Lamenting the dysfunctional state of many of our nation’s public schools has been a perennial refrain for decades. However, to fix what is wrong will require courageous decisions implemented by communities across the country, despite strong resistance.
Fortunately, some public schools are producing students who demonstrate high academic achievement, and can compete not only with peers here in America but with those across the globe. However, those schools that demonstrate consistent academic excellence, unfortunately, are not the norm.
Why do we continue to tolerate schools graduating generation after generation of children who are ill-equipped to perform the most basic jobs, let alone perform at a level that protects and advances their household, community or nation? Expecting these same children to be able to compete on the global stage is a foreign, if not ludicrous, notion.
With such a vacuous disparity in the educational preparedness of the majority of our children, what does it mean for the future well-being of our communities, our nation?
Irrespective of our opinions, one thing is certain: If we are to have a proliferation of what works in those schools of excellence, it is going to require bold significant changes in our thinking, and in the way that the school administration conducts its business as it relates to students, teachers and parents.
First, we must stop placing blame for educational failure with the students. The current dysfunction of schools is not the kids fault. Even though when you talk with many teachers, administrators and bystanders, you can easily get that impression.
There is a lot of talk about how disinterested, disrespectful and undisciplined students are, how their behavior is disruptive rather than conducive to learning in the classroom. It appears that we readily dismiss that those students were not born that way. So it begs the question, how did they become so hapless and hopeless?
Perhaps they have spent or are spending too much time around inattentive, indifferent and uncaring adults — whether parents or teachers — who for one reason or the other have relinquished their responsibility to play a meaningful role in their lives, and, even worse, have chosen not to become re-engaged.
A bold step would be to stop blaming the kids, and, instead, figure out how to intervene in their lives to motivate them and improve their undisciplined behavior. It is our duty.
In terms of teachers, we know several things. First, there are dedicated, hard-working teachers who are doing a great job. They deserve our appreciation, commendation and a pay raise.
However, there are too many teachers who have lost the passion for teaching, if they ever had it, and they are just babysitting both interested and disinterested students alike, hiding behind their tenure, abiding time until retirement. These teachers are a detriment to education and should do themselves and everyone else, especially the students, a favor and find some other type of employment.
We know that many teachers are not very qualified. According to the U.S. Dept. of Education, our urban schools attract a disproportionate number of teachers who themselves perform in the lowest quartile on their college entrance exams and meet the minimum requirements of the teacher education programs offered in colleges and universities. These less qualified teachers end up in elementary schools often teaching subjects they are not trained to teach. Our children begin their education on an educational deficit from which many never recover. And, we wonder why they are not learning and performing well on standardized tests.
A bold new step would include the administration, along with parents, demanding more accountability of teachers through the teachers’ union, requiring the dismissal of ineffective teachers, while recruiting and retaining effective teachers through appropriate compensation and other needed support.
Just as critically, colleges and universities should be held accountable for producing quality teachers and suffer consequences when they do not. We require qualifying/screening exams for students interested in becoming doctors and lawyers. Should not the same be required of those interested in becoming teachers?
Parents. Their involvement is a critical component to educational success. There is a common perception among principals and teachers that many parents, based on their economic status, do not care about their children’s education as evidenced by incomplete homework and non-participation in parent-teacher conferences. Parents are the enemy not an ally.
Parents, on the other hand, often feel unwelcome, intimidated, and inadequate to work with teachers and schools. Some parents may be unable to help in their child’s schooling due to their economic or educational circumstance. They feel helpless, powerless.
A bold step would involve requiring parents and teachers to work together to address negative perceptions, removing barriers, and implementing action steps on an ongoing basis to foster the best educational environment and support for the child.
Until those in a position of leadership are willing to take the necessary actions to clarify expectations and make accountability from students, teachers, and parents alike, mandatory, educational achievement will continue to elude most schools in our communities and across our nation.
Our unwillingness to take these requisite actions now, will no doubt, portend to measures that are more drastic in the future. Less our well-being here at home and on the world stage is foretold.
