Iâve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best colleges for the very top students. There was honors, accelerated, standard, and remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because thatâs where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldnât disrupt anyone elseâs learning. Nobody cared what happened to those kids including in many cases their own parents.
Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI â the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.
I have taught for multiple years in a southern state in the US within Behavior Support units for the "emotionally disturbed or distracted students." These classes range from neurotypical, ADHD, autism spectrum, to learning disabilities. These students being the so called "bullies and disruptive kids" many people in this thread have directly judged as poor ROI and "not worthwhile."
Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.
I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.
I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.
:Continued below:
Continued from above:
Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
Continued from above again:
Admin churn and policy changes have a direct and deleterious impact on teacher, student, and school performance. I can't focus on teaching academics if I am supposed to reteach classroom policy changes at random times throughout the year. Policy changes can take weeks to months to integrate into a classroom. Teachers who are whipped back and forth between admin and policy changes don't have a moment to settle in and focus on what they were hired for. Instead they juggle the ever changing classroom culture, incorporating morphing policy decisions about how their classroom should be run, and socially adjusting to staffing and admin changes. There is no time to settle in and so burn out and nihilistic expectations take shape in many teachers. This description is only a small part of the problem with admin and policy churn in school systems.
Parents and parenting styles are other pernicious issues that are extremely controversial. These issues directly affect students and indirectly affect teachers. Whether it hurts or not to admit, parents have power over the school system. Many people outside of the school system focus on teacher unions and large scale public school administration as a main pain point.
Yet when teachers and school administration are under threat from being sued due to happenings in class because parents don't like what occurrs, the school system adjusts to accommodate those parents' wishes. At some point the school system begins to become an inane policy labyrinth to avoid lawsuits. There are plenty of lawsuit examples if searched on any search engine. These lawsuits set precedents in our county for how policy will look in coming years. As for parenting styles, these are varied and diverse. Every household has their way of rearing children. Yet when you take diverse children and put them into a class of 20+ students and typically one teacher the varied rearing styles become a pain point when applying teaching standards. In one highschool class you can have students reading on a college level, while others are emerging eighth grade. Has the system failed them? Sure, the system didn't catch them in time before they moved on and moving them now would take months due to admin churn and County backlogs on the other hundreds of thousands of students issues weighing down a bloated inept system. Or maybe the previous school was worried that funding would be cut causing admin to push through many students that should have been retained because if not the "greater good" of hundreds of other students would be impacted by funding cuts. But it isn't just the school systems that have failed students, so have the parents. Sometimes students aren't held back because of parental intervention. These interventions can be lawsuits or putting up enough of a fight that the county relents and allows the student to progress. The latter has happened four times in my classes and many more times to my other teaching peers. When teachers hold students back and parents put up a fight by bringing in the county, the school's admin and teacher have to follow the county dictates, which almost always fall on the parents' side. A cause for this is teachers are not considered experts when it comes to education. There are a myriad of reasons for this ranging from poorly funded college education degree programs, to society's mistrust of experts, to a belief parents know their children the best. As exemplified by the recent pandemic and social media post hating "lazy teachers who want to get out work" , mistrust in teachers and their teaching abilities are pretty apparent.
> to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile
The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot.
It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
> school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
It is also bad recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who are neurotypical white privileged background kids.
I went to pretty good primary and secondary schools which actually tried to get the best out of pretty much everyone. Remedial teaching was taken seriously and wasn't just a bin into which difficult children were dumped. But even then the results left a lot to be desired. It's really difficult even in the absence of political interference.
The surrounding society makes a big difference. I count myself as lucky growing up where and when I did.
"school as the institution taking care of those kids"
But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids?
The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.
Both.
The public school system goes behind education because it's the only state service where most children can be reached. They're crucially important for providing food security and shelter to millions of children whose parents can't or won't.
It's exactly these low performers who never study, are always late, interrupt, and bully who make school living hell for the neurodiverse students that actually try. They can go into a coal mine and move piles of rocks for the rest of their lives for all I care as long as they can no longer disrupt everyone else.
