dagblog - Comments for "Reforming K-12: Scarborough Blames Teachers Unions"

"...blaming teacher unions or

A Guy Called LULU — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:09:50 +0000

"...blaming teacher unions or students doesn't solve anything. In fact, I submit that it allows us to ignore the real problems that face our public schools."

First, notice that I did not blame either teachers, their unions, or the students themselves. I did say that the nature of the students entering schools has changed. If that is a correct statement then I submit that ignoring it is ignoring a real and a very big problem that faces our public schools and which is faced daily by the teachers who get most of the blame for any failings of the system.
A kid who grows up watching TV from infancy, who plays computer games as long as he is allowed to, who never gets to ride his bicycle a few blocks from home to play an un-supervised game of baseball, who never gets to stay out late playing night games, whose both parents work, who never has the hands on experience of taking things apart to see how they work, who has a poor diet even if he is affluent, who gets little physical exercise, whose image of the cool kid is of one who has the latest designer clothes and is precocious and shows it by being a smart-ass on a sitcom, etc, etc, etc, and who goes to an overcrowded class filled with others raised the same way, has not been ideally set up for success as a student. There is plenty of evidence that their brain may actually be wired differently than one who grew up having his senses stimulated by real things in the real world rather than everything being virtual.
And yes, I made a sweeping statement generalizing about the entire population of students taken as a whole. That is who we are talking about isn't it? Certainly there are exceptions, and out of millions of students there are many exceptions, but I maintain that it is the exceptions that prove the [my] rule.
Either there is a problem with the results of our system or there isn't. If we once got better results, then point to a time when that was true and try to identify what has changed that is the cause of the degraded performance.
I am not blaming teachers, but I do not think that teachers can be the entire, or even a very big part of, the solution. I believe that to suggest that by paying teachers more we could get ones that could solve our country's education problems is a simplistic and incorrect conclusion.

What do you see as the real problems facing our schools today that could be corrected so as to end up better educating the students of today?

Hi Moemoe, thanks for all the

tmccarthy0 — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:23:44 +0000

In reply to Good post thanks for bringing

Hi Moemoe, thanks for all the information, I'll just reply here.
You have shed some light on what goes on in Florida, very interesting. Dedicated teachers really can make a huge difference in the lives of their students, if Joe Scarborough really wanted to make good points about education reform, he would quit with the dog whistle BS about teachers unions being the problem, he knows better but I don't think he gives a rats ass. It's easier to demagogue unions though, I am sure it is some of the dues he pays to keep calling himself a Republican.

So good to see you Moemoe, this is your grandsons first year in college right! Do he and his girlfriend love it!

Here is hoping we can do something about college tuition too.

Lulu, that is a sweeping

tmccarthy0 — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:12:04 +0000

In reply to The very nature of American

Lulu, that is a sweeping generalization about children. Do you really believe that in k-12 teachers have a rooms full of disinterested students? I've never seen a kindergarten class filled with disinterested students.

The problems our public schools are facing are not solved by over-simplified stereotypes of teachers or students. Some children come to school with such disadvantages, what might seem to be disinterest to the casual observer might actually be a student struggling to learn.

We have work to do in our public schools, blaming teacher unions or students doesn't solve anything. In fact, I submit that it allows us to ignore the real problems that face our public schools. I don't think this is fair to our students or to our teachers, but its end result hurts or society over all, because we fail to take any real action towards real reform.

We had a similar policy in

Verified Atheist — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:28:35 +0000

In reply to Here in Florida, we would

We had a similar policy in Georgia, except in our case passing the fcat made you ineligible for office.

Just to clarify. ..many of

trkingmomoe — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:17:09 +0000

In reply to A few Florida facts about

Just to clarify. ..many of the private charter schools closed during the first year. Teachers and kids would show up to find the doors locked. I know this happened in Pensacola also. It was a year or so.later when the State Supreme Court ruled on it. But by that time vouchers had proven to be not as good as public education. There are still vouchers for kids attending good private schools following guide lines set out by the courts. The Bush experiment took the gloss off of private charter schools for Florida in general.

A few Florida facts about

trkingmomoe — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:56:24 +0000

In reply to Reforming K-12: Scarborough Blames Teachers Unions

A few Florida facts about fcat...Private Charter Schools are not mandated to take fcat. Fcat scores are used to determine pay bonuses for public school teachers and bonuses for school funding. The public school district my grandchildren attend has a K-12 charter school that is run by the school board. They take the fcat. You have to pass fcat in order to graduate from high school but if you attend a private or charter school you are exempt from that rule. Some kids that are attending public charter schools do so because they aren't doing as well in regular school. In third grade in a regular public school, if you don't pass the reading and writing part of the fcat, you will fail third grade. You can see why public school district may have set up a charter school. The state designed the fcat to be punitive to teachers and political appealing to the southern far right. It was to show how bad the public schools are so voucher system could be sold political. The state tried vouchers in the first term of Jeb Bush. Most of the private charter schools did not stay open. The schools just couldn't operate on the cheap. Fcat did not achieve what it set out to do. The state supreme court found the way the state was doing vouchers unconstitutional. The fcat has lost it's popularity in many parts of Florida and there is a push to get rid of it.

Good post thanks for bringing

trkingmomoe — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:50:07 +0000

In reply to Reforming K-12: Scarborough Blames Teachers Unions

Good post thanks for bringing this up. I agree with Mr Smith that it has to do with the unwillingness to raise revenue. But there is another reason the GOP uses education as a whipping post, part of their southern strategy. The south was forced to give up apartheid in their school systems. There still is lots of anger there to harness. My grandson graduated from high school last June. According to the fcat he was attending a mediocre high school. It was a urban school in a ghetto and under funded. Newsweek (when they were rating the best public high schools) it always placed it in the top 500 schools in the country out of 27,000 schools. Newsweek started only rating the top 20 this past year. His graduating class of about 200 received 5 million dollars in scholarships. So the state finally decided to grade the school.with a B. The high schools in good neighborhoods in this district never made it on the Newsweek list and don't come close to sending as many graduates off to college always got graded an A. So thanks to some fine teachers in low graded K-12 schools by fcat, he is doing well in college. Pensacola High School is also a top school in Florida ranked 200 on the Newsweek list. Gave the NFL Emmit Smith. Joe S is just blowing smoke because there is a primary going on. It takes more than a chalk board and chalk to educate kids today. Technology is expensive and we need to do more for poverty.

Here in Florida, we would

trkingmomoe — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:53:48 +0000

In reply to Perhaps completing a year in

Here in Florida, we would like to make politicians take the tenth grade fcat before they can run. If they fail they can't run for office.

It is one of the happy notes

Elusive Trope — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:52:17 +0000

In reply to Exactly, the problems are

It is one of the happy notes that Canada has become very much in demand as a speaker across the country. His message is resonating with people - from educators to business leaders.

Perhaps completing a year in

erica20 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:46:35 +0000

In reply to Many parents think the public

Perhaps completing a year in a classroom at teacher pay should be a prerequisite for running for more than one term in congress.