151–160 of 236 posts
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If we're going to have an enforced one-size fits all national curriculum, we can do better than the one we reverse engineer from some stupid standardized test.
Can we?
One of the reasons - probably one of the biggest reasons - for continuously lower test scores in America is the quality of the care these children receive. Over 40% of children in the US are born to unwed mothers, compared to 5% at the beginning of last century. About 70% of unwed childbirth is by black mothers, versus just 24% in 1965. The last two peaks of teenage pregnancy were 1991 and 2007 - so the children of t…
> There is almost no reasonable assistance given to the families of these children - assistance like food, shelter, access to education, daycare, transportation. Yes, there is. You are arguing for more welfare, but welfare caused the problem in the first place: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=16...
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=124&t...
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> This doesn't seem like that bad of an idea. One of the bigger problems with tests is that they tend to become a terrible metric once people start preparing for them specifically (and test-prep can suck the oxegyn out of real education). If the students and teachers don't care about the test, it is much easier (but still difficult) to make a test that gives useful feedback to the school system. Of course, you want s…
>I don't like how you need so many licenses to be a teacher. Most college lecturers do not have a background in education and definitely don't have a license and we do just fine. The licenses just feel like a way to limit supply. Teaching adults who pay for the privilege of being in your class is VERY VERY different from teaching children who are forced to be in your class. The latter requires a very special skill se…
And without exception, every teacher I've ever spoken with (including several in my family) has told me that this skill is something you have to learn on the job. All of them, regardless of what route they took to become a teacher, were unprepared for managing classroom discipline.
And it took all of them a year or two to learn how to manage classrooms (some teachers never learn this skill).
I strongly agree that the licensing is just a way to limit supply. I'm not against unions per se, but in this matter, the teacher's union is a serious impediment to educational achievement in this country. It should be much easier to hire and fire teachers in this country. And teachers should be much better paid.
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Babysitters generally don't need to manage more 15 children all at once (none of which are related or have known each other for a very long time), in a setting that is not their home, for longer periods of time than they are with their families, for the purpose of education and not play. There are transferrable skills, but they're transferrable in the way that making buildings out of LEGO is transferrable to building…
> Babysitters generally don't need to manage more 15 children all at once Sorry for going off-topic but I come from a small school and I don't understand how it is acceptable for class size to be huge (40+ students in a class is considered acceptable). I mean I get it if the class is led by someone extraordinary like Richard Feynman and everyone wants to be in his lectures but as others have said most teachers are no…
When are we going to come out and admit that our schools are not providing our society with what it needs or wants? For a large chunk of HN, schools served us relatively well. But for a huge chunk of the US, school is just a waste of time. At best, it's free childcare for parents. Preparing everyone to college is overkill (n.b. having a way for everyone who wants to go to college an affordable way to go to a good sch…
I'm not going to say that education is great as it is, but the worst attitude you can come across from a student or a person in general is the question "When am I ever going to need this?" The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_. How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics. To expose everyone to the knowledg…
This is a rationalization. The real reason people learn literature, algebra and so on is a mixture of practical application and historical accident.
If the reason they teach algebra really were to teach "how to reason" they would teach actual mathematical logic. That's what they teach Computer Science students who actually need to know how to reason to do their jobs.
If the reason they teach literature really were to teach "how to think" they would teach how to properly read non-fiction books, not just fiction. If they really wanted to teach "critical thinking" they would teach actual rhetoric.
We can't expect to just teach kids a bunch of arbitrary useless things and expect that, as a pure side effect, they will end up learning what we want them to learn.
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Most students have the combined genetic material of their parents. Genetics are a key influence on aptitude. To be transparent, I personally benefited from public schools, and my parents were not wealthy (but they were graduates of public colleges). I'm not arguing that only wealthy people should have access to quality education. I'm just saying that it's a weak argument to point out that success in school is linked…
>I'm just saying that it's a weak argument to point out that success in school is linked with wealth. Would you like to say that the Earth is flat, disease is caused by an imbalance of humors, and Adam and Eve tamed dinosaurs for use in ancient rodeos while you're at it? Because those would have more chance of being correct than what you're saying. Socioeconomic security correlates more strongly to educational outcom…
* IQ or other measures of aptitude contribute to success in school
* IQ/aptitude are heritable
* IQ/aptitude contribute to success in life
I think you're arguing about magnitude of effect? That, while that's true, socioeconomic status effects educational attainment far more than natural aptitude? That also seems plausible to me, although not guaranteed to be correct. Do you have any sources on the relative effects of each contribution? I'd be curious to see.
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"This is the most important sentence in the article. It points to a problem in the test itself - California's students didn't just get magically stupider." Yes. Having gone through public education in California the tests were treated as a total joke. They had no weight to your grades and there was zero incentive to do well. Often you wouldn't even get the results. In elementary school it was common for a teacher to…
The lack of incentive to do well is precisely the point of these tests, and they are designed with this context in mind. The testing regimen relies on the same level of apathy in both students and teachers being present year after year, which provides a nice baseline for statistical analysis/comparison. Incentives mess everything up. See also: NAEP [1] Source: worked in ed covering this subject, studied assessment in…
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>I'm just saying that it's a weak argument to point out that success in school is linked with wealth. Would you like to say that the Earth is flat, disease is caused by an imbalance of humors, and Adam and Eve tamed dinosaurs for use in ancient rodeos while you're at it? Because those would have more chance of being correct than what you're saying. Socioeconomic security correlates more strongly to educational outcom…
This seems like kind of a low effort comment. Are you disputing any of these claims: * IQ or other measures of aptitude contribute to success in school * IQ/aptitude are heritable * IQ/aptitude contribute to success in life Because those all seem sort of reasonable to me, and would explain the top comment of "wealth is the largest predictor of educational attainment", without some sort of nefarious inequality good sc…
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> There is almost no reasonable assistance given to the families of these children - assistance like food, shelter, access to education, daycare, transportation. Yes, there is. You are arguing for more welfare, but welfare caused the problem in the first place: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=16...
Not too say that the website doesn't have anything useful to say, but is has some very extreme views like , "Muslim efforts to advance the hegemony of Islamic law in the United States by introducing it stealthily and incrementally into American society" http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=124&t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz#Allegations_of_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz#Criticizing_Isl...
(and yes, this is an ad hominem attack, I will reply to the previous commenter with why the article in question was stupid)
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This seems like kind of a low effort comment. Are you disputing any of these claims: * IQ or other measures of aptitude contribute to success in school * IQ/aptitude are heritable * IQ/aptitude contribute to success in life Because those all seem sort of reasonable to me, and would explain the top comment of "wealth is the largest predictor of educational attainment", without some sort of nefarious inequality good sc…
SES and IQ are not orthogonal . In the limited studies we have, SES interventions generate durable IQ gains, gains substantially larger than the supposed gap between races. The grandparent comment is "not even wrong".
Oh, really? That's awesome. I was under the impression this wasn't possible. Do you have any resources on what the interventions were? I'm interested from a selfish parental perspective...