Florida edumacation system

[Lucavi]

I was with you, and then I saw that sig. I think Gary Coleman wants to know why, as well.

[zoobernut]

Assuming that parents have this magical all-powerful effect some in this thread seem to be ascribing to them, wouldn't this basically punish people who work nights, or work long hours, or have learning disabilities themselves, or have kids with learning disabilities, or have kids who are above their grade and just bored with the material, or have kids who are creative rather than adept at regurgitating rote facts for standardized tests, or....

Well aside from the fact that it was a sarcastic over simplified post, I am sure that if we could find a program certain situations would be worked out to account for learning disabilities. As for the other crap that is 100% a parents fault. When I was in elementary school I got bored with the stuff they were teaching and started not doing well, you know what my mom did? She actually cared enough to start assigning me homework outside of class that she made up. She used to make me do extra book reports and write essays about a subject that I was required to research. She used to find extra activities to keep me busy. It worked my grades went up. Not saying that approach works for everyone but just an example of a parent who cared and paid attention to their kids enough to do something rather than just blaming the schools or the school system.

One of my college professors always told me you only get as much out of school as you take. That is true for college and it is true for any school. Kids that slack off do poorly and fuck around are not taking anything from school therefore they get nothing. That doesn't automatically mean their teachers are shitty.

But really you missed the point of my post which was merely that parents LOVE to shift all responsibility for their own children off themselves and onto the teachers. Parents love to use excuses like working nights or whatever, parents at least in this country love to blame anything but themselves for their kids issues. See blaming tv, video games, the neighborhood they live in, ect. the list of things that parents in this country blame is very long.

It is about time for parents to stop shifting the blame and take some fucking responsibility.

[#686578]

Floridian student

Agreed with OP

[Ohemgee]

Sad thing is, about 40% (pulling the number out of my ass, but you know what I mean) of the kids don't give a fuck about school. I feel terrible for Miami-Dade teachers who teach the poorest of poor.

And yes, more money = better education. No matter how you slice it.

[Alleya]

But really you missed the point of my post which was merely that parents LOVE to shift all responsibility for their own children off themselves and onto the teachers. Parents love to use excuses like working nights or whatever, parents at least in this country love to blame anything but themselves for their kids issues. See blaming tv, video games, the neighborhood they live in, ect. the list of things that parents in this country blame is very long.

It is about time for parents to stop shifting the blame and take some fucking responsibility.

I got a pretty good education in my public school.

If the parents aren't shit, the kids won't be shit, and the teachers can actually teach.

So much truth to this statement.

I'm sensing a pattern here.

My point being that parents are not a magic bullet. If you bother to read the science, all a parent can really do is offer a positive environment. How a child ultimately behaves has tremendously more to do with their temperament (which is largely genetic) and their peer groups.

For those same reasons, standardized testing is a joke. Being intelligent and being successful in school are different things, especially since the definition of what is successful in school is growing more and more divorced from the definition of what defines real success.

[zoobernut]

Wow your powers are amazing... did you know that there is a pattern in the numbers 2, 4, 6 too?

I don't really understand what you were trying to point out there if it was that I agreed with Archi and then posted an explanation of why I agreed with him then yes you successfully stated the very obvious.

[Alleya]

I was pointing out that you claim parents shift all responsibility away from themselves and you clearly think this is a bad thing, when in fact all you are doing in your posts is shifting all blame to the parents, which is intellectually bankrupt and empirically untenable.

[archibaldcrane]

Parents can't magically make kids smart.

They can make them respectful, attentive, and present in class.

But what we're dealing with in really poor areas are kids who, ya know, can't fucking read. If your kid can't read (at a decent level), he's fucked. If he can't do arithmetic, he's fucked in math class. And if a kid can't read or can't do arithmetic, and his parents either don't know, or don't fix that situation, that's a huge fucking parental problem.

If kids were attentive, respectful, present in class, could read and do arithmetic - so many of these problems go away. These are the things I expect parents to provide and control, and things I blame them for if their kids are significantly behind in. Teachers/school systems can take care of, and be blamed for, progress or lack thereof on top of that. (I'm mainly talking about middle and high school kids here).

