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"It wasn't budget cuts; good grief the schools kept getting more and doing less with it". I'm sorry you never heard of inflation.
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As a matter of fact, I do understand inflation. I also understand the cost of growth. And I understand the cost bloat. I've been doing budgeting and long-range planning for decades as part of my job. Inflation is not bloat. Growth is not bloat. Adding massive nonvalue added overhead is bloat. And yes, any bureaucracy, government or corporate, experiences bloat. As a principal, surely you had to manage a large budget for your school. So you know that focusing on inflation while ignoring growth and bloat is a bit disingenuous.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phetaroi
"non-value added overhead". When I was in school as a student, they didn't really teach special ed kids to be anything but special ed adults. That's a whole new world. We no longer shuttle the sped kids off in small room at the end of a dead end hallway. We also didn't have gifted education. Or the level and types of discipline issues that you parents send schools today. We educate the kids who come to our school. The good kids. The bad kids. The lazy kids. The go-getters. And those ingredients are formulated by YOU parents.
Starting with the bottom first. Ah, yes, the standard "It's the parents' fault." That educator meme has grown old and meaningless. I'll grant that some parents don't bring their kids up well, for whatever reason. But reality is, that's a fraction of the parents out there. Most parents are trying to provide a good home and good upbringing for their kids and most are doing a pretty good job. So when are YOU educators going to take some, any, amount of responsibility for schools you manage?
Now back to the actual topic. I consider SPED growth, not bloat. And SPED was not a driver for the staff at the schools I'm speaking of. Nor was gifted education. Our oldest was in the gifted program. Sure, she had an IEP through elementary and middle school. But all it really meant was extra homework. If the other kids had to read one chapter, she had to read two. If they were assigned the odd problems, she was assigned the evens too. That's not a gifted education; that's just extra work. There were no gifted teachers. So when our youngest came along we didn't waste his time in it.
But even then, I'll grant that's not bloat. Bloat is the addition of multiple high paid administrators from assistant principals and vice principals to the assortment of very highly paid educrats in the main office, that's bloat. The schools I'm using as an example: One had one principal and one secretary for the school. The other had a principal and a couple of assistant principals and a principal's secretary and a front office secretary and a general secretary and a receptionist and an attendance secretary. And that's without getting into the extra staff running around. That's bloat. Assorted admin offices added more staff then having to add more administrators to manage more staff. That's bloat.
The interesting thing is, in a large bureaucracy, government or corporate, bloat never seems to happen in the working front -- those folks who actually deliver the product, in this case teachers. Bloat happens in the back-office support functions and head office staffs. All of whom have to justify their jobs by creating more unnecessary work for that same few workers -- teachers -- that are still actually doing the job.
They don't use it. When I was a kid, and I will be 64 in a few days, they told us that we would be switching to the metric system, and we were taught it. But all that really happened is that soda started being sold in 2-liter bottles.
Now I am in a country that uses the metric system, so in my old age, I had to figure it out. It isn't difficult, but I still have to think about it.
I actually think it's far easier to use the metric system than all those fractions.
I mostly agree with you up to a point. By "educators" I do mean those who have too much education theory and who confuse social philosophy experimentation with "education." Teachers are those who actually teach. I know, it almost seems circular but at the basic level, that's what a teacher is. I'll take it a bit further and say having an education degree by itself does not make someone a teacher, even if they are in the classroom.
Where we differ is I believe teachers, as a whole, have lost some of their standing is through two main things -- their unions. While individual teachers may not believe or support certain education philosophies or social engineering disguised as "education," their unions certainly do. Guilt by association. Those "academic theorists" and "education bureaucrats" are guided by, and work to implement those union goals. That's why, while I believe most teachers want to do a good job, until they reign in their unions back to a focus on teaching, teachers shoulder part of the blame.
The best way to differentiate educators from teachers is (those who've served in the military will understand). There are Chiefs and there are E9s. And there are some E9s bucking for E10. Good teachers are like Chiefs. Educators are like E9s.
Keep in mind that right-to-work states (28 of them) give teacher unions very little real clout beyond 'advising'. I was a union rep when I taught in Maryland, and even in that NOT-right-to-work state (at least at the time) our union had very little influence. In Virginia (a right-to-work state) I was an administrator for 20 years and our school had one complaint from a member of the 'professional organization' during that time...that was dismissed by the 'professional organization' (even though the complainant was their own building rep). Do you know what the 'professional organization' said to their own rep? "If you can't get along with Victor _____, then who can you get along with?"
There is this idea out in the public that, for example, teachers can't be fired due to tenure. If you have 'just cause' you can fire any teacher (or vice principal). And if you don't have demonstrable 'just cause', then you shouldn't be attempting to fire them to begin with.
The "unions" may support various things but the bottom line is still what's implemented is what's adopted by local School Boards upon recommendation of the Administration. No union (or association) ever mandated what I taught in class. That was the School Board (and in Maryland that included the State School Board and Maryland State Department of Education and its adopted Voluntary State Curricula (which were actually not voluntary but required) for subjects.
