What is best for education?

Spin-off thread!

I say rigorous curriculum. The usual argument against it is that students in special programs are compared against kids with parents who don't care as much, so I'm going to try to dredge up some stats on charter schools by program to back my case.

Revisiting my arguments from the other thread, here are some of the things I think need improvement.

1. Break up the impenetrable collective barrier of school boards, tenured teachers' unions, and localized curricula. Enforce a unified federal curriculum and distribute all education spending on a strictly per-capita basis adjusted for cost of living.
   • Set teacher salaries on a scale determined by outcome, not tenure. The goal should be the overall improvement of their students.
2. Set up individualized student testing starting at the kindergarten level to determine which learning methods are most suited to each student. Some students are visual, some are kinetic, some are auditory, etc., and each needs a tailored curriculum.
3. Break up the "peer group advancement" horror that's invaded our schools. Each student should advance at his/her own pace. However, each school day/week should include "common time" where students from all curricula can mingle and share with one another, by age group.
   • Similarly, abolish fixed grade levels. A student should be rated not as a "third grader" but in terms of his/her achievement at each of the curricular goals.
4. Reinstitute mandatory P.E./recess at schools.
5. Revise school meal guidelines. Right now it's an abomination — an atrocity that perpetuates the cycle of ill-nourished kids. We need to at least double school meal funding and ensure a supply of healthy, reasonable calorie meal options at all educational institutions. There should be no up-front payment required for school meals at any income level. Ban all third-party sponsored food like vending machines, although there may be cash options available in addition to the basic fare.
6. Add "life skills" to the core curriculum. Teach kids basic financial skills, domestic arts, sexual health, and child development.
7. Abolish summer break in the absence of a demonstrated requirement such as kids who genuinely are needed on the farm (the original reason).

edited 5th Aug '11 3:14:50 PM by Fighteer

...Would you believe that I can actually see the merits of everything you said? A federal curriculum might not be great, but it's probably better than a system where almost all the textbooks are printed in Texas and California. I think that the more a curriculum reacts to feedback from private citizens, the better it's likely to be - but I know full well that local school boards are nearly as entrenched and dogmatic as any federal bureaucracy.

EDIT: Though if I had to go through P.E. again, it would probably come to blows.

edited 5th Aug '11 3:24:13 PM by DomaDoma

What?

No, seriously, what the hell?

~shuts down and babbles incoherently at the madness~

Summer breaks are a hallowed tradition and all that, USAF, but think of all the things that slipped out of your head over the summer that the teachers had to waste weeks catching you up on.

edited 5th Aug '11 3:39:29 PM by DomaDoma

"Abolish summer break in the absence of a demonstrated requirement such as kids who genuinely are needed on the farm (the original reason). "

Hahahhaahaha. No.

Also, I call bull on judging a teacher's pay based on performance. That's incentive to cheat (like what No Child Left Behind is doing) and even the best of teachers cant do much for bad kids/stupid kids.

Teachers need more love. Also in...Sweden or Denmark, I forget, all classes have like...THREE teachers. 1 to teach and 2 to help out kids who fall behind. Thats an amazing idea if you ask me.

edited 5th Aug '11 3:41:06 PM by Thorn14

I'm ok with that actually. At least a month reduction would probably do a lot of good.

Individually track students. If they show a marked improvement, that shows a teacher's merit - unless they revert to their previous state under the next teacher, which is an easy way to identify the cheaters.

That doesn't answer my points. Its an incentive to cheat. And you cant grade teachers based on an individual student. There are good kids who will do great with a bad teacher and bad kids who will suck under a good teacher.

Sure, but if you aggregate all the students a teacher works for, you get yourself a good trend to gauge them by.

A teacher's ability goes beyond just "grade scores"

Thats the problem with this idea and No Child Left Behind. You cant judge everything by test scores. Instead all it does is it turns an entire curriculum into test taking skills, so that the school/teacher can support their future.

Except year-around school wouldn't fly, period. None of the kids—myself included, thank you—would go for it. School is bearable in part because there is that long period of time in between where you don't have to think about it and all the stressful bullshit that accompanies it. I could live with a shorter summer, but getting rid of it? I'd fight you over that.

Teachers shouldn't be cut based on how new they are like it's been recently. It's a huge mess that makes things worse.

For one, new teachers get paid way less. That means, if you want to say a million dollars (rough estimate, obviously) you need to fire a lot of new teachers compared to a few older teachers.

This slopes right into less teachers, period, which means for crowded classrooms, classes being removed, etc.

Getting rid of new teachers also means getting rid of those who have been taught to teach the next generation. New tactics and techniques aren't being used to full efficiency because the teachers that learned this aren't being hired. Instead, we have a lot of old teachers that are sticking themselves to the values they were taught because "it's how it's always been."

