Should we be giving up on public schools?

[younggun308]

I just watched an episode of The West Wing last night, and it showed a deal in which the President had to sign a bill that would allow the Federal Government to hand out school vouchers to kids so they can go to public schools. It seemed to make a good anti-Democrat argument, since the Democrats are all about public schools funded by the government. But the fact is, it doesn't take an Eisenhower to figure out that our schools are doing a terrible job of producing well-educated kids, and this has been blown out of proportion since "No Child Left Behind," I've heard plenty of complaints on here about the low quality and the "dumbing down" of the classes, and it's honestly really sad.Now, the majority of kids coming out of high school can't get a college, because they're not well enough eductated, and they have to go to inferior community schools.
Private schools provide excellent education, but they're expensive, and many people can't afford them, of course, that's where the vouchers come in, the government helps pay for it.


I also heard a brief summary of a BBC interview done on a program called "HardTalk," and a person was being interviewed who said that one of the greatest tragedies of American masses is that people generally aren't aware and informed to the extent they should be of how the world and all the nations in it are co-dependent now, and isolationism is impractical, and that Americans should educate themselves of the values that come from the experience of other countries, and embrace the inevitable change.
Americans used to educate themselves, what happened? Self-education is what made Lincoln.

Although I realize both cases are certainly able to be considered liberal points of view, I have to agree with most of it, I live in Europe most of my life, up to now, in fact, I'm actually in Prague, the Czech Republic at this very moment, in the process of moving back to Tennessee permanently and I can tell you, globalization is real, very real, and so is the demand to have the knowledge to interact with other nations and cultures. America is ill-equipped for this.


I have friends in America, and a lots of acquaintences, and they have a major issue with education. They don't realize, that school was never designed to teach you everything you need to know, but merely (or not so merely) to actually point you in the right direction, so that you can investigate, and come to your own conclusions. It's meant to inspire you to search, to give youa hunger to learn more and improve your mind's capacity. The fact is, no average American kid will think of it that way, it's not presented that way, instead, it's all about "remember this term, and that term for the test.", do your homework, and when all that is done, spend the rest of the day trying to forget about doing studywork, and spend as much time as you can while in school, observing the social "castes" and trying to find where you fit there.


Somehow, that such a thing is what many people think an education before college should look like,is almost evil and at the very least, irresponsible. Learning is a gift, and instead, it's become portrayedlikea burden. Everything in life is just another burden. What ever happened to enjoying life for what it is? A gift. Priceless joy.

When did we become animals? Why not have the government step in, and allow students to go to a private school? Pay for it. Don't build the school, don't control the curriculum or buy teachers, but just provide the means, and allow the community to pour into the minds of the students?

Perhaps an educational rapture could have greater effectson our culture, in a good way,that are more long-lasting, than the Sexual Revolution did in the mid 20th century?


Look, it's a mess, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well, you know what? It's broken, it's going to get gangrene all over it, and we'll be able to do nothing soon but chop it off, and start all over again. Time to allow the people who aren't living and breathing politics to educate us. Enough Americans are working in the auto industry and steel and coal and construction; move forward.


Quit spending money on public schools that don't work, aren't safe, and mix the smart and stupid together, so that everyone comes out stupid; and quit funding daycares, instead, use thatmoney to give 85% tax breaks to stay-at-home mothers who raise their children better than daycares, and allow for security, and who knows? Maybe having parents in the house more and greater interaction will lower the divorce rate? Wistfull thinking, maybe, but it's going to work better than what we have now.


Are public schools the enemy of American progress? We have to have Congress pass legislation for what's taught in a science class, and when sex ed can be taught. Why not quit giving the job to Congress, and allow smart people, to tutor smart people,and pay for it. It'll be the best investment the U.S. ever makes, and it'll actually work for once.

Hopefully, someone will come out with this in their platform,and if I could promote this at some point in the future, I wouldn't care if I had tobe aDemocrat to do it.

