To me the first step towards addressing education and coming up with Solutions is to accept that no solution will save every child or should even try.

The second step is to stop caring about comparative performance between the various groups we like to segment our society

Once you do that you can focus on the correct goal for any education system.

That goal is simple. You want to seek and environment where every student is able to achieve at the maximum level their environment effort and teaching can take them

This means that your smartest kids you want to become their absolute maximum highest achieving selves. Anything less even if they destroy the SAT is a failure

For the average kids you want the exact same goal. They won't hit it higher bar but you want them to hit the highest bar they can hit.

For the dumbest kid who still try hard. The same goal.

Any factors to include children who don't fall into any of those categories that tend to detract from those categories should be removed

And stop fricking worrying about varying results. Why do we care if the white kids improve by 50% and the black kids improved by 30%? Isn't it still better then neither improving at all?

I want a story on a school district in Ohio that was bragging about reducing the gap between whites and minorities. As I read the story I realize something glaring was missing. The actual results. When I research the actual results I found the black kids had not improved at all. And these assholes and charge were calling this a success.

Just another example of setting the wrong goal

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Posted by Willie Stroker

Member since Sep 2008

13129 posts

Posted on 3/19/17 at 1:02 pm to ShortyRob

quote:

To me the first step towards addressing education and coming up with Solutions is to accept that no solution will save every child or should even try.

The second step is to stop caring about comparative performance between the various groups we like to segment our society

I agree. We also need to do a better job of linking consequences to choices. I understand the impulse to suspend kids from school as a consequence for bad behavior. But bad kids probably see that as a reward. I also understand a reluctance to group all bad kids in a bad kids' class. Educators probably see that as harmful to group all bad kids together.

A more viable alternative might be to have multiple tracks. One should be heavier on PE and/or military, one should be heavier on votech, while another more academic in concentration. All should cover math, reading, and life skills but the rest of the school day can be filled with other activities that vary as described above. Depending on the severity of behavior, when any child engages in undesirable behavior, they may end up being forced to choose a different area of concentration. They will never get a day off to reward bad behavior, they'll just get removed from the environment where their behavior occurred and made to adapt to different circumstances.

A system like that would require a more diverse group of teachers than what we currently use, but clearly the status quo is not producing the different results we want.

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