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Conservative War on Education

Go said:
They re-worked the curriculum to put our Nation's history is largely negative light, glossing over the positives and focusing more on the negative aspects of America's founding.

There's plenty of articles w/ a simple google search "AP US History changes"
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Unfortunately there are too many idiots who share your thoughts involved in our education system.

What you advocate (a white washing of history to only highlight American exceptionalism) is something right out of the communist propaganda play book, and we all know you wouldn't want that.
 
TownieDeac said:
My high school was still using books printed during the Cold War. When they showed the "two types of global economies" in a chart, there was the free market economy on one side with a smiling Uncle Sam holding a moneybag, and on the other side, the command economy, a yellow star with red eyes and fangs. Literally.

The textbook inculcation of American children has been propagandist for over a century. It has taken a "leftist turn" to include Japanese internment, to change the concept that maybe Christopher Columbus wasn't a perfect heroic symbol, that maybe even our founding fathers owned slaves.

The honest reckoning with American history is important.

Don't worry, kids are still made to recite the pledge of allegiance.
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I have no problem with any of this. So far I only have 2 complaints with my kids' experience with the eduration system.

1) For some reason my 12 year old's teachers refuse to talk about Pearl Harbor on December 7th every year. Minor complaint, but annoying to me that we don't spend any time recognizing this event.

2) the common core math standards are complete horseshit. For starters the standards aren't hard enough. And second, the one size fits all approach doesn't give teachers any flexibility to adapt to the needs of their students. I have 2 students who are highly gifted in math who are bored out of their minds with their math lessons because they've far outpaced the standards being taught.
 
Liquid Karma said:
Unfortunately there are too many idiots who share your thoughts involved in our education system.

What you advocate (a white washing of history to only highlight American exceptionalism) is something right out of the communist propaganda play book, and we all know you wouldn't want that.
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I'm not advocating Mr. Jump to Conclusions Mat.

I do not support an entirely AMERICA IS BAD curriculum. There's a healthy medium between talking about the negatives and highlighting the positives.

I mean the new curriculum cuts out MLK and Ben Franklin. Yeah, lets not mention these two guys...can't we put everything on the table?
 
Common Core, NCLB, and so many other top down school reform methodologies that have failed or succeeded in mediocrity just cement my position that school reform needs to take place from the bottom up. Something nobody really talks about when they talk about school reform failure is when it happens at the individual school level, it's often because of teachers who just don't want to make it work. They know what works and what doesn't with their students, and bureaucrats setting education policy on a macro scale isn't part of what works. I think decentralization is the most commonly successful concept behind turning failing schools into great schools. Let teachers decide on curricula and lesson plans that work with their students, decide policy at the school-wide level instead of the county or statewide level, and leave the teachers the fuck alone. Of course, standards are necessary. Public school teachers shouldn't be teaching creation alongside evolution in the classroom. Test scores, as vile as they are as an indicator of success, are still probably the best measuring stick we have for the future success of kids, but the core competencies that underlie them (critical thinking, reading comprehension, decision making, analytical thinking, memory) don't need to be tied to "teaching to the test" in order to get it right.

We need to simultaneously pay teachers more, not be afraid to fire bad teachers, and decentralize as much as we can.

And we also need to stop shying away from making what we teach our kids more "liberal" if that means acknowledging the horrors of our country in the past. Lionizing and infantilizing American history leads to fucking millennial dipshits who think they're special not only because they get stickers for behaving or trophies for participating, but just because they were born in America in a luxurious time. Recognizing how we got to today in America is really important. We have a ton to be proud of in America, namely our incredible founding documents, our standing up against tyranny, and our diversity. But we also need to stop ignoring and denying that we were and to some extent still are the same colonial fuckwads that we came from.
 
I like that last paragraph Townie.

Basically, hey we did some really cool stuff but lets not start celebrating because we also did some horrendous shit. I just don't think it hurts to have a 16 year old leave Junior year thinking America is a inherently good place or at least means well but we've got to learn from our past/current sins.
 
agree that individual schools and teachers should be empowered, but as they are now we've got kids at different schools with completely different curricula. There's got to be some kind of standard.
 
Go said:
I'm not advocating Mr. Jump to Conclusions Mat.

I do not support an entirely AMERICA IS BAD curriculum. There's a healthy medium between talking about the negatives and highlighting the positives.

I mean the new curriculum cuts out MLK and Ben Franklin. Yeah, lets not mention these two guys...can't we put everything on the table?
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This simply doesn't exist. You're tilting at windmills.

