<p>Ah, if only political correctness were really the reason why Greek mythology, American literature or World history/literature aren’t taken seriously in the curriculum! My concern is that it’s EASIER to teach (and read) say, Amy Tan in high school than Flaubert. Also, the young teacher in charge of the classroom was also educated in a system where the classics were for AP only, and may not have as wide a reference, so he/she doesn’t teach it. So her students are actually the second (or third) generation who are being dumbed down, and not because of Common Core. </p>
<p>Quite correctly observed. Dumb and dumber in action.</p>
<p>But part of the impetus behind common core is what has happened over the years to the curriculum, and with it, student competence. </p>
<p>I’d be happy with a little grammar and spelling from time to time.</p>
<p>“The knee-jerk calls to get the federal government out of education and leave things to the states, local districts, and schools are hilarious. What do you think got us into this mess in the first place?” – Oh, I so agree. </p>
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<p>Kinda silly, IMO. Our California school district just keeps on doing what it does pretty much every other day. By definition, the high achieving students don’t need ‘prep’ for state standardized tests. For example, ~90% pass the so-called “HS Exit Exam” as Frosh. </p>
<p>OTOH, they do do a lot of prep for AP tests, but that is the point of the AP curriculum, is it not?</p>
<p>JHS, you are correct about the autonomy given to teachers in Finland. There is indeed little need to direct the efforts of teachers who have completed a rigorous training and graduated with an advanced degree in the subject they teach. Generalists focus on the lower grades where pedagogy trumps the need for subject mastery. </p>
<p>Obviously, the success of Finland is not traced to a single element. The relative equalization in salary and social status also contributes to the attraction for the best to become a teacher and forego a career as a doctor or lawyer. And face the extreme competition of being accepted in the teaching profession. </p>
<p>Perhaps our aspiring teachers should have to pass a CPA or bar-like exam. Or perhaps a version of the French Bac or … score in the 75 percentile on the SAT. While it sounds silly on the surface, it is fair to assume that no curriculum gyration will succeed without teachers who understand the material enough to be able to teach it, without a teacher’s solution manual. </p>
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<p>Depends on the subject and the state testing instrument. Essay tests are scored by rubrics. The students had to be drilled to write in a certain format in order to get high scores on these tests, which were sent to a scoring facility out-of-state. The examiners are looking to check off boxes. The students had to spend time doing writing drills for an arbitrary and fairly useless form of writing when they could have been reading another play or novel, or working on a research paper. The clumsy test instruments end up driving curricula. </p>
<p>“I’d be happy with a little grammar and spelling from time to time”
Yes! Add to that a little memorization of poetry or world capitals! – mental calisthenics aren’t bad, and absorbing some poetry can in fact be good for the soul. Alas, neither is practiced much in our “progressive” public schools. </p>
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<p>Exactly. Just bcos your state gurus picked poor assessment instruments/vendors does not mean that the concept behind Common Core is not a good idea. (Reading the papers, it appears that NY assessments are even more poorly thought out.)</p>
<p>Our school district is funded 4% by the federal government. How much influence should they have over our curriculum?</p>
<p>Also, schools with strong teachers’ unions, in general, outperform schools without unions. Can someone explain to me how under-performing schools are the fault of the unions? Maybe some of our internationals can chime in, but I notice two things about the French and German cousins of my kids: their school day is longer, and much more money is spent per kid on education in the classroom.</p>
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<p>My kids started out in the U.S. public school system in their early childhood. Since then, they have been in a number of different private schools as they have been dragged from one int’l posting to another. One thing common to all the private schools is that the schools had highly esteemed, well-compensated, grey-haired veteran teachers, and they had lame-O teachers that were shown the door.</p>
<p>^^
What is the basis to compare schools with strong unions to schools with weaker unions? Are we measuring degrees of mediocrity? How about measuring the cost of education in strong unions districts. Perhaps, all we need is to look at Chicago or … Detroit. </p>
