Posted on 01/23/2006 8:51:36 PM PST by AZ_Cowboy
Jan. 16, 2006 issue - The surest, quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be addition by subtraction: Close all the schools of education. Consider The Chronicle of Higher Education's recent report concerning the schools that certify America's teachers.
Many education schools discourage, even disqualify, prospective teachers who lack the correct "disposition," meaning those who do not embrace today's "progressive" political catechism. Karen Siegfried had a 3.75 grade-point average at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but after voicing conservative views, she was told by her education professors that she lacked the "professional disposition" teachers need. She is now studying to be an aviation technician.
In 2002 the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education declared that a "professional disposition" is "guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice." Regarding that last, the Chronicle reports that the University of Alabama's College of Education proclaims itself "committed to preparing individuals to"—what? "Read, write and reason"? No, "to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism," and to "break silences" about those things and "develop anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist community [sic] and alliances."
Brooklyn College, where a professor of education required her class on Language Literacy in Secondary Education to watch "Fahrenheit 9/11" before the 2004 election, says it educates teacher candidates about, among many other evils, "heterosexism." The University of Alaska Fairbanks, fluent with today's progressive patois, says that, given America's "caste-like system," teachers must be taught "how racial and cultural 'others' negotiate American school systems, and how they perform their identities." Got it?
The permeation of ed schools by politics is a consequence of the vacuity of their curricula. Concerning that, read "Why Johnny's Teacher Can't Teach" by Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute (available at city-journal.org). Today's teacher-education focus on "professional disposition" is just the latest permutation of what Mac Donald calls the education schools' "immutable dogma," which she calls "Anything But Knowledge."
The dogma has been that primary and secondary education is about "self-actualization" or "finding one's joy" or "social adjustment" or "multicultural sensitivity" or "minority empowerment." But is never about anything as banal as mere knowledge. It is about "constructing one's own knowledge" and "contextualizing knowledge," but never about knowledge of things like biology or history.
Mac Donald says "the central educational fallacy of our time," which dates from the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, is "that one can think without having anything to think about." At City College of New York a professor said that in her course Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education she would be "building a community, rich of talk" and "getting the students to develop the subtext of what they're doing." Although ed schools fancy themselves as surfers on the wave of the future, Mac Donald believes that teacher education "has been more unchanging than Miss Havisham. Like aging vestal virgins, today's schools lovingly guard the ancient flame of progressivism"—an egalitarianism with two related tenets.
One, says Mac Donald, is that "to accord teachers any superior role in the classroom would be to acknowledge an elite hierarchy of knowledge, possessed by some but not all." Hence, second, emphasis should be on group projects rather than individual accomplishments that are measured by tests that reveal persistent achievement gaps separating whites and Asians from other minorities.
Numerous inner-city charter and private schools are proving that the gaps can be narrowed, even closed, when rigorous pedagogy is practiced by teachers in teacher-centered classrooms where knowledge is regarded as everything. But most ed schools, celebrating "child-centered classrooms" that do not "suffocate discourses," are enemies of rigor.
The steady drizzle of depressing data continues. A new assessment of adult literacy shows a sharp decline over the last decade, with only 31 percent of college graduates able to read and extrapolate from complex material. They were supposed to learn how to read before college, but perhaps their teachers were too busy proving their "professional dispositions" by "breaking silences" as "change agents."
Fewer than half of U.S. eighth graders have math teachers who majored in math as undergraduates or graduate students or studied math for teacher certification. U.S. 12th graders recently performed below the international average for 21 countries on tests of general knowledge of math and science. But perhaps U.S. pupils excel when asked to "perform their identities."
Which hire their teachers from the same colleges of education. By global standards, American private schools are almost as bad as its public schools.
Liberal professors give liberal students higher grades. How will hiring based on GPA do anything but assure liberal dominance in education?
Glad I ran into this - reminder to finish reading that post.
And this post is most illuminating in a very strange way.
I had some outstanding public school teachers. I also had a few duds and one or two jerks. But I loved school.
But I walked away from education as a college major, literally. 'Cause I knew I'd get fired.
If you know any freepers that understand UN stuff, or even grants, I would appreciate it if you ping them to my Healthy People thread.
I have questions about a few things. Thanks.
the commie plank of dumbing down the us populace is nearing completion
Ping for later
"This is exactly why you send you children to private schools."
This is also why you get nine like minded families, pull your kids from Public School, find a good teacher with strong values and alternate houses where he/she can teach the ten kids.
You form a corporation, chip in, pay the teacher an annual salary with benefits and based on your kids test scores, give the teacher a bonus.
Finally, you sue your local government to give you a tax rebate on the portion of the taxes that you pay for the schools.
I don't know any FReepers like that, but I have a little bit of experience with grants. Not federal ones, but I'm working on that : )
They aren't federal grants. They are grants from NGOs that are funneled through federal departments that partner with them.
I've since found someone that is familiar with CFRs.
This is in no way done;but I'm trying to upload what I have, as I go through it to here:
http://www.nationalpropertyowners.org/
I will then organize it once I'm done.
Freema, these grants come with terms and conditions that are frightening. I think we have eminent domained ourselves to the UN.
Excellent idea! I'd like to see it in action. Have you been with a group that has had success with this model?
We did something very similar to that when we lived in N.C. We not only alternated houses; but we alternated ourselves to teach supplemental material based on our area of expertise.
It worked very well.
Bump to you!
::now that I'm back in Blue Jersey....this doesn't work::
I tried this out in the late 90's. I got too much flack from the township and was forced to back down. They said I was being too "political" and it would be wise not to address the issue further.
It is my belief that if you can do this with 50-60 families with multiple teachers rotating between houses on a weekly basis, you can make this work.
My coaching business is geared towards education and working with teachers and parents on using goal setting and other techniques to help students achieve better grades. I am working on some material that would fit into the NCLB format to raise kids grades, hence more funding for schools.
Teachers and my school district doesn't want to know about it. They believe that they are not responsible for bad grades and don't want the responsibility for it. But they want higher wages which raises my property taxes.
It's not that hard. IMO, the real problem starts with the way we teach arithmetic. Both my kids could factor a quadratic before they had finished learning their times tables because they were using algebra to learn their arithmetic.
Excellent reply.
You would be suprised at how little the average taxpayer really pays for his or her children's education.
Public education for the most part is paid for by people who have no children.
For those who understand economics, the entire issue is about a "free good" and how it is abused.
If parents had to pay, they would think very differently about how they educated their children.
Milton Friedman talks about "choice" , but that choice means a whole lot more work for parents.
And the parents are nowhere to be found.
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.