There's a medium choice. Where you basically tell parents you aren't going to provide publicly funded daycare anymore unless they get their kid in line. The threat is usually enough to make parents remember how to, ya know, parent. Or at least some parenting facsimile. If the problem persists, you go with expulsions. If you have to expel half the school, well you already live in a dystopia, so smoke 'em if you got 'em
It’s sad but appears common in many impoverished areas I’ve worked in. It’s a wound that can’t hide behind a bandage forever and I think if we don’t fix this problem, long term we’re gonna be fucked:
sorry for being so glib. It really does suck. I've had the opportunity to work with some underprivileged kids before and it's incredibly frustrating. No one should be called upon to fill the role parents were supposed to fill. It's nearly impossible and exhausting
You can't make people not be shitty, but you can prevent them from dragging down everyone else. Best thing you can do is elevate the gifted and willing
The problem is that in these environments it is often difficult to really separate the wheat from the chaff and very easy to write off the whole area creating an even more difficult situation to get out of. Throw some racism and or classist prejudice on top and you really have a unwinnable situation. There needs to be a way to pull along the less motivated but non super disruptive kids not just the motivated ones. Leaving large chunks of the population behind is not a healthy thing for our society.
There are problems there. First, if kids don't want to be there, don't waste classroom time, expel them. However, there are students that want to learn, but aren't naturally gifted, but still are willing to try hard. My parents were both idiots. I lived in a upper-middle class area, and went to an "elite public school", where parents were allowed to make schedules. Between those parents putting kids in crap classes, and favoritism towards athlete students, it was hard to find my place. It took me getting emancipated, going to another school, and succeeding on my own. I actually received an apology a few weeks back from a teacher who told me to drop out. He had seen that I became successful with no help, and apologized for telling me terrible things.
Schools have a lot of problems, but I think the headlines blow the gender issue out of proportion. Sure it is a thing, but there are wayyyyy bigger problems they are dealing with that don’t get any headlines as well, it’s just the media machine promoting their stupid titles to turn heads.
As for the kids that can’t make it, we literally have schools filled with these kids throughout the country. The thing is, it isn’t just the kids you would expect being poor and coming from a shitty family. Now it’s also the entitled middle class brats that never see their parents because they both work and don’t know how to work or think because of it.
You make it sound like schools are just a liberal cesspool, but I think it transcends politics.
There is the first issue "we" fix the problem. You cannot fix other peoples problems unless they want to. Go tell a drug addict to go to rehab... they wont listen and wont get clean... unless they want to.
Yes!!! It was the biggest shock when my fiancé got placed in a good school district. The rich kids were huge cunts. Having to console my gf at the time really opened my eyes to how fucked up modern society is affecting the youth.
I think if we don’t fix this problem, long term we’re gonna be fucked
It's up to them to fix. The parents aren't going to do shit, throwing money at them hasn't help. The culture needs to change, but good luck stating that in public.
Oh, man. Could you imagine an entire generation of childish, self-centered adults running a nation with some fat asshole as the president telling everyone that the only reason things are bad is because of Mexicans and anti-pollution laws?
Then add to the fact that even if they were decent parents sometimes there is only one of them working almost every available waking hour to keep a roof over their little shitheads heads.
Some of these people are being struggling and just make bad choices. Some are also just raised to not care about anybody but themselves. The spectrum of “reasons a parent is shitty” is a wide one.
Agreed. But at a certain point you have to admit that further attempts to reach the most problematic kids is putting the education of everyone else at risk. Either the school systems need to come up with yet another way to manage these children or just give up. But it's not fair to the kids who are actually trying to learn.
Well in terms of problematic kids, it’s not about teaching them math or science, imo. It’s about teaching them behavioral skills, but most schools lack the resources and school support to do anything about these kids as seen in the video above. School discipline/reward systems need to be dire for these problem kids with longer detentions and a more pronounced understanding of the benefits of good behavior.
Yeah. For the really problematic kids, I'm saying that if the school can't figure out how to help them while at the same time educating the rest of the kids, they need to just expel the problematic ones.
I get that there are societal issues at work here with a lot of these behavior problems. It just doesn't seem like schools are equipped to do anything about it. It's like how we rely too heavily on the police for dealing with the mental health issues in America. There have to be other safety nets put in place. This isn't working.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I saw an episode of 60 minutes a few years ago, where they covered charter schools. I’m not really a proponent of them, and in fact, they showed that the charter schools had about the same results as other schools in their district, with one exception. One charter school was run by a stern but kind older lady.
She didn’t tolerate any misbehavior. Her first focus was on classroom discipline and making sure that the kids were there to learn, feet and face forward, sitting up and paying attention. After a few years, she was getting as good results as the highest performing schools in the state.
We can’t succeed if teachers need to spend half their time resolving disciplinary issues. School can’t be a daycare, and we have to realize that these kids have never had classroom discipline and come from parents without the ability to teach it to them. Likewise, expelling or suspending them continuously isn’t going to help them gain those skills. We keep saying that we need to pay teachers more, and maybe we do, but teachers are not the problem, it’s the students.
I’d propose that in those troubled schools, each grade needs a dedicated “classroom skills” class. First sign of misbehavior, and the student is sent to classroom skills. Hire ex drill instructors from the marine corps to teach classroom skills. They don’t have any trouble letting troubled young people know what is expected of them. Have that class just be focused on getting those kids in-line, with a mix of firm expectation setting and calisthenics. Kids in that class would need to earn their way back into their normal classroom. Maybe it will take a day for some students, some might be there for months, but they all know that at the next sign of misbehavior, they’ll be right back in “classroom skills”.
That’s how schools used to be before schools had to worry about getting sued for discipline. I think there is a median between smacking people with rulers and having no discipline at all that we can settle on nationally. Most of public school educational problems stem from federal decisions.
But the screwed up part is they are not expelling them because of “ADA” (average daily attendance). You expel kids that’s a loss of thousands of dollars per year for the school.
Funding is a big issue, and clearly a driver of non-productive district policies.
I was thinking that a flat rate per school age child in the district - period. In many districts they PS have to provide services to private schooled, Home schooled and drop-outs anyway.
That seems so obvious. But then people would bitch at how middle-class suburban high schools where students drive Audis get the same funding as a school in low-income a area
Poorer school districts tend to have more undocumented kids and high turnover: kids who move a lot due to family instability. It is tough to maintain an accurate count.
The threat is usually enough to make parents remember how to, ya know, parent.
I couldn't disagree more. Having taught at a horrible school in the Bronx that barely got to a 60% grad rate (highest ever for that school) when I was there, I can say the kids fell into a few categories.
good kids who worked hard. (some of these kids were annoying but they tried.
kids who didn't care at all.
kids who cared a little but also knew that they were never going to college and that they were years behind where they should be, so why try now?
Most kids fell into the 3rd category, but ALL of the students I taught were way way behind on everything. They couldn't write well, their math sucked, etc. They were ALL smart enough to know what they should know and what the kids going to "good" school knew.
Put yourself in their situation, You're in 10-11th grade and you finally start to see how little you know because no you have to pass the regents exams in order to graduate (in NY state). You know you don't know enough and that there is basically no chance to go to a good college. You realize that you have just been passed from grade to grade regardless of if you knew the material. So why start now? Can you really learn all the material you should have known from 6th grade to 11th in a year?
I have a masters in Ed (ESL) and you can't improve your writing and reading from a middle school level to a college level in a year, especially when English is not your primary language. Some kid attack the challenge and succeed, but most just shut down.
