School Shock

It seems to me that these data demand a very serious national discussion, not about race, but about our culture, our values and ourselves.
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It seems to me that anyone concerned with the health and well-being of our culture would be much more concerned with banning television than same-sex marriage.

It is a broad brush. Where exactly is the problem? I know in TX we do not do so well.
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Obviously, the answer is to unionize the poll takers. Problem solved!!

Well Joe

You have successfully revived the debate as you predicted. What now about a solution?

Ky sux in that regard also. Too much reliance on standardized testing to judge results, to the point that the teachers appear to be teaching with the annual state testing cycle in mind.
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The last time the state test changed, the scores went down because they didn’t have time to see the new test before developing their curriculum.
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If you’re teaching the material properly, the testing should be an after-thought.

What does that say about our educational system generally?

Up until now, you’ve been saying it’s the fault of teacher’s unions, remember? And that line of thought has been as much about union busting and the privatization of our kids’ education as anything else.

It says, not to put too fine a point on it, that we are becoming a nation of ignoramuses.

When the criteria for becoming the President has been whether or not s/he’d be a good person to sit and have a beer with, I’d say that witlessness extends beyond the current generation of schoolchildren.

For more than 40 years, ever since the publication of the Coleman Report, the key variable when it comes to educational achievement is parental involvement.

It’s about having enough to live on.

It seems to me that these data demand a very serious national discussion, not about race, but about our culture, our values and ourselves.

As long as our culture defines success as getting rich and getting famous whatever the cost, nothing will change, Joe. Want better kids? Make better parents.

Want a better democracy? Make better citizens.

“But let’s look at it another way: only 38% of white boys are “proficient” at reading, which is a level below true fluency with the printed word. What does that say about our educational system generally?”

That was my thought upon reading this too. My God. That’s just wrong.

Don’t blame crap culture. Our culture is a response to the economy you allude to. Busy two and three income households are going to have a tougher time entertaining themselves with “high culture.” People have to relax sometimes. Everything can’t be “Boardwalk Empire” and “Bored To Death” and heck, HBO costs money.

The real issue is that we need for it to be economically viable for parents to be able to cycle in and out of the workforce. One person working should be enough for a family to maintain a high standard of living. Then people will have the necssary leisure time to explore higher culture.

Every major artistic, creative and philosophical advance has come from an increase in available leisure. But lately our new technologies have eroded leisure rather than added to it.

Well that is at least two states where we can do less with less. Go GOP

Parental involvement seems so key. I have a teacher friend who has a student being raised by a single dad who had a bad beginning. He spent time in jail the kids mom is STILL in jail (and not part of the kids life) and decided his son would not be, as Joe put it, an ignoramus. He gets that child to school everyday. He lists the work they did at night and the books they read and gives it to the teacher every day. He involves himself. He gets to conferences. He makes himself a part of the education process. He’s not probably even middle class, but he has a priority. More people need that. How do we get people to do that?

We will of course cut back on education to save our children from the scourge of debt. It being discretionary and all.

Surely you aren’t saying young black males watch “Jersey Shore” regularly? Heck, if they’re not dodging bullets or doing drug deals (true to an extent but not stereotypically all-encompassing), the high amount of broken homes these in which these kids live practically guarantees they won’t learn as much as children from other races. I know you don’t have to be rich to succeed but being black and poor has been a two-strikes thing since, oh, the 17th Century.

What an EXTREMELY pathetic statement about our educational system. We already know we are way behind most industralized countries (and some that are not). The stats are not surprising. To my knowledge we have not tested the parents and adults with respect to their profiency in reading and understanding. I don’t have much optimism there either, as I look at the political landscape. There were certainly a lot of voters totally ignorant of the facts and guided based on negative propaganda generated by the ad agencies and certain media.
Just this week I heard a woman say “my son, he don’t like to read or study – just like me – so I don’t push him.”

I agree with most of your post here Joe, with one crucial caveat. The data really do show that parental income is a factor as well, and of course parental income often tracks very closely with both parental involvement and race.

But I do wholeheartedly agree that we are creating a nation of ignoramuses. . . and the test, drill and skill mantra of NCLB has only made matters worse.

We desperately need a national dialogue about what it means to be educated, and how we as a nation can create an educated citizenry. Both these scores and the level of discourse prior to last weeks election tell me we don’t have an educated citizenry now.

Hey,Joe, that is simply wrong. James S Coleman’s study said the best predictor of student performance was socio-economic status of the parents. That is not the same thing as “parental involvement.”
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But it is interesting you think it is, or, at least, remember it that way.
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. A more precise reading of the Coleman Report is that student background and socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational outcomes than are measured differences in school resources (i.e. per pupil spending).[2

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Samuel_Coleman#Coleman_Report
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“Crap culture”
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My siblings and I are masters of Gilligan’s Island trivia, which is in syndication for the after school hours when we were kids.
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Our music all sounded the same, too.