[burniegoeasily]

All Ill say is, Start with getting rid of NCLB. I"™m tired of dumbing down upper level courses to suit the lower learner. Let teachers teach, quit tying their hands. Public school, teachers, and administration is not the problem, it"™s the politicians trying to half ares fix it that is screwing it up.

I tell you the quickest fix;

Let teachers teach. If kids don"™t want to learn, or are trouble makers, kick them out. Or at the very least, remove them from the general population so they do not continue to disturb the learning process of those who are willing and able to learn. Way it is now, a student cannot be removed from a class. It is up to the teacher to deal with problem kids at the expense of all the other kids.

Don't force every kid to take all the same classes (NCLB problem), but let the kids who can handle upper level classes take them, and put the lower learners in classes appropriate for them. Quit babying Special Ed kids. Teach to their level, then get them in a vocational program. Never made much since to me to have special ed kids in my upper level chemistry classes, just to put the burden on me to teach to their level, which the cores alone is above their level to start with. Any given year, I"™ll have a physics class or a chemistry class where I"™ve got over 5 to 6 lesson plans for each period. Teachers have to have individual lesson plans for each student and their respected problem or talent. Each special ed kids has a personal lesson plan, which I have to come up with on a day by day schedule, and each gifted and talented kid has his or her own special lesson plan, and then there is the lesson plan for the rest of the class that is neither gifted and talented, or special ed.. It"™s a real juggling act. This year alone, I have 36 lesson plans a day. Not like when I first started this game. If I had 6 classes, I had 6 lesson plans. It was up to the kids to learn the subject as taught. If they could not handle it, they needed to go to another class to learn the basics and the next year, try again. Bush is hell bent on holding teachers balls to the fire because special ed kids cannot learn these upper level classes. In the mean time, the upper level kids are getting dumber and dumber because of all the focus on the lower learners. Do you all realize your kids are probably not getting any science or social studies until about the 5th grade. NCLB does not insist on kids being tested in science or social studies until the 5th grade. Up until the 5th grade, NCLB only mandates that the kids be tested in english and math. So guess what your K-4th grade teachers are teaching? Nothing but English and math. They have to, because if the spend time teaching anything else, they might lose their job after the NCLB test scores come in. I can tell a biggggggggg difference in students basic science knowledge when they get into the middle schools and high schools. They are much more science ignorant than they were prior to NCLB.

Give the states their rights back. Education is a states right. When Bush pushed NCLB he stepped on states right, forced fed. mandates on schools, but did not offer to fund these mandates. Bush should be shot for what he did to education. We went from a liberal, feel good mindset, to a cookie cutter style mindset. At least the liberals were not forcing teachers to attempt to do the impossible. That is, teach every kid at the same level. They at least allowed teachers to teach by not forcing every child take courses above their head. They allowed schools to place special ed kids and lower learners on a path suited for them, which allowed the upper level classes to be taught to the appropriate target audience.

[Fieldmouse]

Yes Burnie I love some of your points however remember NCLB was writen by the liberal Senator Ted Kennedy and didn't have the complete package (bush's fault for signing the darn thing. I agree, education is a state issue not a federal issue. We should abollish the Department of Education and quit stealing that money from the people in the first place.

[burniegoeasily]

ORIGINAL: Fieldmouse

Yes Burnie I love some of your points however remember NCLB was writen by the liberal Senator Ted Kennedy and didn't have the complete package (bush's fault for signing the darn thing. I agree, education is a state issue not a federal issue. We should abollish the Department of Education and quit stealing that money from the people in the first place.

I can agree with a lot of that. It really gets me bent out of shape when politicians point out how our math and science scores suck, yet they caused the problem. And then, they have the nerve to blame the teachers. Like I stated, NCLB has forced teachers of classes k-4 to ignore science and push english and math. Then they wonder why the middle school and high school teachers can not teach science at the level we use too.[:@][:@][:@] Also, they compare America to other countries and state that our kids are dumber. True, that is when you compare our masses to their top percent. We are the only country that insists on educating the masses at the same level. Other countries educate to ability, they turn over lower learners to work and to develope a vocation.[:@][:@]

[burniegoeasily]

Something else, while i'm on a rant. What other country forces teachers to suffer the problem students as we do in America?

