Monthly Archives: January 2013
It all depends on how we go about change. Do we pass laws that are the same as reverse discrimination—-the US already did this and little changed—and set quotas so minorities and people of color will have an advantage over Caucasians, or do we build schools where merit is a level playing field while providing early education as young as three to help disadvantaged non-reading students of all races to become more literate and learn to love reading. Literacy is the key and if a child grows up in a home where his or her parent/s do not instill a love of reading, those children fall behind and seldom catch up to children from families where literacy is valued.
For example, in 2003 in the United States, 7% of whites; 24% of blacks; 44% of Hispanics, and 14% of Asian/Pacific Islanders read below-basic literacy levels. Literacy and a love of reading begins in the home. Children who start school illiterate seldom catch up no matter what the schools do. In Finland, one of the best education systems in the world, parents start teaching their children to read as young as age 3 at home, and all children are literate and love reading by the time they start public schooling at age 7. Should parents in Finland feel guilty just because almost 100% of the population is white and literate but in Kenya only 87.4% is considered literate or, for more examples, Mexico where only 86.1% of the population is literate or Nepal where literacy is only 60.3%.
The other day, I came across a tweet about a Wisconsin school being investigated for teaching white privilege. Apparently, a parent at this particular school became very upset after reading the content of a course her son was taking titled “American Diversity.” The mother felt the curriculum was being used to teach white students that they are racist and oppressive. She also felt the lesson on white privilege made her son feel unearned guilt for being white.
I can’t speak to how the material was presented or what the exact lesson plans were, but my takeaway is simple: kids aren’t the only ones who need these lesson—adults do, too.
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We told our daughter, who is now in her third year at Stanford, that it didn’t matter how good a teacher was, learning was her responsibility. We also told her if she had an incompetent teacher, she was to tell us. She only told us once K – 12, and that incompetent teacher in 9th grade was a long-term substitute who could not control the class after the regular teacher had a baby and went on maternity leave. Our daughter came home and told us that boys in that class were doing strip-tease acts when the sub turned his back on the class to write something on the board.
When that happened in our daughter’s 9th grade English class, I taught her what she was missing at home after school and on weekends. I also let the principal know what was happening in that class and he eventually replaced that sub with an older, retired teacher, who happens to live down the street from us. But that took a few months.
The parent has a vital job and instead of complaining and putting blame on teachers when kids do not learn because he or she isn’t reading or doing homework, the parent must be held responsible for the child’s learning. When kids are not learning, the root of that problem may almost always be traced back to a parent and/or parents and the attitude or parenting style.
How a teacher interacts with his or her students differs from student to student based on individual perception. Some students may love how a teacher teaches while others cannot stand the same teacher and uses that as an excuse not to learn.
WORTH READING!
I am holding my future in my hands.
Trembling fingers can barely rip open the plastic casing containing the thin strip that will show me whether I’m pregnant, or have just thrown away a chunk of life savings and my soul on failed IVF.
My mouth goes dry and my heart starts into erratic bat-wing thumps. I need to do this quickly before I start thinking too much, while I’m still groggy with sleep and this hazy dreamlike state is providing a buffer against reality.
I’m testing early, perhaps too early. Tomorrow (Monday, 14 days after embryo transfer) is the official testing date recommended by my fertility clinic but I know that I couldn’t face the second week of a new teaching job on the back of devastating news. Testing today will at least give me a few hours to try to come to terms with the result.
I’ve been…
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What makes Education Toxic?
A comment left for a post—NC Teacher: “I quit”—on Diane Ravitche’s blog made a good point, and I posted a reply:
I think you have made a great point or at least inadvertently focused a spotlight on an important issue and why it is there. Turnover in a school or school district may be a red flag—a strong warning sign— that the school board/administration/students are not the easiest to work with or work for [another word would be dysfunctional ].
This could be extended to an entire state since each state has its own department of education that decides policy in that state as directed by the elected politicians from the governor of a state on down. Due to a need to gain votes, religious and/or political agendas tend to rule in such organizations and the winds may shift at any time.
For example, I friend sent me this about the current situation in the high school in Southern California where he now teaches.
I was a public school teacher from 1975 – 2005 and we worked together before dysfunctional administration at our high school and in our school district drove him to quit and find a job in another district that at the time was a better place to work.
But beware of the grass is greener over there syndrome because a drought will kill the green grass leaving behind sweltering heat and dust.
During my thirty years in the classroom, I worked under nine-different principals. Some were great, some good and some horrible.
The horrible ones drove teachers, counselors and VPs out of the schools where they ruled Nazi style and turnover could reach as high as fifty percent in a few years.
Good principals, who are usually a sign of good administration and a sensible school board, tend to hold on to staff.
I mean, how many people quit jobs—any job—with a boss that knows what he or she is doing; a boss that supports his workers in the best possible ways to make the work environment a place where we want to spend twenty to forty years of our lives?
My friend said of this school year (2012 – 2013):
“112 scheduling changes in the first three weeks (the classes he teaches)
“75% of the administrative team is new; a lot of chaos
“50% of the counselors are new; a lot of chaos
“We lost our department chairs, so there is no communication between the teachers and administration
[This high school, he says] “once had a top-notch academic program; however, we are falling apart at the seams; our test scores have flat-lined and they will continue to flat-line because there are just too many new faces at our school; two of our Vice Principals have never been a VP before; they’re nice people, but we have to wade through their learning curve.”
