Michael Gove proposes longer school day and shorter holidays

[chitoryu12]

I obviously mostly speak from my own experience in the Central Florida public school system, but teachers tended to be very hit-or-miss in terms of respect and effectiveness. Some of them plain didn't seem to like the jobs or the kids they were teaching and were just in it for the pay (my first senior year English teacher lasted literally a week before administrators found his "highly disparaging" private blog posts, which included admitting to faking a drug test), some loved teaching and liked the kids no matter what but were hindered by their overbearing attitude, some were very popular mostly because they would go off on unrelated tangents that used up class time, and so on.

We seem to really stop instilling any sort of real respect for teachers after elementary school, when kids start to hit the first strides of cynicism and puberty and school starts to transform into "This is about the test." Teachers have to rely on their own force of personality and skill in making learning enjoyable to actually get the students to respect them, and it still doesn't stop the kids from getting upset if they get punished because they view it as a more personal betrayal if it's by a teacher they like.

I agree that it's probably the massive focus on standardized tests that's causing so much difficulty, as well as a lack of emphasis on "real world knowledge." I'd have gladly given up my macroeconomics class for something that taught daily financial knowledge for laymen; it's all well and good to know how the stock markets are operating and the difference between a bull and a bear, but that doesn't help much if none of the kids have been told how to fill out a check or how to properly balance their budget.

[DieselJester]

Why are you capitalizing Random Nouns?

Anyway, if I had to choose between paying the teachers half again as much money, and just hiring half again as many of them, I'd choose the latter- and I'm already living on that salary. The problem isn't just spending enough money to recruit high-powered talent. It's that you physically need X people watching the special ed students, you need Y people sweeping the halls and keeping people going to class, you need Z teachers covering remedial math...

Basically, by "leaving no child behind," we're keeping in the building the most labor-intensive and challenging students, who require the most input in manpower and effort to teach, and who often learn the least from he experience. As a result, we end up either hugely overworking the teachers, or hugely increasing the number of teachers so there are enough warm bodies to go around.

Since you don't get twice as much talent for twice the salary normally, we need more staff more than we need higher pay.

Sorry about the random capital letters in there. It's what I get for typing out a response before I'm fully awake in the morning.

Ok, I can see how increasing the staff could help more than merely increasing the salary of the teachers. Good point.

It's not pay that we need, it's social standing. Finland and Singapore (the two educational systems people love to put up as the best in the world), don't pay their teachers significantly differently from the US. However, what they do do is hold teaching as a worthwhile profession for skilled people to go into. Within their society teachers are help up with respect, and there are stringent entry requirements to become one. Contrast that with many views in the United States, where teaching is where people with no talent go. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in many cases.

Where are these views coming from? You're probably the first person that I've ever heard say that teaching is a profession where people with no talent go to.

Median US full-time employee income is approx $28K. Median income for all US high-school teachers is approx $52K. Exactly how many times more than an average worker do you think a teacher is 'worth' ? Increasing the salary of all high-school teachers uniformly would cost approx $6B per $1K; pay increases for elementary teachers would cost a similar amount, but they earn less than half as much as high-school teachers. How are you going to raise those funds and what specific improvements will that expenditure buy?

How would I do it personally? Probably by making cuts in the US Budget that others wouldn't want made, namely from the Department of Defense ($672.9B for FFY13) that ranks third in total outlay for Federal Fiscal Year 2013 (The top two being Health and Human Services and Social Security Admin which I wouldn't want to touch). Bring more of our troops home, close up some overseas operations, and I'm sure that we could shave around $6B to dedicate to the Department of Education that ranks ninth at only $71.9B.

But, as Simon Jester pointed out, the increase in salary wouldn't necessarily bring higher quality teachers, but we could use that increase in budget to allow more staff to even out the workloads.

Figures retrieved from Wikipedia's summary of the 2013 US Federal Budget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Unite ... ral_budget

[Simon_Jester]

Personally, I don't think we need net salary increases, we need a way to incentivize the system to not crushingly overwork individual teachers by piling on too many students and too many extra responsibilities. Insofar as some teachers I know aren't using "best practices," it's partly because there's so much stuff that must be done in terms of paperwork and grading for N students that there's little or no time left over to think and plan.

