<p>Chicago State is dirt cheap, relatively speaking, and its graduates can get real jobs as teachers, nurses, etc. It’s pretty unlikely that someone is going to be driven into poverty by their loan burden from Chicago State. But in the event that someone is considering borrowing thousands to attend, how can it hurt for kids to have full information about the odds that they’ll be able to pay their loans back before they make the decision to borrow? Ignorance solves nothing.</p>
<p>As I said above, I’m mostly concerned about the Degree 4 Success Institute, Incorporated, not the Chicago States of the world. Those private diploma mills cost a fortune, and a lot of them are basically scams. Kids end up no more employable than they were before, but now they’re a year older and have ten grand in non-dischargeable debt. Disclosure rules might do quite a bit to help steer students toward less expensive options, like public community colleges.</p>
<p>Katliamom, the other point to keep in mind when reading those type of studies is that while college profs think those skills are most important, they are also often expecting students to come with a certain amount of content as well. Yes, introductory college courses (I’m thinking of sciences in particular) do go over some of the same ground that a high school course does at the beginning, but at a much faster pace. I think there is definitely a certain assumption of prior knowledge.
This leaves the high school teacher to provide all the content the profs are expecting while developing those thinking skills - I’m not entirely arguing that’s bad, I think that is their job - it is the implication by the college profs that that process should be more or less accomplished by the time students are freshmen that I find annoying. If that assumption should be correct, then we have way too many people going straight to college, because many of them are barely developmentally ready, they just acquired those higher order thinking skills at the end of the 11th grade, they need more practice!</p>
<p>We in the US have relatively short school days and school years, and we try to prepare almost everyone for college - these are culturally based attitudes and behaviors. They aren’t necessarily bad, but we can’t have our cake and eat it also - you can’t educate kids for a shorter period of time than other nations and expect teachers to teach everything to everybody, and instill higher order thinking skills to the kid in the last row. Something has to give.</p>
<p>“we try to prepare almost everyone for college”</p>
<p>I think that this is part of the problem, and it’s a huge disservice to most of the kids. Many kids end up neither prepared for college NOR for the working world (thanks to the elimination of most trade school courses that used to set kids up for good, raise-a-family type jobs as mechanics, court reporters, plumbers, etc.). Not everyone wants to go to college, and if you aren’t going to go, it’s a huge waste of time and energy to try to prepare for it when you could be learning something the world will reward you for knowing. I value my education, but I don’t agree with the criticism I have sometimes gotten that supporting trade schools makes me a snob who wants to reserve educational privilege for a small elite. On the contrary, I think it’s snobby to suppose that my path is the one right path for everyone to follow.</p>
<p>Hanna, I agree what you say about trade schools. However, with the country educational structure as it is now, will lead to many students who go to bad elementary and middle schools to be placed in trade schools.</p>
<p>If any of you get chance, Constance Weaver’s Reading Process and Practice raises some interesting points.</p>
<p>Her review of the research found that kids who get the drill and kill do perform better on tests of rote skills in the early grades. However, by eighth grade that advantage is gone. Worse, the kids retain their lower performance on questions that involve higher order reading skills, such as drawing inferences from text.</p>
<p>I don’t know how widely known it is that some of the nation-wide reading curricula come with a script and the teacher is not allowed to deviate from the script in any way. It spells out what she should say and when, even hand gestures. Monitors are sent around to police compliance. If a teacher deviates from the drill and kill in any way (for example to ask the kids why they thought a character did something, or if they’ve ever been in a similar situation or any other thought induction questions), she can get in trouble.</p>
<p>Weaver’s book looks prophetic now. Two of her big complaints were that some of the research used to justify NCLB and Reading First was flawed, and that the program was so plagued by conflicts of interests, that money motives were trumping research findings. At this time, inspectors are now recommending criminal charges for some of the people involved in Reading First, because they were pressuring districts to purchase curricula that they had a financial stake in. One Reading First official made over a million dollars.</p>
<p>“However, with the country educational structure as it is now, will lead to many students who go to bad elementary and middle schools to be placed in trade schools.”</p>
<p>If you take a static view, it may be bad. Because in a nutshell uou are saying that just because you are poor, you can’t go to college.</p>
<p>However, if you take a long term view of the society that one of the reason those kids go to lousy schools is because their parents are poor and are ill equipped to demand academic excellence either from their schools or kids. In that case learning a trade would make them employable, raise their standard of living, would learn importance of education and hopefully they would demand more from schools and kids.</p>
<p>I am not sure what a parent can do to demand more from schools if federal funding is based on the school doing things a certain way. How many public schools can really afford to say no thank you to federal education dollars for reading and math?</p>
<p>All the parent can really do is opt out and send their children elsewhere.</p>
<p>katliamom - Post #3: “In fact, the education-for-the-test approach is one that is favored by most nations – nations we are compared to and need to compete with – and many parents. The idea being, if it’s a GOOD test, a good measure of learning, why not teach to it?”</p>
<p>I respectfully disagree with you. Most nations don’t have meaningless tests like we do. For example, why does it make sense to ask californian students to take CA High School Exit Exam in 10th grade? The test is just a joke and students don’t care about it. It just costs tax payer money and school resources. How many employers in California require students to pass this exam? California also asks students to take STAR tests in high school every year. This is another joke. The California STAR tests are only meaningful in elementary and middle schools because learning programs in elementary and middle schools don’t differ much statewide. In high schools, each student has a different learning program each schoolyear, why ask all of them to take the same test which they don’t really care about every year? Besides high school students already a lot of standardized tests like PSAT, SAT, SAT-II, APs, so why bother with more tests?
