Indoctrination versus education: “Time that we remind teachers of their job descriptions.”

The first article that I ever wrote for a MACE publication in 1995 was headlined: “For Kids’ Sake, Let Teachers Teach!” (For the record, these old magazines can be found in the Archives section of http://www.theteachersadvocate.com.) For years, we have been clamoring for allowing teachers to be creative in their teaching. The public schooling process had become and still is so stifling and boring — both for the teachers and the students. The cookie-cutter approach does not work. Everything becomes so regimented and shallow. I hope that change is finally coming!

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I’m stuck in the filter… again!

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I better go to bed now. We have a good, juicy picket tomorrow. Apparently, an Atlanta principal dogged out (yes, dogged out!) his faculty on Wednesday, demanding that they all had to come to work on Saturday and threatened them with their jobs if they did not show up! We’ll just have to hit the pavement and remind him “[T]o remember the Sabbath Day…” I am sure that this very public picket will tighten him up! The last principal abruptly resigned in the middle of the year. Hmm. I think that this cat might need to go too!

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It seems Prof Grabar was primarily talking about social studies classes. CRCT doesn’t test that, so who cares anyway?

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Fun and creativity are fine, but the end goal is that students learn. Too often, teachers’ efforts to create a fun lesson ends up being a rather superficial gimmick which results little learning. Teachers should be focusing on effective teaching so that students will find fun in learning.

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Well, in Hall County, we are told HOW to teach it (at least we are at my school). Lord love you if you stray.

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Yet another call for common sense. As with most topics of late whether it’s at the federal or local level, proponents take the extreme view at either end of the perspective. Yes, knowing the pertinent dates of events like the Civil War gives students a needed perspective but memorizing the month, day and year of many battles is another.
As with most topics here and at other venues (see Congress), people feel the need to gravitate to polar opposites. Until we adopt a more moderate, centrist view of common sense, we will continue to be a culture of extremists.

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Since we’re all about fixing things that are broken now-a-days (healthcare, banks, adnausem), let’s fix education too. It’s clear the government can’t make education work. Let’s have the private sector take over it with school choice. A woman can chose to have an abortion but can’t pick what school that child goes to if she decides to allow it to live?

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Go to Rate Your Professor.com and you’ll understand why Prof. Grabar is so upset. Her ratings by students suggest she is in the wrong field while the object of her criticism is held in much higher esteem by former students.
Could this be professional jealousy rearing its ugly head? After all, doesn’t matter too much what you teach if you can’t teach.

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Just google Mary Ann Grabar – her views seem to be right up there with noted intellectual beings such as Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. That Ms. Grabar wrote such an unprofessional letter with personal attacks should surprise no one. While some of us may not agree with Roberts, Ms. Grabar took that disagreement to a uncalled for level. Maureen, I really am surprised you felt the need to print this.

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Well said, Ms. Grabar.
And you can tell by the majority of the feedback just how lacking education is in America.
The comments about teaching “critical thinking” are a joke. An empty head can’t think. And empty heads can’t teach.
A student’s head is like a computer, it needs programming to make it work. Bad programming produces bad or no results. So, teachers have to go through the grueling task of filling those little “hard drives” with “boring” facts and figures.
I taught karate for years and spent most of my time teaching fundamentals because if the fundamentals aren’t there, you can’t do the fancy moves and kicks. You might compare critical thinking to fancy moves and kicks and without fundamental knowledge, the brain isn’t capable of “fancy thinking.”
It really disturbs me to know how many unqualified teachers are out there feeding bad information to our kids rather than just teaching them how to read, write and do even simple math. You have half-educated “educators” trying to produce rocket scientests. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.

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And they wonder why there is an exodus to private, charter and home schools. Yet Maureen Downey opposes the school choice movement. The amazing thing is that if our schools were run by conservatives as opposed to liberal ideologues, liberals like Downey would be the main ones in support of school choice. (I do agree that conservatives in that instance would oppose it … you can just imagine Rush Limbaugh and his ilk calling charter schools “affirmative action academies for teachers and students who can’t cut it in government schools.”) I do give Downey credit for actually printing this article. Most education establishment liberals do their best to deny the possibility that indoctrination goes on in public schools, and that is why the left demands universal public education … they don’t want alternative views heard and worldviews developed. (A leader in promoting this viewpoint is Martha Fineman of Emory University, feminist legal scholar, who demands that private, charter and home schooling be made illegal.) So, stuff like this usually doesn’t see the light of day in mainstream press, because the left doesn’t want you to know what their agenda is.

I give Downey a red badge of courage (the title of one of my favorite children’s books, back before the good children’s books were deemed politically incorrect and they started dissuading people from reading them) for putting this out there. Maybe she is an honest woman for whom there is hope for after all. Because I am not anti-liberal. (I am also not a conservative … I dislike them just as much, probably more.) It is the dishonest, subversive liberals that I oppose, and maybe by putting this out there Downey demonstrates that she is not one of the MANY subversives who denies that indoctrination is going on in public schools.

That said, I am not going to back Grabar either. This standardized testing nonsense is ridiculous. It only measures the ability to take tests in the standardized format. It does not measure or develop work ethic. It does not measure or develop critical thinking or reasoning skills. The testing craze was only proposed by conservatives as a quick, easy fix to stop social promotion and to expose the failure of liberal failed education fads like new math and outcome based education. It shows that conservatives have been too LAZY to get involved over the REAL public education fights, primarily because most conservatives left the inner city public school systems behind during the white flight era.

So a pox on both their houses. A pox on liberals for creating this mess because they want to brainwash our kids politically. A pox on conservatives for being too lazy and disinterested to fight this problem because it only RECENTLY started affecting their schools when the Marxist indoctrinators started migrating from the inner city schools to THEIR suburban ones.

I hate to say it, but charter schools aren’t a panacea, because once charter schools become numerous and powerful enough, the liberals will start creating their own. That is already getting to be a problem in Washington D.C. and New York. I recall that liberals were some of the main proponents of the early charter school movement before the teachers’ unions started to crush it because public schools weren’t liberal enough! So they wanted charter schools to try out the really far out there experimental instructional methods, and schools that would be totally focused on radical politics.

But if we have to put up with a few Marxist academies in order to get the charter schools that focus on “the three Rs”, that is a price well worth paying.

