I just finished watching Matt Lauer interview President Obama about our country's schools. Lauer led off his interview by citing some very troubling statistics:
- 67 percent of Americans believe that our education system is in crisis
- 1/3 of students don't graduate high school
- 1/3 of high school graduates aren't prepared for college
- 35 percent of 12th graders aren't proficient in reading
Those numbers are make me gag. I'm on an education rampage. Some of the bile will end up on this blog this week.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
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Apt. 11d 
I look forward to the bile. But, I fundamentally disagree that the education system is in crisis. First, I completely disregard any crises that are dependent on the number of people who believe that there’s a crisis. Second, in order to know the relevance of your other 3 numbers (1/3 of students don’t graduate from high school, aren’t prepared for college, aren’t proficient in reading), I’d need to know what those numbers were in previous decades (and, this analysis would have to include the fact that our educational system was officially limited access through the sixties, and unofficially so far a bit longer).
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First, I completely disregard any crises that are dependent on the number of people who believe that there’s a crisis.
Many crises are wholly dependent on how many people think there is a crisis. For example, bank runs, concert trampling incidents, and those cases where people get stomped in Mecca. I suppose a crisis in education isn’t completely analogous, but it isn’t completely different. In a given district, if you have the middle class worried about education, they all move and cause a crisis.
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I also watched Matt’s interview with Obama this morning. I was impressed with the amount of time Obama gave to do this. Obviously this is a very important issue to him. I live near the Canadian border and have been there to see their education system. I did this because they have one of the highest ratings in both literacy and math/science in the world. It is amazing what their teachers do for each individual student and what their system does for developing great teachers. While they don’t have or need charter schools, they do support schools for all children- both English and French speaking as well as religious schools. They have province-wide curriculum and teacher training. Everyone takes the province-wide tests and everyone is measured by them. But more importantly the instruction for each child is tailored to how they do on these tests. It was radically different from the school district where I worked and no one in the district wanted to learn a different way to go. Very disappointing- especially as Canada has the same ‘problems’ we have here with immigrants, poverty, working and/or single parent households, etc. and yet they are doing the job we just aspire to.
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Wow that was a glowing review of the Canadian system. I would say though that it’s a little rosy from my experience. I’m in Toronto.
The differentiation is really true from what I’ve seen though. When I worked as a special ed/reading centre assistant almost all the teachers could approach reading, for example, from both a phonics and whole-language viewpoint and would sometimes enlist the centre in coming up with strategies for individual kids whether they had been tested/labelled special needs or not. However we still had teachers that were less successful than others.
One thing that makes the Canadian/provincial system very very different from the US is that education is funded provincially/centrally in (I think) all provinces. That means that you don’t get as much disparity of funding between school districts. Taxes are pooled across the province and then distributed to boards.
The downside is…if a particular district has unique challenges (poverty, northern & rural schools) it can be hard to acquire extra funds to address those issues.
However I will say that I do think our public schools overall are pretty decent.
What I find disturbing in both my American and Canadian family and friends is that the answer to almost every problem tends to come up as “homeschool.” I’m pretty concerned that this DIY tendency is having an impact on how far parents take their concerns within the school (and school board) system.
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“I’m pretty concerned that this DIY tendency is having an impact on how far parents take their concerns within the school (and school board) system.”
Speaking of the DIY approach:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gKKU89nzYKrE_cze3ngfD6cAqvWQD9I9RV4O1
“A father furious because his 13-year-old daughter who suffers from cerebral palsy had been bullied stormed onto a school bus and threatened the children who teased her, deputies in Florida said.”
“Jones told deputies he complained to Seminole County school administrators in the past, but nothing had been done to help the girl, Jackson said.”
I bet he gets more prompt attention now.
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Wow that was a glowing review of the Canadian system.
Listening to what Americans think about Canada is a great way to learn what Americans think and a so-so way to learn about Canada. Canada is America’s ink blot.
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I’m glad these sobering statistics are being broadcast to a larger audience because many people have simply been unaware of the scope of the problem.
And, according to ACT, it might be closer to 3/4 of high school graduates who are unprepared for college.
http://www.joannejacobs.com/2010/08/act-24-test-as-ready-for-college/
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And, according to ACT, it might be closer to 3/4 of high school graduates who are unprepared for college.
