There’s a very good piece by Jal Mehta in the Times last Sunday, reflecting on A Nation at Risk. He criticizes not teachers, but the profession of teaching:
Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work.
By these criteria, American education is a failed profession. There is no widely agreed-upon knowledge base, training is brief or nonexistent, the criteria for passing licensing exams are much lower than in other fields, and there is little continuous professional guidance. It is not surprising, then, that researchers find wide variation in teaching skills across classrooms; in the absence of a system devoted to developing consistent expertise, we have teachers essentially winging it as they go along, with predictably uneven results.
I’m very uneasy with his subsequent comparisons with countries that do better, though — Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Canada — which lack large swathes of relative poverty and, in a couple of cases authoritarian cultures. Its not as though these countries have developed technologies for teaching the kinds of student that American schools educate. But he makes an interesting point about why we know so little, and so little of what we do know is usable:
Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has estimated that other fields spend 5 percent to 15 percent of their budgets on research and development, while in education, it is around 0.25 percent. Education-school researchers publish for fellow academics; teachers develop practical knowledge but do not evaluate or share it; commercial curriculum designers make what districts and states will buy, with little regard for quality.
Anyway, there’s lots of good stuff, so read the whole thing.
{ 133 comments }
Davis X. Machina 04.18.13 at 1:56 am
There’s an old teacher’s joke that a real profession has three things — a degree (M.D., J.D, etc…), a title (Dr, Esq., CPA,…) and a jargon, and you can tell that teaching isn’t a real profession because all we have is the last one.
djw 04.18.13 at 2:03 am
Thanks for this, Harry. (and it’s great to have you blogging again lately!)
Chris Mealy 04.18.13 at 2:20 am
The thing that makes Finland interesting is that their schools were performing badly through the 1970s, they deliberately reformed them, and now they’re performing very well. So it’s not a case of homogenous society or unknowable cultural magic. As far as I can tell Finland’s reforms were basically progressive era stuff, more professionalism and more money.
Harold 04.18.13 at 2:27 am
Finland’s reforms were based on John Dewey.
Barker 04.18.13 at 2:38 am
Which, unfortunately, are apparently still cutting-edge.
Harold 04.18.13 at 2:42 am
Finland has strong teacher’s unions. The folks pushing “common core”, i.e., the big multi-national media-publishing conglomerates, want to destroy the unions and consolidate their monopoly. They are what is wrong with education in the first place, not the solution.
Finland set out not to make education more rigorous, but correct social inequality and that its children were properly nurtured from infancy on. Their educational success was a byproduct of this. That is the way we should be going, not trying to further enrich the Murdoch’s and Wall Street bankers and their hench-people and paid spokesmen which is the way of the current school “reform” (so-called), through the application of more cruelty. That is “Common Core.” The NYT article was a disgraceful sham from start to finish.
Harold 04.18.13 at 2:42 am
sorry for the typos. My blood pressure.
John Quiggin 04.18.13 at 2:59 am
It’s interesting that university teaching gets only intermittent criticism [1]. But there is essentially no training [2], and occasional attempts to impose more stringent requirements have essentially gone nowhere. The assumption is that, if you can give a good enough job market seminar to get hired[3], you can teach a course.
fn1. There was a book a few years ago, can’t remember the name
fn2. I’m not clear on the complaint in the original article. Don’t US teachers mostly have degrees in education?
fn3. In Oz, most courses are still taught by tenured/tenure-track academics
Main Street Muse 04.18.13 at 3:05 am
We have a political environment that brands teachers as lazy moochers who work from 9 – 3 nine months a year. We see dramatic cuts in education funding every year. We see charter schools – with no real track record of success as a teaching model – funneling scarce funding from public educational systems. Under Bush, we finessed a “teaching to the test” educational mentality that leaves students ill-prepared for the rigors of college and the world beyond college.
There is an appalling untruth stated in the linked article: “How schools are organized, and what happens in classrooms, hasn’t changed much in the century since the Progressive Era. On the whole, we still have the same teachers, in the same roles, with the same level of knowledge, in the same schools, with the same materials, and much the same level of parental support.”
That’s simply not true. None of it. It’s such an imaginative view of the unchanging nature of education that I cannot believe this article is taken seriously at all.
