As someone with kids, I can honestly say that this part of his hiring could have the longest term impact on our country. R’s seem to want dumber people. Easier to mainpulate the uneducated. The CIC said it himself during the campaign.
Yeah, considering the decades-long war waged by Republicans against quality education, DeVos is merely an extension of their already intolerable positions, and not something new. . . but that doesn’t exactly make her good by any reasonable stretch.
95% of education dollars are spent at the state and local level, that isn’t changing.
Arnie Duncan was one of the highest visibility, most effective, and I believe longest serving secretaries of education.
So let me ask you the question I’ve asked other teacher and students
As result of Arnie tenure, my childs education is better because of A, B, and C. Or for teachers my school is better because of X,Y or Z?
I generally get blank stares.
The efforts over the last five or so years to make it easier for kids to pay for their college education and to push back against predatory lending were probably the biggest thing he did for me and my kids as I’ve got kids entering college (or one year in) right now. The stuff that DeVos wants to change messes with all that.
At the local level, the programs started by the R’s under Bush are what screwed with my kids the most. Specifically No Child Left Behind, started under Bush, which caused the smarter kids to get held back in public schools because of the way it was interpreted to constantly bring up the bottom while putting the brakes on the top of the class. This was not undone during the last eight years, unfortunately.
Bullet pointed lists aren’t easy to come up with on the spot, but there are some things that I know have affected my kids that came from the Federal Government level. The people in charge absolutely make a difference.
Yeah there was a time when students and parents were funneled to more expensive and less lenient private loans and had no idea, literally no idea, that government loans were available since so many school took money from this private organizations and had no incentive whatsoever to offer the other ones.
Then there were the ridiculous, read outrageous fees these banks had on their debit and prepaid cards these campuses started issuing Federal Aid on…
but you’re right, a terrible secretary of education who can directly affect the lives of millions of students, our future workers, leaders and inventors couldn’t possible have a dire affect on our future because apparently we only need to worry about the individuals in charge of bombs… is that it?
I was talking K-12. NCLB was bipartisan legislation arguably more the brainchild of the late Sen. Kennedy than Bush 43., that started pre Arne Duncan. It sounds like that you believe the NCLB was more a negative than a positive, is that true? If so doesn’t that argue for a lesser role of the federal government in K-12 education rather than more?
Arne and Bill Bennet are almost certainly the two most consequential Sec of Education ever. It just seems to me that if the Sec of Education made a big difference, everyone should be able to rattle of a few good things they did. The fact that people can’t supports my hypothesis that Federal government doesn’t make much of a difference in K-12 education.
So let me help, two of Arne’s big pushes were Race to the Top and Common Core. Did either one help your kids? If so how?
The federal government does play an important role in providing student loans for higher education. Now if that is a good thing or has the availability of student loan lead to a massive increase in the cost of college education is a debate for another thread.
Precisely because it would pass without him. He would have been a good little soldier if his vote was required.
As with everything, the devil is in the details. The balance of positives and negatives in a role for the Federal government in K-12 isn’t wrapped up in how people feel about any given policy. It’s a balance of what’s out there vs. what would otherwise exist, and that’s an extremely complicated part of the equation to figure out and uses a lot of assumptions to even attempt it unless we’re certifiable experts in the field. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try (I mean, I like to consider the merits of different nuclear power designs even though my job has nothing to do with that), but I’d take anything we come up with as “less than credible.”
I believe that NCLB, as implemented in PA and specifically in my school district, was a net negative, yes. As noted by Dan_Theman, it is not so simple as to say that means the Federal Government should stay out of education, it just means that often the simplest path chosen to implement the ideas isn’t always the best. Also, I think misinterpretation of what that NCLB idea meant is what led to kids at the top being held back while kids at the bottom were inadvertently doing the holding back based on what Teachers were forced to prioritize among students to reach testing goals.
Looking at Common Core and Race To The Top, I think both have admirable goals at the root of the legislation but I don’t know if there’s been enough time yet to practically judge the effectiveness, although I do think I’m seeing an improvement at the High School level (10-12) right now at my school where more AP courses have been added in the last few years. I especially like this part of the Common Core…
Media and technology
Since media and technology are intertwined with every student’s life and in school in the 21st century, skills related to media use, which includes the analysis and production of various forms of media, are also included in these standards.[28]
The standards include instruction in keyboarding,[30] but do not mandate the teaching of cursive handwriting. As of late 2013, seven states had elected to maintain teaching of cursive: California, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Utah.[31]
I’m all for the Federal Government putting into place better and more realistic standards for education. I want to see them push for schools and especially for teachers to up their game. One thing I encountered this year that was concerning was a teacher who had my son’s class doing their “lecture” at home on the PC and then coming to class to essentially do the homework. If he didn’t get it while watching a video, then he was lost upon entering the classroom and the squeaky wheel kids took up so much time that he could often fall through the cracks on that section. It felt like the teacher simply didn’t want to teach but rather to just correct or help people after the fact. Lecturing can be exhausting and boring for kids, but I still think it’s an important part of learning. You can’t figure everything out from a YouTube video. I wasn’t real happy with that.
