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Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

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Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#241

Post by cbozeman »

dls2016 wrote: post #45
jimmygrapes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are questions that are not allowed to be asked and addressed because they are (often rightly) deemed racist. There are also questions that need to be asked that despite the racism still need to be addressed. But because there is no one size fits all, it doesn't matter. The only answers that avoid the questions are those which cannot be answered for many, many generations, and which also require racist policies…

Sorry, I don't follow.

Okay, I'll say what apparently everyone else is terrified of mentioning, for some reason.

Black people score lowest on IQ tests than any other population group in the world. It's been repeated the world over, dozens of times, over a minimum of 30 years, and psychometricians are dying to somehow disprove it, but have so far been unable to do so. You'll see a lot of assholes who've done absolutely zero reading on this subject post after this saying, "OMG THAT'S NOT TRUE", but if you actually go digging around in Google Scholar and sampling the research, you arrive at the same inescapable conclusion: the highest IQ individuals are Ashkenazi Jews, followed by Asians, followed by Whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by Blacks.

When people read this, they're bothered by it - and rightfully so, because it's troubling - but they don't know what to do about it. No one seems to know. No one seems to know because so far the research is pretty clear on intelligence, IQ, g factor, whatever you want to call it so you can sleep at night... but here's what we know so far:

1. You're born with it or you aren't. Some people have a high g factor, some don't.

2. There's nothing you can really do to "get smarter". Whatever you've got is what you've got. Research consistently shows you can move the needle a few points, and that's about it.

3. There's far, far more variance in population groups than between them, so while Black people collectively seem to score lowest, within that population, there's no shortage of genius-level Black people. Same for every other population group.

Don't ask me what to do about this; I don't know. That problem is beyond not only my capability, but my interest. I just know we have a problem and we need to look into it.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#242

Post by orwin »

bennysomething wrote: post #200
laserbeam wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a fun thing to talk about, but an HN thread is insufficient. There are schools and countries out there who focus more on excellence and cater to the top students. They put a ton of effort and praise on the top % with contests, a dense curriculum. I think most of eastern Europe, possibly Russia and likely a lot of other places fall into this category. On the other side, you have places like Scandinavi…

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/30/no-excuses... This school takes really deprived kids and gives them a great education. But it gets a lot of grief. Edit it's an old article I believe they now have ex students attending Oxford and Cambridge.

From the article: “In other schools that would never happen. You’d never see a teacher ask a pupil to pick up a grape, because they’d go mad.”

If this sentence is true, i'd worry about education in your country. And if the bullying bit is also true, it's even worse. And i fail to see how "same punishment for everything, no matter how small" is a good thing to enforce. It's lazy for the teachers and a very poor habit and thought process to teach.

No, honestly. I've taught children, schooled, homeschooled, sometime at a youth camp, sometime on perischolar activities; i'm pretty sure i've taught better habits in hours than this school can do in years. I mean, if you want button-pushers, this school sounds great, i'd rather have the children i teach understand why they are learning, how they can learn more, and how safely do stupid experiments, like my some of my math, chemistry, physics and history teachers did.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#243

Post by truffdog »

KMag wrote: post #203
fennecfoxen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Orleans post-Katrina style , that’s how. Takes political will though.

I don't have enough context here. The first search result I found disputes claims of post-Katrina New Orleans schools doing better than similar cities[0], but maybe that's a biased sounce. Do you have some links and maybe some elaboration on the point you're trying to make? From my short reading, it sounds like the narrative is that the disaster gave both sides the political cover they needed to make the concessions…

AFT is definitely biased- one of the big things they did post Katrina is union busting.

It's interesting their article doesn't include the normal dispute of the post-Katrina improvements, the fact that the cohort of students is very different.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#244

Post by cbozeman »

DeathArrow wrote: post #233
bambataa wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most limiting factors as I see them are first and foremost a lack of love and care from one's parents, and second a wealth deficit. I have numerous friends who are teachers and they all consistently say that the biggest problem is poor parenting. Primarily disengaged parents or parents who don’t value education. Of course this is the elephant in the room because no politician is going to blame parents. It seems…

>I have numerous friends who are teachers and they all consistently say that the biggest problem is poor parenting. Primarily disengaged parents or parents who don’t value education. But that should be the role of public schools. Teach children even if their parents don't care and don't challenge them to learn.

> But that should be the role of public schools.

Negative Ghost Rider. The state should never try to replace parenting. If Western society no longer values parenting and sacrifice and suffering for it's children, maybe it is better for some other subgroup of humanity to overtake us.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#245

Post by orwin »

inglor_cz wrote: post #192
stjohnswarts wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

"Public schools work. You can’t deny that." That is like saying that the Space Shuttle worked. It was certainly able to reach the orbit, but the loss of life was politicaly unpalatable, the technology was much more expensive to build and operate than promised and the supply chain was one huge boondoggle covering the entire USA so that every Senator would be happy. At the end of the day, more efficient rockets like Fa…

(The space shuttle was cheaper to operate per payload in orbit than falcon 9, and was human-rated from the start. Most of the cost of the program was R&D. But indeed, it was not safe enough, especially compared to newer rockets, and even older ones)

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#246

Post by tomp »

sien wrote: post #186
jhoechtl wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the general intelligence level going down since like 20 years or so? I admit I have no factual proof nor a link to study, I only read and hear that from time to time so this might be an urban legend. But if so, we face a large-scale societal problem we might not even be able to tackle, like leaded gas was likely a major contributor to soaring violence in the 60ies to 80ies.

