251–256 of 256 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Classroom size matters a whole lot if you're expecting teachers to give special attention to struggling students to make up for parental deficiencies.
My proposal doesn't expect anything. It just gives a bonus if the kid reaches grade level. Leave it entirely up to the teacher as to how to achieve that, or not. I bet the teachers will find a way. Greed is funny that way :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Appreciate the enthusiasm and I’m all for trying. Still don’t think it’s pragmatic. > don’t give the teachers the test questions beforehand This is already the case, except for all of the practice questions that students are drilled over weeks before the actual test. Teachers simply could apply the test-taking strategies in real-time more efficiently than students to arrive at and share the answer. Honestly I believe…
> A few seconds of thought: “give the proposed money to teachers upfront.” No incentive, won't work. Parents have zero influence over teacher quality, and neither do taxpayers. > Why should there be more hoops to jump through towards a sustainable career in one of the toughest jobs? Because the existing system doesn't produce results.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Classroom size absolutely matters, at the extreme you encounter Bloom's 2 sigma[0] around ratios of 3:1. Small classes get you two things: 1. Easier classroom management 2. More individualized education (1) is good and has some effect, but (2) is the meat and potatoes. I will grant the effects are not linear and so haggling about 16-24 kids may not be worth it but the difference between 20 kids and 10 is enormous. ht…
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-eviden... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/class-size-and-ed...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an awful excuse. The whole purpose of public education is to give students who don't have support at home an education. Passing the buck to parents makes the whole point of public school moot -- if kids with involved parents read and those without don't, why put kids in school at all at that point?
It's not an excuse - it's just the way it is. If kids don't have parental encouragement or involvement at home, they won't see the value in education. I taught in a rural district in the South that epitomized this. Cultural/familial attitudes towards education matter a lot more than anything the school can do. After all, kids still spend more time with their parents and family than they do at school; those attitudes…