The United States continues to fail our children in public schools in cranking out children who are below basic proficiency in both math and English. With an increasingly competitive economy demanding higher levels of skills, we are leaving most of our children in a position with dwindling opportunities and futures. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress test results released by the U.S. Department of Education, sixty-five percent of the eighth graders in American public schools in 2017 were not proficient in reading and 67 percent were not proficient in mathematics. That dire situation is even worse in cities like Detroit.
In Detroit, only 5 percent of Detroit public-school eighth graders were proficient or better in math and only 7 percent were proficient or better in reading. Schools in Cleveland, Fresno, and Baltimore are little better.
We have previously discussed the ongoing failure of our public schools. Again, I understand that many of these kids are coming from broken homes or extreme poverty that makes the task far more challenging for the schools. However, these statistics are still an utter disgrace for any system and show massive budgets being spent without minimal and measurable success. I still believe in public education and I have sent my kids to public schools. I believe these schools play an important role in our democratic systems in raising future citizens. We cannot fail in this basic task as a nation and remain a viable and successful country in the increasing challenging global economy. These scores reflect a permanent underclass where these children are finished before they even start to make their way in life.
Here are the subjects my daughter had at a public school in Germany – primary school ( until age 10). German, Math, English as a foreign language, Art, Music, Gym (including swimming and riding a bike), Religion, and then a course called “Sachunterricht” where they learned some natural science and some social science topics (like sex-ed). They also had lots of recesses spent outside with hardly any adult supervision. Don’t remember many standardized tests. I think there was 1 in the 3rd grade which was to see if they were on par with other 3rd grade classes…never got her individual score.
IMO, too fragmented. Elementary school should consist of literacy and numeracy at the outset, emphasis on numeracy. Youths would be sorted into five or six tracks which are shoveled material at different pace. At around age 10 (for the median track), social education would be added to the curriculum. Social education would consist of the fundamentals of American history, geography, and civics. Literature would be taught in order to learn grammatical English. The object of education in mathematics would be to master arithmetic and elementary algebra. An ordinary student would finish at age 13 or 14, a fast-tracked student at age 10, and a slow student would continue to slog until voucher financing ran out at age 18.
Sounds appropriate for ritalin, fast-food and screen-time junkies! Just give them the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel curriculum…gotta save that tax money to buy bombs to kill them foreigners!
No, it sounds focused.
People who wish to pursue study in literature, foreign languages, mathematics, natural sciences, history and geography, art, or music will have the opportunity at the secondary level. People who want to study vocational / technical subjects will have the opportunity at the secondary level. People who must continue working on their basic education past 14 will be able to do so in dedicated tracks or schools. You get to age 18, or whenever you leave school, and you have a book of certificates which indicates what you were able to complete in re each subject on which you worked.
Bad plan.
David Benson – the Germans seem to like it.
Riesling – did your daughter go on to Realschule or Gymnasium? Despite growing up in a small village I attended the US Dept of Defense schools on base. Our curriculum was the same except no religion and German as a second language.
My best friend (native German) was 3 years younger than I was and I noticed that her math was much more advanced. Also the US school had a lot more library time and literature courses.
She went to Gymnasium. She had a look in an SAT prep book when we were in the States and said she thought they had covered all that math by the 10th grade. What I really missed in German schools was the literature and the love of reading. They can’t be bothered with it. Children’s books are also kind of blah.. .. there are good ones, but my English kids love the American children’s books and their parents also comment on how they’ve got more Lebensfreude than German ones.
If our K-12 education system, and public education being the largest of it was doing its job, no college or university would need to offer (sell) courses that used to be requirements to graduate high school. The taxpayer is paying for a finished product but the “finishing” isn’t being completed until they enter college and start paying fees for tuition, books, etc. The student loan program is more than willing to lend your little scholar money to complete his high school education and beyond.
