[Edumacashins] thread
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?p=18555174&posted=1#post18555174
It was getting out of hand, really.
So, okay. Public education. Does it suck? Why and how much? What would you do different?
And so on . . .
It was getting out of hand, really.
So, okay. Public education. Does it suck? Why and how much? What would you do different?
And so on . . .
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Prop up the local valleys in property tax income with state and federal funds in localities below median property value. (Or some percentage of median depending on budget.) We already kind of do this in California because Prop 13 and it's part of the reason we're broke. Wow, that doesn't make it sound so appealing, does it?
Replace compensation tied to performance-based metrics (NCLB) with procedure-based metrics (did the school/teacher do everything that they were supposed to do?). I'll let the wonks figure out what those procedures are supposed to be.
After we have decent metrics in place, make bad teachers easier to fire. Sorry, teacher's unions. I love you, really. This hurts me more than it hurts you.
More charter and magnet schools. I worry that we focus so much on helping the worst-off kids that we neglect our best & brightest.
Stop acting like all students are made equal and implement trade school / college tracks in the style of Germany. This also implies promoting trade schools and skilled labor a lot more, possibly working directly with trade schools to recruit from high school graduating classes.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And then on top of that, science teachers sometimes have to use in class experiments that they must fund themselves out of the little money they already make just so that their class can have a dynamic learning experience instead of a boring "write some notes and then take this test" bullshit class.
Of course, they have to put up with children all day. Other people's children. Children that you didn't raise and are sometimes raised by people who have no idea how to raise children and shouldn't have had them in the first place. Then when they fuck up, the parents complain that you are the problem, not them and certainly not their precious snowflake of a child who can do no wrong and always got A's all the way through grade school AND HOW CAN YOU GIVE MY GENIUS CHILD A C I'LL HAVE YOUR JOB FOR THIS.
Out of every profession I have ever been a part of or been witness to, teachers absolutely get the least amount of respect proportional to the work they do. People will venerate doctors all day long for being life-savers and miracle workers and not stop to think that they would have never had their abilities if it weren't for some damn fine teachers teaching them what they needed to know. Good teachers deserve statues with blazing fires surrounding their smiling and proud visages. They deserve more money. They deserve way more respect.
Fun fact: The state of TN is screwing with a lot of things that affect teachers right now, a couple being how tenure works and how teachers are evaluated. Tenure doesn't need to be messed around with in this state. Currently, it takes 3 years of teaching at a school in TN to gain tenure (some schools let you take your accrued time with you if you move schools, kind of like college credit). Annecdata: My girlfriend used to work in a school district where they would keep a teacher on for a couple of years and then just straight up fire them so they wouldn't have to worry about tenure laws. That's some bullshit.
Also mentioned in in that article is a new school-wide evaluation system that sounds like a crock of silliness:
The audience was warned by Senate Education Chairwoman Dolores Gresham, R-Somerville, that they would be removed if there were any outbursts. Ashlee Bullington, a physical education teacher in New Johnsonville, was among the educators who crowded into the haring room.
"I'm a good teacher, I do a good job, and teachers aren't afraid of accountability," said Bullington, 35. "Teachers are afraid of being accountable for things we have not control over."
Bullington said teachers are being unfairly portrayed.
"Teachers get into this because we love kids, and now I feel like we are absolutely a target," she said. "We're made into the bad guy, a villain."
If I seem a bit rambly and mad, it's because I am. My mother was special education and english teacher and is now a principal. My sister teaches kindergarten. My aforementioned girlfriend teaches high school biology, chemistry and physics. My grandfather taught high school science. My brother-in-law is studying to become a science teacher. I almost became one myself before I realized that it just wasn't worth it to me. The subject of how teachers are paid and treated is very close to my heart because I have always been around it and I see how these types of laws affect people.
Re-working teacher evaluation so that children aren't being taught by some lazy fool is a great idea, but this isn't even close to the right way of doing it.
That's why I support vouchers for kids in underperforming schools. The parents who want to give their kids a shot at a better life will at least have the option of sending them to school somewhere else.
DC public schools have a bad reputation, but crappy schools are not universal here. The elementary schools in (predominantly white and middle-class+) Northwest DC range from good to excellent. But the kid living in Anacostia can't go to those schools, unless he lucks out in the allocation lottery.
Rigorous Scholarship
Where did you gather the information from? From the BLS surveys I remember looking at, teachers spent about as much time on work related activities as other white collar professions. And they accounted for taking work home. I imagine if you divided it into cohorts based on age, young teachers spend more time outside of work than young engineers. This would be due to the large amount of effort going into lesson plans at the start of their career and subsequent decline as those become firmed. But it would appear that flips later on. Could be something else at play too I suppose.
Well funding is certainly a mess. The use of property tax seems to be a large part of that. But schools aren't really starved in aggregate for funding more than they were previously. Spending per student has increased steadily since the 1980's in real terms. It doesn't appear to be well allocated though.
