Idea for new School System

[SagaLore]

We need more schools, but less grades.

Many schools are too big. Kids get lost in the shuffle. I'm not talking about the teacher/student ratio - I'm talking about the overall student body. There should be a strict limit of how many kids a school can contain.

There should be more total schools - they should be more local community oriented. Property taxes should be paid into a county fund and redistributed evenly among the smaller schools.

To pay for the higher overhead of building and faculty distribution, we should actually have less grades. K through 12? Nah. It should be 1 through 11. K should be a part of opt-in pre-school. For all schools, grades 10 and 11 should have vocation options. I remember a school district where you could opt to take "college prep" courses, or get bussed to another votech school for half a day to learn a trade. I think this setup was efficient and effective, and think it should be available to ALL school districts in the US that have populations large enough to support it.

We keep having these debates about throwing more money at the way the school system is, but I'd rather look at revising the school system itself. It really is a poor setup. Its like someone decided that 13 years of schooling seemed like a good number and just filled up the schedule. Since an Associates Degree is now taken for granted as if its the new high school diploma - we need to cut down the time it takes to get to that point.

 

[waggy]

i agree with the 1st part. smaller schools tend to be better for a education of teh core subjects. bigger schools have more after school things and other subjects.


but the rest i disagree with. they have tried to revise the school system. that's part of the problem. they need to get back to the teaching the three R's instead of the shit they do.

 

[werepossum]

Costs a lot more per student to run smaller schools versus larger schools, both in utilities & maintenance and in personnel. I don't like to see schools drop below 300 students. I do agree that the huge 2,500+ megaschools are probably counterproductive, no cheaper per student than 1,000 student schools and much more unwieldy.

I'd love to see more vocational education available in high school. We'd have to roll back our outsourcing economy though, for a lot of trades. No point in training thousands of welders if the economy can only support hundreds. I'd also like to see more emphasis on personal economics and small business. Commercial foods for instance is a useful training program, but needs to include basic business math, accounting, & management to provide the tools to move beyond short order/cafeteria cook into management or ownership.

 

[1prophet]

We need more schools, but less grades.

Many schools are too big. Kids get lost in the shuffle. I'm not talking about the teacher/student ratio - I'm talking about the overall student body. There should be a strict limit of how many kids a school can contain.

There should be more total schools - they should be more local community oriented. Property taxes should be paid into a county fund and redistributed evenly among the smaller schools.

To pay for the higher overhead of building and faculty distribution, we should actually have less grades. K through 12? Nah. It should be 1 through 11. K should be a part of opt-in pre-school. For all schools, grades 10 and 11 should have vocation options. I remember a school district where you could opt to take "college prep" courses, or get bussed to another votech school for half a day to learn a trade. I think this setup was efficient and effective, and think it should be available to ALL school districts in the US that have populations large enough to support it.

We keep having these debates about throwing more money at the way the school system is, but I'd rather look at revising the school system itself. It really is a poor setup. Its like someone decided that 13 years of schooling seemed like a good number and just filled up the schedule. Since an Associates Degree is now taken for granted as if its the new high school diploma - we need to cut down the time it takes to get to that point.

That was the norm, and you could take the college courses (if qualified) but you had pay in order for them to count as college credits otherwise they just counted to your high school credits. But then again I remember when kids would jump at the chance to rake your leaves, shovel snow, etc. for 10 or 20 dollars and weren't afraid to work hard during summer break and proud that they earned the money instead of being handed to them.

 

[monovillage]

I would love to see more experimental schools and education centers set up. There's so many great ideas out there that never get tried.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Way back when, before your time,K was a training area, not part of the school systems.

Then people wanted something that they refused to do at home - teach the kids.
And others thought that they could pick the taxpayer pockets and accomplish that.

A serious problem is that schools cost a lot of money to build and maintain along with the overhead that goes along with such.

Smaller communities choose to either have their own school system of join into regional systems.

