NOTE:Please keep this thread here.

Let's try to minimize our political opinions that relate to this thread, otherwise it will disappear into the bowels of political chaos where socialism and Democrats abound!

As a retired teacher, I don't like what I'm seeing in our educational system, both secular and religious. The only exceptions are the elite prep schools that are still holding on to education as it should be taught.(what I mean by this is that they aren't under any legal constraints re: testing etc.) But that figures since money walks and everything else talks.

Check out these two very informative links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/education/03ravitch.html?ref=todayspaper

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/science/earth/04climate.html?ref=todayspaper

Any suggestions on how to turn this around? Is our Adventist educational system doing things better? How about home schooling? If you think we should maintain testing, what should these tests look like? National exams like some countries have? Significantly raise teachers' salaries?

And lastly but probably most importantly, how do we get our country and our parents to value education more seriously?

Well Alex I don't want to get this to be political either, but to answer your question without mentioning the government will be hard. So first let me say that the previous and present administration are both wanting this! I'm not sure that the way either one has been going about it will help! Now for the other thing, I think until the parents of each child think that education is the most important thing for there children nothing will get better. When we went to school our parents always backed the teachers, today the teachers can't do anything without the parents permission. The kids come home and complain that there's to much this to much of that, not enough of whatever. I not saying that the educational system is always right but its definitely not going to work correctly if the parents are not 100% behind it.

pk

I was under the impression that since our Adventist colleges accept Federal grants we are now required by law to do what the law mandates, i.e. teach evolutionary concepts. Is this correct?



I get really disgusted with how teachers are treated. Where are the parents????? Nobody can make a child study at home, and if the teachers are not backed up by the parents, what are the teachers supposed to do?

Firing teachers and principals is NOT the answer!!! IMHO

I feel this is the real issue! Historicly we have not seen education for the general populace as needful, ie, founding fathers. Other than a K-12, you need money and most often, lots of it for continueing education. We are a young country and think of goals in the short term.
When money gets tight at federal or local level, education funding is one of the first areas that seem to be cut.

Turn this around? How? Long term goals at both the federal and local levels with parents needing a better understanding of its value, which will continue when the the children have left the educational behind. Parents will vote down school levy's when their children are gone saying 'it's not my responsibility any more'. The future should be a continuing concern not short term. I also believe free education should be available up through 4 yrs of college. This country can afford it, we need to invest in America's future first!

And who is going to pay for the teachers' salaries?

I routinely vote down public school levies when I know for a fact that students in the local high school have urinated on the inside walls of the schools, broken school property, and make nuisances of themselves in the streets.

No need for more taxes, simply make it higher in the budget before our dispensing of funds (aid, etc) to other countries!

I could agree with that. Pay our own people before shelling out funds to other countries! Yep! I'd vote for that one!!!

OK, politics without rancor: in both the US and Australia we've had shifts from centre-right to centre-left governments in the past couple of years, and in both countries the 'test and punish' regimes in education have continued unabated. So it seems to be a more general trend rather than any particular ideology.

To me, there are two broad classes of issues - those related to home and those related to government policy. There are micro issues in particular schools and classrooms and so on, but it's the broad ones that make the real difference (and that Alex was pointing to). And, IMO, part of the problem is that we try to use actions in one domain to address problems arising in the other...

So, on the family front: when I was at school 30 years ago, there might have been one or two kids in my class with divorced parents. Now, in my kids' classes, there might be one or two whose parents are together. That can't fail to have a huge influence on the security of kids, and on how much emotional energy they have available to invest in schooling. Add that to more TV and less reading (and more TVs - one in each bedroom instead of the family gathered around one), and there's a recipe in itself for kids who struggle with literacy. And so on... When I was growing up many kids had Mums who stayed home at least a lot of the time, now almost none do. Doesn't matter whether it's Mum or Dad, but kids who are raised by teachers and day care workers and rarely see their parents are (generally) kids who are less well prepared for life. Add to that society's general shift to just giving up on parents and expecting schools to instill manners and respect as well as knowledge...

So that's one domain of problems - and yet I would also say that even with that, it's a tiny minority of students who are really antisocial, and there are 'moral panics' about the decay of today's youth that are not really reflected in the stats on crime, drugs, pregnancy or other measures of actual (rather than perceived) delinquency. Stereotyping and a rose-coloured view of the past need to be counterbalanced by the realisation that every generation since at least Socrates' time has mourned the corruption of the young...

Then there's the governmental belief in 'making a pig heavier by weighing it' - the touchingly child-like belief that if you measure yourself every day it will help you grow. More testing is not more teaching, and we know that pencil-and-paper tests that are easy and feasible to mark on a large scale tell us about only a very narrow subset of the broad range of outcomes we want from schooling. Yet more testing is proposed as the cure for every educational ill.

That would be bad enough if tests were used diagnostically, to find struggling systems and students and then devote the resources to improving them and offering better education to those students. But they're not, they're used punitively. Find schools that struggle (usually because their students are poor and come from disadvantaged backgrounds) and then defund them even further.

All I can hope for is a change of tide and approach... but I can't see any leadership in either country that's heading in that direction. Australia has just developed a new national curriculum for the first time, and I'm very hopeful about the directions it heralds. We'll be working toward a new national assessment program too, and the noises they're making are encouraging. I guess we'll see, and I always like to be optimistic. I hope there'll be some similar vision and leadership in the US around these issues.

(in case I wasn't clear enough, my problem is not with testing per se but with the uses to which test results are put)