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Unread 26-07-2011, 17:36
TJ92 TJ92 is offline
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Re: How Can We Make American Students Smarter?

A lot of good points have already been made, so I would just like to mention one large part of it that doesn't get enough attention. Education starts at home. It is the responsibility of the parent(s) or guardian(s) of a child to ensure they are prepared to come to school every day and try their hardest.

You can say as much as you want about the quality of educators (something I could spend a whole afternoon on), class size, how data is gathered, curriculum difficulty, lowering standards, and so on, but the root of the problem is not reached when you only examine 25% of a students time. Education does not start when the first bell rings, nor does it end when the last bell sounds.

An educator is only responsible for a child roughly 6 hours a day. What about the other 18? In today's society there are simply too many households where kids don't get enough supervision. When you live in a single parent household, a household were both parents work extremely demanding jobs, or with parents who simply don't care, kids don't receive the attention required they might need to get homework done or stay out of trouble.

Having a grandmother and two aunts who taught in public schools their entire working careers, I heard this firsthand. When I ask them about slipping quality of education in the United States they always start with the same thing. Parents just don't get involved (the next thing would be their co-workers, but that's not my point). They expect the school to take care of every single educational need the child has. I heard the same things from my teachers going through the the public school system myself. I would frequently hear some variation of this sentence after teacher conferences: "thank you to the four of you whose parents showed up last night."

I fear the reason this does not get addressed more often is because, unlike other things which are merely nearly impossible to change, this is impossible to change. When 50% of marriages end in divorce, single parent households are inevitable. When it is now the norm for both parents to work, kids having too much unsupervised time is inevitable. When people expect the school to do everything, it is inevitable.

Another thought I had involves CBAs. A 9th grade geography teacher is much different than a 12th grade calculus teacher. They should be nowhere near same pay in my opinion. A CBA will undoubtedly push the pay of most teachers up, yet it seems like it harms the most important teachers and the hardest teachers to find. There is a reason why 300 people applied for a social studies position at my high school, yet only three people applied to be the new physics teacher the same year. I couldn't believe those numbers myself, but after I heard them the first time three separate people backed them up later on. This included the physics teacher who got hired out of that trio.

So, to answer your question shortly. We cannot fix it until parents get back involved with their children's lives.
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