The present education system for K-12 is weak but you hate vouchers, what is your fix of the education system, if you had a say?

My fix? Reduce the ridiculous amount that we spend on the military complex and put it into education.

We could stop spending a billion dollars a piece on fighter jets. We could stop electing jerk-offs and seek out problem solvers. Since we won’t do that then there is no point in further discussion. But… speaking hypothetically we change the way we teach in a very fundamental way. Instead of doing everything we can to “prep” kids for college (make our school look good on standardized tests) we teach practical things like how to change a tire, make music or build an electronic circuit. We teach in a way where kids will know what they are good at, what they want to do and what they need to do to make it happen. I knew so many “AP chemistry” kids who never learned anything practical except what questions would be on the ACT. I remember telling my guidance counselor “I’d like to take auto mechanics and electronics in vocational”. She was like “are you crazy! you’re in AP” I ended up doing both because she could not stop me from signing up. Surprise, I found out I was good at and liked electronics. We need more of this….

@syz My fix? Reduce the ridiculous amount that we spend on the military complex and put it into education.
The fairy of education has granted that, the military budget is slashed in half and that money goes into education. They int turn uses cash for fancier offices, bigger paychecks and curricular athletics. Now more money is in education, how is education better if they spent the additional funds that way?

More home schooling. Pay bonuses to students who exceed expectations.

Also hot breakfast and lunch.

I think the first thing to do is to look around at more successful educational systems. I don’t think it is necessary to go through all the time and expense of re-inventing the wheel. There are fine models out there, if we’re not to arrogant to take a serious look. Norway, for example, is considered to have the best schools in the democratic world. I think it’s worth the few bucks it would cost to send a well-chosen committee over there for a few months and take a thorough look at what they are doing right. If we like what we see, do it here.

@Hypocrisy_Central more money equals smaller class sizes and better paid teachers. If our culture paid/valued teachers like we paid lawyers in this country, we’d have a ton of very smart people becoming teachers. The phrase I hear a lot is “those who can’t do, teach.” I think that sums up the general worth of teachers in our culture.

Another huge component of the education problem is the shrinking middle class and the proliferation of having 2 parents working full time (just to maintain the lifestyle that 1 working parent would have generated a generation ago).

@gorillapaws If our culture paid/valued teachers like we paid lawyers in this country, we’d have a ton of very smart people becoming teachers. The phrase I hear a lot is “those who can’t do, teach.” I think that sums up the general worth of teachers in our culture.
I can say IMO that a lot of that came from decades of the media portraying teachers as stuck up nitwits seeking to ruin the fun of students. You are right; we do not give teachers the due they should have. I once spoke with a saint who worked as a teacher in Africa on a mission trip, she said when she was invited to someone’s shack (which they called home), she was treated like royalty or some rock star and her host was the envy of the community because teachers were highly, highly respected over there. When her trip ended and she came back to teach here in the US, she said her lazy, rude, self-absorbed students here made her long for the students in Africa. Some, however, believe teachers get paid too much as it is, certainly for the amount of ”official hours” they work, pound for pound when stacked up against cabbies, janitors, couriers, barbers, etc. some think they make out pretty good per hourly pay vs hours worked over the year.

Another huge component of the education problem is the shrinking middle class and the proliferation of having 2 parents working full time (just to maintain the lifestyle that 1 working parent would have generated a generation ago).
That could be a whole different issue in itself. Generations ago I believe families were content with less. Plus they saved to get extravagances, toys, or recreational things. If they did not save they put it on lay-away, when they took it home they owned it. Today people want it all and they want it now, so they go into hock up to their eyebrows, but that is another issue.

@Hypocrisy_Central “Generations ago I believe families were content with less. Plus they saved to get extravagances, toys, or recreational things. If they did not save they put it on lay-away, when they took it home they owned it. Today people want it all and they want it now, so they go into hock up to their eyebrows, but that is another issue.”

This is an interesting interview discussing what I’m talking about. The link should take you to the spot where she discusses the comparison of spending/income between then and now.

It’s kind of a chicken-egg problem. I went to two high schools in very different income brackets. In one, the parents were successful even if they weren’t always home. Most of the kids grew up in the same place for their whole school career, had enough to eat, and studied in peaceful, comfortable homes. Their parents were college-educated, so they understood the college application process and could either help pay for it or navigate financial aid.