Like everything else, just follow the money. It’s insane how many school bond measures are put on the ballot every year and somehow the schools always need more. Infrastructure spending is always a good come on but then the repairs and upgrades don’t happen. School administrators don’t suffer in their salaries and there are many layers. Pensions are on par with the police and firefighters and certainly far richer than most military retirees.
Absolutely right, Olly!
People can’t add in their heads anymore. Was at a fair at the weekend. Volunteers bbq-ed sausages and tapped beer to make money for their club. Not once did they add up my bill right. I’m talking about 2.50 plus 1.50. Normal people. My girlfriend is a financial executive at an international company. She travels around the world for her job. Once a year she helps out waitressing at a wine festival. She said it is so difficult to figure 5 x 2.50 plus 3 x 1.50 in her head. It exhausts her.
Ha! your friend sounds like me Riesling re ” She said it is so difficult to figure 5 x 2.50 plus 3 x 1.50 in her head. It exhausts her.” I am also numerically dyslexic which doesn’t help.
Autumn, do you think being numerically dyslexic could have something to do with German numerals being “five and twenty” (25) and “one and eighty”(81) etc? I think that could mess with your brain! 😀
Once again, those commenting here largely fail to understand.
Until we break apart the govt. sponsored monopoly called public education we can expect more of the same. Education should be treated as a business with students being the product. Teachers should be paid based on their skill level and subject. A gym or music teacher should not be making what science or literature teachers make. Also need to remove all of the social engineering bs that exists like aids day.
Also need to stop making people without kids paying for it.
Doesn’t need to be treated as a business. A philanthropic model will do and commercial companies do peculiar things with schooling. However, we absolutely do not need monopolistic public agency provision.
Jim,
As a business model, the input variation today is far more common than special cause. I do believe if vouchers were the norm and parents had other school options, we would quickly see public schools either evolve or fade away.
Just issue philanthropic charters to existing public schools, placing them under the government of trustees elected by stakeholder bodies. Define the stakeholder body as any registered voter within a certain geographic ambo who attended a school for at least four years or was granted a secondary school diploma from said school. Place questions about school attendance on voter registration forms and then have the secretary of state or state board of elections build a preliminary voter roll on that basis, comparing the form answers with alumni records and sending out postcards to registrants asking them to clarify matters in case of discrepancies. The secretary of state or state board of elections could hold elections to these boards quadrennially. Anyone in the stakeholder body could stand for election by registering their candidacy in the state capital by paying a deposit and leaving a 600-word statement of candidacy. The state board or secretary of state would then assemble these statements into a prospectus and mail them out with printed ballots to stakeholders with instructions. Stakeholders fill out their ballots and place them into pre-printed envelopes which send the ballot to the board of elections where the school is located where they are tabulated. Trustee fees would be regulated by law, which would also have common provisions proscribing self-dealing by trustees. Ideally, these would be ordinal ballots tabulated according to the conventions the condorcet ballot. Ideally, the order of the candidates on the ballots would not be uniform, and you’d have as many stereotypes as candidates who qualified for the ballot, with each candidate having an equal chance to occupy the 1st, 2d, 3d, 4th… position on the ballot. The superintendent’s office would be dissolved, with just a school bus service left as a residue.
It is insane that a parent can not take their school tax money and purchase the best education for their children.
Easy access to birth control and to termination of adverse pregnancies would address many problems of proliferation of mental dysfunction.
Chris, it really isn’t in your interest to advocate extinguishing the mentally deficient.
LOL!
George W. Bush and Donald Trump are to blame for this.
Please elaborate specifically how they made this happen.
Dear “Jim22”: George W. Bush and Donald Trump are also responsible for global warming. I cannot elaborate – I heard this on MSNBC – so it must be true.
Bill Martin – so the scores suddenly got better under Obama?
Since MSNBC was so happy when Obama was in office, I take that to mean that the scores probably went up when Obama was in office.
