Reply #50: Here's more than 2 cents.

[LWolf]

Holding me to "higher standards" is a way of blaming me for a wealth of things I have absolutely no control over.

Ask my colleagues, my principal, my students, my parents...my standards are plenty high, and they have not a damned thing to do with long laundry lists of isolated skills or corrupt standardized tests.

I will be happy to tell you how to improve the quality of public education. First you need to understand a few basics. You cannot "force" me to work miracles, for a start. You cannot "force" me to produce results which are statistically, realistically, and physically impossible. Understand that, and we can get started.

Let's improve public education:

1. Smaller schools. Cap enrollment at 500. In a small school, everybody knows everybody, students are real people, not just numbers or names on a list, and it's harder to fall through a crack.

2. Smaller classes. Research has shown, over and over, that when you get beyond more than 15 students in one class, academic growth and performance suffers.

3. Curriculum. The U.S. curriculum is miles wide and centimeters deep. Give us less to "cover," and we'll actually learn more.

4. Time. Time in the school year and school day for planning, for conferencing with students, for meeting with colleagues. And quit scheduling outside activities during our instructional time.

5. Materials/support. We'll tell you what we need; you provide it.

6. Philosophy: instead of a business model, where schools are factories and kids are widgets, let's treat our students as individuals. Allow us to meet them where ever they are at, and give them everything we've got to grow from there. Let it be expected and approved for them to achieve their personal best, at whatever level they are at. Quit comparing them to each other.

7. A parallel curriculum. When a student is failing, we have 2 equally bad options. We can send him on, where he will be even further behind. We can hold him back,which research tells us doesn't work. And it doesn't work in the vast majority of cases. Instead, we could offer a parallel curriculum/classroom for these kids. Smaller classes...no more than 5. Intensive one-on-one time and attention. All day. All year. Focused, not on grade level expectations, but on whatever it is they need. Not based on being identified as "learning disabled," or anything else. Just based on identified need for more.

8. Support services for those failing. Tutoring, etc.

9. Parent ed starting at conception. To address how to create an environment from birth on that stimulates the formation of neural connections and intellectual and social development.

10. Restructure the power. Put the decision making in the hands of the stakeholders; parents and teachers. Take it out of the hands of administrators and politicians.

11. Make assessment about student need, and about finding ways to meet the need; not about blame and punishment. Make assessment appropriate to the individual.

There you go.