So Much for Equality!

[maidboy]

More funding for government schools?  That will solve nothing but waste more of taxpayer's money.

My girls attend private school though one is still in preschool.  So, I'm not that familiar with the government schools in this area.  However, a friend in Atlanta said that Atlanta city schools spend about $13,000 per student, not including what is spent on building maintenance.   So, how is it Atlanta has less than a fifty percent graduation rate?

My oldest daughter's current school year cost $6,200.  The graduation rate through high school is 99%+.  Go figure.

Not so difficult to figure out.  First of all, I suppose the $6,200 per year is
what you pay in tuition.  Private schools also receive donations from alums,
church collection plates (in the case of parochial schools) and other sources.
So in all likelihood, the amount spent on your daughter's education is much
more than what you pay yourself.

Secondly, many if not most public school districts supplement state funds
with local property taxes.  Thus schools in wealthy districts can afford to
pay higher salaries for more qualified teachers, have more teachers per pupil,
have money for computers, updated textbooks, gifted student programs etc.
Less affluent districts are left to make do with what little they have.
Georgia apparently is one such state that relies on local property taxes for
public school funding, much to the dismay of school officials there...

http://www.casfg.org/press/061306_factsheet.html

Illinois is the most egregious example of such inequities in school funding.
That state spends about $9,000 per year per student on average, but more
affluent school districts spend more than twice that amount.  The amount
spent for a student in Chicago is about a paltry $5,000 per year, so it's small
wonder that the poor academic performance of students in poor districts
bring down the average for students statewide.  So much for equality!

http://www.progressillinois.com/2009/2/6/argument-school-funding-reform

Finally, parents who can afford to send their children to private schools are
more affluent and educated than less affluent parents with little education.
The education levels of pupils reflect those of their presents, with the result
that private school students perform better on tests and have much higher
graduation rates than their public school counterparts.  And while private
schools can pick & choose who they admit, and expel troublemakers and
poorly performing students, public schools are required to take all comers,
which significantly lowers their average student academic performance.

Far from being "a waste of money", a more generous and equitable funding
of our public schools would be money well spent. 

[Melissa]

I think you're missing something in the numbers.

First, my daughter attends a non-religious school.  They are rare.  Catholics have the domination in private schools, by about half of all private schools.  Yes, they have received private donations but they were mostly one-time gifts for library improvements, sports facility and other minor items.  The school is very modest and is run by only seven administrative staff, two of those being the principal and assistant principal.  I'm glad they don't use the "Head Master" nonsense.

Let's say it is only $5,000 per year.  One of the major problems claimed (and somewhat concerning) in government schools is class size.  Let's say the size is 30 students (there are 25 in my daughter's class with one teacher).  And, let's pay the teacher a comfortable $50,000 per year for their 6-8 years of service.  That's well above the average of about $42,000.  We have left a good $100,000 for materials, administration (often to top heavy), building support and maintenance.  

There are 25 classrooms at my daughter's school scattered from K-6.  That would equate to $3.75 million for an academic year for roughly 750 students at a cost of only $5,000 per student.

Now, let's apply Atlanta's $13,000 per student to the same size school with same class size.  That comes to $9.75 million for the same 750 students.  Where is the money going?  And, why are the results so much worse than a private school?

Oh, let's throw in the private donations so we can deal with that argument.  I'll raise my daughter's tuition from $6,200 to $7,000.  Multiply that by the same 750 students and we now have $5.25 million.  That's $1.5 million more to account for your private donations.  To my knowledge, they haven't gotten that much over the last three or four years.  Donations are announced but public credit is not given to the donor at the school nor is it released to the public.  As I said, it's a modest school with conservative values.  They teach true altruism is done from the heart in private and require the same from its donors.

Again, where is the money going?  And, you want to pour on more waste?

This will tick off the union-loving liberals.  I've said this before... The single most dangerous threat to education is the National Education Association.  Abolish teacher's unions and you'll see an improvement in education.

As with most government, the problem is not with enough funding.  It is a matter of wasteful spending.  And, a lot of it.