That’s why we have communications departments.
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“I bet he gets more prompt attention now.”
Yeah, but he also got arrested, since he threatened to kill 13 year olds on a bus, on video.
Of course, 40 years ago, the father of that girl with CP would have been told to institutionalize his child and forget about her, after all, they could have more children.
I worry about the DIY approach, too, but I also think that it turns into the right solution for some. One size fits all can’t be right in education, but it also can’t be custom tailoring for everyone. School, and especially public school, is going to have to be ready-to-wear. People can and should campaign for the ready-to-wear not being tailored just to the size M’s (or even worse, the size S’s or L’s, i.e., an extreme), and we can argue for M 1/2’s and M+’s, and the ability to take up and down hems and shorten sleeves. But custom-made-couture isn’t a reasonable expectation (both because of resource limits, but also because school is, by nature, a homogenization tool).
If you have a child who needs a custom fit, perhaps we can choose as a society to offer that. But, if you just want that for your child (and I think more people do these days, it’s part of the trend towards believing everything can be custom designed for you, and it gets even worse when we talk about our children), I don’t think it can be provided by the public.
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This is going to sound terrible, but for me one of the nice things about the emergence of the DIY approach is that it takes highly motivated parents with values and/or educational philosophies at odds with mine and removes them from the system. For example, I’ve heard criticism of my daughter’s elementary school as being “too academic”, or too focused on reading. I’m glad that I don’t have to compromise with those people.
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Thanks Laura for this focus on education issues. Very interesting to me and I will tune in (as usual) to see what you have to say and what links to interesting thoughts you provide. Excellent as always!
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One size fits all can’t be right in education, but it also can’t be custom tailoring for everyone. School, and especially public school, is going to have to be ready-to-wear.
BJ, I think that statement was true, up until the last 3 years or so. Now, however, in my opinion, it is possible that our public system may head in the direction of custom tailoring, through technology. Computers don’t work well as instruments of homogenization. They work very well in allowing individual users to customize their experience. With computers, there is no reason the entire class must focus on the same lesson at the same time. Each student can receive customized lessons which match her skill development level.
With the advent of statewide tests, I see increased customization as a good thing. Otherwise, all instruction will concentrate on meeting grade-level goals. That’s great if you’re the child who’s just at the cusp of meeting the goals. It’s terrible if you’re the child who exceeds the goals. Adaptive, computer-based instruction could be a godsend for the above-average kids.
I cannot predict how public school systems will react to these innovations. In my more cynical moments, I can see the public schools, as presently constructed, as vast systems which work, as intended, to wash-out and rank students.
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Can we agree on reasonable goals for the public schools?
All children literate by 12th grade, 8th grade, 4th grade. (Wait, how do we measure that…)
All children prepared to succeed in college.
All systems receive the same funding per student.
Systems with hard-to-educate students receive more.
Schools should be large, as that’s more efficient.
Schools should be small, as that’s more efficient.
Schools should prepare students for college.
Schools should prepare students for the workforce.
Schools should identify students who would benefit from vocational training (or college study.)
Schools should not place students into academic tracks.
Schools should place students into academic tracks.
Schools should offer competitive athletic leagues.
Schools should graduate students who are physically fit.
Students who are not physically fit should be subject to special fitness classes.
Students should know their future career tracks by 12th grade (8th grade, 4th grade, kindergarten.)
Choose some, not all, of the goals above.
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“67 percent of Americans believe that our education system is in crisis”
I’m not particularly troubled by this stat considering 60% of people do not believe in evolution.
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First, I agree that there is a crisis. Second, I believe that solving this crisis will include something that I haven’t heard much being said about—the “what” of what is being taught. While some changes have been made in the last few decades, our schools teach curriculum that was developed for an earlier age and a completely different world. So how about a national brainstorming to revision and redesign public school curriculum? Go to projectschoolSOS.org to find out more and participate. Thanks
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” With computers, there is no reason the entire class must focus on the same lesson at the same time. Each student can receive customized lessons which match her skill development level.”
