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Education: It CAN Be Improved

By Bronwyn's Harbor on March 2, 2012 at 11:09 AM in Current Affairs

Thanks to a 33-year-old interim vice superintendent who is one very impressive man … thanks to the concentrated efforts of a New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, whose talent for and experience in leadership set statewide standards … thanks to students who saw that things were different and who rose to the occasion … and thanks to all the leaders who took on the teachers’ union, which put its priorities on seizing $2,000 in dues from a struggling young teacher’s salary and blowing that $2K on billboard ads attacking the leaders who insisted on getting rid of “bad teachers” and rewarding “good teachers” … from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

DO NOT MISS THE NEXT VIDEO — It’s a Chris Christie classic!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There are many more videos where those came from. I am watching the DVR’d three-hour “Morning Joe” — today its special on improving education — and haven’t heard the segments featuring Gov. Christie and other political leaders. I can’t wait.

My first impression: That it is possible to tackle seemingly unsolvable problems and — in part by tossing away all the excuses that educators provide as to why education can’t be improved without means beyond our grasp — improve the educational experience for nearly all students.

The key seems to be in getting rid of all the bad apples and also changing the perspectives of the surviving educators from feeling demoralized and over-worked to feeling empowered and realizing true success.

This can be accomplished everywhere in the U.S. The only thing stopping us is finding good leaders and freeing them to work their magic.

Of note: The great strides depicted in this video were made at the LOCAL LEVEL. Not in Washington, D.C. The successes were created by people at the school district level who were capable of envisioning change and then making it happen by tossing out the excuses along with bad teachers — not by the sincere but ineffective efforts of Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education.

Take a look at the Department of Education’s budget figures in the image to your right, which I found at Wikipedia. Under the Budget section, Wikipedia notes the following:

For 2006, the ED discretionary budget was $56 billion and the mandatory budget contained $23.4 billion. As of 2011, the discretionary budget is $69.9 billion.

These are the “functions” of the Department of Education which, by the way, was elevated to a cabinet post by President Jimmy Carter:

The primary functions of the Department of Education are to “establish policy for, administer and coordinate most federal assistance to education, collect data on US schools, and to enforce federal educational laws regarding privacy and civil rights.”[8] The Department of Education does not establish schools or colleges.[9]

The Office of the Inspector General has a unit of enforcement agents who conduct investigations and raids in connection to student loan defaults and fraud.[10]

Unlike the systems of most other countries, education in the United States is highly decentralized, and the federal government and Department of Education are not heavily involved in determining curricula or educational standards (with the recent exception of the No Child Left Behind Act). This has been left to state and local school districts. The quality of educational institutions and their degrees is maintained through an informal private process known as accreditation, over which the Department of Education has no direct public jurisdictional control.

The Department’s mission is: to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.[11] Aligned with this mission of ensuring equal access to education, the Department of Education is a member of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness,[12] and works with federal partners to ensure proper education for homeless and runaway youth in the United States.

What a bunch of baloney.

What a waste of money.

I have NO CLUE that any of those “functions” accomplish anything of any value.

That is why it is so damn heartening to be introduced to a New Jersey high school that, despite the wasted bullshit in D.C., is succeeding.

Okay. Back to the “Morning Joe” special. If you watch any of the other videos, please share what you discovered.

  • Anonymous

     For the last 40 years the Libs have been pushing indoctrination instead of education. THAT is the main problem.

    • Anonymous

      Yes, that is a major problem.  Then there is that the children — who confided in me when I was a mentor to high-risk children — hate school.  They felt like school was prison.

  • Kathy Fitzgerald

    Bottom line – when unions get in the way of helping our kids, we lose.  There is so much potential a teacher’s union could do recruit and keep excellent teachers.   24k per pupil in the city to educate a child???  That’s close to top dollar for private, non religious schools K-12.  

  • Anonymous

    Bronwyn,

    Here I was promising myself that I would not get distracted and would get my desk and files cleaned up today.  So I am going to try to make a short comment.  (But most of you know me.)

    I am currently teaching a class of mostly very nice young people–to me everyone else is young–in an English writing class at a community college.  It is a pre-college class because they did not score high enough on the placement test to take the college-level writing classes that are undergrad requirements in most colleges and universities across our state.

    I become so disoriented because I have to teach things that I taught 7th graders when I first started teaching in ’70.  I talk to the other instructors, and they now just take for granted that students can’t write coherently, that what can now pass a college-level course may be what I would have expected from ninth graders long ago.

    I agree with HARP2  about the indoctrination–especially at college level.  It is indeed progressive indoctrination in the Arts and Humanities.

    The indoctrination at the public school level comes from the Education departments.  I’m not going to do anything but continue to mention who is now considered highly in the Education Departments:  Billy Ayers.  Do any online search to locate his writing–it’s total and absolute nonsense.

