Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this, but a Florida teacher was recently fired for giving zeroes to students who didn't turn a project in
.
She had assigned her students an explorers notebook project and gave them two weeks to complete it, but several students didn't turn anything in once the deadline arrived. Apparently the student and parent handbook had a "no zero policy" that stated students had to get 50% partial credit, but it didn't seem right to her that a student could turn nothing in and still receive some points.
Though when pressed about said policy, the school district chief information officer released this statement:
Given how Trump picked De Vos to try and dismantle the public school system in the US, it's appropriate to look at the cultural force that the high school experience is
and has been over the last century. Sure, today's kids might not appreciate Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Breakfast Club the way they should, but even today, high schools are a strong community binding agent.
Families who have watched their local schools struggle might agree with De Vos, but her characterization is still troubling. It reflects a distrust of education as a communal goal, not just an individual one. That’s a big change from the goal of American public schools during their first two centuries. Far from being a “dead end,” for a long time the public school—particularly the public high school—served an important civic purpose: not only as an academic training ground, but also as a center for community and activity in American cities.
From curricular offerings to extra-curricular activities, shared milestones to cultural traditions, high schools have been remarkably consistent across the country and even across generations. Many Americans can remember the awkward school dances that memorialized the best (and worst) music of the day. Or bumping past different teenage archetypes on their way to classes. Or the pep fests and rallies that they may have loved, or loved to hate. Football games that captured the attention of entire towns.
Public schools have also perpetuated racial and economic inequity. But the high school still galvanized a shared, American society. It helped people aspire toward greater equality together, and it used education to bring together diverse interests and people to forge social bonds of support. That effort shaped the American city of the 19th and early 20th centuries. High schools can continue to do this, so long as they can resist being dismantled.
The public high school got its start in the early 19th century, when the education reformer Horace Mann—“father of the public school”—pressed for the establishment of “common schools” intended to provide a common base of knowledge to be shared by all citizens, free of charge. According to Mann and others, the public school would be the safeguard of the republic, which would benefit from the general education and enlightenment of the populace.
The “high” school, so called to indicate its relative status above the common school, joined it in most cities and towns by the end of the century. It was designed to extend that shared learning into the more advanced branches of scientific and cultural knowledge, as indicated by its frequent identification at the time as the “people’s college.”
The public high school issued a challenge to the old Classical curriculum of higher education and the vision of society it entailed. That curriculum, featuring Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics, was designed to prepare students for the traditional professions of law, medicine, and clergy. It was a mark of cultural and social distinction, and thus of division rather than commonality.
Instead, many early high schools embraced a more practical curriculum, featuring literature, writing, science, and other modern subjects. These fields, which eventually became popular in elite colleges as well, were meant to prepare a more diverse body of students for a wider range of careers and lives. They promised to provide a common academic and cultural background to unite the American people.
Commentators celebrated the applications of scientific study to industry, farming, commerce, and even domestic work. Writing skills were appreciated in business and at home. The study of modern languages—especially German in cities across the North and Midwest—was thought to forge cultural and economic ties to growing immigrant communities. And students inherited a shared cultural heritage through the study of American literatures and rhetoric.
During the 19th century, enrollments remained low and support was not universal. But communities still rallied behind their public high schools, convinced they would connect education to local and national prosperity. As leaders of the Syracuse High School in New York explained in an 1879 school-board report,
Even one educated person in a community has an elevating tendency upon the masses of that community, and the greater the number of the educated, proportionally the greater the influence and benefit. Through the influence of the High School, then, we have better lower schools, more thorough and efficient teachers, broader and more cultivated parents and citizens, better prepared to exercise the duties and privileges of citizenship.
Reflecting this shared sense of investment, locals called public high schools our schools, and the students became not just children but our children. Large public audiences (parents and non-parents) attended their performances, public examinations, and school ceremonies, which were also advertised and noticed in local newspapers.
Of course, the ideal of academic access and mutual achievement was only partial. For a long time, the supposedly open public high schools remained the purview of the elite, because the families who participated could afford to forego their children’s wages while they continued school. And, where public high schools were available to black students at all, they were most often segregated and under-resourced, as were rural high schools across much of the century.
