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mrmitchell
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Japher--I didn't intend for it to be. That's just ONE thing we can do to make schools a LITTLE better.
If I said that we should enroll in, say, one of those Save the African Children Who Don't Have Shoes programs, would I be saying that I intended to develop Africa to first-world status by giving them shoes?
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David Floyd
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The bottom of a large bottle of beer
Jan 1970
time: 05:29
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I certainly agree with you, mrmitchell, and I also don't think that we should be grammar Nazis, but at the same time, I don't think we can call a population that accepts phrases such as "I be ready to score some weed" is a well educated population.
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mrmitchell
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Sure, I can accept "I be ready to score some weed". I usually don't say so myself, though.
(The period is supposed to go before the end quotation mark, isn't it? Well, that's grammar Nazi'ing for you.)
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Ramo
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Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:29
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Well, there are a number of problems:
1. Unqualified teachers. Public school teachers are generally paid very little, particularly in the South (IIRC, in Austin the highest salary for a teacher is around $40,000), so very few qualified people are willing to work in these jobs. Furthermore, in most high schools one can teach a class without a degree in the relevant subject. This tendency leads to students bored with all the teachers are capable of providing - busy work, meaning students behave more poorly, so fewer qualified teachers are willing to teach, exacerbating the lack of decent teachers.
2. Underfunded facilities. Public schools often don't have the most basic resources to teach students, such as books.
3. Misguided focus on standardized tests by school and state bureaucracies and the lack of appropriate standards. This leads to teachers overemphasizing to an enormous degree the basic material, leading to bored students who eventually down the process are so disinterested to be incapable of even properly understanding this material. This also contributes to the problem of unqualified teachers.
4. Most importantly, public schools are funded by property taxes. This means schools in poor areas are totally crappy; they don't get decent teachers, don't get decent books, don't get decent facilities, etc., etc. This is the THE problem in our education system.
Edit:
Oh, and I've been in public schools all my life (until 10th grade which have been in rich areas), and was in a Magnet school (a federally-run school program that focuses on math and science, and generally, as in my case, is run in a ghetto area to maximize oppurtunity for the poor) since the 10th grade.
Last edited by Ramo on 29-07-2003 at 07:11
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Sikander
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Boulder, Colorado, United Snakes of America
Jan 2000
time: 22:29
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There are so many problems that it is hard to know where to start. So I guess I'll start from the top down.
Public education in the U.S. suffers from a lot of problems, many of which are systemic problems visible at the highest levels of government and society. For one, the quality of a public school education varies wildly, from places that manage to educate a child less than that child would have been educated by sitting at home and watching television, to schools which regularly produce children that the nation would be proud to call their own. This wild variance in quality creates more problems than those suffered by the students who manage to become trapped in the worst schools. They make the jobs of universities and employers very difficult, as GPAs and class standings are almost meaningless without some background information on the particular school system the child attended (one of many thousands).
Additionally, those students who have managed to graduate from the worst schools may believe that they have what it takes to succeed in college. They are often sadly mistaken. This tendency has become so acute that many univeristies must invest very heavily in remedial classes so that their students can learn high school skills before they are needed for college level work. This is incredibly inefficient and a blow to the confidence of students who may be intelligent enough to succeed in higher education, but so shortchanged by the educational system that they lack the necessary confidence. One thing that should be a goal of educational policy at the highest level is that a high school diploma should be a reasonable assurance that the bearer has mastered a basic skillset. This will enable both higher educational institutions and employers to start from a known point when they accept a young graduate into their programs / companies.
Another problem in public education is the lack of portability between schools. Americans move more frequently than most people in the industrialized world, yet have an educational system that varies immensely from locality to locality and state to state. This presents an enormous problem for students who transfer between schools, as a different emphasis between schools in different states may have that student studying material for which the groundwork has not been laid, as well as going back over familiar territory to no great benefit. Some sort of national curriculum standard could be used to eliminate this problem, but there are a number of problems with this solution. For one thing the loss of local control would be considered odious by many. Secondly, there may be several paths to a successful educational outcome for a student, but some might not be viable for all students. A more difficult but probably realistic approach is to have several "types" of educational submodules, each one based upon known "types" of students and applied only after careful testing and observation of the student in question. These standardized building blocks would then be used to craft a fairly individualized education for a particular student while providing tools to make sure that the student isn't sent into a class for which he hasn't the prerequisites.
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29-07-2003 06:28
Smiley, ever heard of FOX News? 
Corporate and party all in one. 
Dispite what libertarians say, this is bad because lack of funding is why many schools suck. I now this personally because my school had to cut several classes as a result of Minnesota's buget crunch.
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