    When I first started teaching, most of us thought of it as a “calling.”  We knew we weren’t going to be paid as well as many other college graduates.  But we counted on the pride we could feel in a job well done.  And indeed the first few years that I taught, though I killed myself because of the amount of work I did planning and grading, I felt pride.

    It was a time when teachers were expected to continue their education IN THEIR FIELDS.  I never moved up on the pay scale for added education by taking anything other than ENGLISH courses, since that is what I teach.

    Now young teachers in my field get a job, plan multiple choice assignments, do little grading of writing, have studied nothing but literature–no classes in rhetoric or (gasp!) language (meaning grammar).  They are young and have grown up in a system that began in the late 70s to think that grammar instruction was busy work, that children would learn the correct language naturally by listening to their parents.  It may have been a half-way true premise in the early 70′s because a large percentage of the parents had learned grammar in the public schools and so knew how to speak formally.  But since they stopped teaching it thereafter, nowadays our parents and teachers don’t know it to teach it.

    The young teachers also move up on the pay scale taking online night classes from strange “schools” in classes that teach only the new buzz words and theories in education. They never take a class in their subject area again.

    Christie is right to battle the unions.  They have fought for much of this change.  He’s also right to fight for merit pay.  I would have been happy with my pay, though it was far less than the $100,000 mentioned in the video, if I didn’t know that teachers who weren’t doing much in the way of educating in their classrooms were also earning the same amount.

    When I announced I was going to retire, another teacher in the department announced his retirement at the same time.  Our department chair had been trying to get the principal to observe his classes more often because teachers near his room were always complaining about the noise and confusion–e.g., he was teaching swing dancing in an English class (no joke).  Homework assignments were often simply copying answers from the board, making a poster, etc.  The kids loved him and never complained.  He was fun.  He also helped coach baseball.  My students often complained to the principal because they had to do work that other students didn’t have to do in their classes.  Principals don’t like to deal with complaints.

    So, the chairman did what she was not supposed to do because the union had fought against it.  She took our state test results after they came back and figured the average progress my students had made and compared to the average LOSS that his students had shown and went to the principal and made it clear that his inability to deal with “bad” teachers had cost the school.

    Schools can be fixed, but I keep saying that if I had children starting public school at this time, I would severely cut my income, stay home and homeschool them.  Many of the top universities now go out of their way to recruit homeschooled children.  My ex-colleague is homeschooling her adopted daughter.  The girl, who would now be in third grade, scored last year (after what would have been her second grade year) on her tests as sixth and above in all her testss.

    • Anonymous

       Great comment. I’m sure your students are quite fortunate.

  • Anonymous

    Bronwyn,

    Here I was promising myself that I would not get distracted and would get my desk and files cleaned up today.  So I am going to try to make a short comment.  (But most of you know me.)

    I am currently teaching a class of mostly very nice young people–to me everyone else is young–in an English writing class at a community college.  It is a pre-college class because they did not score high enough on the placement test to take the college-level writing classes that are undergrad requirements in most colleges and universities across our state.

    I become so disoriented because I have to teach things that I taught 7th graders when I first started teaching in ’70.  I talk to the other instructors, and they now just take for granted that students can’t write coherently, that what can now pass a college-level course may be what I would have expected from ninth graders long ago.

    I agree with HARP2  about the indoctrination–especially at college level.  It is indeed progressive indoctrination in the Arts and Humanities.

    The indoctrination at the public school level comes from the Education departments.  I’m not going to do anything but continue to mention who is now considered highly in the Education Departments:  Billy Ayers.  Do any online search to locate his writing–it’s total and absolute nonsense.

    When I first started teaching, most of us thought of it as a “calling.”  We knew we weren’t going to be paid as well as many other college graduates.  But we counted on the pride we could feel in a job well done.  And indeed the first few years that I taught, though I killed myself because of the amount of work I did planning and grading, I felt pride.

    It was a time when teachers were expected to continue their education IN THEIR FIELDS.  I never moved up on the pay scale for added education by taking anything other than ENGLISH courses, since that is what I teach.

    Now young teachers in my field get a job, plan multiple choice assignments, do little grading of writing, have studied nothing but literature–no classes in rhetoric or (gasp!) language (meaning grammar).  They are young and have grown up in a system that began in the late 70s to think that grammar instruction was busy work, that children would learn the correct language naturally by listening to their parents.  It may have been a half-way true premise in the early 70′s because a large percentage of the parents had learned grammar in the public schools and so knew how to speak formally.  But since they stopped teaching it thereafter, nowadays our parents and teachers don’t know it to teach it.

    The young teachers also move up on the pay scale taking online night classes from strange “schools” in classes that teach only the new buzz words and theories in education. They never take a class in their subject area again.

