Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading • Hacker News Board

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#251

Post by dorchadas » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 11:54 AM UTC

_AzMoo wrote: post #142

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but during my time as a teacher, the one variable that seemed to govern the success/failure of students was home life—especially whether or not the child had two loving parents. Poverty seems to be the common denominator in those unstable households. I think a broad and robust approach to our collective welfare can address the issue far better than "more money to education!" can.

It's not just anecdotal. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02765... Just one example of many. Everybody's talking about the problems with schools, but the issue is the enormous gap in economic inequality that is just growing larger and larger. Parents who have to work 2-3 jobs to support their families don't have the time or energy to devote to supporting their children in their academic lives.

And often those same kids don't have time to dedicate to their studies, having to work after school to help support their family.

Teaching at the rural school I grew up in really changed my perspective. I was very abnormal when growing up there, and all my friends were too (I can only think of one good friend who's parents were divorced, and her mom and remarried when she was fairly young), and I was super insulated from the realities of things there. Coming back as a teacher made me see how much worse it is, and it's a clear difference between the kids; even those kids whose parents want them to do well struggle if the parents can't be at home.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#252

Post by tzs » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 11:58 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #194

mlyle wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what level? Undergraduate physics / secondary honors track, sure. But in MS physical science and the intro physics HS class I'm familiar with-- doing simple, well-understood kinematics problems is where a whole lot of test effort is spent (while trying to build intuition and process that the best students will be able to use for harder problems). I mean, it's fun to ask "trick" questions, like what happens to a he…

> like what happens to a helium balloon in a turning car Is that really a "trick" question? The balloon drifts to the underside of the roof on the inside of the turn. > I wouldn't assess based on them I would. I expect physics students to get past their knee-jerk intuitions and think about the principles they've been taught. Otherwise what's the point of learning physics?

A slight variation of that balloon question (it asked what happens to the balloon when the car starts moving) was on a Ph 1 homework at Caltech in 1977. I don't know if I'd call it a trick question, but there were large contingents supporting both "it moves toward the back" and "it moves toward the front", and a few going with "it stays where it is".

Back in those days there was an annual organized bus trip to Disneyland for Caltech students, and that homework set happened to come out right before that. The Disneyland trips always had a large number of first year students, and Ph 1 is a required course for all first year students, so something like 80% of the people in my bus on that trip had opinions on that problem. Several bought balloons when it was time to return to the buses.

It must have been a strange sight to the bus driver to see the entire busload of students get on the bus and then just sit in silence staring at balloons while waiting for the bus to start moving.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#253

Post by dorchadas » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:00 PM UTC

bruceb wrote: post #223

JPKab wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a parent of two kids and I couldn't agree more. I went to mostly black and poor public schools my entire childhood. Back then there were a few teachers who clearly didn't care and were never held accountable. Most of the teachers were pretty good though. It's increasingly shifted towards the opposite. I was blown away by how pathetically run my children's public schools are here in Colorado so I put them both in…

yes how dare they take vacation as already negotiated in their contract. Darn those teacher hanging at their mansions Also anyone who works at google should not be allowed to take vacation if they worked from home. Sure that would go over well. The vaccine wasn’t really available till a few months into 2021, and I can understand the hesitation on some to be the first to take a new vaccine. Yes private schools might r…

> Yes private schools might run better. Shockingly richer and generally two parent families are going to have children that been primed to respect learning and have less trauma so much easier to deal with. Public schools teachers don’t have this luxury.

Exactly. OP acts as if it's such a great surprise they're run better. Obviously they would be, because they can pick and choose who they take and usually only get those kids who's families are well off enough to afford it; those kids already all have huge advantages when it comes to learning. It's exactly why the voucher system would do no good either -- it'd just make the public school worse as the private schools take those kids who are already borderline on affording it.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#254

Post by dorchadas » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:02 PM UTC

scollet wrote: post #177

wyldfire wrote: post #56

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Public education is one of those rare positive externalities. I think it would be a mistake to abandon it. If we wanted to succeed here, we would likely need to invest more money to hire more or superior teachers that could work individually with these students that struggle to meet the requirements. The worst part would be that even with that investment it may not even be enough. Some portion of the students who don…

That's untrue. I'll bet my life that the population of students uninterested in excelling is around 50 people in the entire US.

As a teacher, I can name at least 50 that are uninterested in excelling. Mostly because they've been conditioned to be that way, usually by parents/community who see no value in education. You can work with them and get them interested, but it takes a lot to undo that conditioning (along with all the other stuff they've endured through their education years of being told "Well, you're just not an X person", etc.). It's also really hard to work with them and get them over that given the current way things are (seeing 150+ kids an hour a day).

