"Waiting for “Superman” A must see movie - All discussions

Parents Forum
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<p>Thanks, xig
I was, in fact, just watching the trailer for “The rubber room”. Annual cost to NYC taxpayers $35-65 million. Un-friggin’ believable.</p>

<p>** In the trailer, some students say, for example, that they report their teacher if they don’t like the teacher , and the teachers may then be pulled out of the classroom and sent to “purgatory” (their word) with no idea what they have been accused of or how to defend themselves? What a mess. Watch the trailer. Quite distressing <a href=“http://www.rubberroommovie.com/[/url]”>http://www.rubberroommovie.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>rubber rooms closed last summer, i believe.</p>

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<p>I did, but it’s not relevant to me, because I’m not part of that crowd, or such “education colleges.” (Apparently you did not see my earlier post – the first time I posted in this thread – which explained how my classmates and I were chosen for our credentialing program. We all had to be among the top of our graduating classes to be selected.)</p>

<p>I do take issue, yes, with some of the content of contemporary credentialing programs, as I think that’s your complaint. But some of your earlier quotes may have been taken out of context. I’m a prime proponent of information being a mainstay of classroom teaching! But the teacher’s role is also to enable the student to find, use, & apply information, not only to contain the information in a vessel called the brain. The brain needs to sort & organize, in order to make information useful for academics & life. That may have been the import of the earlier quote (teacher as “facilitator”). (I have not explored the Joanne Jacobs article.) It’s the teacher’s primary job to show students what to do with information, and how ideas connect with other ideas, etc.</p>

<p>As to PowerPoint presentations, this tool can be abused as a substitute for the difficult task of writing, and allow students to substitute shorthand for writing. However, I have seen such assignments being used to expand & supplement full writing assignments, or to be the basis for writing assignments. When used thus, they’re appropriate and they facilitate organization. It really depends on the skills & professionalism of the teacher.</p>

<p>Math: In my region, the problem is not that skills are not taught. The problem is that there is no cohesion to the teaching of mathematics, nor the understanding that math is a language built on symbols, and that both immersion in and facility with that language is the key to confidence & fluency. It should be approached as one approaches a foreign language. </p>

<p>The problems with the teaching of math are several, starting with:
(1) No organizing methodology
(2) Poor training in the difficult teaching of math
(3) Disparate and ever-shifting, “novel” approaches to math curriculum, by district, by school, by State, which confuses both students and teachers. That includes appropriation of new language without defining how new terms are integrated with older terms.
(4) The big one: textbooks – both content and method of adoption. This is the area most open to exploitation, particularly in those regions hardest hit by budget concerns. Often, adoption is based on price, resulting in fancy pitches and promises by publishing companies. Companies will offer deep discounts based on volume, so larger districts are particularly prone to becoming prostituted by this. Second, the method of decision-making is often arbitrary – such as recently in our district, where one favored & partisan individual made a particularly poor math-textbook decision for the entire district, which has proven to be disastrous. The fact that “best practices” (in this case, decision-making) seems to be an unknown or unknowable concept in some bureaucracies really does affect teaching content and student performance.
(5) Practice & assessments: The sound-bite phenomenon of the Information Age has found its way into the mathematics period. That’s because the teachers have caved into the culture, rather than being counter-cultural. You do not master something by being introduced to it once, practicing it briefly, and moving on. Again using the reality that mathematics is a language built on symbols, in order to master a language you need to practice it, and often. Review and drill are aspects of that. Once truly mastered, repetition of mere “drill” exercises is not essential; however, use of those skills becomes important to maintain one’s competency. So one needs to revisit the skill periodically to refresh mastery. That is a practice that has been all but abandoned in many classrooms. Some of my 7th through 9th graders have told me that they were introduced to percentage “once,” or to reducing fractions “once,” and they are not lying. </p>

<h1>5 is equally pertinent to the introduction of (English) language/grammar. Most of my 8th graders, and an alarming percentage of 9th/10th graders do not know parts of speech. They were also “introduced” to these once, anywhere from 3 years ago to 5 years ago, and never revisited such lessons. We are not talking here about the difference between the past perfect and the future conditional tense (although that would be nice, too), but the difference between – don’t laugh – an adjective and a verb. (!) English speakers. First language users. I end up giving them intensive courses, because without that, my students are unable to write.</h1>