In my country parents can choose which school they send their kids to.
You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
> Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation.
More likely, segregation happens because parents don't always want the best for their kids. A lot of it is simply self-segregation, driven by varying parental attitudes to education and the like.
There are many good reasons to de-racialize the discussion around US public education. One is that the "white school" trope is increasingly out of date. Instead, we've begun to see "Asian schools" wherever high-performing public high school schools admit students based on standardized testing. The top-ranked high school in the entire US, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is 65% Asian and 23% white in a county that is 17% Asian and 62% white [0][1]. Stuyvesant High School in New York City, another high-performing public magnet school, is 74% Asian while Asian residents make up just 14% of the city's population [2][3].
In my view, there's a degree to which such lopsided admissions represent a greater Asian American cultural emphasis on education (good) coupled with a marginal standardized test score advantage produced by many hours of after-school test prep (bad). As repeated studies have shown, the advantage of e.g. SAT test prep courses is consistently relatively small, but enough of an edge to matter when you're looking at a ~10% admissions rate [2][4]. Not all applicants have parents who can afford or are aware of the value of such test prep, so it represents an uneven advantage. Crucially, this advantage is not inherently racial, but rather an artifact of culture, parental choice, and socioeconomic background. To mitigate this uneven advantage without completely eliminating merit-based admissions, a blurring filter e.g. random lottery might be applied to the top X% of test scorers.
And there is absolutely value in merit-based admissions. It makes these magnet schools what they are [5]. Despite their distorted demographics, it's what enables schools like Stuyvesant to still function as effective ladders out of poverty for many students:
>What makes these schools so good? The general consensus is the academic rigor. But whatâs come out clearly in our interviews with Stuyvesant graduates is something arguably more important: a peer-driven expectation of achievement. What Stuyvesant does is take 3,000 pretty bright kids and put them in a building together. Then magical things happen. They push each other, they strive to be like each other, they learn from each other.
>Nearly all of these kids went to college, often selective ones, and most went on to do well professionally. The poorer students became middle or upper-middle class, and the middle-class students often did better than their parents. And they were happyâmost (though not all) felt that Stuyvesant had had a big effect on their lives. For instance, Elizabeth Reid Yee, a white 1985 graduate who grew up poor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fully credits Stuyvesant with keeping her from a life of poverty.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County,_Virginia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
[4] https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cos...
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/new-yo...
This was the explicit and intended result of No Child Left Behind.
Schools were only given incentives to make kids pass, not to help them excel.
If we're being honest, no one was willing to work at or fund helping kids excel. It's just too huge of a problem.
Honestly, I think viewing it as an exclusive choice is harmful.
Schools need resources for both kinds of students, and if they have to choose who gets the attention they are simply underfunded.
Some of these failing school systems (Baltimore, MD & Prince Georgeâs County, MD) have some of the highest budgets per pupil in the country. The problem isnât money.
I'd be interested in how those budgets are broken down. Are those schools spending the money on finding the best teachers, counselors, mentors, etc. for their struggling students? Or are they spending it in more questionable areas?
That's a genuinely curious question. I haven't researched any specifics about those schools or how they use their money.
It's possible for a vicious cycle to develop between waste/corruption in a school system and poor academic performance, wherein additional money doesn't help improve outcomes. That doesn't mean that withholding resources is the solution; rather, it means that a more fundamental restructuring than American municipal governments may be comfortable with is in order.
I think numbers might lie a bit there.
If the function of education is to provide an even starting point for kids regardless of their personal environment, it stands to reason that in places where those personal environments are worse you'd need brutal amounts of resources, since you'll indirectly be covering for parents' neglect, psychological issues, and other factors that should have been handled somewhere else but are being stuck in the education budget. If you see it under that scope, absolute numbers might not tell you much.
Highest budgets still aren't very high though. It's anchored low.
