Tag Archives: Achievement

Polemics

Is public school a viable option for Christian parents?

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A couple of quick anecdotes from Yahoo News first, then we’ll see the numbers.

Excerpt:

Take the case of Petrona Smith. She says in a lawsuit that she was fired from teaching at Bronx PS 211 in March 2012 after a seventh-grader reported that she’d used the “N” word, according to The New York Post.

‘Negro.’

Smith doesn’t deny using the word. But she argues that everyone uses it, when speaking Spanish. She was teaching the Spanish words for different colors, and the color “black” in Spanish is “negro.” She also taught the junior high school students, in this bilingual school, that the Spanish term for black people is “moreno.” And by the way, Smith, who is from the West Indies, is black.

And more:

The Akron Public Schools Board of Education voted in January to pursue the firing of Melissa Cairns. She was a math teacher at Buchtel Community Learning Center.

The school district said that Ms. Cairns posted a photo on her personal Facebook page which showed 8 or 9 out of her 16 students with duct tape across their mouths. The caption read: “Finally found a way to get them to be quiet!!!” The district says a colleague of Cairns’ notified a supervisor of the photo.

[…]This past week, Cairns was officially fired because “She showed a lack of good judgment. Her conduct was unbecoming of a teacher,” Akron Public Schools spokesman Mark Williamson told Newsnet5.

He went on to explain it wasn’t the use of the duct tape, but the posting of the photo of children on Facebook that showed poor judgement.

As you know, you can’t fire public school teachers for incompetence or sexual abuse of children.

Excerpt:

He worked just one year as a full-time teacher in New York. But he has collected nearly $1 million for 13 years for doing almost nothing.

Aryeh Eller, 46, a former music teacher at Hillcrest HS in Queens, is the longest-sitting “rubber room” teacher in the city. He was yanked from the classroom in 1999 and confessed to repeated sexual harassment of female students, according to a 2000 investigative report.

[…]Since his 1999 suspension, he has collected $943,000, plus health and pension benefits — and the total will hit $1 million this year.

Now let’s see if this focus on political correctness instead of results is working for taxpayers and students.

The Wall Street Journal:

Over the last four decades, public education spending has increased rapidly in the United States. According to the Department of Education, public schools spent, on average, $12,922 per pupil in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. Adjusting for inflation, that’s more than double the $6,402 per student that public schools spent in 1975.

Despite that doubling of funds, just about every measure of educational outcomes has remained stagnant since 1975, though some have finally begun to inch upward over the last few years. Student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the only consistently observed measure of student math and reading achievement over the period—have remained relatively flat since the mid-1970s. High school graduation rates haven’t budged much over the last 40 years, either.

You can find more data to flesh out those claims linked at the Heritage Foundation think tank.

To remove any doubt, just take a look at the libertarian Cato Institute’s graph on public school spending vs scholastic achievement. We are are wasting money indoctrinating kids in political correctness. The extra money that we are spending on education isn’t going into making students smarter or more productive.

Commentary

How the secular left made a generation of public school students unteachable

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I’m totally swamped with a release deadline tonight, but I noticed that Stuart Schneiderman linked to this article earlier today and I thought you might like it. I chose an excerpt that talks about the well-known problem of students attacking TAs and professors after they get poor grades in order to make them change the grade – without doing any make-up work.

Excerpt:

This pedagogy of self-esteem developed in response to the excesses of rote learning and harsh discipline that were thought to characterize earlier eras. In Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Mr. Gradgrind, the teacher who ridicules a terrified Sissy Jupe for her inability to define a horse (“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth … ”), was seen to epitomize a soulless pedagogical regime that deadened creativity and satisfaction. Dickens and his readers believed such teaching to be a form of mental and emotional abuse, and the need to protect students from the stigma of failure became an article of faith amongst progressive educators. For them, the stultifying apparatus of the past had to be entirely replaced. Memorization itself, the foundation of traditional teaching, came to be seen as an enemy of creative thought: pejorative similes for memory work such as “rote learning” and “fact-grinding” suggest the classroom equivalent of a military drill, harsh and unaccommodating. The progressive approach, in contrast, emphasizes variety, pleasure, and student interest and self-motivation above all.

It sounds good. The problem, as traditionalists have argued (but without much success), is that the utopian approach hasn’t worked as intended. Rather than forming cheerful, self-directed learners, the pedagogy of self-esteem has often created disaffected, passive pupils, bored precisely because they were never forced to learn. As Hilda Neatby commented in 1953, the students she was encountering at university were “distinctly blasé” about their coursework. A professor of history, Neatby was driven to investigate progressive education after noting how ill-equipped her students were for the high-level thinking required of them; her So Little For the Mind remains well-worth reading. In her assessment:

The bored “graduates” of elementary and high schools seem, in progressive language, to be “incompletely socialized.” Ignorant even of things that they might be expected to know, they do not care to learn. They lack an object in life, they are unaware of the joy of achievement. They have been allowed to assume that happiness is a goal, rather than a by-product.

The emphasis on feeling good, as Neatby argued, prevents rather than encourages the real satisfactions of learning.