I think that schools and teachers I respect have been doing this kind of customization forever (helping choose books that “stretch” them in language arts, and math packets with which children are allowed to work towards their own level). I think computers will make that easier for some things (our kids’ math teacher allows kids to print out logic games from the computer when they’re done with their work; the tech teacher has designed her own CD-based keyboarding worksheet for kids to work with at home so they can do the fun stuff at school). But I don’t think they’re going to be able to custom-make the curriculum for individuals, just allow it to be less one size fits all than it used to be.
and I most emphatically do not believe that our educational system has become more rigid than it used to be.
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I’m not particularly troubled by this stat considering 60% of people do not believe in evolution.
I’ve seen so much hectoring over that, if polled I might just answer that I didn’t believe in evolution. Of course, if they asked the question in such a way that belief in evolution required you to hold that God didn’t act directly in human development, I’d answer against evoltuion regardless.
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Also, if the government starts buying TV time to hector me about eat vegetables, I’m going to start selling loose cigarettes outside D.C. area private schools.
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BJ, we’ve had success using the online system ALEKS with our children. http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/overview
It seems to use a variant of computer adaptive assessment to determine each child’s present level in math. http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Adaptive_Assessments
There is no need for a teacher to make continuous adjustments for each child in his class. Software can do much of the level-switching automatically. If a child wants to learn, they can learn at their own pace.
We did have an interesting time explaining to our oldest child that getting an answer wrong on the assessments did not mean “I’m stupid.” It just meant she hadn’t learned that topic yet.
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“I’m not particularly troubled by this stat considering 60% of people do not believe in evolution.”
Knowing isolated “facts” isn’t the end-all-be-all of education. What’s important is being a life-long learner. If you need to know something, you can always look it up!
Wendy, more seriously, doesn’t that 60% cause you some disquiet on the subject of American education and how effective it is?
Totally off topic, last year one of my kids had a teacher who (upon sending a 4-year-old and a 5-year-old to school last year) had just returned to teaching. It was a bit too much for her and she quit. There was some talk about her working part-time at another school. Anyway, I saw her picking up her kids at school today and she looked so happy and so rested!
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And here’s what makes those statistics even worse in my viewpoint.
I was fairly well prepared for college. (I went to a non-selective college for one year, the transferred to a very selective one; I would have been unprepared at the second if I’d gone there first, as I didn’t have pre-calc and calculus was the lowest level of math they offered.)
I went only through eighth grade; only 150 days a year; and only 4-hour days, with effectively no homework.
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I can’t say there’s a crisis in my immediate area–the city is another story. Are even some of the elite suburban public schools failing some students? Yes. But they have to cater to a broad student base. I’ve spent most of the whole day looking at the technology/computer science courses offered at competing private schools and then checked the 3 or 4 surrounding public school districts. At the public schools, the technology courses vary in the same way that the rest of the curriculum does. There are the “hey, you’re gonna be a secretary right out of high school” courses. There are actual computer science courses for the college bound. And there are trade courses–CAD drawing, graphic design. And then there are courses that fall in the middle–web design, multimedia design, etc.
The public schools offer life/vocational courses like cooking, child care, parenting, auto mechanics, etc. None of that is offered at private schools in the area. It’s all academics because they’re all going to college. Public schools have to provide courses for different avenues students might pursue. Trying to be all things to all people is a difficult thing.
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There are the “hey, you’re gonna be a secretary right out of high school” courses.
If you go for your diploma, you could join an Excel pool.
Turn in your URL guide and go back to high school!
Web design school dropout (Web design school dropout),
Hanging around the iTunes store.
Web design school dropout (Web design school dropout),
It’s about time you knew the score.
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“Wendy, more seriously, doesn’t that 60% cause you some disquiet on the subject of American education and how effective it is?”
The problem, as I see it, is that there is no consensus on what education should accomplish and there probably never will be.
When *hasn’t* there been a crisis in American education? These 60% of people who don’t believe in evolution came from somewhere, from people who didn’t believe in evolution, people who were educated in previous years when, I assume you guys think education was “good” as opposed to now when it allegedly sucks.
There are 44 year old high school classmates of mine on Facebook who are dumb as frickin’ dirt, people. They had the same education I did. What the hell do you expect schools to do?
