Expensive and easy fixes haven’t solved education woes

Step 1 — eliminate the teachers union

Step 2 — bonuses for teacher who turn out kids who are educated

Step 3 — retire teachers who are not performing

“When will we learn that expensive, politically easy reforms to fix our failing schools just don’t get the job done?”

When we realize that success in school is 90%+ due to an intact, stable, loving nuclear family unit.

Only 1 thing will solve it. Eliminate teachers unions, and allow competition among the schools. This will weed out the crappy teachers very fast, and the entire system will improve.

The only advantage schools have today they didn’t have in the Renaissance, when classroom style teaching was invented, is technology. Therefore, technology should be seen as a way out of the educational morass we are in today.

Learning has long been imagined as a pyramid. It’s foundation is memorization, with various higher levels representing more complex modes of thought. The trouble is in most cases, either all the emphasis is on memorization, or memorization is disdained in favor of teaching other levels. The end result is not complete learning.

Group learning also tends towards mediocrity, instead of helping both the good student move ahead and helping the poor student catch up.

So what technology needs to do is create individual based learning, and emphasize a strong learning foundation on which teachers can build.

Beginning young, students should have an individual pod, designed to maximize their audio-visual experience. They should be given media instruction and training on how to type and use a mouse, then techniques to use to help memorize—many are known. Hand in hand with a complex diagnosis to find out if they have various degrees of dyslexia, vision or learning problems.

The idea is that memorization training be given for them to have a multi-dimensional memory, instead of a linear, random access memory. This will help them pack in the data faster, and have better retention, then be able to use that data better.

A computer can deliver memorization information not only faster and more efficiently than a teacher, but do so at the optimal rate for individual students. Instead of the inefficient lecture method, the students get a complete audio-visual multimedia presentation.

This can be standardized and fine tuned around the State or even nationally, so that it is the closest thing to a “perfect” block of instruction. The instruction can be given at the *same* time as review and evaluation, as well, so saves a great deal of student time.

Advancing up the grades, this more efficient method can integrate more than a single subject in a study. Say a student is getting a block of instruction on US history. While they are seeing what looks like a TV show, and interacting with it, they are not only getting a simultaneous spelling lesson, but the same lesson is being given in both English and German.

At higher grades still, the students follow an educational “path” of a subject, and are able to digress or expand on a block of instruction, for credit, outside of the block, by using an Intranet. Say they are learning a block on field mice, and see that they are preyed on by owls. They can digress from the block to learn more about owls, and learn for credit about owls, on a parallel block.

Such information might go far beyond their grade level, but within reason, as long as they can show that they are learning, they can “go for it”, even to college level, eventually returning to finish their block on field mice.

Such a system takes into account differences between students, and different subjects with the same student. It can help them through the ebb and flow of their learning, spending extra time on difficult subjects, and letting them exploit those times when they are really on the ball.

Importantly, a multimedia curriculum of this type is also transferable. Student curriculum can be determined by the student’s parents and educators ahead of time, and they should be able to move from school to school without wasting a day. They can carry their complete profile on an encrypted thumb drive, and the school can download their curriculum.

This does not replace teachers one bit. But it does mean that they will be working on higher levels of learning, and all that implies. Subjective performance, aesthetics, synthesis and creativity.

Public education IS the woe. It needs to be phased out, or at least marginalized.

I think multi-media-based learning is the future, too. The idea of the school building where students are grouped by age to sit and learn only what a teacher has prepared for 20-30 kids... is antiquated. Virtual schools are the future, imho.

I fought against computer-based learning when my husband turned our children onto it. He turned out to be right. Multi-media-based instruction works well. We just need to know how to use it more effectively, and we need better programs that keep learning fun while holding a young person’s attention.

I’m a pen and paper person myself. Pen and paper is still important. But we need to make good use of these other tools, too, instead of avoiding them.

Cleaning out the teaching staff won't make a difference unless you change the lesson plans too.

See this article Skipping Science Class, Continued for an example of the degradation of the content taught in schools in England.

School choice is one way to let parents choose the better lesson as well as the better teacher. Getting the government out of education would work better yet.

ANOTHER REASON TO HOMESCHOOL

This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.

If we're really interested in what works, why not look at the top performing public schools in the state?
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If they **really** bother to look under the rock of a “good” school this is what they will find:

Parents and children at **HOME** doing **tons** and **tons** of “afterschooling”!

ALL academically successful children are homeschooled or afterschooled. I have never met a single exception.

While I have met academically and professionally success adults who have come from less than stellar homes, I have **never**, not even once, met an academically successful **child** who was not being homeschooled or “afterschooled”.

