50% of all children are below average!!!

[Tim Walsh]

Just something from the trenches, my wife-to-be is a first year teacher who's teaching in what is or was a "failing school" and the reason they have to "teach the test" and nothing else is because of the consequences of not doing well on those tests. At her school if they don't pass the test this year, the whole administration will be replaced. No Child Left Behind has really screwed with how teachers are allowed to teach. At this point they have to teach the test because of NCLB. Heck she had at least 2 days last week after their semester ended and before the standardized tests that she wasn't allowed to teach anything at all, just babysit.

Yes I'll say that there are right many teachers who really need to be replaced, but what do you do when you can't find enough of them as it is? At her school there are currently 14 open teaching positions, do you fire the current incompetent ones are then leave the kids with no supervisor at all?? Also what do you think happens to the kids learning when you have to have a school lockdown because you have 4 gang fights break out in 10 minutes?? That was last week at her school.


Sorry, it just pisses me off when I hear from the peanut gallery that teachers are lazy, teachers are overpaid, teachers are incompetent blah blah blah, when there are many many of them out there that are trying their damnedest to get their students ready for the real world despite NCLB, stupid standardized testing and when many students have a complete lack of any stability at home.

[KFC911]

Originally posted by snowman
50% of all children are below average!! This statement is true by definition....

Hmm.. I disagree ! "50% are average or below" would be correct imo....

[Tim Walsh]

Originally posted by KC911
Hmm.. I disagree ! "50% are average or below" would be correct imo....

so does that mean 49% of children are below average?

[Jim Richards]

+1 to Tim's post.

Teachers, cops, firefighters are all underpaid and underappreciated. Just my 2 centavos.

[Jim Richards]

Originally posted by Tim Walsh
so does that mean 49% of children are below average?

1% cutting class.

[KFC911]

Tim, where does she teach? ....and Congrats BTW!!!

[KFC911]

Originally posted by Tim Walsh
so does that mean 49% of children are below average?

That is a true statement....

[Tim Walsh]

She teaches the deaf students and English at Durham Southern High School. It's been an interesting experience for her since the population is about 90% minority and she hasn't ever come into contact with large numbers of them before. (Her college and hometown is almost entirely Caucasian)

Thanks!!

[island_dude]

My daughter is in a fancy private school. When she moving into the first grade she got a very inexperienced teacher. They had noted that when they compared performance on the standardized tests the kids generally did very well (as in above expectations for grade level) except in one area -- Spelling. The school principle, admin and the elementery teacher decided that they would had some additional focus on spelling. Mhy daughter's teach decided that the only homework she would assign would be spelling lists followed every friday by a goold old style dark ages spelling quiz. most of the time my daughter does pretty well on the tests. When she doesn't, she gets very depressed.

We met with the teacher before she went on leave and she didn't have much to say about our daughters progress. I was unimpressed since her previous teachers were a lot more proactive. We would not have waited for a meeting to hear about an issues. One of the teacher's comments rasied a concern that she might have a learning disability. Since the school I am pay tons of money to has no privisions for providing "help", we went to the public school. We met with 7 people to review our concerns and to determine which actions to consider next. The principal of the school was there and took a very active interest in the situation. she made some excellent sugestions (mostly related to certain kinds of vision issues we should screen for). I was very impressed. The group was horrified to hear that they were giving quizes to first graders on spelling. They thought was a very lame way of addressing spelling to first graders, who are just having issues reading.

My wife decided to meet with the principal of the private school about the spelling test emphasis. It was hard to actually get this meeting set up. Of all the time we have been associated with the school, I had met her only once. This is a school of less than 100 kids. There only 26 kids in the age span of all of the elementary grades. The principal was basically useless. Her inital reaction was to say that since the other parents were expressing complaints than it must be an issue with our daughter. Note there are 5 first grader, so that is a 20% failure rate. That would be a concern to anyone else. she spouted some nonsense but essentialy wanted us to go away.

We are pulling my daughter and sending her to the public school. We will save a ton of cash and have a lot more influence in the process. In a private school, if you don't like what they are doing you can complain but nothing compels them to respond. As it turns out, our county has excellent public schools, so this is not necessarily how this would play out elsewhere. I can say this, our daughter's teacher is pretty much a zero. While she was gone, her sub was much better. He has a lot more enthusiasm and experience.

So before you jump on the bandwagon of bashing public schools, keep this in mind. As far as the trend for home schooling goes: I really doubt that a high percentage of parents really have the skills to teach well. Teaching is not just having the answer key in the back of the book. There are actual skills involved. Yes, we have seen a number of kids do very well with home schooling, but I have seen the other side. It isn't pretty. FI that is what people choose to do, I admire their commitment to their kids education.

[Moses]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with "teaching to the test". If you are not measuring real learning, that just means you need a better test.