[maidboy]

First of all, I neglected to mention endowments that private schools enjoy.
Investment income from often substantial endowments is another source of
funding for private schools.  Donations to private schools are not simply one
time propositions for a single purpose.  Private school alums often "subscribe"
to their old schools with annual or semi-annual donations.  Your raising the
amount spent on your daughter's education from the $6,200 tuition you pay
to $7,000 seems rather arbitrary and quite low.  But as I'm not familiar with
that school, I'll pass on comparing funding numbers.

You neglected however to address the other points I raised.  Specifically...
1)  The great disparity in funding between affluent public school districts and
poorer ones, resulting in poorer academic performance by the disadvantaged
which bring down average test scores and graduation rates for all schools.

2)  The fact that parents who can afford to send their kids to private schools
are more educated than parents who cannot.  Educated parents can help
their children with their homework, read to them, and otherwise give children
the educational support that less affluent & educated parents cannot.

3)  The fact that a private school can pick and choose the students it
admits from among the best and brightest applicants, and is able to expel
students who cause trouble or don't live up to high academic standards,
thus lowering the school's test scores & graduation rates.  Public schools
on the other hand, are required by law to accept all students, be they bright
hard working kids, of average or lower intelligence, slackers, or downright
trouble-making gangster thugs.

I agree with you up to a point about teachers unions and public school
bureaucracy, as they often end up in "turf wars" that stand in the way of
attempts at much needed educational reform.  But for the most part,
teachers are dedicated, hard working people who do an admirable job
under often difficult circumstances.  Rather than abolish teachers unions,
there should be greater and more equitable funding of public schools.
Simply giving up on public schools is a recipe for future disaster.

[Ric9009]

Wow, you lot must waste a huge amount of money.  Australia has a system where all schools are funded by the government.  The formula is complex because a school in a town of 24 kids in Brewarina (a tiny town on the edge of the desert a very long way from anywhere) needs more money per child just to keep running.  It needs airconditioning because Brewarina easily gets to 48 degrees (since the US went metric in 1974 but did it such a stupid way that it never caught on properly I'm going to let you work it out if you want - but if you can't be bothered just accept that it is very hot).  Private schools then also charge students fees which can vary from what I pay, which is around $20 per month per student to one school that charges around $20,000 a semester.

The funny thing is that it is not whether kids go to public or private schools that matter so much as where the school is.  A school in a very poor socioeconomic area tends to not have many that get decent marks.  As it was pointed out, a very big component of whether a child learns well or not is the parents.  But it is also peer attitude and a number of other things.  Our very best school in terms of long term success of its students and academic passes is a public school then as you go down the list it sort of alternates between public and private schools.

Melissa missed a great deal in how much it costs to run a school.  A teacher earning $50,000 a year costs the school about double that and more if you take into account recruiting and training.  Maintenance costs, school supplies etc are a rather big expense.  If the school supplies computers such as my kid's school does then they tend to be replaced every two or three years plus a number need replacement in the interim and that adds up to $1,000 or so per computer.  And our teachers get paid around $60,000 on average (and I'm using equivalent to US$ here) plus they get 12% superannuation and a few other things tacked on to their salary.  In our public school systems we have teachers paid $100,000 to be teachers rather than administrators or principals.  This is a merit based program for the best teachers but it would still impact considerably on the cost of running a school.

Melissa missed some very expensive capital costs that have to be amortised.  You could not possibly run a school on $5,000 per year for class sizes of 25 when you took into account the need for more than one teacher for that class, plus the enormous cost of the land on which the school resides plus the costs of the buildings and their maintenance.  It is not all that uncommon for a school to be sitting on $25 million worth of land, with a rebuild cost of all buildings being around $10 million or so.  And that is a typical school of 500 to 800 students (Australia does NOT have schools of 3,000 students and has only two divisions split between the first six or seven years and the last six years).

