* Present it as a “How to...” article, provides a few vague sentences on how you might be able to begin to plan to do it, then quickly devolve into an article on what must be done “for the childrenz!”.
* Use lots of emotionally charged nonesense words and phrases, like “gifted”, “radical ideas”, “enabling the genius within”, “renewed commitment to excellence”.
* Make it all about the childrenz.
* Be sure to add some complaint about lack of funding for projects related to your sparkly notions.
* Make the use of everyday judgement sound like a complicated process only safe for use by experts.
* Support the statement of your opinions with references to other articles stating the same opinion, but do it in the fashion of a scientific reference.
Good to know that Scientific American hasn't changed since the early mid 1990s when I stopped reading it. There was a time that Scientific American had articles on research and experiments (the first 150 years or so of its existence), rather than agenda-based editorial pieces.
This failure has consequences. America ranked 31st of the 56 countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, which assesses the academic skills and knowledge of 15-year-olds.
Two "easy to fix" reasons why our school sucks: Summer vacation and sleep depriving school schedule. Sleep is necessary for learning, but high school students don't get enough of it because their biology collides with school schedule. Summer vacation have a reputation for destroying education gain, because they're not spending time reviewing what they have learned. Review is crucial to the learning process, since our knowledge decay due to little or no use. That's why adults will have rusty math and know a lot less than high school seniors unless said adult is an engineer or a doctor.
They are easy to fix, in theory. All you have to do is distribute summer vacation days into the rest of the school years. All you have to do is shift starting time to something more reasonable like 8:30 AM or 9:00 AM.
However, they are hard, because of politics and culturally mandated stupidity.
> shift starting time to something more reasonable like 8:30 AM or 9:00 AM
I never showed up before 9:00 am myself anyway, often much later. However, there really is nothing wrong with summer vacation, there is nothing wrong with letting kids and teenagers actually have some time to enjoy life and do things they would like to do.
If summer vacation destroyed your education gains, you probably hadn't really learned it to begin with. A little review will help you pass the test, but that's it.
>"That's why adults will have rusty math and know a lot less than high school seniors unless said adult is an engineer or a doctor."
They're not remembering it because they don't need it. You are not going to remember every detail of everything you learned in high school once you leave it if you don't need it. You learned it to give you a base from which to grow from. This is a horrible example to use for removing free time.
Of course, I could have simply said all of this with there is no such thing as an easy fix. The only time you can have an 'easy fix' problem is if the problem is trivial to begin with (education is not) or you simplified the issues down so far as to make your analysis of the issue useless.
I never showed up before 9:00 am myself anyway, often much later.
Good for you. However, my local high school still force students to start at 7:30ish in the morning.
However, there really is nothing wrong with summer vacation, there is nothing wrong with letting kids and teenagers actually have some time to enjoy life and do things they would like to do.
I am not suggesting we should end vacations. I am suggesting that the summer vacation is far too long. Or, we could supplement summer vacation with learning opportunities to reduce or prevent loss of knowledge.
If summer vacation destroyed your education gains, you probably hadn't really learned it to begin with. A little review will help you pass the test, but that's it.
Spaced repetition and the forgetting curve is a very real thing. It doesn't matter how well you learn the material. You'll need to review the materials at some point in the future.
They're not remembering it because they don't need it. You are not going to remember every detail of everything you learned in high school once you leave it if you don't need it. You learned it to give you a base from which to grow from. This is a horrible example to use for removing free time.
I am giving an example of forgetting/remembering knowledge, not showing deficiency in the education of adults.
Summer vacation is only detrimental to poor kids. In wealthier households, the children get sufficient mental stimulation so as to come back to school without fallen behind.
The problem with changing school hours is that getting children to school needs to work around parent's work hours. This is less of a problem in other countries where young children can walk to school on their own or in groups, but would require massively changing American society to work.
I don't even know how you can justify the "only detrimental to poor kids."
It is far more an effect of the parents and household than it is economics of the house.
And that of the school hours is kind of wrong when you reach high school because that is when children take the bus or ride with friends with cars and drivers licenses.
There is a huge difference in the high school, especially in bus in areas where buses come at anywhere from 6-6:45am. This isn't an issue caused by parent schedules or you would see similar times for middle and elementary school.
