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Friday, May 11, 2012 | 2 a.m.
What do you think?
Send us a letter c/o Letters to the Editor, Las Vegas Sun, 2360 Corporate Circle, Third Floor, Henderson, NV 89074. Or send a letter via email: letters@lasvegassun.com. Or fax: (702) 383-7264.Clark County School District officials are due to present a revised budget next week, reworking numbers after an arbitrator ruled in favor of the teachers in a contract dispute.
The dispute was over a provision that provides automatic salary increases for teachers who completed extensive coursework in education at a personal cost to them of up to $10,000. The district said it couldn’t afford the step increases and wanted the arbitrator to allow it to quit paying. The teachers said the district had the ability to pay, and the arbitrator agreed.
Superintendent Dwight Jones has said the arbitrator’s decision will force cuts, and he expects teachers to be laid off to make ends meet.
The situation has caused quite a stir in education circles, opening up the broader discussion about the quality of the schools. The tone of the discussion has been marked up with shallow stereotypes and finger-pointing from all sides. It’s kind of like a bad multiple choice question.
All of the problems in education can be blamed on (choose one):
a. greedy teachers;
b. greedy unions;
c. bloated administration and “educrats”;
d. lazy students;
e. absentee parents;
f. bad policy and poor funding.
You can put your pencils down. The topic of improving education won’t be easily boiled down in a multiple choice question. It’s too complex. And it’s unfair to single out and vilify a single group of people, like teachers or parents, and blame them for the state of education. Not only does that do a terrible disservice those blamed, including the good teachers and parents, but it also misses the point: If there’s blame to be assigned, there’s plenty to go around.
Although the teachers are in the classrooms doing the hefty work of education, everyone, from the taxpayers to the Legislature, plays some role in Nevada’s education system and bears some responsibility. Taxpayers, for example, not only pay for the schools, but they also elect the people who set the policies and oversee them.
More so, the broad brushes used to describe participants in this debate fail to take into account several problems and overshadow the work being done by many people — from classroom teachers to elected officials — who are trying to improve the schools.
It’s not an easy task. For years, the state has failed to see the type of achievement anyone would like and progress has been sluggish. Part of the issue is that the state hasn’t adequately invested in education. Not that funding is, in itself, the answer. It matters how the money is spent, and accountability is vitally important. Additionally, policy goals have often changed, and not always for the better. The federal No Child Left Behind Act, for example, and its one-size-fits-all approach set goals that were unrealistic and often didn’t help promote student achievement.
For the schools to improve, it’s going to take a commitment of time, money and effort. It’s also going to take people moving toward a united goal of improving public education, not tearing it and those involved in it down.
Where much of this starts, is in the conference rooms where leaders PLAN to provide a service, and then coordinate efforts in implementing these services. Step by step. Back to the very basics. We have a community of people, who need roads, protections, services, libraries, schools, etc.
Somewhere in that chain of command, there was some planning that was misguided, to get to where we are today. The values of the voters or People who elected representative, truly reflects the kind of progress we have had.
Yeah, there is plently of blame to go around. You bet.
Blessings and Peace,
Star
"at a personal cost to them of up to $10,000"
I'm spending 15000 on a master's degree, which will give me about a hundred-dollar-a-month raise. I must then spend for another 32 graduate credits to see anything even noticeable. Ten thousand? I wish.
And when it comes to blame, I'm sorry, but whoever is responsible for continuing social promotion - which means that kids can be years behind the skills they need for the classes they're in - should be ashamed.
Once again story/editorial w/o complete facts, dispute was about 2 types of raises. One was for education credits mentioned in story but there was also an automatic pay raise for simply working another year (unless topped out) and this auto raise costs CCSD much more money than the education credit raises
There isn't any real argument that public education in Nevada is pretty poor and it's not just limited to Clark County, Even the rural schools with far more resources per pupil suffer by comparison to the rest of the country. The US, as well, compares unfavorably on the OECD rankings. Consider though that the US does have some of the best public education in the world. We have many high schools based on the International Bacelaureta[sp]? degree and many more where Advanced Placement is the norm rather than the exception. This is less common in Clark County but exists in some schools.
Something to note is that the in the US we generally attempt to educate every child through 12 years of school. That is unusual in many nations to which we are compared. Unusual in the 12 years and unusual in the attempt to educate every kid. In Germany, for example, students as young as 15 are tracked towards academic, professional, skilled and unskilled occupations. At 16 many are working in apprenticeships and are effectively finished with classrooms as we know them.
