What Do You Think Should Be Done . . .
moultano
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">with the American public school system?</div> This is a huge problem with dozens of sociological factors, so it may be difficult to keep the discussion on track, but I'd be very interested to hear people's experiences from public schools around the country. What worked? What didn't work? What were your impressions? Are the problems fixable?
I'll post my thoughts sometime this week.
I'll post my thoughts sometime this week.
Comments
My wife and I are young, we have no children, and we just bought our first house.
We have to pay through the nose in taxes to send other children to public school.
My wife is a school teacher in a private school - it gets 0 governement money. In order to accept government money it would have to start teaching crap like evolution in the classroom.
Parents pay huge dollar amounts to send their kids to the school my wife teaches at. This is on top of their tax dollars used to send other kids to the crap public schools. They make a huge sacrifice for the quality education. And none of the parents are rich - all middle class working people.
The kids in the school by in large do very well when tested. They don't have behavioral problems (some come from single parent homes), and they aren't all hopped up on ritalin. However, they all know that their parents care enough about them to keep them out of public school.
Scrap the system.
ROFL. Good to see private schools are all about educating students instead of pushing religious agenda...
Honestly it's all about the attitude of the students in the school. If there are kids who don't want to be there, no amount of money is going to help them. And the only sure fire way to make them want to be in school and succeed is for parents to push them to do so, to show them that education is important.
Private school provides this kind of boost, usually because the parent is paying out the wazoo and will make that kid take it seriously. It's not that public schools are worse than private schools, it's that the attitudes of the parents and children are different.
Inner city schools aren't necessarily failing from a lack of funding, but rather from a lack of parenting. States can throw money at schools all they want and not improve them on anything but a superficial level.
I went to a huge public school and we had many successful students, some that tested better than any in the region. And it wasn't really well funded, no class trips, no blinds or shades in the classrooms, paper shortages, budget failures. It's all what the students make of it.
My fixes would consist of the following:
1. Repeal the No Child Left Behind Act -- It doesn't work and places unmanagable burdens on teachers. It doesn't take things like mental handicaps into account when determining average and it cuts funding to schools that don't meet certain standards. There's a reason educators hate it and I'm more inclined to listen to the myriad teachers that are saying it's bad than to take Bush's word that it's a good thing.
2. Increase the school's ability to deal with problematic students -- This includes things like allowing teachers to kick problem students out of their class and give schools more leeway in suspending and expelling troublemakers. I'm not saying let's beat the little bastards, but I always felt cheated when 10 minutes of class time was wasted trying to get things under control.
3. Increase the difficulty of the curriculum -- No more of this lowest common denominator crap. I slept through my classes in high school and I still graduated with honors. I got very tired of having to go outside of school in order to find anything interesting to read and discuss. The top three things I'd like to see an increase in teaching are philosophy, mathematics and science. Philosophy because it's the cornerstone of Western thought, mathematics because it's so intregal to modern society and science because it's important to know how the world works and it's a good long-term investment in the economy. I also think that some economics classes should be mandatory. The number of students going off to college who know nothing about the economy is alarming.
4. Allow for some controversy -- I always wanted to debate things like abortion, religion, gun control and other current events topics but was never allowed because of their volitile nature. Pretending that controversial topics don't exist does a great disservice to people.
I saw enforce discipline, set up a better tardy policy/system, and invest in school uniforms.
2. Enforce a firm (but not overbearing) dress code that does not include uniforms. If the children violate this code, then have uniforms ready for the extreme cases. Embaressment in front of your peers is a powerful tool.
3. Allow gum chewing and bottled drinks in class. Giving children the capability for some minor activity while listening to a long lecture can actually make them pay better attention. As a side effect, if gum and small candy is not frowned upon more might go in the garbage and less under the desks.
4. Be highly selective of teachers and pay them better...for god's sake. While the mentally handicapped should not normally be descriminated against, they may have no place teaching children since they have a mental handicap. Teachers should be knowledgable, alert, understanding, willing to look beyond their own favored viewpoints, reasonably healthy, mentally stable, and good humored. They need all their facilities in good form and in turn, they should be payed much better than they are.
5. Allow for political, cultural, and religious debate but the state and school should ultimately favor no one side. It should be the school's view through national law that all law-abiding religions, political ideologies, and cultures are to be treated equally. If debate interferes with individual intellectual advancement through lecture or other teaching, the debate must be abandoned for the purpose of said advancement. The debate may continue at another, more reasonable, time.
Individual and student-led religious acts such as prayer should be allowed if the behaviour does not interfere with lecture or teaching of the individual in question or other students. The school as an entity, however, should not lead religious acts of any type at any time as it is not the duty of the state to do such.
6. Involve the parents. The parents of children under the age of 18 should be required to attend a minimum of two meetings per school year. There should be minimum of two meetings held each month of the school year, by school authorities. If the parents have no reasonble explaination as to why they did not attend, they should recieve a fine for neglecting to participate in their child's education.
The school is not there to raise children, not even it can teach everything required for living life to the fullest. The parents must be involved and held accountable for their actions if they refuse to be involved.
GG. Now only people who can afford school can get educated, so if your family is too poor, they will be too poor to educate you, and you'll grow up unable to find a decent job because you didn't get an education, and so you'll be too poor to send you're kids to school. TR would kick you in the balls if he weren't so busy spinning in his grave.
I honestly don't know.
I grew up in NYC, I went to one of the Science High Schools (Bronx HS of Science), I had to test to get in. I come from an upper middle class family.
I am now a college drop out living with his mum, working at a dead end job.
You people suggest making school more strict?
I had a dress code:
No midriff showing, shorts/skirts no more then 2 in above the knee, nothing foul or suggestive on clothing, no hats inside school, and no gang colours (and I think wife beaters and bras straps showing were a no no also).
Our attendance policy was decent (I know many people thrown out for cutting).
We were listed as one of the top 5 safest schools in the country.
My senior year nearly 1/2 the teachers quit, or moved to another zone so as to get better pay.
Allot of you are forgetting that schools are NOT federally run, they are locally run. NYC School teachers get payed didly compared to Connecticut ones.
What do we really need?
We need studies that will tell us what actually needs to be learned, and how best to teach it.
We nee to know how to get students interested.
We need to know how to keep lower class neighborhoods from getting the shaft.
We don't need teachers who have been using the same lesson plans for 30+ years.
We don't need to just shovel factoids down students throats.
How can we do this?
I don't know.
Wish I did.
but then again, I am a stock clerk with 2 years college experience, what do I know?
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I've been to around 7 schools so far, some of them were DoD schools, all public.
When I was in public school I felt the same way: kids were being taught how to <b>do</b> but not how to <b>think</b>. This is fine if you want school to be an assembly line for menial task workers. I would like to think that the majority of the population is capable of more than that. But maybe I'm too idealistic. Maybe we need lots of dumb robot-people to fill in the lower/middle classes, in order to maintain society's stability. In this case school is doing its job just fine, eh?
On privatization, I think the biggest "danger" would be an increase of class stratification, like others have said. But I think public school is assisting in that already.
It's fun, but man it's just boring. I say make school not a chore, if that's somehow possible.
We need to have higher quality teachers and stop hiring coaches to do the job. Now I know alot of coaches are good teachers as well, but with my past experiences all the coaches I've had taught straight from the book. I mean straight from the book, word for word. We also need to have teachers teaching fields they majored in. I.E. stop putting math teachers in english classes.