11–20 of 64 posts
How common is it to have the local funding of schools outside the US?
Schools are funded by property taxes. In lots of places this leads to expensive suburbs allocating lots of money to schools and leaving neighboring cities and low income areas out to dry.
Is this just another symptom of increasing wealth disparity in the US.
It's interesting to me the degree this article focuses on curriculum and not resource allocation.
Around 2009, I was considering a change from software. I applied to both Teach for America (TfA) and the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR. Similar, but at least in principle involves more training and you end with a masters degree in education) and got in to both. I applied to teach high school math.
Brief digression: Why that route and not following the traditional route of college? Because I wasn't willing to sink a shit-load of my own money into taking a (massive) pay cut. Digression over.
I went to BTR and got my first firsthand view of how the education system works from the inside. The comments below are principally about the education system, not BTR.
shantly's comment [0] is spot on. There is a huge emphasis on testing, even in a school that is trying to emphasize broader learning. The school I was placed at had pretty minimal classes outside of the same shit we all suffer through. I believe the only music class available was choir. That may have been the only art class at all.
The math teachers I worked didn't ONCE meet with teachers of any other subject to do any discussion let alone planning about to alight subject matter. There are some pretty obvious ties between most math and most science classes. With a little effort, I'm pretty convinced you could find ties to non-STEM classes too, but everybody is focused on their own silo.
Outside the building, it's worth remembering that the standards/"best practices" change with a frequency that virtually ensures that every student will live through a shift in methodology. Remember No Child Left Behind? Me either; I was out of school for that, but whatever that was gave way to the seismic shift of Common Core some time in the late aughts/early teens.
Nobody (within rounding error) spends a lot of time reworking their entire curriculum/lesson plans every time a shift is made, because everybody knows that it's going to be changed again soon enough. In due time, the better teachers will have updated piecemeal as they have time and see what parts of the new methodology are good. They'll be done just about in time for the next big wave of change. Students, meanwhile get caught in the middle of these changes as everybody is trying to get their feet back under them.
If it wasn't bad enough that the politicians feel the need to change things up regularly, you have the well known problems of the morally bankrupt textbook and calculator industries. Unless of course, your school doesn't have enough money to have a book for every student (not a hypothetical; I never saw a math textbook during my time in BTR).
But wait, it gets worse: is your boss unskilled in your area of practice? Don't worry, if you're a teacher, you're almost guaranteed to be in that situation. Two types of teachers try to get into administration. A few good, idealistic ones, and a lot of crappy ones who don't much like teaching and would rather appreciate a pay raise.
The problem propagates upwards. At some point you leave the bureaucratic side of administration and enter the political side. Good luck finding a skilled teacher there. Unfortunately, since everybody has had the experience of going through school, a lot of people have strong opinions of how school should be done. Periodically, one of those people gets high enough to drive a change, and you end up with the aforementioned seismic shifts.
And then the press comes around a couple years after a shift and writes a whole bunch of articles along the lines of "We fixed it: Why isn't it better yet?". The answer is because your pipeline extends almost literally to the birth of the student. But nobody wants to face those problems and everybody wants a quick fix.
Full disclosure: I decided that while I didn't much want to be in software, I didn't much want to be a teacher either around February. I would have been lousy anyway, at least at first: I'm not much for multi-tasking, and I didn't want to spend several years trying to get good and letting my programming skills get out of date. All for the aforementioned big pay cut.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692026
[1] Most teachers would rather appreciate a pay raise, but most of them aren't interested in going admin to get it.
It’s still baffling to me how much emphasis we still place on test scores.
No one can come up with anything better that provides feedback at least annually for all grades upper elementary and higher, and can be used to compare districts and schools across a state.
Otherwise you get grade inflation for example when I left school an Civil service ASO (assistant scientific officer) you needed 5 or 6 O levels (age 16 exams) now its a Degree entry.
Chart of PISA results of all participating countries from the source: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png A quote from the Economist article on PISA results (which the NYT article is also based on): “In these parts of China the average pupil’s maths score is 591, compared with an OECD average of 489, suggesting local teenagers are roughly three years ahead of the OECD average.” Note that the total popu…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/01/04/are-the-pis...
The single biggest problem in the US educational system is that the people in charge of educational policy need to stop and have a nice thoughtful think about the streetlight effect.
Chart of PISA results of all participating countries from the source: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png A quote from the Economist article on PISA results (which the NYT article is also based on): “In these parts of China the average pupil’s maths score is 591, compared with an OECD average of 489, suggesting local teenagers are roughly three years ahead of the OECD average.” Note that the total popu…
Before reading too much into China's scores, there reason to believe there is selection bias in who they are testing. In 2017, applying the same rules to the US would have resulted in it shooting up to first and second place in some subjects, which shows that methodology has a bigger impact than what we actually want to measure. https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/01/04/are-the-pis...
Honest question: How common is it to have the local funding of schools outside the US? Schools are funded by property taxes. In lots of places this leads to expensive suburbs allocating lots of money to schools and leaving neighboring cities and low income areas out to dry. Is this just another symptom of increasing wealth disparity in the US. It's interesting to me the degree this article focuses on curriculum and n…
Suburban schools do better largely because the kids are easier to teach, not funding. It correlates with richer districts because kids whose parents bought more expensive houses to get their kids into better schools tend to be kids who are easier to teach, for a bunch of reasons.
Chart of PISA results of all participating countries from the source: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png A quote from the Economist article on PISA results (which the NYT article is also based on): “In these parts of China the average pupil’s maths score is 591, compared with an OECD average of 489, suggesting local teenagers are roughly three years ahead of the OECD average.” Note that the total popu…
Before reading too much into China's scores, there reason to believe there is selection bias in who they are testing. In 2017, applying the same rules to the US would have resulted in it shooting up to first and second place in some subjects, which shows that methodology has a bigger impact than what we actually want to measure. https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/01/04/are-the-pis...
Moreover, MA's population of ~7 million is only ~2% of US population, whereas the four provinces' 180 million is about 13% of China's population.
"for the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. It shows the state is tops in the country in math, but when you zoom out and look globally, Massachusetts ranks 20th in the world."
https://www.wbur.org/edify/2017/04/10/massachusetts-math-edu...
"I found that if Massachusetts were allowed to report subject scores independently ... the Bay State would rank 9th in the world in Math."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2014/09/29/...
I think there should be a clear-eyed view toward China's progress in education as well as advanced research. For example, based on some measures of publications in top AI conferences, among the top 10 academic institutions in the world, 4 are in China, 4 in the US, and 2 in Singapore.
http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2018/toyear/2019/index?ai&v...
This hyper-focus on test scores worries me. The most important things for kids to be learning are not necessarily things that lend themselves well to multiple choice questions. And it's distorting the ways that kids are being taught in ways that, at least according to the small amount of research I've looked into on how people learn, may very well be actively harmful. The single biggest problem in the US educational…
This hyper-focus on test scores worries me. The most important things for kids to be learning are not necessarily things that lend themselves well to multiple choice questions. And it's distorting the ways that kids are being taught in ways that, at least according to the small amount of research I've looked into on how people learn, may very well be actively harmful. The single biggest problem in the US educational…
This is all crazy what we've been doing to the educational system for the last 30 years, and if we can produce functioning adults from it, it will occur despite the emphasis on test scores, rather than because of it.
We had one of the finest education systems in the world, and we're taking all the wrong lessons from other developed nations on how to "improve" it.
And in the mean time, we're causing severe burnout among all the hard-working and passionate teachers who are on the front lines of trying to deal with all the issues with the educational system today.