I’m liking much of what Obama has done lately. At least, his willingness to tackle issues like overfishing and some pollution is commendable. But on education, he really screws the pooch.
Speaking as someone with no shortage of experience in education, there’s only one rough way to do it correctly. As in writing, where what you write depends on your audience, in education what you teach depends on your students — except that they come in strata. You either teach to the top or to the bottom. All subvariants of a plan distill or decay down to one of these two: teach to top, or teach to bottom.
Teaching to the bottom is the “inclusive” and politically correct method. In this view, all your students and the teacher are so damn smart that a new idea will be introduced, they’ll get it, and then wait patiently for Joe Slow and Callie Clueless to catch up. In reality, while we’re waiting, everyone zones out including the teacher. This produces school that bores its students, causing more discipline problems, which ends up becoming a jail (to handle the discipline problems) in which boredom is the norm (because everyone is zoned out or waiting for the slow). In Texas schools, they’re even “mainstreaming” retarded (sorry: “mentally challenged” and “learning disabled”) students so that the whole class gets to wait for the 70 IQ point kids in the back to grasp what a concept is, or even remember the name of the subject.
Teaching to the top is how we used to do it in this country and Europe. In this view, education is like a speed train or a hose you drink from in the summer. It constantly generates high-intensity material so that smart kids are not bored, and lets everyone grasp what they can. A student who is both intelligent and organized will capture the 90% of this material necessary to perform quite well. Dumb students are just screwed, but they end up getting mercy Cs and getting passed along to next year.
Obama’s plan combines teaching to the bottom with penalties for those who do not make bricks out of mud alone, e.g. somehow motivate those politically equal but mentally unequal slow kids to perform as well as the smart ones:
In interviews, they said the administration’s proposal for rewriting the main law outlining federal policies on public schooling, No Child Left Behind, would continue what they called an overemphasis on standardized tests, impose federal mandates on issues traditionally handled in collective bargaining, and probably lead to mass firings of teachers in low-performing schools.
The proposals, Mr. Duncan said, would encourage states and school districts to develop better teacher evaluation systems, better teacher education programs, and more effective career advancement systems.
The administration’s plan for the No Child revision would, if enacted by Congress, replace the law’s accountability system, based around the goal of bringing all students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014, with another intended to help all students graduate from high school ready for college and career by 2020. The current system has labeled one in three of the nation’s 98,000 schools as failing, far more than any level of government can help, and the process has left many teachers demoralized.
The administration’s proposal would instead focus the most intense school turnaround efforts on about 5,000 of the most chronically failing schools. – NYT
So Obama’s plan is to penalize teachers for lagging behind, and throw our money into the chronically failing schools. This not only neglects our best hope, which is the smart/motivated/organized kids, but also will penalize teachers for not being able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. If a student has an IQ of 90, they’re not fodder for high school or college. They will never be in an advanced class. They will only fail.
Even worse, by continuing our deflation of the value of an American high school education, we’ve forced colleges to take over the tasks of remedial education, which wastes half of a college degree on menial stuff. That means in turn that a college degree is not worth much, and so we all must rush out for graduate education. In turn, that isn’t worth that much, since a lot of it gets dedicated to filtering and re-reducating undereducated college students.
By teaching to the bottom, we’ve reduced our education system to three tiers of high school.
As a result, every single person out there wants a college degree and thanks to the dumbing-down, they can get one — but this in turn dumbs down college further and makes each college degree that much less valuable. If every job candidate went to college, and even elite colleges accept relatively unstellar students for political or financial reasons, the college degree becomes the new high school diploma.
Two articles in the last year have attacked this idea. In the first, Charles Murray points out that college for people under 115 IQ points is a total waste of time. In the second, Thomas Reeves shows how many students do better by not going to college, which in turn prevents the dilution of the value of a degree.
America stumbles downward toward third-world status not because we’re importing third world workers, but because we’ve dumbed ourselves down to the point where we’re useless and expect a gold ribbon for showing up and writing our name on the page. The rest of the world doesn’t work that way, and we can’t afford to keep working that way as we get more dysfunctional. We need to reverse dumbing down, but Obama’s combination of focusing on the negative low performers, and penalizing teachers for not making them high performers, only worsens the situation.