It has long been established that the DeVos and Koch families want full privatization of public schools. Teach the kids for profit they say and everything will be OK. But as a whole it does not work, except for some shareholders. They have a plan that will work this time, give more tax breaks to the top 1% like Kansas and Arizona did and everything will be okeedoekee. And if it don’t work, then strip more money from public schools and give more tax breaks. And keep doing it until teachers in full red states walk out.
It’s just a way of siphoning public money into religious groups. That’s all it is.
Right now were gouged with tax assessments to siphon money to public agencies run by people addled by rancid social ideologies. You fancy that’s fair, because you are incapable of being fair to anyone.
Is that an answer? Christian lunatics want public money. This is nothing new.
I can explain something to you. I cannot comprehend it for you.
It has long been established that the DeVos and Koch families want full privatization of public schools.
Of course they do. Instruction is a fee-for-service activity which appears spontaneously on the open market. If you’re concerned about distributional questions, a voucher program will address that quite nicely, so long as the tuition-funded sector and the voucher-financed sector are distinct and schools do not combine the two sources of income. The only defensible justification for making use of public agency as a delivery vehicle is where you have sparse populations and an insufficient critical mass of youngsters for private education to emerge. Well, that’s rural Alaska, eastern Oregon, rural Nevada, rural Utah, and swatches of Montana, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the western portions of the Plains states. If you’re not in the 0.7% of the population of the United States who lives in these area, you’ve got no use for public agency as a delivery vehicle.
There is one other use for public agency: to warehouse incorrigibles that normal schools cannot handle and do not want.
FWings
If every school in America would simply purchase an Ignite! Learning system from Neil Bush’s company, that would solve the problem. Maybe. Neil agrees it’s worth a try.
Neil Bush is an elderly man in Houston who owns and operates a company which employs a couple-dozen people and has $4.6 million in annual sales. You’re name-checking him just why?
You must be very lonely; get a real hobby.
This is the same group who enter University (for the life of me I don’t know how) and then refuse to hear other opinions. They create buzz phrases like “Mathematics itself operates as Whiteness” “Mathematics perpetuates white privilege”. I don’t put the complete blame on the teacher after all how can you teach someone who will kick your ass if you ask them to participate in class.
The NAEP test is not given to every student, it is given to randomly selected students (depending on how honest the district is). So you are always subject to who is selected. Now, tell an 8th grader that they are going to have to take a test, but it is meaningless and they will never see the results and what do you think they do? What would you do as an 8th grader? Personally, I would make bubble art on the score sheet.
I have always questioned the validity of this test as a marker for anything.
Paul,
I did that in 6th grade. I think they used to call it the Iowa tests. We were told that they didn’t count for anything. So I just filled them out randomly. Next thing I knew, I was being sent to the special ed. area. I pleaded with them that I didn’t belong there and told them what I did on the tests. After about two weeks, they let me out of special ed jail. Never trusted what I was told again.
The NAEP is given to 8th graders and one grade in h.s.
When I was teaching at a computer h.s. we had a program that would evaluate the student’s level and then automatically set a program of study for them. Some would screw around and the program would start them at the 3rd-grade level. We would let them suffer through that for a couple of 8 hour days and then explain they had been hoisted on their own petard. However, we would reset the computer and allow them to retake the original test to set the course. They were much better behaved after that. 🙂
Here in NY, they made us take these tests quite often especially in elementary levels. We were always tols that they didn’t count towheads our grades.
1. Who defined ‘proficiency’, when, and how?
2. Is performance on these tests improving, decaying, or remaining the same?
3. If we’re so dumb, how come we manage to outproduce just about every country in the world that isn’t sitting on a natural resource bonanza or turning good coin as a tax haven?
From the link in Turley’s original post:
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a continuing and nationally representative measure of trends in academic achievement of U.S. elementary and secondary students in various subjects. It is the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of what our nation’s students know and can do in select subjects. It was first administered in 1969 to measure student achievement nationally. Teachers, principals, parents, policymakers, and researchers all use NAEP results to assess progress and develop ways to improve education in the United States.
