The problems with this essay are legion. I find it ironic to be correcting an essay of a teacher complaining about the lack of critical thinking in the youth. Or perhaps "sadly ironic" would be a better phrase.
I think the worst offender is the idea that people who don't do X cannot sit in judgment of those who do X. Our entire system of democracy -- of jurisprudence -- rests on informed citizens making judgments about areas where they spend their money. Nobody gets a free ride. I get to vote on whether the fire station gets a new truck whether or not I've ever been a fireman, whether or not I've ever driven a truck, and whether or not my house has ever been on fire. To do this any other way is insane.
The saddest part is that the public education system took a reasonable request -- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare. I hate to be blunt but I'll just say it: these folks shouldn't be trusted with sharp objects, much less our kids' education. They (the administration, the consultants, the "blob", the politicians) are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Testing has nothing to do with anything.
As sharp as my criticism is, I mean it in the aggregate. There are no bad people here, only a bad, overly complex system that is failing our children. It's a scandal, and removing testing isn't going to do anything but make it less visible. This is very much akin to the attitude of "Why do we need testers? All they ever do is complain!"
I'm not going to continue my analysis because this is an old, tired road, and full of little homespun essays like this which are supposed to make us take sides. I refuse to. We need tests. Period. In my mind once the tests leave, the teachers leave, because I'm not writing a check for something I can't measure. The rest of it? I'm perfectly open to discussions about the kinds of tests, the types of measurements that would be acceptable, and so on. We've taken a good idea and made a monster out of it, yes. But that doesn't make it a bad idea, that just is another indication of how totally screwed the system we've created is.
Most non-unionized service businesses take it for granted that the quality of their work will be mercilessly evaluated by people who aren't themselves providers of the same service---people called customers.
They assume that negative evaluations (both individual and group) will put pressure on the service organizations to evaluate their internal operations, fire some people, promote others, reorganize resources, change their operations to improve customer evaluations, or go out of business (and fire everyone).
Then there are unionized or government operations, where people are protected by "the contract" (real or figurative), don't have any clear sense of who their customers are, and rise up in great umbrage at the impudence of outsiders thinking their work should be evaluated. (Customers, to people who don't understand the concept, are "outsiders" or "civilians.")
I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.
I'm a parent, the customer, and to participate in this debate, that's all the qualification I need.
> They assume that negative evaluations (both individual and group) will put pressure on the service organizations to evaluate their internal operations, fire some people, promote others, reorganize resources, change their operations to improve customer evaluations, or go out of business (and fire everyone).
This isn't really true for any given business. In theory that's how businesses get better, but there are so many examples of businesses doing something horrible for their customers or society at large and then doing nothing to change their internal processes or staff.
> Then there are unionized or government operations, where people are protected by "the contract" (real or figurative), don't have any clear sense of who their customers are, and rise up in great umbrage at the impudence of outsiders thinking their work should be evaluated. (Customers, to people who don't understand the concept, are "outsiders" or "civilians.")
I don't know other unions, but teachers unions aren't generally opposed to being evaluated at all. Standardized testing isn't the only way to evaluate a teacher and it is argued that student test scores are a bad way to evaluate teacher performance.
> I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions. The author of this post was lamenting that his experience as a professional teacher wasn't relevant to those making policy decisions because they are making their decisions are ideology and personal belief of how things should be.
> I'm generation four of five generations of school teachers, but don't talk to me about who is and isn't allowed to have an opinion about the way our education system operates.
I've always wondered about being a customer w.r.t. public education. How exactly are you a customer? What good are buying with your money? I don't consider students to be a commodity, so I'm curious as what exactly you think you are getting.
This isn't really true for any given business. In theory that's how businesses get better, but there are so many examples of businesses doing something horrible for their customers or society at large and then doing nothing to change their internal processes or staff.
I'm not talking about theories about "society at large," because "society" doesn't keep a business in business; paying customers do. "Any given company" with too few paying customers goes out of business, which is an ever-present danger even for companies that try their best. You can treat your paying customers horribly as long as they have no better alternative, as is true of government, union, and other monopoly or near-monopoly situations, or even free market situations where the current crop of competitors are, for the moment, even worse, but companies facing real competition can't do that without losing customers, which is the same as a body losing blood. In a free market, some competitor will figure out how to beat you if your customers don't like you. Even monopolies are of variable durability, and the more poorly you serve your customers (in their opinion), the more people will be looking for a way to provide an alternative and take your customers (and their money).
teachers unions aren't generally opposed to being evaluated at all
No, they aren't generally opposed to being evaluated---as long as they are the ones evaluating themselves. They only object to attempts by "outsiders" to evaluate them.
How exactly are you a customer? What good are buying with your money? I don't consider students to be a commodity, so I'm curious as what exactly you think you are getting.
Too many people in education are confused about this. You are a customer if you are buying something. No, children are not commodities. You don't buy fifty pounds of child per year from a school. You buy education.
Schools are personal service providers like hair stylists. Hair stylists don't sell people, nor do they sell hair. They sell a service that improves people's hair. If you don't like their service, such as insisting that bad stylists can't be fired and you have to take whatever stylist they assign you to, you go somewhere else where, in your opinion, they sell better "hair improvement" service. A hair styling company that acted like the public schools would be put out of business in short order, because they can't afford to pay what the teachers unions pay for political protection of their monopoly.
If education as a service seems like a foreign concept, think of private piano teachers who teach young students. "I don't consider students a commodity" doesn't seem very relevant, yet they are single-subject educational service providers and the schools are multi-subject educational service providers.
And as for what exactly I think I'm getting: Since, strictly speaking, you can't buy skill directly, you buy teaching that creates skill, but you evaluate it by measuring how much added skill is produced, so you are effectively paying for the added skill. To insist that you're not buying skill but teaching would be like saying you're not buying a haircut but the stylist's effort that results in a haircut: meaningless pedantics (that you aren't suggesting, but someone might). If you don't get enough piano skill added to your child for the money you pay, you stop paying the provider and, maybe, look for an alternative provider.
If I put my kid in a private elementary school, I'm still a customer buying knowledge and skills for my kid. I'm just doing a bulk purchase of multiple skills (and including knowing something like world history as a type of "skill").
If I put my kid in a public school, I'm still a paying customer buying knowledge and skills for my kid. The school is still a paid service provider, but in this case, it is one with legislated monopoly power to take my payment from me by force, whether I think their service is worth it or not. Since others without kids are also forced to pay for my kid's education, they are also involuntary customers, but they are buying my kid's education, too.
If my neighbors without kids decided to chip in and pay part of the cost of my kid's piano lessons, they would be customers, too, and would be buying piano-playing skill for my kid. They could be hoping for some benefit for themselves as a result (a source of music for their later years) like a company that pays an external service provider to teach a skill to one of their employees, or it could be altruistic. I'm happy to help pay for the education of a kid whose own parents can't pay. There are things I want to use my money for, and buying useful educations for poor kids is one of them.
But if I, a paying customer, am not getting good enough educational service for those kids from the provider I'm paying and am not allowed to take my money and search for a better provider, I'll be pretty angry about it. Such a situation doesn't benefit my kids or poor kids or customers like my neighbors and me; it merely protects the adults in the politically powerful government-educational industry.
The author is complaining that non-educators are trying to tell him how to do his job, not that they are judging him and his fellow teachers based on the results:
"Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach."
There's a big difference between judging others based on the objectively observable results of their actions and ordering others to do things a certain way. If a non-programmer complains about slow or buggy software from a vendor, that's fair, but if he tries to tell the vendor how to write it, it's a completely different matter.
Everybody in the debate has worked full time in a school for at least 12 years, and probably more like 16 to 20 or beyond if they are seriously participating in this debate. Sure, they were on the student side, but that's long enough to gain a breadth of experience that at least qualifies them to sit at the table. I'm really not sympathetic to "We're teachers and you aren't". Yes, you are, I value your feedback, but we're talking about a system that almost everyone is mandated to participate in for years. Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here. We've all been school professionals.
The author of the post is lamenting that while these boards and panels put teachers on them, their input is completely ignored in favor of whatever is politically in vogue for the other participants. It doesn't make sense to invite a professional for their input and them ignore what they say.
> Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here. We've all been school professionals.
No, we haven't. Having gone to school does not make you a professional. That would be like saying anyone who has used a computer is a computer professional.
No, the computer metaphor breaks down; programs are not a dialog between a teacher and a class, nor is there any reasonable way to translate that.
Honestly, think about what you're arguing there; 12 years or more in an environment, one ostensibly teaching critical thinking, but you still don't have enough experience to apply critical thinking to that process itself? If that's the case, why did we bother with the schooling process in the first place if it's so incapable of being applied to the thing you've spent the largest part of your life doing up to that point? That's ridiculous.
What percentage of the people involved in the debate had 12 years of education in public schools with high stakes testing? Unless you're a teacher, or a student who went through that system and have the ability to critically reflect back upon it, then no, you aren't an expert in it. And even for students: we wouldn't say that you should be telling Google how to create new products, simply because you've used their phones and search engine for 10 years.
Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here.
On another place on the Internet, I participate in discussions about military budgets, and there are a certain group of people who insist that since they are soldiers they have the ultimate call on how much funding it should receive. (Spoiler: the answer is "more.")
To use the same analogy used in the article: A random person would not be qualified to participate in the discussion about medical procedures used in an emergency room, sure. But if I had worked in an emergency room for 12 years, even without a medical degree, I would feel like I had at least something to contribute to the discussion.
I agree with the article that we should value the teacher’s input to the debate and that it’s way easier to tell teachers they are doing their job wrong than to do it better yourself, but that doesn’t mean other people cannot have a valid, meaningful opinion on schooling.
Every teacher I've talked to gets routinely exasperated by people who think they know about teaching because they went to high school.
Whether or not the "we're professionals" card is valid, I think it should be pretty damned obvious that eating paste in kindergarten does not give you equivalent experience to teaching kindergarten.
This is true if you've gone to school under the recent testing regime. If you haven't, your opinion as to whether it's an effective method of evaluating teachers is not valid.
Yes, he is specifically making that claim, but only in support of his larger claim, which goes something like "...Those who have imposed the mindless and destructive patterns of misuse of tests to drive policy in K–12 education are already moving to impose it on higher education..."
Gad, the essay rambled quite a bit and confused its own argument. I can understand your concern. These two ideas are conflated. I have no clue as to whether this was deliberate or not. But to me at least the gist was clear: if you're not doing my job, stay out of the business of judging me.
[Insert long discussion about whether the community as a whole has a right to delegate people to tell teachers how to do their jobs. I think this is a no-brainer, "yes", but there are a lot of side issues, most of which boil down to what my initial comment was: we've created educational systems of people which are monstrosities to understand, manage, and make work.]
How is that a no-brainer? As a software developer, I do not delegate outside of the technical community on how to do my job (Note - Inspiration is drawn from the outside, but not explicit direction.) This is probably true for most tech people. It seems to unreasonable to hold teachers to different standard. Heck, as a community we often pride ourselves on being opinionated on a specialized area.
Then again, maybe that's close-minded of me. For all I know, the next billion dollar software company might have all of its technical decisions vetted by a panel of soccer moms.
I don't. I vote in alderman and mayors who do this stuff. Just the idea that direct democracy is for everything is questionable. You just get bikeshedding and other forms of mass ignorance.
Nor do we vote what jet fighters get bought and how many of them. Obama decides that. You may have voted for him, but that doesn't mean you have this level of granular control because it would be insane if you did.
One of the US's biggest faults is that there's too much direct democracy in the form of referendums and line items brought to popular votes. In my town I vote in everything from all the county judges (30+ people) to the dogcatcher. Elitism and autocracy that go against what Joe Public thinks are needed. If everything was direct, we'd be living in a bankrupt theocracy sending the poor and minorities to gas chambers while enriching the popular and well connected. The people can be as much dictators as a sole individual.
> I get to vote on whether the fire station gets a new truck whether or not I've ever been a fireman, whether or not I've ever driven a truck, and whether or not my house has ever been on fire.
But you don't get to vote on what kind of hose they use, how they store their equipment, or how they go about putting out fires. You're talking about a question of budget whereas in the NCLB it is (or ultimately ended up being) a question of how teachers should actually teach. For this latter sort of question, some amount of expertise or at least experience in the subject should be required.
I will contradict myself a bit by asserting that as a parent I expect a voice in this process, but I'd argue that that does give me some relevant (if tangential) experience with schooling if my child is in school.
>because I'm not writing a check for something I can't measure.
This is interesting. My first response is that not everything of value can be measured [1], but then I thought better of it and realized there probably are ways to measure everything of value [2], they're just not easy, obvious, or intuitive, and the odds of convincing a national educational bureaucracy that does things as much for appearance and expedience as effectiveness are probably not great.
I think the worst offender is the idea that people who don't do X cannot sit in judgment of those who do X.
You do realize that this...
the public education system took a reasonable request -- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare.
...was the result of people who don't do X sitting in judgment of those who do X?
We need tests. Period.
IMO this is the root of the problem. We do not need tests. We need judgments about whether a particular student is ready to move on--from grade to grade, from high school to college, from college to a job. The people who should be making those judgments are those who have the facts: parents, teachers, employers, and the students themselves.
Tests are only a tool that can be used towards that end, and they are often a bad tool. You can't encapsulate human judgment in a formula, but that is what standardized tests mostly try to do.
> I think the worst offender is the idea that people who don't do X cannot sit in judgment of those who do X. Our entire system of democracy -- of jurisprudence -- rests on informed citizens making judgments about areas where they spend their money. Nobody gets a free ride. I get to vote on whether the fire station gets a new truck whether or not I've ever been a fireman, whether or not I've ever driven a truck, and whether or not my house has ever been on fire. To do this any other way is insane.
This isn't really accurate, as in most places you elect someone who then goes on to make decisions on your behalf, presumably representing you and your community's desires and needs. We also don't vote directly on particular one off issues like funding items for fire or police departments. I also disagree that doing things in another fashion is insane, as there have been successes and failures that don't follow the western democratic republic model.
> The saddest part is that the public education system took a reasonable request -- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare.
It was not the education system itself that made the bureaucratic nightmare. Testing policy like No Child Left Behind's purpose was to begin to enforce taking measurements and applying those measurements against schools, pupils, and staff. Applying those measurements directly is a problem, as we aren't accurately measuring things, we are sacrificing well rounded education for better test results, and are using those measurements to fire expensive teachers and replace them with newer, cheaper teachers. New programs like Race to the Top make this even worse, as the aim is to now replace public schools with private charter schools, schools which have not been shown to work on the same scale as public systems and will leave people with even less choice.
> As sharp as my criticism is, I mean it in the aggregate. There are no bad people here, only a bad, overly complex system that is failing our children. It's a scandal, and removing testing isn't going to do anything but make it less visible. This is very much akin to the attitude of "Why do we need testers? All they ever do is complain!"
This is very true, we need data about what is going on, and most school systems do collect this kind of information. The real core of the issue is what to do with that information.
> In my mind once the tests leave, the teachers leave, because I'm not writing a check for something I can't measure.
I can appreciate you want accountability, but not having standardized testing won't end education or the profession of being a teacher considering how long education and teaching have been around. Education is not capitalist in nature, so treating it by those rules would be foolhardy.
We also don't vote directly on particular one off issues like funding items for fire or police departments.
You are nitpicking a minor error in his post, but the fundamental point remains.
