Is There Really An Education Crisis?

[ThereseR]

Originally Posted by NewHope33

^ Peripheral issue at best.

Really? Could you please explain what you mean?

[jrcsmom]

During my son's senior year he participated on his school's speech team. One area of competition was discussion in which a group of 5-10 students sat and discussed a topic for an hour which they had been given prior to event. This was a academic team composed of some of the top students in the schools and the majority of the students who opted to participate in the discussion category did so by choice. I both observed and judged the category during different events.

I was astounded by how many basic facts the students didn't know. Not just some of the students, but ALL of the students. During one event the topic was the US's involvement in the UN. One participant said that involvement was irrelevant because there were only 8 participating countries in the UN. Not one students out of the group of 8 argued the point. I yelled at my son later, "*YOU'VE* toured the UN!!!!! How could you not argue against that????" I got some comment in response like, "He sounded like he knew what he was talking about."

Another week the topic involved technology. I sat and listend to a group of 8 students discuss that the country needed to invest a lot more in technology because we were lagging behind so many countries, including China? and that huge investments needed to be made so we could continue to compete on the world stage.

I left each and every week shaking my head and tutoring my son on the drives home.


Who's to blame? Students - yes, teachers - yes, parents - yes, society - yes.

I began college a 'few' years ago as an education major. My whole life I'd been told what a great teacher I'd be. The courses I took in the school of ed were anything but challenging. I switched from elementary ed to secondary ed so I could take classes outside the school of ed that were a bit more challenging. Then in one education course we took an open book, open note test with no time limit. I answered 60-70% of the questions, then started looking up answers, in just under an hour I knew I had over 90% of the answers and turned my exam in. A few days later the grades were posted and I had received an "A", but a classmate had received a "D"?????? All I kept thinking was someday that classmate could potentially be teaching *my* children. I couldn't even figure out how someone could manage to get a "D" on an exam where you could look up every answer, obviously the student didn't care much about their own education, but yet wanted to be a teacher?????

But then again my my college it was often said around campus that if you flunked out of your own major, just switch to the school of education because they'd take anyone.


Ever since my days as an education major, I knew that I had a responsibility to ensure the education of my own child. Sure there are some good teachers, there are some great teachers, but how do you know if they are the ones teaching your child. Teachers take responsibility for students for 9 months. Parents have responsibility for their children for their entire lives. A teacher has some basic grade level knowledge to teach. Parents are responsible for ensuring that their children can successfully transition into adulthood. I started teaching my son to read when he was 3. By the time he was in kindergarten, he was reading at a 1st grade level. I started teaching him addition in preschool. In elementary school we played with money to teach addition, subtraction, and early concepts for decimals and fractions. I bought him workbooks and educational computer games that were always just a little too advanced that he had to 'grow into'. Parents that expect schools to teach everything their child needs to know are going to have the students that are lagging behind. Even those upper-middle to upper class parents that don't spend the time like I did, have resources available for thier kids. They have the internet, they go to libraries, they go to zoos and children's museums. Their children ARE learning outside the classroom as well as within. There is A LOT to learn in this world and most of it won't be learned inside a classroom and parents who feel they don't have a responsibiity to teach their children anything are doing a serious disservice to their children.

But society has a responsibility too. Grade inflation is currently ridiculous. It used to be an "A" showed a true mastery of a subject. My son had >4.0 and had never brought a text book home freshman, sophomore, or junior years of high school. If he didn't turn in homework a few days, then he'd make those points up with extra credit or bonus points on the tests later. Today you almost have to work to get less than a B. And that's not just high school, but college, and grad school. I just completed my MBA at a very highly ranked program. The grades were curved so that about 10% of the students in a class got an A, an additional 20-25% got an A-, an additional 20-25% got a B+, and the remainder of the class got Bs. Grades less than B were reserved for special circumstances where students didn't even attempt to do required work. It was possible to struggle, not understand concepts, not do work correctly, and then find your transcript reflecting a B - I know, it happened to me in one course. It made me feel bad. Someday I could apply for a job and it actually looks like I have an understanding of that concept. I got a "B" in a graduate level class.

In another graduate level course we were required to submit a group reserach paper. One of my group mates referenece Wikipedia in a graduate level paper. I objected. The paper was submitted in spite of my objections. I was embarassed to have my name on that paper. The instructor didn't even comment on the Wiki reference. After the course ended and we were evaluating the course, I commented on how inappropriate referencing Wikipedia in a graduate level paper was. The instructor responded that personally he agreed with me, but that we were on the losing side right now and that he'd been allowing it for years because so many students did it?????? Isn't the instructors responsibility to end it. If he allows it, then isn't that just encouraging students to believe that it is acceptible.


