Hey Soy Boy, Deep State, China Paid, Antifa Libz...

[BmorePat87]

(02-25-2021, 01:24 AM)Dill Wrote: That is a WONDERFUL synopsis--informative, compact and professional.  I see my questions answered, along with some I didn't ask.

I understand your complaint about Biden. I remember my son was in HS when No Child Left Behind came out, which I believe instituted the idea of nationwide testing, linking test performance to federal funding. People who had never been in a classroom were among those deciding, for example, what English and math requirements should be. Teacher "accountability" was a sore point there too. Before long teachers were complaining how the focus on tests detracted from learning. But they "accountable" if student learning dropped.

I understood the motivation--the dropping performance of U.S. students. But I disagreed with the assessment of causes.  

Anyway, I have been interested in university curricula for years, but the Trump era has shifted my interest back to public schools. I have long suspected that Trump's success was in part a failure of the education system (along with other causes, like demographic shifts and income inequality).  So many in public discussion seem not to know the difference between authoritarian and democratic ideals. Many conflate rule of law with law and order. And of course there has been a shift away from grounded arguments and towards "truthiness" as a criterion of political judgment, so the kind of responsible public discourse needed for successful governance is disappearing. These are the kinds of things that probably cannot be taught without dialogue (I'm a big fan of Plato). But I meet so many people--including the occasional educator--who thinks all teaching is top-down transfer of specific content, best accomplished by repetitive exercises and testing.

But I don't want to be one of those who "knows better than the teachers" what ought to be taught and how. I have no idea what "5 preps" would be like, and for classes of students with widely different ability. 

Yep, NCLB was my freshmen year of HS. Democrats and Republicans love testing. It is a bipartisan obsession. Obama's Sec of Edu Arne Duncan pushed for full testing even with special ed kids. It's infuriating. Gov't is the assessed social studies class in high school, so I have to hit all the assessment limits. After 10 years I've gotten to a place where I know the pacing so I have worked in my bonus lessons (particularly my public policy unit) and can say for certain assessment limits "Look, this topic is not as important, but the test wants you to know it. This is the way you'll see it written on the test."

So much of our achievement gap is tied into our high childhood poverty. We need to be developing schools that use the community based model where the school is a hub in the community. It should be a community center that can work with other agencies to provide health and food services. It should be in the middle of the community.

Well trained school resource officers are critical to this model too, which is why I oppose efforts to remove them.Our last SRO left to be a detective focused on kids in our county, but he was awesome. He coached, most of the kids loved him, and he made an effort to be involved with them in the community.

I teach at my old school. We are split between the side I grew up in (apartments and rentals, the working class, minority majority, mostly Black and Latino kids) and the newer part ($750k+ homes, upper middle class, mostly White and Asian kids). My elementary school is in the middle of wjere I lived, but they built our middle school and high school 10 minute drives away. The high school is down a highway while the middle school had $600k homes built around it. They give out free lunch during the summer for that part. Most summers it was at the elementary school, but one year they moved it to the middle school. They got a bus to drive kids, but it made no sense. The ones who NEEDED it should have been able to walk 5 mins to get lunch, but walk 5 mins to get one a bus to take a ride to get it and then ride to bring it back home. 

I keep telling my school, we're making a mistake by holding our after school help programs at the school. The kids who need it are lower income and cannot get rides home. They can't walk an hour down a highway either. Many need to be home for their little siblings. There's a new community center in their neighborhood next to the elementary school. We need to hold it there and the siblings can come join them. 

Little changes like these will make a difference. Not tests. Our approach cannot be based on standardization. It has to be tailored at the individual level