Final - Rough Draft

Over the last hundred or so years our society has taken a dramatic shift, from that of the uneducated laborer to the learned worker. We have taken a system that was part of what helped keep the upper class always above the peasants, and made it accessible to the masses. The system that I am talking about is the education system. In the early part of the twentieth century the United States passed laws requiring compulsory public education that eventually would evolve into the system we have today where citizens between the ages five through eighteen must be provided some formal education. The noble goal was that by educating everyone we would achieve a better society where everyone had an equal chance at success. In Gatto's Against School he lists out what he thinks the stated goal of compulsory public education. "To make good people. To make good citizens. To make each person his or her personal best." (Gatto, 2) Now nearly one hundred years later there seems to be something of a consensus that while the goal itself is noble the execution has been subpar for any number of reasons. I would argue that the true goal of education is to develop the skills of critical thinking and give a student the skills to solve problems for themselves. Unfortunately I feel that this is an area where the schooling systems are not only failing but perhaps actively training us in the opposite direction. Our systems of standardized testing that is easily quantified across a very large nation serves more to stifle creativity and original thought than it does to foster and develop it.  

No two people are exactly alike, even to the way that they learn. There are some students who do very well in a lecture environment while there are those that will achieve much greater retention when they can read it from a text book. Neither method is wrong or better than the other and usually there is some form of cross-over between the two for most subjects. What about those students though that neither of these methods work. There are those students who's ideal method of learning is not one of the ones that are easily scaled up. There are people that learn better with open forum where they can engage in idea sharing or in hands on experiences where you physically interact with the lesson being learned. Unfortunately both of these latter two are more time consuming and as a result more expensive. One goal of the current system is to educate as many people as they can with the given budget. This unfortunately requires that those that either learn well with other methods or are already outpacing their peers tend to get frustrated and often give up on the system.  

In addition to teaching as many people as they can it is required for many reasons including political that we are able to place every student somewhere on a graph showing how far along they are in this standardized model. Have they achieved enough knowledge to move onto the next area of study or do they need to repeat the course until they can recite the answers. Perhaps the purpose of standardizing the education everyone receives is to give everyone a fair chance at life, but there are times where instead of allowing a student to excel in an area of interest they are instead forced to wallow in mediocrity by being required to take any number of subjects of little or no interest to them. In his talk on TED Ken Robinson talks about a woman named Gillian Lynne who is a well known dancer and choreographer. He says that in a talk with her she revealed that as a student she had been rather hopeless and was not a good student. He went on to say that had she been a child today she would have likely been diagnosed with ADHD. After going to see a specialist though it was revealed that she was "a dancer." When freed from the standard curriculum of education and instead given the opportunity to pursue something she truly cared about she went on to excel.  

Sometimes it is not even that the student is not interested in the given subject, but instead it is an issue with the way that it is taught. When the foundation is built incorrectly it can cause a feedback loop of hopelessness where the student in constantly being reminded of a failure that they likely do not recognize as not their own. In the essay I Just Wanna Be Average by Mike Rose he talks about students in remedial classes struggling with what should be basic concepts. When presented with a new problem it just brings back "embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of longstanding inadequacies." (Rose, 6) Eventually going on to blame themselves rather than think that possibly it was the system itself that caused the problem.  

Tests have become the primary method of gauging a students abilities and understanding of the subject. Standardization and its need to measure comprehension in numerical values demands it. This also requires that an attempt is made to give each student the same education so that when each score is compared versus another the results are as directly correlated as possible. These standardized educations depend on the teachers giving the students the required pieces to pass the test. As there is such a large volume of information to be dispersed and it leads to what Paolo Freire refers to as "banking" where the students become receptacles for information so that they can later regurgitate this information. This can have the side effect that many classes become a lecture hall where the students listen and take notes and then study these notes verbatim, regardless of how well the notes were taken. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem. The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of' capital' in the affirmation 'the capital of is Belem,' that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil." (Freire, 1) Without some form of communication between the teachers and the students the teacher may have no idea where the breakdown between what was said and which bubble on the Scantron sheet was filled. These tests then show that the student did not correctly grasp the concept and therefore have not fulfilled their responsibility as a student.   

