The Friday Flyer, June 16, 2006 - Article: English and American education is a lot alike

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English and American education is a lot alike

By Jeanie Corral
Reporter/Columnist

     During the last weeks of May and the first week of June, I was able to see up close and quite clearly what goes on in at least one school system located in Bristol, England. The school, named Henbury, had a student body of 850 students that wore uniforms and followed a similar regimen to what our schools in Lake Elsinore are facing.
     The students, ranging in age from 12 to 17, were confronted with standardized tests and passing what they called “A-Level Exams” which would determine if a student could go on to university or be sent to a vocational training center. The caveat—don’t pass and a chance for higher education slips out of reach. Both the staff members and the students were more than a little stressed over how the test results would reflect on the school.
     Strangely enough, as I worked in several of the classrooms and talked to staff members, the same problems we face in local schools were right at home in Henbury as well.
     First, academic progress and retention of material was an ongoing problem. Every teacher voiced concerns over why children weren’t able to master basics. There was a large discussion about having to “teach to the test” when it came to the national exam used to gauge students progress.
     One London newspaper reported that more than half of the students in England were failing in, of all things, the three R’s. Another article addressed the failure of the mathematics curriculum and how “chunking” as they called it, wasn’t working. There was a new thrust on obesity and how schools would be expected to cope with the nutrition education standards.
     One newspaper wrote an editorial about the “dumbing down” of basic curriculum.
     The students in the school were like students here. They were curious and asked questions about life in California and what an earthquake felt like and if we ever got rain. For the time we were there, it rained all but three days and the weather never got above 60 degrees. I asked the students in a science class if they could send some of the rain our way and one youngster remarked only if we could transmit the California sunshine. However, he went on to add a theory about conducting electric current and what meteorologists might try to do to control the weather.
     There are a number of social issues that face English schools in regard to race and religious tolerance. We think our immigration issues are very bad, but the same thing exists in the British Isles as well. Students arrive from Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey and lots of other countries creating a whole new approach to teaching ESL, or English as a Second Language classes. While I was there, a young black boy, Kiam Prince, was stabbed to death outside a London school. The following day, in another school in a nearby community, another young black student was stabbed, too. He was in critical condition but survived.
     Racism is still alive and well, along with the fear of many that immigrants are overrunning the nation and costing too much in terms of social programs and financial aid.
     University students were in an uproar over not being able to graduate because their professors, unhappy about merit pay, and pay raises for staff, did not come to classes for final exams. Letters and commentaries from students regarding why they wouldn’t be able to graduate filled many newspapers.
     I talked to administrators who faced a great deal of pressure from their respective communities. They don’t have just a Board of Trustees; they have a school committee of about 20 who are parents, educators, administrators and citizens at large. That committee exists for every single school in every town, there are not districts per se, and each committee of 20 reports to a different Board of Governors which report to a city council member who reports to an education administrator affiliated with a national government office on education. The biggest problem of ongoing concern was funding.
     Parents pay for absolutely everything and a great deal more. You can’t pay, you don’t play and it makes for an uneven situation that helps fuel resentment and prejudice between the schools that have and those that do not.
     When I returned to California, I was struck by a couple of basic thoughts. Students are the same throughout the world. They learn in spite of what the adults do. Adults are not doing enough to help the next generation because, frankly, some adults haven’t figured out what is truly important themselves.
     As well, the problems we face here are not unique to our country. The same problems, with other descriptions or faces, are being handled in other places as well. Some of the solutions being used elsewhere may work for them, some might work for us but overall, when I hear people decry the poor state of education in today’s world, my first question will have to be, “Where else have you been.”