Home Schools, Alternatives, post-pandemic

[temporal1]

Excessive violence in schools
viewtopic.php?t=5414

[temporal1]

Money.

“Hundreds of Thousands of US Students Have Not Returned after Pandemic”
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/h ... 61012.html

Hundreds of thousands of American students have dropped out of public schools since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
They have essentially gone missing from schools.

An examination by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee reached some of the “missing” students. They found an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absences from school could not be explained. These students did not move out of state. They did not sign up for private school or home-school.

Missing students received a lot of attention in 2020 after the pandemic closed schools around the country. In the years since, however, missing students have largely become a budgeting problem.

School leaders and some state officials worried about how they would lose financing if the students did not return.
More students means more money from the city, state and federal governments.

There is no longer urgency to find the students who disappeared from school. Early in the pandemic, school workers would go to students’ homes to try and help them return to the classroom. Most such efforts, however, have ended. .. ..

i suppose the first question should be (without bias) are they worse-off? are the older students working?

there are valid questions about education and/or work. esp about college. this mystery may introduce more questions?
after all, reports are, lots of schools are failing to teach reading/math, the basics; are students better off not going, not learning bad habits, not being bullied, etc.?

the prevailing presumption would be this is a disaster for these students, is that the reality?
those (wanting the money) are unlikely to be tolerant of balanced questions.

[temporal1]

^^To add to above. What’s the point? When the function/purpose is gone, fund out of habit?

Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools – Wirepoints
https://wirepoints.org/not-a-single-stu ... irepoints/

[Ken]

^^To add to above. What’s the point? When the function/purpose is gone, fund out of habit?

Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools – Wirepoints
https://wirepoints.org/not-a-single-stu ... irepoints/

I frankly wouldn't believe it. Kids are so over-tested these days that many many of them don't even bother with these standardized tests. So the results are often just garbage. I have to administer them from time to time and lots of kids these days just click click click through until they are done without paying any attention to the answers so they can get out a book and read or do something else. Sometimes they race each other to see who can get done the fastest by random clicking. Or if it is a paper and pencil bubble form they just randomly bubble and turn in their answer sheet. They know these standardized tests are meaningless to them personally as it doesn't go onto their actual grade in the class. So why bother? It is just a big waste of time and money.

More and more parents also agree and just keep their kids home on testing day or opt them out. There is a whole anti-testing movement out there.

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog ... re-testing

On Long Island, NY, a middle-class suburban area east of New York City that has been called the “epicenter of anti-testing,” more than half of all public school students opted out of the tests. In some individual schools, the numbers were much higher. For example, in Sayville, NY, only 25% of children in grades 3-8 took the state math test. In Rocky Point, NY, another Long Island community, 80% of students sat out the April tests. Some administrators in New York fully supported the opt-out movement, and one school district’s board of education even considered passing a resolution to refuse the tests district-wide.

The movement was not limited to New York. In Indiana, a school superintendent recommended that parents homeschool their children during testing days and opt-out of the exams. In Seattle, an entire class of eleventh graders in one high school refused to take standardized tests, and in the city’s other high schools, hundreds of other students followed suit. In 2015, the movement became nationwide.

If these common core standardized tests are so important ask yourself why not a single private school or religious school anywhere in the country bothers to administer them much less release results.

[barnhart]

Some private schools still do standardized testing. Our small church school does CAT and Regents. Data is available for parents and interested parents.

[temporal1]

Regarding the present state of many gov schools:

[temporal1]

Some private schools still do standardized testing. Our small church school does CAT and Regents.
Data is available for parents and interested parents.

one good purpose our family has experienced via standardized testing is: revelation of ability above+beyond what may be seen in everyday classroom work and interaction. this can be good reason to dig deeper into what a child is struggling with, and, often, adjustments, special attention, even “accomodations” can be implemented to turn things around.

even decades ago, my dear bil who taught (public) h.s. science for many years, then became a school counselor, shared with us the peculiar reality that, sometimes, very intelligent children may be outwardly indistinguishable from those most struggling!
this intrigued him, me, too! it’s really interesting. he was such a good guy. really miss him. he was so thought-ful.

i’ve used it with our children.
in college, our very able daughter decided she could get away with a lot just by saying, “i can’t do that, i’m not that smart!”
i told her to save it for someone else - i’d seen her SATs and other tests. i knew better.

really bright children can be lazy+manipulative, too. they can keep ya on your toes! God’s creation.

nothing is perfect, nothing always works. but standardized tests serve purposes. they’re a tool in the toolbox.
i hated taking those tests. however, they serve purposes.

in olden says - much of what we children-teens, et al, did, was NOT what we “wanted.”

[temporal1]

Current Events: “CULTURAL SEPARATION FROM PARENTS”
viewtopic.php?t=6072

P.20+21:

P.20:

Why SHOULD public schools be teaching about gender and all the other questions you raise?

- - - - - - -

This seems to me to imply, that in the public education of children, these questions you raise SHOULD be the primary focus of education and after getting these questions answered correctly, THEN you move on to the less important things like reading, writing and math.

This is what many of us are saying is wrong with the education systems of our day.

i was so hoping GaryK would weigh in this morning.

