Land of the “Everything’s Free”

When you tell a supporter of the public school system that not only is it broken, but unjust as well, they whip out the big D. "This is a democratic society and we believe that every child should be educated voters and you just can't leave education up to the highest bidder!!" If you counter with an example, say, food, they say they don't see how that relates at all.

Food is a biological necessity (primarily more important than education) and yet we don't just give it away for free, fearing society's collapse. Instead the marketplace has fleshed out into every possible niche to fill every need and want. We have supermarkets where you can choose from numerous brands or build your own meal . We have specialty markets, farmer's markets, fast food, cafeterias, sit-down restaurants, bars, pubs, drive-throughs, five star dining and even food in carts on the street and driving down the street (ice cream trucks and taquerias). We even have volunteer charities and local groups helping out the less fortunate with food banks. But I've never heard a politician complain that food should be free for everyone, or at least a select group.

Until now. Houston Independent School District (HISD) is one of the largest in the country. Last week, the superintendent, Dr. Abelardo Saavedra, proposed free breakfast for every single student in the program. That's roughly 208,000 students. Before this program, regular students were paying a mere 90¢ for breakfast while low-income students only had to shell out 10¢. Assuming there are about 180 days in the school year that works out to a grand total of $162/year for the well-off kids and a paltry $18/year for the less wealthy.

Commenter "Robert", over at the Lone Star Times, did an excellent job summing up this scenario.

You forgot to mention that you don’t have to be a legal resident of this country or their parents don’t have to pay any taxes for all those students to benefit. This is socialism at its finest. The government will take care of everything.

If after being fed, you still don’t want to learn. No problem, we will tutor you at no cost.

If you can’t learn without a computer, no problem we will provide you one and don’t being playing games on it, your [supposed] to be studying.

If after that, you don’t pass, no problem, we will promote you, socially. We don’t want you to be left behind or be embarrassed if your classmates move on.

If after all that, you still can’t graduate, no problem just dropout and join our welfare rolls. We can still take care of you there.

If all fails, no problem, start committing crimes and blame it on your social upbringing, after all it wasn’t your fault. This is “no fault” state you live in. We aim to take care of you.

Oh, I forgot, there is one thing you need to do for us, please learn to pull the “Democratic” Lever when you vote!!!!!!

Besides the immorality of forcing taxpayers to shell out even more for irresponsible parents, there is the issue of why Dr. Saavedra really pushed this proposal through. My impression of educrats is that whenever something is academically unacceptable, they come up with something "fun" or "free" to draw attention away from the real problem. So I was curious if this had anything to do with the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) tests.

The TAKS test is, quite honestly, extremely simple. Just like most standardized tests, it is designed to cover basic knowledge, not to test for academic excellence. Additionally, even if students fail their classes but pass the TAKS test, the state says you have to push them forward anyway. With this in mind, one would probably expect to see fairly consistently high scores across the board. Let's see…

The following is a compilation of scores for all students regardless of race, income or disability.

So, with the exceptions of science, fourth grade writing and eleventh grade reading, every single score went down for 2005. (The full report may be found here.)

"Oh, but we shouldn't count special education students."
"Oh, but you see they've just changed the scores for harder standards."
"Oh, but it's not fair to compare the other races to the whites."
(or my favorite…)
"Oh, but students might not understand the testing format."

These objections miss the point that students are just flat out doing worse. Still, if you examine the chart, you may even find that overall scores don't have a positive correlation to the special education students, those with limited English skills or those who are poor.

Dr. Saavedra, shame on you for encouraging parents to participate and contribute even less to their children's future.

Newsbits, May 2006

Teachers of Multiculturalism Would Be Proud

In an unsurprising turn of events, 1,500 Chinese teachers face potentially losing their job for not passing a proficiency test in the subject they teach. Speak to most education majors and you'll find a severe lack of actual knowledge about the subject they want to teach. What matters to them is how they teach it, never mind the fact that they don't know "it." The introduction to this article wasn't terribly shocking to me. What I found surprising, however, is that teachers are apparently the same the world over when it comes to taking responsibility.

Teachers are required to pass papers in reading, writing, listening and speaking.
The scheme has provoked controversy since former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa proposed it in his first policy address. The 75,000-strong Professional Teachers' Union boycotted the first tests in 2001, saying it was an insult to their profession.

While education groups say the tests are unfair and detached from the realities of classroom teaching, parent associations support the tests as an indicator of teaching quality and are concerned by the results.

In general, only a third of the candidates pass the written test. In December, a report by the authority criticized candidates' grammar and vague explanations for common mistakes. "Many answers displayed a lack of understanding of English grammar," it said.

"In short, many candidates simply did not demonstrate an ability to discuss language matters in a professional context."

Teachers have criticized the exam's structure. All the tests are standard and do not take into account the fact that a band-three teacher or a primary-school teacher may require other qualities apart from an ability to explain grammatical constructions, they argue. [Emphasis added]

Why are U.S. teachers whining about the NCLB act? Because if a certain percentage of their students don't pass standardized tests, the schools may lose a tiny amount of federal funding. (Remember, the majority of funding comes from the state, and the NCLB act is a federal mandate.) If a student is taught actual content in a subject, there shouldn't be a problem with him having to see it on a very basic test. But, if you're not really teaching any content, or any actual thinking skills, of course you would panic and blame the test, not yourself.

American Students Are Bad At Science

A new report shows that high school students seem to lose their proficiency with science, while fourth graders have slight gains. Again, not too much of a surprise here. However, the report seems to offer this last tidbit as a positive note.

