the problem with the US public school system
Been working on this one for a while now - there's probably more to say, but this is a good start.
So, let’s start at the beginning.
I don’t think most elementary or high school teachers are underpaid [1]. I think they’re simply asked to do much more than one should reasonably expect with much fewer resources than are really needed to do what’s been presented. Many teachers report buying classroom materials out of their own pockets, which just strikes me as ridiculous - few employers expect employees to do this sort of thing; contractors and the self-employed generally get that perk to themselves.
I also don’t think most teachers are bad people - I just think most of them aren’t really enjoying the working conditions they face, which leads to burnout. And this essay really has very little to do with teachers, and everything to do with the education system as a whole.
I do think that the primary function - the only function, really - of schools is to educate children. While private schools have the benefit of being able to pick and choose which children they’re going to educate, public schools are tasked with educating every child, no matter what problems, disabilities, or family history the child has.
No matter what happens, it’s my personal opinion that schools should be held responsible for that task, and that parents should not get in the way of accomplishing it - don't like what your kids are learning, put them in a private school or home school them, but they're still expected to be functional members of society when they're done.
Every single child should be educated to his or her potential. That means that nearly every child should know how to read, write, do basic math, and so on (seriously, I've seen kids with a lot of mental and physical challenges who could read street signs, write basic words, count, and do basic addition and subtraction - if kids aren't getting there, it means someone isn't paying attention). It means that children who are talented in specific areas should be encouraged to work ahead, and it means that children who are behind in specific areas should get help in catching up. It means that children with learning differences should be identified and taught ways of working with or around their particular issues, rather than shuffled to the back of the class, and given a passing grade to get them out of this class and on to the next.
It means that no child, no matter what his problems, should ever be told, implicitly or explicitly, that he can’t learn - rather, he should be encouraged to learn whenever and how ever possible. It means that no child, no matter how smart, should ever be expected to sit through a subject that is a significant level beneath her current educational level, leaving her bored and disconnected from the education process.
One of the things that disturbs me about most US schools is the insistence that children be grouped and separated by age. We give them no role models and no opportunities to interact with and help children who are younger than them. At no other point in our lives do we only spend time with people our own ages. Once we’re in high school, we’re in classes with people between 14 and 19, sometimes all in the same class. And after that? As adults, we work and live with people of all ages. Single age classes group children by birthday rather than any educationally useful category. While there are some things that are fairly consistently age dependant, academic standards aren’t really one of them. I've seen it in action - my high school geometry class had freshmen who were very mathematically talented, and seniors who had started high school still in basic math; while the entire class was learning geometry, it was obvious to everyone that the range of understanding in the class was a hindrance to all of us.
One of the other things that bothers me is the way that children are taught. American schools take Henry Ford’s assembly line to heart, running as many children as possible through the same identical education in the shortest time possible using the smallest number of resources, in a one-size fits all model. But children aren’t cars. They need individual attention. They learn in different ways, at different rates. They have different strengths and weaknesses.
The major result of this assembly line process is that teachers tend to teach to the median student. And with the new views on mandatory standardized testing, they don’t even do that much of the time; they teach exactly what’s on the test, no more, and no less. Since the tests are meant to gauge proficiency, they have to test at somewhere below the median to have any reasonably useful results - if everyone failed the test, the test wouldn't be useful at all.
At one point in the past, schools used a process called “tracking” - while it had it’s bad points, the good point was that, in any given class, you had a much closer grouping of students’ ability levels. But this has been declared illegal, because it means children are treated differently - "smart" kids got to move through material faster, or got to take different classes than everyone else; moving between tracks was often difficult, so if you were stuck in a track, and caught up to the next track, you were often still stuck at the old level of proficiency.
Except…without tracking, children end up being treated differently anyway, and in ways that are bad for them. They’re treated differently in ways that say that what they are and what they know isn’t valued, only what gives the best test results is valued. They are treated differently in ways that teach them that being different is bad, standing out is bad, and not being right in line with what’s being taught is bad. I suspect it encourages kids who need help not to ask for it either - the teacher is teaching above their heads, so speaking up makes them look stupid.
So how do we fix it?
Well, at this point, the first problem is money. No one wants to pay for education, and the people who think they want to pay for it want to pay for it based on tests that don't actually prove whether the children they're testing can function in the real world. Standardized tests are easy…getting good results from them, on the other hand, is not that easy at all.
We as a country would have to decide that this was really important - important enough to ask whether teaching degrees qualify people to teach (because I know a lot of engineers who are better than teaching math and physics than the teachers I had in school), important enough to hire the number of people required to give kids more individual attention, and important enough to re-structure most schools.
We also have to ask ourselves why, if it now takes a college degree to get even the most menial jobs, we don't focus more attention on vocational studies for things that require hands on skills, and put more effort into making sure kids coming out of high school have the skills to get a job. College is nice, but it's expensive, and making it compulsory does no one any good.
We need to look at mixing ages of children in a given learning environment. We need to make classes either smaller (35 first graders in a class is simply too many for one teacher to manage), or making sure we have assistant teachers in each classroom. We need to spend the time to give each child an individual learning plan, not just those kids who get classified as "special needs."
Mostly, we need to remember that while assembly lines work reasonably well for consumer goods, they still produce defects - and children are much more complex than cars.
