Ten most ghetto cities in Indiana

[IndyDave1776]

Let me preface my comments by saying that I count both teachers and a high school principle among my family and friends so I get plenty of feedback about the education process. In my opinion we have three basic problems working against high quality education:

Social: The general population has been pushed in the wrong direction, especially by the actions of our leftist friends. The dole, the disintegration of the family and the lack of parenting accountability has created children ill prepared to enter the education system. Once kids start school, many parents further disengage and expect teachers and the education system to raise their kids. Irresponsible/lack of parenting and student accountability is a huge problem that will need to be solved.

Political: Get the federal government out of education. Return control of educational policy to the local level, or at a minimum, the state level. The federal government is incenting the wrong behavior from those responsible for education. And as with most things, the Feds screw up anything they get their hands on.

Professional: We treat our K-12 front line educators like trash. We pay poor salaries for educators we task to educate our kids. A very close friend is a teacher in IPS. She has been hit, spat upon, cussed out and disrespected with little or no support. I've also been told that IPS is no longer expelling students from the classroom because, "It's resulting in a disproportional number of minority students being expelled". Would you work in an occupation where this was a real part of your daily job? Likewise, education has it's fair share of "dead wood" that is coasting along and is disengaged at doing it's job. Thank unions for this. Raise salaries to get the best. Burn the deadwood out of the system. Make the penalty for disruptive behavior painful and lasting.

So often I hear how Asian students are "so smart" and excel. I don't believe that for a minute. It's the system. Working in both Japan and South Korea for various lengths of time between 1990-2002, I noticed three big differences: Parent involvement and engagement, a consistent system that recognizes differences in learning and well compensated and engaged group of educators who are respected and valued.

I cannot budge on the foundation of the problem. John Dewey and Horace Mann fell in love with the Prussian school system for a reason, and that is the production of human product that they wanted. Unfortunately, a few generations of quality teachers screwed the plan up until recent memory historically speaking. A system cannot work well to our satisfaction when it was deliberately engineered to do otherwise.

Based on what my aunt and uncle are making, I have a hard time with the notion that teachers are underpaid. Your mileage may vary, but the biggest problems I see are from federal kibitzing. As a result, my aunt (who teaches elementary gifted and talented) works until 9:00 or 10:00 most every night on school days, and very frequently on weekends, mostly caused by the requirements to feed the federal paperwork machine. My uncle teaches welding and therefore is pretty much done when he walks out the door, but still has to deal with increasingly difficult disciplinary problems.

1. We have a system of education that (for our purposes) was predestined to failure by design.

2. We have children entering the system who are predestined to failure (academically and in terms of discipline) by lack of parenting.

3. We have the feds jumping in, imposing a system of standardized testing that essentially measures rote memorization rather than understanding, and has such time-consuming demands that there is no time for anything else.

4. With our without federal kibitzing, we have political correctness run amok, including and especially viewing disciplinary expulsions in terms of demographic statistics rather than in terms of removing individuals who have caused actual and significant problems. Further, we have demographic equality pushed to the point of representing the new bell curve in which the rewards for achievement are deemed improper to apportion based on results but rather by theoretical projected statistics. In the original bell curve style of grading, it would be possible for a person with excellent performance fail or at minimum get a poor grade while a student who basically failed to grasp the material could get an excellent grade in a different term based entirely on comparison with the other students in the class that term (in other words, what on an objective scale would be a B student could fail with the bad luck of being in a room full of A students while a D student could walk away with an A upon having the luck to be in a room full of D-/F students). Similar results can be expected when we hold up demographic parity as a standard for educational outcomes.

5. The real problem: Solving our general societal attitude which is the product of the modern liberal/progressive movement, particularly in terms of its attack on the traditional family and traditional values. It has been shoved down our throats and we see how it has worked out for us. The additional effects have been the erosion of respect for most all who had in generations past been respected, and has much to do with standing as the justification for much overreach which adversely affects our lives today. The absence of the desire to achieve good results predestines failure regardless of any other consideration involved in the process.

