BBO Discussion Forums: the future of education? - BBO Discussion Forums

PassedOut, on 2011-August-04, 10:26, said:

I recommend looking at the home page for "Encounter Books" (The crack publishing squad responsible for "Class Warfare")

http://www.encounterbooks.com/

These folks are pretty far out there...

I readily admit that the US educational system is badly broken. With this said and done, a lot of your assertions questionable to say the least.

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Nearly all rigorous studies that control for creaming, parental involvement, and the like show no statistically significant difference in student performance between public schools and charter schools.
Moreover, there has been a very large round of cheating scandals here in the US effecting both public and charter shools.
(It turns out that its easier for teachers and principals to change kid's test scores than it is to actually teach them)

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Comparing dollars spent per student is an attrocious metric. I agree that the US school system is inefficient in the way that it spends its money.

Special education programs are budget killers.
All of the new testing infrastructure is nearly as bad.

I'd argue that teachers are significantly underpaid.

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Tenure exists for a reason. I agree that there have been some horror stories where it proved very difficult to fire bad teachers.
Balanced against this, you have the abuses by admistrators like Michelle Rhee and conservative dominated school boards.

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I agree that good teachers are very important.

Here's the rub: With some very rare exceptions, our best and brightest don't go into teaching.
Why would they ever want to?

The pay sucks
Class sizes are horrendous
Most of your time is spent teaching to the test
Parents have turned into pissy little bitches
Education is no longer valued in this country

Our education system worked great when women had no other good professional opportunities.
These days, its fundamentally broken.

However, all this charter school crap is a distraction (at best)

FWIW, my big issue with charter schools is that it I think that people are going to self-select on a whole bunch of criteria that have nothing to do with education. At the end of the day, I think that parents are going to care a lot more about issues like religion, politics, racial composition, football, and the like than they do about whether or not Johnny is learning to read....

You think that America is polarized today...

Just wait until the the Republicans and the Democrats get to use "charter schools" to indoctrinate the next generation of the party faithful.

PassedOut, on 2011-August-04, 10:26, said:

Its not really a book with arguments about how best to do teaching. Its more a case study of the reform movement in the US, and how the political situation conspired to block reform in many states, because the democrats were beholden to the teaching unions up until the Obama candidacy. (He is anti UFT and pro reform - see Race to the Top and that kind of thing).

I have read a little more on the UK situation. For obvious reasons that is more interesting to me than the UK situation. At the moment there is a simmering political cat fight about treating Private Schools as charities (I.e. tax exempt). The left has been bandying around the idea that the reason comprehensive schooling has failed is that all the middleclass parents took their kids out of it into private schools. I have no time for that argument.

hrothgar, on 2011-August-04, 11:38, said:

If you believe that teachers in one school system cheat more than others I imagine you are quite deluded, it just happens that some have been caught. Probably there is a wave of cheating scandals in public schools just around the corner. People are not so different from one another .

I have just read a long piece of research on charter school effectivenes by the RAND institute. (you can find it here key findings on p 85).

The part that are interesting is that it shows that students of charter schools are not significantly different from TPS (Traditional Public School) students. Either in ethnic make up or in social economic background. They find, broadly, that charter schools are neither better nor worse that the TPS in attainment on standardised tests, however, charter schools do significantly better when measured by college enrolment and attainment. The study also raises certain questions about its on validity.

Firstly, studies of this kind are based on the reversibility hypothesis, which, in short, says that if you have three years of bad education then three years of good education, then that is equivalent to having three years of good followed by three years of bad. This has not been extensively tested and may well be untrue. Intuitively it feels like once you are ahead of the curve you have an easier time staying their. Once you fall behind it is harder to catch up. If this hypothesis is untrue then these studies will significantly underestimate the value of charter schools, as they are based (partly) on comparing students who transfer in with students who transfer out. In general there are large problems comparing school attainment between different classes of students due to the huge number of factors which can effect school attainment.

Secondly, (not from this study, but from class warfare) the rand study does not seem to account for the fact that charter schools typically replaced the worst performing Public schools, which obviously has a large effect on the average attainment in the TPS sector. This effect is virtually impossible to control for. Studies that compare charter schools to the schools they replaced, rather than average schools in the area, typically demonstrate that charter schools are well ahead.

An absence of test scores for kids who began in preschool and stayed in the same school can be problematic. Typically kids who transferred in or out would sit entry tests, but this results in a difficult of having enough data for primary schools to compare accurately.

