Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion How have US public schools changed?

I agree with moomin's replies. FWIW, I was in school in the "age of democratization and inclusion" - and my first thoughts of what was different in my children's education and my early elementary education are just a few re actual curriculum and more significantly societal. Re curriculum:

* we didn't work on projects or in groups, we sat at individual desks and did individual work

* there was very little lecture work and a lot of book learning, plus a few movies thrown in here and there

* we didn't have a gifted program but we did get a lot of differentiated work in leveled groups (this sounds opposite of what I wrote above but it isn't!)... I remember that I was very happy in school because I could move along at my fast pace and continue to receive higher level challenging work (and I was in a regular public school classroom). This continued to be true through upper elementary and in junior high we were tracked by ability level into different classes.

* I don't think we were taught how to read until 1st grade, and later on, in middle school in particular, it seems that students today are being taught much higher level science concepts than we were as children.

* Math was all about numbers and facts, and no one was concerned about relating it back to real-world applications until pre-algebra etc. I don't recall ever seeing a "word problem" until middle school.

The larger differences to me (and just as significant really) were societal:

* I grew up in a suburb next to a large city. The inner city schools were segregated, and education was incredibly unequal. Minority groups in our area were absolutely not receiving the same quality education as white children were within the bounds of the large city. There were no minorities in the suburbs. When our larger city was forced to integrate, there was massive "white flight" to suburban schools.

* When I looked around the classroom in elementary school, I saw a sea of faces that all looked like mine - white. My children's schools are all much more diverse, and yet they are also growing up in a city where there is a lot of racial segretation by neighborhood and where there is a noticable differentiation in school programs based on neighborhood.

* Sexual equality in sports - there was none. Title 9 passed when I was in middle school. There are so many parents today who aren't even aware of what Title 9 was. If you were a girl and you had athletic ability, you had cheerleading for the guys to look forward to.

* Pay for teachers - it was so very low. There were other issues in our schools too. Teachers were not happy with their working conditions when I was in elementary and rather than having the went on strike when I was in early middle school.

* The cost of school lunches then seemed much more affordable for most than it does today (where I live now).

* Kids didn't have many (if any) after-school activities - either at school or privately. Sports teams for elementary kids were usually summer activities. During the school year we had a lot of free time to play after school, although I did have a third grade teacher who sent home homework almost every day (and the adults in our neighborhood were all beyond shocked about that).

* Play was different - we all free-ranged. My kids are in a neighborhood where most kids free-range but from what I gather online it is very different than most of the US at this point in time.

* I walked to school all the time.

* My parents didn't become very involved in either my homework or my school life. Other than helping me make a papier-mache pumpkin when I had the role of "Great Pumpkin" In our 3rd grade school play. I feel like I'm much more involved in my children's school and homework, but don't know if that's due to school specifically, 21st century parenting styles, personality (mine or my parents) or most likely, because I have children who have learning challenges.

That's what I think of when I think of the differences between my early education and my children's.

You missed the reason that I think is most likely in my case, and possibly yours as well - I didn't really have much homework until 7th grade, and even then, it was probably less than my daughter had in 3rd. The occasional project that my mother nagged me about, but not more than two or so of those a year. I know you said your 3rd grade teacher sent home homework, but also that all the adults were shocked by it. My parents rarely got involved in my school life, but that was mostly because I kept school stuff at school and home stuff at home. Things are much more "mixed" for my kids.

That was one advantage of the rank and file desks with the stand and deliver teaching: I could finish all my work at school. My brother brought stuff home because apparently talking was more interesting to him.

As I remember elementary school, work was always by subject, none of this homework sheets at the end of the day stuff.

We had an advanced english class in sixth as the only differentiation. We discussed things in more depth and spent much of our time preparing for a big play we did for the whole school and the other elementary school in the district.

In the fifties, my mom's sixth grade was a complete pullout that did everything, but didn't advance core instruction as a leveller for smart kids.

Starting in fourth we changed classrooms as a group for math and social studies.

OMG!! I remember this!!



I thought that was-- seriously-- the weirdest thing ever. That was also in my (second) first-grade classroom where we seemed to spend (what seemed to me, anyway) an inordinate amount of time watching The Letter People.

I think that Moomin is definitely on to something re: the era in which the teacher was originally trained. Many of my teachers were my mom's college classmates. (And yeah-- talk about a major BUMMER. "Oh, no, honey-- I know John. He would NEVER..." Curses! Foiled again! Heheheh... well, and besides the fact that adults are not always the same person with other adults that they are with children, KWIM?)