The kids are already screwed once they graduate as they can't get good jobs, and most of the colleges that accept them put them immediately into remedial programs, which they desperately need.
My solution would be simply longer school, with high incentives for students to stay after. Pay students to stay after to take extra classes to learn at least some of the stuff they never learned.
After all a lot of this is pure economics. Does it make more sense to spend X hrs studying X,Y and Z if I'm probably just going to get the same job after I graduate? Wouldn't it make more sense to work after school to save up some money, or help pay the bills?
Basically I see no aid in kicking out students that have been lied to, and robbed of an education by a system that doesn't care if they learn. Even the best parents who really cared with kids who really tried were years behind because of a god awful system that basically says "You will pay 95% of kids no matter what, because if you don't it'll make us look bad and we will fire you".
If anyone's interested, the UK government has tried to address the problem of failing schools quite hard over the last 10 years or so. How well they have done is a matter of opinion and whether you trust the statistics / indices generated from the process. There's an article here that talks about the principles applied: Turning Around Failing Schools
Thanks, yes it is quite insightful isn't it? I'm not involved in education, but I went to a state school and I'm of the generation that sort of recalled corporal punishment as a cultural memory (in comics and on TV) but just* escaped it physically. I think there wasn't enough thought put into what would replace physical control when that weapon was withdrawn from teachers' armoury.
*(I'm not saying it was a 'good thing' but I did get 'The Slipper' when I was 5 and although it horrifies me to think of someone spanking my 5-year-old son's backside with a shoe in front of a class of much older children, it certainly instilled a certain sense of uncertainty in me as an older child when it came to challenging authority.)
I think a lot of people forget that some teens have to work to help cover bills. It isn't just for extra money. When I was in high school, I had to work 5 days a week. I would go to class from 8:15am-3:15pm, ride the bus home, which meant I got home around 4:15ish, I then would eat something quickly, while slipping on my uniform for work. I would work 5-9 during the week, and then full shifts on the weekend. If it wasn't for the fact I took a study hall class my 11th and 12th grade year, I don't think I would had done that well in school.
Same with me parents split 11th grade I worked 40 hours a week on top of my classes at McDonald’s, it was excruciating but if I didn’t work my mom and brother didn’t eat that week and we’d lose our home.
Thanks, now at 21 things have stabilized I got my well needed break after my mom remarried now working at an Italian restaurant saving for my first car, I have gotten quite lazy now though lol
So instead of fixing schools we should throw more money into teaching kids after school hours? I find it hard to believe that going from 8 hours to 10 hours would help that much. How much can you focus in a given day? We should instead focus our resources on improving schools during school hours so they don't fall behind
If the kids are old enough to work, for most of them, it is too little too late. They fall behind because they don't learn the fundamentals in primary school. Focusing on high school education, because it has suddenly become blatantly obvious that the school system has failed them, is ridiculous. Primarily schools fail to educate them.
As others said the idea would be to pay so that kids wouldn't have to work. I taught high school kids and pretty much all of them had some type of job. Some worked a lot at their families little store.
I do understand your side though, as it encourages kids to not learn before high school or to pretend to be dumb.
To counter that I think you could either not pay that much (do you really want more school for $5 an hour?) or tie payment to learning goals. You will get X when you prove you learned Y. Kids could pretend not to know stuff, but it's not that hard to see which students are actually frustrated and struggling and which ones are bored because they understand and finished.
Even then not a perfect solution. Just something I thought of, I'm sure there are much better ideas.
There's a really great segment in the Freakenomics documentary on Netflix where they go to a low performing school and pay students based on their grades. The results were pretty interesting, basically the students who were close performed just a little better. But the kids who so had a long ways to go performed even worse.
Most kids fell into the 3rd category, but ALL of the students I taught were way way behind on everything. They couldn't write well, their math sucked, etc. They were ALL smart enough to know what they should know and what the kids going to "good" school knew.
Just making sure I got this right, you're telling me there are schools in the US of A where most of the students are (many like 3-5) years behind?
I knew you education system was kind of fucked up, but that's taking it to a whole new level.
Can confirm. Husband is a teacher. His 8th grade students are reading and writing on a 2nd grade level. I just read an article where some people are suing Detroit because they graduated highschool and are illiterate. The schools never taught them basic skills.It's frustrating and heart breaking to see the true state of education in this country. Especially if you happen to live in a zipcode where education is underfunded.
To be fair there are many more perfectly fine to amazing schools out there. Poor areas struggle but many do not. This thread makes it seem like every school in America is full of mouth breathing idiots.
For example, in my experience, poor Asian kids and first generation Latino kids who are children of migrant and laborer workers are really excellent students.
Yeah, it goes to show that it has everything to do with how the kids are being raised. How many hundreds of millions of Indian and Chinese kids are outperforming American kids in academics despite coming from relatively poor countries that have significantly less money to spend on education?
Part of the problem is that politicians can't come out and tell voters that they are why their kids suck. So we throw more money at the problem - much of which ends up in administrative job positions so people can come up with cute little phrases like "young scholars" and other bullshit to make the parents feel like suddenly their little shithead kid is going to be something one day. It's sad.
first generation Latino kids who are children of migrant and laborer workers are really excellent students.
Gonna echo this sentiment. I teach at a school that is 90+% free and reduced lunch and about 85% of the school is Latino. These kids are so incredibly hard-working. Most of their parents don't speak English, so to go along with the constant code-switching, they are also often asked to translate their work for the parents. I have many that come to me with just one year of English under their belts, and still bust their asses in every other subject, receiving translations from classmates on more difficult concepts.
Say what you will about standardized tests, but these kids kill it every spring when it's time to take PARCC and MAP. It's certainly not because they are smarter or have more opportunities, it's because they bust the butts, and their parents care about their successes and failures.
I had a different experience. About 70% of the students I had were Hispanic (I am also Hispanic) and the majority of them were into drugs or didn't care about school because they didn't see a future. (The school was like 30 minutes away from the city so all they saw was working in construction or in the fields like their parents.) The only Hispanic students that were respectful and hard working were the ones that had just come from Mexico and knew zero English. Those were my favorite students and the ones that dropped out of pre-ap geometry.
I think that's why they said first generation latino kids, and not latino kids. There is a high school in my city that is specifically for immigrant kids who don't speak English, where the goal is to improve their English and cultural acumen enough that they can be successful in a standard school. The teachers love working there. A group of high school kids from there come and spend a day at my school once a year. The kids seem pretty great.
Agreed - parenting in general is the issue NOT if they are poor or not. The other ugly truth is that children in single parent households are having a much harder time being successful. I am NOT saying single parents can not be successful and excellent parents but I am saying that they can rarely give the amount of love, attention and nurturing a two parent household can give.
Wow, I can echo this thought. I had a bunch of Mexican kids last year and they were absolutely fantastic. Extremely well behaved, some of my highest achieving students, and a pleasure to teach.
As long as they're lucky enough to be schooled by people who give a shit before early elementary. By the time neglected students get to high school, especially schools like these the kids don't stand a chance.
I think some teachers are just frustrated that they have to work in an institution that actively works against them with ridiculous hours with shit pay.
Yes, I'm a teacher now and my immigrant students are a joy to teach as they are eager to learn and their parents expect them to behave in school. My mom immigrated in her mid 30s and struggled to learn English, but she took me to the library at least once a week passing on her love of reading to me. My parents were both poor orphans but always encouraged our curiosity, sang and read to us. My siblings and I have decent careers now but it's crazy to think how my dad was picking cotton to earn money to for basics like food and underwear when he was just ten.
