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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Stupid in America (Article on American public schools...) |
| 2006-01-13 |
| Interesting OT article I found via (amazingly) FARK..... EFL. For "Stupid in America," a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid." The Belgians did better because their schools are better. At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education. In New York City, it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad teacher, says schools chancellor Joel Klein. The new union contract offers slight relief, but it's still about 200 pages of bureaucracy. "We tolerate mediocrity," said Klein, because "people get paid the same, whether they're outstanding, average, or way below average." One teacher sent sexually oriented emails to "Cutie 101," his sixteen year old student. Klein couldn't fire him for years, "He hasn't taught, but we have had to pay him, because that's what's required under the contract." They've paid him more than $300,000, and only after 6 years of litigation were they able to fire him. Klein employs dozens of teachers who he's afraid to let near the kids, so he has them sit in what they call "rubber rooms." This year he will spend twenty million dollars to warehouse teachers in five rubber rooms. It's an alternative to firing them. In the last four years, only two teachers out of 80,000 were fired for incompetence. When I confronted Union president Randi Weingarten about that, she said, "they [the NYC school board] just don't want to do the work that's entailed." But the "work that's entailed" is so onerous that most principals just give up, or get bad teachers to transfer to another school. They even have a name for it: "the dance of the lemons." The inability to fire the bad and reward the good is the biggest reason schools fail the kids. Lack of money is often cited the reason schools fail, but America doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years. Test scores and graduation rates stayed flat. New York City now spends an extraordinary $11,000 per student. That's $220,000 for a classroom of twenty kids. Couldn't you hire two or three excellent teachers and do a better job with $220,000? Only a monopoly can spend that much money and still fail the kids. If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom. This already happens overseas. In Belgium, for example, the government funds education—at any school—but if the school can't attract students, it goes out of business. Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents. "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, "You can't afford ten teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again." "That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S." Last week, Florida's Supreme Court shut down "opportunity scholarships," Florida's small attempt at competition. Public money can't be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state constitution commands the funding only of "uniform, . . . high-quality" schools. But government schools are neither uniform nor high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well. A Gallup Poll survey shows 76 percent of Americans are either completely or somewhat satisfied with their kids' public school, but that's only because they don't know what their kids are missing. Without competition, unlike Belgian parents, they don't know what their kids might have had. |
| Posted by:CrazyFool |
| #11 I can't help you with that one, Seafarious. There are idiots everywhere. But you seem to have learned to think effectively despite a temporary lack of punctuation marks. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-01-13 18:08 |
| #10 CF as much as I agree with your implications, the fact is that the "using keyboards" is just about right. I have 3 sons, 30+, 24 & 20. They all have terrible handwriting despite my wife's and my best efforts. The 24 & 20 basically print. BUT, I don't think any of them have actually hand written anything longer than a Xmas card in years. The 24 year old is a VP in real-estate and does everything on his blackberry or computer, the 30+ year old is a free lance writer who works and corresonds via PC, the 20 year old is in school and everything is done on the laptop. I wish they could write, but it's hard to prove that it matters anymore. (Personally I learned to type 40+ years ago cause I physically hate writing so much) |
| Posted by: AlanC 2006-01-13 16:53 |
| #9 Lots of valid complaints to be made about the schools but there's another important point to remember when seeing these international comparisons - most other countries "divert" their less academically promising (is that sensitive enough?) students out of the academic education system to parallel systems where they are often not included in these studies. The overwhelming majority of American kids stay in the main system all the way through to 18 and skew the sample in studies like this. |
| Posted by: Wholuling Thravirong9904 2006-01-13 16:45 |
| #8 My niece was told, in 4th grade that "Handwriting isn't important because in the future everyone would be using keyboards.". As a result, at 23, she has the handwriting of a 4th grader (oh and no job...). Teachers (and unions who often are the ones who really call the shots) should be held responsible for their student scores. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2006-01-13 16:30 |
| #7 And yet, tw, when I was a kid in the Cincinnati public school system, we were told at the end of fourth grade that our fifth grade math books would be omitting punctuation. In order to save money on ink. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2006-01-13 16:10 |
| #6 I have three teenagers in three different high schools, two public and one private. All have good teachers and poor teachers, but it's the principal that really runs the show. When my private-schooled son's new Spanish teacher turned out to be a total loss, I met with the principal twice, was properly received each time, and in a few weeks the teacher was replaced. When my public-schooled daughter's teachers decided to take the kids out to a movie (Zorro) and lunch on a school day (to reward them "for their good work"), I complained to the principal in writing about the wasted school day and never even got an acknowledgement. That's in a moderately-affluent, suburban school district where 11th graders are getting sub-standard scores in math. I don't expect every teacher to be a star, but I do expect that the principal will not let the slacker teachers set the agenda. If I had it to do over again, my daughter would not be in that public school. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2006-01-13 16:07 |
