Entries Tagged 'Education' ↓

The whole state just finished their Standardized Tests. If you’re a parent you know that the entire school year has been hijacked by making sure kids pass these tests. It’s legislation called No Child Left Behind and was the major education reformation of George II.

The test had a number of consequences — some good, some bad. The good part was that it created a national tracking system that allowed us to get some idea of who was learning what. Prior to No Child Left Behind schools and districts were using their own tracking system or no tracking system at all.

The bad part is that it took a lot of creativity out of the classroom, substituted rote memorization for actual learning and put a ton of pressure on school boards, principals, teachers, parents and students.

In other words, the Standardized Test became the central focus of education. Which robbed our kids of the experience of actual learning through creativity; substituted artificial learning for an organic, authentic education. It made kids conform to a “cookie cutter” education.

It also increased Title 1 participation, because if your kid diagnosed with autism, ADD, dyslexia or whatever their issue is, their test scores are counted, but they get special tutors, services and accommodations in order to ensure that their test scores improve. If you’re a parent, you want your kid to have the best education and performance possible, and if you’re on the faculty you NEED these kids to perform well. In other words, it is likely that the increased number of kids with a diagnosis is, in part, a result of Standardized Testing.

Another downside is that it really isn’t appropriate for schools and the public education system to bear the burden of making sure kids learn well when it is obvious that there are other factors at play. Time Magazine’s article Why It’s Time to Replace No Child Left Behind points out that there actually are children left behind and they are the same children that were being left behind before this supposed magical reform of America’s education. While middle-class and upper-class kids have improved their scores and do well, poor minority children still lag behind.

Part of this is the way we fund education in this country. If you live in a rich community there are dollars to spare for education through higher property taxes or at least property taxes on more expensive homes, which equates to more education money. Money buys better technology, safer classrooms and halls, better faculty, better and more extra-curricular activities, more educational resources — in other words, a far better education. If you live in a poor one — you’re screwed. Education isn’t equal in this country and it never will be unless we reform how we fund the education of our students. One solution is to distribute dollars equally through gambling or lotteries as Nevada and a few other states do. Another is to fund education entirely by the state, property taxes which fund education dollars go to the state school board, as opposed to the local one, and the state distribute funds equitably regardless of the income of certain neighborhoods and parts of town. For obvious reasons upper- to middle-class communities will likely oppose this, because hey, their kids’ get a great education.

But, money is not the major issue here, as New Jersey schools show quite clearly. New Jersey spends far more per student than average and they have far more than average failing schools and failing students.

Yes, yes, fire the sucky teachers, sucky administration, etc. You’ve heard it all before as the big solution to education’s problem. God bless the teachers who are willing to go into these failing schools, stick their feet into quick sand and fight the battle for these kids. Certainly, moving away from a failing school and students who don’t score well would be most prudent for their careers. Unless, of course you choose to believe that all teachers who enter these institutions couldn’t get a job elsewhere and don’t care at all about their students, only their retirement. I think that’s pretty far fetched.

What I don’t understand is why schools are being held accountable for the factors that have nothing to do with education at all: the culture of African Americans where the numbers of single mothers and absent fathers is staggering; the astronomical number of minority males who are in prison; the communities that are drug-infested nightmarish nests of violence; or the culture of certain communities whether from religious persuasion, cultural norms or just plain apathy that don’t value education at all. It seems absurd to me that we expect schools to overcome these obstacles, in fact, it’s absurd to assume that schools have any responsibility to change the consequences of these environments for these kids. It’s simply not their job.

For the most part, I haven’t had a serious problem with Standardized Testing. Probably because Ainsley performs well on them and I have no reason to believe that Zack won’t perform well too.

My problem this year was the way Standardized Testing is being delivered to students. Ainsley sobbed that she went over and over her writing essay and didn’t finish the last sentence. It was confounding to me.

I didn’t finish the last sentence, now I won’t get my candy bar and I won’t get a good score! 

You’re a better writer than most people in your class, how will they even know you planned to add one more sentence at the end? I’m sure your score will be above average. If not, it’s not a big deal. Everybody bombs a test now and then.

No, my teacher saw me not finish when she called time.

Your teacher isn’t grading the test. 

My grade is going to go down. 

This test doesn’t effect your grade at all! 

What? It’s practically my WHOLE grade. 

It’s NONE of your grade. They aren’t grading you with this test, they are grading your school, your teachers, your principal. If you don’t score high on the test then they take money away from your school. 

