Posted on 05/29/2006 4:05:52 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
Colleges across the country are reporting a drop in SAT scores this year. I've been tutoring students in New York City for the SAT since 1989, and I have watched the numbers rise and fall. This year, though, the scores of my best students dropped about 50 points total in the math and verbal portions of the test (each on a scale of 200 to 800). Colleges and parents are wondering: Is there something wrong with the new test? Or are our children not being taught what they should know?
Before 1994, the verbal section of the SAT was about 65% vocabulary (55 out of 85 questions) and 35% reading comprehension. Then the Educational Testing Service shortened and reworked the test, devoting half of the 78 questions to each area. Last year ETS changed the test again, and now it is heavily skewed toward reading: 49 of the 68 items require students to read, synthesize and answer questions.
In such a way, ETS has increased the penalty for not reading throughout one's school years.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
The testimony of college professors indicating that more and more "high school grads" go to college not having high school graduate skill levels in reading and math is enough for me to realize that our K-12s are failing .... at everything but normalizing deviant sexual behavior, getting kids to think that they all have equal talents, and lowering the levels of excellence.
I tutored middle and HS kids for many years as well and some of the things I heard about the teachers' methods indicated both sheer and utter laziness and even ignorance in many cases. I was appalled by some, not all of what I heard from them, often with students completely related to others by class confirming these things.
There are good teachers and bad teachers and everything in between. Yet, all are rewarded, and we wonder why they teach that all students are equal.
Where would this be?
Any success I have in my classroom occurs only when I don't do things according to the bureaucrats'/administrators' ways. I deviate from the proscribed curriculum all the time. I assess my class, find their weaknesses and go from there. I assume nothing about my students. If they need to learn how to read, I teach them reading. If they don't know how to take notes, I incorporate that into the mix. If they can't sit still and listen, we work on that. I do this while trying to accommodate as much of the syllabus as I can, but I'm not married to what the State wants, I need to teach my students what they need.
I do.
I was surprised this year. I asked my students to write a paragraph to tell me how we could help students do better in class.
The most frequent answer I got was "You can't make people learn; they have to want to do it themselves" and variations on that theme. That is to say, it seems that students don't blame the schools or the teachers, they blame themselves for not doing the work.
It's also true that the "best and the brightest" women mostly aren't becoming teachers anymore. They're becoming doctors, lawyers, businesswomen, scientists and engineers.
One of the first things I found out is the teach will not stand over your kid and force them to do work by sitting them in the corner or some other punishment.
You have got to be kidding! My classes last 45 min. and according to you I should spend that time on one student,get real ,I have a time limit on getting the information to my class and there's no time for individual presetation. I do have tutorials after school and am repeatedly told by parents that they can't spare the time to make a special trip so that their child could attend.
Yes, eepsy is quite correct.
In the schools where I have taught, we were not allowed to punish students for not doing their work. We were allowed to punish them if they were disruptive, because that would keep other students from learning.
When I was a student, you could get a spanking, in addition to the zero, for not turning in your homework. I'm not sure if that changed because of a court case or change in philosophies.
The teachers blame the parents.
The parents blame the teachers.
Who got the low grades again?
My daughter is not a genius, certainly by no means the brightest in her class, but she is a very hard worker and prepped religiously for the SAT. First time she got 800/760, studied like mad to bring up her math, second time (the new 3 part) she got 780/800/800.
I attribute it entirely to her hard work and the superior teaching at her private school. Our local public schools are supposed to be pretty good, but our son (who has a lot of learning disability problems) was in very briefly and it was a complete joke. We yanked him and I home schooled him for several months (caught him up on all the stuff like fractions and spelling that the school had failed to teach), then got him into a small private school that focuses on strategies for learning disabilities. He's doing great there and is on the college prep track . . . but he wants to go into the Navy and then go to college on the GI Bill -- he's a very stubborn kid so I guess he'll do it his way.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine about that subject. He said that he had heard a statistic that the male/female ratio in colleges had gone from 50/50 m/f to 40/60 m/f in less than 10 years. He attributed that to video games, i.e. boys are getting consumed by these games and neglecting their studies. His viewpoint was biased by the fact that he married a woman with a problem son--poor grades, socially inept, constantly playing his video games, etc.
Do you, as a teacher, see video games as a major player in poor male educational progress?
You say, "Don't worry, this thread will soon be flooded by public school teachers that will blame all the low scores on the parents."
Sorry - I'm not a teacher but as long as the schools are banned from punishing students or kicking them out of the classroom/school the teachers cannot be expected to take the full blame. You can't teach a stump. The worst parents - the ones with the criminal kids are the same ones who seem to always have a lawyer on retainer -curtesy of the tax-payers. As long as we live in a society that puts the rights of the individual over the rights of the collective public neither our schools nor our criminal justice system are going to be about what actually works best for the public. I'll admit that there are bad teachers in the same way that there are bad dentists or mill-workers but the bulk of teachers are no different than we are - they pay their taxes and try to do a good job. Stop acting like they are looking at classrooms filled with students who are hungry to learn and eager to please. Just like everywhere else in this liberal society the classroom is filled with problems that the libs won't allow teachers to deal with.
1. There is no ONE solution.
Teacher Instruction + Principal's Leadership (or lack of it) + District Policies + State Laws + Parent Support + Child's Basic Abilities + Child's Motivation = Success.
a. Homeschooling - Usually works because the parents care and are involved one-on-one with their child. If only all parents took the same level of interest in their child's education as homeschooling parents do!
b. Private Schools - If all schools were instantly privatized, some would emphasize academic success, strict dress codes, the necessity of hard working students and parent support. Other schools would have a four-day week, no homework, and lots of fun activities and programs. Lots of parents would choose this school.
2. Test scores:
Imagine a class of 30 children. Two come from broken homes with uninvolved parents, and 28 come from intact homes with supportive parents. TV programs do not promote an attitude of disrespect for authority. The year is 1960.
Fast forward to the present. Thirty children. Eight (usually less) come from intact homes with involved parents. Eighteen come from homes with serious problems and have (relatively) unsupportive parents. Four recently arrived from Mexico (whether they are legal or not is immaterial right now) and speak little or no English. In addition to not speaking the language, usually their education is substandard and they are academically behind their classmates, so they have to learn the language and also get caught up academically.
...Considering all this, it's amazing that scores are as high as they are!
I understand and agree with you.
But the day my administration changes one of my grades because a parent became involved is the day I retire.
The author of the article doesn't understand the older test. The old verbal section was not mainly a vocabulary test; it was a relative to an IQ test that was known as the Army Alpha test. To conceal what was happening overall with the test, the ETS instituted a series of changes to mollify the leftists running their main customers - for example, Richard Atkinson at UC Berkeley. So, they took out the analogies test and other portions that they thought would "help" scores. Contrary to what the author says everything was made easier and the test was renormed upward. Now the test is basically just reading comprehension, which fails to measure the relative potentials of prospective students for colleges of different levels of rigor. I also doubt that the math test is as hard. Calculators were not introduced because they wanted to test "higher level" skills. They were introduced because insane theories of math education and other factors had resulted in generations of students who could not calculate. Using big numbers does nothing for testing whether a student really understands the fundamentals of algebra or geometry. Finally, "precalculus" is an invented subject. It used to be that you did algebra, geometry, and trigonometry first, then you took calculus. The "precalculus" texts I have seen simply show that HS courses on algebra, trig, and geometry have been watered down so much that an additional course is needed to teach more of those subjects. In today's schools, what is called "algebra" is often mainly just arithmetic.
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