    Christie is right to battle the unions.  They have fought for much of this change.  He’s also right to fight for merit pay.  I would have been happy with my pay, though it was far less than the $100,000 mentioned in the video, if I didn’t know that teachers who weren’t doing much in the way of educating in their classrooms were also earning the same amount.

    When I announced I was going to retire, another teacher in the department announced his retirement at the same time.  Our department chair had been trying to get the principal to observe his classes more often because teachers near his room were always complaining about the noise and confusion–e.g., he was teaching swing dancing in an English class (no joke).  Homework assignments were often simply copying answers from the board, making a poster, etc.  The kids loved him and never complained.  He was fun.  He also helped coach baseball.  My students often complained to the principal because they had to do work that other students didn’t have to do in their classes.  Principals don’t like to deal with complaints.

    So, the chairman did what she was not supposed to do because the union had fought against it.  She took our state test results after they came back and figured the average progress my students had made and compared to the average LOSS that his students had shown and went to the principal and made it clear that his inability to deal with “bad” teachers had cost the school.

    Schools can be fixed, but I keep saying that if I had children starting public school at this time, I would severely cut my income, stay home and homeschool them.  Many of the top universities now go out of their way to recruit homeschooled children.  My ex-colleague is homeschooling her adopted daughter.  The girl, who would now be in third grade, scored last year (after what would have been her second grade year) on her tests as sixth and above in all her testss.

  • http://twitter.com/jbjdjbjd jbjd

    I am so sick of shallow analyses of complex problems; and always disappointed to see knee-jerk reactions to such superficial treatment, here.

    Here’s what the term “Needs Improvement” means.

    Each year, as required
    under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the New York State
    Education Department (SED) identifies a group of Title I public schools
    in New York City that are “Schools In Need of Improvement” (SINI).
    According to NCLB standards, these schools have not made “Adequate
    Yearly Progress” (AYP). They have not reached student achievement
    targets which are set for every school.

     

    Under NCLB, AYP is
    determined based on each school’s progress toward meeting the state
    proficiency level for all students in English language arts,
    mathematics, science and/or high school graduation rate. Schools are
    held accountable for the achievement of students of different races and
    ethnic groups, students with disabilities, students with limited English
    proficiency and low-income students. Schools must also have an average
    over two years of 95% of their students participating in State tests. If
    a school does not meet requirements in any one of these categories, it
    is placed on the list of Schools in Need of Improvement. While some
    schools on the list have educational programs that have produced good
    results for many students, they have not improved achievement
    sufficiently for other students. In other cases, not enough students
    participated in state-required tests.
    http://schools.nyc.gov/RulesPolicies/NCLB/Overview/default.htm

    Want to raise student scores? Expel students whose performance lowers these scores. Of course, this includes several categories of students entitled by law and, as in MA, the state constitution; to a free education. (That’s why we have a civil rights enforcement division in the DoE.)  

    I could go on but, people outside of education generally fail to consider too many variables which go into the final product; to address in one comment.

    (This theater of the absurd even features a high school student asked publicly to review the performance of his teachers. His reply elevates him to the status of ‘prophet’ whose utterances are now analyzed by Al Sharpton, of all people. )

    • Anonymous

      jbjd,

      I agree that the NCLB requirements are ridiculous in many ways.  However, as an ex-teacher in public schools in CO, I had to administer CSAPs (the CO test for the NCLB requirements).  We always received copies of OLD tests that were no longer being used so we could understand what was tested and how it was tested.  Personally I felt the tests were quite good. 

      What surprised me was that many teachers in my area thought they were unfair and so tried to do some pre-test “coaching” on how to answer questions as they were posed on the tests.  In my mind, if a teacher had been doing his or her job teaching content, the student would be able to handle the tests without the “coaching.”

      When the Nation at Risk report came out under Reagan, I applauded it.  I KNEW our nation’s education system was going downhill fast.

      The problem came with fixing the system when we got a FEDERAL level education department (which meant it became a political department and was therefore open to politics just as the EPA is).  Then we got all the education departments running the “fix” rather than the academic departments.  So when there had been no progress after the Nation at Risk came out, we finally got Bush’s NCLB, a major disaster–though, I do have to concede that it did achieve some improvement in our school.  The only problem is that the way it’s set up a school has to improve every single year forever.  And the guidelines for monitoring schools that don’t make “adequate” improvement are so arbitrary.  (One of the hs in our area that had the team come in for observation and review is a case in point.  Some of the people observing a teacher’s class thought she was doing a crappy boring job because she was working on topic sentences and paragraph development, while another teacher got rave reviews for the kind of idiocy I described above–swing dancing lessons in an English class (which took up many days of classes) to tie in with reading poems from the Harlam Renaissance.  The observors had NO BACKGROUND in English instruction..

