Posted on 10/31/2005 9:04:55 AM PST by SouthernBoyupNorth
There's a growing movement in the US that says the educational concept of "No Child Left Behind" is putting an emphasis on basic skills even as it leaves super-achieving kids behind. Bob Davidson is a dot-com millionaire who has co-written a book with his wife Jan titled, "Genius Denied."
(Excerpt) Read more at kywnewsradio.com ...
"it's the district higher-ups that seem to be discouraging it."
I will agree with that and offer that ideologs and corrupt union leadership are two reasons for it. Parental involvement is the best way to combat that. Question after question drives em NUTS lol!
I feel for your son, and for you. That must be so very frustrating for you both.
My daughter is only in 2nd grade and is already bored. I'm not claiming that she is some type of prodigy, she isn't, but much of what is being taught, she knew in kindergarten.
I understand your issues on private school, it was not an option for us either - so we moved out of a rotten school district to a much better one, though by no means perfect, in another state. We do what we can at home, and the teachers are very supportive of our efforts and very willing to help.....but all of our hands are being tied by the higher ups at the district.
In my H.S., back in the 80s, the 'trades' and 'shop class' were not for the complete burnouts, but not for the college-bound kids, either. It was basically for the kids that weren't oriented to book-learning, but bright enough to realize that they needed something more than a HS education to get somewhere in life.
Also, FWIW, the burnouts were all in the 'C' classes, where if you showed up more than once a week, and were breathing, you were fairly assured of getting a degree. Unfortunately, the plague of self-esteem has cheapened the value of a High School diploma to nearly nothing. There were about 140 in my class, about 120 graduated, and I can think of at least a couple dozen that were functionally illiterate. They were certainly unable to perform life's basics, like filling out a credit application or balancing a checkbook, without help.
I went to college. Got an engineering degree. Haven't used it once, yet, in my career. Would I do it again? Probably not - I think that I'd go to trade school. Corporations are not going to outsource their plumbers, electricians, etc to India. And honestly, so long as I'm getting a daily challenge, I don't care what I do.
The problem is that the Education "Thugocracy" doesn't want an intelligent and self-supporting product. They refuse to divide their classes into the Advanced, Average and Slow Learners like when I was a kid. You were encouraged to "raise caste". Now, nobedy "fails", but nobody is encouraged to succeed!
That's something to be proud of, congratulations for the part your family played.
However, from the moment of acceptance to the time they move on to middle school, the children at the "gifted" school are told over and over again how special, superior, marvelous, wonderful, exceptional, blah, blah, blah they are. It is quite nauseating.
I can only imagine. There is no seperate "gifted" school in this district, but there is a talented and gifted program. The subject of TaG has never been discussed in all my conversations with the teachers and the principal - nor did I ever mention it when speaking with the people at the district. So you can imagine my surprise when I received a letter last week seeking our permission for her to be evaluated for the program.
A student has to be referred/recommended for this evaluation and I didn't ask, nor did the teachers or principal make the referral. The only conclusion I can reach is the district people are tired of me and think if they toss this bone to me I'll go away - they don't know me.
My objective this year is to push TPTB to acknowledge that their system for teaching "gifted" children is inadequate and that they must do more to meet the needs of the students who do not attend their segregated school.
I wish you success. That is exactly my goal at this time. I was assured my child's needs would be met - I have assured them her needs are NOT being met in the manner they were in the past.
"My uninvited 2c...."
^^^^^^not quite sure what to make of that.
At my highschool in the 80's woodshop and small engines were strictly elective classes.They were simply an hour class like the rest. You took them if you wanted to. Now vocational is another story. Body work and welding things of that nature were half day courses. Book classes such as math science history and English lit were all still required.
I agree that a high school diploma has been reduced in value and letting kids out that are not ready to be out...or even elevated to the next grade, is why.
Kids get the idea that it is easy to have 'help', when indeed what they are learning is how to have people do things FOR you. I agree many come out of highschool with that mentality. We saw it in the post school life recently in New Orleans.
Plumbers, electricians, pipe fitters, iron workers, sheet metal workers, carpenters and operators spend 4 years in class in addition to their labor as apprentices (providing they are union of course). If a person refused or could not learn in highschool, they will not get thru this four years any better than they did the four years of highschool.
"And honestly, so long as I'm getting a daily challenge, I don't care what I do."