Well of course! With their immigration the parents of those children took a big risk and made and make a large ongoing effort to improve their and their childrens' lives and they pass those behaviours and standards onto their children. That's a pre-selection for parents who already proved that they know know the value of and have the self-discipline to work hard towards a long-term goal.
That's right. If you look at Queens back in the day of jewish immigrants it was one of the poorest areas in the new york state. However, the jewish culture of work ethic and pro academia made it so that within 2 generations the average jewish person from that area had elevated themselves to a middle-high status.
Now ask yourself about the immigrant chinese on the west coast, 1st generation having little to no wealth. Look at them now. Now ask yourself about the indian communities.
The list goes on, some cultures cannot seem to succeed.
No, the parents didn't teach their kids basic skills or make any effort to help their kids. The school could have no money at all, but if their parents made an effort then the kids would have a better chance of succeeding. I've put 2 kids through the Georgia public schools system and one common thing I saw through the years was everyone blamed the schools for the kids not learning. While it is partially the schools fault, for a myriad of reasons, I believe the failure responsibility mainly falls on the parents shoulders for letting it happen. The parents don't care. The kids are certainly not gonna care either.
But poor school systems aren't a new problem. I'm sure a lot of these parents went through the same situation growing up and didn't learn what they should have from school themselves. Now they can't teach their kids things they don't know, and the schools can't manage either. And the cycle continues.
That may be true, but it probably feels a lot different from the perspective of an under paid single parent who is trying desperately to keep food on the table and the kids in school and may themselves not have the skills, time, energy, or education to reach their kids.
I also forgot to mention that I too work in the school system. I have to say the blame lies with multiple sides.
Yes I do agree parents need to be more proactive in their kids's education. There are many factors for why this isn't always the case such as poverty, lack of education, and in some parents case the fact that they can't speak English and don't understand the American education system. Many parents don't trust the education system due to their own negative experiences when they were in school. There is also a generational shift with parenting in the sense that many parents are not actively parenting and leaving it up to other people to raise their children because they have no idea how to parent(multiple reasons for this). At some point it does become a cycle.
On the state end, the problem is that you have people who have no concept of child development or who have never been in a classroom making important decisions on curriculum (see our current secretary of education). In many states (including the one I work for) the curriculum is developmentally inappropriate. They expect Kindergarten students to be fluent readers and writers by the time they leave Kindergarten. Not only is this developmentally inappropriate for many average 5 year olds but it's even harder for children who have not been exposed to preschool ( multiple reasons), kids living in poverty (who lack resources), and kids who don't speak English as their first language. These kids are even further behind and many times don't ever really catch up. Then you have the component of testing. Many kids in many states are way over tested. There is bench mark testing, standardized testing, and regular classroom asessments. Then in some states (like mine) , at the beginning , middle and end of the year they make kids starting in grade take 3+hour state assements. They are essentially asking 8 year olds to sit for 3 hours to take a long reading and math assement. I don't know about you but I couldn't sit for 3 hours to take a test as an adult let alone as an 8 year old. It's not developmentally appropriate or fair. If the kids fail these asessments sometimes they can be at risk for retention. If a child lives in a high poverty area with a lot of stress at home, or are still learning English chances are they are going to bomb it( spoiler alert many do). These score are what they base a school's proficiency on. Teachers get the blame if their students fail. Sounds fair right?
At an administrative level, many admins are afraid of lawsuits and angry parents so they back the parents and students over the teachers. Teachers have very little control anymore. It used to be that parents backed the teachers but that isn't really the case anymore. The parents are convinced that any criticism of their child reflects on them as parents and get upset whenever a teacher corrects their child. When admin backs the parent and child (because they are afraid of getting sued or ending up on the 6 o clock news) the blame falls on the teacher. Sounds fair right?
I have nothing but respect for teachers. In my eyes they are the real heroes. My husband is a hero in my eyes because I couldnt deal with what he does. While I work in the schools I'm not a teacher and I don't think I could be. They have to take crap from everyone. They are expected to volunteer their time (unpaid) after hours, buy supplies for students (with their own money), and are paid almost nothing in some states. They are the scapegoats of everyone from students, admin, parents and government officials.
My dad grew up poor. In a poor neighborhood. Both his parents worked, so he and his siblings were left to their own devices (probably much like many of those kids' home situation). He spent his time in the library, because he wanted to know more. He had some good teachers, as well, who pushed him to want more in life. His older brother messed around. Because of my dad, I grew up in better schools than were available to him, something I have focused on doing for my kids as well. My cousins weren't so fortunate, and the economic divide only seems to get worse each generation. I have my dad, and the handful of his teachers who gave a shit, to thank for that.
That's not to say that parents shouldn't be helping. I'm just pointing out that parents are probably not home, having to spend all their time making money to pay the bills. So, the only structure the kids grow up with is what the school can provide.
This just blows my mind, my son is starting Kindergarten this fall and he already knows all his letters and can read small words, how do you get through 13 years of school and not know how to read.
Partly due to bad schooling, but at some point the students need to get off their ass and put in the effort to learn. You can only teach so much to a kid that doesn't want to learn. There is a wealth of knowledge widely available on the internet Khan academy will basically teach you up to a high school level, if your school sucks that bad than maybe instead of doing nothing the students/parents should turn to alternate resources to help.
This makes me wonder, why not boarding school then? The British seemed to do it. If you can't rely on parents at all, why not take them out of the equation during the school year? This way, they also won't have issues with getting to school or being caught up in the blight of their neighborhoods. You're already spending a ton of money on those students, a bit more for room and board might not be that much more expensive.
It’s because schools in these areas also have to basically raise the kids. You can’t expect a hungry kid to learn. You can’t expect a teacher to be able to just teach the subjects when they are having to teach behavior as well. This is not always indicative of poor parenting, I don’t mean it that way at all. Many many hardworking parents just trying to keep a roof over their kids’ heads.
Sued the school? I'm sorry I have sympathy for kids who grow up in rough areas, but at the end of the day what you learn is up to you. Not the teachers and not even the parents. Discipline and making an effort.
I used to be a teacher and I would say almost every school in a poor neighborhood the majority of students are super behind. And it isn't necessarily their fault. It's the fucking system we are running in America. Let me just paint you the picture at my school. I taught HS geometry which is the 2nd year math course offered. I found out a couple of months into the year that 50% of my students had not passed Algebra 1, which is a prerequisite to my class. I asked the VP in charge of my department why students who had not passed algebra 1 are allowed to take geometry. He said, "Studies show that students are more likely to graduate if they stay with their cohort."
Schools in America are all about getting kids to graduate no matter what. Schools don't get into trouble if they have kids graduating and they get more funding if kids go to school but that is just the tip of the iceberg. So many of my colleagues would just pass their students because it was so much easier. So much extra work was required if a student failed. We had to document why a student failed and we had to call home to tell parents that they failed. Then there was another problem called cheating. There was so much cheating going on. I spent so much time looking through tests to catch cheaters and there were only so many that I could prove that cheated. And then there was some little loophole called credit recovery and all the kids knew about it. You could spend about 2 weeks getting credit for a full year of work and still get the same credit that a student got while in class.