[Fieldmouse]

ORIGINAL: burniegoeasily

Something else, while i'm on a rant. What other country forces teachers to suffer the problem students as we do in America?

Hey Burinie, I just got a copy of my mother's family history. In there there is a picture of my grandfather's one room school house. It states that all the students were very well behaved because if they weren't they were made to kneal on a fire poker in the corner. I made my son do it and he lasted 45 secs.

[Griswold]

I don't know if "giving up" on public schools, per se, is a good idea. But the entire system is obviously in dire need of overhaul. The first thing that needs to happen is the federal government needs to butt out with their ideas of inclusion and all that crap. When Teacher Barbara Jo has 25 students, 24 of which are fully capable and 1 is Little Johnny who is autistic but has to be included in a normal classroom setting because some bureaucrats in Washington thought it was a good idea, what ultimately happens is Teacher Barbara Jo has to spend most of her time focusing on Little Johnny and the other 24 Johnnies and Jennies get screwed out of the education they're supposed to be receiving.

Maybe I'm a hypocrite, because I'll follow that up by saying that I think the federal government took a big step in the right direction with NCLB. I know many teachers don't like it because it forces accountability on them and they've never had that before (I'm not aiming that at our resident educator, BTW; just something I've noticed in my own family of educators) but the fact is that it has helped schools that previously had a don't-give-a-whiz attitude to shape up and make sure their students are making the grade. I've seen it in several schools in my home state. Students really were getting left behind before. Now they aren't. NCLB isn't perfect; far from it, in fact. But it was a step in the right direction. It now needs to be amended for a better fit. Getting 100% of students to test proficient in any subject or 100% of students to graduate is a pipe dream and isn't going to happen in any spectrum of reality, but public education is better right now than it was in the '90s. If the federal government is intent on maintaining the current model of public education, then some variation of NCLB is a must.

The argument against school vouchers is that when students start pulling out of public schools, the public school that's left will be under-funded and, thus, the remaining students will suffer. It's a good argument, and I think it has a lot of merit. The counter argument is that every student would have equal opportunity for private education under the voucher system, and that's also a good argument with some merit. But the reality is that getting 100% of students into a private school is just as big a pipe dream as getting every student to test proficient in public schools. This is especially true in rural areas.

With that said, I don't see that our current schools are leaving us much choice. Schools concern themselves more with trying to cure America's social woes than they do with trying to teach kids the 3 Rs. At some point, some bigwigs in the NEA decided that it would be a good idea to make sure that kids understand that gay people are not that way on purpose and that it would be a good idea to make sure that every student has access to birth control and condoms. We can argue all day about whether homosexuality is right or wrong, or about whether the most effective method of sex education is abstinence or birth control, but the bottom line is that those are issues that should be decided by parents and instructed by parents. Sure, there are some parents that won't sit down with Little Johnny and have the talk about the birds and the bees until he's already learned the Playboy version from his 3rd grade buddies. But it isn't public education's position to do the parents' job. There are less than 200 school days in a year, and students spend less than 7 hours a day in a classroom. Take out time from that to make sure that they learn the Dewey Decimal System in the school library and go to the school's gymnasium to play dodge ball for 30 minutes so that they'll work off those 2 Twinkies they're going to go home and eat, and there's not enough time to teach math, spelling and writing, let alone time to talk about Mary's daddy's special friend and demonstrate the proper way to get down on your prayer rug and point your body towards the east and put your nose against the floor so you can pray to the god of Islam. I'm very ignorant of the education systems in ***an and other areas of the world that are superior to us, but if I were placing a blind bet, I'd bet that they stay out of the social issues and stick to the fundamentals of a good education. Until get the NEA's influence the heck out of the arena of education policy, no amount of federal legislation is ever going to get our public education system back on the right track.

