Oh, deary me.

Being a bit on the generous side, the 1950s teaching methods may have been successful at instilling academic knowledge, but did they release into society a generation of well-rounded, well-adjusted individuals?

Personally, I think that the more you get the kids to learn before they hit 11, the more they’ll retain for life. Would that this included critical thinking skills!

I am not surprised to learn that modern 16-year-olds struggled with a 1950s 11+ maths paper. Year-on-year improvements in GCSE results are a clear indicator that the exams are getting easier. And there was a clear step change from the old GCE O-levels to the GCSEs in the first place (GCSEs gave credit for things that were assumed to be background knowledge for the GCEs).

I am shocked to learn that Numbers for Living exists as a topic for teenagers – did these kids learn nothing when they were 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10?

Also, did you see the TV series a few years ago – I forget what it was called – in which a group of 16-year-olds were subjected to 1950′s style teaching, to see how they would cope with it? The kids involved were among the brightest of their school year, and were expected to do well in their GCSEs. They were taught using 1950s methods, and according to the 50′s curriculum.
At one point, they were given a genuine maths exam paper from the 50′s, without being told what level it was. They all struggled with it. When asked what level of exam they thought it was, they assumed that it was an O-level paper. It was, in fact, a 1950′s eleven plus paper!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For non-British readers, O-levels were the exams which the more intelligent kids used to sit at age 16. The eleven plus was the set of exams which they used to sit at 11, in the last year of junior school, the result of which determined whether or not they would go on to grammar school and be taught to the standard of O-levels. So what this experiment found was that the brightest of today’s 16-year-olds are not capable of passing exams which used to be given to 11-year-olds.
Need I say more?

Sheesh!

No wonder the soft options (“media studies” anyone?) are so popular.

Bring back GCEs – at least they meant something.

My fiancée – being a few years younger than I – had no choice but to do “combined science” instead of biology, chemistry and physics at school. And yet it was timetabled as a “double” subject (instead of the three it allegedly replaced).

In math, he’s still learning that 5 is more than 3 (SECOND GRADE!!!)…

They teach that in school in the US?

I think I had always assumed that such basics of counting would be expected to be taught by parents before the kids reach school age.

Our situation is complicated by the fact that my son is gifted with an anxiety disorder. (He scored a 134 on an IQ test but had a panic attack during it. Doctor said he would likely have scored over 140 had he not had a panic attack.)

On the gifted front, my son’s school is refusing to challenge him acedemically. In math, he’s still learning that 5 is more than 3 (SECOND GRADE!!!) while he wants to learn multiplication and division (which I introduced him to… he immediately grasped the concepts and wanted to move to fractions).

On the panic attack fr0nt, the school is very slowly moving forward. Emphasis on slowly. We contacted them 2 weeks before school started to set something up and they are just now getting around to writing something up for to work with my son. Meanwhile, the kids have learned that triggering his panic attacks means they don’t need to learn anything (as teacher needs to deal with my son’s screaming/out of control panic attacks).

Therefore, our decision needs to take into consideration not just general academics, but how those academics can be adjusted to maximize our son’s learning potential.

According to a 2006 study by the Goldwater Institute, Arizona’s public schools spend 50% more per student than Arizona’s private schools. The study also says that while teachers constitute 72% of the employees at private schools, they make up less than half of the staff at public schools. According to the study, if Arizona’s public schools wanted to be like private schools, they would have to hire approximately 25,000 more teachers, and eliminate 21,210 administration employees

Wow! What the hell do all these people do?

When I was at school (in the UK) in the ’80s, we had roughly 45 – 50 teachers, a head teacher and deputy head teacher, perhaps 4 technicians, 3 admin staff and perhaps 6 ancillary staff. That’s nearly 80% of the staff actually being teachers.

How about cutting the amount of money schools spend on elite sports? The idea that schools spend more on their football team than on their (say) English department in the hope that one of their players will make it to the NFL is just depressing.

This is an aspect of the US system I had forgotten.

As a kind of analogy, how might we feel if the school our child attends had an elite chemistry lab, that existed only for the best chemistry students?

I’d probably feel rather conflicted about it. On the one hand, I’d want to encourage my child to excel in that subject and so get the benefit of the facility, and on the other it would be a very obvious sign of elitism. Schools are not really the place for such excessive elitism in education – this should occur mainly in universities.

It’s in the interest of business to have a well-trained workforce, but not necessarily a well-educated one. As for politicians, it seems they tend to favor ideological fervor in their constituents rather than enlightened insight. There’s precedent for this. Diane Ravitch’s Left Back documents the long-standing view that most people don’t need a well-rounded education, just vocational training. Fortunately this view is not dominant (and it’s one she emphatically does not share), but it does persist.

But it is hard to determine which ones will have an impact and which ones won’t. Someone smarter then me could probably come up with an equation to do it, something like” S=media coverage times violent repression log total numbers times charismatic leadership squared”

That’s “Depledge”, with three “e”s.

D’oh!! And I’ve been on this board HOW long? *facepalm* I’d claim ignorance, but it’s right there. My apologies.

