151–160 of 386 posts
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It doesn't really work in the private sector though; it leads to destructive and short-sighted juking of the relevant metrics.
Companies wouldn't use it pervasively if it didn't work.
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The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.
I think that could work but you would need to give teachers more control over the discipline and syllabus in their classrooms. If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.
The actions that the California state education system towards Blacks and Brown kids are exactly what the most insidious racist person would do. If I hated Black and Brown kids, I would lower the education standards so low that these kids would graduate high school being unable to compete at the city, state or country level. And this is EXACTLY what is happening. Half of the Black kids in SF are graduating high schoo…
Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 and a large portion of the parents who pulled kids from schools during COVID simply aren't going back.
Understandable, because the quality of education is extremely poor. Unqualified parents homeschooling literally produce better outcomes.
Not to mention the violence in public schools (which is escalating), and the abuse from teachers that the major US teaching unions ritually cover up (the teacher's unions vehemently defend predator teachers).
Teachers unions are in the business of protecting predators, financially and with predator-friendly policy like union-decided arbitration venues. [1]
[1] https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/campbell-brown-teachers-un...
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Hence the vehement opposition to the idea, sadly.
Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference. The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.
If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.
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> The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to. Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.
There is a better, older, phrase that would be great to promote over that tired saying: “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” — Aristotle
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Companies wouldn't use it pervasively if it didn't work.
Pervasiveness seems to be more a function of whatever the latest workplace fad is rather than based on underlying assessments of how well it works. I've heard upper management outright say things like they're mandating return-to-office simply because everybody else is doing it.
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There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long. As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any soluti…
My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.
The Author may have good points, but there is still a lot of value in teaching basic statistics, and I don't understand why Algebra is required to understand basic stats. Even just learning the basic descriptive statistics and getting people fluent in reading charts can be very valuable. The fact that they may not understand the deeper nuances is fine in my opinion. Also... I work with a lot of data analysts and data…
> why Algebra is required to understand basic stats I don't understand how you can say this. Literally every statistical concept is defined via formula, and to manipulate formulas correctly (or even really understand the concept) you need basic algebra. Going even further than that, if you have the most basic "business scenario word problem", like cells in excel that describe how many widgets are made per hour, how m…
I didn't really "get" it until I started programming and learning stats. That's when it all hit me, then I went back and had to relearn what the hell they were talking about during my middle school years.
Also, once I got to Highschool math, Algebra 2 and PreCalc, it was very easy to simply memorize formulas and plug and chug.
You don't need to know Algebra to know what profit and loss is. If you want to calculate a break-even point, you look up the break-even point formula and plug in the numbers, or more commonly today, find the menu in your analysis program. None of my business classmates had any idea how to manipulate the formulas. You get a "quant" to do that for you. Yes, there are bad consequences because of this, but this is the reality of most modern businesses. People are already skipping Algebra, we just kinda let people move forward anyway.
To test it, give a highschool Algebra test randomly sampled modern workers. Don't let them study for it, pop quiz. I believe almost everyone would fail horribly if you could control for cheating.
Same story for trig, I didn't really appreciate or "get it" until I got really interested in ballistics and digital signal processing many years later.
Kids like me find Algebra, by itself, too far removed and too abstract to even begin to find value in it. I really had no idea what we were talking about most of the time. Sure you can learn some patterns and "trust" that the teachers know best, but then I go home and ask my parents, one who has a Doctoral degree in medicine, and the other a Master's in finance, when the last time they calculated an integral, or used the quadratic formula, and they say freshman year of college 40 years ago... A lot of my teachers were also full of shit and power tripping a significant amount of the time, so that didn't help build any trust either.
Thankfully, I figured out the deep beauty and power of math, but I have quite a lot of catching up to do, but my mental framework now is far more organized at mapping how all the concepts relate, and why they're valuable. I can learn more now in a few months than years of study when I was in Highschool. All because I can plug the concepts into a nice modular framework, and I can experiment with ideas in code.
Almost nobody that I knew did the same though, most of my coworkers over my 15 year career don't have the patience or curiosity to dive into this stuff. It's actually really hard to find friends who geek out about math and functional programming (expect for a few corners of the Internet, including here).
Hopefully that clarifies things, if not, I'd need to know more about your confusion.
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Pervasiveness seems to be more a function of whatever the latest workplace fad is rather than based on underlying assessments of how well it works. I've heard upper management outright say things like they're mandating return-to-office simply because everybody else is doing it.
WFH is the fad. Work In Office and pay for performance has been around since the Dawn of Man.
Most of human history has seen the bulk of humans living in rural areas within all manner of labor exchange schemes.
"Modern Capitalism" was founded with "work from home" as a significant factor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work
Since the phrase 'piece work' first appears in writing around the year 1549, it is likely that at about this time, the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home, rather than within the master's workshop.