Typically it's because it's still dark out for the earlier block. Parents dislike having elementary school kids walk to school in the dark. (I have no idea whether it is actually less safe, but that's certainly the perception.)
Summer vacation is only detrimental to poor kids. In wealthier households, the children get sufficient mental stimulation so as to come back to school without fallen behind.
Maybe so, but wikipedia indicates that is a problem not just for poor kids, but also middle income kids as well.
The problem with changing school hours is that getting children to school needs to work around parent's work hours. This is less of a problem in other countries where young children can walk to school on their own or in groups, but would require massively changing American society to work.
For older students, this is not much of a problem, but smaller children does indeed provide significant challenge. However, given that adults are also continuously sleep deprived too, society will probably gain a lot from shifting their schedule.
Really have to disagree with summer vacation. Motivated students need time to learn and explore. While Newton's account is slightly controversial, he invented Calculus when he was at home from school (school had shut down due to the plague). I've always got more work/studying done during vacation times. Less holidays would have crippled my exploration.
What is the issue with summer vacation, and how would breaking it up throughout the year mitigate that issue? Genuinely want to read up on this. Thanks.
Spacing effect and the forgetting curve. When you're not reviewing information, you will eventually forget. Hence, the need for constant review. Otherwise, you start off the school year reviewing information that you have learned the previous school years. That wastes time that could otherwise be spent on learning new knowledge.
this might help improve performance (though probably the effect will be much smaller than you think), but it doesn't explain the comparative weakness of american PISA results.
Because: Finland? We have 2 month summer vacation in elementary school (189 work days/year). The school days seem to begin around 8.30 am. And we were long time the best country in PISA rankings (currently ranked 3nd after a city state of Shanghai and South Korea).
What many people who try to model the success of Finnish education system fail to see, is that Finnish society is highly equal. This is true between genders and especially between individuals from different social status and background. We work hard to give high quality education for everybody, no matter the cost.
This is the reason why sometimes I wonder how the projects that aim to export the Finnish school model to the countries like Saudi-Arabia can succeed, if the profound problems with the inequality deep in respective societies is not addressed first.
The PISA measures averages and it is in cutting the lower performing tail of the distribution where Finland excels.
Seriously ... summer holidays are pretty universal; it's not like countries generally considered to have very good educational systems don't have them.
China, Korea, Japan, all have 6-8 weeks of summer holiday; the U.S. seems to have somewhat more on average (of course in all of these countries there's some local variation), maybe 8-10 weeks, but that doesn't seem enough of a difference to have any dramatic effect.
The U.S.'s problems with education are cultural: American culture does not value education. School scheduling is mostly irrelevant.
"Only four states currently mandate services for gifted students and fully fund those mandates. The failure to develop the talents of our children deprives all of us of a stable of future innovators, creative thinkers, leaders and outstanding performers."
Except that clearly, it doesn't. We know this because a) we had plenty of "genius" before we had any "gifted education", and b) the nature of the thing implies exceptionalism that overcomes cultural boundaries. (I also strongly suspect that "gifted education" has never been demonstrated to increase "genius", but that's just my speculation.)
If you look at what public education is designed to do (provide for a well-educated populace), it makes sense that most of our resources should go toward the under-performers: it's far more important to have a baseline level of literacy and numeracy for 95% of adults, than to nurture the development of the top 5% of people who will probably excel regardless.
I say this as someone who did "gifted education" in elementary and middle school, and found it to be mostly useless. In retrospect, I'd rather that my school district invested the money spent on gifted education in more AP classes, better funding for the arts, computers or early language instruction. It's almost negligent that a school system can afford to pay a full-time "gifted" instructor, but not provide for foreign-language instruction starting in kindergarten.
I was also put into a "gifted student" class in elementary school - it was little more than extended play time. The problem is alluded to in the article - it's not really agreed on how to systematically produce brilliance. At most a school does is shunt the smarter kids into classes a bit higher than their level. That might save those kids from some time wasting, but still isn't developing them above from what they naturally are. IMO brilliance is a mix of ability, effort, long term planning, and guidance - and each have dozens on variables for maximization. Frankly I wouldn't want public schools as they are doing any long term planning and guidance for my kid. They aren't doing well enough teaching the basics as it is.
