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As many of you know, I am student who wants to be a teacher. Being the nerd that I am, I was really excited to watch Waiting For Superman. I have my own thoughts on why the system fails those in lower income areas but I want to know what your guys' opinions are on education reform/issues and the movie itself.
I don't think the system fails those in low income areas, or any area really. I think it is user error that fails the system. If you don't show up for school, your parents don't care if you do well in school, nothing is going to change that attitude. We've seen it in practice, inner city poor kids bused to some of the best schools in the nation and they STILL fail--why, because their families don't care if they get a good education or not. Until THAT changes, nothing is going to help "the system".
The movie is a piece of propaganda. The solutions given are simplistic and don't work in general.
There are good dedicated teachers in the regular public schools and terrible teachers in the regular public schools, but the same is true of most charter schools.
The movie was directed by left-wing propagandist and Obama biographer Davis Guggenheim and won awards for Best Documentary at both Sundance and the Critics Choice Awards. Despite the initial accolades from left-leaning movie people and the pedigree of the director, the movie has lately come in for a lot of criticism from the Left and a lot of praise from the Right.
I personally think the problems confronting public schools are rooted in the way our culture has evolved in the last 50 or so years, and not in the greed and work rules of teachers' unions (as the Right would have you believe) or in the lack of tax funding (as the Left would have you believe). If the solution was as easy as putting every failing kid in charter school and forcing the public schools to "compete" for students, we would have solved it by now.
I think a lot of the problems in education can be solved by-
1)Making schools accountable to local communities, not Washington DC
2)Hiring more teachers for the classroom to work directly with kids...and cut administration drastically.
3)Schools should be open enrollment- you should be able to go to any school in your district.
4)Schools should be funded evenly- not through property taxes. Where I live, schools in higher value neighborhoods receive more funding. Schools in poorer neighborhoods receive less, but have money transferred from the wealthier neighborhoods (it's called the "Robin Hood plan")
5)Get rid of ESL classes, and mainstream all English language learners. We are ghetto-isng kids.
6)Allow for specialized school academies- Special Ed, GT, Art/Technical, etc
5)Get rid of ESL classes, and mainstream all English language learners. We are ghetto-isng kids.
I cringe to think what our school would be like if we took your advice. We already do to a certain extent anyway and it can be a disaster. I work at a high school with English Language Learners. (ESL implies that English is a second language and several of our kids know more than two already.) I have tested several students already this semester and 2/3 of these don't know enough English to pass 1st grade, much less high school. They have no more than two of the 7 classes per day in ELL classes and that's only if they are rank beginners. We had to pull one of our beginners out of astronomy today because the teacher teaches the class more like a college class. We have one teacher to teach all of the ELL classes and two TA's to help pull them thru their subjects--we have around 100 students in the program and about 15-20% are total beginners. The assistants have their hands full trying to help the kids learn specialized academic vocab on top of the basic English they're also struggling to learn as well as teaching basic writing skills, helping them get thru algebra and geometry when many come over w/ weak skills, and reading tests in such a way that they don't give away the answer but making the vocab more accessible. Yeah, here is the way a typical test question is worded for a high school biology test: "Vertebrates have a pair of round organs, each containing two chambers. The front chamber is filled with fluid and the back chamber is filled with a clear, jelly-like substance. The back wall of each organ contains many cells that are stimulated by light. What is the function of these organs?"
Our TA's spend their days rewording these tests to reflect knowledge of the subject and not just of English. Sometimes these same test questions are 3 or 4x longer and more complex than the one I just provided and even the ones where they have to evaluate a cartoon are often based on an idiom--one showed a man with his "head in the sand."
Some of the kids take it and run with it and others just give up and join a gang and this is with help. W/o help I think that all but the most determined would join a gang. Do not make the mistake of thinking they'd go back where they came from. So, how is providing ELL services ghetto-izing them exactly?
I haven't watched the movie, but I probably should. I just figured it was just another media avenue used to demonize teachers.
With Common Core coming it, I think it is going to get worse. I teach Algebra 1 and Pre-Algebra.
I cannot tell you how many students come to middle school unable to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, with mastery. I blame the teacher preparation programs for elementary teachers and the curriculum machine in elementary school. When I was in college 15-20 years ago, there was a downplay of the importance of memorizing math facts. Anything having to do with memorization was portrayed as "bad". I have even heard teachers (yes, teachers, and plural) say, "I don't know why I need to teacher long division. If I need to divide I use a calculator."