This problem is as simple as 2 plus 2 is 22. We need to pour more money into the public school system. We also need to change the system of measuring progress so that students grades and scores are automatically at above passing rates by firing teachers and administrators that won’t go along with this program. Problem solved.
If a private corporation were as dysfunctional as these inner city schools and another entity acquired that company the first order of business is firing the senior and middle managers and starting over with better talent. But as long as schools are a sacred cow this will not happen. Plus failing schools seem to be a benefit to democrats since it provides a cause célèbre they can then pounce on and claim to be helping simply by throwing tax money at the problem (and taking credit). There comes a point when dumping money into the organization fails to return a positive result and eventually causes more problems. Of course, very few politicians and certainly nearly no administrators in these schools are willing to fire the bad apples, and bring a culture of achievement into the arena. It is all “oh these kids come from poor communities and have criminal records. Let’s just throw our hands in the air and kick the can down the road for someone else.
I’d venture to guess the only Greek philosopher these failing school officials can draw from is Mediocrates, the patron of ineptitude.
That doesn’t work.
Why should “better talent” want to work at a failing school when most teachers in failing school systems get paid next to nothing and often have to spend money from their own pockets to supply the students with basic needs like pencils and tissues in the classroom.
Yup.
Schoolteachers are paid satisfactory salaries and get fancy retirement benefits (the median retirement age is 59).
The problem is their working conditions, and their working conditions are the function of the social ideology of administrators (especially off-site administrators) and of the public interest bar and their accomplices on the appellate courts.
As a former teacher, yes a starting teacher makes next to nothing and is required to get their Masters to continue. At this point, they have moved over 2 career ladders and moved up two years. The pay in a regular district is set by union contract. It is the number of graduate hours + years of teaching. However, if I move to district B, even though I have 25 years of experience, the union contract says I can only get credit for 5, so I am enslaved to district A after five years because it actually costs me money to move, unless the other school pays more in the long run. Don’t forget retired teachers have a nice retirement package. 🙂 A teacher with a Ph.D in h.s and 30 years experience makes about 100k
The starting college teacher makes less than the starting elementary or high school teacher but can top out higher with fewer classes to teach.
No, you are not paid next-to-nothing. The median cash salary for an elementary schoolteacher is $57,000 per year. In the economy as a whole, about 20% of employee compensation is in the form of fringe benefits. It’s higher for public employees and retirement benefits for teachers are generous enough that the median retirement age is 4 years lower than that for ordinary workers. Elementary schoolteachers who receive salaries placing them at the 10th percentile of the elementary teacher corps receive salaries of $37,000 per year, i.e. about 70% of the mean for the economy as a whole and above the median. That’s adequate compensation for a 25 year old post-adolescent female just starting out in life.
A sheriff’s department in New York will have four divisions: civil, court security, jail, and patrol. Add a fifth division: schools. The schools division would have two functions: it would provide security guards on request in return for a capitation (paid by the school at a rate set by the county government) and it would operate detention centers. A metropolitan county of ordinary population (say, 800,000) would erect and maintains about 15 detention centers for boys and a couple for girls. Each center would have about 200 youths housed therein and most would be located proximate to the bulk of the clientele. Those so remanded would be kept locked up much of the day and are let out in shifts so that teachers there employed can try to stuff some remedial education into them.
Darren
Your argument illustrates the deplorable level of logic of far, far, far, too many Americans. That you own a thesaurus and a dictionary is evident. However, your statement that Democrats are somehow uniquely responsible is beyond ludicrous. If ever there was an example of creating a catastrophe in order to appear as the solution it is the Republicans and Trump. The exaggerations, lies, and blaming done by this buffoon and other GOP hate and fear mongers has been so evident these past few years that only a complete dupe could miss it.