I remember being a union rep in PG County when I was there and I always had to laugh at the way the union operated. Each year they would make 10 proposals for the annual contract negotiations. The first 5 would be about education matters, and the second 5 would be about pay, benefits, etc. At the first meeting between the union and the school system they would always drop the 5 things about education matters and stick to the 5 things about pay, benefits.
Did you find the union very effective in your time in that same school distrcit?
"New Math" was a response to the Soviet Sputnik launch in 1957. I started 1st grade in 1961. I remember hearing about New Math through the 1960s, but I don't think it got to my school district. Teachers in those days were very independent and pretty much able to teach how they wanted.
It was a failure and ultimately abandoned, but not before it caused massive damage to our economy.
We had it. I thought it was crazy. But, if the purpose was to get students to think about how math words, beyond just rote memory (such as times tables), then it laid a foundation that was important.
As a matter of fact, I do understand inflation. I also understand the cost of growth. And I understand the cost bloat. I've been doing budgeting and long-range planning for decades as part of my job. Inflation is not bloat. Growth is not bloat. Adding massive nonvalue added overhead is bloat. And yes, any bureaucracy, government or corporate, experiences bloat. As a principal, surely you had to manage a large budget for your school. So you know that focusing on inflation while ignoring growth and bloat is a bit disingenuous.
Starting with the bottom first. Ah, yes, the standard "It's the parents' fault." That educator meme has grown old and meaningless. I'll grant that some parents don't bring their kids up well, for whatever reason. But reality is, that's a fraction of the parents out there. Most parents are trying to provide a good home and good upbringing for their kids and most are doing a pretty good job. So when are YOU educators going to take some, any, amount of responsibility for schools you manage?
Now back to the actual topic. I consider SPED growth, not bloat. And SPED was not a driver for the staff at the schools I'm speaking of. Nor was gifted education. Our oldest was in the gifted program. Sure, she had an IEP through elementary and middle school. But all it really meant was extra homework. If the other kids had to read one chapter, she had to read two. If they were assigned the odd problems, she was assigned the evens too. That's not a gifted education; that's just extra work. There were no gifted teachers. So when our youngest came along we didn't waste his time in it.
But even then, I'll grant that's not bloat. Bloat is the addition of multiple high paid administrators from assistant principals and vice principals to the assortment of very highly paid educrats in the main office, that's bloat. The schools I'm using as an example: One had one principal and one secretary for the school. The other had a principal and a couple of assistant principals and a principal's secretary and a front office secretary and a general secretary and a receptionist and an attendance secretary. And that's without getting into the extra staff running around. That's bloat. Assorted admin offices added more staff then having to add more administrators to manage more staff. That's bloat.
The interesting thing is, in a large bureaucracy, government or corporate, bloat never seems to happen in the working front -- those folks who actually deliver the product, in this case teachers. Bloat happens in the back-office support functions and head office staffs. All of whom have to justify their jobs by creating more unnecessary work for that same few workers -- teachers -- that are still actually doing the job.
The largest department in our school for most of the 20 years I was there was SPED.
I can only speak for my school and my district for the 20 years I was there. Our school had 850 to 1,300 students (the high number being after my retirement), usually averaging about 1,150 students (as I recall). In 1988 we had an administration that consisted of 1 principal, 2 vice principals, and one guidance director). In 2008 when I retired, despite having grown by about 250 students, we had 1 principal, 2 vice principals, and one guidance director. In other words, no administrative growth over 20 years, despite student enrollment growth. At the school district level, I'm sure of the numbers in central administration.
In your complaint about the school where that personnel were simply "running around"...what were those people doing? Just sitting at their desks cleaning their nails? Or were they working?
First of all, except for the profoundly retarded and other extreme conditions, very few students are "too stupid to learn".
So - you admit there exists a set of students who are too stupid to learn. You & I agree.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phetaroi
Instead, go back to the Army recruiting tune: "Be all that you can be..." SPED students will never achieve to the level of gifted students. So what? Big deal. Let them become all that they can become. For example. we used to take our mildly mentally retarded students to a store with a set amount of money to spend. They had to work through what they could buy with the money they had. They learned a valuable lesson in doing that. One of our physical education teachers had a Downs Syndrome daughter, who for over 20 years worked for the US Geological Survey; was she a geologist? No. She did go-fer tasks, Xeroxing, stuffing envelopes, etc. She became all she could become thanks to our educatinal system.
Irrelevant to the discussion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phetaroi
Second, the resources aren't scarce, just need to be better prioritized.
I see you never studied economics at the high school or university level. Please re-read your sentence above and note you disprove the first clause by stating the second clause.