It’s not the “profession of teaching” that’s the issue. It’s a national disdain for what public education is all about.
Harold 04.18.13 at 3:08 am
A recent report on the top-down so-called “reforms” touted by Arne Duncan, Rupert Murdoch, Pearson, Walmart [Walmart!!!] showed that the “reforms” did virtually no good and harmed those it was intended to help:
KEY FINDINGS
http://www.boldapproach.org/rhetoric-trumps-reality
The reforms deliver few benefits and in some cases harm the students they
purport to help, while drawing attention and resources away from policies
with real promise to address poverty-related barriers to school success:
1 Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform†cities
than in other urban districts.
2 Reported successes for targeted students evaporated upon closer examination.
3 Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers.
4 School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts
money.
5 Charter schools further disrupted the districts while providing mixed benefits,
particularly for the highest-needs students.
6 Emphasis on the widely touted market-oriented reforms drew attention and
resources from initiatives with greater promise.
7 The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of
poverty on academic performance. Real, sustained change requires strategies
Harold 04.18.13 at 3:17 am
Last sentence from executive summary should read: “Real sustained change requires strategies that are more realistic, patient, and multipronged.”
Real change would involve getting the the “economists”, hedge-fund managers, and political “scientists” out of the education business and addressing what Jonathan Kozol has so rightly identified as the “savage inequalities” of American society.
Main Street Muse 04.18.13 at 3:29 am
Let’s not forget the “statistically improbable” rise in Atlanta public school test scores – where administrators cheated their way into nice bonuses by falsifying test scores. Teaching to the test is no way to prepare for the future. The Atlanta administrators have been indicted – because cheating constituents/customers to get bonuses is wrong when teachers do it – but not wrong when bankers do it.
That NYTimes article is really terrible. It’s such a terrible article that I wonder, once again, just what they are teaching over at Harvard. The author compares teachers to doctors and lawyers – yet fails to consider that doctors and lawyers make significantly more money than the teacher (who is, after all, a lazy, unprofessional, untrained person – likely a woman! – working in a “failed profession.”) And the author fails to recognize that there are “wide variations” in skills not only found in classrooms, but also in law offices and hospitals. The idea that our educational system is terrible because teachers are just “winging it” is so simplistic a notion that it is irresponsibly foolish.
Barker 04.18.13 at 5:01 am
re: 8
Of course, the university system doesn’t have the kinds of standardized tests that primary and secondary schools have to deal with as a major basis of criticism.
I’m sure that someone out there, however, is getting dollar signs in their eyes at the idea of it. I sincerely apologize if you’ve just broken out into a cold sweat at the future this implies.
rageahol 04.18.13 at 6:40 am
re:13
no, but medical schools do. you want to talk about failure of an educational model, start there.
christian_h 04.18.13 at 7:09 am
I have trouble taking an article seriously that seems to suggest by comparison that other professions – like law for example – have some kind of consistent quality standards. Medicine, maybe. But law? Engineering? Accounting? Architecture? Come on.
ajay 04.18.13 at 9:27 am
It’s interesting that university teaching gets only intermittent criticism
You’re all too dangerous for people to dare to criticise you, clearly.
Teacher 04.18.13 at 9:27 am
Please consider what I call the increase of “environmental disabilities.” The lack of support from home, the living conditions, the fractured families, the acceptability of lying, cheating and stealing……teachers now face challenges that were not the norm just 10 years ago. When you spend a disproportionate amount of time with discipline and character issues, there simply is less time to teach the basics. This is real, it is happening now, and society has to deal with it.
If the new normal is having teachers raise children as well as educate them, so be it. Society seems to be demanding it. But, and this is a big BUT…the education in reading, writing and arithmatic will suffer. There is only so much time in a day.
Barry 04.18.13 at 11:02 am
Main Street Muse:
“That NYTimes article is really terrible. It’s such a terrible article that I wonder, once again, just what they are teaching over at Harvard. ”
More and more I seriously doubt that Harvard is a net benefit to the human race (except for the Medical School). Of course, I’m being unfair – Harvard’s contribution to the Great Financial Crash alone probably wiped out more value that it’s generated for the past few centuries.
