An Amazing Mind: Sucky Schools - How To Repair Our Education System

Kind of a long read, subsequently I won't copy/paste the entire thing, but some people in the educational field may be interested.
Any thoughts?

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Here's a spoiler for you: Chinese Democracy is shit

i would love to read that, but i simply haven't had enough coffee today.

Here's an extremely short summary:
In the U.S. "learning" in schools is distilled to memorizing facts;
Grades are way overemphasized;
Standardized test perparation basically destroys actual learning;
Students aren't allowed to learn cooperatively, usually; and
Students aren't really allowed to discuss anything creatively, given that teachers monopolize most class discussions.

Why are things this bad? Well, simply because in the U.S., we're used to shittiness, especially right now.

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Here's a spoiler for you: Chinese Democracy is shit

yeah that last point is especially bad.
but i don't think it's possible to have a perfect education system because every child is so different. kids are gonna get screwed over no matter what. :/ i do think more attention should be paid to individual kids...perhaps more teachers (like SHITLOADS more) and smaller classes could be the answer? probably impossible though.

This sounds eerily like what they were saying in the 60's.

ok so if its how to repair... then stating obvious points is redundant. what ideas are there to repair it? if any.

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When I awoke, the Dire Wolf
Six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window
All I said was "Come on in".
Grateful Dead

they are saying the same thing in the UK: too much testing, combined with publishing test results in competitive school league tables, means you teach students how to pass the tests, rather than giving them an education (whatever that may be).

though i think state education is poor in the UK mainly because of poor staff/student ratios, but improving them costs massive amounts of cash

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they made soup out of my research turtles.

There are some ideas for improvement contained within the article...the main idea is to improve teacher strategies, however there are many very good teachers within U.S. school systems who are forced to spend time focusing on having students pass standardized tests versus having them engage in "real" learning...

Not trying to sound completely political, but "No Child Left Behind" either should be overhauled or demolished.

__________________

Here's a spoiler for you: Chinese Democracy is shit

I promise to read it when I've got more time. I'm about to go prep for a family program I run in a museum and that many parents love simply because it allows their children to learn in different ways and to have discussions. Things a lot of public schools don't have. This is why I could never go into regular teaching. In the time I've spent here, I've met a lot of NYC teachers who are burnt out. They are tired of the apathy school administrators show, parents, and also students. It is hard to change things on your own and especially when you have 30 children you want to help individually. I do teach classes as big as 30, sometimes a bit more, but my best experiences are definitely below 20 students. In that case I can learn their names in an instant, gage what their personalities are like, be able to actually hear what they have to say, not to mention helping them with the process of making art.

I have to say that I feel a sense of fatalism when I see schoolgroups come in here with teachers who want to squash every bit of creativity. In front a painting we were making shapes we noticed with our body and moving along with the rhythm of the lines (it was an abstract painting) and one of the chaperones told me that I had made the kids crazy and unable to focus. They're FIVE. They're looking at fucking abstract painting. It's fun. It's colorful.

Anyway, I could talk about this forever. But like I said, I teach in such a different setting. Away from school.

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"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation," she told the crowd.

""Sure you can raise standardized test scores. Just eliminate arts, restrict extracurricular activities, and spend hours on end drilling the students on test-taking techniques. And sure enough, the test scores will increase. What a meaningful measure of learning."

exactly what has been happening. and what we fight against here.

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"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation," she told the crowd.

The article was pretty much a rehash of what everyone already knows. In my opinion, one of the biggest problems with the education system is the teacher's union. Not that unions are inherently bad, but the union just allows allows poor education to proliferate.

I went to a public school through graduation and all of the worst teachers I ever had were there on tenure. They were apathetic, they didn't teach, treated student's poorly, and just obviously didn't care about their jobs. They were horrible teachers, but they were never going anywhere because of the teacher's union. It's really the only profession I know of where unless you shoot someone or molest a minor you're gaurenteed to never lose your job.

Young teachers with new ideas who might actually care about education constantly get let go and pushed aside in favor of teachers who have been there forever and don't care.

Also, the union refuses to pay teachers who teach more difficult classes more money. There's a huge difference between teaching 7th grade english and AP chemistry, but the union doesn't see it that way. The lack of math and science skills among today's graduates is alarming and it's not because of standardized tests. It's because no competent person with an MA in statistics is willing to make 40k a year. I went to one of "best" public schools in the state and there was an embarressing short life span for a math teacher.
All teachers should be payed more. But teachers who teach advanced courses need to be payed much more.

But that's just what i like to rant about. It doesn't make any difference because there's no way public schools are going to get better funding. Education is usually the first thing on the chopping block since in the US family values means hating gays and thumping the bible - not financing public education.