Educational resources absolutely are scarce. The entire reason we set priorities is because resources are indeed scarce. If they were not scarce, there would be no reason to prioritize.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phetaroi
Third, yes, some students "have no interest in learning" or are "too lazy to learn".
Good. We agree.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phetaroi
But guess what, those students may not bloom in elementary school, or in middle school, or high school. Maybe they won't bloom until they get to some level of higher education. I know that's true. It was me. I was rescued in college by a professor who saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. Ended up with a B.S. Degree, an M.S. Degree, and a Grad degree. And I'm not the only one. Admittedly there are those who will fail and always fail, but that doesn't mean we give up on them when they are still children. Once they become an adult, that's another story.
Your anecdote is irrelevant.
Because resources are scarce, we should focus resources on those who are willing & able to learn. Those who voluntarily choose not to learn should still be given the opportunity to learn. But they should never be the priority. The priority should be to educate those who wish to learn and who have the capacity to learn.
K-12 educators should send a clear and unambiguous message to the students and their parents/guardians when the students have made a choice not to learn. It then is the job of the parents/guardians to change the attitude of the children - or not.
Last edited by moguldreamer; 07-30-2022 at 10:22 AM..
First, your post is opening with two different topics. Your friend's entrepreneurial successes are not usually something that comes from public schooling. My entrepreneurial class came from a private business college, but usually successful entrepreneurs are working with an inherent, not learned skill.
Individual grades are usually an indication of the effort a student's dedication to her coursework, not the school.
I'm not buying the video's message. The government isn't doing anything to suppress education. People are what happened. School districts started cutting education programs in the 70s, when tax payers started voting down school budgets, which more than likely came about as a result of losing the bulk of our high-wage jobs to businesses' off-shoring, than an attempt to suppress anyone.
Instead of valuing a broad education, fostering a desire to learn, we started thinking that education was just to get a job. We cut history, the arts, and then we stopped supporting things like home economics, we turned our backs on trade skills like carpentry and mechanics, and the list goes on. The only programs that seem to be bullet proof to cuts are sports -- the one area where there is little opportunity for the majority, and does the most damage physically.
The focus on jobs and income started in the 80s, in my experience. Off-shoring high wage jobs reduced working people's wages before things started going high tech. People stopped caring about enriching children's opportunities to learn, for the sake of just finding a job that would pay their way.
I am at the end of the boomers. We were educated to learn to learn, to think critically, to observe, challenge and question the status quo. My classmates and I were challenged to read, learn to communicate our thoughts, listen to opposing opinions, debate. We were tested for aptitudes, and our skills were promoted by structured extracurricular training. If we excelled in a particular class, we were rewarded with advanced training. I learned to manage my money in a high school business law class that covered all the fundamentals in the first few weeks. These things are not even in the offering now.
I graduated in the 70s, when budgets were starting to be cut. I spent my sophomore through senior years in highschool in college preparatory classes. Unfortunately, my family finances wouldn't allow me to start college until nearly ten years later when I enrolled in community college in the 80s.
I was astonished to find that the course work I did in high school was far advanced than the community college curriculums. Eventually I went to a private school to complete my bachelor of arts degree. Twenty years later, after getting laid off, I went back to community college for a refresher in Accounting and found to my disappointment that the text books were teaching a much lower level than I'd taken in private school, and the instructors couldn't answer questions beyond telling me to read the text books.
We've failed the school system's by focusing on jobs, but not to suppress people -- but to keep taxes down. Now we are "reaping" those rewards of our own actions. The video's assertion isn't supported by actual history.
I'm not an educator of course, but I pretty much agree with your whole post. I, too, was a late boomer. I look back at that time with quite a bit of nostalgia. For the most part, the curriculum was good. Students were being encouraged to express themselves more. The idea of teaching kids "how to think" was in vogue and for the most part it actually worked. I was taught to love books by teachers who made a point of reading good books out loud to students for about forty-five minutes every day. We were taught to write by teachers who valued creative expression. Often, they would read a story and we would write an essay completing that story in the way we thought that it should end. Sometimes, we would be assigned topics that we would debate with one half of the class taking one side and the other side taking another.
My observations about my own children's education much later in the public schools are positive too. However, I don't think they had a curriculum that was as challenging or thought-provoking. It seemed watered down to me. It was more politically correct. I remember how the name of our western civilization class was changed to "world civilization" when my children attended high school. The teacher complained he had to teach about more civilizations and that he had all of four class sessions to teach the Roman Empire.
I think too many burdens are laid at the door step of today's teachers and principals. It is not their fault that kids spent inordinate amounts of time playing with electronic toys or watching t.v. It is not their fault that their parents are at work most of the day. Nor, can we expect that systemic problems of poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, crime, and racism can be magically "fixed" by our educators.
There is a saying I heard years ago that still rings true for me today: If you think education is expensive than try ignorance. Ultimately, it is more the public than educators that determines what is taught and how it is taught in schools. If we want better schools, we have to be prepared to commit more and better resources to them.
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