Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ucsd!ames!killer!elg From: elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: blaming teachers Message-ID: <5111@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> Date: 7 Aug 88 04:12:41 GMT References: <12230@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <12260@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <233@quintus.UUCP> <1412@devsys.oakhill.UUCP> Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas Lines: 105 In message <1412@devsys.oakhill.UUCP>, steve@oakhill.UUCP (steve) says: >I'm sorry for raving, but I just want to make this point. Education will >not improve until the community as a whole supports it. To blame teachers >for it is wrong. There are bad teachers, but from my experience more of them >are dedicated to educating our youth than any of the other groups (school >administrators, parents, etc.). Better yet, let's stop pointing fingers >and start working together to correct the problems, and change the communities >attitude. You certainly have a point. In the early days of the U.S., reading was highly encouraged by both parents and church/community leaders, due to the Protestant tradition of Bible-reading (in fact, that was a major cause of the split of many Protestant denominations from the Catholic Church... the Church said, "The Bible stays in Latin, we don't want the peasants and slum scum getting their hands on it", and others disagreed). In any event, the desire for education was much greater in years past, when success obviously depended upon being well-educated and good with words. Now, today's models for success are illiterate jocks and empty-headed fashion-plates... is that progress? To a major degree, television is responsible for recent attitudes towards reading. But even before television, education in the U.S. was on a long downwards trend. Perhaps one factor is that universal public education became universal lowest-common-denominator education, with a curriculum suited for low-budget operation in an agrarian society (the prototypical "little red schoolhouse") being made virtually global in the U.S. In rural areas of the time, children worked long hours on the farm, and often could spare only 3 or 4 months in the winter for full-time school studies. So the curriculum had to concentrate on the basics, how to read, how to add, and the curriculum had to repeat much material from last year in the next year, because over the long layover the students had forgotten much of it (not to mention that they may have missed much of the end of the school year for spring planting duties). This is why we teach our students how to multiply two numbers together in the second grade. And in the third grade. And in the fourth grade. And in the... Teacher training may have something to do with it, too, especially in the field of mathematics. Most elementary school teachers still believe that mathematics consists of adding long columns of numbers together*. This was no problem in an agrarian society, where the ability to do arithmetic was as far as most people got. But this approach is woefully inadequate for people who will go into advanced mathematics, or even not-so-advanced mathematics such as algebra and trigonometry. And compared to "classical" education, where students recieved instruction in the "classical" languages and higher mathematics (Calculus in the 7th/8th year... Finally, back to the question of teacher pay. Catholic schools generally have lower pay than the surrounding public schools. Yet Catholic schools today score much above the national average on standardized tests. For example, at the Catholic high school I attended in Shreveport, Louisiana, teacher pay was quite low. Tuition was reasonable, and there was financial aid available for needy students. Yet over 90% of the students were college-bound, and most students scored over the 80th percentile on standardized college entrance exams. Now, this is an atypical situation, in that the parents of these students were obviously interested in their children having an education (although I got the impression that many of the students were there simply for "status" reasons within the local Catholic community, not because of interest in education). Perhaps these students learned all this stuff on their own. But I doubt it. There were many talented and dedicated teachers there. Said one teacher(paraphrased), "I could get more pay at a public school. But here I have students willing to listen, and I don't have to put up with bureaucracy." No 1-year waits for Civil Service to put out bids on new textbooks, no filing daily progress reports to 15 levels of oversight and assessment committees, nothing of the sort... the principal hired teachers, fired teachers (if they were incompetent), bought school supplies, etc., no hassle, no bureacracy, as long as the money was there. That principal would have been fired for gross insubordination, for bypassing the Civil Service system and violating tenure laws, if he'd been in public education. A note on pay: Higher teacher pay is a common "educational reform" goal. Teacher organizations note that there's really no teacher shortage -- there's lots of teachers, only, many of them are no longer in the education business, because of low pay, family issues, etc. But will higher pay really improve education? Or will it just give us "more of the same"? Paying a teacher $5,000 more per year will not make him/her any better of a teacher than from before the payraise. Taxpayers around the country have made it known that they do not support raising taxes for "more of the same", by voting down tax proposals left and right when they are not tied to some sort of "merit pay" plan. Where raising teacher pay may come in handy is for the next generation, 10 years down the road, where, one hopes, a better quality of student will enter education programs because of the competitive pay, resulting in better teachers. So while raising teacher salaries will solve local shortages, it is no magic panacea for immediately improving the quality of education. To do that, we will have to improve both the teachers, and the attitudes of our students. In an era of habitual child neglect by two-parent-worker households, that's going to be a tough row to hoe... Eric *Reference -- "Increasing Teachers' Understanding of Mathematical Ideas Through Inservice Training", _Phi Delta Kappan_, June 1987 -- Eric Lee Green ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.