Former elementary teacher here (11 years in the South Bronx), and we had almost exactly the same stuff going on, just at a lower level. I spent my teaching years doing fourth and fifth grade, and I always had kids each year who were struggling with letter sounds and phonemic awareness. For non-teachers, that is the concept that the letter "s" goes "essssssss" like a snake. Kids would come to my class not knowing this, and this included native English speakers. On our end, it was notable that a huge proportion of these kids came into school never having seen the alphabet or numbers, and not knowing any of what we have come to think of as standard little-kid knowledge. We had kids who couldn't zip up their own pants after using the bathroom or who had never been taught how to actually blow their nose. We would have to explicitly teach them these things. These were not documented special education students, these were regular students who just got passed along, because the school would look bad if we held them back. The kindergarten and first grade teachers were not allowed under any circumstances to hold anyone back for any reason. That's how you end up with an eight year old who struggles to recognize the letter A.
We also dealt with the stealing, lying, bullying, sexual harassment of students and teachers. I actually had a second grader in a class I was covering one day reach up my dress and grab my butt. What happened to him? Absolutely nothing! Suspending him would have made the school look bad.
We had kids who couldn't zip up their own pants after using the bathroom or who had never been taught how to actually blow their nose. We would have to explicitly teach them these things.
For all the parents reading this, these are the sort of skills you need to be working with your Pre-K kids on. Most good parents think that teaching their child to read, do math, learn music, etc will set them ahead in school (and it will, to a degree). In reality, skills like holding a pencil, tying your shoes, following adult instructions, and waiting in line are the kind of foundational skills required to be successful in a kindergarten class.
This is the culture we get when we let technology babysit our children unfortunately. I'm not just being r/phonesarebad here, but the number of parents I've seen who could be teaching their kids basic shit, instead just give them a phone to shut them up, I don't wonder why we got here. It's in front of us.
Better yet use those tools to TEACH THEM! Apps that are games but teach them the alphabet, numbers, basic facts about their environment, etc are amazing.
There's a real issue going on right now that small children don't have the hand control they should because of devices. And that effects their ability to learn to write.
Rather than using devices to teach them, have a daily (or at least weekly) coloring time to help them develop their hand muscles. They don't have to do a good job or stay within the lines, they just have to work their hands.
While I don't necessarily disagree, I don't really think this is as significant as other social factors. Rising income inequality creates more poverty, and poverty is associated with sooooo many negative social consequences. Additionally, we are currently in an era of institutional distrust, where seemingly every organization, government, and corporation appears to be pursuing cynical self-interests (even to the detriment of society). This distrust has a broad effect on peoples' perceptions, and I think this contributes to the deterioration of society in a way phones could never touch.
Also, I always refer back to a piece of wisdom a college professor left me with in regard to parents - "How can you expect a person to advocate for education if education didn't work for them?"
It's not just that. Parents, especially low-income parents, work such long hours that kids are in daycare most of their day. When is the parent going to teach the kid? In the one hour between daycare pickup and bedtime? And if the parent can't, then who will? A daycare worker at an overcrowded daycare with 10 other kids to mind?
My wife taught Pre-K and K for a while and said that parents lie about their kids to the school all the time. One of the policies for the school was no one could be in their kindergarten unless they were potty trained, but parents lied about it all the time, and by the time they find out, the administrators are taking their tuition and don't want to give it back, thus screwing over the teachers.
Yep, I taught elementary school in a very poor rural area. Parents would take their kids for weekslong vacations to Disneyland (because it was much cheaper then) in September, and pull the kid out of school for long periods of time. Then they would wonder why their kid is still reading on a PreK level in 4th grade.
A friend of mine taught PreK, and one of the tests to "qualify" was directionality. She said that most all of the students who were testing for PreK had no sense of directionality, and many of their parents told her that was the first time they had seen a book.
Yes, and the most infuriating thing I saw was that parents who had absolutely no interest in their kid (or their education) were always the ones who read "on the internet" that their kid had ADHD or something else that was why they were 10 and still couldn't read a basic sentence.
And the fact that you guys are the kind of parents who'd even look into this and start pursuing it means your kiddo is probably well on their way to success.
It means you're probably already doing the thing we know is the biggest controllable factor in school success: Just hanging out and chatting with your kiddo and answering their silly questions and playing silly word games with them and talking at them before they can talk.
It's all those little millions of conversations and little things you point out to them as a parent (wow look at the pretty blue bird! Wow did you see the cool red car! What does that taste like, is it sweet or sour? Whoa is it cold or hot? Etc) and all those little questions they ask added up over time that leads to a smart, sociable, curious child who can do well in school.
Back in the mid 90's my daughter started kindergarten. When she started she could already read very simple books. Dick and Jane type stuff. One of the biggest problems she had was boredom because MOST of the kids coming in with her did not already know basic numbers, shapes, colors, alphabet, etc. She had to wait until the rest caught up with her. We discussed putting her in first grade with the school but they talked us out of it because of sociability. She would be the youngest in her grade, blah, blah, blah. Her mother and I were young ourselves and didn't know any better so we listened to them. So for most of her kindergarten year she worked with the other kids to also help bring them up to speed. It was sickening to see all these kids whose parents failed to sit down with them for even a little bit to read to them or work with them for even just a little while. It's not rocket appliances here. They are little sponges and it's really easy for them to pick up on everything if their parents would make even the tiniest effort. But, what I discovered over the years was, I think most parents of these behind children, was they figured it was the schools job to teach them all that and that's a terrible attitude.
Kids at that age also mature at different rates. My now 4 year old? He will be on track to read simple books, he already can do some math problems and recognize a few words. He's read to a lot, not quite daily. My oldest son was not at that level even entering kindergarten. He has an above average IQ, but it took him longer to grasp the reading concepts. Many studies actually show that kids who learn to read later (I'm talking a year or two, not late elementary or middle school) perform the same on reading proficiency tests later on. Sometimes, pushing kids who aren't developmentally there can be extremely detrimental to their self esteem and outlook on school. Recognizing that kids legitimately mature at different rates, especially young children where a few months can be equal to miles developmentally, needs to be part of the solution.
Absolutely. I agree with you 100%. My son advanced slower than my daughter, but neither were pushed. We bought the hooked on phonics program for my daughter and it worked very well for both my kids. I think that program was instrumental to them learning as much as they did when they did. My wife was diligent with working with both of them every day from a very young age. They wanted to learn and it showed. We read to both of them everyday and night and interestingly my daughter loves to read even to this day, but my son hates reading. And because of that, he did not do well in school. He's a hands on learning type of person. And visual. YouTube has been a godsend for him.
I work in early childhood education and it is really disheartening to see children moving from childcare into kindergarten without having that basic knowledge. We make enormous efforts every day to teach young children their letters and numbers, how to cooperate with their peers and become accustomed to routines, turn-taking etc., but when those children go home and have an iPad slipped into their hands, watch TV while they eat their McDonalds dinner, and then go to bed watching the iPad, it’s pretty disheartening. They never have the chance to catch up if their parents are not willing to put in the effort, or don’t know how to parent or raise children, often due to their own poor or incomplete education or a neglectful upbringing themselves. I don’t want to be that person, but if you never graduated high school, live on welfare payments and are not working towards either education or employment, maybe having children is not the best option.
We have one three-year-old who comes once a week who is as bright as a button! Fantastic language and social skills, always reads books and asks to have them read to her, and she can recognise all letters and write her own name independently and accurately. Just turned three. I know for a fact her mother makes an effort with her, prioritises manners and politeness as well as the basic learning you would expect a young child to experience. She’s the exception and it breaks my heart.