[fordlltwm]

Easy way to reduce teacher workload? Kick some of the kids out, send them to a specialist school for disorderly kids. Seriously they were a few in my class who were of mediocre to high ability but refused to apply even that and instead spent they're entire time pissing about, infuriating the teachers and make life miserable for whoever was lowest on their social pecking order. A criminal institution would've been the best option for the little shits, most of them are fathers by now (I'm only 21) though how many are still with the mothers of their children I don't know, and I'm sure the devil spawn will be just as disruptive when they grow up.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

If you give up on the problem students, of course they're going to end up getting worse as time goes on. Instead of throwing them in prison until they hit 18 (??) we could instead actually try to help them to become less disruptive, helping not only the rest of the class but also them. The fact that the school system is set up in a broken fashion that already leaves a large chunk of the student body behind doesn't mean we should cut them off entirely, but rather to fix it so that education works for as many as it can.

[fordlltwm]

If they choose to disruptive fuck 'em. I was bored senseless in school as well, so I read books instead, and still managed to stay abreast of the work. I remember one lad in school had 21 yellow slips, in theory when you 3 your parents were called, and 5 was in theory suspension territory, but he ended up with 21 and never gave a shit, and the school never really punished him, I got one for not writing a script in drama class and got hauled into my registry teacher and given an earbashing, then made to see the deputy head and given after school detention, along with serious warnings about future conduct. One rule for the trouble makers, another for unpopular quiet ones it seems.

[CarsonPalmer]

Where are these hellholes everybody is talking about? I don't live in a rich area so much as an average suburb, but growing up my father taught in one school, my mother worked in another and I went to a third...and things weren't bad. These weren't elite Catholic/private schools, either, just your run of the mill schools. My experience was that the teachers were good (mostly), the kids were good (mostly), and people were happy (mostly). And as I look back now, most of my classmates are getting out of college and headed for decent jobs or at least internships. If you had asked me what was doing the most damage, it was the constant "CRISIS IN EDUCATION" talks that were choking the life out of the better and more creative teachers. And now that I'm wrapping up the end of my first year teaching, that's pretty much what I'm seeing. We have our problems, but the idea that most high schools are sociopathic zoos seems pretty foreign to me. Are there one or two kids in every class that I have to constantly keep on track? Yeah. Its annoying for me, but I don't feel like it keeps me from covering the material I need to cover or answer the questions of engaged students.

Granted, New Jersey's schools outside of the inner city are pretty highly rated but still...things seem nowhere near as bad as some alarmists like to make them sound.

[DieselJester]

If they choose to disruptive fuck 'em. I was bored senseless in school as well, so I read books instead, and still managed to stay abreast of the work. I remember one lad in school had 21 yellow slips, in theory when you 3 your parents were called, and 5 was in theory suspension territory, but he ended up with 21 and never gave a shit, and the school never really punished him, I got one for not writing a script in drama class and got hauled into my registry teacher and given an earbashing, then made to see the deputy head and given after school detention, along with serious warnings about future conduct. One rule for the trouble makers, another for unpopular quiet ones it seems.

So then the solution to the problem here probably would be enforcement of the rules with appropriate punnishments dealt out. Hell, if I'd been informed back in school of that doctrine and wound up with 21 slips with no punnishment, I probably wouldn't have cared either. The school that I went to upheld their punnishments. I've seen classmates be handed out detentions, suspensions, and expulsions for violations of the rules.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

If they choose to disruptive fuck 'em.

Or we could choose to fix the problem? When kids "choose" to have disruptive personality, do you think just cutting them loose so that they end up in worse situations with no way out and thus no way to do anything but disrupt society is going to benefit anyone? Children don't just sit down and choose to be good or bad students for the rest of their life or whatever; it's a matter of how they've been raised and what the system they're in is like. If it's too late to fix the former, then fixing the latter can still help.

