Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How would you improve our educational system K-12

Slim down the higher ups makin top$$

Hold elementary and middle school teachers accountable. I teach NJROTC at a high school in TX and the number of kids getting to HS without being able to do the big 3 of reading, writing and arithmatic at a HS level is mind boggling.

Elementary and middle schools no longer hold students back they just assign "accomodations" and send them to the next grade. States dont get too involved until the students are in HS and by then many are so behind in the basics that it isnt recoverable. Hard to break that cycle if students have just been passed along for 6 or more years.

And they should shi+can the unions

We sure seem to spend a lot of time and money on special education. I'm not sure that the allocation of resources is properly balanced. More time and attention spent on the middle to high achievers might be more productive.

Remove sports. If you want to play games, that's on you and your parents and can be done at some other time.

You can't get rid of tenure.


You would lose more good teachers than bad teachers.

What about spealing?

Some very astute, successful and dedicated educators have worked toward best ways to broadly assess teacher performance. Trials in properly controlled situations have shown many of the ideas/methods to have been effective. As any smart person would suppose, there is no one-way, single action, easy-peasy method - effectiveness in such evaluation requires a wise combination of means/efforts designed according to the educational challenges/situations involved.

Rather than to cite specific projects/studies/outcomes from erudite publications - and if I can find the time today - I will try to give some simple conceptual explanations and examples.

Hint: some very promising methods often are resisted, or rejected out of hand, in teacher union situations.

Please tell me you are joking, school sports brings a lot to the table for these kids. A lot can be learned about between the lines or on a baseball diamond about being a person, teammate, leader, outside the classroom. You mention parents, parents are certainly part of this bigger issue. You assume these same parents that are leaving it up to the schools to raise their kids are gonna get them to games elsewhere. Shoot, these school coaches are some of the most important people in some of these kids lives.

Man, I'm not sure about that.

You think teachers would walk if they lost their tenure, I think we could fire a bunch of crappy teachers if they were not protected by tenure.

My niece is a vice principle at a local high school, she will openly admit they have bad teachers they simply cannot practically get rid of. So these crappy teachers get moved around leaving a trial of destruction where ever they go. GOOD teachers are more prone to leave over BAD teachers than bad students.

Agree , good post. Some way kids need to be exposed to different trades/careers . Seems like some kids followed the path of their parents. Maybe not all bad, but the kid might be better at something else. Example a Bankers son might be better at running heavy equipment . I was exposed to the building trades through my father. My brother hated construction and after a few years went into the military. He came out of the army and got a factory job. I think finding the slot we fit in ASAP is beneficial . While the price of education is high, incarceration is much higher.

homskools kool, watching Clifford the Big Red Dog and Teletubbies, getting the eggs from the henhouse for you grampa.

Before you get to the teachers, start holding the school board accountable to provide the best school superintendent, who sets the curriculum to ensure the students are well grounded in RW&A by the third grade. Then hold the principal's feet to the fire to make sure the Sup's orders are carried out. This is where it starts. My mother told me in 1978, I read better in the fifth grade than most of her senior students. This isn't anything new.

Reading. Everything else is based on it. With it, you can learn anything and often teach yourself.

Teach and comprehend the US Constitution. Knowing the rule book helps keep you free.

School choice and vouchers. Nobody should be stuck in a school that doesn't meet your needs. Everyone has different interests and learning styles. Finding the right school shouldn't be limited to your zip code.

It's ashame none of these current teenagers can't read a tape measure , just sayin'

How many of you Lazy-Boy quarterbacks ever tried to manage a classroom full of ghetto gangbangers and "special ed" students? I did it for 30-something years, and retired in 2011 after teachig vocational trade subjects in a school with 3K+ students and 10 acres under the roof. The campus was about 80 acres. We had two onsite cops to patrol all that area. Do the job yourself for a while, and then tell us who survived the incompetent administrators and dangerous gangbangers how to do our jobs. Otherwise, STFU. Talk is cheap!

Reading seems to be the key indicator of success.
85% of people on welfare cannot read past a fourth grade level.
The vast majority of drop outs happen after the first year of high school, and of those, a large portion cannot read.

We should not progress a child if they cannot read. We are actually doing them (and us) more harm than good.

Not to kick the OP but threads like this never seem to accomplish one single thing except to point out the obvious.

Model it after the German Education system.

I went to school in the late 1950s and thru the entire 1960s. Graduating high school in 1970.

At least return to the education system, that I went thru in the 1960s. Where we learned about "Civics", true history and not revisionist history to make the politically correct crowd happy, math at an early age, proper English etc.

The school system I went thru in High School, was the 20th highest rated in the entire nation at the time. Fairfax County VA, right outside of DC. My high school was the highest rated high school in the county at the time, out of 17 High Schools.

We were required to graduate with 16 credits, but the door was open to graduate with as high as 24 credits, which I did.
We had advanced mathmatics available, which I took 6 levels of Algebra, and in foreign languages, I took two years of French in my freshman year in advanced classes, and then took 6 years worth of German in 3 years, taking advanced classes. Heck I use to think in German even. Those were available.

95% of my senior class attended college in the fall of 1970.

Education system is a joke, just about anywhere in this nation anymore. Colleges are worse. You pay big bucks for your kids to be indoctrinated into the democRATic Socialist System, "the liberal" leftists want to adopt. Our founders of this country are probably rolling over in their graves, at 10,000 RPMs in what our current society standards have turned their nation into.

Hell half or more of them around here, can't even read a book that most of us would understand, when we were in the 5th and 6th grade. Kids aren't dumb... the liberal left teach them to be stupid....

You surely aren't saying our public education cannot be improved. What are your ideas? I'd also like to hear how you would propose evaluating teacher performance so the good ones could be justly compensated.