RSS

Category Archives: American Public Schools

The Reality of American Education – Part 3/3

05 Jul

MYTH: “American Universities Are Being Overtaken.” (concerning research and development)

Wildavsky’s ANSWER: “NOT SO FAST.

He says, Asia’s share of the world’s research and development (R&D) spending grew from 27 to 32% from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea.

However, R&D spending worldwide massively surged in the last decade from $790 billion to $1.1 trillion, up 45 percent, and in 2007, the U.S. spent $373 billion (up from $277 billion in 2002) on R&D, which was very high by global standards totaling more than all Asian countries’ combined ($352 billion was spent on R&D in Asia).

MYTH: “THE WORLD WILL CATCH UP”

Wildavsky’s ANSWER: “Maybe, but don’t count on it anytime soon.”

While the global academic marketplace is without doubt growing more competitive, the United States doesn’t have just a few elite schools as most of its foreign competition does, and the U.S. spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent in 2006 by China, the European Union, and Japan combined.

In fact, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), eight of the top ten universities are in the US and so are 54 of the top 100, while the US State Department recognizes 194 independent countries around the globe.

If this three part series of posts sparked a curiosity to learn more on this topic, I urge you to take the time and click over to Foreign Policy magazine‘s Website and read all of FP’s Think Again: Education written by Ben Wildavsky.

It’s always a good idea to discover the facts before you form an opinion or believe what someone writes in a Blog. In today’s Internet dominated world, opinions without reputable and reliable facts to support them are worth as much as sterile dirt, which is why I usually link to the sources I use for facts.

After reading Wildavsky’s piece in FP, it is obvious that America’s schools are not failing and have never been failing and are actually either holding steady or slowly improving.

That DOES NOT mean the US should stop working at improving the public education system.

Considering the handicaps and competition teachers in the U.S. public schools face to gain the attention and cooperation of the average child and/or adolescent, the facts says American teachers are doing an incredible job.

Imagine what would happen if the average American parent was actually involved with his or her child’s education as much as the average Asian-American parent (such as Amy Chua of Tiger Mother fame). If you are interested in learning more of Amy Chua, I recommend reading her oldest daughter’s Blog, a new tiger in town, who is now attending Harvard — ranked number one by the ARWU.

Return to The Reality of American Education – Part 2 or start with Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on July 5, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, politics, Public School

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Reality of American Education — Part 2/3

04 Jul

MYTH: “The United States Used to Have the Worlds Smartest Schoolchildren.”

ANSWER: Ben Wildavsky says, “No, it didn’t. Even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance and economic strength, American students were never anywhere near the head of the class … the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967 … Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom …

“If American’s ahistorical [unconcerned with or unrelated to history or to historical development or to tradition] sense of their global decline prompts educators to come up with innovative new ideas, that’s all to the good.  But don’t expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age—there wasn’t one.”

MYTH: “Chinese Students Are Eating America’s Lunch.”

Wildavsky’s ANSWER: “Only Partly True … China’s educational prowess is real. Tiger moms (such as Amy Chua, who wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) are no myth — Chinese students focus intensely on their schoolwork, with strong family support (mostly missing in the U.S.), but these results don’t necessarily provide compelling evidence of U.S. inferiority.”

“Wildavsky then says that many of the students in rural China outside Shanghai (the PISA international test was conducted only in Shanghai) are poorer and less educated than ‘China’s’ coastal cities …

Wildavsky says, “(American) alarmist comparisons with other countries, whose challenges are quite different from those of the United States, don’t help.

“Americans should be less worried about how their own kids compare with kids in Helsinki (Finland) than how students in the Bronx measure up to their peers in Westchester Country.”

MYTH: “The U.S. No Longer Attracts the Best and the Brightest”

ANSWER:  “WRONG.”

While Wildavsky mentions that the U.S. should be concerned about the future, the U.S. college education system was (and still is) second to none since the United States has long been the world’s largest magnet for international students.

