Posted on 01/09/2007 8:12:11 AM PST by shrinkermd
...This is the most widely held myth about education in America--and the one most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.
Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen...
...One reason for the prominence of the underpaid-teacher belief is that people often fail to account for the relatively low number of hours that teachers work. It seems obvious, but it is easily forgotten: teachers work only about nine months per year. During the summer they can either work at other jobs or use the time off...
The most recent data available indicate that teachers average 7.3 working hours per day, and that they work 180 days per year, adding up to 1,314 hours per year. Americans in normal 9-to-5 professions who take two weeks of vacation and another ten paid holidays per year put in 1,928 working hours. Doing the math, this means the average teacher gets paid a base salary equivalent to a fulltime salary of $65,440.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
The 2000 US Census accounted for 92 different ancestries with at least 100,000 American citizens. In most major metropolitian areas, more than 100 languages are spoken as the first language in children's homes.
This complicates the process of education as the United States, the most multicultual-multiracial nation in world history.
If the schools don't teach solid reading skills by 3rd grade, and the fail to teach solid arithmetic skills by the end of 4th grade, kids will continue to achieve below their potential.
As you noted, it's just so obvious only people willfully blind can fail to see what's going on.
Our public school system is a miserable failure. But I would not so quickly point the finger at teachers. Our public school system is a miserable failure because its operation is primarily in the hands of corrupt and incompetent politicians. Our government has become a miserable failure. We spend more for less. Follow the money. If we followed every tax dollar, would we find any government entity that is more effective today than it was a decade ago? Teachers are merely government employees and like all government employees their pay exceeds their effectiveness and value to society by a wide margin.
I think you're both right, to some extent: the curriculum is terrible, and there is a limit to students' abilities.
However, given the village-idiot level of the tests used by the states, just about every child would be able to score "proficient" if he was simply taught to read and do basic math. The fact that they are not taught this is a result of ideology and politics, not the inability of almost any person to learn reading and basic math.
I think the curriculum will have to be revised to correct achievement disparities with other nations. On a par at 4th grade, ours have fallen behind by 8th grade. That's mostly because seventh and eight grades are black holes that do not introduce new skills here. Improving the relevance and rigor of 7-12 would be the best way to lower college costs, because, once again, young people could go into the workplace qualified.
Skills introduced in the lower grades can be acquired by most everybody, and that is where Bush is. Levels attained do correlate with IQ, and you say, but that does not absolve primary schools from teaching normal children to read and calculate. I did not kmnow the 85 number for HS grad, but I do know that college grad is 120.
Schools told to push brightest and help slowest
By Graeme Paton, Education Correspondent Last Updated: 2:10am GMT 03/01/2007
Schools will be asked to push the brightest children and provide more help for those who fall behind as part of a review into the way lessons are delivered.
The recommendations come after a 10-month investigation chaired by Christine Gilbert, the head of Ofsted, into how schools should tailor the National Curriculum for pupils from both ends of the spectrum. However, her 2020 Review, published tomorrow, is unlikely to recommend wholesale streaming or setting, a move likely to anger parents in favour of greater selection in state schools.
The Daily Telegraph disclosed yesterday that the vast majority of adults wanted the brightest children taught separately to maximise their potential.
More than three quarters of people responding to a poll by the Right-wing Centre for Policy Studies either want more streaming by ability in comprehensive schools or the chance to send the best children to wholly-selective grammars. Almost as many believe that the weakest pupils benefit from being taught on their own. However, the review, which will set out a vision of how teaching should develop to 2020, is unlikely to go that far.
Currently, only around 60 per cent of all lessons are segregated by ability. Most schools use "sets", in which children are placed in different classes according to their level. Streaming — in which year groups are set along ability lines — is rare in state schools. Yesterday's study suggested that parents believe children cannot reach their potential in mixed-ability classes. In a move designed to ease concerns over wasted talent, ministers last week unveiled plans to give the brightest 800,000 pupils "vouchers" to buy in extra lessons.
Sir Cyril Taylor, a No 10 adviser and chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, said the country was still failing bright children and called for a 20-fold increase on the amount spent on "gifted and talented" pupils. However, responding to the Centre for Policy Studies report, he said he was "totally against" bringing back selective grammar schools.
"We need good schools for everybody. That doesn't mean you don't have programmes for the gifted and talented and setting and streaming," he said yesterday.
"The 164 grammar schools left have one per cent of their pupils eligible for free school meals. They have become free independent schools for the middle classes. What we need is more good schools across the board."
He added: "Sadly, this report could damage this initiative by bringing back selection, which egalitarians go crazy about, and that could actually harm the interests of bright children."