Your concern seems to be more with the urban schools.

One can have x students per school facility - the problem is where to get the land; money for construction and the admin overhead that schools now feel that they need.

Many urban school system have the land and/or buildings available; but the cost to bring them into compliance with codes makes it impractical cost wise.

There was an article on NYC recently where a local school was built on toxic ground and the admin knew about it for 2-3 years but kept quiet.

One justification was that they had no where else to put the kids and to expose the issue would create a panic.

Many counties outside of the urban areas have no more than 2 HS and the needed support schools that feed them. There is not the tax base for a 1K student body per HS, even if there are that number of students in both HS and the feeders. The only reason for two HS may be the overall distance or that there are two urban centers within the county.

The 13 years of schooling used to be only 8 mandatory with the last 3-4 optional.
When the agricultural society stopped; it was felt that the extra 3-4 years would help with the next economic boom. Now in some urban areas the last 3-4 are a upscale baby sitting service

 

[JTsyo]

If you're breaking up the students into different schools better to do it by classes. So instead of 9-12 in one school split it into two schools with 2 grades each. This way the kids have a larger pool of friends and school programs will be easier to find interest for.

 

[bfdd]

We need more real life learning and less bullshit in schools, especially high school. Students need access to more vocational programs and they need to NOT be taught "If you don't get a college degree you'll live in a van down by the river", because that is a load of bullshit.

 

[SagaLore]

This way the kids have a larger pool of friends

But that doesn't happen. Clicks form. A lot of kids end up lost in the noise. Only a (popular) minority end up with lots of friends.

 

[SandEagle]

mandatory military training.
and finance classes starting from pre-K

 

[polarmystery]

mandatory military training.
and finance classes starting from pre-K

Knowing what I know now, if this option were available when I started school I'd be at the head of the class every day. I was completely stupid with money until just after college.

 

[fskimospy]

We need more real life learning and less bullshit in schools, especially high school. Students need access to more vocational programs and they need to NOT be taught "If you don't get a college degree you'll live in a van down by the river", because that is a load of bullshit.

I agree. Lots of countries have separate college and vocational tracks and I see no reason why the US can't do it as well. (in all fairness our schools do this to some extent, but not nearly as much as they should)

I believe offering a job training environment for those who don't want to go to college would not only be good from an education perspective, but by engaging students in learning that they found to be more worthwhile it would probably improve attendance and graduation rates as well.

 

[xBiffx]

I agree. Lots of countries have separate college and vocational tracks and I see no reason why the US can't do it as well. (in all fairness our schools do this to some extent, but not nearly as much as they should)

I believe offering a job training environment for those who don't want to go to college would not only be good from an education perspective, but by engaging students in learning that they found to be more worthwhile it would probably improve attendance and graduation rates as well.

+1

Vocational schools are the way to go for a lot of career paths.

 

[dank69]

I'm of the opinion that school systems aren't broken. Parenting today is broken. No parent can ever do wrong by their child and their child can do no wrong.

But by all means, blame the teachers/system when their hands are tied.

 

[sm625]

I would tend to agree with the previous post to some degree. The schools are bad but the parenting is bad too. My kid is the best in the class on math but even he has this attitude where he doesnt want to do the extra credit problem because it is extra credit. I try to explain that the extra credit problems are the only ones that actually teach you something. It just goes over his head. He says he is bored and wants to be challenged, but then doesnt want to accept the challenge when the challenge is given? Makes no sense to me, so I just attribute it to laziness. You can try and try to talk someone into accepting challenges, but it seems the whole world is bent on teaching kids to not accept challenges. Parents dont stand a chance against that. The societal push towards stupidity and laziness is too strong.

 

[Aikouka]

I recall watching an episode of The Daily Show from... I believe last week or two weeks ago, and they had the Director of the Department of Education on. I liked a bit of what he had to say, until he got into his spiel on needing to educate kids for college. I'm more in line with what people here say about making vocational much more available and not upselling the need for college so much.