Teachers pick up where parents leave off. If the parents leave kids with no chance to succeed in school (no discipline/inability to read or do arithmetic). If I felt the big problem in poor/shitty school situations is that teachers were fucking up educating kids who had parents who were pulling their weight, I'd be all for pointing fingers in their direction. It's just not what I see.

[Skeeterxi]

Once a kid reachers high school age they pretty much are who they are going to be, you can only hope to steer your kids in the right direction.

Florida education is a complete joke though I agree. I was an idiot and dropped out my senior year, I just couldn't take it anymore. Everyday was so fucking mundane and boring. Showing up for school, and having teachers "teach by the book". Basically just fucking hand out work sheets to be graded. The only teachers I had lecture were history and math. I loved my history teachers so much, everything else was just complete garbage.

They shouldn't force you to take a ton of stupid fucking electives. They should come up with better testing than LOLfcats. Once you pass the test you should just be free to graduate. I passed my Fcats and watched kids in honors classes fail, I kid you not. Here I was a C student who skipped 2-3 days a week and I passed that shit no problem. It was a huge moment for me confirming what I believed to be true, high school in Florida is completely fucking useless.

I'm in my second year at my community college, I couldn't be happier too. It might not be the best education but, Professors actually lecture and genuinely care, only grades are exams and research papers/essays. That is the way it should be. I'll admit I still skip about as much school as I did in high school, but I learn better by teaching myself and studying on my own and bringing up questions I actually do have. It works out because I'm not graded on attendance and retarded fucking busy work like I'm in a day care, that is almost what high school is down here.

I don't know what its like in a four year university but at my community college they would only let me skip so far ahead even though my entry exams grades, or w/e the hell it was, were basically high enough. Basically did half the shit I had already done in high school.

I've studied and learned more in one semester of college, especially my anatomy classes, than 4 years I spent in high school. To me all a diploma represents is being patient enough to deal with our bullshit education systems here, and waste 6 hours a day. I wasn't.

I have a 3.7 GPA right now, I will prob drop it to 3.5 because I'm getting lazy but after this year I will be eligible to apply for my schools radiology program which I'm going to aim for. Once I get my two year degree, and get my feet wet working I'll decide If I want to bother going for more.

Also, it must have been pretty shitty for a long ass time because my dad is an 8th grade drop out and breezed through college no problem, this was 20 years ago, I actually had some of the same elementary school teachers as him.

[Ohemgee]

Sad thing is. GED = High School diploma. The only thing you get from graduating high school in Florida is a chance to get Florida Bright futures. Which could be replaced by financial aid and a few paychecks at a part time job at minimum wage.

[zoobernut]

I was pointing out that you claim parents shift all responsibility away from themselves and you clearly think this is a bad thing, when in fact all you are doing in your posts is shifting all blame to the parents, which is intellectually bankrupt and empirically untenable.

Nowhere did I say to shift ALL responsibility onto the parents. So in fact you claim that I am shifting all blame to the parents when that is not true at all. I was making a point that you obviously completely missed that it is intellectually bankrupt to penalize the teachers for the performance of the students while there lies no responsibility with the parents as it is now.

If a student is doing poorly in school if they want to penalize the people responsible it should fall on both the teachers and the parents shoulders not one or the other. I was making a point by exaggerating and being sarcastic but even though I stated that you still missed the point.

If a student is doing well in school likewise the parents and the teachers should benefit.

Basically you took an off the cuff sarcastic hyperbole and took it way to seriously and tried to pick a fight over it and ended up completely missing the point of my posts.


Edit: Just so we are clear I am not laying all the "blame" on you. I might not have been clear enough in my posts for you to understand but I thought I was fairly clear what I meant by my original and subsequent posts.

[aznmajiktaru]

Sad thing is. GED = High School diploma. The only thing you get from graduating high school in Florida is a chance to get Florida Bright futures. Which could be replaced by financial aid and a few paychecks at a part time job at minimum wage.

hay nao don't hate on bright futures, I got paid to go to college '~'. Though yea, florida education was pretty shit. I swapped between an "A" highschool school (based on derp FCAT? scores or some shit) and I think hollywood hills was like a "C" school or lower. The difference was huge; at the A school, I was surrounded by more people who gave a shit about their education and the AP classes were actually hard. Swap over to C school, I could cut class and still blow past the AP classes. Swapped back to the A school after a year and on my senior year I practically had the maximum allotted days allowed for unexcused absences before I was going to be detained a year cause I really didn't feel like the education taught me shit. At the point, you pretty much learned you needed certain amount of AP credits in order for it to even make a difference (not requiring you take the shitty general ed for the first 2 years). A lot of vals and sals I knew went to CC for first 2 then just jumped to a better college and saved up a lot of money with bright futures, and personally it was a good way to have fun going to college while not having to worry about tuition, food, books,etc.

