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The one that got all the education and job training they needed at the best relative price.
The problem is that we don't have a good intermediate tier of job-skill-oriented education in this country. There used to be, and are, trade schools for specific fields... but by and large they are looked down on except in narrow, largely mechanical-service industries. So to get a "good job" in any skilled trade, the only route is to get a godz-honest degree from an admired college... even if the curriculum outside of liberal arts requirements is nothing more than trade-school training. At many times the cost, not only to the student but to... all of us, who have allowed, even cheered this cycle's expansion.
My daughter the one that did
2 years of community college and has a 60k a year job waiting for her as soon as she gets that piece of paper.
My son went the 4 year route and is still bouncing around from job trying to find his way.
My daughter the one that did
2 years of community college and has a 60k a year job waiting for her as soon as she gets that piece of paper.
My son went the 4 year route and is still bouncing around from job trying to find his way.
Heh. My #4 daughter has dabbled in college and never found an interesting direction... so she is now in a trade school, learning a fairly heavy mechanical trade she loves, and already employed the rest of the time at an adequate rate. She will probably be hired at a better-than-living wage when she completes school, and is taking an additional management track with an eye to opening her own shop within a few years. She could well end up out-earning the Cal Poly and Cal grads among her siblings.
Maybe, if we narrow the discussion to the bare bones of affordability and access to college.
But the overall problem and its ramifications are... yeah, I'd say dire is a pretty good adjective.
The fundamental place and purpose of secondary education is broken, and we are in an increasing spiral of misdirected use of this resource to ends that have only qualified benefit to the population while encouraging (even enforcing) a life path that is onerous on individuals economically and probably subverting real fulfillment for many of them.
But hey, if we're all getting rich from loan costs and shadow tax revenues, it must be okay!
Again, only from that caught-between-forces notion of affordability and outcome.
The problem is a glut of mediocre students chasing job tickets and clogging up an education system for everyone else. You shouldn't have to go to a four-year institution for technical training - but that's how the system is structured. Faultily.
I see. You're talking about much more expansive reform. I was trying to think in terms of what's politically possible in the short term. Tuition-free community college is feasible now. A tuition waiver or reimbursement program structured like the GI Bill that starts at the community colleges and ends with a bachelor's degree from a state branch university is politically feasible now. The immediate problem I'm looking at are people taking out too many loans for typical degrees.
That said, I agree that we need to reconceptualize education from the ground up. They (college presidents, education experts and political leaders) did this in the 1890s in response to industrialization for which the one-room schoolhouse was no longer working. That is how we got 13 grades from K-12 and got high school to be universal by the 1940s.
Today, we probably need education to start earlier and end later. We need more advanced pre-school. We probably need to get kids reading and doing basic arithmetic by their 4th birthday, not age 6 (grade 1) as currently constituted. Then we need to have some tracking gateways somewhere around age 11-12, and again around age 15. We need to rethink the middle school-to-high school-to-college progression. More and more research is showing that college success can be predicted by students' performance in 8th grade. If that is true, then why do they waste 4 years in high school?
This should have started as soon as K-12 began to look inadequate, which was around the time of the personal computer revolution - late 1970s, early 1980s. It would have been hard then. It will be EXTREMELY difficult now.
Here's the crazy thing - Common Core was meant to get us at least some of the way. Phonetically reading words and doing some basic math by the end of kinder so that they can get the ball rolling on reading, writing, & math in grade 1 are Common Core goals. Common Core in general front-loads everything to lower grades so that what we typically think of as your first two years of "gen ed" in college would be done in 11th & 12th grades.
It also introduces a more intuitive style of mathematical reasoning, not so dependent on rote memorization and work-drills, that will alleviate the problems we have with math by the middle & high school level. Our students are so bad at math because we have to radically re-teach them numeracy between 7th and 9th grades. I still remember the trauma of when numbers changed to letters; it happened in 7th grade and at least half the class cried because we had to re-learn math. We had been taught to compartmentalize various math skills and certainly separate it from non-math.
Under common core, they're supposed to learn ARITHMETIC as a type of EQUATION starting literally in grade 1, smoothing out that transition.
