For one these were bipartisan plans that have been passed in regards to the Federal mandates for the public education system. So while one side had certain goals, the other side had other goals, and the two compromised to come up with the best system that they could come up with--at least in the 90s. In the 70s, a fully liberal Congress pushed the mainstreaming through, although it wasn't even a blip when it comes right down to it, and because it was a blip the Congress had no reason not to sit down like adults and have some amount of compromise. Plus, no one went back in the 80s and reviewed it, no one was fighting to repeal it with the zeal that we see right now as our personal finances are going to be affected. So it's a stark contrast to what we have right now.
Let's cover some of the 1970s changes. President Carter is considered one of the less successful presidents. Not for lack of trying, but he was a young president and his Democrat Congress did whatever they wanted. It is hard to blame Carter for the policies of the day, but yet, it was near impossible for him to get them to do anything that he wanted. Congress ignored his requests for legislature protecting farmers and subsidies to help guarantee the farm lands would remain fertile by paying farmers to cycle their fields and other things that would help the American farmers survive. (Historical note: This plan eventually became known as FarmAid and was pushed through by President Reagan, who saw the benefit and pushed it through in spite of it not being his plan. That, my friends, is called leadership.) Most people remember high gas prices (if you think they're high now, you have no idea), gas lines, the Iranian Hostage stand-off. President Carter's administration suffered immensely. He wasn't the right President for the time, perhaps. However, President Carter also had another major focus, and in that focus, he was successful. He created the Department of Education. He continued to push the desegregation of the schools, that ultimately has lead to the ability for a "black" man to serve as President of the United States. (Carter was from Georgia, in case you didn't know or couldn't remember.) He also supported mainstreaming students. By mainstreaming, they hoped to break down the divide of the social classes and how drastically different the educational system could be due to social make-up of a school district or state. These were effective overtime. Minimum requirements for graduation were also levied, although often still ignored. Of these social changes to the educational systems, the majority of the impacts were positive. Children could change schools and still be able to graduate on time, the curricula mandate ensured that all schools were following at bare minimum similar requirements. In the 1980s, the fluidity of society--most educated people moving at least twice during their careers, divorces forcing school changes, etc.--became predominant. These requirements allowed the children to see minimal impacts during rough changes in their lives. It also started programs that focused on the gifted and talented children, the 2% to 5%, that accelerate beyond their peers and require more intellectual challenges at a faster rate than the majority. There were no longer those handful of kids in the schools that needed fully individualized attention or were stuck with no attention to their intellectual ability. President Carter, while his legacy overall was poor (Presidency, not his achievements following), had one major success.
Like all successes, there was a failure in mainstreaming. It is very rare for everything to be all good. Not all school districts could afford special education schools, so parents of the day had to find and locate to a district that had a special ed school or pay for private education. Some districts would agree to fund a special education school and all the children from several districts might attend the one school. Mainstreaming lead to the elimination of most public funded special education schools. For that reason, many of our children today sit in classes with children that are what we politely call "slow" and sometimes crudely, sometimes accurately though, "retarded" children. Two of my boys had a kid in their classes that when he got frustrated would get up out of his seat and start beating his head on the wall. Thanks to mainstreaming, his parents had the right to have him in the regular school. There are very few public schools in any districts anymore to address his particular special needs, and regular children were exposed to him beating himself on some occasions until he started bleeding. I was livid when I found out and expressed it to the principal who told me why it was the way it was. I had wondered why in the late 80s almost all of those special needs schools were gone. Now, I knew why. Worse yet, because of the Federal law, the parents of this special needs child could sue if the child was not "mainstreamed". I was frank. Take my boys out of those classes and place them in equal or better classes or I will go to every parent with a child in that class and get a class action together demanding that the boy be moved to a better location. Federal law doesn't mandate that such behavior be tolerated. It doesn't address it at all. In fixing the social issues involved with poorer areas, we had left behind the needs of special children that simply cannot be mainstreamed without adverse implications on the average students. While I do feel sympathy for the parents' of special needs children, exposing the majority to the adverse effects of severe learning problems is not the best answer. This is the one failure in those efforts that really needs to be re-addressed.
