The Compost said it was Ohio...not the federal bs...
“political correctness”
As long as PC is political, you can’t expect it to be correct.
It was wrecked the minute we made education mandatory and government sponsored. At that moment it ceased to be education and turned into propaganda/indoctrination. It was only a matter of time until the bad teaching drove out the good. See Gresham’s law.
The solution: remove all laws governing education and watch the free market fill in the gaps. Central planning always fails.
When I was a kid I don’t thinking was too difficult. But it was a small close community and if you were a goof off EVERYONE knew, you awaited the fury of dad, and the teachers were allowed to take down the paddle.
Now... The kids are in charge and they know it. I recently watched a youtube video where a black thug got ‘all up in’ a teachers face for using the wrong color ink on the white board. This poor emasculated teacher put down the pen and got the new color.
Who would tolerate that?
When my husband added up all the days spent on standardized testing this year it equaled a month. They lost a month of instructional days to testing to give the government data.
Obviously he is concerned about the direction of public education, but he hasn’t commented too much on the additional paperwork, he just stays late after athletic practice or events to get it done. Maybe because as a coach he is already used to not seeing his family at all most nights that staying late for paperwork has always been part of his routine. All the meetings at his school are done before 8:00 when the school day starts so no running from place to place.
The anti bullying legislation, however, along with common core content are his biggest concerns. Those will have a tremendous impact on kids.
Not one word concerning Common Core State Standards, which replace the universally hated NCLB. I believe every single issue he related as impacting his decision to leave the teaching field can be traced to Common Core. He places some blame on State Legislators, and rightly so, although in many cases it was the education establishment and the Governor who in most cases were responsible for the ease with which the Common Core and the dangling money associated were embraced.
He is talking about the 7 hours between 8 AM and 3 PM. He fails to mention the preparation hour the teachers get each day, along the break for lunch. He also fails to mention the abundant downtime for fall break, spring break, Christmas and summer vacation (assuming they are on a traditional calendar). Teaching can wear you down, but it pales beside many thankless private sector jobs.
In fairness, much of his rant is about the bureaucracy and the pointless evaluations and measurements imposed by government bodies. Normal people hate bureaucracy.
An aside: My socialist neighbor teaches middle school art. He complains about his 9 1/2 hour work days. He leaves home at 6:30 AM and arrives back at home at 4:00 PM. He gets to school at about 7:00 AM to turn on the kiln for clay projects. After flipping the kiln switch he reads the newspaper and drinks coffee until 8:00 AM. So his "workday" includes his commute time and an hour of leisure time drinking coffee. He didn't like the idea of an automatic switch on the kiln.
I am tired of whining teachers. Let them compete like everyone else and education will improve exponentially.
I don’t know what too much testing is.
I taught school for eight years in 50’s,60’s - math and science. And, I loved everything about it except pay. As you may remember pay scales then were designed for married women whose pay supplemented their husband’s.
I would test each Friday on the material taught during the week, then a unit test, mid-term and final. Then, once a year had a standardized test from the state (no Fed Dept. of Educ. in those days.)
Did I test too much? How much more testing goes on now?
...and then there’s the notion of whether teaching should even really be “a profession” - per se.
Government schooling is a single-payer, compulsory-use, compulsory-funded, and socialist entitlement. It's destiny was always assured. It was bound to move from local to state control and then onward to federal control.
Government compulsory schooling was a progressive brain fart of the 1800s.
Progressives have always controlled teacher training and curriculum development.
Progressives always have pushed for increasing separation from God.
Progressives have always been pushing at the edges of society's morals and ethics.
Government schooling limped along due to the borrowed ethical foundation of our earlier pioneer founders. Today, that influence has been gone for two or more generations.
Soon....Our health care will resemble government schooling. In two to three generations, those that were trained in the old system of health care will be dead. Then many foolish conservatives will say, “Socialist health care was good in the 2030s.”, and will recommend all the silly reforms they now propose for socialist-entitlement schooling. It will not occur to them that the problem is socialism and that it must be abolished.
Abolish compulsory government schooling. Now! It is the only rational solution.
Khan Academy is free
Ohio Ping
Scott Ervin (Fairborn Primary School): “the Ohio Department of Education and the Ohio Legislature as well as to Gov. John Kasich: the people who have cut our funding while asking us to jump through multiple, time consuming hoops that don’t help anyone. “
As stated by post #7 the “Common Core State Standards, which replace the universally hated NCLB. I believe every single issue he related as impacting his decision to leave the teaching field can be traced to Common Core.”
And see the two threads below - Congress has voted to renew NCLB.
House narrowly votes to renew No Child Left Behind after drama
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3309606/posts
House Republicans Betray Common Core Moms
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3310485/posts
Resource link:
http://ohioansagainstcommoncore.com/
All children are precious. Not all children are equally good students. All children should have the opportunity to pursue a rigorous education, and allowance should be made for late bloomers and second and third tries. But the insanity will not stop until we accept that children are different, and that ability grouping and tracking are essential.