We judge the police department on crime stats without being cops ourselves. We judge contractors based on whether the roads they build measure up to DOT standards. This is true even if the DOT officials are not construction workers themselves.
Similarly, we can judge teachers based on education stats without being teachers. This is true even if we vote directly on education priorities, or indirectly vote for a mayor/president/whoever who does.
Our entire system of democracy -- of jurisprudence -- rests on informed citizens...
Indeed. And as most experienced teachers will tell you, very few parents take the trouble to inform themselves about what's going on with their own children. The children of those who do are generally doing quite well.
Though I can't play piano, I can judge the virtuosity of a piano player quite well - because their performances are public. And it is easy to qualify and quantify what constitutes great piano playing. The complexity of the teaching job is neither public nor easily quantified, regardless of the wishfullness of (clearly) unqualified dreamers and schemers.
As a (previous) K-12 teacher I could talk for hours about the weaknesses of public education. You would leave understanding that few of them are due to the lack of qualified, capable teachers. And you would be the one in 10,000 willing to spend the time to become so well-informed. I recommend that, if you're as concerned as you feel you are, you take that opportunity to talk at length to a local teacher or two. And you'll discover that quick-fixes are not in the cards, that most teachers work long hours for inadequate rewards, and that no algorithmic approach is useful in approaching this difficult (and (potentially rewarding) problem.
You guys (Americans) had a great system which failed your weakest but managed to get you'll to the moon.
And then for some reason your country decided it wanted to test like India and China.
This is lunacy from where I stand. Having walked through the wringer in another country I know exactly what it becomes. Learning divorced from understanding.
Stop testing, break class size in half, increase teacher pay and double the number of teachers. But no one wants to do that because of the daft political climate, fund crunch, difficulty and the alternative of tests.
So a non human solution.
I've seen the end state of the path you have begun walking down, and it is flat out teach the test land.
Students by guides to the material with the shortest most efficient answers written down for memorization.
People realize that multiple choice tests are too easy, so more difficult tests are devised, in the hope of ensuring that it makes sure students are better prepared.
This results in yet more teach the test.
Tests are a poor proxy for checking if someone understands the material.
The argument is that"tests are all you have and better than nothing.".
What people assume is that testing is static, it's not. The testing process is dynamic and exerts a force on the behavior of the students and teachers, and over time over the recruitment and measures of students and teachers themselves.
Good question and I've argued this case myself from the other angle to figure this out as well. Sadly I don't have an answer, just working at it.
The best bridge I've got so far is that testing is a stop gap between here and wherever we want to get. (I assume the end goal is education over just simple literacy.)
Testing has 2 negative aspects to it
1) Its analogous to the effect nicotine or other habit forming drug/medicine has on its subject/user. After a while they have more than just an alleviating effect, the subject is itself altered to depend and operate under the influence of the chemical.
2) For any sufficiently complex task, tests create narrow fields of focus and reduce creativity and mastery. A movement towards the letter of the law, but not the spirit. If you want non educational examples, take everything from CEO performance, to tax evasion, to behavior in video games. It makes an argument for indirect measurement of outcomes.
At the core of the issue is that absolute terribleness of testing to actually measure anything other than itself, and how there is only a small range of measurable tests that can be conducted which are also applicable at mass scales.
Now I can't see ways to ameliorate or reduce these effects. One attempt has been to 'improve tests' - what with more complex tests and so on. All I've seen it do is create a push for more rote learning and often creates a side effect of whimsical marking.
I'm definitely, not going to argue that we should find a new or improved test. That would be as hand-wavy as saying "testing/measurables will solve it".
I suspect the answer will lie here, and at the intersection of what Panos learned with his cheating scandal. Likely a move towards more peer/group oriented work, which has a real world test which needs to be performed. Which of course would require teachers to have more time to work with and test the final result.
I'll respond and see if I can flesh the idea a bit later. Thoughts?
I think the worst offender is the idea that people who don't do X cannot sit in judgment of those who do X. Our entire system of democracy -- of jurisprudence -- rests on informed citizens making judgments about areas where they spend their money.
While I agree with this general point, it does appear that actual educators were not given sufficient voice. Recognizing that you don't always have to do something to judge those who do doesn't mean ignoring them is a good idea either.
The (unintentional) irony was in TFA to which he was responding. But if you prefer the word "incoherence" to "irony" when discussing that piece I won't argue.
Re: your firetruck analogy… that's not very common in most parts of the US. I've never lived somewhere with that level of direct democracy about infrastructure, certainly.
But, let's assume you do get to have a say on whether your local fire station gets to have a new fire truck. You don't get to have a say on who gets hired or fired, or what training they require, or, perhaps most aptly, what people who are being rescued must be or do in a given circumstance.
While I agree with most if not all of what was said in this piece I think there is something it misses on completely. While this is my opinion I believe it to be true.
Our schooling systems have there faults, large ones, but they are NOT the main issue. I firmly believe that any student who wants to learn will learn. Students have to WANT to do well. The way our society has (progressed?) over the last few decades this drive to do well has pretty much evaporated. Since probably after WW2.
IDK if this is still the case but when i was in HS some 6-7 years ago i came into the start of "No Child Left Behind". We had the standardized tests, the passing grade was 30%. Students still failed, and these students were still allowed to progress to the next level. While I understand these baselines were increased this is still very shocking.
In another example of rewarding failure we have sports, where we hand out trophies no matter the placing. This could not be further from reality where everything we do is base on our performance. We have to let our youths fail so that they can strive to improve and to do/be better.
So long as we promote failure our school systems will never get better, because as much as it is the teachers and the system behind them it is up to each student to want to learn. More today then ever there is no excuse, with the internet and its practically infinite resources information is never more then a few seconds away. If a student wants to learn they can, teacher/no teacher and school/no school. But the students have to WANT to learn and be/do better.
"I firmly believe that any student who wants to learn will learn"
Not if they are punished for it, and students in America are routinely [edit: punished] for any attempt to learn outside the confines of a narrow curriculum. Students routinely lose points for answers that are not based on what they were taught in class, even when their answers are correct and their techniques are logically sound. A student who is bored in class will be in big trouble if they skip class and spend their time learning independently.
The problem is not that students do not wish to learn, but that our education fails to prioritize learning and actively discourages it. A student who wants to learn will be just as poorly served by the education system as a student who has no interest in learning. The only students who succeed are those who have mastered the art of compliance, as the primary purpose of American education is to produce compliant people.
"Students in America are routinely published for any attempt to learn outside the confines of a narrow curriculum."
As a public school teacher, I strongly disagree with your opinion. I suspect your opinion has been formed based on a relatively small sample size. I'm sorry your experience was poor, but you simply don't have to data to implicate tens of thousands of schools.
I do agree with one tiny piece of it, however: the biggest crime you can commit in an American public school is insubordination. No amount of intelligence or work ethic will save a student who refuses to do (or stop doing) what faculty and staff ask.
I don't disagree with this policy because it's a simple matter of safety. My school employs slightly fewer than 200 faculty/staff. We have over 2000 students, most of whom are physically stronger. If students won't do what we ask them, it gets Lord of the Flies in a hurry.
I included the example that I did because betterunix's comment included two trigger phrases for me: "big trouble if they skip class" and "produce compliant people".
I've been teaching CS for more than 15 years; the brilliant but unconventional student is literally who I work with all day. betterunix's choice of language brings to mind many dozens of students I've taught over the years.
It's the "I'm smarter than them and I can see the Game is bullshit but they get rewarded for blindly following orders and I get in trouble if I want to learn" trope.
(Apologies to betterunix if I've misjudged you, but I've seen it SO MANY TIMES I'm probably not wrong.)
The thing is, yes, some of what students are being asked to do in public schools is bullshit. I try to minimize that in my own classroom, and I literally teach seminars to other teachers trying to convert them as well.
But basic compliance is absolutely necessary. Your average public school is not a police state. Asking students to complete a worksheet, even if it utterly lacks value, is not a violation of their fundamental human rights, and you are not a brave free-thinker for "standing up to The Man."
Schools absolutely DO NOT make a goal of "produc[ing] compliant people." It's just that the average student must comply in order for public schools to work at all. And if that's in place, then we can try to actually teach something worthwhile.
Basic compliance is necessary for what? Here you are, claiming that the goal of school is not to produce compliant people, yet you claim that compliance is "absolutely necessary" in a school. You are claiming that time-wasting assignments with no educational value are a necessary thing for students to work through, because at some point you might be able to teach. How about just skipping the things that you admit are pointless, and just teaching?
"the average student"
If you are willing to acknowledge that some students are different from others, that some students have different needs than others, why not grade talented students differently? If you have a student who has clearly mastered the material of the course, to the point where your assignments and lectures are just wasting their time, why not give them an A and then teach them more interesting / advanced material? Why demand that students who are not in need of your instruction be just as obedient as those who would be lost without you?
Basic compliance is absolutely necessary in any working environment. It sounds like you're advocating anarchy as a viable education model.
"You are claiming that time-wasting assignments with no educational value are a necessary thing for students to work through."
I am absolutely not saying that. I had hoped your reading comprehension was better than that.
I said: "asking students to complete a worksheet, even if it utterly lacks value, is not a violation of their fundamental human rights." I stand by this statement. Note that I am not in any way advocating time-wasting assignments.
Time-wasting assigments may indicate a poor teacher. However, refusing to do them and/or skipping class is more a reflection on the student than the system.
Regarding your final paragraph: there are a LOT of assumptions there based on how you think I run my classroom. You have assumed incorrectly at almost point. I do literally everything you suggest in my classroom.
Edit: here's evidence of that from a couple of years ago [1]
Well I did not mean to imply anything specific about the way you run your class; those were more rhetorical questions than anything. On the other hand, I am not sure how you can defend the idea that a student who fails to complete a time-wasting assignment should be punished, which is what you seem to be saying, when your own teaching style seems to be based on trying not to waste students' time. Nor am I sure how you can reconcile the idea that time-wasting assignments indicate a poor teacher with the notion that students should be completing those assignments.
Now, as for my reading comprehension, the way I read what you wrote is this: students should do as they are told because compliance is necessary for a school to function, even if they are told to work through a time-wasting assignment. I am still not sure that is the wrong way to interpret what you are saying. What I see in your comments is the idea that it should be entirely the teachers' responsibility to ensure that students are learning, and that students should just do what their teachers command regardless of whether or not they actually learn anything from it (feel free to correct me if this is not your view). Thus a student who does not bother with pointless exercises that have no educational value is just as wrong as the teacher who gave those exercises, regardless of whether or not the student is learning in lieu of doing their official assignments.
For what it's worth, if I had you as a teacher back in high school, I probably would have done well, at least based on what you said elsewhere.
"Well I did not mean to imply anything specific about the way you run your class."
Except for when you said I "approach school like prison." :)
"On the other hand, I am not sure how you can defend the idea that a student who fails to complete a time-wasting assignment should be punished, which is what you seem to be saying."
In my opinion, a student who doesn't complete a time-wasting assignment ought to expect to receive a grade of zero on that assignment. I think either fewer or more consequences would miss the mark. I'm not sure if you would consider this "punishment"; I would not.
I think we're missing each other because we're using the same words but with different definitions.
I don't consider failing to complete a worksheet (time-wasting or otherwise) to be a matter of compliance. Notice that in my original comment I used the word "insubordination", which is important.
(I do think that there's a place for requiring a specific method. When I give my kids programming assignments, I sometimes restrict how they're allowed to complete the program. If I say "You must use a while loop", and the kids uses a for loop, there's no credit, even if a for loop would be better. I gave you this assignment because I want to MAKE SURE you can solve it using a while loop. Sometimes my curriculum requires me to make sure you can solve the equation using "completing the square" even when other techniques might work just as well. I think I'm justified in not giving points if you don't complete the square.)
I'll use a different example: in my school, hats are prohibited by dress code. (This is a dumb rule.) If I am walking through the halls and see a student wearing a hat, I ask him to remove it. If he removes it, we are good. He has "complied" with my perfectly legitimate request. If he refuses to remove it, we have a problem. He is insubordinate, aka "non-compliant".
I maintain that this sort of compliance is ABSOLUTELY necessary. I don't make very many outright demands of my students ("Johnny, I need you to sit down.") but when I do they damn well better comply.
Now, as I've said, I much prefer to let natural consequences rule the day. But some students want to break rules and then ALSO avoid the consequences of those rules, and that's what I object to. It's like, you understand that Rosa Parks was arrested, right? She didn't just refuse to move to the back of the bus; she also gracefully accepted that she was going to get arrested for it, too. And that's why civil disobedience works.
In the case of a "completing the square" worksheet, I think it's justified to not award points for getting the correct answer if the method wasn't what was specified. If my curriculum prescribes that "students must demonstrate mastery of solving equations using completing the square" (which would be a bad curriculum, agreed) and you refuse to demonstrate that you can do that, then I can't in good conscience award you points. And if you're a dick about it, then we may have an insubordination issue on top of it.
So it's not as simple as just ensuring students are learning. Sometimes we're required to make sure they can get their answers in a specific way.
To give a real example from my classes: I think object-oriented programming is WAY overrated. But I have to teach it. When I do so, I apologize to the kids for making them do it, because OOP doesn't make sense for the small programs they're using it on. Using OOP for a 50-line program is almost always BAD design.
But when I ask kids to write Tic-Tac-Toe in an object-oriented way, and they turn in a perfect but non-OO solution, they get zero points. And if they try to argue with me about it, then we're getting into disrespect territory.
I suspect that this is what happened to you. You got into a lot of power struggles with teachers. (Those teachers were probably also bad teachers, which is only partly related.) Then you got tired of fighting about it and just started skipping class. But you didn't hate the curriculum, just the methodology.
So, to deconstruct: "Thus a student who does not bother with pointless exercises that have no educational value is just as wrong as the teacher who gave those exercises, regardless of whether or not the student is learning in lieu of doing their official assignments."
A teacher who gives exercises with no educational value is the most wrong.
(Important caveat: you probably are not a perfect judge of which exercises have educational value, because 1) you had a bad experience, 2) some of your teachers were bad and treated you badly, so even if the assignments were okay in and of themselves, they were received badly, and 3) you didn't do some of them anyway. Like, who knew that eating kale could improve your eyesight? You'll never know if you don't eat it.)
A student who cares about learning is better than one who doesn't, even if one does assignments and the other doesn't.
A student who doesn't care about learning but completes assignments anyway is probably slightly more likely to succeed than a student who DOES care about learning but refuses to do classwork. This is a shame, but statistically true.
Always remember that Rosa Parks would never have accomplished anything if she had run from the cops.
And finally, for what it's worth, I have the following sign posted in my classroom:
The Best Students in my Class
* Ask questions until they understand deeply
* Want knowledge more than grades
* Accept consequences gracefully for their choices
* Don't quit (They have grit.)
You're grossly overestimating the capacity of any public school system in this country. You're talking about people who are underpaid, who face being laid off on a yearly basis, and who have too many pupils in their classrooms. What you're asking for -- a system that recognize's each individual's capacity and inclination and tailors the learning experience accordingly -- is a joke. Given the constraints, the only thing you can hope for is to try to present a curriculum which will be as effective as possible across as many students as possible.
Students of the type you're talking about would best be served by being home schooled or attending private school. I realize that doesn't work for many families. What's your suggestion? You get what you pay for.
Students of the type you're talking about would best be served by being home schooled or attending private school. I realize that doesn't work for many families. What's your suggestion?
