Posted on 11/21/2005 12:14:01 AM PST by neverdem
The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena.
The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put this problem on the national agenda. Instead, the country has gotten bogged down in a squabble about a part of the law that requires annual testing in the early grades to ensure that the states are closing the achievement gap. The testing debate heated up last month when national math and reading scores showed dismal performance across the board.
Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach. These issues get a great deal of attention in high-performing systems abroad - especially in Japan, which stands light years ahead of us in international comparisons.
Americans tend to roll their eyes when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The most common response is that Japanese culture is "nothing like ours." Nevertheless, the Japanese system has features that could be fruitfully imitated here, as the education reformers James Stigler and James Hiebert pointed out in their book "The Teaching Gap," published in 1999.
The book has spawned growing interest in the Japanese teacher-development strategy in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods. This process, known...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I can't stand that concept. I understand that the idea is to get the students to understand the math involved, but they have completely eliminated the practical need to know the material sufficeintly so that they can use it to solve problems. 7th grade is way too young to try to deduce math theory when what they need are the basic skills. Rote memorization of techniques may be unimaginative, but it still needs to be done. Only then can any new problem be approached. Without a mathematical toolchest, the students are completely unequipped.
" THey also go to school 6 days a week "
This system ended about 5 years ago .
The idea that all we need is more uniformity and more centralized government control over education to solve all the problems in our schools is offensively ridiculous.
Look at our college and university system - it is, by and large, the envy of the civilized world, and students the world over flock to the US to pursue advanced degrees.
Why is this?
Because there is a free market in colleges and universities, with a broad array of choice and price points, from vocational technical colleges and community colleges at a hundred bucks a credit or less, up to rarified Ivy League schools that can set you back hundreds of thousands.
And they're all competing with one another for the best students, and the students are competing with one another for the best schools. It's about as far removed from the one-size-fits-all government-run primary school systems as it can be.
What we need is NOT more government control - that is to say, more and more of what we've had more and more of over the past decades as our performance has slid further and further.
Rather, we need to get government OUT of the business of education, and let the market forces - which have been so ruthlessly stifled in primary education - take hold.
In Soviet Russia, the government was in charge of every aspect of bread production, and you were lucky to get one pound of stale, mealy bread in a week. In the US, where bread is produced in a free market of profit-seeking competition, we have entire aisles in our grocery store selling 50 different kinds of bread from a dozen different bakeries.
The education of our children is too important a task to allow the government to run.
Anecdotal evidence, but my opinion based on experience nonetheless. My liberal "friends" say schools need more money and I say schools need better parents.
Actually, I homeschool my kids, so I don't really have to worry about all this crap. HA!
I believe that's true for most nations (and I think it's true for all of the major western European nations), but not for Japan, which I believe also is reporting all students just as we do.
The problem is that so many kids just DON'T GIVE A FLIPPING CRAP about learning, and nothing any teacher can do will change that.
Mommy sits at home collecting welfare, smoking weed, and screwing a different guy every week. That's all they know.
Even when I was in 2nd grade we had to memorize the multiplication tables. That was in 1984-1985.
Students all wear conservative uniforms (which are checked for compliance) and they clean the schools --Janitors perform an extremely narrow set of cleaning duties. When students misbehave, they are asked to reflect on their behavior, and to apoligize; they will not merely be asked to stop the bothersome behavior --they must CONFESS.
There would be a TIDAL WAVE of lawsuits if they tried to institute Japanese-style education in the USA.
COMPLETELY UNFEASIBLE.
It annoys and disgusts me when some late teen or early 20 something ignoramus at the checkout counter or a fast food restaurant can't figure out the change for $10.00 on a $9.41 sale without the register.
Even in high school (early-mid 90s) I would audibly scoff when we read aloud in English class and some kid who's supposed to be educated enough to be in 11th grade English was stumbling over simple words. Almost got my a$$ kicked a couple times!
Didn't know that. My wife graduated 10 years ago and has lived mostly outside of Japan in that time. Thanks for the info.
Oops missed this post! I love teaching, but hate modern methods which in my opinion have cause a massive increase in the highschool dropout rate and really hurts kids. If a student makes it to college, he/she has no idea how to succeed in college-no study skills etc.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.