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State of Secondary Education
Soon after we arrived in D.C., I was still waiting to waive into the D.C. Bar and mostly unemployed while shutting down my practice in KY. My wife started hinting that I better get a job, so I found a listing in the education section on craigslist. It said that some high school was looking for a part-time algebra teacher. I sent my resume, had an interview with the headhunter at a Starbucks, had an interview with the assistant principal at the school, and the next week I was teaching three algebra classes at a charter school on the bad side of the Anacostia River in D.C.
It turned out the job was more full time than part time, was very demanding, and not very fulfilling. My classroom smelled of smoke because a kid set fire to the building the year before. One time I told the assistant principal that a student was absent from my class, and he said, "Oh yeah - he was stabbed this morning." Most of the kids were just this side of illiterate. For instance, one girl wouldn't believe and couldn't understand that 1-(-1) is 2. She "proved" that it is 0 by keying it into her calculator. Of course, she keyed it in wrong, but she couldn't be persuaded that she was doing anything wrong. She was a sophomore in Algebra II. I had more than 1 kid in Algebra I that didn't know multiplication tables past 5. That's not too bad in itself and can be remediated, but the kids had absolutely no interest in learning. Now when I say this, I don't mean they were indifferent. I mean they ran into the classroom fighting and screaming with the security guards and that I had to regularly call security guards into the room - not to simply make the kids be quiet, but to stop fights that actually started in class during lecture. If things got really bad, there was a panic button that automatically put you on the intercom with the front office. It didn't work. If there was ever a time when they ran out of steam and I could actually begin lecture, they started screaming nonsense like "LALALALA" just to drown me out. So they were not just indifferent to learning. They were actively antagonistic.
While I was there, I was often threatened with some type of physical violence. One student threatened a teacher with death. Another student pushed a teacher to the ground and kicked him. We had a big staff meeting afterwards. It turned out that the teacher had been trying to calm down students that had been watching cops outside arresting some guy. One student in particular was getting pretty rowdy and the teacher put his hand on the student's shoulder to calm him down. That's when the student pushed him to the ground and kicked him. The administration told us that the teacher made a big mistake in touching the student and that he was lucky he didn't get fired.
So not a lot of learning went on in that school. I was very happy to get out of there at the end of the semester and get into document review. Document review is basically glorified paralegal work, but it pays better and no one tells me they're gonna mug me for my shoes.
I notice some people here are high school age or not very much older. Are your schools as bad? What about the people outside the U.S.? Do you think our schools are as good as foreign schools our that our kids can compete with foreign kids? I can tell you for a fact that the kids at the high school where I taught were pretty much all lost causes.
It turned out the job was more full time than part time, was very demanding, and not very fulfilling. My classroom smelled of smoke because a kid set fire to the building the year before. One time I told the assistant principal that a student was absent from my class, and he said, "Oh yeah - he was stabbed this morning." Most of the kids were just this side of illiterate. For instance, one girl wouldn't believe and couldn't understand that 1-(-1) is 2. She "proved" that it is 0 by keying it into her calculator. Of course, she keyed it in wrong, but she couldn't be persuaded that she was doing anything wrong. She was a sophomore in Algebra II. I had more than 1 kid in Algebra I that didn't know multiplication tables past 5. That's not too bad in itself and can be remediated, but the kids had absolutely no interest in learning. Now when I say this, I don't mean they were indifferent. I mean they ran into the classroom fighting and screaming with the security guards and that I had to regularly call security guards into the room - not to simply make the kids be quiet, but to stop fights that actually started in class during lecture. If things got really bad, there was a panic button that automatically put you on the intercom with the front office. It didn't work. If there was ever a time when they ran out of steam and I could actually begin lecture, they started screaming nonsense like "LALALALA" just to drown me out. So they were not just indifferent to learning. They were actively antagonistic.
While I was there, I was often threatened with some type of physical violence. One student threatened a teacher with death. Another student pushed a teacher to the ground and kicked him. We had a big staff meeting afterwards. It turned out that the teacher had been trying to calm down students that had been watching cops outside arresting some guy. One student in particular was getting pretty rowdy and the teacher put his hand on the student's shoulder to calm him down. That's when the student pushed him to the ground and kicked him. The administration told us that the teacher made a big mistake in touching the student and that he was lucky he didn't get fired.
So not a lot of learning went on in that school. I was very happy to get out of there at the end of the semester and get into document review. Document review is basically glorified paralegal work, but it pays better and no one tells me they're gonna mug me for my shoes.
