California needs real math education, not gimmicks • Hacker News Board

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#271

Post by ryandrake » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 2:32 PM UTC

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.

I think you have baked into your plan an incorrect assumption: You are massively overestimating the effect a teacher's input has on student output. Of all the things that lead to student education performance, the quality/performance of the teacher is very low on the list. Teachers are not factory workers, where if they are more skilled, or faster, or better trained, they'll produce more widgets faster.

Most teachers can predict each of their student's year-end educational performance by the end of the first parent-teacher meeting week. Students whose parents who are not involved or where there is no culture valuing education at home are pretty much screwed, no matter how much effort is spent on them, and students whose parents are dialed in and taking an active role in their educations are going to succeed regardless of whether the teacher is even there.

Basing a teacher's bonus on student performance will have one effect: Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.

There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes". Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#272

Post by Balgair » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #199

Balgair wrote: post #141

Like a lot of education, California's is so tied up in so many ways that it takes books to understand. The first issue that springs to mind is the funding. Most funds in California do not stay local, they go to Sacramento and are then distributed out. If you're thinking that is a system ripe for abuse, then you are correct. The formulas and methods for determining funding aren't easy to grok. But then you add in all…

Funding is not the problem, at least not everywhere. My local school district (San Francisco) has: - an annual operating budget of $1.2bn/year. - ~50k K-12 students. That's $24k per student per year. Let's assume a teacher costs $150k/year and you want a low student:teacher ratio of 20:1. Of the $24k, $7.5k is needed to pay 1/20th of the cost of the teacher. You still have two thirds of the money left. Is that not en…

The median salary for a teacher in SF seems to be ~$70k +/- $9k [0], so about half you guess. Which, I mean, how the heck are they living anywhere near SF on that salary? Jeeze Louise...

A better breakdown of the '21-'22 budget for SFUSD seems to be here: [1]. Numbers in () are a per student number

Federal Revenue: $48,915,000 ($926)

Local Revenue: $667,062,000 ($12,631)

State Revenue: $455,213,000 ($8,620)

Instructional Expenditures: $503,371,000 ($9,532)

Student and Staff Support: $193,984,000 ($3,673)

Administration: $104,612,000 ($1,981)

Operations, Food Service, other: $103,178,000 ($1,954)

Construction: $190,399,000 ($3,605)

Student/Teacher Ratio: 19.32

Total $ per student seems to be ~$22k, the ratio is just under 20:1, and construction is just under 20%, so your guesses were pretty good!

The site has more info, but one thing to notice is that the expenditures add up to more than the revenues. As in, SFUSD is in debt at ~$6 per student.

Play with the numbers yourself (please also find another source of data). In the end, it seems SFUSD is not doing all that well if it's only paying teachers ~$70k, is still running a deficit, and has revenues of ~$1.1B per year. Something seems strange about all those numbers.

[0] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho...

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I...

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#273

Post by throw9away6 » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

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.

I think it’s the reverse. The baseline remedial student growth is say .8 grades per year. Therefore to get 1.0 grades of progress you would need 125% baseline effectiveness. To get the same with a 1.2 growth rate student it would only take 83%. Students also can’t be judged in isolation, remedial students adversely affect other students so that needs to be taken into account somehow.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be done but you would need a pretty sophisticated model to try to figure out who is or isn’t effective. Then once you turned on the model you would need to constantly tweek it to handle metrics based tampering.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#274

Post by slowmovintarget » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 2:42 PM UTC

> Math should be more inclusive. Math should be more engaging. I think one of the biggest mistakes both Dr. Boaler’s supporters and detractors have made in this debate is to try to slot what should be a practical, fact based argument about optimal math education into an ideological struggle invoking silly phrases like Woke Math. Dr. Boaler and her fans did not make math education worse by being too left wing in their math—whatever that even means—but by sloppy with their science and lazy with their facts. You don’t make math education better by advocating for changes based on lies, and unfortunately, that is exactly what happened here.