[temporal1]

An alternative approach for gov schools: TEACH

”How a rural Alabama school system outdid the country with gains in math”
https://www.aol.com/news/rural-alabama- ... 52973.html

PIEDMONT, Ala. (AP) — While the rest of the country’s schools were losing ground in math during the COVID pandemic, student performance in a rural Alabama school district was soaring.

Piedmont City schools notched significant improvement in math, landing in the top spot among school districts across the country in a comparison of scores from before and during the pandemic. Nationwide, students on average fell half a year behind in math, researchers say.

Piedmont, a 1,100-student district where seven out of 10 qualify for free or reduced-prince lunch, has stuck with an approach it adopted before the pandemic: It gave teachers more time to dig into data on students' scores and lengthened classes to help them focus on specific skills.

“We made a total transformation about five years ago,” Superintendent Mike Hayes said. “We decided that we were going to let data make every decision.”

In other words, Piedmont teachers use test scores to see where kids are struggling and then target teaching to each kid.
And then repeat.

___

The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

___

Targeted instruction for small groups of students has years of research and evidence to back it up, said Rebecca Dreyfus of TNTP, a national nonprofit devoted to helping schools improve student learning. Pinpointing what skills need shoring up — and using systematic and explicit instruction, as backed by the “science of math” — makes it even more effective, she said.

“The short answer is that using data effectively and efficiently to plan and monitor instruction is always going to make instruction better for kids,” Dreyfus said.

Piedmont students ranked 35th in the state in math proficiency in 2017, when Hayes took over as superintendent.
By spring 2022, the district ranked twelfth in the state on math proficiency, with 57% of students reaching proficiency.
Statewide, 30% of students scored proficient in math.

“Once we made that decision and stuck to it and made changes and allowed our teachers time to look at the data and dive into the data, it paid off,” Hayes said.

TEACHERS GO DEEP ON ‘DATA DAYS’

To encourage teachers to dig deeper on student data, the Piedmont system made the school day longer and freed up time every four weeks for “data days,” when educators get together to analyze the numbers.

The data days help teachers see where the weaknesses are and adjust instruction, said Cassie Holbrooks, who teaches fourth grade math.

Sixth grade teacher Lisa Hayes said she was surprised to see how hard teachers worked during the data sessions when when she joined the district five years ago.

“When I came here and we had a workday,” she said, “you don’t sit in your room. You’re in here (the media center) most of the day, digging through test scores.”

Teachers then use the analysis to decide how to divide the students into small groups for targeted instruction on particular skills.

Grouping two to six students together to work on a specific skill has long been used for reading instruction and in younger grades.
There is less research on the use of targeted small group instruction in math and in middle grades. But researchers like Dreyfus say it involves the same principle of identifying students who need extra help on certain skills, rather than simply pulling out children who are “behind.”

At the state level, math specialist Keri Richburg has been working to help more middle grade educators use small group instruction effectively. She oversees training for middle school math teachers through the Alabama Math Science and Technology Initiative.

Research supports the use of regular testing, called formative assessments, to help teachers figure out which students need personalized help, Richburg said.

“The idea is that we’re using evidence of student learning and making in-the-moment decisions about our instruction for each of our students within those small groups,” she said.

BALANCING SMALL GROUPS AND INDEPENDENT WORK

While math teachers in Piedmont’s elementary and middle schools work with small groups, the other students write in math journals, play learning games, or use iPads to work on their Individualized Learning Path, created from assessments of what a student needs or wants to learn.

One day in August in Holbrooks' class, she worked with a group of four students on how to subtract 278 from 4,000, borrowing from the “0” in each place. Holbrooks modeled the steps, working with each student who needed additional attention.

At first, when Piedmont expanded small group instruction beyond reading in elementary grades, teachers said they didn’t have enough time in a regular class to do it well, Hayes said. So the district expanded math and English language arts to 80 minutes every day in the middle school and 120 minutes each day in the elementary school.

The longer math classes made a big difference, teacher Landon Pruitt said.

“In a 52- or 53-minute class,” Pruitt said, “there’s no way you can consistently do (small groups) and work on getting through the standards that you have to cover.”

The school also had to help teachers adjust classroom management techniques to accommodate small groups and independent work simultaneously. Hayes said one solution was to give teachers a program to monitor each students’ screen.

The district wants to make sure teachers have the support and resources to do the job well, Hayes said.

“I’m not sure we have a secret sauce or anything earth shattering,” Hayes said,
“but we do have teachers and administrators committed to being intentional with data and letting that data drive small group instruction. Changing instruction in real time to meet our students where they are may be the most important step in our data-driven instructional process.”

___

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The AP is solely responsible for all content.

[temporal1]

GEORGIA teacher speaks up.

Matt Walsh / “This Teacher Has Gone Viral On TikTok. See Why.” / 14:30min

Description:
Viral TikTok says kids are underperforming and emboldens teachers to speak up.

Keep in mind:
1) Present teachers AND parents are, themselves, products of the U.S. “education system.”

No one can teach what they do not know.

2) Unions are a factor.
Unions are known for keeping incompetent/corrupt workers on active duty, not just in school settings.

To Matt Walsh:
Please do a another documentary:
“WHAT IS A PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER?”

Referenced report:
USA TODAY / “ ‘It’s hell out here’: Why one teacher’s bold admission opened a floodgate”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/hea ... 981596007/