The City University community college system released a shocking statistic last week that roughly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates fall below proficient levels of reading, writing, and math and must take remedial courses before starting any classes.
It is the latest disclosure of our school system that shows how we are creating a lost generation of kids in a sub-standard educational system. It is a disgrace that the vast majority of kids going into the community college system would not have the most basic skills required of graduates. It shows how our schools are often churning out students and “making the numbers” — and failing our students.
Nearly 11,000 kids who came from city high schools needed remedial courses to re-learn the basics.
This should be seen as a far greater threat to our national security than terrorism or economic pressures. We are educating a population that simply cannot compete on a large scale with other nations that put greater effort and support behind education. Worse yet, we are widening the gulf between classes in our society of those people who are highly educated and affluent and those who are left with a remedial level of education. The failure in our school system has now shifted basic learning to the college level. Notably, many kids never go to college, so they are left without even remedial education.
We remain a country that maintains the highest level of war-making capabilities while disregarding the low performance levels of our schools. It is a trend that can only lead to problems in the future. We will become the world’s soldiers while other nations take the lead in science and the economy. This is not to say that we do not have a highly educated elite. However, we have a large unskilled and barely educated population going into a world that demands greater and greater sophistication in the workforce.
Source: CBS
Educational Rot
American education is in a sorry state of affairs, and there’s enough blame for all participants to have their fair share. They include students who are hostile and alien to the education process, uninterested parents, teachers and administrators who either are incompetent or have been beaten down by the system, and politicians who’ve become handmaidens for teachers unions. There’s another education issue that’s neither flattering nor comfortable to confront and talk about. That’s the low academic preparation of many teachers. That’s an issue that must be confronted and dealt with if we’re to improve the quality of education. Let’s look at it.
Schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, tend to represent the academic slums of most college campuses. They tend to be home to students who have the lowest academic achievement test scores when they enter college, such as SAT scores. They have the lowest scores when they graduate and choose to take postgraduate admissions tests — such as the GRE, the MCAT and the LSAT.
The California Basic Educational Skills Test, or CBEST, is mandatory for teacher certification in California. It’s a joke. Here’s a multiple-choice question on its practice math test: “Rob uses 1 box of cat food every 5 days to feed his cats. Approximately how many boxes of cat food does he use per month? A. 2 boxes, B. 4 boxes, C. 5 boxes, D. 6 boxes, E. 7 boxes.” Here’s another: “Which of the following is the most appropriate unit for expressing the weight of a pencil? A. pounds, B. ounces, C. quarts, D. pints, E. tons.” I’d venture to predict that the average reader’s sixth-grader could answer each question. Here’s a question that is a bit more challenging; call your eighth-grader: “Solve for y: y – 2 + 3y = 10, A. 2, B. 3, C. 4, D. 5, E. 6.”
Some years ago, the Association of Mexican American Educators, the California Association for Asian-Pacific Bilingual Education and the Oakland Alliance of Black Educators brought suit against the state of California and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, charging that the CBEST was racially discriminatory. Plaintiff “evidence” was the fact that the first-time passing rate for whites was 80 percent, about 50 percent for Mexican-Americans, Filipinos and Southeast Asians, and 46 percent for blacks. In 2000, in a stroke of rare common sense, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit found CBEST not to be racial discriminatory.
Poor teacher preparation is not a problem restricted to California. In Massachusetts, only 27 percent of new teachers could pass the math test needed to be certified as a teacher. A 2011 investigation by Atlanta’s Channel 2 Action News found that more than 700 Georgia teachers repeatedly failed at least one portion of the certification test they are required to pass before receiving a teaching certificate. Nearly 60 teachers failed the test more than 10 times, and one teacher failed the test 18 times. They also found that there were 297 teachers on the Atlanta school system’s payroll even though they had failed the state certification test five times or more.
