10 Problems with American Education & How to Fix Them

[awake]

1 through 10 are great solutions, but the people who enjoy directing the public school system can not possibly begin to employ any of them. It would mean the removal of their state backed privilege. It would require a complete free market in education, good luck getting that past the teachers unions.

! through 10 are precisely what an individual must do once he escapes the public school system.

Great points none the less...

 

[heavenlyboy34]

What would be wrong with just letting people learn at their own pace in their own interests?

technically nothing. But our overlords have adopted the Prussian model, so that's the way it must be.

 

[Travlyr]

technically nothing. But our overlords have adopted the Prussian model, so that's the way it must be.

Right. But why should a grown man or woman be in "trouble" (jail time) for letting their children learn the world through induction and deduction?

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Right. But why should a grown man or woman be in "trouble" (jail time) for letting their children learn the world through induction and deduction?

IMO, nothing. That method is preferable IMO. I'm an autodidact in many fields myself.

 

[donnay]

I would like to see the kids learn survival skills. The public school only teaches kids to be dependent not independent.

 

[Lindsey]

The problem I have with OP, is that what is right for an education for him, may not be what I value in an education. The issue I have with OP and many of the responses is that they are focused on the idea of schooling and not the idea of education. Schooling does not equal education. I believe in "school choice," but more so I believe in the freedom to homeschool, particularly the unschooling variety. Allowing people to learn to learn is far greater than any of the points 1-10 in my not so humble opinion.

 

[donnay]

"I've never let my school interfere with my education."
~Mark Twain

 

[BenjaminRosenzweig]

The only private schools I know of today still operate basically the same as public schools. There are some online colleges, but they follow the same bullshit rules as regular colleges, so whats the point of having them at all?

Private schools, as well as charter schools are far more likely to be to receptive to innovation. However, I'd like to promote innovation in both private schools and public (i.e. government-run) schools. In particular, I would like to persuade some public high school teachers and college professors to integrate opposing viewpoints into their social studies and social sciences courses such that students are no longer being indoctrinated with a rigid Liberal ideology.

That being said, I don't want children to be indoctrinated with any political ideology, including Libertarianism. I believe if students genuinely compare and contrast different viewpoints, consider them equally and apply some critical thinking, most of them will favor Libertarianism. I for one used to be a Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher-loving Liberal until I stumbled across a copy of Myth, Lies and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel and couldn't find anyone that could debunk any of his claims or offer a logical counter-argument.

And I've continued to keep my eye open for convincing counter-arguments to John Stossel's economic arguments and have yet to find them. However, some of his views on environmental and nutrition-related issues are more than questionable but I won't get into them here for fear of derailing the thread from the issue of educational innovation.

 

[BenjaminRosenzweig]

"As far as pre-college schools are concerned, I would change the format and have them operate more like colleges. Stop treating kids like babies and forcing them to be watched 24/7. Have them go to school 2 days a week, and demand they study the rest of the week, like they would in college. If you treat people like kids, they'll act like kids. If you treat them like adults, they'll act like adults."

This is also an idea that a private high school should try out. In some states this might be illegal so you would certainly have to look into that.

If it was a boarding school, I would make sure the students didn't leave the campus at night unless the parents have stipulated otherwise.

If I were to run a non-boarding school this way, I would allow students to visit the the school grounds seven days a week and it would be open from 6AM in the morning until midnight. However, just like a college, students would not need to be there when they don't have classes. This would probably only be suitable for a mature young adult; it would be up to both the parents and the school faculty whether the student was a suitable fit for the school. If the student is accepted, the parents would have to sign a contract in which they acknowledge that their child is NOT under our supervision when they are not in class. Otherwise, the school would be liable and it would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.

 

[Indy Vidual]

"I've never let my school interfere with my education."
~Mark Twain

I did really well in school, most of the time.
Can someone help, what's this thread about?

 

[BenjaminRosenzweig]

1 through 10 are great solutions, but the people who enjoy directing the public school system can not possibly begin to employ any of them. It would mean the removal of their state backed privilege. It would require a complete free market in education, good luck getting that past the teachers unions.

! through 10 are precisely what an individual must do once he escapes the public school system.

Great points none the less...

Why would it require a complete free-market in education? There are still private schools that can innovate. Just look at Sudbury schools, they're certainly innovative! Though I personally believe a little bit more structure combined with a fair amount of in-school self-education would be preferable, at least for my future children. But again, that's just MY preference.

I'll start my own vision of the ideal school myself if I have to. All it requires is a smart business proposal, some interested investors and some interest parents.

