Posted on 12/15/2006 4:32:26 AM PST by Zakeet
WASHINGTON - Education and business leaders urged an overhaul of the U.S. school system, including ending high school at the 10th grade for many students. Current teaching is failing to prepare young Americans for the global economy, members of a bipartisan panel said Thursday.
Beginning teachers should earn more, according to the group, and money for this idea could come from the scrapping of conventional teacher pension plans in favor of other benefits such as 401(k)s.
"People have got to understand what we've got is not working. It's not working for kids, but it's not working for teachers either," said William Brock, a former congressman who was labor secretary and trade representative in the Reagan administration.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
You are strongly advised to take anti-nausea meds before reading the rest of the article.
I did not read anything about blowing up anything, however, whether Ms. Cortese wants to acknowledge it or not the governance system is the cause for failure.
Smells like more bipartisan compost. The NEA wants higher salaries for teachers and it opposes 401K plans to replace pensions. Both sides are included in this making the recommendations contradictory and meaningless.
People teach their children at home without the big salaries and private schools educate with lower salaries and benefits.
Its not the payscale that determines the quality of education, its the commitment by all involved including students above all.
Lets just get to the end point.........pay the teachers a lot, don't have them teach the kids at all.
Perhaps if everyone was forced to home-school, the country might be better off, after all.
It's actually a great idea to cut out the last 2 years and send the academically-inclined kids to community college.
Kids who can't pass the 8th grade level CA high school exit exam by 10th grade, for example, could just go on to trade school instead of being baby-sat and disrupting classes for another 2 years. Those who are on a college track would get the much better education available in community colleges.
Homeschool and Public school ping
Do you know who keeps the public school ping list these days ?
Think about it this way. The number of liberal teachers goes down by eliminating 2 grades, and the kids who do not learn anything by 10th grade do not have more tax money wasted on them.
The major reform that schools need is a complete reformation, based on technological interface. That is, the system of a teacher standing up in front of a class to train students is archaic. We finally have the common technology that will allow efficient, individualized instruction to maximize what the students can learn.
To start with, on a national, regional, and local level, the best, most interesting and entertaining multimedia presentations be created for the entire elementary and secondary curriculum.
Students are assigned to a multi-screen interactive computer system. Instead of getting just one learning track at a time, they get several. For example, they are watching a lesson about lions. They not only see hundreds of movies and pictures of all sorts of lions, while reading text and answering questions about what they have just learned, and being tested and reviewing, but they also get their lesson at the same time in another language.
On top of it all, each lesson would be like an html page, linked to dozens of other lessons, so that if a student is interested in the subject, they can digress. If they are "on a roll", they could even go off on a tangent for a while, and yet still get credit for learning.
The computer tracks how the student is doing compared to their usual performance, and against other students, if they are getting ahead on one subject or falling behind in another. And because such instruction is individualized, it is completely transferable between schools without loss.
And it is all designed for one purpose: to not waste student time. The cardinal sin of the educational system.\
Just by not wasting time, the student curriculum can be radically expanded to include many subjects not taught at all today. Etiquette, music and art, penmanship, geography, etc., etc.
A corporation as large as Microsoft would be responsible for producing and distributing the tremendous volume of content needed. And for controversial subjects, State and locally produced content could be included or substituted as well.
For their part, teachers should be moved from a "blue collar" union status to a white collar "professional" status. Instead of spending their time teaching rote information, inefficiently, they are more involved with higher levels of learning, such as teaching their students how to organize, discriminate, evaluate and creatively synthesize what they have learned.
But in the final analysis, students *could* learn in elementary school as much as students today learn through college. They would even have to early learn mental systems for organizing information more efficiently than in a linear manner. Such techniques are well-known, but should be taught and used by students.
Just more AP push polling with the ultimate aim of getting complete federal control over all education. And of course to funnel more money to those secular saints, teachers.
1) Education and business leaders - Leaders? says who?
2) "thought-provoking ideas" - Obviously anything that promotes additional federal control is "thought provoking" to the AP
3) The commission's work was financed by several foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - Follow the money.
4) The commission recommends paying beginning teachers about $45,000 per year - Of course no mention of merit here, this is just Liberal hard core constituent minimum wage
Its just the same 'ol song N dance - More money, more federal control, no performance evaluation for teachers and no questioning of the political allegiences or motives of these "leaders".
I'd actually be for slightly higher salaries if they did away with the pension plans. The pension plans are MUCH more valuable than a few extra thousand in salary. For example, if you become a teacher in California at 25 and work for 30 years, you can retire at age 55. You then get 75% of your last years salary, for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. End result is most public workers in California earn MORE over their lifetime than similar positions in the private sector.
Just what we need, a bunch of unemployed-unemployable 15-year-olds running the streets.
Only changes I see coming down the line in education will be political and won't solve the problem, just like NCLB; anyone remember that one?
Majority of Americans can't or prefer not to homeschool; let govt do it. Wanna see the problem, look in the mirror. Its me and you, how we raise our kids; probs in ed just a reflection of the bigger social prob facing America.
Don't worry, the National Education Association is hardcore against any change from the current pension systems they call "defined benefit" to 401K's they call "defined contribution."
And the union has the legislatures in their back pocket right now. That includes the California teachers union that's waged an all-out war against Schwarzenegger's reform ideas. They've bought the legislators in Sacramento to keep 401K's from becoming a reality for teacher retirement.
Public school ping list? That's on DU. =]
The number of persons on the government payroll never goes down and the government never stops wasting money.
The commission recommended school end in 10th grade, with 10th graders tested for either early graduation/community college or more time in school. :-)
But then it recommended the money saved be used for "new pre-kindergarten" programs and higher teacher salaries! :-0
This ping list is for the "other" articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. If you want on/off this list, please freepmail me. The main Homeschool Ping List by DaveLoneRanger handles the homeschool-specific articles.
One of the freepers above might run the Education Ping List. Here's a ping to all of them...
It goes to the very heart of the problem of *why* so many students want out of school early--they see their own precious time being wasted and resent it horribly.
However, the vast majority of students respond very well to their "level of intensity" when learning. Much like a one-on-one teaching situation, student needs, interests, and their personal dynamic are addressed immediately.
What would be going on behind the scenes of such instruction would be the computer monitoring *how* a student is learning. If one day, the student is "up" for English, but "down" for math, the day's emphasis is on English, to capitalize on where the student happens to be, intellectually. Conversely, if a student is having a slump in a subject, they are given extra training to get them moving again.
This is another advantage of such technology. It recognizes that students have highs and lows, their own pace, good days and bad, and spurts of creativity and initiative. Students get sick, need recreation, and have family problems, too.
So physiology and psychology is also involved in the process. Students perform lots of diagnostic tests to see if they have dyslexia, vision, hearing, or psychological problems, how they are cognitively developing, if there are problems in their family, and what their relationships are with other students. And these are all woven into their lessons seamlessly.
The educational modules, the curriculum, keeps getting added to and improved on a yearly basis, with new software and hardware. And there would be a huge national selection of educational module products.
For example: The student is about at 5th grade level in History. So their parents can subscribe to any number of 5th grade History classes with accessories, just like buying anything else.
Module 'a' offers lectures from some top notch professor, a vocabulary builder, and an online genealogy creator.
Module 'b' offers lectures from a different teacher, a regional emphasis to US history (say, the importance of Florida to the US), and a Spanish bilingual parallel class.
Module 'c' offers a more traditional history class, but with heavy linkages for student digression; this would be a more advanced module.
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