Comments on: The War on Teachers: What has Michelle Rhee learned about education politics?

By: fantasticworkers comp lawyer

fantasticworkers comp lawyer — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 08:19:48 +0000

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By: JackDanielsBlack

JackDanielsBlack — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 12:31:03 +0000

I saw a news article saying that Governor-elect Rick Scott of Florida may propose school vouchers for all Florida public school students that would assign a certain amount of money to each student and follow that student to whatever school, public or private, he or she chose to attend. See
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/article1139033.ece
for details.

If this proposal is enacted, it will be very interesting to see the results. Perhaps we are finally starting to see some state-initiated real reform of our broken school system.

By: Z

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 04:06:03 +0000

@Western Dave. This is fascinating. Own curricula, yes, I get it. For that, though, they have to trust you and it seems that the refusal to trust teachers is the key problem.

From further up, on standardized tests, “Who do you think writes and grades this crap?” This is the other thing I wish the public realized. I wonder whether it’s actually crappy testing that has people angry at education in the first place.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:48:44 +0000

@Z. Historical data is tough to find because of apples and oranges comparisons but…, Drop out rates overall have had held steady since the 1970s even as graduation requirements have gotten significantly tougher. This could be interpreted to mean that schools are actually getting better. Re: funding: my school funding doesn’t differ that significantly from a public school (and if you took out some of the more expensive sports programs it might come out lower). However, we have a more limited mission. Every kid in this school is at least in a college prep track and has at least average IQ or close to it. We offer significantly fewer choices than a big public school does. We spend more on materials and less on salary (but more on benefits). Our tuition is all inclusive except meals (snack is included for lower school kids but not lunch). The biggest difference is the autonomy of teachers to develop and implement their own curricula. I can’t stress enough what a difference that makes.

By: Z

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 04:22:56 +0000

P.S. by which I mean — what about refunding public schools, instead of impoverishing them and then complaining they are “failing”?

Meanwhile: does anyone have recommendations on where to start to find out to what extent it is true American students are less well educated now than 30 or 60 or 150 years ago … and whether at all points we were less well educated than the countries we’d like to compare ourselves to (or that we consider to be in our “tier”)? Are students really worse or just differently bad? Isn’t it really all about funding? Isn’t it true that Western Dave’s school is that good because it can afford to be?

Really and truly, re teachers: are they really that bad? I mean, we educate a lot of high school teachers at my place and it is true, many aren’t our top graduates; some just squeak through the Praxis exam in their subject areas. Yet when I visit their classes later on, and those of their colleagues, I am always impressed. What is with this anti teacher war, really?

By: Z

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 04:13:53 +0000

@Tom, GRACIAS re no vouchers.

I went to good public schools years ago. There were different kinds of standardized tests for purposes of studying US, but not for the (destructive) uses to which they are put now.

I like tests for pedagogical purposes, that is, I liked them at one time and still do in theory, if they are well constructed. But now, at the university, I would prefer not to give any until at least the junior level because of the way the students have been geared exclusively toward test preparation which they see as a completely different activity than learning. After seeing performance on a final exam today, and the amount of plagiarism in the papers, I am thinking of doing 100% project based courses, with oral midterms and final (no cheating possible then) whose grades are given to the students as information (on what level of achievement they have actually attained; I’d give comments and recommendations but not count the grades unless they raised the individual students’ average, because otherwise too many would fail). That way they might get real feedback and in the meantime learn how to study via the projects, but not be led to focus on test survival as they have been taught to do pretty much exclusively by now.

By: JackDanielsBlack

JackDanielsBlack — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:02:54 +0000

Truffula, if your kids are going to a public school, how do they avoid being achievement-tested? I thought No Child Left Behind mandated testing for all public schools that receive Federal funding. Am I wrong?

By: truffula

truffula — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:49:33 +0000

County school, Jack, not private.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 14:05:13 +0000

I’ve already laid out one contradiction in school reform movements, but there is another one. School reformers can’t agree what they want out of schools. Look at the conflict over math programs. Do you want everyday math or one of it’s variants: where kids will learn principals of mathematics as they learn math facts? But it’s time consuming and involves a lot of teacher training to do well? Or do you want kids to do drill and kill math facts, which can be done relatively cheaply but doesn’t lay the groundwork for every kid to calculus the way everyday math does? But just as the push for every kid should take calculus is cresting, there is a new push that says most people will never use calculus and everybody should take stats because it’s necessary to understand science and policy debates, etc.. Want students to take both? And cut what? Face it, as long as most Americans measure the success of their schools by the football team’s record (or in my hometown, the lacrosse team’s record), school reform is mostly a shill for “we want to pay less taxes but the same amount of services.”

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:52:56 +0000

I would support for vouchers for my school if there were no strings attached. But that can’t be policy because you would have all kinds of crap schools springing up that would just take the money and run. In Philadelphia, our experience has been that for every decent charter that opens, there are two or three crappy ones. I’m talking embezzlement, self-dealing, screwing the kids to get the money kind of stuff. Now some of this has to do with the incredibly corrupt political culture of Philadelphia where the Republicans gave up on trying to win elections in exchange for the receipts and patronage of the Parking Authority and the reform mayor (a democrat who won with the help of state Republicans although not city ones) is stymied by a devil’s bargain coalition of Republicans and Democrats in city council who all have their own mayoral aspirations. It’s not unheard of, for example, for a Republican city councilperson to switch parties and run in the Democratic primary. More typically, it was the other way around. Anyway, that’s a roundabout way of saying that real school reform is unlikely to happen through political meddling, that accountability is way more difficult than people make it out to be.