Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
When did American public schools start to go downhill?
When the teachers started teaching the students not to think for themselves.
At what time did this all start? In the 60's, when JFK created the Teacher's Unions. Teacher's Union = less accountability, more money for teachers.
Because of the decreased accountability for teachers, more people came out of the woodwork to become teachers and more got selected. Because it is very easy for the teacher to instruct their students to be like robots and let someone else do their thinking for them, they do that.
What the teachers should be doing is actually leading them by example and teaching them to think for themselves. But nooooo, that requires too much effort and extra training.
So the teachers instruct the students to be like robots and medicate the ones who don't conform. That is another tragedy of today's failing school system - teachers having the ability to medicate students.
In my book, teachers who recommend medication for their students are the worst of them all; they have proven by their recommendation that they want to control the student rather than teaching him to think for himself.
If someone were to ask me what my solution to the education crisis in America would be, I would say it is twofold: abolish the Teacher's Unions, and remove the right for teachers to have anything to do with medication for students.
I think that we learned the basics better. We also were afraid to talk back to our teachers. Now, there are so many kids in the classes, and the teachers have to cover the material too quickly. I went to Catholic school too and if we did not pay attention to the teachers and nuns, or if we got into trouble, our parents would have to deal with us, and they did'nt blame the teachers!
Educators base a lot of their educational practices on "beliefs" based on ideology, theory, and conjecture. Many parents and advocacy groups have tried approaching educators with facts about the ineffectiveness of currently favored educational practices, but fact-based and actual scientific research-based information seems to be a foreign concept to educators so it is very difficult to get anywhere using actual facts and scientific research results. They don't get it.
I would like to second what Informed Consent is saying here. I speak only from my own experience, so of course it's really not proper or possible to make large, sweeping judgments about entire systems, but what IC said above was certainly true for me.
A central reason why we are homeschooling our daughter is that based on conversations with our local school, it was clear our child's needs were absolutely not going to be met. One solution would have helped, but "ideology, theory, and conjecture" among teachers stand generally opposed to the practice, despite the fact that there was a very well-researched meta-analysis of many studies of this academic accomodation which proved that this particular type of accomodation worked well not only in the long term, but in the short term also, academically and socially.
I did everything the previous poster suggested: I went to the school board meetings; I spoke passionately attempting to convince them that this solution could be implemented at almost no cost to the district and little actual trouble to the school; I presented the results of the study.
Nothing.
I spoke with the superintendent. Same thing. What I said amounted to little more than a fart in a windstorm.
I think some parents just get tired. Tired of dealing with bureaucracy, tired of low expectations, tired of entrenched interests voting for themselves and to their own advantage, tired of muleheaded teachers, tired of ignorant principals. Obviously, school boards are not all corrupt, nor are all teachers muleheaded, nor are all principals ignorant, but enough of them are so that we have had enough, or at least I have.
As a few others have said, taking God/prayer out of schools was definitely one of the steps in the downward spiral. Taking God/prayer out of American society in general is having a destructive effect on just about all the reasons given for the schools going out of control. One thing leads to another.
This gentleman has a most interesting take on public education, as well:
Book Review: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto | The Foundation for Economic Education: The Freeman, Ideas on Liberty (http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=1700 - broken link)
I believe that the degradation within the schools really started to pick up momentum when our society adopted its mastery of being blameless and unaccountable. I'm trying not to make absolute statements because I realize that everyone is different, but the underlying minority of those who easily shift blame through threat of litigation, destroying reputation and other 'bullying' tactics has set just about everyone off track. Many parents can push the responsibility of their child's development (academic, emotional, social, etc) squarely onto the shoulders of teachers and the schools. Many administrators have their hands tied in one way or another. Honestly, I'm disgusted by the complete lack of motivation and values that I see from many teenagers. Sorry this post is so short and somewhat erratic, I had limited time to make this post.
Educators base a lot of their educational practices on "beliefs" based on ideology, theory, and conjecture. Many parents and advocacy groups have tried approaching educators with facts about the ineffectiveness of currently favored educational practices, but fact-based and actual scientific research-based information seems to be a foreign concept to educators so it is very difficult to get anywhere using actual facts and scientific research results. They don't get it.
Abstract: Education school professors in general and curriculum and instruction experts in particular are major forces in dictating the "what" and "how" of U.S. education. Although they wield immense power over what is actually taught in the classroom, these professors are senior members of a field that lacks many features of a fully developed profession. The judgments of education "experts" frequently appear to be unconstrained and sometimes altogether unaffected by objective research. The first section of this essay provides examples from reading and mathematics curricula that show experts dispensing unproven methods and flitting from one fad to another. The middle section describes how experts, for ideological reasons, have shunned some solutions that do display robust evidence of efficacy. The following sections show how public impatience has forced other professions to "grow up" and accept accountability and scientific evidence. The paper concludes with a plea to develop education into a mature profession. (Contains 27 endnotes.)
http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/carnine.pdf (broken link)
Heck, educators wouldn't even listen to the 200 mathematicians, scientists, Nobel laureates, and Fields Medal winners who protested the fuzzy math curricula. An Open Letter to Richard Riley
You've just struck paydirt. Education seems to go through a "flavor of the month" approach, whereby some bureaucrat makes a decree that "Henceforth and forevermore, the classroom teachers will jump through this hoop. All previous hoops are hereby declared invalid, and woe be unto them who persist in jumping so."