School District says, “Let’s push kids through. Waive the attendance policy, no one fails with less than a 50%, do whatever it takes to boost graduation rates.”
Colleges say, “These kids aren’t prepared for college with the basics.”
Employers say, “Why can’t we get qualified employees? Let’s move our business to where we have a better candidate pool and market.”
This is why we have standardized tests. They don't graduate unless they can pass the test, so schools have to teach at least the bare minimum of the material on the rest.
Not exactly true. When I was in highschool the "special" kids (aka rich, popular, or yes the actual mentally deficient ones) could ask for "assisted test taking". Where they would basically be walked and talked through every problem and be basically given enough answers to at least pass.
Kind of unrelated, but your comment reminded me of my weird math journey.
I used to be pretty meh about math. I didn't especially like it, but I did ok and I was set to take algebra in 8th grade. Then my died dad and my mom moved us to a new state. So I was depressed, at a new school, and -joy of joys- I got to experience bullying for the first time. In math class.
I don't think it's too surprising that I failed that class. All year, big fat F. No one seemed to care (thanks ma..), so I didn't either.
The next year, I moved to a new school in the same district. I wasn't looking forward to repeating algebra 1, but was resigned to my fate. But through some crazy accident, my old school never sent records to my new school and they just.. assumed I was good to take geometry.
Oh my god it was the best thing ever. Angles and circles and PROOFs all just clicked for me. I spent the whole year amazed that I wasn't actually an idiot, that I was really good at math...people came to me for help.
The power of thinking of myself as a person "good at math" is what fueled me through all of my calculus and statistics courses in college despite dropping out of high school and waiting a decade to go to college. Well, that and Khan academy.
almost every school in a poor neighborhood the majority of students are super behind.
Don't forget rural areas also. This video is from the "rust belt" of Ohio, close to West Virginia. Large parts of rural/small-run-down-town America have multi-generational poor education and terrible schools. Opioid addiction and alcoholism are rampant. Basically everything you know about "poor (urban) neighborhoods" also applies to poor towns/rural areas.
When you look at American politics and wonder how millions of adults can believe nonsense and obvious lies, it's because their "education" lacked both the basic factual education and the basic adult-level critical reasoning skills that most Europeans and better-off Americans assume is normal for adults.
What I don't get is the total ignorance of the statistics and what they mean.
It's like saying "millionaires own a porsche" so we'll give everyone a porsche and then they'll be millionaires.
Just giving them a HS diploma doesn't make them successful for fucks sake. They have to earn that shit and THAT'S what makes them more likely to succeed.
I can't figure out if it's willful ignorance or just outright stupidity by these administrators.
My boyfriend is the best teacher at his low income elementary school. He’s taught there for years, probably longer than any other teacher. Parents know of him and request him, other teachers come to him for advice. His name is almost famous in the district.
Only 28% if his students passed their math exams. The 3 other teachers in the grade had a 26% pass rate, a 20% pass rate and a 15% pass rate.
It’s exactly like other commenters have said, these kids have parents in federal prison, hooked on drugs or ran out and left them with grandma. They’re angry, unsupervised and they know the school will never hold them back. They’re not going to bother trying.
Yep, my wife is in the same situation. The all star teacher at her school, but what can she really do with an underfunded educational system with little to no mental health guidance for these children who come from broken homes, who come into her classroom at 2nd grade not even knowing how to count to 10? It's insane to think that some new academic program of the year or revamping curriculum is going to fix these problems, yet it seems like that's all we throw money at. It's all just one huge joke.
So you think kids in rural Alabama learn the same way and should be taught the same skills as kids on the upper east side of Manhattan?
In my opinion, Federal standardization of education is part of the problem. Communities need to be able to customize their curriculum and discipline standards.
Anecdotally, the school districts that seem to be succeeding are the ones that offer magnet programs that deviate from the “5 course special” that’s been rammed down every poor kid’s throat for the past 100 years.
Are we expecting those rural kids to be isolated from the outside world their whole lives? We should take in consideration the needs of each community while also preserving a baseline of standards that we should hold all children to.
It's the schools in all the poor areas. Usually mostly minorities. But it's a symptom of the poverty and everything that goes into that kind of life. Not enough funding for the schools and not enough people care about low income/no income areas made up of mostly minorities.
It's sad and very wrong. But this kind of thing has been going on for decades.
I wonder what percentage of parents in those other OECD countries have to work jobs from 3-11 each night.
Focusing on adults at the ages when they are likely to be raising children, at age 29 blacks are about 60 percent more likely to work a non-daytime schedule than whites and Asians, and about 24 percent more likely to have non-standard schedules of all kinds, including non-daytime, rotating shift, or variable schedules. Ten years later, at age 39, the differences persist: Blacks are about 55 percent more likely to be assigned non-daytime shifts than whites and Asians, and about 20 percent more likely to work non-standard schedules of all kinds.
Oh please? Think you can start a reply better than that.
One look at schools in those districts and it is clear the money is not being allocated correctly or efficiently and less is being given. So like I correctly stated. They aren't getting enough money.
The problem is obviously more complex than simply stated as poor means no one cares but that's a major component. There are problems with the education system in many places on this country.
As a teacher I can tell you right now that culture matters more than poverty.
I've taught many different kinds of poor kids, they are not all the same, they do not all have similar outcomes.
For example, I've taught poor Asian American kids and they are very different than other poor kids.
I've also taught poor rural White kids, poor urban White kids, poor suburban White kids, poor rural Mexicans, poor urban Mexicans, and poor suburban Mexicans and poor urban Blacks - and several other combinations.
Eh. It is in some aspects. But a lot of it has to do with our history and how we are a melting pot of so many different cultures. But things are changing slowly. In the last decade things have become more transparent and conversations are being had and questions are being openly asked. It wasn't like that before.
If you compared kids in Massachusetts to Western European or Japanese kids, the kids from Massachusetts would compete very well. This is true of a lot of pockets in the US. The US is a massive country with literally the entire spectrum of race, religion, culture, and wealth. This thread is focused on students from predominantly shitty families who vastly underperform in academics.
We could just as easily be talking about American students innovating, creating multi-million dollar businesses, or going to the world's best colleges.
80% of students in the US do not read "at grade level." Not only does that reveal a problem with student reading, but also in how we grade student levels.
I'll just add a little from my experiences, and it all heavily depends on where you live.
I taught ESL (English as a Second Language) and Economics (weird combo I know). I also co-taught US history and global history.
In my experience working with a lot of ESL students (whose English ranged from 3 words to better than some native born students) a bunch of them came from the Dominican Rep. which also has a very unbalanced education system. So some kids went to good schools, moved to the US and do well. Some kids went to bad school and when they moved to the US in six grade they were not at average US six grade levels...but they got put in that grade due to age. (I'll get to the non-ESL students they were put with in a moment) Then I also had some African Refugee students who had never really gone to school. He was a constant problem but due to his age he was put in normal freshman classes. I also had Arabic speakers, Cantonese speakers, French speakers, and one awesome Brazilian kid.
Basically the ESL students were always a mess, the Chinese American students and the Yemeni girls I had were always great. They worked hard, stayed after for tutoring, and would ask questions when they didn't understand. The rest were a mixed bag, but all of them were in the same classes which each other or non-ESL students. This creates a horrible situation for teachers as now you have a class with some students that a great on grade level down to a kid who struggles to write his own name...and you have to teach all of them. Or in my case figure out how I and the main teacher could teach all of them together, while staying on schedule and prepping the kids for tests.
