Is There Really An Education Crisis?

<p>Hunt, I am not sure why you’d think I am in disagreement about the plight of the poor. Please refer to one of my posts above where I talked about measuring our crisis in education through an analysis of the bottom quartiles. </p>

<p>I objected to the statistics that intimated the US was one the poorest nations on earth. I did not object that we DO have a problem in educating the least fortunate among us. Considering that, with the notable exception of Luxemburg, we spent more than anyone else on earth (in absolute numbers --not in percent of GDP.)</p>

<p>Again, I do not think that the crisis is that visible to the regular user of CC. We do not have a crisis in coming up with the 300,000 students who apply to the Ivy League and their highly selective counterparts. Our crisis is our inability to stop spiralling down in an even deeper hole as we do worse with our lower quartile students, and perhaps worse at the most selective end, as more and more foreign born students replace what used to be the historic domain of the BWRK.</p>

<p>PS I believe that people with money would be more than willing to see changes, if the controlling forces would not be so intent to maintain the actual monopoly. This is what I called spiralling down. The only thing that separates us from breaking up the failing monopoly is courage to fight a faceless and abject enemy. It WILL happen, and we WILL do the right thing, but not until we exhausted all other possibilities. That is how America operates.</p>

<p>:) </p>

<p>xiggi, you sound like Winston Churchill “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing… after they’ve tried everything else.”</p>

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<p>The point of my post was actually that Americans do very well, not that we need to work harder because we’re losing to Finland and South Korea. </p>

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<p>Do you have any rebuttal against the results of Asian-Americans, who beat every country, or White Americans, who beat every country except Finland and South Korea? Finland and South Korea are extremely homogeneous countries, probably the two most so who participated in PISA. What issue do you have with the PISA results I posted?</p>

<p>Thanks, Vlad, I understood your point. I was adding on. I don’t see how we can fairly compare overall educational achievement between the US and other countries without considering how different they are from ours, politically, demographically, culturally and geographically. While Finnish and South Korean students may score better than our students do on some tests, it doesn’t mean that they will achieve anything more than our students will or make better contributions to the world than we do, or even know much about the world outside of where they live. </p>

<p>It is a couple of data points we don’t “win,” but looking at it the way Vlad does, we are near the top. The next question is,…so what?</p>

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[K-12</a> Spending Per Student in the OECD | Mercatus](<a href=“http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd]K-12”>http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd)</p>

<p>I believe in some cases the kids do not see the need for education. I am from a small town and you really have 3 types of kids. Type one top 20% wants to make some thing of there life. Type two 20-70% want to go to graduate with little effort 2.0-3.0 GPA because they have know desire to do any thang more then go to a community college of there parents saying they have to. Finally the bottom 30% well they want to draw a check. Not that they have a disability they just want free government money which is a shame. All because there lazy able body parents draw a check. I am not just talking bad about the well fare system it is a good thing for disabled vets the elderly and people who truly can’t work. But the government should not make it look ok to set at home and do nothing while the working people support them. I have great example in my home room there is a boy who set next to that made a 13 on his state act on purpose and said he wants to graduate to draw a check. I believe in the lower level of society it is not the poverty that prevents education but not having the desire to better their live trough education. This is America the land of opportunity there is actually more college opertunitys for first generation and low income college students then the smart.</p>

<p>If we truly want to help the lowest achieving students, we as a society would have to make changes that I don’t believe most Americans will support.</p>

<p>I believe we need to create high quality public boarding schools that are open to all students, K-12. Most of us on CC wouldn’t go that route, but for those families mired in poverty, in inner cities or rural pockets of poverty, families in total disarray, families with drug, alcohol, legal problems… for those families it would be a Godsend. </p>

<p>I believe that every parent wants opportunity for her children. I believe that some parents simply don’t have the means to achieve those opportunities. I believe that there are places where kids just don’t stand a chance: where the lure of gangs, life on the streets, the grind of poverty, homelessness, the dysfunction of home are overwhelming hurdles for our youngest citizens.</p>

<p>I think of it as being comparable to the WWII bombings of London, where kids were sent to safety in the country. We need safe, free boarding schools for our most vulnerable, and high school is too late to start. We need schools placed where kids can be free to succeed, free to see a possibility of a different life, where they can stay year round if need be.</p>

<p>I’d want to see enough of these schools so that any kid could attend. I’d want tuition covered by vouchers from districts and states, and I’d like to see kids able to cross district and state lines with those vouchers. I’d like to see no admission standards, but behavioral and academic growth required for kids to remain. I’d want to see many more psychologists, social workers, special education teachers, and support staff hired than is the norm. I’d like the federal government to support the schools. I’d like to see pay for teachers and support staff double that of public schools, to attract the best of the best. </p>

