Schools with varying degrees of funding.

It's very easily tailor made. A provincial curriculum gives bullet points on what students should know by the end of each term. It's up to a competent teacher how to ensure students know the material.

That's what we have now, in too many cases. It's called "teaching the test"

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I've always wondered why America have the best colleges in the world but such a sub-par education system by first world standards. Good colleges = Good teachers = Good schools, yes? So why are American children so far behind other OECD countries? The gap between the college and school system is so large it's like they are from two different countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment

^ It's a combination of factors from teacher's unions promoting lazy, incompetent and uncaring attitudes, to piss poor quality parents, to worshipping the standardized test as the be-all-end-all answer (they are not), among other things.

Funding is actually the least problematic of the factors why.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Colleges are self selecting for students who give a shit. The colleges also answer far less to the public, and answer to accreditation groups instead.

Fight smart, not fair.

You forgot proponents of the third and the sameself lazy parents always blaming the unions even when it isnt their fault, too.

And don't forget to factor in non-union states that have teachers who aren't paid enough to give a shit.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian

Tom: Far from the unions. Look at Texas. Guess what they don't have and how shitty their education system is. I have done student teaching in Texas and some of my friends have been teachers in Texas at various levels. The best way to describe the Texas school system outside of select districts, private schools, and private universities is a war zone.

In Omaha we have a equal distribution of funds for the Omaha school districts. Problem is that it did jack for quality in lower quality schools and dragged the quality down in the schools that did not have same the issues. There was not enough funds from the better off schools to fund the worse off schools. There is one exception and that is Millard schools. They got a deal before they were annexed that their schools and school funds would be separate from Omaha. They all pay higher property taxes even in the poor areas of Millard. The net result is the Millard school system is much better then the Omaha one. Just this last year or year before Omaha tried to take over their school district to get at their funding.

Unions do not promote lazy teachers at all Tom I don't know where you get that bull shit. Last I checked the unions insist you maintain certifications and certain standards that non-union districts are lax on. Funny same thing with all the unions out here. Better trained better paid.

What it all boils down to is this. If you want your schools to be worth something stop bitching about taxes, unions, and crappy teachers and suck up the tax hike to pay for the damn schools.

Next would be working on curriculum but that is a different fight all together.

edited 2nd Aug '11 6:16:36 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

Have you seen education funding for the last 20 years? It goes up and up and up and the quality of education goes down and down and down. Something else is the problem and it ain't funding.

(And yes unions do share the blame, do you know how hard it is in some states to simply fire an incompetent teacher?)

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I have a theory but maybe they are hiring teachers that act like Ms.Bitters from Invader Zim who destroy the students'spirit and joy.

It's just a wild guess but some teachers go out of their way to discourage the kids.

We need a huge culture shift, really. We need to make it harder, more lucrative, and more prestigious to be a teacher. If society attachs more worth to them, then their own dissatisfaction with their position won't crush the students' morale and will to learn.

"War doesn't prove who's right, only who's left." "Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future."

My mother is a teacher in Texas, so I know from her that yes, funding is a huge fucking problem. It may not be the entirety of it, but its the vast majority of it. High school teachers simply are not paid enough. And schools that aren't funded don't get the better, newer textbooks, or the good sports and band equipment, or the basic facilities tended very well.

Frankly, No Child Left Behind was a terrible idea and should not have been implemented. If a kid gets held back a year, then they get held back a fucking year. Teach them to fucking take things seriously or there's an actual consequence to failure.

I can count on one hand the number of things I learned in math via memorization instead of some sort of method of derivation or flow of thought since like sixth grade. One is the quadratic equation, and the rest are trig identities.

If your teacher is teaching everything through memorization, either he's lucky enough to have an entire class who can actually learn well via bland forcefeeding and is psychic enough to know this ahead of time, or he's a very lazy and fucking terrible teacher.

As for why schools suck, it's a combination of funding misappropriations and honestly bad teachers (I've had to undo the damage from many a crappy math teacher myself, and one of the teachers of my quite well off elementary school didn't know what exponents were when she had to teach the area of a circle). Most of the worst teachers I've seen aren't poor though, they're tenured.

edited 2nd Aug '11 9:51:49 PM by Pykrete

Definitely - It's not that you're a bad teacher if you're in a poor neighborhood; it's more like you can only do so much in such an environment, and you can only take so much of bad pay and bad funding and troubled, frustrated kids before you just say "Screw this".

"War doesn't prove who's right, only who's left." "Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future."

Oh, thanks for reminding me. Sometimes the students really are the problem too. Almost doesn't matter how awesome your teacher is if he's stuck teaching chaperoning a remedial class full of superseniors who stick around for easier markets to peddle/buy drugs.