In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. Itâs not just SF, look at whatâs happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-...
The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.
The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-comp...
> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as...
> Our recent report, âAssessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,â [1] concluded that, on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.
From the same report, the bullet point above your first quote:
> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
That âobjective measureâ is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.
Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.
I feel itâs like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.
Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, Iâd look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldnât move. And itâs not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he canât take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.
In my experience, teachers are strong communicators, highly self-organized, aware of organizations, able to work with others, and able to create and follow a plan. They have a demonstrated history of continued learning - and know a lot about how to learn. Teachers, when I've been lucky enough to hire them, have been excellent additions.
> specialized profession.
Color me skeptical that it's a specialized profession. It does not appear to me that decades of education majors have done any better than those who didn't possess such a degree, or that there are any special skills involved beyond knowing the subject and good interpersonal skills. When I think back to my best teachers, none of them had any special skills. They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read. [1]
Let's try a model where yes, we pay teachers more - much more. But instead of hiring "teachers", we hire experts who are passionate about their subject and want others to learn about it. Let's do this from middle school onward.
In elementary school, we can focus on getting kids to read and do basic arithmetic, and otherwise let it basically be daycare. A lot of underperformance at that age goes away if you simply give the kid more time to mature - for some mad reason at least in my school district, kindergarteners are expected to already know their letters and numbers and be able to read a few words.
heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw
Regarding the first quote, itâs not the opposite of what youâd expect if teaching was a low-status profession that could only attract weaker, lower paid labourers.
Teaching doesnât attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.
If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores.
Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. Youâll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.
> Teaching doesnât attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.
You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.
As a teacher, you have no control over your classroom.
Disruptive students that destroy everybody else's learning environment? Too bad. No Child Left Behind! Wait, that's the old slogan, what's the new one? Equity Uber Alles? Equity Macht Frei?
It changes so often, I keep forgetting.
Assaulted by the kids? Suck it up, we don't want to be sued! Better to have a battered teacher -- the Unions will keep them in check -- than a lawyered-up parent.
I have seen this first-hand.
Want to actually teach kids things they need to learn to succeed? This is the wrong job for you.
I know a lot of motivated folks that went into teaching, with big salary bonuses, full scholarships for their degrees, everything. None of them lasted more than four years.
Public education in the US selects for Dolores Umbridge, and against Remis Lupin.
The analysis is harder than that.
I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: theyâre meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead.
Zooming in a bitâŠthe big âfringe benefitâ is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that itâs linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet thatâs not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.
> I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: theyâre meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less.
This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast...
> The fact that teachers with masterâs degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned masterâs degrees, and found no impact.[1]
> This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers.
[1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness
Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001â2002 through 2008â2009.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
I would say itâs the opposite. Vacation time has more incremental value the longer it goes on. Even a 2 week vacation Iâd have trouble fully unwinding from. An entire summer, you can truly have some quality time to yourself to recharge, focus on a hobby, travel a lot, etc. I would say those summers off are easily worth $100k.
I had one amazing high school math teacher who graduated from MIT at 18, and was teaching all the way up to diff eq in public schools. Heâd made his money and then decided to teach because he was annoyed that his sonsâ math teachers sucked. Thereâs absolutely no way teacher salary+pension was competitive with what he was making in industry. And we should want a lot more people who are like him teaching, without the needing them to be lucky enough to not need to care about money.
Not necessarily. People who are really smart and great in industry are not necessarily great teachers. Frankly, if you are talking about making the salary competitive with one that allows FIRE will have the opposite effect that you want (ideology vs money).
> The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom.
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problemâneat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
Its refreshing that there is somewhere left on the internet where someone can point out that a problem might have nuance and not get immediately down voted to oblivion. HN is great.
"HN is great."
In nuances ...
You say âuntil we are dominated by idiot majorityâ as if it hasnât happened. Just look at the platforms of the peoples vote to represent Americans. Rarely are they platform that would actually matter to the people and most of the time it is identity politics, nationalism, gun rights, and religion. We canât even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesnât devolve into an ideological/tribal argument. I think the US is already dominated by idiots in every state.