Of course, the progressive approach has advantages, not the least of which is that it enables university administrators to boast of the ever-greater numbers of students taking degrees at their institutions. Previously disadvantaged groups have gained access to higher education as never before, and more and more students are being provided with the much-touted credentials believed to guarantee success in the workforce. Thus our universities participate in a happy make-believe. Students get their degrees. Parents are reassured that their money has been well-spent. And compliant professors are, if not exactly satisfied — it corrodes the soul to give unearned grades — at least relieved not to encounter student complaints.

I can remember when I was doing my Masters in computer science a few years back when I was taking a course in Network Security. Somehow, I botched the midterm so badly that I ended up with a 14 out of 20. I was disgusted with myself, and pleaded with the professor to give me something – anything – to help me get my grade back up. He gave me a programming assignment that was harder than the midterm, and it took about 20 hours to do. I gave up my weekend and got it done. He raised my grade. Professors are usually willing to give you a break if you want to demonstrate that you have the knowledge. But when you just go in there and complain to get the grade changed without learning anything, it’s just not right.

When you get out into the real world, either you have the skills, or you don’t. Your transcript doesn’t really matter. It’s rare for interviewers to even look at transcripts anymore. Instead, they want to see what you’ve actually done. I once had to do a 20 hour implementation of a multi-user clustered cache for one interview with a CRM company. I had to pass several interviews before they gave me that independent study, and they looked at my code line by line. It was a lot of code, too. Grades don’t matter in the real world. What matters is what you can do. If you can’t do the job that companies expect, they will find someone else – maybe in another country – who can do it. That’s why students should not put so much emphasis on grades. You’re only cheating yourself if you really can’t do the work.

Commentary

Studies show that religious involvement is beneficial to children

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I found survey of the relevant literature at Reasons for God blog.

Excerpt:

Imagine with me two different parenting styles: Type A and Type B. When these two types are scientifically compared to one another, and the outcomes of each approach to children are carefully measured, a wide difference emerges. Furthermore, the differences are controlled for factors such as race, age, sex, rural vs. urban residence, region, parental education, number of siblings, whether the mother works, and the presence of a father or male guardian at home.

Still, it emerges that seniors in high school who are raised by the Type A approach, when compared to the Type B approach, are:

  1. Less likely to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, drink excessively, go to bars, use, sell, or take drugs, get a traffic ticket, argue with their parents, skip school, be suspended or expelled from school, hit their teachers, be violent, and commit a variety of crimes from shoplifting to armed robbery.
  2. In addition to avoiding these negative behaviors, they are more likely to exercise, play sports, volunteer, and participate in student government.

As a parent who wants the very best for your child, on the basis of this data, which parenting approach makes more sense? If you want your children to be physically active, serving in the community, and leaders at their school, while avoiding violent behavior, criminal activity and drug use, you’re better off with the Type A approach.

[…]Type A outcomes are for the most religious high school seniors when contrasted with the least religious high school seniors.

So the data leads us to the conclusion that parents can strengthen the likelihood of good outcomes for their children, not by sending them to Camp Quest, but by fostering religious commitment for their children. The study quoted above is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, a large number of studies demonstrate positive physical, emotional, and psychological benefits, all associated with greater rather than lesser religiosity.

For instance, other studies have shown that the more religious parents are, the more likely the are to have strong and supportive relationships with their children. These positive effects of religion include:

  • Mothers who became more religious throughout the first 18 years of their child’s life reported a better relationship with that child, regardless of the level of their religious practice before the child was born.
  • Mothers who attended religious services less often over time reported a lower-quality relationship with their adult child.
  • Grandmothers’ religious practice illustrates an intergenerational influence. The more religious a mother’s mother is, the more likely the mother has a good relationship with her own child.
  • Greater religious practice of fathers is associated with better relationships with their children, higher expectations for good relationships in the future, a greater investment in their relationships with their children, a greater sense of obligation to stay in regular contact with their children, and a greater likelihood of supporting their children and grandchildren.
  • Compared with fathers who had no religious affiliation, those who attended religious services frequently were more likely to monitor their children, praise and hug their children, and spend time with their children.

Are these studies just cherry-picked in favor of religion? According to one review of the literature, which involved “a larger systematic review of 850 studies on the religion-mental health relationship published during the 20th Century”t:

The majority of well-conducted studies found that higher levels of religious involvement are positively associated with indicators of psychological well-being (life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and higher morale) and with less depression, suicidal thoughts and behavior, drug/alcohol use/abuse. Usually the positive impact of religious involvement on mental health is more robust among people under stressful circumstances (the elderly, and those with disability and medical illness).

The fact is that Dawkins and Humphrey, for all their rhetorical flair, have unsupported theories about the effects of religion on children and families, theories which are not supported by the scientific research. They are ‘leaps of faith’, in line with their preconceived secularism, rather than sober deductions from a look at the evidence. Likewise, Camp Quest is encouraging children to adopt exactly the wrong kind of worldview. From the data above, it appears that a religious summer camp is a distinctively better choice for the development of children.

On the basis of these studies, the evidence-based conclusion is that religion is good for kids, good for their parents, and good for society overall.

Fascinating stuff, especially since it contradicts the assertions of Richard Dawkins. It’s important to let evidence decide these questions, and the evidence is clear. Religion is good for children. Now, having said that, Christians don’t practice their religion because it is a life enhancement – we practice it because it is true. And we have reasons to believe that it is true that hold up well in debates about Christianity.