Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Is current traditional schooling accepted cruelty?

Student teacher ratios are the best indicator of learning success in early grades. getting rid of non-school staff will allow schools to hire more teachers. There should be an associates degree for elementary schooling.

My DD's soul is being crushed in traditional public school, but this is based entirely on the district and school administrations' idiotic biases and how they're aggressively preventing DD's placement in an appropriate learning environment. If she weren't gifted, she'd be just fine.

Her homework load is pretty light. She's in GT class half the day, and they tend to go from one project to another, with a week or two deadline which allows us to help DD budget time appropriately, without having a negative impact on her sleep or her extracurriculars. The rest of the day she's in a normal 1st grade class, and she gets most of that homework done on class time.

She's on a soccer team full of kids from a private, Catholic school. Those first graders are doing an hour of homework a night, often stretching out beyond that because they're burned out. Between the homework, soccer, and ordinary daily activities (eating, bathing, etc.), they're not getting enough sleep every night.

It also helps that DD's school day starts nearly two hours later than the private school. That makes a huge difference. It means we're not trying to send her to bed while it's still daylight to ensure she gets enough sleep. It also means she gets some Daddy time after dinner.

The charter we used to attend required a long application. Supposedly there was then a lottery among applicants who met the desired requirements. I suspect the students were actually handpicked.

They also did indeed find ways to kick out kids with LDs. I don't know how they do it, legally, but they have done it.

That said, the school also had some great teachers and did some great stuff. It was a mixed bag.

Anyway. Are there dumb, soul-crushing things happening at schools? Yes. Are there are also wonderful teachers doing great things? Also yes.

Ultramarina- Lotteries are required to be held publicly. Did you go and observe?

As for finding a way to kick out kids with LDs, I hate to say it but traditional public schools do this all the time. If you don't believe that to be the case, I suggest you find out how many expulsions your local high school had last year. How many kids transferred to the continuation or credit recovery school? How many simply dropped out?

In my former charter, and all over California, charters do not simply "kick out" kids with LDs. There is a progressive discipline policy as well as a progressive academic policy. Often we find that kids with LDs, with support and assistance can be successful in our school. Sometimes they can't.

Let me give you an example to illustrate. In my former school (where I worked for 10 years and my son is now there in the umbrella as a homeschool student), high school students ALL take college prep classes. There is no credit-recovery or remedial academic track. Students are physically at school from 8am to 4pm, at a minimum, then have one to two hours of homework a night. Students are all required to participate in an art major and an art minor. Some students are dancers, musicians, actors, game designers, painters etc. Students may be at school until 11pm for several weeks before a big show. The school has a minimum GPA requirement of 2.5 at all times. If you fall below 2.5, you get extra tutoring, assistance with homework etc. If you fall below 2.0, you have one semester of no activities allowed, plus additional support, 3 different SST meetings and a special afterschool class 2x a week for assistance with homework.

Sometimes, even with all of that built in, a kid cannot make it in the system. If we know this in advance, they have an IEP or a 504 in place when school starts. They may have modified homework, different books to read or extra time on tests (as examples). If the parent doesn't tell us, it will take a full school quarter (by law) to get a 504 in place because of the required meetings and evaluations that have to take place.

Sometimes a kid just doesn't do their work. Period. It's that simple. I can beg and plead, their parents can bribe and cajole. But sometimes, they just don't do it. There really isn't much I can do about that. Why would I hold a spot at a coveted arts academy for a kid who isn't going to try when I have a waiting list of 200 who are dying for the opportunity?

And while I'm on a roll, let me also say that the rumor that schools kick kids out right before standardized testing is also baloney. In CA, and most other states, the date of enrollment determination is in October. The STAR test is in May. It doesn't matter if a kid left my school the day after the determination date or the day before the actual test, his STAR scores still count in our final tally.

Class size is a huge inhibitor to fostering creative thinkers. In a class of 30 kids, it is nearly impossible to facilitate dialogue among the children on a topic. Instead, the dialogue is between the teacher and each individual child who has something to contribute. Our school breaks kids down into ability groups of 8 to 9 kids during reading and math centers (with 3 to 5 kids going to a remedial teacher in another classroom), which helps with that dialogue during those times. But most of the day is about behaving, being quiet, listening, and "contributing productively."

The teachers value most the children who are able to behave and be quiet and comply. Kids who want to do things differently are disruptive when you have large class sizes. This means that the kids who are most successful in our school system are not the ones who will be most successful in life beyond school, where leadership, creativity, and critical thinking put you ahead.

This whole thread is depressing me, along with the thread on the parenting and advocacy board about the 3rd graders who've lost their fire for learning because of their school environments. Both threads are really hammering on the things I already don't like about our school. But I haven't been able to find a better school, and I've looked at a lot. Our current system has problems, I think people recognize there are problems, but we have a long way to go to solve them. For any parents on this board who had children in elementary school prior to NCLB, I'm wondering if there's a marked difference between then and now?

That is an overstatement. The correlation between success in school and in life (however one measures life success) is not 1.0, but it is certainly positive. IQ imperfectly predicts success both in school and in life, as does the ability to get along with others.

Bostonian- Every study I've seen that showed an advantage for disadvantaged students using Open Court was funded by the publishers of Open Court.

"This study analyses the research that supports Open Court, describes its translation into instructional policy in California, and compares the average SAT 9 reading scores of English-only children in schools using Open Court against comparable schools using non-scripted programs in one large urban school district. It found no significant difference in the average second grade SAT 9 reading scores in Open Court and comparison schools. Furthermore, it found no Open Court school had positive differences of 10 or more percentile points between second and fifth grade whereas 21% of the comparison schools did. Long-term Open Court schools had negative differences of 10 or more percentile points between second and fifth grade twice as often as schools using non-scripted programs. Finally, long-term Open Court schools serving communities where 97-100% of the children receive free / reduced-price meals were significantly more likely to be in the bottom quartile of the SAT 9 reading assessment than schools using non-scripted programs serving similar children."

http://instructional1.calstatela.ed...o_Instructional_Policy_in_California.htm

What's Open Court? My Google searches led me to online viewing on trials and parent-produced sites that didn't tell me much.

Could someone provide a link? Thanks.

Yes, I agree, it's an overstatement, a broad generalization, as is much of this whole thread.

Val- I'm having trouble finding a specific link for you. Open Court Reading is published by SRA McGraw-Hill and is vaguely referred to on their website and in their "Direct Instruction" section. They are also doing a national study to determine the effectiveness of Open Court and Everyday Math.

Open Court was implemented in many CA schools in the early 2000s. Lots of schools are still using it either because they liked it or they didn't have cash to replace it. It is a scripted, direct instruction curriculum. In districts that required implementation and did not allow teachers to deviate, it is a fully scripted program that does not allow teachers to change, modify or move away from the text. And by fully scripted, I mean it says "Students, now we will read the next work. Read ___. Good. What word is the next word? ___. Good." As originally published, it came with a clicker to cue student response, like in clicker training for dogs. Really.

The biggest complaints I heard from teachers at the time, was that you had to read the same story for five days in K and 1st. It didn't allow the teachers to change anything and there were assignments that went with the story. It took an average of one and a half hours to get through the daily lesson. If you had an assembly or field trip etc, you had to double up on a day to catch back up again.

You can see samples on Amazon.