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A certain amount of rote memorization is necessary in any field just to be conversant in that field. Memorizing the multiplication tables, the alphabet and the meanings of a small vocabulary would be obvious examples. I had a chemistry teacher once who I believe said it best: The most important things one learns in school are not facts, which can be looked up in any book, but concepts. But there are benefits to learning how to remember facts too and have certain facts at one’s disposal.
The most important part of any type education is reading since reading is common and prerequisite to all learning and knowledge. About 71 years ago a genius level scholar Mortimer Adler, Ph.D., wrote a book called “How to Read a Book” published by Simon and Schuster, New York. At the time he was a professor at the University of Chicago. In that book he made this astounding statement, that college kids then could not read past the sixth grade level! By the way, professor Adler, who later became the editor in chief for the Encyclopedia Britannica, was the only person to be awarded a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University in New York without having graduated from either high school or college. What do you think the situation is today?
The teacher of secondary schools today is in a tough spot. They have been poorly prepared for their plight by mostly education schools who have betrayed them by focusing to much on methodology rather than subject matter and concepts. Then these same education colleges produce their low level supervisors the superintendents and principals who “rose to the top” like the scum in a cup of hot chocolate. Most of these cowardly administrators could not pass an elementary physics or mathematics class in most community colleges let alone a more advanced class. After all this is why they chose education isn’t it?.
But they have the autocratic power over the teachers who are in the trenches today.
The problem is only compounded by constant distractions to learning by entertainment television, sports entertainment, Hollywood perverts and living the good life, not to mention the thugs and criminals in the classrooms. It is difficult to concentrate under such circumstances.
Testing is going to be part of any education process. What is “fair” for one is “unfair” for the other. But in the end, we should first get rid of the education colleges and educate teachers in the same departments of physics, mathematics, English, chemistry, French, etc. everyone else is educated in, and throw in a few bits of teaching techniques along the way. Second, teachers, for better or worse, must have broad powers over their own classes and evaluation of their own students and have almost total immunity from claims.
No administrator should be permitted to change their grades period.
Third, if principals are going to evaluate teachers, teachers should also evaluate principals, superintendents and school boards too. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
The autocratic system of Georgia is as outdated as slavery was. Education here must be brought into the 21st century. Until it is, what is usually falsely called education will be little more than meaningless indoctrination and propaganda which is a betrayal to every student and the taxpayers who pay the enormous costs of about $12,000 per year per student which most of the parents who foster those students pay very little or any of.
By the way how often do you observe a principal or superintendent with a Ph.D. degree in say physics, mathematics, biochemistry or even English or Literature or History, etc ? Almost never. Most of them took the easy road of “education” which challenged them little. But now they are running the school! This is disgusting stuff. They possess the virtually meaningless Ed.D. degree which should be abolished and should never have been approved in the first place.
Winfield J. Abbe, Ph.D., Physics
150 Raintree Ct.
Athens, GA 30607
wjabbe@aol.com
P.S. Anyone who has children quickly learns that a child is like a wild animal and must be disciplined immediately for failure to follow directions and instruction lest they get killed by a car crossing the street or asphyxiated by an idling engine in an enclosed space or drown by falling through a iced over pond. They must be disciplined immediately, not weeks or months later. Our former teachers and ancestors knew how to do this by spanking and straps or hickory sticks. Yes, these may injure the child. But consider the risks of no discipline.

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Who was it who said that in order to think critically, students must have something to think about?

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If you are going to encourage readers to google Grabar, they should also google Mari Ann Roberts and appreciate that she is in fact an Assistant Prof of Multicultural Education who wrote her thesis on whether “European Americans” should be teaching African American Students.

She also has a poem published while she was at Emory that exudes enough hatred that more than one parent said they would not be comfortable having her in a classroom instructing their child.

Neither of these writers is mainstream. One’s views definitely had far of a following which is interesting. I found Ms Roberts’ piece to be shallow and poorly reasoned as if she had been led to believe mere assertions are all that are necessary to present a view. I was clearly in the minority which is what makes it interesting to read the comments.

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Jay Leno could have a lot of fun questioning today’s students. Here are a few observations of public school students and teachers from my part of town.

The neighbor’s 13yr old asked me if Ben Franklin was on currency. This is an honor student with involved parents.
A teenager asked me a few years ago “Who is Bush/Cheney?”. Supposedly they had not covered it in school and she did not understand why there were so many bumper stickers. A Highschooler asked me one day what the exchange rate was in Hawaii.

On the other hand, I recently met an Economics teacher that had only 1 Econ. course under her belt, which she passed with a “D”. Hope no one asks her any detailed questions about the economy. However, she informed me that her hubby has a Business degree and got her up to speed to teach the course.

We are not going in the right direction folks.

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ONE OF THE SCHOLARS PUSHING THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX….has advanced degrees in ECONIMICS….GO FIGURE–????

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I actually think this woman is a nutcase on a personal vendetta. I believe that our children should learn about history and should be told the date of occurrence. However, regurgitating the date of the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement on a test is of less importance. I am offended that she would bring the Civil Rights Movement into this discussion, due to the fact that most of our textbook mention very little about the movement or slavery. All history is important, but knowing the exact date is of less importance than knowing why the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement happened in the first place. Those topics should be used as a discussion point and analysis of the event; told in chronological order and therefore creating a time period. If you don’t know what led up to an event, what good is it to know the exact date? The social studies course is not a math or science class, where knowing a formula is of importance. If she wanted to compare the process of regurgitating a date versus anything, it should have been regurgitating a date and the need to know an exact formula or mathematical procedure.
The need to know formulas and mathematical procedure is 100% more valuable in the workforce, than the date of the Civil War. Critical thinking is importance in the workplace, which is why the context that led to the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement is much more beneficial than an exact date.

If anyone should be fired it should be this woman.

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I wonder why it is that in spite of all the heads being put together to go over this curriculum or that standardized test, GA is still dismally ranked nationally? Part of the problem is the quality of the educators themselves, I’ve cringed so many times when hearing improper syntax or when seeing egregious spelling errors. This is pathetic.