The problem with American public schools, in that they spend significantly more per student and get significantly less when compared to our peer nations, can be found in the dysfunctional manner of government we enjoy. The US is an oligarchy. The oligarchy exists best when served by illusion and chaos. Americans have the illusion of democracy from the local as well as the state and federal levels. In fact, our candidates, on both sides, are funded by concentrated wealth provided by the oligarchs; they are not the best of the best but puppets that will further the divide between the two opposing arguments that fuel whatever controversies on the table. The chaos is created whenever needed, the thousands of lies told by Trump illustrate this perfectly. The sky is said to be falling and the dupes head for the cave. The base chaos is already there with the argument between the ‘no government’ and the government solutions.
Add to all this the conflicting administrations at the local, state, and federal levels, apparently to too many this is how democracy is supposed to work, and one gets an idea of the source of the problem. On top of all this there is the tendency to refuse to observe successful paradigms found in higher performing nations. This knee jerk response to admitting that other countries may just have better ideas is not uniquely American but is found in the US to a sometimes xenophobic degree. The question is rarely asked, that if other countries can do more with less, why don’t we learn from them. Instead the illusion of free choice is fed by opting to focus on privately funded education, funded by the government and those that can afford to pay, and primarily for the pursuit of more wealth for the mega rich, or the oligarchs. If ever there was an example of this stupidity it is Betsy DeVos.
Darren, sometimes you present arguments that represent a respectable degree of intelligence, but not this time. The ‘bad apples’ are not the teachers but those that refuse to understand that a strong centralized system of education that pays its teachers well and is not hamstrung politically works and the chaos and illusion that is found throughout the US, does not. The way to get rid of underperforming teachers is to raise the level of the profession both in pay and training to attract better candidates. Teachers have always included those that couldn’t make it in more demanding professions, and those transitioning from a college degree to a more lucrative profession, however, the core group are those that take it on in order to make a difference. After many years of the American experience, that sours.
“In fact, our candidates, on both sides, are funded by concentrated wealth provided by the oligarchs…”
And the worst swamp-thing was Trump (“When they call, I give…if I ask them, if I need them, they are there for me…”).
And yet his flock perceived him to be an “outsider”.
All they did was elect an oligarch, so he himself could cut out the middleman (and get all that free press he couldn’t afford to buy).
Seems like a lot of words to really sat nothing.
Public school teachers were organized on the wrong model (an industrial union, where the school district does the hiring and firing). Public school teachers should reorganize on the trade union model with a hiring hall and business agents who bid on contracts with school districts. Of course, they’d need trade schools for public school teachers to control the skill and make the trade union model work. Meanwhile, very large school districts controlled by very large municipal governments should be broken up into much smaller districts governed by Townships. Somebody else will have to figure out the taxing authority on that count. Oh. Bother.
In the era of “Mediocrates,” did demonstrably ineffective teachers unionize and strike or were they dutiful, respectful and grateful for their comfortable lives without toil?
Detroit, Cleveland, Fresno and Baltimore. Teachers can only do so much; you get a certain demographic in the schools, and you need magicians. And saying “I send my kids to public schools,” without mentioning that you live in the one of wealthiest school districts in the country, is rather disingenuous. If JT didn’t live in the leafy suburbs of No. Virginia, where his kids attend “public” school with the children of other elite professionals, he would have to do like I did; cough up the money for Catholic school tuition.
No, you don’t need ‘magicians’. You need to sequester the incorrigibles. They won’t do that because of their stupid social ideology.
Its not just 8th graders:
http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/04/26/tucker-carlson-college-worth-it-costs-rising-courses-getting-easier
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Close the Dept. of Education.
Decertify all teachers unions.
Fire strikers.
Eliminate superfluous curricula.
Reduce requirements for teachers.
Repeal all laws that deny the right to hire replacement workers.
The military has no unions.
Schools must have no unions.
Right. Dumb down the curriculum. That will definitely help. (Not.)
He said eliminate superfluous curricula and gut the certification requirements. Having students waste time on non-academic mush benefits only purveyors of non-academic mush. As for the certification requirements, there’s a case to be made that they are reducing the quality of the applicant pool. This isn’t that difficult.
two thumbs up!
