It is also even less the teachers’ or the schools’ fault that I came to school with a speech disability. Yet, I had the speech disability, and a number of people had to work at teaching me to speak properly. People who were even less to blame for my disability than they were or are for poverty. Sometimes you’re not responsible for causing a problem, but you still can solve it. And, to shift back to schools, if other schools are solving the problem, and a school is taking money but not at least trying to copy successful solutions, then they’re being irresponsible.

And, also, just because you might not be able to teach children from poor backgrounds as much as ones from rich backgrounds doesn’t mean that it’s not worth teaching them at all. I still struggle to learn to speak foreign languages (even European ones that use the same sounds as English use them in different orders and that trips me up), but I do think it’s worthwhile studying them before going to a foreign country as I can read and write and understand a bit of what people are saying to me and they can understand a bit of what I am saying to them. Ditto for poor kids. If they spend far longer learning to read and write than rich kids, the rich kids may learn far more than them, but the poor kids can still gain from learning to read and write.

Plus – how many successful poverty eradication schemes do you know of that don’t involve education?

I was wondering—just how much of an “incentive” would it take to get better teachers into some of the poorer schools (unions notwithstanding)? How much would it take to pay a teacher what, in effect, is “hazard pay”? $5K? $10K? $20K? I think you may misunderestimate the effect of such “incentives.” Many public school teachers will take a pretty big pay cut—even in much less dangerous non-urban schools—to teach in a more secure and learning-hospitable environment. This situation would only be magnified in the much more dangerous environs of inner-city classrooms.

Some people have suggested that regimented approaches are not useful in the real world, but I don’t see how that’s true. Most jobs require consistency over creativity, and though they may be repetitive, boring and unfulfilling, its better than not being able to afford healthcare or put food on the table.

I’m just an interested observer with a freshman in college and two 9th graders.

I’ve always considered one of the intrinsic theoretical problems with education is that there is no widely recognized “bottom line.”

From a layman’s POV that’s why we have standardized testing. So that we can get our hands around some kind of indication of success.

Also, I think that one weakness of the educational establishment is the trendiness. How many different ways to teach math, for instance, have been promulgated in the last 40 years?

Just a layman’s two cents.

Class of ‘02 or thereabouts. So my impressions are pretty recent, if still horribly subject to small sample sizes and limited exposure to different qualities of schools. I’m not pretending my experiences are a substitute for actually knowing anything about education.

steve labonne said:
“pdf23ds, we have too many “creative” students who don’t know sh*t. And that’s a much worse fate for poor kids, who don’t have parents and other aspects of a middle-class support system that can help make up the deficits. That’s why we need real assessments equipped with teeth.”

I agree with your first two statements. The third is a complete non sequitur, or else completely begging the question, depending on how much slack I give you. I was asking “why”, not “yea or nay”. And I’m very open to the idea that testing is necessary. But if it’s having deleterious effects as practiced, we need to recognize that and and determine as best we can where those effects are coming from, what the ideal role of testing is, and how we can train teachers not to misuse it.

And also, you seem to only be talking about yearly assessments. This is completely ignoring half of my previous post. Thinking about this over the night, I realized that the continuum of tests, from the common form of classwork/homework through pop quizzes and six-weeks/unit tests all the way up to end of year or state exams, are indeed continuous in nature. The one end ends up being very different from the other, but the use made of and the effects of any two points in between are comparable.

john macdonald said:
“The surgeon has to be able to make the fine adjustments needed to get the best results. Isn’t that true for teachers educating children?”

(Echoing jenny d. and steve here)

To some extent. On the other hand, there’s a pitfall in that, to a trained surgeon, the small adjustments may obviously be improvements, while even to a trained teacher the effects of small adjustments to the curriculum have effects that aren’t always as obvious. Oh, and many teachers start out without any curriculum at all, and so have to fabricate the whole thing, which they’re probably not really qualified to do, any more (and probably less) than the average surgeon is qualified to invent completely new procedures. And also that the adjustments routinely made to curriculum are substantial rather than fine.

To really understand how students learn and what the ideal methods of teaching are is probably harder than to understand how to operate on a human body. The only reason teaching requires less qualification is that a poor teacher can still teach some students a little, while a poor surgeon will kill.

So, while I agree with your overall point, we should also be careful in putting too much trust in the sensibilities of the teacher, since they’re likely to be wrong often, and we should definitely give them a sensible starting point.