In the 1990s, it became very apparent that some states were simply doing the bare minimum and that many of the poorer, more rural and inner city schools were still not getting "equal" education benefits, although no one was really sure how far behind those schools actually were. The ACT and SAT scores were a small help in determining how great the issues were or even where the deviation started. It was just apparent by the low percentage of students even taking the tests that some states had to be "leaving behind" a large number of students. The major hurdle: There was very little testing conducted by the states overall as far as various milestones. Some states conducted no testing whatsoever and left it up to their districts, and even if they had testing, they were not able to definitively compare to other states. South Carolina was one of the worst states in the nation for percentage of students taking college bound testing, had some districts with drastically low graduation rates, and was consistently ranked at the low end of the 40s in comparison to the rest of the 50 states which many in the state argued was an unfair ranking. The "Leave No Child Behind" legislation created Federal mandated testing. It helped gauge programs from state to state, district to district, and helped parents look at the quality of the school(s) in an area before they committed to living there. All bonuses. Many states now could see where they truly stood in comparison to other states and internally also. Another big bonus. It also forced many schools at the bottom of the rankings to start teaching the tests. That is not education. That is memorize and regurgitate. Most teachers were drastically upset by the measures, because now their curricula was even more controlled than ever. It also didn't allow for children that learned by different methods. It forced the teachers to teach as the test was laid out. Of course, I'll be frank. I have friends that are teachers and school administrators. At first, at some schools, maybe even for a majority, this is probably true, regardless of the quality of the school. However, over time, a teacher and/or program that truly wishes to engage the students is going to put forth the effort to start teaching and let the testing guide what is included in their course agendas without diminishing the quality of education. It sounds very easy on paper. I assure you that it is not. It takes a lot of dedication and sometimes our teachers are only teachers because they get summers off. But in 10 years, South Carolina has gone from the bottom in the Federal mandated comparison data to a Top 20 state. I consider that an epic achievement. The mandatory testing showed where they were lacking and a strong commitment from the state, the school districts and most importantly, from their teachers and administrators has resulted in leaps and bounds improvement in just a decade. They are no longer doing the bare minimum, but are exceeding other states in educational quality because of the ability to compare and see exactly where they stood within their state and to the rest of the nation with a distinct measurement. That simply wouldn't have happened without Federal mandate.
In addition, the Leave No Child Behind Act meant that parents didn't have to have their children attend schools that couldn't meet the minimum testing standards. This at first sounds like certain schools would be overwhelmed by requests to opt out of the worst schools in a district. This is true, but in application, most parents were unaware so the effect was minimal overall. In order to deal with these shuffling children, many school districts implemented magnet schools that began focusing children's innate talents. In most cases though, the quality of those schools that were below standards was improved through improved requirements for the teachers and the administrators. Quality teachers and quality administrators makes a huge difference in the quality of a school, not the location. The quality of teachers and the minimum standards for teachers were also upgraded. While there are still school districts in this country that allow a person with only a high school diploma to act a substitute teacher, there is not a single staff teacher in this country that doesn't have a Bachelor's Degree and a minimum certification completed. While this doesn't guarantee the quality, it does guarantee that each teacher has minimum requirements. If you only have a high school diploma and you barely understand Algebra, should you be teaching it? (Incidentally, why I do NOT support at home schooling.) While students from lower income areas are still at a greater risk, the quality of the staff of those schools has improved exponentially. It's too bad we can't improve the parents with some simple legislation. I'm painfully aware that some parents could care less.
Perhaps some of the parental indifference though is to the amount of homework most kids and particularly teenagers have to complete now. The truth is the downfall to improved quality of teachers who want to ensure their students are meeting the bare minimums is that the average kid does two to three times the amount of homework as their parents did. It's frustrating both to the kids and the parents, who in actuality have probably forgotten more than they learned. My over-achiever has 5 to 6 hours of homework a day, after an 8 hour day of school. It's overkill. He's that 2%, the "gifted", that will achieve and overachieve regardless, and even though he somehow has that innately, I see him often being exhausted and just walking away from it. The goal should not be to wear down the best of the best. Likewise, one of his brothers is above average smarts and does pretty well on tests...in spite of the fact that he does the bare minimum when it comes to his homework. His overall grades are often adversely affected by his choice to blow off some homework. I just can't bring myself to force him to do 3 to 4 hours of homework a night. I'll take the Bs and Cs, rather than crush his love of learning and the fact he performs well overall. He's a curious kid and was advanced and talented. However, the excessive homework started to drown him and make him hate school. We were lucky to have a Guidance Counselor that understood him better than I did that helped us choose a program that engaged him and got him interested in learning again. He still blows off some homework, but when he's struggling, he'll do the homework diligently. I'll take it. Somehow with all this intervention, we've forgotten kids are still supposed to be kids.
