Kids Suffer Long-Term From Schoolwork That Doesn't Interest Them

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Penelope Trunk is a writer and blogger who examines the life of people in their 20s and their interaction between work and life. Her blog has appeared in the Boston Globe and Yahoo! Finance. Trunk claims her blog has appeared in more than 200 publications. She is the author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. She is also the author of the blog Brazen Careerist.

When people ask me why my kids aren't learning math, I ask them why their kids aren't learning an instrument. Or why they aren't learning a language. Because math, music, and language all develop the brain in similar ways. They are all good for a similar type of learning. But the question that assumes that math is the one right way to develop that part of the brain betrays the assumption that traditional school knows best.

The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why the Economy Won't Get Better Anytime Soon

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Mark Cuban is an American business magnate. He is the owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of the HDTV cable network HDNet.He is also a "shark" investor on the television series Shark Tank. In 2011, Cuban wrote an e-book, How to Win at the Sport of Business, in which he chronicles his life experiences in business and sports.

This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today:

Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit.  Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy. And prices kept on going up. And as long as pricing kept on going up real estate agents kept on selling homes and finding money for buyers.

Until the easy money stopped.  When easy money stopped, buyers couldn’t sell. They couldn’t refinance.  First sales slowed, then prices started falling and then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices crashed. We know the rest of the story. We are still mired in the consequences.

Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different?

Against School

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John Taylor Gatto was a New York State Teacher of the Year. An advocate for school reform, Gatto’s books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, the Underground History of American Education and Weapons of Mass Instruction.

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. 

And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were. 

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

Home Schooling Benefits Are Real, Widespread

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David W. Kirkpatrick (kirkdw@aol.com) is a senior education fellow with the U.S. Freedom Foundation and also with the Buckeye Institute in Columbus, Ohio. Read the original article at Heartlander.

The evidence that home schooled students do well is more than special-interest pleading. Departments of education in such states as Alaska, Tennessee, and Washington have conducted studies that found the typical home schooled student comes out ahead on virtually every significant measurement.

Specific instances abound. One family sent three home schooled youngsters to Harvard; a home schooler wrote a bestseller at age 15; home schoolers placed first, second, and third in the 2000 National Spelling Bee; Patrick Henry College in Virginia was founded for such students. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett has suggested, probably only partly tongue-in-cheek, that “Maybe we should subcontract all of public education to home schoolers.”

Homeschool Domination

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When you compare homeschooled kids to public school kids as a whole, homeschoolers consistently outperform their public school counterparts. Also, it doesn’t seem to matter how much parents spend in the process or whether or not the parent is a certified teacher.

The info-graphic when you click 'read more' tells this story in a more visual way. One piece of interesting info not mentioned in the graphic: the amount of state regulation also does not affect how students performed, according to this article by HSLDA.

Created by: CollegeAtHome.com

It's Time for a New Kind of High School

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Jerry Y. Diakiw is a former superintendent of schools with the York Region Board of Education, in Ontario, Canada, and currently teaches about social justice and equity issues in classrooms, schools, and communities, in the faculty of education at York University, in Toronto. He can be reached at jdiakiw@edu.yorku.ca. Read the original article at Education Week.

Our high schools are relics of the past. Based on an antiquated economic formula designed for the Industrial Revolution, high schools in the United States and Canada are ill-suited for the emotional and intellectual well-being of our young people and profoundly out of step with the needs of our contemporary economy. We have been tinkering with the high school formula for decades, but the recipe for innovation has yet to be written.

As academic and Phi Delta Kappan columnist Ben Levin pointed out in a paper in 2010: "Schools embody an industrial model of organization in a postindustrial world, and an authoritarian and hierarchical character in a world where networks and negotiations are increasingly prevalent." And Sir Ken Robinson, the noted international education expert, said in 2006 at the TED conference that we have been "trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past, and on the way we have been alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school."

Self-Taught is Best Taught

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Bob Wallace writes a personal account of why school wasn't a good fit for him growing up, and how he taught himself more than school could by exploring rivers, nature, reading, etc.. A beautiful read.

I don't remember much from grade school, especially in-between second and fourth grade. It's mostly a blank. I chalk it up to being in public schools. For all practical purposes I might as well been asleep. Now that I think about it, for the most part, maybe I was.

To be fair, I didn't really sleep my way through school, although I did nod off a few times in high school (as did some other kids). Mostly I daydreamed. I had such an imagination I could shut out the world and get lost in my dreams.

Yet at the same time there are things I remember vividly—and very few of them were from school. I lived on the edge of the suburbs, with a lot of country around me. There was a very large lake about a mile down the road.

When Education Becomes Abuse

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The Raymond S. and Dorothy N. Moore Foundation is a non-profit organization in North Bonneville, Washington. The Moore Foundation is best known for its "Moore formula" educational concept in homeschooling, consisting of study, manual work and community service. The Moore's principal research finding encourages parents not to "subject your children to formal, scheduled study before the ages of 8 to 10 or 12.^"

In Acres of Diamonds, Russell Conwell’s most famous Chautauqua story, Al Hafed sold his farm to finance his quest for a legendary diamond mine. He searched the world over until his fortune was gone. He died penniless, unaware that a vast diamond deposit had been discovered in the river sands which snaked through his own backyard, now the famed Golconda Diamond Mines. America’s quest for excellence—for healthy, self directed, student minds—very well could have the same ending.     

