Ran into a friend the other day whose husband works as a public high school teacher in the Dallas area. He's still pretty green at it, and I remember the idealism with which he entered the teacher workforce, so I asked her how it was going. She said he'd applied for a transfer out of his school.
"He says he can't change a culture, and he's burnt out trying," she explained.
"Bobby" teaches in a school that's majority Latino, with a large number of African-Americans in the student body. His wife -- and let me say, these are white liberals -- told me that Bobby has run smack up against a culture of anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism. Bobby and the other teachers go through training to make them culturally sensitive to the large number of Latino kids, immigrants from Mexico and points south. But in the end, work has to get done. And the kids aren't doing it, and teachers can't count on support from home, Bobby's wife reports.
"A lot of these kids come from families where the mom and dad are doing way better here than back in Mexico," she said. "So they figure if their kid drops out of school, big deal, he can go join Uncle Freddy's lawn crew and still do much better than he could have back home."
She added that her husband was discouraged because any time he tried to challenge his students to study and work harder, the reply was always some variation of, "You're a rich white man, what do you know about our lives?"
Yeah, public school teachers in Texas pretty much light their cigars with hundred-dollar bills.
How do you change that culture? And what if you are the parents of kids -- white, black, brown, whatever -- and you believe in education, personal responsibility and the like, and you don't want your kids to have to suffer through a school full of layabouts -- but you can't afford private school? Unless you homeschool, you're stuck. And if both you and your spouse have to work, you can't homeschool.
Conservatives complain all the time about our failing public schools, and we're right to do so. But what if the most broken thing about our public schools is the personal culture of the public that uses them? What do you do then? How can you even begin to address this politically? Is it the government's fault that nobody in Bobby's class will turn in their homework, and nobody's parents will make them?
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Daniel
But tracking people into lower-paying occupations and educational programs has much greater consequences in the U.S., where the wealthy, middle class, and poor live in vastly different worlds and where there is minimal social welfare structure to assist the working poor.
Exactly, which is why, although I think tracking is a very good idea, (It is, in essense, the 'Gifted' program at large.), it is a particularly dangerous concept in the US.
I want to tell people a story: I was fairly smart in school, and took Algebra I in seventh grade, aka, in middle school.
When I reached HS, I took Geometry, Algebra II, passed them easy, and then failed Trig. The next year, my senior year, I was in emergency mode, because I needed three high school maths to graduate, and I knew if I couldn't handle Trig the previous year there was no way I was handling it that one.
So, I looked at the rules, and went back and took Algebra I, and passed it trivially while sleeping through the class. (I wasn't the only guy doing it, I had another senior with me. In that specific Algebra class. It didn't occur to me until years later that, as there were five or six such classes, there might have been as many as a dozen seniors doing that. Out of a class of 130!)
And, now, on my HS transcript, I have a failed Trig on there, despite Trig not being required, whereas people who took it easy and waited until eighth grade to take Algebra have a higher GPA. And don't get me started on people who had Pre-Algebra, Algebra, and Geometry as their three.
Basically, what I am trying to demonstrate, is that educational grading makes no sense. I got punished for trying hard and failing, as opposed to not trying, and I had to go back and do something everyone knew perfectly well I could do, wasting a class.
Even before the idiotic 'teach to the test' NCLB showed up, schools were already discouraging learning. Sure, they try to fix it piecemeal with 'honors' classes and whatnot, but there's absolutely no systematic attempt to make grades actually reflect any sort of skill or willingness to work or anything that's even vaguely relevant.
And as grades have basically just come to mean 'You graduate and you get into college', of course people have started to think they've 'earned' such a grade.
We need to totally redo the entire grading system from top to bottom. When we're done, we need people to walk out with information that actually indicates something about their skill. This will mean, sadly, many people will walk out with 'below average', instead of the crazy grade inflation that lets even the worse student walk out with mostly Bs. (Which are supposed to be 'average'.)
To keep people from being upset at this, I propose some new scale, not dividable by 10 to keep people from 'translating' it to the old system, so let's say a scale of 0-15. A 5 would mean basic knowledge, in math it might mean basic Algebra skill. A 10 would be, basically, 'ready for college',somewhere around Algebra II/Trig/Precalc, and a 15 would be 'we've taught them as much as we can and they got it all'.