The assertion is that this was not leftist politics at work. Why else would Dr. Boaler advocate for what the author asserts are lies, then? The author also admits that the aim is equal outcomes and gives data showing the approach is actively worse, even on that measure. How is this not a problem of Progressivism over Liberalism?

> In response to this, science and math professors across the state have been raising alarms. In response, Dr. Boaler turned to a tactic she often relies on—trying to wrap her ideas in the context of a broader culture war, painting critics as stodgy conservatives fighting her efforts to make math more equitable and diverse. She described her critics as those resisting change. The notion that teaching this version of data science rather than Algebra II is somehow more equitable permeates the CMF in often bizarre ways.

> The CMF says data science is more equitable than other STEM fields because “data scientists work together to address uncertainty in data while avoiding bias.”

So the aim is to train people to "clean data," leading to more equity! That is, train people to use the tools to eliminate data from datasets that meets someone else's definition of bias. Why "someone else's?" Because if the people wielding the tools don't have an understanding of the underlying math (something the article opines about) they can't know whether a dataset is biased or not without someone else telling them it is and how. When someone else tells them that any data indicating X How is this not a problem of politics getting in the way of education?

The only possible alternative is that it is the adjacent hustle of big business aligned with a particular political mindset. But that only makes it mildly removed from, not entirely divorced from, Progressive policy advocacy.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#275

Post by _8j50 » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #259

_8j50 wrote: post #207

I think standardized tests are ideal. Make them very hard and don't be afraid to fail most of your students and have them repeat grades. Testing should not account for anything about a student other than physical disability needs. The effects of these measures are seen decades after enactment. From what I have observed, the politicization of education and having metrics other than academic tests has gotten so bad, it…

> other than physical disability needs. And mental, unless you wanted to likely fail many people with various kinds of dyslexia and many other issues. If your actually care only about the test results, there's lots of other adjustments you should be very interested in to enable everyone to have a shot.

Yeah, mental too, so long as it impedes learning.

> If your actually care only about the test results, there's lots of other adjustments you should be very interested in to enable everyone to have a shot.

Depends. If a child has terrible parents for example, testing shouldn't accomodate for that. Same thing if family income and other issues are a factor. I think you are talking about learning accomodation and that's probably fine but tests should measure ability.

I inclided physical disability only because I couldn't think of how mental disability could be accomodated for in a test. But dyslexia is a good one, carefully crafting questions and answers for dyslexic kids makes sense.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#276

Post by throw9away6 » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 2:51 PM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #246

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.

> 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. You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems i…

Why does teaching to a test not work? If the curriculum was standard and the test was well made it should work fine. All my college grades were 50-100% test based and it seemed to work fine. Maybe you break down the content into testable units or something instead of one big test but still what’s wrong with tests?

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#277

Post by throw9away6 » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 2:53 PM UTC

donw wrote: post #107

WalterBright wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

School choice only works because you can choose to not be in a school with high need kids. The public schools can’t choose their student so it’s a huge disadvantage

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#278

Post by slowmovintarget » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 3:01 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #82

another_story wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

We have already seen that such incentives produce the wrong effect. At the whole-school level, what we see from incentives like this is that the system gets gamed such that the standard is lowered so that pay milestones are achieved, as opposed to the actual results of educating the children.

Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs.

Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#279

Post by slowmovintarget » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 3:10 PM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #140

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 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.

No. Children are not the bottleneck. Parents are. All the statistics we have say that children in homes where the adults value education and urge their children to learn do better, regardless of other circumstances. Unruly children are typically the result of parental neglect. There are many many examples among poor families of well-behaved children achieving a trajectory that raises them out of poverty within a generation. But it all has to do with the attitude toward education and behavior in the home.

The classic example is poor Asian immigrants that produce successful professionals within one or two generations. Strict behavioral expectations in the home, coupled with an attitude of parental sacrifice for their child's educational opportunities causes significantly better results decade over decade. But this is an attitude that often doesn't translate to many American households.

Vouchers might be one way to help, but it still requires parental involvement in creating the incentive for the child.

Re: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

#280

Post by coconuthacker42 » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 3:15 PM UTC

another_story wrote: post #77

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…

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…

And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/