Universal, portable public education vouchers, payable to any educational institution the parents select. (A portion of the standard voucher could be payable to the parents themselves if they wish to homeschool and can maintain a satisfactory inspection record. I wouldn't complain if such an inspection regime were very strict: it's public money.)
Some public schools would close overnight; they would literally empty the instant that their customers had any choice at all. Others would struggle for a few years before either closing or improving. Other public schools would have to add staff and buildings. Some private schools might grow more selective. Other private schools might just grow. We'd also see online providers expand and innovate, which will be good news for those who spent high school in their own lockers.
The top-down thing hasn't worked, and even TFA agrees with that. It's time for the people at the bottom, the customers, to have a choice.
In other words, you approach school like prison or perhaps like a military occupation. In a prison, the guards must ensure that the inmates know who's boss, or else they will lose control of a population of dangerous people. In a military occupation, soldiers have to occasionally harass or intimidate the citizens whose lands they control before those citizens get any bright ideas about rebellion or independence.
I wrote my reply to waterlesscloud above before I read your comment here. I honestly don't mean to be condescending or dismissive. Truly. If I had had different parents and just the wrong combination of teachers in my own high school twenty-something years ago, I probably would have ended up with a very similar outlook on things.
While I do agree that the current system in no way promotes creativity. The current standardize test system is simply inadequate.
The problem with your analysis(IMO at least) is that you believe that learning and doing well on tests are mutually exclusive. While i do agree that these tests do direct students on a direct "compliant" course that does not in any way mean that those student striving to do well and if so learning by themselves would go in opposition to these exams. If anything learning on the side should only make these exams more mundane as they are a "minimum requirements" exams.
Students learning on there own and striving to do better is never punished. Saying they are punished would mean the answers they are provide are technically right but graded as wrong.
All I have to speak of on this are my personal experiences but i was never in a situation where my provided answer was counted wrong even if i used a different method as taught. Unless the specific exam was to test a particular method, in which case it would be given points taken off yes, but I believe thats warranted.
The problem i believe you are speaking to is strict adherence to specific exam related curriculum. In which case I completely agree that this is the wrong direction to go, but at the same time I dont believe a student wanting to learn or learning outside of school would be negatively effected by these exams.
Also i am in no way saying a student should ever skip school to learn on there own.
"Students learning on there own and striving to do better is never punished"
Well I am a counterexample to that statement. I was punished year after year because I spent my time learning instead of doing my homework.
"Saying they are punished would mean the answers they are provide are technically right but graded as wrong."
Yes, that is exactly what happens, especially in math courses. Answers that are not only technically right, but which show a serious of logically consistent steps leading from the question to the answer, but where the steps diverge from what the teacher taught the student to do, are often marked as "wrong" or worse still, marked as "right" but with a point taken off for using a different technique. It happened to me on more than one occasion, and it happened to friends of mine.
"Also i am in no way saying a student should ever skip school to learn on there own."
Why not? If the goal of school is to educate students, does it really matter if a student attends class to learn or skips class to learn the material on their own? Does it make a different if a student skips class to learn, and then comes to the teacher outside of class to ask questions? Why is sitting in a classroom so important that we must punish students who fail to do so?
"I was punished year after year because I spent my time learning instead of doing my homework."
You were punished for not doing your homework, not because you spent your time learning. Just because you made these two things coincide for you does not mean that they have to.
For your second point yes this is a problem, but its more a problem with the teachers then what was mentioned in the article. And as i pointed out in my previous comment this depends on what the teacher is testing over. If they just want you to get the right answer(which is usually not the case) then yes it is wrong to count of for using a method other then what they taught. But if they are testing you over the method that they taught then yes you should get points taken off.
IMO this directly depends on the level of schooling. If you are in college and you are paying for your education you should have every right to come when you want. But at the same time if its part of the teachers grading is attendance then you as a student have the choice to ether follow it or not. You should be required to attend classes.
If you don't need to go to class to learn then go take all the ACT's and SAT's you want and get yourself into college without them and stop whining. Otherwise go to school.
Funnily enough, I was punished once in middle school for doing my assignments.
After one particular social studies class, in which I had finished all the work, I opened my reading book. In our English class, you read any (approved) book you wanted to and took comprehension tests afterwards. You accumulated points and you had a goal to meet as one particular assignment (e.g. reading skill level of X meant you had to score 300 points, whether you got that in 10 books or 50 that was your choice). I reading that book and got a silent lunch for it. Apparently the correct response to finishing all your work early was to do nothing for that particular teacher. For the other teachers in that same group (math, science, English) reading your book was the approved thing to do after you finish your work.
I remember doing the same in middle school. Cant remember the name of the program for the life of me though. Thats ridiculous that you got punished for reading in a school, especially in that situation.
Our program was called "Accelerated Reader" or AR. Other schools may have different program names. I know the accelerated classes went through 3 or 4 renames.
"You were punished for not doing your homework, not because you spent your time learning. Just because you made these two things coincide for you does not mean that they have to."
Assuming, of course, that the volume of homework is sufficiently low to actually leave time or mental energy for anything else. I am not sure that is something that we can just assume, although I will admit that I did not really bother to find out how long my homework would have taken in middle school. Really though, the punishment for not turning in homework is handed down regardless of whether or not students spent their time on something with more educational value, and that is what I think is wrong here. Doing your homework is more important than learning; if doing homework coincides with learning, that's good, but there is no requirement of that or even any consideration of the possibility that the homework might have no educational value.
"If you don't need to go to class to learn then go take all the ACT's and SAT's you want and get yourself into college without them and stop whining. Otherwise go to school."
Of course, colleges also demand to see your high school transcript, and top schools will reject students whose high school GPA does not meet a certain threshold, so what you seem to be portraying as a student's choice is not much of a choice at all. High school grades can have consequences years later; when I was an undergrad, I went to MIT to ask about their graduate program, and they stopped answering my questions as soon as I mentioned what college I was attending. I had top marks on the SAT and SAT II exams, but without a report card to back that up I was not accepted to a top tier university. I am by no means alone in this; I met plenty of other people like myself in college, and this sort of story can be heard elsewhere.
It is not a matter of whining, it is a problem with the approach we take to education. Students who "play the game" get ahead; learning the material is secondary and on its own it gets students nowhere (on the other handing, forgetting the material at the end of the academic year or gaining the minimal understanding needed to receive a high grade is not punished or discouraged). Disobedience means closed doors, regardless of whether or not a student has mastered the curriculum they were supposed to be taught. If this sounds like the rest of life, well, that is exactly the point of school right? To prepare students for life -- both by teaching the skills needed to survive, and by teaching students to abide by the rules of the system they will be expected to live in.
"...that is exactly the point of school right? To prepare students for life -- both by teaching the skills needed to survive, and by teaching students to abide by the rules of the system they will be expected to live in."
Yes indeed. Part of school is socialization. You say it like it's a bad thing.
"if doing homework coincides with learning, that's good, but there is no requirement of that or even any consideration of the possibility that the homework might have no educational value."
Do you really believe that the teachers aren't trying to make the homework useful? That they are just trying to waste kids' time? Do you know any teachers as an adult?
"Do you really believe that the teachers aren't trying to make the homework useful? That they are just trying to waste kids' time? Do you know any teachers as an adult?"
No, teachers are not trying to waste students time with homework, at least not that I am aware. Yet that does not mean that the homework cannot be a waste of time for a student. The problem is that in a typical American school, a student whose time would be wasted on homework will be punished for failing to do that homework. Homework may have no educational value for a student who already understands the material, but such students are generally expected to complete the homework anyway. The penalty for not doing homework is given regardless of the educational value of the homework; hence a student who has top marks on every exam/written assignment, who is tutoring other students in the class, can still receive low or even failing grades.
That's true. The system has settled - after a few millennia of experience - on an all-students-gotta-do-their-homework model. What scalable, affordable system would have the best total outome, given real student populations? That's the problem for the public system to address. Note that this is not the same question as "what's best for betterunix".
I have a lot of sympathy for you, as a student who did as little homework as I could get away with or a little less. Lucky for me that exams were more important back then. I might have more trouble nowadays.
>I firmly believe that any student who wants to learn will learn.
Well sure; people overcome all types of adversity to learn, produce, and excel in the world. A child from the ghetto may strive to succeed and go on to be a chess grand master, this does not mean that we should go building more ghettos to produce chess grandmasters.
Learning despite misguided education policies will occur, but it's not a legitimate defense against criticism of the policies.
So some kids don't have adequate "drive" or motivation. Should they be dismissed because of it? They are kids! Some kids need more encouragement and support, and we should be helping them succeed (truly succeed, not be socially promoted), not saying "well you aren't trying hard enough, you deserve to fail." Do not worry- they will get that plenty as an adult. The purpose of school is to prepare kids for adulthood, we shouldn't be dismissing them because they aren't prepared already.
Another bone I must pick with your 'they they don't want to learn' argument comes in the form of an experience I had repeatedly while in school:
Sequoia: I understand and have memorized the formula, but WHY does theorem XYZ behave thus?
Teacher: Sequoia, that's a great question, but I've got 30 other students I'm trying to just get to the baseline- I really can't devote time to advanced discussion of this topic when some kids are struggling to just pass the test.
Nowadays there are lots of highly accessible/usable online resources to address such students and I hope teachers are employing them, but the fact is that was not an environment that was conducive to learning regardless of the fact that I wished to learn more.
Yes, I could have looked it up on my own but that's not an argument for school- I could look it up on my own without school. Saying "go learn it yourself" is tantamount to saying we don't need schools.
EDIT: Changed double quotes to single to make clear that I'm paraphrasing "...any student who wants to learn will learn. Students have to WANT to do well ...over the last few decades this drive to do well has pretty much evaporated." with 'they they don't want to learn', not quoting directly. Sorry jug! The other uses of double quotes are legitimate: I'm not ascribing the statements to anyone in particular.
Basically, rote learning is undervalued by a lot of education experts. It's a great foundation for higher-order learning. The problem is, when you learn by rote you don't really learn why. It's a good hack to build a foundation, but it isn't worth much by itself.
If No Child was getting kids up to a baseline, which created a foundation for later learning, it would be OK. They'd be able to read, write, and do arithmetic, which would let them tackle the big questions later on. Unfortunately, it's just a stepping stone for more rote learning. Most of them are never going to learn to use their knowledge in a flexible way (solving difficult unseen problems with it), they are just going to memorise the basic steps required to pass the test.
It's like trying to build a house out of nothing but a foundation.
You definitely have a bone to pick with someone but it doesn't seem that you even read my post.
"Well sure; people overcome all types of adversity to learn"
My post does not even remotely touch on diversity, not that its not a worthy discussion as far as education goes its not what i am speaking about.
"Learning despite misguided education policies will occur, but it's not a legitimate defense against criticism of the policies."
I never once defended the current policies, in fact i specifically said "Our schooling systems have there faults, large ones"
This I have the most issues with, you even made up a quote about me.
"So some kids don't have adequate "drive" or motivation. Should they be dismissed because of it? They are kids! Some kids need more encouragement and support, and we should be helping them succeed (truly succeed, not be socially promoted), not saying "well you aren't trying hard enough, you deserve to fail." Do not worry- they will get that plenty as an adult. The purpose of school is to prepare kids for adulthood, we shouldn't be dismissing them because they aren't prepared already."
We SHOULD encourage our kids and we SHOULD support them, thats my whole point. You mis quoted me saying "well you aren't trying hard enough, you deserve to fail.". This could not be further from what my whole post was about. My post had nothing to do with trying, it has to do with wanting. I also NEVER said that anyone "deserve to fail", what im saying is that our kids should be allowed to fail, to know what its like to fail.
"The purpose of school is to prepare kids for adulthood, we shouldn't be dismissing them because they aren't prepared already."
Passing students who have not learned what they need to is not preparing them for adulthood, its doing them a disservice by putting them into a situation they are equipped to handle all in the name of being politically correct.
"Another bone I must pick with your "they they don't want to learn""
Again you miss quote, miss represent and say exactly opposite of what im trying to say. So i will ignore the entire rest of your argument.
The part that gets me is that teachers always complain the government is imposing testing requirements on them, but if anybody mentions taking the government out of education, or switching to a voucher system, then the teachers unions are the first ones rallying against it.
They can't have it both ways. If they're going to be part of the government then they have to accept the fact that voters get to decide how their performance is measured.
That's a ridiculous argument. The binary decision is not crap govt. schools or a voucher system. You american's are crazy the way that that has become a culturally conditioned, rational response to such situations. The solution is to make govt. provided education better. Like it is in New Zealand where I was publicly educated. Reading stuff about the american school system is quite horrifying from over here: children never exposed to music and art? 160 Public schools with no libraries? What the hell kind of system is running over there when one can be part of the wealthiest nation in human history yet that nation is incapable of delivering quality public education to all its citizens?!
The fact of the matter is that when education is a part of the government the voters can decide how school performance is measured.
The citizens voted on it, and we got "No Child Left Behind." You can say it's dumb and that we don't know what's best for us, but that's how our government works.
As long as education is part of the government then educators have to suck it up and realize they have to listen to the tax payers, or go to work for a private school.
"You american's are crazy", "american school system"
Perhaps the NZ school system could have spent a bit more time on the capitalization of proper nouns and the where to put a possessive apostrophe with a plural.
It's easy to criticize. Harder to find solutions. NZ's history, culture and scale are quite different. Got any ideas?
Nitpicking grammar on a casual internet forum is a great way to win an argument. I post on here (like most I'd imagine) as a distraction from the more mundane parts of my job, forgive me for not applying enough rigor to my grammar in such a context...
While you were busy being condescending and not making a point, you ignored my main point that, with the amount of money the Americans (happy?) have available to them, the answer should not just be blow up the entire system because GP has a hardon for libertarianism, but to use the vast resources available to make the system better, and allocate more if need be.
My point was my last sentence. I was attempting to ironically point out that you were criticizing from a position of assumed superiority without offering anything. My means of doing so was self-referential, until the last sentence which was intended to give the game away. I guess I was not clear enough, and I didn't mean to offend.
Anyway, surely you can enjoy the irony of messing up grammar during a fierce critique of another country's education system?
Meanwhile, the trouble with the argument you're using with libertarians that since the US is so rich they could afford better public services is that libertarians can easily counter with "America is so rich (partly) because we don't waste money on that stuff."
I don't believe that, but it's very hard to refute.
Part of the issue is how to measure future success? Research is starting to show that qualitative indicators in children are indicative of future successes as much as (or even more than) quantitative test scores. These "qualitative indicators" include things like self-control, delaying gratification, and social skills.
What metrics would you consider good? That is, measurements that accurately predict future successes in life? Reading comprehension and math ability honestly sound like decent metrics to me, but they're clearly not working as intended. What sorts of things do you think we should measure instead? I don't really have any good ideas myself.
Yeah, these are very good questions. It's easy to pick an arbitrary metric that seems like it would measure the right thing, but doesn't.
I usually try to stick to the specific phrasing - what is the test that measures your definition of success, such that if the test passes, success is definitely going up, and if the test fails, success is definitely going down?
Even before that step, part of the problem is that we have to have a definition of success before we can determine how to measure it. Ask people what the goal of the education system is, and you'll get many different responses.
I think the real problem is that nobody has any good metrics that will work 1) cheaply enough and 2) at scale.