| #5 Yeah, yeah. Americans are dumb, everybody knows that. What studies like this fail to reveal, because the authors never think in those terms, is the different aims of American and European educators. The various European education systems have the goal of turning out individuals who have a great deal of factual knowledge, but are completely responsive to their superiors about what to do with it. That is, when asked a question, they can provide the answer. However, it rarely occurs to these well schooled individuals to pose questions to themselves or others. The American system, on the other hand, is oriented toward teaching the students how to think. Facts can be found easily, for those who know how to look; in my day we were taught how to find sources in the card catalog of the public library, and in encyclopedias, and to compare the results from various sources to winkle out the facts. Nowadays the kids learn how to do effective Google searches, and to sift the grain from the chaff. European students (those headed for university, at any rate) memorize reams of scientific information; American students learn to do laboratory experiments from the beginning of their formal education, and are expected to draw lessons from failing to attain the expected results (ie, accurate measurement of materials matters, order of addition matters, temperature matters, don't drop that bloody flask in the middle of an exothermic reaction!!!, etc). So American students come out knowing much less in the way of raw facts, but able to wrestle areas of ignorance into actionable information on short order. European students do well on these kinds of tests, but don't realize that they can question , let alone that they should. (This used to drive Mr. Wife crazy when we lived in Europe -- especially his German colleagues, who while otherwise delightful, didn't even know what they knew until he asked them a question; and who used to write him memos full of masses of raw data, unsummarized and unanalyzed, because the sheer number of numbers was more important in demonstrating their cleverness than actually pulling something useful, let alone actionable, out of the unorganized mess.) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-01-13 15:26 |
| #4 With all due repect, these comments miss the point. We DO have a crummy education establishment, and it has been poisoning our country for decades. Addressing this subject properly would take up too much of Fred's bandwidth, so I will keep this as short as I can. My mother tried to teach in the Chicago Public schools for one year, after having taught in Wisconsin and Michigan before that. From the first, Chicago, like many other areas, abandoned any school that had even one black student. When she taught, nearly 50 years ago at the school that served the newly opened Cabrini Green complex, she had fifty-five first graders, 1/3 black, 1/3 Puerto Rican, and 1/3 Czech. The school was a firetrap (finally replaced several years later after the Our Lady Of Angels fire). The books were falling apart and the school had not seen scissors and paste in the supply room for two years. Teachers could get all the construction paper they wanted, but there were no scissors and paste. The Chicago Teachers Union allowed senior teachers to bump junior teachers out of any position, at any time during the school year. As I grew older, living in the Chicago area, I saw all kinds of abuses perpetrated by political hacks in school administration. The system was determined to make life impossible for good teachers and keep the fools in cushy positions. As the article "Stupid In America" points out, the Byzantine system that allows for stupidity to dominate school administration won't go away without some good, healthy competition. Please note also that the report points out that the drop in achievement occurs between ages 10 and 15. A huge part of that drop is the middle school culture. When I was working toward my teacher's certification course, the concept of Middle School was gaining popularity. After doing my practicum in a middle school, I came to the conclusion that Middle School is an invention of the Devil. A middle school keeps the same kids together all day, with no opprotunity for escape unless one is in band or orchestra. So take prepubescent hormones, and stick the kids in the same group from one end of the day to another, and you have the potential for some difficult class chemistry. At the same time, kids are on their own more at this age, meaning they have less parental supervision. This is the age to which the advertisers of sleaze pitch their strongest appeals. So the combination of teen hormones, lack of supervision, and promotion of sex and irresponsible behavior combines to make the middle school age a minefield for kids. I used to volunteer in a difficult neighborhood in Madison. I would see children who had the brains to run General Motors in 5th grade go to middle school, and suddenly abandon their schoolwork because achievement was uncool or acting white. You've heard of black students telling mixed race students they "aren't black enough." I saw it happen. I also saw the jerks drag down the smart students because achievement was "acting white." I home schooled my daughters through middle school because the girls are vicious. My boys, because of their autism issues, have close staff supervision, so they are better protected. Even so, kids took advantage of my eldest and caused him a lot of trouble. If the Belgians allow competition and choice among the schools, then they have an advantage over our system. Now if we could just get the socialist claptrap out of the teacher preparation courses (that's a different rant), we'd be doing our children a great favor. |
| Posted by: mom 2006-01-13 15:19 |
| #3 Arnold tried to take on the teachers union in CA. look what happended to him. It has become a self serving monster of a union. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2006-01-13 15:09 |
| #2 Right. We're dumb. The Belgies are smart. Before they go to far with that, they maight want to consider what would happen if we weren't playing with one arm tied behind our back. But they've thought about that already, cause they're so smart. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-01-13 14:49 |
| #1 The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid." Wonder if that would happen if we sent them kids from Roxbury, Brockton and South Boston? |
| Posted by: Raj 2006-01-13 14:44 |