[CALIBK12] Our children need a quality education

[Catania, Amy]

After reading some posts, I am curious about a few things.  A lot of people have compared other countries and the US with achievement levels.  This is something that we have heard for many years.  So I am curious by nature and thus curious out which factors were studied.  Do these countries have compulsive education for all students, or are some not afforded an education?  Do students have to pay for their education, or is it free?  Are the comparisons based on tests or other factors?  Are students tracked early in education?  Are some students put on a trade track and others on an academic track?  How involved is the family with the child's education?  What cultural factors, if any, affect the child's education?  The US (and even every state, county, city, etc.) really is a unique place with its own unique culture, values, etc., so I just want to put whatever surveys were done in perspective.
 
There are good teachers as well as bad, just as in any profession.  I do get frustrated when teachers are blamed for all the ills in education (not that anyone did that, but I'm just venting a little having heard this numerous times before in the news, etc.).  It takes the school, the family, and the child to help a student obtain his/her potential.  If one leg of that is lacking, the child has a decided disadvantage.  This disadvantage can be overcome, but it is much more difficult on the other two legs, especially the older a child gets.
 
I used to jokingly say that anyone making rules about education has to teach at least one year in a classroom.  In our profession, perhaps just sticking a legislator with writing MARC records from scratch would give a little glimpse into the profession (insert evil chuckle).  But, honestly, I do not think the solution is just on the teaching end.  I think it must come from a change at home, with the students themselves, and with a good riddance to NCLB.  Somehow we have to make students see the value in education.  Last week, a teacher brought a statistic to me, and it meshed with one that showed up on this list serve.  Only 17% of students in a the survey this teacher cited believed that education has value.  That attitude needs to change, but it must start early even before a child goes to kindergarten.  Fifth graders say, "If I finish high school..." not "When I finish high school..."  Really, a positive spin needs to be put on education.  Some kind of campaign needs to be done to make education a valuable commodity.
 
Even though I became a teacher and then a librarian, when I was a teenager, I saw school more as a chore, a means to an end (i.e. getting into a good college), rather than something that I wanted to do.  I'm not sure how to change that, but it seems a well entrenched attitude that appears to have become even worse in the last ten years.  The point of this rather rambling narrative is to remind us all to look at the many factors that go into the education of a child.  There is rarely just one solution to any problem.

________________________________

From: calibk12-bounces at lists.sjsu.edu on behalf of Blanche Woolls
Sent: Wed 2/18/2009 1:05 PM
To: calibk12 at lists.sjsu.edu
Subject: [CALIBK12] Our children need a quality education



Who's walking away? They may not be walking away, but who's not walking
toward the problem. Let's start with those working in school libraries who
aren't members of CSLA and who don't know what CSLA is doing. Let's look
at parents whose big interest in school seems to be a place where they
won't need to pay for a baby sitter. Let's look at administrators who are
being asked to solve this budget problem with everyone around them telling
them how they can't cut this and they can't cut that and no one helping
them figure out how to stop doing unnecessary things to save the necessary
ones.

Who's not too worried? The many who are not in jeopardy because their
salaries aren't at the level of a professional Teacher Librarian, so they
will remain to check books and textbooks in and out of the room with the
books and textbooks. Perhaps we shouldn't call a room without a teacher
librarian a library?

Who's not worried? Classroom teachers who have been ignoring the things a
school library offers to their children, whose jobs are secure although
they may have a few more children in their rooms and they may lose their
aide. All because they haven't had the services of a good teacher
librarian and they don't know what their children have been missing.

To cancel a test, one saves the cost of buying the test, the cost of
administering the test (in teacher time which equals loss of teaching and
learning time), the cost of returning the test, the cost of time spent
looking at the test, the loss of time in genuine learning when teachers
stop teaching students to think and return to teaching rote answers. When
one goes back to early education, one finds the model from India developed
by a man from England to teach the children of English soldiers born to
Indian women. This model had the teacher teaching one student who,
equipped with his slate took on the next younger group having them
write and memorize what was on his slate and taking it to be written and
memorized on slates of the next younger group. It had success because what
they learned was better than not learning anything at all, but what did
they retain?

I'm not aware of any studies of time in the classroom related to what is
learned, but that would be an interesting study. We all know that teachers
can waste the lives of the students in their classrooms by giving them
busy work, by teaching to the test, by boring their students into slumber.
I well remember one first grade teacher who had watched unable to do
anything another first grade teacher who spent more time partying in the
evenings than preparing to teach the next day. As the last children were
getting on the bus on the last day, Teacher A turned to the playperson and
said, "Do you realize you have just wasted 25 years of life?" That's what
my ranting is all about.

The studies that have been done on an international basis show the U.S.
students ranking much lower in most areas than many other countries of the
world. I should have looked up some of those results before embarking on
this.

What I want is for my granddaughter to have a good education before she
tries college, where she can compete with students who go to very
expensive private schools. I want my nephews and nieces to come away
thinking and problem solving. I want all the children of California to
come away able to compete with the rest of the U.S. and the world with
good thinking and problem-solving skills, and they need our help, right
now.

Blanche

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009, Richard K. Moore wrote:

> Did David happen to mention any study showing a correlation between time in class and
> academic achievement?
>
> Is canceling tests really about saving trees?
>
> Or is this really about child care, and if so, why?
>
> The readers of this listserv are fully aware of the superb work being done by CSLA
> leaders to protect jobs and to promote a high level of school library service and
> quality. It's all there on the CSLA website:  http://csla.net/
>
> Who do you think is walking away?
>
>
> Richard K. Moore, InfoSherpa
> Huntington Beach, CA 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.sjsu.edu/pipermail/calibk12/attachments/20090218/972caed2/attachment-0001.html