I am apart of the National Council for Teachers of English. I am a SLATE representative, who finds articles and happenings in English Education in the U.S. Periodically, I receive electronic newsletters from them, via email, showing different articles published in various periodicals.
I read an article from June 1st USA Today, which was titled, “4 States Yet to Agree to Standards for Academic Rigor.” This interested me because I see that public schools are starting to cater more to the students, the standardized scores, Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), IEP’s, Professional Learning Committees, and Differentiated Learning; rather then dealing with the two things I feel are most important, curriculum rigor and discipline.
In the article, 46 states have agreed to develop a uniform, consistent set of criteria called the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Currently, every state has their own set of criteria, but studies have shown that students in the United States have steadily been slipping further and further behind international students. There is one issue, Alaska (my home state and where I taught for two years), Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas are yet to sign up.
For those that might not know, people come to Anchorage, Alaska for these reasons, A) They heard of the permanent fund dividend and thought they were going to make free money, only to find out that they were mistaken. B) They want to go on a fishing boat because they heard that they can make a lot of money (The show, Deadliest Catch made this worse.) Or C) They are in the military and are doing their time. So needless to say, there is a lot of turnover with residents. I remember nothing being more frustrating than having a student transfer from another state and either have not fulfilled the rigor of my course or the course being too easy for them. Either way, the student is bored. It pains me to see that a state with so many military bases was not the first one to sign up for this.
The article goes on to state that out of the 30 countries that participated in the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), The United States “ranked 25th in math” and “students lag about a full year behind" their peers in the countries that perform best in mathematics.
My feeling is that this has become the norm in the U.S. and it is totally unacceptable. We are so far into an instant gratification world that we are having trouble digging ourselves out. This is America and we survive on being first; it is how this country was made. So why should education be any different?
You have so nailed this, David, I just can't tell you. Our society has coddled itself into a position that seems to feed itself and go nowhere but down. We strip the teachers and schools of the ability to appropriately control students and their classrooms. In the interest of being inclusive we teach more to the lower end than set high goals and expectations. If failure seems possible or likely, we don't address the problem, we get rid of it by abandoning standards and simply quit (if you think I'm being dramatic, remember what the entire state of Minnesota just did).
ReplyDeleteYou are correct - we are not striving for excellence anymore - we are applying lower standards and then pretending we have acheived something. We create tests and programs and processes and when they don't work, we create some more and the spiral only gets faster.
We are 25th in the world in math for a reason. It is not because our kids are dumber and it's not because our teachers are less competant, less caring, or less hard working. It's happening because we have abandoned a small number of vital ideals and put in their place an educational system based on hand holding that is controlled more by that parents anhd students than by the teachers and schools.
This country used to be #1 academically in the world. We produced the best students and greatest minds in the world and we did it with less money and fewer programs. I am not advocating poverty level wages for teachers, one room school houses, and a return to corperal punishment, but all of the great ideas and money and programs and consultants and NCLB and the obsession with self esteem has done little except lower our scores and created a heighten loss of control in our classroom, Oh yes, it has also dropped us from the best in the world to 25th and that should tell us something.