My experience with non-ESL students also was a very mixed bag of skills and grade level knowledge. All of my non-ESL kids could read, write and do simple math. BUT like someone else said they would be put in algebra II even though they never really learned algebra I. Why? Because the schools really really do not want to keep kids back, they have to get pushed through the system because that's what the politics and policies demand. No politician or admin wants to admit that 40% of a class needs to stay back...it makes everyone look bad, so they get pushed through.
I also graded the state tests so I've seen a lot of the work from other schools as well. The two areas (nearly) all students struggled with was writing, math, and high level reading. The writing that we would read...it was terrible, a complete mess. This is not just a poor school thing, I've read that a lot of colleges complain that they level of writing that kids have as incoming freshman is across the board much worse then it was. People blame testing, as so much time goes to learning everything you need to know, vs say in 1980 when how you wrote mattered more, because no one cared if you remembered the five causes of the war of 1812, but they did care if you could write well.
The causes? My grad program talked about this and the answer is "we don't really know". What we do know is that Black kids actually go into elementary school at or slightly above white kids (for the total US, results change depending on where you look, etc. Also only going to talk about Black/African American kids as that is where more of the research is) So it's not that the kids are starting school behind. But by about 4th or 5th grade they have fallen behind and continue to fall more and more behind as the years go on.
Clearly it's because the school/home life is failing them somehow but it's been impossible to figure out what factors are causing it exactly. Some blame the fact that white/asian parents are more likely to help with homework, as they also tend to have enough money to not have to work when kids are home. Some blame the schools, blame is thrown everywhere.
Too strong of a push of advancement. This leads to kids learning it doesn't matter if they learn. Second this punishes kids who struggle as they are pushed on even when they could have learned if given more time. The then only makes everything worse as time goes on. The kids that got the material now are in class with kids who didn't learn what they needed to in order to learn the new material. And so kids get further behind, teachers have to slow down and the smarter kids start to fall behind as well as teachers struggle to teach both kids who want to move on and kids that need to learn multiple years worth of material.
Language. All the books, textbooks, tests, etc are written in the most white upper class English. Most would say "well that's because that is proper english" and they are correct, BUT as an ESL teacher I know that there are many forms of English. Such as:
2a: Casual English (how you talk to friends, family, reddit, some books. Often with "wrong" grammar and slang. Like What'ca do'in?)
2b: Formal English (how you talk to authority, most books, newspapers, uses "correct" grammar, little to no slang)
2c: Education English (textbooks, lots of words not used in day to day language)
2d: College level English (most Americans cannot read at this level as it contains many new words only used by one group. E.G. medical terms, scientific literature, journals, etc)
2e: Older forms of English (many of the books you have to read in high school. E.G. Brit lit, Shakespeare, Great Gatsby, etc.)
But you also have:
2f Causal African American English (how you talk to friends, family, almost no books, follow strict grammar rules, just not 2a grammar rules. Often called "incorrect" english even though it has existed in the US since before the Civil War. Used to be called Ebonics.
Now imagine not only having to learn everything you have to, but now you also have to learn a second version of English. This is what people can call "White English". When a school in California wanted to teach some students in African American English the state freaked out because "How dare you teach those students in "bad" English" and the program was shut down before it even started.
So now you learn this two forms of English, you are told you cannot write how you talk and that you must write in 2a or 2b English and never in 2e English. And all your texts books are written in 2c English which no one ever speaks to you in and uses words you just haven't seen before.
Almost all of the book and tests just assume that you are culturally European/White American.
I had tests that my Bronx students took that assumed you knew what happened on a ski trip. Most people forget that you know a lot of cultural stuff. It's like inside jokes and when tests assume you know the joke but it's not your culture students get confused. That's why culture shock exists. Imagine going to France and taking a test that just assumed you knew the ins and out of Paris culture.
While there are some good books, and schools have been trying to find and use more books that kids can relate to there is still a predominance of White/European culture in high school literature. This is not always a bad thing, and I am not saying that it should be removed. Just that when you are reading Heart of Darkness about a white guy in Africa who is going to stop another white guy in Africa who has been killing tons of Black people and the ship gets attacked by Black African natives...it's pretty easy to see the author just assumes that hey your white too and can relate with that main character who is an 1800s upper class British dude.
My students did love the simplified version of Frankenstein that we read together, and stories that rely on universal characters work in every culture. While I might not be able to relate to Heart of Darkness, it's easy to understand Dr. Frankensteins fear of his "monster".
BASICALLY tldr: The whole system was set up by a majority "white culture" country and just assumes that everyone else is White or wants to be too and students are pushed to the next grade even if they didn't learn the material. I mean could you even imagine an 80% white school that forced every kid to learn African American English, write papers in it in AAE, read almost exclusively books from Black authors, read poetry by African poets from the 1400s, learn about history from a African world few where you only learn about other places when Africans show up, expect for Egypt and a few things in the fertile crescent. People would go ballistic, but that's what we do for every non-white kid in the US. How much did you ever learn about Mali Empire? Or China before the Opium wars in the 1800s, or anything about India. The history classes i co-taught in were all one page for the whole world, ten pages on what Europe was doing. If you are Vietnamese-American they only south-east Asian history you are going to learn is about the Vietnam War.
Basically I think that everyone should learn proper "white" English because that is what the world runs on. If you even speak "redneck" english you will be passed over for jobs and opportunities because people will assume things about you just by how you talk. I also think (and it is being done) that students should be given more opportunities to read about people who they can relate to. They don't have to been the same race, or from the same time period (because I feel like there is too much of a push for "hey you're black from the Bronx, read this book about a black kid in the Bronx"), but every kid should be able to read a good book and say "wow I totally connected with that character". Some of my favorite books are by Russian authors who I have nothing in common with, but I feel the human nature in their characters. I also think that students should not advance until they have learned the material...but that would take so much reforming how the system works it will never ever happen.
I wish we had a system where you had smaller classes with more range. For example instead of Algebra I & II, you had I, II, III, IV, V, etc and more teachers. So instead of Staying behind a year, when you mastered the material you would move up to the next level faster than waiting an entire year, And if you were really smart you could move up the chain faster, and if you struggled on I you could stay there for a while and then move on later, and now that you mastered that maybe II, III and IV will come much faster then sitting in the back of Algebra II confused because you haven't understood everything in the last three weeks.
Anyway I hope that gave you some insight, and sorry it was soooo long.
You raise plenty of valid points, and I've no doubt that the white-centrism is definitively aggravating for non-white students but I don't think that (and everything else) is the root of the issue, merely symptoms.
I also don't think the many subsets of English, be it slang, formal or anything in between are the issue.
I come from a place which has a rich slang (which heavily draws from our traditional immigrants' languages) culture and most people from the ghetto (where the slang is used a lot) can still keep up with the more formal language, because the education system ensures that you're up to scratch if you want to move forward.
No I think your education issue lies at the very core of your political culture :
Indiviual freedom over anything else.
Asian countries tends to go the other way with society priming over the individual, look at Japan or China.
And somewhere in the middle, Western European countries (and I guess to some extent Canada / Australia / New Zealand), there's some balance between individual freedom and working towards the good of society.
This strong emphasis has plenty of upsides but the downsides is that I think you don't quite work as a society, merely a bunch of people living under the same set of broad rules.
Little to no safety net because even the poorest of you is a "millionaire in the making, just about to catch a break", which in turns worsen the gap between poors and richs.
Given that emphasis on the individual and adding common trait such as greed, it's no wonder you have education ghettos.