I never understood this. In terms of social kudos I've always seen teachers placed alongside doctors, firefighters, etc. In terms of salary, effort doesn't equal pay. Firemen also don't get paid much. I mean you could argue that higher pay would lead to better teachers, but I don't think I've ever seen that backed up with any sort of data. Hiring/firing decisions for teachers are heavily distorted for a variety of reasons.
You realize that sort of behavior is at least partially an artifact of the pay/seniority system that the teacher's union advocates.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a very good assessment methodology. My beef with the Teacher's Union is that they seem to offer very little in the way of alternatives to the status quo. I'm not really dogmatic on that point, so if they are alternatives being offered I'd love to see them. I don't prima facie hate organized labor or anything.
Cure for cancer. Flying cars. End world hunger and war.
"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."
Um, this happens already. Honors classes, AP classes, even the school you pick and the TYPE of classes you pick.
In NYC we have what are called the "specialized high schools". Three were created when Sputnik scared everyone and they were originally supposed to be all about math and science but these days they're just good high schools all around. Anyway I think they added 3 more recently, but that's beyond the point. So basically here's how crazily grouped by ability and interest my classmates were:
1. They picked and got into the high school. In NYC you can choose what high school you go to, these high schools are open to all but there's an entrance exam to get in.
2. They qualified for AP classes (could only join them with decent grades, some were too booked even with that so you had essay contests, etc. to get into them)
3. They picked non-mickey mouse classes. Most of the curriculum is of course required but there's still a lot of optional stuff, for example New York State only requires 3 years of math, so taking math at all, let alone calculus, in the 4th year is voluntary. Even then there's AP Calculus AB or AP Calculus BC, AP Physics with Calculus or AP Physics without Calculus, AP English Lit vs. AP English Comp (ok that last one isn't very fair since they're different, but Lit was way easier). Then there was laugher stuff like AP Spanish, Chinese, etc. while being a native speaker of that language.
Anyway so by my senior year when my schedule was 6 AP "hard" classes in a high school you had to pass a test to get into, I think I was pretty squarely grouped by ability and interest versus the guy in his locally zoned high school taking whatever the law requires he take.
Lastly, regarding teacher unions and they problems they cause, that's never going away. Teacher unions are huge, huge supporters of the democratic party. I heard somewhere that they're the largest monetary contributors but don't quote me on that. So it's directly against the teacher's union's interests to fire ANY (dues paying) teacher and it's against any democrat's interest to fuck with the teacher's union.
Standardized tests are terrible. They only want a very limited amount of information that often is derived from the cultural background of rich white folk, and thus is not really relevant to other students.
IMO, schools should be pursuing more "real" forms of assessment: get students to really think about what they are doing, get students to realize the connections between their life and world and the subject they are studying, and get students to be able to build on their areas of previous expertise to learn beyond just rote memorization for the ACT/SAT/Whatever.
The problem with this, of course, is that coming up with good real assessments is hard. You can make a real assessment (formative or summative) that would truly test students' abilities to think, but just completely not connect to them. Likewise, you can create an interesting and exciting activity that doesn't actually support student learning in any way. Making an interesting and relevant activity that truly makes students think about the connections between different subjects, their life, and the world is no easy feat. And teaching in this way? Also not easy. Teachers aren't lazy, quite the opposite, but it's easy to fall into a groove that's not really beneficial to anyone.
Citation needed.
What's ethnocentric about math and science skills? Or grammar?
How low do we continue to set the bar as we blame poor performance on everyone but the students and teachers?
^This. We should focus on fixing shit for people to help them overcome real socio-economic disadvantage. We shouldn't be pretending it's the test's fault.
Obviously it's because it's Strunk and White.
If you want to make sure a kid can name every state capital, they work just fine. If you want them to push higher on Bloom's Taxonomy and actually be able to use that knowledge for something, it's almost impossible to measure that via standardized testing. At least as we know it today.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Seriously? You've never heard of the issues the SAT has with ethnocentric questions?
A lot of research on education (mostly elementary, from my experience, however) uses Pierre Bourdieu's social reproduction theory as a baseline and finds that those students with higher cultural capital (ie. upper class students) will almost always perform better on standardized tests due to natively having skills and ideas that the tests ask about whereas students from lower-class backgrounds are at a distinct disadvantage from not having this innate culture. I seem to recall Lisa Delpit being a big proponent of this theory, but I can't list any solid titles off the top of my head. Take that as you will.
Grammar is one of the most ethnocentric things out there. What makes grammar proper? Why is upper class white grammar apropriate while the grammar of Appalachia or inner-city Oakland not?