You should never, ever see a 30% average in a class that gives out more extra credit than actual work, but I've been in one of 'em.

edited 2nd Aug '11 10:23:59 PM by Pykrete

You want to know how scary the funding problems are? Take a wander through the Donor's Choose website. It's an organization that matches teachers who need supplies for their classrooms with people willing to donate money to buy them. Yes, there are some who are asking for expensive stuff that they maybe could get by with something less expensive, but there are also teachers asking for crayons for their first graders, and construction paper and fucking pencil sharpeners and scissors.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Funding is a non-issue. It's regularlly been shown that funding has minimal effect of quality.

...

Lol.

South Korea has the third best education system in the world, they pay brand new teachers 3 times as much as veteran teachers in america.

Deux, I do not believe you have actually read anything posted about how lower funding schools have consistently lower quality.

edited 2nd Aug '11 11:42:44 PM by Enkufka

Very big Daydream Believer. "That's not knowledge, that's a crapshoot!" -Al Murray "Welcome to QI" -Stephen Fry

Madraguda, that is depressing as fuck.

Also, anyone who thinks funding isn't an issue isn't paying attention to demographics.

As for the drug peddlers; I suppose one of my suggestion would be to put some funding towards security than can weed that shit out. That would probably be a bit draconian, but from what I've heard a lot of schools have things like metal detectors anyway. My high school never got that bad while I was there, but they did have the security guards come by every now and then with a drug sniffing dog. (We weren't even allowed to have Midol, they were that serious.)

I don't know if things like that make students feel safer or intruded on, though.

1. deux: the real issue is that low funding schools also tend to have shit pay for teachers, next to no teaching supplies, and a distinct lack of facilities large enough.

The problem is that even when they get funding, its mismanaged or simply thrown at the school, then when it doesnt magically work, they blame the teachers and take it away.

OTOH:

I love us too . Though I think South Korea has done better on most things recently (especially maths).

Midget:

In the Finnish highschool equalient for ages ~16-18 it's about 30 mandatory courses out of a minumum course count of 75, so that's roughly 3/5 you can choose independently. Need I say I think it was great?

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

Hey, sounds great to me

Anyway, yes, children who find class nothing but a chore and school a place to talk to their friends, are really not going to learn much. Giving teachers the tools to allow them to engage the class and let them enjoy learning would probably go a long way to improving the school system. Personally, I hated math with a vengeance when I was a little girl because it was rote learning, and once I got into the higher levels where it becomes more logic and problem solving I enjoyed that part more - but I'm still awful at math, because my basic skills are completely wretched. Having an investment in what you learn is one way to get engagement in the material, which is what higher levels do when it's more about teaching you how to gather the information than the information per se. How to make a coherent argument, gather reliable sources, design your own tests. I think that could and should be integrated into younger grades.

Now, there are of course different aspects to getting students to engage with the material - the teachers' time with the students, the size of the classroom, the ability to take a class on field trips and have special materials which may be expensive (as has been pointed out, some classrooms can have problems with even basic materials!). And then there are teach-to-the-test curriculums, which don't help. It's not all money related, but some of it could be helped that way.

edited 3rd Aug '11 6:52:17 AM by TheGirlWithPointyEars

She of Short Stature & Impeccable Logic My Skating Liveblog

Semi-Thread Hop:

Perhaps, but I—being a future teacher, fingers crossed—would want to do it anyway. It isn't really about the money, to me, so much as it's about the job itself. I like teaching things to people. I like kids. I like the environment.

I never really talk about this thing, because I've never dealt with the public school system before. I have no basis for comparison. I've been in private education my whole life—which I am infinitely grateful for—and the only thing I can definitively say is that I probably wouldn't have amounted to much if I'd gone through the equivalent education in the public system. I would say, "it needs reform" except 1) it's obvious, and 2) it's such a god-awfully huge, complex, and difficult system that I would have no idea where to start. I would say funding is a big problem, but it isn't the catch-all end-all solution, either. It's a general miasma shitstorm of things going wrong, and it's really rather sad.

edited 3rd Aug '11 7:11:04 AM by USAF713

I am now known as Flyboy.

I'd say the biggest issues with public school is actually parents and american cultural views of schools.

Most parents dont really give the slightest shit at all if schools turn out barely functional proles who cant discern political hyperbole from facts, so long as the kids gtfo of their house at 18. or downright get pissed if their kids start critically thinking and ascribe it to teachers "giving them ideas"

edited 3rd Aug '11 7:34:42 AM by Midgetsnowman

I think one of the most amusing things in the world is that one of my friends is very religious. He went to public school. I'm not religious at all. I went to Catholic private school. Who had the better education? Me. Funny, that...

I am now known as Flyboy.