NYT on Educators' current skill deficits

[Mort Zuckerman]

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Subject: NYT on Educators' current skill deficits

Date: Nov 13, 2008 6:15 AM

[ARTICLE BELOW]
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It's crappy instruction, today, for the kids. They're asked to
*approximate*
spelling.

They're taught a basis of "sight-words" instead of the *tools* of
phonics.

It would be better if kids were given at home a MECHANICAL way to
acquire
phonics. In the old days we had sturdy kiddie-record players that the
kids
could *manipulate themselves* (as opposed to computer programs), and
the
hard, actual *books,* where the kids have to turn the pages to follow
along.

Teachers today teach by rote instead of 3-D manipulation which fails
boys
because they could not care less about appearances and have a natural
inclination
to get down and dirty. All you have to do is *watch* boys: They're
always
the
first ones to pick up some disgusting bug under a rock with their bare
hands.

The *worst* thing teachers can do is require kids to sight-read. Then
the kids
are thereafter stuck without the knowledge of how to decipher (and
build) the code.
People need to understand that words, letters, are code. The intent
of the code
is
to build a picture in a student's mind.

It would be hard to teach kids phonics if they hear ebonics at home.
It would be better to get them started with letters meaning sounds at
least by age 3, and if the pundits and the bureaucrats and the
parents,
especially would finally realize that scientists and engineers have
VISUAL-SPATIAL abilities, rather than math abilities. Math is a tool,
not
a science. Math puts down the picture in yet another code.

Kids should be taught chemistry and physics in kindergarten. Crystal
making, for
instance (rock candy). The gas laws: CO2 is a gas that can be made
into a crystal
and it shrinks when it's cooled. Water is the only substance that
defies this
"shrinks when it's cooled" physical principle.... the pigments
experiment:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=paper+chromatography&btnG=Search

The worst problem we have with US education is that the educators tend
to
be women, who usually do not have strong visual-spatial abilities.

You can't ask Americans to support educators that don't teach kids HOW
to think instead of what to think, so it's the instructors who need to
change. And *everyone* needs to understand that boys, especially, are
physical and need to be ACTIVE. There's no surer way to torture a boy
than require he glue his butt to a chair 6 hours a day. Boys (and
grown
boys) need to be part of the day *in the shop* (even if it's breaking
things
or taking them apart, depending on your opinion of what they appear to
be
doing), and better if we can convince girls that that's where it's at,
too.

The underlying agenda for the New Deal/New Energy Education should be
-
for the *educators* - to teach kids "HOW STUFF WORKS."


Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
http://www.relapsingfever.org

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

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

November 13, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama and Our Schools
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

President-elect Barack Obama and his aides are sending signals that
education may
be on the back burner at the beginning of the new administration. He
ranked it fifth
among his priorities, and if it is being downplayed, that’s a mistake.

We can’t meaningfully address poverty or grow the economy as long as
urban schools
are failing. Mr. Obama talks boldly about starting new high-tech green
industries,
but where will the workers come from unless students reliably learn
science and
math?

The United States is the only country in the industrialized world
where children
are less likely to graduate from high school than their parents were,
according
to a new study by the Education Trust, an advocacy group based in
Washington.

The most effective anti-poverty program we could devise for the long
run would have
less to do with income redistribution than with ensuring that poor
kids get a first-rate
education, from preschool on. One recent study found that if American
students did
as well as those in several Asian countries in math and science, our
economy would
grow 20 percent faster.

So let’s break for a quiz: Quick, what’s the source of America’s
greatness?

Is it a tradition of market-friendly capitalism? The diligence of its
people? The
cornucopia of natural resources? Great presidents?

No, a fair amount of evidence suggests that the crucial factor is our
school system
— which, for most of our history, was the best in the world but has
foundered over
the last few decades. The message for Mr. Obama is that improving
schools must be
on the front burner.

One of the most important books of the year is “The Race Between
Education and Technology,”
by two Harvard economists, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. They
argue that the
distinguishing feature of America for most of our history has been our
global lead
in education.

By the mid-1800s, most American states provided a free grade-school
education to
the vast majority of white children. In contrast, only 2 percent of
British 14-year-olds
were enrolled in school in 1870.

At the beginning of the 1900s, Americans embraced high schools, and by
the 1930s,
a majority of American children attended high school. In contrast, as
late as 1957,
only 9 percent of British 17-year-olds were enrolled in school.

Then the United States — with help from President Franklin Roosevelt —
pushed for
mass education at the college level, and by 1970, half of American
students were
attending a university, at least briefly. We were far ahead of the
rest of the world.

Professors Goldin and Katz crunch the data and conclude that America’s
edge in mass
education was the crucial competitive advantage that allowed the
United States to
build wealth while reducing income inequality. For most of the 20th
century, America
prospered at the same time that the gap between the rich and poor
diminished.

Then in the 1970s, the United States education system began to
stagnate, with high-school
graduation rates stuck at about three-quarters of all students.
Probably as a result,
income inequality increased again.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world invested heavily in education and
caught up with,
and in some cases surpassed, us. As Fareed Zakaria notes in his
terrific book, “The
Post-American World,” the problem with American education is not the
good schools.
White suburban schools still offer an excellent education, comparable
to those in
Singapore, which may have the best education system in the world.

Rather, the central problem is our bad schools. “Lots of kids are
being left behind,”
Professor Goldin said, adding: “Investing in human capital is still a
very good
deal. Returns are very high.”

There’s still a vigorous debate about how to improve education, but
recent empirical
research is giving us a much better sense of what works. A study by
the Hamilton
Project, a public policy group at the Brookings Institution, outlines
several steps
to boost weak schools: end rigid requirements for teacher
certification that impede
hiring, make tenure more difficult to get so that ineffective teachers
can be weeded
out after three years on the job and award hefty bonuses to good
teachers willing
to teach in low-income areas. If we want outstanding, inspiring
teachers in difficult
classrooms, we’re going to have to pay much more — and it would be a
bargain.

No family underscores the power of education more than Mr. Obama’s.
His father began
as a goat-herd in a remote village in Kenya, but his studies carried
him to the
University of Hawaii. And Mr. Obama himself has ridden the education
escalator to
the White House.

So Mr. Obama, let’s give others the chance to board the escalator that
you and your
father enjoyed. Let’s pick up where we left off in the 1970s and mount
a national
campaign to make high-school graduation truly universal, and to make a
college education
routine.

I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join
me on Facebook
at www.facebook.com/kristof.

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