“Reforms to Ease Students’ Stress Divide a New Jersey School District” is a New York Times story about some immigrants and/or their children who have been unable to adjust to American cultural norms:
But instead of bringing families together, Dr. Aderhold’s letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines. On one side are white parents like Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter’s middle school, who has come to see the district’s increasingly pressured atmosphere as antithetical to learning.
“My son was in fourth grade and told me, ‘I’m not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé,’ ” Ms. Foley said.
On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold’s reforms would amount to a “dumbing down” of his children’s education.
”What is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future,” Mr. Jia said.
The district has become increasingly popular with immigrant families from China, India and Korea. This year, 65 percent of its students are Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007. Many of them are the first in their families born in the United States.
The article is also notable for the fact that the superintendent, holder of a “Ed. D” degree, is referred to as “Dr. Aderhold” by the Times. The Times style policy says the following:
Dr. should be used in all references for physicians, dentists and veterinarians whose practice is their primary current occupation, or who work in a closely related field, like medical writing, research or pharmaceutical manufacturing: Dr. Alex E. Baranek; Dr. Baranek; the doctor. (Those who practice only incidentally, or not at all, should be called Mr., Ms., Miss or Mrs.)
Anyone else with an earned doctorate, like a Ph.D. degree, may request the title, but only if it is germane to the holder’s primary current occupation (academic, for example, or laboratory research). Reporters should confirm the degree holder’s preference. For a Ph.D., the title should appear only in second and later references.
Also see the related “As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short” (nytimes): “In California, South Carolina and Tennessee, the authorities have recently eliminated requirements that students pass exit exams to qualify for a diploma.” (i.e., the high school diploma is the new junior high school diploma) Here’s an interesting reader comment:
I’ve been teaching HS [English Language Arts] in the NYC Public Schools for 13 years. Standards keep getting lower and lower. … drop below a 70% pass rate and watch how fast you’re on the spot. And of course, thanks to years of “education reform” efforts, it’s all the teacher’s fault. A kid doesn’t do homework? Teacher’s fault for giving too much homework. Solution: adopt a No Homework policy as a means of achieving “social justice”. A kid who lives in a shelter/ in poverty/ witnesses violence fails? Teacher’s fault for not reaching out enough or providing enough “socio-emotional support”. Kid can’t pass a standardized test? Make the test easier and rate the teacher down. It goes on and on. It’s all about profit, union breaking and moving money to consultants and charters. … School-to-prison pipeline in the news? Stop suspending and remove consequences for bad behavior. If chaos follows, blame teachers for poor classroom management. The smart kids can make the numbers so why bother with them? Focus on getting the lowest performing to reach minimums. Then everyone goes to college because everyone needs to be in debt forever. If kids show up most of the time and aren’t too horribly behaved, they believe they should pass; that’s what they’ve been taught. …
And some comments from folks at the next stage in the pipeline:
As a college professor for 25 years, I often wondered what kids were learning in High-School. They can’t name the 3 branches of American Government, the name of the state’s Governor, nor some of the most basic facts of the world. … It is anti-intellectual to such an extreme extent, that so many students have no interest in their world outside of sports and entertainment. Rigorous study, such as outlining a textbook to truly lean the material is out of the question.
As a college instructor I am struck by the deficiencies in basic reading, writing, math and critical thinking skills I see in my students who have made it to college and are not classified as remedial. Their skills are lower than those of family in my parents’ generation who were non-native English speakers with only a high school diploma. … I have to adjust my grading to avoid giving everyone C’s and D’s so that I stay in line with my department.
As a college instructor, I see this every semester. Students will try to do anything to get out of reading, think reading ten pages is way too much, and their ability to comprehend what they are reading is astonishingly low. Many of them have no idea about history beyond their lifetime and even then it is relegated to popular culture. Their writing is horrendous. The international students I teach are much more prepared and often have a greater command of the English language than native speakers. … college instructors find it difficult to teach advanced concepts and subjects to students who are about as educated as a third-grader was in 1950.
It is not just poor students or the schools in the South. Before retiring I taught engineering at a major NY university. At one point we noticed that entering students seemed to lack the necessary math skills and decided to test all entering students. The idea was to give remedial training to those found lacking. To our surprise we found that almost half the students with poor basic skills (Algebra, Trig) had been AP honors math students in well rated high schools. We came to the conclusion that the high schools were skipping or skimming the basics so that the student could move on to resume-building AP Calculus courses.
I was a community college history professor for twenty two years,crediting in 2013. My students came from two of NJ’s wealthiest counties. By various measures, the preparedness of my students declined sharply over these 22 years. What I found astonishing was that 68 per cent of high school graduates had to take remedial classes in English and/or math. An increasing number of my students were clearly unable to read or write at a college level. When I used graphs or charts, the numeric illiteracy ws appalling. I had earlier run two businesses. At the end of a semester with 34 students, often I would identify 3. Or 4 students who I would have considered hiring.
How does it look to a parent?
K12 teachers are trained, in ed colleges, to “deliver content”. All learning, all knowledge, is reduced to “content” … I watch as my daughter and her friends are taught, in a blue-ribbon, self-celebratory school district, complete garbage by well-applauded teachers who just plain don’t know very much and don’t want to hear that they don’t know enough to be teaching. You get this scramble to do with standards because by and large the people who develop standards and write tests are either overeducated itinerants or professors who actually know something in their fields. The K12 teachers then scramble to pretend that they are meeting the standards, usually by buying and serving up, with terrible literalness and poor fidelity, some curriculum advertised as standards-meeting. The teachers themselves, for the most part, are not capable of generating curriculum on the fly that does meet the standards. They just don’t know enough. Worse, they don’t know when they’re misinterpreting what they’re reading and heading off into intellectual garbageland. The children, of course, are none the wiser, but do know they’re supposed to pass the tests, so they stuff it all in, then let it fall out again.
My kids have gone to both public high school and public charter high schools. Unfortunately, all these schools have a significant number of kids who would rather not do any work. This is regardless of race or economic status.
To an employer?
While in the US Air Force we found it necessary to write our technical orders for some of the highest technology in the world at the 5th grade reading level so our young enlistees could understand what they were required to do. All our enlisted were high school graduates. We wrote the technical orders for the officer corps at the 11th grade level to meet the average capability. All our officers are college graduates.
Related:
Full post, including comments
gives us a reminder not to judge people by teenage behavior: Humboldt “was now the most famous scientist in Europe and admired by colleagues, poets and thinkers alike. One man, though, had yet to read his work. That man was eighteen-year-old Charles Darwin who, at the very moment that Humboldt was being fêted in London, had given up his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. Robert Darwin, Charles’s father, was furious. ‘ You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching,’ he wrote to his son, ‘and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’”
right now. The professor says that the idea that work was somehow ennobling or inherently rewarding would have been considered laughable in Ancient Greece.