Tests & School

[Richard]

Harold O. Levy, the New York City schools chancellor from 2000 to 2002, has been a trustee of several colleges.

I read the article this morning and offer the following:

1. The reader has to know the author's background as having led one of the great failed school systems in the country to understand where his line of reasoning is coming from in his opinions.

2. I don't agree with the belief that the lengthening of high school will ensure a lower drop-out rate - apples and oranges in that line of reasoning - or that a high school education is insufficient for the general workforce as so many high schools do offer all levels of education - from better preparing someone to work in a warehouse to graduating students with upwards of two years of college coursework completed.

3. As far as the high pressure techniques he touts as a means for truant officers to curb truancy, those are nothing new and - for many reasons - offer little more than what many school systems use now. My experiences with that issue have been a bit different and my views on this can be read in my blog at - http://sfoda726.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive.html

4. Using the DOE - a failure from the get go - to further involve themselves in the educational processes at even higher levels is - IMO - the pervasive lunacy of a typical educational bureaucrat whose commitment is to systemic stasis vs real change and improvement.

Mr Levy isn't entirely wrong in some of his opinions - but he certainly isn't entirely correct in many of them, either. YMMV.

Richard's $.02

[Sigaba]

The Economist's Lexington throws in his (her?) two cents on America's education system. Source is here.

The underworked American
Jun 11th 2009

Children are exceptions to the country’s work ethic

AMERICANS like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? Have you heard that they are so addicted to their holidays that they leave the sick to die and the dead to moulder?

There is an element of exaggeration in this, of course, and not just about French burial habits; studies show that Americans are less Stakhanovite than they think. Still, the average American gets only four weeks of paid leave a year compared with seven for the French and eight for the Germans. In Paris many shops simply close down for August; in Washington, where the weather is sweltering, they remain open, some for 24 hours a day.

But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial courses in English and maths. At least a third of successful PhD students come from abroad.

A growing number of politicians from both sides of the aisle are waking up to the problem. Barack Obama has urged school administrators to “rethink the school day”, arguing that “we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home ploughing the land at the end of each day.” Newt Gingrich has trumpeted a documentary arguing that Chinese and Indian children are much more academic than American ones.

These politicians have no shortage of evidence that America’s poor educational performance is weakening its economy. A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession.

Learning the lesson

A growing number of schools are already doing what Mr Obama urges, and experimenting with lengthening the school day. About 1,000 of the country’s 90,000 schools have broken the shackles of the regular school day. In particular, charter schools in the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) start the school day at 7.30am and end at 5pm, hold classes on some Saturdays and teach for a couple of weeks in the summer. All in all, KIPP students get about 60% more class time than their peers and routinely score better in tests.

Still, American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

One is sentimentality; the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency. American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs. But Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. And brain work is going the way of manual work, to whoever will provide the best value for money. The next time Americans make a joke about the Europeans and their taste for la dolce vita, they ought to take a look a bit closer to home.

[ZonieDiver]

I love your blog, Richard! Well done!

The school at which I toil (and the ONLY message on my voicemail aftter three weeks away was from my principal "offering" a student teacher - Thank you, God!- for next semester) is our district's "vocational magnet" school. Kids can get an education that affords them an opportunity to start in many fields, from cosmetolgy to auto body shop - or floral design to culinary - and most of the kids who opt for these things are goal-oriented and seriously want to succeed.

There are many problems in education. Those problems, for the most part, do not start with the students.

[Richard]

And then there's this - a steroidal version of the daunting college entrance exams most Europeans also face to ever have a chance to go to college within their own countries. MOO - our system has flaws - but the opportunity is always there when the college-capable individual is ready for it.

Richard's $.02

China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession
Sharon LaFraniere, NYT, 12 jun 2009

For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test.

Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.

He was still carrying his textbook from room to room last Sunday morning before leaving for the exam site, still reviewing materials during the lunch break, still hard at work Sunday night, preparing for Part 2 of the exam that Monday.

“I want to study until the last minute,” he said. “I really hope to be successful.”

China may be changing at head-twirling speed, but the ritual of the gao kao (pronounced gow kow) remains as immutable as chopsticks. One Chinese saying compares the exam to a stampede of “a thousand soldiers and 10 horses across a single log bridge.”

The Chinese test is in some ways like the American SAT, except that it lasts more than twice as long. The nine-hour test is offered just once a year and is the sole determinant for admission to virtually all Chinese colleges and universities. About three in five students make the cut.

