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Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

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Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#41

Post by tartuffe78 »

Ntrails wrote: post #33
Haul4ss wrote: post #23

I can't help but think there's a Submarine[1] effect going on with reporting on public schools in the U.S. The U.S. is a huge country with a heterogeneous population spanning a wide swath of the socioeconomic continuum. To say "teaching is bad" as a blanket statement is intellectually dishonest, to the point where I think some organization(s) intentionally push this meme in the media to further their own purposes. I…

As with many things I'm reminded of the west wing: "Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just li…

"... free of charge to its citizens...", except for taxes of course

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#42

Post by lbotos »

ddebernardy wrote: post #37
jimktrains2 wrote: post #31

Teaching isn't bad, society is. I have a friend who teaches in an intercity school: * One or more of her students will be shot to death each year * Many of her kids get pulled out of class and beaten by rival gangs each year * Many of her kids will go to jail for a portion of the school year for drug charges each year * Many of her girls will be out due to pregnancy each year How is any of that the fault of the teach…

Wouldn't you agree that, in a society where kids are primarily parented by third parties in practice, teachers and educators ought to get their fair share of the blame for not being good role models and keeping kids protected from that mess?

How do you propose a teacher protect a student who they just met Day 1 of the school year who is heavily indoctrinated in gang culture? You can blame the teacher the year before but that teacher never saw the student much because he wasn't in class. It's not about role models it's about survival.

I grew up in a rural area. Farmland. I now live in NYC. This place breeds a hardened tougher person and in the impoverished areas education and schooling are often second fiddle to money that is here, now, that will keep food on the table.

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#43

Post by TwiztidK »

ddebernardy wrote: post #37
jimktrains2 wrote: post #31

Teaching isn't bad, society is. I have a friend who teaches in an intercity school: * One or more of her students will be shot to death each year * Many of her kids get pulled out of class and beaten by rival gangs each year * Many of her kids will go to jail for a portion of the school year for drug charges each year * Many of her girls will be out due to pregnancy each year How is any of that the fault of the teach…

Wouldn't you agree that, in a society where kids are primarily parented by third parties in practice, teachers and educators ought to get their fair share of the blame for not being good role models and keeping kids protected from that mess?

No. Not even remotely. Teachers do provide a good example for their students, but it's not their responsibility to watch children 24hrs a day to ensure good behavior, to inspect their home to make sure it's suitable, to watch their parents and ensure that they're not abusive or setting a bad example. If we give them a "fair share of the blame," then their share would be exactly 0%, because they are not responsible for the problems they and their students have to deal with.

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#44

Post by ddebernardy »

jeremysmyth wrote: post #4
cies wrote: post #2

i did not read the article, just quickly scanned through. but the answer to my best knowledge is: 1) it isn't always that bad, if you pay the premium for private education you can get some of the best education available in the world 2) the people who pay for private schools also pay a significantly larger share of the taxes 3) those taxes pay for the public schools thus: public teaching is bad because the ones that…

I'm not following the cause and effect of your logic. Are you missing a point or two? Perhaps "The ones who are paying for it are paying less than they need to"? or maybe "The ones who apportion those taxes have no financial incentive to apportion them wisely"? Even in those cases, there should be enough distance between those paying the tax (in whatever portions) and those spending the tax to ensure that the governm…

As I understand what the parent post's author wrote, the ones who pay for the US school system aren't the ones who use it: their kids go to private schools.

Perhaps this point was missing or too implicit: contrary to what occurs in Europe, there is no "How is my money being spent?" effect as a result of this.

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#45

Post by acdha »

Haul4ss wrote: post #23

I can't help but think there's a Submarine[1] effect going on with reporting on public schools in the U.S. The U.S. is a huge country with a heterogeneous population spanning a wide swath of the socioeconomic continuum. To say "teaching is bad" as a blanket statement is intellectually dishonest, to the point where I think some organization(s) intentionally push this meme in the media to further their own purposes. I…

Agreed. I'm married to a teacher and wince almost every time I read something about what's wrong with education because most of the problems I hear about are caused by social problems (usually symptoms of poverty). The public education system gets blamed for the effects but has very little funding or ability to fix the causes.

There are two main drivers: the most obvious one is that teachers are one of the largest unionized groups so there's going to be a certain level of attack just from that particular culture war.

The less appreciated one, however, is the number of companies and investors who benefit from changes. A major policy change means billions of dollars in new textbooks, curriculum materials, etc. — and almost inevitably follows this cycle where test scores drop (boosters: "see how bad it was"; teachers: "these kids have had the new approach for one year"), improve as everyone has time to get used to the new system and then plateau at roughly where they'd been under the previous system. Each time you repeat, textbooks companies make billions.

The rise of charter schools gives an even greater benefit to attacks. Each student who switches is $10+K/year and there's a lot less oversight on where that money is spent so you have room for modern CEO salaries, dividends to investors, etc. so there are plenty of people trying to jump in.

