Margie tells me that her daughter keeps getting hit by the kid with special needs in her Kindergarten class. The boy really likes her daughter, but only knows how to get attention by whacking people.
While waiting for the school bus, Maria says that our kids are in a class with several kids with special needs. There are three aides in the class to help them out, but there’s one girl in particular who jumps up a lot and disturbs the class. The class also maintains a rigid schedule to coordinate with the schedule of the kids who are pulled out for special classes. Jonah is getting in trouble for going ahead in his workbook. I have to meet with his teacher next week.
I’m the last person to complain about the inclusion and mainstreaming of special education kids. My youngest one, Ian, will probably be one of those kids — the boardline problems who aren’t severe enough to require a special school, but aren’t going to sit quietly and conform. He’s going to be easily distracted. He’s already doing Kindergarten work, so he’s going to be bored by the time he gets there. He’s going to have trouble answering questions. He’s going to have sloppy handwriting. He’s going to need an aide to help him stay on task, and this is going to cost the district a lot of money.
One of the neighbor boys has a learning disability. Last year, he was an angry, frustrated kid always picking on Jonah and fighting with his mother about homework. Now, he gets pulled out for work in the resource room where he gets a slower pace and one-on-one attention. He’s a lot happier. His future looks a lot brighter. Instead, of becoming a high school dropout and drug addict (which would cost the state a lot of money), he’ll perhaps ending up working for his dad’s construction company. He’ll graduate high school, pay taxes, and own a home.
I know that Ian is going to annoy other parents and teachers in the future, just as these other kids are bugging Maria and Margie. And I can see their point that their kids shouldn’t be hit or disturbed. However, these kids probably need extra help, more expensive aides, and more support to help them overcome these behaviors. I just hope that there isn’t a major backlash brewing.
Apt. 11d 
IMHO this is all about evening out the impact. A high-needs kid moves into the neighborhood and there goes the district budget. Too many special needs kids in one class and the whole place turns into a circus. It makes neighbors turn on each other; it’s fraught.
Some things are a societal burden. We take them on for the future of our society as a whole. Roads. Caring for veterans. Medicare. I believe special needs ed should be handled this way. Currently the federal government gives lip service to providing special needs support but never actually coughs up the cash. Meanwhile the school districts are required by law to provide some services, even if they have no money for it. It’s not right.
As an aside, I think maternity leave is in the same situation. As a nation we intuitively understand that women need paid maternity leave, and that it’s very expensive long-term when you don’t provide it. But as a business you take a huge short-term hit by providing paid maternity leave to employees. Unable/unwilling to get thru the short-term, these employers are not able to think long-term. If we took the financial burden off the employers and funded maternity leave the way we fund unemployment benefits, one of the major drivers behind discrimination against women (“What if she gets pregnant??”) goes away.
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I think there has been a quiet backlash brewing for a while now, and it takes the form of kids leaving the public school system, even in solid schools like those in my own neighborhood. It takes the form of battles over “gifted and talented education”
I find the comparison to maternity leave compelling, too, especially the way it works in the US, where the cost is imposed on the company. And then, the company imposes the cost on the co-workers of the person taking the leave. So, people learn, maternity leave == more work for me (it’s not just the employers, it’s the folks who have to take up the extra work). Special needs have the same problem. The Feds impose the cost on the local school system, the school system imposes it on the particular class, and on a particular teacher. So, people learn, special needs children means more work for me, and the possibility my kid gets ignored.
I think imposing these costs on a wider social network (like unemployment insurance) would help a lot. But, it won’t fix the backlash problem, because of the non-economic costs. Yes, it will be easier for an employer to offer maternity leave if they can recoupe the costs of the employee, but let’s face it, teachers leaving in the middle of a term, scientists leaving mid-project, lawyers leaving mid-case all impose a cost greater than their economic cost. And the same thing is true for special needs kids in the classroom (although in both cases, they provide benefits as well — the employee because they might otherwise be permanently out of the work force, and the child because of what they contribute to the classroom).
bj
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I also think that maternity leave and special ed inclusion are an excellent comparison. I think that if spec ed was better funded, it would help with some of these problems. Maybe if there was more help for the kids who hit and the kids that jump up, other parents wouldn’t be as angry and there wouldn’t be as big of a backlash.
How do you convince parents of regular kids that having my kid in the class is a good thing. I could play the diversity card and say that their kid is going to learn a lot from mine. But I’m not really certain of that. Besides, most parents of special ed kids are trying to get them to blend and aren’t really proud of their disabilities.
I think the best that I can do is say that your kid won’t be harmed by having my kid in the class and that my kid has a right to best possible education he can get and that isolating him will cause irreputable damage.
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It seems to me that support for education in general, as paid for by the local property tax, has been maintained by a confluence of (1)parents having an interest and (2) non-parent homeowners thinking their property values are elevated if people think well of the local schools and (3) ceaseless pressure for higher budgets from teacher (and nonteacher support staff) unions. Only #1 is closely related to caring for the interests of the kids, and it’s kind of accidental if this set of interests would get funding to the ‘right’ level. Success up to now has been heavily dependent on education being relatively cheap.
Now, look how these interests align for special ed kids – non-parent homeowners will rightly expect that parents of special ed kid are a tiny part of their potential market, and how well the district serves them does diddly for property values. AND they are loads more expensive than non-specials. Parents of non-specials are going to have mixed motivations, as you, Laura, have pointed out. Kids who hit and jump around and disrupt will be less popular than cute quiet blind kids. And teacher unions are going to be interested probably only to the extent that they can identify special teacher and aide jobs to add to their empire.
So it seems the balance of interests is not as favorable, and doing the job right is more expensive.
How to fix this? Hard work on advocacy from parents of specials, and at least partial central provision of resources for specials is all I can think of. Will it get the levels right? Jeez, I don’t know.
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Dave S. writes “3) ceaseless pressure for higher budgets from teacher (and nonteacher support staff) unions.”
Oh come one — does anyeone in the free world still think that the quality of work you get is unrelated to the pay you give the worker? Of course what we pay our teachers is directly related the quality of the education we buy for our children. Or are teachers the one group of people who are supposed to work to the best of their ability regardless of what they get paid to do?
And if special ed resources are going to be paid for centrally, why shouldn’t all special needs, including those caused by poverty and lack of parental involvement?
bj
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Laura:
You can’t give up on the diversity card. Yes, folks aren’t going to enthusiastically fall over themselves for this argument, but that’s what education is for. Parents, and kids need to be educated diversity (in all it’s forms) is one of the main things public education delivers.
bj
PS: I will note that doesn’t prevent people from abandoning public schools in favor of private when they can, but I think most of us choose that route when they think the diversity car doesn’t balance out the harm.