My son took a web design course during his senior year. Right now our county government is looking to pay a substantial amount of money to have a new website developed. I suggested they allow one of the schools develop a website in the web design courses. I was repeatedly told this was beyond the capabilities of a high school class. Really???? Designing a website???? Beyond the capabilities of high schoolers with a teacher overseeing their work? So, I mentioned it to my son and he looked at me like I was crazy to think that you actually learn to make a website in a web design class in high school. He told me that there was no way that they could do something like that in their class. Seriously?????? A high school class on web design can't design a web site????? What do they do then????????

The question shouldn't be "is there a crisis?" Of course there's a crisis. The question should be how do we solve it.

[eastcoascrazy]

Chockisses, I agree that sometimes the best teachers are those who understand "not getting it" because they can find other methods to convey the material.

Which goes back to the phonics/whole language issue. The original idea of whole language is a warm, fuzzy perspective of how many (well loved, well fed, stable, middle class) kids naturally learn to read. It used the methods most of us here have used with our own children without even thinking about it. We pick out a book, with pictures and an engaging story. Our child snuggles in next to us, and follows along with his finger as we read the story aloud, talk about the pictures, talk about the characters, etc. As we reread the story over and over, our kids begin to recognize words, memorize the lines, "read" the story themselves, recognize the story's words in other contexts. Along the way, we incorporate phonics instruction in a natural way. "Kuh- aaaa- t. Cat." it is an ideal way to learn to read.

Elementary school teachers adapt many of those techniques to the learning styles of their students, some of whom enter kindergarten already reading and some of whom enter kindergarten not able to recognize all the letters of the alphabet.

Ultimately, our system of written language is phonics based. We have to be able to decode unfamiliar words, and we need to have a method to do so. Many kids who have had a lifelong exposure to books, words, reading, will internalize those rules without them needing to be "taught" explicitly. Those kids will thrive in a "whole language" curriculum.

However, many other kids need to be explicitly taught those rules. They haven't had the thousands of hours of exposure to words and books that other kids have had, or they have a learning disability... (hundreds of other reasons also apply here).

Where it gets ugly is when one particular method (often originated as a sucessful method to teach kids who have difficulty learning to read) is sold as a method to be used for all kids.

[jrcsmom]

@eastcoascrazy -

That's great in theory. Different students do learn better with different methods. Back when I was an education major I used to think about what classes I had done well in or could have done better in and often wondered if we'd used a more hands on approach in physics if I would have learned more, etc.

But today, teachers do not always get the freedom to choose. My sister teachers first grade (in Illinois) and her school dictates the methods she must use in her classroom. Even if some of her students are struggling and she believes they may learn to read or learn basic math using different methods, she is not allowed to use those in her classroom.

I'm sure her school isn't the only one with such restrictions.

[Mom2M]

I think inflexibility is a huge problem. Dictating teaching methods may work in some situations, but in general it is not a great idea.

During a textbook adoption in our district, they class tested the top three choices. The teachers ALL voted for the same text...it had a lot going for it (D was in one of the test classes). The school board tried to adopt another text--mostly because one board member had a dyslexic student who needed that particular type of instruction. I called the authors of all texts to get their opinion: they all said adopt the text the teachers wanted. It would lead to the best teaching. Use alternative methods for the kids who need them.

I think the school board was shocked--but I wasn't going to just let it go. And they adopted the text the teachers wanted. I do think that teaching needs to be flexible. I also think that tenure is bad thing--we have several teachers who need to retire, but there is nothing the school district can do about it. But overall responsiblity for education is parent responsiblity. Parents need to speak up, and stand up for the students. And they need to make school a priority from day one of kindergarten.

[csdad]

Failure at the high school level is a direct result of behavior. Not neccessarily "bad behavior", but rather the behavior of not doing the work. If a student has excellent attendence, is engaged in class, & does their homework, beginning in primary school, they will never fail to achieve a high school diploma. Until "learning" is looked at in more behavioral terms, not much is going to change.

[emeraldkity4]

Over the years I have seen our school district change curriculum, change graduation requirements, move principals every two or three years( as soon as school community finds out they are a joke) , use rotating subs all year in elementary, implement testing that takes weeks at a time, increase half days, cut the school year, cut money to the classroom, use money meant for special education students for the general budget, mess up when applying for federal funding to support needy students, change curriculum again, drag their feet in training teachers to use the curriculum, ...I can go on and on.
Behavior of district administration is as bad as a truant teen.

[thumper1]

annasdad I sometimes make note of your posts because I believe your D attended the same HS as my S - a highly selective math and science public boarding school

YES...I thought Annasdad's daughter attended a PUBLIC boarding school as well. That is why I was mighty surprised to read his post upstream that said his KIDS went to PRIVATE schools.