In fact, he says there are more foreign students in the United States today than there were a decade ago — 149,999 more in 2008 than in 2000.

For international graduate study, Wildavsky says, American universities are a particularly powerful draw in fields that may directly affect the future competitiveness of a country’s economy: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Continued on July 5, 2011 in The Reality of American Education – Part 3 or return to Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on July 4, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, media, Parenting, Public School

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Reality of American Education — Part 1/3

03 Jul

Tired of reading endless criticisms of just about everything global, I dropped my weekly subscription to The Economist magazine (TE).

To me, it seemed that most of TE’s staff does not have the intellectual ability or knowledge to write with depth, which might explain why they hide behind anonymity. Over several months, I only remember reading one piece that was well researched.

Instead, I shifted to Foreign Policy (FP) magazine, which comes once every two months, and from what I’ve read so far in a few issues, the writing and ability of its staff is on a much higher level than The Economist.

Maybe that’s because FP has more lead-time to research, think, write, revise and edit before the next issue comes out.

The idea for this post came after reading FP’s Think Again: Education. The writer was Ben Wildavsky, a senior scholar in Research and Policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the author of several scholarly books.

Knowing who wrote what you are reading is a big leap from TE, which is probably wise since what TE publishes is often insulting, biased and flawed.  In fact, writing in anonymity often leads to lazy, biased and sloppy writing littered with inaccuracies.

What Wildavsky does in FP magazine is debunk the myths about the American educational system, and he does an excellent job.

MYTH: “American Kids are Falling Behind”

ANSWER: Wildavsky says, “Not Really”, and explains, “the U.S. education system … doesn’t look to be failing so spectacularly.

“The performance of American students in science and math has actually improved modestly since the last round of the (PISA) international test in 2006 … and reading scores … are more or less unchanged since … 2003.

Continued on July 4, 2011 in The Reality of American Education – Part 2

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on July 3, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, Parenting, Public School

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 7/7

18 Jun

The day I discovered the principal was not going to do anything about Macario, I finished my workday at 6:00 PM and drove to the police station that served the neighborhood where Macario lived, which was a fifteen-minute drive in the opposite direction I would take to go home and the drive home usually took an hour in the afternoon and evening due to rush hour traffic.

When I arrived, the lobby at the police station had several other people already there waiting to talk to the officer working the counter. While I waited, I broke out the red ink and correct student work.

I had to wait a half hour before I could talk to the officer on duty and get the proper forms then spend another thirty to forty minutes filling out the forms, which resulted in a squad car with two officers visiting Macario’s home to question him and his parents then report the incident to child services, who then became involved.

After child services became involved, Macario had more counseling in addition to the school counselor, his mood improved but the joker in teen was gone.  He even started to do the schoolwork in my class and managed to bring his grade up to a “C” or a “B” by the end of second semester.

To do this, he spent more time at Janice’s house doing homework and a few years later he graduated then I lost contact with him and Janice never hearing from them again.

Moreover, Macario was one of about 6,000 students that I taught during my thirty years in the classroom. I have hundreds of stories similar to this one but not about sexual abuse.

According to studies, one in six men has been sexually assaulted by the age of 16. Source: Sexual Abuse of Males

Return to The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 6 or start with Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
1 Comment

Posted by on June 18, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 6/7

17 Jun

I did not agree with the ogre idiot but the principal refused to take this incident to the next step and contact the proper authorities such as the police and child services.

The law in California is specific. Since I was a teacher and the one that reported the incident, I was the one that could lose his job if Macario was sexually molested and it went unreported to the proper authorities, and the ogre idiot would not lose his job.

I had no choice. I had to finish the job that the principal should have done.

My school days were often 11 hours or longer. I usually arrived at 6:00 AM when the gates were unlocked and seldom drove home until after 5:00 PM and sometimes stayed as late as 11:00 PM to work with my journalism students.

The time I spent at school does not count the time I spent at home correcting student work or planning lessons.  On average, I corrected at least 20 to 30 hours at home after having spend a workweek that often ran 60 to 80 hours at school.

