I speak as a parent of two successful, homeschooled adult children...one gained her Doctorate in physical therapy at age 24 and the other is a federal law enforcement official working upon his second master's degree...who has a keen interest in promoting the welfare of all children. I mention my children's bonafides not to brag, but to illustrate just one alternative to our current public education system.
My diary first details some disturbing statistics re how disadvantaged poorly educated children fare in our society. My diary then goes on to question our current public education strategies and philosophies.
Read on McDuff
First of all it is important to acknowledge the difficulty of teaching in today's schools. The phalanxes of students seated 5 or 6 deep by 5 or 6 wide are better suited to child crowd control than to helping our children to learn.
We have low expectations for American students.
American students rank 25th. in math and 21st. in science compared to students in 30 industrialized countries.
America’s top math students rank 25th out of 30 countries when compared with
top students elsewhere in the world.
By the end of 8th grade, U.S. students are two years behind in the math being studied by peers in other countries.
Sixty eight percent of 8th graders can’t read at their grade level, and most will
never catch up.
Too many students drop out.
More than 1.2 million students drop out of school every year. That’s more than
6,000 students every school day and one every 26 seconds.
The national high school graduation rate is only 70 percent, with states ranging
from a high of 84 percent in Utah to a low of 54 percent in South Carolina.
Graduation rates are much lower for minority students. Only about half of the nation’s African-American and Latino students graduate on time from
high school.
Dropping out has dire consequences for the dropout...
The poverty rate for families headed by dropouts is more than twice that of
families headed by high school graduates.
Nearly 44 percent of dropouts under age 24 are jobless, and the unemployment
rate of high school dropouts older than 25 is more than three times that of college graduates.
Over a lifetime, dropouts earn $260,000 less than high school graduates.
The health of an 18-year-old high school dropout is similar to that of a more educated person over two decades older.
...and for society.
Dropouts from the class of 2007 will cost our nation more than $300 billion in lost
wages, lost taxes and lost productivity.
Dropouts contribute about $60,000 less in federal and state income taxes. Each cohort of dropouts costs the U.S. $192 billion in lost income and taxes.
Sixty five percent of U.S. convicts are dropouts and lack of education is one of the strongest predictors of criminal activity.
A dropout is more than eight times as likely to be in jail or prison as a high school graduate and nearly 20 times as likely as a college
graduate.
For each additional year of schooling, the odds that a student will someday
commit a crime like murder or assault are reduced by almost one-third.
Each year, the U.S. spends $9,644 per student compared to $22,600 per prison inmate.
Increasing the high school completion rate by just one percent for all men ages
20 to 60 would save the U.S. up to $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from
If I were a public educator who was interested in bettering our public education system, I would focus on some of the following questions.
- Considering that our current education regimens promote the production of passive learners...we tell children to read chapter 3 and to answer questions 1,4,7 and 9; we then administer multiple choice tests to measure their "learning"...how might we develop strategies that would encourage children to become active learners by encouraging them to follow and expand upon their interests via exploring and researching these interests?
- Has the standardized testing industry served as an aid to education or has it contributed to the drill and kill passive learning that many of our children in public schools experience?
- Is it time to consider that it is arrogant to talk about teaching children and rather change our focus to one of helping children to learn?
What mechanisms cause our children's natural curiosity and desire to learn to diminish progressively after they start their public school educations?
- Should educators take responsibility for a child's learning or should they simply take credit for the successful children and blame the child or the parents if a child is not doing well?
It is my opinion and my bias...the experience that my bias is based upon comes only from rearing two children and helping them to learn...that we need to scrap our current philosphies and practices re public education and start over. We need to scrap our current public education practices and be guided by what we know works rather than by the vested interests of the standardized testing industry and what the entrenched self-interest of current educator lobbies would dictate.
We can do much better for our children. It is time to make our children paramount rather than to continue to bow to the current supposed Gods of public education development.