End results, no one really knows whether charter schools are better or not. However, they certainly are not worse.

hrothgar, on 2011-August-04, 11:38, said:

People go into teaching because its a vocation rather than a career. I know many bright people who turned down city jobs to go into teaching. (Ok, many might be an exageration, about 12 from 300 in my cohort from a very prestigious university). One of the things that other countries have going for them over the US is that they ahve a more equal salary distribution. One of the things all the top attaiment countries have in common is highly redistributive tax systems. This makes teaching mroe attractive as it lowers the money incentive in city jobs. City jobs require a lot of hard work, 60+ hours a week is normal in London, 80+ a week for the really top jobs. The bonus is that you get paid ten times what a teacher does. In the Nordic countries more penal tax regimes mean that you get paid at most twice what a teacher does after tax. The Netherlands has a law that says the maximum salaried payment is the salary of their PM, about 100000 euros. This limits the attraction of city jobs and you end up with more highly qualified teachers.

Obviously, the american reaction is to pay teachers more, rather than lower inequality. Capitalism is pretty much your philosophy over there.

phil_20686, on 2011-August-04, 12:47, said:

My parents were both teachers (and very successful ones. (My father was a university professor. My mother taught at both the high school and university level)

Neither of them considered this a "vocation". They both made informed decisions about where they wanted to work based on a tradeoff between $$$ and quality of life.

I had originally intended on being a university professor as well. One of the main reason why I switched over to the private sector was the destruction of the University of California system and the forseeable glut of academics fighting over tenure track positions. These days, the tech sector offers a much more enjoyable way of life.

I have any number of friends who graduated near the top of their class from good universities.
None of them have gone into teaching (despite the fact that many would consider aspects of the profession enjoyable)

I don't doubt that there are some people who go into teaching because they consider it a vocation.
I suspect that a hell of a lot more tell themselves that same thing...

hrothgar, on 2011-August-04, 13:04, said:

phenomenologically speaking, they'd be right

phil_20686, on 2011-August-04, 09:51, said:

Funny enough, it hasn't. They become better teachers after working for three years, and then quit teaching. Coincidentally, others also become better teachers after teaching for three years.

I also question that being in TFA means that someone is smarter. But I also know that I have many different ideas of intelligence than the average person.

I like this article:

TIME MAGAZINE

not sure what qualifies as a "trusted outlet" for you, but there are so many studies that posting studies does not seem a fruitful way to argue the point.

Elianna, on 2011-August-04, 22:02, said:

This is interesting: What camp are you in? Intelligence as a learned phenomenon? Intelligence as primarily genetic with flexibility based on environment? Intelligence as wholly genetic? The theory of multiple intelligences, or the concept of the "general intelligence" with specialisations.

Intelligence is well worth a discussion. Its so interesting .

This issue of how much teachers have to know is tricky. I am very skeptical of studies that show that it doesn't matter, but we have to accept that we cannot have Richard Feynman teaching all of our high school physics courses. The world has to keep turning with more or less ordinary people doing most of the spinning.


Adam, no I see that this was Richard above, but maybe Adam elsewhere, has mentioned that he comes from an academic family and went to good schools. The same could be said of my granddaughter who just finished her first year of college. I have no criticism at all to make of the education she received, all of it (until college) in public schools. That's not where the problem lies. I grew up in different circumstances and it is in this arena that I fear we may have moved backward in what we provide for children.

If I could time travel, one of my stops would be my eighth grade class at Randolph Heights Elementary in St. Paul. It is my recollection, and I would be delighted to check on my memory, that every one of us could add, subtract, multiply and divide. It may be that a few had trouble placing the decimal point properly when multiplying, say, 23.7 by 4.58 but most of us could. We could tell the nouns from the verbs and we were reasonably good at adverbs and adjectives. My father had finished eighth grade, typical for the kids in my class. I am not so sure that current eighth grade classes, serving kids with a similar background, can say the same today. Of course there are many reasons for this but still...


Now to get back to what teachers need to know. It was in late, or maybe not so late, elementary school that I began to understand that it was best to rely on myself rather than to trust what a teacher, or any adult, were to tell me. By high school, this was a settled matter with me. Still, there were teachers whom I thought I could largely rely on, and there were teachers whom I was quite sure I could not. Mrs Swann taught me freshman algebra and sophomore geometry, a real break for me. I doubt that Mrs. Swann was ready to take advanced calculus but she understood that geometry develops theorems from axioms via proofs, and she could tell a correct proof from an incorrect proof. Some of the kids got stuck with Mr. Wilson, who definitely had problems with such matters. My high school biology teacher, as near as I could tell, knew almost no biology. It matters, it really does, and I don't care how many studies show that it doesn't.