No it’s not. It’s a big part of our grade, the teachers said it was really, really important that we do our very best on the test. 

Yeah, because they need the money and they want to keep their jobs. Not because it effects your grade. 

Well, I don’t want my teacher to be fired either! 

People, my daughter didn’t believe me at all. My neighbor’s daughter didn’t believe her mother either. These are high-performing students who work hard and care about their grades and their performance on tests. The school bribed the children with candy bars of their choice and class parties if they showed up, finished the section and tried their mightiest to score as high as possible. They told, or at least implied, students that this test would be a major part of their grades. Good God, the emotional trauma this testing has inflicted on faculty, school boards, parents and children should be enough to motivate us to think of a better method.

As Americans we’re supposed to be innovative. This isn’t innovative at all, it reduces a real education to a factory line. We’re not going to be more effective in the global marketplace with this stunted thinking. Genius is born of creativity and the guts to make million mistakes before success. Intelligence is born of exploration. Things do not not get invented by the people who have excellent scores on Standardized Tests, things are invented and discovered by curious people who daydream a lot. The people who ask, “what if this is possible?”

Surely, we can think of something more . . . creative. Surely, we can dream a bigger dream for our kids, for our futures.

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Some of our family and friends have “disabilities.” Of course, yours do too. My kids ask questions about their friends’ disabilities. Sometimes adults use letters — ADD, ADHD, OCD — to describe these disabilities, other times they use words that mean nothing to kids like Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Mental Retardation, Downs Syndrome, Aspergers, Dyslexia, Bi-polar, depression. Usually people talk about these different abilities so negatively. I find this type of thinking limited. I hate that we attach the word “disorder” or “syndrome” to God’s gifts. Has anyone ever met a “normal” person? Does anyone really want to be one?

My kids want to know things like what does the name of these “disorders” mean, what does it mean the kid or adult can and can’t do, what will it mean for their future, will they be okay, should they be pitied, do they need help or special treatment?

I’m not an advocate for any special group, I’m not an educator for any particular disorder, I’m not a specialist on any of these disorders. I’m a parent who wants to tell my kids the truth as I know it, answer their questions and make sure they leave the conversation with respect for the way God chose to make different kinds of people, instead of doing the boring thing and making us all think the same and act the same. I don’t take special care to answer my kids with “political correctness” so if you’re offended, please choose not to take it personally.

Attention Deficit Disorder — ADD and ADHD is the inability to focus or sit still, or at least that’s what the public school system wants you to think. These people are highly creative, have a lot of ideas and find it difficult to focus on one thing. This sometimes makes it hard for them to learn what their teachers want them to learn in school. It makes it hard for them to sit still and be quiet in class, so sometimes they have to take medicine to help them. But, when they grow up, these people will be fantastic salespeople, communicators, marketers, artists and entrepreneurs. They’ll have lots of brilliant ideas and if they can find the right people to implement them before they lose interest, they’ll probably make lots of money.

Autism and Aspergers — These people are born with an ability to think differently than you or I. They have linear engineering minds. If ADD or ADHD is the inability to focus, Autism and Aspergers is the ability to hyper-focus or focus so intently that you almost can’t learn anything else or connect with the people around you. They get fixated on certain things to the point of obsession. Maybe the way things are made or the way things are built. In the school system and society, people interpret this as odd and peculiar. They miss social cues and don’t have a lot of friends, they find it difficult to have deep emotions or make intimate connections with loved ones. But, when they grow up, or even while they are teenagers or older children, they are capable of great leaps of discovery. They might find the gene that cures cancer or make the next leap in technology or computers. They become so focused on one thing to the exclusion of everything else that they are bound to discover or invent something new about it or expand it in some way. They are geniuses.

Downs Syndrome and Mentally Retarded —  These people have brains that don’t develop at what is considered a normal rate. They may have suffered an injury or they may have been born this way. These people are pure and innocent. They connect intimately and they came to teach us how to be vulnerable and love purely.  They find it easy to connect to the Now and stay present and focus on the important things in life. When Jesus said “be like the little children,” these are the people you want to look at to see what he meant. Pure. Innocent. Present. Connected. Open. Vulnerable.