Textbooks used in schools of education might explain some teacher ineptitude. A passage in Marilyn Burns’ text “About Teaching Mathematics” reads, “There is no place for requiring students to practice tedious calculations that are more efficiently and accurately done by using calculators.” “New Designs for Teaching and Learning,” by Dennis Adams and Mary Hamm, says, “Content knowledge is not seen to be as important as possessing teaching skills and knowledge about the students being taught.” Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar’s text “Methods that Matter” reads, “Students can no longer be viewed as cognitive living rooms into which the furniture of knowledge is moved in and arranged by teachers, and teachers cannot invariably act as subject-matter experts.” The authors explain, “The main use of standardized tests in America is to justify the distribution of certain goodies to certain people.”
With but a few exceptions, schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college. American education could benefit from slum removal, eliminating schools of education.
Walter Williams
Just watch the Bush family move in for the charter school remedy so they can clean up.
Ravitch on New York’s failed experiment in school turnaround model. Lessons for all of us.
July 22, 2012, by Maureen Downey
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/07/22/ravitch-on-new-yorks-failed-experiment-in-school-turnaround-model-lessons-for-all-of-us/
Many of you follow the blog of noted education historian Diane Ravitch. She sent me a link today to her most recent blog, which I thought was worth sharing. You can read the original here.
Here is her blog on the failed reform efforts of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg:
From The New York Daily News (owned by billionaire Mort Zuckerman, who also owns U.S. News & World Report) often runs editorials applauding the “reforms” of the Bloomberg administration. Its editorials are anti-union, anti-teacher, and consistently supportive of the policy of closing schools that have low test scores.
But the New York Daily News has excellent reporters who don’t follow the editorial line. They just report the news. And the story today is stunning.
The headline summarizes the story: “Bloomberg’s New Schools Have Failed Thousands of City Students: Did More Poorly on State Reading Tests than Older Schools with Similar Poverty Rates.”
This analysis shows the abject failure of the policy that has been the centerpiece of the Bloomberg reforms for the past decade.
Closing schools and replacing them with new schools is also the centerpiece of the Obama-Duncan “turnaround” strategy.
Here is an excerpt from the news story. Note that the grandmother of a student in Brooklyn makes more sense than the six-figure bureaucrats who run the New York City Department of Education. Tanya King of Brooklyn for Chancellor!
…When The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.
The new schools also showed poor results in the city’s letter-grade rating system, which uses a complicated formula to compare schools with those that have similar demographics.
Of 133 new elementary and middle schools that got letter grades last year, 15% received D’s and F’s — far more than the city average, where just 10% of schools got the rock-bottom grades.
“It’s crazy,” said Tanya King, who helped wage a losing battle to save Brooklyn’s Academy of Business and Community Development, where her grandson was a student.
The school opened in 2005, then closed in 2012.
Instead of closing struggling schools and replacing them with something else that doesn’t work, King says, the city should help with extra resources to save the existing schools.
“You have the same children in the school,” she said. “What’s going to be the difference? Put in the services that are going to make the school better.”
Her grandson Donnovan Hicks, 11, will be transferred next fall for the seventh-grade into another Bloomberg-created school, Brooklyn’s Peace Academy, where just 13% passed the state reading exams this spring.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
The Limits of School Reform
By JOE NOCERA
Published: April 25, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/opinion/26nocera.html
Excerpt:
I find myself haunted by a 13-year-old boy named Saquan Townsend. It’s been more than two weeks since he was featured in The New York Times Magazine, yet I can’t get him out of my mind.
The article, by Jonathan Mahler, was about the heroic efforts of Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, to make his school a place where his young charges can get a decent education and thus, perhaps, a better life. Surprisingly, though, González is not aligned with the public school reform movement, even though one of the movement’s leading lights, Joel Klein, was until fairly recently his boss as the head of the New York City school system.
Instead, González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, “all of the educational experimentation” that took place on Klein’s watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that’s required to improve student performance, so that’s all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to face squarely — and needs to.
Saquan lands at M.S. 223 because his family has been placed in a nearby homeless shelter. (His mother fled Brooklyn out of fear that another son was in danger of being killed.) At first, he is so disruptive that a teacher, Emily Dodd, thinks he might have a mental disability. But working with him one on one, Dodd discovers that Saquan is, to the contrary, unusually intelligent — “brilliant” even.
