Interesting read about the state of education in 1994

If you are complaining about "the state of education" then you cannot complain about deporting illegal immigrants. The quality of students is lower because of illegal immigration. It doesn't mean illegal immigrants are stupid or bad, they just aren't prepared. So you cant expect the presence of 10+million of them to not have negative effects on our schools and finances. Pro-amnesty people seem to hink that illegal immigrants exist in a vacuum, and if you suggest otherwise, then you are a racist, hateful, or xenophobic person.

I'm none of those things. I just don't want my schools being degraded and taxes spent unsustainably and crime increased. Immigrants should be ready to contribute when they arrive.

Teachers, through there unions, are always bitching about there pay and that if the pay was higher, so would be the quality of education at their schools. Well we've paid them more over the last decade and things are worse.

Teachers are underpaid still given that the job is nearly impossible. They walk into the classroom each day and right in front of them is a group of kids who are often under fed, dont know the language, unruly due to lack of discipline taught in the home, lazy, unmotivated to do actual work, impatient and unable to cope with any struggle including general problem solving.

I enjoyed the article although there was plenty of arrogance and elitism in the writer.

The system is flawed in many areas including some of the things the unions do. Like any job/career there are many talented and committed and also some who arent very good and take advantage of the system. I see the same in doctors, lawyers, bankers and more.

Rather than rip on the intellectual capabilities of the teacher (like the author did) why not flat out recognize the impossible task they face every day. Even the most intellectually gifted would not succeed.

The writer rips the teachers by saying they dont know their content but knowing it does not automatically equate to being able to effectively teach it. John wooden said "just because you taught it doesnt mean they learned it". I agree with him.

What about this quote:

"IN EDUCATION, NOTHING WORKS IF THE STUDENTS DON'T."

You can go back way further than 1994. Political candidates have debated about how to "fix" public education during every election cycle since before I was born in 1983. Public education will never be fixed because it can never be fixed.

HandWringingLiberal wrote:

Teachers, through there unions, are always bitching about there pay and that if the pay was higher, so would be the quality of education at their schools. Well we've paid them more over the last decade and things are worse.

I suspect that you were educated over the last decade.

This article was mostly a lot of obvious or invalid observations and didn't actually address any of the problems it brings up.

If we agree with the article and think we should get rid of offered electives what are we supposed to do with the gained time? Reducing school hours would save some money but not improve education.

Are teachers supposed to spend even more time on the same core classes? For good students classes like AP calculus already move painfully slow. They are spending 135 hours (36 weeks of 45 minute daily classes) on each of calc ab and bc to cover roughly the content of the typical calc 1 class in college, which is probably more rigorous and spends much less time on lectures (roughly 37.5 hours of in class time compared to 270). Offering more advanced classes for these students to take would also be problematic considering it can already be a challenge to find teachers that can teach simpler material well. For the below average students, more time on math is going to be painful for both them and the teachers. If the author is criticizing below average students for wanting to do engineering in one paragraph he shouldn't be advocating forcing that student to do more of what they're bad at when they're not interested in learning from it anyway.

Also, what are we supposed to do about attracting better teachers? Students in a discipline can either make way more money or have way more prestige in industry or academics. That's not going to change even if both pay and respect for teachers increases significantly. In the sciences and math at least, you would think the smartest students who are actually passionate about the subject would typically want to be on the cutting edge and doing research, not teaching things way below their understanding. I would imagine someone with a sufficient (moderate to slightly above average at least) level of intelligence who is passionate about teaching would do high school kids far more good than a genius who thinks teaching is decent.

For example, high school mathematics is almost entirely algorithmic. Teaching it proficiently is more about keeping kids motivated than actually understanding the concepts, and teaching it well primarily requires the ability to inspire students to learn things independent of the course. Trying to give conceptual math lectures that actually promote understanding would be a waste even for most of the better students not because they couldn't understand it but because a majority of these kids want to use math to do things like engineering or science, not understand math for the sake of math. The best high school math teachers are the ones who can explain the computation algorithms effectively, give (actually) motivating 'real world examples' that satisfy the majority of the class, and know how to point the couple kids interested in mathematics itself down the right direction.

This also lines up with my experience at least: my best teachers were the types who knew they wanted to teach subject x before college and were at least somewhat intelligent, fair teachers tended to be relatively smart but only wandered into teaching when they grew dissatisfied with academics or work, and bad teachers were both apathetic and dimwitted.