Public education is an artificial hoax, scam and charade as a daycare and redistribution of wealth program.
Websites as classrooms.
Public education should have been automated long ago. One DVD nationally for each subject at each level. Most instruction conducted digitally on home computers.
Free public education is local and does not require a national Dept. of Education.
Free public education is defeated by greedy teachers demanding to be made rich.
Lazy and greedy teachers hide behind the innocence and vulnerability of children.
The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, driven by greed, is for teachers to strike and every other public worker and elected official to receive “comparable pay” as Marxist redistribution of wealth. Those “chains” must be broken.
The only important component in public education is the size of the student’s brain, not ridiculous levels of pay for “over-educated” and “overqualified” teachers.
Homeschooling “teachers” aren’t overqualified and they aren’t even paid; why and how do they do so well?
George – having taught in a computerized school, some students need to interact with their teachers, some do not. Many do not have the discipline for at-home computer courses. Personally, I do better with a teacher in front of the classroom.
Mr. Turley, you misspelled proficiency in your lead line. 😀
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Until local governments stand up to the leadership of the teachers unions, we will only get worse results. Eva Moskowitz has achieved great results with her Success Academy in NYC, lifting so many minority and impoverished children.
But Mayor DeBlasio won’t let her expand as rapidly as needed. So, we will continue to have poor results.
The unions are a secondary problem. The real problem is to be found in the teacher’s colleges, the off-site administrators, and in case law brought by the usual suspects. Politicians can be a problem as well when they’re running interference for idiots or hoodlums.
NII, I also should have mentioned the administrators and support staff’s unions. Way too much new money goes toward catching up on underfunded pensions.
Let’s completely eliminate childhood lead poisoning, ensure that all developing fetuses get all of the micronutrients they need, and stop poisoning fetuses with tylenol and other products we’ve been sold a false bill of goods on, as far as prenatal safety.
That will help.
There hardly is such a thing as ‘childhood lead poisoning’.
Lead is ubiquitous and there is no minimum tolerance. A little bit of lead makes one a little bit stupid. How much lead have you ingested? Seems like a lot to me…
Your federal public health officials are of the view that they’ve identified about 240,000 youngsters with problematic levels of lead in their blood. That’s 1% of the population of pre-school youngsters.
The nurse’s aide on duty needs to wipe the drool off your chin.
Any level of lead is harmful.
Learn the facts, fool.
An inner city elementary school has become the Vocal School. The school day is an hour longer; there is a half hour of group singing in the morning and again in the afternoon. The curriculum remains the same, otherwise. The standardized math test scores for the school went from 10% to 80%.
That is exactly what is needed. Longer school days and school year. More music, art, and activities that engage students, foster community and a desire to do well, and make students want to be at school and want to learn.
I learned this from an article in The New York Times about 2–3 years ago. I hope all will encourage group singing in elementary school and beyond.
Just because that’s what they do at your nursing home doesn’t mean the young need to squander more time on it. ‘Group singing’ was a witless chore when I was that age.
Well, you suffer from obvious mental deficiencies.
I believe it’s pretty well settled that music is very conducive to learning math.
Not buying. So many mis-specified models and non-replicable studies in educational psychology.
You are wrong about most things so why not this.
No, we do not need ‘more music and art’. At the primary level, these are diversions. At the secondary level, they’re only appropriate as ancillary subjects for those following an academic curriculum. We need better basic education and we need to make VoTech bog standard at the secondary level.
Read more of the neuroscience literature, if you are capable of sitting still for so long.
Briefly, yes, more music builds better minds.
No, more music employs more music teachers.
My daughter wasn’t doing well in Math. Just wasn’t her thing. Then she started playing the mandoline and the piano when she was 10 and she got much better. In fact, math became her favorite subject by the time she was in high school.
Nice for her. It’s still a diversion.
Obviously. And to good purpose.
So, yes, for those who are fact based.