Do I like every single thing that happens in my kids’ schools? No. Did my parents like every single thing that happened in my schools? No. Did my grandparents like every single thing that happened in my parents’ schools? No. What under the sun is new? Nothing.
I’m not being defeatist. I’m not saying things shouldn’t change. I do think that we’re asking a *lot* of schools and of overstimulated kids and of overworked parents, and we need to chill instead of insisting there’s a crisis. My daughter is learning some algebra in 6th grade. I learned it in 8th grade. Is her school *failing*? Or are our standards rising?
I could go on and on and match Laura’s bile with my own, but I end up feeling like I’m banging my head against a wall. Tomorrow I’ll be spending time in a “failing” urban middle school classroom with my lit students. What are you guys doing?
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And in case you couldn’t tell, I’m tired and busy and overwhelmed with lots of stuff, and this week of education posts is going to get on my last nerve. So I’ll either be absent from here or very very rude and profane. 🙂
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So I’ll either be absent from here or very very rude and profane. 🙂
Have you tried altering the lyrics to show tunes?
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What am I doing? Well, I spent at least 20 hours last week trying to pump money out of local businesses for a stupid Casino Night in our school, which will raise money to fund the Lego club and other educational activities, because our governor flushed our budget down the toilet. I spent an hour in a principal’s office this morning trying to find out why a fully tenured teacher isn’t giving my kid homework and isn’t challenging him, and smiled as she blamed the stupid children and their thoughtless parents for the low test scores in our schools.
1/3 of kids drop out of high school. In this economy, if you don’t have a high school diploma, your chances of finding a career that can support a family is minimal.
That’s a crisis.
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“I spent an hour in a principal’s office this morning trying to find out why a fully tenured teacher isn’t giving my kid homework and isn’t challenging him, and smiled as she blamed the stupid children and their thoughtless parents for the low test scores in our schools.”
You wouldn’t catch me begging for homework from someone whose pedagogy I didn’t respect. Lord knows what might come of that.
“1/3 of kids drop out of high school. In this economy, if you don’t have a high school diploma, your chances of finding a career that can support a family is minimal.”
Right. Although now that you mention it, who’s checking? I suppose that in this day and age, you can easily get that information about applicants by checking local newspapers online, etc., but who would go to that kind of trouble for an entry level position? I know there’s quite a big difference between life outcomes for dropouts and high school graduates, but I wonder how much academic difference that last year or two actually makes. Isn’t the difference more likely the operation of the sorting machine, rather than actual value-added? There’s also the issue of adult immigrants who arrive in the US with very few years of formal education under their belts. However they do in the US, it is not a reflection on our K-12 system. (Now that I think of it, are we taking people’s word for their level of education? Based on my email spam, there’s an entire industry devoted to creating a fake academic paper trail, and presumably the more successful people are, the more temptation they will feel to improve their resumes. So the outcomes for the less formally educated may not be quite as uniformly bad as we are assuming.)
“What are you guys doing?”
I only regret that I have but one husband to give for my country. My husband’s amateur astronomy club does free public education nights that tend to draw interested adults, homeschoolers, and lots of Boy Scouts (no Girl Scouts, so far). There’s a short lecture, followed by an opportunity to use telescopes. He also helps with the yearly star night for the kids’ private school. Last year and this year, we’ve been trying to run a board game club at school around once a month (this week is chess). We’re also in talks with the school to launch a monthly elementary math club next year. That latter stuff is private school, but a school is a school. I also been babysitting a speech-delayed preschooler when he gets expelled from public school, which happens regularly.
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Wendy wins!
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The drop out rate is worse that 1/3 in urban areas. I have visited some urban schools in Philadelphia where only 1 in 10 kids graduated. Educational attainment is entirely tied to income and race. I’m sorry, but if you don’t think that’s a crisis, you’re reading the wrong blog.
I’m not blaming teachers. There are some bad teachers and the system has to be fixed to get rid of them, but teachers are certainly not the whole problem. Politics is the biggest problem — a local system of education, teacher tenure, a traditional school year, shaky administration, the isolation of the urban poor and their extreme social needs, bureaucratic morass, racism, low expectations, tradition bound school leaders, and, yes, even the teachers unions. I’ll make my case on them later.
