If schools are doing a poor job at teaching the most critical subjects using the absolutely massive resources they are given, expecting them to competently teach a broad spectrum of additional subjects may be a stretch, or simply too expensive to tolerate.
Are you expecting this kind of policy to cause innovation that would allow teachers to reach students in homes that do not value education? I tend to believe it would simply result in massive teacher shortages for regions in which education is not culturally valued. Given those incentives, if you were a teacher would you consider even for a moment going to work for an inner city school in the US?
I agree that giving them more money is a bad idea. I argue that the pace of education has slowed considerably due to the compounded effects of Outcome Based Education, No Child Left Behind, and Common Core. There's too much curriculum redundancy, addressing the same topics repeatedly. Eliminating curriculum redundancy, and permitting students who earn F's to either drop out or continue earning F's if they don't value an education, is how you provide peak education to high achievers. It's far past time to get the socialism out of the schools. Reward kids who invest their efforts and energy into their education, and quit wasting resources on the losers that will be losers the rest of their lives with the attitudes they have. Teachers who advocate like burned out social workers are not going to fix urban schools.
Those urban schools WILL turn around if the losers are allowed consequences of losing, and educational resources are invested into the kids that deserve and earn it instead of spread out on all the boat anchors.
As far as I can tell, success in education is primarily dependent on having a culture that respects and emphasizes it. The quality of teachers is secondary - at best.
I fully agree. Can you imagine how effective a school could be if it also operated under those principles and reciprocated them? The greatest educational advancements in human history came about between the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. In about 4 generations, humans went from cottage industry metalworking, to jet powered air flight, distributed electrical grids, and the ability to wield nuclear power. The educational system in place during that era provided a nominally free education, as long as you weren't a nuisance to the other students trying to get as much out of it as possible. If you reached your maximum aptitude, you dismissed from school to work the family farm or do whatever you could to support yourself and your family. "Child" labor was awful in that period because of unsafe work conditions, not because it's bad for children to work. There's nothing inherently wrong with a 14 year old dropout working at a fast food joint or apprenticing with a painter or drywaller instead of being a drag on educational momentum in the schools.
Any system that punishes teachers for defects in their student's culture is going to have a difficult time recruiting in areas with a culture that devalues education.
Which is why teachers need to stop trying to appeal to these students by means of cool factor or cultural/tribal parallels, and start wielding the F and pronouncing condemnation on inferior cultural values. If the boat anchor student isn't in class, he cannot drag down the momentum of students capable of achieving more.
Urban schools have - by far - the most per-pupil public funding and almost invariably the lowest performance. I don't know what the answer is but clearly throwing money at the problem isn't solving the problem, and I'm guessing that yanking job security and salary from teachers in those areas probably wouldn't either.
When you have students at the high school level that are functionally illiterate, yet never received an F from elementary school to middle school, I think it's quite legitimate to say that you have a failed educational agenda, and a failed implementation at the classroom level. Consequences need to hit the teachers for pardoning, or enabling, such dereliction of opportunity placed before the students.
Regardless, I'd probably suggest using some defined performance cutoffs instead of bottom quartiles.
Sure. I'm game for the standardized tests to actually serve some useful function. Pick a metric, I don't care how it's used. But the tests are worthless without consequences. Same with grades. The tests, in my opinion, need to be a means of standardizing the value of grades since grades can vary in subjective value from teacher to teacher. Mrs. Pritchett's Algebra 1 in Brooklyn will have different curriculum and pace and ordering of subject material than Mr. Hanson's Algebra 1 in Puyallup. Maybe an A is harder to get in Mrs. Pritchett's class than Mr. Hanson's. More homework, slightly longer tests, maybe a 3 minute shorter class period, some variation that makes it a bit more difficult to excel on paper. The standardized tests should show that Mrs. Pritchett's students and Mr. Hanson's students are (hopefully) absorbing the same material and the teachers are presenting it competently.
If Mr. Hanson has a bunch of students that are incompetent at Algebra 1, it means that the teachers of those students before Mr. Hanson didn't teach those students fundamentals. If those students don't have F's for the prerequisites for Algebra 1, those earlier teachers are at fault. But it's up to Mr. Hanson to put a stop to this process by failing an incompetent Algebra 1 student and referring him to remedial mathematics or ejecting him from the school entirely if the student is clearly not interested in education... not advancing the student with the now-customary polite D so he can continue to drag down the class in Geometry next year.
The standardized tests should show that LAST year, when that poor performing student took them in the Algebra prereqs, did not understand the material and the discrepancy between the standardized test and the grade received should be analyzed and reflect poorly on the teacher LAST year. Not on Mr. Hanson.
That said, if you do start expelling kids who don't want to perform then the remaining ones are probably culturally more focused on education. What that does to urban crime rates and so forth would be interesting to see. From a distance.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/I don't think that compulsory education of problematic students has a meaningful impact on lowering crime statistics, from a career perspective. It may lower the frequency of certain petty crimes, but it doesn't stop the ultimate trajectory (kids can't graffiti and shoplift from 8AM to 3PM if they are in school, they'll just graffiti and shoplift from 3PM to midnight instead... this does not stop the kid from ultimately progressing his criminal career to something that results in incarceration once, which then becomes repeat offense and incarceration through life).
What is clear though, is the last 60-75 years of public education has been an abject failure. Continuing down this path will yield more of the same. It's time for something different. The patient will not respond to continued altruism. Perhaps it will respond to peer envy, or competition, or economic stimuli. Pick one. But ditch the altruism.