I can point to a handful of teachers that were NOT my mom's (rough) contemporaries, and yes-- they definitely had a different pedagogical outlook. My second grade teacher was one of them.

My mom and her contemporaries were initially trained in the early 1960's, but most of them spent a lot of time in continuing education as well, so they were definitely exposed to new ideas as they emerged. The other factor is that we lived near a laboratory school teaching college-- probably THE teacher's college in the region, in fact. So not only were they initially trained with cutting edge thinking, they also had a lot of peer pressure to keep up with it. I know that my mom was VERY excited by the emergence in the 1970's and 1980's of research that improved the understanding of learning disabilities impacting literacy and numeracy.

I think that some people are just more flexible and open than others, too.

I didn't go to public school for K-8...I went to Kindergarten when it wasn't part of elementary school, so that was a private K.

I went to a private school 1-12 but only for 1-6 then switched to a catholic school 7 and 8 and then public high school.

I was in elementary in the 70s (I am in my late 40s)

My elementary school all grades 1-6 had reading right after homeroom. Each teacher had 2 (sometimes 3) reading groups in his/her room. At reading time you either stayed in your room or got up to go to another room for your group...it could mean moving up or down as far as grade level teacher but huge portions of kids moved from one room to another. It was no big deal. We used Lippincott reading series (I remember the brown book specifically) and we also used the SRA cards (because the teacher was splitting time between 2 or 3 groups if you were done with your assignment before she got back to your group, you grabbed a card).

Random kids did move for math too but that was just a few per grade rather than a mass mixing up of everyone. But this school was probably already a grade level higher than public schools to begin with.

I remember every single period there was time to work on your classwork and turn it in (small assignment) and time to work on homework (again small assignment)...and I remember learning that if I only had two math problems to finish after math was done, during science I would finish those two and then start on science so as not to have both science and math. And I remember having about 10-15 minutes at the end of the day set aside for homework...I also remember finishing the smallest thing during that time. THEN I had an hour bus ride home so I did homework or read on the bus. The actual distance was 25 minutes away but the bus had so many stops that it stretched the ride out.

I remember loving my 1st grade teacher and being able to sit on my hair (it was that long). In 2nd grade, I remember the teacher having us watch Electric Company and finding it boring. I used to have a contest with my seat mate during TV time where we whispered a word to each other and would try to look it up in the dictionary the fastest. By 3rd grade, I have been told that the teacher said I lacked initiative. The rest of school, I don’t remember as good or bad. I don’t remember standardized tests or recess amounts. I remember bits and pieces along the way, but my final memory from high school is having a teacher ask me if I wanted to apply for a scholarship and me telling him I had a C average. I ended up graduating from the University of California and going to law school – both in my 30s. At my 20 year HS reunion, my best high school friend (who I had not seen in nearly 20 years) asked "how did that happen - you never even liked school."

I started kindergarten in the late 70's. One thing that my elementary school did was differentiate instruction a lot more than my kids' current school does. Ironically, they call my kids' school a "traditional" school in terms of format. By traditional, I guess they mean circa 1950. We had what were called "Pods" (a big open space for each grade) with 3 classrooms in each pod, and were grouped according to ability for both reading and math. And we went to the classroom and teacher in the pod that matched our level. I was always in the high reading group and the low math group. They must have done some testing to determine who went where (but not standardized testing). And kids worked at their level. For math, for instance, if a kid finished a worksheet and mastered a concept, they went onto the next worksheet.
Now my kids are stuck in a single class with all different ability levels, and everyone does the math curriculum at the same pace. "Gifted clusters" start in third grade but all it really is is enrichment activities involving higher order thinking skills (and not very often, from what I can tell). The school thinks that since they have an official "gifted" program they are off the hook in terms of differentiating. It doesn't matter that all the kids in the gifted cluster are scoring 98th-99th percentile on math achievement tests--they can't move through the curriculum any faster. Honestly, I couldn't care less about the label "gifted"--I just want my kids to learn something in school on a daily, regular basis! I would gladly go to a school that did not have a "gifted" program or do any kind of ability/IQ testing if only they would let my kids work at their pace.
The school does a bit better in reading, in that they have leveled reading groups, but not much. They still have to go through the grade-level reading curriculum.
There is a school in our district that has a very open layout like the one I grew up in, and they combine grades. It was also built in the 60's or 70's (I call it the "hippie" school).

I'm beginning to think that this is what we need to be seeking as parents. Looking back, I can see a world of difference in the results when the people we needed help from were flexible, open types. (In other words, my kind of people. lol)