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@ Joke,

In the contrary. I think it takes extreme talent and knowledge to be effective teachers. I’m sorry that my statement about teacher creativity often ends up being just a bunch of gimmicks. The problem is that so many of those teachers don’t realize that their products are just gimmicks – and that shows the lack of talent/knowledge.

@ WJ Abbe,

I agree that some “rote memorization” is necessary, and I suspect most people do, too. The difficulty is what should be memorized. I would argue that the multiplication table isn’t something to be memorized. Yes, automaticity of basic multiplication IS important but how you get there shouldn’t be just memorization. The notion that facts and critical thinking are learned disjointly is absurd. You can learn facts while engaged in critical thinking. Of course, that will take knowledgeable and talented teachers…

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BUT THEN SLAVERY was not about cheap labor….

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What’s funny is how on the nose much of the professor’s piece is… and how clueless some of y’all really are.

I was in UGA’s Social Science Education program, but left it to pursue a history degree only. Why?

Because the program is a JOKE.

She’s not joking when she says we have people being graduated by our colleges to be social studies teachers who have only a cursory knowledge of their chosen profession.

In Georgia colleges, you have to take 8 hours of history-based credit in your core classes. To become a social studies teacher, you only need 16 more, or only four more classes!

That’s INSANE.

The other problems she speaks of do persist. Revisionist history, as read in textbooks written by PhDs with an obvious ideologically bias, runs rampant in our schools across this country.

I am a historian. I pursue the TRUTH. Even if it doesn’t quite match up with what I personally believe, it is what happened. To change the truth of what our history is to fit a narrow ideological bias and then pass that on to children to be learned as fact is tantamount to fraud and criminal neglect.

Some of you people need to wake the frak up. While I do believe that as historians, all of the Five Ws (and One H) are important, the way we teach history in this state and this country is all backwards.

First: Stop focusing on Who, What, When, and Where. If you focus on Why and How, Why something happened and How it happened you can actually grab the interest of the students, then Who, What, When, and Where become far easier for them to remember. Who, What, When, and Where are equally important, but cannot be the sole focus. Too often in social studies classrooms, Why and How are completely ignored. And this is why so many students complain that the subject is “boring.”

Second: ENOUGH with “social studies.” It’s HISTORY, people. It’s GEOGRAPHY. STOP adding in SOCIOLOGY where it does not belong. For a very short time, I added sociology as a second major (since shortened to a minor). It was like banging my head against a wall trying to have a rational discussion with some of my professors. For the time I’ve been at UGA, I’ve found very little ideological bias outside of social science education. I certainly never found it at Le Conte. But boy did I ever find it in the Sociology building. I’m surprised I wasn’t given my own Little Red Book upon entrance.

We need to stop with the politically correct bullcrap that has seized our educational system and just teach FACTS. Not different “variations,” or watered-down half-truths to protect the innocent. Just FACTS. Just TRUTH. And not some insane, biased version of the truth.

OUT with social studies. IN with history and geography.

Third: treat this new history class idea (remember, no more social studies) like colleges teach history. No more text books. ACTUAL history books. Or, much like a high school English text does, being filled with various texts and such, fill a US History text with excerpts of books like “Team of Rivals,” or “John Adams.”

No more intellectually-dishonest, ideologically-biased social studies textbooks. No more revisionist history. ACTUAL history, written by noted historians. Not tenured college professors with an ideologically, politically correct ax to grind.

Wake up, people. The system is BROKEN. And your precious political correctness and need to rewrite history as you see fit has broken it.

It’s child abuse. Plain and simple.

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concerned citizen…. you mean like switching verb tenses in the middle of a sentence?

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How about we switch up the way teachers get certified in Georgia. I originally came from Illinois, and when I first was certified we had to major in a particular subject area, mine was history. In addition we took education courses, and two tests to become certified. Once this was done it was course work in subject areas that qualified us to teach in additional area. So, for many of the social studies areas once I had 36 hours in history I needed 3 courses. I got those in government, geography, and sociology. Then I move to Georgia, and find out that many never took a class in subject matter they taught, instead they crammed and passed a test. Now I am working a masters degree in Public Policy and Administration, yes I am looking to get out of the public schools, however if I intended to stay this degree would give me more education in the realm of government than anyone in my building…yet according to the PSC I am not qualified to teach it. It’s time Georgia realize teachers should be experts in their fields of instructions, not just “experts” in instruction.

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S&T-

The traditional definition of a civil war is when both sides are fighting over which gets control of the national government. That’s not what was at issue in the 1860’s. The south wanted to go its own way and no longer be a part of the national union.

I think they preferred the term War Between the States because it implies parity between competing positions.

I’m old enough to have had a grandmother who was the youngest of 11 children and she had uncles who fought in the war. She also remembered when the Titanic sank and recalled it vividly when Challenger exploded. Something about a common thread of hubris about technology.

Cultural capital matters in school and in life. If you can’t get it at home and the ed schools that are the gatekeepers for who gets to teach devalue it as “mere facts”, we fail to raise too many children beyond the circumstances they were born into.

That’s a pity for the child and a national loss of potential to boot.

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I do believe educational programs have to change but to become more realistic. Multicultural education classes and diversity pedagogical classes are needed to help new teachers understand the various students they may come across, and learn varying teaching techniques for those students. Again, public education is just that, PUBLIC. Many of our students are kids who most people could not/would not even think of speaking to, or would be afraid to do so…
Unfortunately, educational programs are not realistic. They give new teachers these great idealistic,critical, exploratory activities to use in the classroom that they can not really use because of the curriculum schedule. They also do not prepare new teachers for the legal obstacles they will face especially with Special Education children. This is why teachers complain so much (as someone stated earlier) because the expectations are never really met. New teachers quit every year, or play the switching game thinking they will find a school or system that works. And of course they never find one. Between the politics; the bickering b/t admin. and teachers; the silly testing; uninformed parents; unfocused students w/many electronic devices and no paper/pencils; the furloughs; growing population of children w/special needs; etc… Education in this country is going downhill. I could go on but I think you get the picture. There is not one answer but as one teacher stated…”If parents do not wake up, they will lose their children and this country a whole generation (and generations to come).”
Honestly, to prepare a teacher for today’s schools, more academic hours would have to be added and more classroom practice. For the poor pay, not many of the new generationers will sign up for this…Lord knows they want it quick and easy, and so do their parents. Teaching is so much more than academic knowledge because any average person can study a book and become knowledgeable. To teach a child is something totally different…

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@ S&T: could it be because the American Civil War was literally a “war between states.”

