<p>Garland, I am not "fond" of standardized testing, but I do think it has a place. The problem is without it some districts will not perform, and without the high perfoming districts participating in testing, we wont have benchmarks.</p>
<p>Kayf--that's an interesting use. Maybe if the camera just focused on the teacher. I woudln't want parents/students to feel nervous. I more saw it as a check to bad teachers (myself, I'd hate it, but I don't teach in a public school....)</p>
<p>Kayf--we are not a "high performing district." I've found that that correlates pretty closely with "High income district" and we are not that, either. Standardized tests are a club to punish us for our socio-economic profile, as near as i can tell.</p>
<p>Low cost improvements to school:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Stop putting special needs kids in with the smart kids. It drags the whole class down, and turns smart kids off to school.</p></li>
<li><p>Break the Union grip. Give Principals the right to not renew contracts of under-performing teachers, just as high tech businesses can let go lagards.</p></li>
<li><p>Send a constant message to parents: homework is important - plan for it; schedule for it; value it.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Most of the principals from elementary schools to highschools in my district spend a lot of effort on fund raising? Should it be their job?</p>
<p>If the schools carefully select teachers then they don't have to weed them out. But this is hard because there are not many teachers having formal training.</p>
<p>Garland, we are in a very small school district and can get hammered by costs to provide any out of school education. We are also in a state which requires a lot. We are trying to work with protections on this, including destruction of tapes after 2 weeks, etc. </p>
<p>Toadstool, as to heterogenous grouping of kids. I am convinced this is what as lead to proliferation of honors and AP classes. Instead of calling a group low perfoming, we have 3 groups, regular, honors and AP.</p>
<p>I just got home from the California Association for the Gifted conference. The best panel I attended included Professor Karen Rogers of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota discussing the importance of grouping students by performance level. In controlled studies, gifted kids made almost two years growth in one year of school when grouped in a cluster of 6-8 students in an otherwise mixed ability classroom.
Interestingly, the most effective grouping was based on performance levels, not just GATE identification.</p>
<p>Three things I would do to improve schools in addition to the many excellent ideas already mentioned.</p>
<p>1) smaller class sizes--a teacher is much more effective when s/he has 15 students to deal with than with 30
2) improve teacher development--eliminate most depts. of education (even among teachers, or especially among teachers, they are overwhelmingly reviled). A good teacher needs a full major of hours in his/her discipline, some basic psychology, and a good methods course or two specifically related to the discipline and how to function in a school setting. Provide serious mentoring for new teachers. Some potentially excellent teachers burn out too quickly or are overwhelmed by the problems they face. With a little help from a "good" mentor, they would learn to be successful.
(3) eliminate "talk" about self esteem. We all know how important it is for students to have self esteem, but talking about it doesn't create it. Setting up situations where students can accomplish something builds self esteem. S2's K teacher was notoriously tough but fair. She had those students (even the troubled ones she was often assigned) under her thumb, and when she gave praise (not constantly), it was earned, and the kids basked in her approval and worked hard to earn more. I had a 6th grade teacher tell me she could pick out in a class pretty accurately those who had had this teacher. </p>
<p>I also remember S1 coming home from middle school and complaining abut something. He looked at me and said "I have low self esteem." My response, "Cut the crap. I'll show you low self esteem." They had, of course, been discussing it that day.</p>
<p>I agree, tango, my D did not start out well in HS, but has improved greatly. When she started EARNING good grades, she felt better about her self.</p>
<p>I had this idea when I was a reading tutor in a Title 1 elementary school:</p>
<p>Have the kindergarten and first grade students get tutored for half an hour daily by selected students in the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades in the schools. They could get together after the older kids had lunch. It would reinforce the older kids' phonics skills, make the older kids feel powerful and vested in an outcome, thereby increasing the sense of community these kids feel, and they could bring home a tutoring attitude which may translate into helping their younger sibs with THEIR reading (if they attend a different school). Sure it would take some doing and there would be kinks to iron out, but after a few years everyone would know what they were doing and it could run quite smoothly (maybe!). </p>
<p>The parents have to understand that the earlier their kid learns to read (age 4 is ideal time), the better. Parents need to invest time reading to their kids when they are young until age 7, when presumably the kid will take over. The purpose of reading to your child is to make them realize that reading is a blast, and then should they have trouble learning to read, they will persevere because the reward is so desirable. If parents put their efforts on the right things, as in stressing reading and going to the library and reading to their kids for 15-30 minutes a night, kids will see reading as rewarding and will be interested in doing their own reading to themselves. As a consequence, they will continuously improve their reading comprehension and be better students as a result.</p>
<p>Kids who read for pleasure learned to do that at home. </p>
<p>So I see that schools will be improved if the home environment places more emphasis on recreational reading at a young age on up thru middle school.</p>
<p>I decline to throw more fuel onto the fire, other than to suggest that we've all been living similar HS educational experiences. I'm sure these real life anecdotes are not what Sally was looking for with her OP. But I'm pretty sure they do represent the common frustrations that keep current educational achievement far beneath what it used to be -- never mind the level parents would like it to be.</p>
<p>Teacher: "The volume of a cylinder is calculated by multiplying the length of the cylinder by the radius of the end."