[Simon_Jester]

If you give up on the problem students, of course they're going to end up getting worse as time goes on. Instead of throwing them in prison until they hit 18 (??) we could instead actually try to help them to become less disruptive.

YES.

The problem is, doing this takes an entirely different approach to schooling than the one it takes to just take a bunch of average-to-bright students and shovel the maximum possible amount of knowledge into their heads. It is a really bad idea to try to handle both types of kids in the same building.

Kids with emotional disturbance problems and severe behavior issues need a lot of things-

For the sake of our society, we really need to have at least three tiers of schools:

1) Magnet schools that are designed to take gifted students and turn them into very well educated technical specialists
2) General-ed schools that are designed to take students who are... let me be frank, who are cooperative enough to be educated without an extreme effort. Kids who would fit fine into this school make up the majority of the population, and frankly you could probably blend (2) and (1) successfully. The problem comes when you blend in people from the third population, more on them below.

The thing about (2) is that they're trying. They, if asked why they come to school, will honestly answer "to learn" instead of "to hit on girls" or "I don't know," or of course, "fuck you, bitch." They are more likely to be frustrated by a teacher who isn't teaching effectively than by one who is, they generally aren't actively disrupting the class to get attention, they generally aren't bullying or preying on other students as a habit.

The tiny minority of kids who don't match that description... they're the problem. It's not that they should be abandoned, it's that they do not belong in mainstream education, where they serve only to become grit in the gears. By nature mainstream education can't specialize and individualize its treatment enough to reach them well, and it provides them with an endless stream of victims and impressionable people to set bad examples for.

Even kids with actual special-ed learning disorders can be mainstreamed more easily than kids with behavioral problems.

Where are these hellholes everybody is talking about? I don't live in a rich area so much as an average suburb, but growing up my father taught in one school, my mother worked in another and I went to a third...and things weren't bad. These weren't elite Catholic/private schools, either, just your run of the mill schools. My experience was that the teachers were good (mostly), the kids were good (mostly), and people were happy (mostly)...

I agree. This is actually very common in US schools, and the "CRISIS IN EDUCATION" stuff isn't nearly as universal as it can be made out to be. But it is precisely the schools which have an actual problem that need fixing, and therefore most discussion focuses on how to fix them.

The problem of "CRISIS IN EDUCATION" drowning out creativity and flexibility, mind you, is very real. Especially when "OMG CRISIS" manifests as "NEED MOAR TESTS FOR MOAR DATAS," which it often can.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

The tiny minority of kids who don't match that description... they're the problem. It's not that they should be abandoned, it's that they do not belong in mainstream education, where they serve only to become grit in the gears. By nature mainstream education can't specialize and individualize its treatment enough to reach them well, and it provides them with an endless stream of victims and impressionable people to set bad examples for.

Well, I'm not sure about that, since fixing education in general may leave room for better helping out those kind of students. But since that's not guaranteed, it might require something entirely different, yeah. But we're agreed that the best way to deal with problem students is to try to find a way to help them engage with things and channel their energy better, even if it will be hard, and not to just toss them aside for having made the wrong "choice" while growing up.

[Simon_Jester]

We seem to really stop instilling any sort of real respect for teachers after elementary school, when kids start to hit the first strides of cynicism and puberty and school starts to transform into "This is about the test."

The testing makes it worse here because it creates a huge chunk of the student's experience, which dominates and sets the tone of the classroom experience, and which is effectively outside the teacher's control. "Shut up and take this test neither of us wants and that I can't grade you on" is just such a shitty message to send students.

The tiny minority of kids who don't match that description... they're the problem. It's not that they should be abandoned, it's that they do not belong in mainstream education, where they serve only to become grit in the gears. By nature mainstream education can't specialize and individualize its treatment enough to reach them well, and it provides them with an endless stream of victims and impressionable people to set bad examples for.