While kids are supposed to be kids, we really don't understand how to reach some parents. I've been accused of not being engaged with my children's educations because I stopped attending parent-teacher conferences at open house seminars. Well, yes, I refuse to go. I'm not good in pushy crowds and the last parent-teacher open house/conferences that I attended I was shoved while walking down the hall into a wall--not intentionally, but like a lot of people, and moreover a lot of veterans, these open houses can be harrowing. It might not be that the parents aren't engaged or wanting to be engaged. It just might be difficult and that can be for a myriad of reasons. We simply don't know what keeps parents from being more engaged. There are no studies on the parents, no comprehensive understanding, no actual data to explain the perceived parents' apathy, indifference or unresponsiveness. We have some teachers giving empirical information based on their observations. That's not really good data. Like before the Federal testing standards were actually instituted, we only have people's observations that are skewed by their own internal opinions and concepts. Many thought that states were wrongly ranked before the Leave No Child Behind standardized testing. It was a wake up call for many. We don't have that wake up call for the parents of our children. We know of various excuses--work hours, single parents, parental apathy, et cetera. But we really don't know for sure, and we really can't address issues when we haven't even begun to understand the problem. The problem definition for parental involvement hasn't been addressed, so therefore all the darts that teachers and administrators throw at the problem doesn't necessarily fix it. In addition what would fix it in one case, might be completely inaccurate for another family. A single parent who is a high school dropout is going to have very different issues that affect their kid's education than a single parent who was married for 10 years and is reentering the workforce. The impact on the kids might have similar outward responses, but the "cure", the way to address those problems, comes down to what started the stress on the kid. We simply cannot think that one solution will fit all family situations. We take the "case by case", but that is exhaustive. We need to start understanding the similarities in parental issues that can impact their children's educations, and start providing a way for administrators and teachers to help the kids. Can this even be legislated? I'm not sure it wouldn't do more damage than help given the draconian turn society has been taking. No matter how good or bad legislation can be, there are simply some things that laws may just make worse.
Basically, education in the United States has taken a downward trend, or so they tell us. I'm not sure about that. I think that we might have different gauges than other countries, just as our individual states did prior to the Leave No Child Behind Act. However, I also know while many other countries provide "free" education that is not all accolades and roses. In many countries, once a child fails (a relative term--a C by our standards may be considered a fail by theirs), the child takes that education to that point and goes to work--whether a sixth grade equivalent education or a high school diploma. Some countries have massive, exhaustive testing after completing high school that a pass means a "free" college education and a fail means the end of your education, regardless. No going back to school in your 30s because you've matured and want better opportunities or a better life or whatever motivation. A single failure (again failure being relative) is the end of all future educational possibilities. So when I hear someone say that we need to change our system to allow only kids that are engaged or only kids of parents who are engaged, I cringe. Such ignorance should be duct taped, put on a plane and shipped over to one of those countries in trade for someone who would love a second chance at an education. Our educational system is not perfect, but in comparison, we afford all citizens greater opportunities than the majority of the rest of the world.