 

[BenjaminRosenzweig]

This school got the right investors and the right parents. I'm sure I could as well once I have my MBA and an adequate business proposal. I'm still working on my bachelor's in Business Administration so that won't be anytime soon. But in the meantime, I'll continue to study education and improve my ideas.

 

[BenjaminRosenzweig]

9. Students Are Not Being Encouraged to Pursue Any Level of Self-Education

You would think that in school, at least half of what a student reads would be books, essays and articles that he or she chooses to read based on his or her own unique, individual interests. But alas, most students have very little, if any freedom at all over the path of their own education. However, some do.

In her book, The Reading Zone, Nancie Atwell advocates reading workshops in which grade school, middle school and high school students pick what books they want to read from the school library rather than being assigned what to read. While she's only applied this to fiction and literary non-fiction, her method has proven wildly successful not only in improving children's reading and writing levels but transforming children into passionate, lifelong readers. Here are a few passages from her book:

Over my twenty years of teaching reading in a workshop, the annual average for a class of seventh and eighth graders is at least forty titles. In the lower grades at our school, the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), the numbers are similarly remarkable. The K6 teachers and I make time every day for our students to curl up with good books and engage in the single activity that consistently correlates with high levels of performance on standardized tests of reading ability. And that is frequent, voluminous reading. A child sitting in a quiet room with a good book isn't a flashy or, more significantly, marketable teaching method. It just happens to be the only way anyone ever grew up to become a reader.

And that is the goal: for every child to become a skilled, passionate, habitual, critical reader—as novelist Robertson Davies put it, to learn how to make of reading a personal art.” Along the way, CTL teachers hope our students will become smarter, happier, more just, and more compassionate people because of the worlds they experience within those hundreds of thousands of black lines of print.

We know that students need time to read, at school and at home, every day. And we understand that when particular children love their particular books, reading is more likely to happen during the time we set aside for it. The only surefire way to induce a love of books is to invite students to select their own.

So CTL teachers help children to choose books, develop and refine their literary criteria, and carve out identities for themselves as readers. We get that its essential that every child we teach be able to say, These are my favorite authors, genres, books, and characters this year, and this is why.” Personal preference is the foundation for anyone who will make of reading a personal art.

Starting in kindergarten and going straight through until the end of high school, free choice of books should be a young readers right, not a privilege granted by a kind teacher. Our students have shown us that opportunities to consider, select, and reconsider books make reading feel sensible and attractive to children right from the start and that they will read more books than we ever dreamed possible and more challenging books than we ever dreamed of assigning to them.

And I can personally testify for the effectiveness of Nancy Atwell's methods. At the beginning of my fifth grade at St. Raymond's Elementary School, I was a below-average student who spent the majority of his time playing video games and watching television. However, during my first week in Ms. Grassi's classroom I saw a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on a bookshelf in the classroom, started reading it in class, read it on the bus ride home, read it when I got home and stayed up until four-a-clock in the morning until I passed out with the book still in my hands. I believe I finished the rest of the book in about three or four days and read the other three books that had been published thus far in less than two weeks. I'm not sure how many books I read in fifth grade but in sixth grade we had reading journals. Students were required to read at least five books over the course of the school year. I read eighty-seven, all of them fantasy-fiction. In seventh grade, I got tested for ADHD because I wasn't paying attention in class. One of their tests showed that I was at a thirteenth-grade reading level and a twelfth-grade writing level. And what was the psychiatrist's diagnosis? I had ADHD. He wrote me a prescription for adderall. I'm not kidding.

That being said, I believe that at least half the books students choose read should be informative non-fiction. For example, in a high school career research and analysis class, I would ask students to read at least six non-fiction books relevant to their career interests in addition to a reasonable amount of assigned reading. For example, a student interested in both medicine and psychology might read The Future of Medicine by Stephen C. Schimpff, On Becoming a Doctor: Everything You Need to Know about Medical School, Residency, Specialization, and Practice by Tania Heller, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care by Dr. Jerome Grossman, Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Again, my aim would be for at least half of what a student reads in school to be books, essays and articles he or she has chosen based on his or her own unique, individual interests. I would not do away entirely with assigned reading material and testing.

 

[awake]

Why would it require a complete free-market in education? There are still private schools that can innovate. Just look at Sudbury schools, they're certainly innovative! Though I personally believe a little bit more structure combined with a fair amount of in-school self-education would be preferable, at least for my future children. But again, that's just MY preference.

I'll start my own vision of the ideal school myself if I have to. All it requires is a smart business proposal, some interested investors and some interest parents.

