Posted on 01/09/2007 8:12:11 AM PST by shrinkermd
...This is the most widely held myth about education in America--and the one most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.
Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen...
...One reason for the prominence of the underpaid-teacher belief is that people often fail to account for the relatively low number of hours that teachers work. It seems obvious, but it is easily forgotten: teachers work only about nine months per year. During the summer they can either work at other jobs or use the time off...
The most recent data available indicate that teachers average 7.3 working hours per day, and that they work 180 days per year, adding up to 1,314 hours per year. Americans in normal 9-to-5 professions who take two weeks of vacation and another ten paid holidays per year put in 1,928 working hours. Doing the math, this means the average teacher gets paid a base salary equivalent to a fulltime salary of $65,440.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
"The reason performance hasn't improed has nothing to do with IQ and everything to do with a dumbed-down or useless curriculum."
I agree. Given the right kind of instruction, the vast majority of people, including those with "below-average" IQ (an ill-defined concept at best) can learn to read, write, and do arithmetic and probably some simple algebra (percentages, ratios, fractions, etc). Our schools have failed a significant percentage of our students in transmitting even those basic skills. No, not everyone is university material, or maybe even academic high school level, but there's absolutely no excuse for our schools turning out students who are functionally illiterate and innumerate.
Sounds like she'd studied -- and learned! -- some psychology, lol.
I always hated memorization and thought I wasn't very good at it. Still not good with names, dates, etc. OTOH, I can't help but notice that I would bike and car magazines when I was a teen and could recite back every important figure to do with those vehicles - dry weight, HP, torque, brands of carburetors and FI systems, etc. So I suspect it was more a matter of just being lazy to do the memorization, and nobody ever really forced me.
I did memorize the times tables, like most people. I would hope that kids still do, at least up to 10x10, as it's pretty hard to do any kind of arithmetic without a calculator without knowing that. Then again, I don't know how to do square roots, or cacluate sine and cosine, or logarithms, or any of that stuff, either manually or with a slide rule. At one time those would have been considered essential for anyone going into science or engineering.
You get it.
The more amazing thing is that most people can even teach themselves anything they want to learn without formal schooling - once the basics are learned.
And that's the kicker. We're creating entire generations of helpless, dependent people who cannot think for themselves.
They can't even teach themselves anything because they have been brainwashed into thinking if they learn it outside of school it's not valid learning. There is a pervasive belief that if you aren't taught by someone with a license, then you have not learned the subject.
Yeah, I've been reading the online book at this site:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
and realized how much I had internalized a bunch of bad ideas - not surprising, I guess, since I had never really been exposed to others. One of those values I had internalized is this concept of "intelligence", and that the ability to learn is decided by it. Logical thinking and problem solving are a big part of what IQ tests test for, and they are skills that can be developed, but almost always they require a foundation in the 3 Rs.
When I think back to all the years I spent in public school, I'm amazed by how little I learned in all those years. And a lot of what I learned about history and geography I learned too early, when I had no use for it or context in which to understand it. Meanwhile I could have been developing my skills in math and science, which I had a natural aptitude for. If I had kids (unfortunately it's looking less and less likely I ever will), I really don't think I would choose to send them to public skools. Seems like about the best you can hope for with public schools is that the kids won't come up totally screwed-up. Sure, I learned enough to go to university and prosper in the work world, but I could have done so very much more in that time.
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Rather than the exponential growth of doubling at regular intervals, it seems to be merely a linear expansion. The intervals are not constant.
It looks like this:
1945 (ish): $1214
1955 (ish): $2345, up $1131, or $131.10 per year
1972: $4479, up $2134, or $125.50 per year
2002: $8745, up $4266, or $142.20 per year.
In constant dollars, it's still ugly, but using the "doubling" theme with inconsistent (and actually increasing) intervals seems misleading to me.
Get rid of the federal Dept of Education, and some of these problems start to go away. Neuter the teacher's unions, make it easier to get rid of incorrigible students and inappropriate teachers, and empower the remaining teachers and administrators within their own schools (especially against threats of lawsuits), and many more problems magically disappear.
