The Five Primary Goals of Public Education

Usually, agendas like you have presented have been formulated by panels of education experts over a few or many years.
Homeschooling has shown that students can reach academic success in half the time it takes a brick/mortar student.
Developing community service as a part of education isn't such a bad idea. There are HSs here that have community service programs. You're being a bit cynical or just lack imagination about the limits of such a program.
As for counsellors, pay them
fairly. Why does it always have to be about money to the bean counters? The most wasteful spending in education that I have seen is related to administration and bureaucrats. Way too many with high salaries. Cut them and pay teachers more attracting better qualified teachers and hire more full time counsellors. The administrative bean counters will jeopardize the education process to justify their position.
There seems to be a pronounced direction toward social skills integration. I think that in some ways that it is a interesting but in some ways totally too scripted.
But education can't be all study,testing quizzing etc.
Trying to add some fun and other escapes is necessary.
Problem is that parents or Guardians have their own ideas that work for them but may not be beneficial to the big picture.

All five portions have merit. Emphasizing that they are of equal value is the problem. You never get MORE when those who provide the funding send LESS each year, which is the case here. LESS that ends up anywhere near the classroom, that is. The four areas of emphasis other than core education require new money. Thus, it will be taken from what would otherwise go to core education. Those things that can be helpful, say in the civic/social area, are great but they generally involve busing and full days away from the school. Empty classroom chairs aren't doing much good. Laying one's head on the book/iPAD/laptop and hoping to learn by osmosis in the bedroom at home is not particularly effective in learning new concepts.

Holy Cow, post: 394559, member: 50 wrote: in my home State, but probably not your home State.

The top dog at the State Department of Education changed about a year ago. This one has a fairly different view of what is important and what is not. It will take time to find out if he's right or he's wrong. Here is what he is implementing State-wide at this time.

There are five primary goals:
A) Better prepare toddlers to be kindergarten-ready upon enrollment.
B) Evaluate overall school performance by following former students to about age 25.
C) Stress civic involvement and social skills.
D) Regularly assess each student's career goals to help steer that student into the correct classes and experiences.
E) Achieve high levels of academic success.

The latest educational research suggests that true success can only be achieved through placing equal importance on each of the five goals. Of course, it will take a decade or two to find out if this is true. Meanwhile, a lot of different expectations are being placed on school district employees. For one thing there is a need for far more counselors than ever before. Where the money will come from to pay them is not clear. Similarly, moving into even more efforts than are out there today to have positive influences on all pre-schoolers is nebulous and unfunded. Tracking individual students every few months to determine how their future aspirations have changed so as to move them towards the best classes and experiences to achieve those aspirations will be monumental. (I wanna be an astronaut/bull rider/fireman/forensic scientist/professional basketball player/movie star.) Stressing civic involvement and social skills is very interesting. That will be fun to follow. I foresee lots of roadside litter removal work and reading to little kids. The one goal that has been the standard through the ages is for academic success. Now it's to be only one-fifth of the overall effort.

I count 2/5's for academic success. Evidence is overwhelming that early preparation is not being accomplished by the family anymore. Headstart type programs are really the only thing shown to improve academic success in todays world. Could even count 3/5's by including civic involvement and social skills, that are also no longer supplied by the family. This country has tried to replace the family with the educational system, but not given the resources to do it. They expect educators to step in and cure the failures of early development in children who have been neglected the first 6 years of life. Deride and fire all the teachers you want; that approach will never work.

Some of this reminds me of what we were told about life in Russia 50 years ago. That's what really worries me.

Local schools teach the test, not the subject.
They have no room for free thinking and fact checkers that seek out the real answers and squash those that try.
State programs for needy kids that will bring in more money per student are filled with students as a priority rather than as a need.
These special needs programs have three levels with each paying more according to the special need.
The total percentage of students in these programs is close to 25% of the students in each school and their performance does not get graded and they are not tested or counted with the total population of the school.
Basically, they are attending school by law and actually being left behind in education.
That is the job of the counselors, to adjust the boundary between students who get full education and those that will fill a seat that pays the school more money.
Their progress is un checked and does not count toward the accreditation rating of the school.
Nothing happens in these special needs classes to reclaim them into the social activity of the school.
They are not allowed to be in any interscholastic activity, sports or to gain any recognition for their effort in cheer squads, flag corps, FFA, Forestry, trade class or band or have an opportunity to take any selective classes.
Every school has an enormous teacher and principal and superintendent turnover rate.
I've seen many very good educators be thrown under the bus because they did not agree with the narrow minded school policy.
They were forced to move away from their homes to some place they were able to continue as an educator and not a policy follower.

