181–190 of 256 posts
Overall dropout rate has dropped by nearly 50% since 1972:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-high-sc...
A population of ignorant and illiterate peasants is great for maximizing political capital. They are receptive to propaganda. They are an energetic bloc of voters. They know something is wrong, but are too ineffective to correctly identify the problem, which means politicians will continually entice them with "solutions" that solve nothing but increase the political or financial capital of interested parties. We're h…
We already have it, and it's nothing new. See: Fussell's Class : a guide through the American status system (1983).
A population of ignorant and illiterate peasants is great for maximizing political capital. They are receptive to propaganda. They are an energetic bloc of voters. They know something is wrong, but are too ineffective to correctly identify the problem, which means politicians will continually entice them with "solutions" that solve nothing but increase the political or financial capital of interested parties. We're h…
Are you sure? Ignore is bliss and all of that.
p.s: accurate portrayal of the situation I must say.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
from a social development standpoint it makes sense, a lot of "geniuses" had/could develop problems growing up with people emotionally/socially more mature, altough keeping gifted people with underperformers and lowering education level to keep them "afloat" is a disservice to both groups
People are not underperformers , you can't and shouldn't segment the population across some quantitative boundary. Each individual should learn at a difficulty gradient for them that is positive and engaging for each subject. For everyone this will be a different value. What you are describing is a form of damaging elitism.
Perhaps they should also learn at an optimal rate for personal growth. This doesn't negate the statement above, and it certainly isn't an argument for grouping children together where they can't learn at a personally appropriate rate.
Bucketing children by age and not developmental milestones has always confused me. No matter how you slice it, some kids are more advanced in verticals than others (emotional, math, reading, problem solving, etc.) and there aren’t tracks in the U.S. to accommodate that so we end up forcing all these square pegs into round holes - everyone loses.
from a social development standpoint it makes sense, a lot of "geniuses" had/could develop problems growing up with people emotionally/socially more mature, altough keeping gifted people with underperformers and lowering education level to keep them "afloat" is a disservice to both groups
Take any vertical you want and you'll find the same argument.
The progression by age seems to be approximately correct when you average development across all verticals across an age group when you look at it from a high level, but once you zoom in it's an absolute mess.
Why don't we get rid of grade levels? It would seem 50% of the students are continuously behind and probably suffering. A more humane approach would be to continue to teach the material at a level they can learn from until they get it, and or find new ways to teach it. You see a bimodal distribution in technical subjects (reading and math are technical) where if you get behind, you will continue to get further behind…
Thus in some sense we should strive to have better grade levels, but we'll still have grade levels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%. Ties in with this data too: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy ~50% of the entire US is at a 6th-grade reading level. Update: Sorry, I didn't put the hyphen that is in the text of the article. "sixth-grade level"
Ok so grade level is another word for “median.” So saying 50% of students are above or below the median doesn’t really elicit the same reaction as saying “grade level” - presumably they knew this and picked the name and the metric to induce hand wringing.
We have to cut the crap and get drilling. Common core is a disaster. Get rid of it. We need to build students to be resilient, work collectively and be able to demonstrate applied knowledge. Take a Finnish education system and copy it. https://www.amazon.com/Leading-High-Performance-School-Syste...
There are public school districts in California which couldn't be more eager for specs to push standards forward by another 0.5+ years because the Common Core is still catching up from behind to their de facto standards, but there's a seriously powerful (perhaps majority) democratic and political will to hold standards back.
What the Common Core and Equitable Math should not be understood as is as a new way of teaching or learning math. Neither of these are revolutionary. All parties involved understand that there's an existing supply of math teachers across the nation who are comfortable teaching some curriculum at some level, and that a true re-arrangement or re-imagination of subjects carries high institutional friction.
In other words, we might rearrange Geometry to be taken before Algebra, but replacing Geometry with Linear Algebra (per Gilbert Strang's suggestion) would be revolutionary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The general idea you're getting at, incentivize teacher performance, rests on the underlying assumption that a "great teacher" can have an outsized impact on students outcomes in the one year they're teaching the student. Much of the US tried to find evidence of this in the 2000s and failed. Past the basic "does the teacher understand the material?" level, outcomes on a year-long basis are dominated by: - Home life (…
Classroom size does not actually matter much. Teachers unions love smaller classrooms, though... Your first item -- which is really many items -- does matter. Especially if we open about the fact that "socioeconomic background" is mainly a (poor) proxy for the students' IQ. We know this, because grades track the students' IQ better than their socioeconomic background or the IQ of their parents. "Does the teacher unde…
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-s...