I grew up in Europe, so that impacts my views. I agree with you with shorter summer breaks. In Europe, we got 6 weeks in the summer. Then we got one week in the fall, two weeks for Xmas, one week in Feb/March, two weeks in May.
I want schools to get enough funding to buy supplies for kids instead of parents and teachers.
Smaller classrooms, no more than 25.
I'm an anomaly but hate the idea of year round school, I love having our summers and my kids do summer swim team and we do a month long trip every summer. I also know we are privileged to be able to do all of that and for a lot of families year round school would be better, I just personally don't like the idea for us.
Saying that, we get a week off in Fall, a week at Thanksgiving, 2.5 weeks at Christmas, a week in March, a 5 day weekend for Easter, and we are out for Summer 3rd week of May, and go back mid August (typically 12-13 week break). So it seems like we get as much or more as people in Europe (and I am basing this on my family and friends in the UK)
What do you (and or your spouse) do that you can be so flexible in the summer for work and long vacations? I wish we had longer vacations for work (like European August ), but without, I am much more stressed in the summer with kiddos home.
Post by formerlyak on Jan 27, 2021 12:04:59 GMT -5
I should add, and may be unpopular, but I think the job protections that come with tenure should be reimagined. There are some teachers who simply shouldn't be teaching and do the bare minimum because they are tenured and know they can't be fired. There is one in the next grade at DS' school and I am terrified that he will get her. She is awful and the parents in that class have to do a lot of at home teaching (even in non-Covid years) to make sure their kid learned all they are supposed to learn in second grade. It's really bad.
Post by breezy8407 on Jan 27, 2021 12:06:14 GMT -5
I'm a parent of 3rd graders, and we've been privileged to not come across too many issues yet. From that experience and H being a HS teacher I will say...
- smaller class sizes (H has close to 40 students in some math classes I think?) - no or revamped standardized testing - more active time like PE but maybe not as formal? I'm not sure what this looks like but my kids have PE at most 2x a week for 30 minutes and I would like to see kids be able to active every day - more art/music - I know it's only 3rd grade, but there has been so much emphasis on reading and math. They are finally doing some science and social studies type work this year, but everything is so focused on just those two subjects it seems. Maybe because of the standardized testing they take 2x a year? - increase in teacher pay and no more out of pocket expenses for supplies and or/reliance on fundraising and PTO's for those things
This is probably a pipe dream but as someone who works on buildings and building design all day, I would say money for infrastructure. Old and failing buildings pose a health threat and if referendums don't pass for new buildings, they are left to make due. Access to daylight and fresh air is so important. I won't even get into school design and security issues with shootings, but that is another place we need to spend more money. (Disclaimer I don't design, not have any experience in designing schools)
Post by morecoffeeplease on Jan 27, 2021 12:07:10 GMT -5
This is specific to my job but there should be clear laws about special education caseload size. I think parents would be appalled at how many kids I have on my caseload.
I'll also say I think I'd like to overhaul school oversight. My county is enormous and diverse and very populous and I really think we could break things down so we don't have one Superintendent and one Board of Ed and one set of school busses, maintenance department, etc. governing the whole thing. At minimum we should break it into two school systems for upper/lower county. But I'd love to see more autonomy at even the cluster level for decisions about start and end times, weather closures, illness closures, etc.
How many students and schools are you talking about in your county? Just curious.
According to Wikipedia, from the 2017-2018 school year: approx 162k students, 205 schools.
Elementary-smaller classes sizes, more recess, more special time. Less sitting in the desk for hours.
ALSO NO MORE HOMEWORK. OMG, why is this a fucking thing in elementary. That has been the best part of the pandemic. The elimination of homework.
In high school I don't think our kids need to be in school FT. I would love to see a transition to in-person plus at home time to complete homework. This could easily solve class sizes. I don't know how you do it, but it seems crazy that we are making these high school kids just SIT in classes full time. Now that we have seen it done in different ways.