But the public lost its freaking mind about Common Core when their kids starting bringing home "algebra" questions in 3rd grade rather than multiplication tables to memorize. It was also a challenge of raising the bar very quickly. When student test scores dropped like a rock, parents again lost their minds. So schools stopped trying so hard to meet the standards & benchmarks so that the outcomes of common core are kind of vague goals. It's okay if you don't quite meet them or even try to meet them if you at least give them lip-service at some point. Now we have an education secretary who says "Common Core is dead" because it lowered test scores and wants to encourage "parental empowerment," whatever the heck that means. Thus we're still sending kids to college with about the same skills they had before.
If there was ONE thing that would go a LONG way toward improving education, it would be for Americans to care less about scores on damned standardized tests & care less about high stakes testing in general.
Last edited by redguard57; 01-18-2018 at 06:00 PM..
I see. You're talking about much more expansive reform. I was trying to think in terms of what's politically possible in the short term.
Everyone seems to think of these major socioeconomic problems in terms of solutions that can be implemented next year with available resources, none but trivial changes allowed. Ain't not no-way gonna happen, and the changes we can make within that rigid framework won't have any real lasting effect.
So yes, I look at big-picture fixes. Yes, they do look like windmills. But I'd rather tilt than rearrange those deck chairs.
Everyone seems to think of these major socioeconomic problems in terms of solutions that can be implemented next year with available resources, none but trivial changes allowed. Ain't not no-way gonna happen, and the changes we can make within that rigid framework won't have any real lasting effect.
So yes, I look at big-picture fixes. Yes, they do look like windmills. But I'd rather tilt than rearrange those deck chairs.
As I said above though, Common Core was an effort at that. A collaborative one among a consortium of states. People lost their freaking minds so much that the Common Core approach - setting ambitious benchmarks based on concept skills rather than "answers" - is probably "dead" as our education secretary put it.
How we'd accomplish it in current political context is beyond me.
Last edited by redguard57; 01-18-2018 at 07:05 PM..
As I said above though, Common Core was an effort at that. A collaborative one among a consortium of states. People lost their freaking minds so much that the Common Core approach - setting ambitious benchmarks based on concept skills rather than "answers" - is probably "dead" as our education secretary put it.
How we'd accomplish it in current political context is beyond me.
Common Core was a good concept executed about as poorly as it's possible to do. That is, unfortunately, a thumbnail description of most attempts at education reform. Either so timid as to be inconsequential, or so - let's call it ambitious instead of disconnected ivory-tower theorizing - ambitious as to grind itself to a halt on all the friction. There simply isn't any single point of fix for education at any level; just one problem with Common Core was that a good percentage of teachers weren't up to teaching it. (But, of course, cannot be fired, reassigned, effectively reeducated or much of anything else.) (And there are no replacements available; we have to limp along with worn, broken parts.)
I don't like to find myself in a place where the only real solutions approach impossibility, but I can't stomach any more efforts along the line of rewriting school mission statements or micro-repartitioning funding. Been watching that flea circus too long.
Common Core was a good concept executed about as poorly as it's possible to do. That is, unfortunately, a thumbnail description of most attempts at education reform. Either so timid as to be inconsequential, or so - let's call it ambitious instead of disconnected ivory-tower theorizing - ambitious as to grind itself to a halt on all the friction. There simply isn't any single point of fix for education at any level; just one problem with Common Core was that a good percentage of teachers weren't up to teaching it. (But, of course, cannot be fired, reassigned, effectively reeducated or much of anything else.) (And there are no replacements available; we have to limp along with worn, broken parts.)
Indeed. Although in my experience, 80-85%+ of teachers really try hard. But some of them literally need a couple years in college again, or some other significant training, to get it right. There is neither time nor money for that.
~15% of them don't try. In aggregate that's a damn lot of students losing out.
Quote:
I don't like to find myself in a place where the only real solutions approach impossibility, but I can't stomach any more efforts along the line of rewriting school mission statements or micro-repartitioning funding. Been watching that flea circus too long.
God yes. Very frustrating, that. I just rewrote some b.s. "assessment outcomes" a couple months ago. They were simply statements of what we already do, but translated into some kind of Dark Tongue of Mordor that only administrators seem to appreciate. Or at least they say they do because that is "proof" that we're doing what they tell people we do.