I have no idea how funding is made for schools in the US, and my only personal experiences with US schools have been all negative.  my sister's children had to have extremely expensive private tutors to keep them up to the standards of Australian schools for the two years my brother-in-law was stationed in the US and I was told that they went to a very good school district in an affluent area.  That does not say a lot for the standards of education.  The big difference I found was the academic standards were not watered down so that kids seemed to pass nor was the teaching aimed at the lowest common denominator.  Schools have no problems failing students who do not reach a particular standard which is determined basically country wide and that way a problem student may be identified and remedial studies is available and sometimes even works.

Speaking to parents in some southern states where the kids seem to have appalling educations, it is not only the health care system that needs fixing.  The reality is that education is vitally important to a nation and cannot be let slide.  A country in the modern world can no longer get by on semi skilled labourers unless you want the wages that are paid in China or Vietnam.  The smarter the population and the better basically educated they are, the much higher standard of living will be a few years down the track.

I'm not saying the Australian system is without serious problems.  Both our Education system and our Health System could do with major improvements.  Indeed, our health system is being stuffed up by a couple of states so much that the Federal Government only today has stepped in and is going to take the running of hospitals away from the States.  Considering the Federal Government funds the hopitals completely and the states have a bad habit of robbing from funds meant for hospitals, that change makes a lot of sense.  But remember this is totally different to the US system.  These hospitals are owned by the States and are public hospitals where treatment is free.  That is quite differt to the US Federal Government suddenly taking over huspitals as your hospitals are privately owned mostly.  And schools have problems especially in poor socioeconomic areas which is rather unfair to those already disadvantaged.  No system is perfect.

[Melissa]

Ric,  I addressed the biggest problem there is... waste.  It's rampant in all areas of government and schools are not immune from it.  That same answer applies to Boy's issues.  Waste.  If it were under control, lack of funding in non-affluent districts would not be such an issue.

As for a merit system for teacher advancement, that's one of those items the NEA is constantly fighting.

[DrRick947]

May I weigh in on this topic?  I was once a member of a local public school finance committee (as a parent) and later a member of the town school board (which cured any desire I had to run for higher public office).  As a consultant, our firm had nearly two-dozen large school districts as clients.  During those years, I made a couple observations.  

First, it costs a huge amount more to run a comprehensive high school than it costs to run an elementary or middle school.  The reason is that there are so many more course offerings so there have to be many more and different kinds of teachers.  

Our local high school lists well more than a hundred courses available to students (I can find courses in agriculture, animal husbandry, anatomy, Asian studies, astronomy, and auto repair just on the first page of the program of studies), and they all have to be taught be certified teachers.  The elementary schools just have the seven levels of a basic curriculum, plus teachers for music, art, and physical education.  Secondary costs much more than elementary school.

Second, special education is vastly more expensive than regular or gifted education at all levels.  Special ed extends to kids with all manner of disabilities, disadvantages, and drawbacks; IEPs, 504 plans, and other institutional attempts to be helpful.  Special ed costs vastly more than regular ed.

Third, kids are encountering a variety of unsavory situations, especially at home, earlier than ever.  Abandonment, physical, mental, and sexual abuse, drug abuse, alcohol, promiscuity, you name it.  Schools need counselors, social workers, psychologists, and other professionals to deal with all this stuff.  Kids don’t get to stay kids for long anymore.  Kids with problems outside of school cost much more than kids who don’t have such problems.

Fourth, small class size has been the holy grail of public education ever since Gene V Glass (then at University of Colorado) reported a relationship between increased achievement and reduced class sizes back in the ‘60s.  But they apparently didn’t read his whole report and thus assumed that smaller is always better.  It isn’t.  You don’t begin to see an effect of small class size on achievement until class size drops below about 15 students.  If you have 22 students in the class, you may as well have 35 … class size will probably make no difference.

So far, all this means that if you have an average or above-average kid who does well in school, does his/her homework with no hassles, doesn’t make waves, has a decent home life, and needs no extra services … that kind of kid is by far the least expensive to educate.  And the typical secular private school student often fits that description (as I did, BTW).  No wonder private schools’ per-student costs are lower.

Fifth, non-instructional costs, from student transportation to HVAC to employee benefits, are going through the leaking roof.  One factor many of these costs have in common is that they are connected to energy prices and are therefore out of anyone’s local control.