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Yeah, all teachers only care about is adding to their empires. That’s why they went into education instead of say, business. Because we all know teaching is so lucrative and such a laid-back job.
Laura it’s a hard call for everyone. We completely mainstream the kids in our school. We might do a pull-out to help build on some developmental delays. And for a couple of autistics kids we have one on one aides in the classroom for them. But frankly the behavior of the special ed kids is on a wide spectrum just like it is of the “normal” kids. Some of them interact well with others and are a joy to have in the classroom, while others take a lot of intellectual and emotional space for everyone involved. They all benefit from having each other around, I think it mirrors life in that you must learn to adapt to others who are not just like you.
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Well, I would argue that in areas with a low cost of living, teaching is arguably the most lucrative and secure profession available for persons of extremely moderate intelligence and abilities. (By the way, I recently learned that my hometown’s recent test scores were the very lowest for the state, finishing behind a number of reservation schools. So, yes, I do have an axe to grind.)
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Yikes! I have done the old ‘let’s you and her fight, I’ll hold your coat’ trick. I hope AmyP and LisaV don’t encounter each other on the ground… I now want to revise and expand my remarks…
I wasn’t intending either to impugn teachers or to call them selfless saints, nor to say they SHOULD be selfless saints. I was talking about teachers unions.
Unions are supposed to seek the best working conditions and best wages they can get for their members. That’s what unions are for. It happens often that these are things which are good for children – smaller classes, better temp. control in school buildings. Sometimes they are neutral – better parking for teachers. Sometimes they are against the interest of the students – seniority and tenure protections for incompetents who have retired in place, inability of a district to move an employee to the place where she or he would best serve the kids (sometimes tenure and seniority are wonderful, and protect inspired teachers against Neanderthals in the administration, too). But teachers unions, if they are doing what they are supposed to do, are working in the interest of their members, and not primarily in the interest of the students.
And the point I was trying to make, and will try again at, is that there seem to me to be three main forces for increase in school budgets – parent advocacy, people-who-think-it-does-their-property-value-good advocacy, and teacher union advocacy. In general, their interests will lead them all to press harder for ‘general’ educational funding than for funding for ‘specials’. Parents of ‘specials’ will need to band together and push hard for their kids interests, and may well do better at this if they organize state-wide and get dedicated funds into the district from state legislatures than if they focus only on local decision-makers.
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I don’t want to argue with you guys. I want to argue with the online casino. Damn it! There are better sites!
Dave S- teacher’s unions function the way most unions or any organization does, there are good and bad, just like you have pointed out. I think the positives far out weigh the negatives.
But really teacher’s wages when compared with other professionals are low, Amy. Not when compared with just any job, but with jobs that require significant education, experience and expertise, they are low. And as for the moderate intelligence and abilities, you get what you pay for. I feel fortunate that the men and women who teach my children are truly gifted and devoted to their students and careers.
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Speaking of “education, experience, and expertise,” my daughter goes to pre-K at one of the better DC public schools. Her teacher has many years experience, seems smart, and to know what she’s doing in the classroom. However, she doesn’t do e-mail with the parents! I can’t think of any other profession where one could get away with that kind of unavailability and unresponsiveness today (although now that I think of it, doctors are also conspicuously unwired). From what I hear and read, it doesn’t seem like education as a field is making adequate use of available technology and expertise. And with regard to ed school, it’s an open question whether education students are helped are harmed by what they learn or “learn” there. (For details, see Oh Snap, a blog chronicling one woman’s experiences in ed school.)
Personally, I’m convinced that the ed school model is wrong. I’ve taught a bit (not very well, but enough to get my feet wet) and I think that a BA in a content area plus a few courses in education plus a few years working as an apprentice to a master teacher would be the most efficient model. A substantial number of beginning teachers bail out just a few years into teaching, and more hand-holding might keep them in the profession. It’s nuts to put a twenty-something up alone in front of a seething mob of adolescents and expect anything good to come of it.
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Oh, Snap! is at schoolnerdblog.blogspot.com.
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Amy P:
My mother is a high-school teacher with almost 40 years of experience and one of the parts of her job that is the newest is doing mentoring to beginning teachers– she agrees that it’s very important as far as retaining teachers, but not nearly as important as raising pay. Most new teachers at her school can’t afford to buy a house in the area they teach in– who would volunteer for that, especially with a math or science degree, in today’s job OR housing market?
Also, teachers are already underpaid and overworked– expecting someone like my mother, with over a hundred and fifty students in her workload, to also be in constant email contact with their parents is ludicrous– not to mention the huge technology gap in public schools today.
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I understadn the impulse not to e-mail. I have parents that would e-mail me every day if they could to get daily updates on their child. This isn’t helpful. As a private school teacher, I can tell them, (ever so gently) to take a giant leap when they try this but I think a public school teacher would have a harder time given administrator disinterest etc.
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I understadn the impulse not to e-mail. I have parents that would e-mail me every day if they could to get daily updates on their child. This isn’t helpful. As a private school teacher, I can tell them, (ever so gently) to take a giant leap when they try this but I think a public school teacher would have a harder time given administrator disinterest etc.
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I’m hoping things will get better, but we have an information blackout at school. For the first month, I had no idea what the kids were doing at school. There were even no drawings coming home. So I have no idea what they were doing for that 6.5 hours a day. There was something in the school newsletter about how the first weeks would be devoted to learning the routine, but what does that mean? Furthermore, there were to be no parent classroom visits until six weeks into the term. I have confidence in my daughter’s teacher, but I wish we were on the same page.
We hear all the time about how important it is to have parents involved with their children’s schooling. How can we be involved if we have no idea what’s going on?
Incidentally, I think a classroom blog (or maybe a webcam) is the answer. Daycares have webcams these days. Why not public schools?
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I’ve also had an enormous trouble getting information on my kids. One of my kids is almost mute and his teacher only has 9 other students. A communication notebook is standard practice for kids with speech disabillities, and she refused to do it. Jonah can talk, but chooses only to tell me what happens at recess. My solution is that I schedule regular meetings with his teachers and blame him for the lack of communication.
I love the webcam idea.
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“Why not public schools.”
Would you want a webcam watching your every move at your job? I know I wouldn’t, and I know it would negatively impact my work.
As a former teacher, I can’t imagine anything worse than having parents watching me on a webcam; I’d quit before I went through that.