Again, I can't name any titles off the top of my head, but I believe Rosina Lippi-Green is a good author for tackling these sorts of questions (though I think Delpit also goes into this area)
I'm not saying that everything but teachers and students have to be blamed, or that teachers and students should be without blame. However, the current system of education greatly favors those who already have power within their societal group, so it really should be no surprise that students from areas without that societal power don't do as well. Some of this is on the teachers. Some of this is on the students, some of it is on the parents, and some of it is on how we test students and how we fund education. And, in my experience, testing is often a large problem, especially when funding is tied to how students perform, which causes teachers to teach to the test, which is (again, in my opinion) terrible.
EDIT: I can only remember author names right now, since I read the individual works a couple years back.
The thing with standardized testing though is that it's the easiest and simplest way to standardize education and the results there of.
It's the go to method for making sure schools are actually teaching what they are supposed to be teaching.
Here you go.
If you couldn't find any citations, you weren't looking all that hard.
I never said I looked all that hard. I said I've never seen a compelling citation. And seeing as how you only linked an abstract of an article that isn't available, I still haven't seen a compelling citation.
Have you even read this article, or are you just linking based on the abstract?
That is the weakness of standardized tests and their use as a universal grading method for schools.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I think the much bigger problem are things like schools only teaching three years of Math in High School or at most four science courses.
It has it's place, but it shouldn't be the thing we're basing the majority of our judgments about education on.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
This. And creationism is fucking up what little biology there is. According to Science Magazine via http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/bad_science_education_in_the_u.php, 13% openly teach creationism, and 60% teach the bare minimum they can get away with to avoid confrontation with uppity creationist parents.
/facepalm
more charter schools and magnet schools would be great. i almost feel like this alone would be enough to help our education system get its shit together. just dont allow the unions to block out competition and i think we'd be halfway there.
That's pretty much all you need to know about grammar, from an educational point of view. Either students learn proper grammar, or they get left behind in society. The rest is just ivory tower mental masturbation.
Rigorous Scholarship
Here's an article from last year discussing a new study showing that the SAT still has ethnocentric bias.
If you want, I can keep posting. Turns out Googling "sat racial bias" brings a lot of information back.
Again, if you haven't seen any compelling citations, you weren't looking.
I can see a place for them in the system, but so many are being run by greedy fucks who don't care about education past the money it can make them.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
No that is the weakness of standardized tests that you have right now. Your criticism is on the over-reliance on multiple-choice questions and dumbing down to make it more "fair", not on standardized testing itself.
but our math and science scores still suck compared to the rest of the developed world.
the flaws of standardized testing doesn't magic that fact of reality away. something more fundamental is wrong with our education system. standardized testing is such a tiny component of what is wrong that we may as well consider it a red herring.
but how do you explain our country's shitty math abilities?
The fact that language is naturally evolutionary and adaptive doesn't negate its context-specific correctness or its static ruleset.
You can deconstruct the meaning out of just about anything if you try hard enough.
Wouldn't a possible alternative solution be to stop funding local schools through property taxes? I would think it would be better to take taxes property or otherwise from the entire state and the disburse the money to districts or schools based on the number of students attending. Actually I would prefer this to be done at a national level so you don't have the same problem with poor states that you currently have with poor counties.
Another large problem is the anti-intellectualism that occurs in the US and the lack of importance that some people place on education. Sadly I don't know how we solve that problem.
could you just name a few of the problems? im not trying to be facetious here. im genuinely interested.
charter schools and magnet schools are one of my last great hopes for the u.s. education system.
Then what would you base them on?
You can devise a way of testing critical thinking that can be distributed among all students and the results tallied. Right now, though, we don't do that. There are a lot of reasons, chief among them being manpower issues and huge discrepancies between educational priorities and budgeting priorities.
Determining critical thinking skills takes a lot longer and more involved of a process than determining ability to regurgitate facts. That we have people in charge of education budgets who think that the second is a perfectly acceptable measure for school quality is at the heart of the problems with standardized testing.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
This. Huge chunks of every tax/bond dollar for education never get anywhere near the classroom. They're tied up in the mahogany desks and 12-foot oak doors that line school district headquarters.
Check out the pride of Los Angeles Unified School District - a school that cost $578 MILLION to build, and opened last year.
And the $377 million school that opened in 2009.
And the $232 million school that opened in 2008.
BTW - from 2009-2010, over 3000 LAUSD teachers were laid off.
"More money for teachers"? Might as well ask for "More money for starving Haitians under the Duvalier regime". You can send all you want, it'll never reach its intended target.
Standardized testing as we know it now sits in the Knowledge section and occasionally spikes up as far as Application. We see no testing of students' ability to Synthesize knowledge or Evaluate concepts because it's basically impossible as of right now to grade millions of tests that would show that kind of upper level thought.
It's easier to measure knowledge level thinking, and we've tricked ourselves into thinking that that's the highest level we need for our schools to be effective. This simply isn't true.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Yeah I never understood why you guys don't do that.
standardized works fine for math and science though right?