You’re preaching to the choir, Joe. How many times haev I responded to you that our main problem with our education system isn’t the teachers but school boards, lack of parental involvement and our society in general that doesn’t value learning for learning’s sake. And we have now reached a new low where being educated is labeled “elite” by rightwingers.

My nephew went to a backwater school in a tiny town in TN. Because he was motivated and had family who believed in education, he managed to graduate with real skills that translated to his SATs. He went to a smally community college for his first two years, transferred to TN Tech his junior year and now is in medical school and in the top ten percent of all med school students in the US.

Most of our schools can educate our kids if we have a curricula that is set by professional educators who know what they are doing, parental involvement and motivated students.

I also have to wonder about the idea of a generation that communicates through text far more than any other post war generation is somehow less literate.
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It’s an interesting question, because it is impossible to use electronic text to communicate (as here) without being aware of the impact on what is considered to be standard english. While much of the shorthand and abbreviations that take place in 140 character world of texting have their roots in telegraphy and the early days of (expensive!) online communication, there is a definite evolution of a language variant that will not be tested for.
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I’m reminded by this because the wiki about Coleman (I didn’t have to look up the Coleman Report. I happened to be acquainted with it, and other studies like that of Coons, Klune and Sugarman of the time.) brought up an opinion of his I wasn’t aware of:
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“These tests do not measure intelligence, nor attitudes, nor qualities of character. Furthermore they are not, nor are they intended, to be ‘culture free.’ Quite the reverse: they are culture bound. What they measure are the skills which are among the most important in our society for getting a good job and moving to a better one, and for full participation in an increasingly technical world.”

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The crap culture Joe refers to includes language variations that are quite a bit removed from standard English. It’s of course true that standard English is still a critical skill for success in the US. But it may be that there is a broader pedagogical opening that needs to be addressed with more creative approaches to teaching kids how to read and write. It’s not like they are not gonna be reading and writing…

Hey SoBell! Are you on teh Twitter?

Jack, I’m a practicing Luddite!

We have dial up computer connection at home. Neither I nor my husband have ever texted.

But, we are going to join the 21st century soon, as friends our age assure us it’s painless and a great way to keep in contact. And since we have family scattered around the country, we’re going to take some baby steps and get wireless internet in December.

Ah, I may have the wrong SouthernBell. You’re not an the atriot who was interested in solar power?

I’m curious about how these results were gathered. I work pretty active in the schools through volunteer activities, plus my wife is a first grade teacher, and I just don’t see the level of inneptitude at the average school this report is talking about. Are things as good as they should be? No. At the same time, at the elementary level the kids are learning things more advanced than when I was about thirty years ago.

I know my experience is limited but if things were this bad (38%) you’d think it would still show up somehow. Also, what were the results 10, 20, 30 years ago? I’m a strong advocate for education reform, especially at the secondary level, but a lot of these reports are drummed up with the goal of creating outrage. We should be concerned and even outraged about things like inner-city school standards. On the other hand, we should make sure the facts we’re going by are accurate. This is an easy subject to get emotional about.

Also, Joe, please don’t fall into grumpy old man syndrome. Is entertainment really dumber now than in the past? You could argue it’s more obnoxious. At the same time, The Sopranos, Lost, or even CSI wouldn’t have seen the light of day years ago because they would’ve been deemed too smart for the audience. We tend to remember past culture in “best of” highlights and forget things like My Mother the Car or Jerry Lewis movies. The only difference now is there’s more of it all, good and bad.

No, Jack, someone shares my name. I’m interested in general in other energy sources.

djtrudeau makes some very valid points. I do believe we celebrate people more these days for merely being famous than for accomplishing something concrete but when I was growing up (I’m now 50) most TV shows were cut from the same cloth, very much produced by a formula. No Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mad Men, etc. The best who I remember, in terms of quality, is The Fugitive.

And a big problem in this country is that our brightest students are not going into fields where they are needed, science, R & D, but still gravitating to business degrees. I think it was Walter Mondale who recently said that when he was young only the mediocre students went into business management as a career.

You of course realize that the higher on the ladder the more involved the parent can be with their child.

Your comment is typical of the problems we face. Why not attempt to say something constructive rather than making off-the-cuff comments based on your own observations without facts backing them up:
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1) Unions are a serious part of the problem that need to be addressed. This is not about union busting but about ensuring the education system works. Schools are the most direct thing in the system the government has any control over. Joe has never said this is the only thing that needs work.
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2) How do you know our society is overly focused on getting rich and famous? Any verifiable evidence or just your own personal opinion? I would agree there is certainly some element of wanting to be financially successful but that is not new. As for wanting to be famous what is your basis for believing that this is a widespread phenomenon? Watching American Idol?

