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Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

economist.com

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Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#71

Post by bluGill »

squeefers wrote: post #30
nixon_why69 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them. To be less fair to the economist, "adjusted by poverty level" is a heck of a spin, we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. And that's without even speculating about what "demographic factors" means or implies.

> your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.

Teachers generally make the same in a suburb as in an inner city school. In the Des Moines area all schools get the same amount of money per student, but you still see suburbs outperforming the city schools. I don't know what the problem is, but this disproves the money is the problem theory.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#72

Post by TimorousBestie »

wildzzz wrote: post #59
TimorousBestie wrote: post #28

I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.

Birmingham had a chronic absentee rate of 29% prior to this program which is defined as missing at least 10% of school days. They brought it down to 14%. Missing class is a major detriment to learning and causes kids to fall behind faster than they can keep up. Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism is not really the solution to preventing the spread of childhood diseases.

> Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism

Not something I was advocating, thanks.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#73

Post by ch4s3 »

justin66 wrote: post #48
prodigycorp wrote: post #24

Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.

> not teaching phonics Teachers use phonics all the time. “Teachers don’t use phonics anymore” is just a thing people say. It’s odd.

This is not really accurate. There was a vary long running debate about phonics which is 1 piece of a larger system (alphabetic coding, phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and comprehension) vs Whole language which became popular int he UK and US in the 1980s and 1990s. Whole language is junk pedagogy and doesn't work but was the preferred method taught to teachers for nearly 30 years in the US.

The NYT Daily podcast did an ok episode on this[1].

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aerQQFrBbPQ

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#74

Post by ch4s3 »

hyeonwho5 wrote: post #44

It is interesting how much these interventions copy the absolute basics of what is done in Steubenville, one of the best performing low-income cities in the nation [1]: - Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school. - Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made…

The debacle of instituting "whole language" instruction should be viewed as a great national shame.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#75

Post by ch4s3 »

fncypants wrote: post #13
gruez wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the chart. Adjusted for "poverty rate and other demographics", the top states are red states, so it's harder to chalk it up as some sort of n=1 outlier.

What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.

> What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute

Reading scores are SUPER strongly correlated with family income levels in the US. The fact that Alabama does a better job teaching its poorest students to read than Massachusetts does is impressive, particularly given the disparity in funding levels.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#76

Post by cestith »

mikkupikku wrote: post #49
cestith wrote: post #34

Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.

The latter will probably work much better. Good teachers get embittered and burned out through exposure to bad students (who are mostly bad because their parents are trash, and feeding the kids breakfast partially mitigates this.) Of course the teachers will tell you that paying the teachers more is the solution, but that doesn't seem to track with the evidence. Good schools, which are good because the students are g…

But you get the best teachers by requiring a Masters and paying $40k a year while your school has three assistant principals and your district pays six figures apiece to multiple assistant superintendents, right?

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#77

Post by ch4s3 »

HanShotFirst wrote: post #27

1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home. 2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days. 3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores m…

>the article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)

It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based.

[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of...

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#78

Post by ch4s3 »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #28

I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.

This might be the dumbest take I've read online in months. Alabama has had 1 case of measles in 24 years. Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools and has a 95.3% vaccination rate which meets the accepted threshold of 95% for heard immunity. One minute of searching could have turned this up for you. But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow childhood vaccine rates".

Seriously, I can't fathom why you'd think the poorest students in Alabama shouldn't be receiving high quality in person education even in the face of imperfect ventilation. Talk about the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#79

Post by prodigycorp »

bluGill wrote: post #70
prodigycorp wrote: post #24

Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.

English is not really a phonic language. The is some, but the rules are not clear - why is phone not fone? Many letters can have more than one sound, and it is arbitrary which is chosen. Different English speakers even have different sounds / ways to pronounce a word. Not that phonics is useless, but it isn't as helpful as it should be. We need spelling reform first - which probably needs to start with a more general…

This makes some sense!

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#80

Post by squeefers »

bluGill wrote: post #71
squeefers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.

Teachers generally make the same in a suburb as in an inner city school. In the Des Moines area all schools get the same amount of money per student, but you still see suburbs outperforming the city schools. I don't know what the problem is, but this disproves the money is the problem theory.

he said the link was with poverty and education outcomes, not school funding and education outcomes
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