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My friends argument is a great teacher would be able to control the class and her public speaking ability would engage the class and the students would sit there engaged and interested in learning. As a result there would be no issues with acting out.
Your friend doesn't know her head from a hole in the ground if she really believes that.
Don't blame the teachers, even if they are horrible it's not their fault the kids fail. Ultimately it's the parents' responsibility to see their children learn how to learn, study and work at their education. I believe I could take an average intelligent kid of 12 and teach that child everything the public school would teach him or her up to grade 8 in a few months. I have a lot of friends who teach their kids at home and those kids are well educated. The parents are not professional teachers in any way either. I think the primary benefit of primary school is that the child learn how to deal in social situations. Like I said in term of actual hard learning and information the kids take many years to learn very little.
There is some really bad teaching out there. Problem is, there's really bad administration, too, and there's also a lot of bad parenting and lot of political meddling in our school systems that has absolutely nothing to do with educating, but rather, it has more to do with foisting an agenda of religious and political brainwashing on everyone else.
The United States has stubbornly held on to this idiocy of having the local PTA become a school board member. The school boards ought to be populated by people who actually have some knowledge and expertise in education theory and experience in the classroom. It should not be some reformed gang member whose qualifications for office are that she quit gangs and has worked very hard to stay off of welfare. Those are admirable qualities but that doesn't make someone an expert on how learning works, how to hire teachers, and how to run a school.
If all of our doctors were excellent everyone would live forever. True story. I hear the Gates Foundation is planning on pouring money into a data-based evaluation system to find all of the bad doctors. I hope this happens soon because although I'm no expert it seems to me that right now our hospitals are failing patients with so many of them dying.
It's so easy to simply blame the teachers. It means that no blame is on the parents. But the entire system is failing, including teachers, parents, and the overall curriculum. The expectations are high, but pay is low. There's little incentive for teacher to work as hard as they do. Teachers are expected to perform their jobs as they are originally intended, but our system expects them to teach to tests and not have time to study each individual child and help them learn using their strengths and pushing their weaknesses. Tests are part of the curriculum and they do nothing to teach kids. Parents at home are expecting teachers to do everything, but are either doing their child's homework for them, or not encouraging proper study habits. The students are losing their drive to learn because they are not taught early on good habits and a reason to learn. Tests are scary and useless to them. They want to feel motivated and valued. They want to know they have something to offer their generation, but a well-intended student coming home with another barely passing or failing grade that week is extremely discouraging especially if that student doesn't know why he or she is doing so poorly despite their efforts to learn.
The entire system is failing. The blame is not solely on one group of people. Teachers are messengers. Some are horrible at their jobs. Some are very good at their jobs. Both of them will produce great students and poorly performing students. The good teachers will find at least some way to try to work with the system they are handed in order to offer that poorly performing student some extra help. The not so good teacher may ignore the problem and assume the parents will figure it out or the student is just a problem child and will not acknowledge the attempts to be better the student may make. Some parents are not very good at helping their kids learn. Those that are good will find a way to encourage their child to do their studies without doing the work for them while remaining available for guidance when needed. Other (possibly well-meaning) parents just don't have the tools to do that and will either completely stay out of their child's study habits or do the work for them. Neither will produce a child with good study habits. A child who is valued at both home and school by teachers, friends, and parents will thrive during and after school. They will do better overall in life and will have the drive to learn.
So your friend saying it's the teachers fault is not correct. It's everyone's fault. The school system needs to study other countries that are doing better overall and try to find a way to implement some different ways of learning in to our system. More options need to be available to everyone. There needs to be more of a focus on teaching the individual child and less on the tests.
"If all or our teachers were excellent we would not be faced with failing schools!"
That was the comment from a friend of mine who was talking about the problem with schools and education today.
I tried to tell him that it was not really the teachers fault but the fault of unmotivated students, poverty, ignorance, teachers unions, a sick youth society, and government policies that says anyone who is interested in learning is a nerd, and a thousand other reasons. He would not buy it.
He went on to say: "If the teachers were any good they could get the students to listen to them and every student would excel. And if the teacher does not get results, fire them and bring in someone who can do the job."
Do you think my friend is right? Most of the fault is the teachers?
No, I think it's closer to "If all or our parents were excellent we would not be faced with failing schools!"
No, I think it's closer to "If all or our parents were excellent we would not be faced with failing schools!"
My experience teaching first in a charter school and now in an affluent district would agree with this.
Just the other day, a teacher was commenting that she didn't know how the kids in another teacher's class did so well on the common assessments. I pointed out to her that demographics alone predicts success for our kids. We see very little variation in learning between different teachers if you look at the common final exams in spite of major differences in content knowledge and classroom management. Even the kids who have first year teachers who are the most ineffective do just fine where I am. IMO, the quality of the student is a much better predictor of the success of the school and high quality students come from high quality families.
I will second your post. If all parents were excellent, we would have no failing schools...AND we'd teach more material to greater depths than we do now. People like to compare schools to factories but factories control the quality of the incoming raw stock while schools do not. Schools are forced to take everyone. Then teachers are beat over the head when everyone doesn't excel. In my school we have a large subset of kids who have very high GPA's. That is not because we are an excellent school. It's because they have parents who push them to attain high GPA's (there are some intrinsic problems to this but it does result in having a good school as the government measures good). You don't see the most common grade in your school being an A because your teachers are great. You see it because of demographics. Granted not all of those A's are earned but we do have a higher percentage of kids earning an A than the next school over. We also have a median income that is about double that of the next district over.
Demographics is the number 1 predictor of school quality. I have no idea why people don't see this. It's obvious. Some of the best teachers I've known have taught at the worst schools. They're good because they have to be to survive where they are but it only makes a real difference here and there when they can connect with a particular student and help put them on a better path, which is great but it doesn't make the school good in spite of the teacher being excellent.
I've posted before about the goth-punk girl who moved to our district a couple of years ago. Peer pressure turned her into a prep in less than one year. I am willing to bet that there is NOTHING her old school could have done to have resulted in that change. I'm also willing to bet that it's not anything that teachers did that resulted in that change. I'm convinced it was her trying to fit in to her new demographic. Goth-punk isn't acceptable where I teach. She was the only student coming to school with blue hair, black clothes and a studded collar. Now she looks like the rest of the kids and with each passing month she acts more like the kids who grew up here.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 12-14-2013 at 03:48 AM..
No, I think it's closer to "If all or our parents were excellent we would not be faced with failing schools!"
There is some truth to this, but it is not true maybe 30% of the time. Teachers tell me about kids who grew up in great families on the wealthy part of town with parents who were devoted to education. In a family with four kids 2 of the kids in the family do great, one is average and one does poorly.
It's the individual kid's genes and personalities. In some cases even the best parents and teachers just can't motivate these kids matter how hard they try and they do poorly in school.
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