Give me 25 students and two hours, and I can write a paragraph for each kid very accurately detailing their strengths and weakness in writing computer code (my area of expertise).
But even with 15 years of classroom experience, I still can't design a curriculum that works for someone that isn't me.
Actually, it is quite easy to devise a system that will scale within reasonable cost.
// Initialization
For each grade in 1 to N-1
let teacher[grade] = class[grade].teacher;
end for
let teacher[N] = peerFromNearbySchool();
// Main loop, do term after term.
For each grade in 1 to N
let teacher[grade+1] = (grade < N)
? class[grade+1].teacher
: peerFromNearbySchool();
//Basic adversary strategy
//1. Have someone with actual situational awareness
// and stakes on the game choose the measures.
let teacher[grade+1].design(exam[grade]);
//2. Implement checks and balances to avoid abuses.
teacher[grade+1].send(exam[grade], principal);
try
principal.disclose(exam[grade], teacher[grade]);
catch UnfairnessError(err)
let principal.dealWith(err.complexSolution());
//3. Measure, take decisions and deal with corner cases.
for each student in class[grade]
note = student.take(exam[grade]);
if (note < std.threshold)
student.flunk();
else
student.pass(grade+1);
if (student.isALuckyIdiot())
let teacher[grade+1].dealWith(student,
next_term);
end for //student
Even good metrics would be resisted by teachers. Unionized workers don't want their performance to be subject to metrics when it can instead be subject to more subjective measures they can more easily game.
This is a bit of a distortion. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) doesn't oppose testing wholesale, but rather the use of standardized test results to generate new policy, something that test makers explicitly said their tests are not useful for:
http://www.uft.org/teaching/hot-topics/testing
Why do teachers need to be evaluated by metrics at all? Every professional (software dev) job I've had has managed to do a reasonably good job selecting and promoting the right people. Not perfect, but well enough. Why is teaching the only domain where adults are unable to make professional judgments about coworkers?
This has a whiff of the perennial 'kids today' rant. I know Google NGrams is hardly a robust research tool, but a few phrases that are fun to speculate about ...
I think this shift in word use is natural. Words become popular, and then get overused to the point that using them calls to mind a lot of connotation. To avoid that, speakers looks for a comparable word and start using that instead.
Then, eventually most good words (small enough to be known by the average person) get used up and speakers end up creating new words for the same reason.
Witness 'comment / commenter / commenting', which in the sports world has completely given way to 'commentate / commentator / commentating' to the point that those 'new' words past Google Chrome's built-in spell-checker.
For the last ten years I've been coaching a form of high school debate in a Chicago public school. This activity involves arguing for and against federal government action on various issues and so requires, as a minimum for success, reading comprehension, an ability to express thought in writing, and the most basic familiarity with your grade school history textbook.
Let me tell you right now: A lot of kids can't do it. And by a lot I mean almost all, at least with respect to Chicago public schools, and this goes all the way up to the selective enrollment schools, one of which I coach.
As a volunteer with limited time, it kills me to see kids eager to join the activity only to find they lack the aptitudes to present and defend rational arguments, and I just don't have the time to reverse years of standardized education. The problem gets compounded if you're not attending a selective enrollment school, where general neglect at all levels is mandatory.
Now, the school I coach is also my alma mater, and yet, my own aptitude for debate was fostered precisely because I gave two shits about schooling in general and basically attended just to debate. All of my teammates were in the Top 50 of my class but couldn't debate to save their life. I had a student who was the number two student in a class of nearly 1000 and it was the same story - and she went on to attend the University of Chicago!
I'm at a small rural community college. Fall 2012 was the most challenging semester I've had. The students were impossible to motivate for any length of time. I've had to involve the college's counselors who have made calls to parents, had meetings with them. The parent meetings with admissions counselors is the only thing that's had any noticeable effect. It's terrible. It continues to be a challenge to motivate this group. It can't go on like this.
I upvoted you, but I really have to ask why you can't just fail those students who aren't motivated to study or work for their grades. I assume that the students you are teaching are over the age of 18 and are paying tuition to attend your college. They're adults and should be treated as such.
>I really have to ask why you can't just fail those students
Who says they didn't fail? I didn't get into detail. For one thing, I don't want students to fail. Another thing, it is stressful to have more than half your class fail, even for a self-righteous ass like myself. Here are the grades from my freshman (Fall 2012) course, (IIRC):
A, 1 < Non-traditional student, ex-convict, age 30-ish.
They're probably not paying that tuition now. They will eventually though, and at that time they may not think they got a very good deal for all their loans.
If school loans disappeared tomorrow then the situation GP describes would as well. Of course, that might coincide with the disappearance of that entire community college.
I have a relative who was a Professor at Eastern Michigan and got her PhD in Education. For her dissertation she looked at standardized testing in USA as well as internationally. She was in Finland, doing research at a school there when she noticed a discrepancy in their testing statistics, specifically, the number of students being tested as compared to the total population.
Particularly, she noticed that NONE of the children with special needs were taking the tests. When she inquired as to why, the administrator was pretty blunt: "Well, they are not tested because they are handicapped."
I question why the USA is reacting (maybe even over-reacting) to a situation that is not apples for apples.
EDIT: I realize this is an anecdotal story. But the gist is that education in the USA is an inclusive opportunity for everyone and every student undergoes standardized testing. The same can't be said across the world so how can a true comparison be made?
If you go out and meet gen x/y Finnish people they are in general shockingly more educated, intelligent, and well-informed about reality and events in the world around them than are Americans in the same age group. Most also know at least 2-3 languages and have traveled and met people of many different cultures/languages. They are in general also significantly more physically and mentally healthy.
America really is not doing well as a society at the moment.
I have found that young adults who are in an environment similar to those of the "Gen x/y Finnish" have similar traits. However, the United States does not have the luxury of having nearly the entire country living an environment like that (compared to the relativity small and highly metropolitan European countries).
To draw a comparison in the way you have is disingenuous.
I'm just as suspicious of Scandinavian comparisons as the next American, but this is not a valid objection. We are specifically comparing the privileges and services that each society provides to its citizens, for the citizens' well-being and that of the society as a whole. To say, "we don't have that luxury" (of what? a "metropolitan" environment? our urban kids do worse than our rural kids!) is to admit in damning fashion that our privileges and services aren't as good as those the Finnish receive. I could understand this sort of whining from Bangladesh or the Congo, but coming from the USA it's pathetic.
It's a lot easier for 17 million people to live in (relative) privilege than it is for 300+ million. Scale matters when dealing with tangible requirements.
I'm not sure what "scale" is supposed to indicate in this context; if you rank nations by population density then Singapore is at one end and Finland is at the other, and they both have better results than the USA. In 2011 Finnish per capita GDP was less than 80% of ours. I don't doubt they'll pass us eventually (Singapore already has), and our woeful system of elementary and secondary education is a principal reason why.
That's like saying the elites in [insert third world country] who go to western-style universities are quite similar to their western counterparts, and therefore it's disingenuous to talk about the conditions most in that country live in.
There are no demographically homogeneous parts of America, perhaps the ghetto may qualify, but thats not your point.
2.
Even in the most elite school, you would be hard pressed to find somebody who can speak 3 languages. This is for the predictable reason that the state of Indiana is not bordered by 3 distinct linguistic regions.
3.
The differences between American and Finnish schools have been summarized here : http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... . All American students are subject to the crippling exams and tests mentioned many times over. It is my opinion that the elite groups are ones where their families can make up for what is not taught in school: which often means connections to a culture outside of the US. For example, Finnish. The only hope for American children is to stop being American.
Unfortunately, one actually cannot say there is a contiguous & homogeneous Finland sized segment of Americans that know 2-3 languages, travel extensively and are well educated and informed about reality.
> have traveled and met people of many different cultures/languages.
Traveling to different countries is much easier to do in Europe than the US. There you can take the train for a weekend trip, here you need to save up thousands of dollars and take your kids out of school for at least a week (if not done during the summer).
Also, I think that Americans interact with more cultures and languages daily because it is a land of immigration. From a young age I learned how my nationality's ethnic dance, traditions, and customs. I have also learned about my friend's traditions from India, Germany, England, South Korea, etc... all without leaving my city.
However, I do concede that there should be a stronger push for becoming fluent in foreign languages at a younger age. Unfortunately there is a prevalent attitude in society that it isn't "American" to do so.
> * Americans interact with more cultures and languages daily because it is a land of immigration*
Only in a few places. You'd be amazed at how many people even in a big, multicultural city can't understand my husband speaking at all due to his (extremely light, perfectly grammatically correct) Austrian accent.
Or how many (vast majority) of Americans assume all Latinos are "Mexicans" -- not Americans of long descent (thanks to our whole, you know, manifest destiny), not Ecuadorans, etc., but Mexican. I used to live in southern MD which had a huge immigrant population and despite the "Viva Ecuador" bumper stickers everywhere, everybody thought they were "Mexicans." Like, the flag is right there. But nope.
Anecdotally I've heard people from New Mexico complain that people look at their license plate and assume they are not American.
We are talking about a country where large minorities to majorities do not know whether the Sun goes around the Earth or vice versa, that there has been no significant scientific debate about evolution in a century, or that the evidence for human-caused global warming is overwhelming. A country where many colleges find that the performance of their football team has a bigger impact on their financial bottom line than the quality of their academics.
Outside of various bubbles, this is not a country that actually values knowledge very much. Every attempt to change that is swimming upstream against a strong current.
All know at least 3, because two are compulsory and that does not include English.
Finland has a small problem of degree inflation. Masters degree is highly preferred. Vast majority in traditional research university students are likely to skip over the bachelors. Because of this average graduation age is dangerously close to 30.
Finnish perspective: The only quality you truly need to worry about is the quality of your teacher education.
You can find out the answers to the factual questions you raise (not from anecdotes, but from published, peer-reviewed research reports) by looking up the publications of the two main international educational studies, TIMSS and PISA.
Simply put, you are mistaken if you think that the United States is especially disadvantaged by how the national sample surveys on which those programs are based are constructed.
AFTER EDIT: Following up on the two replies now shown, the PISA FAQ document does not imply that there is any systematic different in national sample characteristics by learning disability, which is the claim farther up in this subthread. Further, people who have read the extensive research literature on learning disability identification in varying countries will be well aware that the United States is particularly generous in identifying students as having "special needs" as compared to other countries, so a general student sample from other countries would be more, not less, likely than a United States sample to include unidentified students who have personal special learning needs.
Okay, where in those studies do they mention which students were sampled? I cant find anything. I highly doubt Hong Kong, Singapore and China include children with disabilities in their tests.
Another anecdotal story would be in my classroom in 1980-90s Canada, where not all the students wrote those international testing exams, and of those that did, only a select few had their tests submitted by the school for grading. This was confirmed to the school's PTA (Parent Teacher Association) after concerns were raised about taking time from teaching for an exam that was not felt to help the students' learning.
Having discussed the issue with a senior education ministry official in Singapore, they pre-select which schools and students write the exam. Even if all students in those schools write the exam, not all exam scores are submitted. She did a study in China recently (not yet published), and there only elite urban schools are tested, primarily in Shanghai and Beijing, with a similar selection process.
I would much prefer my children to be taught in a middle-ranked Canadian school, than any I have so-far visited in Singapore or China, no matter at what level the students supposedly score on international tests.
> EDIT: I realize this is an anecdotal story. But the gist is that education in the USA is an inclusive opportunity for everyone and every student undergoes standardized testing.
Unfortunately this is just not true. Foreign language and special needs students suffer the most under a standardized testing regime, as do their teachers. The quality of your school has a lot to do with the quality of where you live, which means that significant portions of people get a substandard experience. The author's essay also highlights that the needs of any given community are likely to be overridden by someone who has no idea what a given school or community needs.
You have to test, or you can't know how kids are doing. Maybe the tests need to be changed, but saying testing at all is the problem is wrong. You must test if you want to improve outcomes, otherwise you're just twiddling knobs with no idea how they're affecting the kids.
Have we not learned by now that people can be trained to score well on tests without really understanding the material they are being tested on?
The problem here is that there is no randomized sampling in these tests. Everyone is tested, and so teachers know in advance that their students will be tested and they know what those tests will cover and even how the problems will be stated. Teaching "to the test" is a practically guaranteed outcome when you start telling teachers that their salaries or careers will be linked to student performance on tests.
There is also the matter of failing to recognize that a student with expertise in math has a great advantage on tests in physics, chemistry, and to some extent even literacy tests. One cannot simply blame a science teacher whose students are doing poorly if the students' poor performance is the result of incompetent math education. If students are illiterate, they will probably do poorly on all standardized tests because they will be unable to read the instructions.
Are you saying that they weren't testing before? That the grades I received all throughout school meant nothing, because they weren't controlled by the government?
We had a measure of how kids were doing: The report card.
To me, that's what this gentleman is asking for. A return to previous teaching standards, not teaching to some standard written & defined at a government level by people who don't teach.
"We had a measure of how kids were doing: The report card."
Report cards are as deeply flawed as standardized tests. If I were to tell you that I received a D in middle school algebra and an F in English, would you assume that I found algebra challenging and that I had literacy problems when I was 12? If so, you would be utterly wrong: I was beginning to understand limits and integration was I was in 7th grade, and I was reading at a "post-high-school level" according to my school.
The reason my grades were not even remotely related to my aptitude was simple: grades are not meant to reflect aptitude. Aptitude gets you a D- if you do not turn in your homework, even if you did not bother with homework because you were busy learning more advanced material. I am neither the first nor the last person to have been given grades that did not reflect my understanding or talents in any subject.
Report cards try to give a one-dimensional view of a student's academic performance, and in doing so they favor a particular kind of student. Obedient students who do exactly as they are told and nothing more, who only learn what their teachers expect them to learn, receive the best grades. Second best are those who try really hard to be compliant but who lack the talent or understanding needed to answer every question to their teachers' satisfaction. Last place is reserved for students who either do not care about being educated or those who care but fail to properly follow instructions or fit into the neat view of people that American teachers have.
Our education system is meant to train people to follow directions to the letter, and the switch from report cards to standardized tests has not changed that.
"Obedient students who do exactly as they are told and nothing more, who only learn what their teachers expect them to learn, receive the best grades."
I always completed my homework, and then went on to learning the more advanced things. It was so simple for me that in the majority of cases, completing it took me very little effort or time.
However, I'm sure most of my teachers would laugh if they heard me called obedient. I'm sure they'd have loved to have flunked me if I'd ever given them the smallest opportunity to do so.
It's quite easy to learn what you like, and have the best grades as well. The really annoying thing is running out of homework to do and then getting busted for reading a book quietly instead. (1000 page asimov novel being somewhat more obvious to spot than a page of algebra homework)
(That, and having a 105% in a class and still not being allowed to go back to sleep in your seat at 8AM. Zzzz.)
Oh, I see now. You are advocating we use psychic powers to know that a student didn't turn in his homework because he was off learning more advanced topics. You're right, we should get started on developing nation-wide psychic tests.
No, I am saying that either people need to recognize that grades are not a reliable indicator of ability, understanding, or aptitude, or else teachers need to start assigning grades that are a reliable indicator of such things. Right now, we have grades that are interpreted to mean one thing, but in reality mean something else.
Your comment starts with the assumption that having grades that are based on whether or not homework is turned in is how things should be. My point was that teachers should not be giving bad grades to students who did not do their homework, they should be giving bad grades to students who do not demonstrate an understanding of the subject.