<p>It will never happen. Even as I hit the “Submit Reply” button, I know every negative response that will be written, how many ways it wouldn’t work, how the costs would be prohibitive, how it’s a dreamy, hippy dippy, Harry Potter solution. </p>

<p>We American citizens will never be willing to spend the money to give the bottom quartile of our youngest citizens the chance for success that their families can’t provide.</p>

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[quote=SteveMA]
Does anyone have kids that attend a middle class or upper middle class public high school with a larger black population that is also middle class to upper middle class? If so, any personal experiences with how the black students do compared to the white students? Would you say that parental involvement is similar among all students and their families?

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<p>I don’t have a lot of experience at the high school level, but I have plenty of Preschool through 8th grade experience. I’m the parent of a child who has attended several public schools with large middle class black populations. I’ve also had 20 years experience teaching and working in schools with significant middle class black population. I have many black friends, many of them middle class, and many of them parents. I’m also the middle class parent of a black boy, although I myself am white.</p>

<p>My own anecdotal data aligns very closely with the article someone linked above. While i certainly know white children who struggle, and black children with stellar academic performance, on average, the proportion of black students who struggle or underachieve is higher than that of their white peers at similar socio-economic levels. For example, in my county math acceleration is the norm, and pretty much every middle class white student I know takes algebra in 7th grade. In contrast, the majority of black students I know take it in 8th, with a significant minority taking it in 9th. </p>

<p>There’s a pretty prevalent myth that the reason for this underachievement is black parents who are uninvolved or uninterested in their child’s education. In my experience, this myth is both innaccurate and hugely damaging to children, and is, in fact, a major factor in the underperformance of our black youth. </p>

<p>When I look specifically at the middle class black parents I know, I see parents supporting their children’s education in various ways. I see fathers checking their children’s online grades on the sidelines of sports practices. I invite kids over to our home, and find out that they can’t come today because of Kumon, or French lessons, or because their science fair project is due. I see mothers buying books in the Children’s section at Barnes and Noble. I talk to parents about what their kids are doing this summer, and hear that they’re attending space camp in Florida, or engineering classes at UMD, or a residential program at a college in New England. I speak to parents at Back to School night, where dads ask my permission to video tape me so that mom, who is upstairs in a different class, can watch my presentation later. In short, I see black parents acting very much like their white, and Asian and Hispanic peers. </p>

<p>However, when I look at the response of teachers, professionals, and other parents, I see people who are far quicker to judge black parents of the crime of “not caring”. Can’t get a white parent on the phone to talk about an issue? They’re probably busy, happens to everyone. Teacher keeps trying. Can’t get a black parent on the phone? Well, clearly they don’t care, don’t even bother to leave a message. White child shows up without homework? Well, maybe the parents had other priorities, or they made a decision about what was right for their child or they decided not to “helicopter”. Black child without homework? Parents don’t care.</p>

<p>This gets transmitted to kids. When a white child misses an exit ticket, clearly the teacher did something wrong, let’s have an afterschool study session, or a “reteach group”. Black child “well, that’s what happens when parents don’t care”. When interventions are suggested, they’re aligned with the hypothesis that the problem is the parent. White kid failing? Let’s put in place some tutoring, get them tested for learning disabilities, find a research based instructional program, get a new teacher. Black kid failing? Must be because their father isn’t involved, he needs a “role model”, let’s have the janitor spend some time with him, perhaps they can meet during the reading block. </p>

<p>When my kid was in Kindergarten he had a lousy teacher. A number of parents, myself included, eventually went to the principal. The white and Asian parents had their concerns addressed. I was told that the issue was that my son wasn’t “ready”, and that the school could address it by having him repeat the grade. </p>

<p>When my son was in 3rd grade, his school offered an afterschool class to prepare for the state reading test. None of the white kids in my son’s reading group were invited. In fact, my son told me there were no white children in the class. My son attended for the first three lessons, which consisted of listen to the teacher read the book Bunnicula, a book I’d already read to him. When I queried how listening to someone read a novel aloud was going to prepare my kid for a test where he was expected to read short passages, I was told that since most of the kids hadn’t been read to as young children, they needed to make up that experience. </p>

<p>I could go on with examples, but this is already way too long.</p>

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America already spends more per-student on K-12 education than any other OECD country besides Switzerland. Absolute poverty rates here pale in comparison to Poland or Hungary.</p>

