Saying smaller school results are mixed is inaccurate.

Recent media articles have given a mixed message about the successes of smaller schools. The trouble is two fold. First, smaller schools were never a guarantee of success. It only made success more likely – probably more likely than any other factor changeable from outside the family. Some studies say that the only higher predictor of success than school size was socioeconomics, i.e. the family. With smaller schools, success becomes possible for people who will work to create the right setting for learning to happen. Big schools make that much more difficult.

Second, most attempts at creating smaller schools have not been truly smaller schools or they changed other things in the process. Most attempts at creating smaller schools have been what used to be called “schools within a school.” These is where students continue to come to the same big school but are grouped together by a common theme in smaller “communities” within the same school. Though it has been called creating smaller schools, it is not. It is just another way of organizing a large school.

Some have even reorganized a community of schools so that, for instance, all of the sixth grade students go to one building with other grades also similarly grouped. This is also NOT creating small schools, because the magic of smaller schools is in lowering the grade level size. Smaller grade levels make it possible for all students of varying interests, at the same age to know each other well, and makes real collaboration between teachers less difficult and cumbersome.

A school of 600 6th graders would be a huge school because the grade level size is so big. A school of the same number of students grades K-6 would be a moderately sized school, because there would be somewhat less than 100 students per grade. If a school was a K-12 school with that same number of students, it would truly be a small school, again, because of the number of students per grade level rather than per building.

Conclusions that smaller schools have mixed results are not accurate, because they aren’t judging real smaller schools. They are evaluating reorganized large schools. Schools within a school are what have mixed results – not smaller schools.

Real smaller schools work. Pretending to create them confuses people. The research is already there. When will we listen and act accordingly?!

Class Discipline

A well disciplined class requires a well self-disciplined teacher.

Public Schools not Government Schools

I believe we have confused the term “public education” with “government schools.” Public education is not necessarily government education. It has just become that by government takeover.

Public education was created in the 1600s by the Puritans. It predates this country. Indeed it helped create the New England common people who were educated and independent enough to start the revolution that created our country!

For the first 250-300 years public education was NOT government education. It was a publicly held, locally owned corporation where the local property owners (taxpayers) were the shareholders. They controlled education. This changed when, first the school districts in growing cities became big. They became the flag ships that everyone looked to. Their property values (and thus tax revenues) increased rapidly, while the rural, smaller districts did not. The smaller districts coveted the revenues and begged for state revenue sharing. That led to state control, which might not be so bad, but that led in the 1960 Presidential election to Kennedy blaming schools for Soviet space advances and at the same time promising federal funding for them. That is what won the election for him, and THAT is when the change to becoming government schools started. False philosophies had been around for 50 years and more. They had some limited impact, but did not prevail until the national takeover began.

Public education isn’t the villain. The villain is government intrusion, which has been bought with tax revenue. Even the union isn’t the fault. It is rather an indication and complicator of the problem. The cancerous philosophy that government can guarantee success has grown exponentially in the last 50 years. It is destroying self responsibility and initiative. It also promotes and protects false philosophies. Actually it is amazing how good the schools are given the situation. That is a reflection of parents and teachers who have held to correct beliefs they grew up with and learned in their families and churches. Otherwise the schools would be much worse, and are in some places.

A community coming together to do the education of their children is not the problem. The problem is national interference and take over. Eliminate that, including restoring districts to community size, and education would be more likely to do a better job.

http://www.constitution.org/primarysources/deluder.html
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/edpolicy/research/res_essay_kennedy_genaid.shtml
http://www.smallerschools.org/

Group projects

Group projects, while occasionally useful in limited settings, are usually just easier for the teacher, not best for the student, despite all assertions to the contrary. They create less for the teacher to grade, and what is graded is highly subjective. The teacher also knows that SOMEONE in the group will make it happen, and this will allow the teacher to pass everyone, thus avoiding confrontations from students earning poor grades. However group projects are frustrating to those who do the work and have to put up with those who don't. By avoiding giving the grade deserved by each individual, because the teacher doesn't even know what each individual has done, it short changes the students who have not been productive. In fact it promotes the attitude of just sit back and let someone else do it, because someone WILL do it, and they'll all get the same grade anyway. It actually creates the same situation that causes communism to fail! Even the pilgrims of Massachusetts found that people work harder when they have their OWN property to take care of individually rather than collectively.

Grouping works best if it is very short-lived, not graded, and used mostly to discover or reveal some little thing, after which the lesson continues. There may be some limited success using group projects, but usually this is not the best way to teach or for students to learn.

Quality teaching

The quality of teaching depends more on the character, rather than the pedagogical training, of the person.

Memorization - "low" level? - unimportant?

Those who mindlessly rail against memorization are using shallow and low level thinking skills! Memorization DEVELOPS the thinking ability and gives a person more to think about! Memorization, particularly of more important facts, is like giving a brick layer more bricks with which to build.

Memorization is encouraged for older people to prevent dementia. It builds self confidence in children. It gives debaters more ammunition. It actually develops the ability to think, because it practices thinking. It exercises the mind!

Constructivists maintain that repeating something memorized is a low level thinking skill and should therefore be avoided. They denigrate it by saying it is "regurgitation" of "mere" facts, as though it is vomiting worthless bits of data! They equate it with "old fashioned, traditional" teachers.

Bloom's taxonomy of thinking skills should be drawn as a pyramid, because "lower" level thinking skills form the foundation and basis of the higher level skills such as evaluation and should have more time spent developing them. How could one evaluate without having the facts?!

Another way of looking at it is that NONE of these skills should be considered lesser or lower. All are necessary. Considering the body, do we need the nose more than the feet, the shoulder more than the hand, or the eye more than the stomach? All parts of the body are important, and the eye cannot say it hath no need of the neck, to expand upon the holy writ.

Memorization of IMPORTANT facts is very valuable. Constructivists don't like to judge one fact as more important than another, but some facts are much more worth knowing. Knowing dates of certain historical events helps one tie happenings together, developing a better understanding of why certain things happened then and now. Memorizing the top ten song hits of a particular year probably won't develop anything worthwhile.

Some things are more worth knowing, even though some may not understand that. Truth is independent of opinions however. Some educators make themselves popular by encouraging the learning of things that are popular instead of things that are important. This lack of discrimination of facts shortchanges students. We NEED to memorize worthwhile facts in order to become wise.

"Professional development" employees

I'm coming to the conclusion that "professional development" officials give the inference that classroom teachers don't know much, because that makes their teacher training job so needed. They say it so often that they actually come to believe it, but it really is for their own job security. They don't really want the teachers to be good, because then they wouldn't have a job, since they wouldn't be needed. That may be why they always push a constructivist philosophy, because it doesn't work. When this is the official policy and teachers try to implement it (since it doesn't work) the teacher is made to look bad, thus guaranteeing the further need for more "professional development!" That is why they are so eager to agree with board members and conservative legislators when they bring complaints about teachers. Between the lines they're saying, "Increase funding for professional development, my job, and my status."