Q: Dear 100 Hour Board Reunion Tour,
If you could change one thing about the US education system, what would that thing be?
-train and pay teachers like doctors/lawyers
A:
Dear trainer,
More vocational training options.
More doing, less "learning." Teach us what jobs will be like by making us do jobby things.
Less focus on the core and way more required electives. Make students stretch themselves and try new things.
-Inverse Insomniac
A:
Dear you,
In addition to just about everything that has been said, bigger classrooms and more parent support from home.
-Ms.O'Malley
A:
Dear train,
Let me preface my remarks by saying that I'm a teacher at a public high school in an upper-class suburban neighborhood. The median annual income per household is more than $250,000. As a result, our school is well-funded, and is supported by a host of highly educated parents who strongly support their children in their educations. More than 95% of our students go on to a four-year college, and we are consistently highly ranked in lists of top public schools in the state and nation. I recognize that there are numerous problems with education with which I am entirely unfamiliar that may be related to income inequality, race issues, and other similar factors. I am not going to discuss them because I do not experience them and so have no foundation to form a complete opinion about them. With that said, there are lots of problems in my school that I think are generally applicable that I would love to change if I had the power.
College
I hate what colleges do to high school students. I hate that my students stack their schedules so that they can appear well-rounded instead of filling their days with activities that actually interest them. They force themselves (or their parents force them) into taking AP classes that are wholly unsuitable for them from a health perspective (both physically and mentally), join clubs or sports teams to improve their college acceptance chances, and they would cut their mother's throat for an A. The number one argument in favor of a higher grade at the end of a term is, "I need this for my college application chances." When a student gets a B first semester in my honors physics class, they run immediately to their guidance counselor to try to drop to a lower level—a class that demands less of them—so that they can preserve the almighty A. Grade-grubbing runs rampant at my school (as, I imagine, it does at other schools).
And I can't even blame them. Because if you want to get into the best schools, being impressive isn't good enough. You have to look impressive. Thus the joining of clubs, the forcing of AP class registration, and the throat cutting. My college experience was one devoted to education. I took classes that taught me knowledge and skills that I would need later on. And I truly feel that the deeper I went into my major, the more my classes became educational experiences instead of a posturing medium for my future employers. But high school is all posture. And the spirit of education is what is taking the hit. Why should I blame them for an end-grade-based focus on their education when that's exactly what the system demands of them? How can I convince them that learning the important skills that I can teach them is more important than looking good enough to get into the dream school? If I had a magic wand, here's what I'd change:
No more AP classes. There's this sadistic pride in killing yourself for some AP credit that I don't understand. Most AP courses with which I am familiar in my school move really fast and cover a broad range of topics. The most common complaint from AP teachers that I know is that they can't slow down or stop because they won't get through all of the material. It kills me to think that the best and brightest are the ones who have the least leisure to delve deeply into an interesting topic. Do you know what I could do with a class full of AP-grade students if I didn't have to fire-hose physics down their throats at a rate of three major principles a day? (OK, that's hyperbole, but not by much). What if that same class were in a class called Honors Physics with no college credit on the line? I imagine a class where we model physical situations to derive physical principles, and then harness the principles to solve complex problems. Yes, it sacrifices a little breadth, but what my students gain from it is a real understanding of what science is, and how it's done for real in real labs. But I can't do that, because they're in AP. This article talks about a nice alternative to AP classes that let you demonstrate an interest in a particular field or college during the admissions process.
We need to make not going to college a valid option. I mentioned earlier that we send more than 95% of our students to a four year college. Whoop-de-doo. Take a guess at what percentage of those students finish college. It's something like 75% with most of them dropping out after the first year. What a complete waste of $50,000 of tuition and a year of important time. I can think of several students in my classes (of seniors) who really shouldn't be going to college. But there's no chance of that happening. If I told them not to go to college, I'd be raked over the coals by their parents. These kids would make great tradesmen. They're interested in car repair, construction, cooking, and other areas that don't start with C but are equally valid options. Why is going to a vocational school a second-rate option? In 5 years, most of them would be making significantly more than me and my masters degree are making, and they would be contributing to society in equally important ways. But not going to college makes you a failure, so they apply, and they go, and they drop out. Lovely. Non-college, post-high-school education needs to be a more accepted track for students.
