[kenberg]

One more word on schools. Everyone in my family is from public schools. In my father's case, an immigrant kid in Nebraska, public school was critical. So I intend my comments as a concern about whether the schools are still playing the important role that they did for my family. I believe there is cause for concern.


With schools, as with anything, we can look for guidance in various places. Europe, Asia, our own past, our own current success stories. My own high school was far from perfect, I don't think I presented it as such. Still, it served me and others reasonably well and possibly there is something to be learned from thinking back on the experience. Or not.

[JoAnneM]

I don't think anyone tested the voters who did turn out as to their actual understanding of the issues. However, they might have been able to recite the TV ads.

[awm]

While it is popular to trash the public school system, I think there have also been a number of positive changes in the last few decades. For example:

(1) Education for the top students is substantially better. There are many opportunities in almost every high school to take college level courses. A lot of students enter college with up to a full year's worth of credit, and substantial percentages are taking calculus (for example) in high school. I doubt this was true for people attending high school in the seventies or earlier.

(2) Education for students with learning disabilities is substantially better. Years ago these kids were just classed as "dumb" and often drummed out of the education system before high school. Now their disabilities can be identified and in some cases treated, and teachers are required to be educated in how to reach these kids. Some of them are in fact quite bright.

(3) Accountability and standards have improved markedly. There is a great deal of rigorous testing that goes on now (much more than years ago). This is probably dragging some of the worst schools up, or at least making the problem easier to diagnose.

Obviously there are still a lot of issues in schools. The one that seems to be getting a lot of attention is weapons in schools and shooting sprees. It may be worth mentioning that there are not really all that many of these (they are just very newsworthy when they occur). Nonetheless it is true that inner city schools have a lot of kids in gangs, metal detectors, etc etc.

I think there are two big things that have lead to this situation. One is the disintegration of the family. Many of these problem kids are from single parent homes, or from homes where both parents work and there is rarely anyone taking care of the kids. This situation is much more prevalent in today's society than it was years ago. You can blame it on a lot of different things (women working, no fault divorce, changing standards for child raising, etc) but this is definitely a change. The other issue is the segregation of American society. Wealthy families increasingly live in gated communities far away from poorer families. Communities where everyone is poor and out of work tend to become pretty dangerous areas. Since we have schools where almost all the students come from such communities, we end up with some dangerous schools. Obviously there have always been rich people and poor people, but I don't think the level of segregation in where they live and go to school has always been this great.

[kenberg]

Not sure why I am awake at this hour but I am so I may as well reply.

The segregation by income is, I believe, a major issue. Growing up, the guy across the street drove a bakery truck for a living but a guy on my paper route drove an Alfa Romeo for fun. No one within walking distance of where I now live does either.

Now I am going back to bed.

nite all

[kenberg]

Now that I am actually awake it would be good to say more in regard to Adam's post, much of which I agree with. I need to think a bit first though. The short version is that the good students definitely are better off than when I was young, I am rather discouraged by the situation at the lower end.

[JoAnneM]

I think awm's post is very good. Howver, I do not see #3 as especially a positive:

"(3) Accountability and standards have improved markedly. There is a great deal of rigorous testing that goes on now (much more than years ago). This is probably dragging some of the worst schools up, or at least making the problem easier to diagnose."

From what I have heard from parents and teachers, in most school districts now they are only teaching the "TEST". This is the test given to the students which grades the school and the teachers. This is a very specific test so they don't even teach things like geography anymore. This used to be a junior high subject and if you tested average 10th graders in an average high school right now I doubt if they would know where Chile is, or even some of the states of the US.

[jdonn]

JoAnneM, on May 27 2009, 10:14 AM, said:

I think awm's post is very good.

I sort of disagreed with all the points. I think 1 might just be a sign that those are the courses that SHOULD be high school level courses. 2 may well be true, and is good from it's own moral standpoint, but I don't think has much to do with the general level of education. In other words it may technically bring up the average but only by creating a few more well-functioning members of society, not by increasing standards as a whole. There may also be a problem of over-diagnosing I think. 3 I think is not necessarily true at all, I would be careful not to confuse increasing with improving.

[hrothgar]

awm, on May 27 2009, 09:52 AM, said:

While it is popular to trash the public school system, I think there have also been a number of positive changes in the last few decades. For example:

(1) Education for the top students is substantially better. There are many opportunities in almost every high school to take college level courses. A lot of students enter college with up to a full year's worth of credit, and substantial percentages are taking calculus (for example) in high school. I doubt this was true for people attending high school in the seventies or earlier.

(2) Education for students with learning disabilities is substantially better. Years ago these kids were just classed as "dumb" and often drummed out of the education system before high school. Now their disabilities can be identified and in some cases treated, and teachers are required to be educated in how to reach these kids. Some of them are in fact quite bright.

