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but the nail in the coffin was school racial integration

What in God's name are you talking about? You're cool with racial segregation? Seriously?

Antone, are you cool with the idea that busing kids across town is more important than educating them? Seriously?

Are you cool with the idea that black kids can't learn unless they are in a school with white kids? Seriously? Sounds pretty racist to me.

The problem with racial integration is that it is predicated on the idea that forcing kids to hang out with people they don't want to hang out with is far more important than educating them.

Judging by the pre- and post-integration levels of riots and inter-racial violence, forced integration has worsened relations between the races. My sense is that forced integration has dramatically slowed the real integration of American society. In recent years, it looks as if the progress has gone from nil to negative.

I'm not cool with forced segregation. I'm not cool with forced integration, either.

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Antone, are you cool with the idea that busing kids across town is more important than educating them? Seriously?

Are you cool with the idea that black kids can't learn unless they are in a school with white kids? Seriously? Sounds pretty racist to me.

Absolutely not, nor did I make any claim to such. It's just my simple opinion that segregation/discrimination on the pure basis of race is the realm of jack booted thugs, so I hold anyone that is fine with it in the same category as the statists that perpetrate such policies.

In my Utopian world there wouldn't be government schools. However, saying "the problems were sealed with racial integration" irritates me to no end. If you're segregating by culture, that's one thing, but to make it race related infuriates me.

I don't have any answers. I'll admit that. But people that are cool with discrimination on the pure basis of race (and nothing regarding culture, etc.) is a hot button item for me which causes me to snap. I am a humanist way before my race comes into play.

I'm much more lenient when it comes to discrimination by culture/character/actions.

Sorry, rant off.

Forced integration put a lot of black kids in white schools with white teachers that didn't give a **** about educating black kids. In segregated schools black kids were in schools with predominantly black teachers and black administrators that actually cared about their black students. Yeah segregation is stupid, but forced integration before the underlying moral issue of racism was solved only made things worse and largely just for the black community.

I allow self organizing in my science labs and without fail the black students always form a group with black students, and then white guys tend to group up with other white guys, white girls tend to group up with white girls and the hispanics seem to work with everyone equally, defying racial and gender boundaries. It is quite fascinating sometimes to see how race and gender self organize.

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It is not like we went to school and got nothing out of it.

I would venture to say that I'd be better off if I'd not gone to shool. There seems to be a pervasive fallacy out there that people know things because they learned them in shool, and that we therefore would know nothing if not for shool. I am quite certain that without shool, I'd know at least everything I know now.

I taught 4th grade in FL for half a year (I was hired in January due to the class size reduction law and split a class of 36 kids with another teacher).

Grading standards for the writing portion of the FCAT have always been very lax. The entire emphasis was on things like the student's use of descriptive language and the correct form for the 5 paragraph essay (intro with "grabber", 3 body paragraphs, and conclusion). Spelling, punctuation, and grammar were secondary. We are asking 9 year olds to compose a stellar 5 P essay in 45 minutes with no time for revisions or drafts.

One year the topic was something like "Tell about your favorite ride". This being FL, I assume the test creation company was trying to get the child to write about a theme park ride. However, not all kids have even been to a theme park (we have 2,200 homeless kids in my district for Pete's sake and we're just 20 miles from Disney World). Some kids wrote about riding in a car or whatever they could come up with, which didn't exactly lead to an exciting and attention grabbing essay.

Ok, so what happened this year? The grading standards were changed and suddenly, spelling, grammar, etc all counted for a lot.

I assure you that grammar is drilled into these kids from kindergarten on. I also taught 1st grade and we drilled language arts all year.

My husband teaches 5th and he is probably just going to quit after this year. Things are that bad in today's classroom. How can you teach kids who tell you to f off and who yell things like "I have brown stuff in my pants!" all day? His class had the highest test scores on the FCAT last year out of his grade level team of 7 teachers. So what was his reward? He was non-renewed (probably for being too much of a "hard ass").

