ATTN Suu and Nigel: this is why your fellow students derp so hard

[Sita]

Because teachers have very specific credentials and licensing, overseen by the state. They have state-mandated continuing education. They are reviewed by their peers and overseen by a principal, the school administration, and the state board.

Yeas, sometimes incompetent teachers are allowed to continue teaching when they should be ousted... but NCLB doesn't seem to do fuck-all to address that problem.

In fact, it supports the crappy teachers at the expense of the decent ones.

it depends on how you define crappy

Oh, that's easy.  Teachers who teach to the test, because the lesson plan is something to get to the bottom of ASAP.

Sadly to the government that makes a good teacher. Because all that matters is that the kid do well on the test. Whether or not they remember it 10 minutes after it's done is not their concern.

My son has an extremely hard time in math. Last year his teacher gave a possible reason as to why: They are told to teach for the FCAT first, and to teach the way of doing things that is expected for that test (when they show their work).
My son can't grasp the way it's taught and so now he has an IEP and gets to be taken aside with a few other kids in his class to work on it with another teacher. This group of kids has grown every year.
His grades have improved, but that's because he now doesn't have to be held to quite the same standard as kids not on an IEP (also he can pass on with a low FCAT score instead of being held back another year)

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

PS, Carlos Danger; your new handle makes me LOL and LOL and LOL.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

This year I enrolled my kids in a charter school because A) fuck public schools, and B) fuck most of the parents of kids who go to public schools. Anyway, this charter school still has to produce standardized testing results, BUT they are free to develop their own curriculum and processes for arriving at those results, rather than being held by the public school district's plainly awful way of doing things.

We're 3 weeks in now, and my daughter (in kindergarten) has already surprised everyone with her reading ability. This isn't the school's doing entirely, but when my son was halfway his first year of kindergarten they had just barely covered naming the fucking letters in the alphabet. Luckily he's borderline-autistic and was reading by the age of 3, so he spent most of his kindergarten year getting yelled at for being too far ahead of the other kids and getting bored.

I feel a little bad for abandoning traditional public schools and the unions that go along with them to protect teachers' rights to organize and bargain collectively, but at least in AZ the public schools aren't worth it. The class sizes are inexcusable, the teachers are all burned out and the results are so bad the kids might as well just watch Sesame Street all day.

[Doktor Howl]

This year I enrolled my kids in a charter school because A) fuck public schools, and B) fuck most of the parents of kids who go to public schools. Anyway, this charter school still has to produce standardized testing results, BUT they are free to develop their own curriculum and processes for arriving at those results, rather than being held by the public school district's plainly awful way of doing things.

Funny how that works, isn't it?  It's almost like the law was deliberately written that way.

[Suu]

I'm not knocking you V3x, you did what was best for your family, and I KNOW you're a good parent. But, at the same time, I feel the "fuck public schools" approach is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

I see plenty of Republicans knocking public schools left and right and insisting on homeschooling or private schooling their kids, but at the same time, they're mostly responsible for the shit that went down with NCLB. If parents would be more proactive in their children's education at the public level, it would be more efficacious to fight back against this bullshit. I know, I know, it's a damn pipe dream, but my parents hovered over my ass when I did homework every night. I was never short of help from either of them, even though they both worked, and weren't home for the better part of the afternoon. Hell, my mom worked nights and weekends, but she would find a way to make time to help me with the subjects she knew. She also almost got herself arrested a few times organizing sit-ins at the school board to protest the busing laws, and the cutting of curricula in the early 90s.

Are the parents today just lazy? Are the students just careless? There's so many factors I can't wrap my head around, and it frustrates me.

And then there's the schools themselves: I think I could offer public school students a lot as a history teacher because I had AWESOME teachers and I would want to do them justice, but history is getting cut left and right, because hell, who needs it when you only need math and science to do anything ever? Where is the proactivity that my mom and her cohorts had?

I'm probably talking out of my ass, but I just feel something somewhere went amiss, and people just don't care anymore.

[MMIX]

Suu's Ass : Attractive AND Erudite

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I'm not knocking you V3x, you did what was best for your family, and I KNOW you're a good parent. But, at the same time, I feel the "fuck public schools" approach is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

I see plenty of Republicans knocking public schools left and right and insisting on homeschooling or private schooling their kids, but at the same time, they're mostly responsible for the shit that went down with NCLB. If parents would be more proactive in their children's education at the public level, it would be more efficacious to fight back against this bullshit. I know, I know, it's a damn pipe dream, but my parents hovered over my ass when I did homework every night. I was never short of help from either of them, even though they both worked, and weren't home for the better part of the afternoon. Hell, my mom worked nights and weekends, but she would find a way to make time to help me with the subjects she knew. She also almost got herself arrested a few times organizing sit-ins at the school board to protest the busing laws, and the cutting of curricula in the early 90s.