From that point on, Dodd does everything a school reformer could hope for. She sends him text messages in the mornings, urging him to come to school. She gives him special help. She encourages him at every turn. For awhile, it seems to take.
Meanwhile, other forces are pushing him in another direction. His mother, who works nights and barely has time to see her son, comes across as indifferent to his schooling. Though she manages to move the family back to Brooklyn, the move means that Saquan has an hour-and-a-half commute to M.S. 223. As his grades and attendance slip, Dodd offers to tutor him. To no avail: He finally decides it isn’t worth the effort, and transfers to a school in Brooklyn.
The point is obvious, or at least it should be: Good teaching alone can’t overcome the many obstacles Saquan faces when he is not in school. Nor is he unusual. Mahler recounts how M.S. 223 gives away goodie bags to lure parents to parent association meetings, yet barely a dozen show up. He reports that during the summer, some students fall back a full year in reading comprehension — because they don’t read at home.
Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.
NYC School Reform, Bloomberg-Style: Taking Care of Business?
by Michelle Chen
Published on Saturday, November 13, 2010 by In These Times
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/13-1
Excerpt:
The New York City school system may be short on textbooks and qualified teachers, but it does feature a big, shiny revolving door. Through this entryway, education moguls flow freely between the city’s gilded corporate enclaves and its pauperized classrooms.
To continue this tradition, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has tapped Cathleen Black, chair of Hearst Magazines, to succeed the outgoing Joel Klein as schools chancellor. The three boast similar corporate-media pedigrees. Bloomberg was a media magnate before his wealth catapulted him into a (legally precarious) three-term reign at Gracie Mansion. Klein was a business lawyer with no background in education when picked for the post.
The Klein-Bloomberg team (along with D.C. counterpart Michelle Rhee and Obama’s education chief Arne Duncan) garnered national headlines with its scorched-earth brand of reform, which dovetails neatly with the liberal elite save-our-schools crusade, fueled by free-market ideology and philanthropic dollars. Bloomberg and Klein pummeled schools with a slew of “entrepreneurial” top-down shake-ups that sought to shutter “failing” schools, seek “accountability” through testing, and inject new ideological blood into powerful principal positions.
Embattled union teachers bristled at these changes, seeing Bloomberg and Klein as out of touch with their day-to-day challenges. Moreover, advocates attacked the administration’s coddling of controversial, often overhyped charter schools as an effort to undermine and privatize public schools and constrain unions. But there was little recourse, as the system had few checks aside from a stacked panel that critics saw as little more than a rubber stamp for the Mayor.
Klein’s approach privileged corporate managerial prowess and downgrades the thankless work of teaching long division and iambic pantameter. Did it pay off? Today, the yawning racial gap in academic performance remains massive. Test scores Bloomberg once touted have been revised downward under a new assessment by the state, which has jolted many schools with a drop from previously distorted grades.
Now the city has hired a media executive to heal the school’s political, economic and ethnic fissures. Activists have already derided Black’s private-school background and what appears to be her unabashed cluelessness. She recently pleaded for “patience as I get up to speed on all of the issues facing K-through-12 education today.” Unfortunately, patience is one virtue New Yorkers do not possess in abundance when dealing with opaque school officials.
Yet in the wake of Klein’s reform blitzkrieg, students, teachers and parents are wary not to endorse rash change just for change’s sake. What’s missing from the reform equation isn’t momentum, it’s a community-wide deliberation on how to create an environment for meaningful learning and developing intellectual confidence.
Black will step into a battleground of school reform fraught with competing union and mayoral agendas, litigation over school closures, slashed budgets and brain-choking standardized tests. The actual experience of learning may well get lost once again in the din of partisan bickering.
To progressive-minded teachers, there’s no magic reform bullet, and that’s the delusion that got so many public schools into trouble. The solution starts with following the wisdom of responsible, and responsive, educators who know how a school functions: how to keep a kid’s attention for 45 minutes straight, how to defuse a playground fight, how to speak to parents about a boy’s lackluster report card, or fight for more resources when the supply cabinet goes empty again.