In the other, most of my friends came from very unstable homes. The parents would be in and out of jobs, crashing with other relatives, moving the family around, or dealing with substance abuse problems. My best friend from this school is an example. Her dad had two families and lived with/ supported one of them. His wife was controlling and didn’t want him to talk to the other side or pay them child support. Her mother had clinical depression and spent most of the time sleeping on the couch. They lived with her aunt who was an RN. My friend always had to have part-time jobs for spending money and sometimes for groceries. A lot of other people I knew depended on free/reduced school lunch for meals. One winter the school building wasn’t heated for about two months, and we all went to class in our coats every day.

To fix the education system, we have to address poverty too. We’re basically a first world country with big swaths of third world country in it. With all the aid we send to other countries, we need to start thinking of parts of our own country that way.

Maybe there need to be expanded after-school programs for low-income kids, with good meals, quiet study time, and tutors. As others have said, we should cut military spending and put more into education. (We also need to get college tuition under control. It keeps rising relative to income, while a bachelor’s degree is worth less in the job market.)

We also need to model our curriculum after other successful countries, and massively cut back on standardized testing. And teachers need to be paid more. True story, I was debating between teaching and nursing this summer before going back to school. I asked around and talked to a couple teachers about their job satisfaction. Everyone I talked to is burned out and called it a labor of love. Starting teachers earn about what I make now as a retail manager, and after their workday ends they spend their whole evening doing unpaid teaching work like creating lesson plans and grading paper. With that on top of student loans, it just didn’t make sense. So I didn’t do it.

It would help a lot if the parents became teacher allies instead of enemies.

It would help a lot of students were actually held accountable for their actions instead of everybody finding excuses for their bad behavior.

It would help a lot if parents actually cared about their children’s education, and didn’t see school as some sort of fancy, free daycare.

^ Holy smokes Bullwinkle, I actually agreed with most of that if not all.

faints

I never disrespected my kid’s teachers in front of them. That doesn’t mean I didn’t go to battle with a teacher on their behalf, but I did it quietly.

My parents never said anything bad about my teachers either, even though now I know they thought a couple of them were idiots!
When I was in 3rd grade my girlfriend and I made up a secret code. It involved using the letters of the alphabet, but only partially writing them. For example, the letter A might be composed of just the right hand slant and the cross bar in the middle. The letter C was just the bottom half of the C and so on.
Teacher intercepted a note and became very upset because she couldn’t read it! She called my parents in for a conference. They sat at student desks in front of me, and I sat at a desk behind them. I remember thinking it was so odd to see my 6’ 5” dad sitting in a little kid’s desk!
I was worried. I mean, I just didn’t get in trouble.
So, she showed them this NOTE that SHE couldn’t read!!! She was so mad! She demanded that I read it. I did. I don’t remember what it said.
Dad asked where this came from, and she told him that my friend and I had made it up, if you can believe THAT!!! Grr grr grr.
He looked at the note, then turned around and looked at me, with a twinkle in his eye and the smallest of proud grins on his face and said, “You made this writing up?”
I nodded mutely. He just nodded back, reset his face to “stern” and turned around and told the teacher that I would not do that again.
He was damn proud of me! On the way home he just said, “That was very interesting, Valre Lynn. Don’t pass notes in class any more.”
I didn’t, and I never forgot that. Obviously.

Actually, come to think of it…I don’t think we were passing the notes in class. I think she just saw one lying on my desk or something. But I don’t know.

^^ I never disrespected my kid’s teachers in front of them. That doesn’t mean I didn’t go to battle with a teacher on their behalf, but I did it quietly.
Well, that ship has sailed. I know parents who would march down and bypass the teacher and go straight to the principal demanding their 10lb of flesh. If their child has grades equal to a sack of rocks with 3 extra stones, and is as controlled as a feather in a dust devil, it can’t possibly be them (the parents), it HAS to be because the school or teachers don’t understand their kid, or at worse, is picking on them. The school system is supposed to be janky anyway so who better to blame their child’s behavior and poor grades on? Surely they can’t say their child is the way he/she is because they are the parents, and it comes down to what they do or fail; to do.

Maybe they should say once you get into high school every ‘D’ on the report card means you wait an extra 90 to get your driver’s license and for every ‘F’ you have 180 days tacked on and see if that motivates them to learn.

Oh, I know, @HC. I dealt with it. It had sailed at the time I was sending my kids through school. I was teaching then. I know what the parents did. I just think for myself. I think about what’s good, and not good for my kids.

People learn different ways, and have different sensory strengths and weaknesses. I believe that early childhood learning should be multi-sensory. Once children show dominance in certain methodologies of learning, they should be grouped by how they learn, not by perceived intelligence as they are now, and the kids who are grasping a lesson can help the ones who might be struggling. This will help reduce some of the cliquishness of the school environment.

