The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom • Hacker News Board

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#131

Post by chernevik » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 11:49 AM UTC

loteck wrote: post #60

Do we care more about student progress or our appearance? We care about both, and we have to. Proposed solutions will have to cater to this reality to have any hope of success. Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable…

Yep. The tests are there because people don't trust the schools and looking for some independent means of motivating them to get better. Unfortunately, the testing architecture isn't entirely appropriate to the task -- but scrapping it just brings us back to the core problem.

The reality is that many of the schools, and many of the teachers, are just bad. This can't be acknowledged in the public debate, so it isn't addressed. The unions have established a structure dedicated to protecting bad and mediocre teachers. Which is why great teachers can't get paid appropriately -- the unions would never allow it. It's also why teachers don't enjoy higher status: As a group, they really don't deserve it.

Yes, the unions are right that, without tenure and their workplace rules, teacher hiring and pay would be a political game. That's what political systems do, they respond to political incentives. That's the whole idea of charters: to move the accountability of the schools out of the political system and into the hands of a constituency invested in actual quality. It's probably true that _today_ parents as a group aren't completely equipped to handle that role, because they've been trained to just send their kids off to school. But as they get the opportunity to make more decisions and influence the schools' offerings, they'll come up to speed.

tldr; The testing apparatus is a symptom of a broken governance apparatus. The solution is to fix the governance and incentives. So long as the incentives are political, the results will be political.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#132

Post by bitcoin-truther » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 11:58 AM UTC

deadgrey19 wrote: post #115

jonpress wrote: post #109

I was surprised that he mentioned the global financial crisis. I think 'too big to fail' was one of the biggest frauds ever committed against society. There is no such thing as too big to fail. I think the 2008 financial crisis was an evolutionary mechanism for society to rid itself of excessive greed among its leaders (natural selection). The bailout was an unnatural intervention and will only serve to propagate the…

This seems a little short-sighted to me. Bailing out the banks was not a question of protecting the banks (who are by no means blameless), it was a question of limiting collateral damage. A large bank failing has the potential to render (literally) millions of innocent people ("mom's and pop's") instantly bankrupt. If a bank fails, there's no way to get your money out. The money simply goes away. Typically banking pr…

This book [1] says the popular narrative is wrong, and that "mom & pop" businesses/households were never in danger. It wasn't a bank bailout to save accounts... that would have been covered by an existing program like the FDIC[2]. It was, rather a hedge-fund / gamblers bailout.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Great-Deformation-Corruption-Capitalis...

[2] Technically the FDIC has a trivial amount of money, this link [3] shows how laughable it is in the casino of Wall St.

[3] http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/fdic/fdic.html

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#133

Post by noir-york » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 11:59 AM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #122

noir-york wrote: post #120

The American political system is broken. Here is a middle-class family that can barely make it. The GOP harp on about lower taxes and immigration, and the Dems talk about economic equality and healthcare. The ACA helps the middle-class but the political gridlock ensures that the president, or anyone else, can't force through effective change. Commonly cited are campaign finance and lobbying and polarisation but those…

>even if Warren were to be the president (a far off prospect, even though she is what the US needs) There's little evidence that Warren wouldn't just continue the current policies of the Obama administration, perhaps with a few extra low-benefit bureaucratic programs on top. She talks a good game, but so did Obama. I think you've hit the nail on the head, though. The problem here is the entire political system. It's…

The current policies of Obama are not necessarily the policies he would like to implement.

He voted for the cromnibus' because it keeps government open and funds a few of his signature policies, but that doesn't imply its the budget Obama wanted to pass. Obama has to be pragmatic.

Obama and Warren 'talk a good game' as you put it but I'd bet that in a different political system, say Britain's, they'd be execute on their talk.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#134

Post by NateEag » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 11:59 AM UTC

waynemr wrote: post #9

The sad and infuriating thing is that good teachers leaving public service is precisely what conservative groups strive for, in their "starve the beast" agendas. As more quality staff leave, they [conservative groups] can claim greater and greater failures in the public system and siphon more tax dollars into private voucher schools.

As someone who grew up in conservative homeschooling culture and still has ties to it, I should point out that many, many conservative homeschoolers are appalled at vouchers and the idea of government funding in general.