Post by irishbride2 on Jan 27, 2021 12:13:40 GMT -5
I've taught at schools with class sizes of 35-40, and schools with class sizes of 12-16....and the difference is night and day. Even now, I can tell the difference between my class of 11 and my class of 18. I can give SO much more support.
Post by irishbride2 on Jan 27, 2021 12:14:18 GMT -5
To add, I would cap elem at 12-14 and high school to 16-18.
ETA: i only even go that high for high school because some of my history and english colleagues prefer numbers closer to that for more robust discussions. I would love to have all classes at 12-14 (math).
Actually funding is a main issue. I don't know we can assume it away. It is the primary reason that inner city school districts do not do as well. That and corruption and too powerful teacher unions. And I am pro-union, but some unions are too powerful and don't put the student first.
NPR ran a great series on funding and where it does and does not matter. But more money or equally split doesn't always solve issues. I live in NYC where money is pooled across the city so low income and high income get the same money per student and lower income schools often get extra from the city and the federal government. We still see big gaps.
I lived in NYC a long time ago. I remember there was a case where the schools had to take the state to court because the state hadn't paid them millions of dollars. I tried to find it, but I guess there were a lot of lawsuits, so a simple google search did not bring it up right away. I'm not 100% sure they were getting all the money owed to them. Hopefully things have changed for the better since I left there.
I will definitely take a look at the NPR article when I have time.
I have to post and run and will probably get flamed a bit but I don't care - if we're pretending to start from scratch, first thing I'd want are no private schools or charter schools. Either you send your kids to public schools that in this dreamland would offer on-site education for students with all kinds of needs (with accommodations happening through the school district to provide a virtual education if needed as well), or you homeschool. While everyone living in a community pays taxes regardless of whether they use the public school system or not, we all know funding inequities exist and there's more that must go into a successful school than just baseline funding through property taxes, which is already itself problematic from community to community.
This is why I'm so worried about public school funding for the next 10 years - many families de-enrolled or moved during the pandemic which also coincided with a Census year. Ugh.
Does this mean actually banning private schools? Because I don't see how that could even be legal - unless you're just stating your ideal/dream world where they magically wouldn't exist. (Charter schools are different to me, because they receive public funding).
Yes. And yes, it probably is not legal (especially schools with religious affiliations). It's just my dream. I have to think about more realistic dreams and come back here when I can lol.
Treat teachers like the professionals they are. Many have masters degrees and/or more formal schooling than you can ever imagine. Which leads to - reduce parental influence in decision making when it comes to actual teaching decisions. The degree to which parents think they can boss around teachers is appalling. That's a societal change, though.
I am feeling grateful for our district because a lot of what has been listed happens in our district already.
Elementary classes are capped at 22 for K-4 and 24 for 5-8. I think high schools are higher and they shouldn't be. Most years DD has only had 17-18 kids in her class and it's been great. Lots of individual time. No class really should be more than 20 kids.
Elementary kids get at least one special if not two most days of the week.
I would like to see increased recess for this age group. Kinder-1st should be getting recess a few times a day but even older kids (and much older kids) could benefit from more.
I'd like to see year round school with a shorter school day. Every grade level here goes for 7 hours and 35 minutes and it's just SO long. No one is productive at the end of the day. Breaks are important, too, but a 12 week summer is just ridiculous.
Very limited homework. We haven't had any this year due to Covid and it's made such a difference in DD's mood.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the high school experience. Is 5 days a week, 7 classes a day the right model? Does it prepare the kids well for college? I don't know. I feel like there is some room for improvement. Maybe instead of trying to cram in 7 classes a day each semester they focus on 2-3 core subjects plus an elective. Build in more time for independent work. Then if high schoolers weren't on campus for 8 hours a day 5 days a week classes wouldn't be so huge.