This stuff is complex, and I feel like DeVos doesn’t have much complexity in her. I also am very concerned with the push to allow religion and religious schools to drive things like voucher programs and the like. It all smacks of trying to either ideologically or financially cut kids out of getting a good education. Plus I think there is indoctrination into potentially damaging ideas being rammed home daily rather than having the kids think for themselves about social freedoms that the religious right specifically would like to curtail.
Finally, her ties to companies that want to bury kids in debt from college makes me uneasy, to be kind.
Good response.
I worked for a company that publishes SIS* for K-12 schools (public/private/charter) and the NCLB data collection was fairly simple and straight forward. In fact there’s comparatively very little federal imposition on what’s required by schools; it’s state requirements that are ‘burdensome’ and complex (for the states we cover, PA is one of the worst.) States knowing best isn’t always the answer, either (although honestly I don’t know what the answer is - i think federal spending on education demonstrates that more money doesn’t necessarily result in better outcomes.)
*School Information Software
It’s like anything. It’s a complex problem and there is a ton of grey area. I think the problem often comes from not thinking about what’s happening to the kids enough and instead looking for simple ways to solve complex problems. Kids have different needs when it comes to education. I spent ten years coaching soccer, baseball and basketball, and I always had to take into account how different kids would internalize the stuff I was teaching and also how best to talk to them after the “exam” (games) to get all of us back on the right track. I also had to be a motivator while at the same time preaching individual effort and responsibility on the field and the court. I completely understand how this can be difficult for teachers with 30 or more kids in a class during a day when they have to literally jump “game to game” to make a (maybe bad) comparison to what I was doing within a specific subject!
It doesn’t help that so many parents while preaching “School is important!” turn around and in the next breath talk about how much it sucked to go to school or how much they hated math or physics, etc. Your kids are listening! sigh It’s easier to motivate in sports because often the game itself is fun. Math may not always be “fun” in the same way but you need some understanding of it to survive beyond high school.
Anyway, I don’t have all the answers. I do think I have some clue about what could be changed to make it better in any and all schools, but I also know I’m at a point in my life where getting involved in a school board is something I don’t have time to do. In a couple years I may consider it…
How about we just focus on Secretaries that won’t harm the kids instead of great deeds of the past? Isn’t that enough of a reason to not support this woman? I’d prefer the country not support her rich friends by subsidizing their kids’ private school education at the expense of poorer kids.
Thanks, Dave good response.
I’m personally agnostic about NCLB. It is beyond a doubt the most consequential program to every come out of the DOE in the departments 38 year history. It was one of the rare bipartisan programs of this century and it actually included a significant increase in the DOE budget.
Did NCLB change schools? yes it accelerate the trend of K-12 schools to do more testing.
Did it make schools better? Possibly, we saw a very modest increase in test scores. But did it actually turn high school student with better skills for the 21st century? Dubious
Did it make dramatic difference in our school? Absolutely not you’d be hard press to find statistical support for huge difference in K-12 school before and after NCLB.
So let’s look Betsy Devos and the DOE. The proposed budget for the DOE is 59 billion down 9 from last year. Let’s say Betsy is wildly successful and diverts the $5 billion dollars in Arne’s Race for the Top to some voucher system.
In the context of the 1.4 trillion that States and cities spend on K-12, 5 billion is barely even a drop.
As MrGrumpy says the Federal Govt doesn’t put much of a burden on schools, that’s the job of states and local school boards. Given that Republican are philosophically opposed to the federal involvement, that’s not changing under Betsy. You add in the teacher union vehement opposition to vouchers, you won’t be able to measure Betsy impact on K-12 schools in the US with an electron microscope.
So let’s pretending that Betsy Devoss matters, much less Senator McCain’s vote on her.
Strollen, no offense but reading this thread’s latest posts with fresh eyes I’m under the impression you moved the goal posts here. You went from praising McCain’s character and defending him against criticisms to demanding practical, real-world consequences for his failure to break ranks as a maverick typically would do.