Ivy League needs to stop being the dream. There is virtually no difference between undergraduate programs at the best, fancy-schmancy private schools out there and Podunk State University. Or at least, there's not enough of one to justify both the financial burden we place on college students and the mental distress we are causing high school juniors and seniors. At my school, kids talk about going to state schools like it's something to be ashamed of. It enrages me. I know many successful people who went through state school systems and came out on the other side with good skills and good prospects. I wish more people understood that the effort you put into your education has so much more to do with your success than the place at which you get it. If more people understood this, I think there would be less pressure to get accepted and much less posturing for colleges in high school.
Teacher Quality
I totally agree with your sign-off statement. If we treated teachers the same way we treated doctors (rigorous training and high wage compensation), we would have better quality teachers out there. But we'd still have to make schools a place where those kinds of people wanted to work. Here's how:
Stop broad-stroke federal oversight. The federal government tends to believe that there is a set of regulations you can apply to every school in the country that will make all schools improve. This is patently ridiculous. Every school has its own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, every school requires a unique solution. If federal oversight of schools is going to continue, it should exist to identify under-performing schools and help them develop and execute a plan that is tailored to its specific needs without making the rest of the country conform to a set of solutions that, in many cases, do not even address current (or even possible) problems at other schools. Not only do these measures not make much of a difference, but this environment is also not an environment conducive to the best and brightest. If we want good teachers, we have to give them a good place to work.
Pay teachers on merit, not for time served. It is relatively rare for a teacher to oppose the so-called "tenure" that high school teachers enjoy. I oppose it on the merits of quality. Every good company has a way of letting unsatisfactory employees go. And I can't think of many companies that are willing to keep a bad employee based solely on the fact that he or she has been there for a long time. I, personally, am frustrated by the few teachers in my school who are not dedicated to improving their craft. The fact that we basically can't fire them without cause is frustrating and confusing. Why wouldn't we want to do that? I believe that my work speaks for itself and I would be happy to defend my right to stay with evidence that I've done good work. I think that all teachers should have to. But this is where it gets sticky. How on earth do we measure good teaching? Frankly, I don't know (and this is a discussion for another post). I support merit pay only if we find a satisfactory way of answering this question (which probably means that each school comes up with its own criteria). One thing I can say for certain is that the massive teachers unions out there have made this problem a lot worse. By making it harder to fire bad teachers, unions have made schools worse.
So, in summary, we need a different way to get kids into college (and an acceptable parallel track for non-college-goers) and the feds and unions need to just leave me alone. I got this.
-The Man with a Mustache
A:
Dear friend,
There are a lot of changes that I would love to make (including paying teachers more, because I like getting paid), but I think they would need to be implemented at a state or local level and tailored to fit the needs of individual communities. If I had to choose one sweeping change to make, it would be eliminating summer vacation in favor of a year-round schedule with frequent 2-3 week breaks. Yes, children need rest and recreation. Yes, teachers would go insane if we didn't get any time off. But aggregating all of that time off into a two or three month period causes intense learning loss. If you're from a well-off family with a stay-at-home parent who can make sure you're reading and learning and growing all summer long, then you'll probably bounce back. But if you don't have that luxury, it's much harder to recover that learning. Two-thirds of the high school achievement gap between low SES and high SES kids can be attributed to summer learning loss during elementary school. That's right, the consequences for missing those two months each year as a child last clear into high school.
Look, I know our culture has an emotional attachment to summer; it's the magical season of ice cream trucks, pool parties, and Popsicles, after all. But the fact is, the practice is arbitrary at best, and harmful at worst. And imagine how much more productive teachers could be if they didn't have to spend all of September reteaching everything from the year previous. Maybe then they'd finally raise our salaries (wink, wink).
Peace,
-Stego Lily
A:
Dear reader,
I have a lot of thoughts, but I'm going to limit myself to one relatively small but relatively realistic hope. After reading Thinking, Fast and Slow (please read it) and way too many frustratingly ignorant internet debates, I've decided that while classes that teach you about scientific discoveries are great, the most important science class is the science class that teaches you how to do science. If I had my way, every high school would have a year-long course devoted to nothing but the scientific method.
No amount of knowledge can ever outweigh critical thinking skills, and the scientific method is one of the most important critical thinking skills known to humanity.
-yayfulness
A:
Dear I agree, but not in the way you mean,
I think that competition is the key to improving our schools. Like PD Kirke is going to say, having education be a free-market entity would vastly improve our school systems. I may be biased because I teach at a private school, but I have a really hard time with the idea that schooling is a right. Learning is a right, but if someone has to provide it for you it ceases to be a right and turns into a privilege. You can independently learn as much as you want, but you can not force anyone to teach you. Increasing competition among those who provide for this privilege is an excellent way to ensure that those who are most motivated are most rewarded, while having the side benefit that schools (businesses) who want more students (customers) need to find a way to balance the costs with the quality of education to provide the best product at the best price. It will not happen based on government fiat or because the president gives a stirring press conference, it can only happen when there are elements competing to provide the product.