Actually, literally, it was a war between a republic and a confederation of independent states.

But War Between the States is an accepted variation.

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Georgia looks at education differently, that’s for sure.
My daughter was the highest ranking student in her class when she got her Masters Degree in Special Ed. She burned out after eight years and decided to go to regular classroom teaching.
The deep thinkers in education told her she had to go back to school and take certain classes to be certified. To my twisted way of thinking that was like sending a Marine veteran to army basic training.
She breezed, needless to say. Just a waste of money.

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Bugkiller: Very well put. I agree with you 100%. I remember a social studies teacher that I had in high school (in 1983)that was really liberal – and all of the students in the class were heavily influenced by her, or were afraid to propose opposing views – I was the only one who would ever disagree with her. More recently, I completed my accounting degree and had to take a business management class – the teacher was hugely liberal and taught more sociology than management!

I have a daughter in fourth grade. The underlying theme in much of her science book is about how people are destroying the earth. Not much weight is given to OTHER things that have an impact on the earth. I know that, unless there are some dramatic changes, it will only get worse as she goes through school. Fortunately, I take an interest in what she is learning in school and make sure that I fill in the holes in her education.

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Really, what a lousy English teacher, to so abuse the practice of scare quotes.

The argument that someone who did not feel it critically important to know the date of the Civil War would find it important to recite the date of a speech by Martin Luther King is a strawman. I think it is a cogent point on education to say that it’s more important a student understand the themes of the Civil War and of the Civil Rights movement than the dates on which some events occurred. It’s more important to teach students, indeed, to think critically about these themes: there’s this perennial debate about whether the Civil War was about slavery. Well, let students hear both sides of that. Or let students learn about attempts to pass Civil Rights in the 40s and 50s that were blocked by Southern Democrats. This kind of information is history, less so the date of this or that event.

Also, this Gardner person really circles around white fears of encroachment. Who said critical thinking is always anti-Western values? If you want to talk about industrialization in Europe, for instance, tell students about Max Weber, Karl Marx, the Luddites, Adam Smith, Peter I of Russia, and the labor movement. You can pretty much only talk about white guys, and appeal to this Grabar lady, and still see the different ways people reacted to that, their concerns, and whose model works better for understanding industrialization.

Grabar gives us a pretty plain-jane populist critique of contemporary trends in education, perhaps to shield her deeply dishonorable conclusion calling for the firing of a remote colleague (both Grabar and Roberts worked at Clayton State). What will ultimately measure the success or failure of a history education? If students go to college and take history courses, they’re much better off thinking critically about history than having a set of dates memorized. (Most professional historians are, or are reacting to, some sort of broadly-structural understanding of history that places more emphasis on cause than on the actions of individuals, at least in the context of most historical debates.) If students pursue work in an area other than history, the ability to form arguments, understanding causation, and contemplate the broader significance of things is about the best you can hope for, I think, from a history education in terms of employable skills. If students just need to speak intelligently about a topic for five minutes, rote repetition of facts is less useful than forming those facts in a narrative sequence, or understanding 2 or 3 different views on a subject. If students are supposed to just supposed to know some facts, then it’s easier to fit facts into some sort of framework, like an argument or a narrative.

All this stuff Grabar puts in scare quotes, about exploring things and making culture quilts, is just regurgitated right-wing rhetoric from the 80s. A good culture quilt assignment might teach students about history–it just depends on the depth of the subject matter discussed.

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Dr. Daddy, if you were capable of rational thought beyond your own biases, you may understand where Dr. Grabar is coming from.

She’s not someone who “sees communist conspiracies” everywhere. As for her ratings on RateMyProfessor. PLEASE. You might as well be deriving your information from a Wikipedia page, but with far less oversight.

While I do not agree with everything she says, she is largely correct in pointing out how a very NARROW ideological bias is destroying government-controlled education in this country.

But I’m guessing you’re all about that particular bias, so you don’t care all that much.

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Rote learning of the facts is boring and forgettable. Teach them the facts and make them discuss the facts in the time frame in which they occured and throw out scenarios for critical thinking. Dump the scantrons and constant government testing and test them regularly to see that they are getting it. Fail the ones who don’t and move on.

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Pierce Randall:

Thanks for proving that you are out for leftist indoctrination as opposed to actual education.

And the person who said “she wants to take us back to the 1700s” (which means back when 15 year olds were studying Greek and Latin instead of sending explicit pictures of themselves to each other using their cell phones) thanks for showing what you are all about as well.

And the person who claims that in a voucher system the upper class will abandon public education and the lower and middle class kids will be left behind … thanks for putting your cards on the table too.

This is the primary problem. The left sees public education as a vehicle for social transformation and social uplift. It has ever since A) John Dewey transformed public education in America and public education adopted his theories (and yes, John Dewey was a socialist) and received a huge shot in the arm with B) busing for integration purposes (which embedded the idea that transforming society was the primary role of education) and C) things like Head Start, school nutrition/health, and the liberal pedagogical reforms (which put the finishing touches on the idea that schools are supposed to uplift the poor and remake society).

People are so intent on using public education to solve society’s problems (even conservatives are getting in on the act with “abstinence education”, although in this they were only imitating the massive failure of liberal sex education programs, which were introduced in the 70s and 80s only to see teen pregnancies continue to spiral out of control … abstinence education wasn’t introduced until the mid-90s when the teen pregnancy rate in many communities and populations was already 70%) that teaching kids how to read, write, compute and reason gets pushed aside.

If Roberts, Downey, “liberal teacher” or the rest of their ilk actually cared about kids’ education, then they would be on the front lines demanding that we return to the way schools were run back when they actually worked for most people: back when everyone agreed that no learning was ever going to take place in the absence of a disciplined environment or in an environment where large percentages of children fail to master fundamentals.

But they don’t care about kids learning. They care about using schools to achieve societal transformation. Look, these “graduation tests” … most of them are actually on the 8th grade level. Even the SAT was only on the 10th grade level before they dumbed it down to the point where so many kids now get perfect scores that some get rejected by Texas and UCLA (especially if they are Asian). But instead of being concerned with the fact that in so many schools 60% to 70% of 12th graders can’t pass an 8th grade level “graduation test”, instead of asking how they got into the 12th grade without being able to pass a test at the 8th grade level to begin with, they challenge the practice of giving the test!

