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Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

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Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#81

Post by aspensmonster »

mpyne wrote: post #76
taylodl wrote: post #20

Linus is now seeing firsthand that opportunity is not equal in the United States. You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. The goal is to keep the wealth concentrated in the already wealthy. That's how it works here in the United St…

> You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school My parents were in the military so I floated all over as a kid, even through high school. After high school I managed to get merit scholarships, but only enough to fully cover an in-state school 99% of you have never heard of, the very illustrious Universi…

The only thing I've heard about UNF is that U Never Finish, because the registration system was completely fubar'd. IIRC, there was a story about a CS student that wrote a bit of software to try and work around the registration system, but it was shut down by the administration.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#82

Post by joelhooks »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #5
manaskarekar wrote: post #2

The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.

Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents? Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?

We have been home educating our four kids. The oldest is 15, enjoys poetry, plays basketball competitively, likes to tinker with computers, reads history, does math, etc. He isn't handicapped by our abilities or knowledge because we provided him with tools to learn. We've made it clear that his education is ultimately his responsibility. It is his job to learn. We serve as mentors and facilitators by providing opportunity.

The other three are on the same trajectory. I understand that you essentially discounted HN parents as exceptions, but we are also part of a broader community and I see similar results with children whose parents have no clue as to what a HN is.

None of them know haskell, but the oldest is working through The Little Schemer.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#83

Post by daxelrod »

diakritikal wrote: post #61

One thing Linus didn't mention about Finland and education which some of you may find interesting and of note; is that the right to education is enshrined in the Finnish constitution. http://www.oph.fi/english/education Coming from a family of educators I can't help but think this plays an important role in cementing Finland's position at the top of the OECD education rankings. Furthermore, being a Scotsman and under…

The right to an education is enshrined in many US states' constitutions as well. That's unfortunately not enough to make the difference.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#84

Post by acjohnson55 »

anarchotroll wrote: post #75

He says he dislikes a private system but, at the same time, indirectly acknowledges that what makes the system at his district work is the fact that it is partly private. It is partly private because people actually raise money voluntarily and charge outsiders in order to make it work.

He does acknowledge that. The problem is not that empowering the community to pay for its education doesn't work; the problem is that different communities have vastly different resources to pull from, both financially and in terms of the soft assets that communities share, like social mobility, intellectual capital, etc. It's unfair because your average low-income school district can't pull off a bond issue or massive fundraiser to fund new initiatives.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#85

Post by thrownaway2424 »

jrockway wrote: post #80
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #65

SHOCKING NEWS: Ethnically and linguistically homogeneous people from tiny, frozen nation easier to educate than diverse citizens of world's most-immigrated-to nation. Stay tuned for more surprising revelations, as soon as we hear them!

So if the US were colder we wouldn't have education problems. Interesting theory.

No, if it were colder nobody would want to immigrate here.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#86

Post by jiggy2011 »

tolmasky wrote: post #74
jiggy2011 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents? Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?

What is so bad about different children learning different things? At the end of the day, someone always ends up deciding what they learn, and the reality right now is that that curriculum is often highly politically motivated. Even if it wasn't, in an ideal world where everyone working on putting together course plans had the best intentions -- still, who decides what's right to teach and what's wrong? There is no r…

I'm more conservative, I think it's fine that you have to make an argument and persuade if you want CS taught in schools because such decisions should be made after strong consideration by parents, teachers and other experts.

My problem isn't so much with parents who might teach their kids extra programming classes or whatever. It's with parents who may be incapable of (or unwilling to) teaching their kids anything (and therefor raise kids who are also incapable of teaching) or parents who will teach nothing but creationism/scientology or whatever. Or parents who would decide on some career they want their kids to follow and try and teach them everything around that without long term consideration. Plenty of parents would rather their kids be good at sports than math for example.

I would be concerned that we would see something of a return to a caste system since what parents would be most qualified to teach would be what they themselves do.

Environment is also important for teaching, some of the environments in low income parts of the UK would be environments unsuitable for learning. Loud noises, drug/alcohol abuse, domestic violence etc.

At least having a school gives kids somewhere they can go and at least have some chance of learning.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#87

Post by jiggy2011 »

joelhooks wrote: post #82
jiggy2011 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents? Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?

We have been home educating our four kids. The oldest is 15, enjoys poetry, plays basketball competitively, likes to tinker with computers, reads history, does math, etc. He isn't handicapped by our abilities or knowledge because we provided him with tools to learn. We've made it clear that his education is ultimately his responsibility. It is his job to learn. We serve as mentors and facilitators by providing opport…

It's like most libertarian style ideas, fine when applied to the educated middle class but a disaster if you tried to apply it in a ghetto.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#88

Post by barry-cotter »

nawitus wrote: post #50
robomartin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal is to keep the wealth concentrated in the already wealthy. I don't understand this kind of thinking. Perhaps it isn't what you meant. My apologies if that isn't the case. I have heard and read this kind of sentiment before. Is the idea that the rich somehow conspire to do as you suggest? If so, how does that work? Did Steve Jobs receive a letter once his net worth passed a certain threshold inviting him to…

" What would happen if teachers were not unionized and had to compete for their jobs? What would happen if teachers lived in a true meritocracy without a sure protections?" Incidentally, practically every teacher in Finland belongs to an union, and it's unheard of to fire teachers on the basis of bad job performance. A true rationalist looks at the empirical evidence regardless of ideological opinions. You may not "l…

Master's degrees have no detectable impact on teacher effectiveness.

http://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeeecoedu/v_3a30_3ay_3a2...

It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness

Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson

Economics of Education Review, 2011, vol. 30, issue 3, pages 449-465

Abstract: Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#89

Post by adamgray »

rayiner wrote: post #78
ams6110 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are also required to live IN the city if you are a teacher in CPS. So you can't take that salary and escape to the suburbs after work.

Sure but the city of Chicago isn't very expensive. It's cheaper than the suburbs of say DC or NYC or SF by a good margin. $70k is a very good salary in the city. You can get a nice 2BR apartment in Lincoln Park (one of the more expensive areas) for only $1,600 per month. My studio Westchester costs almost that much! Chicago teachers start around $51k with a bachelors. You can live better with that salary in Chicago t…

That's not true anymore, the average 2BR cost has gone up to $1800-1900, even higher in places like Lincoln Park.

Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general

#90

Post by barry-cotter »

derda wrote: post #47
rbehrends wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what tracking means -- that you get "sorted" into either they "Gymnasium", "Realschule", or "Hauptschule" track after fourth grade. However, this is not what happens in Finland. In Finland, everybody gets the same basic education until age 16, then picks either general upper secondary or vocational upper secondary education (note that vocational upper secondary education does not bar you from attending a univ…

> However, what he mostly doesn't seem to realize is that Germany (or Finland, for this matter) does not really have the same type of highly competitive admission process for its universities as the United States [1]. Well that is because the Abitur (german high-school diploma) is regarded equally no matter which school you attended. From what I gathered the US high school diploma is worth pretty much nothing, withou…

Don't universties and Fachhochschule discriminate between the Abiturs of different Laender? Bavaria has the most difficult and highly regarded one, right?
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