A few years ago This American Life did an excellent episode on what happened in Washington Irvine Elementary School when teachers were given more autonomy and then what happened when it was taken away[1].
I just listened to this episode the other night and the themes presented parallel this discussion nicely. The narrative presented suggests that one of the best things Washington Irving did was to have carefully constructed report cards that measured what specifically was being taught to students. The other thing was removing poorly devised standards.
That being said, at the end of the episode, one of the teachers interviewed, when asked about whether the temporary success of Washington Irving was due to some hard to measure effect of having good teachers at the right place at the right time had this to say:
> It can't just be magic. It can't just be fluky things landing people in the right places, and the chemistry being right. It just can't be that. What's the hope for the rest of the schools? What's the hope for Irving in the future? What's the hope for any school, anywhere?
The apparent tension between a need for measurement by standards and a need for teachers' autonomy was palpable and heartbreaking. It is well worth a listen.
As for a solution, I can't help but wonder why there is such a focus on making and enforcing standards at higher levels of administration. I imagine it gives a feeling of productivity and control. I wonder if it would be more useful if those bodies focused on studying and informing. Of course studies are harder without standards but it might be worth expending the effort, since it would give a more natural view of what is effective in promoting learning.
I am not sure where you went to school, but in the New York City public school system, report card grades followed a formula of roughly the following:
65% exam scores / written essays
25% homework
10% classwork
A 65 was basically a D-, and anything less was an F. In other words, a student who receives perfect scores on all exams or written essays (depending on the subject) could receive a D-, as though they had only the most minimal understanding of the subject matter.
So while the report card is meaningless, it is meaningless for a different reason than you suggest. It is meaningless because it has nothing to do with aptitude or education and everything to do with obedience.
Although you don't mention it, I feel that this post strongly implies that the teachers can't be trusted to exercise professional judgement. What's the point of even requiring teachers to meet standards if you believe that they can't properly evaluate their students?
That's orthogonal to my point. Teacher quality or competence in assessing quality, doesn't have anything to do with whether they assign grades in the ways I've enumerated. I've had absolutely amazing teachers that have graded in those three ways.
Even if they're good judges of quality, it's still a matter of how they determine your grade. Is it good quality relative to what they think your skills are? Is it good quality relative to the rest of the class? Is it good quality relative to what they believe constitutes mastery of the subject? And some teachers curve and some don't.
And I haven't said whether I think teachers should be required to meet standards. I don't even know if it's possible to create good standards.
Like most everything else, it all comes down to execution.
Typically when educators critique "testing" the critique is in two parts:
1. Why is there so much emphasis on raw factual knowledge - which is easily tested - and so little emphasis on analysis and critical thinking (points mentioned in the article).
2. The amount of testing and test preparation conducted in schools has now reached a point where it is materially effecting the amount of actual teaching that is being done.
If a school or district fails a national level test it typically kicks off a spiral of district level tests, practice tests and separate test preparation which ends up putting the kids further behind.
Any teacher worth half their salt will know how well the kids are doing.
It takes literally 30 seconds of looking at a piece of student writing, for example, to have a pretty accurate assessment of their writing ability.
The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers.
If teaching is the problem, why are we testing students?
We don't blame bad code on the users, do we?
The second problem with your statement, is the unanswered question of who is doing the testing, and who is fiddling with the knobs. Not an easy question, but one that can't be ignored.
Well, that should be the job of the principle in charge of the school. One of the big problems is that it is very difficult to fire bad teachers, even if it is obvious they are not performing well. Right now, union rules make it very difficult for a school principle to properly do their job.
This isn't 'automated' accountability. But it is a real answer, not the short-cut that many people are looking for with standardized testing.
There seems to be a common temptation to chalk student performance solely up to teachers. This despite the fact that there are plenty of things that are out of teacher's control that strongly affect how well a student performs. Here in Maryland, there have been a bunch of recent articles about an alarmingly high percentage of students coming to school without getting adequate nutrition outside of school hours. This has a huge effect on concentration acquisition of new material. In general, socioeconomic and cultural differences between communities have very strong effects on schools; teaching in a school district with highly involved parents gives a huge boost to test scores vs. districts with largely uninvolved parents. Same for rich vs. poor districts, rural vs. suburban districts, etc.
Also, what makes you think school administrators have some answers that teachers don't when it comes to how to do the job, or have any idea, really, how to fairly and correctly evaluate teacher performance. Similarly, why do the same people who routinely call for teachers to be fired for poor performing classrooms never seem to want to hold administrators and school boards to account for their poor performance? Why do state and local governments who cut education funding year after year get a pass?
I think it's a comforting world view to think that if we could just bust the teacher's unions and start firing people, we'd get real results. But it ignores the fact that the system is broken in may more ways—and in many worse ways—than just the teachers.
Are you assuming I'm chalking student performance solely up to teachers?
Are you saying that a teacher's supervisor (the principle) shouldn't be in charge of evaluating their performance?
Are you assuming that I think administrators and school boards shouldn't be held accountable as well?
Are you assuming that I'm saying firing people will fix the system?
If we can't overcome a problem as simple as firing bad teachers, how can we address so many of the other issues that face the school system? Does the fact that other problems exist mean we should ignore this problem?
Well, in your parent comment you say "The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers." So, that does seem to be what you were saying.
Of course a teacher's supervisor should be in charge of evaluating them. But they must be competent to do so and they should do so through evaluation of individual lesson plans and classroom observation, not the performance of the teacher's students on a standardized test. That's not a straw man by the way, there are a lot of people in this debate who think that's an acceptable metric for making decisions on compensation and hiring and firing [1]. Whether you are one of them, I have no idea. But the argument you make above is one I have encountered many times, and typically its adherents are quite myopic about the culpability of everyone else in the system.
Of course there should be a way to evaluate teachers and hold them accountable. And there should be a way fire them if it's called for. But it has to be equitable. And it shouldn't hold teachers hostage to factors they don't control. But even granting you that, I haven't seen any evidence that this is going to lead to much an improvement in the educational system. There are much bigger problems here than "bad teachers".
If you randomly assign students to teachers (which is already more or less the case) and each teacher has a large enough sample size of students (which is already more or less the case), aggregating the performance of all of a teacher's students will say more about the teacher than about these confounding variables, since all the other factors would be shared between all teachers at the school.
Of course there are other problems to be solved. But the fact that there are no effective controls whatsoever on teacher performance, and that teaching is not a highly selective profession, is still a problem.
I address this further down thread, but in a nutshell: there are effective, fair ways of evaluating teacher performance [1]. And I'm all for them. Standardized test performance is not on of those ways. Furthermore, in a lot of the schemes currently being put into place, teachers are not evaluated by test scores at the school level, but at the district or state level. Teacher evaluation is necessary, but it's not easy. Trying to shortcut things by asking standardized test score to do more than they are capable of (which is not much) is exactly the kind of thing that drives good people out of teaching.
That sounds fine for intra-school comparisons, but as far as I know, the teacher comparisons are inter-school, which is a whole lot less random in student assignments.
You say test but I think you mean measure. You can't improve unless you have a way to track improvement.
There are many ways to measure though and tests are just one of them. They also happen to be the easiest and most understood, which is why they get used in schools and by use officials to track and rate how well a school is doing.
I agree we need to test but I think the problem is what we do with the test scores. It should be a natural goal for a school to raise it's test scores as time goes on. Learning the correct way to do things and improve.
The main issue I see is how funding is provided to schools based on the scores. It makes everyone focus solely on the scores because each administer is trying to get money to run the school which is based on how they test. Provides the wrong kind of message. We should be passively looking at these scores and sending additional support to schools that are low not basing how much money the school gets based on them.
"It should be a natural goal for a school to raise it's test scores as time goes on."
With many of these tests, especially good schools are hitting the ceiling of how well it's possible to do. If you're scoring a 99% every year, how do you improve?
The problem isn't testing, its tying funding to the result of these tests. It is this fact that has caused serious turmoil in this country's educational system. It must be stopped.
I am a high school student who cares about learning. I value the content of my subjects in school. But I am actively discouraged from learning at school.
For example, I have a chemistry teacher whose sole goal is to get us to pass the test. I'll ask something like, "So this ratio applies under a set, standard pressure and temperature?" And she'll reply, "What!? This has nothing to do with pressure or temperature, just multiply this number by this number...."
Other times, I'll ask a question and she'll say, "You don't need to know that for the test." She actively discourages inquiry into the "why" behind the material and instead prefers to teach robots.
I love learning, but I can't stand some classes in school. My learning is literally being shut-down by teachers.
It's kind of interesting how every teacher I've talked to that's taught for a decade or three agrees that NCLB is awful, yet among the general populace (HN comments), that's considered more evidence that teachers are incompetents.
Possibly the best thing I can say about NCLB is that it's fueling demand for good exclusive secular schools. Which is all well and good if you live near an urban center, but too bad for you if you're growing up an hour away from the nearest magnet school.
Almost all teachers dislike NCLB.
Almost all policemen dislike right-to-record-the-police laws.
Almost all doctors want to limit malpractice.
Almost all taxi companies dislike Uber.
It's as though there's something going on with those groups besides their greater familiarity with the subject. Some kind of... incentive.
Yet you did basically say that the reason teachers hated NCLB was because it would reveal them not doing their job properly, in the same paragraph as you basically saying that police hate recordings because it would reveal them not doing their job properly, or doctors hate malpractice suits because they reveal them not doing their job properly.
Which I guess isn't exactly the same as saying that only bad teachers hate NCLB, but the distinction is minor and irrelevant.
Well, what I actually said was not that "they reveal them not doing their job properly," but rather, "they have incentives."
All of those things are a nuisance and a threat for those groups of people. Even if you're a good policeman whose conduct is objectively awesome, when you see someone recording you, you have to wonder, "Will this guy catch me on camera screwing up, even though the last hundred times I've done everything right? Will the people who view this recording understand that I'm doing everything right if I do? Why doesn't this guy trust me?" And even if you're a good policeman, you know your buddy Bob, well... he doesn't have as exemplary a record as you do, but you think that on balance he's a good guy.
And, I don't know if this is true of the police, but for the teachers at least, they have the unions, their representatives and advocates, spending a LOT of time saying, "Testing is of the devil." They hear it day in and day out, from other teachers, from the unions, from a lot of politicians.
Those things matter. They matter a lot. If they didn't matter, teachers wouldn't be human.
And the fact is, there are downsides to all of those safeguards. They aren't perfect. Some of them may need to be reformed. Some may need to be reformed a lot.
But that's all beside the point, which is that teachers have a huge incentive to hate NCLB outside of its merits or faults as a program.
> it's fueling demand for good exclusive secular schools
I went to programs for the "highly" gifted as part of LAUSD (the largest school district in the US), half of it under NCLB. I watched my high school's program's decline firsthand in the first years of NCLB, as teachers went from actually teaching and not restricting us to what we have to learn, to teaching to tests instead. It was pretty much gutted in the last several years due to lack of teachers and funding - and that was despite the ongoing donations made by parents and alumni to supplement the program (such as buying new textbooks and specialized equipment).
Keep in mind this was a program of maybe 350 students in a 4000+ student high poverty school.. at most a 10% that scored so highly on tests that we skewed the performance numbers for the entire school. National Merit Scholars and SAT 1600-ers (perfect score then) with full AP and beyond AP courseloads destined for Ivies mingled with some of the most impoverished students and low performers in the entire district for lunch.
The biggest alternative that I recall was a private school many of my friends ended up going to - Harvard Westlake, with a then $25k/year tuition now I think more like $35k/year. Admission to both my public program and that private school was very competitive, with waitlists and whatnot. I think there still are waitlists for my old program, even though it's a shadow of what it used to be. But really, it's just one among the many if not most gifted/magnet programs in LAUSD in the same situation.
Where is this incredible demand for good schools now? Where is the support to maintain existing good schools? Most importantly, where is all of this for the average American student instead of the few with resources that you can't even begin to imagine (read: ones that can afford $35k/year tuition and private tutors)? All I'm seeing now is a sea of mediocrity outside of a handful of teachers, programs, and schools that have prospered so far, and it's generally the community that's helping them more than the state or federal government. There is rarely a benefit to outperforming beyond measure when everyone is focused on the people that can't even meet minimums. :(
I see this guest blog post was kindly submitted here today after making the rounds of my Facebook friends yesterday. What I have to say about this is that ill prepared college freshmen are a well known phenomenon in the United States. But I think the author of the guest blog post submitted here has not correctly identified the underlying cause of that problem.
I have read some of the curriculum standards adopted in various states over the last decade and have examined the item content of some of the No Child Left Behind Act state tests implemented during the same period. The curricula were often quite lousy, and the tests rather poorly constructed. But neither so constrained teachers that we can conclude that they made things WORSE for teachers than before the Act and the associated tests. Teachers are in the classroom to help pupils and students learn something. Defining part of what that something is by no means prevents teachers from teaching more. A teacher who self-educates about good quality research on human learning
can help learners learn better even if the surrounding pattern of school regulation is less than ideal.
I am a teacher of prealgebra-level mathematics in private practice. (In earlier years I was a classroom teacher of English as a second language or of Chinese as a second language.) My elementary-age pupils come to me for lessons after attending their regular school lessons each week. All my clients have to pay me (my nonprofit program also offers financial aid, up to a full fee waiver, for families with financial need) after already paying their taxes for my state's friendly public schools, and some of my clients come to my program after paying out of pocket for a privately operated classroom school or as a supplement to family homeschooling. I don't give my pupils letter grades, and tests I offer to the pupils are from national voluntary participation mathematics contests, which they take (or not) as one of several reality checks on how they are learning the course material. Parents from a wide variety of school districts have told me that their children do much better on various kinds of school tests after taking my course, even though my course is explicitly NOT test-prep, and even though I don't align my curriculum to the curriculum presupposed by any testing program.
Children who learn how to use their brains to think
can handle novel problems and are not afraid of tests. Children who are overprotected in school from learning challenges outside the standard curriculum often get scared and shut down when tested, even when tested on the curriculum content they have studied over and over. I'm all about helping young learners be unafraid to take on challenges. If a teacher is not doing that, what is the teacher doing?
It's probably worth noting for other HN participants that the blog from which this guest post was submitted has had guest posts before that many Hacker News readers caught omitting many of the key facts of the described situation,
AFTER EDIT: btilly kindly asks, in the first reply to this comment, what class size I teach. The class size I teach is lower than the typical class size at the schools of regular enrollment of the pupils I teach, and more to btilly's point, my total enrollment of students at a given time is less than the typical student load of a full-time teacher in the local public schools. That's a fair contrast between my situation and theirs. On the other hand, for the first several years of my program I was writing the whole curriculum from the ground up (as no suitable textbooks were avaiable from United States publishers) and sometimes gathering materials from three different countries just to put a lesson plan together.
More to the point of teaching large classes, it has been done and done well in many parts of the world. When my wife was growing up in Taiwan, the typical elementary school class size was sixty (60) pupils. An unusually small class would have only fifty (50) pupils enrolled. The differences in school staffing practices and teacher training to make that possible are described in book-length works
but boil down to letting classes be extra large, so that teachers can be scheduled to have joint prep time together each day in which new teachers learn from master teachers and plan lessons together. My teaching would be better if my program were big enough that I had a colleague to confer with each week, or especially each day.