Comments
Children are the ones Hurting
I find much interest in the topic of elementary school s not performing to the standardized projections. I do believe teachers are well deserving of a raise and deserve so much more credit than they already do. They’re the ones in the classrooms teaching the children and in turn they earn less money than other members of the educations system. I also agree that it’s ridiculous to blame the students for not wanting to learn and not behaving in class. By reading the article, I got the feeling that students now a days, are worse off than 20 years ago, also that parents are not engaged in student’s lives? 20 years ago there were parents around that weren’t engaged in their child’s life either. In today’s era, who’s to blame for that? The average middle working class family has to have both parents working in order to survive. Houses are getting foreclosed so it’s a dear necessity that both parents work and bring in money. Jobs are scarce these days, and if parents have to commute daily to work, that means they’re leaving to work early in the morning and coming home late. In my area I live in, they recently cut all bus transportation to all elementary and middle schools. Everyone is in a crisis, and the ones who are going to pay the price of our economy, lack of bus transportation, and having 40 students to one teacher in a 4th grade classroom is the students. They’ll just be passed on to the next grade and once they reach high school and are able to graduate, they will not be prepared for any college courses. Well not unless you live in a white neighborhood that has good test scoring schools. Let’s face it, schools with more white students receive more money from the state because they test better. It’s almost as if minority students are destined to fail. So what do they do after high school, if they even graduate? Work jobs they hate or join gangs and sell drugs?
I touched a lot of different areas in this response, this subject means a lot to me, and I feel that local and state officials could be doing so much more to help.
Educational system...
Our educational system has been in crisis for long; the problem grows with the wrong decisions to resolve the unresolved problem of the existing educational system. The effect of Standardized testing in public schools makes the problem worst for students, teachers and parent. The unfair decision is taking a harsh action from taking away funds from schools to closing out schools. The problems are growing because first, the system don’t considered the main social problems of unequal and unfair distribution of funding to run schools. Second, the students’ economical and educational backgrounds are never taken in to account. Students who live in low income area don’t have the same resource as higher income family students. Generally, the system is not considered other matters that affect learning. . Blaming parents, students and teachers don’t solve the problem. Unless the educational system take a step to resolve the main source of the problems and started to look what matters for education, the problem will exist.
Who's to blame?
I believe that it is unfair to put the blame for the lack of success in education on one person. I think that students do not deserve all the blame that they are given in the classroom, but that they do share some. A bad kid is most likely a bad student. You cannot blame teachers for being unable to teach a bad kid who disrupts class for everyone and takes away from the other kids learning. I believe the responsibility should given to parents, teachers, and the student when trying to correct this kid. Parents need to play their role and be a parent. I understand that many families work and spend a lot of time at a job and cannot find time to give to their child's education, but they need to. Teachers are at fault in cases too because I have encountered many teachers who do not really want to be there and teach. This is where schools need to critique teachers and get rid of the bad teachers who are hindering education. I believe that the education system is the biggest culprit in these scenarios however. First of all, they should not allow teachers who do not perform well to get teaching jobs, and to have students participate in standardized tests is not an effective measure of how much a student has learned. These tests measure test taking skills instead of knowledge and a lot of students memorize material and then forget it after the test. If we want students to be important members of our society, than we do need to take bold steps. However, we need to take a bold step on getting everyone to work together and to stop distributing blame for the situation and just work to fix it.
Whose to Blame?
The status of the American public schooling system is at a dangerous, children are graduating from schools that barely gave a half-effort attempt to genuinly teach them and the students themselves are not ready for college or the work force. If our children are our future, what does that say to how we are valueing our future. Spending 10 times as much on the military them we do on education, is that the grand plan for our country, create a Spartan like society where all the men are uneducated and forced to be soliders to fight our countless enemies, and our women to be nothing but breeding stock? Something very drastic needs to happen to make the powers that be wake up and understand what is going to happen to our nation in the next generation.