I didn’t know this. Do you have a reference to that info?

Well, no sources as solid as I’d like – a somewhat wide range of numbers seems to come up in teh Google, and some are outdated – but the overall consensus seems to be that this is true (some states pay less per student, while some pay more).
Sauce:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States#Funding_for_K.E2.80.9312_schools

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-comparison_x.htm

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/13/national/main838207.shtml

http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/05/24/us-usa-education-spending-idUSN2438214220070524

On the other hand, this chart seems to correlate SAT scores very closely to per-student spending, per state:
http://xenophilius.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/how-per-student-spending-on-education-compares-to-state-sat-score-rankings/

In any case, it looks like things are only getting worse (again, from an informal scanning of Google hits). It looks like the studies that show US school spending ranking higher globally are all older, and those ranking the US low on test scores are all relatively new.
It may very well be that increased spending does directly lead to higher scores all around, but our system is just particularly wasteful and inefficient across the board.

The question is: where is the money going and from where is it being taken.

Sadly, in my son’s school district, I know where the money is going to: Charter Schools. There has been a big push here to open more and more of them. This is despite the fact that the ones in this area are failing all of their metrics. (They get to select which students they want and self-report test scores with no third party checking of these scores and they still fail!)

Meanwhile, the money flows away from the public schools to the Charters. Of course, this means the quality of public education declines (class size increases, teachers get laid off, schools are closed, etc).

So what happens when the public school quality declines? The businesses that own the charter schools lobby to open up more. This secures more money for themselves and drains more from the public schools.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

We’ve been looking into private schools but our options are limited. First of all, is the cost. We’re just not sure we can afford it. Secondly, all of the private schools in our area are religious institutions. I have a problem with my (Jewish) son going to a school where all of the kids are going to be taught about Jesus Christ in a religious way. Even if he’s excused from those classes, he’ll still be singled out (moreso than in a public school). There is one Jewish day school in the area and we’re considering that but it still triggers our price concerns.

Meanwhile, we’ve looked into homeschooling. My wife is a teacher by trade even if she’s a stay-at-home mom/freelance writer at the moment. She’s concluded that it isn’t something she thinks she could do and doesn’t think it would be optimal for our son’s needs. (Nothing against home schoolers. No one solution is perfect for everyone.)

So our options seem to be: 1) Remain at the crumbling public school and hope for the best or 2) Go deep into debt paying for a private school (while still paying taxes to finance the declining public schools and proliferating charters). This has been a very stressful decision to make.

Hey, how about an increased tax on the bonuses paid to incompetent bankers?

BTW. Did the huge corporations & stockbrokers ever pay back all their taxpayer funded bail out money from the GFC – preferably with interest like they’d charge for us? If not, why not?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

You’re right. You’re guessing.

As far as I’m concerned, any serious cuts to the academic side of schooling are serious, whether it’s in the English, Maths, Science, History or any other Department. There are lots of things kids need to know to be functioning members of society.

“One thing i do know is that Jan Brewer is certainly planning to abolish “ethnic studies” ( garbage useless courses and even dangerous in cases like Arizona).”

Okay, I’ll take your word for it.

“Also, what would your solution to the education crisis be? increasing spending on ED?”

How about cutting the amount of money schools spend on elite sports? The idea that schools spend more on their football team than on their (say) English department in the hope that one of their players will make it to the NFL is just depressing.

“money is not the solution to all problems. What is needed is more quality education. Quality always beats quantity.”

And the solution for the mice was to put a bell on the cat. It’s all well and good to say what the answer is. I’d like to hear a bit more on the “how”. How do you propose to provide quality education?

I’m not saying, “Woo-hoo, cut education spending”. I am saying, however, that a lack of spending is not the problem with the schools.

In fact, I did a little Googling just now and guess what… huge tax breaks for Intel in Arizona. A tax break large enough to drive the entire education funding cutback through.

http://azdailysun.com/news/local/state-and-regional/article_530fc982-ea45-52d6-a7e2-3dee33f436a6.html

Big business and politics – SSDD.

Eh, I have mixed feelings about this. Obviously, education is necessary, and should be a top priority.

On the other hand, here in the US we spend more then most nations per student already, despite placing from mediocre to lousy on standardized national testing. It stands to reason that it’s entirely possible to improve our education system without simply throwing more money at the problem.

I didn’t know this. Do you have a reference to that info?

Anecdotally, my mom used to teach: ultimately, she left in disgust. Between inept, overpaid administrators who’d never set foot in a classroom (and lots of them), ridiculous red tape, unrealistic parental expectations, large class sizes, etc etc, she just couldn’t deal with it. And don’t even get her started on the waste. She told me that teachers often “dumpster dive” behind the County Office of Education, because the furniture and computers that they THROW OUT are better then anything that the teachers can get for their classrooms.

Yeah, the problem with giving administrators control of the money is that they too-often spend it where they want it spent, not where it does the most good.

I’ve never encountered this kind of waste myself, but I was shocked to find that at least some UK schools had removed the practical aspects of subjects such as chemistrty (I mention chemistry in particular because it was the focus of the TV documentary a couple of years ago).