How about him telling the press that Congress is going to regret going nuclear, that it’s a mistake, and then going inside and voting for it? When I read your comment how America doesn’t deserve a man with McCain’s character, I might’ve agreed with you in the 2000 primaries. But by spring of 2004, when that lying SoB went over to Baghdad and played party boy with the media, telling them that Baghdad was safe, that he was able to take a walk around one of its marketplaces, and left out that he had a platoon of armed marines escorting him, with two helicopter gunships in the air above, whatever respect I had for him was lost at that immediate moment. He’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, but a pocket-sized caricature of an actual legislator since that moment. I’ve seen nothing from the man to suggest otherwise in the intervening years.
Don’t have time to pop into the ongoing discussion as much as I’d like (and unlike most topics in P&R, it’s one I’m reasonably well-versed in, working for an education nonprofit focused on STEM career pathways and teacher leadership), but I wanted to come by and comment a little on this.
The general technique being used here sounds like a flipped classroom, if perhaps inexpertly implemented. It’s actually a great pedagogical technique that’s seeing a lot of play in top teachers’ classrooms, and when a pro puts it to good use, it’s really something special.
In short, the teacher should be recording solid video lectures for students to review at home each night, often accompanied by textbook reading to flesh out the material. When done “right,” the teacher is engaging, makes good use of the format (displaying graphics and examples on-screen during their lecture), and accommodates students with limited technology access (say, by loaning them a classroom laptop with a thumb drive full of all the lecture videos).
When the students come to class the next day, the teacher should do a small assessment to gauge overall understanding of the material, ideally targeted enough to identify students who might need a little extra guidance or topics that the class as a whole isn’t strong on. This is where your scaffolding skills come into play–how well can you adapt to students who absorb the video material at different rates?
Then, the majority of the class period can be spent on active, engaging implementation/practice/activities. This is most obviously “best” in, say, Science classes where you can immediately start doing experiments and lab work that exemplifies the material covered the night before, but virtually any subject can benefit from it. English classes can move into debates on material or active performances of plays; history classes can reenact a moment or reconstruct an object in a historically accurate fashion; math can perform experiments or use tech tools that illustrate the concepts at hand, etc.
The basic idea being that not only are lectures “boring,” but they’re also not necessarily the best way to reach a lot of different kinds of learners, and putting new skill and knowledge into practice right away helps cement the material in memory much better than assigning a homework assignment after 44 minutes of lecture and hoping the kids get around to doing it.
Moreover, this way, students who don’t understand can be quickly identified and worked with. If a kid misses a key component of a lecture during a standard schoolday and goes home with their homework, they’re basically SOL unless they’re really good at teaching themselves from the textbook (assuming they even have one). In a flipped classroom, people who didn’t catch on as quickly can instead be identified and brought up to speed during the activities when their gaps become evident, either by the instructor or by their peers during group work.
This technique works especially well with things like Project-Based-Learning, where classrooms might work on a multi-day or even multi-week, unit-long project that incorporates numerous new strands of knowledge and technique in a “real world” example. By moving the lectures into “homework” time, more of the class period can be spent on active learning where the students are debating, researching, building, and experimenting. In fact, flipped classroom + PBL is probably my favorite one-two pedagogical punch!
. . . but of course, a bad or unskilled educator can completely miss the point of all this, or just do it poorly. . . but then again, bad educators aren’t a new phenomenon, and they probably weren’t much more effective doing things the oldschool way, reciting book material to straight rows of students for 45m.day, either. . .
One thing I will say in McCain’s favor is that he has provided at least a rhetorical bulwark against the reprehensible defenders of torture, another policy which Trump’s gutless ‘I’m going to look into it’-ism has kept necrotically alive.
Even though I’m expecting it to happen now, didn’t think it possible to get any angrier
I think their rationale will be that Comey testified that Trump was not under investigation and that he did not disclose evidence of collusion (the fact he said he couldn’t discuss it in an open session was interpreted to mean there was no evidence, because GOP), therefore there is no point in having an investigation.
If it happens, it’s a watershed moment. Any republican that falls in line with that decision will be complicit with everything as far as I’m concerned.
trump is showing Republicans that laws, ethics, and morals have no place in politics (see their health care bill.) It’s just … I don’t know.
(Gotta laugh watching an MSNBC roundtable earlier pontificate that Democrats are in trouble because they have no message and unifying against trump “isn’t enough.” )
Well, I actually think that’s true to a certain extent, that they need a message beyond, “not trump”, something that will resonate with moderates/independents. Otherwise, they aren’t liable to make much in the way of gains in 2018/2020.
There’s plenty of time for that to happen, but where’s the leadership in the Democratic Party? Who is going to step up and lead?