Our Culture is the Culprit
There is no question or doubt that educational success is waning and schools are in dire need of repair; however, teachers and parents are not the problem and should not be blamed. So who is the culprit? How do we tackle something without scapegoating a group? Technology is an immense part of the problem. Society is more passive now more than ever; we have become dependent, lazy, and unmotivated because manual, hard-work has been stripped for the equation. Although technology offers an assortment of wonders and is therefore seen as our ally, it is also an enemy that subdues self-reliance and independency. Kids are constantly watching TV at home, are on MySpace, or are playing video games. At school, they play with their iPods, iphones, and whatever else constitutes as the latest "must have" gadget. When bombarded with these fancy, needless toys that society dictates we must buy and own, our children's values are distorted and their priorities shifted. We live in a generation where relationships, perseverance, hard-work, dedication, and motivation rank under desires instilled by the mass-media. The media dominants and controls our lives, regardless of how hard we try to fight its socially-constructed ideals. Do you see educational emphasis flickering on the screen? Of course not. Corporations are trying to sell everything but education; thus, we don't value education as much as we need to. Adolescents are overwhelmingly impressionable, learning and abiding from what they see in their environment. Therefore, we can't blame parents or teachers, at least not solely or directly. Children are manipulated and brainwashed by destructive images and messages that reinforce materialism. Society is the problem. We have allowed our social constructions to overpower and reign over us. We invented these negative ideals and values, and now we need to deconstruct them. It is incredibly disheartening to see and hear everyone ceaselessly blaming teachers and parents for the lack of learning. Parents do their best to raise their children under whatever their circumstances or plight may be. Similarly, teachers and professors provide the best pedagogy they know of, and strive to challenge their students. It's neither of the two's fault, given people choose to tune out and listen to their iPod, go to a party, or doodle on their laptop. We can't blame a single group or individual for societal attitudes. If we want to secure our future, we need to inspire younger generations and implement values that we want to see reflected in our community and other generations to come. We also need to understand that schools maybe performing poorly because of the lack of minority assistance. Communities of color are rapidly populating the educational system and it is our job to facilitate learning in such a way that caters to their needs. We can't just push these students aside and automatically label them as defective or incompetent. We must cease to be a monolingual country that pressures and demands that other regions cater to us and speak English. We must provide bilingual, trilingual services for those who come to us. Minority students are overlooked as invaluable and worthless, when in reality they harbor a significant amount of community cultural wealth that we need to take advantage of. Culture clashes and multiple languages shouldn't be perceived as a nuisance or a threat, but an opportunity to learn from them and incorporate their wealth into our culture. Thus, the educational system isn't failing; it is simply misunderstood in that reforms must be made to improve it. Societal dictations need to be deconstructed and reconstructed and additional cultures need to be embraced and assisted.
Our Future
I believe that we do need to help our future and one way that we can do that is by helping our nation become smarter. Start with helping the schools with better resources, Books, teachers aides, better pay, and teachers that have passion to teach. I think that there are to many teachers out there that teach because it is a pay check. I mean their will always be a need for teachers and people understand that and teach because they know its a job and thus in return they do not have the passion to teach our youth. It takes a teacher with great ambition to help kids learn and want to learn in order to be successful in life and by doing these few things it will better the future for all of us.
Bold quote
One thing in this article that stood out to me was that "A bold step would be to stop blaming th ekids, and instead, figure out how to intervene in their lives to motivate them and improve their undisciplined behavior. It is our duty." To me this is a powerful statment, not only stating that we need to stop blaming children for faults in education, but also that it's our duty to, meaning that our future depends on the educational system in this country improving. Typically, and unfortuantely, most of the educational problems can be looked at from a very negative perspective which blames the kids for mistakes rather than the system, much like the justice system towards minorities, but that's a separate topic. In reality, the way we can improve the system is to revise the educational system, perhaps to a collaborative partnership way of learning where kids can interact with one another and be supervised and guided by a teacher rather than having information (and false information at that) forced upon them. Another way may be to strive to have school such as the one mentioned in the beginning of the article, where kids can interact with people even on an international level and further advance to higher learning levels than others in their age group. If we had more schools such as that one, we may be able to advance our educational system as a whole, but of course it's going to take a lot of money, budgeting, and time to acheive.
