). I think I got one class per year I could "pick", and the closest to software / IT was web design which was just how to make a wordpress site, and never touched html / css / js.

Re: Reinventing the School

#38

Post by dragonwriter »

zanny wrote: post #34
dragonwriter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just graduated from primary school in the US. I want to be a programmer, but I never once took a programming class. Normally I would say "that's okay, you've got plenty of time to do that in secondary school (middle/high school)". But then you go on to say this: > Most of my peers still have NO idea what they would like to study, even though some of them are paying $10,000-$20,000 to go to college. If you just gr…

US doesn't see middle / high as "secondary" school. Secondary school is college. Primary school is just the K-12 process because it is continuous with no breaks in between, besides maybe the divide between one year being led around hallways by a teacher and next going room to room on your own.

> US doesn't see middle / high as "secondary" school.

Yes, it does. [1]

> Secondary school is college.

No, secondary school is either equivalent to "high school" or equivalent to "middle and high school". [2] College is "post-secondary school". [3]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_school#United_States

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_school#United_States

[3] e.g., http://www.cpec.ca.gov/SecondPages/CommissionHistory.asp

Re: Reinventing the School

#39

Post by arkades »

kazagistar wrote: post #30
codva wrote: post #15

Instead of reinventing the school, I think we need to be thinking outside the school. The institution of school comes with a whole host of problems that are just systemic to the idea of everybody reporting to a central location and being primarily segregated by age. Not that you can't get a decent education in school, because many of us did. We don't need the best and brightest teachers. We need the most passionate a…

> We don't need the best and brightest teachers. We need the most passionate and dedicated teachers. Agreed. It is reasonable that people who did poorly academically will be the ones who have the best insight on how to improve academic performance, and the teachers who struggled to understand a subject area will have the best insight on how to make the subject easier to learn.

According to a study done on GPAs of SUNY graduates (State University of New York; several state-funded universities), teachers already have the lowest GPAs and SATs of all graduates.* A cynic might suggest this has less to do with offering insight into a flawed system and more to do with providing the lazy/dumb with a pathetically easy degree.

*This trend did vary by demographics. Asian teachers had lower-than-average-for-a-teacher SAT's; African Americans had higher.

Re: Reinventing the School

#40

Post by zanny »

SirSkidmore wrote: post #22
vtempest wrote: post #4

Good ideas, but lets just not have classrooms / teachers - just learn online and then come in to use teacher as consultant

Online learning can be good, but it can also be absolutely detrimental to education. I just graduated from high school in a relatively rural community where online classes were extremely popular among students. You got time in the computer lab, and had an "adviser" for each of your online classes. There were notes, assignments, tests, and quizzes. Sounds great right? Except students quickly discovered their "adviser"…

Online learning only works when you aren't coerced into having to undertake it. Your peers cheated because they had no reason to give a crap about learning the subject matter forced upon them.

> a semester course shouldn't be that easy to complete in such a short amount of time.

Sure they can. When you go to college, by the way, take an absurd amount of CLEP tests. Preferably now. You can skip upwards of a year or two of attendance and save buttloads of money. You also save a lot of time. I completely avoided a senior year of college by CLEP testing out of all my schools requirement courses and it took me around 2 weeks of study per subject (rigorous, 4 - 6 hours a day) to accure enough to pass the tests. And I passed all 6 of them.

Your problem just demonstrates the trend - there is no "do this and everyone learns wonderfully and the world is butterflies and rainbows". People are different, will interact differently, and the capacity of an education system hinges on the participation and good intentions of all parties involved. I think that requires more voluntarism and self-motivation on the parts of students, and instructors and mentors that have passion for their craft.

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