I notice some people here are high school age or not very much older. Are your schools as bad? What about the people outside the U.S.? Do you think our schools are as good as foreign schools our that our kids can compete with foreign kids? I can tell you for a fact that the kids at the high school where I taught were pretty much all lost causes.
Comments
At the last day on my last year of auto tech on that school my instructor Mr. Prakash gave us a "indoor school trip" basically my section raised enough money for a barbaque, we took or playstation 2, playstation one games, nintendo 64 games. It was a truly great day.
On my final year I moved to Prince William County, Manassas City. I asked for the classes that I wanted to take from my previous school. And all of them conflicted, it was horrible. The school was small and there was very little freedom compared to the other one. I mean on the other school , people were able to go outside and eat even on the parking lot or just go to the next class and take your food there so you can eat there, or you can take it to the library.
By the way I went to Lake Braddock High School and then to Osbourn High School
Students have to buy their own books, and students are not allowed to use calculators until 4th year. Let me see, math on first year, I took algebra, the second year more algebra, third year geometry, fourth year trigonometry, fifth year was calculus (that is what my friends told me since i never finished school in my country). And the story is very similar for the rest of the subjects. If you fail a class, you have to re-take it during summer, you are only allowed to take up to 2 classes, if you failed more you repeat the year.
Students after high school, only need to take a specific test for a specific university. It can very stressful, that is why most students take a whole year of to study on a pre-university school. There are some universities that have also school, and if you do good enough on them you will automatically enter to that university. Also, there are schools where the first student in each year can enter to any university that he wants.
Extracurricular activities are not very important for high schools unless those high schools are like the ones from "Ouran high school host club" believe me we do have some of those . "THE SHAME"
No one won the iPod at the end of the semester because no one qualified.
When I was a high school student in KY, we had a chapter of the Future Farmers of America. At my D.C. school, they could've had a Future Felons of America, but none of the kids would have been able to sit through a meeting. A junior at the school was involved in a series of local burglaries.
So I deperately hope that these kids do not represent the norm, because, if they do, we're in trouble.
Starting in 1954, the whole Brown v. Board of Education really got things rolling here in the Queen city. Because we were on the edge of the Deep South, de jur segregation was pretty much a policy in our system, as a remnant of the “separate but equal†days and Jim Crowe. However, significant advances were made and segregation, legally, was eliminated in our school systems, it was apparent that there were still major racial inadequacies (not to mention academic) in our school system. In 1972, Swann v. CMS (Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools) legitimized busing to solve the problems of segregation. Students all over the county were given opportunity to attend whichever school they wanted. This was an ideal solution to a very complicated matter. Granted, I do not have very much knowledge of what happened between then and the ~25 years until I began studying in the system, however, our county is now seeing significant reverberation because of it.
In 1992, the magnet program was offered here in Charlotte. This program, taking much from the International Baccalaureate (IB) gave many students of different backgrounds a chance to begin schooling in a track that would take them into advanced courses in high school. I was the first of my family to be enrolled in it, and I was taken to a very, very fortunate school called Barringer Academic Center. (The irony of this institution was that it was placed in the less affluent west-side of our city, which had a student population that somewhat contrasted the neighborhood, hence why this is such a tricky problem to solve). The idea was that I would continue through this program, to the MYIB (Middle year program) in middle school, and then follow through to full-fledged IB in high school. This tactic was very effective at giving students opportunities and challenges they otherwise would not find in standard education.
However, the problem arose when busing became too complicated, as students were reinforcing de facto segregation through a “white-flight.†I cannot recall when it was in the 1990s, but there came a time when the system really shined away from the whole busing students around and about just to even things out. Pretty much what has happened is we now have a few predominately white schools that exceed less fortunate ones in test scores, funding, etc.
There also arose a significant issue with school zoning. Our city is pocked full of contrasting economic incomes. We have very affluent neighborhoods that are placed hand in hand with lower-income communities (This all reflects back to the past century, where the servants of the more prominent families would live down the lane in the servant communities). In contemporary terms, this causes significant burdens on schools that have large numbers of minorities and a small amount of more affluent students that are all zoned within the same designated area. Giving the students chances to apply to get out (to use so blunt a term) of these districts cause many schools to lose funding and support from families in the very same neighborhood that send their kids elsewhere.
***Edit, I have to add this caveat***
Despite there being 'Homeschools' now, which means you are assigned to whatever school is in your district, programs such as magnets, IB and such allow students to attend different schools, entirely by passing this requirement. Statististically, the IB program here is not largely composed of minorities Legally, however, the busing is not provided.