(3) Accountability and standards have improved markedly. There is a great deal of rigorous testing that goes on now (much more than years ago). This is probably dragging some of the worst schools up, or at least making the problem easier to diagnose.

Obviously there are still a lot of issues in schools. The one that seems to be getting a lot of attention is weapons in schools and shooting sprees. It may be worth mentioning that there are not really all that many of these (they are just very newsworthy when they occur). Nonetheless it is true that inner city schools have a lot of kids in gangs, metal detectors, etc etc.

I think there are two big things that have lead to this situation. One is the disintegration of the family. Many of these problem kids are from single parent homes, or from homes where both parents work and there is rarely anyone taking care of the kids. This situation is much more prevalent in today's society than it was years ago. You can blame it on a lot of different things (women working, no fault divorce, changing standards for child raising, etc) but this is definitely a change. The other issue is the segregation of American society. Wealthy families increasingly live in gated communities far away from poorer families. Communities where everyone is poor and out of work tend to become pretty dangerous areas. Since we have schools where almost all the students come from such communities, we end up with some dangerous schools. Obviously there have always been rich people and poor people, but I don't think the level of segregation in where they live and go to school has always been this great.

Few comments regarding AWM recent post

When I was in high school back in the first half of the 80s, New York state had an excellent college prepatory curriculeum. The school districts were heavily tracked. The "gifted" program was very much focused on the Advanced Placement exams. Most of my classmates took 2+ AP exams their senior year. Almost everyone took between two and three semesters of calculus.

My impression is that a lot of this infrastructure has been dismantled due to a combination of

1. Teaching to the "test"
2. Budget cuts
3. Exploding budgets for special needs students

No Child Left Behind is a disaster for any school district that is actually trying to teach students to think rather than learn to take tests.

Coupled with this, educational opportunities for special needs students is certainly much better than it used to be. However, as insensitive as this might sound, I question our priorities on this one...

[luke warm]

one of my favorite boston legal reruns was on last nite, about the school girl who shredded 'the test' at her school... no child left behind is a disaster, especially since schools have very little choice in the matter (assuming they want/need federal money)... i noticed some stats on the act avg results since 1967... at that time the avg culmulative score was something like 19.6... from 1968 - 1989 it ranged between 18.4 and 18.7 (nothing in the 19s)... in 1990 it jumped to 20.5 or so... coincidently, the test was changed in 1990

another funny factoid - the sac math scores indicate that students are math-ok, the act scores indicate the opposite... it seems to me that the percentage of students in remedial math should tell which test is more accurately guaging college readiness in math

[JoAnneM]

And, how could I forget, my sister retired as chair of the English department of Lowell HS in San Francisco, a premier college prep school, where students routinely graduate with college credits. I believe those college credits were being given the entire 30 years she was there.

[kenberg]

A small world, JoAnne. Both my wife and my older daughter graduated from Lowell. My daughter was a classmate of Naomi Wolfe, class of '78 I think. An exceptional school. My wife took a long bus ride to get there from the Haight Asbury area where she was living during the Janis Joplin era. She is even less a hippie than I am, but she did see several of the famous ones live.

[Winstonm]

JoAnneM, on May 26 2009, 08:18 PM, said:

I don't think anyone tested the voters who did turn out as to their actual understanding of the issues. However, they might have been able to recite the TV ads.

You mean a heavy Republican turnout, then.

[Winstonm]

luke warm, on May 27 2009, 12:50 PM, said:

one of my favorite boston legal reruns was on last nite, about the school girl who shredded 'the test' at her school... no child left behind is a disaster, especially since schools have very little choice in the matter (assuming they want/need federal money)... i noticed some stats on the act avg results since 1967... at that time the avg culmulative score was something like 19.6... from 1968 - 1989 it ranged between 18.4 and 18.7 (nothing in the 19s)... in 1990 it jumped to 20.5 or so... coincidently, the test was changed in 1990

another funny factoid - the sac math scores indicate that students are math-ok, the act scores indicate the opposite... it seems to me that the percentage of students in remedial math should tell which test is more accurately guaging college readiness in math

Interestingly enough, last night I watched "Stand and Deliver", the movie version of the true story of the LA inner city school where H. Escanlante taught an AP calculus course and the first year had a perfect 18 of 18 pass.

Terrific movie.

[JoAnneM]

kenberg, on May 27 2009, 09:54 PM, said:

A small world, JoAnne. Both my wife and my older daughter graduated from Lowell. My daughter was a classmate of Naomi Wolfe, class of '78 I think. An exceptional school. My wife took a long bus ride to get there from the Haight Asbury area where she was living during the Janis Joplin era. She is even less a hippie than I am, but she did see several of the famous ones live.