BTW, I’ve seen an article stating that the overwhelming majority of money going into research on educational reform is provided by the Walton, Gates and Broad Foundations, all of which are pushing basically the neoliberal line working for the destruction of public education. The end result is that anybody working in this field either toes the neoliberal line or gets basically no money.
Jonathan 04.18.13 at 11:16 am
“America’s overall performance in K-12 education remains stubbornly mediocre.”
This statement all by itself discredits the article in my mind. There is no such thing as “America’s overall performance.” Rather, there are two educational systems. One, for the affluent, performs quite well, thank you. The other, for the less-than-affluent, is a warehouse.
This finding is so old and so well known that it needs willful blindness to ignore it.
“Charter-school networks like the Knowledge Is Power Program and Achievement First have shown impressive results”
I don’t know about Achievment First. KIP gets results, but it’s so expensive that I have trouble imagining it replicated on a wide scale. Although I’m all for it. And a pony.
Jonathan 04.18.13 at 11:21 am
“Finland, a perennial leader in the P.I.S.A. rankings, has eight universities that train teachers; the United States has more than 1,200.”
And Finland has about 1.7% of the US’s population. Gad.
Harry 04.18.13 at 11:50 am
Harold — I don’t see what Common Core Standards have to do with teachers unions, or how they will undermine them. Agreed, all the people you mention subsequently want to destroy the unions, and agreed, common core may yet turn out to be no help (a lot turns on the quality of the tests).
JQ — yes, teachers have education degrees, but…. the training is minimal and not well-aligned to the job. As for higher ed teaching — there’s a lot of criticism, some of it a bit rhetorical, but much of it very sensible — eg, Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges, which I have mentioned before. I think everything that is wrong with teaching as a profession is also wrong with higher ed teaching but more so.
I completely agree that i) lawyers hardly constitute a success story and ii) that the environment surrounding schools makes teaching much more difficult than it need be.
Jonathan — you’re not disagreeing with him about charters and KIPP. As for the claim that there are two systems — yes, sure, but there is no reason to think that the high tier system is much better. The kids do better because they have lots of advantages and are surrounded by other people with those advantages. But teachers still, mostly, don’t align curriculum or instruction with standards, learn from each other, get much infrastructural support, and principals are still, mostly, prison wardens who run an athletics program. OK, that’s harsh, but you get the idea. See this post and the links in it:
https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/03/low-performing-high-performing-schools/
Cranky Observer 04.18.13 at 12:14 pm
Can you provide reference to some broad-based studies that document this, please? Due to job moves, etc, plus large family that also moves around, I’ve been involved with dozens of modern suburban, Small University City, and exurban school districts over the last 16 years (admittedly all in the Midwest), and that just doesn’t describe what I’ve seen. Continuous education, new teaching models pushed down from the Ph.D programs and consulting companies, constant testing and revising of curriculum against this year’s “standards”, extensive peer review and discussions: these are the norm in every US school district that can afford them AFAIKS. Clearly that’s anecdotal and by no means random, but its also pretty consistent across the fairly large county where we live now. If there’s a huge are of untrained, unsupervised, feckless teachers out there [1] it must be hidden pretty well.
And quite honestly, the better teachers – particularly K-6 teachers, who year after year serve emotional and development needs that most adults wouldn’t touch with a 30-meter pole – are sick of the theoreticians who have never heard the saying “the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice” shoving theoretically beautiful, untested schemes on them and then walking away saying ‘working with children isn’t really my strength; I’m more of a strategic thinker’.
Sweeping statements of this nature would be circled and marked “source?” on an undergraduate paper, grounds for rejection and a serious discussion if offered by a graduate student, yet seem to get thrown around casually (and with no reference to their origins in the hard right wing movement) when used by academics and think-tankers. I’m not saying there isn’t some basis of fact to this, but detailed, thorough sources would seem to be a minimum before we get started on another round of demonizing and dismantling.
Cranky
[1] I’m specifically excluding the few remaining large urban districts – both those that are failed and those still hanging on – from this discussion as they are a separate problem. The vast majority of US students attend locally-controlled suburban or exurban districts however, so that’s not a significant factor in this discussion.
Coulter 04.18.13 at 12:32 pm
“We see dramatic cuts in education funding every year.”
