Why US Education is in Trouble.

[OJsDad]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/whats-hot/this-kindergartener%E2%80%99s-homework-has-baffled-the-entire-internet/ar-BBA8iEU?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp

Click the link above to see the page of homework that's talked about

It's one thing when a kindergartner gets stumped on their kindergarten-level homework. But what happens when the kindergarten-level homework is tricky enough to stump the parents? This happened to one New York mom and daughter duo, and soon enough, this kindergartener's homework actually baffled the entire internet.

Royce Winnick posted a picture of her daughter's homework sheet to her Facebook in search of answers. The page is clearly designed to have kids practice writing their T's and spelling T-named objects. Tub, ten, top, and then — what the heck does that group of rabbits have to do with T?

Winnick was at a loss and asked her Facebook friends to help her out.

According to The Huffington Post, Winnick shared the sheet and comments started to pour in. One friend suggested "twins." Another said, "two by two." Someone joked, "twabbit."


Winnick's daughter thought the answer was simply "rabbit," but together she and her mom decided to write in "pet." The teacher marked the answer, "OK," but we don't think the question was OK to begin with!

"The real answer was 'vet' which makes no sense!" Winnick told the Huffington Post. Ahem, excuse me? Vet?

And what's more infuriating is that on "K" worksheet, the kindergarteners were meant to label a drawing of man "Ken," and picture of a family, "kin." How the heck is anyone supposed to know that guy is named Ken?!

We guess kindergarten just isn't what it used to be! Gone are the days of reading a page of Dogzilla for homework and calling it a day! We wish the kindergarteners of the world the best of luck on their future assignments. If you need help, we're just a tweet away.

[Gusington]

My kindergarten teacher actually smacked my hand with a ruler to force me to stop using my left hand for writing. I was in her 50th class, in 1979. Which, if you do the new kindergarten maths, means she had been teaching kindergarten since 1929. I wonder how she would feel about the above sheet.

[Sir Slash]

Was it FOR right with your left hand or WHAT you were writing with it?  ^-^

[jamus34]

Was it FOR right with your left hand or WHAT you were writing with it?  ^-^

I believe smearing poo on a sheet of paper is an applicable reason to apply the ruler across the knuckles...

That said the wife is a teacher and the shit she tells me about what is being dictated that the teachers do nowadays is ridiculous. I mean the job itself now should read as part time nanny, part time politician part time public reader. Because with all the bullshit that is forced there way there is no time to actually reach the kids.

[Boggit]

I recently saw a documentary - Channel 4's Unreported World, or BBC's Panorama (can't remember which) that suggests that 20% of the adult population in the US are illiterate. It came as a shocker to me. Is this really true, or just in some parts of the country? The documentary seemed to suggest that the rates of illiteracy were across the whole country, but for some reason was focusing on Detroit for their "case studies".

[Sir Slash]

It's not the English we have a problem with, it's the Math. Fifty percent of the people don't know anything, 50% know too much, and 50% don't care. And half of them can't add or subtract.  :-"

[OJsDad]

Boggit, I believe the 20% is pretty accurate.

[bayonetbrant]

that 20% of the adult population in the US are illiterate.

There are varying ways of defining "illiterate"

It's true that a huge percentage (last I saw was close to 45%, but it's been a while since I saw an updated number) cannot read beyond the 8th grade level.
That said, there's a huge percentage of the population that doesn't need to, so they never get pushed to do any better (by themselves or anyone else).

So what are we defining as "illiterate"?

Trust me, I've taught 4th-grade English to 35-year-old college students, so I know there's a deficit of ability, as well as a deficit of giving-a-shit, so this is one area I can speak from experience about....

[Nefaro]

that 20% of the adult population in the US are illiterate.

There are varying ways of defining "illiterate"

It's true that a huge percentage (last I saw was close to 45%, but it's been a while since I saw an updated number) cannot read beyond the 8th grade level.
That said, there's a huge percentage of the population that doesn't need to, so they never get pushed to do any better (by themselves or anyone else).

So what are we defining as "illiterate"?

Trust me, I've taught 4th-grade English to 35-year-old college students, so I know there's a deficit of ability, as well as a deficit of giving-a-shit, so this is one area I can speak from experience about....

Agreed.  Definitely a matter of how illiteracy is defined.

There are quite a few who suck at it.  They can do it at a basic level, but it's quickly evident when you hear something read aloud or attempt to read their writing.  Not only that but the kids I've heard reading aloud seem to struggle with it more years than I recall being the case in my youth.

We can get an idea about how bad it can be by reading some select social media posts.  You guys know of what I speak.


It's not just literacy that's been suffering, however.  I think there's been a steady drop across most public school subjects.  When I see the supposedly streamlined ( bad shortcut) methods employed, and the removal or paring down of the curriculum, it disgusts me a bit. 

I was probably fortunate to attend public school in a small town with a vast majority of older & highly experienced teachers decades ago.  Seeing the modern school system and how it's run, here in the city, is rather alarming.  Even in the middle-class 'burbs it doesn't look so good.

Someone (here?) mentioned our modern public school system has seen a trend of curriculum and methodology experimentation in recent times.  That such experimentation has become trendy in the educational bureaucracy, with the old tried & true methods/topics being tossed out just because they weren't new.  Seems like these administrative trends are likely a part of the educational quality falloff.