We have an entire nation to educate and not just any nation, the fourth largest country by area and the third largest by population. This leaves us with a very large group of people that we have obligated ourselves to educating. With so many people to educate and the limited means by which to do it the most rational method of making sure that everyone gets a sufficient schooling is to make everyone demonstrate that they are learning. This leads to the elevation of topics that are easier to delineate between correct and incorrect answers. Not only this but for those that could be more open to interpretation we are often given the compromise of answering in a fashion that hits on the points that the teacher covered in lecture so as to get full points for that short answer question. Rather than fostering discussion and critical thinking we are instead trained to give answers that are as close to what was given in class so as to receive the marks that will allow us to progress to the next level. This allows for a single teacher to grade five classes worth of papers of thirty-five students each, educating as many people as possible in as cost-effective a method as possible.  

I think that the biggest thing that needs to change in our current education system is to reinvigorate the imagination. Require that the students consider the topics rather than just recite them. These standardized tests are training our students to all think the same way and our best hope lies in those students that can game the system. The ones that can well answer the questions the way required to pass but still continue to talk about and examine the topics after it is no longer "required." We need to limit the use of the hard fact driven tests and reintroduce the open discussion that counts for more than participation points. Innovation does not come from unchallenged ideas and identical thinking. We learn best from adversity and there is nothing more aversive than throwing your ideas into a circle to watch a incomplete idea get taken apart. It becomes a learning experience so that the next time the idea is better prepared and capable of standing on its own. Hard facts do not make for interesting discussions, it is the areas of gray that allow the imagination to thrive.  

Against Education

First and foremost VERY cynical. That is not to say it isn’t without merit. I have had discussions with friends about the fact that an “adult” today is someone who would have been allowed to participate in a more functional way in society only a hundred years ago. As the paper points out that childhood has been extended by three to six years by these large educational institutions. These schools reinforce this notion that we are not adults until we are out of high school. Even once we are out of high school college encourages this once again by instilling this notion that even at age twenty-two are still are not part of the “real world” yet. Somewhere between one third and a quarter of our lives go by with us being convinced that we aren’t yet mature enough to participate in “real” society. This has been formative years spent reinforcing the notion that we cannot think for ourselves and by the time that we are supposed to do so many are not able to. The paper takes this to the extent that we are being trained to be a docile mass that is easily guided by a small but powerful minority that want nothing less than control over all of us. This is expanding on the idea slightly but not by much distance. Once again cynical but perhaps not without merit.

BlackRose & Superman Chalk

I think that the biggest issue, something that all of these touch on in some way, with our current education system is the attempt at standardizing and mass producing an education.
Taking a successful practice from one particular school in one particular neighborhood and trying to apply it as a blanket fix across the entire system. Its a difficult problem since we are trying to balance so many things in an attempt at making a fair system in which everyone has the same opportunities but failing the vast majority. Rather than personalizing the education system to best fit each student, for monetary and political reasons we have to instead focus on trying to get everyone as equal of an education as possible in the easiest way to roll out uniformly across an entire country. In an effort to try to give an equal education to each student and qualify the education that they are receiving by means of standardized tests we are letting many students receive sub-par educations. The problem is trying to solve how to better educate the individual while maintaining a level of efficiency that allows you to educate a rather large population. While we may be held up to the rest of the world of quality of education keep in mind we are trying to educate a population many times larger than the countries we are compared to. The country with the next highest population to the United States that ranks higher is South Korea with fifty five million. Nearly 1/6th the population of the United States.

