Education Reform

"No matter how much money is spent, literacy rates plunge and SAT scores fall. General knowledge throughout the society becomes more scant. Our better students can’t compete against better foreign students. The depressing statistics are all around us.

Everyone admits the public schools are doing a lousy job. The question is, why can't we do more to improve them?"

If you are a legislator looking to gather beaucoup campaign contributions, you make the tax code as difficult as possible so that you can promise to simplify it.

If you are an up-and-coming homosexual fashion designer, you make sure your next collection is more outrageous than your competitor's so that you will get noticed.

If you are an aspiring teacher and you see that there is no upward career mobility as a teacher, you become an educator instead and devise a whole new way of learning so that you can change your job description and your pay grade.

None of these ways of getting ahead actually advance the real reason why you are there.

Everyone admits the public schools are doing a lousy job. The question is, why can’t we do more to improve them?”

The problem with the schools (public) is garbage in, garbage out.
When the NEA and the Feds started dictating the areas of studies because they controlled the money the schoolsystem went downhill rapidly...
In California people have to fight to keep the homofascist from being introduced to their kindergarden children.
This is just nonsense. Parens need to get the NEA and the Fed out of their kids schools or get theeir kids out of the Government controlled schools.........

It is aggressive, but very interesting. Last semester I did a paper on different teaching styles, and was amazed (but not surprised) by what I learned. Although direct instruction is universally viewed with scorn and derision by professors of education, I discovered in my research that it is hands-down and overwhelmingly found to be the most effective teaching style when compared with a variety of other, trendier, and more kid-centric strategies.

In my conclusion to that paper, I noted the documented effectiveness of direct instruction over all other teaching methods currently in vogue and questioned why, since it is proven to be so effective, it wasn't promoted more in teacher education programs. My professor wasn't thrilled with my conclusions, and noted on my paper that "the jury is still out" on which teaching strategy is indeed the "most effective." No, the jury is not still out. The jury came back with its verdict decades ago; that direct instruction works best. But teachers acting like teachers is so yesterday...so dreadfully boring...so unfashionable.

Cooperative learning (small-group learning, self-directed learning, where the teacher isn't so much a "teacher" as a "non-instructional mentor" and not so much a source of knowledge but a source of "guidance") is pushed on all students in teacher education programs. Direct instruction is mocked and jeered. This is indeed a big problem.

Too much focus by the Liberal teachers and professors on "diversity", "sensitivity", etc., all the while promoting socialist ideals to the students, while revising history to fit the agenda. Kids are taught that they are "victims" from day one, with no responsibility for their actions, and that it's always someone elses' fault, in all cases.

That's how The Messiah was elected; White Guilt, coupled with entitlements' mentality and FREE MONEY FROM SOMEONE ELSE just for showing up on this planet!

I've been in the trade for 25 years, and I've come to two main conclusions as to why our schools are failing.

The first hit comes from the fact that parents aren't doing their job to prepare kids for learning. Mrs. Othniel and I started reading to our two kids when they were about 4 months old. We never spoke baby to them, and they didn't watch tv at all until they were three, and then it was Veggie Tales or something we could control. We help them with their homework, we challenge them, we make sure they do their stuff for school before they play. Guess what? My ten year old ACED parts of the state test last year. My 12 year old has all A's and one B in his subjects, and they go to schools that are very high in academics. Compare this to kids of parents where I work: they never read to their kids, nor have they. There is often no reading material in the house, and it shows in the kids reactions to books and writing. It's foreign to them. Parents in the 70's who were a$$hole hippies in the 60's quit reading to their kids, so that link was lost. They didn't read, so their kids came to school less prepared than those who parents did take reading seriously. So stuff got dumbed down to accomodate those who weren't succeeding. (Gotta protect that special sense of self-esteem!) As the kids grew up and had kids themselves, they once again didn't read to their kdis because they didn't know how to keep that link going. So another generation grows up without the stuff in place between the ears to succeed! And the curriculum gets dumbed down a bit more.

The second reason are the illegals who don't know English, and don't want to learn it. You couple that with all the stuff in reason one, and it is a recipe for disaster, the kind of disaster you see unfolding before us. The teachers and schools have to spend time and resources on getting little Pablo to read, but guess what? While that is happening, little Paul isn't learning what HE needs to know, even though he has been prepared by his parents to soar. Nuts to that. I spend my time on Paul, getting him to fly, instead of pouring myself into Pablo, when each day he goes back to a home where English isn't spoken, learning isn't valued, and parents feel like they have no stake in their kid's learning.

Sure, some of it is the unions and pointy-headed administrators, but a bulk of the fault lies with parents who don't do what they're supposed to. Makes my job harder each year, but I won't give up. Ever.

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