<p>But the bottom line is this: Not all of these bad teaching directions are the products of newer credentialing programs. Some of these have been merely arbitrarily chosen by centralized administrations with too much self-appointed decision-making power. Others are the result of teachers (again) caving in to what they assume students “will” or “will not” accede to, as if it is the teacher’s responsibliity to get permission from the student what/how to teach. The simple fact is that it is the teacher’s job to get the student to be functional with information; without the essential tools, the student cannot be functional; that student is not in the position to know what he or she does or does not need to survive and thrive in the world of academics and non-academics. You, the adult, do know that.</p>

<p>So I give my students the tools that they should have had 3-5 years ago. They groan a little at first; then they thank me profusely for making it easy for them to write. ;)</p>

<p>Enough of my complaining for the moment…</p>

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<p>A remark on testing of young children:</p>

<p>It is extremely difficult to get truly accurate assessments of very young children before they are fluent readers. That includes the issue of diagnosing LD. Children’s cognition is very fluid between age 4 and age 8. “Normal” difficulties with speech, language, reading, & writing can be misperceived as clinical or organic problems, when one or more of those sometimes are just a matter of slower development, exposure, and training. And it can take awhile, depending on the child & his or her personality & receptivity, for all those elements to come together. That cohesion is the task of the primary age years. Conversely, true LD sometimes slips under the radar in the young child, because this cohesion is all in-process. Most professionals do not like to try to diagnose before about age 8, because of this. Exceptions are in cases of true developmental delays caused by organic or medical situations. (I know a few of those intimately.)</p>

<p>In terms of merely standard learning assessments (non LD), these also can be less than definitive in the young child, due to testing administration that is required for non-readers, combined with immaturity – and the fluidity I just mentioned.</p>

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<p>Speaking as someone who does diagnostic evaluations, I don’t see it the way you do, epiphany, especially with respect to identifying pre-reading disorders that may cause problems with the development of “fluent reading” .But this isn’t the place to discuss that and it will take the thread OT.</p>

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<p>epiphany –</p>

<p>I did see your earlier post, if you’re referring to the one about the very selective credentialing you underwent. Given that, I’m surprised you find the other 95% of teaching programs that produce most public school teachers to be irrelevant to you.</p>

<p>In any case, while we seem to agree on the importance of content in curriculum, I disagree with you if you think that the current constructivist/discovery pedagogical methods are serving our students well. I think education schools have taken the “teacher as facilitator” idea too far. While students must learn to think on their own, the “student centered” approach currently in practice wastes many hours of classroom time with students left to muddle their way into an education. It is notable that most of the successful charter schools use direct instruction instead of inquiry-based teaching. Their teachers actually “teach”, as opposed to facilitating learning.</p>

<p>"Despite decades of advocacy, there is no body of evidence based on randomised, controlled experiments demonstrating the superiority of inquiry-based over explicit instruction.</p>

<p>[Explicit</a> Instruction or Reform - Mathematically Sound Foundations](<a href=“http://soundmath.wetpaint.com/page/Explicit+Instruction+or+Reform]Explicit”>http://soundmath.wetpaint.com/page/Explicit+Instruction+or+Reform)</p>

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<p>Here is an example of how well taxpayers’ money is spent and the public school system improvement methods work:</p>

<p>The state gives the city grant money to implement a pre-K programs most of it going to a single elementary school where the pre-K program is run. After 1 year, the state and city realize that the students in kindergarten do not seem to have achieved beyond those who were not in the pre-K program. So the city has the director of the pre-K program do an evaluation of the kindergarten program and a rating of its teachers. The rating is color coded - red means bad, green means good etc. Teachers are rated badly with the comments: “not enough books in the classroom”, “not enough learning centers” etc. This is the typical method employed to make changes.</p>

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<p>PayFor, do you have any evidence that “95%” of teacher credentialing programs are largely non-content based? If most programs are training teachers in this manner, or if most districts are demanding that content not be the focus, then your point is “relevant.” That’s all I meant.</p>

<p>I do not see (in my area) that teacher credential programs are mostly about letting students direct their own education. There are some specialty schools in which students are more ‘primary agents’ than at other schools, but that is not as a result of any state or private credentialing program. That is a result of the focus of that school (usually either charter or private), including if those students are taught by teachers credentialed in that state (which usually they are.) And overwhelmingly, that tends to be reserved for gifted students, not students floundering with basics.</p>