Of course, this is mostly the result of silly turf wars, with no substantive research to back it up. And in far too many cases, these proclomations are coming from someone with no recent classroom experience.
I believe that the degradation within the schools really started to pick up momentum when our society adopted its mastery of being blameless and unaccountable. I'm trying not to make absolute statements because I realize that everyone is different, but the underlying minority of those who easily shift blame through threat of litigation, destroying reputation and other 'bullying' tactics has set just about everyone off track. Many parents can push the responsibility of their child's development (academic, emotional, social, etc) squarely onto the shoulders of teachers and the schools. Many administrators have their hands tied in one way or another. Honestly, I'm disgusted by the complete lack of motivation and values that I see from many teenagers.
Given the fact that there's more and more teenagers vying to get in America's Ivy League colleges and top-tier universities, I'd say that the opinion stated above just doesn't hold.
As the link I posted previously stated, even students at the Ivies are so poorly prepared academically by K-12 schools that they earn D's and F's on a quiz of basic U.S. History. Prof Singal has written about the documented massive decline in the top quartile of students in The Other Crisis In American Education, establishing that the only K-12 schools that have bucked the decline are schools that have adhered to a rigorous academic curriculum and have maintained skill/performance level grouping for class placements.
There are numerous examples of responsible, hard-working, eager to learn students who are being let down by the focus in many of our public schools on one-size-fits-all, lock-step education, thereby dumbing down the very students that some like to blame as somehow 'lacking' - and to make matters worse, pointing the finger at their parents, as well.
Given the fact that there's more and more teenagers vying to get in America's Ivy League colleges and top-tier universities, I'd say that the opinion stated above just doesn't hold.
As the link I posted previously stated, even students at the Ivies are so poorly prepared academically by K-12 schools that they earn D's and F's on a quiz of basic U.S. History. Prof Singal has written about the documented massive decline in the top quartile of students in The Other Crisis In American Education, establishing that the only K-12 schools that have bucked the decline are schools that have adhered to a rigorous academic curriculum and have maintained skill/performance level grouping for class placements.
There are numerous examples of responsible, hard-working, eager to learn students who are being let down by the focus in many of our public schools on one-size-fits-all, lock-step education, thereby dumbing down the very students that some like to blame as somehow 'lacking' - and to make matters worse, pointing the finger at their parents, as well.
But the one-size-fits-all approach is the cheapest method for processing mass quantities of students. And few school administrators have any real concern for academics aside from what NCLB requires. Of course, these administrators probably take a lot more heat from parents and taxpayers about the football team or the marching band than they do from the rare parent who expresses concern that their son/daughter isn't being challenged enough in class.
#1 Prayer being taken out of school had nothing to do with it. You're essentially setting nonbelievers up to be targeted because they don't believe. That wouldn't cause problems? For the record, some of the most nonreligious nations have the best test scores and grades. Not to mention, they've been shown to have more moral people. Just though I'd throw that in since we're on the topic of kids "misbehaving" along with doing bad in school.
#2 The Pledge of Allegiance has nothing to do with it. I don't understand how patriotism is tied to being a good student. That is ridiculous.
#3 I don't know if a lot of you have been in present day classrooms, but they are not what a lot of you grew up with. The work is way harder and more advanced. My mom said she didn't get a geometry class until college. I got one in the fourth grade. Classes get more advanced every year you're in school. Math these days isn't addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It's way more than that, and some people don't and won't do good with it. I personally think they should make advanced classes a choice, not a requirement, because some people will have careers that won't require that knowledge. You shouldn't give someone who wants to be an electrician an advanced literature course and make sure he can recite Shakespeare poems off the top of his head. You'd give him an advanced algebra course and a physics class on electricity. Honestly, people who haven't been in class at all in the 90's wouldn't understand. It's definitely not like it used to be.
They used to homogenously group kids- according to ability. Of course, that went out the window, b/c it seemed unfair to label kids low, average, advanced. When they started lumping all kids into one group, as to not affend anyone, it got dicey. When I was the only teacher of a particular grade, I had reading/math groups. The instruction met their needs. Actually, two years ago, the other two third grade teachers and I made reading/math groups- according to ability (shhhh- don't tell anyone!). We tested the kids, watched their progress, and adjusted the groups. If you were strong in math, it did not mean you were strong in reading. We were flexible. It worked beautifully. And, lo and behold, the did wonderfully on the state test- the only thing that matters anymore.
I wish we could go back to that. I believe everyone should have a basic education- basic knowledge (math, history, reading, writing, gramar, science, art, music). But, we used to "track" kids, and for the ones who were in technical/ industrial studies, this worked well for them. They were still on grade level, but, taught different things when they got to hs.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