Families pull out all the stops to optimize their children’s scores. In Sichuan Province in southwestern China, students studied in a hospital, hooked up to oxygen containers, in hopes of improving their concentration.

Some girls take contraceptives so they will not get their periods during the exam. Some well-off parents dangle the promise of fabulous rewards for offspring whose scores get them into a top-ranked university: parties, 100,000 renminbi in cash, or about $14,600, or better.

“My father even promised me, if I get into a college like Nankai University in Tianjin, ‘I’ll give you a prize, an Audi,’ ” said Chen Qiong, a 17-year-old girl taking the exam in Beijing.

Outside the exam sites, parents keep vigil for hours, as anxious as husbands waiting for their wives to give birth. A tardy arrival is disastrous. One student who arrived four minutes late in 2007 was turned away, even though she and her mother knelt before the exam proctor, begging for leniency.

Cheating is increasingly sophisticated. One group of parents last year outfitted their children with tiny earpieces, persuaded a teacher to fax them the questions and then transmitted the answers by cellphone. Another father equipped a student with a miniscanner and had nine teachers on standby to provide the answers. In all, 2,645 cheaters were caught last year.

Critics complain that the gao kao illustrates the flaws in an education system that stresses memorization over independent thinking and creativity. Educators also say that rural students are at a disadvantage and that the quality of higher education has been sacrificed for quantity.

But the national obsession with the test also indicates progress. Despite a slight drop in registration this year — the first decline in seven years — five million more students signed up for the test than did so in 2002.

China now has more than 1,900 institutions of higher learning, nearly double the number in 2000. Close to 19 million students are enrolled, a sixfold jump in one decade.

Liu Qichao, 19, a big-boned student with careful habits, plans to be the first in his family to go to college. “There just were not a lot of universities then,” said his father, Liu Jie, who graduated from high school in 1980 and sells textile machinery. His son harbors hopes of getting into one of China’s top universities.

But the whole family was shaken by the results of his first try at the gao kao last June.

The night before the exam, he lingered at his parents’ bedside, unable to sleep for hours. “I was so nervous during the exam my mind went blank,” he said. He scored 432 points out of a possible 750, too low to be admitted even to a second-tier institution.

Silence reigned in the house for days afterward. “My mother was very angry,” he said. “She said, ‘All these years of raising you and washing your clothes and cooking for you, and you earn such a bad score.’

“I cried for half a month.”

Then the family arrived at a new plan: He would enroll in a military-style boarding school in Tianjin, devoting himself exclusively to test preparation, and retake the test this June.

Despite the annual school fee of 38,500 renminbi (about $5,640) — well above the average annual income for a Chinese family — he had plenty of company.

One of his classmates, Li Yiran, a cheerful 18-year-old, estimated that more than one-fourth of the seniors at their secondary school, Yangcun No. 1 Middle School, were “restudy” students.

Ms. Li said she learned the hard way about the school’s strict regimen. When her cellphone rang in class one day, the teacher smashed it against the radiator. Classes continue for three weeks straight, barely interrupted by a one-day break.

Days after most of their classmates left for home, Mr. Liu and Ms. Li were still holed up last week in their classrooms. Mr. Liu’s wrist was bruised from pressing the edge of his blue metal desk, piled with a foot-high stack of textbooks.

Ms. Li’s breakfast was a favorite among test-takers: a bread stick next to two eggs, symbolizing a 100 percent score.

Hours after they finished the test on Monday, both students had collected the answers from the district education bureau and begun the laborious process, with the help of their teachers, of estimating their scores.

Mr. Liu calculated that his score leaped by more than 100 points over last year’s dismal performance. But he was still downcast, uncertain whether he would make the cutoff to apply to top-tier universities. The cutoff mark can vary by an applicant’s place of residence and ethnicity.

Ms. Li, on the other hand, was exhilarated by her estimate of 482.5, figuring it was probably high enough for admittance to a college of the second rank.

By Wednesday evening, both were buoyed by news of the cutoff scores for their district. His estimated mark was well above the one needed to apply to first-tier schools, and hers was a solid five points above the notch for the second tier.

Before the test, Ms. Li’s aunt warned her that this was her last chance for a college degree. Even if she knelt before her mother and begged, her aunt said, her mother would refuse to let her take the test again.

But Ms. Li, a hardened veteran of not one but two gao kao ordeals, had a ready retort: “Come on. Even if my mother kneels down before me, I will refuse to take this test again.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/wo...html?ref=world

[Sigaba]

Source is here.