Our Education System
I really liked the topic of this article. I believe that the kids should not be the one's to blame, nor should the parents or teachers. Like the article said, some kids don't get the attention they need from their parents so that's why they misbehave at school, hoping to get attention there since they don't get it at home. Sometimes the child goes unattended due to the fact that both parents work, because now in days with this economic crisis that the U.S. is going through, both parents must be employed in order to survive. Our education has come to a halt, in terms of the learning that the kids are getting due to the fact that schools, mainly elementary schools, are hiring the not so qualified teachers. This is scary to think of because if it's always been said that the children are the future. How are the children suppose to prosper when not even the teachers know what they're teaching? One thing that came to mind while I read this article too was the minority group and how they too are getting affected by this. Kids whose parents are of low income are the ones who are hurting the most, they receive less school resources and if they do they're not up to date so their learning is at a slower pace than a kid with parents having a higher income. It's sad to say that education has even fallen in the idea that those who aren't 'white' which usually signals toward the wealthy, don't deserve the right to get a higher education. Yes, there needs to be bold actions taken but in order to do so our society needs to step away from the social construction that minorities (e.g. Mexicans, African Americans) are less worthy of than a 'white' kid. All in all I believe that race has a lot to do with why our education has failed to prosper over time.
This is my favorite article
This is my favorite article I've read on this site. It brought up so many good and interesting points. I believe that teachers have a tough job and deserve good compensation for all the hard work they do- but only those teachers that truly deserve it. The ones who push the children to think out of the box and who actually help the children learn and keep them engaged, and the ones who aren't afraid to read and grade papers. I know I could have definitely benefited from a teacher making me do some creative writing. I never had to do that so today I'm a horrible writer. Just as a child would be bad at math because the teacher only assigns the minimal amount of work. It's not the students fault at all that they are being moved up and graduated to another grade. It's the fault of administration and teachers. No child should be able to go to the next grade level when they aren't ready. They should be held back- it's only for the good of their future. You should only be a teacher if that is your passion in life and when it no longer is, or you become tired of it you should find a different career because you are just a detriment to society then. I also believe parents need to help too at home teaching their children to respect adults and there peers and of course be able to help with after school work.
Teachers standards
I think that the school systems need to start holding teachers accountable for the material they are teaching. It is important for teachers to actually know how to teach the subject to children. I think that lately it has become far too easy for a person to just take a test and be able to become a teacher. I find it very important for teachers to actually be educated on teaching before they go into the field. It is more beneficial for the children to be educated by someone who actually has knowledge behind their ideas. If children are expected to obtain a certain standard, then we should hold our teachers to achieve an educational standard as well.
Parents' Duty
This is a terrific article. I particularly liked the reflection near the end on how parents and teachers should work cooperatively in order to ensure that children receive the most effective and meaningful education possible. Unfortunately, many parents subconsciously fall under the impression that raising their children is the duty of school teachers. While talented, passionate teachers are essential in a complete education for children, they can only impact a child who has disinterested and removed parents so much. While teachers are called to improve their methods and endure more rigorous training and studies, parents must also answer the call to raise children who are competent, civilized, and sociable outside of the classroom setting.
I'll put my money on the Tortoise everytime!
