As we meander through the pros and cons of the proposed solutions to America’s educational problems, we easily become lost. There are no simple solutions to our problems, despite what is written across cyberspace and into newspaper columns daily. The problems are too complex for any fast fix.

We discuss longer school years, longer school days, early enrichment programs, and smaller class sizes. We talk about more intensive teacher training. We write articles about raising the bar and creating tougher standards. In a gingerly fashion, we sometimes even address the issue of educational funding, although one problem with attacking the funding problem is that the current system tends to work very well for our legislators. They don’t live in our poorest school districts and when they do, like the President, they send their children to private schools.

I believe part of the problem can be found in the steadily increasing centralization of education. We are standardizing education at a time when our population is diversifying. We are taking control away from local officials and local school boards by  creating national requirements, many of which take away/reallocate scarce  local resources. All across America, academically healthy districts are devoting time and money to preparing for the common core curriculum even though their students are/were doing great under the old standards. Academically-challenged districts are also preparing for the new curriculum, even though preparing for a harder test when you can’t yet pass the first test seems absurd. Can’t pass the test? We’ll make it harder!

(The people who came up with that solution ought to demand their college tuition back. They’ve learned so little about how the world works that I think they are entitled to the refund.)
 

Eduhonesty: Discussing plans we can never put into action cannot help us. Discussing plans we SHOULD NOT put into action helps us even less.

When we read these articles about new graduates struggling with loan debt, or see these students on TV, it’s worth paying attention to the fact that the graduates in question are hardly ever engineers or computer programming students. Liberal arts majors need to recognize the greater risk in their loans. If you want to study art history, fine, but don’t delude yourself into thinking you will find a high-paying job in the field. You will be extraordinarily lucky to find any job at all.

Super low or even low loan rates can sound like a deal.

My daughter: “Mom, I saved $200 on these boots. They were only $150 dollars.”

It’s her money and she’s a sharp girl, if a little too fond of flashy boots. But many people respond to deals this way. I can easily hear a similar young woman saying, “And the interest rate is only 3.8%. I saved so much money!”

Then year by year, this same girl will “save” money as she tacks another ten or fifteen thousand onto her debt.

Kids take loans out without thinking. Parents obligate themselves without thinking. They don’t necessarily run the numbers to find out what will be coming at them in a few years.

Students and their parents need to run those numbers and ask themselves a few pertinent questions: What is the job market for dance majors? How much are loan payments likely to be? How much money will I have to make to pay that loan back? Higher loan rates are likely to stimulate thinking that does not happen nearly often enough.

Eduhonesty: The U.S. government is selling college to America’s students. They want to keep the loan rates down to encourage college enrollment. But legislators and members of the Department of Education don’t pay the loan debts they facilitate. They don’t forgive them either.

They did not pass the law that would give students lower interest rates but they probably will.

I wish to go on record as saying I don’t want those lower interest rates passed. We don’t need to make student loans more attractive. We need to make student loans less attractive.

I watched a TV show last night which included the story of a young dancer who had gotten a much-coveted $28,000 per year position as a dancer. She was lamenting that she could not pay off her $60,000 in loan debt. Of course she can’t! There was close to zero chance that her intended career would supply her with the salary needed to cover that loan debt.

Nobody should take out $60,000 in loans to get a dance degree. Or a theater degree. Or an anthropology degree. Not unless they plan to live with their parents for a number of years.

From http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/my-money/2013/01/30/how-much-student-loan-debt-is-too-much:

Language learning preferably should start in elementary school — or middle school at the latest. It’s possible to learn a foreign language starting in high school, especially if a student continues to study in college and lives for some time in a foreign country, but a functional vocabulary is 5,000 words and true fluency is more like 40,000 words. That requires an enormous commitment. 

The effect of our current policy is to make most Americans monolingual. Two years of a foreign language provides the barest ability to manage in that language and after a few years many students will lose even that ability, especially when they have little intrinsic commitment to learning a second language in the first place. Unless a language is used, its vocabulary and grammar fade away, becoming no more than distant memories, a few random words that can’t be fit into any useful reading or conversation. 

I know colleges often require those two years of a language. That’s why foreign languages are now a requirement in many schools. But if we are going to require language study, we should do it right. We should start young.

Perhaps colleges should make a change. Why not require 5 years of a foreign language instead? That would push language study into the middle schools. Our graduates might then become authentically bilingual.

Eduhonesty: When a sixteen-year-old, beginning Spanish student says to her teacher, “I’m not going to learn Spanish in two years. Nobody can learn a foreign language in two years,” she is absolutely right. If she were motivated, she might be able to get a great head start, but unless she’s willing to put in many evening hours, we are wasting her time and ours.

We manufactured this crisis — have no doubt about it. We drone on and on and on throughout school about how our students must go to college. So they do. Whether they are ready, able or interested — they sign their name on all sorts of dotted lines to do what they were told to do. 

Another reason so many trees died: Often, to raise test scores or improve student behavior, the administration created an activity which supplanted my lesson plan for the day. In many cases, I didn’t have time to get back to the activity since future days were already planned. But I hate to throw away a fully prepared lesson, so I kept these papers and activities, thinking a day would come when I could use my lecture and materials for reinforcement. That tomorrow never arrived, though, and more of my plans were laid waste by other administrative brainstorms.

Many trees died this year. I feel sad as I throw some of these aborted lessons into the recycling.

Trees died this year, supporting the academic effort. Trees have been dying for a long time to help me out. As I sorted the papers yesterday, old and relatively new, I was struck by the fact that stricter curricula have not been kind to my students. My older original creations and copies from times when I got to choose at least some of my materials are simply better and more interesting than the materials that I have often been handed and told to use.

I kept copies of a lot of the old stuff, hoping to find a position where I could use them. I threw almost all the new stuff in the recycling.

It’s not that the new stuff is bad. But it’s not particularly good, either, and if I end up in another district where they are handing me my materials, they’ll give me more. I don’t need to fill files with mediocre assignments. Too often, the district happily provides that service free of charge.

Eduhonesty: I know my students. I can do a better job of selecting reading material for them than some faceless stranger in a board office. If my classroom has 19 boys and 11 girls, that matters. If my classroom has 23 Hispanic students and 7 African-American students, that matters too. I am in position to ask my students what they like and what they want to read. I should be picking the books.