The question of ‘holding them accountable’ is quite a separate one.

What part of the concept of joint accountability do you find difficult? Do you think parents should be held accountable for their children’s education?

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”

I don’t think people know what you mean by “holding parents accountable”. To hold a physician, for example, accountable means that if he does something irresponsible, careless, or incompetent in his official capacity as a physician, he can be sued, or stripped of his license, or he can be subject to other kinds of sanctions that I can’t name off the top of my head. So are you suggesting that parents can or should be sanctioned in some way for failing to provide adequate educations for their children? It’s hard to know what kind of sanction would harm the parents more than it would harm the children.

If you are just saying that, morally, parents ought to make sure that their children get adequate educations, I think people might agree, but what is supposed to follow from that?

So you support shutting down schools and giving all the education money to parents? (After all, if schools aren’t responsible for the failures of their students, why bother paying them?)

This makes no sense whatsoever . . . especially given the fact that teachers are also responsible for the education of their students. Why would you think otherwise? Did you read the whole thread before commenting?

I am in favour of being able to send disruptive students elsewhere in the school system where at a minimum they can’t disrupt other students. I am in favour of explicitly training teachers in classroom management and supplying teachers with backup from school administration and experts they can call on. I think a lot of problems in education are wrongly placed on the teacher’s shoulders rather than considering the whole school system. But if schools are going to hold parents accountable, then I see no point in paying schools.

What part of the concept of joint accountability do you find difficult? Do you think parents should be held accountable for their children’s education?

Please have a look at Direct Instruction’s results – see http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm

It is entirely possible for a problem to be fixed somewhere other than at its cause. For example antibiotics have saved the lives of millions of people even though the antibiotics are often prescribed by a doctor and supplied by a pharmaceutical organisation despite a lack of any causal evidence that any of the parties involved caused the bacterial infection. I was born with a minor case of dyspraxia, that was treated by a speech therapist, despite that we still have no idea what causes dyspraxia. Indeed, at the time I started treatment, they didn’t even know it was dyspraxia.

It’s like arguing about the best way to treat smallpox two hundred years after the discovery of an effective vaccine.

This implies that there is a vaccine available. If so, what is it? Where is the evidence similar to Dr Edward Jenner’s evidence for the effectiveness of cowpox as a vaccine for small pox?

What might help—over and beyond the rather utopian solution of changing the class system itself—would be a determined effort to educate parents, especially single mothers, so that their kids wouldn’t show up in preschool with 20% of the vocabulary of middle class kids.
So instead of educating the kids, you educate their parents? Why do you expect this to work if educating kids fails?
I believe this approach has been tried with great success.
And the evidence that your belief is correct is? (I believe that we are doomed to disappear into non-existance when we die, I have no proof of this belief, I don’t expect anyone else to believe it on my say-so and rather wish I didn’t believe it myself, so I’m not particularly impressed by claims by other people what they believe).

Which other professions?

Large engineering companies hire separate test engineers, who evaluate what the design and maintenance engineers have done and provide feedback. This doesn’t always prevent errors, but when companies fire the test engineers problems they generally regret it. I understand that one of the reasons air accident rates have fallen over the decades is that co-pilots have been deliberately trained to actively challenge the pilot, and a way to increase hand washing by medical staff is to openly observe them and provide feedback.

How organisations reduce error rates has been an interest of mine since I happened on the book “The Logic of Failure” years ago. There are many ways of achieving performance improvements without adding peer evaluation (eg an ample supply of alcohol-based handwash gels also increases handwashing), but I can’t think of a profession that has eschewed peer evaluation and gotten better results by doing so.

SoV Hold the parents accountable for the failures of their children, and enforce accountability with real, believable sanctions.

So you support shutting down schools and giving all the education money to parents? (After all, if schools aren’t responsible for the failures of their students, why bother paying them?)

I am in favour of being able to send disruptive students elsewhere in the school system where at a minimum they can’t disrupt other students. I am in favour of explicitly training teachers in classroom management and supplying teachers with backup from school administration and experts they can call on. I think a lot of problems in education are wrongly placed on the teacher’s shoulders rather than considering the whole school system. But if schools are going to hold parents accountable, then I see no point in paying schools.

But I am not so pessimistic. I think people will get tired of the present state of things. They have in the past. Perhaps it will require only a little push, when people are ready. And then, one can only hope that the puritanical reaction will not go too far.