> We canât even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesnât devolve into an ideological/tribal argument. I think the US is already dominated by idiots in every state.
Gotta appreciate the irony of this statement. The Idiot Tribe are victims of The System, not driving it. They are not my enemy.
Agreed. If we're using education and related achievements as a barometer for "not idiots", the American ruling class are hardly uneducated dimwits. Those at the highest rungs of power in politics, academia and the mass media are almost without exception highly educated graduates of top institutes. If they fail, that's clearly on them, and not the "idiot tribe".
They are all victims. Nonetheless, the unfortunate reality is that the state persists precisely because this idiocy broadly holds.
I fear I am feeding a political tangent here, but I think most of the problems you mentioned could be fixed in the US by recognizing (admittedly this would be a timely process) an official third electoral party. It's a lot easier for nuance to prevail when the system isn't designed to be binary.
Recognizing a third party does little with the spoiler effect. Not sure if you are referring to this in your final sentence, but the voting system has to change first to some sort of runoff model so people can express their primary choice without fear of the spoiler.
Nice comment but I think this is a bit wide of the mark. Schools are a state and local issue in the US where party is less significant. Look at the difference between a "republican" in, say, California's central valley vs. the same in Alabama. In most other places, that'd be two different parties.
Though I agree we'd be better off with something more like Germany or the UK, with coalitions.
The issue is not that we need n+1 political parties. Its that people donât have time or much motivation to read actual policy.
Teachers (or their unions) often lead the charge for the very policies that hinder performance. Some of these are done in the name of equity (local metro school districts are a prime example).
Ultimately, teachers alone can't solve the problem. As seen in both poor white rural schools and poor non-white urban schools alike, if the parents don't care about schooling or enforcing any discipline at home, there will be significant problems at school.
> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50%
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism".
The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
There is an effort underway to recall members of the SFBOE:
https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/
There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions.
Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.)
I find this situation baffling.
>the public has identified the man
The father collecting petitions or the person attempting to steal petitions?
Cyan âRecall Chesa Boudinâ Bannister is a very bored billionaire housewife.
I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.
I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds. If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we assume that high grades, extracurricular activities or essay tutoring are not correlated with family wealth.
If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
This kind of narrow thinking is what has caused schools in SF to suck for everyone. Because Lowell doesn't exist in a vacuum and the arguments that privileged people have a leg up doesn't really make a difference - it is similar logic to burning libraries because some folks can't read.
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out âbadâ students including the type of students who donât care about school who hold back students who do care; the problems of the article are virtually nonexistent at Lowell. I donât think Lowell was particularly selective (I think something like 50% of applicants get in) and there were plenty of poor students (including myself) who benefited from an academic public school that does have both wealthy and non-wealthy students who care about learning (as opposed to private and suburban schools which definitely do discriminate on the basis of wealth/income).
> either we must assume that they are less smart ⊠or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination
The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
> If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true
Is this what the evidence suggests or what you wish to be true?
If we do not take advantage of the more capable students because of equity, what will the future be without people who can do the sorts of things that require highly capable individuals?
No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can.
The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up enthusiastically working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester.
This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no
> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam
> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
> . The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from.
Itâs easy to recover from if you donât use a stupid method if aggregation, but that takes actually thinking about what it is you are trying to measure; for instance, if you grade by % in each of several competency areas throughout the year, and have a final grade catehory standards (cumulative, so you get the highest grade where youâve met all the standards):
D: median of competency area medians meets minimum proficiency standard
C: median score within every competency area meets minimum passing standard
B: median of competency area medians meets high proficiency standard or median in at least one competency area meets excellence standard
A: median of competency area medians exceeds excellence standard
(standards might be something like passing 70%, high proficiency 80%, excellence 90%, but the exact numbers arenât the point.)
