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Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

nytimes.com

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Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#21

Post by hereme888 »

Maybe the issue has more to do with things such as:

- The boredom of being imprisoned all day long

- The slavery of feeling forced to do uninteresting homework

- Lack of free time after school to pursue your own interests or learn your own material

- The toxic culture in school, and being forced to be around people you hate all day long.

- Lack of sleep, etc...

...all to regurgitate a bunch of short-term memory into a piece of paper, and forget it soon afterwards.

For most honest people, school was mostly boring and overall a waste of time.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#22

Post by shantly »

hereme888 wrote: post #21

Maybe the issue has more to do with things such as: - The boredom of being imprisoned all day long - The slavery of feeling forced to do uninteresting homework - Lack of free time after school to pursue your own interests or learn your own material - The toxic culture in school, and being forced to be around people you hate all day long. - Lack of sleep, etc... ...all to regurgitate a bunch of short-term memory into…

Making better use the huge amount of time we stick kids in school would probably require a whole lot more money (mostly for more and better teachers) and, to bring the costs anywhere near the realm of feasibility and achieve maximum benefit, "tracking" (grouping by ability) for at least much of the day, if not all of it. I don't think either of those are likely to happen.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#23

Post by Coffeewine »

ansible wrote: post #20
mumblemumble wrote: post #15

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…

Agreed. 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 bur…

So this may be a dumb question, but by which metrics did the united states have one of the finest education systems in the world?

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#24

Post by wiglaf1979 »

mauvehaus wrote: post #12

Gonna post and run, because I have other work to do, but here goes: 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 th…

``` 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). ```

I did a similar route for Arkansas and the Non-Traditional Licensure program. My first year teaching circa 2004 I had 18 math text books for Algebra I class that had 25-ish students. The kicker was it was the exact same book that I had when I was a freshman in high school in 1993.

Not only did I not have enough text books, I was using a text book that was at least one maybe two shifts in teaching standards away. Hell, we had a smart board given to the school as part of a grant but no one could use it for fear of tearing it up. A locked up resource does no good, nevermind that a Smart board is useful but at best is a nice to have. Textbooks are a must have in comparison.

It was an utter shit show and explains more about why education in Arkansas is horrible.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#25

Post by frockington1 »

shantly wrote: post #22
hereme888 wrote: post #21

Maybe the issue has more to do with things such as: - The boredom of being imprisoned all day long - The slavery of feeling forced to do uninteresting homework - Lack of free time after school to pursue your own interests or learn your own material - The toxic culture in school, and being forced to be around people you hate all day long. - Lack of sleep, etc... ...all to regurgitate a bunch of short-term memory into…

Making better use the huge amount of time we stick kids in school would probably require a whole lot more money (mostly for more and better teachers) and, to bring the costs anywhere near the realm of feasibility and achieve maximum benefit, "tracking" (grouping by ability) for at least much of the day, if not all of it. I don't think either of those are likely to happen.

The problem with tracking is that parents of slow kids don't like to admit there kid is slow, they would rather point the blame at the teacher/school

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#26

Post by mumblemumble »

ansible wrote: post #20
mumblemumble wrote: post #15

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…

Agreed. 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 bur…

Specific anecdote:

I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a year. The other day we had a friend we hadn't seen in a while over for dinner. She's a school teacher in the very language I had been learning, so, naturally, the bulk of the dinner conversation between us proceeded in that language. And, naturally, she commented on my rapid progress, when most her students can't read a comic book after eight years of study, and wanted to know more about my study technique.

I kept it positive because I didn't want to trash her whole career, but I can say that my only real secret sauce was that I studiously avoided just about every practice in mainstream language education. I didn't do what schools do, and I didn't do what Duolingo and Rosetta Stone do. Because, at the start, I spent a while reading up on the academic research on how people learn new languages. There's a lot of it, it's about as well established as any sub-field of psychology can be, and it is, to a remarkable degree, summarily ignored. The mainstream has no choice but to ignore it, because most of what's been discovered does not lend itself well to the establishment of standardized curricula or easy, objective assessment criteria. That means schools don't want to take that advice because it's incompatible with their mandate to assign letter grades, and Duolingo doesn't want to take that advice because it's impossible to gamify.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#27

Post by hereme888 »

shantly wrote: post #22
hereme888 wrote: post #21

Maybe the issue has more to do with things such as: - The boredom of being imprisoned all day long - The slavery of feeling forced to do uninteresting homework - Lack of free time after school to pursue your own interests or learn your own material - The toxic culture in school, and being forced to be around people you hate all day long. - Lack of sleep, etc... ...all to regurgitate a bunch of short-term memory into…

Making better use the huge amount of time we stick kids in school would probably require a whole lot more money (mostly for more and better teachers) and, to bring the costs anywhere near the realm of feasibility and achieve maximum benefit, "tracking" (grouping by ability) for at least much of the day, if not all of it. I don't think either of those are likely to happen.

I'm not sure how it would cost a lot more. I would think it would cost way less, unless you're referring to "tracking" them in everything they do.

I believe older children and teenagers have the ability to choose material that comfortably challenges their own ability better than any software or person. Students aren't lazy by default. They're just lazy and unmotivated when forced to focus on what their brains consider boring.

As for more/better teachers: the best education is already available for free online (such as Khan academy). I'm all for face-to-face interaction, but that could happen almost for free with older student mentors, and ocassionaly with paid professors.

Also, if maximum benefits mean "highest scores" or "highest efficiency of time", I'd rather youngesters learn to rest and have more down-time.

I'm not suggesting "I have solved the education problem". Just thinking outside the tiny box our system has been stuck in for decades too long.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#28

Post by AlanYx »

nopinsight wrote: post #3

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…

"...suggesting local teenagers are roughly three years ahead of the OECD average."

I don't find this all that surprising. I've done casual comparisons of Chinese curricular materials for math vs. Canadian (Ontario) materials, and there is about a 3 year difference in content level being presented to the students at equivalent age levels. Of course, there could be other elements like selection bias, etc. playing into the results, but there is actually an underlying divergence in terms of the basic curricular material.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#29

Post by ergfdseragf »

mauvehaus wrote: post #12

Gonna post and run, because I have other work to do, but here goes: 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 th…

"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."

In middle school in Italy, all the classes were coordinated so you were learning similar material. Therefore, if in tech class we were learning about the steam engine, in History class we were learning about the Industrial Revolution, in Literature class (Anthology) we read chapters from 19th books, in Art class we studied 19th century art.

The end of middle school exam was in front of the whole body of teachers, and you had to present what you'd learned in 8th grade. You had to cover every subject, but you had to transition to each subject seamlessly.

It was a lot of work, but I haven't forgotten any of it 20 years later.

Then I moved to N. America. There were positives, but school wasn't one them.

Re: Test Scores Cast Doubt on U.S. Education Reform

#30

Post by Ididntdothis »

wiglaf1979 wrote: post #24
mauvehaus wrote: post #12

Gonna post and run, because I have other work to do, but here goes: 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 th…

``` 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). ``` I did a similar route for Arkansas and the Non-Traditional Licensur…

Maybe I am misreading your comment but I am wondering. Why would a math book that was OK ten years ago not be OK now? It’s not like math is changing much. Seems to me that textbooks should be relatively timeless in most subjects.
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