What we need:

1. Elimination of federal kibitzing. This should start with the elimination of the Department of Education. There is no constitutional authority for it and no success at its ostensible purpose to justify it even if we ignore the absence of authority for its existence.

2. Start from the perspective of teaching children to succeed at being who they are. This means a number of things:

a. Schools are to be institutions of learning useful factual knowledge, not social/political indoctrination.

b. It is necessary to accept the fact that not all children are going to be suited to higher education. Teach them how to make the best of what they have to work with, not get tunnel vision and neglect the more capable students while insisting that that class dunce can magically be converted into college material. Pigeonholing doesn't really work, but make the options available for each to find his own course that actually works.

c. Accept the fact that children are going to be discipline problems, and serious ones when not taken in hand as needed. Stop allowing them to act like barbarians and animals, particularly in terms of giving certain groups free passes in the name of statistical evenness. The only fairness that needs to be applied is penalizing those who need it and rewarding good behavior. Color and creed are irrelevant to this situation.

3. Elimination of arbitrary standards for teachers while protecting those who would be vulnerable to abuse. I have a problem with seniority being an all-powerful determining factor, yet also see a need for it to some extent. On one hand, I fail to see why a teacher should have any claim to position based on having reliably screwed up everything he/she touched for 30 years and given preference over the teacher who has been doing excellent work for 5 years. On the other hand, I am also aware of the threats that older teachers face in the absence of seniority and/or tenure the threat of arbitrarily getting kicked to the curb in favor of a new teacher who gets paid half as much. I don't really have a solution for these two competing problems, but they necessarily will have to be solved.

4. The final result will necessarily require providing useful instruction rather than teaching to standardized tests which do absolutely nothing toward useful education. They not only suck down incredible resources which are completely wasted, but they prevent through denial of time and other resources the teaching of knowledge which would actually be useful to the students.

5. How to restore our society to what it once was? Other than having hot lead filling the air like flies and blood flowing like a river and letting the survivors, who would hopefully be the better examples, sort it out, I have no idea. You can lead a horse to water. From that point, you can kill it if you feel it to be necessary, but you will never force it to drink.

 

[Zoub]

The solution for your #5 will have to come from rural America. I am not sure it happens until after a fairly uncivil war.

It is hard to plan for a healthy future with urban centers in the mix. Job free zones produce nothing of value, absolutely nothing.

 

[IndyDave1776]

The solution for your #5 will have to come from rural America. I am not sure it happens until after a fairly uncivil war.

It is hard to plan for a healthy future with urban centers in the mix. Job free zones produce nothing of value, absolutely nothing.

I would agree, both in terms of overcoming the dead weight and in that the dead weight in question has been conditioned to expect the rest of us to carry it. Add in the concentration of criminal enterprises found in areas where there are teenagers who don't understand that there are people who work for a living, and there you go. I am not going to argue that they are in principle worse than, say, Appalachians who don't work and live on the draw, but the numeric density makes the urban examples especially troublesome. The others are spread out enough to be not so much of a problem.

 

[jdmack79]

Indydave, I'd have to disagree about teachers not being underpaid. In my school corporation teachers start around $33,000. With the current budgetary situation from the state, we are t getting a pay raise for the next two years. That's not very much money considering the amount of work I put into my job.

 

[IndyDave1776]

Indydave, I'd have to disagree about teachers not being underpaid. In my school corporation teachers start around $33,000. With the current budgetary situation from the state, we are t getting a pay raise for the next two years. That's not very much money considering the amount of work I put into my job.

OK, no argument here. The examples of which I am aware are making about double that.

 

[jdmack79]

OK, no argument here. The examples of which I am aware are making about double that.

The people maxed out on the pay scale are doing pretty well. The problem from my end is how long it takes to move up a step on the scale. In the old days teachers moved up a step every year. Now an increase isn't a given. A lot of districts are only bumping their teachers up once every couple of years. At the current rate of increases I would be at the top of the scale in roughly fifty years.