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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

#221

Post by tomp »

treis wrote: post #71
nerdponx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it either. People have learning and thinking differences, we know that and have known it for years. Accommodating those differences is important. Living out a real-life version of Harrison Bergeron is not the only way to do it.

It's not mandating everyone be equal. It's allocating resources to those that need them most. Which is how I think we all do our jobs. You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine.

Even for people who do have this goal ("helping those who need it most") in mind, this reasoning doesn't make any sense.

There's only so much resources you can invest into a single person. Their time is limited, so if their leaning rate is slow, there's really nothing else that can be done beyond some point to speed it up. Forrest Gump will never be Stephen Hawking.

The reality is that this equity movement is motivated specifically by pushing down high-performers. They're removing (or wasting) resources just so that they don't get to the top 10-30%.

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

#222

Post by mmarq »

lubujackson wrote: post #150
mmarq wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This kind of narrow thinking is what has caused schools in SF to suck for everyone. Because Lowell doesn't exist in a vacuum and the arguments that privileged people have a leg up doesn't really make a difference - it is similar logic to burning libraries because some folks can't read. So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send y…

> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?

Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.

> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?

Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.

> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.

The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.

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

#223

Post by mobilefriendly »

kyboren wrote: post #143
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?

That trope needs to die. California's schools are not underfunded. California spends a record amount on education[0], over $18k per child. "Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021…

As a nation, US inflation adjusted, per-student K-12 spending has tripled since the 1960s.

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

#224

Post by jimmaswell »

rcpt wrote: post #98
ipaddr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges. If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout. I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.

Also in the name of equity the UCs are now ignoring the SAT

This short story shows where we're headed with things like this: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

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

#225

Post by verisimilidude »

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.

You’re describing Finland. They outlawed private school funding for exactly the reason you’re proposing: to get the wealthiest and most engaged parents invested in fixing public schools for all.

It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.

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

#227

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

dnndev wrote: post #155

Public school is broken and we all know it - in general. We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school. Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.

> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.

All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school.

Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my experience.

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

#228

Post by neaanopri »

professoretc wrote: post #114
analog31 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester. This hits very close to home for me, a…

> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no > realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam > or missing a few assignments early in the semester. You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impo…

One of my classes in high school used "competency quizzes":

* Several easy math problems

* Unlimited re-tests

* You had to get 100% to pass

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

#230

Post by akomtu »

antihero wrote: post #74
brianwawok wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No child left behind. It’s been ruled that it’s better that all students get to 20-80% knowledge then some get 100% and some get 0%. Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.

Surely this can be solved by streaming? Here in the UK we had bottom sets for the kids that were struggling, and top sets for kids who excelled. This meant that the learning pace could be tailored for each group. Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools…

I chuckled at "pupils from all backgrounds benefitting from each other". I grew up in a dirt poor family. Some of my classmates in high school were criminal material and many did end up in prison (for murder, not weed) before their 25th birthday. Some classmates were quiet folks with ADHD, some were punctual learners who really valued good marks. All sorts of backgrounds. The only "cross background" learning was bulling lessons that the future criminals were giving to the quiet folks. Teachers were useless and powerless to straighten up the bad apples. Luckily, I correctly guessed what I need to learn on my own to get "segregated away" from that madness, so my college years were decent. My takeaway from that experience was that the cross-background learning happens only when the backgrounds differ only slightly and have something in common.
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