, <\/strong>a bio prof and and director of biology education at Emporia State University.<\/p>\nAt a casual listen, Petrilli was doing the usual party line – China is kicking our butts at education, and we need serious reforms, most of which involve pouring more money into the system (and I’ll freely cop to the fact that I may be shorting his side of the discussion).<\/p>\n
Shrock was more interesting.\u00a0 He noted that America has traditionally had some significant advantages over the rest of the world, at least when it comes to secondary and higher education.\u00a0 While it’s become a chanting point that China, India and Europe teach three times as much science as the US, Shrock notes that most of that education, especially in China, has been traditionally focused on rote memorization – on “teaching to the test” – while the US’ more freeform system traditionally fosters critical thinking and creativity.\u00a0\u00a0 Metric:\u00a0 The US, for all of the caterwauling about our system’s shortcomings, has over 200 Nobel Prizes in the sciences (for which one must actually do something useful, unlike the Peace Prize).\u00a0 China: 0.<\/p>\n
So far.<\/p>\n
Shock also notes, however, that as the US system moves more and more toward rote memorization and “teaching to the test”, the Chinese are working on copying the part of our system that actually does <\/em>work – the critical thinking, the questioning, the creativity.<\/p>\nThere was some good food for thought.\u00a0 To sum it up:<\/p>\n
Quit the caterwauling about class sizes<\/strong>: Class sizes in the US have shrunk steadily over the past 30 years.\u00a0 They are lower than at any point in the history of compulsory education.\u00a0 They are smaller than in any of our competitor nations. But., Shrock notes, the US system has systematically chosen “quantity over quality” – his words; we’ve thrown a lot of teachers into the classrooms, but given them an exceedingly low bar to try to surmount.\u00a0 More on that in a bit.<\/p>\nTeaching Sucks<\/strong>: I’m not going to bag on teachers; most of my family, myself included, have been teachers of some kind at one point or another.\u00a0 Many of them do a great job.\u00a0 But I remember even when I <\/em>was in college, looking at the outlook for a career in education, and thinking “Um, no”.\u00a0 It wasn’t the money – for all of the right’s caterwauling about inflated teacher salaries, teaching in most of the country doesn’t pay quite as well as someone with the same credentials gets in the private sector, although the benefits usually help make up for it.\u00a0 It was the fact that even then, 25 and more years ago, the establishment was turning teaching into a commodity job.\u00a0 Shrock noted that in many countries – Finland, Japan, China, India – teaching is a prestigious job; it happens to pay relatively well compared to rest of the regional job market (although Shrock also notes that in Finland in particular, the socialized economy limits prospects in the private sector), but it’s really a matter of respect.\u00a0 In these places, teachers actually get to teach<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe philosophy of reducing class sizes, and creating lots and lots of teachers to fill those rooms, is of dubious benefit to students; it does, however, make teachers unions a much more powerful constituency.<\/p>\n
Shrock also notes that if we in the US were less concerned about throwing teachers into classrooms to reduce class sizes, we could make some headway on making teaching – and the results we get from our schools – suck less.\u00a0 If we had the same class sizes we did 30 years ago (and, I suspect, the same relative number of administrators), we could pay good teachers $100K a year – and they could actually earn it. But in the US, while we throw a lot of teachers at the problem, we hamstring the good ones with a cornucopia of niggling distractions; the US system is clogged with unfunded mandates that suck time away from actual learning; those mandates are accompanied by rafts of administrators – one for every teacher, now, up from something like 1:9 forty years ago – whose edicts and mandates and general flailing about really contributes nothing to teaching (and that’s without even looking at the travesty of the Star Superintendent system in major urban schools).<\/p>\n
It’s not for nothing that you see so many excellent teachers leaving the big, unionized district schools to go to work for charter, private and parochial schools; frequently for less money, but for jobs in systems where they get to teach<\/em>, rather than spend their days yelling “off what” when tier after tier of administration says “jump”.<\/p>\nAnd, most of all…:<\/p>\n
Teaching To The Test Is Killing Us<\/strong>: Here’s an utterly bipartisan set of foulups.\u00a0 With the advent of No Child Left Behind, American education became “accountable” – to a series of more or less arbitrary numbers, derived by an even more arbitrary process.\u00a0 Schools can lose their funding, and teachers their jobs, based on students’ performance on a series of cookie-cutter, one size fits all standardized tests – which, I suggest, are the absolute worst way to measure learning across a broad population of students. And no, I don’t have a better way, but neither can I think of a worse way;\u00a0 it’s caused American education, in the past ten or so years, to morph into the thing which it theretofore was not; a system that pushes rote memorization; a system that de-emphasizes critical thinking (worse than it already is in some of our more blighted districts), and that punishes creativity, both in students and in teachers.<\/p>\nIs it a wonder some teachers leave the field – to go into customer service?<\/p>\n
The show is worth a listen, when it finally comes out on podcast.\u00a0 Mark your calendars, I actually recommended a Keri Miller show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You won’t hear me say this much, but Keri Miller had a good show this morning on MPR. The subject was edumacation,\u00a0 specifically education reform.\u00a0 Miller – who, like most former TV people, is a taste I’ve just not acquired on the radio – was interviewing Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17029"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17049,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17029\/revisions\/17049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}