51–60 of 64 posts
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.
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…
It's not the money, exactly. Our struggling-to-regain-accreditation city schools, for example, pay teachers significantly better than AFAIK all the suburban schools in the area, thanks to all kinds of funding available to struggling schools, but they're still considered undesirable to work in because of the conditions (think: gun threat lockdowns all the time, 3rd graders calling you all kinds of nasty stuff pretty m…
Those parents tend to emphasize education. Those parents tend to encourage literacy, and discourage bad behavior toward teachers. This creates an environment where all of the children, more or less, have a reasonable environment for learning, but the largest contributing factor is the parental involvement.
Children don't become magically easier to teach because of resources. Resources at home, however, can help the parents focus on their child's behavior and amenability to learning. This means that the problem of ineffective education of poor children must be addressed at home, not in the school.
It’s still baffling to me how much emphasis we still place on test scores.
It's baffling to me whenever someone makes a comment like this. What else would you put emphasis on that can't be easily skewed by rampant subjectivity / favoritism?
First you could use more evaluative criteria. This is how most knowledge workers are evaluated in most modern startups. Unless you work on sales, you are probably measured by the quality of your thinking, your attitudes, projects, and initiatives. You don't deliver a piece of code and get a grade.
Things like PISA were invented so that the people managing could, well, manage. So they could compare and get "concrete" numbers to get elected.
And in terms of your question, what is wrong with subjectivity? We are dealing with human beings here, not computers. There will always be subjectivity. Our desire to boil everything down to data is a clear reflection of the computer age where everything needs to be a 0 or a 1. The medium is indeed the message.
I think a broader question is what is the purpose of school? Is it an institution where we help people learn, or where we teach people how to memorize things? We are what we measure. If we are measuring how well students can memorize things and give "right" answers, this is the kind of society we will create.
This is the reason schooling continues to be more and more irrelevant today.
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…
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``` 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.
Take the Quadratic Expression forms
o Standard Form: ax^2 + bx + c
o Factored Form: a(x – r1)(x – r2)
o Vertex Form: a(x – h)^2 + k
I would have needed to recognize that shortcoming and figured out a way to cover it so that my students didn't appear to be lacking according to the ever-shifting standards. Not impossible but arbitrarily stupid to redesign the standards every couple of years.
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It's baffling to me whenever someone makes a comment like this. What else would you put emphasis on that can't be easily skewed by rampant subjectivity / favoritism?
There are numerous options. First you could use more evaluative criteria. This is how most knowledge workers are evaluated in most modern startups. Unless you work on sales, you are probably measured by the quality of your thinking, your attitudes, projects, and initiatives. You don't deliver a piece of code and get a grade. Things like PISA were invented so that the people managing could, well, manage. So they could…
I'd be much happier if my code received a grade. My boss doesn't currently like me because I'm not a complete "yes man", while the other Project Managers here would 100% tell him the moon is made of cheese if that's what he wanted to hear. "Evaluative criteria" are ripe for abuse in a thousand different ways, including internalized bias and racism.
There will always be subjectivity, but we can and should try to minimize it. I can't find the article now, but I remember reading a study where classical musicians were graded with the reviewers watching them, versus only hearing them play behind a curtain, and the scores were substantially different, exposing considerable bias.
Here is something similar... https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
Hence, standardized testing. It's practically a miracle, as far as I'm concerned -- a truly fair way to quantify many types of intellect / skills.
>This is the reason schooling continues to be more and more irrelevant today.
Schooling is more irrelevant today as people are realizing that putting a child into a school doesn't make them smarter, just like putting them onto a basketball court doesn't make them taller.
It's just conditioning and babysitting (which most families need, to be fair.)
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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.
In principle it should be but in this case the devil was in the details. Take the Quadratic Expression forms o Standard Form: ax^2 + bx + c o Factored Form: a(x – r1)(x – r2) o Vertex Form: a(x – h)^2 + k Arkansas could decide that in Algebra I all students must know those three forms. But the book I had was created off of a standard that said that the Factored/Vertex forms weren't needed until Algebra II so it didn'…
That seems to be the real problem.
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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?
I believe the idea of common schools originated in the USA, or at least it did as far as Western countries are concerned. Well into the 19th century, the European attitude was that parents were responsible for providing for their own children's education, and nobody else's. Working-class children were largely shut out.
More contemporarily, the US is still in the top 10 by at least some rankings. But talking about those rankings doesn't sell ads or get the voters riled up or help rich parents feel good about all the money they're spending on private schools, so there's a tendency to cherry pick the rankings where the US is merely in the top 10%. Ideally followed by intensely fetishizing Finland.
(Fetishizing Australia, which tends to rank even higher than the nordic countries, never seems to happen. Funny, that.)
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"...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…
I'm interested in your thoughts on this. You noticed a grade differential in raw math concepts. Is it possible to notice things like creativity, communication, and imagination as applied to mathematics? https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/11/more-on-chinese-an... >In many cases, the teachers would like to take a lesson from American schools and concentrate more on imagination and resourcefulness. They say it is th…
Creativity understood more broadly is a tough thing to shoehorn into a math curriculum, because average teachers have difficulty with mathematically creative material that is sufficiently in-depth. The Discovery math curriculum that's popular in North America is emblematic of that; there is a huge amount of time devoted to finding multiple creative ways to visualize/deconstruct basic operations, but actual, profound mathematical creativity like exploring various ways to prove interesting theorems is largely absent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are numerous options. First you could use more evaluative criteria. This is how most knowledge workers are evaluated in most modern startups. Unless you work on sales, you are probably measured by the quality of your thinking, your attitudes, projects, and initiatives. You don't deliver a piece of code and get a grade. Things like PISA were invented so that the people managing could, well, manage. So they could…
>Unless you work on sales, you are probably measured by the quality of your thinking, your attitudes, projects, and initiatives. You don't deliver a piece of code and get a grade. I'd be much happier if my code received a grade. My boss doesn't currently like me because I'm not a complete "yes man", while the other Project Managers here would 100% tell him the moon is made of cheese if that's what he wanted to hear.…
But here is where I think I differ.
If you are grading a performance, or evaluating the effectiveness of a drug, or which peanut butter brand you like more, then sure, go ahead and do a "standard" test.
But is that the point of school? Is the point of "learning" and "schooling" to test (in a standard way) how much students can do "math," or write "proper" english, or memorize "facts" about America?
I would say "no."
Does a score of 500 versus 400 mean that someone "learned more?" As soon as you have "tests" with "grades" you immediately optimize for providing the "correct answers" and to get "better grades". I think people jump to fast to correct answers = learning.
An example, in a similar way that if your code got graded, every coder would immediately optimize what they do to get that A. I am not questioning the method of how that A is evaluated, but I am questioning what are we optimizing for. And optimizing for giving correct answers is not a good idea, in my opinion, since it bears little resemblance to any of the important open-ended questions we are faced with on our day-to-day lives.
Schools should help people learn how to learn, cultivate their own interests, and develop skills and aptitudes for a changing world. Not "find" "correct answers" to problems that someone already knows the answer.
In regards to your points: > I'd be much happier if my code received a grade That's interesting and I'm sorry about the boss... I'm interested: what would be the criteria to determine the grade of the code your boss would give you? I'm assuming a few of them would be: does it run, does it follows proper syntax, is it simple and the best way to do this, correct? But what if you think there is a better way that goes against the criteria?
> School is more irrelevant... Agree 100%. Again, what is the point of putting people in school then. Isn't it to make them smarter? Is it to get them a job? Or is it to teach them how to conform? What do you think?
Thank your for the link, by the way! Let me know if you find that study. Sounds super interesting.