Are the parents today just lazy? Are the students just careless? There's so many factors I can't wrap my head around, and it frustrates me.

And then there's the schools themselves: I think I could offer public school students a lot as a history teacher because I had AWESOME teachers and I would want to do them justice, but history is getting cut left and right, because hell, who needs it when you only need math and science to do anything ever? Where is the proactivity that my mom and her cohorts had?

I'm probably talking out of my ass, but I just feel something somewhere went amiss, and people just don't care anymore.

I agree with all of this. I know both I and my wife are pretty involved in our kids' education at home and at school. Last year we had to teach ourselves the ridiculous NCLB methods for math because the way they're teaching it makes no sense at all. The charter school uses Common Core, which isn't a replacement for NCLB but it does vastly improve the methods, at least as far as my kids are concerned.

It's easy to see, a decade later, that NCLB was basically engineered specifically to kill public schools in favor of charter schools. That's been a goal of the "privatization/eliminate government" crowd since forever, and it also pleases the "eliminate unions" crowd. As for me, as much as I despise falling into a system designed by these crazies, I have to admit reality. Because of a combination of NCLB and growing educational negligence among parents, public schools are more or less a dead end these days.

And, truth be told, I'm not entirely sad about this. If it's possible to privatize education and have an industry of for-profit companies making money off of education, while providing education superior to what public schools can provide (for whatever reason), keeping the price at or near zero, and retaining genuine educators who really are willing to do a good job, then what's the problem? It isn't like the State has an inherent monopoly on effective education. Public schools were never about getting the BEST education possible, they were about expanding access to education. If the "market" has a solution to this that works, there's no reason to hate it just because it's the "market."

One thing that's nice about the charter school option is that kids don't "accidentally" end up in a charter school. Parents have to at least think enough about their kids' education to intentionally put them on a list to get into a charter school, so as a baseline we're working in a system that has parents whose participation level is already light years ahead of the average "school = babysitter" parent out there.

Like I said, though, we're only 3 weeks into it so we can't really make anything like an informed judgment about this experiment, even one limited to our own school district. But 2 years in the public schools were enough to convince us our kids had nothing to lose, and potentially a lot to gain from rethinking where they are educated.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

The problem with charter school is that *by design* they gather the kids that were going to do fine anyway because their parents are more involved/have better resources/whatever and the kids themselves are brighter, and the kids who were going to have a rough time of it are literally "left behind" over in the public schools. I'm super pissed off at the public schools here, but I will home school my kids before I buy into a system that's built to make sure the peasants are kept in their fucking place.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

The problem with charter school is that *by design* they gather the kids that were going to do fine anyway because their parents are more involved/have better resources/whatever and the kids themselves are brighter, and the kids who were going to have a rough time of it are literally "left behind" over in the public schools. I'm super pissed off at the public schools here, but I will home school my kids before I buy into a system that's built to make sure the peasants are kept in their fucking place.

Certainly that's one way to see it. But I'm not going to punish my kids or put them at an educational disadvantage by keeping them in a public school when there's a better option, just because I might disagree with the political reasoning behind that better option. I still support fixing public education, and you'll never hear me say that free public education ought to be eliminated or even scaled back, because there are millions of kids that depend on it and without it our whole system would be up the creek. But that doesn't change the fact that right here and right now, public schools aren't the best option for my kids and if I can give them a better education somewhere else, I'm going to do it.

Arizona is actually implementing Common Core statewide, so hopefully we'll eventually see some improvement in schools. The problem of course is always funding, and being that our state is full of terrible bastards who will shoot down anything with a price tag if it's floated by the government, I don't expect public schools to improve too much soon (or ever) here. And as much as I support organized labor, there are serious problems with teachers' unions (like forcing the state to retain ineffective educators just because they managed to dodge the axe for enough years), and those do need to be fixed.

[Golden Applesauce]

My understanding is that charter schools have much laxer rules about, for instance, the quality of school lunches compared to public schools. You aren't allowed to take special ed students if you don't have the resources to cover them properly... but in a lot of places charter schools aren't required to have special ed resources in the first place, so they can leave all of the difficult kids in public schools.

Public schools - as govt institutions - have to maintain a minimal standard of students civil rights. Private schools can kick you out for whatever they feel like. The school I'm helping to build an administrative backend for has something like 6400 days of suspension served in the last five school years out of 6900 students, and only 400 of those suspended were only suspended for one day. About 500 were suspended for 2-3 days. Their suspension curve is crazy, they have a ton of students who've been suspended for 20+ days.

