I know of no better way to promote inequity than to gatekeep knowledge so that only those with abundant resources can access it.
California needs real math education, not gimmicks
211–220 of 386 posts
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.
An incentive for the teachers is better than no incentive. I recall a case at a company I worked for. They snagged a major contract with IBM, but it had a tight deadline. They hired a team of 6 or 7 greybeards to do the work. The fun thing was they each got a $10,000 bonus if delivered on time. They delivered it on time, got the $10 grand each (a lot of money in those days), IBM was happy, all good. So I asked them,…
While I agree with the idea that people respond to incentives, you are making it out to be a lot simpler to design these schemes than is actually the case.
The examples you give are straightforward. You already have a bunch of people who know how to do a job, so you pay them to do it quickly. Basically you are giving them money to go and tell their families they are going to be working late for a while and they have to postpone their holidays. These are both examples of a simple task with a definable, specific goal. Everyone can tell when the junction is built.
With this teaching math thing, there is no finish line. The people who decide if the kids pass are... teachers. Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes. You want to adjust for how easy the task is because you don't want easy classes to get paid and difficult classes to be excluded from getting the bonus. But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.
Finally there's the problem of feedback. Incentives work when the person who is incentivized knows how things are going and knows how to change the outcome. It is not clear at all that teachers know that if they just show Billy Bob the times tables as a rhyme then he will pass his test. It is not clear at all that teachers even know whether Billy Bob understands the times tables, or is just repeating what is being said.
This is the problem with all incentive engineering schemes. I'm an engineer too and I wish it were simple. But the history of it is rife with all sorts of catastrophes.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#213Earlier 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.
I think we tried that in the form of scholarships. Basically, the students with the highest grades get discounts from different colleges. It's not exactly the same, but the effect is similar, and this system has been running for generations. I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't unde…
> I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.
True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores".
Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right-ish, but... the problems of educational sciences are plenty, but most importantly the impossibility to run proper experiments, and the almost complete lack of fundamental, reliable knowledge about human cognition and learning. The bottom line is that they have no idea how learning works, nor how teaching works. Their findings should not be used as evidence. Only the largest effects could be cautiously us…
There's 200 countries to examine. Should be plenty of ways to get data to analyse. For some reason it seems to be minimal how much comparison we get. Whether comparisons we do get end up being a kind of contest, like PISA.
So we assign each difference to national differences. Or language. Or some other part of the environment.
If you could get say 50 countries to do a double blind experiment with two different teaching methods, you might make use of the scale. But even then you can only conclude something if all results have (more or less) the same effect size, and what do you win? Little. You can't even generalize over countries, since it wasn't a representative sample. And that's ignoring all the aforementioned factors, and the near certainty of a less than flawless execution that will definitely screw up the results.
So I don't think "200 countries" will work. Such approaches have been tried with other, easier manipulations, like dieting, and it frequently turns out that interpreting the data isn't straight-forward. It isn't physics.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#215Earlier 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.
My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop. Money talks.
We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing.
We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter.
The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick.
(Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#216Well, "Yes Prime Minister" already figured it out. The whole education system is more for the welfare of bureaucracies and teachers/unions instead of students'. And that was some 40 years ago.
A bureaucracy tries to keep itself alive. That's part of its goal. But "Yes, Prime Minister" is a British series, so unions are small, and not well off; they've got some political influence, and form a jumping board for future politicians, but that too is the nature of "middle field", as it's known in Dutch: the sector between citizens and government. Teachers' welfare also can't be the point, since more and more peo…
The teaching unions have pretty broad coverage, even more so when Yes PM was written.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right but you give the incentive to the construction company, not to the food truck that feeds the workers. The teachers aren't the problem (to the extent there even is a problem, which is an embarrassingly unexamined question), the students are. So give them an incentive to stop being a problem.
Giving the teachers an incentive to find a way to incentivize the students is a perfectly reasonable approach.
How do you incentivize IQ?
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "advice" coming from these professors of education to state governments should be what is giving you a giant red flag. Reducing quality of education by lowering standards, and lying about the data, shows that it is not driven by science. My opinion on this: the "education" establishment in the US is driven by people looking for consulting fees, as shown by someone in this post linking to Dr Boaler's absurd consul…
> Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead My Chinese gf learned how to analyze simple electric circuits (Ohm's law, reading schematics, etc.) in middle school and was tested on it for high school entrance, even though she was an arts/humanities student. The standards here in NC for middle school science seem to only require knowing that circuits must be closed and insulators/conductors. That would be an…
> In America you can get into university (even a prestigious one) and start off at "College Algebra."
It may be possible to get into any given University and start off with college algebra, although I'm not entirely sure about that. However is certainly not the case that you can get into any program at any University and start off at college algebra.
Admission requirements for majors are determined by departments responsible for those majors, and they can and do set their own standards for what is acceptable when declaring that major.
For example anything remotely related to Stem at any of the UC schools is going to expect that you have, prior to entering the program, already completed at least the equivalent of Calculus BC, and usually linear algebra as well, in order to be accepted into the program. If you're starting off at college algebra in one of those schools you will never complete the math sequence necessary to start one of these programs and still graduate within 4 years.
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#219U.S. high school math scores lag significantly behind other countries, even though scores in reading and science are above average How much of this math gap is because other countries focus heavily on test prep and exam performance?
Optimizing for test scores is an American phenomenon. AFAIK schools in most of the rest of the developed world are not worrying about these metrics. (They do worry about how many pupils go on to graduate college, for example.)
(Although of course nobody on here likely knows anything about more than a handful of countries’ systems at most.)
Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks
#220Earlier 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.
My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop. Money talks.
Learning is a kid’s job.
A kid is working a decades long project to figure out how he wants to spend his life and do the work to make that happen.
Imagine facing that and being told you have to do something you aren’t interested in doing without a clear concept of why it even matters… and without really any say in the matter anyway.
I don’t know if I would have the tenacity to tackle a twenty year project partially against my will and I don’t have to worry about developing socially, growing physically, etc.
Pay the damn kids, I say.