You're extending your experience to that of a public school teacher, and that's simply not a fair comparison. I'll try to touch all of the ways in which your situation is different and why this has a bearing on the subject at hand:
-You have fewer students. This is a _much_ bigger deal than you make it out to be, especially at higher grade levels. When you have to give feedback to close to 200 students (over 200 it not unheard of), you can't make it as meaningful as you'd like. There are things you can do with a couple dozen students that simply does not scale.
-You are dealing with an easier subset of children. If their parents want them to have extra lessons, and are both willing and able to pay for it (or even fill out scholarship forms), then you're not dealing with any of the difficult kids. Parents who don't care about school beget kids who don't care, and they are orders of magnitude more difficult to work with.
-Its clear that you are not aware of how much material these standardized tests expect you to cover in a course. I'm sure it varies by state, but this is from the perspective of VA testing, which is where I grew up and where I know many teachers. For just about any tested middle or high school class, they have the material mapped to within 3 or 4 days of the length of the school year. A couple of unexpected days off and they have to start cutting material that the test expects to be covered. There's absolutely no time to do the things you're talking about unless you want to blow off the tests - and then you're out of a job.
Standardized testing, _in its current form_, is an unmitigated disaster for students' educations. If you can say otherwise having actually faced the system you are so happy with (or even talked to a few who have), then we have a conversation.
The question is - would it be worse without testing or better? As the poster above notes from his own experience, some "math teachers", for example, do everything but actually teaching math. And from my own experience, being educated outside of the US, teachers vary dramatically in quality, with bad ones much more frequent than good ones and the majority being below average, and bad teacher usually means next to no education on the topic (I still have knowledge gaps in subjects where I had bad teachers, which I regret a lot but don't have enough time/mental agility to fill properly). The tests give you some kind of standardized quality, which is akin to McDonalds - nobody would call it a gourmet food. But the question would be - is the alternative a Michelin-starred restaurant or no food at all?
> The tests give you some kind of standardized quality
No, they don't. It remains nearly impossible to fire a teacher thanks to unions.
Note that I'm not arguing against standardized testing. But in its current form, it leads to kids being taught to memorize and how to take a multiple choice test (and nothing else, thanks to the breadth of the tests), rather than any useful skills. I do, in fact, believe that we'd be better off with no tests than with what we currently have.
Its also worth noting that the only way the tests are used in most states is to punish at a school level. Schools who underperform, inevitably those in poor neighborhoods, lose funding and are occasionally shut down. This actually makes the problem worse - it leads to fewer, less funded schools in exactly the areas that need them most.
Finally, the person who's experience you're drawing from was speaking about elementary schools. Please take my words only in reference to middle and high schools - I don't want to pretend to have knowledge about the situation in elementary schools.
The fact that it is impossible to fire bad teachers does not really prove tests do not produce some positive effects on these teachers, forcing them to at least teach something to the test, instead of teaching nothing at all. Again, you seem to be comparing "how teachers would teach if they had no tests and were excellent teachers" to "how teachers have to teach with tests". However, the sad reality is the excellent teachers are rare, and without tests nothing prevents a teacher from spending a year of math class discussing how they students feel when they look at numbers and why math is inherently sexist, while teaching no actual math at all.
It is long known that throwing money at a problem is not solving the problem of poor performance of schools. Poorly performing schools spend the same money per pupil as best private schools and still remain poorly performing. The solution, if it exists, appears to be more complex than pouring more money into it. Maybe solving the problem with the unions is a part of it.
>>>> I do, in fact, believe that we'd be better off with no tests than with what we currently have.
Could you explain why? I.e. if we now abolished all testing, how the situation would improve in average case?
> without tests nothing prevents a teacher from spending a year of math class discussing how they students feel when they look at numbers and why math is inherently sexist
Tests with no consequences don't prevent a teacher from doing so, either. My experience (and that of teachers I know) is that bad teachers don't particularly care how the tests turn out, since there aren't direct consequences, while good teachers do care and adjust accordingly. This comes about because bad teaching correlates (unsurprisingly) with not caring how the school as a whole looks compared to other schools.
> Could you explain why?
If we abolished tests, bad teachers would continue doing what they do now and what they did before testing, while good teachers would stop spending all their time teaching how to memorize facts and take multiple choice tests, and leave time for teaching how to think.
I would like to point out that 200 students per class in a public high school does not appear to be a worldwide phenomenon. High school classes in Europe appear to be much smaller.
Sorry to not be specific. This article is about the US, as is my comment.
I also was talking about 200 students per teacher, not per class, which comes about because middle and high school teachers generally teach 5-7 classes, of 20-35 (although sometime) students.
What you can reasonably do with 20 you can't with a class of 160. When children learn to think, they are all going to think differently. That makes it hard to interact with them in a group setting and still encourage thought. Impossible? I won't say that. But I would call it well beyond my abilities in a classroom setting.
It takes him 13 hours to give each student's paper 5 minutes of attention. That is what is passing for "individual interaction". This may be very far from being the whole problem, but it definitely is a problem.
This is probably the greatest issue: teachers are expected to deal with their students in an individual, personalized basis... But they are constrained on all sides by the syllabus, the final exams and the sheer amount of paperwork.
Edit: also, the fact that the tests do not include relevant 'reasoning' questions makes them worthless.
I disagree. We teachers have plenty of time to properly assess student work. But we also have to give accurate, consistent and fair grades and usually written feedback as well, and that's what usually takes forever.
An hour a day with 30 kids is enough time to meaningfully interact with each student if you're not wasting the whole class period lecturing.
Non-meaningful interaction might be saying hello, asking if the student is present, asking the student "Where is the homework assignment you were supposed to turn in?"
Meaningful interaction is checking in with the student regarding their understanding of the course material. Providing clarification if the kid is confused on some point. Allowing opportunities for the student to ask questions. That sort of thing.
The curricula were often quite lousy, and the tests rather poorly constructed. But neither so constrained teachers that we can conclude that they made things WORSE for teachers than before the Act and the associated tests.
I find this statement quite extraordinary. Moreover, despite the length of your post, I don't see where you reconcile the implication that there's nothing to worry about here. The various measures you're talking about might indeed ameliorate some problems. Most of these aren't available to individual teachers but to parents and administrators. Moreover, even these were available to individual teachers, even if the only thing stopping them was their venality (two statements I don't believe are true), even then, the teachers on average simply haven't done and the consequence is that a lot of classroom time has been devoted to mere test preparation. And so given that this program began a decade ago, there have been results.
Ill prepared college freshmen are a well known phenomenon in the United States.
Yes, you'd assume college teachers would consistently remark on this if the quality of graduating seniors were consistently declining. But you're this as if things couldn't get worse and I kind of think we should be worried about them getting worse.
Yes, the author here is blind to the fact that they are getting worse, and assuming its part of the normal trend.
Perhaps if the original article said that even the best students are now coming in with great test taking skills but little practical knowledge, then maybe it would be clearer.
Anyway, this is Hi from India, where we have been choking on the fruits of this system.
If you wanted to divorce understanding from proficiency, there is no better way than what you'll have implemented.
What's more terrifying is that this system mutates and evolves, and as older teachers drop out of the system you are left with a new crop who know of no other way to teach.
Finally you'll start getting guide books and coaching classes, massive money spinners,where students are trained on potential test questions relentlessly, so that they can get perfect scores.
A few years down the line some bright spark will argue that "we need to improve the system, our kids are getting through without knowing the rules of the grammar"
Cue fractional mark losses for bad grammar.
This kind of machinery is blind to its faults, and since it produces numbers and measurables, its hard to argue with.
But from experience with tests and human behavior, people always find the shortest path to getting stuff done. Be it video games, taxes or testing.
This is a sacrifice of your best for the mediocre.
The mediocrity of a lot of third world education comes from an education system fixed on memorization - Richard Feynman had a comment about Brazilian education in one of this books (though things might have gotten better there for all I know). The thought that the US is creating a third world system out-of its previous first world education system is mind-boggling.
I have to say that I think defining set curriculum and test goals for students DOES constrain good teachers. They are attempting to prepare their students to pass a test. So what do they do, they focus on that test and attempt to prepare them to pass with a certain disregard for what actually should be taught.
I think that this limits the scope and types of tests that teachers can give their students to really prepare them for these tests.
I think that we need to create a better metric for testing teachers and students, because our metrics are broken. I (as a student) see the education that is given post NCLB as detrimental to the future of our nation. It has taken a few steps back in the fact that we no longer allow extraordinary teachers to set the pace, but we allow the state to regulate what pace we need.
EDIT: It doesn't constrain teachers, but it does pressure teachers to teach to the test rather than teaching for college and education in general.
Do you find that the fact you are paid by parents for your work has any effect on the motivation or performance of your students? How about your own motivation or performance? What percentage of public school math teachers do you reckon would have the success that you have had if they tried to what you do?
Assuming they're being paid "enough", paying teachers more does almost nothing to improve motivation or performance. There are quite a few studies about this, and my own experience bears that out.
Having students that are out of the normal context does make a difference, though. Especially given that there is high parental expectation for the student to make an effort. That's really a big deal, and parental support like that is very inconsistent in public schools.
Paying people that are currently teachers more does not improve their performance.
But, the pool of people willing to take up the profession of teaching increases if the pay is higher.
Where I taught, teachers with only a bachelors degree maxed out at $60,000 a year after 15 years of teaching (you could get that up to $80,000 if you got a doctorate). I was earning less than half of that. After teaching for a year, I quit to take an entry level programming job and was suddenly making more than I would have ever made as a teacher and my job was physically and emotionally much easier.
I probably wasn't going to be a great teacher. But how many great teachers exist but can't/won't take a job that pays so little?
Right now schools hire the best candidate willing to work for so little. I'd like to see them start filling up with the best candidates.
The fact that teachers aren't motivated more by greater rewards for excellence (money), but are strongly motivated by having a job with excellent security even for mediocre performers, should not be something that comforts us.
The answer about teacher motivation/performance is interesting, not least because it isn't answering the question that was asked. (Unless you do private work like tokenadult I suppose you don't have a basis from which to answer that question.) Do you find that public school teachers are paid enough? If they are paid enough in general, are there particular groups that aren't? Are there other particular groups that are paid significantly more than enough?
The answer concerning students makes perfect sense, and is what I would have expected. I want to blame the parents, but then I remember where they went to school.
I actually ignored your question because it seemed obvious (to me at least) that it would have virtually no effect. I cannot imagine a situation in which the motivation of the student would be in any way affected by the fact that the parent was paying the teacher. EXCEPT, as I mentioned, where that fact intersects with the parents having high expectations that the teaching is of value.
In my experience, public school teachers are paid "enough".
I worked out some numbers to that effect a few years ago [1]
However, that doesn't help bring qualified people into the discipline. I wrote about that, too. [2]
>>>> Do you find that the fact you are paid by parents for your work has any effect on... your own motivation or performance?
>>> ...paying teachers more does almost nothing to improve motivation or performance.
>> The answer about teacher motivation/performance is interesting, not least because it isn't answering the question that was asked.
> I actually ignored your question because it seemed obvious (to me at least) that it would have virtually no effect. I cannot imagine a situation in which the motivation of the student would be in any way affected by the fact that the parent was paying the teacher.
Do you teach reading comprehension? I would have hoped that it was clear: I was asking about the effect that being paid directly by the customer has on the performance and motivation of the teacher. Much like it affects the performance of waitresses, auto mechanics, architects, dentists, store clerks, pro athletes, and in fact most occupations in a market economy. If we're not providing a service that customers prefer to competing services, we're out of a job. tokenadult is a teacher who might have some experience of this phenomenon, so I asked him about it.
I really hope you're trolling me here, but I suspect instead a sort of epistemic blindness.
Not trolling. Also, I note that you cleverly elided over the question to which I was referring.
You (to tokenadult): "Do you find that the fact you are paid by parents for your work has any effect on the motivation or performance of your students?"
Me (to myself): Is this a real question? Under what circumstances could that possibly be true? I guess ONLY in the sense that parents who are paying someone have higher expectations for their students, and those higher expectations correlate with higher student achievement.
I have also been paid as a tutor, though I have considerably less experience as a paid tutor than tokenadult has. As far as I can tell, he does not have experience as a public school teacher in America, so I'm not sure I'm less qualified to answer the question than he is.
I am paid for my work, albeit at one level of indirection. But believe me, public school teachers constantly talk about parents "paying for their kids to go to school here" because they pay the state taxes that pay my salary. In fact, some parents intentionally move into a district with higher property taxes (like mine) so that their students can go to a better school.
So in my opinion, my being paid by parents isn't different from tokenadult's in any meaningful way, so I felt qualified to answer your questions with the data I am aware of.
Reading this again I can see that I was ambiguous. Instead of, "How about your own motivation or performance?" I should have written "How about on your own motivation or performance?" I refuse to repeat the entire "Do you find..." clause of the immediately preceding sentence, however.
If you feel that your position is in no way different from tokenadult's, how many students have left your class for another class or another school because parents felt your teaching was in some way inadequate?
I wouldn't say my position "is in no way different", though I can see how making my statement more dogmatic is convenient for you.
"How many students have left your class for another class or another school because parents felt your teaching was in some way inadequate?"
Almost none, but it's because I'm the "good" teacher. I do however have a couple of students per year that transfer from other high schools in my district to my school in order to have me as their computer science teacher instead of one of the other five CS teachers in our district.
I very occasionally lose a kid (one every few years) for my video game programming course because there's another CS teacher in my district that's clearly better at teaching that course than I am.
Were you not aware that students can sometimes transfer within high schools in a school district?
Edit: Oh! Also I teach computer science full time. The teachers at the other high schools have fewer students in their programs than I do (even though our schools have approximately the same number of students overall), so they have to pick up extra courses to fill out their schedules (like babysitting the in-school suspension kids) whereas I get to only teach CS.
I'm not very impressed either by the article's arguments. He seems to be promoting the idea that these tests cause teachers to teach more of what is tested. Things that aren't tested get taught less, and students need to know those things, too.
How is it that most K-12 industry spokespeople think this is a persuasive argument for eliminating testing? Why is it that only "outsiders" think this might be a better argument for expanding the testing? ("Outsiders" are what unionized or gov't organizations, which don't have a concept of customer, call customers.)
At our local (Silicon Valley) public elementary school, I got to see firsthand how the system worked with standardized testing. (I remember it prior to NCLB, because I come from a family of teachers.) Most elementary teachers are native English-speaking women who like kids, have better English skills than kids, mostly by virtue of several extra decades of daily use rather than formal study, did not like math very much when they were in school and had hoped to avoid "mathy" jobs, and for all these reasons plus decent money, security, and some prestige, had chosen elementary ed.
Most teachers at this level are very free regarding what and how they teach. Their are limits, of course, but the big one these days is the mandated standardized tests. How they tend to deal with this is fascinating and disturbing.
Most teachers (that I've seen in our school) teach very little math for most of the year. We had a wonderful exception last year, but some teachers will go days without teaching any math at all. They prefer reading stories, drawing pictures, talking about American Indians and Martin Luther King, drawing pictures, writing stories using "invented spelling" (you're literally not allowed to ask how to spell a word, because it's about creativity, not "correctness"), and illustrating stories with pictures.
Math homework might be to cut pictures out of magazines showing people using numbers. This is to "promote engagement" and "encourage critical thinking." In an era when everyone has a calculator in his pocket, math is about concepts, not correctness, we're told by people who never liked math and whose government-mandated teaching credential requires exactly zero classes on math concepts.