Fast forward now that I'm doing masters, shit's still pretty easy and I've got 4 1/2 months left meanwhile I'm sitting at a 3.5 with a full time job (I'm a lazy fuck and only study night before). Honestly a masters course shouldn't even come close to being this easy no matter which university you go to.


Anyways, pay for performance is kinda meh. Like with everything else, you teach them the rules and they'll tell you how to play the game. Teachers who care about their pay will just structure around getting the highest scores on these tests. I think it's also backwards to train kids purely to past these exams. Sure they might "know" the material but that really doesn't require much thought to be put into it at all. I understand they could say they're trying to push a standardized education/ bring up education with this but isn't that what the FCAT was for anyways? People may laugh about FCAT, but I had to tutor a lot of people for it during after school tutoring time. Which also brings up the other point, why penalize the teachers (not saying all teachers are great teachers) when the students are the ones who really should be more responsible for their own future.

Teachers may be more "earnest" to teach but it really doesn't mean shit if the student doesn't want to learn. People not being able to graduate without being able to pass the FCAT was a good direction to go, just keep raising the bar on the FCAT and then you'll have a higher desired education level (assuming the tests actually tests for what's expected of someone who's gone to X years of schooling).

I think education, overall, just needs an overhaul. What is the aim of graduating out of high school anyways? If it's about knowing a certain amount of material, then sure as fuck they don't need to spend all that time in high school to do it cause I had a 1-3 sophomores(while I was a senior) who finished our HS curriculum for math and some other shit so they pretty much dual enrolled at college most of their high school careers. I just don't see how this bill is going to help anyone besides piss off a whole buncha teachers, especially the ones stuck in dade lol.

[Beckwin]

I'm sensing a pattern here.

My point being that parents are not a magic bullet. If you bother to read the science, all a parent can really do is offer a positive environment. How a child ultimately behaves has tremendously more to do with their temperament (which is largely genetic) and their peer groups.

For those same reasons, standardized testing is a joke. Being intelligent and being successful in school are different things, especially since the definition of what is successful in school is growing more and more divorced from the definition of what defines real success.

I wanna know what science you're reading, because studies that I've read draw strong links between parental/community involvement, at home literacy support, and socioeconomic status and school performance.

Beyond the literature, if you talk to any teacher working at a struggling school, you constantly hear stories about students who go home to an empty house on a regular basis, parents who lack the ability to help with homework, students who come to school hungry, and so on. While parenting is certainly not the only factor, but it's an essential component of a child's development and that includes academic development.

meanwhile we have this fucked up system of averages determining a school's or teacher's success that does a damn good job of marginalizing the individual needs of students while pressuring teachers and administrators to focus more on numbers, all in the name of essentially adding market characteristics to public education.

fucking ridiculous.

and of course, the easy target for blame is the teacher, because politically it's a goldmine to target people who are government AND union workers.

[Drex]

The teachers will just give even more bullshit assignments like "write your name on this paper for an A". Basing their pay on grades is stupid, which is why I am very afraid it will happen.

I actually had a class in high school where 30% of our grade was "Participation". Apparently they meant to say attendance, and even that is questionable, because people who skipped the first week of the class and never opened their mouths once to ask or answer a question got a perfect participation grade. lol.

[Cptnobvious]

They should come up with better testing than LOLfcats. Once you pass the test you should just be free to graduate. I passed my Fcats and watched kids in honors classes fail, I kid you not. Here I was a C student who skipped 2-3 days a week and I passed that shit no problem.

Couldn't agree more with you. I moved to florida my senior year of high school. Didn't even know what the FCAT was, and passed on my first try. Meanwhile had students around me who were on there 3'rd or 4'th attempt at it.