The important point is it is overall...individual courses get scored however, but in the end, you walk out the door a piece of paper saying 'He knows this much in Math', and that's all. (I'm not opposed to additional grades saying how hard he works or something, though. Or other subgrades...a separate lab grade for science might be good.)
If you get 5 in a few core subjects, you graduate, or maybe you also have to score another extra 5 anywhere. (Aka, 'electives', although instead you could just go further with the cores.) This would, incidentally, let people who currently drop out actually speed through an education of the core classes in two years, and get a degree that says, while they may not be exceptional, they at least understand the basics of stuff.
Basically, the only way to stop grade inflation is to stop having all the successful grades crammed in the top 30% and then averaged. That system is entirely nonsensical.
David, I don't disagree with you in principle, but your story illustrates that one can (and should) fix the existing system.
I, too, took Algebra I in 7th grade. Our stories immediately diverge right there, because I received HS credit for the class. If I had later needed another math credit, I would not have had the bogus option you had. I would have done what you should have been counseled and pushed to do: retake Trig to pass it.
There are too many babies sitting in bath water puddles.
SVS, If we followed the zero-sum logic of Murray, we'd have thought that the newly arrived Jews from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century were going to be a permanent underclass of the "intellectually challenged." That talk was all the rage of the eugenicists and nativists of that time. Guess they got that one wrong.
Sorry, but your atttempt to lump Murray with eugenicists and nativists is simply pathetic. His logic is not zero-sum; it is merely following the data where it goes.
Jews had high IQ back at the turn of the century (IQ doesn't change that fast, even with the Flynn effect). And your claim is simply false: we didn't have effective IQ tests (that had good data behind them) at the turn of the century to know how Jews tested back then. What we do know is that as soon as Jews and Asians were given a chance (also around the 1950s) they kicked -ut-.
IQ tests actually save smart minorities from racists: there are tons of brainy minorities of all races, and IQ is the anti-racist tool for smart minorities to get ahead.
But I don't know why I even bother on these threads. What Murrey said is a yawn to anyone who knows even the basics about IQ research. Even your line of arugment - trying to find weird exceptions and then cry racism - tells the whole tale. Truth isn't what you're after.
If I had later needed another math credit, I would not have had the bogus option you had. I would have done what you should have been counseled and pushed to do: retake Trig to pass it.
That's not what I should have done. That would have run me the quite real risk of not graduating high school.
But the story would make exactly the same amount of sense even if I'd gotten credit for the middle school math. I'd have still taken Trig, even if I didn't need, I would have still failed it, I would have still gotten hurt by attempting it when others who didn't try did not. I just would have used my 7th grade Algebra grade instead of my 12th grade Algebra grade to compute my GPA, which would have hurt me even more.
The grading system in schools, as it stands, makes no sense. There are people who walk out with high GPA who took easy classes, and people who walk out with lower ones because they didn't. There are people who had some sort of family crisis in the middle of a year, flunked their classes, and came back and caught up with a lot of work and night classes, and their grades still suck. There are people like me who can memorized a bunch of stuff for short amounts of time, and always breezed through any history test, while others who genuinely tried to learn the data did poorly, but knew a lot more a year later. OTOH, I actually did learn the concepts in math, doing poorer on test because I hadn't memorized the rules, I actually had to work from the concepts, which made me flunk when I hit a math I didn't understand, whereas people who were memorizing happily kept memorizing.
When I was in high school, I complained about grades not reflecting knowledge. Well, I understand now grades are not solely about knowledge, they're about skill and willingness to work and learning and even effort....except they don't reflect those things either. They don't reflect anything.
It's hard to directly explain the link between this and what the article is talking about, but there are people who are complaining that teachers have decided that grades are meaningless and everyone gets As and Bs and goes to the next grade even when, for example, they cannot read at a 4th grade level in 10th grade English lit. These people need to understand that teachers are just accepting the reality that grades are meaningless, and have always been so.
Until they do reflect some actual thing, until people walk out of high school with paper that indicates actual skill level at something objective, instead numbers saying totally random things about how they bounced around between classes, you will have parents arguing based on 'fairness' and have grade inflations. Right now, they're just random dice throws that, if you get enough of, you graduate, and if you get enough more, you go to college, and of course parents want a rethrow if they get snake eyes.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.