Why is it so critical that you know what’s going on every moment? Maybe a way to get involved would be to lobby your school district or PTA for more money to pay for aides or assistants so that the teacher can be freed up to improve communication.
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If you think a webcam is a great idea, how about setting one up in your classroom when you start to teach again, but also have one while you are preparing for class and talking to students.
See how it changes how you do your job and then imagine how fun it will be the first time an entitled 18yo decides to take the webcam to your boss to complain about the stuff you are teaching in Politics 101, or the first time a parent writes a letter to the college president because they didn’t like what you said.
Can you imagine anyone suggesting a webcam monitoring the work of a profession that was mostly male? I can’t.
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I can’t imagine caring if there was a webcam in my class. I’ve had classes of 52 or more – all of whom were very capable of complaining to admistrators if I said something offensive What’s one more pair of eyes? My husband’s workplace, which is mostly male, is completely open with no walls or partitions. Everybody is watching everybody.
I wouldn’t want to watch my kid’s class on the webcam to see what the teacher was doing. I want to know what my kid is doing. Is he listening? Is he jumping around a lot? Is he raising his hand? How does he do in comparison to his peers? What aren’t they doing in school that we should supplement at home? I have no clue what goes on his classroom, and those end of the year 5 minute conferences are useless.
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I would say visit the classroom. Or volunteer for a field trip. Even working parents can manage an hour or two, two or three times a school year. It gives you tremendous insight into not only the school, but Laura as you said, your child. If you don’t feel comfortable volunteering, then just go and observe. My husband travels 3 out of the 4 weeks a month, but we still get him into the school with each kid twice a year. We have 4 kids- that’s 8 times a year. We make time for dentist appointments and other necessary obligations, I think our child’s school should be considered the same way. It’s a challenge, but for 80% of us it’s not impossible.
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I’m with Laura. We get 20-30 minutes for parent-teacher conferences but they feel really rushed. Also, if you have to rely just on reports, you may miss out on important information, like that your child hasn’t been speaking in class for the past couple months (that was my daughter in preschool last year, but I don’t think any harm was done).
With regard to webcams, I’d like to mention that at least back in the 90s (when I was an undergraduate) it was quite normal for students to tape record lectures, purely for academic reasons.
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But you can’t monitor your child’s behavior without also monitoring what the teacher is doing. I have no doubt that the desire to monitor the child would ultimately end up with complaints about the teacher and criticism of how the teacher is doing their job.
You husband’s office may be open, but he doesn’t have a webcam monitoring his every move; that’s what would happen to the teachers. Having a recording or live-feed of your classroom is different from 52 eyes taking notes; the webfeed is going to end up in your tenure file so that all your peers can monitor your every word and movement.
I understand the desire to want to know what is happening when our kids are at school, but doesn’t it also mean we have no confidence in the professional educators in our schools? And would we be so busy second guessing professionals if they were mostly men instead of mostly women (many of whom are young)?
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Susan,
Actually, I think (for obvious reasons) I would spend a lot more time watching a webfeed if my child had a male elementary teacher. It’s a wicked world, and unfortunately we do have to scrutinize people (especially men) who “love” being with kids. I’ve had a very good male babysitter, but you can bet that I supervise him a lot more carefully than I supervise female sitters.
I think given the pressures of our age, it’s not reasonable to expect that involved, sensitive parents will be willing to treat school as this big black box where they drop kids off at 9 and pick them up at 3 and have no idea what’s happening in between.
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But how would a reasonable person expect to turn our schools into this Orwellian society instead of visiting in person or asking for an extra conference until their concerns were answered. Really face to face contact will be much more effective. Get to know your kid’s teachers, the other parents, and the other students. Don’t just be an observer, get in the game.
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re: professionalism and privacy. Back to my husband’s example. His office is the size of a football field. Everyone sits on one long tables four feet from their co-worker. Some of these guys are making serious cash and they sit right next to the temps who answer the phones. Everybody hears everybody’s conversation and sees what the others are looking at one the computer. My husband’s phone calls are monitored. Every single one of his e-mails are read by his boss. (No saucy, wifey e-mails allowed.) My husband reads his staff’s e-mail. Between FEC regulations and fears of harassment lawsuits, he has no privacy in the workplace. This notion of professional privacy is a dinosaur.
re: how to get involved in the classroom. I’ve found it incredibly difficult in our school system. There are no opportunities for parental volunteer work. Even the class parents aren’t allowed to stay in the class for the parties. They are told to drop off the supplies and leave. I’ve been trying to set up an appointment with my kid’s second grade teacher, but she’s being very evasive. She won’t meet with me during her prep periods and only wants to get together before or after school, when my hands are full with both boys. I had to hire a babysitter, so that we could meet.
Meanwhile, I’m reading the special education literature, which is all blue skies, perfect world stuff. And they say that the best special education schools have two way mirrors for the parents to observe what’s going on. Couldn’t they do this in every classroom? The literature keeps talking about how essential the connection is between home and school, but it’s all talk. The schools don’t want parents near them.
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Lisa V,
I don’t see it as being necessarily an either/or thing. The more information from as many sources as possible, the better. Visiting is good, volunteering is good, chaperoning is good, hanging out with other parents is good, e-mail is good, etc.
One problem that a webcam solves is that children are unreliable/uncommunicative witnesses, and also prone to Jekyll/Hyde transformations depending on setting. A parents presence and observation can disturb the phenomenon–think of all the children who sob and sob while mommy is dropping them off at preschool, but then are all smiles once she leaves.
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If we think our kids are anxious now, just wait until they are being watched 24/7 by their nervous mothers who are scrutinizing their every scribble. It’s like a NYT trend story waiting to happen.
Special education classes are different, arguably, then a traditional classroom. If for no other reason there is a specific IEP which needs to be monitored and evaluated. However, if a pack of moms showed up everyday to watch through the one-way mirror, I’m betting the school would put a halt to it.
“This notion of professional privacy is a dinosaur.”
He doesn’t have a webcam peering over his shoulder. A teacher is already putting on 900 shows a year for students and has minimal privacy. They’d love to have you husband’s autonomy to sit at a desk and answer phone calls even in a crowded office space. It would be a dream to actually be able to sit.
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I think parents and other taxpayers would be more open to increasing school funding if there were increased transparency, responsiveness, and accountability on the school’s side.
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I just off the phone with my husband who had me make several corrections. It’s SEC, not the FEC. Duh! Investment banking isn’t just a male field anymore. He would like two months off every year like a teacher. And he is monitored by webcams. He’s under constant surveillance with several cameras pinned on him all day.