That shows your character and honorable it is. This is required in school also. Parents have to instill that in their kids (if they are not born with that instinct or the ability to apply it). I would offer that the desire to learn is to be nurtured by parents, without parents doing so, the teachers don't stand a chance in their goals.
We homeschool. And we try to make it as fun as possible. But I think there's truth to what you say. Some things only get learned by repetitive drilling. And repetitive drilling just isn't fun.
I can almost hear the "Not her again" in the voice of the one person I have had the most dealings with in the district.
The teachers and the principal welcome my calls and have been very supportive of my efforts to shake some people up at the district..it is an interesting battle.
It is a tough and interesting battle and I commend you for taking action in waging it.
Two years ago my kids school did a segment about "private parts" (keep in mind this is in the first grade).
This amounted to sexual harrasment training for little ones.
I was shocked and appalled. To me this is something to be taught at home at this age especially. I fought, I lost. My only option was to remove him from the unit and thus segregate him from his class. To be sure a couple people said "not him again" about me in that timeframe too. :)
Good for you.
One of the reasons we moved to this part of Virginia, besides it still being in my husband's work territory, was the schools are so much better than those in the area of Delaware we lived.
The school board itself hasn't dealt with me yet - but they are aware of me......because the district staff are not at all happy with me. They dread my phone calls. Good.
Not waging this battle is not an option to me.
The ultimate responsibility of a child's education belongs with the parents, regardless of where the child is receiving "formal" education (homeschool, private or public) it is still my responsibility to see to it my child receives a proper education. If that means I am ging to be a thorn in the side of the school district or school board, so be it.
One thing I can not stand is a bureaucrat who forgets just whom it is that he/she works.
The problem is scholarships are scarce. In some communities, they are nonexistent.
The parents of the best and brightest should be given vouchers so their kids can have true access to better education. For that matter, the parents of all kids should be given vouchers so their kids can have true access to better education.
In some communities private schools are non-existent. The "local" private school here is in the next county and from the stories I've heard about that school, the best and the brightest in the public schools here, particularly the HS kids, do not want to go there. Talk about a great big daycare center......
My H.S. lagged pretty far behind most others. It was in the backwoods of Maine, and I feel like I started out with 2 strikes against me because of it. For instance, in my college engineering classes, Freshman year was just a review for most of the kids, whereas I struggled with the 'basics'.
I'm not all too sure what voc and shop offered at my H.S.. I took drafting through the shop classes - it was basic, but valuable. Skipped all the other stuff, though. It sounds like your school was more advanced than mine - although that bar was set pretty low - LOL!
when indeed what they are learning is how to have people do things FOR you.....couldn't agree more. In fact, the best lesson that I learned was from a college prof that failed me. I wasn't even within rifle range of passing his course, and I went into a conference with him all full of p* and vinegar - "What are WE (really *you*) going to do about this?!" etc etc etc.
He told me to stop wasting his time and kicked me out of the class. I thought differently then, but now I realize that it was one of the best things that could have happened.
And, I'd love to talk to H.S., and particularly college kids today. I'd just tell them - if you think that you have hard teachers now, wait 'til you have a boss. Or clients.
A simple search on any search engine found in every state advanced programs in math, science and literature. I doubt that kids are not exposed in every state to better classes - that is not to say that I think education is doing a fine job, just that NCLB is a conservative soltuion to the poor education of far too many children. These children that are left behind cause gang problems and increase prison populations.
The solution would require streaming [i.e. rigorous segregation by ability] of students. Other countries are doing/have done that. It would be nice to have a school with all the pupils above IQ 150.
Human abilities are distributed along a bell curve. Therefore, excellence and equality are mutually exclusive.
No amount of testing, curriculum tweaking, or funding redistribution will have any effect whatsoever on this.
NCLB amounts to the largest expansion yet of the strategy of directing more resources towards the students making up the lower end of the curve. This isn't a new idea, and there's no reason to believe it will be any more effective on a national scale than it has been in repeated district and county level attempts.
Special education programs make up one quarter of all public K-12 education expenditures.
The bottom one fourth of public special education students (about 1.35 million students, out of 49 million total) absorb close to 40 billion dollars a year. For this staggering investment, as a group they don't even come close to meeting the low state standards, let alone excellence.
Imagine what the top 1.35 million students would accomplish with that same 30,000 dollars a year of personalized instruction.
We already have that in the NFL. Its Called Parity, and enforced through the salary cap.
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