Now again, I am not a fan of the CRTC, ITBS, NAEP and all of these other alphabet soup acronym tests. I especially hate how so many schools have eliminated art, music, PE, recess etc. so kids can sit and study for standardized tests all day. But the tests aren’t the problem. The problem is why these tests exist in the first place: all these kids in HIGH SCHOOL who can’t read the Sunday paper (let alone Charles Dickens or Shakespeare), who can’t write a half-page essay about THEMSELVES, and who can’t add fractions or perform long division. Even worse, these high school kids don’t know or care about their educational deficiencies because they haven’t been instilled with any ideas about their own personal goals and future.

We need to get away from these political agendas – whether liberal or conservative – and get back to talking about how to start back producing kids who can read, write and do simple arithmetic. The problem is leftists like so many of the people posting on this forum who could care less about your academic deficiencies so long as you think (and vote) like they do. It is fitting that the first commenter was John Trotter. Lest we forget, it was Trotter who put his underlings on the Clayton County Board of Education, leading to that system’s loss of accreditation, which Trotter then went on to claim was a racist conspiracy by SACS.

I will say that if teaching kids “social justice” requires that they be so poorly educated, that is a powerful bit of evidence that right wing ideologues like Roberts have on their side!

And oh yes, the person who said that Roberts’ ideas sounded like something from the Reagan era: excuse me, I am no Reagan fan by any means, but as far as education goes, everything they said was correct. The Reagan folks stated that outcome based education, new math, connected math, social promotion, and all of those other fads from the 60s and 70s were failures, talked about the decline in kids’ mastery of basic educational skills, sounded the alarm about the increasing discipline problems, let folks know that “comprehensive sex education” was a massive failure, and warned of the declining academic performance of males and minorities. Guess what? They were 100% right. Look, even stopped clocks are right twice a day, and that points to the correctness of what the Reagan conservatives said on education. But a clock that is running fast is ALWAYS wrong, and that describes the “public education as social uplift/transformation” liberals who claim that the way to address the problem of so many 12th graders being unable to pass an 8th grade test is to stop giving it so that we won’t find out how miseducated they are.

Carter G. Woodson, the fellow who created black history month, once wrote a book called “The Miseducation of the Negro.” Were Woodson alive today, it would take him 5 seconds to conclude that all races are now being miseducated, and no Woodson would not see that as an improvement, for black people or anyone else.

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Maureen, you should read Sandra Stotsky’s book, “Losing Our Language.” She demonstrates with statistics the decline in reading levels over the years. Today’s ninth-grader, for example, reads at the level that a fifth-grader would have read 50 years ago. She documents it. Textbooks have been dumbed down. Kids aren’t even writing essays, but blog posts. More and more teachers assign “video essays.” The high school graduate of fifty years ago knew a lot more than today’s high school graduate. This is not only backed up by anecdotal stories like the ones I hear about someone’s uncle doing crossword puzzles in Latin, but from studies. They’re out there. The liberal school reforms have been ANTI-intellectual.

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S&T, I’ll spare you and everyone else a joke about the value of your “southern” education. As BugKiller points out, the American Civil War included the United STATES of America and the Confederate STATES of America. The Union (USA) had a more centralized (Federal) government, which UNITED the STATES. the Conferacy (CSA) favored a more loosely organized CONFEDERATION of STATES. this is why some believe the war was about “states rights” (which is another of saying; slavery was a states rights issue, ipso facto, the war was about slavery)

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Professor Grabar: You make some valid points, but the answer is not the sterile, one-inch-deep curriculum that reflects essentially just what is questioned on a standardized test. I was an undergraduate history major. I went to grad school at UGA to earn a Master’s and a PhD in History. I looked at the job market and concluded that I did not want to end up teaching History in junior college in Kansas. I was and am a Georgia boy. So, I decided to teach school in Georgia. I had to take a couple of quarters off from my history studies to go through the certification stuff. For one quarter, I took a block of courses in Education over at Aderhold Hall at UGA. I student-taught one quarter. Then, I resumed my studies at LeConte Hall in History. I agree that the teacher (especially in the upper grades) needs to take many more courses in the subject that he or she will teach. This is very important. The students need to sense that the teacher is “the authority” in that field. Unfortunately, so many of the courses that a prospective teacher has to take from an education department on a college level are a waste of time. I believe that one semester (no quarters anymore!) of education courses is plenty! Most of the time should be spent on subject matter.

When the student becomes a teacher, then let the teacher teach! And, if the teacher simply cannot cut it, then a loose net will catch this. By far, most of the prospective teachers will be very adequate teacher, if the snoopervisors will leave them alone. Let them teach. Let them be creative. Trust and respect their professional judgment. The tight net-type of snoopervision is destroying public education and causing many otherwise good teachers to abandon any idea of “teaching” in this type of environment. (c) MACE, February 25, 2010.

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“We have a great deal of information about what works in education but not a willingness to implement it or we would be copying what works in the high achieving states and A+ countries.”

Although I don’t agree that “copying” something from another country (or even state) would necessarily produce the desired results, I think it is worth looking at what others are doing and adopt things that can be useful in our context. The GPS mathematics standards seem to be one such effort – by examining and adopting the Japanese (one of the A+ countries) curriculum standards.

Of course, people are quick to point out that Japan is practically mono-racial/ethnic country, Japanese parents value education more, etc.

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Anyone with an open mind who has spent any time at all in public education will have no difficulty vouching for the truths stated by Dr. Grabar. Educational leftist bias is the norm, in my own experience as a teacher at the high school and college level. Think of any educator you know and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts they are liberal. I think many liberals are well-intentioned and ill-informed, all the while believing they are ‘the ones we have been waiting for’. Not!

Some of these posts have teachers union written all over them. Of course people don’t want their stranglehold on educational indoctrination challenged or broken. Maybe the Patriotic, revolutionary housecleaning beginning to happen in Washington will spill over into the educational system. Clean out the shit-for-brains and America-haters.