<p>^^ difference is, in Poland each school receives exactly the same amount of money – all schools and school principals are paid pretty much the same (with the exception of slightly higher salaries in especially expensive cities) schools have the same facilities, and they follow the same nationwide curriculum. The notion that a school in a poor neighborhood doesn’t have the same resources as a school in a rich neighborhood is quite shocking to Poles, as well as most Europeans.</p>

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<p>Not true at all. Americans do NOT do very well. They perform at an average level, and trail countries that do not share our vast resources. Again, we perform very well to well from kindergarten through middle schools, and perform quite poorly after that. Fwiw, you can correlate that with the direct engagement of … parents. While, they are able to help their toddlers and pre-teens in school, but find it more difficult or impossible as the students progress to high school. An indirect indictment (again) that it is our system that does not work well as it should not be so dependent on outside help. Citizens of other countries do shake their head when hearing about the (over)involvement of parents in the education of their children. In many countries, parents do rely on the SCHOOLS and the TEACHERS do provide the academic education.</p>

<p>And, if it were only Finland and South Korea, we’d be sitting pretty. That is, unfortunately, NOT the case. Many countries perform better than we do. </p>

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<p>You posted the “results” as viewed and sanitized by the US after attempting to control the results by introducing race and income. The results have to be analyzed by comparing the results of the methodology used by PISA. If other countries do not apply the same controls, your apples do not correspond to their oranges. </p>

<p>By the way, the “extremely homogeneous” argument is a canard, if there was ever one.</p>

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<p>Yes, we should cut out useless bureaucrats and administrators. They are a waste of money. That does absolutely nothing to rebut my claim that American students perform very well compared to their peers in other countries. </p>

<p>I believe in large part CuriousJane is correct, a symptom of distrust of Blacks from Whites. There is also distrust of Whites from Blacks, no doubt, and I think both play a significant role in the Black-White achievement gap. I think that’s why we see charter schools run by Black principals, with Black teachers teaching Black students do so well and many inner city schools run by White principals do so poorly. Of 'course, you can’t simply racially segregate all the schools, that’s no good either. But I think we need to admit as a society that there are cultural misunderstandings between Blacks and Whites and see what can be done to address them.</p>

<p>A large part of what drags down the average score on tests like PISA is the difference between how Blacks perform and how Whites perform, but there are other issues too. I don’t think merely addressing this is enough to push education forward.</p>

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<p>The problem is that we DO spend the money. Willingness is no longer an option; the way we fund education has removed that element a long time ago. Our options are to OPT OUT of the system by making the efforts to send children to private schools or invest in homeschooling. Fwiw, one could imagine the (devastating) impact of all private schools and homerschooled kids returning to the public system! </p>

<p>The unfortunate reality is that our system has simply fed the insatiable monster of the trilogy of waste, corruption, and ineptitude. This happens when you let the system directed by the service providers. Cannot blame THEM for having protected their own and taken advantage of clueless citizens and corrupt politicians. Blame should be directed at anyone who never thought the system was worth challenging.</p>

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First, I really hesitate to use racial groups to sample ‘peers’ in different countries.</p>

<p>Second, I’d like to see references supporting the claim that administration is responsible for the difference in spending between the US and other countries.</p>

<p>Third, American students clearly do not perform ‘very well’ if significantly higher funding is required to produce results no better than those in far poorer countries.</p>

<p>Keep in mind with those funding dollars that the US educates ALL students with those funds, including students that are typically institutionalized in other countries or are not educated in any way. It is very expensive to fund special education and it skews those figures quite a bit.</p>

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<p>That’s pretty interesting and makes me wonder about my own experiences. As a 6th grader, I was also invited to a similar after school class for reading. This was even though I later scored the highest of the five levels on the test that year, and got a 22 on the ACT (which isn’t great, but I was in 6th grade). I’m not black - I’m Indian - though there were very few Indians in my school, so I doubt there was any racism at all behind this. It’s still interesting to me that this happened since I have no idea why I was invited in the first place.</p>

<p>Also, I found this article to be very nice, and it discusses some of the issues related to the achievement gap and preparation of teachers, thought only with respect to elementary mathematics education - <a href=“http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf&lt;/a&gt; .</p>

<p>Referring back quite a few posts, I’m about to enter IMSA and after seeing many of their teachers, I’ve found that they really do care about you. The difference between teachers in different schools isn’t always about how educated the teachers are (even though over half of IMSA teachers have a Ph.D.) but it’s about how motivated students seem to be. Teachers want to teach at IMSA and deal with IMSA students because they are usually more motivated, more willing to come in for extra help (unless they fall into WoW syndrome) and are there to learn more.</p>