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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

#281

Post by grammarnazzzi »

bodhiandpysics1 wrote: post #7
grammarnazzzi wrote: post #2

> Los Angeles and San Diego Unified — the state’s two largest school districts, with some 660,000 students combined — have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines. That lesson is going to serve them well in the workplace. Teach students that they are entitled to…

School really doesn't mimic the workplace very well. For one thing, work doesn't usually give homework! (with some exceptions like the law). Docking students for bad behavior is problematic, because it requires the teacher to be extremely honest, to avoid unequal standards. Late penalties almost certainly impede learning since they cause the give up effect, where students give up on something they can't hope to finis…

> School really doesn't mimic the workplace very well.

That irrelevant.

The point is that in any given relationship, expectations are established and how well an expectation is met greatly determines the outcome.

If a student, employer, son, friend, mate agrees to completing a 1-hour task within a week and they fail to deliver, that's a problem. There are consequences.

The gist of the article is that the student is really the victim and should be pandered to.

That might work for a student or a someone's kid, but any other relationship is going to end badly. Friends, partners and employers get to choose their relationships. If you're irresponsible and disrespectful, they get to chose someone else.

> Late penalties almost certainly impede learning since they cause the give up effect,

You're confusing causation with correlation. Late penalties do not impede learning. Chosing not to learn by not doing the work impedes learning.

If a student isn't mature enough to meet expectations, the underlying cause should be addressed: the student's imaturity, irresponsibiltiy, home environment, learning disablity, lesson plan, whatever...

Removing consquenses for failing, making excuses, and giving the student a victim identity isn't doing the him/her any favors.

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

#282

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

uejfiweun wrote: post #35
bko wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing is that the bar is so low in the US. Where I live, Hoboken, NJ, the high school math and reading proficiency rate are 8% and 44% respectively, while the graduation rate is >95% What the hell are they doing if they're not even teaching kids math and reading? And why are they graduating them? Grades aren't meant to be a feel good merit badge. They're supposed to be an accurate reflection of your level o…

How on earth do we de-escalate from here? I feel that in the US it is impossible to summon the political willpower to make it HARDER to graduate HS or go to college, even if these things would make society better off. My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however.

> My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however.

I don't think that's a good idea. Privatization has a way of making many things worse and more expensive. I can't really see how privatization wouldn't increase the gap between poorer students and students from more well-off families, for instance.

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

#283

Post by bambataa »

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.

Teachers do try, but that’s why public school teachers are so tired and overworked.

When children are constantly receiving the message “school is a waste of time, don’t bother trying” it’s exceptionally difficult for teachers to overcome that in class.

Politically no one wants to grasp it because conservatives like to talk about parental choice, as if every parent is well-informed and usefully involved, while the left doesn’t want to accept that some people won’t help themselves.

This then perpetuates from generation to generation, people see the success of immigrant children whose parents value education, resentment grows etc etc.

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

#284

Post by bambataa »

dorchadas wrote: post #269
cbozeman wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is it that we don't value it, or that parents don't have time to actively parent? Or aren't around due to other socioeconomic issues? I taught at a rural school in the States. Less than a quarter of our students lived with both parents at home. And less than 10% lived with families who made enough to keep them off the 'free and reduced lunch program' (thankfully our school gives everyone free breakfast and lunch, and…

Well, it’s a mixture of both of course but I have seen parents who are aware that they can’t parent as well as they’d like, for whatever reason, and accept any support available.

The ones that seem worse to me are the ones saying “don’t worry about school, we’ll get you a job in the family business”. Maybe they’re financially more secure, but they’re hardly giving their kids much of a chance.

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

#285

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

> American public education burns through a lot of money for mediocre results.

American everything burns through a lot of money for mediocre results. We're a country of middle-men and middle-men don't make money from efficiency.

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

#286

Post by dls2016 »

cbozeman wrote: post #239
dls2016 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is full if the “homework doers” who scored well and got nice professional jobs. Hence the downvotes.

Yeah, because in life you have to put in the work. Using math as an example, you can't master it without a lot of practice, and that practice is homework. Albert Einstein wrote that he was practicing mathematics often and at length from an early age.

And to put in the work, you need motivation. The existing homogenized K-12 system of mathematics is not very motivating to a lot of students. Hence the inequality.