But I can see how the webcams would bug teachers, and teachers are over worked/under paid. Maybe it would bug them less if the cameras were on for only 40 minutes per day. That would satisfy everyone, since no parent really wants to watch their kid for a full day. Probably 15 minutes per day would make the parents happy. Might even make the parents appreciate the work of teachers more, too. Why assume that all parents are evil?
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“no parent really wants to watch their kid for a full day.”
That’s exactly right–nobody’s got that kind of time. But it would be nice to have the webcam option available.
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wow — as a mom, I got to say, we have to let these kids go. The whole point of school is that they now have lives apart from you, and you’re simply not going to know everything they’re doing, or everything that’s going on.
I too have been frustrated by not knowing what’s going on at school, ’cause my daughter won’t tell me anything, and what she does tell me is, shall we say, part real, and part fantasy (at least we presume so, when she tells us that a kid got a “ticket” for being late to class). She now lets me ask her questions for 5 minutes, but she is pretty bad about answering questions.
But, the fact is, I don’t think I have a right to know what happens at school every day or every hour, unless I have some reason to be worried about what’s going on (and I don’t). Yes, unlike with an adult, I do need to get longer term updates, but short term, [My husband’s been training me actually, to let my daughter go].
bj
PS: do it Laura — i.e. the webcam– if it’s not an invasion of privacy, then set up the webcam in your classroom. If you have an internet conneciton & a mac, it’s easy. But, I will point out that you’d need to get your class’s permission first, and that if I were in the class, I’d probably say no, as I would if someone wanted to webcam my daughter’s K classroom. It would be fun to peek in, but I wouldn’t want everyone doing it (i.e. peeking at my daughter, even if they’re main goal is to peek at their child).
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yeah, separatiing from our kids is a good thing, especially as they get older. I need to far less about what goes on in my 7 year old’s classroom than in my 4 year old’s. (Ian is also a special case, because I need to work closely with his teachers to get speech going.) I just spent 30 minutes asking my kid a dozen questions to find out what happens in his classroom: who’s the tallest girl in your class? who’s the fastest kid? Who finishes their work first? Who’s the best listener? He tells me nada.
But parental involvement is a very important factor in predicting the overall quality of a school. There have been dozens of studies that have shown this, and they date back to James Coleman’s work in the 60s that found that Catholic schools had high levels of social capital. Parental involvement in schools is a very good thing.
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Webcams are not parental involvment. Parental involvement is actually being at the school, volunteering to help out, working with the PTA, helping your kids even if they don’t have homework. Watching a webcam while sipping a latte or between loads of laundery isn’t involvement., it;s spying and, well, a little creepy. It’s like all those horrible stereotypes of smothering mothers looking at their Blackberrys to book playdates and elaborate birthday parties.
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I have it on good authority (Vicky Iovine’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Toddlers) that it’s OK to spy, at least when your kid is in preschool. She says: “Do spy on your child and his teacher from time to time. Pop into the class with a “forgotten” sweater or to offer some flowers from your garden. Park yourself unobtrusively where you can watch the playground action. Offer to read a story every once in a while. Face it, none of us can relax unless we know that our child is having fun, staying safe, being interacted with, and getting hugged as often as all the other kids, and you can’t know that stuff without a little espionage.”
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Susan S., do you have kids? Latte-drinking moms? Hmmm. Perhaps some of your problems with the webcam idea are your preconceptions about mothers. We’re sneaky and just hang out with lattes in hand.
We wouldn’t be debating the pros and cons of webcams, if parents were welcome in the school and the classroom, and the PTAs were more than social clubs.
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I am a mom. Three kids. I trust the professionals at the school where my kids attend and have found many ways to get involved to be helpful. PTAs as social clubs is as bothersome a cliche as latte-sipping smotheirng mothers who are convinced the know more than the teachers. Sure there are unproductive PTAs, just as there are overanxious mothers who like to micromanage the “help”
I understand the desire to know what’s going on at school. But webcams and monitoring your kid’s every move isn’t the answer.
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“Vicky Iovine’s Girlfriend’s Guide to Toddlers”
Oh dear. Will we be quoting The Rules next? Maybe a little more Betty Friedan and a little less Oprah would help us understand the dynamics of women and how they don’t trust other women with their children and understand the class issues involved in setting up webcame in public schools where poorly paid women care for the children of women of privilege.
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I actually think that parents should be way more involved in the schools than a little PTA work and shelving books in the school library.
I’m was a big fan of the now defunct LSCs in Chicago where elected parent representatives had say on all curriculum, budgetary, and staffing decisions in their local schools. These LSCs were operating in extremely poor urban areas. They empowered some local parents, mostly women, to run for office and have a say in the schools that educated their children. For a few of these women, their involvement in the LSCs led to other professional rewards.
My graduate school mentors was one of the leaders of the community control movement in NYC in the 1960s, so I can really go on a rant here, but my husband is yelling at me to go to bed.
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“I trust the professionals at the school where my kids attend.”
That’s wonderful. We have to move soon, and the search for a neighborhood, a house and a new school for my older child is starting to drive me nuts. After many hours on greatschools.net studying test scores, demographics, and mappping school locations, I’m realizing that even in Montgomery County with its “wonderful schools” the test scores correlate very precisely with the percentage of children receiving free/reduced price lunch. The fewer poor children, the better the test scores. So, which neighborhood and school does one pick?
Choosing a neighborhood and a school is a huge commitment which will wind up shaping at least the next ten years of our lives, and mistakes could be very expensive, both financially and educationally, so I have to approach any school with a lot of skepticism.
I can’t “trust the professionals,” because I don’t know which of the professionals I can trust. “Professionals” make serious mistakes all the time (for instance doctors writing prescriptions) and we as patients and parents have to be fully engaged, asking questions and doing research, acting as full partners in treatment or education.
Incidentally, while it is true that in some public schools “poorly paid women care for the children of women of privilege” I expect that it is equally true that in many other schools, middle-class women teach poor children, which is at least an equally problematic situation.
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There’s a book on the subject entitled “Black Students/Middle Class Teachers.” I have no idea if it’s any good, but the author thinks that having 83% or so of elementary school teachers be White middle class women causes problems for Black school children.
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By the way, I think Vicky Iovine has done more for American mothers than anyone since Dr. Spock.
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I would oppose webcams in classrooms, for the welfare of the children. I have observed that some moms (not all moms) are terrible gossips about other children’s behavior. They will maneuver to attempt to exclude a child whom they dislike, whether or not their feelings have any basis in reality.
