Let’s put aside the horse race for the day and talk about schools. The two candidates haven’t done enough talking about schools, though one is clearly rougher than the other. So, let’s do the heavy lifting for those guys. Scanning through Bloglines, I came across two blog posts on education that deserve more attention.
GeekyMom finds it very frustrating that she and her husband can’t give the attention to her son’s homework that the school expects. When they get back from work, they are just frantically trying to get dinner made and decompress after a long day. As I’m sizing up my options for next year, this is a HUGE concern for me. Homework takes a lot of time and I can’t delegate that job to a babysitter.
GeekyMom thinks that schools need to do a better job accomodating families with two working parents. "I get frustrated at times because I feel like two-income families are
in a real bind when it comes to getting kids through school
successfully."
Dan Drezner points to an article in the Boston Globe, by Jay Mathews, which explains that studies that find American kids lagging behind kids in other countries are faulty. They are comparing apples and oranges. Kids are tracked in other countries, so the kids who are shunted to vocational schools aren’t included in national test scores. In the US, all kids are tested, even though who haven’t been exposed to calculus.
That seems to be a fair complaint with international comparisons of education, but it brings me to another concern that I’ve had lately — what happens to kids who aren’t on the professional track.
It’s part of the tradition in the US that kids aren’t tracked into professional and vocational tracks. Everybody attends the same schools. Early test scores don’t sort the kids out into various types of education. Late bloomers have the chance to prove themselves later in their academic career. All types, future doctors and future plumbers, hang out at the same lunch table and ogle the same girls. That’s a good thing.
However, we’re doing a lousy job taking care of the future plumbers. They get the worse teachers and are stigmatized by not taking calc or honors English. They aren’t getting the career counseling that they need. Especially, the girls, whose options for future employment are much worse than options for the guys. They are being shuttled into jobs as daycare workers and classroom aides. These jobs are extremely low paid and unstable.
A few weeks ago, I was talking with twin high school girls, who are unofficially in a vocational track and they had no idea what to do after high school. The guys in their class were future contractors and plumbers, jobs which can support a family. The girls were at a dead end. I suggested looking at being a hospital technician. Those EKG readers do very well.
These two problems with schools are on my mind this morning. Give me a couple more minutes and a shot of something stronger than my coffee, I could do more.
Your turn. What’s pissing you off about schools this morning. One per person.
Apt. 11d 
For me it is just the usual. How can you lose 1/3 of your enrollment while your budget keeps increasing?
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So, I’ll do it again. Last night I read a book called the “Rabbi’s daughter’s” set in Lorain, Ohio. Fictional, but also historical. It reminded me again of the common theme in the story of every immigrant (at least, every immigrant who eventually writes a book). Public schools + Public libraries. The book is set in the early part of the last century, so a different time (when the Jewish girl is pleasantly surprised to have a teacher who does not discriminate). But, the same story played out for me in the 70’s & 80’s (the next big wave of American immigration). I look at our neighborhood schools, and know the story is still playing out today. Every school that I know of personally does so much for the children.
(even when it doesn’t do everything that affluent/middle-class parents want it to).
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“They are comparing apples and oranges. Kids are tracked in other countries, so the kids who are shunted to vocational schools aren’t included in national test scores. In the US, all kids are tested, even though who haven’t been exposed to calculus.”
This argument is a major pet peeve of mine since it ignores the fact that US drop-out rates mean that not all high school age US students are being tested either. There are places in the US where the drop-out rate is 50%, if not higher. (It was about 1 in 3 in my old school.)
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“GeekyMom finds it very frustrating that she and her husband can’t give the attention to her son’s homework that the school expects. When they get back from work, they are just frantically trying to get dinner made and decompress after a long day.”
I decided after the hell that was my daughter’s second grader teacher’s requirements, that I would basically tell the teacher that I was not going to be involved in long involved homework activities with my kids. And I would insist that my children not be penalized. So far I haven’t had to do this, though I am a bit peeved over the “math games” I’m supposed to play. Fortunately they haven’t taken much time and, honestly, I have the time these days. But I still resent it.
My only peeve about the school lately continues to be the asshole superintendent and his stupid residency policy.
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The way inclusive classrooms are falling apart in some school districts–ours included–because we haven’t committed the resources to make them work, or explained to parents that classrooms today include a wider range of kids than they were accustomed to meeting in their own classes of the 70s and early 80s.
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The way inclusive classrooms are falling apart in some school districts–ours included–because we haven’t committed the resources to make them work, or explained to parents that classrooms today include a wider range of kids than they were accustomed to meeting in their own classes of the 70s and early 80s.
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Standard stuff: fundraising, “why do they expect me to be able to take all these days off”, more fundraising, “why does it have to be zero-sum with special needs kids”, all that kind of crap. And I actually think the kids go to a great school! I have much less to complain about than many.