Main Street Muse – you need to go back to school … public school spending in the US has been growing faster than inflation since … 1950. there has never been a single year where US public school expenditures were less than the year before.
Of course, with pension, healthcare and disability benefits for teachers growing at 2-3x the rate of inflation for the past 10 years in my state, I can see why there are fewer, better paid teachers than before …
” The author compares teachers to doctors and lawyers – yet fails to consider that doctors and lawyers make significantly more money than the teacher”
There are a lot of lawyers that make less money than teachers. Do you ask your doctor or lawyer how much money they make before you hire them for their services?
Harry 04.18.13 at 12:44 pm
The claim is not that teachers are feckless, but that there is a very limited infrastructure supporting improved instruction. More for elementary than for secondary, much more for teachers children bound for selective colleges (AP, etc) than for teachers of children who won’t go to college. My experience is not scientific, but most teachers I talk to think that most of the PD they do is a waste of time, and I think they are largely right about that. Lacking common standards, lacking quality management, and lacking time (a point that Mehta makes — I don’t know, maybe teachers in your experience feel that they have loads of time to learn how to improve, and if so that’s great), teachers are left alone in the classroom, and then berated outside it. Oh, and, yes, their districts buy a lot of snake oil that they pass on.
For sources: Oh, I don’t know, see the Payne book that Mehta cites, or Elmore, “School Reform from the Inside Out”, or Bryk et.al. “Organizing Schools for Improvement”, or Cohen and Moffitt, “The Ordeal of Equality”. I haven’t read Mehta’s book yet.
Maybe I’m wrong but the tone of your first paragraph sounds as if you agree with Mehta about the quality of professional development.
Practitioners can, of course, always reject the observations of non-practitioners. I agree that most of what gets pushed out of ed schools is, at best, unhelpful. But I am a practitioner myself, as a teacher in higher ed, and I know many of my colleagues seem to believe that we have a monopoly of understanding of what constitutes good practice in our realm. That’s just stupid. Somewhere in his book Bok cites a study showing that 90% of college teachers believe they are above average teachers, which sounds about right in my experience.
Tony Lynch 04.18.13 at 12:48 pm
So, JQ: “It’s interesting that university teaching gets only intermittent criticism [1]. But there is essentially no training [2], and occasional attempts to impose more stringent requirements have essentially gone nowhere. The assumption is that, if you can give a good enough job market seminar to get hired[3], you can teach a course.”
So?
The thing is/was, we do/ did it because we love/loved to think and teach. So what are the “more stringent requirements”? (And are they more or less than getting a job in your “job market seminar”?
Anarcissie 04.18.13 at 1:18 pm
@15 — Medicine as well. But suppose these professions were, actually, well-managed and governed, there would still be a profound difference between their objects and those of the education industry, which should be obvious: teachers and other educational operatives are supposed to actually mold the minds of young humans and sort them into the right boxes for optimal use, while the material they work with is afflicted by broad swathes of poverty, ignorance, superstition, class and race war, and so on. You can’t have many good schools in a bad society.
MPAVictoria 04.18.13 at 1:21 pm
Is the American system really so different than the Canadian one? All the teachers I know have 4 or 5 year degrees that involved at least two lengthy practicums under experienced teachers and multiple courses on teaching methodology and theory. This isn’t the case in the US?
Anderson 04.18.13 at 1:38 pm
“I have trouble taking an article seriously that seems to suggest by comparison that other professions – like law for example – have some kind of consistent quality standards.”
As a lawyer, yeah, you’re right about that one. And n.b. that legal scholarship is read by law professors, not by lawyers. I may have cited two law-journal articles in 10 years of practice (and I do a lot of appellate work).
JulesLt 04.18.13 at 2:31 pm
I think there’s some good points – but the question is whether America really wants a professional teaching body, or the usual thing of bemoaning a lack of professionalism amongst a body of people who are not treated as, paid as, or recruited in the same way as professionals.
Those lower academic requirements, and the lower number of years to become qualified help keep costs down. The lack of ongoing professional training helps to keep costs down.
The opposite would mean teaching having to compete with graduates against other professions as a lucrative job for ‘the best’ – rather than the current model of it being a vocation for ‘the best’ – that they are turning away the possibility of higher earning for a higher calling – or at least a steady job for the second and third tier graduates.
