My Boarding School Blog

The New York Times report that teachers in France are slowly leaving their home land to teach in the United States. France is now facing an impending risk of “brain drain” from this growing incident. French government and officials are now becoming worried that there will be no more qualified teachers left because a good number of them has fled for the US.

What is most concerning is that the professionals leaving France are included the best among the best in their fields. Most of them studied in the finest and prestigious schools and universities in France. Biologists, economists and scientists are found to obtain their masters and doctorate studies in US and never came back. When asked why they leave France to pursue their professional career in the US, most of them answered that they are motivated by the American system of education wherein there are larger universities boasting of richer and flexible curriculum and a wide range of specialization. Scientists are attracted to the United States’ concept of being competitive in the scientific approach and in research which the French are less focused on.

France’s educational system still lacks the richness and intensive approach to quality standards that compared of the US. The French government does not allocate enough funds to nurture the educational demands of both teachers and students thus preventing their local’s talents to proliferate and develop. This brings a barrier to their full potential as successful individuals in their own chosen fields of study. Additionally French professors who work in the US are paid more than what they get when they teach in France.

The window of opportunity has opened for French teacher at the start of the US – France Teachers in Training Exchange Program wherein American teachers are exchanged with French teachers to teach in poor communities. Teachers are given seminars of the each country’s culture, history and society and these teachers in turn impart this knowledge to their students. French students learn American language, culture and history through the American exchange teachers. This program enables learning of different cultures and promotes healthy social development between students from two different countries.

This program is implemented and supported by the ECA, the Fulbright Commission and the French Ministry of Education. With a funding of around $350,000 the program aims to enrich teachers of both country into teaching and learning about each others culture, people and history.

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Technology has certainly changed the way the world works. It has greatly influenced the various aspects of life and redefined our day to day living. Without a doubt, technology plays a critical role in our lives. Thanks to technology, many tedious tasks have become easily performed through automation. A lot of complex and critical processes can now be performed with ease and efficiency. The fields of education and industry are no exception. They have undergone a major change and surely have changed for the better.

Technology, particularly the arrival of personal computers and the Internet have revolutionized education. It has made it easier for the teachers to supply knowledge and for the students to understand it.

Computers have interactive audio-visual media. PowerPoint presentations and animation software programs can be utilized to render information. These result in inviting a larger attention from the students. These software programs can also serve as visual aids to the teachers. These audio-visual teaching techniques have brought about significant improvements in student attendance and concentration. Interactive media have proven to be helpful in enhancing the concentration of students.

The Internet is a huge information base. This could be one of the most effective tools in acquiring knowledge. All the students need to have is a search engine where they can type in their search queries. There are loads of different websites and web directories that offer information on a wide variety of subjects.

Today, computer education is a part of our school and college curricula. The wide range of different applications and computer programs has made it necessary for almost all of the students to become knowledgeable about these programs. Considering the advantages, it’s critical that every student at least have the basic knowledge in operating the Internet and different computer programs.

Technology has also given birth to online education and distance learning. Today, students do not necessarily require being physically present in classrooms. Many educational organizations offer online courses. Majority of the schools and colleges have online facilities where the students can perform and submit their assignments. There are universities that have programs that allow students and teachers interact with one another and access different reference materials via the Internet.

The importance of the computer and Internet technology in education cannot be stressed enough. The introduction of computer technology and the Internet in the educational field has made the process of learning and teaching an interactive and exciting activity. Computer and the Internet technology is indeed two of the most greatest inventions of mankind.

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The quality of education today is far improved and centralized than it was centuries ago. The method of teaching back then was just instructional with little or no student participation at all. The primary aim of education at the early times is to just give information to students. There were no opportunities for self learning, exploration, analytical thinking or problem solving. It is all concentrated on knowing the facts.

Government institutions have structured education reforms to uplift the face of education to the people. Programs have been implemented to make education free for all and available to all society classes. Bringing a positive change in education is deemed very idealistic though it is not impossible. With education reform there are many aspects that need to be considered like assessment, technology and curriculum.

Here are just some of the issues that various education reforms are trying to address.

• Class Sizes – this refers to the student teacher ratio in a class. A low student ration is considered by some to be very effective in student learning. With a smaller class size the teacher will be able to concentrate on a handful of students and will further determine their areas of strengths and weaknesses which she can utilize to help them improve in their academic performance. For developed countries like the US in which their Department of Education is allocated with high funding for education can employ many teachers to keep a low student teacher ratio but unfortunately for most states this is not always the case. Funding may be insufficient or there are no teachers available in their area. Big classes is not advisable for optimum child development as not all have the same learning ability and for those who are lagging behind, the teacher cannot slow down for them to accommodate their learning speed and information uptake thus producing poorly educated students.
• Quality of teaching – this is an ongoing issue for most educational institutions as there are fewer teacher who are qualified to teach students nowadays. Let’s face it being a teacher, with its low income and huge amount of workload it is not the most popular career choice. Teach for America (TFA), a non profit organization in the U.S. recruits new college graduates to teach for two years in low income communities in America. The goal is to help out and make an impact to the students in pursuing their education. Members are given a five week summer training to prepare them for the commitment. Criticisms towards the TFA program have been raised many times. A USA Today 2009 article stated that the program replaces experienced teachers with new inexperienced ones who have not developed teaching effectiveness yet to save on costs for tenured teachers. Some schools are rumored to lay off experienced teachers and employ new TFA teachers with beginner’s salary. The hope of receiving quality education for these low communities is now taken away from them.
• Curriculum standards – standardization of school curriculum is proposed but has never been implemented as schools choose to have their own structured curriculum based on their resources and facilities which is a sound argument. The government in turn wants to implement a standardized way of evaluating student performance through standardized tests like what the No Child Left Behind Act is trying to carry out.

