http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/education/18child.html?_r=2&ref=education&oref=slogin&oref=slogin The American obsession with mediocrity rears it's ugly head. Nice to see some data supporting this rather obvious problem finally. I favor kicking students with no drive or educational disdain out of school at 16. Set them up with an internship/mentor and let those who actually care about school go forward without having to be dragged down by those either uninterested or socially revolting.
I have several problems with this, first of all, "No Child Left Behind" is a failure on all accounts. I wouldn't trust any of the scores, especially the scores from poor school districts with schools fighting to keep the funds coming in. Lastly because I wouldn't trust any of the scores I don't agree with the conclusion that we are forgetting the higher achieving students but if I were to trust the scores, my conclusion would be higher achieving students have less room to grow.
What a horrible idea. At 16, you have no clue what you want, and lack a visceral understanding of what the purpose of school is. There are those who can't be reached, but giving school admins an eject button for kids who are dragging down their schools and costing them money is ludicrous.
By age 16, it's totally obvious if you are interested in learning or not. When I was that age (actually age 14) at the tail end of intermeidate school the whole class assembled in the atrium and listened to the principle explain the options for high school. At that time you had two options - an advanced path or a "meet the state requirements" path. 75% chose the latter. You know if you're the type who wants a challenge and enjoys learning. I regret using the term "kick out". Certainly that should be used in some cases, but I should have said "give the option". Let those who don't want to be in school get out, and help them find a career that makes them happy.
I feel the same way looking back, but I think it's a damn shame aptitude went wasted just because the desire to learn wasn't encouraged. I wonder how successful the education effort would be if we weren't in a cultural morass celebrating the lowest common denominator.
I wonder how much better off our society would be if we applied our athletic methodology to academics. In athletics, the best are given access to ever better routines, trainers, camps. They are focused and driven by a retinue of teachers demanding more and more. Those who are not athletically gifted just go through the motions, and no one really cares. In academics the focus is on making "everyone" somehow "averagely intelligent". It's impossible, and it's why "everyone" is going to college, even if they have no reason, and no ability. It's psychotic.
rhad, I really don't think you're giving our educational system enough credit. HISD has an excellent magnet program, I would like to take a more indepth look at these numbers and see what kids they are considering as above average, what the cut off is, because I don't think in any school district that isn't struggling for money, providing better education to the better students is a problem.
its a big plot because if they learn then we will have a nation of evil doers less likely to believe in God budumtah
Fair enough - but data is available that, as a whole, american students are behind their foreign peers. To be fair to the original point of this posting - the rationale was to provide some quantitative data to the widely held assertion that standardizing schooling lowers the gross intelligence of the group, particularly within the gifted.
I hate NCLB. Hate it with a passion. It needs drastic reform or just scrapping altogether. It is an utter and complete failure. We're teaching kids to regurgitate information when information is doubling several times each lifetime and computers will soon have more computational ability than the human brain. We should be moving from dealing with information to developing skills that create knowledge out of that information and wisdom out of that knowledge. While we're on the topic, here's a stat: If you took the top 20% of students in China you would have more than all the students in the US.
If you took the top 20% from any country I bet they would be on the same level. Its just way intelligence is distributed among any great number of people. This is America if you don't want to study you fall behind. I mean we are not socialist or communist. If you want to make it you better try hard even if you are a kid.
Yes, but for some kids who have their parents to provide for them, they don't understand this, so just p**s around at school, doing jack, and not appreciating education at all.
Let's face it the United States does not have a culture that really values education or book smarts. Nerds are looked down by most of the society. Sports are valuabled much more at middle schools than academics. Most (not all) parents does not really care if their kids excel at school as long as they get by, they put in much mroe effort for little baseball, football etc.
Just FYI, HBO is running a documentary on a Baltimore H.S. and the effects of No Child Left Behind. I think its a little skewed, Baltimore has one of the worst school districts in this country, but its still interesting.
If you do MAKE SURE you see the coach's post game speech. I am not gonna ruin it but I was laughing my *** off.
I agree with the first part of your comments, but what do you suggest be done for a kid that refuses to learn anything? It is usually a bad attitude on the kids part, so who's going to do what to get this person productive?
America is losing ground in math and science. We actually perform very well in in Language Arts/Reading. Although we are still at the top (contrary to what the news programs would have you believe) we are steadily losing ground. Keep in mind though that we have the only country in which literally NO child is left behind. Other countries choose to ignore the disabled and poor. We literally work with everyone in our classrooms. As a teacher myself I must say it is not easy to meet the needs of such a wide range of kids. Can it be done? Yes. Will it take more than the 7:45-3:45 duty time? Absolutely. We have several things working against us in this country. One our whole country is being compared to other countries of a non-comparable size. Finland is currently ranked top in math. I believe we need to start comparing states to countries rather than our entire country to others. As our curriculum is determined by the state we need to find which states are lagging behind and work to correct that. I know a lot of people would probably disagree...but a national curriculum would be great! Consistency of material and expectations across the country could settle a lot of issues. Schools need more funding. We are behind in technology. We are preparing our kids for the 21st century but have schools with technology from the 20th. How is that effective?! Kids need a skill set and need to be interested...when they are using Facebook, myspace, wikis, tagging, and blogging to talk and get information why are we still in the world of whiteboards. We need SMART boards, and Elmo's instead of overhead projectors. We need consistent computer access for all children. The list goes on and on. Teachers can't do it all. And what do we do? We sit around complaining that we don't have quality teachers. I don't know if you've looked at our pay scale lately, but it's not exactly comparable to what people ask from us. Until the government, community, and parents step up to the plate and say, we are here and will do what is needed to assist in the education ALL of our nation's youth, we are at a standstill. Right now the situation is like being at the United Nations but no one has access to a translator. We need to be talking the same language to create effective change.
