Report: Students don’t know much about US history

“The history scores released today show that student performance is still too low,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement. “These results tell us that, as a country, we are failing to provide children with a high-quality, well-rounded education.” [emphasis is mine]

Education experts say a heavy focus on reading and math under the federal No Child Left Behind law in the last decade has led to lagging performance in other subjects such as history and science.

Why does this not surprise me?

Basically, Texas is embroiled in a bit of an argument about what topics and which prominent people should be included in the public K-12 social studies program. It’s the usual fight: the Left versus the Right. The Left generally wants to make sure that No One Is Excluded at the expense of their religion, race, creed, gender, politics, belief in marsupial afterlife or odd persistence in drinking caffeine-free diet sodas. If you honestly believe in it, whatever it is, they’ll find a way for it to be included in the national curriculum. The Right generally wants everything to be very Christian all the time. Except for Santa. Santa can suck it, as far as they’re concerned. I’m pretty sure you can find that in the Bible somewhere, written in code maybe. So sayeth the Lord and all that.  Or maybe I’m thinking of Nostradamus. Dan Brown? Jerry B. Jenkins? I dunno. Somewhere, at least.

So, it’s really not surprising that the two sides of the Texas school board can’t seem to find a middle-ground on this issue. Nothing new there. And I don’t even live in Texas, so why should I even care, right? And I wouldn’t really, except for this:

The curriculum it chooses will set the guideposts for teaching history and social studies to some 4.8 million K-12 students for 10 years. The standards will be used to develop state tests and by textbook publishers who develop material for the nation based on Texas, one of the largest markets. (emphasis is mine)

So, basically, most of the nation will end up with whatever Texas decides. And frankly, if I weren’t homeschooling already, I’d be watching this one Very Closely, and carefully considering my options. Because if you haven’t read it yet, you really need to read this article: A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong With Education by Tamim Ansary, and see the politics behind how American public school textbooks are written and published. For example:

If you’re creating a new textbook, therefore, you start by scrutinizing “Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills” (TEKS). This document is drawn up by a group of curriculum experts, teachers, and political insiders appointed by the 15 members of the Texas Board of Education, currently five Democrats and ten Republicans, about half of whom have a background in education. TEKS describes what Texas wants and what the entire nation will therefore get.

Texas is truly the tail that wags the dog. There is, however, a tail that wags this mighty tail. Every adoption state allows private citizens to review textbooks and raise objections. Publishers must respond to these objections at open hearings.

In the late ’60s, a Texas couple, Mel and Norma Gabler, figured out how to use their state’s adoption hearings to put pressure on textbook publishers. The Gablers had no academic credentials or teaching background, but they knew what they wanted taught — phonics, sexual abstinence, free enterprise, creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian values — and considered themselves in a battle against a “politically correct degradation of academics.”

Phonics sounds good. So does free enterprise. But the rest of it… not our cuppa, so to speak. And before you all freak out on me for bashing on the Texas fundies, here’s what California likes to do with their textbooks:

Concern in California is normally of the politically correct sort — objections, for example, to such perceived gaffes as using the word Indian instead of “Native American.” To make the list in California, books must be scrupulously stereotype free: No textbook can show African Americans playing sports, Asians using computers, or women taking care of children. Anyone who stays in textbook publishing long enough develops radar for what will and won’t get past the blanding process of both the conservative and liberal watchdogs.

It’s not so bad as the conservative push in Texas, but it’s still over the top for me. The idea of never showing women taking care of children doesn’t sit well with me. There’s such a thing as Too Politically Correct, if you ask me. They’re shooting themselves in the foot at the expense of the children they’re trying to teach. And the result is social paralysis and an uneducated American public.

It’s really an eye-opening experience, revisiting this article. The kind that makes me grateful for even the most difficult day around here, when we’re just slogging through the material in the middle of an endless cold-snap and the holiday break is over and we’re all grousing and grumbling at each other and waiting for spring. Because at least I’ve got the freedom to choose what we study and to present the material in a meaningful way.

Yeah, we homeschool. Thank God.

700 NYC Teachers Are Paid To Do Nothing

What I love most of all about this article is how it spins to sound as if every teacher in those little rubber rooms has been wrongfully accused.

Chances are, yes, some of them have been wrongfully accused. But then again, chances are, quite a lot of them have been rightly accused, too.

Seems to me, more and more, that the public education system really isn’t about teaching kids at all anymore.

If it ever was, that is.

…over the last decade families of all kinds have embraced the practice for widely varying reasons: no longer is home schooling exclusive to Christian fundamentalism and the countercultural Left. Along with growing acceptance of home schooling nationally has come increasing diversification of who home schools and of what home schooling actually means.

 It’s a bit long, and somewhat heavy on charts and stats, but well worth the time, if you’ve got it.

The article is essentially a review of a new book coming out written by a couple of professors at the University of Texas, Arlington, Ben Agger and Beth Ann Shelton. The book is titled, I Hate School: Why American Kids Are Turned Off Learning.