My 6th Grader: "Daddy, this doesn't look right."</p>
<p>Obviously, judging teachers by absolute test scores has problems. But most proposals for rewarding teachers based on test scores talk about relative test scores. They look at the progress students have made year to year while under the instruction of the teacher. In some respects the worst students offer the best potential for progress. It is hard to improve on the performance of students who perform in the 99th percentile.</p>
<p>"It is hard to improve on the performance of students who perform in the 99th percentile."</p>
<p>Improvement needs to be done to the level of what is taught in school, elementary and HS. It is definately well below sufficient level and way below of what is taught in other countries. So, yes performance of the very top needs to be brought up considerably just to be on par with the rest of the world.</p>
<p>There are two fallacies prevalent in public education; the Democratic fallacy and the Republican fallacy.</p>
<p>The Republican fallacy is that public schools can be improved without spending any money. This position is held by many people spending 10k to 40K per year on private schools for their own kids. This is akin to the "cheap, just, and quick" Iraq war fallacy.</p>
<p>The Democratic fallacy is that throwing large sums of money into the exisiting system will somehow, automatically, magically fix things. This position is held by many public school administrators, teachers, consultants, etc. that want more money for themselves, infrastructure and programs for students. This is the cousin of the failed Federal public housing projects; expensive, ineffective, and simply not what people want.</p>
<p>"The Republican fallacy is that public schools can be improved without spending any money. This position is held by many people spending 10k to 40K per year on private schools for their own kids."
So you believe schools are running perfectly efficiently? Anyway, why do so many countries with public education perform so much better than we do (according to the PISA rankings), when we spend close to the highest per student in the world? </p>
<p>29th in Science in PISA ranking 2006 [PDF]: <a href="http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/42/8/39700724.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/42/8/39700724.pdf</a></p>
<p>3th highest in spending primary education, 4th highest in spending all secondary education, chart B1A [.XLS]: <a href="http://ocde.p4.siteinternet.com/publications/doifiles/962008041P1G011.xls%5B/url%5D">http://ocde.p4.siteinternet.com/publications/doifiles/962008041P1G011.xls</a></p>
<p>Anyway, why do so many countries with public education perform so much better than we do (according to the PISA rankings), when we spend close to the highest per student in the world?</p>
<p>My opinion is that these countries give more value to education than we do. It a societal thing. There the guy/girl who gets the highest grades is treated well and is popular. Everyone aspires to be like him/her. But here we just label them as a nerd. </p>
<p>Something I do not understand is this "giving everyone a medal" thing. I don't really think this is happening. If it is it's only in elementary school. After that in HS, they see reality and that not everyone get a medal for trying. They lose that entitlement feeling they have.</p>
<p>You make a good point that in some other countries education is more valued. All you have to look at here is how the top athletes are treated in the schools vs. how the top students are treated! Attention and recognition is heaped upon kids who do well in sports, while the kids who do well academically are generally ignored (until they are accepted at top schools and then other people are jealous).</p>
<p>That said, I know people who have lived in other countries and the systems are different. In some countries, the public school students are tested as early as 3rd or 4th grade in order to be "tracked" into college prep or vocational education. This is one reason the U.S. doesn't show as well on those "top countries in math/science, etc." I suspect some of these countries only use the data from their "college track" students , while the U.S. uses all of the scores. </p>
<p>I would like to know if other countries spend as many resources on Special Education ( I'm not saying we shouldn't, just that we do). Our country provides an education to ALL of our students, regardless of ability, special needs, etc. Do other countries do this?</p>
<p>
[quote]
In many school districts, the best way of improving schools is by improving parents.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Amen to that!!! I used to volunteer at our firm's "Adopt a School" program school. It was one of the "worst performing" elementary schools in town. I expected this dark dingy scary place where the teachers were idiots....of course, I was totally wrong. It was a clean, well maintained school, with bright, engaged teachers and administrators. The problem was the parents - or lack thereof - and the level at which these kids came into the school. There was no PTA - it was a dream of the school to have one. But a huge percentage of the kids were not living with their actual parents - they lived with a grandmother, an aunt, foster parent, etc. While my own kids started kindergarten knowing how to read - soley because they were read to - not because we tried to teach them, most of the kids at this school came in not even knowing the alphabet. They were SO far behind where they needed to be...the very dedicated teachers couldn't bring the kids along fast enough to test at grade level by the time the state testing started.</p>
<p>Fallgirl, I agree, we educate and count everyone, as we should. If it makes our averages lower, it doesnt mean our top students arent just as good. And why is everyone all over the world trying to go to college in US?</p>
<p>Newhope3 -- my Ds elementary school dramatically improved science through the use of labs with parent volunteers.</p>
<p>I seem to recall reading somewhere that the percentage of foreign students in graduate and professional programs in the US was declining. Institutions in other countries are catching up to and will pass the US.</p>
<p>If the availability of money were not the most critical factor in educational excellence, why do the USNWR rankings correlate almost perfectly with the size of the endowment?</p>