My wife shared with me data on the number of students failing the last chance proficiency exams given last week. It's pretty dismal, almost 75% failure rate. But remember, this is the fifth time that most of the students have taken taken these tests; can they not reasonably prepare themselves for what they know is coming? In many of the nations to which we compare ourselves those kids might be given two opportunities at best.
Money???Well, if we choose to educate everybody through 12 years it's going to cost more. It's not hard or expensive to educate the kid in the middle of the bell curve, but get to the ends and it's a strain on any budget. How much do you think they spend per kid in Palo Alto at the high school attached to Stanford, or Bronx Science. Look at the report on Sandy Valley going to a 4-day week and compare their per pupil expenditures to the balance of Clark County. Or how about education for kids with autism...classes of six or eight with two teachers and a couple aides can't be cheap to run. Many places those kids would never have an opportunity to get out of an institution.
The biggest challenge to public education is that too many of the stakeholders have backed themselves into ideological corners and have not left them selves opportunities for graceful exits or compromises. CCSD is a perfect example of that. With his hard-line approach Dwight Jones has made it difficult to back down so he and his top administrators need scapegoats. The Board has been ineffective and CCEA duplicitous. Someone is going to have to take on the role of the adult in the room.
We are so blessed to be so cursed with such a cluster of problems that exclusion will fail, guaranteed. It is obvious that inclusion and decency will be our only successful way out.
When we view the role of what we could for our students, the best thing might be NOTHING.
A good student's role in the learning process of usual school involves activity. Students are successful when they take control, not when they are passive in educational processes. School improvement calls upon students to empower THEMSELVES and to assert their rights in the learning community.
This notion merely reinforces what good teachers have long realized. Students must be viewed as, and actually become, active "producers" of their own learning.
This is just a traditional hope of education: develop the dispositions and skills that incline people to take responsibility for their own lifelong learning by developing habits, capacities, passions and interests to commit themselves to a lifetime of engaged personal learning.
The best learners have learned how to formulate the most useful questions to the relevant problems they face and have learned how to engage in the kind of problem solving that enables them to draw upon the best available information.
If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand data.
But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, then you haven't got a pulse.
Humanity is coalescing.
It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.
You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, peace, deforestation, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and education.
This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection.
Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power.
We are blessed with such a curse that we can not fail because we will all fail together, and nobody wants that.
The current state of education is NOT JUST the teachers' fault. It is ALL our fault:
Jones' "Ready by Exit" should have been "Ready by Entry" and that goes to parents, the community, academia, the lawmakers, and the powers-that-be. Each one must assume his respective role in educating children.
Parents: A child formally starts Kindergarten at age 5. By age 3 his personality has been set. If that child has not learned by that age positive social interactions and self-discipline, the teacher would have to fill that gap. If his brain has not been stimulated by that age, the huge gap needs to be filled in before any formal academic instruction can begin. This is the parents' responsibility that teachers have to 'assume' when the child is in Kindergarten, in addition to the school curriculum that has to be covered. With 30 students to a class, imagine how a teacher does this magic. If that gap is not filled, it becomes cumulative and frustrations lead to dropping out.
The community cannot ignore education because the children of the community are its children. What is put out there and how they are treated, the children see and emulate.
Academia must examine its curricula to stay abreast with current needs and requirements. Teachers must be fully prepared to teach the current breed of students with the challenges they are facing in a fast changing world and culture.
The lawmakers must educate themselves on what education requires and must legislate support measures devoid of partisanship and politics -- simply for the purpose of preparing children as leaders and for citizenship.
The powers-that-be must hold themselves accountable for each influence they place on public policy with the conviction that ROI does not only come in monetary form, but also in elevating human conditions.
Utopian? Yes.
It is always easier to travel in the road of least resistance and blame others when we lost our way.
The people of this state seem to see no value in an educated population. The citizens of California, Washington, New York and Massachusetts believe that the future of their state depends on a highly educated populace.
Nevadans do not agree. Nevadans consider the educated among us to be the elite as if "elite" were a pejorative term. They consider education to be an unnecessary burden on the taxpayer.
Until and unless that attitude changes, and Nevadans begin to respect and value educating their youth, we should not expect anything better than what we have.