Are there changes that I would make? Well, hell yeah. I think we've forgotten as the world has gotten smaller how important learning another language and culture is. Ironic right? Would I teach it at the high school level? Culture yes, language no. I'd teach the languages in kindergarten through fourth grade when the mind is a sponge for language. Culture, well, that should be in middle and high school range--the age where we start to appreciate differences. Perhaps that way our kids could learn compromise by appreciating differences in societies, and thus learning to appreciate differences in people in general. Music and the arts are very important to creativity and opening the mind to appreciate the differences in life also. Again, better to start at a young age and continue though the significant teen years. Yet, we are killing off music and art programs left and right in this country. I'd teach all teenagers critical thinking. Many schools teach this to the gifted and accelerated children. They kind of assume that the average child is incapable. Such bullsh*t. Any child, short of retardation (yes, I call it retardation--slow learners are not retarded), is capable of learning critical thinking. For those of you that don't understand what critical thinking is, it is the ability to observe, read or otherwise be exposed to and make reasonable conclusions. There are so many people incapable of this right now, and we assume that is because they can't. It's not that they can't. It's that we have wrongly assumed that they haven't the ability. I have a friend that argued that she couldn't do that. She couldn't debate or any of these things. Yes, critical thinking is a fundamental skill needed in debate. However, if you've ever read a mystery novel and recognized who the culprit was before the last chapters, then you have engaged in critical thinking. Much like most people don't understand that they use Algebra in everyday life, most people use critical thinking but never understand that is what they are doing. I'd also make sure that all education in high schools had real world application examples. It wouldn't be any skin off a teacher's back to show that Geometry could help you buy tile for a bathroom or that Algebra is actually how you decide to buy 3/$5 or 4/$4. We make statements that we should learn from our past mistakes; any high school world history class should be able to contrast the League of Nations concept to the United Nations and ask any kid what the lesson there is. Some might use critical thinking to argue that even with or without the League of Nations WW2 was inevitable or they might be able to argue that it might have been like the United Nations helping to avoid many conflicts. The great thing is that neither argument is ever going to be right or wrong. However, it does offer the opportunity to show teenagers how learning from our past mistakes, even if they were not ours specifically, can change a world. Also, as the Principal of my boys' high school now believes, high school should be "fun". The kids should look back on those years as the best. It's the last years that they get to be "kids". We have no business taking that away from them with our fears and draconian controls. Is the American education system on a downward trend? I don't buy it. Are there still improvements to be made? Yes, and some of them rest solely on our approaches and our own limited views.
Perhaps, I'm a little nostalgic when I hope that we can make high school "fun" again. But I believe that we are still selling our kids short even though I believe that most of the Federal mandates over the years have actually resulted in great strides and improvements overall. However, we are still missing the point when we start making cuts to the arts, music, languages--those things that create the spark of mental curiosity in the first place. We are still selling our kids short by assuming that only the gifted and accelerated can be taught critical thinking. Yet, these are the children that will take over the world someday. I often end these types of blogs with an applicable quote and yet there are so many education quotes. What I can say is that critical thinking requires our kids to learn to take in the information, process it for themselves and then come to a conclusion based on their own analysis. It doesn't necessarily mean right or wrong--sometimes it just helps them formulate their own opinions. But when you are confident in your own opinion, you can respect another's opinion, whether in opposition or not. We talk about wanting better politicians--then we say perhaps we need better constituents that are not easily lead like sheep...We want better laws, compromise and adult behavior in DC. Perhaps that is truly the most important impact of better education. At least let's hope so, because the back end of the Baby Boomers and the beginning leadership of GenX are definately leaving something to be desired. Fortunately for us, educational arguments in the Federal government don't take on very much attention. From current observations, that's probably a good thing. When they can't make a circus of it and compromise, seems like they come up with pretty decent plans overall.
In addition, the Leave No Child Behind Act meant that parents didn't have to have their children attend schools that couldn't meet the minimum testing standards. This at first sounds like certain schools would be overwhelmed by requests to opt out of the worst schools in a district. This is true, but in application, most parents were unaware so the effect was minimal overall. In order to deal with these shuffling children, many school districts implemented magnet schools that began focusing children's innate talents. In most cases though, the quality of those schools that were below standards was improved through improved requirements for the teachers and the administrators. Quality teachers and quality administrators makes a huge difference in the quality of a school, not the location. The quality of teachers and the minimum standards for teachers were also upgraded. While there are still school districts in this country that allow a person with only a high school diploma to act a substitute teacher, there is not a single staff teacher in this country that doesn't have a Bachelor's Degree and a minimum certification completed. While this doesn't guarantee the quality, it does guarantee that each teacher has minimum requirements. If you only have a high school diploma and you barely understand Algebra, should you be teaching it? (Incidentally, why I do NOT support at home schooling.) While students from lower income areas are still at a greater risk, the quality of the staff of those schools has improved exponentially. It's too bad we can't improve the parents with some simple legislation. I'm painfully aware that some parents could care less.