I will say, though, that I do not think that teachers should be educated like doctors and lawyers, it's apples and oranges. Eight years of school for an elementary teacher? Hogwash.Their method of instruction, though, should be similar. A teacher should be in the classroom early in their credentialling process, and student performance should have a heavy weight in their success in the teacher education process. Their students don't perform? The teacher candidate doesn't graduate. Then, when good teachers get through, they should be rewarded based on their performance, and the performance of their students.
I don't think that the education system in our country can be improved without two major societal shifts, though. The first is that the caliber of teachers isn't what it should be, because our society places so much emphasis on prestigious jobs that we think that to have an equal society, we have to have as many female doctors and lawyers as male doctors and lawyers. Thus, the women who get into teaching are often those who do not want to be in other industries, or do not want to be stay at home moms, rather than people who actively want to be teachers. UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT, as a male teacher, and an excellent male teacher, I find I am outclassed by many of my female coworkers. I am smarter than any of them, and handsomer and more entertaining and more popular with the students, but they have something (besides, unarguably, experience) where there students just plain perform better than mine. Freakonomics dances around it in this otherwise excellent podcast, that the golden age of education in the United States was between the times when society finally allowed women to be teachers, and when society said that they weren't good enough as teachers. From the podcast:
the way [Catharine Beecher] sort of conceived of teaching was that because women were natural-born mothers, they were biologically suited to spending time with children, that they would be wonderful teachers in the classroom as well. And she’s interested in this because she decides that she’s not going to get married, and she would like to have something interesting to do with her life other than kind of be an old maid, which is this horrible 19th century stereotype of the single woman. So, she would like single women to have a socially useful role in the young, American, democratic experiment in the early 19th century. And she conceives of public school teaching as the way to do that. And policy makers like Horace Mann, who is considered the founder of our public-school system, this is very attractive to them.
DUBNER: On an economic level, yes?
GOLDSTEIN: Yes, for pragmatic reasons. I mean, if you’re going to make public schooling compulsory, which did not happen across all the states until the late 19th century, if you’re going to do that, you need many more teachers. And you can pay women 50 percent as much. So this kind of feminine, modesty, morality, argument…
DUBNER: Loses out to utilitarianism…
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, Catherine Beecher makes this argument and then male politicians, they love this because it sounds really good, but it’s also cheap.
KLEIN: I went to kindergarten through graduating from high school in public schools in Brooklyn and Queens.
DUBNER: Joel Klein again.
KLEIN: That was from 1951 through 1963.
DUBNER: When I think of those years in New York City, particularly, but in U.S. public education generally, I think of them as a kind of golden era. Was that a golden era of public-school education?
KLEIN: On the one hand, we expected so much less from education in those days. And what I mean by that it always struck me, when I started public school in New York City in 1951, Stephen, approximately 16 percent of America’s workforce were high school dropouts. Today that number is probably 5, 6 percent and declining. So in some respects what we expected from education was different. But I do think in other respects it was a golden era in that during that period certainly my experience and I think nationally the experience was that teachers, particularly women teachers, not having the kind of opportunities they have today would draw really high quality people into the field. That’s not an argument for denying women opportunities, but the beneficiary of the sexism that was taking place were very high-quality, talented women went to work.
DUBNER: This is the brain-drain theory of U.S. teaching. It argues that as well-educated women started having the opportunity to becoming lawyers and doctors and engineers, the talent pool for teachers got shallower. And, relative to those other professions, teaching became a relatively low-paying profession.
Yeah, I acknowledge that it's sexism, but I have no problem with that. I've been called a lot of things and being called sexist for my ideas on gender roles doesn't concern me a bit.
The second cultural shift is that we shouldn't place so much emphasis on college in general. A large segment of the population should be prepared for blue collar jobs, and should not be set up to be unhappy if they do manual labor, or work at a factory. We are ignoring the issue by outsourcing and pretending that every American deserves a six figure desk job. Mike Rowe is making huge strides in this avenue. I have had 12 jobs in the last three years, because I was not too proud to do whatever it took to provide for my family. Having a college degree did not matter for any job I've had except for my current job.
