[artdutra04]

I grew up and went to school in a city that would be considered an urban, mid-size (population 60,000), inner-city area where 65% of the students were on free or reduced lunch and scores on standardized tests were much lower than surrounding (richer) towns.

The largest factor that I witnessed affecting the grades of students was the socioeconomic conditions of the student's home life. Students from middle class (or better) families were significantly more likely to be in honors courses, be involved in sports or extra-curricular activities, complete their homework and show up for school, and overall get better grades.

The biggest reason that I witnessed as to why the students from "the projects" did not do as well as those from nicer neighborhoods was attitude and the culture they were brought up in. Many of the students from the projects wanted to be rich and famous but did not understand the connection between their education and their desired success.

They rarely did homework, thought school "was stupid" (very common attitude), and overall didn't care about much about learning, education, or hard work. Many of their parents had similar attitudes, and never enforced rules or made them do homework growing up. These students grow up in that atmosphere, saw school as stupid, then fail classes and/or drop out, and then repeat the cycle with their kids.

It's a vicious cycle that continues unless something is done to break the loop, which is where an exceptional teacher/coach/etc can open the student's eyes to the world outside the bubble they've lived their entire life in.

Thus, I think there is plenty of room for improvement in our education system.

I believe that tenure is both a tremendous asset to good teachers but also can be a crutch for bad teachers. Tenure protects good teachers from being fired for [rightfully] failing a student when the parents of said student come in to yell at the school for failing their "smart" kit. Tenure also protects teachers from being fired for "bad test scores" if they are stuck with all remedial classes one school year.

Performance based bonuses and higher pay for more difficult classes are two things that should be more common. In order to attract the best possible talent, teaching in an inner-city school should pay more than teaching in a rich suburban town. Inner city classes are also much more difficult to teach for when most of the students do not care about school.

Also, I believe performance based bonuses would help reward individual teachers. However, this needs to be done VERY carefully, otherwise it could have unintended results. The performance based bonuses should only measure that teacher against that particular school/school district's average over the last X years. This way, teachers who are exceptional at lower-performing schools get rewarded.

But measuring the performance is difficult; putting too much emphasis on standardized test scores makes the teachers spend too much time teaching to the test instead of teaching what is useful knowledge.

At the same time, I also believe their needs to be rigorous national standards to which every state is gauged against, rather then let every state set their own goals. When you tie education funding to test scores, and when you let states develop their own tests, you WILL see states purposely relax their standards to increase their test scores to get more funding. To an outsider, it will look like their schools improved, but they really only hid the problem through stupid shenanigans.

Another topic that really needs to be addressed is the very content of what we are teaching. I personally feel that there is way too much emphasis on memorizing facts and figures instead of analyzing and thinking critically about things. I think we should teach foreign language courses from elementary school through high school. I think students should have to take more match and science courses. I think history classes should focus more on analyzing why events happened and what were their repercussions rather than memorizing names and dates. In English courses, I think there needs to be more emphasis on critical thinking skills, such as understand when they are reading facts and when they are reading opinions. There should also be more emphasis on effectively communicating, debating, and arguing topics.

Thus, as with most things in life, this is difficult to sum up in short sound bites and doesn't fit into an exact black-and-white narrative used by many politicians.



TLDR; You are lazy. Go read everything above. Nuances cannot be summarized into sound bites.