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Teachers are all at a loss, despite great deals of efforts over the years, academic achievement among students, particularly in high school, continues to lag behind. In their attempt to improve the results, educators are consistently trying to find root causes of poor academic achievement amongst high school students.

Some blame the outrageous loads of home works given to students. The argument is that the students are overburdened with academic demands that are questionable of value. As a result, students become indifferent to studies due to exhaustion and stress. There is probably small truth in this claim. However, recent studies have denied these suggestions.

The latest Pew Research Centre poll has produced unprecedented results. Academic achievement is going down not because of enormous pressure and stress. It was due to low expectations.

This claim was supported by Stanford University lecturer Denise Clark Pope, who has researched and written about the effects of stress on students. Her research was conducted in the comfortable San Francisco Bay Area communities which proved that the reason of poor level of knowledge is due to the lack of challenge in the school environment; and not on the heavy workload that are exposed to students.

Thus, the problem becomes apparent that low academic proficiency is due to the search for causes that are based on ’how much’, rather than ‘what’ are students are asked to do.

This leads to identification of different contributors to low learning proficiency such as incorrect approach to assessments, incoherent assessment tasks, teachers’ and parents’ indifference. This list is rather long, unfortunately.

1. Not Knowing The Purpose

The core reason why so many high school students are uninterested is because they do not understand their studying routine. The truth is, there is a huge number of teachers that do not even bother explaining to their students the expected outcomes of the learning are, the reasons why they need to achieve these outcomes, and the method in which they will be assessed.

Now, students read stacks of books and do hundreds of paperwork, without having any idea of the initial purpose of all these tasks. They accomplish by command, which results in lack of interest, reluctance, and initiative to study.

2. Incorrect Approaches in Assessment

Another contributing factor to the lag in knowledge proficiency is the incorrect approach used in the assessment process. As a matter of fact, assessment is often intended by teachers as punishment or traps for the students, to catch them out. Grades seem to exist in order to show the students where they made an error on, rather than to give students reasonable opportunities for displaying their achievements of specific learning goals.

Needless to say, instead of making the students feel excited about the assessment of their hard work, it creates a fearful attitude towards assessment. This tends to make the students focus on getting a “pass” grade rather than focusing on what was learned. Education becomes more concentrated on grades rather than knowledge.

3. Incoherent Assessment Tasks

It is alarming that the common practice of majority of the teachers is to set a lot of time-consuming and unrelated tasks that demands for a great deal of work to be accomplished in the shortest time period.

As a result, this approach makes students use surface approaches, which is trivial. This involves seizing all the facts and memorizing them, without necessarily understanding them, as best as they can just in order to pass.

4. Lack of Personal Approach to Students

Due to the large classes of more than 20 children, many students don’t receive due attention from their teacher. As a result, students don’t feel cared about, become indifferent to studies, and lose faith in a brighter future. This is a problem of a great deal amount of students.

5. Parents’ Attitude

Unfortunately, parents also contribute to the problem of low interest of students in their studies. Many of the parents’ thinking are set towards the “performance orientation” which emphasizes grades rather than if whether or not their kid was able to master the material. On top of that, most parents are reluctant to help their children with home works for the fear of being unable to supply them with the correct answer, thus leads to losing the child’s respect.

However, these fears are baseless. This simply misleads their children into thinking that not giving them a helping hand mean indifference to their work.

It’s clear that children are wrongly geared towards the quantity of knowledge rather than quality. Educating students should be about be about challenging and engaging them. If radical steps aren’t taken in the soonest possible time, the situation is expected to aggravate some more.

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Drug abuse has plagued our society and is slowly increasing in prevalence among young children. Use of marijuana, a plant derivative that causes visual distortions, dry mouth, red eyes, poor coordination and other pleasurable sensations can lead a young child to get addicted to it. Almost 69 million 2 year old Americans have taken marijuana at least once. A government study conducted in 2005 by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) showed that 97.5 million people at the age of 12 years or older has tried marijuana at least once or twice in their lifetime which makes up about 40.1% of the United States population for that particular age group.

The United Nations shows an estimate of 141 million people who uses marijuana worldwide while use of other drugs has become rampant in the last 10 years. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) showed 10.4 million people aged 12 years and older have tried Crystal Meth or Methamphetamine at least once in their lives.

Due to the rising statistics of drug use in children 12 years old and older schools have started to implement random drug testing to their students to help in preventing drug use and potential addiction. This is also to address the growing number of drug dealing and illicit drug use among school kids. By doing random testing school administrators can acquire proof that a student is using drugs and will merit expulsion from the institution to advocate a drug free school environment.

Schools outsource medical professionals to conduct the drug tests based on randomized lists of students. The student will provide a sample for testing which can either be urine, saliva, hair, sweat or blood. The sample is then tested for different drugs. For urine samples drug use for only the past 2 to 3 days can be detected while hair samples gives out a much longer time frame of 7 to 100 days depending on the length of the hair sample.

Drawback for drug testing includes alterations in the sample specimens. Urine samples are taken inside a cubicle to provide privacy and this can be altered easily if there is no supervision while inside the comfort room. Hair testing is rather expensive that deters some schools to resort to a much cheaper kind of testing which makes use of urine samples that is not always as reliable.

Students who come out as positive on the random drug test will be directed to counseling and parents are immediately notified. If student is diagnosed with drug addiction he or she will be recommended for rehabilitation.

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