Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Monday, February 17, 2014

Illiterate Graduates? Blame Politicians, not Teachers



I have written many blog posts about the functional and cultural illiteracy of young people. We all have stories of entire classes of college freshmen unable to write essays, calculate a percent change, identify nations on a map, or distinguish between U.S. Constitutional clauses and mere political slogans.  I have often stated that something is terribly wrong with our educational system…but this article will be different.


This is not about criticizing students, or, for that matter, their teachers.


It is an indictment of politicians who hold teachers and schools “accountable” for these problems, while themselves being a significant contributing cause to the problem.


As the President of a teacher’s union at a local community college, I have watched in amazement as the politicians and bureaucrats have fought us tooth and nail each time we have sought to improve teaching and learning. If you are one who has assumed that the blame for students’ poor performance can be laid at the feet of their teachers…please reconsider. What follows are just two of the head-shaking realities.


Currently, adjunct college teachers around Massachusetts are voting on a new contract. This new contract includes an incredible “win” for labor that we fought long and hard for – a requirement that Management actually evaluate new Adjunct Faculty before they receive reappointment rights.


Yes, you read that correctly: we, the teachers in the union, have been asking for new teachers to receive timely, helpful, substantive evaluations from school administrators soon after being hired to help them become better teachers.


Management has fought us on this. For Years.  


Finally, they agreed to this in our new proposed contract…as long as there were no repercussions if they failed to get around to it.


Yes, folks, this is the reality of teaching in 2014.


In a separate process, the state’s Board of Higher Education is implementing a brand new approach to math course delivery throughout our colleges.  


The Boston politicians, taking their cues from Washington, are concerned that it is taking students too long to graduate from college (ignoring the fact that many students are also working due to a financial crisis none of them created.)  Another reason for this is the need for many students to take what are called “developmental" math courses (in days past these were called “remedial” math courses.)  Many students arrive at the college doors with a high school diploma…and critically poor math skills.

In our school there are three levels of sequential math courses that our instructors use simply to get many of these students *ready* to take their first college-level math. That’s three semesters of developmental math – which, of course, means that students will not be able to simply walk in and walk out of college like a revolving door.


One would think that our politicians would be concerned with this, and would allocate teaching and support dollars to our K-12 system to beef up math instruction.


But no.  Instead, they are attempting to find a way to get these students in and out of college without being tripped up by such annoying subjects as math.


We have been asked to consider removing math requirements from courses and programs.  We are being asked to consider allowing students to take developmental math at the same time they are taking the very courses they need those math skills for. As a business and economics teacher, I can not imagine having to instruct students in basic financial statements, stock fluctuations, and economic analysis while they are still attempting to master the concepts of decimals and the order of operations - but apparently, that makes sense to Boston politicians.


We have been asked to reconsider whether math is really even necessary in many of our programs.  At one community college in the state, the administration has been moving forward to allow students to receive college credit for remedial courses whose subject matter is essentially at a high school level – another effort to simply process students through the institution in a timely fashion without actually expecting them to have accomplished college-level work.


This de-construction of math curricula is a precursor, I fear, to the next step in this process: a re-examination of the English curriculum, which is another subject where there are significant developmental needs among our students.


When all is said and done, the politicians will no doubt claim victory: they will point to increased graduation rates, and more timely completion of degrees. 


The losers will be our students, who will continue to lack basic skills; our teachers, who will be blamed for turning out illiterate graduates; and our society, which will continue to be frustrated over poor employee performance even after our politicians have declared ‘victory.’

.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

A Generation of Functional and Cultural Illiterates...and a brief quiz...

About 7 years ago, I was a teaching economics to a class of 100 at Keene State College. In order to make a point about ratios, I asked the class, "for instance, how many states are there in the United States?," expecting this would be an easy example that the students could follow. To my utter disbelief, I could not elicit a single correct answer.

"48!....51!....52!" they alternatively called out. When one student answered, "48...no, wait, 49 since they added Puerto Rico!" I gave up.

Had this been an isolated case of weirdness, I could deal with it. But later, at a class at Greenfield Community College, I performed a simple long division problem on the board to explain per capita GDP. After some silence, a student asked, "what's that?" When I explained I was doing long division, she looked perplexed. I explained it further, and she said, "Oh. I've never seen that before." Others had not heard of the words 'litigation' or 'borne.' The majority of each class is unable to calculate the percent change in a statistic. Meanwhile, the overwhelming number of teachers at all levels in Massachusetts complain about the state-administered MCAS exams.

Leading me to wonder..."What in HELL are they doing in public schools these days?"

These kinds of interactions with my college students encouraged me to give a cultural literacy exam to every one of my macroeconomics classes (This is not just some morbid investigation of mine, but an appropriate part of our studies once we start looking at the educational reform movements of the 80s and 90s.) The inability of students to perform basic math without a calculator, or to recall basic historic facts, or to apply well-known literature metaphors to every-day situations, is both terrifying and astounding. In years of giving a 100+ question exam...no one has ever gotten more than one-third correct.

And these are today's voters...and the future leaders of our businesses, technology, and government agencies.

And so, I present below an excerpt of 20 of the questions on that exam. I invite you to try your own hand at them...the answers are all at the end of this post. They range from music and the arts to sports, literature, history, math and science.

In the meantime, I would be remiss if I didn't thank my parents, who highly valued education; the Baldwin (NY) School District where I was educated; and the NY State Regents exams, which help to ensure that we were functionally and culturally literate before we graduated.

====================

1) In music, what does the notation fortissimo mean?

2) At a corporate board meeting, someone says, "well, we've crossed the Rubicon." What does that mean?

3) What is 30% of 90?

4) What is the origin of the phrase, "the handwriting on the wall?"

5) How many years is the term of a United States Congressman?

6) Where is Prague?

7) Who were the Boers?

8) What is Wounded Knee noted for?

9) What was the Balfour Declaration?

10) Define Xylem and Phloem.

11) Who is Bob Fossey?

12) What are the three 'jewels' of the Triple Crown?

13) What European nation founded the first colony in present-day New York City?

14) The US Constitution states that no one may "be deprived of life, liberty, or..." WHAT? without "due process of law."

15) Who wrote, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..."

16) What characterizes an "Isosceles Triangle?"

17) How many regular-season games does a major league baseball team play?

18) What was the Maginot Line?

19) What is the opposite side of a ship from 'portside?'

20) What is the chemical symbol for Iron?

---------------------

1) Loudest
2) We can't go back (or, we've burned our bridges)
3) 27
4) The Book of Daniel in the Bible
5) 2 years
6) Czech Republic
7) The Dutch settlers of South Africa who instituted the apartheid system
8) The Massacre of unarmed Sioux (Lakota) Indian men, women, and children by the U.S. Calvary, which effectively ended the Plains Indian Wars.
9) The British Declaration establishing and carving the State of Israel out of the British Protectorate of Trans-Jordan in 1948.
10)The structures that transport nutrients and water throughout plants
11) America's most successful choreographer of musical theater
12) The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes.
13) The Netherlands (Holland)
14) Property (NOT 'the pursuit of happiness.' That's in the Declaration of Independence)
15) Robert Frost
16) It has two sides of equal length
17) 162
18) A military line of forts with fixed cannons, built to protect France from Germany. During WWII, Germany simply went around them.
19) Starboard
20) Fe

So...How did you do? ;-)