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North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

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Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#301

Post by yummyfajitas »

wpietri wrote: post #290
yummyfajitas wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll make one final attempt to bring this discussion to specifics. Here is a test from CA: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf Can you be specific about what "test prep" means and how it differs from "education"? Again, many larger companies (e.g., Google, Goldman, MS, DE Shaw) do attempt to standardize their hiring procedures and evaluation methods. But I suppose they are all "insane", right?

Are you seriously saying that any of those outfits uses a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test to make decisions about hiring, firing, and promotion for their software developers? If not, I don't see what your point is. I also don't believe you really don't understand where education and test prep diverge. I think that's a rhetorical technique.

Are you seriously saying that any of those outfits uses a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test to make decisions about hiring, firing, and promotion for their software developers?

They have collections of questions they ask on interviews, each assigned relative difficulties, and a standardized way to evaluate answers. They ask interviewers to stick to a certain structure, and discard results if an interviewer goes rogue. Standardization is about making sure results are objective and comparable to each other - "fill in the bubbles" is just one particular easy-to-grade method of accomplishing that.

In the past companies (pre Griggs v. Duke Power) did use even more standardized methods, which included "fill in the bubbles", they just don't get too close to completely objective standardized tests due to lawsuit risk.

I also don't believe you really don't understand where education and test prep diverge. I think that's a rhetorical technique.

For a decently designed test (such as the one I linked to) I don't believe they diverge significantly. As I suspected, you are unable to justify your claim that they do.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#302

Post by wpietri »

icelancer wrote: post #300
wpietri wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a legal requirement. It's a moral requirement. It's your country, your state, your city. It's your government. You are legally allowed to shirk some of your duties, although not all of them, but that doesn't make you less of a shirker.. Parenting is similar: there are a lot of ways to be a shitty parent that don't rise to the legal level of neglect.

Whose morals? Kant's Duty Ethics? You are making subjective judgments. This is fine. But don't confuse your opinions on "fairness" with an objective reality.

It's the nature of a community, of a democracy. The citizens, as sovereigns, are ultimately responsible.

Don't like it? You can shirk your responsibility and accept your helping of shame. Or you can move to someplace that isn't a democracy.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#303

Post by wpietri »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #301
wpietri wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously saying that any of those outfits uses a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test to make decisions about hiring, firing, and promotion for their software developers? If not, I don't see what your point is. I also don't believe you really don't understand where education and test prep diverge. I think that's a rhetorical technique.

Are you seriously saying that any of those outfits uses a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test to make decisions about hiring, firing, and promotion for their software developers? They have collections of questions they ask on interviews, each assigned relative difficulties, and a standardized way to evaluate answers. They ask interviewers to stick to a certain structure, and discard results if an interviewer goes ro…

Ok. So your answer is: no, nobody uses a test like that for hiring. Why? Because, being cheap to grade, they're not a good measure for anything subtle. Like hiring decisions. And they certainly don't use them to evaluate anything after hiring.

As to the difference between education and test prep, I'm not unable to justify my position; I'm unwilling to try to do so to you. I don't think you're a serious conversational participant here, by which I mean one who's actually willing to learn anything.

But as a hint, your basic claim is that a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test is a perfect leading indicator for the decades-long effect we expect education to have. And that it can't be manipulated to diverge from that.

That's a very strong claim, and you're obviously smart enough to find the holes in that. You won't, though, because your whole MO on HN is as relentless debater on a pretty narrow set of political points.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#304

Post by Locke1689 »

wpietri wrote: post #295
Locke1689 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you work that you aren't graded on a metric? The places I have worked have all emphasized goal-based metrics. The software developer lays out what they think their responsibilities should be and how they'll be measured on them. The manager then reviews the list with the developer and confirms the responsibilities and the measurements. The developer is then later graded upon his or her ability to meet the pre…

I am having trouble taking you seriously. You argue in one place that scientific metrics are the only way to evaluate educators. And then here you are arguing that managerial judgment is a serious metric. Even though it's entirely non-numeric, personal, unstandardized, unrepeatable, and unreliable. The same thing was used for teachers: it's called the judgment of their employers. If you're happy with that, then there…

Where did I say I advocated standardized testing? I simply want a metric. It doesn't have to be standardized, it can be personalized. However, eventually I would like to see us gather some useful information from it. Think of my metric as performing an experiment. We'll try many different methods for the same curriculum, gather the results of those methods (what were the most common goals, what were the most commonly completed goals, what were the most commonly failed goals, etc.). Do you see my point now?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#305

Post by cheez »

wpietri wrote: post #302
icelancer wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose morals? Kant's Duty Ethics? You are making subjective judgments. This is fine. But don't confuse your opinions on "fairness" with an objective reality.

It's the nature of a community, of a democracy. The citizens, as sovereigns, are ultimately responsible. Don't like it? You can shirk your responsibility and accept your helping of shame. Or you can move to someplace that isn't a democracy.

