On The Lighter Side

While being hilariously funny this man hits the mark on just how lacking the high school experience is in real useable knowledge.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/senior_year
enjoy

How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm

Schools out for summer, schools out forever.
Great rock lyrics but think about it when you drive by your local school on your way to work. There's a building standing empty still costing us money every day and there's nothing happening. Let's make a Wal-Mart analogy, how long do you think the supergiant would last if they closed up for 3 months in the summer, how long would ANY business last that did this? How does a long summer vacation prepare our kids for the world of work unless they are planning on becoming teachers that is.
It is known by all that the USA ranks pretty low in math, science and reading in the world amongst other industrialized nations, it is also plain as day that we spend more on education than these same industrialized nations.
We are locked into an antiquated system of education that is in dire need of reform.
We need:
1.Teacher compensation based on performance (like the world of work)
2. Less administration at lower cost (like private schools)
3. Spread the school year out through the summer and increase the number of days to a minimum of 240 (like high achieving countries do) I have heard teachers say this many times in the faculty room, they are tired of so much instructional time being lost to review at the beginning of each school year. Make it happen.

The notion of children needing the summer off is rooted in faulty turn of the 19th century science and here we are locked in to this old thinking in the 21st they are neither frail nor needed on the farm, the schools are well ventilated and rooms without windows are air conditioned. It is time to step forward and stop the hand wringing and piling on of more worthless initiative's eat a little humble pie and look to the other industrialized nations models of success.

A closet Republican?

Why am I suddenly cheered that Walker has succeeded in retaining his position? His handling of collective bargaining was flawed to the Nth. degree but it seems that for the first time someone has stood up to organized labor and said ENOUGH, we're out of money, the party's over, it's time for your reality check
 I was overjoyed to hear that in Erie county Pa. the teachers union in the wake of the Walker announcement has suddenly agreed to pay in more to their benefits package even though their contract isn't due for two more years. The writing must be on the wall. We can only hope the trickle becomes a flood.

In case you haven't read The Washington Post

By Robert J. Samuelson, Published: May 27

The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it’s now doing more harm than good. It looms as the largest mistake in educational policy since World War II, even though higher education’s expansion also ranks as one of America’s great postwar triumphs.
Consider. In 1940, fewer than 5 percent of Americans had a college degree. Going to college was “a privilege reserved for the brightest or the most affluent” high-school graduates, wrote Diane Ravitch in her history of U.S. education, “The Troubled Crusade.” No more. At last count, roughly 40 percent of Americans had some sort of college degree: about 30 percent a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution; the rest associate degrees from community colleges.

Starting with the GI Bill in 1944, governments at all levels promoted college. From 1947 to 1980, enrollments jumped from 2.3 million to 12.1 million. In the 1940s, private colleges and universities accounted for about half. By the 1980s, state schools — offering heavily subsidized tuitions — represented nearly four-fifths. Aside from a democratic impulse, the surge reflected “the shift in the occupational structure to professional, technical, clerical and managerial work,” noted Ravitch. The economy demanded higher skills; college led to better-paying jobs.
College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education. If you didn’t go to college, you’d failed. Improving “access” — having more students go to college — drove public policy.
We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired.
For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. The easiest way to enroll and retain more students is to lower requirements. Even so, dropout rates are high; at four-year schools, fewer than 60 percent of freshmen graduate within six years. Many others aren’t learning much.
In a recent book, “Academically Adrift,” sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that 45 percent of college students hadn’t significantly improved their critical thinking and writing skills after two years; after four years, the proportion was still 36 percent. Their study was based on a test taken by 2,400 students at 24 schools requiring them to synthesize and evaluate a block of facts. The authors blame the poor results on lax academic standards. Surveyed, one-third of the same students said that they studied alone five or fewer hours a week; half said they had no course the prior semester requiring 20 pages of writing.
Still, most of these students finished college, though many are debt-ridden. Persistence counts. The larger — and overlooked — consequence of the college obsession is to undermine high schools. The primacy of the college-prep track marginalizes millions of students for whom it’s disconnected from “real life” and unrelated to their needs. School bores and bothers them. Teaching them is hard, because they’re not motivated. But they also make teaching the rest harder. Their disaffection and periodic disruptions drain teachers’ time and energy. The climate for learning is poisoned.That’s why college-for-all has been a major blunder. One size doesn’t fit all, as sociologist James Rosenbaum of Northwestern University has argued. The need is to motivate the unmotivated. One way is to forge closer ties between high school and jobs. Yet, vocational education is de-emphasized and disparaged. Apprenticeship programs combining classroom and on-the-job training — programs successful in Europe — are sparse. In 2008, about 480,000 workers were apprentices, or 0.3 percent of the U.S. labor force, reports economist Robert Lerman of American University. Though not for everyone, more apprenticeships could help some students.
The rap against employment-oriented schooling is that it traps the poor and minorities in low-paying, dead-end jobs. Actually, an unrealistic expectation of college often traps them into low-paying, dead-end jobs — or no job. Learning styles differ. “Apprenticeship in other countries does a better job of engaging students,” says Lerman. “We want to diversify the routes to rewarding careers.” Downplaying these programs denies some students the pride and self-confidence of mastering difficult technical skills, while also fostering labor shortages.

There’s much worrying these days that some countries (examples: South Korea, Norway, Japan) have higher college ­attendance rates, including post-secondary school technical training, than we do. This anxiety is misplaced. Most jobs — 69 percent in 2010, estimates the Labor Department — don’t require a post-high-school degree. They’re truck drivers, store clerks, some technicians. On paper, we’re turning out enough college graduates to meet our needs.
The real concern is the quality of graduates at all levels. The fixation on college-going, justified in the early postwar decades, stigmatizes those who don’t go to college and minimizes their needs for more vocational skills. It cheapens the value of a college degree and spawns the delusion that only the degree — not the skills and knowledge behind it — matters. We need to rethink.

The Clueless Teacher of the year

In Erie County, Pa. a teacher named Traci Bowman won out over all the other golden apple award winners in our N.W. Pa. region to be the top dog to be honored at a special event held at Edinboro University. In her interview on the local TV station Ms. Bowman made a real point of telling us all that she gave up her real dream of a lucrative career as a pro photographer to be a teacher and how wonderful it is when she sees her students some ten years down the line and they are making more money than she. During this brief TV interview money was the main thrust of her statement, not thank you or I'm so overwhelmed and proud etc. etc.
All I could say was WOW, what a turkey, even the reporter had no response and the camera was cut immediately.
 They gave her an award?
Is she truly clueless about the median income of Erie county residents Is she truly clueless about the median income of pro photographers. Talk about opening mouth and inserting foot.
FYI, The median household income in Erie Pa. is 32,000 and the median for the US is 39,000, that's Household income, a teacher's personal starting pay is above that, given that she is a fifth grade teacher and she says 10 years down the line her former students come to her and tell her all about how much money they are making as twenty somethings just barely out of college with a Bachelor's. Where do I go to sign up?

The school district should help her achieve her real goals.