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I agree with Amy P. It is just not true that we test all the kids while other countries don’t. In fact the 4th and 8th grade children in all the countries involved get tested, but it is only a sample in each country. My school’s 4th graders were tested in the last round but not every 4th grader in this country was tested. The sample tested are chosen to be an accurate sample of students in our country (age, race, ethnic origin, native language, socio-economic status, etc). It is done the same way in every country. We need to get over the idea that somehow the tests are not fair to the USA. We just don’t expect much from our students, the parents don’t want to invest the time and energy needed and our kids just don’t know as much as those in other countries. Many places in the world see education as the only chance their children have to ‘make it’ economically, to have enough money to feed themselves and their families. We take it for granted that those aren’t issues our children will have. We want them to ‘enjoy childhood’ and then we wonder why good paying jobs are going overseas. They have a respect for hard work and learning. We want high grades and lots of leisure time. Wake up and stop making excuses. With 4 times the population in China than here, they also have 4 times the numbers of gifted students who work hard at learning difficult material. Ditto for India. I live near the Canadian border. Many students from Canada come to the US for college. They do an outstanding job and receive great grades. But it is important to understand – the Canadians who come here to school were not good enough to get into Canadian colleges. Yet they consistently do better than our children at the same colleges. Children in India learn calculus in 7th and 8th grade in one room schools that are little more than huts. Yet most American parents believe that calculus is too hard for children to be expected to master in high school here. Yes, we have some outstanding students here in the US. The problem is that not all of our children are learning what they are capable of achieving. Until we are willing to recognize that nothing good comes easy we will continue to rank poorly compared to other countries as far as education of the masses is concerned.
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“It’s part of the tradition in the US that kids aren’t tracked into professional and vocational tracks. Everybody attends the same schools.”
Everybody attends the same schools (except for the poor souls over at the alternative schools), but there definitely is tracking, and where you are in 8th grade does determine what classes you will be able to take in high school. As Catherine Johnson has often pointed out, if you don’t do algebra by 8th grade, you won’t hit calculus by 12th grade.
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One per person, hey? Sneaky guy that I am, I will link to FOUR of mine (and a couple by AmyP and Other Amy) in a discussion at 1/2 Changed World: http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2008/10/tough-jobs.html. My theme over there was a nice match to your concern on taking care of kids who are not going to go to Princeton.
The welcome speech at my #1’s middle school said something like ALL of our kids should go to college. Now, I do fondly hope my kid is Princeton material – or, my pocketbook hopes, UVa – but no. In the future, somebody will need to service HVAC systems and wipe bottoms in old folks homes and paint the aging McMansions put up in the Great Boom of the Noughties. And the kids need to get the skills they will need to do those jobs, as well as to understand when the fast-talking guy who is offering them installment loans is putting them on the road straight to indebtedness Hell. My kid is being served just fine. Some others, not so much.
We have a lot of ideological baggage making it hard to track kids – don’t want to consign them to the ash heap. And there are always counterexamples of people who showed little promise until they bloomed in high school, or at community college, etc. We have seen immigrants come in with nothing and reach the stars. I was talking a lot last summer with the child of a coworker of my wife, who was educated in the Swiss system, where exams in your early adolescence determine their expectations – A-track for University, B-track might go either way, C-track is vocational. He didn’t like the idea that you are cut off from the stars on the basis of performance at that age. On the other hand, C-track kids who don’t suddenly explode into supernova intellectuality get an education much better fitted to succeeding as a mason or a phlebotomist.
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The problem with tracking kids is what you track them into: does it limit their futures?
Kelly Eskridge links to a speech on child prodigies, and how the concept has permeated our expectations and judgments.
our cultural bias toward the prodigy model of creativity denies many, many potentially good or great or genius artists the chance to reach their peak — simply because we are not willing to be patient. Gladwell cites the music and publishing industries: if a first album doesn’t sell well, the band is seen as not commercially viable; if a first novel doesn’t do well, people assume that the writer is a bad writer, not that this novel didn’t work. And that’s the fallacy in a nutshell: if the first product of an artist is not A Work Of Staggering Fucking Genius, then the artist isn’t a Real Artist after all.
I worry that early tracking will limit late bloomers.
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With the school itself? I don’t have many issues at the moment. The pedagogical jargon that comes home as instructions to parents about what the homework is trying to teach sometimes strikes me as either condescending or needlessly convoluted.
I get frustrated by the swirling anxieties of other parents in our community about their children’s education which then carries over into the school itself in some odd ways.
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I’m generally happy with our local schools, although I share MH’s frustration in realizing that other cities do just as good a job with a far less bloated budget.
Honestly, I think what keeps us satisfied is having decided against fleeing the city for the suburbs — if we had saddled ourselves with a massive mortgage to obtain access to (supposedly) better schools, well, it’d make the whole enterprise much more high-stakes. As it is, our kids are learning exactly what we expect elementary school student to learn, love their teachers, and seem happy and unbullied.
The welcome speech at my #1’s middle school said something like ALL of our kids should go to college. Now, I do fondly hope my kid is Princeton material – or, my pocketbook hopes, UVa – but no. In the future, somebody will need to service HVAC systems and wipe bottoms in old folks homes and paint the aging McMansions put up in the Great Boom of the Noughties.
Yes, but the argument you’ll hear, especially in places like the Chronicle’s comment section or any other place un/underemployed PhDs tend to congregate, is that people need the benefit of college to be fully engaged and informed citizens. So yes, they’ll need their HVAC training, but only after they’ve accumulated $40k in student loans from Marginal Liberal Arts College getting cultured ‘n’ stuff.
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