(Of course I meant elitist—fingers & brain not working today)

Harold@78 makes my point exactly. In large part the innate belief systems held by the youth of today and their parents doesn’t come from nowhere. Ming the Merciless is not exactly sitting on planet Mongo beaming his sloth and slacker ray down to earth bathing students in it’s rays. No, these dysfunctional attitudes arise from the general culture within which they are born and raised. And until our current general cultural trends are reversed; and the lionization of ephemera, “bling,” the drug culture and the kings and queens of the hip-hop world—and the general attitudes absolutely hostile to deferred gratification of any kind exuded by such public personalities in their every public performance/utterance are somehow made to seem “uncool” in the same way that, say, smoking is now so regarded among the professional classes, then there really IS NO hope of “changing belief systems.” But to make these changes would require a massive campaign the likes of which the left in general and most who comment here would strenuously oppose. SO—-given that fact, I would say to everyone here bemoaning the current state of American education: Don’t bitch, because none of you would contribute one cent of your money or ten minutes worth of your time to oppose the cultural mores which cause this miserable state of affairs in the first place.

Some of the ideas I am reading here seem really good. But it is important to change belief systems. For success to occur, teachers, parents, and pupils must first believe it is possible.

Unfortunately, in the real world it’s hard to ascertain mastery because a lot of students will not do even 70% of the homework. Whether they are sufficiently versed on the topic is difficult to evaluate; some of them are, and many aren’t.

Well, we could put the burden on the student to prove mastery. Divide a year’s curriculum up into a hundred (or more) microtopics. For each microtopic, there would be something like a qualifying exam for proving mastery. Some might be amenable to using a machine-gradable test, while others might take the form of an oral exam in which the student is asked to answer questions and to explain the answers.
In my opinion, it is best if the person testing the student is not the same person who is in charge of teaching the topic. The student’s goal is not to please the teacher, it is to master the topics.

Giving a “bad grade” is of marginal usefulness, either as a motivator for students (if a student thinks of himself as a “C” student, then getting a C is no motivation to do better), or as an evaluation of student achievement.

A thought suddenly occurs – why not hold people back if they don’t achieve mastery, and cut them loose at 17 or 18? You could graduate the diplomas awarded, something like the military does with it’s general discharge, honorable discharge, other than honorable discharge, bad conduct discharge, etc. You could also let people have the option to stay in the system as long as it takes to graduate – if they don’t at 18, why not at 21? A person who might graduate with a GPA of 2.9 at the age of 20 instead of GPA of 1.9 at the age of 18?

If a child gets only 85% of such problems correct, that means that the child doesn’t understand some aspect of it. We need to figure out what is missing, and correct it, rather than say “well, 85% is pretty good, let’s go on to advanced topics”. In mathematics especially, topics build on each other; if someone doesn’t completely grasp arithmetic, then he or she will have a hard time learning algebra and calculus.

Exactly so. In my own subject, there are plenty of people who are weak on basic algebraic constructs like simplexes and exact sequences, and are still weak when they hit something like the Koszul cohomology. In the ideal world, nobody would be allowed to advance without a certain minimal ‘mastery’.

Unfortunately, in the real world it’s hard to ascertain mastery because a lot of students will not do even 70% of the homework. Whether they are sufficiently versed on the topic is difficult to evaluate; some of them are, and many aren’t. That’s the biggest problem of today’s schools, and where other countries seem to beat us out: again, Asian students aren’t necessarily smarter, but they actually do the assigned work. If you like, the market for education is subject to regulatory capture, just like any other. Only in this case, the rent seekers happen to be the parents.

…there was a load of little booklets, each covering a topic (starting with really basic arithmetic, and scaling up through various geometry and algebraic stuff). The idea was you could get any topic you hadn’t passed the matching test for (and had passed any prerequisite lower level modules), work through it, and then take a test whenever you were ready.

Okay, this is my own pet idea of the way to improve teaching: extend that approach to all subjects. In my fantasy, it works this way: break up the curriculum (all the way from kindergarten to university) into collections of topics that are small enough that is possible for a student to master the topic completely. Forget about the subjectivity of giving letter grades or even percentages; if a topic is well-defined enough, it is possible to give a pretty objective assessment of whether it has been mastered. For examples from the earlier grades, addition, subtraction and multiplication and division are topics that should be completely mastered. If a child gets only 85% of such problems correct, that means that the child doesn’t understand some aspect of it. We need to figure out what is missing, and correct it, rather than say “well, 85% is pretty good, let’s go on to advanced topics”. In mathematics especially, topics build on each other; if someone doesn’t completely grasp arithmetic, then he or she will have a hard time learning algebra and calculus.

