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Our educational system isn't failing. It does many people a lot of good (my brother and I and most of our friends went to public schools and we're now amongst the top 2% of earners in the country).
The average kid doesn't 'do well' in this country because it's not this society's culture to revere education, respect the educated and the teachers, and prioritize academic accomplishment. No amount of money tossed into the school system is going to fix that. I wish people would realize this basic fact and stop wasting our tax dollars by acting like throwing money at the problem is the only way to fix it.
Reality tends to put a damper on many ideas about how education should be handled. We don't have unlimited funds or resources. There is only so much teachers can handle. How much individualization can you achieve with 170+ students? Without tracking?
At the end of the day, we have to deal with reality.
At the end of the day, the student:teacher ratio doesn't matter one whit, as my parents and relatives in India had HUGE classrooms, no climate control, no desks, bought their own books, etc, but because education was so important (school 6 days a week, grades printed in the newspapers, parents pushing them to excel), those kids did well in school. That's still how it is, and my cousins are doing organic chemistry in high school as part of the REGULAR curriculum.
You can fancy it up all you want and drag the horses to water, but until they want to drink, it's all for show.
Here in Los Angeles, education is the biggest joke in the world. The dropout rate is something like 35%. 25% statewide depending on how you count it.
The fact that they even have a hard time telling you what the "official" dropout rate is should tell you something. It'd be like 250 people boarding an airplane for depature, but then you don't know how many left by arrival. That's crazy.
The problem is there's nothing to revere in the current cirriculum. You shouldn't have to wait until a youtube video to find out about this.
"Why is there this assumption, that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are?" Funny how these kinds of questions are never broached upon in school. Is it going to take 12 layers of bureaucracy to allow Ken Robinson in the classroom?
It's funny how quick schools are to show boring videos in class, movies, etc...I guess to "pacify" the populace. But they don't show videos like this that can engage you, or make you question or think.
Here in Los Angeles, education is the biggest joke in the world. The dropout rate is something like 35%. 25% statewide depending on how you count it.
The fact that they even have a hard time telling you what the "official" dropout rate is should tell you something. It'd be like 250 people boarding an airplane for depature, but then you don't know how many left by arrival. That's crazy.
The problem is there's nothing to revere in the current cirriculum. You shouldn't have to wait until a youtube video to find out about this.
"Why is there this assumption, that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are?" Funny how these kinds of questions are never broached upon in school. Is it going to take 12 layers of bureaucracy to allow Ken Robinson in the classroom?
It's funny how quick schools are to show boring videos in class, movies, etc...I guess to "pacify" the populace. But they don't show videos like this that can engage you, or make you question or think.
Drop out rates can be hard to calculate. People move. If someone moves from your district and you don't know where they went, they count as a drop out against your district even if they went somewhere else and graduated.
And schools show the videos they can afford to show....those are usually the free ones we can find on line.
At the end of the day, the student:teacher ratio doesn't matter one whit, as my parents and relatives in India had HUGE classrooms, no climate control, no desks, bought their own books, etc, but because education was so important (school 6 days a week, grades printed in the newspapers, parents pushing them to excel), those kids did well in school. That's still how it is, and my cousins are doing organic chemistry in high school as part of the REGULAR curriculum.
You can fancy it up all you want and drag the horses to water, but until they want to drink, it's all for show.
You hit the nail on the head. I'd take 50 students in my classes who want to learn in my class over classes of 25 who don't want to learn any day of the week. I've had classes where I had half a dozen kids who were there just to see how disruptive they could be. I spent 90% of my effort on them so the few that were there to learn ended up cheated. There is nothing more frustrating than facing a room full of kids who think you and education are a joke. Until the students take education seriously, NOTHING will change.
You can beat teachers all you want but we're pushing a rope until the kids pull. When they pull, the sky is the limit.
I like my current job. The parents push. Most of my kids care about their grades. It's funny to watch them. You can see that they really want to rebel but they just can't bring themselves to do it. They're too afraid of the consequences. The end result, as I've mentioned in other posts, is I'm struggling with too high of a grading curve. I've gone over my tests and they are not trivial but I have a lot of students who get A's and B's. I'm thinking maybe I should just leave it that way. I have a reputation for being a hard A and I've only been in the district 12 weeks.
The end result, as I've mentioned in other posts, is I'm struggling with too high of a grading curve. I've gone over my tests and they are not trivial but I have a lot of students who get A's and B's.
One wonders why you corner yourself into an arbitrary curve to begin with.
"The most destructive form of grading by far is that which is done “on a curve,†such that the number of top grades is artificially limited: no matter how well all the students do, not all of them can get an A. Apart from the intrinsic unfairness of this arrangement, its practical effect is to teach students that others are potential obstacles to their own success. The kind of collaboration that can help all students to learn more effectively doesn’t stand a chance in such an environment. "
One wonders why you corner yourself into an arbitrary curve to begin with.
