Quote:
Originally Posted by OpinionInOcala
For me, the three greatest contributors to lesser achievement appear to be:
- Lackluster/absent parents.
- Living in very poor and/or high crime areas.
- Bullying, and the failure of the schools to deal with such properly.
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I'd have to disagree. We've always had lackluster/absent parents, we've always had poor/or high crime areas and we've always had bullying. While I do think these contribute to lesser success I don't think they are the cause of lower scores when comparing yesteryear to today because they've always been there.
Comparing the idyllic past to today
, what has really changed is we keep everyone in school (on a college bound track no less) whether they want to be there or not,and whether they put in any effort or not. Way back when, if you didn't do the work, you got expelled. If you didn't want to be in school or needed to work, you dropped out and those who stayed in were tracked so that they got an education that was tailored to them.
IMO the biggest difference between then and now is student accountability. Students were held accountable back then. Today we blame everyone except the student for a student's failure. I blame the self esteem movement and technology for low scores today. Kids feel great about themselves but as I said before, they think Googling is thinking. They are not held accountable for actually doing the work and they don't think. They want to be entertained because they grew up with a piece of technology entertaining them and have the attention span of a gnat. Teaching today is more about entertaining students into accidentally learning something than it is teaching. The more we cater to their lack of attention span, desire to be entertained and inability to think, the worse it gets.
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