Public education & the limits of politics

One of the problems faced here in Iowa by teachers is the blatant disrespect students have for educators. Much of this is inculcated at home by parents who are constantly complaining about schools that waste money, schools that do not enforce discipline, drugs and sex in school, etc. Another big refrain that is heard by these students is that the schools are bastions of liberals that do not respect folks "like us."

Of course, when one of these kids gets into trouble (usually sex, drugs or fighting) it is the parents who come into school ready to take on the system because their kid "wouldn't do something like that, and it must be one of the other kids that set them up for this."

Kids listen to TV, radio and other media outlets. When all you hear from conservatives (the loudest voice in the public media these days) is how teachers are overpaid, liberal, and unpatriotic, is it any wonder that kids don't respect educators?

I guess my response to this post would be a question: What are you doing about it, Rod?

While my reading of Wendell Berry is a bit limited, what I have taken from him is the idea that true change to any environment begins, quite literally, in your own back yard.

You post frequently on a short-comings of the public arena: the schools, the communities, the politics, the neighborhoods, etc. Yet I have never heard you take a pro-active approach to dealing with these problems in your own back yard. I do not recall reading anything about how you have joined a school board, organized a community action group or participated in a group that reaches out to fellow members of your community who may not share your faith or culture.

It's easy to blog a couple hundred words on the various ills of your community, but, specifically, what are you doing about it?

Rod: Well, the way to change the "public" is to change the "culture", through all of those small slow forces that are the subject of 3 years of Crunchy Con conversations.

But, as for your statement "Unless you homeschool, you're stuck. And if both you and your spouse have to work, you can't homeschool." I'd be interested in hearing what you mean by "have to work."

My wife and I made the decision 16 years ago to homeschool our kids, and she's foregone a career outside the home ever since in order to make this possible. We're doing better now, but still have only one car as we always have and don't have health insurance. It's not easy, but "have to" strikes me as a slippery way of saying that parents who don't homeschool do so because they don't sufficiently value homeschooling, not because they both "have to work."

Bless,
Doug

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?

Well, gee, I don't know--I guess you might just have to shoot all those bad people and start over, because they're obviously no good and it's no use trying to help them. [/sarcasm] Seriously--what kind of answer is possible to such a question? You're talking about human beings here, not some form of incomprehensible alien life. Ask them what they need. Maybe you'll get some answers.

My own involvement is limited. I was a Girl Scout leader for a number of years, with a troop that was about one-third middle class kids, one third messed-up white kids, and one third black kids from the local housing project. And when we lived in Texas, I volunteered two days a week with a group that provided after-school tutoring to children from a low-performing school in the DFW area.

Based on this, I'd say that the needs of poor children and families are complex, yet comprehensible. And it is by no means so simple as that their families are just no good. The very use of the term "layabouts" to refer to CHILDREN is indicative of an attitude that is not helpful. More times than I could believe, I heard teachers and the complacently well-to-do say things like "well, what can you expect from THOSE children." And "THOSE children" were just, well, children. Thrown into an unkind world through no desire of their own, just trying to survive. Yet they were already thrown away, as far as some people were concerned. It makes my blood boil.

Yet, at the same time, I don't blame the teachers for the whole mess either. It's true--they don't have the ability to change the pathology of a whole society in a few hours a day. It's just a whole lot easier to fixate on who to blame, isn't it? Yet blaming someone solves nothing.

If you want an answer to "what to do" I'll recommend the same thing I've recommended before: Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. Bring it to Dallas. See what happens.

http://www.hcz.org/

Treat people like human beings. Ask them what they need, and listen to the answers instead of flying off into a paroxysm of denial. Invest in their success. Treat them the way you want to be treated. You want an answer to those questions? You're a Christian--go ask Jesus what he would do.

AP classes!

Seriously though, I agree with Derek. We need to accept that not all, and maybe even most, kids aren't the best fit for college, and offer constructive alternatives like vocational education.

I might direct some folks to the work of Cambridge & Princeton scholar Patricia Crone. _Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam_ as well as _Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World_ are key, if controversial, works on this very matter.