Despite reinforcing existing social stratification, high schools still communicated a significant value: shared investment in a city’s children, rich and poor, learning and living side by side. This goal was physically manifested in urban plans as large school buildings and athletic stadiums rose up in the heart of America’s cities. These public schools, as Horace Mann put it, were to be the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” in the economic and social balance.
By the turn of the 20th century, high-school enrollments were soaring in America, and the unifying promise of the project was put to the test. On the national level, the number of graduates rose from around 16,000 in the late 1860s, to 100,000 at the turn of the century, to more than one million by the 1930s. The ratio of these graduates from public rather than private high schools also increased, as more and more communities established local public high schools.
Hundreds of new school buildings were erected during this time. In cities, they were often palatial edifices celebrated for their architectural style. Generally, they were centrally located in the city so that students could access them from any neighborhood. When the model of establishing one or two centrally located high schools was strained by expanding enrollments, citizens petitioned to have newer buildings erected in their own neighborhoods.
As an early arrival on the scene, one of these growing schools was Girls High School of Louisville, Kentucky, where enrollments exploded from a few dozen students in the 19th century to 1,500 by the first decade of the 20th. The sense of community that students had experienced across the school’s 50-year history to that point—previously based in their similar backgrounds and experiences—was strained by the swelling numbers and the increasingly diverse identities and experiences they represented. Given these changes, students at the school recognized in their 1908 school yearbook a new need to establish a “feeling of fellowship” amongst themselves, and they sought to do so by building on their mutual “loyalty and love for the school.”
Enter the idea of school spirit. As a high-school education was becoming a rite of passage for a majority of American youth, the schools became a self-conscious source of cohesion for millions of increasingly diverse Americans, who learned together in classrooms but also gathered together during extracurricular activities and at public events. This is when yearbooks, sports, and other iconic aspects of high-school life emerged on the scene. The school became a site of identity-building and common cultural development.
The school yearbook, for example, emerged as a mechanism for fostering a sense of community in the face of rapidly expanding and diversifying high-school cohorts in the early 20th century. Growing out of the older tradition of the school literary magazine, the school yearbook sought to define and commemorate the social and cultural experience of the high school. As the students at Girls High School put it, the yearbook established “a feeling of fellowship and of loyalty and love for the school as it represents to us, in some degree, a thing higher and nobler than merely a sort of prison schoolroom during five hours of every day.” It offered a place for students to work out their individual and collective identities.
The fellowship of school spirit permeated other activities of the school, including sporting events and other extracurricular events. Football rivalries drew enormous crowds of both students and spectators from the surrounding areas, such as the annual Male High School and Manual High School rivalry in Louisville that routinely drew upward of 14,000 fans throughout the first half of the 20th century. Pep squads and booster clubs grew up around these teams. School social clubs, fraternities, and philanthropic organizations flourished, each with a central focus on the intersections between school and community. Alumni clubs burgeoned too, through which adult citizens maintained a direct investment in and connection to the high school following graduation through attendance at school events and even engagement with curricular reform. As the activities of the schools proliferated, they also fused civic and school spirit together, both for students and members of the community.
The unifying role of the high school was amplified in times of national discord. For American youth, the two world wars were powerfully mediated by the activities of the high school. Students performed war-themed plays and concerts. They organized fundraising drives that brought the public together in support of both the students at home and the war effort abroad.
At Santa Clara High School in Santa Clara, California, World War II became the theme of the yearbook in 1943. Patriotism and school spirit were fused, affirming communal bonds and a sense of common purpose in the face of a fractured community resulting from deployments and internment. As the students explained there,
All phases of school life were affected by the earnest desire of the students and faculty to “do something.” Working for the Red Cross, learning a new and useful skill, buying stamps and bonds, contributing to the comfort of the boys in campus and overseas—in all these ways and many more, high school students and teachers all over America contributed their share to the war effort.
A shared identity and community helped the students cope. A trusted space and a set of common rituals allowed them to test out their own citizenship, preparing them for the adult world and broader civic participation.
Those rituals routinely excluded people of color and their experiences—the black students segregated into a separate high school in Louisville, or the Japanese students forcibly removed from theirs during internment in California. By helping to create American community, the high school also perpetuated flaws in that social order.