Any kid can have a bad day; he or she doesn’t need to run the risk that some parent watching the webcam will decide, “Oh, we should avoid that kid.”
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Thanks to everyone to keeping their tempers in control and for remaining respective of other commenters. I do this blog as a hobby and if there’s too much tension going on in the comment section, then I can’t concentrate on other parts of my life. One of the missions of this blog is objectively debate various political and social issues without it turning personal or ideological. The other mission is to talk about TV shows.
Good point, JuliaK. I wonder how they get around these issues regarding the rights of the kids in the daycares with webcams.
I would critique the webcam idea not using Friedan, but Foucault. Actually, I’ve got a paper that I’m working on using Friedan to critique the lack of real parental involvement in the schools. I think that schools infantalize parents (mostly mothers) by insisting on the use of titles, by belittling their experience with their children, and by excluding them from the real business of running a school.
Like Amy, I have a healthy distrust of all professionals.
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When a Special Needs Child Hits Your Kid:
Laura, a special needs mom, worries about inclusion and school budgets after friends complain about bad behavior in their kids’ classes. “I know that Ian is going to annoy other parents and teachers in the future, just as these other…
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Getting back to “inclusion” and away from “webcams”. First, there’s a huge difference between the special-needs kids “disturbing” the rest and “hitting” the rest.
I want my daughters to always feel physically safe, and came very close to pulling my daughter out of a private pre-school because she was getting “hit” every day by a special-needs boy. I mean, what am I supposed to say? It’s okay to get hit? It’s not okay, but we’re not going to do anything about it and you just have to take it? Kids go off to school to be independent, but they can’t really express that independence well if they don’t feel that they have parents supporting them if they get into trouble.
Lots of moms had complained, but it wasn’t until I (A DAD!!!) actually took time off from work to express my concerns that action was taken and the boy was removed.
Now we’re in the public school system, because the schools here are “Good”, but if there was a similar problem, and no action was taken, I would have no qualms pulling my daughter out and putting her in private or religious school. I could afford it if I had to, and what the heck is the money for if not to be used to keep my kids from being abused?
I am not opposed to mainstreaming if it can be done with only moderate impact on the “regular” kids. But I also understand that people should be seen as ends in themselves, and not as means for someone else. How much should my kid suffer so that she can be used by yours to have a “mainstream” experience. And I don’t think anyone really buys the “diversity” argument. If it were real, people would be lobbying to get a special-needs kid in every class, and other classes could avoid getting a second or third by saying that they’re already diverse enough.
But I’m your “marginal” public school parent. Piss me off, and I’ll leave. Lots of people don’t have the financial ability to make that choice. It’s really them that are being “used” for mainstreaming. And I think that for them it sucks.
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“”Professionals” make serious mistakes all the time (for instance doctors writing prescriptions) and we as patients and parents have to be fully engaged, asking questions and doing research, acting as full partners in treatment or education.”
So are you prepared to set up webcams in doctor’s offices? How about in pharmacies? Are you going to set up a webcam in your attorney’s office or your real estate broker’s office so you can watch them work on your problems?
I’m all for engagement, I just think we need to understand the impact of technology and that not all technology is a good thing. Lots of kids have gotten great pubilc school educations without their moms peering at them through webcams. How did that happen? How did parents remain involved? And when does involved become “too much” and a harm to the child?
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“Choosing a neighborhood and a school is a huge commitment which will wind up shaping at least the next ten years of our lives, and mistakes could be very expensive, both financially and educationally, so I have to approach any school with a lot of skepticism.”
But is this true? Montgomery County is an affluent community with an overall baseline of strong schools. The lowest performing schools are as good as/or betteer than the best schools in surrounding communities.
What “mistake” could you make that would really be so disasterous? Is a disaster that your kids don’t get into Harvard or they don’t learn to read? Is a disaster that they can’t take 10 AP courses their last two years of school or that they can’t pass a basic reading comprehension test?
I understand the desire to have the best for ones kids, but great kids get great educations in mediocre schools. No one wants a mediocre school because we all want to live in Lake Woebegone, but kids success and excel and end up at Harvard even if they are in schools with lots of poor kids or schools where most of the kids don’t have parents who speak English.
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Oooo, ooo, ooo. I need to comment so badly I can’t read to the bottom of the thread. (Though, OK, what I have to say has nothing to do with inclusion.)
*Some* schools are open to parental involvement and communicate well with parents and the community. Some other schools DO NOT. I’ve been on both sides of this and when the school stonewalls parents then it is hard for parents to retain trust in the school. When a school isn’t telling you anything at all then the desire for email, web pages, and/or webcams seems reasonable. Has nothing to do with “letting go” of a child, has to do with feeling welcome and part of a community. So, OK, this does have to do with inclusion, just differently.
And honestly, I think school admin needs to be cognizant of the community aspects of their job, in many senses. There is building and maintaining communication with the school community (which includes students, teachers, staff, & parents) and with the larger community in which those people live and work. Inclusion of parents in the school community can increase their support of administration and teacher efforts. Communication with the larger community can (hopefully!) increase support for the schools in general – v. important when voting time comes around.
Personally, I don’t need a web cam, and anyway it would be implemented all wrongheadedly at the school my daughter attends. But, I would like it if the teacher posted notes about the class from time to time, or sent home a class letter now and then, or if the school had a website with some current and interesting information about school projects. And I’d like it if, when I sign in the visitor’s log, I wasn’t signing directly below my own entry from the day before because all the parents who’ve been here awhile have been scared off.
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Susan,
The reason for my concern is that I am the product of a mediocre rural school system (high drop-out rate, low college-going rate, traditional yearly fatality at high school of 360 or so kids). I was a spacey bookworm and was mostly bored, unmotivated, and disengaged until high school. My husband went to an assortment of better schools (in Canada), but also hated school. And our daughter is shaping up to be a lot like us. She’s bright (she’s 4 and sounding out simple words) but socially below average and a tough kid. She potty-trained at nearly 4 and getting her out the door in the morning or getting her to do anything she doesn’t want to do requires me to be 50% Machiavelli/50% Mother Teresa.
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I have literally no idea how her teacher and aide handle her and another 19 kids, and I’m afraid that my daughter may do very poorly in the next few years as the classroom structure becomes progressively more rigid and demanding.