But then the standardized test day approaches and there is a period of two weeks or so when kids actually have to learn to get correct answers or the teacher's job may be in jeopardy. So, what do they do? Cut up even more magazines faster? Think even more critically?
No, they drop their progressive theory like yesterday's newspaper and revert to actual direct instruction. For nearly an hour a day (depending on age), they stop dividing into groups to "engage in mathematical discourse" and "discover" math for themselves and are taught how to solve math problems correctly---at least those math problems likely to show up on the test. Apparently, when their job depends on their students' ability to actually do math instead of discuss it, their whole approach to teaching changes.
But only until the test passes. Then, whew!, thank goodness that awful test is over and we can stop obsessing over measurable proficiency and get back to cutting pictures out of magazines, inventing spellings, drawing pictures, and talking about critical thinking.
The article's implication is that, if only we could stop objectively measuring student proficiency, teachers would increase student proficiency. That's not how it works in businesses that have to please customers or die. That's not what I see in school, comparing how and what they teach before, during, and after standardized test season.
So, what is his proof? That students today know less than they used to know? I say that's more likely due to being taught less than being evaluated more. But he says that they know less of what isn't tested, because the teachers have to work so hard to prepare students for the things that are tested. I say that if testing causes them to take proficiency in things that are tested that much more seriously, we should take advantage of it to evolve better tests covering even more things.
There's a common problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law) with proxy measurements, and issues with testing highlight this problem. However your description of what the math education looks like I think this is a lesser evil, at least until we find better measurable proxy for actual education that tests.
I assume the NCLB standardized tests cover things which are widely considered to be core reading and math skills. PBS has a number of sample questions here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/education/no_ch.... The topics seem pretty core to me. If teachers broadly find themselves having to devote significant additional time to these subjects in order to pass the tests, what does that say about pre-NCLB curricula? Learning to take a test is a skill which would not necessarily be taught in the pre-NCLB world, but how much time does that really take? Are there any real studies of this? It seems to me that a child with a decent grasp of the subjects appearing on that test would not require an inordinate amount of instruction in test taking.
Standardized tests are not new. I took them in the 70s and early 80s: a few days of sitting in home room, filling out circles with a number two pencil. Big deal: they had no affect on my actual grade. What they were was a benchmark for the school.
As I understand it, what _is_ new is the pressure on the schools to produce kids who can pass the test.
Since there is now a great deal on the line for the district ( funding ), a lot more time is devoted to producing students who can pass the tests. This is only natural, and was easily seen as a consequence of no child left behind.
My experience in the late 80s and early 90s matches your own, except I got the impression that poor teachers did teach to the test extensively. I didn't get that impression from good teachers; they just seemed like good teachers. Looking back, I hypothesize that merely competent school administrators used standardized tests to identify problems, while smart administrators identified problems with the tests but then didn't actually cite the tests when dealing with those problems. Because after you've put a few losers on performance plans and blamed their test results when they asked why, the other losers in your school might catch on. (This seems to imply that administrators at schools I attended were merely competent, which implication I cannot contradict.)
If such a dynamic did exist, one could predict it would take hold on a national level with the advent of NCLB. Then one would expect that NCLB had the effect primarily of making standardized tests less accurate...
We have very little say in what is happening to public education.
Sheer raging nonsense. You're the front line. You're delivering the education. The Nuremberg Defense doesn't work.
If a student is incapable of and unready for the next course, you do him a moral wrong promoting him thereto. Passing the incompetent condemns that student to being "left behind", drifting thru an "education" leaving him completely left behind in the real world. If enough teachers held the line, policy would change.
He can't give individual attention to 160 students. If only every student had a personal mentor/advocate who could coach them to understand what to focus on in high school and what to let slide, someone who could argue with them at the dinner table until they developed a better ability to structure their thoughts, someone who could give then better material on writing than their school's text books or test preparatory guides. If only some parents could step up and help this poor teacher out a bit...
My wife runs a teen drop-in center. Believe me, sometimes the teacher (and any other decent adults in the kid's life) is the only way that kid is going to get any intellectual stimulation whatsoever. Sometimes the parents are useless.
"I apologize because they made me do a lousy job." Well, why didn't you leave earlier, to go somewhere and do a better job? Because you would have made less money and gotten less retirement.
Now the OP sounds like someone who _deserves_ more money. But this is impossible in the current education regime, the teachers' unions are adamantly opposed to this sort of thing. And not entirely without reason, public schools are political institutions with political accountability. It's only a matter of time before discretion over compensation is used not for institutional purposes but political ones. Because whether a public school does well or poorly, it will continue to have students and budget to pay salaries.
Salaries are currently politically controlled, by unions, to subsidize a large-proportion of subpar workers. Currently the alternative is administrative political control, where principals and superintendents will vary salaries for who knows what purpose.
No Child Left Behind was an effort to improve obviously sub-optimal results by imposing some kind of "standards", a regulation of the quality provided by these centrally planned institutions. It's no surprise that these regulations proved as brain-dead and counter-productive as any other management by regulation.
But if we remove the standardized testing, we'll be right back at trusting the discretion of _some_ political entity for the management and control of the schools. The miserable track records of these entities is what lead to standardized testing in the first place.
The root problem in the schools' governance the public schools' effective monopoly on education. Schools are accountable to _politicians_, not parents, because they get budget from politicians. Giving parents control of the politicians only changes the politics. Only when parents control where their children go, and the budget with them, will we move towards governance that actually cares what parents think, and thus acquire a focus on educating kids. Because only then can administrations have the necessary discretion to pursue real qualities, within a check on the usage of that discretion for its intended purposes.
Until we fix that, all the complaints about education and its obvious problems will be so much water under the bridge. The schools are lousy because no effective actor has an interest in making them good. Give the parents effective power to hold schools accountable and things will change. And not before.
In the meantime we'll have pious complaints from the politically indoctrinated about how they were forced to do a bad job. No, sir, not so. You chose to do that job, and you chose it for the money. You were free to do better, albeit at a price, and you chose not to. The responsibility for that is yours.
You're going to blame him for not quitting to devote himself to some quixotic, unpaid battle against testing? Of course he's going to finish his years and get his pension. He's not any more obligated to die on a cross than you are.
RE: unions, they have a lot of problems, most of them centered around protecting bad teachers and pensions at the cost of good teachers and young teachers. But the funding problem for teacher salaries is about 80% healthcare-driven, it's not the unions' fault that healthcare has had 2 decades of >10% annual cost inflation (do the math on that).
I could make a Heisenberg joke here, it's hard not to laugh, but I'd rather not make light of the fact that the act of measuring the students' progress is almost certainly having a negative effect on their progress. I wouldn't argue for an open-loop system, I like the idea of assessments. But somehow, despite all the recent effort that's gone in to education reform, it seems to be going wrong.
Having gone both to schools that don't measure their results using standardized measures, and those that do, with almost identical quality of teachers, the schools beholden to teach to tests end up being able to cover a lot less of substance. This is particularly the case when a school has been teaching to a test previously, and now averages about 95% per student on the tests; since their funding relies on improvements of scores, they've got to spend even more time preparing students in order to do better every year.
In 1992, I was living with a bunch of college-aged folks in a big house in Olympia, WA. My best friend at the time was a big square-headed bruiser who pushed me to do too many drugs. (I'm a lightweight, so not much.) He was a great guy, and a loyal friend where it mattered, but it was awkward when it came to talking about his writing. He was proud of his writing because he could correctly form sentences, but didn't seem to manage much beyond that. Apparently, this put him near the head of his writing class at the community college he had attended. Yet his writing lacked any coherence at all in areas like subject-verb agreement, agreement of tense, logical structure, and so on. This was serious writing which he carefully revised, not off-the-cuff like my comments on HN.
He was insightful and intelligent. I always enjoyed talking to him. However, I was disturbed that he was apparently in the top 10% of what his school could produce in terms of writing. I wondered, if this was typical around the country, what did it say about the quality of education in the general public?
I go to a private school in Florida, so I never had to take the FCATs, or any of the No Child Left Behind tests. When I was in elementary school, I took the ERBs, but the tests meant nothing, so nobody really cared about them that much--or at least the students didn't care. It's hard to remember because that was so many years ago, but my friend who were in public school would always talk about the FCATs, and from what I gathered, teachers taught for the FCATs pretty much the entire year, and almost exclusively for the test in the couple of months proceeding the examination. Meanwhile, I had teachers teaching me the subjects, not the tests.
I didn't really have much testing until during middle school, but staring in freshman year I took the PSATs and AP tests. All the PSAT prep we did was vocab in English class, and then in Junior year some brief prep in math. Luckily most of my class sizes were and are small enough that my teachers could give us individual attention if we needed/need it. As a second semester senior, I don't need it anymore. My friends had the FCATs up through 10th grade, after which they changed gears into (P)SAT mode. I'm not sure if their teachers taught for the SATs, or just taught for the class at that point.
I've had teachers that teach for the APs and teachers that teach the class topic, and I'm of the opinion that if a teacher teaches for the class, and not for the test, and does it well, then a byproduct of the class should be good grades on the AP test. I'm also of the opinion that the AP Lit and Lang tests need to be remade, because it is incredibly hard to teach critical reading. Math and science AP tests make sense, because there is a right and wrong, but language is much more subjective.
Testing is important, however. While the SAT isn't perfect, and while I don't think it will ever be perfect, it's a necessary evil. It's a standard--or as close of a standard that we can probably get to, and so we, and colleges, still need it.
Not sure why NCLB is being blamed here. I graduated high school in the late 80s, and in college writing classes had peers that could not write a coherent paragraph on basic subjects. This was more than a decade before NCLB.
We've always had poor students. And we've always had bright students. Perhaps we're measuring more of it now - we have more information, more metrics and more hand-wringing over it. However, I still run in to bright kids and high-school students, and I run in to people (young and old) who are not that bright or can't communicate, and I'm not convinced the numbers have shifted all that much over the past few decades. But the amount of money at stake in various industries has changed.
I went to school in a day when the Iowa tests came around every few years (twice or three times between 1st and 10th grade), and that was it except for P?SAT and ACT. There was no test to teach to. It was not a golden age. It was an age of fads, just as our age is. That they came out of the teachers' colleges rather than federal mandates made them no more helpful. My brother suffered through more of the junk as being just enough younger. My stepmother eventually quit working as a substitute teacher because of her impatience with the continuing professional education courses she had to take.
Weird that washingtonpost includes kber's email address, with a handy mailto: link.
I've recently watched the UK Channel 4 programmes "Educating Essex". They might be interesting to people interested in English education. The official site is (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/educating-essex/4od).
It's interesting that a few pupils can take up so much time. (all that 80:20 stuff), and it's a shame there's no money available for similar high-intensity interventions for the students who work hard.
"...bad writing— no introduction, no conclusion, just hit the points of the rubric and provide the necessary factual support."
In other words, no worthless fluff? School writing where it's /encouraged/ to just get to the point and present your facts in a clear, short, efficient manner? Regardless of the other issues mentioned in the article, I think that at least is one good thing, because that is an absolute rarity in today's educational environment where you tend to fail if you don't express a 10 word idea in 100 of them.
The essay structure is mostly useless in the real world, but it can help inexperienced writers get started. It's a teaching aid, like simplifying hundreds of pointless equations to get better at simplifying equations.
Interesting. Haven't seen these issues at my kids' school. In fact, I just saw a grade yesterday on a report that was specifically broken down with points for grammar and structure. My boy told me earlier in the quarter a project that was partly graded on critical thinking and argument skills (regardless of the "answers" arrived at).
This isn't for me to say that their school must be better, but just to say that it's obviously not as impossible as this plea would have one think to teach the way that teachers think is right.
There are certainly issues with this article. As a student, who's been in this setting for the past dozen years, I've got some thoughts on the matter:
1. If you want to measure how much is taught, make sure you're measuring how much is taught.
The emphasis on AP scores and ERBs makes for a teaching environment where you're taught not the actual things you need to know, but the particular phrasings that the College Board agrees get you full credit. I'm taking AP Stat, and all of my classmates can parrot off dozens of phrases regarding interpreting distributions, but most of them don't understand a word of it. From there...
2. You need to teach tools that can be used to solve problems, not recipes to solve specific kinds of problems. Otherwise, you're not learning.
3. You absolutely must reward creativity and unorthodox questions. Grading based on adherance to a specific methodology rather than having a reasonable answer (EG, you're being told that atoms are the smallest elements of matter, and you say that Quarks are smaller? You get points off. You ask about that, and are told not to question the Word of Teacher? That's what I'm talking about), and similarly, punishment for students who are too curious are due for the course
4. You need teachers who know what they're talking about. In sixth grade, a science teacher insisted that yes, Dinosaurs did eat humans. This is in a high-income neighborhood, in a solidly blue state. When I called her on it, and she looked it up and found that no, there is a gap of hundreds of millions of years, she closed the lesson by referencing young-earth creationist ideas about layers of soil in Texas.
5. You need to destroy the hierarchy of teachers being superior to students. Hierarchy is good for producing mass laborers who won't question authority, and dropouts. It's not good for helping people learn, or fostering curiosity. Worried about your safety without absolute power? Well, I'd be more worried about your safety when you're playing the role of prison guard. It seems incredible, but at, say, Quaker schools, students call teachers by their first name, they're very friendly with eachother, and the result is vibrant intellectual discourse, not knifings.
6. So you're an administrator/the President/ETC, and you want to measure if students understand material? Ask them. They'll be able to tell you a lot more than sitting in on a class and gauging metrics or Value Added Teaching ever will.
Above all, what amazes me most is that while following this debate for years, not once has anyone ever asked students what they think. If you haven't been a student in one of these schools within the last ten years, your opinions on what the real problems in education aren't valid.
I have now read quite a few articles and comments on HN with teachers attacking either testing or MOOCs (some links below). There comments share a strange incoherence, tending to ramble on about irrelevant but emotionally charged issues (e.g. the rant on disrespect for teachers here) while ignoring pertinent facts (e.g. any evidence pre-NCLB students were better prepared than today's students). There is also a strange paranoia as if there is some grand conspiracy to "damage" education and harm students when as best I can tell the targets of this wrath (e.g. Bill Gates) are tying to help solve what they see as an extremely critical problem.
Is this really representative of the "thinking" of our teachers generally?
The federal government has no business in education. There is no feasible, informative way for a single organization to comprehensively evaluate the education of every K-12 student in America.
Education should between a student, his parents, teachers, and local administrators. Involving an army of faceless bureaucrats cannot possibly make anything better.
I graduated high school in a rural, fundamentalist town. No doubt if this were to happen, I would have had to listen to why I should accept Jesus Christ into my heart. No thanks. Sex Ed is already left to the States and look how that's working. The State's with the highest teen pregnancy rate all teach abstinence only education.
"I graduated high school in a rural, fundamentalist town."
Me too. Also lots of abstinence only education encouraging you to wait until marriage. What were gay people like me supposed to do? Oh, right. Not exist. Got it.
I feel really bad for kids these days. It's hard to know what to do to help. If there are any bright, motivated, self-taught young people in your life, please take the time to tutor them, to correct their amateur mistakes before they become deadly habits, and to generally be a resource that is there for them.
There are only so many natural born hackers in this world, and it's up to us to be there for the next generation of kids who are trying like hell to succeed in spite of the current state of public education.