For all you liberal diversity-lovers out there, please bend over now and kiss Ms Grabar’s arse for actually providing some (diversity of thought). The fact that you all are attacking the lone conservative who ‘dares’ to point out the obvious is a sad reflection on the lack of free-thinking and openness to a variety of opinions in education today. Libs, your intolerance is showing and you have proven Dr. Grabar’s assertions.

JH

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filtered!

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Dr. Grabar,

When assessing educational trends through the use of statistics, we generally use a compilation of actual studies, not books written by a single author. That’s how individuals become indoctrinated- they become entranced by a book by an author who has an ideological bias and can manipulate the statistics to support their predetermined opinion.

My question to you is whether you took many (or any) courses in measurement or statistics when doing your PhD in English? Can you look at the statistics presented by Stotsky, understand them, critique them, and interpret them? Do you know if they are accurate? Do you know how to discern correlational research from experimental research? Do you know which one of those can effectively gauge cause and effect and which one cannot? Do you understand statistical significance, an ANOVA, an ANCOVA, regression, etc.? Or did you just read the book and decide Stostky must be right because her presentation of the data supported your point of view?

As someone with experience in state and national assessment, as a language arts teacher and through doctoral work in educational psychology at a national research university, it is my conclusion that most of your contentions are factually incorrect. It is my understanding that the quantitative ability of American students has declined over the last century, but verbal skills have increased over that time, as measured by standardized assessments and psychological tests. The broad dissemination of print material, in addition to the ubiquity of technology and the internet, as well as the SAE that is prevalent on TV, is likely related to this trend.

While 50% of the adults in the country read at an 8th grade level or below, the percentage of the population that is literate is higher now than at any time in our nation’s history. There were far more illiterate people, proportionally, in the past, with the ratio increasing the further you go back in time. We have many people who are still functionally illiterate or semi-literate, but very very few who are completely illiterate and cannot read short words or pronounce the sounds of letters.

Over the past 30 years literacy has remained fairly stagnant with only small dips and gains, and that is a problem. But it is a problem that shows little resemblance or relationship with the “facts” you report. It does not sound like you understand the difference between a study and a book, science and opinion, fact or fiction. After receiving my undergraduate degree in literature from UGA, I chose not to pursue a PhD in English because it was too subjective, based too much in opinion, and would leave me lacking in more objective scientific knowledge. After reading your work, I cannot say how glad I am I made that choice.

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Joseph– THERE ARE NO TEACHERS UNIONS IN GEORGIA

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Here’s a thought: Why can’t we have both? Children need to know the important facts AND the context that surrounds them. To not have both is to paint an incomplete picture.

One way that could be addressed is by having more true “subject matter experts”. In other words, those with Math degrees teach math, those with Biology degrees teach science, etc., instead of Education majors teaching all of the above.

Just my opinion…

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One Voice-

I am so glad you expounded at length about your credentials since your facts are quite wrong and you confuse a large vocabulary for analysis.

Why precisely did they have to revalue the SAT around 1995? Because of the precipitous drop over time in the verbal scores. If you look at some of Jane Healy’s books she analyzes with examples the difference in standardized test questions over time. It’s the difference between inference and analysis after a sophisticated reading passage and reading a menu now and checking which item is not included on the Supreme pizza.

I do not think Dr Graber described the book “Losing the Language” as well as she might have if she’d known commenters would use her point to show off the statistics terms they know. Since I have a copy of the book, I thought I’d restate her basic point more clearly.

What Dr Stotsky did in 1999 was to show, with examples, how the basal readers used in the US had changed over time -shorter passages, less sophisticated syntax, more action and conversation and little descriptive imagery. She then speculated on why these changes took place and what the likely impact would be as fewer students were exposed to the quality of language that was common in previous generations.

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Vouchers – such an easy solution to problems such as these. Give students and parents real choice in education, and those that don’t care continue to rot away in South Fulton or South Dekalb schools.

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Here’s what bothers me about today’s posting. Dr. Graber’s report is not peer-reviewed and should not be accepted as anything but a political statement. You may agree or disagree, but Dr. Graber’s work is not scholarship. I fully support her right to express any views she has whatsoever, but to claim that this is anything other than a political report written for ideological purposes is, at best, to dissemble.

There are so many things to disagree with in Dr. Graber’s report that I don’t have time to begin. However, I would point out that curriculum is inherently political. The mistake I see on the right (and also sometimes on the left, but not as often) is positing that one’s teaching one’s view is correct and that opposing views are mere indoctrination.

I wonder why people would be surprised that many teachers are drawn to the profession out of a sense of social justice. I took some courses at a business college and expected most of the professors and students to be capitalists. They were, but that didn’t stop me from learning from them. I wasn’t damaged by taking classes from people with a different political bent than mine.

I entered teaching as a way to promote social justice and social transformation. Also, it seemed to offer a way to live in a capitalist society without being a capitalist or supporting capitalism. All educational choices are political; the difference between curriculum and indoctrination depends upon one’s point-of-view. I don’t want to venture too far into postmodernism here, but notions of fixed truth went out of fashion in the academy more than 20 years ago.

I am a lefty, very much so, and I believe in rigorous academics. My education liberated me, and I want to offer the same to the next generation.

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Attentive Parent,

So, the issue is just as much about having quality textbooks, isn’t it? If we don’t have quality textbooks, it really doesn’t matter what the standards say. I think many studies have shown that US textbooks are bloated, unfocused, and incoherent.

By the way, problem solving based instruction (of mathematics) is considered to be a good instruction model by Japanese teachers. See, for example,
http://hrd.apecwiki.org/index.php/Do_I_Have_a_Window_Seat_or_an_Aisle_Seat%3F_Grade_5_%28Japan%29

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Attentive

My point is that if you are going to try to reference statistics to validate your argument, then you should probably know something about them so you can discern whether they are accurate or not. I have my doubts as to whether Dr. Grabar or you possess that understanding.

It is important to understand the difference between correlational research and experimental research because only one of them can determine cause and effect. Dr. Grabar suggests that teaching practices commonly covered in educational courses are responsible for students’ poor literacy skills. This implies a causal relationship, which simply cannot be supported by the type of book we are discussing (and books are generally not viewed as providing sufficient empirical evidence for the reasons I described earlier, so bringing up another one does not enhance your argument). Neither of you seem to understand this so I do not find your conclusions credible.