Here is a story. Some years back I was teaching an upper level college course in number theory. It was a good size class so they gave me a grader. He was a graduate student who had switched from mathematics to mathematics education which, I am sorry to say, was ominous. The homework consisted almost entirely of proofs. The grading was not going well. After speaking with him, I decided to try to help by writing out correct proofs of all of the exercises. This made it worse. There are often different possible correct proofs, and there are always different ways of putting in the details of any given approach. The kids who somehow managed to give my proof, written pretty much as I had written mine, got credit. Others did not. He could not tell whether minor variations were correct or not. As he phrased it "I'm not good at these proofy things". It really matters.

A closing remark, and I mean this fairly seriously. I believe that the best thing that I did during my adolescence to prepare me for college was to buy a car. A '47 Plymouth for $175. It often needed work, fairly often substantial work, to keep it running. I learned a lot about why you should read up on things and think things through before starting out.

phil_20686, on 2011-August-04, 09:51, said:

Then Weingarten is either a liar or an idiot.

hrothgar, on 2011-August-04, 11:13, said:

I see what you mean. Thanks.

blackshoe, on 2011-August-05, 13:08, said:

Or that Phil (or the sources that he is using) is misrepresenting the actual statements

I wonder. When we get a new President, will Encounter Books' writers write new broadsides, or will they just change the name from "Obama" to whatever the new guy's name is?

blackshoe, on 2011-August-05, 19:11, said:

I know little about the publishing house, but Class Warfare is pro-Obama.

I was looking at their "broadsides", which mostly seem to have titles along the lines of "Obama screwed this up".

Here is an article relating to Pam's original post:

http://www.washingto...5KuI_story.html

I would not call it an in-depth look, barely a shallow look, but since it goes back to the original post I thought I would put it up.

Viewing Khan's program as the answer from heaven to all questions is likely a mistake as any program will speak to some kids' needs and not others. But I was bemused by one comment in the antiKhan blog post referred to by Elianna (I think) saying "Rather than instructing students with Khan’s videos, we should be inspiring them to figure things out on their own and learn how to create their own knowledge by working together."

Whatever happened to not reinventing the wheel? Kids who relate to math - and many more will if they feel they have a handle on it - would be free to then go on to exploring the world beyond Khan. I bet that most classical musicians don't start out with a grand creative flourish, they start out learning HOW to play the piano or whatever. Some may learn almost instinctively others not so much but they all need to learn what each instrument can and cannot do. How frustrating if you never learned that a piano was only one instrument of many and cannot make the sounds that a bassoon can so keeping on trying to make it do so ..what a waste of time!

It seems to me that Khan is teaching the mechanics of how things work in a way that many kids find easier to relate to; whether they are used to videos now rather than books or whatever the reason. I think one major advantage will be that the kids shouldn't be under pressure to keep up (or be held back). In my experience working with kids who were regularly booted or even banned from classrooms, often it was directly related to feelings of being inadequate in the requisite skills..once they had those skills, the behaviour largely disappeared. Kids, like everyone else, like to feel competent and resist situations where they feel incompetent. It's no fun to be the only one in the class who doesn't "get it".

In an earlier post Phil said: "I think that the secrets to a strong education system are not rocket science. You need to create a culture of high expectation in the classroom. That means creating a structure of discipline where children are punished not only for misbehaviour, but also for under performing. As soon as it becomes ok for bright kids to hand in adequate assignments, then one has lost the battle for expectations."

I STRONGLY disapprove of punishing kids for "not living up to their potential." All you will do is make the kids resentful and angry and distrustful. Punishment is fairly well recognised as being far from the optimum way to motivate people. If you must punish someone, punish the teacher for not making it worth while for the student to do so. Something else might be noted; in unfortunately too many classrooms, being smart and at the head of the class will not bring admiration and friendship from fellow students, esp if a lot of them are struggling...to punish a kid in such a situation for diminishing his/her apparent abilities is cruel. There are other much more productive ways to deal with it.

When the whip goes down:

I have agrees to teach a class this fall for students who will not have a strong background. Putting theory to the test I looked at a couple of Khan's videos, thinking that maybe I could make good use of them. So far, no. I'll browse some more, but so far I see them as not bad, but not so good that I want to get students to spend time with them.

In the past there have been some handouts for this class written by others. I have looked at them. I won't be using them. Not every add-on is helpful.

When I was an undergrad I took a course in electricity and magnetism that used the world's most boring text. So I got another, I think better, text. BUT! I now had the lectures, the assigned text, and the new text I bought, and I had to somehow integrate all of this. Not for the fainthearted.

Maybe I'm just not with it, but I think the core will be my lectures, the text, and the homework problems. There will be office hours for questions, with me and with my assistants, and I answer questions by e-mail. I take questions in class. I hang around after class. I recommend that the students get with the program.