Sixth, the cost of complying with federal and state mandates is enormous.  I have come to the point where I think the majority of people involved in education today have no contact at all with kids … their work is about kids or around them but not with them.  I can’t support that statement with evidence but it’s a distinct impression I have.

Seventh, central office staffing is often bloated and inefficient.  A superintendent we had in this town called his department heads “the Cabinet” (until we fired him … The President gets a cabinet, not you … idiot).  I always maintained that if no students could identify a central office employee, then that person probably was not contributing to any kids’ education and could be let go.  Kids’ education is supposed to be the point of public schooling.

Eighth, benefits costs are outrageous.  The salaries are great to start with, the benefits are “Cadillac”, to say the least, and retired teachers in our town can remain on the district health plan and keep their spouses on the health plan for life!

Ninth, only now do I come to unions, Melissa (and I am a Democrat).  As I have mentioned elsewhere, I got through college working in a steel mill.  It is hot, heavy, dirty, dangerous work and I definitely understand the value of unions in that kind of heavy-industry context.  The union saved countless lives over the years.  I was a dues-paying member of United Steelworkers of America and proud of it.

But that was then and that was them.  I have experienced the value of unions in heavy industry, but there is nothing in a public school that is anything close to working in a mill or a mine or a foundry.  For that reason, I think unions are out of place in schools.  Not every workforce that can be unionized should be, and teaching is one that should not be.

I would give public school teachers and administrators a choice: you can have a union or you can have tenure; you can’t have both.  It is not acceptable to have high pay, Cadillac benefits, guaranteed employment, lifetime benefits, and no minimum performance requirements, all in one package.  Maybe it was at one time but it’s not now, in the 21st century.  Professional staff or organized labor: pick one.

Tenth, many parents are shirking their responsibilities.  They seem more than happy to leave schooling to the schools while providing no support or discipline at home.  Many teachers, especially in urban areas, don’t assign homework because there is no point to it … it won’t get done.  The threat of low grades means nothing to too many kids.  So schools are called upon to “remediate” learning that never happened in the first place.  Parents have to step up and do their part in raising their kids; the schools can’t do it alone.

My $0.02 worth.

[Ric9009]

I'm afraid I don't know what the NEA is.

Our teachers are unionised and that has led to problems such as they too opposed merit based systems but eventually the changes were made despite the unions.

And I see nothing wrong with Health Insurance being supplied to retired teachers.  How else would they remain insured?  And that brings us to the very big problem of having a Health Care system completely reliant on insurance, and where there are such huge differences in coverage.

There are non US studies about class sizes and I've never seen one that said the class size needs to be 15 to be effective.  For a certain level of students in certain courses a class size of anything below 30 might work.  For remedial students needing intensive individual assistance a class of 15 may be way too large.  IF the teaching is done well and you do not have a high number of students that have simply been put up a grade without learning properly then class sizes in the 20s seem to work well.

[DrRick947]

The NEA is the National Education Association and its state and local affiliates.  It is most public school teachers’ union here in the US.  There is another union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and they are closer to traditional trade unionists.  Both groups vehemently oppose merit pay for teachers. 

Some local districts (such as Washington, DC) are finding ways to introduce merit pay on a voluntary basis; individual teachers sign up for one scheme or the other when they start working.  The theory is that merit-pay teachers will be able to make more money but they will have somewhat less job security.  We’ll see how that works out.

The health insurance question is vexing.  Extending a flawed system to more people does not make it a good system, and that’s what we are in the process of doing.  I have written to my senators and congressman about it, without effect.  In this country, a single-payer program, Medicare, already covers seniors.

I would not want to be the one to contradict Glass’s research; I think he would be shattered (groan).     The effects he described were subtler than “class size needs to be 15 to be effective.”  It’s more like, “below 15, smaller is better; above 15, it really doesn’t matter.”  The research is almost 50 years old now but it has held up pretty well across grades and subjects.  Naturally, there are groups where even a dozen may be too large; it depends on the students’ needs.

I was once in a class (Latin III) that had only two intrepid souls in the class.  At year-end, I was second from the top; the other guy was next to last. 