For another example: at the high school where I taught for the last sixteen of the thirty years I was in the classroom as a teacher, we had one new teacher quit at lunch on his first day on the job with two more classes to teach after lunch. During the lunch break, he walked in the principal’s office, tossed his room keys on the desk and said, “If they won’t show some respect for me and attempt to learn, then I refuse to teach them.”
I know from experience, that district did not do a good job creating a positive, supportive educational environment for its teachers because I worked in that district for thirty years. Instead, it was more of a combative environment that did not offer the support teachers wanted or needed to teach.
It is a fact that teachers teach and students learn. However, that is not always the case. Instead, teachers in a toxic educational environment often struggle to teach while too many students make no effort to learn.
Elected School Boards and the administrators they hire should support an environment where teachers may teach and students will learn, and we can learn from two of the best public educations system in the world: Finland and Singapore.
In Finland, the teachers have a strong union and the teachers make the decisions in a supportive educational environment and it works. Parents start teaching children how to read at age three but the first year of school is at age seven.
In Singapore, merit rules. Students must compete academically to earn where they are tracked and the system is heavily tracked based on performance. There is no self-esteem driven educational environment; there is corporal punishment and students may be publicly beat with a bamboo cane if caught breaking strict-rules built to support a merit based education system.
Why can’t we in the United States learn from Finland and Singapore?
Discover What is the Matter with [American] Parents these Days?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Focusing too much on the gods of football, baseball and basketball
I agree with a post I read at the quiet voice that there is too much of an emphasis in America’s public schools on sports and not enough focus on academics. But is that the fault of the public schools or the fault of the parents and the English speaking culture?
There is a vast difference between the US public education system and other countries such as Finland, China and Singapore. Because of those differences, to be fair, we cannot compare the results of US students with those countries unless we separate the genetically modified chaff from the organic grain and also compare apples to apples.
As a public high school teacher in California for thirty years (1975 – 2005), I taught four periods of English and one period of journalism for several years in addition to being the advisor of the student run high-school newspaper. One year, my journalism students were invited to write a series of pieces for a European magazine called “Easy Speakeasy“, headquartered in France. “Easy Speakeasy” expressed interested in the sports programs in US schools because we were told that these programs did not exist in France and other European countries. Sports in Europe were mostly outside of the public schools sort of like Pop Warner Football in the US.
Pop Warner was founded in 1929, continues to grow and serves as the only youth football, cheerleading & dance organization that requires its participants to maintain academic standards in order to participate. Pop Warner’s commitment to academics is what separates the program from other youth sports around the world. In fact, studies show that kids involved in sports that require them to maintain their academic grades above a 2.0 GPA graduate in higher numbers than students that do not participate in sports. Europe has programs similar to Pop Warner and I understand this is the only place students in Europe may participate in organized sports because these programs do not exist in European schools. In Europe and most countries, the focus in the public schools is academic and vocational—no sports, drama or music programs as in the US.
I can only guess that “Easy Speakeasy’s” editors invited my journalism students to write for their European publication because the high-school newspaper I was adviser for had won international recognition several years in a row from Quill and Scroll out of the University of Iowa.
In the English classes I taught there was a lot of chaff and only a little grain but in that journalism class, I taught the organic cream of our high school—students willing to be at school as early as six in the morning and stay as late as eleven at night to produce the high school newspaper—while many of my English students did not bring textbooks to class, do class work or even consider doing homework. Instead, there were students in my English classes that waged an endless war against academics disrupting the educational environment as often as possible.
Who do we blame for this educational environment in the United States?
Quill and Scroll offers academic scholarships. There is another organization called JEA (the Journalism Education Association) that also awards academic scholarships related to writing/academics. I know this because one of my journalism students earned a JEA scholarship. I required my journalism students to compete at the regional, state and national level in JEA academic writing competitions.
In addition, in most of the world there are two tracks in high school: academic and vocational and students in those countries may graduate from high school either with a degree earned in the academic or vocational. For that reason, comparing graduation rates in the US with other countries does not count because in the US we only graduate through academic programs but still graduate a higher ratio of students through the academic track than any other country on earth.
Then there are children in the United States that cannot read and are functionally illiterate. When we compare the US to all other English speaking countries, the rate of functionally illiterate children is about the same telling us that this is more a product of a culture that does not value learning and reading as much as countries such as Finland where the majority of parents start teaching his or her children how to read at home by age three so those children can already read when they start school at age seven.
But in the US, many parents leave it up to the schools to start teaching children to read at age five or six and only those children that were taught by his or her parents start out on track and move ahead.
Then there is the fact that the US may be the only country on the planet that mandates children stay in school, no matter what, until age sixteen to eighteen. In China, for example, there are about 150 million children in the grade schools but only about 10 million that remain in high school at age 15.
When the International PISA test is given in countries around the world, that test is given to a random sample of fifteen year old students. That means in the US, because almost every fifteen-year old is still in school, America’s students are being compared to the very best in countries such as China where students that are not the best academically have left the system by the time the PISA people show up.
However, when we filter out the chaff and leave only our most proficient students—for example: the journalism students that I taught—and compare them to the most proficient students of other countries, this being apples to apples, the US students beat every country in the world in every academic area tested. You will never hear these facts from the critics of public education in the US.
Discover The Legacy of the British Empire on Literacy
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
I have attended every book club meeting at my school. I’ve never missed a National Honor Society meeting, a Math Honor Society meeting, a Social Studies Honor Society meeting, or a Latin Honor Society meeting. But when I tell people that I’ve never attended a high school football game, I am always asked the same question: what’s wrong with you?
What’s wrong with me? Let’s take a look at what’s wrong with America’s schools first.
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 