That will give you a measure of overall competence that isn't particularly sensitive to outlier scores on a single assignment, even if the assignment has components across many competency areas.
I support this. My kids have had a single zero on occasion for a missed assignment and it demolished their grade. No way to recover. This is not a good measurement of whether you grasp the concepts. Itâs a good measurement of whether you made no mistakes in the process.
If 50% is a passing grade, and a student neither mastered the topic at the beginning or the end, they would still pass. A better solution is to weight the assignments and exams at the end much higher, to give a students a chance to prove their knowledge, while still failing those who learned nothing.
You weigh the grading such that you could still pass the course by doing well in the end assessments. Something like hand out 30% of the grade during the course and the rest at the end.
Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges.
If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout.
I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
Also in the name of equity the UCs are now ignoring the SAT
Well, now many are looking to ban the SAT as well.
> Every year you progress to the next year.
Is that a SF thing? Because normally that is not true.
> Why do we have grades at all?
Class rankings, scholarships. Even besides that, it lets parents know how well or not their child is learning.
Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next yearâs 7th graders.
In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, youâd just go slower, not be left behind.
> In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time
In my experience in elementary school, 3rd grade material is repeated ad nauseum in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Plenty of time to get it. (Being an Air Force brat, I attended 3 different elementary schools, even one in Germany run by the military. All the same.)
A great deal of research has gone into just this concept, often called "mastery-based learning." Sal Khan is one well-known proponent (look for the requisite TED talk).
You could just study using your textbook and workbook. A lot of material relies on what you previously studied in some way. You should be able to learn the things that you missed with your experience and textbook.
Nowadays you also have the internet that can fill those gaps. If a student wants to learn, then there are many opportunities. But students usually don't want to.
How does a teacher instruct a class where every single student is learning something different at a given time, based on their progress up to that point?
If I could have skipped high school, and went straight to a community college, my life might have been different?
I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.
I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.
I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.
All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.
If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
High school should completely be optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who donât wonât be there to simply make trouble.
Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
>I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
But maybe the reason you could do that is because you had already studied this before. When I look back on school work, they look trivial. Even things that I've forgotten look trivial.
Subjects like mathematics (in high school and earlier) are about experience. Sure, explaining hope to calculate the area of a triangle is very easy, but if your only experience with it is having it explained to you and using it once, then you'll probably forget how to do it or the relation it has to the area of a rectangle. We do the trivial stuff so much in school that you get an instinctual feeling for it. I never felt as comfortable with any of the math I learned in college than I did with earlier topics. I suspect it's because I never got to build up that feel for it.
The problem is that parents make a stink when their special little snowflake is given a bad grade, or sent to the principal, or whatever. But parents don't make a stink when their kid doesn't learn, because the teacher is too busy dancing around the kids that s/he can't do anything about because their parents would make a stink.
One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
In SF, the parents are absolutely not the cause here. The issue is a top-down mandate from the school board focus on equity to the detriment of all other objectives.
The parents voted in the board, no?
This looks like a classic "what gets measured gets managed".
If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation.
For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school).
They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
For context: "recent governments" == "every government since 1981", iirc.
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can't afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those "single student who struggled most", will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn't even pass city college's math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn't even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.
>Another thing Iâve discovered is that many studentsâ not just a couple here and there, but several in every classâ consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes.
>I donât know how this happensâ I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect.
Look at the Spanish Mexican keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/KBDLA/
It has the umlaut (actually diaeresis in a Spanish context I think) and acute accent mark pretty prominently available.
Look at the Spanish Spain keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/kbdsp
It has them even more prominently available, right on the same key that an English American keyboard would have the single and double quote.
I wonder whether the students' families are from Spain or Mexico, and whether they're using the Spain vs the Mexico keyboard. I wonder how many people from Mexico use the Spain keyboard due to software confusion.
In my opinion, those wrong characters are probably coming from some OCR software used on badly scanned books. Those "several students" probably all used the same text database which has this particular issue.
