It could only work on a national and voluntary level, rather than at an individual district or school-system level.The Dark wrote: I'm not sure how effective that would be. My high school tried to do something similar, splitting into four different "academies" based on what the student wanted to do. It lasted precisely three years before colleges started asking us to stop doing that because they got students without the proper educational rounding. Besides, how many people know what they want to do right after middle school? I know only three people who have stuck with the same plan from 8th grade, and two of those are to become housewives. The last one's going Air Force, and he's just dead set on doing that. Everyone else I know changed at least once in high school.
You claim that standardized tests must necessarily be the standards by which teachers are judged, AND you claim that the current standardized tests are the only possible ones that could be used when there are quite obviously more options available. Read the description of the standard tests that my district administered for a good alternative.Wouldn't work. Teachers will always be judged on how their students do on standarized testing, and will thus teach to the test. Happened on the FCAT and HSCT even when no funding were attached to them. Standarized testing makes sure everyone is taught at the same level of mediocrity.2. Other students would be educated much the same way that they are now, except that all standardized tests would be established by the state, and designed to test students on the material that they ALREADY learn, instead of giving the perception to teachers that they must teach to the tests.
But not at the expense of other people. There's something called the law of diminishing returns in economics. Basically it says that the first unit of money you put into something will be more efficiently spent than the Nth unit. I agree that special education students should be taught SOMETHING, but to give them literally twenty-five times the resources that "normal" students receive (as many school districts do) is ludicrous because the law of diminishing returns says that the additional funding will not increase their abilities by as much as it would increase their abilities AND another pupil's abilities if the money were split more equitably.I agree somewhat, in that public schools are not the place for uneducable children to be. The educable learning impaired should be aided as much as possible, so that they may become contributing members of society.3. Special Education fields receive severe cutbacks in the public schooling system, and are instead used to fund schools themselves to attract quality teachers from other fields.
The degree level does not particularly matter when teaching a subject, except that it shows a knowledge of the subject being taught. MOST teachers understand the material that they have to teach, and so I'm not really concerned about that. What I'm saying is that the school district pay rates should be competitive with the rates in the private industries, so that schools do not get "stuck" with the people left over once the private sector has picked out all of the intelligent, knowledgeable workers. I'm not even particularly concerned about the GRADES given in these classes. A doctor might expect more out of his students than a person with a master's degree, and so his grades would be more demanding. The opposite could also be true. Your's is a reasonable case-study of one particular student in one particular school, but it teaches little about the general trend in education.I agree that we need better teachers, but we also need more. Many students (myself included) don't learn well in large classroom environments. My GPA was a full point higher in classes with under 30 students than in those with 35 or more. And before anyone asks about degrees, one of the ones I did poorly in was taught by a man with a Doctorate in the field. The others all had Master's degrees.4. We don't need MORE teachers, we need BETTER teachers. A strong teacher can teach classes with 40+ students. Thus, greater emphasis should be placed on attracting skilled instructors from the private sector with higher wages and greater benefits than on hiring MORE teachers for the same price.
No argument with these except on figuring a way to measure the meritocracy. [/quote]5. Additional funding is to be provided to the high-end students, who study advanced classes.
6. Administration staff should be scaled back. Most HS's in America have an administrator for every 8-12 teachers. That is unreasonable. A single Principal and two VP's are necessary for a school of 750 students, with one or two secretaries.
7. Counseling services should be provided in greater quantities.
8. Teachers and other staff members would operate under a meritocracy, as opposed to a seniority scale. Excellent staff members would be afforded the choice classes and privileges, encouraging competition and strong curriculums.
All students, almost all teachers, and most administrators know who the good teachers are. It's not really a concern to me.
Exactly. Economics describes this as a "negative return."I never had a problem with homework through grade school. I'll admit I read faster than most, but I'm also easily distracted, yet I never found myself having more than an hour a night. Even if that's tripled, the average high school student should finish their homework by 7 (assuming the school gets out at 3:15 like those in my home county and they ride the bus half an hour to get home). The problem, as DW said, is teachers who assign trees worth of worksheets as homework. It doesn't really teach anything.9. Homework should be limited in each class to ensure that students be given (including long-term projects) no more than three hours per week, with the time for projects being the total time required divided by the number of weeks granted.
While that particular example was poor management on the part of the administrators, it was used to illustrate an extreme example of why communication between departments is necessary.Sounds like a weak central authority at that school. The principal should be removed and replaced with someone who can keep juvenile fights out of the supposed adults at the school.10. Greater emphasis should be placed on cross-communication between different branches of teachers. In one school in my district, a teacher from the Math Department and one from the History or the Science Department (I can't actually remember) came to blows over a PARKING space. For the entire YEAR, the two departments never talked to each other, and when they both received some new teachers who were unfamiliar with the feud the next year, those teachers were ostracized for their attempts to talk things over with each other by both sides. Such incidents should not occur, and in fact the teachers and staff should attempt to communicate so as to prevent unusually large stress on students for more than one week at a time.