Well, I'm not sure about that, since fixing education in general may leave room for better helping out those kind of students. But since that's not guaranteed, it might require something entirely different, yeah. But we're agreed that the best way to deal with problem students is to try to find a way to help them engage with things and channel their energy better, even if it will be hard, and not to just toss them aside for having made the wrong "choice" while growing up.

Put simply, this year we need to get the disruptive kids out, this would have a huge, positive, and arguably immediate effect on education in struggling schools. Keeping them in mainstream just means that we can't reach them. We're still leaving them to rot- it's just that we're leaving them to rot in such a way that the rot has more potential to spread.

Ten years down the line we can hope to have reformed the system enough that we won't need to do that with so many students. Won't have so many disaffected kids who make trouble and rage and can't engage meaningfully with other people except in 'thug mode' or 'class clown mode.' But fixing that is a much more complex problem, and there's no logical reason why we should artificially postpone and weaken attempts to improve outcomes in education for the sake of waiting for it to happen.

[Zaune]

The only thing that worries me about that approach is the probable fate of the kids who get shunted out of mainstream schools into the specialist ones for behavioural issues. I mean, would you hire a school leaver from one of those places over someone from a normal school?

[Grumman]

The only thing that worries me about that approach is the probable fate of the kids who get shunted out of mainstream schools into the specialist ones for behavioural issues. I mean, would you hire a school leaver from one of those places over someone from a normal school?

I wouldn't hire them now. "Thug who assaults and robs other students" isn't a protected class.

[Simon_Jester]

A lot of the kids I'm talking about aren't even thugs- they're punks, or just endlessly obnoxious. The "class clown" is part of the problem here even if he's physically harmless, because he burns up multiple minutes of instruction time a day. Over the course of a year he may do more to damage the kids' education than the average blizzard. Having too many such children, or enough genuinely incorrigible ones, is crippling to a classroom environment. Because as long as they're mixed in with the rest of the student body at random, the disruptions they create must be dealt with before much if any learning can happen... and they create a lot of disruptions.

The thing is, the whole point of this system is that we can reach and educate kids with emotional and behavioral problems, and make productive citizens of them. It's just harder, that's all: takes more resources per child, takes a specialized approach, takes more experience doing certain things. Trying to do all that while at the same time educating a much larger general population as efficiently as possible is just asking for trouble.

It's like trying to design a screwdriver that doubles as a hammer- you could do it, but the two roles are different enough that it makes more sense to have a single optimized tool for each job.

[Zaune]

The thing is, the whole point of this system is that we can reach and educate kids with emotional and behavioral problems, and make productive citizens of them. It's just harder, that's all: takes more resources per child, takes a specialized approach, takes more experience doing certain things.

And that would be why it's such a hard sell. Very few people want to spend extra money dragging the "difficult" kids up to the same standard as the normal ones when it could be spent on making the normal kids (whose parents, not at all coincidentally, are usually of a social class that tends to be politically active) achieve even higher. If that means kids from less supportive environments get trapped in a vicious downward spiral of poverty, alienation and low aspirations? Well, someone's got to do the Epsilon-work.

[fordlltwm]

The thing is, the whole point of this system is that we can reach and educate kids with emotional and behavioral problems, and make productive citizens of them. It's just harder, that's all: takes more resources per child, takes a specialized approach, takes more experience doing certain things.

And that would be why it's such a hard sell. Very few people want to spend extra money dragging the "difficult" kids up to the same standard as the normal ones when it could be spent on making the normal kids (whose parents, not at all coincidentally, are usually of a social class that tends to be politically active) achieve even higher. If that means kids from less supportive environments get trapped in a vicious downward spiral of poverty, alienation and low aspirations? Well, someone's got to do the Epsilon-work.

The problem is that not removing the trouble makers and disruptive kids means the teacher spends 50% of a given lesson yelling at them, trying to get the class to calm down again, and generally not being able to teach effectively.

[Keevan_Colton]

You're talking at cross purposes here ford, Zaune is talking about the chance of political currency being spent on it and the probability that it will just result in a shafting for those with problems while you're talking about the practical problems which have nothing to do with getting people to actually invest time and money.

