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I think that children will take out of an education system what they and their parents put into it, just like anything else. To say the problem is our schools is a stretch. Are there some unmotivated, burned out teachers? Sure, but in my experience so far, they are few and far between. Most of them love kids and want to help kids learn and are creative in achieving those goals. A family that holds high value in education will almost always have children who succeed in school. In my Wechsler IQ testing course in grad school, they talked about predictors of IQ. They included: parental education levels, number of books in the environment, how often children were read to and other things like that. Standardized tests are supposed to be standardized against IQ tests so that if you scored in the 99th percentile on the local standardized test, you would also be expected to score in the 99th percentile on the Stanford Binet or Wechsler. They also emphasized that all an IQ predicted was the person's ability to succeed in a formal education setting.
That said, there are kids in the Detroit Public School system (which may qualify as the most screwed up school system in the country these days, having been taken over by the state, a real mess) who excel and make it into some of the magnet schools offered. There are students in some of the worst high schools who still get a good education, because they care about their education and they get support from their parents. It is more difficult for them though.
I had an excellent education in my public school, partly because I was in all AP classes with other students who were highly motivated to do well, and parents who placed high expectations on me without me realizing it. There was never a question of whether I would go to college, it was a question of where I would go! It was just an assumption that I was going. It was the step after highschool. There are people who went to my same school who probably got nothing out of their education. They were in the basic classes, high a lot of the time, skipping classes, etc. I was lucky to grow up in a solid middle/upper middle class area.
Some kids face such obstacles in daily survival that most of us cannot fathom. If the only meal they get is the free school lunch that day, they won't be successful in school. When I worked with 5-12 year old kids in the inner city of Southwest Detroit, some of them told stories of dodging bullets on the way to school. Do you think they were mentally ready to focus on learning? Some of them lived in areas where the police and EMS won't go, because the gangs were setting them up to shoot them with false calls for help. They would shoot EMS who were trying to help a rival gang member who had been shot. They lived in houses that had no windows or heat. They have a whole lot of street smarts that most of us don't need to have, but they suffer educationally. They are simply focused on survival. You can't blame teachers for those kids being unsuccessful.
I can even say that I think my kids are getting a better education than I did. I floated through my first two years of college because my high school courses were much harder than my lower level college courses. But, my kids learn in so many ways. When I went to school, we learned multiplication by rote memory. They teach the kids now why the answer is what it is, they teach them patterns (who knew that the 9's times tables answers added up to 9 or that you could quickly do this trick with your fingers to figure out the 9's answers? They didn't teach us those things!), they teach them in many ways, through songs, not just through flash cards. They learn to read in a different structure and read at their own levels, not at the level that the rest of the class is reading. They do units in social studies or science that they turn into English lessons and math lessons too. I'm certainly impressed with all the different ways each topic is addressed. They really reinforce learning.
My point to a really long post is: The education system isn't that screwed up, our society has some major issues that are being ignored, which show up as symptoms in the education arena.
Dee
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