Richard

Maybe the previous post about bootstrapping and this post are related. If this underclass of society is content to inculcate anti-intellectualism and disrespect into their children, then why should it bother me if their economic fate is a deadend? America will be in trouble when bright children who work hard and pursue an education can't make it. I still see plenty of opportunities for the kids of parents who care about their childrens education.

I'll go one further and say we should be discouraging a lot of people from going to college. Excepting scholars and some professions (like medicine, engineering and law), college is often a waste of time and money. Many kids wind up burdened with debts for degrees that won't let them get out from under their debt for decades. How is this "prosperity"?

The comments about trades/vocational education vs. college bring to mind this article by Charles Murray:

www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25464,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

Rod, 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?

Easy. V-O-U-C-H-E-R-S. Let everyone go where they want. The people who care about education will choose rigorous schools, and those who don't should enter the workforce. Everyone's happy - except the NEA and Democrats.

Matt, It's easy to blog a couple hundred words on the various ills of your community, but, specifically, what are you doing about it?

Actually, it's not easy to talk about public schools with any truth, because people are always shouting you down, outspending you with union dollars, or blaming you if you even mention the problem, as you do here. Thank you, Rod, for having the stones to say something.

Not to mention that everyone freaks out if you dare point out the facts, such as this school most likely has an IQ average over 0.5 SD below the mean. Which means education beyond the 3 Rs is really wasting a lot of these kid's time; it would be like teaching me ballet. The kids know it, their parents know it, but what is so funny and sad is that all these smarty-pants educators are too dumb to know it. Ideology = ignorance. What's so terrible is that the kids, already facing tough odds in a meritorious society that exports manufacturing and then looks down on men who work with their hands, will have to suffer through this dehumanizing and dangerous public school institution, and then get a late start on life as their reward, just to satisfy some liberal fantasy.

Can you imagine for just a minute if upper-crust white folk had to send their kids to these types of schools? Can you imagine the howl?

Derek Copold, college is often a waste of time and money. Many kids wind up burdened with debts for degrees that won't let them get out from under their debt for decades.

Shhhh. Don't ruin the scam. The trick is to put on those rose-colored glasses, get all the kids who have no business being in college due to lack of brains to run up debt so they become indentured servants for life. It's easy: high school teachers just whisper in their ear, "you can do anything, be anything." But hey, it's all good liberal politics, as the feds will pay down all that student loan debt anyway once Hillary gets elected. Ruining kids lives and feeling good about it - that's the education scam.

Regarding majority Hipanic schools: get used to it. 25% of all USA babies born in 2006 were Hispanic. This means most babies born in the Southwest were Hispanic (heck, Jose was #1 name in TX in 2006).

MI, The comments about trades/vocational education vs. college bring to mind this article by Charles Murray

Hey, MI, didn't Murray write The Bell Curve? He's supposed to be buried under a pile of liberal rocks somewhere with Watson.

I did go to your linked article and read it; interesting piece, but it's mostly old news. Money quotes:

To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.

These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.

In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier.... [but] properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges.

Old news, sure, but of course this type of rational thinking has no place in the American fantasy that everyone can be a doctor, lawyer, or even professional boxer if they try hard enough. Hope is far more important to American's than love.

I am a public school teacher--nine years at it now. Before coming home, I taught in a highly at risk district in North East Texas. We also had a lot of students who came to this country because of the economic opportunities their parents were seeking here.

We can argue about if it's right that undocumented/illegal/migrant students are here--but it's a fact--and as far as I know, it's a law. We as teachers have the charge to teach all of the kids as good as we can with the resources given. It really came down to family and community support.

I was fortunate enough to meet many of my students parents during my time there. Quite a few of them were educated--nurses and teachers and alike--but because of the lack of good paying jobs, they took their lot with a major chicken plant in the area. Many did want to provide a better life for their kids. There were also, unfortunately, a undercurrent of gangs and underage pregnancy. I had at least two students that were married. Married 8th graders. 8th Grade Moms.