They make everyone wear expensive uniforms, and if something happens to it you gotta buy a new one, or else they'll write up your kindergartener in class every day for even the wrong color socks or whatever. God help you if you got paint on the tie. The catch is that they operate in the poorer neighborhoods of NYC. And as Nigel pointed out, the best predictor of student success is their family income. So you design policies specifically to discriminate against your own poorer students, repeatedly punishing them over trivial matters (I think their #1 "culture infraction" is some variation on "wore white socks with black shoes") until those poorer students parents get fed up and take their underperforming kid to go bring down the average of the public school test scores. Or not, and you just keep suspending the kid. They've got at least a dozen kids who've spent 40+ days in suspension. That's two months of school days. If they were actually dangerous, you'd expel them... so the only explanation is that they're playing chicken with kids lives to try to get the parents to voluntarily withdraw them.

[Cain]

PS, Carlos Danger; your new handle makes me LOL and LOL and LOL.

You'll LOL even harder when Carlos Danger's Penis becomes the Mayor of New York.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

My understanding is that charter schools have much laxer rules about, for instance, the quality of school lunches compared to public schools. You aren't allowed to take special ed students if you don't have the resources to cover them properly... but in a lot of places charter schools aren't required to have special ed resources in the first place, so they can leave all of the difficult kids in public schools. Public schools - as govt institutions - have to maintain a minimal standard of students civil rights. Private schools can kick you out for whatever they feel like. The school I'm helping to build an administrative backend for has something like 6400 days of suspension served in the last five school years out of 6900 students, and only 400 of those suspended were only suspended for one day. About 500 were suspended for 2-3 days. Their suspension curve is crazy, they have a ton of students who've been suspended for 20+ days. They make everyone wear expensive uniforms, and if something happens to it you gotta buy a new one, or else they'll write up your kindergartener in class every day for even the wrong color socks or whatever. God help you if you got paint on the tie. The catch is that they operate in the poorer neighborhoods of NYC. And as Nigel pointed out, the best predictor of student success is their family income. So you design policies specifically to discriminate against your own poorer students, repeatedly punishing them over trivial matters (I think their #1 "culture infraction" is some variation on "wore white socks with black shoes") until those poorer students parents get fed up and take their underperforming kid to go bring down the average of the public school test scores. Or not, and you just keep suspending the kid. They've got at least a dozen kids who've spent 40+ days in suspension. That's two months of school days. If they were actually dangerous, you'd expel them... so the only explanation is that they're playing chicken with kids lives to try to get the parents to voluntarily withdraw them.

This is America in a nutshell.

ps About once every three months your avvie turns around and looks at me, but if I sit there and wait for it, it never happens.

PS, Carlos Danger; your new handle makes me LOL and LOL and LOL.

You'll LOL even harder when Carlos Danger's Penis becomes the Mayor of New York.

Won't be the first or the last penis mayor.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

PS, Carlos Danger; your new handle makes me LOL and LOL and LOL.

You'll LOL even harder when Carlos Danger's Penis becomes the Mayor of New York.

Holy shit, is it running? I'd vote for that!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

And, truth be told, I'm not entirely sad about this. If it's possible to privatize education and have an industry of for-profit companies making money off of education, while providing education superior to what public schools can provide (for whatever reason), keeping the price at or near zero, and retaining genuine educators who really are willing to do a good job, then what's the problem? It isn't like the State has an inherent monopoly on effective education. Public schools were never about getting the BEST education possible, they were about expanding access to education. If the "market" has a solution to this that works, there's no reason to hate it just because it's the "market."

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

My understanding is that charter schools have much laxer rules about, for instance, the quality of school lunches compared to public schools. You aren't allowed to take special ed students if you don't have the resources to cover them properly... but in a lot of places charter schools aren't required to have special ed resources in the first place, so they can leave all of the difficult kids in public schools.

Public schools - as govt institutions - have to maintain a minimal standard of students civil rights. Private schools can kick you out for whatever they feel like. The school I'm helping to build an administrative backend for has something like 6400 days of suspension served in the last five school years out of 6900 students, and only 400 of those suspended were only suspended for one day. About 500 were suspended for 2-3 days. Their suspension curve is crazy, they have a ton of students who've been suspended for 20+ days.

They make everyone wear expensive uniforms, and if something happens to it you gotta buy a new one, or else they'll write up your kindergartener in class every day for even the wrong color socks or whatever. God help you if you got paint on the tie. The catch is that they operate in the poorer neighborhoods of NYC. And as Nigel pointed out, the best predictor of student success is their family income. So you design policies specifically to discriminate against your own poorer students, repeatedly punishing them over trivial matters (I think their #1 "culture infraction" is some variation on "wore white socks with black shoes") until those poorer students parents get fed up and take their underperforming kid to go bring down the average of the public school test scores. Or not, and you just keep suspending the kid. They've got at least a dozen kids who've spent 40+ days in suspension. That's two months of school days. If they were actually dangerous, you'd expel them... so the only explanation is that they're playing chicken with kids lives to try to get the parents to voluntarily withdraw them.

Annnnnd this.