*** ***
Because of this problem, this year we are seeing huge issues with some of our formerly accomplished schools. West Charlotte once hailed as an achievement of both integration and academic accomplishment (I believe they were the first school in the system to experiment with IB) is now threatened with being closed. Almost the entire white population has left the school and daily our local newspaper reports on the problems the system is having with trying to ameliorate the situation. Many teachers are being offered incentives and bonuses to come into these struggling schools to solve the problems.
At the very same time that all this racial tension is happening, Charlotte is among the top 10 fastest growing cities (I apologize, I cannot find the article, and it’s a nightmare behind our school’s firewall) which causes many students to attend suburban schools. This creates strain on the school system to allocate funding proportionally, and fast enough, to compensate for the struggling urban schools and the crowded suburban schools. Due to so many budget concerns, many citizens in the north part of our county, with a 3,000 student school North Mecklenburg, wish to secede (ba dun’ tss) from the system so that their money is not dis-proportionally financing the southern schools and infrastructure.
Now, coupling the problematic sentiments of the northern part of the county, with the deeply rooted racial inequalities, with a nightmare of a budget concern, I think we can begin to paint a picture of the situation the system is in.
Finally, I must apologize for the inconsistency of this essay, if I had a few more minutes I’d proof it, but I only have a few minutes until the bell.
Sources:
This has some decent information:
CMS' website
Because we cannot access wikipedia here at school, I had to use the Google cache. My reference terms were:
Swann v. CMS
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
De jur/De facto
As for the in-class details, I'll have to get back to you. But in a nutshell, it is all based on what level of courses you take. Here we have Standard, Honors, IB/AP. The Honors courses are really just fluffy courses designed to help out the stressed out IB/AP kids, so you can imagine what Standard means.
Try to avoid the neocon plan to send you to Iraq. And Iran. And Syria. In fact, maybe you should just move to Sealand. Sealand is looking better and better all the time.
Honestly, if a student punched a teacher in any school I have been at for any reason, the school wouldn't bat an eye if the teacher took "defensive action"(restrain them by whatever means are most appropriate), before dragging him into the office or having security do the honors. That kid would then be expelled, no second chance.
Charter schools get money based on the number of children they take in, hence their reluctance to expel students. Charter schools also typically have a contract with the state or local governmrnt that lay out certain performance standards that the school must lice up to. IF the school has hardly any, or very low standards, you can get the situation like the one you described. A school like that in New York would likely loose their contract and be closed. I'm surprised that VA would make such a mistake.
Although this fellow Peter Gorman seems to be pretty cool (about a month ago he handled a situation very well: Some concerned mother got this book, "And Tango Makes Three" (Yes, that was my city =/) nearly banned from the school libraries, even by bypassing the review process, simply because its about two male penguins raising a small baby penguin. Anyways, Gorman caught wind of this and publicly announced, "We screwed up on this one." The next day the book was dropped from any consideration to be banned). But we'll see how this swift political move turns out. The hilarious thing is, he just straight up announced it yesterday without telling anyone in the system about it. I got an automated phone call around 8 o'clock that pretty much informed anyone currently enrolled or employed in the county educational system of the changes.
I do not want the school pushing an agenda on my kid.
Teaching how a baby is created is fine.
Teaching that someone can have two mommies and it is fine is an agenda.
Teaching about the big bang and evolution is science.
Teaching creationism is an agenda.
Remember, the kids in the classroom are a captive audience and you are an authority figure. Kids don't like to be seen as being different in school. Some of the high schoolers on this very forum have recently said as much.
I don't want the school system to pass on ANY values, it's the parents job to pass on those values.
If you use a history class to push an agenda "Look what a swell guy GWB is" then no, it should not be done. If you use it to pass on facts and information, "Bush did this while president" then I am fine with it.
What is a "civics" class?
The values of hard work, study and citizenship should be taught by the parents.
I can't believe I'm so old that people don't remember "civics".
BUT: You "don't want the school system to pass on ANY values". Anyone else agree?
Self-esteem isn't a value. It's a psychological and emotional state. Sportsmanship, however, is a value that isn't in dispute. There are many values that aren't: Honesty, perseverance, respect, etc.
But there is a different subset of values that arise from belief structures. These are often in dispute. Schools, I think, should challenge kids to think about controversial issues: Human life (i.e. the factors that comprise opinions on abortion/euthanasia), prejudice against sexual orientations, Republican vs. Democrat (political values), etc. Schools should not push politically-charged values that are based on belief structures.
Go ahead, pick it apart. Grrr. I kept revising and revising, and I'm not sure it came out how I wanted it to.