I also feel that subjects can be overlapped: kids can learn sentence structure on the paragraphs in their history book, for example – repeated exposure to material, and approaching it from different perspectives helps improve comprehension and retention.

As kids get older, they should be taught how to study. Neither my son nor I, 25 years before him, were taught how to study. If this is started in the later elementary grades, you can catch the kids while they are still curious and love to learn and you open the world to them. The resourcefulness I developed on my own in College is more valuable in my adulthood than nearly anything I learned in High School.

On all grade levels, finding ways to incorporate real life experience with the lesson are ways to make the lessons have more value by demonstrating the way the theories are applied on a daily basis. Bringing more people from a great variety of professions – or getting the kids out to the actual workplace – to expose them to the variety of careers available, but also to show why a broad base of knowledge is beneficial in almost all professions.

I like your answers. We were taught to teach to all three of the sensory strenghts, but in a way that presents the lesson so that it does incorporate them all, at different points in the lesson. Gosh, lesson plans are tedious enough to make, and it’s done on your own time, each weekend. To have to make 3 different kinds of lessons plans for each and every lesson would be tough. Really tough. You’re looking at about 6 different subjects throughout the day. And then to group the students by each sensory strength would require the kids to work on their own much of the time.

Well, that is true. I have to say that I like the basic concept of a core curriculum (but “common core” doesn’t represent my theories, for sure)... since there are basics that all schools have to teach, why should each teacher have to come up with their own lesson plans? Of course all kids and all classroom environments have some unique qualities, so variations will be necessary at times, but if a particular lesson plan is found to be effective for kids who learn a particular way, it should be available for all teachers of that grade or subject to utilize.

The best schools let teachers teach the way the teach best. They let the teachers come up with their own ideas of how to teach a certain subject or lesson. The worst schools tell them they have to teach it this way, and no other. Just like “one size fits all” doesn’t work for every student, it doesn’t work for every teacher.

I mean, we share ideas and stuff, and extrapolate from there, but we come up with our own way. The principals just have to sign off on it.

My personal favorite was a plan I came up with to demonstrate how molecules are made up of various atoms. It involved 7 different colored gum balls, representing the three most abundant elements. White represented oxygen, blue represented hydrogen, etc. Then the kids would glue the right number of atoms together, with a hot glue gun, to make a particular molecule. H20, for example.
Their favorite was baking soda, NaHCO(3). I ran out of oxygen atoms. /: I should have foreseen THAT one!

The principal loved it and had it out on display for open house.

Kinda like Beethoven telling Led Zepplin how they need to play Stairway to Heaven, ya know?

My fix is making it a Federal thing (Ben Carson supports this so it must be crazy but I agree) School funding shouldn’t be based on property taxes. Here you can get in a great school or a shitty one for living on the wrong side of the street.

Divvy up the cash on a federal level.

When I went to Cope in Redlands I was in a history class with 45 kids and 30 desks. Being the timid fucker I was in the 7th grade I sat on tiles until they could figure out how to get us desks. And the solution was tables pressed against the walls so we couldn’t see the teacher.

@H_C: Your disdain of education and educators isn’t all that shocking.

Teachers should be better trained and paid more. They should be required to major in the area that they will be teaching.

All this useless testing has to be scrapped. In fact the whole grading system needs to be reconsidered. I have seen the present system compared to moving students along an assembly line.

One possible approach is what is called outcomes based education. Instead of failing a student for not doing well, the student gets to keep at it until the subject is mastered.

Another idea that has proved useful is to give more open ended assignments instead of the boring process of memorization and regurgitation. For example, students might be asked to come up with possible reasons why Rome was so successful and why it eventually collapsed. Maybe the teacher could have a debate in class over different sides of an issue.

@hearkat On all grade levels, finding ways to incorporate real life experience with the lesson are ways to make the lessons have more value by demonstrating the way the theories are applied on a daily basis.
Now THAT is really something that needs to be done. I so hated math questions like If you have 2 and ⅓ apples and 8 friends come by how much apple will each of you get? I found that TOTALLY STUPID, I was thinking if I were having 8 friends plus myself for lunch we would be having pizza or something not trying to divvy up some fricken apples.

@johnpowell @H_C: Your disdain of education and educators isn’t all that shocking.
I do not really think about teachers. The system of hiring and firing teachers is whacky, in areas that have a strong teacher’s union and tenure it is easier to pull teeth from a tiger than get rid of poor teachers, which being said before can occur because teachers get burned out and just show for the check. I have more distain for the system on how they parlay out the money but not education in general.