Two "easy to fix" reasons why our school sucks: Summer vacation and sleep depriving school schedule. Sleep is necessary for learning, but high school students don't get enough of it because their biology collides with school schedule. Summer vacation have a reputation for destroying education gain, because they're not spending time reviewing what they have learned. Review is crucial to the learning process, since our knowledge decay due to little or no use. That's why adults will have rusty math and know a lot less than high school seniors unless said adult is an engineer or a doctor.
They are easy to fix, in theory. All you have to do is distribute summer vacation days into the rest of the school years. All you have to do is shift starting time to something more reasonable like 8:30 AM or 9:00 AM.
However, they are hard, because of politics and culturally mandated stupidity.
I never showed up before 9:00 am myself anyway, often much later. However, there really is nothing wrong with summer vacation, there is nothing wrong with letting kids and teenagers actually have some time to enjoy life and do things they would like to do.
If summer vacation destroyed your education gains, you probably hadn't really learned it to begin with. A little review will help you pass the test, but that's it.
>"That's why adults will have rusty math and know a lot less than high school seniors unless said adult is an engineer or a doctor."
They're not remembering it because they don't need it. You are not going to remember every detail of everything you learned in high school once you leave it if you don't need it. You learned it to give you a base from which to grow from. This is a horrible example to use for removing free time.
Of course, I could have simply said all of this with there is no such thing as an easy fix. The only time you can have an 'easy fix' problem is if the problem is trivial to begin with (education is not) or you simplified the issues down so far as to make your analysis of the issue useless.
Good for you. However, my local high school still force students to start at 7:30ish in the morning.
However, there really is nothing wrong with summer vacation, there is nothing wrong with letting kids and teenagers actually have some time to enjoy life and do things they would like to do.
I am not suggesting we should end vacations. I am suggesting that the summer vacation is far too long. Or, we could supplement summer vacation with learning opportunities to reduce or prevent loss of knowledge.
If summer vacation destroyed your education gains, you probably hadn't really learned it to begin with. A little review will help you pass the test, but that's it.
Spaced repetition and the forgetting curve is a very real thing. It doesn't matter how well you learn the material. You'll need to review the materials at some point in the future.
They're not remembering it because they don't need it. You are not going to remember every detail of everything you learned in high school once you leave it if you don't need it. You learned it to give you a base from which to grow from. This is a horrible example to use for removing free time.
I am giving an example of forgetting/remembering knowledge, not showing deficiency in the education of adults.
The problem with changing school hours is that getting children to school needs to work around parent's work hours. This is less of a problem in other countries where young children can walk to school on their own or in groups, but would require massively changing American society to work.
It is far more an effect of the parents and household than it is economics of the house.
And that of the school hours is kind of wrong when you reach high school because that is when children take the bus or ride with friends with cars and drivers licenses.
Hours for school where I went (in the US):
Elementary: 8:30am - 3:10pm
Middle School: 8:20am - 3:00pm
High School: 7:30am - 2:20pm
Maybe so, but wikipedia indicates that is a problem not just for poor kids, but also middle income kids as well.
The problem with changing school hours is that getting children to school needs to work around parent's work hours. This is less of a problem in other countries where young children can walk to school on their own or in groups, but would require massively changing American society to work.
For older students, this is not much of a problem, but smaller children does indeed provide significant challenge. However, given that adults are also continuously sleep deprived too, society will probably gain a lot from shifting their schedule.
How would that work... would working parents have to take off those days to watch their kids?
Except that clearly, it doesn't. We know this because a) we had plenty of "genius" before we had any "gifted education", and b) the nature of the thing implies exceptionalism that overcomes cultural boundaries. (I also strongly suspect that "gifted education" has never been demonstrated to increase "genius", but that's just my speculation.)
If you look at what public education is designed to do (provide for a well-educated populace), it makes sense that most of our resources should go toward the under-performers: it's far more important to have a baseline level of literacy and numeracy for 95% of adults, than to nurture the development of the top 5% of people who will probably excel regardless.
I say this as someone who did "gifted education" in elementary and middle school, and found it to be mostly useless. In retrospect, I'd rather that my school district invested the money spent on gifted education in more AP classes, better funding for the arts, computers or early language instruction. It's almost negligent that a school system can afford to pay a full-time "gifted" instructor, but not provide for foreign-language instruction starting in kindergarten.
In high school, I was in "honors" classes but had been passed over for "gifted" classes because my parents refused to have my IQ tested. The gifted classes had a reputation for spending most of their time planning parties.
I don't have a clue how to "fix" America's schools, though I suspect standardized testing belongs more to the problem set than the solution set.
That makes little sense -- you can't use an anecdote to compare the experience you did have to the one you didn't.
I did gifted education, and plenty of "regular" education. The gifted education was basically useless.
Although, most of my comments aren't exactly award winning poetry - I would hope that they show some level of engagement on here. How do I de-hellban?
* Present it as a “How to...” article, provides a few vague sentences on how you might be able to begin to plan to do it, then quickly devolve into an article on what must be done “for the childrenz!”.
* Use lots of emotionally charged nonesense words and phrases, like “gifted”, “radical ideas”, “enabling the genius within”, “renewed commitment to excellence”.
* Make it all about the childrenz.
* Be sure to add some complaint about lack of funding for projects related to your sparkly notions.
* Make the use of everyday judgement sound like a complicated process only safe for use by experts.
* Support the statement of your opinions with references to other articles stating the same opinion, but do it in the fashion of a scientific reference.
... and many more!
EDIT: "has" -> "hasn't" in first line.
From the article: >America ranked 31st of the 56 countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, which assesses the academic skills and knowledge of 15-year-olds.
So how exactly is nurturing genius kids going to help that? Shouldn't education for everyone be the goal?
>First of all, we need to train teachers to spot giftedness....
How about training the teachers to teach? There seems to be a lack of good education in the US, at least for people who are poor.
No, the article notes that people don't spend much money on gifted kids.
So how exactly is nurturing genius kids going to help that? Shouldn't education for everyone be the goal?
Scores isn't everything. If your scores is in the last place but you have silicon valley and lot of genius or talents cultivated by your school system, who cares? Moreover, cultivating genius isn't mutually exclusive to ensuring everyone get a shot at a good education.
How about training the teachers to teach? There seems to be a lack of good education in the US, at least for people who are poor.
How about don't make the teacher spend time every year doing the same god damn live-lecture every year? Just record the video, and get all the teachers together to vote for the best one. Record all questions students have. Incorporate it into the next video lecture competition.
We'd all be better served by encouraging the best of us, even at the expense of those less able. Not PC, but undeniably true.
And the BBC's new sherlock also has a hyper intelligent character.
I attended and later worked in and around the public school system. I have a lot of ideas about what's wrong with it that would impossible to fully articulate here. However, I can say that I wouldn't put "nurturing nascent genius" particularly high on the list.