Meanwhile, I have to amend my testing post. While my kids aren’t tested too much, kids in NYC spend about three or four weeks a year doing nothing but taking tests. State tests, city tests, district tests, national tests. Now that IS nuts.

Quite frankly the whole “machismo about constructing your own curriculum” thing is a real problem in higher education too, certainly in the sciences. There is no good reason why the profession shouldn’t be able to arrive at a rough consensus as to what first-year biology or chemistry students in any college ought to know. Yet recently there have been outcries from faculty at state universities here in Ohio about a legislative proposal to insure that credits for lower-division courses in a number of disciplines are transferrable among all state universities and community colleges. I’m not at all sympathetic to the professors on this one. We’re not talking about advanced courses where the individual interests of a professor could more legitimately come into play.

On the good teachers vs. “scripts” argument, there will never be enough really superior teachers to go around. All the more reason to design curricula that maximize the effectiveness of an average teacher. (Bad teachers should be unemployed.)

I think there’s a very unhealthy kind of machismo in the profession, especially among high school teachers, that if you don’t construct your own curriculum from scratch, your not a good teacher. And that if you are struggling it is your fault, and you should be left alone to sort it out. I also think this attitude is picked up in ed school, and that is a worse disservice than anything else they do. There’s nothing at all eccentric about the observations jennyd makes in her second long paragraph of comment 25. Good principals (there were several examples on the show) know this is bullshit, and dangerous bullshit, and they involve themselves in the educational life of the school and the classroom. Good teachers are nothing without a good curriculum, and a good curriculum enables them to become good teachers quicker than otherwise.

Are the scripted curriculums driving good teachers away from the schools that most need them? I watched the show with a good teacher who works in a good high-poverty school (one without scripts, though). She spent her first 4 years of teaching high schools developing her own curriculum without any help at all from anyone. Two of her friends recently retired and destroyed thousands of hours worth of developed curriculums because no-one in authority asked them for it. The waste is staggering. She’d have welcomed a developed curriculum that she could adapt in those first years. Now she’s doing elementary with incredibly difficult kids, she’d welcome a script, as long as she wasn’t completely tied to it (which, as jennyd points out, people almost never are).

steve—I see. I must have seemed very snarky in response, for which I apologise doubly (once for doing it, another time because you didn’t even rise to it!)

Finally, another worry (as if there aren’t enough). All the reformers emphasized the importance of getting good principals (where good encapsulates a lot). I think that’s right. But it makes it very difficult to study reform rigorously. Good reforms attract good principals. But thenit is hard to distinguish the effect of the reform from the effect of the principal. Good principals attract good teachers. But then it is hard to distinguish the effect of the teachers from that of the reform. Etc…..

By the way, I think that sending your children to private schools or schools in wealthy suburbs is no guarantee that they will have many thoughtful, capable teachers.

John, yes the scripts are different. But according to research I’ve done looking a hundreds of classrooms, teachers make decisions that vary wildly, much as a doctor trying to cure appendicitis by cutting off a foot. It varies that much. If teachers were following a script the way doctors, and adjusting for individual differences and needs, I’d be thrilled. But they aren’t doing that. I can prove it.

I also teach in the Ed SChool here, and it’s been eyeopening, unfortunately. Some teacher educators firmly believe that what they can teach future teachers is to have “an educational philosophy” but the work of teachig is something that must spring forth kind of organically from each student teacher. The future teachers are left with few resources and skills. Methods? I wish. There are future elementary teachers who leave without knowing how to hold a picture book when reading to young children in order to get the most effective teaching from it. There is a way to do it, and some future teachers don’t know how. Others come to class and say, I think kids who are really poor might need a different kind of material than the kids who aren’t. But they say this without ever being told that such a stance can lead to poor kids never being offered the chance to do rich, meaty schoolwork.

I think the solution is to improve Ed Schools, a project I’m engaged in. But in the meantime, maybe scripts are a good idea for those already in practice. I’m not worried about the successful teachers. It’s the others that concern me.

But “all children can learn” does get used to deflect attention from poverty as a cause of educational disadvantage (the “stop making excuses” response is either dishonest, or signals an inability to distinguish causes from excuses), and also gets used as an alternative to actual reform. This is part of my criticism of KIPP; insofar as it makes teachers work harder rather than better, its has limited lifespan and limited replicability. But at least it has some benefits—I’ve seen “all children can learn” used without any supplemntary reform at all.