Friere's Banking Education

It seems to me that Friere’s whole concept seems to focus on the fact that our system of education has devolved to a mass produced education churning out “learned” people like a factory. Many identical products at a low cost. What is lost in this though is the individuality that makes any particular item unique and possibly more valuable. Going back to people though, what is lost is the ability to reason or argue (non combative) through a discussion. What I got from the paper that open discussion is one of the things that should be brought back to our education system. Open dialogue between the students and the teachers rather than a unidirectional communication where the teacher is the only one speaking. This is one of the things that I really like the idea of as these kinds of discussions are the ones that I think encourages learning and retention. In my experience nothing sticks better than the experience of voicing a disagreement to an idea and having the point defended well. It also allows for someone to present what could be a general misunderstanding that the teacher is able to clear up. Something that may not have been otherwise presented and as a result accidently ignored.

BlackRose

Lewis Black may be a comedian and some of his points are more humor than fact but even these  may cause for some consideration. As an example one of his early lines about one week to education and fifty one weeks to incarceration is a gross exaggeration but at the same note it is pointed out in the film Waiting for Superman a fair portion of students that fail out of particularly bad school systems do wind up in the prison system. He mentions a number of valid issues with the school system and some rather poor “ideas” for improving them. Charter schools and their limited admissions, hundreds of millions spent on improving school grounds rather than spreading the money around to more schools and improving their tools for teaching. While solutions to the issues weren’t offered that was not the point to the sketch. Without quite as much humor Rose attempts to outline the things that he sees as issues with the public education system and some helpful advice that he feels will atleast give more insight rather than offering a “magic bullet.” Both shoot down some ideas that at face value seem like they could be good ones until upon closer inspection they reveal themselves to be incomplete ideas. Black’s being the “volunteer, even if you don’t live in the area or have kids” and Rose’s “replace the bottom 10% with more like the top 10%.” I feel that both do a good job of showing why existing ideas aren’t working and acknowledging that our education system will be a long fix rather than a one-term political stunt.

Eng101 Final Paper

Over the last hundred or so years our society has taken a dramatic shift, from that of the uneducated laborer to the learned worker. We have taken a system that was part of what helped keep the upper class always above the peasants, and made it accessible to the masses. The system that I am talking about is the education system. In the early part of the twentieth century the United States passed laws requiring compulsory public education that eventually would evolve into the system we have today where citizens between the ages five through eighteen must be provided some formal education. The noble goal was that by educating everyone we would achieve a better society where everyone had an equal chance at success. In Gatto's Against School he lists out what he thinks the stated goal of compulsory public education. "1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best" (2). Now nearly one hundred years later there seems to be something of a consensus that while the goal itself is noble the execution has been subpar for any number of reasons. I would argue that the true goal of education is to develop the skills of critical thinking and give a student the skills to solve problems for themselves. Unfortunately I feel that this is an area where the schooling systems are not only failing but perhaps actively training us in the opposite direction. Our systems of standardized testing that is easily quantified across a very large nation serves more to stifle creativity and original thought than it does to foster and develop it.

No two people are exactly alike, even to the way that they learn. There are some students who do very well in a lecture environment while there are those that will achieve much greater retention when they can read it from a text book. Neither method is wrong or better than the other, and usually there is some form of cross-over between the two for most subjects. What about those students for which neither of these methods work. There are those students whose ideal method of learning is not one of the ones that are easily scaled up. There are people that learn better with open forum where they can engage in idea sharing or in hands on experiences where you physically interact with the lesson being learned. Unfortunately both of these latter two are more time consuming and as a result more expensive. One goal of the current system is to educate as many people as they can with the given budget. This unfortunately leads to that those that either learn better with other methods or are already outpacing their peers tend to get frustrated and often give up on the system.

In addition to teaching as many people as they can it is required for many reasons including political that we are able to place every student somewhere on a graph showing how far along they are in this standardized model. Have they achieved enough knowledge to move onto the next area of study or do they need to repeat the course until they can recite the answers. Perhaps the purpose of standardizing the education everyone receives is to give everyone a fair chance at life, but there are times where instead of allowing a student to excel in an area of interest they are instead forced to wallow in mediocrity by being required to take any number of subjects of little or no interest to them. In his talk on TED Ken Robinson talks about a woman named Gillian Lynne who is a well-known dancer and choreographer. He says that in a talk with her she revealed that as a student she had been rather hopeless and was not a good student. He went on to say that had she been a child today she would have likely been diagnosed with ADHD. After going to see a specialist though it was revealed that she was "a dancer." When freed from the standard curriculum of education and instead given the opportunity to pursue something she truly cared about she went on to excel.