Being an American, I do have to say that I wish there was more individualized attention in the classroom. I also think class sizes should be smaller. I find it counter-productive to prepare students for standardized exams when the whole point of being in school is to learn and prepare for college or life or whatever a student's case may be.

When it came down to taking these tests, especially in high school, I almost felt bullied and pressured into doing well. There were incentives given...like you can get a free pass to this or that. It's complete bullshit.

That being said, I went on to college and graduated in 4 years so I guess it had no negative effect on me, but, still, the education system needs improvement.

Most school disctricts don't have money to hire more teachers, but that is exactly what is needed. MORE teachers so class size is reduced. An emphasis on actual learning and retaining information is also needed...not cramming info down student's throats so they can spit it back out for their standardized exams. Because, let's face it, when done with those hellish exams do/did we remember a damn thing? NO! We were just happy they were over.

I attended primary school in a wealthy district, and I always felt I was stupid because I didn't get across-the-board straight As in everything. No one seemed to have heard of the idea that a child might be advanced in reading and writing, but not so good at math. I remember every now and then realizing I knew a whole bunch of stuff that the 'smart kids' didn't know, because I read about it, and they mostly only knew what we covered in school. And my standardized test scores were middling for the school, although good on almost any other scale. So it's not just schools not having enough money, although most don't, it's a question of what the goal is.

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The reason our public education system is shit is because it is not a system that teaches kids marketable skills. It has become nothing more than a marxist boot camp churning out bolsheviks and mensheviks.

You want to cure the ailing education system in this nation? Eliminate the federal department of education. For that matter eliminate public education altogether if you really want to do it right.

Have private institutions of education. Keep government money and influence far away from it. Government has no business being in the business of education.

This way, property taxes can be eliminated and the money we save from that can go to our sending our kids to private schools of our choice. And we get back some of our eroded rights to private property. It's a win-win.

Do you also show them art of the masters, for example, Michelangelo, DaVinci, Bouguereau, etc, to name a few?

I've never really been an art buff but when I step to something a master has created it is as if time stands still. As with anything, you have bad art, good art, really good art, great art, and then you have something you can't even describe because the mastery simply stuns you. The Sistine Chapel is one.

Nothing abstract has ever, for lack of better words, blown my skirt up. The way I see it, abstract is to Michelangelo, and hip hop is to Beethoven. the same as a tin can is to a one carat flawless diamond. But that's just me.

In my opinion, if anyone can do it, it isn't art. Anyone can piss in a jar and drop a cross in it or shove the handle of a bullwhip up their poop chute. Anyone can make an abstract. Anyone can write hip hop.

Very, very few can create a Fountains of Neptune, or Young Mother Gazing at Her Child, or render Il Trovatore: Di quella pira lorrendo foco.

Perhaps that chaperone who chided you was an old fart like me and was appalled at what you were showing the kids?

There's a chapter in Freakonomics on this. Increased standardised testing leads to wide-spread cheating, by students and tutors. Basically it's the idea that, if you create targets for teachers to meet, they'll pour their efforts into hitting those targets, rather than simply trying to give the kids a complete, decent education.

The shit thing is, it's common to most public services (in the UK, anyway). Sectors where people have been doing their jobs to a certain standard for years end up getting fucked over by management that thinks meeting their KPIs (key performance indicators) means that they've done the job, regardless of the evidence. This is fine if the KPIs are rigorous and thoroughly representative of the job being done, but most of the time they aren't.

The whole point of them is to explain in a few statistics to management staff who have zero experience of the actual workings of the company they manage whether they're doing a good job or not, and funnily enough they almost always indicate that they are doing a good job.

One of the big one is hospital waiting lists. When that was introduced as a KPI, people would do anything to get the length of the waiting list down. It didn't matter that they weren't putting people on the waiting lists who should have been there, because the waiting list had to be reduced. Another was how long you leave someone to see a doctor, and I remember one nurse being interviewed saying that very often people actually benefit from waiting to see a doctor.

Basically, it removes the employee's own judgement from the equation, just so that people with generic Management qualifications can pretend that they know as much about their employees' work as they do. It pisses off said employees immensely, and you end up with your public services being run by temps (like me) who have no real interest or experience in their field.

So when can we hear this hip-hop you've made? Presumably you have made some, if you're able to form the opinion that anyone can write hip-hop, right?

I speak as someone who cannot cram the handle of a bullwhip up my poopchute. I'm disclined to get into the minutiae of why one thing is art and another thing isn't, particularly under these circumstances. I'm also not precious about hip-hop. I just know that it's a lot harder to do well than people with nominal musical experience think it is.