      We need to get science departments (not science education departments),  math departments (not math education departments) English departments that teach more than literature (not English education departments) helping to make the fix.  We need businesses involved–what do they need in regard to writing, speaking, listening, reading, mathematical ability?

      This can happen successfully only at local and state levels.  Get the dang federal government out of it.

    • Anonymous

       

      Want to raise student scores? Expel students whose performance lowers these scores.

      Geez, what planet are you from? Shall we leave the sick to perish as well so that we can improve our economy? Stuff grandma in the closet because she is starting to forget things and needs a little help getting around?

      How about we challenge the TEACHERS to prove they are worthy of the title and pay them according to their results?

      • http://twitter.com/jbjdjbjd jbjd

         Are you intentionally oppositional? Of course, expelling students who under-perform is unacceptable, and not just because it is illegal. That’s my point. Even assuming test scores in this one high school improved; we have no idea why. I was offering only one possible explanation, which has been tried in other districts. Was it tried here, in the school whose supposed improvement is being lauded? I don’t know; we aren’t given these facts.

        • Anonymous

           As you know, it’s not always possible to separate fact from snark unless someone specifies it. Didn’t mean to start anything.

    • Anonymous

       Just curious jbjd are you a teacher or involved in education in some way. You seem to me to be pretty well informed if you are not involved in education.

  • Anonymous

    I can’t believe that I couldn’t object to anything Al Sharpton said in the first video. Kinda stunned. The vice superintendent has exactly the right approach. Enough of the mealy mouthed excuses.

    I can easily see why people have been pushing Christie to run for President. The dude tells it like it is in a common sense manner. Very refreshing. His comments about teachers’ unions really hit home. And like all unions they “bargain” for the most amount of pay and benefits for the least amount of work. At least in my experience. On the college level, teachers that have tenure can get away with almost anything. And they know it. I assume it is similar with primary educators.

    I have nothing but respect for fine teachers. I’ve been fortunate to have a few of them in my life and they challenged, inspired and showed me how to learn. Unfortunately, I’ve also had my share of bad teachers that know no one can touch them because they are protected by the union. I’ve had a few tell me so directly.

    Yes, education can be improved. New Jersey, of all places, has proven it. Kudos y’all!

  • Anonymous

    Upon reflection, I would like to add to what I’ve already stated. There are other problems with schools that are created by the priorities of the Administration. I live in a school district that has fine local schools, or so we are told. And each year they keep asking for more and more money. Well, the citizens around here got fed up with it and declined. As an act of vengeance, the school district decided to cut bus service thinking they could persuade us that way. Nope, we held our ground.

    So they came up with another great idea: Let’s make intramural sports pay to play. Now the parents have to pay $500 per child per sport. So if a kid wants to play baseball and football that’s an additional $1000 they have to pony up for each child. Next they announced that they had to start laying off teachers. Not once did they even offer to cut their own pay.

    When you visit the local schools one thing is very obvious. The buildings are beautiful and immense, they have first class indoor swimming pools and outdoor stadiums that rival many semi-pro teams. Yet they always want more money. For “education.”

    You know, it’s nice to have all these beautiful things for our children. But when they are being provided at the expense of actual education, it seems to me that someone is doing something terribly wrong. And it isn’t the citizens that are tired of paying for this nonsense.

    • Anonymous

      Actually, my daughter-in-law, who is from Turkey and who learned English starting very young in their schools and then who went on to get an English degree at a top international university in Ankara where ALL her classes were taught in English, married my son and had to spend her first years in America in a small town in TN.  There she did a stint as a substitute teacher. 

      She was appalled.  She mentioned the equipment, the books, the supplies, etc.  She thought it was absolutely crazy that the children behaved so badly, knew so little, and that the teachers for whom she substituted provided little in the way of lesson plans.  This was a small town POOR school district in TN; but by the standards for public schools she attended in Turkey, .she was impressed with the facilities and materials.  She told me about how many students were in her classrooms in Turkey, how little they had in the way of supplies, etc.  But, she said, the lessons were organized and hard and children behaved.. 

      When I was in Istanbul for my son’s wedding, I was visiting the museum and taking a break outside in a snack bar area.  Students who were about nine or ten came with their teacher.  A few brave ones came up to us to try out their English.  It was a fun experience.

      I love finding and looking at OLD texts.  They show how much harder the work was before.  But, the last years I taught, our district had paid a fortune for new ninth-grade English texts.  Those texts were very good from a top publisher and provided a plethora of extra materials for the students and teachers.  I was basically the only teacher to use many of those materials–especially the grammar drills.  Most the teachers never even had the students open them.  But they were always clamoring for NEW books.  Made me sick.

      There Is so much wrong with the public schools nowadays, that I would not ever send a kid even to some of the best and more wealthy district.  And you mention one of the reasons–the emphasis on sports facilities (and thus on coaching). 

      • Anonymous

         Thanks for the insight Diana.