Sometimes it is not even that the student is not interested in the given subject, but instead it is an issue with the way that it is taught. When the foundation is built incorrectly it can cause a feedback loop of hopelessness where the student in constantly being reminded of a failure that they likely do not recognize as not their own. In the essay I Just Wanna Be Average by Mike Rose he talks about students in remedial classes struggling with what should be basic concepts. When presented with a new problem it just brings back "embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of longstanding inadequacies" (6). Eventually going on to blame themselves rather consider that perhaps it was the system itself that caused the problem.

Tests have become the primary method of gauging a student’s abilities and understanding of the subject. Standardization and its need to measure comprehension in numerical values demand it. This also requires that an attempt is made to give each student the same education so that when each score is compared versus another the results are as directly correlated as possible. These standardized educations depend on the teachers giving the students the required pieces to pass the test. As there is such a large volume of information to be dispersed and it leads to what Paolo Freire refers to as "banking" where the students become receptacles for information so that they can later regurgitate this information. This can have the side effect that many classes become a lecture hall where the students listen and take notes and then study these notes verbatim, regardless of how well the notes were taken. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem. The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of' capital' in the affirmation 'the capital of is Belem,' that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil" (1). Without some form of communication between the teachers and the students the teacher may have no idea where the breakdown between what was said and which bubble on the Scantron sheet was filled. These tests then show that the student did not correctly grasp the concept and therefore have not fulfilled their responsibility as a student. 

We have an entire nation to educate and not just any nation, the fourth largest country by area and the third largest by population. This leaves us with a very large group of people that we have obligated ourselves to educating. With so many people to educate and the limited means by which to do it the most rational method of making sure that everyone gets a sufficient schooling is to make everyone demonstrate that they are learning. This leads to the elevation of topics that are easier to delineate between correct and incorrect answers. Not only this but for those that could be more open to interpretation we are often given the compromise of answering in a fashion that hits on the points that the teacher covered in lecture so as to get full points for that short answer question. Rather than fostering discussion and critical thinking we are instead trained to give answers that are as close to what was given in class so as to receive the marks that will allow us to progress to the next level. This allows for a single teacher to grade five classes worth of papers of thirty-five students each, educating as many people as possible in as cost-effective a method as possible.

I think that the biggest thing that needs to change in our current education system is to reinvigorate the imagination. Require that the students consider the topics rather than just recite them. There is no rule that an intellectual can only rise from the education system and possibly some evidence to the contrary. One of the more eloquent writers out there, Malcolm X, actually got his education through independent study while in prison. He himself admits to never getting past the eighth grade (1). By contrast these standardized tests are training our students to all think the same way and our best hope lies in those students that can game the system. The ones that can well answer the questions the way required to pass but still continue to talk about and examine the topics after it is no longer "required." We need to limit the use of the hard fact driven tests and reintroduce the open discussion that counts for more than participation points. Innovation does not come from unchallenged ideas and identical thinking. We learn best from adversity and there is nothing more aversive than throwing your ideas into a circle to watch an incomplete idea get taken apart. It becomes a learning experience so that the next time the idea is better prepared and capable of standing on its own. Hard facts do not make for interesting discussions; it is the areas of gray that allow the imagination to thrive.

Works Cited

Freire, Paolo. “The Banking Concept of Education.” Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Books, 1993. Print.

Gatto, John Taylor. “Against School.” Against School – John Taylor Gatto. Cornell.edu, Sept. 2003. Web. 14 Mar. 2013.

Robinson, Ken. “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. TED Conferences, LLC. Feb. 2006. Jun. 2006. 14 Mar. 2013.

Rose, Mike. “I Just Wanna Be Average.” Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Print.

X, Malcolm. “Learning to Read.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1987. Print.