I will stand by the facts I described: 50% of adults in the US read at an 8th grade level or below, but we have the highest proportion of literate citizens of any time in our history. Literacy levels have remained largely stagnant over the past 30 years. You can read your books, and be swayed by their ideological bent, but I’ll stick with reading actual studies, thanks. Enjoy your Supreme pizza.

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Thank you for the lecture on cause and effect and correlational studies. Under the circumstances it is rather amusing that you are so presumptuous.

Constructivist- Of course the textbooks and their quality are important. Before Georgia became such a mishmash of the math content in the GPS, the inquiry oriented learning tasks in the Frameworks to “discover” math through problem solving, and the dire quality of many of the textbooks on the state approved list, everyone seemingly acknowledged that fact and planned around it.

As the math curriculum center (CSMC) quoted so well: “Teachers decide what to teach, how to teach it, and what sorts of exercises to assign to their students largely on the basis of what is contained in the textbook authorized for the course”. This is true all over the world although in recent years in Georgia it has been a problem.

In general CSMC nailed it when they said “mathematics curriculum materials are a strong determinant of what students have the opportunity to learn and what they do learn”. In Georgia, because of the mishmash, it looks like the enacted curriculum is far more reflective of the Frameworks that the Standards themselves. We have had some discussions on previous threads as to whether there was a Bait and Switch with respect to the intended math curriculum.

Problem solving is a wonderful method to apply and extend math knowledge. It’s just a very poor method to use to acquire correctly modeled and scaffolded information and math skills initially. You really cannot acquire conceptual understanding without plenty of problem solving with a myriad of types. First though most students need explanations, worked examples, and plenty of practice to develop automaticity. Rote learning is only a stepping stone but it is a necessary precondition to deep and rich understanding of a subject.

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Attentive Parent,

Many Japanese teachers would disagree with you. They would use problem solving to introduce new concepts and procedures. That is not to say that the GA Frameworks are of any high quality. Even if their ideas may be compatible, their execution might be very different in quality.

I would like to hear what you have to say about the lesson I referred to.

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If you want to talk about indoctrination, you should take a serious look at Direct Instruction. Teachers are required to read the script (don’t worry about individual needs or need for clarification), ask stupid simplistic questions, and CLICK A DOG CLICKER SO THE STUDENTS CAN ANSWER IN UNISON! Can you say “Heil, Hitler”?

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My kids’ 2d grade teacher tried to get my daughter to not to eat a turkey for Thanksgiving feast. She is a tree hugger and wanted her kids to save the world. This lady seemed clueless to just about everything. She took the supplied and made them ‘community supplies’. Students were not allowed to have anything for themselves. Introducing the students to socialism at its finest, along with global warming.

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Professor Grabar- AMEN!!!

Thank you for writing this argument so well.

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No wonder APS is having such a difficult time.

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I have been looking at Japan this morning and my recollection was right. When the results of the 2006 PISA came out and showed a drop, Japan took the unusual step of changing back to the previous instruction methods. It was called the “PISA shock” in Japan. Hard to imagine anything have a similar effect in the US although apparently declining ITBS and PSAT scores did provoke such a reaction recently in Fulton County.

You are right though Constructivist that they do see a different role for problem solving than we do but it is not the NCTM vision either. It is followed up by a well designed teacher lecture on the subject.

Here’s a superb link: http://www.csus.edu/ier/reports/math.pdf . It is from July 1997 and would be describing the methods that brought such good results in 2000 and 2003. The title is “Lessons in Perspective: How Culture Shapes Math Instruction in Japan, Germany and the United States”.

Teachers frustrated by Ga’s rushed implementation of its math GPS will likely get misty eyed at an organized system where the Japanese teachers are always looking at their lesson plans asking “Can you think of a way to make students learn more?” and then sharing these innovations with each other in an organized manner.

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A reader forwarded me this great followup to the linked report.

It describes just how different the Japanese techniques and use of the teacher are from the US reform approach illustrated in Georgia in the Math Frameworks and textbooks like Investigations, Everyday Math, and Connected Math for middle school.

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/siegel/ST11.pdf

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Attentive Parent,

What I heard from my Japanese friend is a bit different from the way you describe it.

The Japanese Ministry of Education released a new national curriculum about a year ago which brought the amount of mathematics content to the 1989 version of their curriculum – which, by the way, is the one that GA used as they were developing the math GPS. In the past few revisions, the amount of content in mathematics was reduced significantly, and many Japanese educators were worried about the possible negative impact. So, the PISA results may have been a factor, but the change was coming anyway. In the meantime, their students continue to do well in the TIMSS.

The Japanese national standards are just the grade-by-grade expectations, and they don’t specify how to teach them. According to my friend, the way Japanese teachers (particularly elementary, but also some at middle school where you see the TIMSS video lessons) have been changing to more problem solving approach since the 1970’s. So, I don’t know where you got the idea that they went back to the old way of teaching math.

What is interesting is that the Japanese Ministry of Education will use the 2-3 years between the release of the new standards and its full implementation as the “transition” time to fill any gaps that might exist when the new standards is implemented. So, if any topic is currently being taught in Grade 5 but is moving to Grade 4, they will suggest teachers to move that topic in Grade 4 at least by the year before the full implementation. That way, the new 5th graders in that year would not miss that topic and ready to tackle any topic for which that topic might be prerequisite. That kind of careful transition plan didn’t exist in GA. Also, there is usually a year or two delay in the full implementation of the elementary and the middle school standards.

“Proofs,” or justifying your ideas, is also emphasized in elementary schools, and using alternative ways of solving problems are often discussed in a lesson. Japanese teachers will often ask a class to solve a problem in many different ways. They will also ask students to think about how to calculate, even for a basic facts, as they study the basic facts. They do want automaticity but they also want students to think, too.

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Japan revised its math standards in 1982, 1992, and 2002. The 2 papers linked above would have been looking at classrooms teaching the 1992 Japanese standards.

In the 2002 revision Japan made some changes similar to the US reform approach. There was a statistically significant 11 point drop in results in Japan on PISA between the 2003 test and the 2006 causing the PISA shock mentioned above.

