Tag Archives: Parent
When looking for a good public school, ignore the Standardized Test Scores.
In this post, I’m going to tell you what to look for when searching for a good public school. FIRST: Charter Schools are not real public schools. Do not forget that.
Charter Schools are not REAL public schools.
Public schools have what’s known as school report cards that can be found on-line. Those reports are supposed to report a lot of info.
Always ignore the standardized test score rankings.
Low standardized test scores basically reveal how many children at a public school live in poverty. A high child poverty rate at a public school is what brings those stupid, useless tests scores down, not the teachers.
Higher test scores for a public school usually reveals it is located in a more expensive area where many of the parents are college educated and/or earn more money.
If the public school report card has the following information, use it to determine if it is a good public school.Look for the average level of education for the teachers at the school and the turnover rate. If most of the teachers have a higher level graduate degree, in the subject area they teach, then they probably know what they’re doing and are good at it.
If the public or charter school has a high turnover rate for its teachers, those schools are in trouble and probably are being mismanaged by its district administrators and maybe the site administrators, too. Those not a public Charter Schools have a reputation for high teacher turnover and harsh disclpline for both teachers and students.
Many administrators have never taught, and many of them couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag if their lives depended on it.
Still, you can ask how many of the administrators at a public school and the ones in the district office were teachers for at least six years before moving to administration. If the top admin never taught, they probably do not know what they are doing because they do not know the challenges teachers face in public school classrooms.
If the public school has a low teacher turnover rate and hangs on to its teachers for long periods of time, those are the public schools you want to focus on. The teachers that stay are more dedicated and work harder. It’s a demanding, challenging job that drives out the undedicated teachers really fast.
A lower teacher turnover rate also usually means the administrators probably know how tough teaching really is. Good public schools do not focus on teaching to raise those damn standardized test scores. They focus on supporting their teachers so they can teach the children instead.
Teachers that don’t learn how to manage their classes and/or can’t stand the pressure burn out faster and leave sooner.
Incompetent administrators, in public schools and those private sector Charter Schools speed up teacher burnout when they focus more on those useless and often misleading standardized test results instead of supporting teachers so they can teach, not to the test, but what their students should be learning.
A good teacher often works more than 50 hours a week while only teaching about 25 of those hours. Teaching is like an iceberg. Most of the work teachers do takes place out of sight, before and after school and on the weekends. When I was still teaching (1975 – 2005), my work weeks often ran 60 to 100 hours when I added all the time I put in: correcting student work at home, doing grades at home, calling parents from school and at home, planning lessons at school and at home, et al.
It’s not easy to manage your classes, teach. and do all that stuff during regular school hours.
I’m a former US Marine and combat vet. Teaching was tougher and more demanding than any other job I’ve had in my life (I worked in the private sector for about 15 years, too), including being a combat Marine.
By the time I went into teaching, I was 30 and I stayed for 30 years until I was 60. If I had to go back to work for some reason, I’d rather be a Marine again instead of a teacher. Marine Corps boot camp and being shot at in combat, as long as whoever was shooting at me kept missing, was less stressful and demanding than teaching. I think the Marines did more to prepare me for teaching than earning my teaching credential through a full-time, year-long urban residency did. Still those urban residency teacher training programs are considered the best ways to learn how to become a teacher.
What Factors determine Quality Public Schools
There are several factors that determine the quality of public school districts, and the results of standardized test score are NOT one of them.
What to look for:
How old are the public school buildings? It isn’t easy to teach or learn in buildings with roofs that leak, old moldy carpets, overcrowded classrooms, et al.
Funding is another important factor. Too many public school districts are not getting the funding they need to update and maintain infrastructure, keep class sizes low (12 to 20 in a class. It’s okay to have less than 12 but no more than 20) and hire the best teachers. In crowded, aging classrooms, teachers often become overwhelmed and face burnout, one of the major factors for high teacher turnover.
“Funding is always an issue for schools and is, in fact, one of the biggest issues facing the American public education system today. For more than 90% of K-12 schools, funding comes from state and local governments, largely generated by sales and income taxes.”
A high rate of child poverty in a school district is also a challenge. Children living in poverty, in every country, have problems learning because… well, they live in poverty.