<p>Regarding spending on education, there are different ways to look at it. The US is one of the biggest spenders by pupil in the world, but not in terms of spending per GDP. We only trail a couple of countries such as Luxembourg.</p>
<p>The length of the school day is a canard. Countries such as Germany have split systems and the schooling is based on half-days. The difference is that more time is devoted on basic education and a LOT less time is wasted on frivolous activities. Also, children have less homework and parental involvement than in the US. The bottom line? Teachers do teach a lot better than in our system. And do it more efficiently. </p>
<p>Our basic problem is to have a hard time admitting to be failing. And feel the need to protect our self-esteem through excuses. We are underperforming and fighting positive changes. </p>
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<p>Outside of Race-to-the-Top (incentives), the feds have little influence over curriculum. Common Core was established by the Governors’ Association. Each state can approve of its standards, or not. Each state approves its own assessments.</p>
<p>FYI
Despite their four-day week and nearly four months of vacation, French children spend more hours in class than most of their European counterparts: 847 hours a year for third graders, for example, compared with 750 hours on average for children elsewhere in the European Union. (In the United States, the average for students of all ages is around 950 hours.)</p>
<p>In France, the new national preschool through 5th grade curriculum is intended to have 5h30 of academic classes plus 45mn of extracurricular or “awakening” activities which may include art, puppetry, sports, chess, Foreign Language, drama, etc.
6th through 9th grade has 6 to 7 hours of class with the day ending between 4pm and 5pm. Extracurriculars take place between 1 and 2 o’clock (“entre midi et deux”, which literally means between noon and two, but the 12 to 1 period is reserved for eating and playing outside).
10th through 12th has classes starting at 8 or 9 and ending at 4, 5, or 6pm, with no more than 9 hours of class a day and as few as 3 some other days.</p>
<p>There is one surefire way to improve K-12 education in our country. Dismantle our system of govt schools and go to a voucher-based system, where parents can choose from a menu of public, private and charter schools. Allow schools to compete for students. If a school is failing and it can’t attract students - guess what - it goes out of business, just like the restaurant that serves lousy food. It’s not rocket science. </p>
<p>BTW, unions would probably cease to exist in a real school choice system. Currently, there are over 70,000 kids that would love to escape the lousy public schools in NYC for one of the 20,000 charter school seats. Unfortunately, the newly elected mayor is attempting to dismantle the hard-fought reforms the previous mayor was able to implement over his 12 years in office.</p>
<p>Goldenpooch: your surefire way doesn’t take into account the fact you’re dealing with humans.
Students aren’t objects or clients. You can’t “produce” them the way a factory produces them (well or not). You can’t “compete” for them - unless you are okay with a bunch of 6 year olds treated as “rejects” and left without an education. What about the very many children whose parents wouldn’t enter them in the competition? Do you just let them drift to whatever they can find on their own? Do you put them together - a full school of children with uninvolved parents who don’t value education, do you think the school will work? And when, according to your system, that school closes, where do these kids with uninvolved parents go? You also can’t put all the kids who want it into the same school - my district tried it and guess what: the wealthy parents weren’t so happy that suddenly there were 37 kids per class and the middle class and working class parents weren’t happy because they were promised they could choose but in the end, there just wasn’t enough space, and all kids left out were in a poor peer environment.
Note that dismantling public schools is the fastest way to lose first-world status (in fact, what you advocate exists in developing countries but even BRICs work on their public schools instead of dismantling them). A strong, functioning democracy and economy requires free education for all for as long as possible and with as much variety as possible.
Your reasoning doesn’t work: If you close a factory, it stops making things. Whatever it was producing never comes into being. Another factory may pick up the slack (perhaps/often in another country). Kids don’t go away just because you close the school. The same kids have to go somewhere. And you can’t outsource kids to Asia.
A school isn’t failing “because it can’t attract students”. Students fail* and schools that have too many failing students can’t figure out what to do.
