Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California needs real math education, not gimmicks

noahpinion.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 386 posts

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#171

Post by ecshafer »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #157
ecshafer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we did that, the money would mostly go to the well off already. They’ve already got a system in place, they are already deeply into what their kids are studying. It doesn’t sound like much would improve.

But school districts are already segmented by wealth. So sure money would go to some families in the wealthier school districts. But also families in the poor ones.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#172

Post by davidgay »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #123
avs733 wrote: post #5

As someone with a PhD in education, anytime someone uses the phrase “real education” as an attack on new approaches to teaching and learning, it’s a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.

I haven't seen anything serious in the field of education. Education can and should be a science. There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work. Instead, we have 5 different preschool pedagogies, 5 different elementary pedagogies, and 5 different secondary pedagogies, and nobody bothering to figure out what works at scale.

> There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work.

I think one of the problems is that a proper experiment takes ~ 12 years (or more, if your want, eg, impact in college or on writing life) which leads to many problems:

- how do you get the research funded?

- how do you get people to stick to your approach for that long?

- how do you justify the risk that your idea will not make things worse (for a whole 12 years...)?

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#173

Post by davidgay »

WalterBright wrote: post #168
davidgay wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to bus the kids randomly across town (county? state?), or else your suggestion is ineffective. That has always been a very popular and well received idea (or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers).

Why would it be ineffective? Suppose you're a teacher at a school where the kids are all below grade level. Sounds like a much larger opportunity to get those bonuses than a school where all kids are above average. > or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers Teachers are only human, and humans respond to positive incentives. The current system has no incentives.

You claimed that the fix to getting lucky with a batch of good students (or unlucky with bad) is random assignment. Now it seems that you're claiming that getting a bad batch is a good deal as it will be easier to get them to improve...

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#174

Post by astrange »

WalterBright wrote: post #94
ordersofmag wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almo…

It works everywhere in the private sector. Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month. > it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling Ac…

Performance reviews aren't always based on "objective goals" and it'd be bad if they were, because almost anyone outside of sales could game them. Typically it's a kind of stack ranking based on how you performed relative to peers, where relative means in the vague opinion of your management tree.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#175

Post by donw »

WalterBright wrote: post #148
donw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It... really doesn't. Sales is a great example. In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time! No…

Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.

That only applies to small companies.

Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.

Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.

This problem can't be.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#176

Post by astrange »

donw wrote: post #97
WalterBright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think that would make a difference. Incentives are whack across the board in education. At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself. We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that look…

We aren't approaching any kind of end stage anywhere in anything.

As a guy said once, there are neither beginnings or endings to the wheel of time.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#177

Post by astrange »

smilekzs wrote: post #32
goolulusaurs wrote: post #25

In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole. The perv…

a.k.a. Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

Pournelle was just another Republican and this is just another political slogan, not an "iron law".

He was also an engineer, which makes it even worse, because it means he has old engineer brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's fields.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#178

Post by astrange »

0xy wrote: post #153
blindriver wrote: post #50

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…

People with money homeschool, with much better results. There's even small homeschooling groups that pool resources to hire the best tutors money can buy. 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 homes…

> Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023

Two data points can't show something is exponential!

Also, it can't possibly be exponential because the US population is not growing exponentially.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#179

Post by astrange »

WalterBright wrote: post #83
blindriver wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fix poverty by educating children and letting them grow up in a safe area free from crime. Educated children get put on the right path in life and lift themselves out of poverty. That's how Asian countries like Japan and Korea pulled themselves out of poverty in the matter of decades. During the 1950s and 1960s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, and by the 1980s, was considered an economi…

The Soviets had a good public education system. No economic miracle. Japan's and Korea's economic miracles came from embracing free markets. The same thing happened in Vietnam and China. Free markets => prosperity, every time.

Korea's economic growth came from export discipline, a kind of industrial policy where the dictator threw businessmen in prison if they didn't manage to get overseas customers. (See How Asia Works.)

That's not a free market, it's more like heading from communism towards free markets and then continuing over the other end of the horseshoe.

It has the problem that everyone in the country is now working themselves to death and is obsessed with plastic surgery rather than having children.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#180

Post by WalterBright »

astrange wrote: post #174
WalterBright wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works everywhere in the private sector. Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month. > it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling Ac…

Performance reviews aren't always based on "objective goals" and it'd be bad if they were, because almost anyone outside of sales could game them. Typically it's a kind of stack ranking based on how you performed relative to peers, where relative means in the vague opinion of your management tree.

Public teacher unions are adamantly against subjective reviews, which is why I suggested an objective mechanism.

> in the vague opinion of your management tree

I know it's popular to believe that management has no idea who the real performers are. But every office I've worked in, everyone knew who the good performers were and who the deadwood was. Including the managers.

It's also true that every person I've talked to who had been laid off was sure he was unfairly targeted. Even the ones who'd come to work strung out on coke.

Post reply on HN