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First and foremost, get the government OUT. The government is failing our kids at education.
We need more male role models, men teachers, and men to set up "moving, learning labs." Hands on. No more dry boring text.
Currently classrooms are set up by women for women.
1. Make "schools" not look like prisons, especially at the middle and HS levels. Make it look like a google campus.
Operate like a google campus.
2. In order to achieve this from existing schools, eliminate florescent lighting and gray block walls. Very oppressive.
Make it a place where they want to be, supportive, engaging, energetic. Make them excited to learn. Creates and fosters
respect. Take away the prison facade and eliminate school police. Make them feel every day excited to get out of bed
because something good is on the horizon. Give them something to hope for.
Stop wasting my tax dollars trying to fix what never will get fixed. At least not when it comes to anything above a 3rd grade education of reading/writing/math.
Spend the money on vocational schools. Give the kids whose parents don't know any better & couldn't care less a chance to learn about cutting hair/braiding/shaving someone's head. Waxing hoo-ha's & eyebrows, taking apart and putting back together "small machines" or large. Welding. Pest control. Working a lottery machine. How to provide top notch customer service for high-end hotel guests. Learning the basics of plumbing or HVAC, etc.
They don't have to be able to quote Shakespeare...they should just know he's some dude that's kinda funny.
They don't have to know anything about Calculus or Chemistry...but they'll figure it out if that comes up in a profession/interest they have. When they are that vested in their "profession" and WANT TO.
Perhaps we ought to have a different set up of grades:
Elementary -- grades K-4 -- content as is.
Middle -- grades 5-10 -- general education -- content pretty much as is.
High -- grades 11-12 divides into "college bound" or "vocational".
The government has no involvement in bettering the education system. You can throw money at low performing schools all you want but money doesn't mean their grades will improve. The city of Hartford throws more money in schools than its suburb towns and yet those suburbs perform MUCH better. Obviously if the government doesn't invest more in bad schools then it'll make them look bad during the election season. Politicians always argue they'll fix the schools system but they never truly deliver. When schools do improve the government gain the credit, however the parents should be the ones put in the spotlight.
In order to improve the education system we must learn that education doesn't start at Kindergarten; however it starts at home. We, as parents, are the ones who kickstart our children's lives. If kids don't learn personal responsibility and the importance of learning at a young age then many won't succeed in school. A lot of kids grow up with a single parent and unfortunately these kids are brought up by parents who don't care about them. Teachers aren't parents though in many cases they may be seen as one if their parents fail at doing their job as a parent.
Listen to those closest to the problem, the teachers! Plenty of smart people with good ideas of what could really work aren't asked or listened to. Instead school districts pay consultants lots of money for pie in the sky solutions that aren't working.
Well, yes and no.
There are teachers who are willing to try educational innovations and be creative.
There are other teachers who want to teach the way they were taught, whether it's effective or not.
I always found my teaching staff (or the staff I was on) to be a spectrum. Some really great and a few really bad teachers, some fairly strong and some fairly weak teachers, and the bulk of the teachers in the middle (who could best be described as "good" teachers".
Some of us are for local control back at the local level for education, but would this work for south Chicago?
And this is a key point. Local government -- and that's what a school board is -- can suck. And often does. And it isn't just city school board that can suck.
Low student achievement is highly correlated with low family income. Not in every case, for sure. There are always some poor kids who will do well in school. But still, the correlation between poverty and bad educational outcomes is pretty big. You want to improve outcomes, then work to radically reduce poverty and its effects, whether that means boosting family incomes (via private or public sector initiatives), or educate poor kids in middle-class schools outside of poor neighborhoods. Research has shown that the latter improves educational outcomes.
But of course Americans are not really ready to do either one on a large scale because deep down America hates its poor.
Easy and emotionally appealing to throw that bomb out there every time this comes up. But of course correlation does not equal causation. I would turn what you obviously expect everyone to infer around and low student achievement is one of the causes of low family income which creates a class among whom learning is not valued which causes low student achievement. A vicious circle. Throwing more money at it won't help. May make you feel good like you're doing something, but it won't actually help.
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Originally Posted by middle-aged mom
Gawd forbid that every student in a US public school be held to a higher and common standard, eh.
I could say gawd forbid that people understand that not every student can achieve a higher standard. None of which fixes the problem with CC that's it's impact is to lower achievement on the things that matter by focusing on the things that can be measured on a standardized test. The output of the education system in this country did pretty darn well up until the social experimenters tried to "fix" it and they've been "fixing" it for the last 40 years. Any more "fixes" and we'd be better off with one room log schools.
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