Bi-polar and Depression — These people are highly creative and intuitive. They go up and down in their emotions. Some people stay pretty level all their lives. They don’t have really high highs, they don’t know how great that is — but they don’t know what serious lows are like either. People with “bi-polar disorder” are often actors, artists, musicians, writers, public speakers — extremely creative people who rely on bursts of inspiration to do their work. During times when they don’t have burst of inspiration they experience lows that can be very dark, this is depression. It’s very hard for them because they know how great real ecstasy can be. They are usually brilliantly creative and extraordinarily passionate and often end up famous.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder — These people enjoy order. They like for people to take care of their business because, hey they take care of theirs. They can get obsessive about it. They like to clean. They can get freaked out about uncleanliness. They can be control freaks. These people will grow up and be Martha Stewart or that Walsh guy who who helps the Hoarders get rid of their shit and clear out their psyches. They’ll be IKEA designers, it will be awesome. When ADD and OCD people get married there could be balance or massive conflict – you just never know.

Of course I didn’t list every diagnosis or different ways of being in the world. Just the ones that have come up lately with my kids as they have touched our lives with our friends and family.

I would love if you left comments describing your perspective of other “disorders” and “diagnosis” that have touched your lives and how you talk to your kids about them.

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Time Magazine has an article about the money sucking, drastically bad investment that many college degrees are becoming in this country and it’s making me rethink my attitude about my kids getting a college education.

Our parental attitude is this: GET A COLLEGE DEGREE!!!!!

Debt Burden

My student loans are our biggest debt burden. I owe about $60,000, having originally borrowed $15,000. I made a crucial mistake — having fielded repeated, harassing calls from solicitors insisting I consolidate my student loans, I accidentally consolidated one measly $1,000 unsubsidized loan with my subsidized loans, causing them ALL to be unsubsidized at a 9.5 percent interest rate, until they finally put a cap on interest at eight percent (after the scoundrels had already racked up a good $30,000 off me) — which has cost me about $40,000 in interest over the last 15 years. It’s the single, most crucial, dumbest financial mistake of my entire life. Once again, I have to thank College Algebra for being utterly useless and wonder why they don’t require Practical Life Math in universities.

Yet, Time’s article I Owe U made me feel like a lucky freakin’ genius!

Students will take out $1 trillion in debt this year. ONE TRILLION DOLLARS! And many of these college graduates can’t get jobs. Or they are resorting to jobs in the service and hospitality industry that they could have gotten without a college degree.

The article, which obviously cited extreme cases that make for good stories, but still, real stories, mentions liberal arts majors graduating with debts of $125,000. It talks about kids who were awarded full-ride scholarships to state schools and turning them down because they got into Ivy League brand name schools, even though they were out $55,000 a year that they didn’t have and then majoring in philosophy or poetry — it reminds me of high school kids who work at McDonalds buying Gucci purses and Fendi Sunglasses. It sites one dude who got a masters degree in multi-media design for a whopping $120,000 (by the way a friend of mine has his own multi-media design shop, makes a decent living of $60,000 a year and doesn’t even have a degree, thus no college debt at all). It sites bullsh!t degrees like “specialized studies” (try selling that on a resume) for $67,000, history degrees for $50,000, and a “global studies candidate” who is about to spend $112,000 for that degree (don’t do it dude — myself, husband and brother essentially all got this degree 15 years ago and we’re all making under $70,000 after 15 years of hard work and we’re scraping by with no where near this debt burden.)

Predatory Lending & Another Bubble

What possesses a bank to loan a POETRY MAJOR $125,000? 

The same thing that possessed that same bank to loan a dental assistant and a computer technician $500,000 on a home worth $200,000.

They knew they would make more money on the penalties and interest than they ever would on a good loan that could be paid back by a solid candidate. They got greedy. They lost their moral compass. They got predatory. They capitalized on the Mythology of College being the Golden Ticket to the American Dream.

And many economists are predicting another bubble blowing up on our already struggling, shaky economy — how can it not? We have an entire generation of Liberal Arts Majors with what amounts to massive mortgages without homes they can live in or sell. Nor, because of bank lobbies and legislation, can a person ever get out from under a student loan. They are not allowed to be written off in a bankruptcy, unlike a home, which you can walk away from and cut your losses. And this is what they have to bring into their adult lives — into marriages and families, into first jobs with starting salaries. If they are lucky enough to score one, that is.

This is one major issue of the Occupy WallStreet Movement. It’s a legitimate question. It’s a legitimate issue. It’s a protest-worthy complaint.

Mythology of College being the Golden Ticket to American Dream

Maybe it’s time to reexamine the Mythology of a College Degree being the Golden Ticket to the American Dream. It used to be that college was the Golden Ticket and if you got good grades, got into a decent, reputable school and worked hard you were essentially guaranteed a good job and a career path in an upwardly mobile direction. Or at least we believed this to be true.