[Simon_Jester]

In that case, we need to ask ourselves an intellectually honest question:

If we can't get the resources to educate disruptive students properly, is it a good idea to keep them in the schools at all, where they act as a drag on everyone else's education? Clearly it's worth spending tax money to educate children, but is it worth spending the education of other children toward that end?

[DieselJester]

I'd rather spend the budget in the Department of Education to train and educate children right the first time rather than spend the budget in the Department of Corrections later when they're incarcerated.

So I think that Simon Jester is on to something here with the 3 tiered school system. It'd be a great punnishment, I think, to have that in place; the threat of being 'downgraded' if you're disruptive might have a good effect on students. However, I'd wonder what kind of punnishment system we'd have to have in place at the lowest tier of schooling? Rewards would be easy: work hard, play well with others, and you can go back to the mainstream schooling. But what would be left to kids after they hit rock bottom to get them to behave (and granted I'm just talking about the disruptive ones here. Others, like the mentally handicapped perhaps, would have to have the special education all the time if they were in the bottom tier).

The only thing that worries me about that approach is the probable fate of the kids who get shunted out of mainstream schools into the specialist ones for behavioural issues. I mean, would you hire a school leaver from one of those places over someone from a normal school?

Did they get their diploma? Did they get their GED? Do they have any work experience? There's a lot of factors that go into that kind of question, Zaune. It's like asking "Do you want someone who graduated at Harvard as opposed to someone who graduated at a Community College"? Yes, any Ivy Leauge college looks good on a resume', but if your requirements for a job states "Must have High School Diploma or GED", then that would include this lowest tier of secondary education.

[Zaune]

You're slightly missing the point. Most employers will want references, and for a school-leaver that means a teacher. That entails telling their employer where they went to school.

That means it's going to be impossible to conceal the fact that they went a "special" school for kids with "behavioural difficulties", meaning in practice that it was a dumping ground for kids too stupid, violent or idle to be tolerated anywhere else. Do you think many employers will be interested in giving them a chance, no matter what their grades are?

[Simon_Jester]

I'd rather spend the budget in the Department of Education to train and educate children right the first time rather than spend the budget in the Department of Corrections later when they're incarcerated.

So I think that Simon Jester is on to something here with the 3 tiered school system. It'd be a great punnishment, I think, to have that in place; the threat of being 'downgraded' if you're disruptive might have a good effect on students. However, I'd wonder what kind of punnishment system we'd have to have in place at the lowest tier of schooling? Rewards would be easy: work hard, play well with others, and you can go back to the mainstream schooling. But what would be left to kids after they hit rock bottom to get them to behave (and granted I'm just talking about the disruptive ones here. Others, like the mentally handicapped perhaps, would have to have the special education all the time if they were in the bottom tier).

Special education students whose problems are not (at the core) behavioral should be mainstreamed into the general schooling system.

It may take extra resources to help teach a child who is deaf, or who needs graphic organizers to understand concepts, but that is not prejudicial to the education of the rest of the student body. They can stay with everyone else.

You're slightly missing the point. Most employers will want references, and for a school-leaver that means a teacher. That entails telling their employer where they went to school.

That means it's going to be impossible to conceal the fact that they went a "special" school for kids with "behavioural difficulties", meaning in practice that it was a dumping ground for kids too stupid, violent or idle to be tolerated anywhere else. Do you think many employers will be interested in giving them a chance, no matter what their grades are?

This is a fair point.

The real problem is that mixing them in with a general student population doesn't improve these kids' ability to hold down a job much- they're still ignorant, violent, or rude and obnoxious even though they come from a school where not all the kids match that description. And at the same time it's hurting the reputation of the school as a whole, and its ability to educate the average student to a high standard.

[madd0ct0r]

you are ignoring
1) they may not behave like that in all subjects
2) they may grow out of it
3) their behavior might be a signal of something going on at home, and once that situation is resolved they return to normal.

just writing kids off is a dangerous tactic.

[DieselJester]

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the EEOC and/or the ENDA has anything in regards to education?