Innovation in the public school sense is impossible, innovations in private schools is illusionary at best. Innovation would be students picking only the courses they wanted to learn, focusing on thier strengths and interests...can you imagine a student simply opting out of mathematics until they were 15? or any other subject until they felt ready and wanting to learn it? How about no bells or buzzers in schools, simply no interruption learning of single subjects at a time? How about teachers who do in home courses? No licenses for teachers? Teaching liberty not as a political indocternation but as a means to individual impowerment. How about teaching people in logic and reasoning to be able to dissolve collective idioticracy in its roots? The goal to self seek truth in knowledge...innovation of this level will never be allowed to exist in the government provided schools and their "private" so called "innovative" schools.

Our current political school system is designed for one thing: control of masses; to become good serfs for the expropritors..

Here is an article I found enlightening as to what we are being robbed of and the ignorant views people spew that glue the status quo in place.

 

[rpwi]

Too much of education focuses on infrastructure. Learning has little to do with how many bricks are in the building...yet it remains an attractive target for politicians because it is tangible. Online schools would REVOLUTIONIZE the system. I've been in the seen and seen how major it can be.

In K-12, too much emphasis is on sports/non-academics. Biology teachers are hired because they can coach the girls swim team, etc... This waters talent and wastes money.

The teacher accreditation system has little to do with quality and everything to do with privilege. We need to end occupational licensing in teaching.

Courses are often too long. It would be much more efficient to break courses into 'mini-courses' perhaps taught one month at a time. This would offer more flexibility and creativity in the types of subjects taught to students. It would also mean that redoing courses would be easier.

Truancy laws force disruptive students in with students who want to learn. If the students don't want to learn and the teachers don't want to teach them...they shouldn't be there.

Scheduling creates too much dead time. If you cut out the long lunches/recess/study hall etc...you can dramatically shorten the school day and increase capacity. Incentives for summer school should be offered as this improves utilization efficiency of infrastructure.

Higher education needs to be more specialized. I went to school to get a business degree. It made no sense, that I had to study chemistry...or that the university had to spend millions on the chemistry lab when they didn't really offer a serious chemistry program.

Many of the general/introductory courses in college are dual-purpose. They prep for the majors and provide electives for the rest. So in my economics class, the 'professor' told us we wouldn't study monetary policy because that was reserved a later course for economics majors. So I didn't get to learn about monetary policy. Made sense to him as the same subject would be taught twice to the majors, but it hurt the rest of us. Same story in my psychology class...we just learned about names and places as the actual pych stuff would get taught to the majors doing more advanced courses.

More concepts/logic needs to be taught as opposed to meaningless dates and places. I want to learn about philosophy...not about the Aristotle, Socrates, history of philisophy, etc...

Courses need to be somewhat applicable...many math courses (while they bragged real world applications) were not that.

Universities need to stop hiring professors that barely speak English...and probably wouldn't even be good communicaters if they taught in their native language to native students.

I can understand perhaps that education can't be completely vocational...but the aspects that are, need to be well administered, inline with what the business community demands, and honest about the job prospects upon gradation. eg My major included MBA enrollment as counting for hired rates (very sneaky).

Non-vocational courses need to less required. Art appreciation/poetry/lit/minority studies/community services...that type of stuff is not helpful. Practical courses like on health, the constitution, civil liberties, monetary policy, environmental ecology, reproductive health, etc... are (or should be if taught right) good because they keep you from harming others or yourself.

Many universities and even high schools need to have better preview options of what courses and majors entail. The dependencies need to be mapped out in a clear and concise format. Elective options clearly explained and outlines/sample tests should readily available for each course so a student can understand in depth of what they are getting into. Too often students are shooting in the dark and given horrible advisory advice (like I was).

A dirty little secret is that much of early grade and pre-school is camouflaged day-care...that the parents don't have to pay for. Used to hear about this when I was in school...the super-intendant would get get a ton of flack for closing school during snow days because god forbid the parents HAD to put them in day-care instead. Day-care/education should not be conflated.

Tests should not be created to trick students. Students should be setup to fail (like curves) to make other students look good. Grades shouldn't be that much of a requirement for higher courses (creates grade inflation). Also great disparities in teachers. You can have identical subjects and get different grades just because the teacher grades differently. If you depended on these grades? Tough... Learning always comes from the individual. Subject matter should be intrinsically interesting and encourage the student to learn it for its own merit. Tests should be clearly defined as to what the students needs to know and how they can learn it.

College application system is messed up. Questionable criteria is used (like high school grades which can be gamed by selecting the right courses and are zero-sum). If education has true capacity issues it needs to increase capacity or raise prices...not create more political gimmicks to gain access to schools. Like references (very political), being a minority, or listing fake 'social clubs' that Madison requires you be a part of to enroll. Even the college 'clubs' are messed up. They are all resume-padders and mostly offer very little benefit.

Just some ideas...I could go on and on.