Vote could open 250 L.A. schools to outside operators
Backers of the Board of Education decision tout choice and competition. Foes call the move illegal, illogical and improper.

By Howard Blume and Jason Song

11:16 PM PDT, August 25, 2009

In a startling acknowledgment that the Los Angeles school system cannot improve enough schools on its own, the city Board of Education approved a plan Tuesday that could turn over 250 campuses -- including 50 new multimillion-dollar facilities -- to charter groups and other outside operators.

The plan, approved on a 6-1 vote, gives Supt. Ramon C. Cortines the power to recommend the best option to run some of the worst-performing schools in the city as well as the newest campuses. Board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte dissented.

The vote occurred after a tense, nearly four-hour debate during which supporters characterized the resolution as a moral imperative. Foes called it illegal, illogical and improper.

The action signals a historic turning point for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has struggled for decades to boost student achievement. District officials and others have said their ability to achieve more than incremental progress is hindered by the powerful teachers union, whose contract makes it nearly impossible to fire ineffective tenured teachers. Union leaders blame a district bureaucracy that they say fails to include teachers in "top-down reforms."

"The premise of the resolution is first and foremost to create choice and competition," said board member Yolie Flores Aguilar, who brought the resolution, "and to really force and pressure the district to put forth a better educational plan."

She and other backers said they expected the district to improve its own performance and to also compete to turn around schools. Bidders could apply to manage schools by mid-January.

For the charter school operators, the biggest prize is 50 new schools scheduled to open over the next four years.

"It's absolutely indispensable, of critical importance to us," said Jed Wallace, chief executive of the California Charter Schools Assn. "It's a once-in-a-generation opportunity: 50 new school buildings coming online at the exact same time that a cadre of charter operators has demonstrated that it can generate unprecedented levels of student learning."

Charters are publicly funded but independently operated and free from some regulations governing the traditional administration of schools. They also are not required to be unionized.

Some of them have failed to outperform regular schools, according to some recent research. But backers of the new plan say that only the top-notch charter companies have a realistic shot at operating any of the 250 campuses that could be included, about a fourth of all district schools.

Finding locations for schools has been a paramount problem for charter groups. Synergy Academy in South Los Angeles, for example, occupies rented space in a church 500 feet from where a new L.A. Unified school is being built.

Among those who could take advantage of the board action is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who could use it to enlarge the 11-school effort run by a nonprofit that he controls. Villaraigosa, who helped elect a majority of the seven-member board, was an active participant Tuesday, speaking before more than 2,000 parents, teachers and others before the vote.

For several board members, particularly those with strong union ties, the debate was heated and often agonizing. Steve Zimmer, for one, sought to require that teachers, other union members and parents approve any school's reform plan through separate majority votes. At high schools students would also vote.

Lacking support from his colleagues, he settled for a watered-down process that includes only advisory ballots.

The final version included a provision that outside groups would likely contract with the school system for such services as cafeteria, custodial, maintenance, security and transportation. Some charter operators regarded this as a huge concession because they typically outsource these services to save money and say they get better attention from contractors than from the district.

But the language protecting these union jobs offers no long-term guarantee. And no union endorsed the resolution.

The protections didn't go far enough, said Bill Lloyd, executive director of Local 99 of Service Employees International. The local represents thousands of the district's lowest-wage workers, many of whom are district parents. "Historically we don't get a square deal because we're not teachers and we're branded as second-class citizens," he said.

Leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles were once again frustrated that their own version of reform -- democratically run school sites with substantial and mandatory teacher input -- played second fiddle. Union President A.J. Duffy threatened legal action to thwart the Flores Aguilar plan.

Duffy chastised board members, especially those most closely allied with the mayor.

"When all is said and done you will have sold this district down the road for political gain for some of you," he said at the meeting, "and for a mayor whose own program has been a dismal failure. And if you end up . . . giving the mayor more schools, then shame on you."

Other critics have joined Duffy in questioning whether schools built with bond funds to relieve crowding, can be turned over to entities not under direct district control.

For their part, charter schools may have to operate differently in district-owned sites. They could be required to enroll more disabled students and higher numbers of lower-income students than at some current charter schools.

Both sides gathered coalitions of supporters. The charter-backed group Families That Can organized a massive rally outside district headquarters before the vote.

And the critics were not exclusively union members. Some called the plan an abdication of district responsibility or a failure to acknowledge district progress.