From the White House to the humblest home, Americans are groping for answers to declines in literacy, ethics, and general behavior which threatens our nation. Apparently, few have noticed the close relationship between the achievement, behavior and sociability we prefer, and the lifestyles that we impose on our children daily which may amount to our most pervasive form of child abuse. For example, a surprising ignorance or indifference exists to peer dependency, a mental health nemesis that is rampant even in preschools.

A Homeschooling Dad's Perspective on Socialization

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This tongue in cheek account is written by Ben Bennett. He is the principle author and founder of SkippingSchool.us. He a parent of four children and has over 17 years of experience in the  home education community, networking nationally, statewide (Indiana) and locally. Ben is the founder of the Indiana Home Educators’ Network and co-manager of Indiana’s largest networking e-list for homeschoolers: IndianaHomeschoolers (on YahooGroups)

I am perfectly aware of the socialization needs of my children. As an involved parent and (home) educator, the awesome responsibility falls upon me to make sure my children receive all the diverse and broad educational aspects of the “public school experience” that they miss by not attending their assigned government institution.

So that others may learn from my experience, I submit for your consideration a few of my homeschool curricula plans to keep it real and balanced with the Government School experience called “Socialization.”

Every three months, I send my little school-skippers to Grandma’s house, where they are under strict instructions to beg her to bake dozens of cookies so they can sell them for a fund-raising project.They are supposed to remind Grandma that their education will suffer if they don’t raise money for their “school.” And just like public schools, the money they raise goes directly to … building maintenance, supplies and the administration. Me. The Administration offices need some new furniture and the teachers’ lounge needs a new microwave and espresso machine. (My union got that in the collective bargaining agreement. Caffeinated teachers make better teachers!)

Instead of Standardized Tests, Why Not Build the World Wide Web?

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Cathy N. Davidson served from 1998 until 2006 as the first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. She is the co-founder of Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, HASTAC (“haystack”), a network of innovators dedicated to new forms of learning for the digital age. She is also co-director of the $2 million annual HASTAC/John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition. She is the author of  20 books. She was appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities in 2011.

Everything we know about high-stakes, end-of-grade testing confirms that: (1) it only matches with and measures about 20% of the actual content a child learns in school;  (2) it really measures one's parents' income or education, not one's own achievement, knowledge, and intelligence; (3) you can "scam" any test result by taking extra prep work in "how to take this particular form of test"--which means that, in order to save their kids' future, their schools, and, in some states, their salaries and even their jobs, teachers have to "teach to the test" which means you are then teaching content to a test that is itself poor and content-poor; (4) the test measures a very narrow range not just of content but of thinking--no logical thinking, no inference, no experiential thinking, very little crossdisciplinary thinking:  "item response" really does mean learning by item and "one best answer" really means that the world shrinks to a few choices from which you choose the best:  nothing else in life works in such a way, with knowledge parsed into discreet bubbles and given to you as a series of simple options from which you select the best; (5) it leaves out so much about knowledge that is important--intuition, creativity, inspiration, originality so to make it the one end of all knowledge (even college entrance) is a disaster; and (6) the test itself de-motivates kids and teachers from real learning.  Oh, and (7): It isn't cheap anymore.  Making and grading and administering standardized tests costs each state tens and even hundreds of millions each year. 

10 Ways to Assess Without Standardized Tests

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Lisa Nielsen writes for and speaks to audiences across the globe about learning innovatively. She has worked for more than a decade in various capacities to support learning in real and innovative ways that will prepare students for success. Her book is Teaching Generation Text, and her award-winning blog The Innovative Educator.

Standardized tests are not what's best for learning. Not only are they not best for learning, but they have become an insurmountable obstacle for innovative educators like me to do my work in schools because helping kids become good and filling in bubbles on a piece of paper is anything but innovative!

Unfortunately, many politicians, parents, and even students don’t know a world without testing and wonder...

“If we don't use standardized tests how will we measure learning, teacher effectiveness, or school effectiveness?”

When people ask me that question, I usually respond with this question:

“How do we assess learning in real life?”

Disobey

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Johnny B. Truant is an entrepreneur and an unschooling dad with an awesome website. In this post he writes about his decision to finally take the plunge to unschool his son Austin. He deeply delves into his reasons for "disobeying" society and choosing to go his own way with his family. (if you are sensitive to profanity, please do not read)

School starts today. Not for my son Austin, though.

Johnny and his son, Austin

I’m finishing writing this at 6am. At a little before 8am, the school bus is going to pull up in front of our house, and because we just got around to notifying the district that we’re not doing the school thing this year, the bus driver won’t know and will honk. I’ll be working. Austin will be asleep. The dogs will go nuts, because the dogs always seem to go nuts when such things happen.

Then the bus will go away and sometime later Austin will wake up, and we’ll hang out and maybe watch a science show on TV or something. Afterward, we’ll do our normal Wednesday thing, which is going to my gym, then to Target to window-shop the new toys, then to Chipotle for lunch. He’ll spend the afternoon drawing and reading these old, used Mario Bros books I got for him on Amazon (or possibly browsing the Mario Bros wiki — noticing a trend here?). He may play a game with me (I’m working on both The Sims and Sim City), play outside, or opt for some actual Mario Bros on the Wii.