Posted on by rjonakait

Educational Disconnect

Grade schools and high schools are back in session, but I sometimes wonder why. I hear again and again that our schools are a failure, so why send kids there? On the one hand, the schools do not teach. On the other hand, they teach the wrong stuff. Of course, this is a disconnect. If the schools are not good at teaching, it does not make much sense to get exercised over their curriculum. This, of course, is a bit like what Woody Allen said about a resort: The food is awful. And the portions are so small.

That many think that our schools fail our kids was confirmed by a recent Gallup poll on education. The polling organization asked how satisfied the polling participants were with the quality of education students received in grades K-12. The responses: 9% are satisfied; 33% are somewhat satisfied; 32% are somewhat dissatisfied; 23% are completely dissatisfied; and 2% had no opinion. In other words, the total of those indicating a dissatisfaction with the present American education were in a distinct majority, outnumbering the satisfied cohort by fourteen percentage points.

This question was about all K-12 schools. The results were even more depressing when respondents were asked about the quality of the education in public schools: 9% are very satisfied; 20% are somewhat satisfied; 28% are somewhat dissatisfied; and 40% are very dissatisfied. While the satisfied/dissatisfied split for all schools is about the same now as it was a decade ago, that split has widened for the public schools. Now 68% fall into the dissatisfied camp while in 2013 56% did.

So, K-12 education generally in this country sucks, and public education sucks even bigger time, or at least that is what the country thinks as indicated by the Gallup poll. But wait: There is more information.

The poll respondents were asked if they had a child in school, and what grade their oldest child was in. The responses indicated that 33% had their oldest child in K-5, 21% had the oldest child in grades six through eight, 44% had the oldest child in high school, with 2% not responding to the question. Overwhelmingly, these children were in public schools—82%, with 9% in private schools; 1% in parochial schools; 3% in charter schools; and with 5% home schooled.

Here comes the shocker: The poll participants were asked about the quality of the education their oldest child was getting. The responses: 32% are completely satisfied; 48% somewhat satisfied; 14% somewhat dissatisfied; 6% completely dissatisfied. The satisfaction group, now at 70%, was even a bit higher than in 2013 when the satisfied cohort was 67%.

So, there is a big disconnect between the general populace’s perception of our education and those with children in our schools. Over two-thirds of the parents were in the satisfied group, while only 42% of the general population fell on the satisfied line. I have been trying to figure out why this split exists, but I don’t have answers. I could give speculations but that is all they would be.

I was not a participant in this poll, and I don’t know how I would have responded. I do know some K-12 teachers, whom I respect, but I have no firsthand knowledge of the K-12 educational system. It has been a lifetime since I graduated from high school, and a quarter century since my son did. Whatever I think I know about our education comes from news stories, politicians, headline-seeking parents, and pundits (also seeking attention), and this is mostly negative. But I find it striking that those who have important contact with the system—parents with kids in school—report satisfaction with the quality of the education being delivered.

Can somebody explain this to me?

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The first anniversary of the American withdrawal from Kabul occurred recently. That withdrawal was not a pretty sight. We are supposed to learn from experience, and we should want to learn about what went right and wrong in that operation. It is an appropriate subject for congressional hearings, but we have not had meaningful ones. The Democrats control Congress, and such hearings might further tarnish Biden. So no hearings now, but Republicans vow to hold hearings if they gain control of the House of Representatives next year. Of course, the goal of these efforts will not be learning. It will be to attack Biden. And, thus, partisanship stands in the way of gaining knowledge so that this might be a better country.

We could learn something useful about the withdrawal, but even more is to be gained by learning about our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the first place. This was the longest of our many, many wars. It cost a lot of our money. Someone could look it up for me. Was it $1 trillion, $10 trillion, $100 trillion, or more? Some say that the recent U.S.-based stimulus packages were too large and helped fuel deficits which helped fuel inflation. The Afghan war did a whole lot more of such fueling, and, unlike the recent stimulus, much of the money was spent abroad without recirculation in our economy. We spent real money, folks, and real lives were lost…for what purpose? Do you see any useful results that would justify twenty years of war, carloads of money, and devastating loss of life? We should, of course, examine our Afghanistan efforts to learn about the limits of our military prowess and democracy-building efforts, for certainly this adventure had very few positive results . But I doubt that we will get any meaningful congressional investigation. The war was started by a Republican president, was continued by a Democrat, and carried along further by a Republican president, and embarrassedly ended under a Democrat. You might think that with both parties having been involved in a failed policy, we would have informative hearings about this war. But we won’t. Since both parties were up to their eyeballs in the invasion and occupation, there is no perceived partisan advantage in considering this issue, which is one of utmost importance for our foreign policy.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” John Stuart Mill.

The spouse said that she no longer puts ice in her water glass so that she will drink more water. I started to say, “Ice melts. It is not always solid.” I caught myself and then thought steam is always a gas. Ice is “ice,” and steam is “steam”; Why is it that what I drink from the tap does not have its own name?

The good old days: A Gallup Poll in 1945 reported that 90% of New Yorkers considered themselves happy.

In the old days, including during my career in criminal defense, when a person informed the police about a miscreant (i.e., ratted someone out), it was said that the informant had “dropped a dime” on the other one. No one calls a cop on a pay phone with a dime anymore. So today, what is the informant doing?