(*It is a peculiar, and recent, trend, that I’ve read about. Suddenly, it’s as if no kid should fail, ever. Kind of the same trend as thinking B is bad. Perhaps along the lines of Precious Snowflake can do no wrong.)
All parents want their kids to go to a good school. A good school has: good teachers, good facilities, a limited total of students which goes increasing with age, few students per class, assiduous students, good solutions for students who struggle. It’s not rocket science. Successful schools all have these characteristics. So, how do you create a strong network of public schools with good teachers, good facilities, few students per class, solutions for students who struggle?
In addition, I personally absolutely oppose any of my taxes that go to funding religious schools (any religion)
(PS: I’m not a teacher but the whole concept of dismantling public school to reach a country’s educational level is just bizarre to me. Is that common belief?)</p>
<p>I didn’t say dismantle public schools, rather, I said dismantle the govt monopoly of our schools. All I am saying is give parents a choice of public, private, charter or any other model some enterprising entrepreneur can come up with. I believe if schools are competing for students it will exact the type of discipline on them which will enhance their performance that is missing today in the govt monopoly of our K-12 system. Will the system be perfect - probably not. Will be a lot better than what we have now - I think so.</p>
<p>I think we know the reason why this is not happening is because of the fight-to-the-death resistance of teacher unions. They can say all they want how they think these reforms will be bad for children, but anyone with an ounce of commonsense knows the real reasons are to protect their system of seniority, tenure, LIFO, lack of merit pay and accountability.</p>
<p>If anyone doubts what I am saying, take a look at the performance of most of the private charter schools in NYC compared to the public schools. </p>
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<p>All students who attend a non-default school option (whether private, charter, home school, or just a different regular public school) are self-selected in that they or their parents have more than average motivation in school selection. Although not all such choices are made for academic reasons (e.g. those who want a religious school), enough of them are that this selection effect is likely a major factor in the existing differences. In addition, many of these schools can expel students more easily than the default public schools, so they can more easily eliminate students who a behavior problems or who are academically failing.</p>
<p>More school choice may very well be desirable in many ways, but it should not be thought of as a panacea to all of the problems in the schools.</p>
<p>I agree - it is not a panacea to all the problems in our schools, but as they say don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. There is no system in the world that is going to work for every single kid. The goal should be to formulate a system that benefits the greatest number of kids without breaking the bank. </p>
<p>I am not sure how self-selecting the charter schools are in NYC. My understanding is that 90% of the kids are minorities and from low income areas. I think it is indisputable that these kids are performing at a much higher level than they were in the public schools.</p>
<p>Goldenpooch, I am not familiar with the NYC statistics, but here in Philadelphia charter performance overall has been no better than that of School District operated schools overall. Within each category, there is a huge spread between the best and the worst schools. At the high school and middle school levels, at least so far, the District’s academic magnet schools far outperform any charter school (and, for that matter, any diocesan school), but that’s in large part because the magnet schools are really cherry-picking and none of the charter schools is allowed to do that. (And none of the high-quality charter school operators is interested in doing that, since the District does a fine job of educating kids with SATs over 1800.)</p>
<p>Over time, in theory, the charter schools will improve their performance, as bad charters are not renewed and good charters expand enrollment. It turns out, though, that it’s pretty hard to get rid of bad charters, and some of the bad charters aren’t so bad. (One school that recently had its charter yanked here had horrendous performance . . . until you compared the performance of its target population in the District schools, which was far, far worse.) </p>
<p>There is little question that part of what makes the good charters good is substantial foundation and other charitable support. In other words, they are bringing more money per pupil into the system – substantially more for the highest-performing charters. That’s why I am in favor of continuing to have charters: they are a way of getting some more dollars into the system, and that helps. But it’s not replicable on a large scale, and it doesn’t have anything much to do with the teachers union. (I admit that I can get powerfully annoyed at the teachers unions, too. But anyone who thinks that the teachers unions are the main factor responsible for the terrible quality of education for disadvantaged kids is indulging in simplistic fantasy.)</p>