Another thing we can do to help is to contribute to projects like the khan academy and other free online learning tools. There are tons of really smart kids out there who want to learn, but who just can't afford to go to private schools because their parents are not rich enough.
It's up to those of us with the knowledge and the passion to make sure these types of resources are available. In today's economy this is becoming more and more important.
Public education in this country is literally under assault, and no child left behind is a big part of that.
The public sector is being chipped away at by wall street, and no child left behind is part of a strategy to destroy the public education system.
Wall street hates public education for the same reason they hate social security, because they can't profit from it, and they are so rich that they don't need it themselves. Here are some links to back up this point.
When you apply a deeply flawed policy ubiquitously, you get ubiquitous failure.
You have to measure something somehow. But if you are forcing everyone to measure the wrongs things at the expense of actually teaching critical thought or other important skills or providing individualized attention, then you are screwing everyone.
Centralized policies can be very damaging, especially if they are too prescriptive and incorrect. Generally speaking, the federal government and other colluding monopolies have too much power, and this is one glaring example of how that is causing very serious problems.
This over-centralization is a result of the structure of fundamental beliefs and institutions. That's just how money works.
Power controls too much without information.
I think its because there is no useful information in money.
It's an interesting piece, but I have a problem with one thing that caught my eye - while explaining what drives the policies that hurt - in his opinion - the education, first thing he mentions is "wealthy corporations". It's a common trope, but I'd expect more from somebody who actually teaches Government - what "wealthy corporations" have to do with this and how comes they - and not, say, vast government bureaucracy or enormously powerful educational unions - supposedly set the agenda and ruin everything for everybody?
The perspective is refreshing but will probably fall on deaf ears to policy:
"Many of us are leaving sooner than we had planned because the policies already in effect and those now being implemented mean that we are increasingly restricted in how and what we teach."
Testing is a good idea, if it's done well. Measurement is always a good thing, unless it's expensive (tests aren't), or the measurements are used in a stupid way (which ... they are).
It's like measuring productivity by SLOC. Good programmers write more code. If you reward programmers for writing more code, though, they'll punch out boilerplate code which won't really do anything. They'll actually get less done, because they are writing meaningless lines of code, instead of actually solving problems. Steve Ballmer claims this a big reason why Microsoft beat IBM when OS/2 was coming out - as IBM rewarded their programmers for more SLOC, so they screwed everything up.
If you reward people for good measurements, they'll find ways to screw with the measurements.
Big tests mean, the students and teachers will focus on beating the test. They'll teach exam techniques, and stick to what they think will be on the test. It's fairly easy to teach a "shallow" way of solving problems, if you can guess the problems. Learning to solve unseen problems is hard - you actually have to understand the material. But most tests won't have a lot of difficult questions, so teachers will focus on getting their class to memorise the algorithm used to solve the basic questions.
Rote learning is good, if it's an enabler. Learning your times tables helps you do higher mathematics. But if you only worry about rote learning, then you can go through school without actually understanding what you are doing - you just follow the rules, and hope there aren't too many trick questions. Rote learning can be the foundation of higher learning, but creating nothing but foundations is a waste of effort.
It's also a huge waste of resources, as teachers will be spending all their time trying to figure out the test parameters, instead of worrying about whether their students actually understand the material.
Finally, there's the opportunity cost. Instead of saying "the good teachers are the ones which get good test results", they could do some deeper analysis. How do the "good" teachers control their class? What kind of homework do they set? What is the format of their lessons? What can the "bad" teachers do, to emulate their success? The "bad" teachers mostly just don't know how to teach well. There's probably a few idiots (who can't teach because they don't understand the topic), a few ones whose personality makes them ineffective, and some who are lazy or burnt out. But I bet most teachers would be much more effective if they knew what the "good" teachers were up to.
If the tests are high stakes, you'll just find that the "good" teachers are the ones who care most about gaming the test, not the ones who are actually good teachers. If the tests aren't high stakes, then the good teachers will naturally do well, and it's worth studying how they became so effective.
It would be justifiable, if the incentive of high stakes tests was strong enough to actually bring the kids up to a certain level, but I don't think it has. Instead, it just creates bad incentives, and is a distraction from serious quantitative research into teaching.
A friend of mine just let me know this was posted over here. I regret that i do not have time to respond to all the comments - I have received several hundred emails directly as a result of the posting at the Washington Post. I will when I have time come back and read through and where appropriate offer responses. For now I want to acknowledge that many of you are taking the time to offer thoughtful comments, even if I may think you misunderstand either purpose of the piece or why I wrote it. Let me offer a few general comments.
1. No Child Behind does not exist in isolation. Before it there were A Nation At Risk and Goals 2000, both of which are part of the ethos from which NCLB flowed. Since NCLB, Race to the Top has if anything made thingsworse.
2. Unlike its predecessors, NCLB had punitive sanctions that began to distort the learning process. When the courses I taught in government were in 9th grade, we began seeing kids arrive at our high school with NO social studies to speak of in elementary or middle school, because those subjects were not tested for Adequate Yearly Progress, the standard by which schools were measured under NCLB.
3. I did not teach just elite students. My last 7 years I taught both the regular level government classes and AP US Government and Politics. For the 1st 6 of those years half of my sections were in each course. The last year 4 were AP. Thus I taught a spectrum of abilities. Nevertheless, the gifted students in my AP classes were decreasingly ready to handle the kind of thinking necessary for that course.
4. do not presume that I EVER resorted to drill and kill for tests. But I fought losing battles. The school system began demanding every teacher in every course do system designed benchmarks. But in AP there was not a common curriculum, because each AP teacher had to submit his or her own syllabus to the College board. I approached the material in a different fashion, one which served my students well both as to their learning but also in how they performed on the AP exam. And yet they would be required to sit for poorly designed tests often on material I had not yet addressed in class.
5. Because test scores began to matter so much, the school system wanted interim tests, which scores broken out by indicators, with teachers required to explain why students had scored poorly on some indicators and to present a plan of remediation. Again, I did not follow the county pacing guide, which may be why I had the best performance in any of the 20+ high schools on the state exam - one year I had 129 students sit for the state exam and 126 passed - ten of those passing having failed all four quarter with me. Certainly I had demonstrated that my students were prepared. Perhaps I should have been asked to draft the pacing guide. At least when it came to AP, I was asked to run a Saturday course to which students from other schools could come to get assistance from me. But when I get told that I am REQUIRED to waste time on tests on material my students have not yet studied and then waste more time explaining why they did not do well on certain indicators, I think you can begin to understand some of my frustration.
I was for a while the only teacher on the county wide panel designing how our school system was going to tie teacher evaluation to student performance, a requirement under Race to the Top. I disagreed with the notion, but was asked both by central office administrators and by the executive director of the union to serve because I understood the literature as well as anyone in the county. We worked hard, designed a system, did some beta testing, only to have the state reject it because we did not meet some percentage on one criteria that they had arbitrarily set at 20% and we had set at 15%, in agreement among the testing office, the top administration, teachers, counselors, etc.
What is happening to our students as result of educational policy which focuses on testing - and in this case NCLB is the primary culprit - is denying them a meaningful learning experience. Because we put so much weight on the test scores, the focus in the school and the classroom becomes those tests, increasingly to the exclusion of other things.
My article for Academe only scratched the surface of what is wrong.
My warning, however, is real, and it is not just about the students arriving on college campuses. There are already proposals to evaluated professors in schools of education on the basis of the test scores of K-12 students taught by their graduates. Let me be blunt - this is idiotic. The professional literature does NOT support evaluating those K-2 teachers by student test scores, not even when using value-added assessments, which have all kinds of problems that have still not been solved. To attempt to use them to draw valid conclusions at one further step away from what the tests were designed to do - which is to measure what students can do at one particularly moment in time - is downright dangerous.
As to those who think teachers still have the ability to use their own best judgment, perhaps to learn the appropriate research and apply it on their own? That ignores that increasingly we are seeing superintendents who want everyone on the same page at the same time, with rigid pacing guides, whether the students can move faster or need to move slower.
Before I was a teacher I worked with computers for 20 years. The old IBM cards were clearly labeled "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate." At least they were standard - in size, in how information was recorded.
Our students are not standard. And what we are doing to them is folding, spindling, and mutilating - their natural love of learning, their ability to draw meaning from their studies.
It is one reason why they will be less and less prepared for post-secondary education.
It is why the fastest growing classes on many campuses are remedial courses to make up for what they didn't learn in high school, even if they passed all the required tests with flying colors.
I saw that too, if you click through you get a very odd slideshow of various celebrities (including SpongeBob Squarepants) with a small quote next to them of what they liked in school.
I graduated High School in 2009. I want to tell a story about what my experiences lead to conclude the root problem is in public education and how NCLB impacts it.
My school was a public high school in a college town, so a large fraction of students were children of professors or college staff. The school did fairly well from local taxes so we had a lot of programs other schools couldn't dream of - for one, we had school provided Macs. Starting in 2004, every student got a laptop to use in class if a teacher wanted to use them.
I was in 5th grade when NCLB hit the scene, and experienced the noticable shift (though the causaution of this is questionable) I saw a significant repetition of topics to such a degree that between 4th grade (I was reading at "12th grade" reading level, had experienced everything up to algebra in math) and 8th grade, I learned nothing new. They were completely dead years. My middle school at the time went through a transition into this new model and structured around standardized tests that moved a significant chunk of the material I had covered in gifted / advanced classes years earlier into every classroom in reaction to the tests. That is the fault of the school though, and doesn't necessarily indicate a systemic issue.
The problem showed itself in high school, and presented itself in two ways - one, I took AP classes, and it was the same 15 - 30 kids taking every AP class. I had a few gen ed. classes (Spanish, Art, Technical Writing) where I got to experience an entire seperate class of student who were thoroughly disenfranchized with the system and being in school was wasting their time, and everyone elses. They were in the "basic" of the basic-standard-honors class placement, they didn't do the homework, they got D's/F's, and got pushed through an assembly line to meet quotas. Everyone involved behind the scenes absolutely knew this was a tremendous waste of time, but nobody did anything about it, mainly because it was systemic and inherent to compulsory standardized rote education.
I had some really good high school teachers. I got scores in 5/5 AP tests that placed me out of an entire semester of college courses and I graduated a year early with my BS as a result, combined with some extra courses to meet the credit requirement. They had passion. They were being crushed by the mass of the student body that wasn't in that select AP student group.
The laptops actually demonstrated something peculier - state assement test scores fell dramatically following their introduction. The school went from top 20 in the state to bottom 50. However, that select group of 30~ students (in a graduating class of 150, the school was delightfully small) were getting better scores than ever.
It is much more generic than this story, but from my experiences technology dramatically enhances the learning potential of an engaged learner, and acts as the ultimate distraction from the disenfranchised. The 80% of students who didn't care and didn't want to be in school used the laptops as a get out of jail free card, intentionally taking classes to get teachers that let them use them. The AP and honors tier of students had group collaboration projects, we make power points rather than cardboard posters, we would regularly look up bios and short stories of famous authors in real time.
That divide comes back to NCLB because the students that want to go further with good teachers that can promote that lose the capacity under a strict standardized testing regime. The year I graduated, the freshman class (the 4 years of "honors" students pretty much knew each other) had around half as many "honors" quality students in a class that was 200 students in size (133% the size of ours).
I think the perspective of someone who went through the NCLB origin years might be useful. I agree the article does come off as somewhat circlejerky "kids these days just aren't as good as they once were" in some aspects. But I definitely felt the impact of standardization strangling the good teachers and students and it made it blatantly apparent the root problem in public schools is that you are carrying around a majority of students who don't want to be there. And the solution to the latter is a harder problem to solve than throw more tests at them.
Formal education, in a lot of ways, is a very dehumanizing experience.
Vanishingly few students give an iota of a damn about critical thinking, about understanding the implications of what they are reading or studying, trying to make connections to other facets of knowledge. The emphasis is on throwing some shit hastily onto a paper (gotta reach that word count), memorizing mathematical algorithms (just because you can integrate a function, does not mean you understand what you're doing), passing the exam, and moving on to the next topic.
I had to do that. You have 25 minutes to write an essay. But you're not graded on the quality, you're graded on the quantity. You're rewarded only for getting as many words as you can onto the paper. Purposely writing like shit is an absolutely horrible experience. It's like intellectual suicide. Why aren't there congressional hearings about this? Why is this acceptable?
Occasionally getting a good grade and learning the material are one in the same pursuit. That's an amazing feeling. You feel like you're not wasting your time. You feel like you can trust the system to educate you and you can see your progress and knowledge reflected in your grades.
I don't know if there's a better way to do education. It's not an easy problem. If you want to maintain your intellectual integrity, the best strategy is to learn what you can from valuable classes, teach yourself on the side, and get decent enough grades to get you into a college with a decent brand, rinse and repeat there. And if you don't care about your intellectual integrity then you can Google for guides on how to get into Ivy Leagues and follow the steps there. Note that that is not to say that no one who attends an Ivy League has intellectual integrity.
Only a year to go and I'm done with academia forever.
I just graduated with my CS BS last year, but I agree whole heartedly that public education is awful.
But it isn't hard to see why. By being compulsory, and children living in a culture of school being a hardship and burden rather than a means to create an educated society rather than sending them to work in a coal mine at age 10, you breed indifference and hostility. The system itself being the most bogged down bureaucracy in the nation doesn't help placate that feeling.
I think the most important take away is this: it will be slow. It will take decades, not months, to fix the absolutely broken public education system in the US. It is entrenched, and has a lot of powerful figures perpetuating its execution in its current form. But one day, we will have to realize that the best way to "teach" is to let the students themselves find passion and pursue it, and that if you accentuate those passions with supplemental factual and rigorous training and teaching, you get the best education you can.
The only successful education is when you produce someone who wants to learn, has passion, and can interact with society to a similar degree of intellectual prowess. Memorizing the periodic table or knowing how to derive the Sine function don't contribute to that at all (unless of course the students want to be Chemists/Pharmacists/etc or Mathematicians / Musicians / Acoustic Engineers/etc).
But yeah, assembly line education is awful for everyone involved.
I think the worst offender is the idea that people who don't do X cannot sit in judgment of those who do X. Our entire system of democracy -- of jurisprudence -- rests on informed citizens making judgments about areas where they spend their money. Nobody gets a free ride. I get to vote on whether the fire station gets a new truck whether or not I've ever been a fireman, whether or not I've ever driven a truck, and whether or not my house has ever been on fire. To do this any other way is insane.
The saddest part is that the public education system took a reasonable request -- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare. I hate to be blunt but I'll just say it: these folks shouldn't be trusted with sharp objects, much less our kids' education. They (the administration, the consultants, the "blob", the politicians) are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Testing has nothing to do with anything.
As sharp as my criticism is, I mean it in the aggregate. There are no bad people here, only a bad, overly complex system that is failing our children. It's a scandal, and removing testing isn't going to do anything but make it less visible. This is very much akin to the attitude of "Why do we need testers? All they ever do is complain!"
I'm not going to continue my analysis because this is an old, tired road, and full of little homespun essays like this which are supposed to make us take sides. I refuse to. We need tests. Period. In my mind once the tests leave, the teachers leave, because I'm not writing a check for something I can't measure. The rest of it? I'm perfectly open to discussions about the kinds of tests, the types of measurements that would be acceptable, and so on. We've taken a good idea and made a monster out of it, yes. But that doesn't make it a bad idea, that just is another indication of how totally screwed the system we've created is.