Perhaps some of the parental indifference though is to the amount of homework most kids and particularly teenagers have to complete now. The truth is the downfall to improved quality of teachers who want to ensure their students are meeting the bare minimums is that the average kid does two to three times the amount of homework as their parents did. It's frustrating both to the kids and the parents, who in actuality have probably forgotten more than they learned. My over-achiever has 5 to 6 hours of homework a day, after an 8 hour day of school. It's overkill. He's that 2%, the "gifted", that will achieve and overachieve regardless, and even though he somehow has that innately, I see him often being exhausted and just walking away from it. The goal should not be to wear down the best of the best. Likewise, one of his brothers is above average smarts and does pretty well on tests...in spite of the fact that he does the bare minimum when it comes to his homework. His overall grades are often adversely affected by his choice to blow off some homework. I just can't bring myself to force him to do 3 to 4 hours of homework a night. I'll take the Bs and Cs, rather than crush his love of learning and the fact he performs well overall. He's a curious kid and was advanced and talented. However, the excessive homework started to drown him and make him hate school. We were lucky to have a Guidance Counselor that understood him better than I did that helped us choose a program that engaged him and got him interested in learning again. He still blows off some homework, but when he's struggling, he'll do the homework diligently. I'll take it. Somehow with all this intervention, we've forgotten kids are still supposed to be kids.
While kids are supposed to be kids, we really don't understand how to reach some parents. I've been accused of not being engaged with my children's educations because I stopped attending parent-teacher conferences at open house seminars. Well, yes, I refuse to go. I'm not good in pushy crowds and the last parent-teacher open house/conferences that I attended I was shoved while walking down the hall into a wall--not intentionally, but like a lot of people, and moreover a lot of veterans, these open houses can be harrowing. It might not be that the parents aren't engaged or wanting to be engaged. It just might be difficult and that can be for a myriad of reasons. We simply don't know what keeps parents from being more engaged. There are no studies on the parents, no comprehensive understanding, no actual data to explain the perceived parents' apathy, indifference or unresponsiveness. We have some teachers giving empirical information based on their observations. That's not really good data. Like before the Federal testing standards were actually instituted, we only have people's observations that are skewed by their own internal opinions and concepts. Many thought that states were wrongly ranked before the Leave No Child Behind standardized testing. It was a wake up call for many. We don't have that wake up call for the parents of our children. We know of various excuses--work hours, single parents, parental apathy, et cetera. But we really don't know for sure, and we really can't address issues when we haven't even begun to understand the problem. The problem definition for parental involvement hasn't been addressed, so therefore all the darts that teachers and administrators throw at the problem doesn't necessarily fix it. In addition what would fix it in one case, might be completely inaccurate for another family. A single parent who is a high school dropout is going to have very different issues that affect their kid's education than a single parent who was married for 10 years and is reentering the workforce. The impact on the kids might have similar outward responses, but the "cure", the way to address those problems, comes down to what started the stress on the kid. We simply cannot think that one solution will fit all family situations. We take the "case by case", but that is exhaustive. We need to start understanding the similarities in parental issues that can impact their children's educations, and start providing a way for administrators and teachers to help the kids. Can this even be legislated? I'm not sure it wouldn't do more damage than help given the draconian turn society has been taking. No matter how good or bad legislation can be, there are simply some things that laws may just make worse.
Basically, education in the United States has taken a downward trend, or so they tell us. I'm not sure about that. I think that we might have different gauges than other countries, just as our individual states did prior to the Leave No Child Behind Act. However, I also know while many other countries provide "free" education that is not all accolades and roses. In many countries, once a child fails (a relative term--a C by our standards may be considered a fail by theirs), the child takes that education to that point and goes to work--whether a sixth grade equivalent education or a high school diploma. Some countries have massive, exhaustive testing after completing high school that a pass means a "free" college education and a fail means the end of your education, regardless. No going back to school in your 30s because you've matured and want better opportunities or a better life or whatever motivation. A single failure (again failure being relative) is the end of all future educational possibilities. So when I hear someone say that we need to change our system to allow only kids that are engaged or only kids of parents who are engaged, I cringe. Such ignorance should be duct taped, put on a plane and shipped over to one of those countries in trade for someone who would love a second chance at an education. Our educational system is not perfect, but in comparison, we afford all citizens greater opportunities than the majority of the rest of the world.