I’m a newcomer to the DC metro area, but having obsessively studied Rockville and Silver Spring test scores, demographics, and parent reviews on greatschools.net, I repeat that there is a huge range in test scores among Montgomery County schools. I keep hearing about how “great” Montgomery County’s schools are, but I’m beginning to think that the county is coasting on its former glory, and that present reality is quite different.
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To document what I said about Montgomery County, I will enclose a few recent extracts from sixteen reviews of Col. Zadok Magruder High School in Rockville, MD. Reviews are mixed. The school has one 5-star rating, five 4-star ratings, one 3-star rating, four 2-star ratings, and five 1-star ratings.
“Academic quality is shaky at best, along with teacher qualifications. On-level classes tend to be wild, noisy, and out of the teacher’s control.”
“I had a great experience there. If you and your children are willing to get involved, you will too.”
“We have had two children graduate from Magruder and our third will graduate in two years. We are literally counting the days. If your child is enrolled in higher level classes, it makes all the difference in the world. If your child has any trouble in school and is in on level classes, forget it.”
“this school is not as good as it used to be and it seems to be getting worst[sic].”
“Magruder is really two separate schools in one building. About half the students, primarily those from the affluent areas of Olney, Derwood, and Rockville, go to the honors and AP school where they are provided an excellent education by caring teachers…The students from the two schools generally do not mix except in Phys. Ed and at lunch. Since they live in different areas, they ride different buses and do not associate with each other.”
“A frightening place for students. Major violence almost daily. I am trying desperately to find a scholarship so my child can transfer out of this school.”
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Webcams in doctor’s offices. Well, I do a lot of research on doctors before I use them through word of mouth and via the internet. I’m always in the room when they’re looking at my kid. I come armed with questions. If I don’t think that they are taking me seriously, I drop them and find another.
Involvement in kid’s education. (great comment, zm!) Yeah, I think it’s important for me to have a hand in it, especially in the younger grades. Not because I want my kid to go to Harvard, but because I think that a good education is one part of having a fulfilling life. My mom was very much involved in my education and found out that the school didn’t believe in teaching me multiplication tables or phonics, so she did it at home. My husband and I, as former and present academics, take education very seriously. We work it into everything we do with the kids in unstructured, informal, absent minded sort of way. (ie. Jonah watches the morning news with me, and we talk politics.) It would be nice to coordinate some of what we do with what goes on in school. But since I have no clue what they’re doing there, we just pretend that school is fancy daycare and completely ignore them.
Yeah, I think that some schools are more open to parents than others. The schools out here in NJ are terrible about it. No information back to the parents about reading methods, science curriculum, or classroom routines. But then I hear from some friends in NYC that they’ve had better experiences. They are even allowed in the schools to help out with tutoring. Kinda funny that the schools out here in NJ are more worried about security than the city schools. Maybe because NYC had this history of community control, its culture is more open to parents.
Rich B. — I completely agree. No kid should be in harm’s way. If a special ed kid can’t keep his hands to himself, then he shouldn’t be in the classroom. But sometimes those problems can be stopped with the help of medication and a good one-on-one aide.
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Also, you can sue doctors when they make mistakes.
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Hey, thanks. I’m sorry to hear your schools are so uncommunicative. I don’t think it’s a country/city divide; my family’s school experiences have aligned the opposite way along that axis. But, I don’t really know what factors push a school toward or against parental involvement, other than the attitudes of the school & district leaders.
More on topic regarding inclusion, I think the individual teacher makes a huge difference in how well or poorly it works. My guess is that there are style differences that make it easier to accomodate more challenging kids. So, a video camera (as opposed to a webcam) could allow a teacher to see what worked well or poorly in the classroom. Though, that would require an optimistic, proactive personality …
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As a public high school teacher, I’m no longer surprised by the spectrum of opinions on our profession and especially the emotional punch some people, childless or not, will pack with those thoughts. Anger, resentment, frustration on one side… idealism on the other. There are the idealists- they are our consistent supporters, and are more likely to trust us. Is it about wishing quality care for everyone in society- so the best strategy is to support us, the ones in the trenches? Then there are those resentful ones who would make a list of jokes about us to rival those about lawyers. It can’t really be just about high taxes… everybody has his/her personal emotional history with teachers.
I, too, have delayed weighing in on this thread because I didn’t know if the highly emotional and very personal tone was dominating it. “Extremely moderate” intelligence? What does that even mean? But then I thought I could add my experiences into the mix and just feel represented.
My stats- I’ve been a public school teacher for 9+ years in Westchester, NY. I have a masters degree in teaching and a bachelors in history. I’m 32 and it’s the only career I’ve ever had. I’m not a parent.
Some experiences-
So far this year, I’ve had a Mom confront me on back to school night (in front of other parents) saying that I threw her child out of the room because he wouldn’t work with his partner but his partner “and I know this for a fact”, she says, doesn’t speak any English. On the day of the incident, I had talked to her son outside the room and then brought him back in. Did she just eat up whatever he said at home and add her own dramatic twist? I don’t know. I just know she has no trust in school teachers and thinks her son is a prince among the masses. These parents *would* turn a webcam towards the teacher and look for faults. The girl does speak English and he hears that as he sits right in front of her and listens in when she asks me a question in her quiet, shy, accented voice. As you can see, the public confrontation stuck with me and I wondered if the subtitle under “teacher” was “your whipping post”.
But there are the thankers. These have been parents from all walks of life. When they appreciate my efforts to zoom in on their kid, it just reminds me why I got into this career and I do it more. I’ll get it in a phone call, an email, and those who happen to also work in the district will drop a note in my mailbox. I often visit the local library and a couple of parents work there and give me support. The kids thank me too and leave their school portrait in the note sometimes. It doesn’t get better than that. It’s a nice case of the apple not falling too far…
The teachers? Well of course they are a mix too. Some have PhD’s and some stopped at a B.A.- (but are working on an MA as required by NY state.) Some are frustrated and some have it all under control. Oh- and I can count on one hand the number of teachers here that can actually afford to not work in the summer months “off”. (Our paychecks, are also “off”). It involves marrying rich.
I’ve taught inclusion several school years. There is extra stress- but it’s not the kids themselves usually. I have less prep time to do grades, phone calls, lesson planning, photocopying, go to the bathroom, eat something, make a personal call, etc… a lot of my time is spent filling out forms- the resource room teachers have 15 kids in my classes and I have to describe their progress every few weeks and get them into mailboxes by a certain deadline. There are IST meetings I must attend. I have to meet with the inclusion teacher that is also in these classes. And I make sure I know their IEPs, and go put tests in binders in offices far across the school by a certain time. The kids themselves? Some use their learning disability as a “get out of jail free” card. “But you can’t be mad, I have ADHD!”. But the others will quietly work 2x as hard as the other kids because they are glad to be in mainstream and want to stay afloat. Those kids walk out with As and Bs every time and often leave others in the dust in terms of motivation, participation, and consistency with homework and papers.