... Summer break? Abolished? No, nice try. Kids should be taught to continue to work and progress their education outside of school. If they were to do that, they wouldn't forget. Summer break is a chance for families to be in charge of the students and teach them their morals. Two days a week all year for 12 years is not enough for a family to raise a child the way they would want to.

What would be a better compromise is to do four quarters of education, as now, with ~2 week breaks between each one. That way, year round education FTW, with more frequest breaks to let students and teachers let off steam.

[edit] Also, you're discounting all of us overachievers who still took summer school too, leaving us with maybe 3 weeks school-free.

edited 5th Aug '11 3:51:37 PM by BlueNinja0

It's better to teach to the test than to teach with no particular goal in mind. Ideally, the test will be short-answer so there's no temptation to hold classes on radio-bubble/five-paragraph voodoo instead of your actual subject.

(Yeah, I know that college freshmen are still expected to do five-paragraph essays. Fuck that noise. It doesn't matter how good your mechanics or arguments are; if it's in five-paragraph form, you're always going to look like a clueless amateur.)

EDIT: Yup, Blue Ninja. That's what I'd like as well.

edited 5th Aug '11 3:52:21 PM by DomaDoma

I would still allow Teacher unions but get rid of tenure. Tenure is just politicing and playing games. A teacher who has proven to be inept should able to be fired/retired regardless of union input. I can agree on that much.

As thorn pointed out. Desperate people will do desperate things and some teachers will fudge results. Such a measure encourages said fudging. Teachers are not really all that well paid.

A national benchmark or criteria for what needs to be taught might be a good idea depending on how it is implimented. It would end a lot of political/personal fighting in the various systems.

Putting the pinch on those school boards and such would also be a good idea.

The education spending I am unsure on that one.

I like the idea of trying to find out which methods of learning work best for each child but catering to those sorted needs will be costly and require larger body to do it.

While it would be nice to let people advance at their own pace there needs to be some push to finish and not linger. Also again this would take a lot larger and more costly structure to impliment.

Common time aka study hall to sit and chat quietly while you work on stuff seems to work just fine. Why restrict it to age group though? Especially once your in your teens.

Funny the grades already work as you described. Your not rated as the grade your in. Your rated on your report card. The grade merly reflects how far you have come thus far and is used to generally measure what you should know by now. Sounds like the same thing with different window dressing.

I can very much agree with this. I would suggest an implimentation of a school store that offers healthy snacks and in general sells generic school supplies.

Many schools require some form of life skill class but only one or two. Every school district I have been in has had sex ed/general health as mandatory. I could see a great benefit in making things like home ec mandatory. Knowing how to do your own laundry, wash, clean sew, iron, cook etc are skills everyone should have coming out of school.

[[quoteblock]]7.Abolish summer break in the absence of a demonstrated requirement such as kids who genuinely are needed [[quoteblock]]

There are some school districts in the U.S. that do something similar. School is more or less year round but the various breaks you get are longer then a few days. Springbreak is about two weeks, Christmas is a full week, summer break is three weeks etc. Basically on the various holidays you get longer breaks but your also in school for longer periods.

The only reason we're so attached to summer break is because we had it in the first place. Students do need downtime, but if curricula were more clearly tailored to individual needs and interests, school would not feel like such an oppressive place that you'd need to escape.

Oh, yes, more things.

• Each day needs to include mandatory "downtime", such as a recess — it might not even have to be P.E. per se but at least some time that the kids can use as they see fit.
• In addition to scheduled breaks, and instead of "summer break" and "spring break", each student is given an allotment of vacation time. Since curricula are individually tailored they won't lose progress relative to their peers.
• Starting in the 15-16 age bracket, students should be encouraged to develop an exit pathway. That is, they decide what their goal is and start tailoring their curriculum towards it. Vocational training should be considered equally viable to secondary education — if a kid wants to become an electrician, we should allow her to direct her interests that way.
• In fact, secondary education itself needs a dramatic rethinking. The so-called "classic education" does very little to prepare students for actual life. We need a pathway set up to develop each person toward their areas of maximum potential.

On the testing thing, yes, you need some kind of aggregate indicator of student progress tracked to each teacher. Aberrations can then be tracked and analyzed — maybe one teacher is just that much better than his peers, or is cheating in some way.

All these things would be more expensive but would result in far better educated and adjusted adults, which cannot help but have massive productivity gains in the long term. Also if we abolish all the property tax = school funding and other craziness, we can have a single unified pool of money supporting all education, which dilutes the pain quite a bit.

edited 5th Aug '11 4:22:58 PM by Fighteer

Overall I agree with Fighteer. I wouldn't set a full curriculum, as what electives are presented should depend on the students and weird ratios of what students feel like taking at a time is to be expected.