[Alsatian]

I have a somewhat parochial view on schools, but this may nevertheless be helpful. In my affluent suburb the public schools are excellent and students are able to get a very good education. The facilities are superb. The teachers are generally -- not all -- high caliber. Additionally, they have a program of pre-Advanced Placement, Advanced Placement, and Gifted and Talented courses that are available starting in the 6th grade. What happens is that parents who understand education and value education steer their kids into these accelerated courses and demand that their kids achieve. In this community, there are a lot of educated professionals, so generally there is a concentration of these "parents who understand and value education." Most of the cut-up, discipline problem kids do not take up these more challenging classes. If kids do not maintain a sufficient grade point in these accelerated courses, they are also herded out of these courses into "academic" courses -- non-accelerated courses. What happens is that the accelerated courses get filled up with motivated kids whose parents have set high expectations for them and the courses are able to progress without the substantial drag of discipline problems and unprepared students. The result is some damn smart kids who have learned a lot -- calculus, chemistry, biology, history, labs linked to the science courses that are MUCH more rigorous and informative than what I faced going to high school in a rural school in Illinois 1970-1974.

I would say that the most important ingredient in the above successful public school system is the isolation of discipline problem kids and underachieving kids from the population of motivated, engaged kids. The motivated, engaged kids can get a good education. The remainder get the crummy, low quality education you all are complaining about -- but this is what they have coming to them, in my opinion. Alternatively, if you could just permanently expell the discipline problems and somehow compell the underachievers to get with it and learn, that might work too. I know small schools are at a resource disadvantage when if comes to providing this quality two-tier system.

Another thing that emerges from the above is how much school quality is a function of culture. Parents who are educated and value education are going to demand this of their school system and of their kids. In an inner city school, this just isn't going to be the kind of parent you have. There is no public school solution for this cultural problem. The culture of these inner cities must change and take on the serious job of forming the character and moral of their children first.

So I guess I would say don't give up on public schools, but understand the problem and understand what works. Don't throw money at inner city schools if the culture there is broken. It will just be wasted money.

Another way to look at it, and I acknowledge that this may be somewhat cynical, is from the point of view of taking care of yourself. If you live in the inner city and have children, move the hell out of there pronto!!! If you live in a small rural community, you might want to move away from there to an affluent suburban community. Same issues, to some extent, in the small rural schools -- discipline problem kids and kids who are simply going through the motions seriously retard the progress of classes for the motivated serious students. Of course, some people aren't going to want to make these kind of lifestyle adjustments to get a good public school education. There is private school. Send your kids to a Catholic school. Many of these are available even in small rural communities.

[burniegoeasily]

Alsatian
You nailed it. As it stands, schools are held accountable for the "slacker" and under achievers above the motivated students. Bush demands a bringing up of the lower element and ignore the upper kids. It"™s sad to say, but I have been told by superior, to ignore the upper level kids, because they can survive on their own, and pay attention to the lower level kids and under achievers. NCLB demands that all kids learn on the same level, so that translates into; lowering the level so the lower level kids can pass the mandated test. It ignores the target kids. And Bush thinks this is going to make students entering college much more prepared. I know a lot about what Bush thinks about education, I"™ve suffered him as a governor. He got all his hair brain ideas as a governor. NCLB makes as much since as putting 7th grade kids on a varsity football team and making them play every position. Even the kids who cannot walk, see, or care to play the game. Doing this so they can learn how to play football at a varsity level, then holding the coach accountable for the kids not being able to perform at that level.

[Lanse couche couche]

All i know is that i became fed up with the state of undergraduate college students' attitudes 7 or 8 years ago, so i can only imagine the attitudes that teachers have to deal with among younger kids in public schools. Too many touchy feely administrative types were screwing things up long before NCLB came along.