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A big catalyst for all this was not only the civil rights movement/political correctness in general, but another effect of that, which was opening up a much larger student loan pool than we had ever seen. Now, suddenly, people viewed going into debt as a right, and getting an education as a right. Put it together and what do you get? A federally funded (read: poorly managed) business with franchises all over. Even the private universities got in on the act and as the funds kept flowing and applications kept coming in, schools expanded campuses and endowments, and raised prices higher and higher. Now it costs about the MSRP of a BMW PER YEAR to go to some of the better-ranked private schools…and even some of the not-so-well-ranked.
Eliminate access to easy money at low interest rates to go in the first place, and you’ve eliminated about half the problem. It used to be that even at private universities – many of which were affiliated with or started by churches – you could borrow money at a low interest rate if you were already there and couldn’t make ends meet. They didn’t want to see smart people leave, and all they had was smart people. Now, they couldn’t give a s**t who stays and who goes as long as they get their $$ from one source or another.
PhD is the new bachelors/masters…you need the will to go to school and live in poverty for about 10 years after your friends who graduate with business degrees to *really* prove you want to be educated.
I’m just glad I went to school when I did. High school was a bit messed up for a lot of other reasons, but I was part of a school district that ranked well in a state that had one of the higher rankings for public schools in the nation at the time. And by no means was I from a privileged community. Also, and I believe this is important, but we had a pretty homogeneous student body. That isn’t to say that there were not different types of people, but pretty much everyone was a native English speaker. Also, there was a bit of technology, but this was before too many computers in the classroom (we had computer labs, and occasionally a teacher had a computer in the classroom, but that was rare.) I will admit though that in retrospect there was a lot about the school environment that was unhealthy. A zoo in a way. But I’m still glad I did it then and not now. Though this is a bias not based upon a full grasp of the modern reality since I am pretty far removed from the school environment of today. Just a disclaimer.
I really don’t know what it is like in the modern classroom, but I am sure there are many places where they have to cater to many ESL students in the main classrooms who might have that barrier there. And I can’t help but think that kids sitting in front of screens all the time (at home, in the classroom, etc.) doesn’t give them a bit of ADD. But like I said, I don’t know the true reality for kids these days so I’ll admit I am only speculating.
On a related subject, I always crack up when people talk about how we have to compete on the global stage. First off, when do we reach a point that we have enough knowledge that we can start using it to make more enjoyable and happier communities, and functional societies? I’m not saying there isn’t always more to learn and discover. But are we going to be in a competitive race for the end of time only to find out we ruined what was good in life along the way? We need smart people to come up with good ideas, ones that enrich life. Even if they are just enlightening philosophical insights that might encourage people to live a little better. Anything to get the masses off there doritos eatin’ couch sittin’ idol watchin’ dope smokin’ people magazine readin’ messed up head thinkin’. Oh, wait. Never mind. I can’t do crap for these people so I think I’ll just do better for myself.
I forgot to add; there needs to be the other side of this coin to make it all work. We also need the spotlight grabbin’ look at me jabbin’ in the endzone dancin’ and prancin’ don’t you know who I am demandin’ cuz I was an internet celeb grandin’ and was in that same people magazine a posin’ showing off my bling-bling like I’m all a knowin’ fools.
It is as if the modern world has become a bunch of knuckledheaded narcissists performing for the clueless masses. The modern reality produces garbage on a lot of levels and the clueless consume it all up. And because there is no end of demand for this stuff, the economic drive to produce more never ends. This very same process then shapes the collective reality we live in and we are made to feel that we have to accept it all as normal and healthy. I guess I could just join the club and start sportin’ some bling. Bling-Bling, bling-bling, bling-bling, look at my bling-bling! I’m so that!!
lol :)
Nice one Eric.
And very true.
You can not change the world.
But you can change yourself.
You are part of the world.
Change yourself, and the world is changed.
Lao Tzu should be required reading throughout the West.
I am a teacher myself and I am confronted daily to the results of teaching from the bottom. Our entire system is built around this approach. We’re making sure the kids will be clever enough to operate the levers but dumb enough to blindly obey authority.
There’s very little one can do to prevent the dumbing-down of the actual or coming generations. Everything is set in place in our society to make sure everyone conforms to the norm and the lower the norm is, the easier it is to fit everyone in.
It just reminds me of “Idiocracy”, the movie…