I moved to florida from california, and it was like night and day. There I went to a decent public school. (Well I actually went to 3 different high schools but that's for a later time), and while no means amazing, you still had to at least try. Move to florida and I slept through most of my classes, never did my homework or study for tests, and still managed to make the honor role. Blew my mind how easy this was.

But a few others have touched upon it. A lot of the blame is parents and the students, and the culture. I am not sure how it is else where but based on my experience in florida, education took a back seat to, getting drunk/high/fucked up, women, sports, fishing, and just about everything else. Kids in my class who's only goal was to make it to the weekend so they could get drunk off there ass, stoned as hell, and then tell all there buddies how awesome it was they don't remember anything about last night. I always felt there was this pervasive attitude towards doing well in school, and that far to many kids rested there dreams of success on, I will make it big in the rap business or music business or I will win the lottery. Or "I am young, some one will just hand me a high paying job because I deserve one, even though I have no discernible skills and my reading, writing and math skills are at the elementary level."

Sorry rant off. Anytime I see something about florida education I get a bit filled with rage.

[Kenshiin]

My wife is a teacher here in the Ft. Myers area and it was something I was thinking about getting into in a few years as well. While basing pay on FCAT scores sounds like a good way to motivate teachers, it really can't work in FL. For one, nearly half her kids can't even speak English and can you really hold that against a teacher? A good majority of her kids have no plans to go to college, they just want to work on their families farm. Also, how are they going to score the subjects that aren't part of the FCAT, like gym or art?

What I ended up telling my wife to do is to take one week out of the month, or one every two months, and work on the FCAT that week. If that's what they are going to base your pay on, then the big wigs must think it's more important than what else you're supposed to teach.

[Julian]

Well aside from the fact that it was a sarcastic over simplified post, I am sure that if we could find a program certain situations would be worked out to account for learning disabilities. As for the other crap that is 100% a parents fault. When I was in elementary school I got bored with the stuff they were teaching and started not doing well, you know what my mom did? She actually cared enough to start assigning me homework outside of class that she made up. She used to make me do extra book reports and write essays about a subject that I was required to research. She used to find extra activities to keep me busy. It worked my grades went up. Not saying that approach works for everyone but just an example of a parent who cared and paid attention to their kids enough to do something rather than just blaming the schools or the school system.

One of my college professors always told me you only get as much out of school as you take. That is true for college and it is true for any school. Kids that slack off do poorly and fuck around are not taking anything from school therefore they get nothing. That doesn't automatically mean their teachers are shitty.

But really you missed the point of my post which was merely that parents LOVE to shift all responsibility for their own children off themselves and onto the teachers. Parents love to use excuses like working nights or whatever, parents at least in this country love to blame anything but themselves for their kids issues. See blaming tv, video games, the neighborhood they live in, ect. the list of things that parents in this country blame is very long.

It is about time for parents to stop shifting the blame and take some fucking responsibility.

This post is incredibly true, and makes me want to call my mom right this instant and give her a really big hug and thank you for everything that she did for me.

And thinking back, while it was mostly thanks to my mom, I had some really great and wonderful teachers along the way, too.

My life growing up wasn't perfect, I moved here from Brasil in November in the 3rd grade. (And we constantly kept moving from one place to another after that.) I had actually already finished the 3rd grade in Brasil, in a private school (feb~nov school years, what's this august-may bullshit they have here, is it just for the sake of a "summer break"?) so I was actually pretty fucking ahead, but because I was born after some date in September, I had to redo the 3rd grade (what kind of bullshit rule is that? Seriously? what the fuck?)

I started out in some shitty retarded elementary school where they made you hold hands outside and cover your mouth with your finger and hold up some sort of peace sign or some retarded shit, school sucked too, teachers were retarded, my teacher actually called me stupid or something because at the time I could barely speak any english. Solution? My mom moved me to a different school.

The other school was a magnet school, and it was great. My first teacher noticed that I was incredibly ahead, and that the shit they were doing was retarded (math tables in the 3rd grade? I fucking learned that shit in 1st grade) so he gave me a bunch of advanced math problems to do while the class was doing something else. I had a lot of teachers like those, and I'm really grateful for it.