But it did not do so alone. It has always reflected broader cultural values and practices. That is why leaving the public high school for greener pastures is not a solution to the problems facing our schools, cities, or nation. The abandonment of the American high school reflects the abandonment of the democratic project of the “common school” that helped shape the American city.
The neglect of urban school buildings tracks this decline. As wealthy white citizens moved out of the cities and formed new, homogenous communities in the suburbs in the second half of the 20th century, their attachment to the city’s schools and children was sundered. As financial resources left, the educational philosophies emphasizing individualized, vocational outcomes rose in popularity. The our in “our children” and “our schools” became increasingly narrow, and with it the goal of shared civic participation.
As Americans face a new era of educational reform and broad societal change, they might do well to heed a lesson from the first two centuries of public education: As an institution, the fate of the high school cannot be detached from the community of which it is a part. Like all educational institutions, it is inextricably wrapped up with the goals and values of the town, city, and nation in which it is located, reflecting and perpetuating them.
Those values include Americans’ attitude to the very schools that would pass them along, too. If, as a nation, we decide that the public schools are a “dead end” for students, we should not be surprised if they become so—and along with them, the cities, towns, and communities they once built together.
I want to ask Silasw about his An-Com commune, which happened to also be a boarding school. It's also a great opportunity to talk about teaching kids to share their wealth and not hoard it when the games aren't zero sum, and to avoid clique-ing, bullying, chains of harm, exploitation, theft, abuse, homophobia, racism, able-ism, etc. You know, all those things some people say are just 'human nature', 'boys being boys', etc. My guess is people can be trained and reasoned out of those tendencies a great deal, but what do science and experience say?
Yeah I figured we’d do this here just so others could ask me any questions they had.
The school is anarcho-commul is that there isn’t private property, while possessions exist the commons goods (so property and such) are owned by the community as a whole. Now while that makes sense for a school keep in mind that I’m talking about the community as a whole, the school is lead by the community. Additionally I’m talking about a boarding school (a co-Ed international one actually), so almost all the staff and students live on the school grounds.
The entire school (around 80-100 people once you include kids and staff) meets (well most of it does, attendance is not compulsory) three times a week to make and enforce all (well almost all) school rules, with rules applying equally to staff and students. Literally everyone gets in a room together for several hours to discuss the rules and punishments for anyone who breaks the rules. Everyone has the same vote in the meetings, be they a 5 year old child or the headteacher, I can remember us in fact subjecting the headteacher to a fine once and her regularly asking the meeting for permission to do certain things.
Now not all power was devolved, the headteacher could expel students without the permission of the meeting (though we could also do it), child protection was dealt with by a separate staff meeting, we didn’t handle finance (though could determin our own pocket money and did have the ability to spend to the money raised via fines), hiring and firing of the staff was dealt without outside the meeting (though kids could sit in on interviews for new staff and vote on which applicant should be hired) and we couldn’t pass laws that violated UK law (though I think we skirted the line with a few things).
The big impact it has on most people is that it teaches you responsibility and to be part of the system, it’s very hard to hate “the man” when you are the man, you respect rules because you’ve seen how they’re made, you especially respect the school’s rules because you know exactly why they exist.
The one other big factor from an educations perspective is that attendance at lesson is not requires, classes are entirely optional (though if nobody attends for long enough the class will be scraped).
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranPosting this partly to see if there are comments and partly because this article
says something that I have a question about (the bolded bits):
That sounds somewhat old for a teenager to be still picked up by parent. And it's probably not a good idea to still do it at this age either. I take that this is an sideeffect of the strike?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanI remember going to school something like five miles away from where I actually lived at that age, and not in town either—if for some reason the school was closed, either I'd need a lift from someone or to actually walk a mile or so in the other direction to try and get a bus with money I didn't have.
Or walk up a steep hill with no path for half the journey.
Age doesn't necessarily have much to do with it.
Am I the only only one who Doesn't understand why Middle School exists?
I'm sure there was a good reason initially, but I feel like Middle School is an outdated concept, and is often the point where Education tends to be its weakest, especially in regards to special needs kids (As one myself, I felt miserable throughout middle school because of it) not getting the proper help they need.
Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Jan 14th 2019 at 12:30:10 PM
Watch SymphogearWhat is the alternative? Bear in mind that effective public transportation does not exist in most American neighborhoods.
As for Middle School, its mostly because the emotional and behavioral needs of Middle Schoolers are different from those of teenagers, and the security concerns surrounding teenagers are significantly different from those of middle schoolers, that its just easier to keep them separate.
Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 15th 2019 at 5:44:08 AM
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.I don't know, from what I hear, 12 year olds seem shockingly savvy these days to a bunch of nasty shit. Apparentlh, they're not taking their puberty with innocent confusion, but a sort of porn-misinformed casual bravado, as if they'd watched Big Mouth and decided that was behaviour to model.
@Silasw: why so many meetings?
Edited by Oruka on Jan 16th 2019 at 3:09:28 AM
The community had a lot of rules, remember each breach of a rule can be bought to the meeting and discussed until people are done and then any proposals (including punishments) needs to be voted upon.
So that’s every time someone skateboards inside, every time someone smokes outside the smoking area, every time someone dumps their bike in the way of the main doors, every time someone is generally a little shit, every time a younger kid is caught smoking, every time someone goes back to bed early during the day, every time the bedtime officers did something wrong, every time someone hit someone, every time someone dives in the shallow end of the swimming pool.
Likewise any alteration to the rules needs to be treated the same, so if you want to be allowed to go into town by yourself (and aren’t of the set age for that) you have to ask, if you want to go away for a weekend you have to ask, if you want to be able to open the cafe (not an actual cafe, a space with an oven and a few other things called the cafe) you have to ask, if you wanted to camp in the woods for a weekend you had to ask, ect...
Plus each meeting would only be a few hours long, so we’re talking maybe 9 hours a week to deal with every (non-bedtime related) rule break that 80ish 5-17 year olds do in a week.
A long meeting was three hours, normally they’d take 1-2 hours, I honestly can’t think what it was we discussed most of the time, I think a fair bit of it was probably just people getting a public telling off by the community.
Hell thats after people exhaust the non-meeting methods of rule enforcement and such, Ombusman existed (an elected positon) to try and mediate arguments between people, bedtime officers put people to bed (and woke them up) and had the ability to issue limited punishments for breaking bedtime rules.
Think about every time a teacher punishes a kid in a normal school, now expand that to a 24 hour school day (we all live there) and remove the ability of the teacher to punish. The ability to hand out punishments lay only with the meeting (plus the headteacher with relation to expulsions, underage drinking and possession of drugs) and the people it delegated that ability to, (mainly the bedtime officers).
Edited by Silasw on Jan 16th 2019 at 11:35:27 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranYeah now you can delegate out some of the rule enforcement (I know of other Democratic school that use a jury system) and keep the anarcho system, but the big thing is you need to be able to hold the meetings for the creation of rules and for the registering of complaints against the delegated enforcers of community laws (for us it was the bedtime officers).
That central meeting thing needs to be small enough that everyone can speak, from a pure logistical point it has to be small enough that the chair can know everyone by name so as to be able to call upon everyone.
Plus that feeling of community, that shared responsibility comes from knowing everyone there, everyone in the community has to know the entire community or it will divide itself. What’s the science on the number of friends a single person can maintain? The number is somewhere around 100 if I’m remember right, I suspect there’s a connection there.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThere's supposedly some kind of limit on just how many people a human being can actually care about on a personal level.
Wikipedia page for Dunbar's Number
On average it's about 150 stable relationships per person. It's a range from 100~250.
However, one would probably have to have better than a "stable" relationship with your fellow students to actually run a commune. So 80~100 seems about right.
Edited by M84 on Jan 16th 2019 at 10:17:40 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedSince this was just brought this into the spotlight, I’d thought I’d put an article.
Proposals from lawmakers in at least six states would require or encourage public schools to offer elective classes on the Bible’s literary and historical significance. That’s a more narrow focus than what’s typically covered in courses on world religions.
Some of the lawmakers – and leaders of Christian groups supporting the bills – say they want to restore traditional values in schools and give students a chance to study the religious text deeply....