Many people outside of education believe a teacher’s job is only the time he or she spends teaching, which is about five or six hours a day during a school week, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. To keep a credential, teachers are required to take annual classes and workshops to stay current in their field, attend staff meetings, and spend 20 to 40 hours of annual duty supervising sports outside the regular school day.

I also corrected student work before school, at lunch, after school and any time I could find during class when my students settled down and quietly worked on an assignment, which was rare.

To be continued on June 18, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 7 or return to Part 5

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on June 17, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior, Teaching

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 5/7

16 Jun

My first step after talking to Janet was to make sure both of them came to my class after school.  We talked again and he admitted to me what had happened but stuck to his story that he managed to fight his way free, get some clothes and escape the house.

That’s when I called the ninth grade counselor to see if she was free, and I walked him and Janet to her office where we had a meeting.  After I reported what I knew and Macario admitted that’s what happened, I left that meeting to fill out the proper form, which went to the principal.

The principal at that time was an unpopular ogre and not popular with the teaching staff. Since he’d been running the school, many teachers had found jobs in other school districts and left to work elsewhere. We even lost a few of our vice principals due to the ogre.

He was one of those administrators that believed teachers were responsible for everything and blamed them for students not studying, misbehaving, failing, not reading—you name it and it was the teacher’s fault.

In short, he was an ogre idiot that spent more time criticizing teachers and writing them up than anything else he did. I half suspected he would blame what happened to Macario on me in some way. That’s how twisted he seemed to be.

That ogre idiot called Macario into his office the next day.

A few days later, I asked Macario for an update. He said after he talked to the principal, the ogre idiot (my words) dismissed the case and said to go back to class.

I met with the ogre idiot and asked him why he was not following up. By then, more than a week had gone by since the sexual assault, and the ogre idiot told me he thought Maracaro was lying to get attention.

To be continued on June 17, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 6 or return to Part 4

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on June 16, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,

The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 4/7

15 Jun

Janice told me that Macario’s parents both worked and were out of the house before he left to school.

She said the only reason he ate a good breakfast was that she made him eat something like a banana, an egg and a piece of toast when he arrived at her house to walk her to campus each morning.

Janice was not only Macario’s best friend and lover, she was also more of a mother to him than his mother was.

The story she told me was that while he was still in the shower that morning, two strange men broke into the house and tried to rape him.

They came into the bathroom and dragged him out of the shower.  He fought and said he managed to break free, but his eyes darted away again as he answered my questions about what happened after the men dragged him from the shower.

He claimed he fought his way free, grabbed some clothes and escaped from the house and hurried to meet Janice on the way to school where he told her what happened to him.

To be continued on June 16, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 5 or return to Part 3

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on June 15, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, Teaching

 

Tags: , , , , ,

The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 3/7

14 Jun

Macario was a talker and loved to be funny and get people to laugh, which wasn’t always welcome when it disrupted a lesson.

However, I must admit, even when Macario interrupted a lesson with one of his off-the-wall jokes or comments, I often laughed too.   It was impossible not to like him.

Then, as he often did after he cracked the entire class up, he would apologize.

Janice, on the other hand, was an “A” student that enjoyed reading books and was as determined as I was to motivate Macario to do the school work and study.

I conspired with Janice to find ways to trick him into doing his homework, which even for the young girl that loved him was a challenge. He was more into having fun than being serious about anything.

Some might wonder why I didn’t contact his parents. In fact, I had called them several times over the months and even had a face-to-face parent conference, but his study habits did not change.  I tried referrals to the counselor, and assigned after school detentions and even a Saturday school. Nothing worked

That is when I made the decision to see if Janice could help.

Between us, Janice and I managed to squeeze a “D” out of Macario in English his first semester in high school.  Without her efforts, he would have failed.

To make a long story shorter but not too short, I kept Macario after class that day and asked him what was wrong. He swore nothing was wrong but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was disturbed and had lied to me because he glanced away to stare at the floor when he answered the question.