The one that got all the education and job training they needed at the best relative price.
The problem is that we don't have a good intermediate tier of job-skill-oriented education in this country. There used to be, and are, trade schools for specific fields... but by and large they are looked down on except in narrow, largely mechanical-service industries. So to get a "good job" in any skilled trade, the only route is to get a godz-honest degree from an admired college... even if the curriculum outside of liberal arts requirements is nothing more than trade-school training. At many times the cost, not only to the student but to... all of us, who have allowed, even cheered this cycle's expansion.
Registered Nurses do well here... fresh grads are quickly at 100k per year and those really driven pick up extra work at competing hospitals...
One of the young couples I know are both the first in their families to graduate... she is a RN and he is a police officer... first full year working after graduation 230k... not bad for 24 year old High School Sweethearts.
Both can be done at a Community College level... plus the benefits are amazing.
God yes. Very frustrating, that. I just rewrote some b.s. "assessment outcomes" a couple months ago. They were simply statements of what we already do, but translated into some kind of Dark Tongue of Mordor that only administrators seem to appreciate. Or at least they say they do because that is "proof" that we're doing what they tell people we do.
My recent ex of 20 is in a collateral field and was driven crazy by having to write up her assessments, programs and reports in Upper Slobovian Bee-Esky for schools and state agencies. One sentence in her own files had to become four pages of fluffering baloney in theirs... reports which were set aside unread while the school head of Special Ed lectured on how she did it 25 years ago. (My ex is a Ph.D. candidate with almost 30 years of very specific, hands-on, field experience in her area. And with an international reputation.)
As for Common Core, she was a supporter and argued my point that it was a curriculum with no complete or workable implementation ("exercise left to the reader") - so she brought home worksheets and such proving there was implementation. I traced them back to an absolutely cynical, predatory, kitchen-table publisher of "education materials"... who had literally just stamped "Common Core" on their books and sold them at yet higher prices. No one on the company tree had any ed credentials at all.
But tha's the past and I think we agree on the inevitable failure of the notions behind CC.
Quote:
Please elaborate?
I am trying to in the course of discussion here, across several threads. As disconnected as some of my comments might be, they all stem from a common, coherent set of ideas and developed theories. (ETA: No, not a "common core," all you smartasses.) But when it comes to "fixing education"... I confess to have few good answers short of the secondary education changes I've discussed. Rebuild and strengthen community colleges as an accessible, affordable education and training resource for pretty much anyone capable of learning. Restore universities to centers of education... education-education, not job training. And build a solid middle tier of respected skills/career training schools, better than the patchwork of for-profit schools and faux "colleges" and as well regarded for career training as any four-year degree is now.
But K-12? Ya pretty much got me. Even coming from family of educators and raising six kids across 20+ years.
This is probably correct. Unfortunately, it will also take us back in time to when only the wealthy could afford college.
As someone has already pointed out, the running of colleges like business has resulted in bloated administrative costs and reduced investment in education, which is then funded by student loans. With the good, came the bad. There are few good options at this point.
We were by no means wealthy. Dad got paid a little more than the assembly line paid, mom never worked after the war except sporadically, for about 6 months total. Nonetheless, they sent 4 of us through college including two through professional school (my professional school was financed largely by myself and those loans that I subsequently paid off, and, btw, that I used, in part, to buy me a brand new car). We did, however have summer jobs, sometimes a year round job. Those two bit jobs more than paid our tuition. That concept is completely out of the question today. $10,000 is way more than the $400 - 700 tuitions we paid as of about 1970. In our very middle class, nothing special neighborhood, going to college was not a question of money. It was a matter of scholarship in the preceding 12 years, and the motivation which was 100% the product of that household's values. Poquito "genes," maybe. But nothing more.
Colleges have become a business, not to mention, a DC-based, politically-driven racket, and that's the problem. Furthermore, absolutely no transparency there even in the public state-supported, tax money funded universities. All anyone pays attention to are the f'ball teams - which, btw, function as a farm league for the mega-billion dollar NFL that, to my knowledge gives nothing back (but that's for another time).
Last edited by TwinbrookNine; 01-21-2018 at 01:03 PM..
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