Trego's Mountain Ear

I read these statistics, posted in response to a New York Times article: Public School: 40% of kids bullied, 30% sexually harassed, 34% read at grade level, $18K a year.

Homeschoolers: 0% bullied, 0% sexually harassed, 99% read above grade level, $1000 a year. I don’t know how solid his statistics were – but it got me pondering on the problems of education.

About the same time, I read Joel Graves’ commentary on Home School – and Joel’s thoughts were not a lot different than mine when we first started publishing the Ear. Still, I was younger then – I had 4 years experience teaching and heading the ag department at a junior college. As I moved to different experiences teaching – the next six years were in the Academic Reinforcement Center, followed by years of Extension education, and culminating in time as graduate faculty, I gained a lot of experience with people whom their education system had failed. Emphasize that phrase: Their Education System had failed them. These weren’t people who had failed – most were high school graduates. Some held a bachelor’s degree. The problem is that, often, public education needs the support of other forms of education – Extension education, such as 4-H is one example, while education at home is another. Vocational education is another form. Back to my point: at a number of different levels of post-secondary education, I dealt with students who had been failed by their education systems.

I recall a young woman – a high school graduate with a tested IQ of 108 – who read at the beginning third-grade level. That 108 IQ says she was ahead of 70% of the population – yet the public school from which she graduated failed her for at least ten years (third grade through twelfth). She hadn’t failed – she walked through the high school graduation.

I remember Gerald – my student for over a year – he had graduated high school (to be fair, not in Montana) but was unable to do math without a calculator, and even with a calculator couldn’t get the order of operations correct. I failed at correcting the problem.

My list could go on – but when students graduate high school without being able to read or do simple algebra, the educational system has failed them. I recall a carpenter, a dropout, who used his framing square to perform his mathematical calculations. It seems fairly obvious that he found a way of compensating for his math weaknesses through Vocational education – whether shop class or on job – that Gerald never found in a math class. On the other hand, Ray has a BS in animal science – but his Extension education experience in 4-H rounded it out so that over a lifetime he could retire with a respectable herd of beef cattle and a decent-sized ranch. He needed both the formal training at the Land Grant plus the 4-H experience.

I recall taking my GRE test – the woman seated next to me (a teacher) needed to score at the 25th percentile to be admitted to her graduate program. She had already taken the GRE twice without achieving that score, and had completed all of her coursework. Obviously, her schooling had failed her.

So I fully understand that public school can fail to educate students while going on to graduate them. One of the problems I see with Extension education occurs when the market sale becomes more important than the 4-H education. Home school can be bloody awful – what can you learn if your teacher is an ignorant idiot and you keep that same teacher for a dozen years? On the other hand, Home schooling can be fantastic – it depends on the parent and the kid. Vocational education offers a second way to support the classic 3 R’s as well as a potential career for kids who aren’t on an academic track.

I spent 4 years teaching Freshman and Sophomore classes – some vocational, some academic. I spent 6 years in academic reinforcement at a community college – that’s teaching college students what they didn’t learn in high school. I don’t know how to break down my Extension career – I served as an agent, administrator and a specialist, and everything crossed over. And I ended a career as a specialized sociologist usually teaching senior and graduate classes. I did work a bit with a variant on home school – my daughter was interested in quantum physics and couldn’t get the information she wanted from the high school. I checked out books and read, so that we could discuss quantum as we drove.

During those many years, I met more students who had been failed by the system than failed at the local high school. I’ve seen parents make a decision to pull a kid out of school and do a bad, or at least incomplete, job of teaching at home. I’ve seen high schools that graduate students and never worry that their students’ ACT scores leave their school ranked in the bottom third. The system and parents combine to fail the kids more frequently than the kids fail on their own.

In my perfect world, every kid would have the opportunity for Vocational education. I had planned to finish high school with 4 vocational classes taught by Harry Donaldson. It didn’t work that way – I finished with 3 or 4 academic classes taught in the morning, and working every afternoon. The first Fall semester I took a drafting class – and was acing the tests and flunking the homework. The only constructive criticism I received was “WRONG SCALE!” written in red. I dropped the class. Years later, when I was looking at my drafting equipment, I realized the bookstore had included an architect’s scale in the package for an engineering class. My instructor didn’t explain the difference. If I had taken Harry Donaldson’s mechanical drawing class, I would have been trained to catch the problem myself. I dropped a class to avoid an F – and taking Harry’s class would have made me successful.

So I see a lot of point-source opportunities to fail students. I’ve described an intelligent young woman whose reading teachers spent ten of her twelve years of school failing to teach her to read, but she still graduated on schedule. I’ve watched Connie Malyevac teach others the math that they missed in high school – and every student deserves a Connie to help fill the potholes in their education. I’ve learned that a parent can read incomprehensible physics books, and stay 15 minutes (or less) ahead of his daughter, and see the success of her graduation with a Phi Beta Kappa pin. I’ve seen students from Dave Peterson’s “slow class” go on to graduate from college and move on to a career of teaching high school. The standard expectation of Vocational education – that academics aren’t for everyone – provides an alternative.

My prescription? I have seen our public schools fail too many students. Despite that, I believe our public schools should be education’s foundation. (I do believe that there is a staffing problem that needs resolution when a school is below the mean for years and years – and that does need to be addressed instead of ignored.) I want parents to be active in their kids’ education (I recall that the teachers had other parents than Renata and I that they felt could have benefitted more from parent/teacher conferences; and I recall one who was stymied by Renata’s question, “Exactly which part of your math class won’t she need when she goes on to college?”

I believe in 4-H – yet I think that there is a lot more Extension education in an entomology project than in selling a market steer. Same thing for sewing and cooking projects.

Every youngster deserves to learn by doing – which is the big part of vocational education.

I want remedial education – early. I am less than impressed by special education that is prescribed late and relies on paraprofessionals to put in a certain amount of hours on the weakness. We measure success in touchdowns, not practice yardage.

To sum it up – we do not need to look at education as public education or home school. We need public education, supported by home education, supported by Extension education, plus Vocational education, plus other forms of education (formal or informal) that are available in the communities. To focus on just one form of education is to provide a situation where that single education system can, and frequently will, fail the students.