[emeraldkity4]

There are public boarding schools?

[romanigypsyeyes]

It would appear so, ek. Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Count me as another who is surprised that annasdad's child(ren) transferred schools from a great public academy to some sort of private school

[momsquad]

LA Times had a good Op Ed on just this topic today:

Higher education's doomsayers are wrong - latimes.com

...we are reminded of Marcel Proust's splendid observation in "Remembrance of Things Past": "The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been 'great changes.'"

We take comfort in the fact that for more than a century predictions about the impending demise of classic higher education have met the same fate: They have been utterly wrong. Around 1900, David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford, forecast the end of the liberal arts college. Others foresaw financial ruin for higher education during the Depression, when public colleges suffered 40% reductions in funding and private institutions lost more than a quarter of their endowments and more than 70% of gifts from benefactors. Then came proclaimers of the end of educational excellence resulting from democratization associated with the GI Bill, followed by prophets of demographic devastation from the large baby boom generation, and conversely, from the baby bust.

In short, there has been no scarcity of doomsayers. We thought that economists were bad at predicting. Next to educational pundits, they have the vision of Nostradamus.

Present-day alarmists fare no better. Though college debt levels clearly are something to monitor, the vast majority of students graduate with relatively small debt burdens — about $25,000 on average — and about one-third leave college with no debt at all. Meanwhile, the college premium — the ratio of college earnings to high school earnings — is at or near record levels and has been increasing decade after decade since the late 1970s. While for-profit colleges enroll an increasing percentage of all undergraduates, the demand for education at selective private and public universities and colleges continues to grow, as evidenced by dramatic declines in the percentage of applicants they admit. And worry that on-line education will replace the four-year undergraduate growth experience that takes place on a college campus seems as unfounded now as when first articulated 20 years ago.

[emeraldkity4]

Learn something new everyday.
Is it cost effective?
Boarding Schools Nurture Low-Income Students (washingtonpost.com)

[xiggi]

Agree with post #6 (csdad) I know the Euopean model (of school) has 2 tracks one to prepare for college the other to prepare for work or vocational school. I tend to think the testing from those countries comes from the college track kids. I would compare our (the US) top 50% to that group any day.

If you are talking about tests such as PISA or TIMMS, you'd be absolutely ... wrong.

[xiggi]

If we were making the same commitment to the teaching profession that Finland has, we wouldn't have an "education crisis." But we haven't, and in the current political climate we won't - and even if we were to start now, there's 30+ years of tenured, finger-pointing, incompetent deadwood clogging up the system.

Challenge as many posts of Annadad as you want, but he is 100 percent on this one.

There are plenty of past discussions that can be uncovered (on CC) about the differences of our system and the ones in Finland or other countries that have superior qualification demands for their teachers. There is a reason why the BEST students decide on a career in education, and plenty of reasons why the ones who qualify to teach at the primary level opt for subject specializations. Our system, on the other hand, is based on lowering everything to the lowest common denominator and believe that pedagogy trumps mastery of the subject taught.

We also tend to compare the successes to ours, and sometimes note that the countries that leave us in the dust are also unionized. This is, however, not that important as the type of unions our system of education has been saddled with.

Our system of education is not in crisis. It has been since the days we abdicated it to the service providers. It is not THAT worse than it used to be; considering the resources spent, it has been horrendous for decades.

Fwiw, most teachers are also victims of the existing system. Just as much as the parents and their children. The unfortunate part is that they did not really created the problems; their leadership did. It is hard to blame the teachers to take advantage of a system they cannot really change. It is also hard to blame them for being tired of all the bad labels sent their way.

The solution does exist. Treat them as professionals, but expect them to perform as professionals.

[NewHope33]

Re: "^ Peripheral issue at best. "

ThereseR - It would be a positive thing if teachers were respected more. But lack of respect is really a symptom of the problem, rather than an independent component of the problem. The Federal Government passes legislation, the State Government passes legislation, state Depts. of Education impose rules, district school boards impose more rules, and district Superintendents of schools impose even more (as well as pressuring teachers with issues such as social promotion and student testing proficiency). Students look around and see that teachers have VERY limited power in the school system ... teachers having to tread lightly on issues such as unruly behavior, parental oversight, trying to teach kids with a variety of abilities and motivation, etc. And that doesn't count having to deal with kids that are still developing socially, academically, and emotionally.

BTW, the above observations are for the "good" public schools. In the poor ones ... you know, the ones with assaults, pregnancies, and 50% drop out rates, it's hard to envision things turning around "if only there was more respect for teachers." Teachers get respect when their word is final, and I don't see that happening anytime soon. JMHO.