Let’s stop this NCLB nonsense.</p>
<p>“All the parent can really do is opt out and send their children elsewhere.”</p>
<p>conyat: true, the schools do have to follow certain curriculum. If the kids are weak, schools have to spend more time drilling. If the kids become stronger and still schools spend 7 months out of 9 drilling, parents can demand to compress that time to say 3 months. Also, if parents are employable they have the mobility to go to district that have better schools - the schools that don’t spend 7 months out of 9 drilling the basic skills.</p>
<p>Just to give an example of teaching to the test, our neighborhood high school doesn’t teach anything before Jamestown in American history. And I think the course ends after Vietnam. They teach this range because that’s what the test covers. </p>
<p>When my daughter went to the state magnet, the course started with Native American cultures, age of exploration, and went up to the present day.</p>
<p>All other things being equal, a child from the neighborhood school would probably do better on the test, since more class time was spent on the period covered by the test. But which child do you think would emerge from the class with a better understanding of American history?</p>
<p>Just so you know, Constance Weaver and other educators would challenge that assumption. Especially educators who advocate for teaching models based on what we know about how the brain processes and stores information.</p>
<p>We tend to learn things that are meaningful to us. We tend to learn best when different parts of the brain are engaged. Many of the drill and kill texts are meaningless because they’re based almost entirely on sound correspondences: Finn’s pin spins. In addition, there is tremendous emphasis placed on fluency in reading aloud, even though oral fluency is unrelated to drawing meaning from text, which is what reading is supposed to be about. </p>
<p>It may well be that the reason the kids are weak is because of the amount of time spent drilling, and not vice versa.</p>
<p>“It may well be that the reason the kids are weak is because of the amount of time spent drilling, and not vice versa.”</p>
<p>I don’t know about that and you may be correct. I live in a district that at one time was pretty good. After Katrina the schools that saw more profound change in demographics due to NO transplants, their (school’s) performance degraded. The teachers are spending more time on the basic skill sets than on critical thinking skills - many of them require one to be able to read. I predict that in the next 5-10 years those schools will become similar to low performing poor inner city schools.</p>
<p>It will not be due to lack of money. </p>
<p>The common themes of such threads is the kids are not learning, the inner city schools are bad due to bad teachers, and lack of funding compared to those suburban ‘white’ schools. You know what? The top two high schools in greater Houston area (~100 high schools) belong to HISD. HISD actually had 4 schools in top 10. Their per pupil spending is no different than the worst high school in HISD.</p>
<p>No one is blaming the parent. No one wants to take either individual or collective responsibility for failure.</p>
<p>One of the things Weaver points out is that when confronted with an unfamiliar word, good readers use context to figure it out, and poor readers try to sound it out.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, because English is very inconsistent with letter-sound correspondances*–and knowing how to pronounce a word often gives very little insight into its meaning–the strategies used by poor readers don’t help much with comprehension. </p>
<p>You can test the value of context vs. decoding each individual sound for yourself, BTW. Have a friend or family member take a paragraph from something you haven’t read, and retype it, putting blanks in place of the vowels in every other word. You’ll likely surprise yourself by how easily you can figure out the missing words based on the rest of the sentence.</p>
<p>If you wanted to teach someone how to weld, would you want to teach them the techniques used by good welders or by poor welders?</p>
<p>*Even a simple rule like “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking” breaks itself.</p>
<p>Kudos to doubleplay for voicing a politically incorrect response. In some respects, not levelling has showed kids how to deal with others - in D’s case, it was that whenever there was a group project, she had better do it all, or else her grade would suffer, because others wouldn’t do their share, or wouldn’t do it very well. And yes, white schools are now also teaching to the test, like our school. (We do have a percentage of minorities, which keeps growing.) We have started TAKS remediation classes, and kids who don’t pass cannot take other electives, etc., but have to take those classes, instead. Kids who pass get to take regulars, honors, AP and soon-to-be Pre-AP courses, where, hopefully, they get to think more. Yet, even then, during our test week, the freshmen were taking the math test on Thursday. So, on Tuesday and Wednesday, when the juniors were taking the exit test, and the freshman had nothing scheduled, they had to come in for 3 1/2 hours of TAKS math practice before they took the test on Thursday. Out or 30 kids in my room, only 2 were black, and 5 latino. It didn’t matter what race, just that they pass the test. Because the legislature has tied the test results to money, the test remains. There is talk of doing away with it in favor of end-of-course tests. Most educators seem to be in favor of that.</p>
<p>2005 NAEP scores here. NCLB tests are set by the state, so they can “improve” their scores by making the test easier. The questions on the NAEP are consistent over time, and they show no real improvement in reading at least.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there seems to be no positive effects for all the costly drill and kill programs that made so much money for administration officials. 12th grade reading scores are no better than they were 2002, and worse than they were in 1992. And the achievement gap (between whites and minorities) is as big as ever.</p>