The 2006 PISA scores were released in late 2007 and the plan was to make a mid-cycle correction and go back to the 1992 standards. They did not want to risk another comparable drop on the 2009 test. Maybe those are the changes your friend is speaking of- the shift back to the 1992 standards?

The drop in Japan’s PISA scores is detailed on some of the blogs involved in the Seattle textbook litigation.

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So GA decided to use the older standards to which Japan eventually went back?

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I have watched both Japanese lessons Siegel discusses in his paper. AP and not so fast are correct that the teaching you see in the video is very different from typical US lessons, traditional or reform. Although AP’s description (maybe borrowed from Siegel) is accurate, the impression you get from reading the description may or may not be what you actually see in the Japanese lessons. Yes, the teachers “lectures,” but “lecturing” tends to be brief and to the point. Siegel points out that n no students “discovered theorems” but that might be due to the fact that the lessons weren’t meant to be for that purpose – the geometry lesson in particular are more about using what students have learned previously in a novel situation.

I think trying to use Japanese teaching in arguing for or against the US reform is meaningless. Japanese teaching, although influenced very heavily by the US ideas historically, is uniquely Japanese. It is something that Japanese teachers’ community developed over the decades. The lable, “grappleing and telling” is reasonable but we need to keep in mind that both teachers and students do “telling” whild “grappling” is for students. In the same way, you can probably label US teaching as “showing and telling,” for both the traditional and reform way. In the traditional teaching, it is the teachers who do showing and telling, while in the reform classrooms it’s students. I think that Japanese teachers seem to have found a nice mix and balance.

By the way, a Japanese friend of mine showed me an 8th grade textbook in which the problems in the geometry lesson can be found (not with students’ names used as the land owners). I think it is nice to have a good textbook with mathematically rich problems.

Oh, one more thing. The dates thrown around by AP and not so fast are a bit confusing. The current standards were released as a document by the Ministry of Education in 2000 but were not fully implemented in 2002. So, the 2000 and 2002 AP and not so fast talk about are the same. The same thing applies to 1989/1992 dates. I think the Ministry of Education have done only about 7 or 8 revisions of their standards since WWII (60+ years). The most recent one released was in 2008, but their full implementation is not until 2011. So, the 2000/2002 standards are still in effect, although the Ministry of Education has provided guidelines for the transition period.

I think GA did not use the 2000/2002 standards because the English version of that standards was not widely available while the 1989/1992 version were included in the TIMSS kit Siegel refers to in his paper.

By the way, 2008/2011 elementary math standards is available from the Ministry of Education page:
http://www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/education/micro_detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2009/04/21/1261037_4.pdf
I don’t think they have translated the middle school one yet.

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I have truly enjoyed reading and learning from this blog. As any good teacher would do, let’s get back to the subject at hand….”Time to remind teachers of their job descriptions.”

Better yet, let’s discuss the inverse, or the things we are expected to do that is NOT in our job descriptions.

Discuss…

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Teaching in FL-

I did not start the discussion on Japan (look at 11:47 on 2/25) and others have repeatedly wished to discuss it since.

I think it has been helpful to understanding why Georgia’s implementation of its new math curriculum has been so rocky. I also respect Dr Stotsky’s work. So must the New York Times, they frequently use her when they need an education expert.

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I know many Georgia teacher ho would be delighted if they felt free to “show and Tell” in a math lesson.

Too many have been told it will cost them their job.

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Attentive Parent

I understand. I like looking at how other countries do things as well. As a matter of fact, I taught in Japanese schools for one year as an exchange teacher. I only worked in English classes, but tried to get a feeling for their “way of doing things.”

I can’t contribute to the discussion in specifics about math. What I CAN contribute is generalities I saw:

-students are so “we-centered” as opposed to Americans (”me-centered”) they were afraid to aswwer questions I asked because they would stick out and embarass classmates

-there was no diversity (compare that to our schools!)

-the majority of what I witnessed was rote memorization (I lived with a family who had a middle school student)

-your entry to high school was based upon testing; high schools specialized and were locally ranked

There’s so much more, (uniforms, zoning, tranportation, etc.) I’d love to go back since I was there 10 years ago, and see what has changed.

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@octex,

the question is can GA students learn the same mathematics as Japanese students do? and can we learn from the way Japanese teach mathematics? Or are we going to say GA students are so different that they just can’t learn the same math no matter how we teach them?

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Just Browsing-

Are you kidding? I sure hope you are not a teacher.

How dare you put the blame on the child or parent as to whether they learn math?

Do you believe whether a child learns to read is a matter of determination?

If you believe that instructional techniques and curriculum materials are less important than how much a child tries, you have not read the extensive research into what works in math and reading.

I was at a dinner yesterday where a motivated, informed parent was recounting what the use of Investigations in their elementary school had done to the math knowledge, skills, and aspirations of her daughter and her classmates.

We can have a discussion of the inclusive classroom but again in states with a sophisticated IEP program, these plans mandate that certain textbooks Like Investigations or Connected Math cannot be used and that explicit instruction and modeling must be provided.

Is the point of your post that whatever the cause of the failure to learn math, it must be the child, the home, or an overly inclusive classroom?

Is that the extent of the available causes?

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So it sounds like one of your points is that the heterogeneous classroom makes it difficult to teach American children effectively? I agree but that’s not how you started. You started by blaming the child or parent whenever there’s a learning problem.

The fact that you think this discussion is about math or reading “strategies” is deeply troubling. It suggests that you do not appreciate just how foundational it is to teach arithmetic and reading properly. It may also be why truly fluent readers are becoming rare. Strategies are a one time boost. Understanding the phonetic nature of the English language and practicing it to automaticity means that all books are accessible. A profound understanding of arithmetic is not a result of successful math strategies. Successful math strategies are an outcome of that deep understanding.

Bringing my children into the discussion is the proverbial “below the belt” swipe. Very unprofessional.

You cannot use basing the Georgia math content standards on Japan’s as a trophy defense to ward off all discussion of their rigor and then refuse to discuss how much different our recommended instructional practices are.

Now you are asserting that Japanese students are too different from US students to compare schools. So does that difference mean we must reject the instructional methods they use successfully to teach the math content we imported from them? Is there anywhere you can point to where an inquiry, discovery approach as advocated by US reformers is being used successfully to teach a mathematically rigorous curriculum to a diverse group of students?

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