So, hearing that from him just seemed rather disappointing.

EDIT:

I try to explain that the extra credit problems are the only ones that actually teach you something. It just goes over his head. He says he is bored and wants to be challenged, but then doesnt want to accept the challenge when the challenge is given?

Are you sure that they're always harder problems? It's been awhile, but in my experience, they weren't always harder, but they typically just felt like more busywork that wasn't required.

 

[spacejamz]

At the high school level, the kids that don't want to learn need to be weeded out from those that do. They just distract from the rest of the class and the teachers probably spent more time on them then the students who want to learn...

Then need to figure out what to do with those that don't want to learn...vocational training? not really sure.

 

[Infohawk]

Since an Associates Degree is now taken for granted as if its the new high school diploma - we need to cut down the time it takes to get to that point.

That doesn't really make any sense. The way things are going a PhD might end up to be par for the course at some point. Does that mean we need to try to cram a PhD into the first 18 years of life? Of course not. Some countries are a year or two ahead of the US but their kids frequently aren't employed part-time during high school (maybe ours aren't either at this point) and they don't do as many extracurriculars.

Anyway, none of this isn't really new. (Your own post recognizes that some schools here are doing it.) Other countries have strong vocational paths and it's not a panacea. Usually you get forcibly put in there and you can never get back out. Did you have bad grades because your parents were going through a divorce? Tough shit you're now a blue collar worker for life. There's nothing stopping people from getting vocational training in the US system in the current system. If anything, we could probably make it more common if we controlled student loans a tiny bit more and stopped acting like the entire country should have a college education.

 

[cybrsage]

they need to get back to the teaching the three R's instead of the shit they do.

Reading, Riting, and Rithmatic?

 

[shortylickens]

We need more schools, but less grades.

Many schools are too big. Kids get lost in the shuffle. I'm not talking about the teacher/student ratio - I'm talking about the overall student body. There should be a strict limit of how many kids a school can contain.

Ummm, thats pretty much the exact same thing as a student teacher ratio.
Whats the point of having 100 kids in a single school building if they all have to share 1 teacher?

Buildings can be easily constructed. We have plenty of laborers thanks to Obama. Good teachers (who stick around for a few years) are quite rare.

 

[monovillage]

The biggest impediment for new thinking in education is the entrenched education bureaucracy and union control of the teachers. Every time someone wants to start a new program or any new idea they jump all over it in an attempt to stop it.

 

[Exterous]

I believe offering a job training environment for those who don't want to go to college would not only be good from an education perspective, but by engaging students in learning that they found to be more worthwhile it would probably improve attendance and graduation rates as well.

I liked a bit of what he had to say, until he got into his spiel on needing to educate kids for college. I'm more in line with what people here say about making vocational much more available and not upselling the need for college so much.

So, hearing that from him just seemed rather disappointing.

Ah - but college education is what sells a school. Its like the contrast ratios on TVs or megapixels on cameras. People don't care for the rhyme or reason behind it they just know they want the school with the biggest college attendance rate because its an easy indicator of a school tahts at least halfway decent. There is starting to be a shift but until if really starts to take hold you will see schools, parents, politicians over-promoting college edcation

 

[Texashiker]

We need more schools, but less grades.

Many schools are too big. Kids get lost in the shuffle. I'm not talking about the teacher/student ratio - I'm talking about the overall student body. There should be a strict limit of how many kids a school can contain.

How about we hire and fie teachers based on their job performance, just like the rest of the work force.

 

[SagaLore]

How about we hire and fie teachers based on their job performance, just like the rest of the work force.

How do you track job performance for a teacher?

 

[Texashiker]

How do you track job performance for a teacher?

Let me rephrase my post, how about we hire and fire teachers without unions tying the hands of the tax payers.

Get the unions out of the schools, and I bet job performance will improve.