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Education students do have relatively low test scores, so “extremely moderate intelligence” isn’t at all unfair.
Going to a barely adequate school serving rural/blue collar kids, I had several real standout teachers, but a lot of mediocre ones, starting in junior high. (My sister drew a weepy divorcee in 5th or 6th grade, but my elementary school teachers were OK.) One rather decent math teacher would devote the last couple weeks of class to movie watching. I recall watching Walk Like a Man, Overboard, Iron Eagle, Summer School in school with her and various other teachers. There were good movies made in the 80s, why on earth would a person with any taste or intelligence show this kind of crud? There was also the advanced biology teacher/coach who liked to set us up with some kind of book work or pointless lab and then spend the rest of the class yacking with his players. We were just cutting up these embalmed critters, having not the foggiest idea what we were doing. (I led a protest against him–you wouldn’t have liked me as a kid! I circulated evaluation forms, took them to the superintendent’s office, then was called on the carpet by the Vice Principal. That teacher was gone the next year, replaced no doubt by someone of equal ability.) There was also a great guy, a teacher of health/Washington state history who had great stories, but somehow didn’t ever get around to teaching Washington state history. He had a memorable story involving two hippies eating popsicles while high, but I don’t think I learned any history in that class. The administration had it’s issues too, but I’ve got to go now!
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My physics class had just four bright girls in it but was an utter waste of time. The teacher (a nice woman who was way out of her depth) didn’t know physics, but was also distracted by her responsibilities, running a local political campaign.
I had a very fine English and chemistry teachers and a pretty good AP history teacher, but there were a lot of rather dim bulbs teaching when I was in junior high and high school. And that was my experience in academic track–you can imagine what the non-academic track was like.
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Strikes me that what a lot of us are searching for here is what the business world would refer to as ‘quality control’ over education. As children many of us had uneven experiences, which doesn’t build confidence overall in the system’s ability to keep itself on the rails. Then there’s Laura’s situation, where you can’t necessarily rely on your kid to tell you what’s going on, and you may or may not trust the teacher.
IMHO No Child Left Behind is attempting to bring quality control into education by measuring outcomes via test scores. One could argue that the problems with NCLB are actually problems with funding, and with incomplete test coverage (meaning that any topic kids aren’t tested on may be thrown out; revising the tests could theoretically fix that). In any case I think most of us would agree that NCLB’s focus on test scores, for the moment anyway, is a problematic approach.
OK, so maybe we’re not OK with the whole test score thing. So then we try to go on reputation. We research and research and try to find a building where we can just turn the kids over and have faith that it will come out OK. In reality what’s going on here is you’re looking for a principal who is enforcing good quality, which you can only measure by reputation. The reputation may be deserved, it may not … it may be based upon things that you care about, it may not. But it’s one approach.
Hmm, but some of us can’t seem to find buildings like that. So we give up on overall quality within the institution and try to ensure that at least in our kids’ classrooms things are OK. We insert ourselves. Meeting with the teacher more often, sometimes pulling the teacher aside (as was done to Tanya upthread). The problem with this approach is that it’s ignoring standards and putting quality control into the hands of people who don’t necessarily have domain expertise. When every parent walking through the door has their own idea of what’s appropriate quality, and almost none of those parents are trained in education, you’re going to have problems with this approach. Also, these same parents need to gather more information in order to better measure quality … but if the teacher is not on board with having more data gathered then you’re in a bind. The webcam idea is one approach for gathering more data, but it’s gathering *too much* data and potentially violating privacy. Hmm.
So what other approaches can we think of? Doctors, for example, have their quality measured in a number of ways. The government requires hospitals to submit quality statistics, for example. Additionally, this group understands that only other doctors can truly judge a physician’s performance. So they as a group accredit people. Finally, as someone has also mentioned, if all else fails you can sue your physician. So overall this is a fairly good system for keeping health care quality in line. Lots of options.
How does this sort of model apply to education? Perhaps we should actually be talking about national accreditation of teachers? This exists but is currently used by an elite subset of teachers. What about the opportunity to “sue” if your kid’s teacher is too awful? Interestingly, you can sue if the school district is not providing appropriate services to your special needs kid, but you don’t have that avenue if your “average” kid is simply being underserved. Laura, I think parents of “average” kids sense that special needs parents essentially have an upper hand in dealing with the school district, and it’s part of what breeds resentment. Instead the “nuclear” option for your average parent is to simply pull their kids. If they can afford it. Lack of recourse is a big reason for so many people’s frustration with their school district. Many parents lack what the game theory people call “best alternative to negotiated agreement”. They can’t go elsewhere unless they sell the house, and on some level the school people know that. It may not be said aloud, but there’s a different level of responsiveness to issues when you might get sued (or written up, or lose a student and by judged by that at end of year) vs. when someone can only yell at you until it’s out of their system and then move on. And so parents end up fighting ground skirmishes about webcams and weekly reports.
FWIW, I think overall the education system in the U.S. is still using models that were only barely appropriate in the 50s. Education is a much bigger deal today than it was. It’s possible that the *entire system* needs an overhaul, with an eye to higher quality. Call me a cynic but I don’t think Margaret Spellings — or anyone except perhaps the Gates Foundation — exactly has that on their radar. I can’t believe it hasn’t come up in the midterm elections.
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Again, I liked the idea of webcam not because I assume that his teacher are incompetent. His teachers weren’t particularly inspired, but they were fine. (BTW, I taught in the public schools and so did my sister. My SIL is currently a teacher.) I just need some idea about what happens during the majority of his day. Between his silence and the school’s disdain for parents, I have not even the foggiest idea what he read in school that day.
I know that there are a very bad apples among the parents. But most parents aren’t that way, just as most teachers aren’t drunks like my 9th grade English teacher. I would love to thank one of Jonah’s teachers, but I have no idea what they did.
Jen-thanks good comment. I think there is much to gain from looking at the education bureaucracy with a business lens. Also a big fan of the Gates Foundation.
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Amy, I wonder if projecting your own experiences on the current system are completely fair. You appear to have a lot of disdain and frustration about public schools (and public school teachers), so I wonder if your panic about finding the optimum situation is being driven by some unreality. It’s hard not to project our issues on our kids (lord, I know I struggle with it), but they aren’t us. We don’t have to continue living out our own middle school dramas on our kids.