[bayonetbrant]

There's been a consistent trimming of instructional time to make more and more time for standardized tests in order to conform to all manner of state and federal requirements

[trailrunner]

My wife is a kindergarten teacher.  She works in the poorest school in the county (which is otherwise pretty affluent).  She likes it there.  However, the amount of administrative overhead and dumb things she has to do is a big drain on her and prevents her from actually teaching.  Every night, she spends a couple of hours taking care of paper work.  She has no planning time during the day.  My daughter is also a special education teacher.

My radical idea to improve our schools would be to double the salaries of teachers.  If we want good teachers, we have to pay them.  Eliminate the useless administrators (who often never have actually taught) with their bright ideas, and use that money to pay the teachers.  Pay teachers well, and give them summer off, and you would start attracting good people.  Make it into a prestigious career.

[Nefaro]

Eliminate the useless administrators (who often never have actually taught) with their bright ideas, and use that money to pay the teachers.

O0

[bayonetbrant]

Eliminate the useless administrators (who often never have actually taught) with their bright ideas, and use that money to pay the teachers.

What's always interesting around here is that whenever anyone brings this up, someone else always says "OK, name the people whose jobs you want to whack" and no one can actually name someone who's not doing anything that still needs to get done. 

IT help desk folks at the district level?  Nope.  Teachers need them
Logistics folks?  Who is ordering and shipping / delivering textbooks?
Teacher inservice training/development?  Who is going to make the teachers better?

Office staff at the school? 
They have 2 secretaries + the data mgmt/enrollment person, plus 1 ass't principal and the principal. 
Because we're a magnet school, we've got a magnet program coordinator, but if you whack her position, someone still has to coordinate the field trips (each grade, K-5, has 1/quarter - 3 local + 1 'big' one), so someone still needs to pull together 24 fields trips each year, plus the magnet program folks that come to the school, like the robotics folks from RTP.
Whack the behavioral specialist?  Who works with the special needs kids?
Dump the AG coordinator?  THat's the only challenging academics the smart kids get.

The idea that there's useless admin folks at the K-12 level *around here* is mostly laughable.  I'll accept that there might well be some of those folks in other districts, but not here.  And that's brought into sharp focus whenever someone asks about cutting 'overhead' and then is challenged to start naming positions / people that need to go.

The closest we've got to "useless" around here are a bunch of high school sports coaches masquerading as drivers' ed instructors, but almost all of the head coaches I know (football, hoops, soccer, baseball, etc) are 'real' teachers with math and history classes.  But like every other school in the US with a sports program, lord help you if you want to start cutting positions where coaches are hiding from real work.


Now, at the college/university level, there's definitely a surplus of paper-pushing useless bloat.  That I've seen first-hand and it's getting stupid-ridiculous at that level.

[trailrunner]

Eliminate the useless administrators (who often never have actually taught) with their bright ideas, and use that money to pay the teachers.

What's always interesting around here is that whenever anyone brings this up, someone else always says "OK, name the people whose jobs you want to whack" and no one can actually name someone who's not doing anything that still needs to get done. 

IT help desk folks at the district level?  Nope.  Teachers need them
Logistics folks?  Who is ordering and shipping / delivering textbooks?
Teacher inservice training/development?  Who is going to make the teachers better?

Office staff at the school? 
They have 2 secretaries + the data mgmt/enrollment person, plus 1 ass't principal and the principal. 
Because we're a magnet school, we've got a magnet program coordinator, but if you whack her position, someone still has to coordinate the field trips (each grade, K-5, has 1/quarter - 3 local + 1 'big' one), so someone still needs to pull together 24 fields trips each year, plus the magnet program folks that come to the school, like the robotics folks from RTP.
Whack the behavioral specialist?  Who works with the special needs kids?
Dump the AG coordinator?  THat's the only challenging academics the smart kids get.

The idea that there's useless admin folks at the K-12 level *around here* is mostly laughable.  I'll accept that there might well be some of those folks in other districts, but not here.

My wife would happily take your challenge of deciding which positions to whack. 

Sounds like you have a good district, but my wife has plenty of useless administrators in her district.  I'm not talking about the staff, but administrators from HQ with dubious positions.  Hell, my wife got audited by someone from the Food and Drug Administration to ensure that she was passing out the lunches properly.

BTW, glad you have someone to plan field trips at your school.  My wife has to plan hers, including making the reservations at the location, coordinating the bus, and getting permission slips.  It's yet one more thing she has to worry about.  There are also two assistant principals (in addition to the principal) in her elementary (K-6) school, and several instructional coaches, and so on.

[OJsDad]

Our school district is a single building pk-12, that's about 570 students.  We in the same shape that Brant described, there is no wasted overhead, just a uneducated yahoos that love to tell everyone how smart they are but haven't stepped foot in the building in years.

Trailrunner, all of the overhead paperwork that we have, is dictated by the Federal/State, not by our district.  It's the professional teachers running state and federal DoE that are causing a lot of the problems.  Pushing everyone to go to college, even if they're getting nothing more than a second high school diploma out of it, while ignoring vo-ag and career tech programs. 

Funny you should mention the FDA coming in to check on how your wife handles lunch.  The state inspector for school lunches (or whatever her job is) inspected our school cafeteria.  We have 1 for the entire school.  Our manager was told that it's better to purchase premade cookies than to make them from scratch.  The inspector actually emailed our manager a couple of days latter, asking for the recipe for a sausage, egg, cheese, and breakfast sandwich that gets served.  The 5.5 years I've been on school board, the federal government has wanted us to raise our lunch prices.  Every one of those years, our cafeteria has run a profit, except this year.  We're down $1000 year to date.  Our cafeteria account still has over $125,000.  It's going to be long time before we have to raise rates.