But of course it’s really a game – the Right has little interest in actually improving public school outcomes, especially if they would mean spending more money. But it has no end of criticism and no end of solutions. It’s an industry in itself.
The Left is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It’s evident that the last 50 years have seen a vast number of second and third rate graduates enter the teaching profession, but the basic inclination is to defend public education and the teaching profession from criticism – but I think it would be great to call the Right’s bluff on this one.
Insist that going forward, only graduates with first-class degrees in their subjects can possibly be considered for teaching. Engineer a recruitment crisis – or at least some honesty that you are knowingly offering a second-rate public education because that is what you want to pay for.
(Lastly, I dare say Finland has the advantage of a more equal society, which makes it easier to keep those top graduates in the teaching profession, as the balance between self-respect and cash is a little closer)
subdoxastic 04.18.13 at 2:37 pm
@ MPA – true regarding years req’d, practicum req’d. Methodology and theory are spotty at best, majority of B Ed programs in Canada do not include assessment theory/instruction.
@ everyone- Assessment is where the focus is at now. For studies regarding teachers’ atrocious record at generating and administering their own assessments see anything by Stiggins, or Susan Brookhart. Black & Wiliam’s metanalysis (1998) and subsequent papers really helped push the assessment reform movement, and while their results and prescriptions are problematic, their description of teacher practice is fairly accurate. Finally, Young & Kim (2010) provide a comprehensive overview. Looking at these results, it’s not difficult to understand why standardized testing is being used. Are standardized tests always used appropriately? Hell no! Particularly when they are of the high stakes variety ( consequential validity is a real concern here and not just for students– standardized tests have proven awful at evaluating teachers’ value added). But until teachers begin demonstrating their own assessments can pass even rudimentary tests of reliability, the standardized test folks do have a point.
So while I thought Mehta’s paper was slapdash, I do agree that more professional training (assessment especially) is one requirement of improving teacher performance and consequently student performance.
MPAVictoria 04.18.13 at 2:44 pm
“majority of B Ed programs in Canada do not include assessment theory/instruction”
Do you have a source for that claim subdoxastic? As my experience, and I know a LOT of teachers, is the exact opposite.
K Zhang 04.18.13 at 2:57 pm
As an educator in mathematics, this is a subject I feel strongly about. There is an obvious core knowledge in mathematics education, and that is mathematics itself. The bad math teachers, mostly likely, are not bad at “teaching”, but are bad at math. For example, a common complain is that the teacher force a certain correct answer on the students, and refuse to accept alternative solutions. However, it may be that the teacher does not know the topic well enough to determine the correctness of an alternative answer. The problem is not about lacking of a common core knowledge in math education, the core is there, but people are pretending they don’t need it. Instead of working hard to improve one’s knowledge and skill in mathematics, people spend time debating philosophical questions about teaching — but all this is pointless if you don’t know what you are teaching.
SamChevre 04.18.13 at 3:26 pm
MPAVictoria @ 27
I work with a lot of accountants, my wife was a teacher when we married; here’s what I see as the difference in training.
It’s not the initial training; that’s the same 5 years for both. It’s the ongoing on-the-job training that is different. As an accountant, you work regularly with other accountants, and have your work checked and reviewed by yet other accountants (auditors). An accountant who’s been working for 20 years has learned a huge amount from other accountants, while working. Teachers usually work alone; in all the years my wife taught, I don’t believe anyone ever (for example) went through her lesson plans and critiqued them. That means that teachers tend to develop their own methods, with much less help and professional guidance than an accoutant does.
subdoxastic 04.18.13 at 3:34 pm
Hi MPA:
My original claim was based on comment made by my assessment & evaluation prof/supervisor. It seems that statement is out of date as brief perusal indicates that @ UVic, students are required to take a 3 hour course on assessment/evaluation as a req for their B Ed certification.
Moving to the mainland, UBC also has an assessment course required. 13 sessions over what appears to be a three week period ( it’s a little confusing since the practicum runs in the same term, it’s likely that the 3 weeks classroom assessment portion is done before the second practical starts, but the final assignment for the course is due at the end of the term. U of A didn’t tun up anything in my limited search. Queen’s ( my alma mater) offers a specific course on A&E totaling 9 hours. Anecdotally, having marked some 300 final assignments for the assessment and evaluation course at my institution, god help us if that is the level of understanding/performance at other schools.