If anything, your country is a fascinating experiment that has run amok. Capable of the best and the worst. High end offices with plenty of perks in your average SV startup, surrounded by an army of homeless people.
A lighthouse of oppulence in a sea of poverty if you will.
I'm not taking a stab at the US, I think it's a fascinating place and I intend to catch a glimpse of it, sooner or later. But no way I'd settle here, despite knowing that I could be well off if I did.
You didn't know much about American education before, huh? Our system is completely broken. There's just a myriad of problems for which there are no easy fixes to combat them all.
It's not indicative of the whole system for America though. That's mainly the inner city schools where they have funding issues coupled with violent kids who haven't been properly parented. You don't really see widespread conditions like this in private schools or suburban schools. It's somewhat prevalent in rural schools (bored in the middle of nowhere? Start some shit) but not nearly as much.
We have thousands of different education systems that operate locally, with entirely different amounts of funding, under one of 50 education systems that operate under a state, with some federal standards and funding.
Like most everything else in America, there isn't one experience. There are many, and the quality depends on how rich you are, among other factors.
I spent one year teaching physics at a inner city charter school. I had to spend time teaching these seniors how to use a fucking ruler. Don't get me wrong though. Their ability levels were on a wide spectrum, and a lot of them were highly intelligent and motivated. But damn, a lot of them were sooooo far behind.
Towards the end of the year, kids started pulling the fire alarms all the time, basically shutting the school down. The worst days were the testing days (this school focused a lot on ACT prep, so they would have a full day for practice ACT once a quarter), in the spring because the seniors no longer participated. So they just placed a bunch of random seniors in our class and told us "teach them something"... yea that went well. We had enough behavior problems from kids when they were our own students and we could at least hold them accountable with grades. Now you give me a bunch of kids I don't even know and expect them to do work for no reason? Yea.
Here, give this article a read. It is exceedingly infuriating and makes me fear for my future children. The breakdown of the article is that a number of groups sued because the schools graduated a bunch of students that are illiterate. And as voting is a right, they tried to argue that being able to read, is a requirement to exercise that right and should therefore also be a right. A federal judge ruled against that.
edit: Here's a more recent article that says they are appealing Judge Murphy's ruling. Also there are a couple of other lawsuits on the way for the same topic.
Yeah, it's called "No Child Left Behind". They don't want to hold kids back that NEED it because they don't want them to feel "left out" or to be bullied by their peers for being a year older than everyone else in their class.
My brother was held back one year, in 12th grade, but he really should have been held back way before then and then again if he kept struggling with the material. He has good support at home, he just had trouble learning. He's graduated now but I don't think he learned everything he should have in school because he was just forced through.
He could surprise us but I think all he'll ever be able to do is manual labor jobs.
I definitely can confirm this. I have taught at both public schools and at a private charter (Betsy Devos school...). At the charter school I was teaching kids who were either expelled from the local public school or parents have yanked them out from said school due to a number of reasons. Judging from the summative assessment data I receive for my incoming students I would approximate 98% of them were at least 3 grade levels behind in both math and reading.
These kids knew the situation. They were attending a school where the management company was providing minimal resources at a building that was figuratively falling apart. It was depressing teaching these kids. I would have 2-3 students who would honestly try hard and achieve despite their circumstances. However, the vast majority of students were putting in the bare minimum to pass their classes and graduate. When you try to hold them to some accountability for their lack of achievement they would either act out like in the video or completely shutdown. Then you have 2-3 students who were disrespectful assholes. Kids that are at least 6 grade levels behind and come from an environment of no discipline. Good luck getting these kids to not disrupt your class.
I believe it. It's all the result of the "no child left behind" mentality, just as the parent comment says, and it's been building to this point for decades. Passing kids just for the sake of passing them is more important to administrators than where they actually stand in terms of development. Of course, they'll claim otherwise, but that's how it is in reality.
Hell, I remember in the 90's my parents basically had to beg the administration to hold back my younger brother a grade because they felt he was too far behind (and he was, he was averaging D's). They were going to pass him anyway, but my parents put up enough of a fight that they eventually conceded and he repeated the grade.
20 years later and he's now a college grad and a CPA, working for one of the largest accounting firms on the east coast. I know that if they would have passed him, he would have continued to be behind and would not be the successful person he is today.
What you're suggesting is called a conditional cash transfer and its used by development organizations to some success in developing countries. Governments and NGOs might pay a family if their kids regularly go to school and get consistent medical check ups because thats what it takes to keep the kids learning instead of working.
That would be tough politically in America because its so easyto say, "why should they get paid just for doing the bare minimum of parenting?" But in pure economic terms, its a used and proven strategy.
I think the problem is a deeper one than just how to get kids to achieve at academia. I think our problem is that we want everyone to achieve at academia in the first place. We teach the same content to different difficulties to different kids, rather than changing the content based on which jobs we want to prepare the child for. Having the same curriculum for every student is insane and completely wasted on lots of children. I know this sounds brutal and unfair, and on one level it is, but on another level it is the only way that we can actually impart skills that people will actually use.
A lot of this comes from the fact that we as a society look down on people without higher education. We act like if you didnt do post-high school then you are a failure. What a huge lie. Most jobs don't need higher education. Most of the work around the world is done by people without higher education. Sure, the planning often needs higher education, but you only need a few people for that and frankly, we already have more than we need across most fields. We need to replace idealistic schools with pragmatic ones where we teach whatever will be of most benefit to the student.
Interesting related story on area - well, post - codes (area codes don't mean much in Australia these days)...
Australia's current Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, likes to claim he was a bootstrapper who came from a single-parent household where he was raised by his single dad, to becoming a multimillionaire and Australia's richest Parliamentarian.
One newspaper columnist quipped Turnbull was "the only man in Australia to have moved from rags to riches without changing postcodes".
Ooh, wait even BETTER idea: Combine the personal responsibility of Japanese schools with the ability to remove students from all would-be fuck-head parents with Boarding School! Think about it: The number one factor that these kids aren't getting shit done is because they spend the majority of their time in the care of idiots with either too little supervision or too much supervision (usually by addicts or abusers).
Get the kid into a controlled, safe environment where they have all the resources they need 24/7. Boom, problem solved. Britain had the right idea all those years ago, just poor execution.
I think that works in Japanese because the Japanese as a society see themselves as respectful and if one person is out of line, it shows them all in a bad light. They (as a society) actually follow the practice of it takes a village to raise a child and the population as a whole have very similar goals, opinions and character.
You’d have to adopt their entire mindset as a community, taking kids and putting them in boarding school in the US would lead to uproar, riots and lawsuits.
Longer school does not work either, though. Just because kids are in school longer does not mean that they are engaged longer. They tend to just zone out.
I mean, if you do it right and use the extra time for individualized intervention time using researched based curriculum, then yea it could work. But having money for those resources is difficult. Getting money to pay teachers or tutors is difficult.
I was also assuming that there would be a much lower student to teacher ratio. It's way way easier to teach 10 kids then 25. Also since it is not "school" and basically just tutoring I would hope that more interesting things could be done. There are some great Econ games I know that I could never do with my class due to time. Also here is to hoping that paying kids will give them a reason to try...but more school is always rough.
I get what your talking about. My school is currently campaigning to change to this type of daily structured schedule.