Or you can opt out of the portions you don't like.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#306

Post by icelancer »

wpietri wrote: post #302
icelancer wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whose morals? Kant's Duty Ethics? You are making subjective judgments. This is fine. But don't confuse your opinions on "fairness" with an objective reality.

It's the nature of a community, of a democracy. The citizens, as sovereigns, are ultimately responsible. Don't like it? You can shirk your responsibility and accept your helping of shame. Or you can move to someplace that isn't a democracy.

>You can shirk your responsibility and accept your helping of shame.

I will. I don't lose sleep at night based on your subjective opinions, fortunately.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#307

Post by icelancer »

ZachPruckowski wrote: post #280
icelancer wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're also teaching kids about subjects they literally couldn't care less about. Every single class I took on World History, Arts, and English literature was very close to useless. I bet the artists and English lit lovers would say the same thing about Chemistry and Physics. We don't trust 16 year olds to make decisions on what they do and do not want to study, so we force them to study some things we know they won't…

Because we want them to have a level of understanding of those fields, even if it's shallow. It's good for society if as many people as possible understand algebra or World War I or how to read and write at a high level. If for no other reason than that as a democracy, we need our citizenry to have a certain base level of knowledge of how the world works.

Citation needed on the "broad base of knowledge being useful" tidbit.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#308

Post by milesskorpen »

smsm42 wrote: post #262
milesskorpen wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scho…

Weak students may benefit, but strong students don't. Some of them are strong enough to work through a class of couple dozens of peers not interested in learning and disrupting the class out of boredom, but some of them just give up. I'd like to see some data about this "net negative" claim. I think forcing bright kids that want to learn and advance to suffer through substandard school and disruptive environment that…

If charter schools consistently out-performed public schools, you might be right. But they don't! It really seems to be a myth that charter schools provide a better education — if anything, it is worse, since they have a number of advantages.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#309

Post by dsanderson »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #282
dsanderson wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardized tests claim to measure those quantities. To be fair, my school system was quite good, so I don't think I suffered too greatly from teaching to the test, but I did read quite a few of the study/test guides put out by Kaplan and their ilk. Much of it was tricks based on the structure of the tests; the "types" of question that will be asked and type-specific solution strategies. These tests are not about ba…

Here is an actual CA standardized test: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf Please explain why you feel it doesn't adequately measure the ability of students to "read, write, and compare rational numbers in scientific notation (positive and negative powers of 10) with approximate numbers using scientific notation" (as well as the other topics listed). Or, similarly, can you explain specifically w…

Sorry for the delay, I didn't realize you had replied (is there some global notification UI element I should look for?) I don't know if you'll see this, but I'll reply anyway.

I'm not from California, nor have I studied their tests, nor did I claim that standardized tests themselves are flawed, so your first demand is misleading, at best. I will grant that, having done further research, my first examples of teaching to the test were flawed; I'll try to summarize it (and my position) below.

Teaching for the test is explained pretty well here: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/teaching-test and on wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test ]. Note that this definition of teaching to the test isn't necessarily bad, only when applied wrong. Punishing/rewarding schools based on student performance on a small set of tests creates an incentive to have student "learn" by mercilessly practicing on those tests, to the exclusion of other approaches. As per the sources on wikipedia, this doesn't impart a "general understanding," nor does it necessarily raise test scores. Other people here have linked stories where teachers and schools actually helped their students cheat on standardized tests. Standardized tests themselves aren't the problem; we've had them for decades, and they can provide valuable insights in some cases. The problem is when we focus on standardized tests to the exclusion of all else, putting a perverse pressure on schools. I believe you previously supported evaluating by standardized tests because they're the only quantitative measure we have; maybe this means we can't reliably quantitatively evaluate the impact of a single teacher on a small set of heterogeneous subjects. Demonstrate we can, then I'll reconsider NCLB.

edit to add another thought: I'd liken this to the problem of overfitting in machine learning. You have a way of measuring the performance of your system, and try to improve the system via that feedback. It's easy to overfit it, making it work beautifully on the provided data, but lack generality. The problem isn't in how we measure "fitness," necessarily, it is in how we update the system based on that result. That is, standardized tests may be a fine measure among students with that "generalized understanding"; I've not been convinced we are using those results intelligently.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#310

Post by wpietri »

icelancer wrote: post #306
wpietri wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the nature of a community, of a democracy. The citizens, as sovereigns, are ultimately responsible. Don't like it? You can shirk your responsibility and accept your helping of shame. Or you can move to someplace that isn't a democracy.

>You can shirk your responsibility and accept your helping of shame. I will. I don't lose sleep at night based on your subjective opinions, fortunately.

"Of, by, and for the people" is not subjective. Neither is the people replacing the sovereign. Nor the nature of a community as a collaborative enterprise.
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