Choice quotes from the article include:

Our schools are failing because they are warehouses and work houses…. They verge on penal colonies where teachers are wardens and students are inmates.

And:

…in an ideal school, “grading and testing would be minimized, and teachers would not be cops and dictators. Schools would have fewer desks and more open space…. Homework would be minimized, as real teaching and dialogue filled the day.”

I’m thinking I might need to get a hold of this book and have a look. Of course, it may not tell me anything that homeschoolers haven’t already been yelling at the top of our lungs for years and years.

But, it’s nice to know that other nonhomeschoolers are finally getting there.

Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High

Apparently, there’s a record number of high school girls at this school expecting babies because they all made a pact with each other to strive to get pregnant and then raise their babies together. The town is heavily Catholic, and birth control is not advocated by the community, and two of the school officials ended up resigning in protest or resignation or perhaps just sheer mental exhaustion after trying to promote birth control to these teens and being told to stop it by the mayor and the town in general.

And here’s my favorite part: the reason all these girls are doing this, apparently, is because they’re all looking for unconditional love. Check out this quote:

The girls who made the pregnancy pact—some of whom, according to Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers—declined to be interviewed. So did their parents. But Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. “They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,” Ireland says. “I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.” 

(emphasis is mine)

Hello? They don’t feel loved unconditionally. So… they’re… having… babies…. It really says something about modern family dynamics, doesn’t it?

I know, I know, this isn’t really a homeschooling issue. But it’s not exactly doing much to SELL ME on the idea of actually EVER sending my daughters to high school, either.

Yeah. We homeschool. Unconditionally.

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=5919703

 A woman allegedly made numerous threats against the school where she teaches, including leaving threatening notes written to mimic a child’s handwriting and fashioning “fake” bombs and leaving them around the premises to be found by others, all because she’s angry that she didn’t get to teach fifth grade this year. Instead, she was told to teach fourth grade students. And she’s pissed off about it.

Because fifth grade is SO MUCH MORE EXCITING AND CHALLENGING THAN FOURTH GRADE???

Sorry, but I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m only teaching first/second grade stuff right now? And I am, of course, teaching in somewhat OPTIMAL conditions. I don’t have to answer to any administrators or school boards. I have to answer to RegularDad, I guess, but he’s pretty happy with our educational plan so far. He’s the farthest thing imaginable from an irate, dissatisfied parent. Sure, we have parent-teacher conferences. Just as often as we can. And they’re really, really FUN. If you get my drift.

Ahem…ANYWAY…

If this woman taught in conditions such as mine, perhaps she would have found a better way to handle her disappointment. And seriously, if a teacher doesn’t get her way, and starts doing things like this woman, what kind of message is she sending to her students? Like, what if they get angry with her because they didn’t get an extra 10 minutes of recess, and they threaten her and leave bombs in her desk? What recourse does she have? She is, after all, TEACHING them that this is the proper way to express one’s anger and disappointment.

This story is happening not far from where I live, by the way. It’s not the same district, but it’s damn close. And then, also close by, another district is on strike.

All’s I’m sayin’ is: Homeschooling ROCKS!

Basically, if grade schoolers in Seminole County, Florida get all A’s and B’s on their report cards, they can bring their report cards into the local McDonald’s for a free Happy Meal. They can also get free food if their report cards show a good attendance record. The report cards themselves are contained in these little cardboard jackets that have photographs of Ronald McDonald, Chicken McNuggets, and the Golden Arches logo printed on them. This marketing initiative is replacing a previous similar program hosted by Pizza Hut for the past 10 years. Except Pizza Hut wasn’t so blatant in their advertising.

It’s not just the fact that it’s junk food they’re offering. It’s more the fact that the commercialism of public schools has become so rampant. Here’s a quote:

The commercialization of educational culture, particularly in elementary schools, has long been a contentious issue. It has become more clamorous in the last decade as hard-pressed school districts seek to raise money for academic programs, sports and extracurricular activities without raising taxes.

Billboards advertising products and local merchants can be found on athletic fields outside schools and inside schools on gymnasium walls and scoreboards.

In some districts, ads appear on the sides of school buses. And some districts play radio programs, with commercials, over the buses’ public-address system.

The New York City Department of Education is considering a proposal to give all students free cellphones, which would use text messages — produced by an advertising agency, Droga5 — to promote achievement. The plan includes sponsorship opportunities for cellphone makers, service providers and other marketers.

At the end of the article, you get the proper responses from nutritionists, regarding the hideousness of this particular little situation: that it’s quite inappropriate to offer McDonald’s to children as an incentive, since we’re all trying so hard to teach the kids about good nutrition in the first place. Not to mention the fact that it’s probably not such a great idea to use FOOD as a reward for things. I mean, after all, isn’t that how we train dogs? Offer them treats? Do we really need to do that to children? Here, Junior! Read this sentence. Good boy! Here’s a french fry! Now go lie down.