Are there changes that I would make? Well, hell yeah. I think we've forgotten as the world has gotten smaller how important learning another language and culture is. Ironic right? Would I teach it at the high school level? Culture yes, language no. I'd teach the languages in kindergarten through fourth grade when the mind is a sponge for language. Culture, well, that should be in middle and high school range--the age where we start to appreciate differences. Perhaps that way our kids could learn compromise by appreciating differences in societies, and thus learning to appreciate differences in people in general. Music and the arts are very important to creativity and opening the mind to appreciate the differences in life also. Again, better to start at a young age and continue though the significant teen years. Yet, we are killing off music and art programs left and right in this country. I'd teach all teenagers critical thinking. Many schools teach this to the gifted and accelerated children. They kind of assume that the average child is incapable. Such bullsh*t. Any child, short of retardation (yes, I call it retardation--slow learners are not retarded), is capable of learning critical thinking. For those of you that don't understand what critical thinking is, it is the ability to observe, read or otherwise be exposed to and make reasonable conclusions. There are so many people incapable of this right now, and we assume that is because they can't. It's not that they can't. It's that we have wrongly assumed that they haven't the ability. I have a friend that argued that she couldn't do that. She couldn't debate or any of these things. Yes, critical thinking is a fundamental skill needed in debate. However, if you've ever read a mystery novel and recognized who the culprit was before the last chapters, then you have engaged in critical thinking. Much like most people don't understand that they use Algebra in everyday life, most people use critical thinking but never understand that is what they are doing. I'd also make sure that all education in high schools had real world application examples. It wouldn't be any skin off a teacher's back to show that Geometry could help you buy tile for a bathroom or that Algebra is actually how you decide to buy 3/$5 or 4/$4. We make statements that we should learn from our past mistakes; any high school world history class should be able to contrast the League of Nations concept to the United Nations and ask any kid what the lesson there is. Some might use critical thinking to argue that even with or without the League of Nations WW2 was inevitable or they might be able to argue that it might have been like the United Nations helping to avoid many conflicts. The great thing is that neither argument is ever going to be right or wrong. However, it does offer the opportunity to show teenagers how learning from our past mistakes, even if they were not ours specifically, can change a world. Also, as the Principal of my boys' high school now believes, high school should be "fun". The kids should look back on those years as the best. It's the last years that they get to be "kids". We have no business taking that away from them with our fears and draconian controls. Is the American education system on a downward trend? I don't buy it. Are there still improvements to be made? Yes, and some of them rest solely on our approaches and our own limited views.
Perhaps, I'm a little nostalgic when I hope that we can make high school "fun" again. But I believe that we are still selling our kids short even though I believe that most of the Federal mandates over the years have actually resulted in great strides and improvements overall. However, we are still missing the point when we start making cuts to the arts, music, languages--those things that create the spark of mental curiosity in the first place. We are still selling our kids short by assuming that only the gifted and accelerated can be taught critical thinking. Yet, these are the children that will take over the world someday. I often end these types of blogs with an applicable quote and yet there are so many education quotes. What I can say is that critical thinking requires our kids to learn to take in the information, process it for themselves and then come to a conclusion based on their own analysis. It doesn't necessarily mean right or wrong--sometimes it just helps them formulate their own opinions. But when you are confident in your own opinion, you can respect another's opinion, whether in opposition or not. We talk about wanting better politicians--then we say perhaps we need better constituents that are not easily lead like sheep...We want better laws, compromise and adult behavior in DC. Perhaps that is truly the most important impact of better education. At least let's hope so, because the back end of the Baby Boomers and the beginning leadership of GenX are definately leaving something to be desired. Fortunately for us, educational arguments in the Federal government don't take on very much attention. From current observations, that's probably a good thing. When they can't make a circus of it and compromise, seems like they come up with pretty decent plans overall.
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