But, even in my generation this hasn’t turned out to be particularly true. As I’ve approached 40 and looked around, I’ve noticed that my peers without college degrees that are in sales, insurance and for a long time real estate and construction are doing far better than I with my gig as a journalist in a profession struggling to hang onto itself in the face of the digital revolution. My friends who have two-year trade degrees in medical fields are making far more money, with far more job security than I am. My friends who work in industrial fields, electricians, auto mechanics, specialized laborers, tend to get laid off more frequently (which they treat as extended vacations on workman’s compensation), but when they work they make quite a bit more money.

Then we have the reality that President Obama is challenging America to produce more college graduates. But, we don’t have enough jobs, as the Time article points out, for the college graduates we currently have. The article then states that what we’re really flooded with is a bunch of unemployable Liberal Arts majors and we’re sorely lacking in Science, Technology, Information and Medical graduates and we’re forced to hire immigrants or outsource these jobs. We’re not being competitive in the right fields.

The question then becomes, why is the US Government continuing to back Liberal Arts Degrees? Evidently, having a college degree itself is a meaningless debt burden. Having a practical degree with an actual career plan and a real job available at graduation is what’s going to make a student a reasonable candidate to pay back student loans. Why is the Federal Government backing loans it can’t reasonably expect students to be able to pay back?

Reduction in Interest Rates Could Help

The Federal Housing Finance Agency  recently announced that it will allow underwater homeowners to refinance their homes, allowing them to reduce their interest rates from over 6 percent to around 4.1 percent. This could put up to $200 a month back in their pockets, which one hopes will stimulate the economy. (There is a fair bit of skepticism about this, though the idea is a good one and I intend to apply.)

The Obama Administration recently signed a student loan reform bill as part of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which is supposed to help students of the future avoid some of the problems current and former students are making. But it’s not retroactive and won’t help students who have already taken out a loan, are already in repayment or are delinquent on their loans. This does nothing to help the millions of students who are now walking into their lives burdened with enormous debt, caused in part, by the government giving cart blanche access to students and subsidizing banks while they issue predatory loans to naive teenagers and young adults with no real world experience to enable them to fend of or resist these loan sharks.

The U.S government should seriously consider enacting an interest rate reduction for current loan holders, as they are in the mortgage situation. Student loans are under much stricter regulation than mortgages and can never be written off in a bankruptcy. An entire generation of college graduates are burdened by enormous debt, the likes of which this country has never seen. I can’t see how they’ll ever be able to pay it off and become upwardly mobile. And if student loans really are another economic bubble that’s about to burst, well, one has to wonder just now much our stumbling economy can bare at the moment.

A reduction in interest is the least we can do for perpetuating the myth that college was a sure thing that would ensure their futures. A dream that is quickly turning into a pretty fairytale or an ugly farce.

Tracee Sioux is a freelance writer, the creator of The Girl Revolution and author of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories. Love letters from editors and clients can be found on her Linked In page, like her on on Facebook and follow her onTwitter. 

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With Ainsley testing above her grade level, I’ve been encouraging (insisting and pressuring) her to read above her grade, so that she continues to improve and doesn’t get lazy.

So, I printed a sixth-grade Accelerated Reading list and we took it to the library. Dracula by Bram Stoker was on the list. I was surprised, because it was required reading when I was in College English, but I loved the book so we checked it out. But, on the way home, I started remembering that there was a sexually-violent undertone to the book that I don’t think is appropriate for a 10-year-old.

I asked around on Facebook . . . How do you encourage your kids to read above their grade level without risking them reading above their maturity level? It’s a conundrum that a lot of families face, it turns out.

Lori Day, an Educational Consultant in Massachusetts, and one of my Facebook Friends wrote back and reported that her Mother-Daughter Book Club had faced the same problem and they had come up with a brilliant list of books that were age appropriate for third- through eight-Grade girls with strong female protagonists. She was kind enough to share her list and the story of her Mother-Daughter Book Club.

Mother-Daughter Book Clubs Enrich Reading and Relationships

Thanks Lori! This is the list Ainsley and I will be taking to the library until we’ve exhausted it.

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I have lowered the price on Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories. 

My intention with this book is to help parents understand the way the culture sets girls up for victimization, coercion and manipulation by distorting what love is. Some of the messages are subtle and some are overt.

My intention is for people to read the book. Therefore, I’ve lowered the price to $3.50 plus shipping and handling. Which covers the cost of the book only.

Simply click here and order NOW.

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