<p>Your experience, of course, may differ from mine.</p>

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<p>DocT, your story reminded me of one that happened in the last state we lived in (NC).</p>

<p>The school system decided to buy Dell Laptops for only 1 hs, the most inner city, poorest school. Now let me say, theoretically, I thought BRAVO! I was 1000% behind this program.</p>

<p>Here’s where the BOE lost everyone’s support. At the end of the yr @65% of the laptops were not returned, and the students reported them missing or stolen. Okay, it is a trial program, but this is inner city, so let’s try to work the kinks out of the system, maybe they are not allowed to take them home could be an option, but in every classroom they are there and the kids use jump drives. NO, what did they do, gave out all new laptops again the following yr.</p>

<p>This is when parents went nuts because there are 10 hs in the county. Even the wealthy school does not let calculators leave the classroom because of shortages, but for whatever reason, The county decided to replace @800 laptops in one yr for one school. </p>

<p>The next yr again the school came up short with laptop returns, but instead of using the logic that we keep them in the classroom, they ditched the whole program, thus, the kids are back where they started 3 yrs earlier. It was really sad to see that the BOE couldn’t logically figure out the most simplistic solution, when every parent could see it.</p>

<p>OBTW this was not a dell program(i.e. grant), it was a line item cost on the school budget.</p>

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<p>Well the biggest concern with what was done in this elementary school was the soft squishy subjective ratings. What does it mean when someone says not enough books in the classroom? How many should there be? There was no data backing anything up. An exam was given at the beginning of the school year when the students from pre-K hadn’t even really had the kindergarten teacher so how valid is any assessment? It wasn’t valid in the least - not to mention that the pre-K teacher was doing the assessment - say conflict of interest? It astonishes me how poorly people gather data, understand it and use it for effecting change. I can go on and on about this all the way from data acquisition for students to the determination of which schools are failing.</p>

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<p>Post 289:
There was some recent research (I believe within the last 12 months – I’m too lazy to look it up right now :p) that found laptop purchase for classroom use to be less beneficial than initially presumed it would be. Exceptions to that are school formats in which instruction and assignments are heavily delivered electronically, during the school day itself. There’s a Charter Arts school near me that has made good use of such a tool, and particulary because they had facilities issues at the time of laptop adoption. I have also taught in two charter homeschools in which computer use was essential, and much instruction was delivered also in that format. The big caveat on this is to understand that electronic instruction for K-8, especially, has limitations and should not be relied on exclusively.</p>

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<p>epiphany –
I didn’t mean to imply that I had such a precise handle on the percentage of ed schools that promote constructivist / student-centered teaching. However, there is no question that the vast majority of teacher training does focus on this type of progressive, content-poor pedagogy. I don’t think many people dispute this.</p>

<p>This is from an earlier version of the survey I linked to above, but the findings have remained pretty much the same:
The process of learning is more important to education professors than whether or not students absorb specific knowledge. Nearly 9 in 10 (86%) say when K-12 teachers assign math or history questions, it is more important for kids to struggle with the process of finding the right answers than knowing the right answer. We have for so many years said to kids ‘What’s 7+5?’ as if that was the important thing. The question we should be asking is ‘Give me as many questions whose answer is 12…,’ said a Chicago professor who was interviewed for this study.
[Professors</a> of Education: It’s How You Learn, Not What You Learn That’s Most Important | Public Agenda](<a href=“http://www.publicagenda.org/press-releases/professors-education-its-how-you-learn-not-what-you-learn-thats-most-important]Professors”>http://www.publicagenda.org/press-releases/professors-education-its-how-you-learn-not-what-you-learn-thats-most-important)</p>

<p>Here’s more:
During the 1990s the United States underwent an unprecedented curricular “reform” of the public schools. By 1990, the ideological legacy of Kilpatrick, Rugg and Dewey controlled virtually all colleges of education and their respective teacher organizations. The NCTM and the National Council of Teachers of English developed standards reflecting progressive values and pedagogy. These curriculum standards were then adopted by state after state as the frameworks for reading and math. The end result was the standardization of ineffective practices leading to inadequately trained teachers and low-achieving students in basic academic domains (Rumph, Ninness, & McCuller, 2001). A generation of students would be taught in progressive schools with progressive pedagogy but not without a fight. “Reforms” touched every state and virtually every school district.
<a href=“http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/bsi/article/viewFile/399/1700[/url]”>http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/bsi/article/viewFile/399/1700&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>While there have been some minor changes recently, most education college requirements are very light on courses that cover actual content knowledge.</p>