[1] www.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htm#earnings - median salary is ~$43-$48K, lowest 10% is ~$28-$33K
So, let’s start at the beginning.
I don’t think most elementary or high school teachers are underpaid [1]. I think they’re simply asked to do much more than one should reasonably expect with much fewer resources than are really needed to do what’s been presented. Many teachers report buying classroom materials out of their own pockets, which just strikes me as ridiculous - few employers expect employees to do this sort of thing; contractors and the self-employed generally get that perk to themselves.
I also don’t think most teachers are bad people - I just think most of them aren’t really enjoying the working conditions they face, which leads to burnout. And this essay really has very little to do with teachers, and everything to do with the education system as a whole.
I do think that the primary function - the only function, really - of schools is to educate children. While private schools have the benefit of being able to pick and choose which children they’re going to educate, public schools are tasked with educating every child, no matter what problems, disabilities, or family history the child has.
No matter what happens, it’s my personal opinion that schools should be held responsible for that task, and that parents should not get in the way of accomplishing it - don't like what your kids are learning, put them in a private school or home school them, but they're still expected to be functional members of society when they're done.
Every single child should be educated to his or her potential. That means that nearly every child should know how to read, write, do basic math, and so on (seriously, I've seen kids with a lot of mental and physical challenges who could read street signs, write basic words, count, and do basic addition and subtraction - if kids aren't getting there, it means someone isn't paying attention). It means that children who are talented in specific areas should be encouraged to work ahead, and it means that children who are behind in specific areas should get help in catching up. It means that children with learning differences should be identified and taught ways of working with or around their particular issues, rather than shuffled to the back of the class, and given a passing grade to get them out of this class and on to the next.
It means that no child, no matter what his problems, should ever be told, implicitly or explicitly, that he can’t learn - rather, he should be encouraged to learn whenever and how ever possible. It means that no child, no matter how smart, should ever be expected to sit through a subject that is a significant level beneath her current educational level, leaving her bored and disconnected from the education process.
One of the things that disturbs me about most US schools is the insistence that children be grouped and separated by age. We give them no role models and no opportunities to interact with and help children who are younger than them. At no other point in our lives do we only spend time with people our own ages. Once we’re in high school, we’re in classes with people between 14 and 19, sometimes all in the same class. And after that? As adults, we work and live with people of all ages. Single age classes group children by birthday rather than any educationally useful category. While there are some things that are fairly consistently age dependant, academic standards aren’t really one of them. I've seen it in action - my high school geometry class had freshmen who were very mathematically talented, and seniors who had started high school still in basic math; while the entire class was learning geometry, it was obvious to everyone that the range of understanding in the class was a hindrance to all of us.
One of the other things that bothers me is the way that children are taught. American schools take Henry Ford’s assembly line to heart, running as many children as possible through the same identical education in the shortest time possible using the smallest number of resources, in a one-size fits all model. But children aren’t cars. They need individual attention. They learn in different ways, at different rates. They have different strengths and weaknesses.
The major result of this assembly line process is that teachers tend to teach to the median student. And with the new views on mandatory standardized testing, they don’t even do that much of the time; they teach exactly what’s on the test, no more, and no less. Since the tests are meant to gauge proficiency, they have to test at somewhere below the median to have any reasonably useful results - if everyone failed the test, the test wouldn't be useful at all.
At one point in the past, schools used a process called “tracking” - while it had it’s bad points, the good point was that, in any given class, you had a much closer grouping of students’ ability levels. But this has been declared illegal, because it means children are treated differently - "smart" kids got to move through material faster, or got to take different classes than everyone else; moving between tracks was often difficult, so if you were stuck in a track, and caught up to the next track, you were often still stuck at the old level of proficiency.
Except…without tracking, children end up being treated differently anyway, and in ways that are bad for them. They’re treated differently in ways that say that what they are and what they know isn’t valued, only what gives the best test results is valued. They are treated differently in ways that teach them that being different is bad, standing out is bad, and not being right in line with what’s being taught is bad. I suspect it encourages kids who need help not to ask for it either - the teacher is teaching above their heads, so speaking up makes them look stupid.
So how do we fix it?
Well, at this point, the first problem is money. No one wants to pay for education, and the people who think they want to pay for it want to pay for it based on tests that don't actually prove whether the children they're testing can function in the real world. Standardized tests are easy…getting good results from them, on the other hand, is not that easy at all.
We as a country would have to decide that this was really important - important enough to ask whether teaching degrees qualify people to teach (because I know a lot of engineers who are better than teaching math and physics than the teachers I had in school), important enough to hire the number of people required to give kids more individual attention, and important enough to re-structure most schools.
We also have to ask ourselves why, if it now takes a college degree to get even the most menial jobs, we don't focus more attention on vocational studies for things that require hands on skills, and put more effort into making sure kids coming out of high school have the skills to get a job. College is nice, but it's expensive, and making it compulsory does no one any good.
We need to look at mixing ages of children in a given learning environment. We need to make classes either smaller (35 first graders in a class is simply too many for one teacher to manage), or making sure we have assistant teachers in each classroom. We need to spend the time to give each child an individual learning plan, not just those kids who get classified as "special needs."
Mostly, we need to remember that while assembly lines work reasonably well for consumer goods, they still produce defects - and children are much more complex than cars.
[1] www.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htm#earnings - median salary is ~$43-$48K, lowest 10% is ~$28-$33K