A good education.

January 8, 2007 in Uncategorized

I read a post this morning on Nashville is Talking that led me to this great post by Bob Krumm. It got me to thinking about how the way the school system is today, has failed my daughter.

Megs is a very smart girl, and that’s not just a mother saying that. I’m completely honest with myself about what abilities my children have.

Aaron is slightly above average as far as intelligence- school is fairly easy to him, he brings home good grades. Aaron’s gift is his ability to get along socially. People like Aaron. Aaron knows how to fit in, how to get along.

Nate, well, I haven’t really placed where Nate’s at on the intelligence scale. Nate has been behind on many developmental milestones. He caught up with therapy, and now he seems pretty average. Nate can remember and sing (on key, even) songs he’s heard once or twice, so I think Nate’s talents may lie in music. He also likes to take things apart and put them together, and he loves to count, so he might be an engineer type. I don’t know.

But Megs, oh, Megs. She’s another story entirely. She’s a really good artist. She taught herself to read when she was 4 years old because I told her she had to be able to read to play some of the video games the rest of us were playing. So she just, somehow, figured it out and can read nearly anything anyone else can read. Megs also loves math. Often we’ll be driving in the car and we’ll be talking about addition and multiplication. Megs, like me, loves that you can take numbers and use a certain method and it comes out into one nice, neat package.

Yesterday we were driving down the road and she said, “One hundred plus ten plus ten is….one hundred twenty?” My heart lept up as I thought about how she really loves learning. Last year she went to preschool in Murfreesboro and she absolutely could not wait to go to school.

This year, she cries every morning she has to go to school and claims she’s sick. She’s not sick, she just hates school. I had tried to get her into the magnet school, but she didn’t “win the lottery”. So she had to go to the regular school that we are zoned for.

The school we are zoned for has a lot of problems. It has way more students than the building can hold, so there are many classes out in trailers. It has a 12% ESL population, and there aren’t enough teachers who can teach ESL, so these students are scattered throughout classes. In Meghan’s class of 22 students, 6 of those are ESL.

Now, I know the conservative types are going to tell me that’s my own damn fault for living in a poor area, and I suppose they’re right- this is one of the reasons we are moving back to Murfreesboro, to get my children in better school districts.

But even when we get the kids into better school districts, they still are not going to get the kind of education they really *need*, because the educational system in America is falling apart. There’s not enough money, there aren’t enough teachers, parents don’t care, or they care too much and fight to get their children into classes they really don’t need to be in.

I have a bold proposal to make, and it probably won’t be popular. I think we should tear down the school system the way it is and rebuild completely. Here’s what I would do.

In kindergarten through 3rd grade, students should be tested at the beginning and end of the year. This way, we can place students that are on a similar level of need. This would be a lot like the “reading groups” most of us had back when we were in school, only it would be for everything. I was placed in the “smart reading group”, but there were no math groups. If I had been able to be in the “smart reading group” and the “dumb math group”, I wonder if my math skills would be better today. Like I said earlier in the post, I *like* math. I just struggle with it.

Also, students would take general classes like music, art, etc- but they would be able to take one “enrichment” class of their choice, like languages, orchestra, choir. I do not think that children who are as young as kindergarten are unable to learn to speak a language, or read and play actual music. I think it is easier when you are younger.

This would work generally the same way for students in each grade following, but classes get more intensive, and more work is expected to be done at home. Once the student hits high school, classes get way more specialized and tailored to the student’s interests and abilities. High school would become more like vocational school- you could walk out of high school and have the training to become a mechanic, a hair dresser, etc.

Now, let’s talk about parental involvement. This is something I’ve rolled around in my mind many times and have not really been able to come up with a good solution. The fact is, parents absolutely *have* to take control of their children and insist that they behave in school, do their homework, etc. But some parents just do not. I’ve thought about fining parents for not making sure their children behave, but you can’t get money out of people that just don’t have it.

I’ve thought about kicking those kids out of the regular schools and sending them to alternative schools which are more like weekday jails for bad kids. This comes closer to a good idea, I think, but sometimes kids are good at heart and just have bad parents and feel they have to act out for attention. So I don’t know. This is the hole in my plan that I think is otherwise pretty good.

So, that’s my basic idea for how I’d like schools to run. There’s a lot more to it than this, but that’s the basics of it. What do you guys think? How would you fix the educational system?