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Thanks, tanya for giving the teacher perspective on all of this.
Don’t teachers get a class size reduction in exchange for taking the inclusion kids? This is the first time that Jonah is an inclusion class and his class size is significantly reduced. Also, most of the inclusion kids are removed from the classroom for the academic material. As a parent, I’m glad that Jonah is getting more individual attention during math and reading. Also, there are three aids in the class who not only keep on eye on their charges, but also help out with the general running of the classroom. On the other hand, I do know that IEPs take up an enormous amount time.
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I think the bottom-line for quality control for doctors and lawyers is how much we pay them. We pay them a lot, so they’re willing to jump through hoops, and the good people drive out the bad.
The “driving out the bad” is hampered by unions, but the problem is that society, in general, has chosen to give rights to teachers (even the bad ones) in exchange for paying them badly. Changing the dynamic requires a sea change in our attitude towards teachers.
I see “certification” and NCLB and other methods of imposing quality control being the McDonald’s model of quality control. Yes, McDonald’s method does produce quality control, but it’s mediocre control, and it relies on treating it’s workers as automatons, who cannot be trusted to make the simplest decision (for example, what to say at the end of taking an order).
I don’t want mcdonald’s for my kid’s education, and that’s what will drive me most dramatically to a private school (yes, it has already has).
bj
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I think Jen is really on to something. Things are improving, but in general there is a shortage of information for parents. I’m becoming a big fan of greatschools.net, but unfortunately some schools have few or no reviews. Private schools are especially hard to judge, since in the DC area they don’t post test scores. I wish they did! I’d also like to note that reputation is a lagging indicator–it can take a long time for people to notice that things have changed. I think that test scores are helpful in this respect–change is immediately visible.
SusanS,
If you’ll read the reviews I posted earlier on Zadok Magruder High School, I hope you’ll agree that there is real reason for concern. I didn’t cherry pick. I posted extracts from all six of the reviews from 2006.
With regard to projection: I would love it if my daughter were a snuggly, sweet, eager-to-please 4-year-old. Unfortunately, she isn’t. She wants to do what she wants to do, and it takes a lot of coaxing and diplomacy (not to mention occasional brute force) to get her to do what she needs to do. I don’t think it’s wrong or excessive of me to realize that she is going to need expert, firm, and compassionate handling to keep her from tuning out her teachers and rejecting school entirely. That’s just realism on my part.
There is also the financial side. We have a growing family and one good income and are living in the horrifically expensive DC area. If we have to go with private school, then we need a correspondingly cheaper neighborhood. If I choose the wrong public school and we have to move, moving is expensive and hard on kids and selling a house in a flat market can be financially disastrous.
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Well now I understand that “extremely moderate”, which should be rendered meaningless as an oxymoron, *did* in fact have a negative connotation.
Now I have to ask. What test scores could you possibly be talking about, Amy? Was there a human intelligence test that I forgot I took?
The reason I questioned that part of your post was that it was offensive and you should be called on it.
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Laura-
Actually in our high school a few things about inclusion really need to fixed. My classes always swelled at 28-29 on the register (I know that’s no big deal, NYC teachers). That’s because our school offers APUSH, reg US and special ed history. Students need no recommendation nor minimum GPA to be in APUSH, so any kid with an inkling to get into a competitive college gets in on AP. (that is whole other topic…) That leaves smallish reg ed, at 16-20 kids per class, and when inclusion students are added to those, they make up about 30%.
You mentioned T.A.’s… Ours are so unreliable. Apparently the pay isn’t an incentive and they get no training so they are often bored, given menial tasks, or in some cases, actually more disruptive than the kids! Last year ours was great- but she was in training to be a teacher, so she was super-motivated.
The teacher-parent relationship is obviously very very different in early elementary compared to high school. I’m surprised that your child’s teacher hasn’t reached out to you. I can’t think of any excuse for that, even if she is busy.
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I just came back from a meeting with Jonah’s teacher, who was much better in person than the playground gossip would have her be. I made the effort to arrange the meeting, but she didn’t give me a hard time once we were there. She said Jonah was on target academically, but needed to be less silly, which is true.
Because we’ve been having this conversation, I asked how she liked teaching an inclusion class. She said that didn’t mind it. I guess the assistants in her class have been okay. And a lot of those hardest cases were pulled out for work in the resource room. She did say that this was becoming a bigger issue though, as more kids get identified and get better treatment earlier. 5 of the 19 kids in the class had issues.
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Tanya,
It is well known that GRE scores for education are weak. Try googling “GRE scores education business” and the first google entry will give you a large table showing GRE scores for different prospective areas of study. The table breaks education students up into several different categories. In verbal reasoning, secondary education is the highest education category, at #21. In quantitative reasoning, secondary education is also the highest education category at #25. In analytical writing, secondary education comes in with a respectable #14. However, elementary education has a much poorer showing. They come in at #40 for verbal reasoning, #43 for quantitative reasoning, and #30 for analytical writing.
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That’s a pretty poor showing, but there are other education specialties that fare even worse. As a teacher, you may take some comfort from the fact that aspiring education administrators score at #48 out of 50 on verbal reasoning.
Anyway, you didn’t read my offending sentence correctly. What I meant is that for persons of very modest ability living in low-cost areas, teaching can be a much more lucrative and secure position than they will find elsewhere. Which, I suppose, is why they never leave.
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“What I meant is that for persons of ***very modest ability*** living in low-cost areas, teaching can be a much more lucrative and secure position than they will find elsewhere”
Nope. I did read you dead-on.
For the sake of not disturbing a peaceful blog, I’m not going to respond to this anymore. I guess tolerance is one of my greater teacher abilities.
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Thanks for being cool about it, tanya. Amy, please don’t tick off the teachers. We often discuss education issues on this blog, and I enjoy getting feedback from them.
GRE scores should not be confused with intelligence scores or with a test of the skills needed to excel in a profession. For example, I scored higher on the math GREs than most of the engineering majors. That doesn’t mean that I would be a good engineer. An engineer needs all sorts of other skills that I don’t possess and aren’t measured by the GREs. There are other problems with this study and its results can easily be misinterpreted, but I’m going to just leave at that.
I’m exerting blogger privilege and closing comments on this post.
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Parental Involvement, Web Cams in the Classroom
Last week Laura had a great discussion on education. It started out talking inclusion of special education students in mainstream classrooms and evolved to web cams in the classroom. At the heart of this dissuasion was how do parents find
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