“Students living in poverty often have fewer resources at home to complete homework, study, or engage in activities that helps equip them for success during the school day.”
Teacher quality is also an important factor. There is no uniform method in the United States to train teachers. In some states, a high school dropout with a GED is allowed to teach. In others, to teach, you need a four year, or more, college degree.
The worst teacher training in the United States is probably from Teach for America. The best are urban residency programs.
TFA trains their future teachers in a few weeks with little or no time practicing, under supervision, in a classroom with real students.
Urban residency teacher training programs often run for an entire school year, full time in a classroom with a master teacher and college classes required to earn a credential through this program are held after regular school hours and during summers.
In The Teacher Wars, by Dana Goldstein, in one chapter, the author goes into detail comparing the different teacher training programs.
https://www.amazon.com/Teacher-Wars-Americas-Embattled-Profession/dp/0345803620
Back to a few of the major flaws of Standardized Tests.
The only tests that are useful are teacher made tests that are not used to determine a students grade or rank teachers or schools. Teacher made tests should be used a s a tool to help teachers discover what their students are learning so the teacher can focus on what they are not learning.
“Some of the cons of standardized testing include the fact that standardized tests are unable to assess a student’s higher-level thinking skills, teachers may alter their curriculum in order to ‘teach to the test,’ and standardized tests have been shown to result in inequitable outcomes for students.”
The human brain also doesn’t work well to remember what a Standardized Test asks. Even if a teacher taught what the Standardized Tests asks, and this isn’t always the case, there is no guarantee students will remember what they were taught by the time they take these useless tests.
“There are numerous reasons to believe that high stakes standardized tests are actually quite damaging to education and have received forceful criticism over the past dozen years as a result. Examples include their propensity to drive out teachers, encouraging teaching “to the test” as well as increasing grade retention and school dropout rates, all of which question the imposition of high quantities of standardized tests throughout a student’s school career.”
https://www.learningandthebrain.com/blog/neuroscience-standardized-test-taking/
Still, what can parents do?
Well, parents may learn how long the average teacher stays in their job in a school district, what the annual teacher turnover rate is, and with a bit more digging, find out if a public school district’s admisntration is obsessed with standardized tests OR supports teachers to teach over the damn tests.
Hint: Parents aren’t going to learn this from the administrators. You have to ask involved parents and teachers, when no administrators are around.
A Teachable Moment with “Gifted Hands”
If you are a teacher or a serious parent more concerned about his or her child’s future as a working adult than a child having fun and/or being entertained all of the time, then this may be a teachable moment.
But first, 43% of adults at the lowest level of literacy lived below the poverty line, as opposed to 4% of those with the highest levels of literacy.
In addition, in 2010, the unemployment rate for adults that did not have a high school diploma was almost 16%. However, for adults with a Bachelors degree or higher (that means a college education), that unemployed rate was 5%.
In addition, since 1992, the unemployment rate for workers with a BA or better averaged 3.31%, but for high school dropouts the average was 8.84%. The lowest unemployment rate for college graduates was in 2001 at 1.5%, but it was 6% for high school dropouts the same year.
After I bought a copy of “Gifted Hands” at Costco recently, we watched the Ben Carson story. It was a film based on the life of a real person and the mother that made a difference in his life. Not once in the film was it suggested that it was the responsibility of any of Carson’s teachers to turn off the TV in Carson’s home and for his mother to tell him he had to visit the library and read books instead of watching TV.
In fact, the teachable moment may be to watch the film “Gifted Hands” (the entire film is embedded—second video—in this post and it has Spanish subtitles), then discuss who and what made the difference in Ben Carson’s life. Then have the child write a one page essay about what he or she learned about the importance of reading instead of watching TV.
Ben Carson’s mother had a third grade education and she got married at age 14 to later discover that her husband was a bigamist. For me, the teachable moment was when Carson’s mother turned off the TV and told her two sons that they were going to check books out of the library, read them, and then write a report of each book to be read out loud to the mother. She could not read but she could listen.
Ben Carson: An extraordinary Life – Conversations from Penn State
In the previous embedded video, at 6:32 minutes, Carson says once he started doing a lot of reading, he stopped hating poverty and realized that he didn’t have to stay in that lifestyle. He could change his life to anything he wanted it to be by working for it.