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<p>My own children have endured much of this student-centered content-poor instruction during their years in public school, and I’ll offer just one anecdote from my 8th grade D’s current science homework.</p>

<p>The assignment is to read a science article and answer a series of questions. Approximately one-fourth of their grade will be based on the answer to this question: “What was your reaction to this article? How does it affect you?”</p>

<p>From experience, here is a likely response to that question: “It makes me sad that the pollution killed the fish.”</p>

<p>The student will receive full credit because there really is no wrong answer. (Need we wonder how grade inflation happens?) In ed school theory, a question like this allows a student to relate science to his “real world”, promotes engagement in learning and teaches “critical thinking”. In practice, it usually adds very little to learning about science.</p>

<p>Instead of laying a strong foundation for future science courses, our middle school is wasting valuable time letting my daughter explore her feelings about science. For my money ($22,000/student spending at our school), this type of science education fails miserably in preparing my children for the 21st century. It lacks rigor. And it’s a direct result of the progressive/constructivist/discovery methods our education schools have been promoting.</p>

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<p>The only pet peeve I have always had about science programs are the science fairs. It especially drives me insane when you can see that MOM AND DAD did it, not the child, yet the teacher can’t penalize the child with a lower grade since they can’t be sure that MOM AND DAD did do it.</p>

<p>It truly is the biggest waste of time IMHPO. It is basically a week of not teaching science, since they also present them to the class. How many times does it take for a kid to learn that if you don’t add eggs to cake mix it won’t make a cake? Or looking at 3 different pieces of bread regarding mold?</p>

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<p>PayFor, thank you for the clarification. I don’t want to get off into too technical a discussion on this already-long thread, and if I do, everyone will dose off.</p>

<p>In a nutshell, methodology has always stressed both (teaching the objective answer – when there is one! - and teaching the means to get there). One is not supposed to be sacrificed for the other, and it certainly never was during my own training.</p>

<p>The math situation is both more straightforward and more complicated. :smiley: Clearly, finite mathematics, and math facts, start from a base of objective facts, answers, skills. Without those, there will be no math mastery, let alone fluency. The problem in this country, as I alluded to earlier, is that – unlike in many other countries – there is no consistent, systematic, integrated approach to math. Not only do approaches and even terminology vary from state to state, district to district, classroom to classroom, but also year to year. Rather than correct this frantically disunified situation, the response has been to continue to experiment, often wildly & desperately, with ever-novel approaches that compound the fragmentation of math teaching. </p>

<p>Again, reducing the argument here, the Chicago quote is concentrating on the fluency (which has been the greatest problem in middle/high school math until recently), rather than concentrating on facts. It’s important to have the facts first, but to build fluency simultaneously, which is the point behind teaching the fact family of 7, 5, and 12. The only way to make students competent, particularly when one moves from arithmetical operations to the more symbolic algebra & beyond, is to combine the understanding of why, along with the facts. </p>

<p>Chicago is again correct that teaching many ways to get to 12 is extremely important; otherwise there is neither understanding nor fluency. (That has also been proven in research.) However – speaking of Chicago – the U of Chicago developed an absolutely horrid math program (text) recently, showing zero understanding of actual classroom learning and children’s minds. It was very theoretically based and unfortunately widely adopted in my local district, with disastrous results. Making the analogy with a spoken language, if you were never taught how to conjugate a particular French verb (where you would start with a regular verb), you would be lost. That’s the parallel to draw here. It’s all theory & no substance. Further, this particular math program came with no manuals, training materials, etc. So I’m having to re-teach & re-center all my kids. But this is not because there are no educators who know how to teach math. What’s wrong (as I alluded to earlier) is the way decisions are made, and who makes curriculum (& textbook adoption) decisions.</p>

