Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Education Changes in the United States

One of my sons was looking at some of his deceased mother’s report cards from high school.  He noticed she had mostly C’s and B’s for grades.  We were talking one day and he commented on how he always thought his Mom was smart and was surprised by the C’s and B’s.
Don’t get me wrong; he knew his Mom was smart.  She had skipped a grade in school and graduated from high school at the age of sixteen.  The dilemma was that by today’s standards, he expected to see all A’s on her report card.
I explained to him that when his Mom and I were in high school, there were no four-point students.  I’m not sure, but I don’t think there were any in my high school.  I remember one student that was a four-point student in engineering at Iowa State University, but was not even close to that in our high school.  Iowa State was one of the best and toughest engineering schools in the country at that time.  
Teachers graded on the curve then.  If someone got an A, someone got an F.  If two people got a B, two people got a D.  Most students were in the middle of the bell curve and got C’s.  I had one teacher from that time period tell me that the criteria for an A was that the student had to be capable of teaching the class without supervision to earn an A.
So why are there so many A students today?  One teacher told me it was just easier to give the grades and keep the parents happy.  The problem is that grades no longer mean anything.  Why do we have the ridiculous idea that we can’t have winners and losers in school?  That’s not real life.
Standardized testing is important because grades have no meaning.  Colleges must look at test scores instead of grades.  Schools and teachers are evaluated on student test scores.  Schools and teachers may even receive bonuses for excellence based on test scores.  I totally agree with rewarding excellent teachers. 
You may have heard about the teachers of a high school in the Atlanta, Georgia area that made changes in students standardized tests to improve the student’s scores and their bonuses.  This scam went up to and included the superintendent.  Some of these educators may actually be facing jail time, and rightly so in my opinion. 
Rewarding individual teachers and schools is good, but hard to evaluate.  I believe this has to be done on a local level and not dictated be the state or federal government.   The federal government gave states money to reward excellent teachers several years ago.  It was left to the states to determine how the money was distributed.  I know some states distributed the money to all teachers based on seniority.  In some cases, this rewarded the tenured teacher, which probably should have been fired, more than the excellent dedicated teacher, which may have even been let go. 
There was a time that the United States had the best education system in the world.  That is no longer the case.  What happened? What changed?
I think it is pretty clear that as the federal government got more and more involved in education, test scores and world ranking have gone down.  Some programs like “No Child Left Behind” have not been successful. 
I know there is federal funding for some good programs, but why send $20 in taxes to the federal government to get $5 back in some educational grant.  This is a joke.  Some past heads of the Department of Education have stated that education in this country would be better off if the Department of education did not exist.  Get rid of it. We must get control of schools back to the local level. 
One of my personal complaints is that schools put too much emphasis on the arts and sports and not enough on emphasis on the 3 R’s.  We defiantly don’t teach civics or accurate American history.  I am ashamed of the misconceptions I had about some of our founding fathers, and I am even more ashamed that our schools are still teaching this creative interpretation of history.
The problem does not stop with K-12 schools.  Our universities perpetuate the same problems.  I find it disgusting that an individual like Bill Ayres, who is a convicted felon for what I would call terrorist activates, can be a tenured professor at a major university.  I know he served his time for his crimes and deserves a life, but to teach our kids and say he did not do enough back then is ridiculous, and he is not the only one.  We should be outraged.  
        We better concentrate on taking back control of our schools and teaching our kids the 3 R’s and what made this country great.  We need Real Change now.

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