The test administrators translate scores into three achievement levels: advanced, proficient and basic.

On the most recent test, 68 percent of fourth-graders achieved at or above the basic level, compared to 63 percent on the 2000 and 1996 tests.

So much for those prodigal fourth graders.

Among high school seniors, 54 percent performed at or above the basic level in science in 2005, compared to 57 percent in 1996.

If we really need to rank our students by the lowest measure of success, I think there is a larger problem to consider, over the 3% drop. To elaborate on this concern, the article helpful explains what is required for a "basic" rating.

To achieve at the basic level on the National Assessment, high school seniors must demonstrate knowledge of very basic concepts about the earth, physical and life sciences, and show a rudimentary understanding of scientific principles.

Sad.

Teachers Not Taught How to Teach Reading

The headline of the article from the Houston Chronicle reads, "Reading not a science for many teachers." From my own experience, I know this to be true. In one class, I was given methods to determine "readability levels" that were admittedly broken, yet told to use them anyway. There are no courses whatsoever covering phonics or basic grammar, much less vocabulary.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, which issued the report this week, examined course syllabi and required texts from 72 randomly selected education programs and found only 11 colleges, including Texas A&M University, teaching all elements of the science of reading. No other Texas schools were included in the survey.

The report comes more than five years after the National Reading Council endorsed scientifically based approaches to reading, which federal officials define as grounded in the systematic teaching of phonics and related skills.
Still, the new study found that college educators consider the science-based instruction just one approach among many and rarely require future teachers to write lesson plans that apply the tools of reading instruction in a classroom setting.

"The decision about how best to teach reading is repeatedly cast as a personal one, to be decided by the aspiring teacher," the report's authors wrote.

"All methods are presented as being equally valid, and how one teaches reading is merely a decision that works best for the individual teacher."

As a result, roughly one-third of public school fourth-graders read below basic levels, according to the report. (snip)

The debate over how children learn to read has long divided the educational world. Some prefer to teach children to recognize words in the context of stories, known as "whole language" instruction, over more explicit instruction in letters and sounds. [Emphasis added]

Educators greatly dislike phonics because there are a lot of rules, some of which are arbitrary. Many educators believe that "whole language" is the way reading should be taught. Never mind that whole language was originally developed to aide deaf children. If it worked so great for them, it must work equally well for normal children.
For those that don't know, whole language is essentially sight-reading. The term "sight-reading" may be familiar to those who took choir or learned an instrument. In music, the premise is that you learn to immediately identify a note based on its position on the staff and relationship to other notes. This method works extremely well and helps create outstanding musicians. The reason it works is because there are only so many relationships between the various notes and once the mind recognizes the mathematical difference between an E and a G through repetition and memorization, sight-reading music becomes almost automatic. Have you ever seen someone sit down at a piano with a new sheet of music and play it almost perfectly? This is because they have practiced sight-reading somewhere along the way.

However, the idea doesn't translate into reading. Whole Language is supposed to work on the premise of repetition and context (just like musical notes) but words don't have absolute meanings. Verbs change tenses, pronouns indicate subjects, objects or possession, adjectives can become adverbs and frankly, reading the same sentence 15 times doesn't help you understand it anymore than the first time if you can't recognize any of the words.

"See Dick run. Run Dick run. See Jane run. Run Jane run." If you recognize this, then you were probably given similar books when you were young. This is Whole Language. Repetition, repetition, repetition. There's no plot, no point, and there are very few new words. Advocates of this method say that it's better to learn words in context, than by a bunch of sounds that adults don't use anyway. What they seem to forget is that by the time we become adults, the phonemic process has become automatic. Memorizing the word "run" does not help you pronounce "ran," "ruin" or "running." Memorizing the single definition of "run" in one sentence does not help you understand verb tenses and sentence construction.

Advocates may also say that children will "pick up patterns" from this method, but if that's the case, why not just teach them the patterns first and let them read something with a plot, like "Cat in the Hat" instead of "Dick and Jane"? English, being a language that has evolved over millennia and has absorbed rules and words from other languages, does in fact have some arbitrary rules. Sometimes "oo" sounds like "boo" and sometimes it sounds like "book." Teaching phonics helps decipher our language into manageable pieces, instead of sadly telling children that they must memorize millions of words, and only after seeing them in a sentence someone else wrote.

Creating Creative Criminals

It's almost unimaginable how stupid educators can be. Almost. This story is so disgusting that no punches need to be pulled in the name of "polite criticism."

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. — A Missouri high school teacher apologized for asking students to write about who they would kill and how they would do it.

Michael Maxwell said it was a horrible mistake he regrets, according to an Associated Press report.

Maxwell said the request to describe how students would carry out a murder was merely a writing exercise. Maxwell teaches a beginning drafting class and it was not clear why he asked the class to write fiction.

School officials in St. Joseph said the teacher will likely keep his job. [Emphasis mine]

Oh yes, you read that right.

Parents as Customers

People who support the vague democratic principle of public schools, funded by the entire tax base, will often say that education is a right and that our system of government depends on an educated populus. (In a future article, I hope to touch on some interesting moments in the history of education that shows the fallacy of this argument.) They will go on to pronounce how the only way to ensure equal opportunity for education is to have this enormous, shared tax as well.

But supporters of private schools often argue, correctly, that choice should be involved when a parent sends their children to a school. The very idea that parents should be perceived as customers, with the students as the resultant products, seems obscene to many public school supporters.