Post by purplepenguin7 on Jan 27, 2021 12:25:23 GMT -5
question for those mentioning year-round school, does anyone have children in year round school? I have a few friends with kids who are doing this and they generally dislike it.
I personally hate standardized testing. The testing itself doesn’t bother me as much as teachers having to teach to the test instead of age appropriate learning. Also having school ratings and sometimes funding tied to testing (that’s a thing, right?) shouldn’t happen.
Totally agree, though I wonder what the alternative is, kind of. How do you measure whether kids are proficient, ready to tackle more advanced subjects, need more help, etc.? Just leave it up to teacher/families to determine subjectively? Then how do you ensure that the meaning of 'proficient' isn't wildly different across the country?
You trust teachers as professionals and experts who understand and can identify what proficiency looks like for the grade level. You allow teachers to work in grade level cohorts (and give them time) to collaboratively on assessments that actually accurately measure what's being taught in the classroom.
Standardized tests don't tell us shit except that some kids are left behind and no one does anything to fix it.
ETA: That said, teacher training needs an overhaul. There are some dumbass people in classrooms and the training programs are useless. In my ideal world, every teacher works with a mentor for their first 3 years and learns how to teach, much like a residency program for medicine.
"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
Does this mean actually banning private schools? Because I don't see how that could even be legal - unless you're just stating your ideal/dream world where they magically wouldn't exist. (Charter schools are different to me, because they receive public funding).
Yes. And yes, it probably is not legal (especially schools with religious affiliations). It's just my dream. I have to think about more realistic dreams and come back here when I can lol.
Be as unrealistic as you like! I am curious about what people's ideal education system would look like.
I personally hate standardized testing. The testing itself doesn’t bother me as much as teachers having to teach to the test instead of age appropriate learning. Also having school ratings and sometimes funding tied to testing (that’s a thing, right?) shouldn’t happen.
Totally agree, though I wonder what the alternative is, kind of. How do you measure whether kids are proficient, ready to tackle more advanced subjects, need more help, etc.? Just leave it up to teacher/families to determine subjectively? Then how do you ensure that the meaning of 'proficient' isn't wildly different across the country?
I teach at a private school and none of my courses have standardized tests. I can tell you exactly where all 70 of my students are and what they struggle with.
You can have a national curriculum without having a national standardized test. You can also make it VERY specific as to what is proficient and what is not. The UK has an incredible system that does this. They only test every two years or so, and in between teachers can very specifically identify what areas students are profiencent in and where they are not due to national rubrics. BUT this is where small class sizes becomes even more important. The bigger the classes, the ore teachers have to rely on massive tests to evaluate performance.
And, its nice because it doesn't rely on one snapshot of a random time (one test). I relies on a year of data. You can collect data without standardized tests.
You trust teachers as professionals and experts who understand and can identify what proficiency looks like for the grade level. You allow teachers to work in grade level cohorts (and give them time) to collaboratively on assessments that actually accurately measure what's being taught in the classroom.
Standardized tests don't tell us shit except that some kids are left behind and no one does anything to fix it.
How would that get measured/tracked across different districts/states? Just with a report card? I'm not disagreeing at all with what you're saying, just trying to understand.
I'm not sure it matters. It doesn't need to be standard. The needs of a student in rural Kansas are really different than the needs of a student in urban Philadelphia. To me, standards should be all skills-based (student can make and prove a thesis argument with evidence and analysis) vs content (at least in history, which I teach, is all random trivia)
"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
Most of my ideas have already been mentioned, just wanted to add another yay vote for capping classes at 15 max. Hybrid learning has sucked in many ways but the most positive has been that my kids’ cohorts have only 10 kids each (DS1 even only has all boys in his). I think both the kids and the teachers really benefit from being able to work with smaller groups and I wish that was more the norm rather than 20+.
The concept of standardized testing is a deeply conservative viewpoint that has become embedded in the education system. As has a generalized distrust of teachers. It does a disservice to so many students and educators.
