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<p>I found this article reassuring. Let’s see how long we can have a civil conversation about this, OK? :)</p>
<p>[Do</a> American public schools really stink? Maybe not - POLITICO.com](<a href=“http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/do-american-public-schools-really-stink-maybe-not-97142.html]Do”>Do American public schools really stink? Maybe not - POLITICO)</p>
<p>I would like to know how many of these other countries educate every student? I would like to know if the students in the US are being compared to the entire student population of the other countries or only among the top students who are bound for higher education. And what do the other countries do for students with special needs? Are those students educated at all, or weeded out and put in vocational programs and not included in this testing? </p>
<p>Without this information, I can not make a judgement on whether or not these countries have better school systems than the US.</p>
<p>I will say this. I am a teacher and I am very glad that my children are out of public school at this point. The climate in the education system has become absolutely maniacal in it’s frenzy to bring up test scores. Those that suffer most are the children. Teaching has changed dramatically in the last five years and I (and most of my colleagues) feel that it to the detriment of the children. They have become data points. Teachers who went into the profession because they wanted to educate the whole child are left frustrated and harried. The state puts enormous pressure on the administrators who, in turn, put pressure on the teachers and we all know what comes after that.</p>
<p>So much energy is spent trying to get every child to the same standard, when, what they need, is to be recognized for their uniqueness and individuality. Teachers are being asked to do more and more busy work that has little or no direct impact on student learning. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t recommend that anyone become a teacher right now.</p>
<p>EPTR - I have a number of friends who are teachers and they have similar things to say. My hat is off to all of the good teachers out there (my kids have had several).</p>
<p>I agree with EPTR. Both of my kids would be fabulous teachers. When they asked me if they should consider public school teaching as a career, I politely said NO.</p>
<p>My career in public education was great…but I started in 1973 and retired in 2011. There were years when I felt like Gumby…so much change. And in my years, I saw many things come around more than once.</p>
<p>I have long defended US schools. They have been under special stresses for the last few decades because the demands of workforce have changed and it’s tough for such a vast infrastructure to adjust smoothly, all while migration patterns, decreased funding, etc. have made investment difficult. If you converted to all digital in 2005, you have to do it again for tablets. Very tough to make decisions when those affect lots of people and require allocations of scarce resources. You can’t often rebuild a school or even rewire it. And toss on top the increased security concerns that eat time and people and thus money.</p>
<p>That said, even in the heyday of our schools, we lagged dramatically behind other countries in some ways. I could write pages about this but to confine myself:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>We decided long ago to teach to the below average, meaning sometimes special needs but also in the ideology that anyone can learn and all it takes is the right method and some work. Other countries don’t believe this. Putting aside special needs, which is a massive subject and cost issue, other countries generally try to identify those who do the best and then reward them over and over. One could say it’s a version of the idea that a relative few create a lot of jobs. The countries that do try to teach all the same tend to be smallish and homogenous.</p></li>
<li><p>Other countries teach more rote in key areas. I first learned this 40+ years ago when exchange students from behind the Iron Curtain would tell me how they learned math and sciences - and were way ahead of us in high school. True. Our system is aimed more at teaching concepts and we rely on universities to teach those who show talent and interest in a field. In other countries, high schools were far more important for employment beyond the menial and lower blue collar; even today you can graduate a high school in some major countries and move into the white collar workforce. That means high school must be different.</p></li>
<li><p>The teaching of rote shows a lot in my family’s experience in a Chinese exam school, meaning an admissions by exam private school in China. The kids learned vast amounts of material by rote. Why? They system is aimed at generating a large number of people who can function reasonably well as engineers, as technical people in many fields and the best way to get that is to teach them this material and make sure they have it down. The other part of the system is they realize, something we refuse to accept ideologically, that very few people are truly good at math or physics or programming or whatever and thus it’s silly - in their view - to spend all that time trying to teach these deeper concepts to people who can’t get there. The basic math class at this school - which is one of the better ones in the provincial capital of many million - was at our higher level BC Calculus track. It was all memorization and then testing on what you were taught, not application of concepts in unfamiliar forms. The goal was perfect repetition. Art was taught the same way. Ever wonder why so many of those kids can draw flowers so well? They learn stroke by stroke. Not many kids can be artists but they believe everyone can draw if taught to draw this and then this and then this.</p></li>
<li><p>And that leads to emphasis on talented and gifted. The total amount of “tag” money spent in my state when my kids were young was less than my district spent on 3 kids with severe special needs. Priorities. China identifies the better and then best. The better get extra instruction and the best … well they can be almost forced out of their homes to go to boarding schools where they receive intense instruction. They do this for violin, for math, for weight lifting, etc. Their belief is the best will lift the rest.</p></li>
<li><p>As I noted above, it has interested me for a while that we seem to carry two opposed beliefs. One is that a relative few act as “job creators” and the other is that we shouldn’t track or distinguish the talented because we need to educate everyone. I think the way this duality is being addressed is simple: those who can afford it rely more and more on private schools and they then try to take more money out of the public system because it is no longer serving their interests.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I was pleased “enough” with my kids’ public school education. But I know, in my heart, after having home schooled for a very short time, that their education would have been so much richer, so much better, fuller, wider, more advanced and so much more awesome if I had homeschooled up until the point of high school.</p>
