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Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

adamcadre.ac

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Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#131

Post by hypersoar »

P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul wrote: post #14
brandmeyer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an incentive alignment problem. It is the responsibility of management (state and district admin) to ensure that what is best for the teacher's career is also what is best for student education.

Who's responsibility is it to ensure that what is best for the management (state and district admin) is also what is best for student education? I'm not too familiar with the details of management here, but is it even possible for public schools (and other government operations) to have proper incentives given voters don't care about results? I suppose "school-choice", which happens to be vehemently opposed by Democr…

School vouchers aren't really about aligning incentives. They're a backdoor to having the public fund the religious schools comprising a large majority of private schools.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#132

Post by mmarq »

somethingor wrote: post #118
mmarq wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles,…

> can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles This seems achievable by the 8th grade.

It does depend on what we mean by read and write. I don't mean just recognizing letters and being able to reproduce them. An adult should be able to read and understand an article from a decent newspaper (say the Financial Times), and write a 5 line summary. Definitely not all 12 year olds can to do that and, I'd argue, a large fraction of adults can't either.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#133

Post by CapitalistCartr »

I learned more in two months of USAF Basic Training than any year of school, maybe any two years.

As they told us repeatedly, it's a privilege to be here. Although they had the option to boot us out, no one was, and only one guy bailed out of 50.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#134

Post by rahimnathwani »

jimbokun wrote: post #97
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders. In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.

How does a teacher instruct a class where every single student is learning something different at a given time, based on their progress up to that point?

It is hard!

But the folks making decisions about education in California (including the authors of the California Math Framework 2021) believe they'll achieve better outcomes that way, than they will by grouping students based on their progress in the subject.

I heard recently from a 6th grade math teacher who has students who are 1, 2, 3 and even 4 grades behind.

Imagine orchestrating a single class in which you're teaching some children about adding single-digit numbers, and others about long division.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#135

Post by TMWNN »

jdhn wrote: post #30

Stuff like this is why I roll my eyes every time I hear that schools are underfunded and how we need to give them just a little more funding, and surely things will get better. If they're just going to pass students anyways, what's the point of increasing the funding?

New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...>). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#136

Post by rizzom5000 »

HDMI_Cable wrote: post #126
somethingor wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles This seems achievable by the 8th grade.

Yeah, by this metric, school should stop when kids are 12.

It raises the question, what are we getting for our money (in the US)?

> In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#137

Post by mindvirus »

zepto wrote: post #121
mindvirus wrote: post #64

One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed. Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.

> get rid of private schools What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too. The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one. The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it ill…

You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling.

It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#138

Post by DoreenMichele »

mindvirus wrote: post #137
zepto wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get rid of private schools What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too. The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one. The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it ill…

You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling. It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.

Or maybe you don't understand California law. Most homeschooling families stay legal by registering as a private school.

Source: I homeschooled my sons in California for several years and participated on various homeschooling lists at the time.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#139

Post by yonran »

mmarq wrote: post #129
spangry wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism". The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.

I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds. If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we as…

Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care; the problems of the article are virtually nonexistent at Lowell. I don’t think Lowell was particularly selective (I think something like 50% of applicants get in) and there were plenty of poor students (including myself) who benefited from an academic public school that does have both wealthy and non-wealthy students who care about learning (as opposed to private and suburban schools which definitely do discriminate on the basis of wealth/income).

> either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination

The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).

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