This was unusual since Macario had never lied to me. When confronted for something I saw him do in class, he always admitted guilt and said he was sorry (once again).

However, when Janice came into fifth period after lunch, I asked her what was going on and she told me everything she knew.

To be continued on June 15, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 4 or return to Part 2

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on June 14, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 2/7

13 Jun

Since I don’t remember the student’s name and will not spend the time to search my files to find it, I will call him Macario because he was a happy boy of 14 when I knew him.

Macario was in my fourth period class before lunch and he wasn’t a good student and seldom did his work but he was a good person and someone easy to like and almost impossible to get angry at.

I also knew his girlfriend, who I will call Janice, since she was in my fifth period class after lunch. The couple often came to my class at lunch when my high school journalism students were working. The chess club also met there to play chess and the high school environmental club met there once a month to plan hikes and projects.

One would think that spending lunch with friends outside would be preferable to a teen.

If you knew the high school where I taught and the gang culture that dominated it, it made sense that good kids would want to find a sanctuary from the potential violence. The gang culture then was large enough that it brought an armed sheriff’s deputy to campus daily, who sat in his squad car in the mall where most of the kids ate lunch and where all the gang bangers could see that shotgun attached to the dash.

The high school also had an unarmed squad of campus police officers.

However, getting Macario to read or do homework was a challenge and 75% of the way through the school year, I wasn’t having much success beyond the minimum necessary to keep his girlfriend from leaving him.

Macario wasn’t interested in school work or reading books, but he was always in a good mood and happy, which is what made me suspicious something happened the one morning he came to class early and with a dazed, disturbed look on his face and didn’t say a word all period.

To go an entire period without attempting to get others to laugh was not Macario.  At first, I thought he may have broken up with Janice, or a family member died or maybe his parents had separated and were going to get a divorce. I had no idea that Macario had been sexually molested.

That day Macario and Janice did not show up for lunch.

When Janice came to fifth, I asked if she’d had an argument with Macario or had broken up with him.

To be continued on June 14, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 3 or return to Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on June 13, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 1/7

12 Jun

It’s strange what triggers a memory.  This memory should have been triggered when my wife and I were watching the Oprah show on November 5, 2010, where she had 200 adult men in her audience that had been sexually molested as children.

As millions know, Oprah was abused as a child and is seriously passionate about the awareness of sexual child abuse.

What triggered this memory was a series of stories such as Anthony Weiner‘s inappropriate Twitter exchanges with a 17-year old girl and French writer Tristane Banon, who refuses to testify in the Strauss-Khan U.S. sexual molestation case.

At this point, you may be thinking that this is about me being sexually molested as a child but no, that is not the story.

This “true” story is about a ninth grade student of mine while I was still teaching high school English.

Since I wrote many of my reports on a computer and kept them on a USB drive, I probably still have this report and the name of the boy that was molested stored away somewhere in a file, but I doubt if I would ever find it since that CPU is now on a shelf and has been replaced by a series of newer, faster computers over the years.

California has a law that mandates educators must report suspected child abuse or the educator (including teachers) may lose his or her job and never work in education in California again.

In California “child abuse” refers to physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and severe emotional abuse. The pdf. document to educate educators and/or teachers is 85 pages long and comes with a test.  Source: Mandated Reporter Ca.com

If you are curious what this training entails, click on the above link and discover the training I had one year.  We may not have used this exact manual, but we had one and spent several hours in a workshop learning what to do and what happened if we didn’t do anything.

The penalties for failure to report are severe. “A person who fails to make a required report is guilty of misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and/or up to a $1,000 fine.… Educators who fail to report may also risk loss of their license or credential,” which means losing your job as an educator/teacher.

During my 30 years as a teacher, I filed one report.  It was the only time that I suspected that one of my students had been sexually molested.

To be continued on June 13, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 2

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on June 12, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, Teaching

 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts
Newer posts →