Not my experience. The gifted classes I attended were far better than the regular ones, and allowed me to study some JHS and HS-level material. The major failure in my education happened during that wasted period between elementary and college.
There's a world of difference between "gifted" classes, and classes that cover more advanced material. You'll notice that I said I would prefer AP courses over gifted education -- there's real value to allowing all qualified students to take advanced coursework.
The situation gets messy when you try to segregate "gifted" kids into special education from a young age. Of the kids who ended up in AP courses with me high school, way less than half were pre-identified as "gifted" at the elementary and middle-school level. We're just not good at identifying intellectual potential in first graders.
Sorry I wasn't clear. These were classes set aside for so-called "gifted" children. Not just classes that covered more advanced material. (Though they did.) Nearly everyone in there was really, really smart. I'm sure many kids fell through the cracks and weren't selected, but other than the odd inclusion of some musically gifted children who quickly fell behind and dropped out, we didn't really have any false positives.
That said, I totally agree that all students who can and are interested in advanced coursework ought to be able to benefit from it. I don't really understand why elementary school isn't more like college. If a 3rd-grade student reads at a 9th-grade level, but only does math at a 3rd-grade level, why compromise his experience?
And, as one who had teachers who couldn't always answer my questions, I don't really think asking one person to teach many types of subject matter is always a good idea, either.
I agree, but regarding foreign language instruction I have to bring up Mark Rosenfelder's article on why people learn foreign languages: http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html
In high school, I was in "honors" classes but had been passed over for "gifted" classes because my parents refused to have my IQ tested. The gifted classes had a reputation for spending most of their time planning parties.
I don't have a clue how to "fix" America's schools, though I suspect standardized testing belongs more to the problem set than the solution set.
My time in a gifted program was certainly valuable, a close second to the free lunch program that kept me fed.
I attended and later worked in and around the public school system. I have a lot of ideas about what's wrong with it that would impossible to fully articulate here. However, I can say that I wouldn't put "nurturing nascent genius" particularly high on the list.
I read this article as "My children are gifted and the government should fund/educate them and forget about all other kids."
From the article:
>America ranked 31st of the 56 countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, which assesses the academic skills and knowledge of 15-year-olds.
So how exactly is nurturing genius kids going to help that?
Shouldn't education for everyone be the goal?
>First of all, we need to train teachers to spot giftedness....
How about training the teachers to teach? There seems to be a lack of good education in the US, at least for people who are poor.
I read this article as "My children are gifted and the government should fund/educate them and forget about all other kids."
No, the article notes that people don't spend much money on gifted kids.
So how exactly is nurturing genius kids going to help that? Shouldn't education for everyone be the goal?
Scores isn't everything. If your scores is in the last place but you have silicon valley and lot of genius or talents cultivated by your school system, who cares? Moreover, cultivating genius isn't mutually exclusive to ensuring everyone get a shot at a good education.
How about training the teachers to teach? There seems to be a lack of good education in the US, at least for people who are poor.
How about don't make the teacher spend time every year doing the same god damn live-lecture every year? Just record the video, and get all the teachers together to vote for the best one. Record all questions students have. Incorporate it into the next video lecture competition.
Mediocre education for all? In a socialist way that makes sense. But won't people with bright kids and money, opt out? Or would you force them to dumb-down their kids experience so your utopian view is satisfied?
We'd all be better served by encouraging the best of us, even at the expense of those less able. Not PC, but undeniably true.
I agree - kids need intelligent role models. The modes of entertainment kids engage in (tv, movies, videogames) do not glorify intelligence - books are much better for that.
* Present it as a “How to...” article, provides a few vague sentences on how you might be able to begin to plan to do it, then quickly devolve into an article on what must be done “for the childrenz!”.
* Use lots of emotionally charged nonesense words and phrases, like “gifted”, “radical ideas”, “enabling the genius within”, “renewed commitment to excellence”.
* Make it all about the childrenz.
* Be sure to add some complaint about lack of funding for projects related to your sparkly notions.
* Make the use of everyday judgement sound like a complicated process only safe for use by experts.
* Support the statement of your opinions with references to other articles stating the same opinion, but do it in the fashion of a scientific reference.
... and many more!