David Crippens, who chairs the committee overseeing school-construction spending, cautioned against "change for the sake of change."

But school board President Monica Garcia, a Villaraigosa ally, asserted that "kids can't wait. . . . My support for this resolution is in the hope that the district can move faster."

Shortly after the vote, Villaraigosa savored a political and policy victory at district headquarters in downtown L.A.

"We're not going to be held hostage by a small group of people," Villaraigosa said, referring to the teachers union and other opponents. "I'll let you infer who I'm talking about."

MOO, the LAUSD will not turn the corner on the issues it faces until stakeholders take a long hard look at the elephant in the room: the teachers' union.

[FMF DOC]

Originally Posted by stickey

I mentioned this in the other thread...but I don't care how many classes i took on education in college and how to get students motivated, but the mere 6 weeks i have been teaching social studies to 11th and 12th graders, the biggest disappointment are the students that do not want to learn. I have been receiving excellent advice from faculty and have come to realize, as they suggest, that you cannot make a student learn or do well as long as they do not want to learn. I explain my concerns with the teachers, they reassure my methods and attempts are noble and productive, then laugh and chuckle and say "welcome to teaching".


The old horse to the water analogy applies here. I have tried to spoon feed these kids the quiz and test material, throwing blatant hints as to what is going to be on them and what the answers are, and still, because they don't care, they still fail. What my fellow teachers are saying makes sense, the students that show effort are the students that have decent parents that support the idea of a good education. The other students come from families that don't care, therefore, they do not care.

I believe one of the reasons your students are so unwilling to learn is that they have been trained that it doesn't matter, they are going to get a passing grade and move on anyway. When was the lasttime anyone has actually failed a grade? Students failing grades reflects upon the faculty of the school and that looks bad for the county/state ect ect.... and they wouldn't want that so they just pass them.

As far as preapring the students for the appropriate exams to pass that level or get into college I don't understand how hard that can be for a teacher. I'm sure at the beginning of each year the school is aware of it is required to teach and have the students prepared for. There are a 1,000 ways to go about teaching it but the results should always be the same that the students are well prepared to take and pass that exam. When I teach my medical classes I have the test, and answer key, it's my job to present the material to my students so they understand it and retain it and beable to pass the exam. It's not all balck & white but I feel they make it more complicated than need be. And parents are also a big part of the problem... Just my half cents worth..

[Richard]

I believe one of the reasons your students are so unwilling to learn is that they have been trained that it doesn't matter, they are going to get a passing grade and move on anyway. When was the lasttime anyone has actually failed a grade? Students failing grades reflects upon the faculty of the school and that looks bad for the county/state ect ect.... and they wouldn't want that so they just pass them.

As far as preapring the students for the appropriate exams to pass that level or get into college I don't understand how hard that can be for a teacher. I'm sure at the beginning of each year the school is aware of it is required to teach and have the students prepared for. There are a 1,000 ways to go about teaching it but the results should always be the same that the students are well prepared to take and pass that exam. When I teach my medical classes I have the test, and answer key, it's my job to present the material to my students so they understand it and retain it and beable to pass the exam. It's not all balck & white but I feel they make it more complicated than need be. And parents are also a big part of the problem... Just my half cents worth..

Here's my opinion on the subject from my blog:

http://sfoda726.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

And so it goes...

Richard's $.02

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by stickey

I mentioned this in the other thread...but I don't care how many classes i took on education in college and how to get students motivated, but the mere 6 weeks i have been teaching social studies to 11th and 12th graders, the biggest disappointment are the students that do not want to learn. I have been receiving excellent advice from faculty and have come to realize, as they suggest, that you cannot make a student learn or do well as long as they do not want to learn. I explain my concerns with the teachers, they reassure my methods and attempts are noble and productive, then laugh and chuckle and say "welcome to teaching".


The old horse to the water analogy applies here. I have tried to spoon feed these kids the quiz and test material, throwing blatant hints as to what is going to be on them and what the answers are, and still, because they don't care, they still fail. What my fellow teachers are saying makes sense, the students that show effort are the students that have decent parents that support the idea of a good education. The other students come from families that don't care, therefore, they do not care.

Occupation
teacher (aka "babysitter" at times)

I do not agree that objectifying and infantalizing one's students is a sustainable approach to teaching.

[nmap]

OK...so how does one accomplish the various worthwhile ends at the undergraduate college level? Let's suppose one has about 700 students for the semester. One class was around 250, two others around 175 each and the fourth one was 100 or so.

