So, in truth, this is a documentary that was sent back to us through a time warp ...?
Posted on 12/15/2023 5:38:06 AM PST by karpov
A columnist covering K-12 education, I come to you, dear reader, with a warning: There’s a coming wave of college-freshman failure that will stress the institutions and systems of our universities. Grade schools haven’t and likely won’t recover from pandemic-era learning losses, and so, ready or not, a poorly educated generation is soon to flood your campuses.
We’ve all read the statistics. Students lost out on months’ worth of education, obliterating two decades’ worth of academic improvements. What’s more, we’re experiencing something of a “long Covid” in education. According to the testing company NWEA, students aren’t just not catching up. Rather, due to chronic absenteeism, behavior challenges, staffing shortages, and a general ennui in K-12 schooling, they are actually backsliding.
This alone would pose a substantial problem for higher ed, but the obfuscation of admissions standards at colleges and universities only compounds the difficulty.
Consider GPAs. While a persistent problem for years, grade inflation has made even more headlines recently. In Los Angeles, where 73 percent of eleventh graders received an A, B, or C in math, only 19 percent actually met grade-level standards. According to the Los Angeles Times, the same disparity plays out across ages and subjects:
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
“[T]wo decades’ worth of academic improvements”—not.
The "old school" teachers such as myself had high personal standards. You got an "A" from me, you could feel like you'd really accomplished something. Even a "B" from me was something to show Mom. But one chairman told me on the first day back from summer vacation, "If you don't have a 65% passing rate, I'm going to throw you out the f___ng window!" Well, that was clear enough. We knew that principals got a $25K bonus for good passing stats and chairmen got $15K bonuses. They could care less whether students actually mastered the subjects.
Finally, Bloombutt and then DumblASSio wanted to institutionalize this fraud, and started soliciting statements from students against their veteran teachers, often coaching them on what to say. These fallacious statements would then form the basis (think "Russia, Russia, Russia") of a kangaroo court hearing to terminate the teacher. If not terminated, they were at least thrown into the "Rubber Room" to languish, while a younger (and cheaper) teacher got their classes and position. And being untenured, these younger teachers would be all too happy to deliver whatever the admin wanted. Thus, schools turned into useless diploma factories. A disgrace for all involved.
College students who can’t or don’t do passing work in their courses now routinely think the opportunity to do “extra” (dumbed-down) work to get to the grade they want is due to them.
And corruption!
The solution will be to dumb down the colleges even more.
My sister taught math to middle school kids for 45 years, the last 15 in a downtown Baltimore school. She watched the incredible increase in administrators. The administrator to teacher ratio ballooned 10X to 40X during her time teaching depending on the school district and state.
All those administrators do is interfere with teaching and introduce new education fads every year. Not one of them ever educated a kid.
It’s always the same in the federal government, state governments, welfare and education. They grow so big that they suffocate competence, performance, quality, efficiency, and initiative.
If we cut out 90% of them performance would soar.
Read later.
Ironically you could learn everything you need to know from watching YouTube videos, it’s there, but nobody takes advantage of it.
I would have loved to have had YT when I was in school. I would have aced every class, and only spent half the time studying to do it.
I am no Fauci fan, but the truth needs to be spoken. The failure in K-12 education is with the parents.
I home schooled child # 4, and I can tell you that elementary school is unequivocally a waste of time. My daughter and I read the classics together, she learned math and grammar and we observed science in real life. All this was done every day before lunch time.
The “ Covid backslide” is a parenting failure. Many parents worked remote. Could they really not give their children math workbooks or spend 30 minutes/day reading with them?
Let’s not blame the government for what is really the failure of parents to parent their children.
> All those administrators do is interfere with teaching and introduce new education fads every year. <
That is so true, and something the general public is not normally aware of. As I noted elsewhere, things really got out of whack around the year 2000.
Before then, we were given overall objectives to teach. I was teaching physics at the time. So I’d be told to spend two weeks on circular motion. It was up to me to get the job done, using techniques that differed depending on the makeup of each class.
Then around 2000 waves of young new administrators started coming in. They’d quote “educational research” showing the way science MUST be taught. No deviation is permitted!
As you noted, the “research” changed almost yearly. One fad out, another fad in. It was maddening.
I fully agree that parents are a big part of the problem.
And think about the people who are now — what? — 10 to 25 years old? I consider this a very damaged age group. Those damaged people are going to be the next wave of parents. Does anyone think they are up to the task? Will they do a fine job of raising the children to be born over the next upcoming 10 years? I think things will continue to go downhill.
So, in truth, this is a documentary that was sent back to us through a time warp ...?
The "solution" in Los Angeles will probably be to lower the grade-level standards.
Student loans for useless majors are a stupid tax for stupid young people.
I was a smart young kid many decades ago and I told my parents that elementary school was boring and filled with stupid people.
Fortunately they bought me “adult” books I could read on every possible subject—so I could actually learn stuff.
These days with the Internet there are no more valid excuses not to home-school kids.
” In Los Angeles, where 73 percent of eleventh graders received an A, B, or C in math, only 19 percent actually met grade-level standards.”
******************************************
LA is hardly representative of the US as a whole. According to Wikipedia
“ Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest school district in California and second largest in the nation, is 73% Hispanic, 10% African American, 9% non-Hispanic Caucasian, 6% Asian, 0.5% Native American, and 0.4% Pacific Islander.”
The average IQ in Mexico is 88. Of course it is taboo to mention this.
“No deviation is permitted!”
Yep. For the last quarter of her career, my sister had the young punk administrators who had recently graduated with “education” degrees telling her how to teach, what she was doing wrong, how to improve, etc. Not one of them had ever taught, but they sure knew how to do it. My sister was a top performer, had always gotten super results, and frequently had students from decades past greet her on the street and praise her for getting them on a good path.
So she just ignored the young idiots and continued doing what she had always done to get good results. She had reached a point where she figured “what have I got to lose?”
The end of her career was very demoralizing, though. Instead of the school recognizing wisdom and achievement that comes with age and experience, anything old was reviled. She was always getting pushed aside and no longer asked for ideas on how to improve school performance (which was on a long downward slide). So she learned to keep her mouth shut, tune out the development meetings, and just quietly do her job.
It’s no wonder that people do not last long in teaching the past few decades. You are constantly gnawed at by pipsqueak, ignorant Lilliputians.
You sound a lot like my sister!
You make a good point, since Covid-sequestered kids would have had to have at least one person of significant age/ability home with them & they should have been encouraging learning. “Zoom” classes were complete jokes, with distractions and teacher inability to keep track of each student and how they were faring.
Pretty much anyone who homeschools knows how easy it can be to foster a child’s natural curiosity and desire to learn by simply reading books together, explaining math & science in daily activities (cooking & baking, chores, card games, Lego, etc.) and listening to them and see what learning opportunities could come from reinforcing their interests.
Even parking “Junior” in front of the TV or computer with educational shows or something like Kahn Academy for an hour a day would have helped greatly.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.