My twins are in first grade and they are at the exact opposite ends of the learning spectrum. One is gifted (not my word) and the other has severe learning disabilities. They are like an educational petri dish – it’s fascinating. The most interesting thing is how they respond to the exact same curriculum (they are in different first grade classrooms, so you do have to account for delivery). My son who is ahead of the curve is annoyed by the creative teaching curriculum, he just wants to know what to do and how to do it, he doesn’t want you to be clever in your delivery. My other son is all about the gimmicks, he isn’t even aware he’s learning math he’s so focused on the “helpers” the teacher brings out to explain the concepts. The best part? Their “net” learning is about the same. What’s my point? I think based on my experience that it isn’t the students, it isn’t the teachers, it’s not the administration, it’s not the curriculum, it’s not even the parents – it’s everything! When we take the time to figure out HOW the students learn, then they can actually learn. If we are so focused on meeting our goals that we are just shoving information down the kids throats then they are not retaining enough of a base to build on. If you don’t have the blocks, how on earth do you build a pyramid? I took responsibility for my children’s education and researched until I found the school in our district that best fit our family. I believe in the public school system and did not want to send my children to private school. How can I advocate change for everyone else, but not my kids? I found a school that is as dedicated to the kids that go there as the parents who send their kids are. It’s a Title 1 school, meaning it receives additional monies because the majority of the population of the school is deemed underprivileged. You wouldn’t think that if you visited this school – the amount of volunteers I see there on a daily basis is inspiring. Particularly in elementary school I think the focus should be on creating a positive learning environment. If we worried more about inspiring children to BE learners, and not just to learn, I think we could in fact overhaul our educational system. Maybe we need a refresher on the old fable the “Tortoise and the Hare”.
Race in Education
I agree with the reading stating that a more diverse institution creates a better learning environment. Growing up from kindergarten to i would say fourth grade, there was no African Americans in my class. I remember thinking even at a young age how strange it was. One of my neighbors was an African American and i was very close with him, we would always hangout outside of school. I remember always wanting to ask him how hard or different it must be to go to a school where you are one of the only people of your color. I remember all we learned in the African American culture was about slavery. Growing up so many kids must have looked at African Americans and thought about slavery and issues they learned while in grade school. It wasn't until at least 5th or 6th grade when i learned who important figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson were. I always thought it must be so hard growing up being a race that you never really learn about in school at such a young age. I compare this to the World Views class i am right now at St. Bonaventure. I really respect how our teacher will ask the class a question and he doesn't go on to the next question until everyone in the class has had a chance to talk. Everyone in the class, many of which are different ethnicity's from each other, discusses their beliefs on what they feel is right depending on the question. I have learned so much already from this class and it has only been two weeks. I really feel as though most of this learning is due to the fact that our class is so different when it comes to race and background. Everyone has a story, and everyone's story should be told.
Governemnt's Fault
I believe the true problem is schools teach their students to pass the test. Schools whose students score high on standardized tests get more funds. The key goal of our education has not been to better the education of the future generation, but to pass tests to get more state funding. With that in mind, private schools even suffer because teachers who have worked in public schools carry this mindset with them and in turn affect the education level of private school students. The problem can't be solved by just getting better teachers and involving parents, you have to start from the source. The government needs to change their standards for distributing funds so that schools get out of the mentality of passing the test and into the idea of teaching students. Our education is one of the worst in the world. Friends of mine from Canada, Bahrain, China, and different places throughout Europe all have felt unchallenged and bored with the education and try to just pass the time while sitting in school. Many have even referred to the grade school portion of America as babysitting until parents get home from work. many students are lazy and care free when it comes to education because all it has become is memorization, spit it all out on the test, and forget a week later to focus on something else to memorize. This is boring and unchallenging to the human mind. Once the government actually makes changes to the schooling system, then there will finally be a change in the education level of students across the nation.
The Education System
I honestly believe that the children are being hindered each day because of the new education standards. More and more students are attending school and learning material just to pass a state required exam. While I was in high school, I had the honor of taking honors classes which focused us on a completely different curriculum, but the one regularly required course that I did complete only focused on the requirements of the state exam issued at the end of the year. I honestly feel that at more minority schools, they are so focused on "only meeting the minimum standards so they will not be shut down by the state or city. This definitely hinders those children missing out on the life lessons necessary for children who consider pursuing a higher education. The only way that we can move forward from this dilemma is if we face the problems of our education system now and fix those problems first.