Dr. Smeed
A:
Dear you,
I come from a province in Canada that has a world-renowned educational system (there was one year that our physics program was ranked first in the world) and my fiancé and I have talked a lot about the differences in schools. One thing that sticks out to me is along the lines of what the Man with a Moustache had to say about not everyone going to college. In my high school, they seriously emphasized the trades. You could take the foods program and be ready to apprentice as a chef by the time you graduated high school. You could take cosmetology and graduate with several years of work experience and course credit towards becoming a hairdresser or esthetician. We had a career-choices class that placed a huge emphasis on providing alternatives to the four-year college route. The province also had several technical schools that focused on two-year degree programs that were designed to provide real work skills.
Along with that, we had different levels of classes. There were AP classes, but those were mainly taken by students who wanted to go to American schools, or by students who honestly would have been bored in any other class. Because the enrollment was so limited, teachers could go really in depth. The "dumb" kids in those classes got 4s, and everyone else got 5s. Only a select few AP classes were offered, and the other classes had honors sections instead.
Meanwhile, there were different strata of classes. There were the "pure" classes, which were designed for students going to four-year universities. Then there were "applied" classes for students planning on pursuing trades or two-year degree programs, and then there were a set of classes for students whose best hope was really just to graduate high school. You could transition between the classes, too – if you got below a certain grade, they would recommend you drop down a level the next year, and if you got above a certain grade, they recommended you move up a level.
Depending on the university program, you could have a mixture of "pure" and "applied" credits. For instance, if I wanted a Bachelor's of English, the program would probably require three years of pure English and Social Studies, but would accept a certain number of applied math and science credits. Similarly, a science program might be okay with applied English or social.
Canadian high school definitely tested more rigorously than American high schools did. There weren't any federally administered tests or a lot of federal oversight, but the individual provinces were very heavily involved in their own programs. My province administered tests in Grades 3, 6, 9, and 12. The tests from grades 3-9 were just a benchmark for teachers and didn't factor into students' grades, and I seem to remember feeling very non-stressed about them since the teachers assured us that we wouldn't be penalized if we did badly, so just relax and do your best. The Grade 12 tests counted for 50% of our final grade in the course, but most students typically received a grade within a couple percentage points of their score in the class. I don't know much about education, but my guess is that the required curriculum wasn't so unreasonable that teachers were unable to cover the material effectively.
Now, I did go to a fairly good public high school in a reasonably affluent community, and it's possible that things were different at high schools in other communities or towns. However, I also didn't go to a school that was particularly well known for their academic program, so I feel like I saw a good middle-of-the-road look at how the system worked.
Probably my favorite thing about the system was how the students could be divided according to relative ability without making them feel dumb or labelling a certain set of students as having "no future." Because of this, classes were more tailored to individual teaching needs than my fiancé's classes were in his public high school in the USA.
-Zedability
A:
Dear Train and Pay,
If I had to pick just one thing it would be to get rid of standardized testing, closely followed by more recess time and little-to-no homework.
Can you tell this answer is from the mother of a kindergartner?
-Sky Bones
A:
Dear train,
How about largely privatizing it via a voucher system with the most basic minimum standards (i.e. functional literacy for high school graduates)?
Then everyone could pursue the things they've listed above in a market environment. Might sound like Ron Paul-worthy libertarian crazy talk, but just sayin'.
~Professor Kirke
A:
Dear,
Right now I want fewer students total, preferably through having fewer classes and smaller class sizes. That would require more money, and that's hard to come by, and often the district thinks the more urgent needs are in other areas, since what we're doing now is working, right? RIGHT? Still, I don't have time to do a good job grading 140 things at once, especially if they're big essays or tests or projects. And especially since I'm a first-year teacher without a lot of experience grading quickly, and I'm building my classes from scratch as I go. Even a dozen fewer students would free up a few hours of time each week, which I could spend on better lesson planning or better grading or showering every day.
-Uffish Thought
A:
Dear train and pay,
If I had to pick one thing, I'm actually right in line with your suggestion. It's sad to me that our country treats teachers the way we do - piling on the work and notching down the pay, forcing teachers to teach just for 'the love of teaching.' I mean, yay? But teaching is an important enough job that we need to pay teachers in more than feel-good rewards, and we need to stop demanding unreasonable amounts of out-of-office work. Fewer classes, more at-work time to do things like grading, and cold hard cash that's actually in line with the work being done.
Yeah, yeah, expensive, blah blah, unrealistic, blah blah.
-Olympus
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