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  • From: Serena Fenton <fents AT metalab.unc.edu>
  • To: InterNetWorkers <internetworkers AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Public Education
  • Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 15:45:17 -0400


Paul Cory wrote


There's a large body of education studies that show that mixed classrooms do little or no harm to high-level kids, but do a lot of good for the moderate to low end students within the standard curriculum. (Note that I doubt the studies were comparing high end achievement to that which might be gained through a more rigorous curriculum). Since we have to maximize achievement for every child on a limited budget, we mix differing achievement levels in the classroom.

I think that you should apply to the public school system. They need folks like you. Educational trends have been steadily dismantling the academically gifted programs for the past 5 to 10 years. Everyone are all gifted in some way. It is up to the teacher with 28 kids in a class to figure out *how* each child is gifted and teach him personally on that level. Starting salary is $19,000.

Don't forget that if you do become a teacher at the elementary level (in Chapel Hill anyway) you will have 4 - 5 kids who are non-english speakers. They get individual instruction one hour a week. Of those 4-5 kids, three will not know even the most basic elements of communication. Any rudimentary foreign language that you may know probably won't help because most won't speak the same language. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Romanian . Many of these children are here with parents pursuing a Ph.D.. These children will leave about the time they learn english and be replaced by a new wordless child. Research has shown that these children do well when and learn English when placed in a full English environment.

In Chapel Hill, you will receive at least one autistic child per classroom in the early elementary grades. One year the autistic population of my son's first grade was 7% of the children. They should have a personal assistant at all times, but if the parents demand full mainstreaming, the personal assistant is not there because the child is deemed a regular student. Research has shown that these children do well in the regular classroom and have a legal right to be there.

Most remedial reading and math efforts take place in second grade and under. Some minority organizations are fighting placing minorities in these classes because it labels them. In the seventh grade math class at Culbreth, they are doing basic addition and subtraction because these kids aren't up to speed. The theory is that a little review won't hurt the kids who are supposed to move into algebra next year. Those kids are smart and can teach the other kids who resent them for being smart.

As you can tell, I think that this approach, while very politically correct, is also very wrong-headed. The research is not particularly impartial, but done generally by educators who are advocating a particular stance. This is the stance of this decade. Remember open classrooms in the 70's-80's, where students were supposed to wander freely throughout the educational institution and when they were ready, they would sit down and learn to read. There was lots of research on that. Thousands of schools were built; thousands more remodeled to be completely open. Twenty years later, there is barely an Open School in existence.
What education needs is not to swing drastically from one trend to the next, but to follow a gentle evolution of tradition and experimentation.
The end - back to lurking - Serena

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Serena Fenton fents AT ibiblio.org http://www.definedesign.org
ibiblio: formerly known as metalab...sunsite.unc.edu ...

Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it. Bruce Mau

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