Attacking public schools also turns out to be a good strategy for a charter school to show results: the marketing appeals to the more motivated, generally higher-income parents, whose children were already likely to perform above average anyway. That helps the charter school and, if this happens enough like it does here in DC where this is about 40% of the students, lowers the public school ratings at the same time.

This isn't to say that there aren't real problems in public education but rather that there are both no simple fixes and many people who stand to profit from ignoring the root causes.

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#46

Post by pastProlog »

A recurring theme here seems to be the bottom 10%, or bottom 20%, or what have you, scores in the US are dragging down the other scores. If those were ignored, the US would presumably be way up top.

But that is not the case. If you compare the top 10% of PISA scores in Japan, Singapore, South Korea etc. - or Finland, Switzerland, Holland - to the top 10% in the US, the US top 10% is below their top 10% as well.

http://educationbythenumbers.org/content/top-us-students-far...

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#47

Post by acdha »

tartuffe78 wrote: post #41
Ntrails wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with many things I'm reminded of the west wing: "Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just li…

"... free of charge to its citizens...", except for taxes of course

… which will be paid at a much higher level for decades by the adults who received a solid education even if their parents couldn't have afforded it. This is hardly a zero-sum game.

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#48

Post by Mimu »

TheBeardKing wrote: post #34
jostylr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been given the task of controlling lots of kids, squishing their natural learning desires and ways. This should be draining as it is against the ways of how we evolved. See for example http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damag... Despite your best intentions, coercive schooling is not a good thing. There are better ways, such as Sudbury schooling, that are both respectful of children and act…

Arguments like this make me wonder whether we should pursue homeschooling. My kids are 2 and 4, and we've been going back and forth on the decision. We couldn't afford private school, and my wife is already staying home. Our county's educational system is one of the best in the state, but it still suffers from the bad practices that plague our national education system.

I live in France but I always wonder how homeschool could work. How can one parent (or even both) be as efficient than a whole school?

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#49

Post by Haul4ss »

Ntrails wrote: post #33
Haul4ss wrote: post #23

I can't help but think there's a Submarine[1] effect going on with reporting on public schools in the U.S. The U.S. is a huge country with a heterogeneous population spanning a wide swath of the socioeconomic continuum. To say "teaching is bad" as a blanket statement is intellectually dishonest, to the point where I think some organization(s) intentionally push this meme in the media to further their own purposes. I…

As with many things I'm reminded of the west wing: "Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just li…

As with many things, it sounds flowery and perfect but the implementation would be a disaster.

- You have to build/renovate schools. That alone on a national scale is almost unworkable. In more densely populated areas there simply might not be room to expand.

- You have to agree on the "right" way to teach, as if there is such a thing. Pedagogy is constantly evolving, and frankly you don't want the One True Way to teach any more than you want the One True Way to write computer programs.

- You have to accept that children are coming into school from wildly different starting points. I'm not just talking about poverty; the U.S. has huge influxes every year of people speaking languages other than English.

- In areas of concentrated poverty you need to keep the schools safe and the children engaged when every other aspect of their life could be immensely more stressful than yours and mine.

- You have to completely overhaul how we find, recruit, and retain teachers, accepting that many mistakes will be made along the way.

And you're somehow going to do all of this from a centrally managed federal department run not by the intelligentsia but from rank-and-file bureaucrats.

I support strong public education, I really do. But I think we lose track of how intractable of a problem that is on the national level. People hold up Finland (population 5.4 mil., 93% ethnic Finn) as an education utopia, but no one likes to talk about how different they are from the U.S. (population 318 mil., much greater ethnic diversity and 12% foreign born).

Re: Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

#50

Post by jimktrains2 »

ddebernardy wrote: post #37
jimktrains2 wrote: post #31

Teaching isn't bad, society is. I have a friend who teaches in an intercity school: * One or more of her students will be shot to death each year * Many of her kids get pulled out of class and beaten by rival gangs each year * Many of her kids will go to jail for a portion of the school year for drug charges each year * Many of her girls will be out due to pregnancy each year How is any of that the fault of the teach…

Wouldn't you agree that, in a society where kids are primarily parented by third parties in practice, teachers and educators ought to get their fair share of the blame for not being good role models and keeping kids protected from that mess?

> Wouldn't you agree that, in a society where kids are primarily parented by third parties in practice,

No, I would not agree that children are parented by teachers. A child has multiple teachers each year and many, if not all of them, change year-to-year. What more could we ask for such a transient figure to do beyond being a good role model?

> not being good role models

Where has anyone every said educators shouldn't (or aren't) be role models?

> keeping kids protected from that mess?

Yes, my petite, 110# dripping wet friend will protect her kids from gang violence. By the time school security responds, the damage is done.

Additionally, how does a teach protect their kids when they're not in school? How do they protect them from gang violence in their neighborhoods?

These are big issues. Seriously, huge issues that cities and our society face. Expecting teachers to be able to build a bubble is ludicrous when children are selling drugs or worse on the streets to stay fed, when they're being shot and beat in and out of school over gang affiliations.

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