A recent separate study by Susan Hallam and Judith Ireson, from the University of London's Institute of Education, revealed that the majority of pupils also favoured segregation by ability. It found that pupils who are regularly in the top sets of particular subjects favoured segregation more than those at the bottom. In some schools, as many as 83 per cent of children opposed mixed-ability classes.
Everyone favors segregation, streaming or what have except the politicians and professional educators who are egalitarians and brook no difference with their ideology no matter how unscientific and flawed it is. That is the problem.
A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said those who proposed an increase in academic selection in state schools did not understand the damage it could do. "Dividing children into successes and failures is not the answer to improving Britain's competitiveness," he said.
The students, parents and population in general want streaming and actual segregation by ability. They are right. But this will not happen or will happen slowly and haltingly because the educators and politicians are imbued with socialist egalitarian beliefs that they will never relinquish.
It's a serious problem, and one that is often found in private schools as well. Schooling is more about how the employees, politicians, and activists "feel" about the "process," than it is about the outcomes for students of low, average, or high ability.
The interesting comparison is that many countries other than the US don't have their kids start school until age 7 or 8. Norway is one example of this.
So, at 4th grade, our kids have been in school for 4 or 5 years(counting kindergarten), and other nations' kids have been in their schools only 2 years - yet their kids have learned as much as ours.
Is that because our kids are that much less intelligent (lower IQ)? No, I am sure it is a direct result of the curriculum used.
If you want a direct comparison you can do at home, pick up the first book of Singapore's math curriculum, then look at our first grade math curriculum. It's a difference between night and day. The Singapore math books are used in classrooms with 45 or more kids per class, and these kids, by 8th grade, vastly outstrip ours in class sizes of 25 or less.
In places like Indonesia and Singapore, parents have, on average, considerably less in terms of family resources and education levels than average US parents. Additionally, we've spent more than double the amount on our kids' education than they have.
It's the curriculum, folks. IQ is just the quality of the slate brought to the table.
No the data for ability to graduate from an academically oriented college goes down to IQ of 110 or 20% of the population. Minnesota now graduates 28% after five years and including community colleges.
An IQ of 125 or better occurs in only 5% of White Europeans.
At 125 or above you can do most professions--law, medicine, Phd, Combat aircraft commander and so forth. Down from 125 there is a continuum. Surely, hard work and coaching can help overcome some degree of limitation, but in the end the destiny of most of us is what we are born with is what we do with.
These figures are well known to psychologists but seldom are quoted or used in policy planning because everyone secretly believes they and their cohort "are all better than equal" a la Prairie Home Companion and Garrison Keillor.
The kids stick it out so they don't graduate ? Sorry, that doesn't make sense. All reports I've seen state schools push the kids out so they don't lower standardized test scores and drag the school into underperforming status.
That may hold true for much of the country, but in California the academic expectations based on CA standards starts pushing these skills way too early IMHO. Kindergarteners are expected to come into school already reading, and they are starting to teach algebra concepts in second grade. While some parents are giving their children a lot of exposure early in their child's life, most do not. Our 7 year old, now in 2nd grade, started Kindergarten able to read, and is reading at between a 3.5 and 4.0 level today. But, that is only because we took the time to start her reading way before she started school. Math, on the other hand, has been somewhat of a struggle for her. She is doing well on the basics, but when asked to use higher order reasoning to compute more difficult math reasoning problems, she struggles. I believe that this is because the brain of a 7 year old is just not ready for that level of reasoning. In CA we are pushing our children too hard, and this results in great frustration for the child, and the family, and might be worse than what the schools were doing before.
Lies, lies, lies. My wife teaches for 7.5 hours and then comes home and works another 2-3 hours planning, making tests, and correcting tests and homework. She has to work more than 180 days, gets two months off in the summer (not three), and she's required to take classes to keep her certificate current. Her compensation is nowhere near what an engineer with a masters degree would get.
We have a couple of small districts in the foothills of Colorado where the parents of special education kids sued and won to send their kids to schools out of state. The school district still has to pay the cost for the kids which I think was about 50-100k a year.
Yeah. I pulled my kid out of school in 6th grade to homeschool. I tutored her in times tables and mental math in the lower grades but it never stuck because the schools (even private schools!) pushed calculator use.
I took away her calculator and had her spend almost a year on arithmetic drills, fractions, decimals and the like - all with no recourse to a calculator.
She then went right into algebra and did just fine - this kid who had always done poorly in math had progressed successfully to algebra in 7th grade because her basic skills were functioning.
Calculators before algebra are just crippling kids. If you have to work hard to do basic math, there is no room left over for higher level thought.
It's so obvious, yet so many ignore it.
I remember my mom putting up gigantic flash cards of the times tables and fractions/decimals/%'s on my bedroom wall when I was in the 4th grade. I would have to look at them every evening before bedtime whether I liked it or not, but I learned them pretty quickly.
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