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Laura, why do kids drop out of school?
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Also, Laura, where are you getting these numbers. I’ve had only 5 minutes to Google search, but I’m seeing a 37% graduation rate in Philly schools for African American males, and higher for other subgruops. The lowest HS dropout rate in Philly I saw was 22%.
Also, there’s a surefire way to increase graduation rates. Better tracking of students who live in very transient impoverished populations.
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That’s a district-wide average, Wendy. When you look at particular schools in Phila, the numbers are worse.
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I think there’s a long term trend of under education for our inner city and minority populations. I think NCLB has forced this trend into the national consciousness.
In NJ, the data I find shows that some 85% of kids graduate from high school. Middle-class parents in middle-class schools, however, have come to expect much more than they used to. After school Lego clubs are not a need; they’re a want, and it’s not unreasonable for us to balance other societal needs against them, and expect parents to fund their own lego needs.
I’m with Wendy on this — I don’t think there’s a nationwide crisis, and that the “crisis” (for the non-inner city) is in the minds of parents, who want their children to have all the opportunities they had (and all the ones they didn’t).
Mind you, that doesn’t mean that I understand any specific school or classroom your children are in and fully understand people being furious if their kids aren’t served, and doing what they can to fix it.
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“That’s a district-wide average, Wendy. When you look at particular schools in Phila, the numbers are worse. ”
But then why are we talking about the schools that are loosing their Lego clubs because of budget cuts?
I do think there’s a problem in some schools — calling it a “crisis” would require a time trend that’s not there. There’s always been a crisis in those schools. And, those schools aren’t the schools we’re sending our kids to.
I was going to complain about the charter school solution — since the data suggests that only 17% of charters out-perform traditional public schools. But then, I saw the data that the charters seem to have done better with ELL populations and high-poverty schools. I’m willing to follow up on that statistics and see if there’s a problem with a solution.
But, that’s not a crisis in American education. We shouldn’t be talking about 33% graduation rates if they reflect a variance including 100% and 10% within single school systems.
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I can think of a way to increase graduation rates. Give everyone a diploma.
I’m not proposing that as a solution, but I think it’s worth considering the tradeoff between putting schools under pressure to meet certain performance standards, and the methods the schools might stoop to in order to satisfy those demands.
For some students, high school classes might collapse to cramming to pass the state’s 10th grade exam, on the first or tenth try. There’ll be no time for anything else. Is that fair to the high school student with low reading and math skills? Would the prospect of four years of remedial math and reading courses make him more likely to stay in school?
Wendy, there is a difference between doing a few elements of algebra (or geometry, etc.) at earlier grade levels, and teaching the subject well. This paper is fascinating: http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/89/study89.pdf. A math professor at Johns Hopkins compared the performance of his 2006 students to his 1989 students. They took the same exam; they had the same SAT scores.
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I’m a 6th grade public school teacher in rural America and am fascinated by Laura’s posts and everyone’s comments. Keep it coming.
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Wendy says we need to “chill” about this so-call crisis as she points out her daughter is learning algebra in 6th grade and questions whether our standards are rising.
I wish standards were rising in our local school, where only one-third of our students are studying algebra by eighth grade. This is in a place where the demographics and the resources should make that percentage much higher, at least double. From my front row seat here, I blame the lousy curriculum and low state standards. Teachers, administrators, ed schools and politicians all play major roles in this failure, and I think these same factors are a significant part of the problem in low-income schools.
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“I wish standards were rising in our local school, where only one-third of our students are studying algebra by eighth grade.”
Oh, dear.
Math phobia is so common among the demographic that goes into elementary education (nice white girls) that I wonder if it wouldn’t help recruitment-wise and retention-wise to shift to a model with visiting elementary math specialists. The sort of person who loves real math is very seldom the same sort of person who revels in collages, glitter glue, etc. By removing the custodial care part of teaching, it might be possible to find and keep more teachers for whom math is the “good” part of teaching, particularly since it would work well as a part-time position (mornings tend to be for hard subjects and afternoons for soft subjects).