[maidboy]

As previously stated, I agree that teachers unions and bloated public school
bureaucracies share in the blame for the poor state of public education here
in the US.  But even if much needed administrative cutbacks were made, the
money saved would be a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed for
adequate school funding.

I'm all in favor merit pay, not just for teachers, but for other work as well.
Perhaps America's corporate executives can set an example by instituting
a merit pay system for themselves, rather than giving themselves multi-million
dollar bonuses regardless of how well or poorly they perform.  But I fear it will
be a cold day in Hell when that happens.

The problem with merit pay for teachers is one of implementation.  How are
teachers' performances to be evaluated?  By test scores as they already are
in some places?  Schools run the risk of simply "teaching to the test" if they
rely solely on test scores as a measure of student achievement.  And poorly
performing schools can get caught in a downward spiral of poor test scores
resulting in less funding which results in even lower test scores etc etc.
The "No Child Left Behind" policy has had this unintended consequence.

And a more equitable funding of public schools needs to be in place before
a merit pay system can be fairly implemented.  Teachers in poorly funded
school districts cannot reasonably be expected to perform up to the same
high standards of their colleagues in more affluent districts without the same
tools (i.e. computers, updated texts, lab equipment etc) that they have.
Not to mention the wide gap in education levels between parents in poorer
and more affluent districts.  Indeed, some inner-city teachers deserve pay
for combat duty more than anything else.

Perhaps if issues like "teaching to the test" and inequitable public school
funding can be made right, the teachers unions will be more open to the
idea of merit pay.  But until then, I'm afraid that teachers will continue
being unfairly made the scapegoats for the sad state of public education.

[DrRick947]

You’re right about the key question, maidboy: “How are teachers’ performances to be evaluated?”

As I mentioned elsewhere, my training is in industrial psychology.  In that line of work, I have been drawn into a variety of attempts to create objective merit pay systems for “professional-level” positions.  Some of those projects have included physicians, classroom teachers, chief executive officers in the financial industry, aircraft pilots, and others.

With lower-level positions, the task is fairly simple.  The employee does the right things in the right order, while avoiding common mistakes, and achieves a successful result.  It’s pretty easy to tell the difference between success and failure.  The highest raises go to the most successful performers.

The problem with higher-level positions is that just as there are many definitions of failure, there are also many definitions of success.  And beyond basic knowledge of the field, professional judgment and experience are key elements of success.  And “success,” for merit pay purposes, may also involve circumstances like avoiding catastrophe or making a bad situation worse, or making the best of a bad situation.

Consider USAirways Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, who “landed” his plane in the Hudson last year.  Success or failure?  All of us (probably) would call it a great success.  Yet success as a pilot has to involve more than crashing a plane so that people can escape with their lives.

The new ER doctor, fresh from residency, treats a kid for an allergic reaction.  Success.  Yet the chief of orthopedic surgery struggles to reattach a severed limb and the patient has a difficult recovery because he was under anesthesia too long.  Success or failure for pay purposes?  Are they equal?  No, and it’s almost impossible to equate them for pay purposes.

The science teacher teaching gifted kids in a suburban middle school has great success: her kids all do well on NCLB-mandated tests.  But what about the third grade teacher trying to teach arithmetic in an inner city school with no resources to hungry kids whose parents are drug-addicted or in jail?  That school is failing to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” and may be closed.  Is the teacher a failure?  Or does the fact that he makes kids want to come to school at all a sign of success?  How do you equate those teachers for pay purposes?

I have come to the conclusion that in “professional” occupations, successful merit pay systems will always involve a large degree of managerial judgment as to the value of a performance in light of circumstances, and the rewards will always involve allocation of scarce resources among performers on the basis of the relative merits of their work.

Teachers unions are bound to have trouble with that approach.  “It’s not objective, it’s too judgmental,” they will say.  “It does not treat everybody the same.  It has potential for abuse.”  That’s all true.  But teaching to the test for the sake of producing good test scores is abuse too: it’s abusing the kids’ futures – and the kids don’t even know it.