I sometimes see an acute accent used instead of an apostrophe in reddit comments. People aren't scanning old books into reddit comments. It's the keyboard layout.
Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized.
I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.
You have just given me flashbacks of using a keyboard in Italy to type in English.
I eventually gave up and just accepted the typos.
One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed.
Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
Youâre describing Finland. They outlawed private school funding for exactly the reason youâre proposing: to get the wealthiest and most engaged parents invested in fixing public schools for all.
It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.
This is a big oversimplification. There are many differences in education between Finland and the US. Pointing to a single one and declaiming it as the cause is unjustified.
As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and private system.
Another thing to consider would be the population differences. The US has ~65 times more people than Finland. In this larger group of people there will be Finland sized subgroups that outperform and underperform Finland even though the US as a whole underperforms.
Massachusetts, for example, one of two states in the US to perform and report their own PISA numbers, is pretty comparable to Finland in 2015 (1 or 2 points above or below on scores of ~500 for science and reading and 11 points below on math)[3]. I couldn't find the official OECD results for 2018, but I believe Massachusetts is slightly ahead by then.
1 - https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/education/
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia
3 - https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States-MA.pdf
Itâs a Finland solution to a Finland problem. I donât intend to suggest it as anything more. Only to show the parent commenter that his/her idea is not so radical; thereâs precedent elsewhere in the world.
Any idea what Massachusetts is doing to achieve such results, and could it be replicated in other states?
> get rid of private schools
What does that actually mean? It seems like youâd have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.
The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.
The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.
You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling.
It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.
Or maybe you don't understand California law. Most homeschooling families stay legal by registering as a private school.
Source: I homeschooled my sons in California for several years and participated on various homeschooling lists at the time.
> You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling.
No straw man involved. I donât think youâve thought through the implications of âgetting rid of private schoolâ.
The point is that to ban private schools youâd also have to ban homeschooling.
Private schools are subsidized by the government. Charter schools receive virtually all of their funding from the government. The state could only fund public schools
people cannot opt out of the DMV and I hear it's still garbage
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal
> for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions
This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))
Yes, the California DMV is a shit hole because republicans want to keep black people down. Makes total sense.
"people cannot opt out of the DMV and I hear it's still garbage"
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
I think you are into something indeed. When rich / powerful people have to send their kids to the same schools, it became important to have the best one.
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually itâs a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
In France there is a mandatory "map" where you can only send your kids to the nearest public schools.
So you've got "good" ones and "bad" ones depending on the neighborhood. So, yes, the best high schools are public, in areas with high rents and property prices.
Additionally, the best high schools select their students on academics, proof of residence, cover letter, letters from former teachers, etc. [1]
Not that simple : back in the days the « carte scolaire » was design to avoid that. Itâs been jerrymandered in the meantime.
But for instance growing up, the big stink was that those poor projects kids weâre in the same middle school that middle class folks. The trick was to pick German to avoid that and be affected to another school.
Public school is broken and we all know it - in general.
We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school.
Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with childrenâs education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.
> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.
All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I donât understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school.
Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools arenât enough seems incorrect, in my experience.
>National Merit Scholar
Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.
I went to a school where National Merit Scholars were a dime a dozen: student performance there was almost independent of the teaching that they got.
âIn a small townâ basically covers it right there.
That's not particularly descriptive, because the high school in my small town of 25,000 was in the middle of the LA metro area. It is most often referred to as a small town by LA locals but it's high school class alone is easily the size of a "small town" in rural areas, where you might need a car just to get to your nearest neighbor.
â in general.â Implies itâs not a blanket statement for all. Of course there is the exception.
If you have a learning disability and your only choice is public school, your pretty screwed.
We should increase teacher pay / benefits to attract better talent.
At the same time, we should decrease how many hours parents have to work each week (40 to 30?) so that they can actually engage with their kids.