A. Captain Amos Grumby
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Question around post 19….

Q: What was Skipper’s real name? see 7.2….

I know, having lived it….

There are at least three “sub-crises” in the larger educational meltdown. The first is the one that gets the most focus – the big urban systems with their predominantly minority populations in which the schools are up against the daunting of educating students under both severe socio-economic stress as well as some crap culture elements that essentially tells all too many students the education is unimportant – and in its worst manifestations forces some minority students (boys especially) to hide the extent they are trying at school. This is the crisis that gets most of the hand wringing and attention and in which progress is very slowly and incrementally being made.

The second crisis – not focused on nearly enough – is in the school systems of many rural and small town areas. Texas, Tennessee, New Hampshire, California to name some of the schools of my experience, have real problems, even in predominately white communities. It is not surprising when one considers that the pool of teachers is going to be limited given that it has become a prefession that allows one to be both underpaid and vilified, a potent combination. But more importantly, the socio-economic stresses in these communities is far greater than is generally acknowledged and the schools have a tremendous challenge just to recreate the results of the previous generation.

And the third crisis is a kind of chaos generated partly by No Child Left Behind (which creates a panicked response in those schools with the least gifted students) and, in the wealthier school systems, an endless streams of fashinable curricula, leaving all too little time for pedagogy. It is a tough row to hoe, but made all the more difficult by the fact that at least one political party has now taken opposition to thought and mathematics as part of their party’s platform.

Why not focus on how to increase reading and math proficiency than getting the statistics for black and white. Good news: atleast they are proficient in math, nice statistics.
Need a national reform on education…

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Your comment is typical of the problems we face.
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How so? Please clarify.
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Why not attempt to say something constructive rather than making off-the-cuff comments based on your own observations without facts backing them up.
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Hey! That’s my line!
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Unions are a serious part of the problem that need to be addressed.
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Never said they weren’t. The comment read:

Up until now, you’ve been saying it’s the fault of teacher’s unions, remember? And that line of thought has been as much about union busting and the privatization of our kids’ education as anything else.

(italics mine)
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As for observation and fact, there’s been too much emphasis on the role of teacher’s unions [see one Klein commentary here] and not enough on reduced funding, the underlying reasons why parent’s aren’t as involved in their kids’ education, and so forth.
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This is not about union busting but about ensuring the education system works.
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Then why the abundance of emphasis placed on the role of teacher’s unions? Why not focus on negative income growth, the dearth of one-income households, and our short attention span culture? Unions are an easy target, and that’s only exacerbated by those who don’t like the idea of a union in the first place.
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Schools are the most direct thing in the system the government has any control over.
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So?
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Joe has never said this is the only thing that needs work.
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Barely. Where are all the Joe Klein articles mentioning education reform that don’t emphasize teacher’s unions as being at fault. [It's hard to find them.]
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How do you know our society is overly focused on getting rich and famous?
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Too many repeated listenings to 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, I guess. Or maybe increasing income disparity. Or that graceless Bristol Palin on “Dancing with the Stars”. Or…
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Any verifiable evidence or just your own personal opinion?
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Just go watch the “Real Housewives of…” series. Or check out an Ambercrombie and Fitch store. Or…
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Maybe you need to get out more.
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As for wanting to be famous what is your basis for believing that this is a widespread phenomenon? Watching American Idol?
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Nope. Try counting the number of people standing in line to audition to be in “American Idol”.

Here’s the debate: You are a racist. End of discussion.

What hasn’t been mentioned here is the thirty year assault on expertise and knowledge by the “conservative” movement and the subsequent embargo of liberals and expert opinion by the establishment media. When I was a kid, scientists and teachers were exalted in spite of the fact that they didn’t run a business, make a lot of money or become famous, simply because they were smart and contributed something very important – enlightenment – to society.
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Simply put, the culture has gradually adopted the “conservative” values of avaricious greed, authoritarianism and antagonism toward (“elite”) experts and empirical knowledge. If only there had been some sort of public media that could have had experts describe the problem before it was so late in the game that even centrist pundits could see it.

Word.