And I fail to see how cutting out MLK is a "liberal" position. The right wing demonization of MLK as a communist adulterer is well established at this point in time.
 
Sounds like Go would fit in perfectly in North Korea.
 
TownieDeac said:
Common Core, NCLB, and so many other top down school reform methodologies that have failed or succeeded in mediocrity just cement my position that school reform needs to take place from the bottom up. Something nobody really talks about when they talk about school reform failure is when it happens at the individual school level, it's often because of teachers who just don't want to make it work. They know what works and what doesn't with their students, and bureaucrats setting education policy on a macro scale isn't part of what works. I think decentralization is the most commonly successful concept behind turning failing schools into great schools. Let teachers decide on curricula and lesson plans that work with their students, decide policy at the school-wide level instead of the county or statewide level, and leave the teachers the fuck alone. Of course, standards are necessary. Public school teachers shouldn't be teaching creation alongside evolution in the classroom. Test scores, as vile as they are as an indicator of success, are still probably the best measuring stick we have for the future success of kids, but the core competencies that underlie them (critical thinking, reading comprehension, decision making, analytical thinking, memory) don't need to be tied to "teaching to the test" in order to get it right.
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So let the teachers implement the cirricula that they think works, so long as you agree with it? I believe in evolution as much as anybody, but some people apparently don't. If your position is to let teachers have freedom, then you need to give them full freedom. Regardless, I don't see decentralization coming to pass any time soon. The rest of our society is moving in the exact opposite direction as we strive for Obama's lowest common denominator utopia (centralized health insurance requirements, centralized interstate licensing requirements, centralized ISP requirements, national marriage standards, etc.), and you think schools would now become decentralized? No way in hell.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
So let the teachers implement the cirricula that they think works, so long as you agree with it? I believe in evolution as much as anybody, but some people apparently don't. If your position is to let teachers have freedom, then you need to give them full freedom. Regardless, I don't see decentralization coming to pass any time soon. The rest of our society is moving in the exact opposite direction as we strive for Obama's lowest common denominator utopia (centralized health insurance requirements, centralized interstate licensing requirements, centralized ISP requirements, national marriage standards, etc.), and you think schools would now become decentralized? No way in hell.
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I mean freedom in method, not in fucking propaganda.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
When talking about educating kids, what's the difference?
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I mean method of pedagogy, not subject matter. You really don't understand the difference?

I'm not talking about which textbooks to teach from. I basically think that we should almost entirely eliminate textbooks from primary education. I'm talking about how you teach, moving away from "turn to page X in book y and let's look at problem z" and towards consensus building, Socratic method, discussion forum. Problem-based learning can also work outside of the repetitive and boring ways that they're forced to be done when you're teaching to a test. Ultimately, when teachers are allowed to come up with inventive ways to teach kids themselves, they often do a really, really good job of it. When they're forced to go through the motions, they aren't into it and neither are the kids.

Not one word of that paragraph has to do with the subject matter being taught.
 
that's the problem, though. people think Common Core is a top-down method directive when that is a small component. it's not "you must teach our kids this way", it's "these are the things that are important and all US kids should know how to do".

obviously, there's a serious debate to be had about the content. everyone flipping the fuck out b/c math-procedures are taught differently (side by side with the other method, btw) is just fucking dumb.
 
ImTheCaptain said:
that's the problem, though. people think Common Core is a top-down method directive when that is a small component. it's not "you must teach our kids this way", it's "these are the things that are important and all US kids should know how to do".

obviously, there's a serious debate to be had about the content. everyone flipping the fuck out b/c math-procedures are taught differently (side by side with the other method, btw) is just fucking dumb.
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I agree that methodology isn't a broad component of Common Core, and wasn't suggesting it was, though I'm not sure that you can argue anything other than the concept that it's a top down approach.

As I said, standards are still important, and tests are still the best measuring stick we have. It's how you get to those scores that I think should be flexible and decided on democratically at the school level.
 
it certainly is top-down; i disagree that the states and localities should be left to develop their own curricula but I do agree teachers and administrations need to be given more leeway for methods and that testing. So i guess we probably agree.
 
Have a difficult time following her "thought" process, but weren't Michele Bachmann's repeated claims that the Founding Fathers (including J Q Adams) fought tirelessly to end slavery intended to put a sunny face on slavery and promote American exceptionalism? She was "educated" in the '60s and '70s.
 
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