A new twist in our decline in education.

[MadHound]

A local school district is debating about implementing a new twist in education. Instead of having each elementary school contain grades K-5, they are going to instead divide the grades between different schools, ie K-1 in one school, 2-3 in another, and 4-5 in still another.

The reason for this is simple, it is another cost saving measure. If the school district continues with the traditional plan, four more teachers would have to be hired. Under this new plan, they can double up on students in one classroom, and save money by not hiring teachers. Of course what isn't being said is that the students will suffer for this, with between forty and sixty students in a single classroom. Not to mention that transportation costs for parents will go up as they have to drive their kids across town instead of down the street.

But hey, property taxes will remain low, which is the underlying problem with all of this. Basing our education funding on property taxes is insane, it allows fluctuations in property valuation to dramatically cut into education funding. Worse yet, we throw the decision of whether or not to increase funding for education into the public arena where a minority of voters can determine that education will not get increased funding.

Meanwhile, on both the state and national level, education funds have been cut. Part of the problems we experience with education in this country is that education and education itself has become a political football. Worse yet, instead of putting actual education experts in charge of education(hello Arne Duncan), instead we appoint political hacks, usually with a business background, who insist that education can, and should, be run like a business.

It is the students who are suffering, who are being done a disservice. We are already seeing the effects of this in our society. Recent high school graduates, products of Bush's NCLB nightmare, are showing up at college ill equipped to do college work. Those who aren't going to college are even worse off, barely having enough education to do simple math and write their name. This pattern is only going to get worse, what with the new emphasis on testing, testing, oh, and taking even more money away from education.

Teacher's woes aside(and I'm not making light of them at all, being a teacher myself), the real tragedy for the game of education football lies in the effects this is having on our students. Our refusal to fully fund education, putting education into the political arena, has done immense harm to the next generation, and is doing even more harm with every year that goes by.

It is far past time to put an end to this nonsense. Take education out of the political arena. Fully fund education, including paying teachers to a scale that attracts the best and brightest to the profession. And finally, start putting actual education experts in charge of education, not political hacks with an agenda to grind.

[abelenkpe]

1. My kids montessori school

goes k-2 and 3-5. Of course there are only 14 kids total in each class.

The older kids gain a lot of confidence helping the younger ones and reinforce their own understanding of what they have learned. But again it is a small class. They get plenty of one on one time with their teacher. So there's something that can be gained from combining age groups.

However, I agree we should fully fund education, limit class size and pay teachers good salaries. Education, government, health care...these are not things that should be run like a business with profit as it's driving force.

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. k n r

[Snoutport]

3. Cheers! Sp Ed Teacher here. nt

[Recursion]

4. My town did that

I didn't realize it was unusual until I went to college. I don't see what's wrong with it, particularly since it lets the grade pool age-appropriate resources.

[Igel]

5. Please, not education experts.

Most of them are fairly clueless. They recruit very dedicated teachers and administrators, supervise them, get a non-representative set of students and perfect their method for a specific subgroup. Then, when they get average teachers and administers, aren't there to supervise them, get an average set of students from different subgroups and their method doesn't work--esp. when the SES and other traits of the set of students diverges wildly from their sample--complain that their method is perfect and everything else is screwed. After all, they're the experts and did "research" and got "data"--as though the mere presence of data absolves them from foolishness. I have data. Doesn't mean my advocacy-based telic analysis is worth a bucket of warm piss.

Students in college aren't ready? Well, one problem is that they get to school expecting that collaboration is okay, that they'll have multiple opportunities to demonstrate their mastery of the information, and that things will be run to suit them. Then they get to the university having had their performance scaffolded, their skills not sufficiently acquired and believing that the minimum they need to know is all they need to know--with clear, explicit objectives that provide ready-made rubrics for evaluating their work. A system in which points matter more than knowledge, etc., etc., and the goal isn't an education but a piece of velum. Then they get to the workplace and find that they don't have the skills necessary to do high-level work, that the skills and knowledge are more important than the velum. The real thinking is reserved for the H1 visa holder or the kids who went to grad school.

Now, you can blame NCLB for this. Except that most of the nonsense is "research based" and "data driven", assuming that "any child can learn anything given enough time" and that enough time must be provided (assuming the testing schedule allows it). They are to acquire, somehow, critical thinking skills and self-esteem without knowing any facts for critical thinking to operate with, and without any basis for self esteem, without focusing on anything else other than themselves because experts believe that kids are only properly interested in themselves and this should be encouraged. Research is geared to the lowest 25% of the student population, and we're assured that by targeting them and differentiating instruction for special needs students, LEPs, and T&G in one classroom--with 30 skill levels for 30 students, some needing to have everything repeated 3-4 times as part of their IEP and with due regard to the need to teach everything for multiple intelligences and learning styles--all students will excel.

Well, in the 20 years that all students have been excelling, according to predictions, more of them are failing to properly validate the data-driven, research-based methodologies. Thus showing that the methodologies are, of course, dead-on accurate, but they're simply implemented poorly. In other words, as a criterion for being a scientific theory of education the first thing we must do is make sure that the theories are utterly unfalsifiable. If nothing else, it insulated the experts.

In other news, I watched the most boring class ever, pre-AP chemistry and physics that was essentially a lecture with a lab every couple of weeks. The students mastered the material. They did all their work. There were no behavior problems. They asked questions and were engaged. Then I watched a different class, one with an energetic, active instructor who interacted and challenged the students, motivating them through making the material's relevance explicit and tying it into their daily lives. The class average was in the upper 40s (out of 100), the students kept trying to go to sleep, and they didn't give a damn--and classroom management was a bear. In other words, the teacher research would tell us is "bad" got impossibly great results; the teacher experts tell us is "great" got sucky results (these are the same people who should know that in determing what's a "reward" and what's "punishment" you look at *outcome*; the same is true for teachers--you don't declare a teaching style to be great without context--except that the "context" is a problem because it can't be discussed).

The bad teacher said he had great students. The great teacher said that they went from a dozen honors and 2 AP classes a year to 2 honors classes indistinguishable from the non-honors sections and no AP classes. What happened? A demographic shift. In fact, in the "bad teacher's" school the shift was on-going: they had burgeoning sections of water-down chemistry in which the kids learned little but were kept awake by constantly doing stuff. In a few years the "bad" teacher will be bad, but probably not much worse than the "great" teacher.

I'd actually vouch for the "great" teacher with sucky results. His results were a good 10 points above most other teachers.

Yes, it's time to put an end to the nonsense. Unfortunately, funding is the *least* of the worries. It's a scapegoat: Funding has soared in the last 40 years and achievement has not. (Again, the hypothesis isn't falsifiable.) As long as the experts are in charge of how we teach, as long as the politicians are in charge of the public perceptions, as long as principals are busy blaming the teachers and as long as the teachers are saying, "Pay us more and we'll be both teacher and parent," the real problem won't--can't--be faced. The parents of many kids are uninvolved in their education and fail to provide the background and stability needed; the kids don't see any point in an education that their parents and society tell them clearly, over and over, won't help them (even if the parents do say, "Get an education!" their actions speak much more loudly). And everybody's too cowardly to tell the parents that they're screwing up their kids because, well, that would be insensitive.