Note: I love using the word WORK to describe what we do as adults to earn money legally.
In one scene, Carson is being given an award for being the top student in his mostly white school and a teacher embarrasses him when she tells all of the white students in the room that they allowed themselves to be beaten by a fatherless black student living in poverty.
What that teacher did was uncalled for—it was cruel and racist. However, she told the white students they were lazy and could have easily beaten Carson for the academic honor he earned. She should have criticized the parents of those white students for letting their children watch too much TV.
The message I learned from this film pointed out exactly how to encourage students to learn to read and work hard in school to earn an education—not more laws that hold only public school teachers responsible for the education of a child.
Studies show that the average American child talks to his or her parents less than five minutes a day and spends more than 10 hours a day outside of school watching too much TV (on average three hours a day outside of school) in addition to playing video games, listening to music, social networking on the Internet, hanging out with friends, sending text messages, etc.
You may be able to watch the movie here. I found this link on You Tube, and it has Spanish subtitles.
There was another scene in the movie with a science teacher. When Carson was the only student in the class to answer a question, the teacher kept Carson after school, because when most teachers see an opportunity to help a motivated student, he or she does help. Teachers can only help students that help themselves and it is up to the parents to do the rest.
Carson’s mother had a third grade education but her son’s went to college. Today Benjamin S. Carson is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at John Hopkins Children’s Center. His brother is an engineer. Through reading and an education, this family left poverty and the high risk of unemployment behind.
Answer this question: If Carson’s mother had left that TV on, do you honestly believe he would be where he is today?
Discover What is the Matter with Parents these Days
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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The results of parenting gone wrong – Part 2/2
As a teacher, I used brainstorming activities in my classroom. After all, I was taught and told to use brainstorming. The concept was to accept what anyone said as correct and worthy of being written down, so we wouldn’t bruise or injure a child’s self-esteem.
However, Lehrer writes, “Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: ‘Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.'”
In fact, in Does Brainstorming For New Ideas Really Work? (Business Insider, March 27, 2012), it was reported that experiments where it is okay to debate and criticize (constructive criticism no doubt) generated nearly 25 percent more ideas and findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them…
These results prove that the self-esteem’s brainstorming mantra of refraining from judging or negating ideas is wrong. In other words, brainstorming (a product of the self-esteem movement) did not unleash the potential of the group. Instead the technique suppressed it, making each individual less creative.
In addition, Stephanie Hallett writing for the Huffington Post reported, “Barely half of Americans over the age 18 are married, according to a new report from the Pew Research Institute. The number of couples married in 2010 dropped a startling 5 percent from the previous year, and the overall number of married couples has declined by more than 20 percentage points since 1960.”
Now, let’s look at the face in that mirror again. The self-esteem movement among parents gained serious momentum in the 1960s and by the late 1970s, it was a force in the public schools leading to grade inflation and a feel-good atmosphere for students. At the same time, marriages declined in addition to an increase in a weakening of parent-child relationships, while creativity in America isn’t what it could be.
In conclusion, it is obvious that self-esteem parenting led to the weakening of the parent-child relationship, is responsible in the decline of traditional marriage and has inhibited creativity, which will hurt the United States in the long run.
Is this an example of the domino theory in practice?
Return to The results of parenting gone wrong – Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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Dumping Teachers due to Standardized Test Results and Student Performance – Part 3/7
In the August 2011 Costco Connection, Norm Scott, the founding member of the Grassroots Education Movement and one of the producers of “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting For Superman”, said, “The fact that I was able to develop long-term relationships with parents, siblings and even children of former students, who were in my class, created a stable and secure environment for many of these students.”
I found this to be true. Several years before I retired from teaching in 2005, I started to receive the children of former students that were now parents. Some of those former students had been a challenge to control and teach but maturity comes with age and by the time they were parents, they understood the value of an education and dedicated teachers.
My experience with the children of former students was always rewarding.
As a teacher that taught for thirty years and more than 150 classes (between 5,000 to 6,000 students), I had only one class where every student passed because so many studied and did the homework—one of more than 150.
Often, in most of the classes, when I walked around the room to collect homework, which reinforces the lesson I taught, of thirty-four students maybe three to five would turn the work in.