...This year, Bible literacy bills have been introduced in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
At least three Bible literacy bills were considered in 2018 – in Alabama, Iowa and West Virginia – but none passed, according to the ACLU. Tennessee passed a related but slightly different bill.
The year before, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin signed into law a Bible studies bill. It created guidelines for public high schools to offer electives on the literature of the Bible and Hebrew Scriptures.
Laser said the Bible studies classes are likely to convey a religious message and preference. That would violate the First Amendment, which guarantees that the government won’t act in a way that prefers one religion over another and that people can practice whatever religion they wish.
In short, there's a line in public schools between teaching about a religion and proselytizing. Lawmakers bringing the proposals say the classes can be taught in a way that doesn't overstep that line.
Those groups include the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, which aims to protect religious liberties; the National Legal Foundation, a Christian public-interest law firm; and the nonprofit WallBuilders note , which emphasizes the "moral, religious and constitutional foundation upon which America was built," according to its website. WallBuilders' name is a biblical reference to grass-roots work and does not refer to the debate over the border wall between the USA and Mexico.
Critics say the groups are trying to reshape America by cementing pro-Christian messages in public schools.
“They have put out a more than 100-page playbook that lays out very plainly their strategy into tiers of bills that they want to pass, and the last tier is promoting a particular religious point of view for legislation," said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which advocates for keeping government out of matters pertaining to faith.
The ACLU provided a copy of the 2018 version of the playbook, called the "Report and Analysis on Religious Freedom Measures Affecting Prayer and Faith in America." Model legislation and talking points within it advocate for preserving the country's Judeo-Christian heritage and enshrining conservative values in public policy. For instance, the groups say marriage and child adoption should be practiced only by heterosexual, married couples.
Edited by megaeliz on Jan 28th 2019 at 1:26:26 PM
Many Atheists believe that the more people study the sacred texts of all religions for themselves, the more Atheists there will be.
But if the study is properly cherry-picked and framed with the right thought-terminating techniques, well, children can grow to believe that they may face eternal torture for not thinking and being a certain way, among others. Cue the LGBT suicides and the unwanted pregnancies, among others.
What I'm amazed at is that these disparate denominations manage to agree on a common curriculum , when they used to murder each other over what gestures to use in prayer.
Yeah while the idea of reeding holy texts to understand them and their impact is good, it shouldn’t be just the bible and it shouldn’t be done the way these people want it done.
I remember age 7 by religious education class did a field trip to a Gurdwara, it was fascinating.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThere's a War on Education in Kentucky
https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/tom-eblen/article195742574.html
And if you think I'm joking?
What the Republican governor didn’t say, but was evident when people actually read his budget proposal for the next two years, was that he plans to under-fund and undermine public education in dozens of ways, both large and small.
Bevin wants the General Assembly to cut $198 million from K-12 education, mostly by shifting more transportation and insurance costs to local school districts, as if they can afford it. He wants to cut an additional $72 million from higher education. And he wants to eliminate state funding for 70 programs, at least 44 of which support education.
Then this.
Fayette County Superintendent Manny Caulk called Bevin’s accusations “misleading and untrue.” Jefferson County’s acting superintendent, Marty Pollio, said 63 percent of the highly paid people Bevin referred to in his district work full-time with students.
The school system is dying in Kentucky and we're all looking for ways to help the people in it now.
We've had mass strikes and walk outs already from teachers before this was announced due to the previous year's cutbacks.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I don't support privatizing education but I do think it's a powerful tool to protect against government gutting of the program.
Mind you, the government in my state doesn't want to spend ANY money on education and wants the population ignorant as well as dying in the streets (not much of an exaggeration).
But I don't consider private schools a bad thing to have even if I hate charter schools.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.The problem with private schools is that they'll never been widely available to the populace the way public schools are meant to be. They are, by their nature, exclusionary. So that powerful tool against the GOP? Not that powerful. As well as frequently controlled by the GOP given that a lot of these schools tend to be run by folks with highly conservative mindsets. In the end, rooting out the GOP is your long term solution here, and it ain't gonna be easy.

Mine started at 8:45, it just took me a while to get there.