For subjects that are less black-and-white, we can’t demand perfection, but we can demand excellence. Written essays must have coherent ideas, the sentences must be grammatical, the spelling must be correct. If factual claims are made, those claims must be backed up. If an essay is turned in that does not have these qualities, then it shouldn’t be accepted; the student should work on it some more, and correct those deficiencies. Giving a “bad grade” is of marginal usefulness, either as a motivator for students (if a student thinks of himself as a “C” student, then getting a C is no motivation to do better), or as an evaluation of student achievement.

The idea here is to focus on the student’s achievements, not the teacher’s brilliance or failings. The teacher should be thought of as the student’s ally, not his judge and jury.

One last comment as things have pretty much wound down. I forgot to mention that as a denizen of New Orleans I might be in a better position to judge it’s rate of recovery than are you. Be that as it may, I would only point out that the real similarity is between the pre-Katrina New Orleans and E. St. Louis in that the miserable state of both city’s education systems and the malaise and topor of the economy and housing of both cities is/was something that “evolved” over time and definitely is/was not an act of God/nature as was the damage to Galveston. Katrina’s damage, such as it was, was entirely man-made in the same fashion that the city’s housing and economy decayed—the result of mal-administration and cultural sloth which poorly maintained the levee and drainage systems and oversaw their original faulty design. Much as E. St. Louis decayed for much the same reasons.

Here’s the problem. Consider air pollution. A scientist writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in a 1969 article, (IIRC) in discussing the problems of nuclear proliferation, once argued by analogy using the difficulties of controlling air pollution. He stated that he had devised a machine that in theory could cleanse the entire Earth’s atmosphere of particulate matter—only problem is that it would take all the ergs of energy produced by every machine on Earth for 24hrs to run it. And that’s not counting the cost of planning and building it. “But just think,” he said, speaking of the pollution, “It all gets up there for free,” i.e., no millions of man-hours of committee meetings planning how best to pollute; no dollar costs of dedicated pollution production, etc., its all a natural by-product.

So in the same way the pollution of the national culture and of personal traits which so produce a climate inimical to sound learning is also seen as a costless by-product of the carrying out of daily commercial interests. But think of the cost in time, effort and money measured in the tens of millions of dollars and man-hours of planning, coordination and exhortation it takes to slow or reverse these dysfunctional societal maladies which so affect the educational process. It’s not even a contest.

I believe you. All the same, I appreciate that you mentioned it, along with this:

I’m afraid even the most concentrated of efforts in this area are simply overwhelmed by the countervailing currents of the culture at large.

That perspective makes complete sense to me, even if I choose to set it aside and approach the topic of education reform from other angles.

Anyhow, I think distinguishing the influence of culture from genetics is very important, and I find it very hard to believe that the former has the kind of influence on the latter that you seemed to be claiming (if interpreted literally). However, given your further comments, it seems to me you are using words such as genetics and evolution somewhat metaphorically, or at least… not strictly literally, a kind of memes-as-genes-of-society conceptualization of prevailing currents in cultural change over time (interpreted literally, there’s no evidence Darwin would support your last statement there, but I can see how you are invoking some idea of ‘Darwin’—butterflies on trees, the predominant effect of environment on natural selection, how can we raise butterflies with the vibrant-wing-characteristics we want when the trees are all ash-coated, etc). I think the metaphorical framework probably has some potential, but it runs a strong risk of treading into Bell Curve territory. I think your comments in the last post, especially “I firmly believe…”, clarified that you are developing a very different kind of theory than the Bell Curvers, a less literally biological theory.

I don’t think the conceptual framework of social evolution, even as a metaphor, is an especially helpful one to adopt in order to think through education reform. Of course, as you implied with Good Luck, you’re not actively involved in education reform; you wish reformers well from a distance. So there’s no earthly reason why you would or should develop a perspective according to whether or not it meets that criterion.

Virgil Xenophon, you really don’t know what you’re talking about… The things that we do gives meaning to our pointless lives.

But what if Virgil’s development of a social evolution theory gives meaning to Virgil’s allegedly-otherwise-pointless life? How can a nihilist judge what behaviors and theories are preferable?

I don’t see myself as ‘pretending’ to care or feigning caring (although Scent of Violets was right to criticize me for making boilerplate statements that imply feigned-caring: it was fun to go back and reread my stupid “height of irresponsibility” paragraph upthread in the voice of Anna Russell, but the fact that it worked so well as parody doesn’t speak well of my attempt at sincerity). Well, anything can be meta-interpreted as insincere: so you are free (!) to believe what you like.