In addition, I made phone calls to parents as my friend does. Each day after school, I’d spend an hour or more calling parents asking them to make sure their children did the work assigned and studied or talk about a behavior problem.
Even with the phone calls to parents, few of the challenging students did the work and the bad behavior often continued.
I am at a loss why this fact never seems to come up in media discussions of public education. It is as if the entire burden of education rests with the teacher while the role of students and parents in the educational process is ignored or doesn’t exist.
One other factor is the stress that teachers often face daily. When I was a U.S. Marine serving in Vietnam in 1966, we did not see action daily. In fact, days might go by before we would go into the field on patrol, on a recon, an ambush, a field operation, or our camp would be hit.
In fact, thousands of public school teachers are phyiscally assaulted by students each school year and some end up in the hospital.
During the thirty years I taught, not a day went by that there wasn’t a behavior problem with a student. I witnessed drive by shootings from one of my classroom doorways once as school was letting out. On another evening when I was working late with the editors of the school newspaper, the member of one teen gang was gunned down outside my class by a rival gang, and not a year went by that I wasn’t threatened by a member of a street gang that was also a student in my class.
He would say, “What would you do if we jumped you, Mr. Lofthouse?” This was one of those times when it paid to stand at six foot four and weigh 180 pounds without much fat while being a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran. I also had this cold-eyed “killer” stare.
What happens when a student doesn’t perform, which means he or she does not participate in class, doesn’t ask questions when he or she is confused about a lesson [correct me if I’m wrong, but teachers cannot read minds], avoids class work, avoids homework, avoids reading assignments, will not read independently, will not study and/or misbehaves in class?
Is that the teachers fault?
Continued on September 7, 2011 in Dumping Teachers due to Standardized Test Results and Student Performance – Part 4 or return to Part 2
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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.
Dumping Teachers due to Standardized Test Results and Student Performance – Part 2/7
In the August 2011 Costco Connection, Norm Scott, the founding member of the Grassroots Education Movement and one of the producers of “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting For Superman”, said, “The biggest danger to education is turnover. Fifty percent of teachers leave within the first six years… Removing seniority rights would create an even higher turnover rate, those cost of which would be devastating—not only financially, but for students.”
In fact, I suspect if it weren’t for seniority, I would have lost my teaching job long before I finished my 30th year, and I would have been fired not because of the quality of my teaching but because I taught by ignoring some of the popular fads that teachers are forced to follow such as boosting self-esteem by inflating grades and dummying down the curriculum, which has caused more students to learn less than any incompetent teacher.
What happens when an excellent veteran teacher ends up with a class full of students that do not study or do homework? During the thirty years I taught, I had many students like this and was often told by administration that I made more phone calls to parents than any teacher at the high school where I taught.
A teacher’s lessons may be excellent but if students do not pay attention, study or do the homework and there is little or no parental support, the chances are those students will not learn much.
A former colleague and friend still teaching in a public high school said in a recent e-mail that he is demoralized because the students and parents do not care or support what he does in his classroom.
For an idea of how bad it can be, the administration at the high school where he teaches requires that teachers spend so much time contacting parents in an attempt to gain support that my friend had to hire a retired teacher at $25 an hour (out of his pocket) to correct work his students turned in so he could free up time at home weeknights and on weekends to call about 200 different parents to tell them about the assignments and to virtually beg them to make sure their children study and do the work that was assigned.
What happens when a student doesn’t perform, which means he or she does not participate in class, does not ask questions when he or she is confused about a lesson [correct me if I’m wrong, but teachers cannot read minds], avoids class work, avoids homework, avoids reading assignments, will not read independently, will not study and/or misbehaves in class?
Is that the teachers fault?
Are there incompetent teachers?
Yes.
However, even “Waiting for Superman”, as propagandized and flawed as it is, admitted that studies show 7% of the teachers fit in this category (other studies say that number is only one percent). In the US, the average student probably has about 50 teachers from kindergarten to the end of high school. Seven percent of fifty is less than 3.5, which leaves 46.5 teachers that were adequate or incredible.
Do we change the public education system and remove job security due to seven percent of the teachers?
Continued on September 6, 2011 in Dumping Teachers due to Standardized Test Results and Student Performance – 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.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 