But Joe wants it to be the mean old teacher’s unions fault, don’t you know?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/9/22/904312/-Behind-the-drumbeat-for-charter-schools
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http://www.thenation.com/article/154986/grading-waiting-superman
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A little history of charter schools which JK so likes and the lack of oversight and attempts at privatization.
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JK, I would also like to ask you about the comparisons between European, Asian and US test scores.
You are aware that many other countries have a 2 tier system. Students, at a rather young age, are put into a curriculum that channels them either into college or non-college academics. When we are comparing outcomes are all systems tested?
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Also, JK, tell me how rural schools fit into your perception of education reform.

dj: It is the old my generation is superior to yours meme. Joe isn’t that much younger than me. He must remember that there were lots of dropouts when we were in school. The difference was they could find a job. Kids with disabilities were not mainstreamed but left to outside resources for training. Today’s teachers must and should incorporate those students in their classrooms.
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Our cultural touchstones were Elvis, James Dean, Liberace, and ick, Milton Berle. Later, during what I guess JK considers the age of enlightenment, we had the Munsters, Ghilligan’s Island, Frankie Avalon, and Annette.
Mixed in then as is true now were a lot of good things.
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But, then as now, poverty was a major predictor of outcomes. Family interest was and is important. Having good teachers is always meaningful. School boards and administrators have influence.

OTOH, the farther up the ladder you go the more nonparental childcare is involved. In any case, you’re just telling a story–not reporting something that was studied by Coleman. It does illustrate one of the difficulties with the Coleman Report. SES is correlated with all the things you want to study–hours of parental leisure (your point), two parent households, race, $/pupil etc. The study was done before home schooling was widespread. Joe’s hypothesis would be well tested by examining that population–at least the polar case of complete parental involvement. The other polar case–parent’s unconcerned about truancy will have obviously bad effects. But you don’t need the Coleman Study for that.
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There’s a term statisticians use for this problem, multi collinearity. When all the independent variables in your regression equation move together, you cannot reliably calculate the contribution of each coefficient.
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I happen to agree with Joe that parental engagement is the most important element in education. But you can’t get that from the Coleman Report.
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Variability in parental involvement is, of course, one reason we have public schools and laws against truancy. Public education exists, in part, to protect kids from parents who undervalue education.
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Finally I recall an airplane conversation with a guy who was deeply involved with his local schools in a rich Boston suburb. He was an MIT professor of economics, who cared deeply about the quality of his kids’ education. He told me there are three kinds of parents, in his experience those looking for daycare (40%), those looking for admission to an elite university (40%) and those concerned about actual education (20%). Seeing himself as a put upon minority no doubt skewed that assessment, but I think there is something to it.

This is excellent commentary to an otherwise trite, CW-filled post.
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Why doesn’t Joe mention the significant gains in standardized test scores made by African-American and Latino students during this period?
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Because the Group Narrative has been decided, apparently, and it’s gloomy, very gloomy.
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Joe’s latest contribution to the debate is to once again claim that people are stupid –too stupid to vote for Democrats whose policies are profound compromises with yesteryear’s conservatives, as Barack Obama told us today:

“We thought that if we shaped a bill that wasn’t that different from bills that had previously been introduced by Republicans, including a Republican Governor in Massachusetts who’s now running for president, that we would be able to find some common ground there,” Obama said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” over the weekend. “And we just couldn’t.“

, too stupid to vote for failed schemes that have made the nations problems worse than the realistic policy choices advocated by the usual sphere of deviance residents.
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As for education, I very much look forward to Bob Somerby’s analysis of this New York Times report, don’t you?
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http://www.dailyhowler.com/

To add to this point, what Charles Murray could just as plausibly claim is that the reason SES dominates is because SES is determined by natural intelligence, g, which is measured by various standardized tests, and is heritable. So the most important determinant of educational success is natural intelligence, which is also the most important determinant of social and economic success, which makes educational resources expended on inferior peoples a misdirection of resources..

Per the Washington Post 1 in 4 adult Americans read zero books last year. I believe the average number of books in a household is one (usually a bible) — with folks like me messing that average, but having over a couple of hundred books in the house….

If a kid comes home to a house with no books, the amount of reading they do during school — no matter how good the teacher is, will never lead to literacy. It is a skill set that requires practice, practice , practice – just like learning to play music.

In our house there is zero tv during the school week — and at our number one rate public school in the state, that is the norm. But when I talk to most people they think that is just weird.

The difference between a school that does great and a school that doesn’t — its not money, because every school in our state gets the same money per kid, its not the teachers … its the lifestyle at home. If the kids are doing great, I bet tv during the school week is very limited. Alot of kids at our kids school have no tv’s in their homes at all. But they are reading at two grade levels above their age — oh and it is an immersion school – so they are doing that in two languages. School is not enough time for kids to master anything, if they are not reinforcing education at home, there is nothing a teacher can do.

Kids need to read at home, which they don’t do if there is internet, tv, or video games which are more fun, or easier to master.