I attended a perfectly ordinary, Midwestern small town high school with no particular academic pretentions. I had the good fortune to have passed through the system before the "everybody needs to go to college" nonsense hit -- i.e., I got through before the great dumbing down of the curriculum, and before social promotion became the norm. I was lucky.
The schools can be fixed if we are willing to relearn old truths, but we will have to put a couple of modern manias to rest first.
“Here it is. TEACHERS ARE TEACHING CHILDREN SEVEN HOURS A DAY! They can’t do anything besides teach during that time. That is a full work day. When you ask a teacher to do something, when you ask a teacher to do ANYTHING, you are forcing them to stop doing something else that they are doing outside of their workday. Teachers do not have “down time.”
Not sure why he thinks that differs from other jobs, other than fewer hours. My wife was a nurse. Does he think she could take a break from her patients to enter data? Well, she’d be fired if she didn’t enter data, so she did - and then got in trouble for overtime.
In the military, I didn’t have many 7 hour days. I also studied flight manuals on my own and spent a 10 year period deploying nearly 6 months each year to places like Saudi Arabia. I couldn’t count the Fridays I attended training until 8 PM after arriving at work before 5 AM, just because that was when the squadron could fit in OUR mandatory meetings.
I’m currently spending my own money and studying on my own time to get certified at a higher level in my job. My wife got her BSN on her own dime, studying when she wasn’t pulling 12 hours shifts in the hospital. I used to skim thru research papers for her, so she could use the ones that had the best data for writing her papers. No one paid me to do it any more than they paid her to get her BSN. And a year later, she quit because of the pressure to file reports rather than care for patients.
And I’m supposed to feel sorry for this guy?
Education has been a favorite whipping boy for a long time - but it has been broken for a long time, too. Can anyone say, “John Dewey?” I suppose, as someone here has already written, that it goes back to the time the fed. government got its fingers in the pie.
I retired from education going on 5 yrs. now. I taught 6th grade, 3rd, 4th, 2nd, was a reading specialist for 1st graders but mostly a guidance counselor. Teaching is one of those professions that can span a wide range of talents. It’s a mix of human relations and intellect. There’s an art to it but you need brains, too. Sometimes, really smart people aren’t very good at it and sometimes you have a minimally competent individual that really connects with kids and inspires them (and sometimes you have both negatives - I’ve met them, too). I have seen totally basket case teachers and administrators just get moved around the system and rarely really dealt with. It’s incredibly frustrating. I believe competition and freedom from government would help a lot - but it is still going to come down to who’s values hold sway. If I had it to do over again I either would not go into education or I would teach at a Christian school and suffer with the low pay. There really are dedicated people out there that are very bright and love kids and love teaching and are in it for the right reasons. My youngest son has 4 little children - birth to five. Right now, his wife stays home and homeschools two of them. He teaches at a church school and makes a horribly low salary. They live extremely tightly watching every dime and penny - yet they are happy and content and love each other. My son speaks 4 languages (English - of course - Hebrew, Spanish and reasonable German. Has had about 4 yrs of Koine Biblical Greek). He studied at Hebrew Univ. in Jerusalem where he was getting his masters, met his wife and learned Hebrew (and Spanish from her). So, you see, not all educators are money grubbing knuckle draggers seducing little socialists. There are really decent, moral, bright people in education for the right reasons - just not too many. And not all the good ones are “Christian Missionaries.” But, remember… look at the population at large and what we have to draw from. See, it’s us that’s destroying us. Morality matters. The more corrupt we get the further down the rabbit hole we go and we all know that but are far less critical when it comes to examining our own heart and life. But it’s the last thing most want to do. Far easier to blame someone else.
As a Christian, I skated as close to the line as possible in sharing my beliefs regarding controversial issues - when they came up (and sometimes when they didn’t). The population in general would hate me for that, I know. But really, the students’ parents didn’t seem to mind (you have to know kids talk to parents about what their teacher says and does at school). But leftist teachers do the same thing. You tend to run your classroom/school based on your values whether you want to admit it or not. I told my students what I thought on every issue (when they asked) and what I believed and why I believed it. I would tell them that they most likely would believe what their parents believed and that was as it should be in most cases - but someday, they would have to decide for themselves what is right and wrong - where would they go for answers? We discussed human nature and why students and adults tend to be self-centered, tend to look our for #1 above all else and how that is what is really destroying our world. There is a god of this world and there is Almighty God the Creator. There is a war going on (if you haven’t noticed) between good and evil. We are both the battle field and the prize. Choose wisely whom you will serve. Education is not the only profession with phonies and lazy bums - I’ve come across them in every area and so have you. But educators influence young minds and hearts so it IS more critical.
I could see the handwriting on the wall and was ready to get out. I just could not tell little kindergarteners that it was “ok” for Johnny to have two daddies or two mommies, that socialism was a good thing, that America was a racists, evil nation, global warming is destroying our planet so we need to kill off humanity to solve that problem and Obama was the greatest president of all time.
Who is the governor of Ohio, again?