NOTES-

Anthony - lives with his grandmother

Anthony - Father passed away from drug use

Daisy - Lives with unemployed father, working mother.

Daisy - Wants to be a vet or doctor

Education is repeatedly "valued" and more money is given to schools. Doubling money spent per child

Reading/math scores have barely improved since 1971

Francisco - Likes math

Francisco - wants to be a "recorder"

Francisco - school has a guard. It is the third largest overcrowded school in the Bronx. 

Bianca - Bianca's mom is trying to teach her sign (on bus)

Bianca - Bianca's mom wants her child to get a "career" rather than a job

No Child Left Behind  required the measure of each students level of education. Goal was 100% proficient in math and reading.

18% math in mississippi. NJ 40%. Highest on image was 43%. DC  was @12%

Most states scored between 24%-35% in grade level proficiency in reading @ eighth grade.

Large numbers of minority children from fifth to eighth grade go from B to D. Builds an expectation of failure in the children.

Daisy - Her mother works as a janitor at the local hospital.

California has a test (the A-G) required to get into a four year college.

Schools where more than 40% of the students don’t finish are termed "dropout factories"

In one mans research he found more than 2000 of these "dropout factories"

Part of the reason is pushing children with sub-par education up

Schools that fail may have a larger impact on their neighborhood than the reverse. Both feeding into one another. A school that produces many dropouts, the students would tend to stay nearby and dragging the community down.

68% of inmates in pennsylvania are HS dropouts

In Pitsburg, 33,000 per prisoner per year. avg term 4 years. 132000.

Avg private school costs 8300 per year.

1 4year term would fund 1 student for 13 years (k-12) with 24K leftover

Anthoney - Never knew his mother. His grandmother was raised by her grandmother. Neither his grandmother or father valued school at the time they went.

Michelle Rea was 7th superintendant in 10 years.

Francisco - has had "bad teachers". He is having difficulty reading.

Students with highperforming teachers advance students 3x as fast as low. Poor performing teachers usually cover 1/2 of the material vs high performing covering 150%

Bad teachers are protected by tenure. Tried to fire teachers for VERY poor behavior. the teachers were rehired with backpay covering the lost time)

Initially teachers NEEDED the protection from abuse by neglect. Poor wages and the like for trivial reasons like "their husbands work". This lead to teachers unions.

The NEA and AFT are the largest political financers (campaign contributors) when put together. Giving over 55 million in 20 years. Mostly to dems (90%)

Teachers Union wants all teachers treated the same. Strict rules for replacing a poor performance teacher with 31 (!) steps.

New Yorks "rubber room" Version of lemondance, costs new york 100 mil per year. This only deals with negligent/abusive/horrible teachers.

Magnet schools were developed to help give parents options where to send their children.

Charter schools were built to be outside the normal legal stuff.

Despite strong efforts on the part of Rheys attempts at reforming the DC system was met with strong resistance from the union

WRAPUP

As a kid I never really thought much about what school I was going to. I do remember once being given the opportunity to go to one of two different schools and I naturally picked the one that my friends would be at. As I get older I start to see the larger workings that go into that decision. I don’t personally feel failed by the education system but after seeing this movie and some of the other stuff we have reviewed in class I do feel that my younger brother was. Starting in first grade his teacher had recommended that he put on Ritalin because he was “to much to handle”. My parents didn’t do that but from there he was tracked into the supposed extra attention classes where the trouble students were put to try to sort them out. In reality it turned out to be more of a collection of these kids who were just bad influences on one another. By the time my brother was a freshman in highschool he was behind most of his peers. I remember overhearing my dad talking about the worst thing he ever did by my little brother was to allow them to put him in that class. All of this started because he was a little rowdier and his first grade teacher (new at teaching) thought he was too much to handle. Tying this back into this movie, I never realized how lucky I was growing up. While my education was not superb I can trace my own failings to myself, not to the system itself. There are areas though where this is not the case. Even in spite of best efforts some kids are just more likely to fail just because of the place they were unlucky enough to be stuck at.