Sadly, nobody in power will entertain such fantasies.
And that's the sad part - of all those wasted years, how much more productively you could have spent them if you had known better and had been able to skip compuslory schooling.
Ah well - homeschoolers are spreading the word.
Another reading suggestion - Ivan Illyich, "Deschooling Society". Yes, I know he was a 60s radical communist but he was one of the first to promote the "we don't need professionals to run our lives" message. The book is short and a very good read; however you will have to ignore some leftist tripe to get to the nuggets.
Better yet - close the government schools and let parents and kids go to the schools of their choice.
Watch the cost of education plummet and the quality to go up exponentially.
Quit reminding me. My first teaching position was with a wonderful group of real educators. We had great chemistry together. Our school employed the "team teaching concept", where the 400 highly-diverse urban-suburban 8th graders were divided into 3 sub-sets for the four core classes (math, science, history, and English). Our kids routinely out-performed the others every year on the state-mandated standardized tests, and by statistically-significant margins.
After only 3 years, my Team was broken up, since the vast majority of incoming students had parents requesting one particular Team. Since they couldn't all be accomodated, it was a "problem" for our appallingly PC administrators, and therefore the staff was redistributed until each Team was equally mediocre.
I left instead. It was the final straw for me after, among other battles, being chastised for teaching mnemonic devices "instead of math", despite the fact that the state tests have memory sections and the principal's primary focus was to increase those state test scores. I finished the last 2 days of the week-long lesson plan, and was written up for insubordination. I only wish that I had been more insubordinate.
Standardized test scores for the school somehow fell overall for the following few years. It was the darnedest thing. Hm.
(Other examples: the rare extra credit opportunities that I offered students were, and I quote, "too creative", and had to be changed to extra repetitions of earlier exercises. In faculty meetings, the principal stopped responding to my questions, since I did radical things like inquire into the actual effectiveness of a test program when the students who were hand-selected for it were intentionally targeted for their likelihood of success. I could go on and on... and again, I was only there for 3 years.)
/soapbox rant and b!tch session>
There are few reasons to behave when students see a virulently disruptive kid returned to class after a few days of vacation (in the eyes of their peers) after threatening real violence against a teacher, throwing a computer monitor across a classroom, and/or being taken from the school in handcuffs for selling drugs in the restrooms. (Yes, those are real examples from my classes.) If there are no visible consequences for acting outrageously, why is there any need to control oneself?
However, if there is the possibility of being removed from sight, permanently, then those astride the fence will certainly take notice and think twice before following a bad leader.
You are absolutely correct but I'm talking about more than school choice. I'm talking about dismantling the education blob and letting parents and kids determine where and when they will attend school, if they attend any school at all.
Yes, I am well aware I am dreaming but it would be really, really nice to return to a system that worked until 1880 when state gov't stepped in and compelled compulsory schooling. (Yes, I do know that is redundant - I left it there for emphasis.)
It's the curriculum, folks. IQ is just the quality of the slate brought to the table.
Singaporeans here excel in the same classrooms that other students are failing in. Take a look at merit college admissions in California. Then take a look at prison admissions. Smart people will succeed in any system.
Correct. The unions have insured that it gets ever more labor intensive.
Here in Vermont as the number of students has decreased the number of teachers has increased. The avg class size is now only 16 students. This is absurdly low. Increase class size back to 24 students or so and maybe my property taxes will return to something reasonable.
If those Singaporeans here in the US are excelling, their scores are not showing up on the NAEP or the internationl tests.
Meeting or excelling at an exemplary curriculum is something else entirely.
The only interactions I have ever had with cursive in the real world have involved cursing the person who decied to write that way as I tried to decipher it. The days of the fountain pen are over.
\No, then they'll just increase the kids in special ed who need additional funding. Once they have hold of your wallet, they never let go.
School House Rock was based on kids could remember the lyrics to their favorite songs but could not remember dates or other information.
Conjunction Junction whats your function?
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