<p>Wish I could have done that - but I’m pleased “enough”.</p>
<p>Great observations, Lergnom.</p>
<p>This is interesting to me regarding China’s education philosophy–“Their belief is the best will lift the rest.” I wonder why so many of the “best” are being educated at the university level in the U.S. then? And it’s not just the “best”–the children of the growing middle class are finding their way into more and more American colleges–even small LACs in the middle of nowhere, where they are encouraged to study what interests them and not focus solely on STEM.</p>
<p>I’m also a teacher (after two long and successful careers in other disciplines) and I’m shocked by how bad schools are today. There are bright spots, but far too many of out children languish in sub-standard schools. By and large, though, we, as parents, are to blame. Children are much as they always were, but our attitudes about what they deserve is different.</p>
<p>Students today are not taught how to fail and try harder; they are taught that failure is someone else’s fault.</p>
<p>The system is broken, and we have to make some hard choices in order to fix it. And no, I would never recommend teaching as a career to my children, although they would be wonderful teachers.</p>
<p>If you have parents that stress the importance of education, you will more than likely have good students. All you have to do is look where the bad schools are and then look at what the parents are doing, or more likely what the parent is doing.</p>
<p>sakacar, I am interested in your perspective as a teacher. Did you read the attached article?</p>
<p>I do agree that a lot of young people today do not take responsibility for their actions and that many are not being taught how to deal with failure. On the other hand, in an era where “everyone gets a trophy,” many are protected from experiencing failure at all.</p>
<p>Well…
<p>Then how is education ever going to improve? How are children going to succeed? How are changes going to occur in the system without dedicated, smart, invested people working for the system?!</p>
<p>My son was val at his public school and is a senior majoring in education. He may not teach forever, but he wants a career that involves kids/education. He sees the apathy and fears it, but ultimately sees the kids suffering. </p>
<p>I personally feel just as we entice kids to STEM fields, we need to entice smart, personable, energetic, talented kids to education. Lets give them some perks to becoming a teacher. Nurture the teachers and perhaps they can nurture the kids. </p>
<p>(I also agree above that much of the blame falls on parents. I fully believe this)</p>
<p>I can’t post a link to it, but I recently saw a cartoon of a teacher standing in front of a blackboard with the words, “No child left behind,” carefully lettered on it. A kid asks the teacher, “Is this the test to test us for the test to see if we are ready for the test?”</p>
<p>My sister is a special ed teacher in Texas. Believe it or not, she is expected to prepare her kids well enough that they are held to the same standards as the non-special ed kids! She has more than 25 years experience and she’s getting tired of it all.</p>
<p>I think that Diane Ravitch is critical of the “No Child Left Behind” testing program, in the book. It started out from a reasonable premise, and I think that it was well-intentioned, but Ravitch (and I) think that its implementation has been harmful to young students. Teaching efforts do truly become misdirected toward “teaching to the test.” Because of the way the tests are constructed (at least in my state), this is not necessarily very useful.</p>
<p>That being said, I am committed to public education. However, of QMP’s first and second cousins that I know about, 6 went to private schools, and only 2 besides QMP to public schools. All of their parents went to public schools. This is an issue of some concern to me.</p>
<p>I agree, QM. Few people are fans of NCLB.</p>
<p>To cancel out a couple of your nieces and nephews, I went to private school and have had two kids in public. It’s a big world out there and I did not want my kids going to school in a cloistered environment (plus, where I live the public schools are very good and the private schools have bigger drug problems). I guess the point is that no one solution is good for everyone.</p>
<p>It’s been a while now, but I did read a study that showed that public school employees had their children privately educated at a higher percentage (and I was surprised at how much higher) than the rest of the population. Perhaps they know something that the rest of the world doesn’t know? </p>
<p>For my family, homeschooling was the answer. I live in a ‘good’ school district but over the years, I never came to regret my decision. As my children have gone on to college and then the working world, they have told me many times that homeschooling prepared them very well for the rigors of college work and the demands of the ‘real’ world.</p>
<p>In my school system, I don’t experience apathy on the part of the teachers. On the contrary, we care deeply about what we do and are very frustrated at the direction that education is taking.
We recently adopted a new ELA curriculum. The classroom teachers have been told that they can only use this curriculum and no other methods, interventions, etc when teaching ELA. So teachers who have been doing this job for twenty years, have developed and practiced methods for teaching ELA cannot use these skills in the classroom. Even when they see a situation in which it is needed.</p>
<p>The frenetic drive that has become the hallmark of school administrators is sucking the creativity out of the profession. How can that be good for kids?</p>
<p>“Ever wonder why so many of those kids can draw flowers so well?”</p>
<p>No! Not sure if I know any of “those kids” , and I didn’t know they could draw flowers. </p>
<p>My dad was a teacher at a “normal” school in Alabama for a bit, as was my mom in NYC. She pulled me out of a private (okay, Catholic) school to go to a public school where I could take both vocational, and AP classes. I think both served me well.</p>
<p>Academically, the public schools in my town are better.</p>
<p>Where is the evidence that other rich countries don’t try to teach everyone? I think this may be projection.</p>
<p>Given the massive disparities in local funding, that could fairly be said about the US. In funding terms, America educates the suburban nearly-rich, and ignores the inner cities.</p>
<p>I was a public school teacher for 7 years, and my own kids have had generally excellent educations through the public K-12 system. However, several of the best teachers they had are deeply disliked by some parents because they don’t put up with baloney, have high standards, and know every excuse our suburban upper class parents can throw at them.</p>
<p>They have also suffered through a few clunkers along the way. As in any profession, there are great teachers, and there are those who are just putting in enough effort to barely get by. But for the most part, the teachers I know are doing a fabulous job.</p>
<p>Of course we are all only talking about our own experiences here. I fully acknowledge that my kids’ experiences are not reflective of those of a kid in innercity Baltimore.</p>