You can't win as a teacher. Sure, plenty of teachers plain out suck, but the system is broken, and when you have PARENTS complaining that you are "teaching too much math" and "administrators" who yell at you like you are a bad child, it is not worth the $38,400 that you earn after 11 years.

Two of my husband's students are being retained this year (failing 5th grade), and the same thing is happening in other classes. One of these boys has already failed once, so he will be 13 and in 5th grade next year. His mother can't be bothered to even look in his take home folder since October! (single mom of course) Never responds to any phone calls, etc. The kid arrived in my husband's class functioning maybe at a 2nd grade level. There is only so much you can do when you have to plow through the curriculum at 100 mph to get it all covered by the FCAT test date (which is way before the end of the school year), and when you have a handful of other students in the class who are just as far behind. Then the other half of your class is functioning at a high school level (based on test scores).

Regarding the success of charters: I don't see that in my particular town. Instead, the for-profit charters score lower than similar regular schools.

You also have to compare apples to apples: if a charter does NOT offer bus service, you have eliminated 90% of the "low" kids right off the bat there. They will remain at the nearby public school. There are other ways for charters to select out kids who might bring scores down. Show me a charter that has the exact same demographics and percent of free/reduced lunch as the competing public school and then we can see which is better. I live 6 minutes from two schools: one is a charter and the other is the public school where my husband works. The charter has empty seats and the public school (literally 1 mile away) is so overcrowded that it has to be rezoned for next year. Parents are choosing to send their kids to the regular school.

Also, the math, science, and reading FCAT scores will be out soon. Scores are expected to plummet because lawmakers voted to make the test a lot harder back in December. (half way throught the school year). The word is that about 50% of all 3rd graders will fail the new test with the higher cut scores. Students who passed last year will be failures this year.

IMO, a LOT of the problems we see in education today are due to the following:

1. trying to cover too much material (state standards for FL are absurd given the grade level, esp in the elementary grades) We need to get back to BASICS and do a few things WELL, not fly through 100 things in 6 months in time for the test.

2. Coddling students. Discipline is out the window. Go to any school and you will see that the kids really run the show. Teachers get in trouble for trying to hold kids accountable and *some* parents will pitch a fit when you try to get their child to follow basic rules and not ruin things for the rest of the class.

3. Total morons running the local school districts (ours is the absolute worst and a big reason that we are moving away)

Regarding the fact that teachers are not known for being top performers in college - I would say that if you are too smart and try to teach, you won't make it. How smart you are has limited correlation to how effective you are as a teacher. One of my high school friends was brilliant in Biology. She tried to teach biology at our former high school (a pretty rough school) and barely made it one year before quitting. She works for a consulting firm now and makes triple. Sure, you should know your subject matter, but you don't need to be super bright.

I do some work in the Inner City School District where i live. Trust me, there's like four or so students in the non Magnet schools who actually have some high level intellgence. The rest - well half of them as soon as the hormones hit cant be taught to the same way as they were before 6th grade.

I remember my union rep telling me to give up after a situation that wasnt my fault. I consider myself more self-aware of how the kids act and how they take information in. The students are going to school to take a exam months down the road. The students where ever i go respect me because their teachers are mostly watered down fakes who have been domesticated out of existance. When it comes to Civics and Science - i can talk about new stuff, but math? Old school. 20 questions on a quiz and 30 to 50 questions on a test. No bull****. No open book and unless stated - no caluatiors.

TANSTAAFL

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I do not know how to assess the teachers' work, but things like "advanced degree applications" will be just as unproductive as everything else. Already too many people who should not be at universities are there and will not have any other future prospects than repayment of student loan debt.

Possibly, thats why I'd rather have a function based on job placement/salary earnings. That might be overly complicated, but I'm just tired of this fantasy in education that a piece of paper earns the right to a 50+k salary. it isn't realistic, and it isn't fair the kids who were sold that bull**** in the first place.