Brian Williams did a story this week on the rapidly disappearing honey bees that reminded me of the roles teachers play in our society. The bee, according to the farmer interviewed in the story, fills a role in the production of his crops (our DINNER) that is on a par with sunlight and water. In other words, without the bee, there'd BE NO dinner.
Our failure to provide the entitlement to a free and appropriate education has left us in this similar predicament, namely our degrading emphasis on the value of education as an appropriately engineered scaffold to maintain a culture adapting to the developments in our landscape.
As our society here has moved from an agrarian base to the industrialized age and now to our current information age, our educational has fallen behind and essentially failed to maintain a functional learning environment appropriate for the next generation to reach comfort in contributing to their own success. The line from Ghost Busters comes to mind""Who ya gonna call?"
The family units have been splitting, the economies have morphed requiring two paychecks for families to survive in many households, cruel poverty has impacted opportunities for many and the educational systems have struggled to maintain a course that has carried the vestiges of antiquated paradigms and top-heavy allocations -- all leaving the kiddos with barely a chance to master the basics required to live beyond mere survival.
We have fallen behind by world standards and the solution is not a simple fix to be assigned and completed overnight by one person citing Wikipedia references. It takes a village.
Crystal ball with me. Imagine a society where individuals have instant access to all the information of the ages, opinions from the brightest scholars, and the chance to discuss and dialogue with others of similar capabilities. Picture in your mind a network with instant communication capacity to connect the curious and evolving minds through print, pictures, video creations and real-time streaming of events from around the world in a multitude of languages with living color and surround-sound.
Toss into this dream of educational opportunity a mentor whose background in acquiring the requisite knowledge and in slathering mortar to join the building blocks matches her talents in tantalizing the learners' temperaments, honing the skills to achieve the mastery that fulfills the learners' hopes of finding success in their own purposeful lives.
Gotcha! Huh? All the world is abuzz with the powers of information, except in schools where we fail miserably and waste those precious days when most kids could be humming along, making connections, pushing their own envelope of mastery and discovery, infusing their understanding with imagination and developing the future for their century with their own tools, time and invested energy.
Personalize education, and we succeed. Continue as we are, and we fail"more later. I'll BEE back
b, c, d and e
Getting education right means getting it right for each child, not as a blanket but a series of threads. In our failures of the past and present, this 'blanket' approach has yielded: inadequate learning outcomes; wasted resources of money and potential; baseless and yet logical antipathy aimed at teachers and admin staff; disappointment and frustration in families and the big one --lost time.
Kids get one chance to become an adult, and our Carnegie units --time sitting on butt in school -- provide the standard measure. Imagine a world of possible outcomes where a self-directed series of learning experiences that the learner sets for herself paces her study path geared for her own ability to acquire and demonstrate enough mastery to proceed into applications and connections associated with a learning unit so she can use her new skill or knowledge base to show how well she can make this thing work in her life.
The basic human urge is to get better and to enjoy the ride. Our current path bores a kid to pieces when the world of information and skill development so abundantly beckons her to click that mouse and POOF, the picture of her own self appears involved and engaged in a learning path, a thread in the blanket that SHE weaves in the world of HER design that provides the satisfaction SHE needs to build a fire inside HER that fills a lifetime with extensions of HER learning and doing.
The entitlement of universal instruction in this country specifies a meaningful education, but we fail the kid in connecting to the future. Our plan is based on last century, and these children are being tortured, if you will, by the frustrating contradictions of the tantalizing potentials outside of school contrasting with the mediocrity of instruction in school.
Just one decade ago, the norm for news was the newspaper. As the numbers of daily papers, weeklies etc drop down, the numbers of folks getting their news online rises. So does the individualistic choice to survey the political spectrum of inputs, the ability to pursue the dialogue in Congress and see for one's self what was said.
A truly personalized education using a keystroke and a mouse click can provide many savings in dollars and time, can improve student buy-in and promote an element of autonomy, a satisfaction in mastery and a clear sense of purpose that are lacking in the current school arrangements. MIT and Harvard announced their online platforms that tailor learning, transform and enrich the entitlement of free education and share access with billions of learners worldwide.
http://www.infodocket.com/2012/05/02/ope...
http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/02/mit-a...
It's time to put education for tomorrow where it belongs -- in the hands of tomorrow's beneficiaries.