North Carolina teacher's resignation letter • Hacker News Board

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#251

Post by yummyfajitas » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 12:44 PM UTC

Tsagadai wrote: post #217

yummyfajitas wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are proposing that the purpose of education is indoctrination into value system X, and propose that a successful system will indoctrinate more people? Your goal is now vaguely stated. But how do I actually count the # of people concerned with individual rights/positive outlook/etc?

Yes, the purpose of all education is indoctrination to a set of ideas. Home schooling is also an exercise in indoctrination to a set of ideas. Critical thinking is an idea, egalitarianism is an idea, individuality is an idea, problem solving is an idea. Education is a way of ensuring a more advanced and productive society through imparting certain knowledge and ideas to its children. The best metric for measuring the…

Education can be divorced from indoctrination. An educated person can display particular skills and knowledge, they don't need to believe that knowledge.

(See, e.g., Einstein displaying knowledge of quantum mechanics without actually believing it, or assorted creationists who actually understand evolution.)

I think your claim that criminality is the best measure of knowledge is interesting. Among other things, it suggests that the best way to increase knowledge might be to shut down the education system and implement a police state. (For the cost of the current education system we could increase the number of cops/courts/prisons by a factor of 6.)

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#252

Post by yummyfajitas » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 12:51 PM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #205

yummyfajitas wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polling is another form of standardized testing (unless you propose asking different questions of each participant). It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of the current school system (conveying knowledge/skills rather than indoctrination).

> Polling is another form of standardized testing (unless you propose asking different questions of each participant). No, it's not. Polling is an analysis of a large population through sampling. Standardized testing, in the context we're talking about, is an evaluation of performance based on the performance of a different group. > It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of…

...evaluation of performance based on the performance of a different group.

I'm confused - what group of people should we be measuring, if not the students exiting the education system?

...there were a number of interesting topics that we had no time to cover because it was more important to teach to the test.

Again, I stand by my claim that your problem is not with standardized tests, but with the goals of the school system. You wanted schools to cover topic B, but the political system decided they must cover A.

The only role the tests played in this story is that they are an effective mechanism for making sure teachers actually do their job.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#253

Post by Semaphor » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:08 PM UTC

Bud wrote: post #69

justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

So, if you aren't a fan of testing as a way to measure and improve teacher effectiveness, please find an alternative that works better. Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have. This is a gigantic assumption which you have tossed out there without any support whatsoever. You are basically making an assumption which encompasses the entire issue in question, and then just blithely…

Same here in Germany. We got more and more standardized tests and curricula (it mostly started after I left school) and the teachers I really respected seemed to become more and more disillusioned and annoyed by the changes.

My personal opinion is that good teachers make bad politicians and thus bad teachers (or even better, people who never were teachers) make the rules.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#254

Post by arnoooooo » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:13 PM UTC

imbriaco wrote: post #66

factorizer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right. why fix the system, when you can be part of an elite?

Because your responsibility is to your kids and not to some idealistic vision of what you could be doing to improve the school system as a whole.

Your kids will be part of the society you helped (or didn't help) create. Your view is not just selfish, it's short term.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#255

Post by me_again » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:47 PM UTC

justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

A bad metric can indeed be worse than nothing, because people optimize for the metric, and if it's a poor proxy for the real thing you want, you can actually get less of it.

Imagine what would happen if you evaluated software engineers by lines of code written, and you get some idea of the potential downside.

Other potential ways to assess teacher effectiveness: - auditing classes & lesson plans - feedback from peers, parents, students and principals

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#256

Post by danielweber » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 1:58 PM UTC

argv_empty wrote: post #218

natrius wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be within the reach of more families if they could take the money that would be going towards their child in the assigned public schools with them to the school of their choice. I don't understand why that idea became a partisan one.

Most of the objections I heard were about putting that public money towards religious schooling (the interaction of government and religion being a fairly well-established as a partisan issue).