Is there are difference between the home lives, or home educational experiences of a homeschooler or institutionalized child? No! Not much! The only thing the school is doing is sending home a curriculum for the parent and child to follow.

Good points. I would add:

* Education should be in the form of low pressure play until the age of eight. Only after age eight, should the child be expected to reach formal and set goals. I believe it is in Finland that the children to not start school until 7 or 8.

* We need a fully privatized system of education is needed. While I would be satisfied with what you have proposed, my neighbor would not. He sent his two sons to the Valley Forge Military Academy.

Only 1 thing will solve it. Eliminate teachers unions, and allow competition among the schools. This will weed out the crappy teachers very fast, and the entire system will improve.
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Far more than this is needed. The entire government K-12 system needs to be shut down, and completely privatized.

When we realize that success in school is 90%+ due to an intact, stable, loving nuclear family unit.
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Please read post #10.

Steps 1, 2, and 3 are merely makeup on a corpse.

The only solution is complete privatization.

Privatize education and you will soon see a return to traditional family values, and development of effecting teaching methods. Why? Because this is is what produces academically successful children, and in the free market success is rewarded.

When we realize that success in school is 90%+ due to an intact, stable, loving nuclear family unit.

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This is not enough. It is not enough to teach family values and then send children into god-less government schools that then work to undermine and denigrate the loving intact family. We need to completely privatize education. Private schools that support family values, support and build up the parents, and have effective teaching methods will be the schools that thrive.

Why?

Schools that support the family, teach parents good parenting, and have effective teaching methods will produce the most academically and socially successful children. And...The free market supports success.

Please read the following regarding children from strong Christian homes who attend government schools. You will see that a strong family, mixed with the government school atheistic worldview, does **not** produce success. A strong family will **not** do it alone.

http://www.exodusmandate.org/art_20050404-salt-and-light.htm

The research data on the success of the public schools in indoctrinating Christian youth with humanistic or neo-pagan worldviews is overwhelming. The Nehemiah Institute's worldview PEERS test shows that 83-percent of the children from committed Christian families in public schools adopt a secular humanist or Marxist socialist worldview. At the SBC's 2002 annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Council on Family Life reported, among other disturbing things, that 88-percent of the children raised in evangelical homes leave church at age 18. Barna Research reports that only 9-percent of born-again teens believe in moral absolutes, and more than half believe that Jesus sinned while He was on earth. We believe the fact that 80-percent of Christian families send their children to public schools is a prime reason for this lost legacy.

I have to disagree about starting so late, for physiological reasons. Very young children, 4-6 years old or so, have a significantly higher level of brain glucose than those just a year or two later and for the rest of their lives. This makes it much easier for them to develop complex language and other extraordinarily difficult skills.

Bi- or multilingualism, unless it begins almost in infancy, is far more difficult to learn at a later age. Most of us miss this golden opportunity, and not just for language skills, but for our future development in many ways.

Infants are paradoxical. At the beginning of life they need a subdued environment for vision and hearing, yet need intensive tactile stimulation for their brains to fully develop. Once their vision and hearing have stabilized, they are devoted to movement, visual and audio stimulation.

When their cognitive facilities come on line, they are devoted to intense learning of their environment.

Much of the “play” children engage in is serious business for their development, but “forced” play is often just to the convenience of their parents and other adults, who are admitting that they no longer have resources for the child to learn at the intensity they want.

The very concept of school is based on the admission that there are limits to what most parents are able to teach their children in a multitude of areas, so they have to subcontract.

But the problem we now find ourselves with is that children are better, are more capable, than the education we are providing them, even by proxy. They need a better, more intense, but especially individualized instruction to maximize their potential.

The greatest offense that can be made to a student is to waste their time. Even their periods of relaxation and unfocused attention need to be intensified, because when students need to relax, they shouldn’t be distracted, they should get the optimal effect, the purpose of relaxation.

I have to disagree about starting so late, for physiological reasons. Very young children, 4-6 years old or so, have a significantly higher level of brain glucose than those just a year or two later and for the rest of their lives.
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I am **not** advocating starting late. On the contrary, the education of a child should start when they are newborns.

Have you ever visited a Montessori pre-school? The children work very hard but the child thinks he is playing. My own children were reading before age 5 ( one started at 3) and had mastered their math facts by 6.

I am merely stating that learning prior to age 7 or 8 should not be high pressure, and strict demands should not be made on the youngest children. The younger child should think of it as **play**.

Personally, I fully support your theory. I wish that when my kids were attending Montessori school and later in their homeschool that we had had the technology that we have today. The job would have been so much easier and enjoyable for me and my kids.