They also believe that a surveyor should not charge over $500 for any survey.............

School superintendent here makes about $220k here under contract under somewhat of a good ole boy/gal
system.
A lot of it is a figurehead position but this superintendent did do the job for the previous superintendent.
Many many many assistant superintendents, supervisors and support staff make as much of 3x a teacher salary.
Principals make 2x a teacher salary and asst principals about 1.5x
If some of these positions were eliminated or pay scales adjusted, the money is there to pay and hire more qualified teachers.
It's all about the money with some politics and nepotism in the tossed into the mix.

In Oklahoma public education has been squalling for 'mo money' for years. While I am not against proper funding, I fail to see any logic in some of their argument. One in particular is "if we had more money we could attract a higher quality work force". What? Are you saying the existing work force is substandard? Then fire them all and hire qualified people.

But I actually need to stay out of the argument. I have no children that need education. And I had a horrible time with public education as a child. My personal opinion is the education system needs to show us some better numbers before we "throw money" at a problem. I'm kind of fond of the idea of annually firing and replacing one teacher for every 25 dropouts...let attrition take care of the problem.

Competition is the answer. The public should demand a voucher system or tax cut for sending their child to private schools. Then watch the system change when monies are available for private education. The government doesn't do much of anything good why should we trust them with our children? My 2 cents, Jp

Much of the "overhead" cost is attributable to what is commonly called paperwork. Absolutely everything in the world must be tracked, assessed, enumerated, massaged and reported in 47 different ways to 47 different other entities, most of which are Federal or State. Some State Representative or Senator decides they need to know something specific. They notify the State Department of Education and give them a deadline. A questionnaire is created and forwarded to every school district in the State with an earlier deadline. Someone in every school must supply whatever it is that is desired. The subject could be anything from what fraction of which types of school lunch ends up in the garbage to school mascot names at all levels within the school.

In large school districts a concern is keeping each classroom doing the same thing. A school district with 17 elementary schools with four classrooms of each grade level has 68 Third Grade teachers. All 68 need to be teaching the same things on the same weeks of the schedule. So when a family moves a couple of blocks and the child must now attend a different elementary school within the same district it is essential that the transition be as seamless as possible at the classroom level. Making this happen takes staff who monitor all 68 classrooms. When new classroom goals are instituted to add or subtract certain items, all 68 teachers must receive identical training. Again, provided by non-classroom staff.

There are many things required of the schools today that were not even classified as fantasies (or nightmares) a few decades ago. There is a new mandate here requiring annual training in suicide awareness for every school employee, including those who have no direct contact with students. Columbine, Sandy Hook and too many other examples have led to a thousand solutions to a problem that cannot be fixed but all staff must have up-to-date retraining on how to handle that which cannot be handled. Special education students are being mainstreamed into the regular classrooms with paraprofessionals and nurses, when essential, moving from class to class with them. I remember one young man at Mrs. Cow's high school who had to lay on a gurney-type contraption all day long due to a degenerative muscle disease. School bus drivers must be computer literate to input which students have entered or left their bus such that this information is available instantly to other school staff. New labor rules on overtime dictate monitoring actual time put in by all employees making less than roughly $47,000 per year, including all sports team aides, assistant coaches, the chain gang at football games, extracurricular program sponsors, ticket takers, crossing guards and even workers whose primary function is working for an entity that is a contractor to the school such as lunch room workers and special education cooperative employees if they also do any work directly for the school. Teachers are exempted from the overtime rules regardless of pay level. There seems to be an endless list of these "must haves" that are being added every week that have absolutely nothing to do with teaching Johnny and Janie how to read, write, do math and think for themselves.

[USER=1617]@Jp7191[/USER]

The public schools are tasked with providing for everyone. Private schools do not do that. It's an apples and oranges thing.

Holy Cow, post: 394614, member: 50 wrote: [USER=1617]@Jp7191[/USER]

The public schools are tasked with providing for everyone. Private schools do not do that. It's an apples and oranges thing.