I think my favorite part of the article was the little sidebar where you see “READER’S OPINIONS” and Elizabeth from Charlottesville says: “Anything that encourages kids to do well in school is OK in my book!” She was probably on her second Krispy Kreme of the morning as she said it, too.

Sigh.

Was there ever a better advertisement for homeschooling than this?

“IN PRAISE OF PRE-KINDERGARTEN”

Gave me a bit of a double-take. I actually gasped out loud. Then I sat down and read the article, and it doesn’t really say anything new. It’s the usual bullshit that people are tossing around at expensive luncheons these days, in support of the new drive towards state-regulated, mandatory public or private preschool.

I live in Pennsylvania where the mandatory schooling age is actually 8. People that send their kids to regular school don’t wait until 8, of course. They start ‘em at kindergarten just like everyone else. But for us homeschoolers, it’s kinda nice to have that high mandatory starting age, because that means we don’t have to report until our kids are 8 years old. And since Pennsylvania has one of the strictest homeschooling regulation processes in the nation, it’s kinda nice not to have to start jumping through all those hoops until the kids are older.

But for those devoted to profiting from mass public education, that high mandatory age is quite a detriment, especially when espousing the benefits of mandatory preschool. So, there’s this nearly constant battle these days to lower that age, so as to get a hold of the kids and start processing them through the system as early as possible. And the system is designed to do only two very special things: 1. classify your kid into a pre-approved social construct (preferably into some sort of special-education-required group that needs expensive medication and lots of IEPs) and 2. turn them into a docile workforce that wants only to spend their hard-earned minimal wage on useless crap from Wal-Mart.

Okay. Just don’t get me started on Wal-Mart. Seriously.

So, here’s a fascinating quote from the guy who gave the speech at the expensive luncheon:

At a time of global competition, workers rely on “brain over brawn” in using technology and pre-kindergarten is a proven way to ensure an educated workforce.

Now, let’s just stop and look at this sentence a second time. Read it again, and ask yourself, what is this guy actually trying to say? If I deconstruct it, I come up with this:

“Because we like cheap stuff, we have to farm out the making of cheap toys to places like China where it’s not against the law to exploit people, so American workers really can’t count on getting jobs that require physical strength or mindless repetitive factory assembly work, so we need to put all the kids in preschool and teach them all how to use computers so that they will be educated.”

That’s the best I can come up with. And I’m sure I’ve flubbed it somehow. But I just don’t think it’s possible to really make sense out of that sentence. Because the problem is that our system of mass public education was designed to output large quantities of people who could work in factories doing mindless repetitive assembly work, or people whose primary work was manual labor.

Starting the kids earlier in the same flawed system and preparing them for an industry that just doesn’t exist in this country anymore isn’t going to fix anything.

Sounds to me like this guy is a product of our public education system.

Doesn’t that just make you feel great?

The article discusses, at some length, the intensifying of bullying among girls at schools around the country for not having the “right” clothing. The right brands. The right fabrics. The right shoes. The right hairstyle and makeup. The right purse. The right everything.

Here’s a quote:

Teen and adolescent girls have long used fashion as a social weapon. In 1944, Eleanor Estes wrote “The Hundred Dresses,” a book about a Polish girl who is made fun of for wearing the same shabby dress to school each day. The film “Mean Girls” in 2004 focused on fashion-conscious cliques among high-school teens. But today, guidance counselors and psychologists say, fashion bullying is reaching a new level of intensity as more designers launch collections targeted at kids.

And:

In one study, more than one-third of middle-school students responded “yes” when asked whether they are bullied because of the clothes they wear. Susan M. Swearer, associate professor of school psychology at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, surveyed a total of more than 1,000 students at five Midwestern middle schools from 1999 to 2004, with about 56% of the sample female. While the prevalence of fashion bullies was greater in wealthy cities and towns, where more designer clothing is available, she found the problem is significant in poorer communities, too.

I went to middle and high school in a wealthy town. And the girls dressed accordingly. Those of us who didn’t dress accordingly paid the appropriate social price. This was (and still is) considered normal adolescent behavior.

I guess the new twist the article is reaching for is to lay the blame at the door of fashion designers and clothing manufacturers. But is that really new news? I don’t think so. I think that’s been going on for decades, ever since designer jeans and leg warmers hit the scene. And probably before that as well. It’s just one of the many ways to encourage more unnecessary spending on crap we don’t really NEED. Although, if you’re in public school, you kinda DO need this stuff, don’t you?

In the end, it’s just one more reason to homeschool. We will hopefully miss a great portion of that particular childhood competition. Oh, I’m sure we’ll have some battles over clothing, but hopefully, not quite as extreme as it would be if the girls were headed off to a place where their emotional well-being is completely dependent upon what the tag that’s scratching the back of their neck says.

Because, really, who has time for THAT?