When the alternative for teachers is to measure things that don’t matter, like the number of questions a teacher asks in a class, or the number of years of service, just because they are objective and easy to count, I’ll take the judgment-based system every time.  Pay disputes can be resolved and if the teacher doesn’t like the resolution, he can quit.  That beats hell out of the cynical approach most districts take now.

[redhatlover]

I have to throw my two cents in here.  I have been around a little and I see that the educational situation is deteriorating.  We spend more and more on our schools, and they produce less and less of a quality product.    The thing that really bothers me is the fact that the mechanics of reading, writing, and math have not changed, yet today, we cannot graduate children that have any proficiency in these subjects.


The owner of the last company that I worked for had a only fourth grade education as he had to go out and work.  In those four years (There was no kindergarten then), he learned how to read, write and do math up to what we would call accounting today.  This education was approximately 75 years ago.  The school was little more than the teachers and a superintendant at the county level.

I learned to read by the phonics method, which should be the only way reading is taught.  I realize that English has many exceptions, but I run into many young people today, that when confronted with an unfamiliar word, have no idea how to sound it out and just look puzzled. If you know the phonetic structure of your language, you can apply the same principles to any other phonetic language.  I spent a year in Korea and learned how to navigate the language in short order.  I am far from fluent, but I can get around Seoul on the buses, order from a menu in a restaurant, and other things that a tourist might do without having to resort to a translator.

As children are allowed to use calculators in school at an early age, I am not surprised at the lack of simple math skills.  We did not have such devices then, and I was only allowed a slide rule in my eleventh grade physics class.  I believe that computers and calculators have no place in schools until the basics are thouroughly learned.  Ancient Greece, in the era of Plato, Pythagoras, & Socrates, did not even have pencils and paper, yet they had a very high level of education.  (Yes, i realize that this was for only the upper classes.)

As for reading & writing, we have it fairly easy compared to the Chinese.  We have 26 letters and 10 digits for our numbers.  The Chinese have to know approximately 5000 characters to be barely literate.  To be considered educated in China, you need the mastery of 30,000 symbols.  Yet their schools produce an education that equals or beats ours.

Now the answer to this is NOT money.  Many people in the US today do not have any inclination of teaching (or even taking care of) their children.  I was very fortunate to have parents that valued learning and began teaching us right from the earliest moments of our life.  Dad & Mom would both read to me, and encourage us to read on our own.  Before I started school, I was reading some of the Sunday comics.  Dad would have me read articles in the paper.  I didn't know the context of a lot of it, but I could read and under stand most of the individual words.

The same mindset was evident in Korea.  I would sometimes go shopping and be waited on by a child of four or five.  Yet they were com petant to handle the sale, to include transactions in both dollars and won.  I had a Korean friend that taught 12 & 13 year old children.  I went to visit him on Christmas Eve,  We wanted to visit, but he had exams to correct.  He asked me if I would help him with either the English or the math exams.  I took the math as it would translate easier.  These kids were doing quadratic equations.  I not only had to correct them but I had to explain their mistakes.  Fortunately there were few.  These students were trying their best to get the highest grades as those who didn't would be going to a trade school.  The ones that passed went to regular high school and had a shot at college.  These kids were taught at an early age to value education and learn as much as possible, as to not do so would reflect badly on them and their families.

Yes, it does take some money if we want to have an educated society.  It also take parents who are willing to teach their kids from a very early age, children that want to learn, and an educational system that is effectively continuing to teach instead of being a giant day care facility.  It doesn't mean throwing money at every new and unproven theory that comes along or buying all the latest gadgets,  Stick to the pr oven basics.

[watcher1]

they also need 2 stop cuts from certain programs just 2 fund sports programs,.

Yesterday, our school system eliminated all Sophomore sports - on the very day Spring sports was to begin. Why Sophomore sports and not Freshman sports puzzles me, since Freshmen year in high school or college is a very big transition time for most students and should be spent acclimating oneself rather than playing sports.