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Laura, I looked at the individual schools in Philly and couldn’t find graduation rates at 22%. One of those schools at 22% was the Culinary Academy, fwiw.
bj’s making good points. Getting funding for Lego Club has nothing to do with what’s happening in the classroom. Hell, I run Lego Club at my son’s school and at this point I’m funding it myself. Minifigs keep disappearing.* I’m just going to do an Amazon Subscribe-and-Save order on Minifigs.
My kid’s school is not making AYP. The MS I was at this morning is. Our measurements are fucked up.
I was sitting on the bus coming back from the MS this morning talking with one of my students, and the student said “Yeah, they’ll find out what college is like from us so when they apply they’ll know.” I had to tell him that about half those kids won’t even graduate. Poor kid was shocked.
(Btw, I’m not denying there are problems. I just have a kneejerk negative response to “crisis” language that tends to oversimplify the issues. We all act like we agree “there’s a crisis!” but there is absolutely no consensus on what should be done to “fix” the problem. What Laura sees as the problem is, I can guarantee you, not what Amy sees as the problem. Define the problem first before you talk about solutions.)
*We found some toy soldiers in our Lego box last week, and I told the kids that maybe Woody and Buzz had sent them to do surveillance on us. 😉
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I was being too glib about the lego club. I didn’t think I really needed to explain the scope of the problem. Christie has devastated our budget. Our superintendent says that our budget is in crisis. I believe him. He says that we’re are one special ed kid away from declaring bankruptcy.
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He says that we’re are one special ed kid away from declaring bankruptcy.
Maybe an arsonist or a wide receiver with litigious parents or something can drive your school into bankruptcy. Take the pressure off the poor kids.
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Why do you believe your superintendent?
Really, I’m curious – do you have enough transparency as to the budget? It’s not as if they don’t have incentives to make parents believe that (a) Christie is driving them into bankruptcy and (b) they have no options other than restoring such cuts.
(And the “one special ed kid” line sounds like a really dirty piece of guilt-tripping on his part.)
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Yeah, the budget is very transparent. I can look up the salaries of individual teachers online, I think. I know I get the salaries of the administrators. I don’t know, Dr. M., a lot of people went over the budget including our local town council, which has been taken over by libertarians. I think the problem is that so much of a school’s budget goes to salaries and benefits that there is very little discretion room when cuts are needed. They can’t fire the tenured teachers or force them to take a pay cut, although that is what our town council tried to do.
Isn’t that “one special ed kid away from disaster” line horrible? He said it in a packed council chamber. There must have been 200 people there. His comment led to a bunch of people getting up to the podium asking if there was anyway that we would stop funding therapy for THOSE kids. The mayor cheered and encouraged them to start a grass roots movement to protest schools have to pay for THOSE kids.
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“They can’t fire the tenured teachers or force them to take a pay cut, although that is what our town council tried to do.”
Is it possible to get governments to stop writing these kind of contracts that lock them into boom-time spending?
If an individual arranged their personal finances that way (huge mortgage, multiple car payments, etc.), I think we’d all recognize that it’s grossly irresponsible. I’m planning on doing a blog review of Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi’s book personal finance book “All Your Worth,” and as I recall, they recommend a budget of 50% needs, 30% wants, and 20% savings. The idea is that with this sort of budget, a family would immediately be able to lose half their income and still function. I think it’s time to start building government budgets and contracts with the same sort of redundancies and fail-safes.
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I don’t think local governments can budget like families do. First, I believe it is illegal in New Jersey for s school district to run a surplus. (Or else the surplus is capped at a very low amount.) You can always change the law, but . . . Can you imagine the attack ads from the “fiscally conservative” if a governmental unit was taking $10 million of “your money” each year, and only spending $8 million of it? There would be immediate calls for a tax cuts. (Or, to look at the same question in another way, would you support an immediate 20% tax increase so that we can have a rainy day fund?)
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I think we are in a climate where you could actually persuade people that a rainy day fund was a good idea. If not, 50% needs and 50% wants would work, too.
I’ve also seen a number of personal finance writers recommend creating a doomsday version of your budget which you pull out after a job loss or major catastrophe. I think it would be a very good thing for legislatures to periodically create different doomsday budgets–one for revenue down 20%, one for revenue down 50%, 70%, etc. And I cannot too warmly urge legislators not to enter into multi-year contracts that will be burdensome in time of recession.
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