The biggy is to get government out of education so there is accountability between those purchasing education and those selling it and those learning it. This would dramatically increase efficiency and effectiveness (not hard to do when state schools cost 10-20k per student per year). This would indirectly cause sooo many other reforms.

 

[BenjaminRosenzweig]

Innovation in the public school sense is impossible, innovations in private schools is illusionary at best. Innovation would be students picking only the courses they wanted to learn, focusing on thier strengths and interests...can you imagine a student simply opting out of mathematics until they were 15? or any other subject until they felt ready and wanting to learn it? How about no bells or buzzers in schools, simply no interruption learning of single subjects at a time? How about teachers who do in home courses? No licenses for teachers? Teaching liberty not as a political indocternation but as a means to individual impowerment. How about teaching people in logic and reasoning to be able to dissolve collective idioticracy in its roots? The goal to self seek truth in knowledge...innovation of this level will never be allowed to exist in the government provided schools and their "private" so called "innovative" schools.

The government does not own private schools...

And what you're basically referring to is a Sudbury school. They're already out there.

 

[BenjaminRosenzweig]

It went on for a while. Eventually I made the pitch that we were still using a 16th century model of education (gathering kids in classrooms), even though technological advancements over the last 15 years has made it obsolete. The Connecticut Constitution guarantees everyone a "free" education, but it doesn't say how that has to be carried out. The state could buy every student in Connecticut a computer and an internet connection for $500/year, and set them up with web sites like Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and some history web sites or whatever, and save billions of dollars and take a huge step towards eliminating property taxes (which is what got me thinking about this in the first place).

I think it was the idea of eliminating property taxes that got her. She's not yet fully on board with radical changes to the education model, but she did start including Khan Academy into her lesson plan at one of the universities she teaches, giving future teachers ideas on how to use it to cut costs.

I'm about to write the tenth section about using Khan Academy as well as math software in-school so that students can learn math at their own pace, which has proven wildly successful in the hundred or so schools that use it so far. As for Connecticut switching all their public schools, or even one of their public schools to a completely online environment, I don't think that we'll see public schools make any such radical change anytime soon. Until private schools innovate to the point that public schools are forced by the public demand to either adapt or lose all their students and then all their funding, most will remain completely unchanged. There is, however, there is at least one private online high school in the U.S.; the Stanford University Online High School.

Also, while I believe completely online courses may be appropriate for some grade school and high school students, and at least one online high school is now available, I don't think it's suitable for all children and young adults. Personally, I'd rather my child conduct a fair amount of self-direct learning, balanced with school-direct learning in a classroom environment. I wouldn't want my child sitting at home all day studying either by themselves or with only a few of their closest friends. I'd rather they have an environment in which they can meet hundreds, if not thousands of other students and have interesting discussions with a wide variety of students of different interests and viewpoints. But that's just MY preference, I would never force it on anybody else nor force them to ever pay for my child's school.

 

[fisharmor]

This is an article I'm currently working on. I'd appreciate any suggestions or constructive criticism.

Forgive the bluntness, but the whole article suffers from the fundamental misapprehension that compulsory state schooling is failing to achieve its goals.

 

[fisharmor]

Innovation in the public school sense is impossible, innovations in private schools is illusionary at best. Innovation would be students picking only the courses they wanted to learn, focusing on thier strengths and interests...can you imagine a student simply opting out of mathematics until they were 15? or any other subject until they felt ready and wanting to learn it?

Here's another great example of why public schools are hopeless.
You have teachers teaching the same thing 4-7 times a day, ad nauseum, right?
So riddle me this: we're 100 years into this, so how come it's still the case that if a student doesn't get it, they're fucked?
You have a teacher in a room going over the material up to 6 more times that very day, but if the student needs to hear the material again, fuck you, get in your gym shorts.

 

[BenjaminRosenzweig]

Privatize the schools and then you'll get more power over what your child learns since the schools will have to have great methods and teach what you want in order to get your support. No one learning model will be applicable or useful for all schools.

I'm merely expressing my opinion on how I believe how a school should be run, just as any other entrepreneur would express how he believes any type of business should be run. I should probably rename the article "10 Problems with American Education & How Schools Can Fix Them". I'll also include a section on why a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn't work and how we really need education entrepreneurs to open schools based on new ideas. But not just my ideas, a variety of new ideas. That's the real key to progress; not game-changing public school reform (which is either impossible or close to it) but a new wave of education entrepreneurs.

Still, it's worth reaching out to public school teachers. They can try out new things without fear of being fired. At least I think they can. Most of them have life tenure after all. IMHO, most of them genuinely want what's best for their students. They're simply in a system that discourages them from trying news things.