Yep, kind of sounds like socialism, doesn't it? All I'm asking for is a little back (2-5k) and lets see how private sector education influences the public sector education. Jp

HC and Mrs. Cow, everyone who is or ever was connected to education shares your pain and understands your complaints. The education world has been taken over by experimenters who need infinite volumes of data to support their work. In far too many cases, the experiments are so poorly designed that no usable information can be gleaned from the data, but results are quoted and used to design everything from curriculum to custodial workflows.

Of the four goals you listed, only part of one can actually be implemented: Regularly assess. I'm not even sure what assessing a career goal entails, but I sure know what regular assessment means. Certainly, anyone familiar with the guidance process at most high schools would realize that counselors steering students into coursework for a hoped for occupation is a joke. So, Johnny, who made it to 10th grade with 5th grade math skills wants to be a nuclear physicist. What coursework would you recommend?

Toddlers are not in the school system before Pre-K, so preparing them better for Pre-K is not doable by the school system. Following students until age 25 is ludicrous. Mandatory annual reporting by former students, or required financial transaction reporting by sellers or credit-rating agencies to school systems, or maybe gps trackers? Are you kidding? Stressing civic involvement and social skills is too horribly vague to result in any consistently productive actions and no one will ever know if what's done has contributed anything positive to either students or society. And, pardon me. but isn't achieving a high level of academic success largely up to the student?

My experience with high-level administrators is that most of them have one thing in common: they were utter failures as classroom teachers. However they are experts at quoting summary statistics from studies whose underlying assumptions are never revealed. For example, a study may show that, on average, students who spend 45 minutes or more playing computer games every day score one letter grade lower on math tests than students who spend less than 45 minutes per day playing computer games. So you parents need to limit that game-playing.

What's left out? Well, the study is probably some computer-generated regression analysis. We need to know the correlation coefficient, the t-statistics on the regression coefficients, and the statistics that show that both distributions (time spent playing and test scores) are suitable for regression analysis. Next time one of your Ed.D. experts quotes something like that, ask him or her for those statistics and watch his or her knees turn to jello and eyes glaze over, Then demand that they either supply and explain the supporting statistics or stop basing policy on the study. And be prepared for something like, "Well, I don't understand the math, but I can interpret the results." You know a proper reply to that.

Mrs. Cow, bless your heart. You have my sympathy and full support (for what it's worth) as you actually try to impart knowledge and convey wisdom amid all the roadblocks that are being thrown in your path. You are essential to the betterment of the world we live in and you have undoubtedly enriched the lives of hundreds of students. Don't take these goals too seriously; as you know, they'll be replaced by something equally ridiculous within five years.

From what I've seen in CA schools (my oldest is a HS Sr this year), goal C) Stress civic involvement and social skills, and goal E) Achieve high levels of academic success, cannot be effectively accomplished together.

The pursuit of the social portion of the goals, in practice, is more accurately described as indoctrination into a social agenda, and it's prevalent in all subjects. "Teaching" how pure sciences, math, etc. reflect on social values necessarily takes time and focus from teaching how and why the laws of math and science actually work.

Another problem is that after a significant portion of the agenda across all academic courses has been diverted to focus on social issues, rather than considering that falling academic performance might be attributed in any measure to this redirected focus, the school systems start monkeying with how they teach the actual academic portions of the academic subjects. In my kids' schools, they were doing this completely nonsensical method called "spiral learning".

An example of how that works is in math. Rather than the normal progression of mastering addition & subtraction before moving on to multiplication & division, then to algebraic concepts, geometry, and then more advanced concepts, they would give the kids a little bit of each in every grade starting with 2nd grade. When my kids were in 2nd or 3rd grade, before they had been able to master basic arithmetic, they were being assigned algebra and geometry problems. The next year, they hit it all again, but supposedly at a higher level of difficulty. For a couple of weeks when my oldest was in 8th grade and my youngest in 5th, the younger one was working on more difficult problems than the older one. The younger was (understandably) struggling with polynomials and the older struggling with multiplication and division.

Isn't it just common sense that a student has to be given the opportunity to get comfortable with the basics before moving on to more advanced concepts? I don't know, maybe other people teach their kids to run just as their getting good at crawling and maybe able to take 3 wobbly steps before falling on their butts.