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#255

Post by dorchadas » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:05 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #192

stjohnswarts wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

"Public schools work. You can’t deny that." That is like saying that the Space Shuttle worked. It was certainly able to reach the orbit, but the loss of life was politicaly unpalatable, the technology was much more expensive to build and operate than promised and the supply chain was one huge boondoggle covering the entire USA so that every Senator would be happy. At the end of the day, more efficient rockets like Fa…

> Back to public schools. If I look at the international comparisons, American public education burns through a lot of money for mediocre results. This is your money; you should be more critical. Why isn't there any Silicon Valley for education?

Because, the fundamental issue with education isn't the quality of teachers. It's the home lives of the students. That's why there's such a big disparity in public education in the States. Until we fix the cultural and social issues, schools will continue to be at the level they are. If we want to fix education, we need to fix the underlying problems that cause some kids to not do well. And it's generally not the teachers (yes, there are bad teachers; but socioeconomic factors of the kids have much more impact)

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#256

Post by dorchadas » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:07 PM UTC

uejfiweun wrote: post #50

adventured wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How on earth do we de-escalate from here? You increase the chances to succeed at the same time you make it more difficult, to overwhelm that aspect. Reduce the binary outcome slightly so it's not just a cycle of fail and be thrown / throw yourself to the wolves (dropout). Dramatically increase vocational education training. Shift to a year-round school system. So you don't fail and abandon. Instead, you never stop…

I love these ideas and I agree with them for the most part. But I am pessimistic about US society's capacity to make such far reaching changes to a system that has largely stayed the same for almost 100 years. There are just too many forces pulling these government officials too many ways - the best we will get is some compromise that satisfies nobody. That's why I say we should move to a more free-market based solut…

Private schools would make things worse, honestly, unless they were banned from refusing to accept students. You'd have the "good" ones only accepting the good students, or the students with stable home backgrounds, and they'd excel. Then you'd have the "bad" ones with all the other students, and it'd be as bad or worse than what we have now, except the parents have to pay even more to send their kids there.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#257

Post by cafard » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:08 PM UTC

Long ago I helped coach some kids' baseball teams. There I got a notion why 60% is or was the minimum passing grade in schools: if you give a kid a task he can perform about 2/3 of the time, it may engage him and he may get better at it. If you give a kid he can perform half or less of the time, you will get a frustrated, then bored and put-upon kid.

Moving a kid who has not mastered basic material into a class that aims to build on it? That seems to me a formula for frustration.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#258

Post by dorchadas » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:10 PM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #222

secondaryacct wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a private school in France, a small one in a smallish town, and I dont really understand why we have public schools. The incentive to succeed starts at parents having to pay, ending with the students being quite aggressively challenged to actually deliver on exams. It may not be fit for everyone, but now that I work in an investment bank in Hong Kong, I dont feel like I m being abused by deadlines, financia…

>The incentive to succeed starts at parents having to pay, ending with the students being quite aggressively challenged to actually deliver on exams. Responsible parents should challenge their kids to learn regardless if the school is public or not, if they care about the future of their children.

This is the issue. At least in the States, even if a lot of parents want to encourage their kids and be involved in their education they can't because they're too busy just trying to survive. And then you have the kids who couldn't give two shits about school when they gotta get straight to work in order to help make the money to help keep their families fed. If we want to fix schools, we need to fix the underlying social issues.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#259

Post by simonsarris » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:15 PM UTC

sien wrote: post #186

jhoechtl wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the general intelligence level going down since like 20 years or so? I admit I have no factual proof nor a link to study, I only read and hear that from time to time so this might be an urban legend. But if so, we face a large-scale societal problem we might not even be able to tackle, like leaded gas was likely a major contributor to soaring violence in the 60ies to 80ies.

Nope. It's going up : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect Mind you, perhaps American High Schools are poised to stop this....

Even Flynn has written and talked about the reversal of this effect in recent times.

Re: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading

#260

Post by throwaway23451 » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:17 PM UTC

dls2016 wrote: post #39

throwaway23451 wrote: post #5

I’m sure every generation feels like the next is going to turn the world to hell… but what the hell? I find it absolutely bonkers that gifted classes, math, homework and objective performance assessments are suddenly under fire as instruments perpetuating inequality. Does our education system leave much to be desired? Absolutely! Let’s pay teachers more and improve access to quality education for all students, not co…

Most of what you're saying seems reasonable... but then I see a statistic like this: "Black Americans receive about 7 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded each year across all disciplines, but they have received just 1 percent of those granted over the last decade in mathematics." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/edray-goins-black-math... And this is the current production! You don't want to see the statistic…

I’d say this is a problem of compounding. The odds of any kid going on to get a PhD in math (or any subject) is vanishingly small, and is impacted by outcomes at every level of education preceding grad school. Saying that math is racist because there are few black phds in the subject neglects the law of large numbers. Few secondary teachers really understand math at a deep enough level to be inspirational… If kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are not shown how beautiful and useful math can be, what motivation would we expect there to be that could carry them far enough in the subject to get a phd in it?