Thank some divine power or other I had a grader.

Remember their names? Maybe some can get that done - I'm not one of them.

Reduce them to objects? Heck, they became mere aggregations of login IDs. A collection of ones and zeros.

Infantalize? Well, some were very smart, capable young people. A lot were sorta average, not particularly capable, but they did what they needed to do. In essence, they were gray men and women. But then there were those who did, in truth and in fact, engage in behavior that was best characterized as infantile.

And then we come to the papers. Now, let's think about this - 700 students, 4 papers, 500 words each. That aggregates to 1.4 million words - not counting the final project. Did my grader read that? Ha! Would I (could I) have read that much? No...neither could nor would.

The project was 1,000 words. So that's 700,000 more words.

Total words for the semester? 2.1 million.

So...read each paper, consider the ideas, make helpful comments, individualize the grading...

My grading procedure, when my grader was overwhelmed, got down to 10 seconds per paper. I would download in batches of 10, open them in word, do a word count, skim the paper for red underlines and to make sure nobody had written "gotcha!" 500 times, then assign a grade, generally 100 if they met the requirements.

I won't say I'm particularly proud of that. But...given the numbers...I didn't see any viable alternative.

And then there's the programming class. Again, some students were very, very smart. Others? (please insert the expletive of choice here.)

I taught the material. Encouraged them to use the free 6 day-per-week tutoring sessions. Gave assignments that connected to tasks on the test. Gave a practice test in class, and discussed each item in detail.

Did I mention that the practice test was exactly the same as the real one, except that the variable names needed to be changed? And the results? A few made 100%. I used a square root curve. Numerous students got well below 50. Several - who were getting full coverage for tuition, fees, and books, plus a stipend - turned in papers with nothing on them. And by nothing, I mean not so much as a tic-tac-toe game. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

And yet these worthy scholars deserve to be viewed as something more than infantile objects?

All I can say is, I admire the patience of those who can avoid such reactions.

[Richard]

If that is truly the state of such a bean-counter driven educational system as you have experienced and, admittedly, fostered - a system in which there cannot possibly be the perception of any real sense of value for the student's individual worth by either the students themselves or the faculty - then I fear "We have," as Pogo Opossum succinctly stated, "met the enemy...and he is us."

However, the scenario described by you is exactly why I chose a small college whose average undergrad classroom size (even for freshmen) was 25-30, where the professors did know the names of all their students, and where students did - therefore - feel a sense of obligation to adhere to the course requirements as set forth by their teachers.

And so it goes...sadly...

Richard's $.02

[nmap]

I remember the college where I got my undergraduate degree...Trinity, here in San Antonio...and it had much the same format as the college you're at. I have very fond memories of Trinity - no doubt your students will say the same, some day.

Large public universities have to follow a bean counter philosophy, I suppose. The large survey classes subsidize the specialized upper-division and graduate courses. A graduate class may have as few as 10 students - a few years ago, it could have as few as 5! - and generally they are taught by senior faculty members. The strong/smart/capable undergraduates do fine; they probably would anyway. The weaker students are part of the retention problem. (shrug). As I mentioned, I'm glad I could enjoy Trinity as a student.

After I wrap up my doctorate, I hope to find a small college, not unlike what you've found. Perhaps I'll even learn the students' names.

[Richard]

Trinity is one of those schools which gets high marks in my book! Others around here are Austin College and St. Edwards.

As far as your quest - I have no doubt you'll get there - and, in the meantime, nil desperandum.

Richard's $.02

[Richard]

Here's an interesting poll regarding perception vs reality in determining comprehension of resource materials and their content mastery in Japan.

It might be interesting - as a point of comparative analysis - to see the results of such a poll for the USA, UK, FR, FRG, AUS, etc.

Richard's $.02

Children do not comprehend textbook content to extent that teachers believe, survey shows
Mainichi News, 28 Aug 2009

Over 60 percent of elementary school teachers believe their students understand 80 percent or more of what they've been taught in their textbooks, but in reality fewer than 20 percent understand that much, according to the results of a survey conducted by a private research institute.

The questionnaire was conducted by Tokyo-based Chu-o Institute for Educational Research, which was founded in 1946 by professors at Tokyo Imperial University, the University of Tokyo's predecessor, and whose current operations are financed by various sources, including donations from textbook publishing companies. From late last year to early this year, the institute surveyed 1,257 elementary, junior high, and senior high school teachers, and a total of 715 elementary school fifth graders and second graders at junior and senior high schools.