ETA: To clarify, standardized testing was born out of the distrust of educators. It literally does nothing to advance education or equity.
But it was an awesome system, assuming they still use it. Everything was broken down. So for example, lets talk about trianlges for ages 12-14. I'm totally making up these examples, but it would have everything related to trianlges broken down to a level. So Area and perimeter would be a level 1 topic. Level 2 would be basic trig. Level three would be law of cosines. Level 4 would be...
So for each topic, I would have to go through and state what level each child was at. But it wasn't hard with how specific the levels were. So instead of one math grade, each child got over 20 from me. I specified where they were on every topic we were covering, and every school had the same rubric. And because the rubrics allow for growth over several years, we could teach the topics in our own order at our own pace.
ETA: AND fluff grades like homework and participation were their own category. I would rate them on a scale of 1-5 on how they had completed homework or how they participated in class. Those were not part of their official transcript, just information for the parents.
Post by neverfstop on Jan 27, 2021 12:49:53 GMT -5
Ditto all these...
I skimmed, but did anybody throw out later start times? Especially for teens, their brain neurobiology is changing and they tend to be night owls and no kids at any age are getting enough sleep.
question for those mentioning year-round school, does anyone have children in year round school? I have a few friends with kids who are doing this and they generally dislike it.
It was a big push here in Texas back in the late 90's and in theory, people wanted it. I think the complaints came from the fact that half of the kids were on a regular schedule or everybody else was still doing the old way. I have a feeling it was more about perception or FOMO...if it was the norm & everybody was doing it, It would provide so much more flexibility.
Post by formerlyak on Jan 27, 2021 12:53:08 GMT -5
abs, I think high school schedules vary a lot. In our district, they only have all their classes on Monday as a kind of start of the week check in. Then they do 3 classes on each of the other days - 6 classes total. There is also a tutorial period and an all school silent reading period built in after lunch. Our students have the option of taking all of their classes at the high school or taking dual enrollment courses with the local JC - some are offered on campus and some require going to the JC. We also have a vocational training track where student can go to core classes for certain periods and then go to a vocational training center in the afternoon to get licensed in a trade like auto mechanic, plumbing, electricity, etc. One of the reasons our district is so desirable is because of programs for all different students. It isn't just the push everyone to college kind of school that many of our neighboring districts have. If a student wants to go to college, there are supports for that. If they don't, there are plenty of programs available to them.
question for those mentioning year-round school, does anyone have children in year round school? I have a few friends with kids who are doing this and they generally dislike it.
Why? I haven't heard a complaint from the ones I know.
Well that's not true, one has a student in a different district, so their children have different schedules (which is terrible).
But it was an awesome system, assuming they still use it. Everything was broken down. So for example, lets talk about trianlges for ages 12-14. I'm totally making up these examples, but it would have everything related to trianlges broken down to a level. So Area and perimeter would be a level 1 topic. Level 2 would be basic trig. Level three would be law of cosines. Level 4 would be...
So for each topic, I would have to go through and state what level each child was at. But it wasn't hard with how specific the levels were. So instead of one math grade, each child got over 20 from me. I specified where they were on every topic we were covering, and every school had the same rubric. And because the rubrics allow for growth over several years, we could teach the topics in our own order at our own pace.
ETA: AND fluff grades like homework and participation were their own category. I would rate them on a scale of 1-5 on how they had completed homework or how they participated in class. Those were not part of their official transcript, just information for the parents.
question for those mentioning year-round school, does anyone have children in year round school? I have a few friends with kids who are doing this and they generally dislike it.
I attended a year round school in elementary school and liked it from what I can remember. Of course it was in San Diego so we didn’t have these huge seasonal shifts in weather like we do here, that made a difference I’m sure.
But as a teacher I hate that we start off every year basically catching kids back up to where we left off- there’s always summer regression and it’s not necessary.