There was another time, I had just moved to Boynton, and I went to this middle school called Christa McAuliffe or something. Classes were kinda dumb, but what really got me were the kids in there. In one of my classes I was stuck sitting in the middle of this triangle of three trouble makers. They would always do something really retarded, one day the kid who was sitting next to the AC was trying to make the AC blow up with his lighter or something, another day one of them had drugs or something and was passing it around. I remember some days I was scared so fucking shitless in that class that I would reach for my phone in my backpack and spam call my parents hoping they would rush over and get me out of that school (I complained once, all the school did was bust the guy who had drugs, he didn't come to class for 2 weeks, then he came back, and all 3 of them were still making a triangle around me, FUCK)

Solution? Well, my mom couldn't just move me out of that school and put me in another this time, because of retarded school districts and stuff, so instead she sent me to a private school for that year, which was pretty good. Classes were finally hard again, I had to notch it up a bit to do well, and the kids in there weren't fucking idiots.

I have one more story to share. I was in my first year in high school, in a rather crappy school. The first year was ok, not great, but I had a few decent teachers. The next year, the school moved to a newer campus, and like, every single teacher I had was a retard. They put me in the exact same computer class again (it was some sort of "hey we're going to teach you how to type!" class, except I could already type at 100+wpm with my eyes closed), and the teachers were dumb. I remember when they finally had an open house, my mom was outraged, she thought my math teacher was retarded lol.

Oh, I did have a good English teacher that I really liked though, and I HATE HATE HATE English, so that was actually pretty fucking surprising. Until they randomly decided to remove 4 people from that class (I was one of them) to put them in another class with a different teacher. Why? Fuck if I know, the girl who was teaching that class was always going on about how she was going to quit halfway through the year cause she got a new job or something, so we never did shit in that class. So my mom went in to complain. They refused to move me back to my old English class, but they did move me to a different computer class. Except, the class was even worse than the previous one, they might as well have called it "Teaching immigrants how to turn on and off a computer", seriously.

So what was the solution? My mom went in again to talk with my adviser. One thing that I just remembered, my adviser was actually really fucking nice and cared about me, and she did everything she possibly could to fix my problems, it was only her retarded higher ups that refused to let her do anything. So while sitting at the office, my mom looked at the district map, and saw that my grandparent's home, which is like, 2min away from where we live, was in the border of another district, so she just went up to the person at the counter, removed me from that school, and the next day we went to the new school and signed me up. We weren't going in fully blind, because we had heard that the other school was a good school, but anything would have been better than that hellhole.

New school was great. Most of the teachers cared and gave a fuck, and knew how to teach. Kids cared and wanted to learn. It was great, and I think the only time where I was actually in the same school for 2.5 years in a row.

tl;dr: I believe that it's a mixture of both (but mainly the parent's). The parent needs to parent their children, and the teachers/faculty need to want to do their job the right way. I believe it's ultimately the parents though, because if there's a problem with the teachers/school, they need to fucking do something about it instead of just going "oh that public education system!"

also, lolfcats

[Acturus]

I'm sensing a pattern here.

My point being that parents are not a magic bullet. If you bother to read the science, all a parent can really do is offer a positive environment. How a child ultimately behaves has tremendously more to do with their temperament (which is largely genetic) and their peer groups.

For those same reasons, standardized testing is a joke. Being intelligent and being successful in school are different things, especially since the definition of what is successful in school is growing more and more divorced from the definition of what defines real success.

Fuck the magic bullet. I'm already sick of the magic bullet.

Parental influence weighs heavily on a child's habits, including their capacity to learn.

Yes, it's not a "magic bullet", but for fuck's sake, the parents need to be involved as much as the teachers do.

[ozz]

also, lolfcats

howd you break your foot?



Idk how I feel about merit-based pay, but teacher quality is definitely an issue...I mean, there's a shitton of kids who obviously don't care, but then there's also teachers who dont care

anyway i loved my FL highschool, and now i'm rockin that 3.9 in engineering

[Julian]

howd you break your foot?

It's 99% healed up now that's all that matters (*'-')

Do you know how on the sidewalks where there are those sewer drain things? You notice how the ground is like very diagonal instead of just having normal drains? Yeah, I walked over one of those in a really awkward way, it was dark out and I couldn't see it, just thought it was regular sidewalk/street and yeah, the rest is history, shit hurt like hell.