<p>The Chicago program I refer to merely looked superficially at the way some Asian countries teach math, which is to introduce all the strands of math at every level of learning – every age. But they didn’t look at how such introduction was done, and how thoroughly that was taught, approrpriate to grade level. It is only one aspect of Asian superiority at math teaching that ‘all subjects are introduced at every age.’ One of the other major factors of success is mastery of math facts until you can do them in your sleep. Another significant factor is the professional collaboration among math teachers, which prevents the fragmentation I mentioned. They decide together what they will do and how they will do it, so that there is coherence from one grade level to the next.</p>

<p>Our pre-algebra students – not to mention algebra students – are struggling because they were never taught fractions properly, or practiced enough, so things like GCF and LCM are problematic, as is Prime Factorization. A significant percentage of these students do not have their times tables memorized. Again, this is a cave-in on the part of U.S. teachers, who assume that “children won’t learn” math facts, partly out of boredom with repetition (& an assumed low attention span), partly due to calculator reliance for eveyrday use. I keep telling my students – and their teachers – that unless you know cold that 48 divided by 6 = 8, you will not be able to solve the equation, no matter how much you understand Fundamental Properties.</p>

<p>But speaking of Properties, there has been an underemphasis on learning math terms, formulas, and rules. I hate the modern approach to geometry, and few of my students understand it, either. Theorems have apparently been dispensed with – or at least the need to memorize them. Though I consider myself, relatively speaking a “math tard,” Geometry was one of my easiest & most pleasurable subjects in h.school. I Earned what I considered an Easy A, because it was taught in the most logical, straightforward way ever. (And I’m a visual person, which helps. :D) You memorized your theorems, you set up your proof with the Givens, and you basically just filled out the missing pieces of the puzzle. Bingo!</p>

<p>But American math teaching keeps trying to reinvent the wheel, which has resulted in most of the wagons breaking down.</p>

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<p>More opinions… [url=&lt;a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100705078.html?nav=hcmoduletmv]washingtonpost.com[/url”&gt;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100705078.html?nav=hcmoduletmv]washingtonpost.com[/url</a>]</p>

<p>from the article:
"So, where do we start? With the basics. As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income – it is the quality of their teacher. "</p>

<p>I disagree with this statement; I believe the single most important factor is the attitude at home about education.</p>

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<p>both are important, rom. I have personally seen that both the quality of the parent’s own education and their active support/oversight of their children’s performance is quite essential (regardless of quality of teaching), but the quality of teaching is still rather important.</p>

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<p>^^ From my personal perspective and experience, the K-12 education has so many problems, it is difficult to even to name them all (such as the education priorities of the schools and school district, the quality of the curricula and many of the teachers, etc). But from I read about the movie, I believe that it is just a political hatchet job (and I will not pay to see it).</p>

<pre><code>This article in Washington post by some of the leaders of our education system shows just how little respect they have for truth and facts. The selective quoting of Obama is a clear distortion of what Obama wrote/said.

Below is the part of the Obama speech the article selectively quoted from:
</code></pre>

<p>"This effort will require the skills and talents of many, but especially our nation’s teachers, principals, and other school leaders. Our goal must be to have a great teacher in every classroom and a great principal in every school. We know that from the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents—it is the teacher standing at the front of the classroom. To ensure the success of our children, we must do better to recruit, develop, support, retain, and reward outstanding teachers in America’s classrooms.</p>

<p>Reforming our schools to deliver a world-class education is a shared responsibility—the task cannot be shouldered by our nation’s teachers and principals alone. We must foster school environments where teachers have the time to collaborate, the opportunities to lead, and the respect that all professionals deserve. We must recognize the importance of communities and families in supporting their children’s education, because a parent is a child’s first teacher. We must support families, communities, and schools working in partnership to deliver services and supports that address the full range of student needs."</p>

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<p>Thanks, NCL. It’s amazing how context can create clarity! That makes much more sense.</p>

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<p>“As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income – it is the quality of their teacher.”</p>

<p>This claim is absurd on its face. You know, I was watching when Oprah announced the grant from Mark Zuckerberg (which was incredibly generous). There were four people on the stage–Zuckerberg, Oprah, Chris Christie and Corey Booker. What they had in common was that none of them had any clue about what it was like to be a child in an inner city where social structures have completely broken down. The idea that you are going to solve these children’s learning difficulties by firing a few incompetent teachers and setting up a bunch of charter schools is ridiculous.</p>