Additionally:

1) break it from a five day a week, to a MWF and TT day plan set up, with several class types and remedial classes offered on a full five day schedule.

2) start HS later, break up the summer holiday into two one month or so breaks spread apart, offer classes during them.

3) buses have to run home twice, once immediately after school, once several hours later to deliver children home from their clubs/assisted learning/whatever.

4) foreign language is no longer in HS, it's in elementary school, as a five day class, and it should take five to seven years to complete the course if students don't show extensive talent. Also, it should actually try to teach the language rather than just giving short crap lessons.

5) gut art requirements to make room for useful things and electives.

6) gym should focus on fitness first, competition second. This class should probably alternate with home-ec.

7) home-ec is a mandatory class. It should alternate between basic life skills and actual cooking, with a focus on easy meals. It's not there to teach future cooks, it's there to teach general food prep skills. Lump basic home repair in here. Probably first aid and sex ed as well.

8) more "trial" electives that give you a sample of other electives so you don't get stuck in one you hate, but get exposed to others.

9) basic mandatory courses should be completable before eighth grade for the average student, with options for accelerated learning for faster students. Meeting the minimum requirement means a student no longer has to have anything to do with the class regardless of talent in it.

10) attempting to create a defacto requirement by limiting elective count is grounds for a funding cut.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. "Develop children toward their areas of maximum potential"? Please tell me you've got a way to do that that wouldn't create a de facto caste system.

Also, classical education exists not to get you a high-paying job, but to ground people in the context of civilization. You don't need civics, philosophy, history or formal logic on a day-to-day basis, but I think you can agree that all those things are very good for a society to know.

"5) gut art requirements to make room for useful things and electives. "

Thems fighting words.

Kids are there against their will, more often than not, no? Of course it's good for them, but there's no eliminating that feeling. I know my life would be horrible if I dropped out of high school right now and didn't finish. Does that mean it's any less unspeakably boring and stressful? Does that mean I watch the clock any less? Not at all.

As for tailoring the curriculum to the student, it can only go so far. If people only took the classes they wanted—or hell, needed for whatever career they want—there would be a sudden, disproportionate lack of people with education in... certain areas... (math, science, and literature). There is a significant amount of truth to Everybody Hates Mathematics, remember. Society would skew towards people without any kind of knowledge there, which, considering that it's already pretty badly weighted in that direction as it is, probably wouldn't help in the least.

Furthermore, not everyone does get the job they want. You can't tell me that every menial laborer in the world wants to be a menial laborer. You can be the most-qualified person in the world for some position; that doesn't mean you'll get hired, though, because the world isn't perfect. Then, if we go with the "people get training in what they need for what they want to do" route, what job are you going to get in lieu of that?

Oh, almost forgot. Change science education completely to not be Jeopardy: school edition.

And add a goddamn computer course set.

There usually are computer courses in school. I remember being taught word processing in like 1995, and it wasn't a very wealthy school, either. It's usually a course in Apple, I'll grant you, because of the long-standing symbiosis that kept Apple alive until they could invent OS X, but that works okay.

I remember being in a computer course in Middle School, and being in one in High school.

@USAF: But why are they there against their will? There's no rule that says school has to be horrible. I remember when I was young loving school, worshiping my teachers and eating up all the knowledge they could offer. I only got sour on the thing when I ran into peers who bullied me and teachers who didn't like me reading ahead. I also had a terrible time with homework because I figured I'd learned the material already. Rote repetition was never my style. If teachers had been more accommodating, I'd have enjoyed it more, but really they were never the problem, it was my asshole peers who were busy not enjoying it and making life hell for anyone who did.

When I say tailoring the curriculum, I don't mean everybody only studies what they want. I mean what was said earlier - that you set up a core educational skillset and then have the rest be electives. Students are graded on their progress on each individual aspect of the curriculum.

As an example, I might test at 10th grade level in English (further split between reading/writing/oral), 12th grade in math, 9th in science, 8th in physical, etc. Or use age-equivalents, whatever. At the point when I'm deciding where to go from there, I note that each career/education path has minimum score requirements in each area, and so if I want to be an accountant I need to sharpen up my math... or whatever.

As for "manual labor"... I can't think of any school curriculum these days that's designed to turn out street sweepers or McDonald's cashiers. However, we do have desperate need for tradeskills such as electricians, plumbers, and the like, and our schools are almost exclusively focused on pushing people into secondary education.

The trend of society is away from unskilled labor anyway, so it's hardly an advantage to seek out that kind of career path.

edited 5th Aug '11 5:32:58 PM by Fighteer