The Paradox of Teaching

On the one hand, memorization and procedural mastery of 'the basics' of writing and mathematics are crucial to a student's educational development. That's why the Common Core Standards are being adopted by nearly every state in the union. On the other hand, you have countless numbers of students from THIS generation, including my student and his classmates at humanities prep, who neither know 'the basics', nor will they have the opportunity to learn them once they've graduated high school. What's worse, they may not have the opportunity to learn these skills at higher-learning institutions (especially community colleges), either due to prohibitive costs or lack of an appropriate curriculum.

So what, if anything, do we do for public high school students, current juniors and seniors, who are entering the job market without the skills they need to succeed?

This question matters because EVEN WITH the corrections being undertaken by state boards of education, there are a number of students who risk falling through the cracks, and because they fall outside of public school 'jurisdiction'  (because of their age), they may be written off by educators and employers alike as lost causes. This puts the future of these students - economically, politically and socially - at stake, and puts the U.S. economy in greater danger than it already is in. If we don't address this question AS WELL AS the question of our younger students, then we risk facing a greater economic crisis than what we weathered in 2008. Without enough workers to meet demand in the job market, companies will continue to outsource jobs, further sapping the economic health of this country.

To try to tackle this issue, I want to understand how bad the situation is: how bad is the disparity between supply and demand for skilled labor in this country, how many universities/community colleges offer meaningful remedial education programs, and what are the components of the common core; i.e. can the common core help students in the final year(s) of secondary school?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/why-kids-should-grade-teachers/309088/?single_page=true

This article from The Atlantic details how Robert Ferguson, an economist at Harvard, has been working to develop a reliable metric for evaluating teachers. His research has found that student feedback about teacher quality is one of the best predictors for year-over-year academic progress. Better yet, the surveys he has helped develop are less controversial than other methods - such as releasing deindividuated student standardized test scores for parents to see - for teacher evaluation. The difficulty, Ferguson has found, is getting teachers unions to allow these surveys to have weight on teacher evaluations- even if they have less than 30% of the overall weight of an eval. That said, this data has proven time and time again to point out which teachers are doing their job right, which teachers need continuing education, and which teachers need to be let go.

If I can get my hands on this data, I can look at the issue from the perspective of the students; how many public school students have 'good' teachers, how many have 'bad' teachers?

I have been looking at the common core standards website, but the details are very hard to delve into without massive time expenditure; I will look into it more later this week.

http://www.npr.org/2013/04/08/176570802/even-highly-motivated-students-arent-ready-for-college

This NPR article suggests, among other things, that 1 in 4 high school students are unprepared for college in the most basic academic domains, and that of all students who enter community colleges, 40% of them immediately enroll in remedial classes. THIS gives me some idea of just how bad things are.

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