I read a great editorial in the NY Times about a man from India, and how when he arrived in America he became instantly smart – the best in his class at math.
American education takes a good bit of bashing. But the bashing is too general. We excel in several ways and fail in others. Math and science are our big failures. The left bears some blame for this, but most of the blame is the refusal to invest in the public good from the right.
Here is the strange thing about education in the US. From k-12 the entire focus on training is on the pedagogy. After 12, the entire focus is on the content. It turns out that this works wonderfully after 12 (we do have the greatest university system on the globe, no contest) and before 3rd grade. But rather than have a slow increase, so that the high school teacher has a balance of content and pedagogy, we have almost zero content to grade 12.
“The second section of the report presents a survey of middle school math teachers, focusing on their educational background and professional development. A significant number of math teachers at this level lack formal undergraduate training in mathematics, and the professional development they are receiving appears to be inadequate to remedy the problem.”
http://www.brookings.edu/gs/brown/bc_report/2004/2004report.htm
From k-3 teachers achieve the most amazing results. Homeless children, children who speak no english, hungry children all show up. By 3rd grade they are the equal of every class in the world, even those which only take the best and brightest. By the 9th grade they are behind.
People are comfortable in American being innumerate. Many people don’t even know what numeracy implies, believing themselves numerate because they can balance a checking account. Social Security? Taxes? Projections and stats – the numbers are ignored.
A discussion about education needs to break education down:
k -3
3-6
6-9
9-12
We have an immense step function at 12 rather than a upward slope from 3-12 that nicely jumps at the university level. Democrats will be again in power. Once the Dems are at the Federal level we can rewrite the No Child Left a Dime. How could it be improved?
I propose the following:
- content knowledge increasing from 3 – > 12
- better pay for k-3
- competitive pay for math, science, business, shop etc. teachers
- mechanisms to rotate teachers to prevent burnout (time off in industry, rotation of administrative centralized tasks, research time, …?)
- ability to bring in content expertise at the higher level w/o sacrificing the amazing results in k-3
At the same time we can celebrate what is great. In every quintile Americans SAT scores have been increasing for decades.
We need more math and more science to maintain a modern democracy. Intelligent design would be a joke and not a political issue in a well educated population. How do we get there?
Wishing it were all nicely constrained by the high-school /college border doesn’t make it so. And that denial won’t help fix the core problems of anti-intellectualism and remedial courses needed for underprepared students at Colleges and Universities all across America.
who has taught from 7 through 12 at various times, primarily social studies but also language arts (English and reading).
First, one problem with a lot of post-secondary education is the very poor quality of the instruction. The fact that someone is themselves knowledgeable about a subject does not mean that they know how to impart that knowledge to someone else. far too many think just getting up and lecturing for 50 minutes is teaching. There are great lecturers who can pull it off, but they are actually quite rare. Also, such an approach puts students in the position of being passive receivers of knowledge — perhaps one reason that many of the most highly sought after colleges emphasize the number of classes they have with 20 or less students, which allows for a seminar approach where the students participate.
Second, you are equating scores on standardized tests with knowledge. That is a separate problem for which the time available for this comment is far too limited. All such tests have measurement error to begin with, even if they are well designed, which unfortunately most are not. And if designed to spread out the scores (such as an SAT is), there are really not designed to truly measure mastery of content. But this is not really the time or place to get into psychometrics and measurement and test design and all the related problems.
Third – from what I have seen, there is actually INSUFFICIENT training of teachers in pedagogy, which is far more than how you deliver instruction — it includes evaluating, adjusting, design of individual assignments, motivation, classroom management, etc. I have seen far too many teachers begin their period as a classroom teacher never have seen the beginning of a school year. Thus they have not really thought about physical organization of a classroom (can make major difference in management, in ability for some students to focus, etc). They have not seen how a skilled teacher establishes classroom routine and discipline without having to totally stop instruction. Further, one key aspect of pedagogy is identifying differences among students and making modifications accordingly. Far too many teachers — and even more who think they know about education when they are prescribing what should occur in classrooms and schools –think that there is one way of doing things, that all students react the same way.
One reason you see a fall-off of performance as you go up the grades is that school becomes stultifying — far too much of the instruction is lockstep, aimed at the middle of the class. For slower students they struggle to keep up, for quicker students they get bored (I was very much the latter until I finally skipped 6th grade). Just because a student can handle 4th grade arithmetic does not mean she can read at the so-called 4th grade level. With 30 or more in a class this becomes a problem.
Even more so, even before NCLB we were seeing increasing mandates of outside testing beginning usually in 3rd or 4h grade, and definitely by 5th and 6th. Increasingly school was becoming test prep — pizza parties if everyone showed up, pep rallies to prepare — prizes for improvement. Rather than learning the emphasis was on scoring. That has a negative impact on real learning.
We have steadily increased the amount of information and the number of credits we want our kids to have. There is rarely a time in most classes in high school to explore an interesting tangent, which is when real learning often occurs. Everthing becomes “coverage” of the curriculum. That can mean barrelling ahead even if a number of students don’t yet get it.
This past year I taught American history, Civil War until the present. I was required to get through 2004. Here I note that I am 59, I took regular American history in 1961-62, and we got up to about the election of Eisenhower in 1952 in our studies. In other words, my students were expected to cover 50 more years of history. And the people creating curricula and tests place a great deal of emphasis on things that were important to them. I remember when i was student teaching in 1995 the high school I was at had a final exam for US history (2nd half) on which 15% of the questions were about the 1960’s and Vietnam. Now, I lived through that era, I served in the military then (albeit domestically), and I think that was unbalanced.
I have little time to fully go through all of the issues raised by your diary. My main concern is that I have alarms go off whenever I see a proposal for what is largely ONE approach to education, and your diary seems to point in that direction. I also have read and analyzed enough educational research that I get extremely alarmed at sweeping statements about education as a whole. I have seen little evidence ever than can sustain the broad statements and charges I often hear about the so-called sorry state of American education.
I will finish with this. In 1983 we were warned that our future as a nation was “at risk” because of the sorry state of our educational system, and the result would be the inevitable collapse of our economic strength versus places like Japan and Germany and Singapore. Well, it is 22 years later, we still hear the same alarms, except
There are things that need to be done to address education in this country. Most importantly, we need to see education in terms of equity issues, most of which CANNOT be addressed solely within the framework of our schools.
In that regard, I invite you to myleftwing where you will find that I have posted several front page stories addressing precisely educational issues.
Or if you wish to read more broadly, you can go to my dkos diaries where if you scroll on through you will eventually come to a diary that will take you through just about all of my diaries on education.
Sorry I do not have time to be more specific. I know we will disagree on some issues. I hope we can keep from being disagreeable.
Teacherken, you make me think of a book by a friend of mine. She was thrown into a classroom as the 4th teacher of the year… If you are interested, here’s a link to the amazon.com page: Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity.