And the evidence for your claims of widespread incompetence on the part of our secondary-school graduates would be…?
(This is a serious question, by the way. There are a lot of very, very flawed measures out there, and as far as I can tell painfully little that are any good, and they don’t generally support your claim.)
I will jump in here with my criticism of public schools in general. Many students in top districts can score well on the SAT and have other qualifications good enough to attend a top college. However, from my own observation that often is not enough to excel at the top college (pass yes, even to do average, yes) . If the goal is to go on to top graduate programs, or extremely competitive programs like medical school, the publics in general didn’t teach a work ethic sufficient to do the work necessary to excel in undergrad. How many were ready to study 4 or more hours a day after class (or even 6 or 8 hours). Some students catch on to this and change, others don’t and some can’t believe that they can not just glide by like they did in HS. Not that some people aren’t stars or brilliant or able to get everything they need from public HS. We know a brilliant valedictorian from a good public who has gone on to many many honors and top grad school. We also know quite a few underachievers graduating from top colleges with an average or below average GPA which is not sufficient for top honors or top grad school in general. Yes, and some privates are not worth the money, that should go without saying.
The worst indictment of public schools are those that continually fail to educate their students. Certain zip codes are just unbelievable. It is a tragedy. Those students have been cheated of a decent education. The teachers there blame the locale - poor, bad or no parenting, crime etc. I find that unacceptable. If you look at some of those districts, and I won’t point out the place I am thinking of now, in the per pupil expenses listed each year in a magazine, they spend the same or more than quite a few really good districts. It would be like going to a doctor who says to the patient, you are overweight, have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, yadda yadda, how can I help you? You are hopeless… Isn’t the job to make a difference despite the bad conditions you are given?
Doing well on the SAT is not enough. What did your kids learn in school? Did they learn to love literature? Can they write a research paper? Do they know what primary sources are? These skills should be taught before college. Some don’t even learn this in college. I worked on an article with a graduate from a top college, and she lifted something in it’s entirety from another article, didn’t cite it, and on top of that (and the worst in my opinion), didn’t understand the paragraph that was plagarized! Perhaps I am a tough editor, but the work was not what I would have expected of a graduate of that school. When I taught legal writing to law students, a few (fortunately a very very few) did not even use standard english in their writing. Perhaps they were just egregious typos in the days before spell check, but I was horrified. Future lawyers should have an eye for detail.
Ok digression over. I still don’t like the SAT.
Kids learn how that works at home, long before the school system ever has a chance. That’s probably why it’s not the school’s job to teach it.
And the reason for the latter is that most Elem teachers do not have critical thinking/reasoning skills themselves. (Not their fault, that they did not learn just as they generally skipped upper level HS math.)
Off to don my flame suit and hide behind xiggi.
JustOneDad, of course it is the school’s job to teach you study skills and how to succeed in college! My own Dad never graduated high school, how could he know what was needed to succeed in college? Hard work, he knew well, but that was manual labor. That the one hour a day I needed in general to do the work of my HS and do well was not sufficient for my college was a rude rude awakening. It need not have been that way.
I think it’s important to remember that we don’t have a K-12 educational system in this country. We have many thousands of them. It’s my impressionistic opinionated impression that many systems in small towns and rural areas are actually much better than they were 30 years ago. I’m pretty sure the one in my home town (about 20K) people is better than it was when I went there. Back then, it was pretty weak. There were a few good teachers teaching honors classes in the high school, but there was no AP, no calculus, very little writing, very little literary analysis even in the honors English classes, etc. All that has changed, so I think things are better for the strong students. It may be just as bad for the weak students as it was back then, though.
Blue,
I did not take upper level high school math (it actually wasn’t available for me at the time), but I am more skilled at analysis and reasoning than most lawyers I know, and I have also been told so by them, by the way.
I do not lack critical thinking skills, and I was taught them in abundance. Some of you still do not get this. Many districts and whole States prefer to teach subjects and “skills” other than reasoning. And most of my students who have taken upper level math are inferior reasoners when it comes to written text.
I have a great deal of perspective from which to speak about this.
“Work ethic” was what you originally said. “Study skills” are yet another thing. Teachers can talk about good study skills, but they don’t have anywhere near the opportunity that parents have to make it stick.
@epiphany, what would you say is the context in which reasoning was taught in public schools of the past? I can’t honestly say that this was a feature of my public school education 30-40 years ago, especially compared with what my kids got in an admittedly superior school district.
I will answer with a number of bullet points because several have been debated ad nauseam here. Not everyone will accept the “evidence” on a technical basis, but the message remains the same.
Beyond the statistical evidence and the lack of improvement since A Nation at Risk, I would say that the easiest metric is to talk to teenagers or … read what they write. Inasmuch as there are plenty of impressive young people who graduate from our high schools --be it from private or public schools, looking at the average Joe SixPack makes you wonder why we start ahead of the pack in K-4, start losing it in middle school only to see our wheels fall off in high school.
Lastly, take a look at the growing number of homeschooled kids where parents with or without training and specific education embark on a journey of educating their own kids because they believe they can do it better. Take a look at why many retain tutors around the clock as soon as they are no longer able to shore up the deficiencies, or send their kids to the Kumon of the world.
Is everyone obsessed with “getting” into a top college? I do not think so, but many are realizing that what comes in the backpack in form of homework or graded assignments hardly corresponds to the lofty goals of the leading country on earth. I am afraid that when it comes to basic Rs our kids fall incredibly short. Throw in critical thinking or reasoning and I’d say that the evidence is there for anyone who … wants to be objective about it.
For one thing, logic was explicitly taught in public schools and then later (when I attended a private school for a couple of years) it was a required course of its own. Two, in publics, we were taught the elements of argument and were required to practice that regularly – both in analyzing texts and in developing our own arguments. Three, we were taught to identify categories as we made our arguments. Ideas belong to classes, and those classes belong to larger categories. Very few high school students I have personally met have been able to do this for me. Fourth, we were instructed in outlining, rigorously, and made to practice that, which obviously reinforced the understanding of categories. My students today couldn’t outline properly if their lives depended on it. Fifth, our true vocabulary mastery (contextual vocabulary) was far superior than what I see in my students today, who memorize lists mechanically yet fail to understand in what class or category the word belongs, and how to differentiate the meaning if several meanings exist. By the way, this entire paragraph is evidence of how valuable analogies testing is in separating the wheat from the chaff.
Finally, and most importantly, today’s high school students do not read. We were required to read extensively and thoroughly. Not screen shots of this or that and phony electronic multi-tasking. The fact that reading material was mostly available in entire book form most often required fuller reading, but if not, invited the reader to do so and certainly made that possible. Today’s public high school students, in my State anyway, are assigned minimal reading as part of course requirements. Too often, also, digests and summaries are available to them in substitute for the primary text. Even assigned classic literature is dumbed-down or partially offered. (One of my freshman students told me he was disappointed that his class will not be reading the entire Odyssey but only “portions” because it’s in some anthology textbook; he acknowledged it will then be virtually impossible to write a meaningful paper on the epic poem. Good for him for understanding that! But I will add that if he hadn’t been already tutored by me for a couple of years, that fact wouldn’t necessarily be obvious to him, because, although he lives in one of the wealthiest districts in the State, he is being cheated out of an education.)
Okay, @xiggi, the following responses, then:
If you’re saying that our K-12 system serves some people badly, well sure. If you’re saying the K-12 system has gotten worse (which I think you imply), then sure, that explains why general literacy rates are lower now than they were a century ago.
Really, I would argue that it isn’t that our K-12 system is horrible (either in absolute or relative terms) as much as the general environment has shifted to make the shortcomings that exist in all primary and secondary (and probably tertiary, too) educational systems more visible.
dfbdfb, I’m not sure what you mean by “prioritizing proximate input” in your #6, but I do know what xiggi means by his #6, and I support his conclusion because, as I said in my post #50, I see evidence of this daily. The only overall comment I would like to make on xiggi’s #8 in his post #49 is that it is probably less an aspect of intellectual qualification and much more the reflection of political agendas. This partly depends on the State in question and how “political” the education is in that State, but in some locales, political agendas override everything and determine curriculum. Or, to put it another way, if you’re a brilliant teacher but your agenda doesn’t fit with the Party’s agenda, you will probably discourage yourself out of the profession pretty quickly once you see the handwriting on the wall.
I’m going to chime in with my 2 cents. Concerning the new SAT or any standardized test for that matter, I have always accepted them for what they are…measuring tools with innate flaws. I applaud those who discuss and analyze them in an effort to improve how they are implemented and interpreted.
That said I hesitate to make generalizations about schools, public education, past versus present, etc based one person’s (or even several) limited anecdotal observations. We have different value systems and different definitions when it comes to intelligence and (maybe more importantly) success.
As a parent I wish that all children could grow up in environments where they can flourish. Unfortunately, there is no “one shoe fits all” scenario, thus the conundrum. Also, we cannot forget the importance of personal responsibility and choice. Finger-pointing, while understandable, can be a positive, IF action is taken to address and improve the situation OR negative, if it creates a ‘victim’ mind-set within a community.
Lastly, in my opinion, many of the difficulties we now face in education is in part, a reflection of the “heredity versus environment” debate. Hypothetically, if society were able to provide identical educational environments for all, we would still see different outcomes, student to student. “Equal” would not necessarily result in “the same”, because people are individuals. Differences would be attributed to different home environment and aptitude (heredity)…and rightly so. Combine all of that, along with our different value systems and wow, you can see why it is so complicated.
Props to those of you who see deficiencies in our educational system and are vocal about it!
That’s your choice, but I assure you there is plenty of external, tested evidence which verifies many of the supposedly “anecdotal” statements you assert are being made. The anecdotes merely corroborate all kinds of data available --certainly within the education industry itself, and accessible to those with the will to discover that.
@epiphany, in what state do you work?
@epiphany, I just meant that humans are really, really bad at developing good generalizations and such because we (and this seems to be simply the way we’re wired) aren’t generally very good at believing that our own immediate experiences (and preconceptions!) aren’t necessarily generalizable.
As a result, it’s best to avoid drawing conclusions about something as huge and many-tentacled as K-12 education in general simply from one’s own observations.
Where and when was this? This is totally alien to my experience in a small town public high school in the 1970’s. It was considered to be one of the best local schools, and I was in the honors classes. We didn’t do any of this. We didn’t read all that much, either. I have to wonder whether you had an unusually good public school experience.
It doesn’t have to be parsed out as elegantly as epiphany is doing.
Just ask a couple of 5th or 6th graders "what’s seven times nine? or four times eight? or eight times seven? "
Stay silent after the questions and note how long it takes to get the answer.
Of course, it all depends on your point of view. Things like this are what the NYTImes would refer to as meaningless memorization.
What percentage of 6th-graders would have been able to answer “What’s seven times nine?” (better: “What’s fourteen times twenty-one?”) in less than n seconds fifty years ago, compared to today?
If we have no answer to that, we have no basis for saying that what we have now is the result of educational methods and/or standards slipping.