Bringing High Expectations Back to Education

[@lawrencesao7379]

The pendulum has swung too far to the left. A lot of these ideas aren't bad ideas. A lot of these authors aren't lazy or their ideas ineffective, but their ideas and philosophies have become the hiding place of the lazy, charlatans who have really done a lot of damage to Urban education. The amount of damage that has been done and the abuse of these systems that have been put into place, especially seeing it as a teacher in Oakland.......m it's rampants and extends far beyond the education of the kids. It goes into the makeup of the very teams that leaving our schools and providing instruction. I believe in Dei I believe in anti-racist ideology but I don't believe in undereducating our students what I do see is in a lot of liberation. I see a lot of people spouting these ideas and collecting 100 to $200,000 salaries and doing half of the work that they would be doing. If they held themselves to a higher standard. The sad part is there's an upcoming generation of educators that have no idea how entrenched and harmful some of these movements have been and they are conditions to ignore student underachievement.

[@xzyeee]

I think social-emotional learning has been hijacked. It is well-intentioned and indeed necessary. However, how it has been applied in schools, based on huge misinterpretations, is the problem.

[@glennmitchell9107]

Schools and teachers should not be responsible or held accountable for student academic achievement. Each individual student should be responsible and held accountable for his or her own academic achievement. Teachers should assist parents and students in developing a unique curriculum for each student. The curricula should be based on the student's goals, while allowing for achieving a common high school graduation knowledge and skill requirement. Exceptionally bright students could meet this graduation standard years before their 18th birthday. Students with severe learning disabilities, who are unmotivated, or who are just plain stupid might never achieve those graduation requirements. That's okay.

[@emilymiller1792]

That's what schools did, more or less, before No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core started the monstrosity of standardization, standardized tests, career pathways, and focus on "competencies" as though students were burgeoning worker bees.

[@glennmitchell9107]

@@emilymiller1792 Even before No Child Left Behind, my public school education was class year curriculum driven. There were no electives until high school when we could take physics or chemistry (or both), a language (French or Spanish), band, choral, or three AP courses. (The languages started in Junior High.) There was no attempt to assess individual educational goals or allow students to progress at their own pace.

[@emilymiller1792]

@glennmitchell9107 No art, no music, no business courses or home ec or shop classes or English electives or Social Studies electives? Did your parents try to expand the offerings by talking to the school directors? The educational goals should be aimed at primarily preparing youth to shoulder being free people, for adulthood in our constitutional republic. If done right, students would also be ready for college or trade school. Mortimer Adler talks about the different goals of education in his Paideia books.

[@glennmitchell9107]

@@emilymiller1792 Oooh! Mortimer Adler. I like that. My K-12 was many, many years ago. There were such courses. Preparing youths to be free people in a constitutional republic is too vague and general to qualify as a useful individual educational goal. Given that so many students can't read or do math at grade level, our schools have a long way to go and should focus on more attainable intermediate goals than shouldering adulthood.

[@absolutelynothingtoseehere]

A different curriculum for every student is idiotic. Impossible to mange, for one, but also because one of the purposes of education is to give all citizens a common background of knowledge. And student goals are irrelevant...they lack to the knowledge to have meaningful goals. They can have that privilege when they graduate High School.

[@Notyet-p5b]

In the introduction, Steven said that Eliot's reply to G Stanley Hall was "who are we to decide [what children should become]?" Well precisely when you started taking the course variation out of schools and whittled it down to core classes with one or two electives. Or how about during the Cof15 when you extended this garbage policy to primary schools. Hall was right - there IS an army of incapables. They're in my classes and they DON'T and WILL NOT learn anything. They don't need to be in institutions, however, but rather working on what intereet them. Instead they're in a Procrustean Bed: fit in or die.

[@Notyet-p5b]

And Eliot's vision was not forgotten. It was, in some ways, cheered on and championed by William Torrey Harris.

[@absolutelynothingtoseehere]

Sadly, children are not interested in the subjects which they need to become functioning adults. Letting them work only on what interests them is idiotic and naive.