Ask them if they had or knew Patricia Hanlon as a teacher. She sure hated to retire.

[PassedOut]

Reading this story brought home to me that things are indeed much different than when I went to school: Teacher Resists a Charge of Corporal Punishment

Quote

When Glenn Storman, a guidance counselor at Public School 212 in Gravesend, Brooklyn, came across an unruly student cursing at a substitute teacher in 2004, he ordered the boy to “zip it” and brandished a rolled-up piece of paper, thinking that would be the last he heard of the encounter.

But five years later, Mr. Storman, 57, is embroiled in a legal dispute over allegations that he committed corporal punishment. A 27-year veteran of the school system, Mr. Storman denies hitting the student and is seeking to erase an unsatisfactory rating that a principal gave him.

One of the phrases I heard often was "Spare the rod and spoil the child." And the rod was not a rolled up paper.

[mike777]

Wow wonderful personal stories of school.

I finally ended up in a school with a small HS population at each level. As I recall all of us were promised admission into the local Univ if we graduated regardless of our grades. I never took the SAT. We took Univ classes in HS but I do not remember anything called AP or AP level tests so I assume I had zero.

Granted this was late 1960's or 1970 so we often walked the few blocks to be part of the protests against the war but I almost never walked the few extra steps to ask for help from my teachers. It just never crossed my mind as an option.

As for my Grammer school in the south side of Chicago, in retrospect, I do wish many more of the teachers had helped. I am thankful for the tiny few who did.

Looking back at all levels of my public education I wish I knew I could or should have went to teachers or admins and demand more ...much more.........

Late in life as a Grad student in Calif I did demand more from these Prof's...some helped...many were worthless.....in general the students came across as even worse so.......

[helene_t]

Somewhat off-topic, my (Danish) school story.

From I was 6 to 10 I went to the local public school just like almost everyone else. A few ambitious parents would take their kids to a private school, but this was an middle/upper class area so the public school was not seen as inappropriate for ambitious parents. My class had some very misbehaved pupils as well as teachers, though. Our classroom was also used for creative class which means making toy animals out of used beverage boxes. We would use those boxes as munition in our wars against the neighbor class. One teacher even encouraged wars during classes. He was fired eventually.

Because of other kids harassing me I would often refuse going to school, or stay at the teachers' office during breaks to be safe from kids. After having asked my mum to move me to a private school for years, it eventually happened when I was 10.

From age 10-14 I went to a hippie school where we were indoctrinated with pop-marxism and had very elaborate sexual training including watching photos of a teacher participating in group sex, but learned very little else. I generally liked it, got well along with the teachers and sometimes with a few of the kids, too. From what I know of what happened to my classmates afterwards, several boys ended up in prison, one girl became a long-time nut-house resident, one became a street prostitute. One girl who was constantly bullied by other kids and frequently ran home crying at lunch break became a lawyer, for what I know she and I were the only ones who got some kind of eduction. I think this is partly to blame on the school although it must be said that most of the kids were quite hopeless cases already before admission to the school.

Then I went for one year to a militant marxist school, left because I got sick of the way the teachers abused the kids although they didn't dare to abuse me, I could speak up for myself. We had only two hours of training a day, the rest was manual work and political stuff. But the training was very intensive so I learned some useful things, such as speaking German. They were OK with me spending the math lessons reading books that my father supplied because the school's books were too easy.

Then at age 15, one year at a more serious moderate-leftwinged private school which was basically set up to give children who had wasted their first nine school years at worthless schools a last chance to learn what they need to learn to go to grammar school. Excellent school. And then three years at a pretty normal grammar school where I learned lots of useful things. It was not a school for the brightest kids, I think out of 27 kids in the class we were only five who started an M.Sc. program three of whom dropped out (although I eventually got my Ph.D. anyway, not sure what happened to the others), but that didn't really matter, the training was fine. For some reason (I don't quite remember) I got tired of it during the last years, so I went three months to Israel to work in a kibbutz during the autumn term.

[luke warm]

my elementary school was about 2 blocks from my house... i still remember standing in line outside the school, holding my mother's hand, while medical people passed out sugar cubes with the salk vaccine on it... i was 6

[kenberg]

Helene, you had a seriously weird childhood! I mean that in a friendly way, but it does sound weird. Much of my thinking on teaching children could be summarized as "Try hard not to do anything that is completely crazy". Movies shown to children of the teacher engaging in sex, whether group, twosome, or single, doesn't pass this test. Kids are pretty resilient or few of us would grow up to be functional but we should try not to test the boundaries.

[Lobowolf]

Winstonm, on May 26 2009, 06:24 PM, said:

I prefer low voter turnout to ignorant voter turnout.

Another point of agreement between Winston and me! I think we're up to 2 or 3 now.