“It’s not our fault.” Right union folks. “We have ZERO responsibility is this failure.”
School Maintenance Report Shows Need For $542 Billion To Update, Modernize Buildings
By PHILIP ELLIOTT 03/12/13
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/12/school-maintenance-report_n_2858279.html
Blouise,
The “shocking” reports/test results are published–but no one ever investigates to find out the real reasons underlying the problems. The new corporate-led school reform suggest we treat the symptoms of and not the actual disease. That’s because folks like Murdoch hope to make lots of money in education reform with their costly “fixes.”
“Finally, my years with NYC taught me the valuable lesson that whenever “shocking” reports/studies are publicized, they are usually being used to promote an agenda and one should be very suspicious of the statistical validity of what is being presented.” (Mike S.)
Requiring students to take remedial courses is also a great moneymaker. I have heard many legitimate complaints from students about this practice.
What AY said about Karl Rove’s keep them dumb plan!
Left….right….. People are wasting precious time arguing partisan nonsense while we are ALL being stripped of our rights, by both the Left AND Right
Bruce,
You mean the unfunded mandate…. Yeah see how that works….. Then why is Texas trying to opt out if its such a good thing?
AY You mean when W instituted no child left behind? Trying to make the schools edcuate children. W’s wife was a school teacher. It seems all the school boards want is more money. The schools are becoming a baby sitting organization, In L.A. they recently laid off a teacher but kept funding an after school program so the kids wouldn’t be running the streets unsupervised.
Bruce,
When using titleIX funds….. It does not matter who is mayor, governor or whatever else…. School deform started with W….
Dear Jonathan,
Have you ever read this? I think this is the most enlightening article I’m ever read on public education.
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
** 09/2003 Harper’s Magazine.
* John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper’s Magazine forum “School on a Hill,” which appeared in the September 2001 issue. You can find his web site here.
Then you might like to reconsider home schooling using the Internet. Also…Ron Paul’s ideas.
Richard Trinko
Bruce,
Bloomberg is not a Democrat.
Joel Klein’s job with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. a sellout of everything he supposedly stood for
Thursday, November 11, 2010
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/joel-klein-job-rupert-murdoch-news-corp-sellout-supposedly-stood-article-1.453824
Excerpt:
Say it ain’t so, Joel!
Tell me you’re not really stepping down as schools chancellor in the middle of the academic year to become a token Democrat in what truly is a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Tell me you are not signing on with a corporation that contributed $1.25 million to Republicans who consider school-funding cuts only necessary and tax cuts for the rich vital.
In taking the job with News Corp., Klein actually said, “I’ve long admired News Corporation’s entrepreneurial spirit and Rupert Murdoch’s fearless commitment to innovation.”
What is Klein talking about, entrepreneurial spirit such as peddling the conservative agenda, at times with willful ignorance? Fearless commitment such as giving that $1.25 million to the Republican Governors Association? The association’s poster boy is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the Jason of school-budget slashing.
Klein also went on to say, “I am excited for the opportunity to be part of this team.”
The team including Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Oh, yeah, and Karl Rove, who helped guide the nation into disaster while at the Bush White House and uses a faux grass-roots movement funded by billionaires to blame President Obama.
Klein added, “And to have the chance to bring the same spirit of innovation to the burgeoning education marketplace.”
Not education. The educational marketplace. That means making money off school kids in times of budget cuts.
In the meantime, the chancellor’s job goes to Cathie Black, who is said by the mayor to be a world-class manager, but has no experience as an educator.
Think of the public reaction if Bloomberg appointed a police commissioner who had no law enforcement background. Think of what it means to real educators when you say that running the schools is just a question of management, only with the widgets being kids instead of magazines
“In taking the job with News Corp., Klein actually said, “I’ve long admired News Corporation’s entrepreneurial spirit and Rupert Murdoch’s fearless commitment to innovation.”
We know what Joel Klein, the only question is his price.
AY i think it’s demicratic most large city mayors are democrats as are members of the city school boards.
Well Roves education reform works wonders…. Keep em dumb and they vote republican…..
You sure that this is not a national edema…