Nope. It's going up : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect Mind you, perhaps American High Schools are poised to stop this....

You should read your sources before posting them.

> Some research suggests that there may be an ongoing reversed Flynn effect, i.e. a decline in IQ scores, in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, and German-speaking countries,[4] a development which appears to have started in the 1990s.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#247

Post by brightball »

mlyle wrote: post #75
brightball wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son is experiencing the homework issue this year. He’s 2 years ahead in math and the class he’s in gives out massive amounts of homework. It’s exhausting. He had to pull him out of sports so he could have more time in the evening for his homework. It’s so frustrating how worthless it all is too.

Huge sympathy on the math thing. For my boys, we went outside school to various providers of math offerings for gifted kids. But quality is rather variable. Being ahead academically doesn't mean you're ahead developmentally. Rote practice to avoid mistakes and do really systemic work is useful sometime around ages 12-14 -- during first algebra classes for kids on the normal plan. But courses for gifted 10 year olds t…

This is exactly the problem. Thank you.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#248

Post by brightball »

null_shift wrote: post #70
brightball wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son is experiencing the homework issue this year. He’s 2 years ahead in math and the class he’s in gives out massive amounts of homework. It’s exhausting. He had to pull him out of sports so he could have more time in the evening for his homework. It’s so frustrating how worthless it all is too.

if it is worthless, then why force him to do it? if his situation is anything like mine was, then the answer is likely to maintain good grades to support future educational prospects. which is unfortunate as this system encourages the pursuit of the grade over the pursuit of knowledge. it took me many years to shake that mindset.

15% of the grade. I’ve thought about having him skip it. It’s just too risky.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#249

Post by inglor_cz »

orwin wrote: post #245
inglor_cz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Public schools work. You can’t deny that." That is like saying that the Space Shuttle worked. It was certainly able to reach the orbit, but the loss of life was politicaly unpalatable, the technology was much more expensive to build and operate than promised and the supply chain was one huge boondoggle covering the entire USA so that every Senator would be happy. At the end of the day, more efficient rockets like Fa…

(The space shuttle was cheaper to operate per payload in orbit than falcon 9, and was human-rated from the start. Most of the cost of the program was R&D. But indeed, it was not safe enough, especially compared to newer rockets, and even older ones)

"The space shuttle was cheaper to operate per payload in orbit"

This is somewhat surprising to me. SS launches were very expensive. Is it possible that SS was cheaper per maximum payload?

The catch is that maximum payload for SS was pretty big and its capacity was underutilized.

"Most of the cost of the program was R&D."

Well, refurbishment of the orbiters after each return was a significant recurring cost in both work-hours and money. The heat shield was a maintenance nightmare.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#250

Post by orwin »

secondaryacct wrote: post #89
uejfiweun wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these ideas and I agree with them for the most part. But I am pessimistic about US society's capacity to make such far reaching changes to a system that has largely stayed the same for almost 100 years. There are just too many forces pulling these government officials too many ways - the best we will get is some compromise that satisfies nobody. That's why I say we should move to a more free-market based solut…

I went to a private school in France, a small one in a smallish town, and I dont really understand why we have public schools. The incentive to succeed starts at parents having to pay, ending with the students being quite aggressively challenged to actually deliver on exams. It may not be fit for everyone, but now that I work in an investment bank in Hong Kong, I dont feel like I m being abused by deadlines, financia…

In public school in France, what i learned:

Triple integrals are a bit too hard for 11th grade, but they are usefull to calculate the speed of a sailing boat. If you admit only one sail form exist however, you can make a simple algorithm for your pupils to apply different lenght/height and calculate the ultimate ratios. Thank you Mr Mason.

Microwaves are dangerous, but the powder inside fluocompacte (don't have the translation :/) bulbs does not react dangerously, and that can be used to who how low-consumption light can change our consumption (it was before LED bulbs became a thing, overall i have a lot of useless knowledge from this, but the method stayed with me).

You don't need to learn italian to translate a fencing treaty from 17th century bologna, but translating historical text is hard. At least you can use some positions and attacks in your saber competition, it's not good but surprising enough to get some points. But well, my history teacher introduced most of us to HEMA

There is multiple francophone theater festival a year, some of them not in France, and surprisingly not many French school attend (We were mostly the only one each of the 3 time). Tulsea is a fine city, Agadir is better and Liege is interesting too (budget cut in my last year i guess, we did not take the plane).

My brother was in a private school however. And i can tell you the difference: in public school the floor is low, sometime very low compared to private school. But the ceiling can be much, much higher when your school have a bit of money (like if it's also a public trade school).

I've also been part of "les petit debrouillards" and i've taught some chemistry and engineering (sometime even electricity!) to kids, at different levels. I've been invited to public school, to homeschooling association, but never to private school. It might be anecdotal, but our group was very well known and liked, we had a lot more invitations than we could respond to/attend to, and never once we were called to a private school. It's not a dig, but in my mind, it is exactly why i couldn't have done everything i've done if i went to the same private school my brother went. I would probably have a lot more money than i do now (not that i really care, i'm still in the top 10% income), but with a lot less skills and experiences.

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