I'm not necessarily supporting the concept, but this seems a strained objection. It's equivocating the word "public." People who get social security (which comes from the government, and so is just as "public") can use it for religious causes and no one bats an eye.

And SCOTUS has approved vouchers funded via tax credits.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#257

Post by danielweber » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:02 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #213

tokenadult wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this article is mainly about some of the other problems I just saw your reply. What would you suggest should be done about the problems you think are most prominently mentioned in the submitted letter?

I don't know the answers, but I tend to side with those that criticize the increased focus on tests. My experience as a programmer leads me to believe that the most effective work is done when you give passionate professionals the tools they need and then get out of the way.

I think this is true, but you also need the other side of that coin -- the ability to can the professionals pretty easily.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#258

Post by milesskorpen » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 2:03 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #174

jmcqk6 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much for pointing this out. For people who are so focused on "data-driven education" they always seem to ignore this. The fact of the matter is that collectively they perform no better than public schools, while undermining those very schools they are trying to 'fix.' Perhaps part of the issue is that people are focusing on a 'silver bullet' for education. Standardized tests, charter schools, and even th…

Why can't there be more than one school serving a particular area? Does the mere existence of charter/private/parochial in a community undermine that community's public school? Why would that be so? Education is far from the only service industry for which there is no silver bullet. Other such industries function by fostering expertise at management levels in addition to the "work" level, but always leaving the final…

A few reasons:

* Charter schools would pull out the best students (or at least the ones with the most motivated parents). Research generally suggests weak students get lots of benefit from being in class with strong students.

* Public schools benefit greatly from economies of scale. If 10% of students (and thus money) is taken away, the public school still needs to pay for existing fixed infrastructure

* Charter schools frequently take the cheapest students — special ed students, for example, are still left to public schools.

Taken together, this makes charter schools a net negative.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#259

Post by hdctambien » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 3:24 PM UTC

ntumlin wrote: post #193

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classroom work? Like it used to be when we were kids. You went to school, and learned the material in class, and the teacher had a grasp on where everyone in the class. You did homework, and took tests prepared by your teacher. Now teachers in some states have to spend 30 min a day just teaching HOW TO TAKE A STANDARDIZED TEST! "here you go little johnney, fill in the bubble the whole way"

What prevents the teacher from giving his class all the answers so that he doesn't have to work and doesn't get fired for his students grades being too low.

Teachers and administrators are actually incentivized to cheat. And sometimes even the students are in on it.

Yesterday: 23 schools penalized for helping cheat tests http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/10/29/schools-stripped-o...

Last March: the head of the School District's test security program reported more than a dozen testing violations at the school. http://thenotebook.org/blog/125270/wagner-cheating-follow

Last Year: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta http://news.yahoo.com/americas-biggest-teacher-principal-che... http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/07/11/teachers-cheating-in-scho...

I remember hearing about a school where the teachers assigned a letter to each corner of the room and would stand in the corner of the room that corresponded to the correct answer to each question.

In Atlanta they were having "grading parties" where teachers were getting together on the weekend to erase incorrect answers and fill in the correct ones. They got sloppy.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#260

Post by crististm » Tue, Oct 30, 2012, 3:40 PM UTC

xaa wrote: post #43

DanielStraight wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the last few real-world problems I've solved (or attempted to solve) with math: If you have a widget (roughly shaped like a cone with the tip chopped off) held at angle a and the widget is tapered at angle b and the tip of the widget has a diameter d , how far is it in x and y from the center of the tip of the widget to the theoretical tip were the taper continued to a point? If two 14" pizzas feed five peop…

I agree with all this, but consider that the type of math being tested on a standardized test is a subset of the skills you mention. You certainly can't perform complex word problems unless you can do the algebra or geometry calculations, whereas the converse is not true. IOW, standardized testing of math is testing the bare minimum, and a successful teacher should be able to teach this bare minimum. If a teacher can…

And if the teacher does better than the minimum, how is that going to be judged with the standardized tests?