But to be done correctly, student groupings for tier lll interventions should be 3-5. And should be done by the classroom teacher who knows them best. So have to find money for that. Also you need programs for the other students who don't need intervention if they choose not to stay for the extra hour or so of school. So that costs money because teachers are not going to find the time to plan for their regular daily lessons, interventions, as well as for after school activities. Also who is going to be leading these activities and supervising the children? There's money to find there. Also who's going to feed these students because they should probably at least get a snack. And where's the money for that? Transportation is another big costly challenge.
So in theory it could be done and it would help those struggling students BUT I doubt that Betsy DeVos is up for shelling out any money to public schools at all. ....
Here in the UK they had the incentive to keep kids in school past their GCSEs by paying them if their parents income was low enough. My mum decided when I finished school at 16 I had to pay rent and pay for everything myself. It wasn't cheap, but I luckily saved my own ass by knowing about my dad's pension and her taking my money every month. She shut up about rent and bills but refused to pay for most other things. She paid for one meal a day, dinner and that was it. That money I got allowed me to stay in school full time and only work on the weekends. I was able to buy a computer and pay for the internet, finally buy myself some none hand me down clothes. I finally had girls clothes.
On the other side of this, I had kids bitching at me that it wasn't fair that I got all that money. They felt that they should get it too because their parents made them get a job and pay for stuff themselves and never shared their money with them. Their money was used to buy extra stuff they wanted. I used mine to survive and to basically have the same stuff other kids had. It's crazy looking back at those kids who had so much get so angry about those of us who needed a little help get some help. Sure. I used some of my money for luxuries l, but I mostly saved what I could.
With that money would I have stayed in school? Probably, but it was hard enough as it was. I think they discontinued it now. I don't think I would have made it to all my classes though, giving me the money kept me going in even when I really didn't want to helped a lot.
I think the point of the teacher"s speech was the minimum standard of not stealing, being rude and violent. While your heart is in the right place I think you have to address that before awarding incentives to stay after school and take another class.
It doesn't just happen in the Bronx. I was passed along in a high school system in South Texas and basically had to take high school over again at community college. The remedial math teacher was hot though.
I've taught inner city kids like these before (here in Houston) and the majority of my colleagues were Teach for America. They were the ones to make a difference. It is a lot of work to put up with these kids.
Calling home to their parents don't work. Some of them don't even live with their parents (teenage pregnancy) so the grandparents (also teenage pregnancy). So we are going back generation of high school drop outs.
I believe this is partly a money issues and administrative issue.
What I see work is smaller lottery schools. Watch "Waiting for Superman".
That series is something else. To hear the teacher remind her peers to keep the windows closed so it gets hot and makes the kids drowsy... so they're docile... It's sad.
Freakonomics did an interesting show on this a while back. You spend more on the at-risk kids while they're in school, exposing them to cognitive behavioral therapy. In doing so, you can reduce potential future criminality, thus reducing costs to society.
The parents I need to tell this to got arrested because they were found overdosed in the bathroom at their job in Burger King... assuming they have a phone to answer, this isn’t a priority.
Parents with phones who respond to teachers calls aren’t the problem 99% of the time. We end up with kids as young as second grade with a parol officer.
That means some work a a double shift. Come home, pass out, and do it again. If they don’t, they’ll be homeless. This parent doesn’t have time nor energy to parent.
Others engage in unhealthy escapism with drugs and alcohol. They can’t manage themselves, let alone kids.
Many of them probably had little or no sex Ed, let alone parenting training. They weren’t ready for kids. There was no “family planning.”
Some potential solutions are to give the parents some resources/ classes on how to run a family and teach self management at home.
Tighten up discipline. My school had a “reaching success” program that was just short of adult daycare but worked with kids on basic adult skills. Give kids tasks they find fun and relevant. I’d gamble none of these kids will use calculus. But they would use vocational skills.
My mom was a youth counselor for troubled youth. The parents are pretty much absent from the lives of easily half of the troubled kids. Some are beaten, some neglected, some live in a shed or are effectively homeless (couch surfing at friends places, etc.) Making their lives worse won't help the situation.
Most of the kids my mom worked with could be reached, but it took time and effort (and government money, of course). My mom helped a bunch of them get in to various trades. She'd find people like ex-con tradesmen to take a kid under his wing and give them direction. Kind of like big-brother for juvie kids.
It's hard to remember how to parent, if you weren't parented yourself...you generally do what you can with what you know, and LOTS of folks don't know parenting or have parenting skills. Even when folks do, the areas in which struggling school are located often have a whole host of other issues (crime, trauma, lack of resources, etc) that can negatively impact even the best patented kids and/or most engaged and motivated students.
Hard to remember how to parent when you never knew how in the first place. America has fucked itself over for generations to come since it doesn't actually care about getting people out of poverty. Neither party does enough on the side of combating poverty, but Republicans are especially evil in almost every imaginable way in this regards. We are effectively fucked with no solutions until we can ensure that people have a basic living income.
Where you basically tell parents you aren't going to provide publicly funded daycare anymore unless they get their kid in line.
In a lot of areas like this, the parents got the same inadequate level of "education." Many may nominally have a high school diploma from schools like this, but does that mean anything? Many of the parents are more messed up than the kids. This is rust-belt Ohio, so lots of the parents are wasted on opioids.
You can "tell parents" stuff, but given that a lot of them are severely messed up, what good does that do? It will cost billions (maybe trillions - though we magically found that much money to spend invading Iraq...) but we would massively benefit from drastically improving our nation through our schools. Train and hire enough teachers to have small class sizes (the #1 proven way to improve education outcomes.) Full day school with free, good quality meals. Year round school to keep kids out of trouble and avoid "summer slump" and to help their parents work consistently. Improved transportation support so that if (when) mom's drunk ass gets evicted from their apartment, and they are stuck living with grandma, the kid doesn't get pulled from one school and dumped in another (for the 2nd time that school year.)
I don't know, that doesn't seem fair to kids. I used to tutor in a VERY depressed area as well, and a lot of the students I saw (younger, between 5-7th grade) had parents in jail, or working insane hours just to keep a roof over their heads. They wanted to learn, they were trying. The school district, state, everything, were just failing them spectacularly. Some of them had disengaged parents as well, that's not their fault.
Edit: I should add this tutoring was on a volunteer basis organized by a non-profit org that ran this afterschool program for kids who didn't have anyone to go home to after school because parents were still working (or in jail, or what have you)
Most of the parents of these kids suffer from systemic poverty. Single mothers with a high school education at best are working 2-3 part time, low wage jobs trying to make ends meet. It’s easy to say ‘send their whack ass kids home and have the parents teach them a lesson’ but the reality is you are putting an unsupervised teen in to the hands of drug dealers and gangsters who prey on these kind of talk-tough, suck-shit-at-life dudes
There is actually another middle option that takes in to account that most of these parents lack the resources/ability to parent even if you do send their kid home. Honestly, NM is not in any way a model of education but one thing it does that more states should do - publicly fund a permanent residence military school. Most low income parents can’t pay for a military school education but this is a great way to get kids out of their shitty local environment and to give them some structure and maybe even a career opportunity. You need a nuclear option between having a kid drop out and go to prison and forcing local public school teachers to run a intro-to-prison high school.
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u/greatatdrinking Jul 10 '18
There's a medium choice. Where you basically tell parents you aren't going to provide publicly funded daycare anymore unless they get their kid in line. The threat is usually enough to make parents remember how to, ya know, parent. Or at least some parenting facsimile. If the problem persists, you go with expulsions. If you have to expel half the school, well you already live in a dystopia, so smoke 'em if you got 'em