[DrRick947]

Good points, redhatlover.  I think you caught the essence of many kids’ situations in your 6th paragraph: “Many people in the US today do not have any inclination of teaching (or even taking care of) their children.”  In fact, many kids in the US today do not even have two parents at home.

 Of course, let’s not tar everybody with the same brush.  There are very many caring and supportive parents out there who spend a ton of time with their kids all during their growing up years.  They read to and with their kids, they tackle the world together, the kids go to kindergarten knowing something of how to read, add, and subtract; they try their best to write and draw; they know basic colors and shapes, and so on.  They get in a homework habit that persists at least until middle school and, with parental persistence, often well beyond.  They do well on tests.  Their parents are involved with teachers at school.  They check their kids’ homework.  Those kids have good futures ahead of them.

It sounds like your upbringing was like that.  Mine certainly was.  I went to a six-room school (all 12 grades in 6 rooms) for the first four years of school with blackboards as the only instructional aids  (“walked five miles to school, uphill both ways, barefoot in blizzards”).

But there are too many more who do not get those advantages, especially in cities, which is where most of the people are.  One of my clients was an orphanage in New York City.  Hundreds of kids lived there; most had one parent in jail and the other dead, or dying of AIDS.

One day a few years ago, the orphanage got a call: the city was cutting its annual payments by several million dollars.  That very same night, the city delivered 14 girls, all 12 and 13 years old, by bus to the orphanage.  They were picked up off the streets and had no parents or homes.  So the orphanage had to find a way to feed, house, clothe, care for, and school these girls.  They needed medical care, too: 13 of the 14 were pregnant.

The extremes make the point: no amount of money, no technologies, no programs can overcome the disadvantages those kids face.  They say those kids go to a “failing school.”  We should be glad they are in school at all.

[Lois]

I was a teacher in the public schools once.

My colleagues were mostly inspirational, with a very few exceptions.  Teachers make very low pay co[pared to other professions requiring a 4 year degree + graduate school.  So it is given that everyone that is a teacher is a teacher because they love, and want to help, children succeed.

Merit pay makes no sense because parents are the No. 1 factor with regards to student success.  A teacher can work their ass off, but if the parents of their students are scumbags they won't make a whit of difference.  So teachers serving low income areas will always draw the short stick under "Merit Pay" schemes.  So if they get fucked over with regards to pay who will willingly take jobs in low income school districts/neighborhoods?  None.

There is room for reform though.  My biggest gripe was with conflicting and competing Federal Agencies.  The Sn Francisco Unified School Dist. Dept of Integration mandated that no more than 30% of any one ethnic group can be in a classroom.  This ran afoul of the need to provide bilingual education for Cantonese speaking students.  Under the Dept. of Integration only 30% of the students in a classroom could be Chinese.  Now maybe out of the 30% of the Chinese students allowed in the classroom, only 20% were Cantonese speaking.  So who is served?  What happens to the other 80% in the classroom?

A friend invited me to the local socialist party presentation supporting bilingual education.  They had the liberal attitude that other children would learn a foreign language in a bilingual classroom, so it was a good thing!  I laughed at them and got flamed. 

The bilingual teachers I have met (especially Chinese) make no bones about the fact that they do not consider that their job includes teaching non-Chinese students Chinese.  One teacher even excused every non-Chinese student in her class for recess for two hours a day while she taught the meager 20% of her students Cantonese!  Of course this caused a huge disruption to the rest of the school because the rest of us had to teach students while children were screaming in play right outside.  And the biggest crime was to the children that were deprived of two hours of education per day.

Please don't mistake me, the theory behind bilingual education is sound.  Students loose valuable learning years while learning English, so keeping them caught up in core classes while learning English is important.  I have no problem with this.  My problem is with how bilingual education is administered.

Another program we had was ESL (English as a second Language).  Under this program we had children from various ethnic groups dragged out of out classrooms every day.  M-W-F from 10 -11 am we lost all of our ESL students.  Of course this was also the time we taught Math.  So hwew we had a significant portion of our students missing math...... *sigh*

Again, I realize that ESL lessons are important, but so is math ...

next post, my solution ....

[DrRick947]

I hope you're coming back with a solution, Emily!