Freeform, no standards learning is a disaster. Look, our public schools are assigned a pretty simple task. Teach literacy, mathematics and the sciences. Learning in all of these areas is easily measured by testing. Testing provides accountability, something that has been sorely lacking in public schools.

I'm thrilled when our public school teachers teach my kids with testing in mind. At least they are learning something useful and measurable instead of spending their days building "self-esteem" and "social consciousness".

[Jims5543]

island - your story is a carbon copy of mine in a public school.

YOUR PAYING FOR THIS?

Our sons new school is amazing, first its a montessori school, the entire enviroment is 100X more relaxed. The older kids are expected to help the younger ones. Have you ever heard that when you teach someone something you learn it better yourself? The sense of community is amazing the teachers are awesome the director (principle) is also a teacher and talks to us every day.

My 13 y/o was failing math in public school the teacher didn't even care. She was more concerned about humiliating him in front of the class over his failure. When confronted she lied. Then my son was pulled from class and forced to write a letter of admission that he lied by the guidance counselor then she lied about what she did. This went all the way through the principle and to the district aministrator. Who did not care what was going on. That was the last straw. We have tolerated abusive teachers in the past but I decided to step up and take this one on, huge mistake. I ended pulling my son from the school in fear of retaliation from the teacher and administration. FYI - My kid had never been to the principles office ever in his entire time in school, he has never been a discipline problem ever. He is very respectful. He went to the priniciples office twice in this ordeal becuase of MY actions and my not letting this go without the teacher apologizing to my son. It never happened.

This public school is supposed to be a better one in our state. We paid a premium for our home to move to this school disctrict .

When I was discussing the problems I was having on here someone made the statement "your district does not sound very good" I had been brainwashed that it was good by the community and the school itself. Once that statement was made to me on here I looked at the school much differently.

[Tim Walsh]

I'm not against standardized testing, but there are problems with it.

For instance half of Steff's kids are on a first grade reading level when she first got them. These are 13-18 year old deaf or hard of hearing kids who's first language isn't English, it's American Sign Language (which has a vastly different sentence structure) Do you punish their math teacher when they fail because they can't read?

[Jims5543]

Originally posted by Moses
There is absolutely nothing wrong with "teaching to the test". If you are not measuring real learning, that just means you need a better test.

Freeform, no standards learning is a disaster. Look, our public schools are assigned a pretty simple task. Teach literacy, mathematics and the sciences. Learning in all of these areas is easily measured by testing. Testing provides accountability, something that has been sorely lacking in public schools.

I'm thrilled when our public school teachers teach my kids with testing in mind. At least they are learning something useful and measurable instead of spending their days building "self-esteem" and "social consciousness".

Thats why my son could fail a class but as long as he tested well he could get no further help from the school.

I went to school in NY and we took a test called the NY state Regents exam if you were in a regents level class.

We were not taught the test, we were taught the curriculam and passing the test was easy.

I get you point Moses, model the test after the curriculam and then you will not have to teach it.

But once again we are back to the fact that this is a government run system and its typcal of every other level of government. You want them to actually do something that makes sense?

[Jims5543]

Originally posted by Tim Walsh
I'm not against standardized testing, but there are problems with it.

For instance half of Steff's kids are on a first grade reading level when she first got them. These are 13-18 year old deaf or hard of hearing kids who's first language isn't English, it's American Sign Language (which has a vastly different sentence structure) Do you punish their math teacher when they fail because they can't read?

Of course you do, you wife works for the government and you want them to be reasonable and make sound decisions. Thats never going to happen.

Why are they not labeled learning impaired and made exempt from the test?

[Tim Walsh]

They are labeled deaf or hard of hearing, but that doesn't mean they're exempted. Many of them are mainstreamed. Sorry I don't know all the details, but I do know that at least a few of her kid's test count, but not all.

[Jims5543]

The learning impaired loophole is a great way for a school to get their scores back up to passing.

Since your wifes school is failing maybe they should look into exempting all the failing students? That what my sons old schools did.

This way no child is left behind.

I wish my sons old school was failing then I could get a voucher to pay for his private school.

[gaijindabe]

I love this - the perfect ink blot test. Something that is so obvious - that 50% are below average (we usually dwell on the 50% that are above average) that we read into it what we will and respond in kind...

[Jim Richards]

yep.

[gaijindabe]

The original article - from yesterday's WSJ:

Intelligence in the Classroom
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.

BY CHARLES MURRAY
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.

How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability--"g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.

There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."

This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.

To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones--for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.
While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.

That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

[Jims5543]

Originally posted by gaijindabe
I love this - the perfect ink blot test. Something that is so obvious - that 50% are below average (we usually dwell on the 50% that are above average) that we read into it what we will and respond in kind...

You have kids in School?

Are you sitting with your kid 3 hours every night trying to teach them what the teacher failed to?

I am not looking at the stupid 50% and who is average. I am seeing myself that the schools have turned from education centers to testing facilities that generate revenue for themselves. Its all about the money and not about the kids anymore.