9486 in the collection  

Another Stupid Pet Trick Attack on Public Schools--Quoting Chester Finn

Ohanian Comment: Once again Chester Finn offers his expertise on a topic about which he knows nothing. Let's see, it's Wenesday--union-bashing day. Blame teacher unions for the purported decline in writing.

I taught for 20 years in public schools. No union ever told me the length of my day.

Quality suffers as schools abandon traditional assignments, leaving students ill-prepared for college

COVINA, Calif. -- High school junior Dominique Houston is a straight-A student enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement classes at Northview High School in Covina, Calif. She hopes to double-major in marine biology and political science in college.

But the 17-year-old said she has written only one research paper during her high school career. It was three pages long, examining the habits of beluga whales.

Houston frets over whether she will be able to handle assignments for long, footnoted research papers once she gets to college.

"Bibliographies? We don't really even know how to do those. I don't even know how I would write a 15-page paper. I don't even know how I would begin," she said.

Her experience appears to be increasingly common. Across the United States, high school English and social studies teachers have cut back or abandoned the traditional term paper.

Although some students and critics contend that teachers are lazier than in the past, many educators say they can't grade piles of papers for overcrowded classes while trying to meet the increased demands of standardized testing, many of which involve multiple-choice questions. Other teachers believe that term papers are meaningless exercises, because the Internet has made plagiarism more common and difficult to spot. And many say long (10- to 15-page) research papers are pointless, because many students' basic writing skills are weak and are more likely to improve with shorter and more frequent assignments.

A report released recently by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, a panel of academics gathered by the College Board, found that 75 percent of high school seniors never receive writing assignments in history or social studies. The study also found that a major research and writing project required in the senior year of high school "has become an educational curiosity, something rarely assigned."

In addition, the report found that, by the first year of college, more than 50 percent of freshmen are unable to analyze or synthesize information or produce papers free of language errors.

Commission Chairman C. Peter Magrath blamed societal changes.

"We don't write letters anymore, because we use telephone and e-mail and watch television," he said.

All schools need to refocus on writing, Gary Orfield, a professor of education at Harvard University, said. Research papers assignments are rare today, he said, because "we're in such an idiotic period in education that we've simplified it into filling in this bubble."

"If we send students to college without being able to think, synthesize or write in a coherent way, students are going to be crippled, no matter what their test scores are," he said.

The result shows in the awful quality of many college term papers, said J. Martin Rochester, author of a book on failing education systems and a professor of political science at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

"I read every paper line by line," he said of his students' research projects. "It's one of the most painful ordeals you can ever go through. Students today cannot write a complete sentence."

Some high school students and college professors say the decline is a result of the unwillingness of a growing number of teachers to spend nights and weekends grading papers.

"Some wonderful teachers stay up until midnight grading," Chester E. Finn Jr., a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a former assistant U.S. secretary of education, said. "But many more are told by unions that the school day ends at 2:50, and that's when they are done."

Kathleen Lyons, a spokeswoman for the National Education Association teachers union, said the average teacher works 48 hours a week, even though their contracts often require far less time. The decline of the term paper can be traced to swelling class sizes, she said.

"If a teacher has 30 students in each class and five periods in a day, that's 150 papers that have to be graded," she said. "That's a monumental amount of reading."



— Erika Hayasaki
Term papers close to extinction
Los Angeles Times
June 12, 2003
http://www.detnews.com/2003/schools/0306/12/a10-191043.htm

---

INDEX OF OUTRAGES

Pages: 380   
[1] 2 3 4 5 6  Next >>    Last >>