Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How do you feel about the public school system?

Sorry to be so negative on this topic. I used to tell my husband that I went through a mourning period when I realized that the public school system that I had loved as a child was actually dead and had no hope of being resurrected.

What makes me particularly frustrated and upset is my son's nosedive with regard to his attitude to school and the adults in it. He went on a 15 minute diatribe the other day after I asked him if he wanted to learn about something. He screamed at me, "I don't want to LEARN about anything. Learning is the worst thing in the world and I hope that nobody on the planet ever has to learn anything ever. Learning is so horrible!"

I started to laugh. I thought that he was kidding because all DS loves to do is learn. Then I asked him what learning means. He said, "learning is what you do in school when you have to sit there all day and learn things that you already know. Learning is sitting and being bored and listening to grown ups talk about the most boring things and then they ignore you all day." His school environment is not allowing him to learn. And as administrators and teachers have told me many times, they are focused on the "high" Common Core standards and making sure that everyone passes the test. The teachers have no choice but to follow their CC aligned curriculum, the administrators have no choice but to enforce the teachers' following it. Everyone is focused on the test scores and bringing the bottom up. Any teacher with the means and the brains have left, by and large. So my son, and many other children who are merely above average are being held hostage in this nutty environment.

I think as a whole, it's not feasible to expect it to serve every child efficiently and effectively... One thing I would love to see is administrators allowing teachers to teach, less trying to teach to 24 levels in a class of 24, and less lowering of expectations.

Where we are, public or private, the schools do not have any services for 2E... if a child has (ex.) sensory processing issues, but has advanced comprehension, they are out of luck until either comprehension drops to meet the SPD or the SPD goes away. We were told that our DD is SO smart that when she decides not to be dysgraphic, she will indeed not be dysgraphic! It is SO archaic here.

... background... attended public schools... worked almost 10 years in public schools, about 7 years in private schools (I have worked part time with one foot in each system)... issues as a former employee... Now, from my parental viewpoint...

... how the PS system is designed and works... they groom people for all kinds of futures because society needs the blue collar worker, the janitor, the burger flipper, the garbage man etc (several thousands of these) in addition to rock star CEOs, Presidents and scientists who win Nobels (we need very few of these). After pondering a lot on this, my theory is that the outliers are expected to help themselves using their innate talents and the system grooms people who are below average, average and above average to move on and fit into society's hierarchy. When you see the system working, you can get the feel that they educate the majority of kids to be mediocre (which is what the society wants) and the effort being put into the education is also mediocre.

When I tutored in a school last year, I researched things like crazy... One kid reported double vision when he was reading and had some major tracking issues, so I researched it, and figured out his reading speed almost doubled if a blue or yellow overlay was stuck on top of the reading passage. I even recorded his reading speed with and without the overlay and reported my findings to the teacher, and she barely seemed interested. Another girl I had (a 9 year old) had many symptoms of dyslexia and also could not walk down steps alternating feet or do basic things in Phy Ed. I kept bringing this up with hints that she should be evaluated or someone should talk to her mother, and mentioned that she has many symptoms of Developmental Coordination Disorder like my DS, except she was worse (and I even printed a thing out and gave it to her teacher). I got blank stares or shrugs from people. No one was concerned or inquisitive about what this girl's problem could be. I had another third grade girl who didn't know basic vocabularly words like "branch" (as in the branch of a tree). After I nagged them for months and said how concerned I was, in Spring they finally agreed to do an eval in the fall (hopefully they are doing it now!). There were numerous other examples like that. And now I'm seeing the same thing in my kids' school. The teachers... don't seem to take much initiative to do anything to get them special help or figure out what is getting in the way of their learning.

I think the requirements to be a teacher should be much higher. Everyone should have a Master's Degree and in depth training in gifted and special needs (esp. now that so many children are mainstreamed).

It's a pity centrists gave up on vouchers. They would speed up reform dramatically. So would eliminating lotteries at charter schools. If markets were allowed to work, they could get us a lot closer to a solution.

The demand is too great for supply... especially when the financial reward is so far below what Master's holders can earn in other fields.

But NCLB, for all its flaws, is making a difference in inner cities.

It's a pity centrists gave up on vouchers. They would speed up reform dramatically. So would eliminating lotteries at charter schools. If markets were allowed to work, they could get us a lot closer to a solution.