They might like to see the public school system go away, but they don't want the tax dollars.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#135

Post by wues » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 12:01 PM UTC

ahomescu1 wrote: post #76

anigbrowl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some things people should remember - how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, or who the parties were in WW2, or what makes a metaphor different from a simile. But you can also give problems, like 'here are the dimensions of some real-world problem, and here's a formula used to solve such problems, apply one to the other'; or 'here's the text of a poem by so-and-so, explain what you think the…

> Well, some things people should remember - how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, or who the parties were in WW2, or what makes a metaphor different from a simile. This line of thinking is IMHO a lot of what's wrong with modern education: none of that stuff matters if you don't understand what's behind it (how you get to the formula of calculating the hypothenuse and why people fought WW2). To…

Oversimplification indeed - to the extent that for the first one year and a half of WW2 Germany and Russia were allies.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#136

Post by noir-york » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 12:03 PM UTC

qj4714 wrote: post #123

noir-york wrote: post #120

The American political system is broken. Here is a middle-class family that can barely make it. The GOP harp on about lower taxes and immigration, and the Dems talk about economic equality and healthcare. The ACA helps the middle-class but the political gridlock ensures that the president, or anyone else, can't force through effective change. Commonly cited are campaign finance and lobbying and polarisation but those…

The political system and Senate reflect the division in the country. There is no easy fix. The problem is people do not trust their government, which is reflective of the current political environment and is the primary reason these problems are not addressed.

Mixing cause and effect. The fundamental cause is how the constitution allocates power to the three branches. Power has a logic all of its own; each actor in the system acts in line with their power and this leads to the division and gridlock that you see.

It is impossible to fix the US constitution under the current political system. There has to be a fundamental realignment of power and that will most likely only happen via a major external shock, like a world war.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#137

Post by femto » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 12:04 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #116

femto wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three arguments against standardised tests: 1) As system, schools tend to teach towards the test, at the expense of a diverse education. 2) The tests essentially test how good a student is at doing tests, rather than what they have understood and learned. Children can do brilliantly in the classroom and badly on the test, then be marked as a poor student. 3) The tests are used to categorise the children as they go th…

I don't understand how someone can master a subject yet be unable to answer written questions about it. In my anecdotal 16 years of schooling, I can't recall a single instance of it.

It's not uncommon for gifted students to also suffer from a learning disability [1], which goes unrecognised, because it is masked by their intelligence. Unrecognised, such students can be written off as the "naughty" one. When taught, and assessed, to their strengths, such students will shine.

By way of example, typical advice is to concentrate on challenge, rather than quantity when teaching these students. Rather than giving them 50 problems of varying difficulty, just give them the 5 hardest ones. When assessing, rather than giving them lots of questions of varying difficulty (like a typical standard test), give them fewer questions, but make them require more thought.

As a parent, who helps in the classroom and observes quite a few children, I'd say that at least 10% of the children in my (typical) school would fall into the gifted category (by measured intelligence) and of those, probably more than half have some soft of learning difficulty. I'd also say that these children will be sold short by the standardised testing.

[1] http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10462.aspx

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#138

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 12:11 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #80

brandonmenc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo. If you dig around the author's Google+ account, his wife appears not to work. I'm not casting stones re: single worker households - particularly if they're living within their means - but an American household wanting to do more than just scrape by r…

The two-income household is sort of the 'betray' option in prisoner's dilemma. If nobody did it, labor would be vastly more valuable, and nobody would need two incomes to support a family (generally). Kids get a full-time parent, nobody has to depend on day care, it's an awesome deal for families. However, as soon as the critical mass of people starts depending on the extra income stream, the value of the labor drops…

Moloch at work. In the end everything stays the same, only everyone's position is worse.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#139

Post by bmj » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 12:13 PM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #18

rdtsc wrote: post #12

Great points. This, I think is one of the fundamental problems: --- If parents and local decision-makers really value education (and there is a small portion of the community that does), student and teacher morale would be much different. --- The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well. Doesn't matter how fancy the workbooks and new materials or how hard we…

If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.

It's been a long time since I was in school, but if memory serves correctly, there were plenty of dis-engaged parents in the 1980s, too, but the schools didn't seem to suffer the same ills they do today.

My wife and I homeschool our kids, but we have very good friends who send their kids to what's considered to be a very good public elementary school. They, as well as other parents, are engaged, even helping out in the classrooms. They speak highly of some teachers, but even with all this involvement, hands are tied by the expectations of the board of education. The kids spend large swaths of their day simply doing worksheets that prepare them for standardized tests.

In my experience, parents that really do care often end up taking their kids out of the public school system because, as the teacher in the original article notes, the edicts coming from "on high" really tie the hands of people who are trying hard to care about the kids.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#140

Post by jdoenejdk » Fri, Jan 09, 2015, 12:14 PM UTC

waynemr wrote: post #9

The sad and infuriating thing is that good teachers leaving public service is precisely what conservative groups strive for, in their "starve the beast" agendas. As more quality staff leave, they [conservative groups] can claim greater and greater failures in the public system and siphon more tax dollars into private voucher schools.

Newsflash: US schools already spend the most per student in the world ($15,000), by far more than most nations, yet still perform at the bottom of OECD nations. Do you want to get your head out of your ass?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-globa...