During the summer, we ran a summer program for our migrant kids. We were able to show them that there was more than just the chicken plant to look forward to. Maybe not Harvard or UT--but something better if they reached for it. The two years that I was apart of the program, we were able to introduce the students to a Mexican American artist from artsy side of Dallas--can't remember his name--but he was a young fella that almost got caught up in the gangs of Houston until he turned his life around and took to art--spray paint art. Makes a great living at it (you should see his studios)--and loves talking to all students--but especially migrant kids--like the kids your friend is having trouble with.

Tell your friend, Rod, that there is hope. High School is a tough age. Your friend won't reach every kid. However, if he keeps at it, many of the kids will see it. Its not over night. One of the toughest things I had to face, just like many of the other Texas educators out there, was the pressure of that darn TAKS (or whatever the hell the folks in Austin call the state test these days). Me and two other dedicated teachers were able to pull their Social Studies scores up from 68% to 96% in three years. Students that were ESL, hadn't been in the country for 4 years--as well as our other students. It can be done.

I respect my fellow conservatives who have the best of intentions for our youth. However, vouchers are the end all for our educational ills. There are some good private schools there--but it won't pull all the kids up. And should failing public schools reform and look outside of the box--certainly. But last time I checked, the problem with Texas education isn't because there's a strong teachers union. Now inner city schools up North and elsewhere...

Well, yes, there are hard issues of social class and perceived prospects for upward [sic] mobility that impact around ages twelve to fourteen, often earlier.

In Europe, with its (previously more) rigid class divisions, the solution is generally to split children up into a tiered set of public schools (usually 3-4 tiers) around that age, according to "performance" and parental choice. Allowing for transfers should the chosen tier be wrong, of course. It makes for cruel arrogance and demoralization and class-based hostility on the part of students, but teachers in those tiered schools then teach according to known expectations and expected variability range of student ability (not always a good thing, but it works in the mean).

Upward social mobility is presently statistically greater in the UK (and probably near its level throughout the EU) than the US. Just maybe :-) social democracy is the winning system once societies overcome the great pains and high costs of their social and economic transition to Modernity.

"Holland's is a profoundly egalitarian society, yet this is how they do it; it seems to me that the Dutch habit of practicality wins out here."

But up until about 10 years ago, the Netherlands was a homogenous society where questions like race need not intrude into egalitarianism,

In the U.S., tracking students has always resulted in race-based decisions. Non-white students are encouraged not to take AP classes even when they have similar grades and abilities of whites and Asians. Educational research shows that lower expectations by the decisionmakers results in non-white students being tracked into lower levels, even when they achieve at the same level as white students.

There is less concern about the tracking in the Netherlands because there is a social welfare framework that has a leveling effect, so students tracked into lower-paying occupations start with such a common base of social services with those in higher-paying occupations that later inequalities are less consequential.

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.

The Atlantic had a great article on reforming education about four years and the main point was you had to break the pay = seniority cycle in public education. When the gym teacher with 20 years is paid more than the science teacher of 5 years, although the competition for someone with the skill necessary to teach science is far greater, and hence results in under-qualified folks teaching science.

M_David:

Think about what the free market would create; most schools would probably be one-room schools taught out of the parent's home, with a single teacher (at $8k per kid, you could teach 8 kids out of your home and make a good living). Also, it could eliminate teh need for an "education" degree, what a joke. The purpose is not to solve all ills, but rather to save thousands of smart kids. But we can't have that, no sir - Dems need those union dollars.

Explain to me how disabled Special Education students would be properly served by such a system, and you have me on board. Or are the "normal" kids the only ones who count?

On another topic, the Netherlands has rich people and poor people, of course. But the gap is FAR less than it is here, and less than it is in the UK even. It's a more pleasant place for that fact. They must be doing something right.

(It's dusk, the caressing dusk of late summer. I'm bicycling past a row of "attached" houses in a suburb of Amsterdam. In every dwelling the front room is lit, and curtains are not drawn. (Another cultural oddity. If you draw your curtains, are you up to something??) Old people sit in their very modest living rooms - these are not the houses of the well-to-do - checking me out. I obviously don't know what I'm doing - even my bike skills are questionable - but they smile tolerantly.)

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.

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.