While 61 percent of the elementary school teachers said they believed students understood more than 80 percent of the content covered in textbooks, only 18.6 percent of students said they picked up that much. The percentage of teachers who believed their students understood around 60 to 70 percent of what they were taught was close to that of students, at 36.3 percent and 34.6 percent respectively. Meanwhile, only 2.7 percent of teachers were under the impression that students had an understanding of approximately 40 to 50 percent of their textbooks, but 41.4 percent of students responded that that was how much they'd comprehended.

Such gaps in the understanding of student comprehension were evident at the junior and senior high school level as well. While 64.8 percent of junior high school teachers trusted that students grasped about 60 to 70 percent of textbook content, only 34.5 percent of students said they'd understood that much, and while 16.1 percent of teachers said they believed students had around 40 to 50 percent comprehension of their textbooks, 36.5 percent of students said they did.

At high schools, 52.9 percent of teachers were convinced that students understood approximately 60 to 70 percent while only 23.5 percent of students said that's how much they'd learned, and 25.1 percent of teachers said they believed students comprehended around 40 to 50 percent of their textbooks while the percentage of students who said they'd understood that much stood at 57.8 percent.

"Children do not comprehend the content covered in textbooks to the extent that teachers believe," said Bunpei Mizunuma, the director of the institute. "The challenge now is to develop textbooks that students can easily understand."

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/...na018000c.html

[FMF DOC]

Originally Posted by Richard

If that is truly the state of such a bean-counter driven educational system as you have experienced and, admittedly, fostered - a system in which there cannot possibly be the perception of any real sense of value for the student's individual worth by either the students themselves or the faculty - then I fear "We have," as Pogo Opossum succinctly stated, "met the enemy...and he is us."

However, the scenario described by you is exactly why I chose a small college whose average undergrad classroom size (even for freshmen) was 25-30, where the professors did know the names of all their students, and where students did - therefore - feel a sense of obligation to adhere to the course requirements as set forth by their teachers.

And so it goes...sadly...

Richard's $.02

Very well put, But I think some (hopefully few) students choose the larger schools just for that reason, so they can slip through the cracks, show up for class do the very minimal maybe less and still get that degree in the end. And unfortunetly once you have that diploma it puts you well above others weather your better qualified for a job or not.

[FMF DOC]

I spoke with a friend of mine who is a professor at LSU, and shared with her alot of the thoughts on this forum and this was her response.

Here's what I would say to this person:

The situation outlined is unfortunately not that uncommon in higher ed. It speaks to how desperately underfunded many schools are and how that results in too many students per class and too many classes taught per faculty member. I'm lucky that I only teach 2 classes per semester (one while I'm in administration). To a lot of people this may sound as if I don't work very hard. To do it will, however, I have to devote at least 10 hours per week to preparing for class and at least that much time grading and assessing student work. And if you are not expected to teach 4 classes you are certainly expected to do something else. In addition to my teaching, I'm expected to conduct research that is published in nationally recognized journals. That takes time (and often a lot of money). And I'm expected to serve on committees and do a lot of bureaucratic crap.

So I don't buy that students can't or won't learn or that teachers can't or won't teach. Students, in my experience, generally try to reach whatever bar we set for them, but they are masters at managing expectations. If there are little or no rewards for excelling they won't. If we ask very little of them they will produce very little and if we set low standards they will only reach those standards. But sadly lot of teachers are overworked and/or burned out, making it near impossible to hold high standards.

To my mind, our countries greatest problem is that we generally don't place enough value in education. We pay a lot of lip service to it but it is often one of the first things cut from the state budget. In LA, the legislature just slashed higher ed. by 5% and will probably do so again next year. Other states are doing even worse. At the grade, middle and high school levels the same is true. This means the cost of educating is pushed onto the parents in the form of higher tuition costs. Education is a public good and should be treated as such. We should be willing to pay taxes that will allow children to receive high quality k-12 educations and college should be available for those who want it and are qualified.

All that being said, I don't think college is the end-all-be-all. Many of the smartest, most talented people I know didn't go to college. Sadly, without a college education, one's earning potential is much lower. So students, who neither want to be in college or really have the aptitude, go because they see the degree as a magic ticket. That dilutes the experience for everyone. We need a better community and technical college system and a culture that values those jobs as much as it values lawyers and doctors.