"The most destructive form of grading by far is that which is done “on a curve,” such that the number of top grades is artificially limited: no matter how well all the students do, not all of them can get an A. Apart from the intrinsic unfairness of this arrangement, its practical effect is to teach students that others are potential obstacles to their own success. The kind of collaboration that can help all students to learn more effectively doesn’t stand a chance in such an environment. "
I don't grade on a curve. I just kind of expect to see something that looks remotely like one when I grade because people tend to fall into a curve. Mine's kind of top heavy. It's more of a wave crashing into the beach than a curve ...yet the students tell other teachers that I am not an easy A?? They say my class is hard. Of course the kids tell me I'm just really good at teaching chemistry
I have to admit I have a, significant, number of students who rise to any challenge I give them. I just graded the third formal lab reports they wrote and I found myself wishing I was an english teacher because some of those reports were so good they deserved something more than others but I grade chemistry content and I don't grade by comaring Johnny's report to Suzie's report.
How do other teachers incorporate quality of writing into grading? I feel like they deserve something more but I don't feel that other students deserve a lower score for merely meeting the standard instead of exceeding it.
Thanks for the link....I'm off to read the article now.
Just read the article on de-grading and, seriously, I don't see schools lowering the student-teacher ratio to allow this. Where is the money going to come from for all the extra teachers? I'm also not sure that kids would be motivated to learn if there is no difference between doing the work and not. I, also, wonder what colleges will think and what parents will think when the first tests that kids take that really matter count more than ever (MME, ACT)
In my last school, if I said I wasn't grading an assignment, they didn't do it. It was that simple. I had to grade EVERYTHING just to get them to do anything. Seriously, if I hadn't graded, they wouldn't have done anything in my class. There were times when I really just wanted them to learn and tried doing activities I wasn't going to grade. They were a nightmare. Few students participated.
Alfie Kohn's various articles and books expand on those ideas a great deal; he points to examples of high schools that have done away with high school grades without running into problems with colleges, and notes that, as far as colleges go, anyway, test scores are becoming less and less important as more and more colleges don't even require the SAT and ACT. There's still external motivation to do well because students still need recommendations to get into college, and schools without grades still have things like portfolios and other evidence of learning. Some of those things presumably take a great deal of time for the teacher, but it's possible that it's balanced out by the fact that they're not stuck dealing with maintaining and calculating grades for the little things.
I think the school community and the parents also need to be behind this; a student who has been brainwashed from childhood that the most important thing is a grade is probably less likely to thrive in an environment where grades are suddenly thrown out the window. I would guess that it's also easier to make the switch in an environment where all teachers are moving in the same direction, rather than just one going against the grain.
I think I was lucky not to have had any grades until junior high; I had feedback, and my parents did get to see a report card (but not with grades) that covered a wide variety of areas, but the grades didn't kick in until later. I was never particularly concerned about grades in high school, and with a few exceptions I did very well. In any case, receiving a good grade wasn't much of a motivating factor to me, and I think perhaps my experiences in the younger grades (as well as my parents' willingness to pretty much leave me alone and do my own thing) helped contribute to that.
Alfie Kohn's various articles and books expand on those ideas a great deal; he points to examples of high schools that have done away with high school grades without running into problems with colleges, and notes that, as far as colleges go, anyway, test scores are becoming less and less important as more and more colleges don't even require the SAT and ACT. There's still external motivation to do well because students still need recommendations to get into college, and schools without grades still have things like portfolios and other evidence of learning. Some of those things presumably take a great deal of time for the teacher, but it's possible that it's balanced out by the fact that they're not stuck dealing with maintaining and calculating grades for the little things.
I think the school community and the parents also need to be behind this; a student who has been brainwashed from childhood that the most important thing is a grade is probably less likely to thrive in an environment where grades are suddenly thrown out the window. I would guess that it's also easier to make the switch in an environment where all teachers are moving in the same direction, rather than just one going against the grain.
I think I was lucky not to have had any grades until junior high; I had feedback, and my parents did get to see a report card (but not with grades) that covered a wide variety of areas, but the grades didn't kick in until later. I was never particularly concerned about grades in high school, and with a few exceptions I did very well. In any case, receiving a good grade wasn't much of a motivating factor to me, and I think perhaps my experiences in the younger grades (as well as my parents' willingness to pretty much leave me alone and do my own thing) helped contribute to that.
And what about kids who are not headed for college? The ones who don't care about portfolios or anything else. Do you just hand them a diploma? Right now, they have to make passing grades to get credit. I can imagine what they'd do if you eliminated the threat of failure.
You aren't going to gain enough time eliminating grading small assignments to make up for the time it takes to maintain portfolios for every student. I have 146 students (and I have a light load because of lab limitations). I'm trying to imagine what quality lab report I'd get if my students knew there was no grade. I think they'd do the bare minimum to get by on most things. Seriously, you'd only need a few good things in a portfolio to make yourself look good. You could phone in the rest.
I think I favor mastery learning instead of a gradeless system. Students, simply cannot go on until they have mastered the material.
Do you have any links to papers on gradeless schools and their impact on student performance? If you took grades away at my last school, the kids would have sat and talked all day. If you took them away at my current school, the students wouldn't know what to do and I'm not sure which way it would go. And what about college? Do we do away with grades there too and go to an everyone graduates system?
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Reality tends to put a damper on many ideas about how education should be handled. We don't have unlimited funds or resources. There is only so much teachers can handle. How much individualization can you achieve with 170+ students? Without tracking? 
...yet the students tell other teachers that I am not an easy A?? They say my class is hard. 
Of course the kids tell me I'm just really good at teaching chemistry 
