In a USA Today interview, Intel CEO Craig Barrett discusses outsourcing, competition and US K-12 Education: “We do not send our basketball teams to compete against the rest of the world, saying the other teams have to play slower because our folks aren’t fit enough to run as fast.”:
Q: In K-12 education, what would you like to see that you are not seeing?
A: If we could capture 1% of the hot air that has gone out on this topic and turn it into results, it would be wonderful. The results are how our kids compare to their international counterparts, particularly in math and science. The longer kids stay in the system, the worse they do compared to their international counterparts. In fourth grade, our kids are roughly comparable. By eighth grade, they are behind. By the 12th grade, they are substantially behind other industrialized nations. Q: What are the hurdles?
A: One is very simply the teachers. I’m not criticizing teachers, per se, but 25% to 30% who teach math or science in K-12 are not educated in the math and science they teach. If you are going to be an engineering major, you are going to need 12 years of solid math. What are the odds of getting 12 consecutive good teachers in a row if 30% of them are not qualified?
While MMSD hasn’t had to deal with this issue directly, yet, it’s worth noting what’s out there with regard to creationism. (A recent poll found over 63% do not accept evolutionary theory.) As a former biologist, I’m stunned at the effort to shackle children’s ability to think critically. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/arts/01DINO.html
So, rather than the storyline of an unfairly maligned school caught up the unfair rules of an ill-conceived law, instead we have a school where about only half the kids are proficient in reading and math overall, few can write at grade level, and special education and black students are doing very poorly. Though the school does appear to slowly be making progress, a lot of children are being shortchanged right now. NCLB was designed precisely to ferret out these inequities which are easily obscured by overall averages.
In Belmont, a huge high school with 5,500 pupils, security guards at the door, gangs in the classrooms and a 40% graduation rate, it is hard to imagine how children could ever learn anything in such a forbidding place. Yet even the better schools seem overrun. Placencia Elementary School, for instance, is full of smiling pupils, but like many other schools it does not have proper terms; instead, it follows a �year-round� schedule, with the students being rotated through the classrooms (three groups in, one out). But at least the pupils are being taught close to home. Every day, 6,000 children from the Belmont area are bused out to other districts. �Can it be good,� Mr Alonzo asks, �for a five-year-old to be woken up at 6am to travel two hours for a half-day of education?�
District F demonstrates what one leading Democrat calls the �these-are-not-our-children� attitude of white voters. With their own children now either educated privately or safe in smaller suburban districts, they have not stumped up the cash to build the schools needed to educate the new browner-skinned arrivals. As Roy Romer, the head of the LAUSD, points out, the same community found the money to build the sparkling Disney Concert Hall and the Staples conference centre.
If you visited these classes and didn’t look at the sign over the door of the school, you might think you were in an elementary school, or a middle school at best. But such classes are not atypical in large urban high schools, where, except for the Advanced Placement (AP) and honors classes, much of the classroom work is below grade level.
On one trip to a Midwestern city, I found one out of eight assignments at grade level in two high schools. A colleague popped in on about 40 English classes in the course of a day at a West Coast high school and found one — just one — class where real learning was going on.
This is the dirty secret in the wars over teacher quality: the low level of academic work at all levels in far too many schools. The consequences of low-level work are seen in poor test results: Students given only work that is below their grade level cannot pass standardized tests about material they have never seen.