Why Our Children Isn't Learning
Radley Balko | March 23, 2008, 10:39am
Because their educators waste time on crap like this:
To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure.
Instead of calling these schools "underperforming," the Board of Education is considering labeling them as "Commonwealth priority," to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale.
Schools in the direst straits, now known as "chronically underperforming," would get the more urgent but still vague label of "priority one."
The board has spent parts of more than three meetings in recent months debating the linguistic merits and tone set by the terms after a handful of superintendents from across the state complained that the label underperforming unfairly casts blame on educators, hinders the recruitment of talented teachers, and erodes students' self-esteem.
[...]
At a December meeting on how to improve struggling schools in Holyoke, Lawrence, and Springfield, superintendents implored members not to stick them with a label of "chronically underperforming."
"For our teachers, it's a blow," said Wilfredo Laboy, Lawrence superintendent. "It demoralizes staff completely."
Joseph Burke, Springfield superintendent, said that while he is not crazy about any label, he would prefer "priority one," because "It sounds nicer."
In October 2006, John Stossel walked reason readers through the Byzantine process of firing an incompetent public school teacher in New York.
GILMORE | March 23, 2008, 3:01pm | #
Aresen| March 23, 2008, 2:21pm | #=
And your compositional skills are going to be pretty weak if you do not have the ability to understand things logically..
+
Cesar | March 23, 2008, 2:25pm | #
Let me also add, that if you don't have good conversational/writing skills you're going to suck at teaching hard science as well.
You've both hit the nail on the head here on why our public school programs of 'siloed' topic-teaching produce pretty lopsided student groups, where some 'choose' or gravitate toward one area, generally neglecting others as irrelevant to their development. Or, at the least, few kids in high school develop much appreciation for how economics affect history, or how science affects politics, or vice versa.
[as an aside, I think the James Burke 'Connections 1' series is great stuff in this respect - they should force kids to watch the whole thing. Its even more interesting from the modern perspective since so much has happened since the thing was produced]
at the analyst firm I worked for we often drew applicants who'd studied finance and economics, or maybe some other quant kind of field. In practice, we tended to hire kids who'd studied liberal arts topics because they had better reading comprehension & writing skills. Our job was to boil complicated things down to simple things, & derive insights. We could train up these liberal arts kids up in the basic economic issues, while we couldnt teach the econ kids how to be more articulate or creative.
I tend to think that logic, rhetoric tend to be the biggest gaps in modern primary education. Few people can make sound arguments or see when someone is making a poor argument. I read my friend's student's term papers from time to time and it's appalling what even "the smart kids" can do.
I also think Jennifer is right - most of why schools fail has less to do with retarded teachers than apathetic children and parents.
Whats always amazing is that even with the worst possible teachers in the worst schools, there are always maybe a dozen kids who, god knows why, are just hungry for information and will learn because they want to learn, and will succeed. I've always thought that teaching was less about feeding kids information, and more about making kids so interested in something that they WANT to learn more about it in their free time.