I think youâll find those parents who donât donât have the time to engage with their kids are working far more than 40 hours. The lucky ones are probably working 60-70 for a tech company and making bank, the unlucky ones are working multiple minimum wage jobs to just live with the basics.
Definitely agree with you, going over 30 hrs a week or whatever the new full time definition would be should always cause overtime pay. There are so many loopholes to avoid overtime these days (classify employee as X, etc etc).
"We need more teachers and smaller classes."
That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.
Another approach could be:
High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who donât wonât be there to make trouble.
Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
I'm not an expert on education, or on public policy.
I see people on twitter and reddit bitch about having to learn calculus and never using it.
But you know? I don't remember how to use calculus at this moment either, but I remember concepts of it measuring infinitesimal increments of change, and how derivatives and integrations relate to rates of change.
I don't remember the mechanisms of all my teachings in school, but it made me appreciate bridges, combustion engines, biology and literature.
The honest question is: How do we determine when a child/teenager has no capacity or will to understand the beauty or utility of advanced learning, and what do we do with them?
Especially as automation takes over in the next 30 years and we have millions more out of work because we don't need taxis, truck drivers, farmers, or 60% of food service?
You need some kind of VoTech and continuing Ed for people without degrees and white collar portable skills. Otherwise you get legions of disaffected populist voters when the economic tides shift against the only industry they know how to work in.
A lack of education is one of the most pressing issues in western democracies. Reducing that doesn't look like a good idea to me.
For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.
If you think that giving less money to struggling public services is a way to improve those services, then you are part of the problem. Political opportunists rely on that line of thinking to put public services into a death spiral, and their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Its probably because obviously not all districts are like this, and its likely that the author's entire school isnt even like this. The blog points out small parts of a single school district in the entire country.
Giving struggling schools less money when they require larger and more diverse funding almost definitely isnt the answer. The average public school teacher still spends a huge amount of money every year to buy stuff for their class to use, and we expect them to continually do that throughout their career.
Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception.
Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)
"critical thinking" is what I think parents should teach to their kids. By that I mean giving cases of deception, gaslighting, etc. and asking the kid to discern the lie and the intent of the lie. I don't think schools teach this skill these days.
They punish this skill. I was literally expelled from my high school during senior year for arguing with a teacher over her misinterpretation of something stated pretty plainly in the textbook. The teacher got furious when I stated confidently that she was wrong, and within about 15 minutes I had been taken to the principalâs office and told to never tell a teacher that they are wrong, to which I said âeven if they are wrong?â and she expelled me on the spot. The expulsion was overturned about a week later but it was a terrible week for me and my parents, and I got pretty behind in my schoolwork because of it. And to be clear the problem was that the teacher was saying something different from the textbook, so this was not a subjective matter, or a question of knowledge exactly. If she had just said âignore the textbookâ it would have been fine.
I had something similar happen to me
in retrospect it was a valuable lesson
I think you are working in the right direction, but you have to include lies that are believed by the teller, semi-lies that were honestly conceived but lose their earnestness through determined avoidance of self-questioning, and even honest but harmful mistakes.
Itâs against their best interests to teach this. Imagine if they taught critical thinking about the Covid epidemic. The very logic unions used to keep schools closed would be unraveled if students and parents were thinking critically.
> Colleagues from programs where these moves happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been: kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing recommendations, get into top colleges, and⊠drop out after about three weeks, saying that they feel like theyâre years behind everyone else and donât know whatâs going on, because they are and they donât.
There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.
Usurious student debt should be mandated at 0% interest and only paid back via a percentage of income. And such this would require it be issued by the state (as no company would want to) and you could tune it so that it would have to be paid back in 15 years (say) or be forgiven - and so offering it to people likely to end up in middling income jobs wouldnât be worth while.
And make it so that if it doesnât get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.
the more you extend debt financing for a given thing the more expensive something gets... mortgages or student debt. debt is where new money comes from in our financial system...
now the second part of your proposal, would be interesting. but in practice if you combine both parts probably they would extremely aggressively filter students
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