This is one of the pitfalls of not using highly trained mathematics teachers at the elementary level. Something clicks (I have research to back this up if you have access to ERIC EBSCO) when you learn long division. A math sense develops. Without the memorization of facts, a student's ability to advance any further is stunted. Every math teacher in the city in which I live, has the same complaint. I don't know if that is going on elsewhere or not and we have some of the worst test scores in the US. Students are not memorizing their addition and subtraction facts either. They are constantly making errors because they are counting on their fingers.
The federalization of education is another reason that education is going down the tubes.
There is more to it, of course, but I don't want to be too verbose in this forum.
I cringe to think what our school would be like if we took your advice. We already do to a certain extent anyway and it can be a disaster. I work at a high school with English Language Learners. (ESL implies that English is a second language and several of our kids know more than two already.) I have tested several students already this semester and 2/3 of these don't know enough English to pass 1st grade, much less high school. They have no more than two of the 7 classes per day in ELL classes and that's only if they are rank beginners. We had to pull one of our beginners out of astronomy today because the teacher teaches the class more like a college class. We have one teacher to teach all of the ELL classes and two TA's to help pull them thru their subjects--we have around 100 students in the program and about 15-20% are total beginners. The assistants have their hands full trying to help the kids learn specialized academic vocab on top of the basic English they're also struggling to learn as well as teaching basic writing skills, helping them get thru algebra and geometry when many come over w/ weak skills, and reading tests in such a way that they don't give away the answer but making the vocab more accessible. Yeah, here is the way a typical test question is worded for a high school biology test: "Vertebrates have a pair of round organs, each containing two chambers. The front chamber is filled with fluid and the back chamber is filled with a clear, jelly-like substance. The back wall of each organ contains many cells that are stimulated by light. What is the function of these organs?"
Our TA's spend their days rewording these tests to reflect knowledge of the subject and not just of English. Sometimes these same test questions are 3 or 4x longer and more complex than the one I just provided and even the ones where they have to evaluate a cartoon are often based on an idiom--one showed a man with his "head in the sand."
Some of the kids take it and run with it and others just give up and join a gang and this is with help. W/o help I think that all but the most determined would join a gang. Do not make the mistake of thinking they'd go back where they came from. So, how is providing ELL services ghetto-izing them exactly?
Explain why Asians who come to Texas run AWAY from ESL programs?
The overwhelming participants in ESL programs are Hispanics. Sadly, they end up speaking very poor Spanish, very poor English, and have very little mastery of core subjects.
How did other immigrants learn English before ESL?
Explain why Asians who come to Texas run AWAY from ESL programs?
The overwhelming participants in ESL programs are Hispanics. Sadly, they end up speaking very poor Spanish, very poor English, and have very little mastery of core subjects.
How did other immigrants learn English before ESL?
Many of them didn't learn English. This study used German immigrants, but other immigrant groups may have been quite similar.
What Salmons and Wilkerson found was a remarkable reversal of conventional wisdom: Not only did many early immigrants not feel compelled out of practicality to learn English quickly upon arriving in America, they appeared to live and thrive for decades while speaking exclusively German.
In many of the original German settlements in the mid-1800s from southeastern Wisconsin to Lake Winnebago and the Fox Valley, the researchers found that German remained the primary language of commerce, education and religion well into the early 20th century, Salmons says. Some second- and even third-generation German immigrants who were born in Wisconsin were still monolingual in German as adults.
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We already do to a certain extent anyway and it can be a disaster. I work at a high school with English Language Learners. (ESL implies that English is a second language and several of our kids know more than two already.) I have tested several students already this semester and 2/3 of these don't know enough English to pass 1st grade, much less high school. They have no more than two of the 7 classes per day in ELL classes and that's only if they are rank beginners. We had to pull one of our beginners out of astronomy today because the teacher teaches the class more like a college class. We have one teacher to teach all of the ELL classes and two TA's to help pull them thru their subjects--we have around 100 students in the program and about 15-20% are total beginners. The assistants have their hands full trying to help the kids learn specialized academic vocab on top of the basic English they're also struggling to learn as well as teaching basic writing skills, helping them get thru algebra and geometry when many come over w/ weak skills, and reading tests in such a way that they don't give away the answer but making the vocab more accessible. Yeah, here is the way a typical test question is worded for a high school biology test: "Vertebrates have a pair of round organs, each containing two chambers. The front chamber is filled with fluid and the back chamber is filled with a clear, jelly-like substance. The back wall of each organ contains many cells that are stimulated by light. What is the function of these organs?"