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

#287

Post by dls2016 »

dorchadas wrote: post #262
bedobi wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm one of them. And I too use to think it was all me and my aptitude and merit and hard work. Now, it makes me cringe how I could ever think that. With age I've realized how privileged I was, and how many people who really worked far harder than me and still didn't get ahead. To be clear, schools can't fix all the worlds injustices. Life is unfair and realistically we may never be able to fix that. But we can…

> Yeah, I'm one of them. And I too use to think it was all me and my aptitude and merit and hard work. Now, it makes me cringe how I could ever think that. With age I've realized how privileged I was, and how many people who really worked far harder than me and still didn't get ahead. Same. For me, though, it took going back and becoming a teacher to see how privileged I was. Mom was a teacher, both parents at home a…

Exactly. I'm sure you put in a lot of hard work to become Valedictorian! But a lot of other responses seem to take any critique of the system as an attack on their own hard work. Realistically, people like you and I who had a stable upbringing probably would be successful in any reasonable system. I personally attended a poor middle school and didn't learn algebra until 9th grade, but still managed to end up as a mathematics postdoc at a very nice place. I cannot wrap my brain around the reluctance to make changes to the system in the face of statistics like the one I mentioned elsewhere and have observed with my own eyes (that is, there are very, very few African American PhDs in mathematics).

I'm also a teacher and, although you can teach college without knowing any formal pedagogical methods, I've at least looked into the works of people like Louis Benezet (setup a middle school without formal arithmetic) and Ranciere (The Ignorant Schoolmaster). And I've come to the conclusion that backing away from homogenized curricula most hurts 1) bad teachers and 2) textbook companies.

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

#288

Post by dls2016 »

throwaway23451 wrote: post #260
dls2016 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what you're saying seems reasonable... but then I see a statistic like this: "Black Americans receive about 7 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded each year across all disciplines, but they have received just 1 percent of those granted over the last decade in mathematics." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/edray-goins-black-math... And this is the current production! You don't want to see the statistic…

I’d say this is a problem of compounding. The odds of any kid going on to get a PhD in math (or any subject) is vanishingly small, and is impacted by outcomes at every level of education preceding grad school. Saying that math is racist because there are few black phds in the subject neglects the law of large numbers. Few secondary teachers really understand math at a deep enough level to be inspirational… If kids fr…

Yeah I'm not qualified to say precisely why things are they way they are. But I also don't understand how people can look at such a statistic and decide that mathematics teaching cannot contain any inequality based on some high-minded, Russell-esque argument.

> If kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are not shown how beautiful and useful math can be, what motivation would we expect there to be that could carry them far enough in the subject to get a phd in it?

Right, and the current homogenized curriculum is not great at inspiring very large swaths of the population. It is pretty good at 1) letting people not very interested in mathematics become teachers of mathematics and 2) lining textbook publisher's pockets.

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

#289

Post by dls2016 »

cbozeman wrote: post #241
dls2016 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I've also read The Bell Curve. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with designing an education system. Lots of kids aren't going to be professional athletes, but they still manage to have fun kicking a ball around. The same is not true in mathematics, for instance.

Of course there should be a small part of the education system capable of identifying and guiding the geniuses... but it should be in the context of helping every student identify their internal motivation... which is really the only way to instill the critical thinking skills everyone seems so keen on.

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

#290

Post by alanfranz »

dorchadas wrote: post #264
alanfranz wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the point is not about lowering standards; it's about preventing unrelated variables to enter the equation. Examples: - A lot of redundant homework is assigned, quantity over quality. Some students with external duties (e.g. family, work) are just unable to deliver all the homework, and thus get lower grades, even though less homework would be enough to demonstrate ability in a topic; - Deadlines are set…

And to not penalize students (.i. homework grades) if they have to work to help support their family, or have so many other trauma issues. GP here really seems to have an idealized version of how school works, ignoring all facts that actually influence learning and stuff (.i. socioeconomic ones). Homework just compounds those problems, and I'd also say there's no such thing as "objective assessments" as well.

> And to not penalize students (.i. homework grades) if they have to work to help support their family, or have so many other trauma issues

Just to explain my point: if a student has worse skills, whatever their reason is, they should have lower grades. That's what a grade is for.

Then, you may want to address the causes of such low grade.

What you don't want to do is penalize students for arbitrary reasons like deadlines, absence from school, et cetera.

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