I’m not kidding MPA, the mandatory assessment training provided to teacher candidates is not sufficient.
So let me amend, Canadian b Ed programs do not include any significant time or effort to mandatory assessment courses for aspiring teachers.
roger nowosielski 04.18.13 at 3:46 pm
@26, Anarcissie
“. . . teachers and other educational operatives are supposed to actually mold the minds of young humans and sort them into the right boxes for optimal use . . .”
I suppose we can’t escape the cookie-cutter model since “education,” insofar as it is sponsored by the state, can have no other object in mind than to benefit the state.
I realize how nihilistic this sounds, but it’s a vicious circle we can’t seem to escape.
And doesn’t that make “teaching,” the function of the Guardians, distinct from any other profession?
Anderson 04.18.13 at 4:19 pm
32: That reminds me of when I asked my 11th-grade Algebra II teacher *why* we couldn’t divide by zero. She was convinced of its moral wrongness, but that was as far as she got.
Chad 04.18.13 at 4:30 pm
“KIP(sic) gets results”. Um, no.
KIPP carefully selects students and does not admit those expected to do poorly. Then, after admitting students, KIPP churns away any who do badly on standardized tests. Dropout rates in our local KIPP school approach 70% in some cohorts and are never less than 50%. I have read similar numbers from other cities.
When you consider the terrible effects of transitions on children, it is clear that KIPP is hurting more kids than it helps. Since those children are overwhelmingly black, I am standing by, waiting for an article in the national media about KIPP’s racist practices.
Harry 04.18.13 at 4:49 pm
SamChevre’s comment gets it exactly right. Are there any teachers posting here who have had an experience more like that of the accountants he works with than like his wife’s?
Harry 04.18.13 at 4:54 pm
Chad — you have to compare the KIPP results with those of the control group. The big Mathematica study, eg, controls pretty well for churn. And they admit by lottery. I’ve only seen studies which claim KIPP does well by the kinds of kids who enter the lottery. One of many reasons why any success KIPP has is not scalable, certainly, but the evidence is pretty strong that they benefit the kids who attend. They may well harm the kids who don’t go — there is not much evidence about that, and the studies I have seen don’t address the question.
Harold 04.18.13 at 5:00 pm
The Common Core is deliberately and with malice designed as developmentally inappropriate, and schools implementing it are being warned in advance that it will drastically lower test scores. The Common Core is actually very vague as to content but very specific as to very lengthy fill-in-the-bubble-high-stakes tests. It will be administered to children as young as five even though it is well known and has been for many many decades that tests on children under seven are meaningless and probably harmful. Teachers whose students score poorly will be fired, according to the Enronesque-rank-and-yank system being promoted by Harvard as a means of union busting. Schools that score poorly will be closed and replaced by out-sourced hedge-fund sponsored ones. How does this help children or raise teacher morale? This is neo-con shock therapy designed to enrich Pearson (not even a US company). [wiki: Though Pearson generates approximately 60% of its sales in North America, they operate in more than 70 countries. Pearson International is headquartered in London with offices across Europe, Asia and South America.]
chris 04.18.13 at 5:01 pm
standardized tests have proven awful at evaluating teachers’ value added
Before I accept this statement I’d like some hard evidence that there is something there to measure in the first place. Are you sure you aren’t just doing the equivalent of blaming oncologists for all their patients having cancer?
The next steps would be, if you can identify underperforming teachers, to evaluate the relative merits of fire & replace vs. retraining. That is, if your agenda really is to improve educational outcomes, and not to cut costs by getting rid of better-paid experienced teachers and/or strike blows against unions for political or ideological reasons.
Checking for patterns in which teachers are underperforming (does it correlate strongly with which teaching school they attended, their GPA in that school, years on the job, something else?) would be helpful too, but seems premature right now, unless the above has all already been done and somehow managed to elude the public eye.
The fact that these extremely elementary (IMO) points never seem to occur to the likes of Rhee make it very difficult for me to assume good faith, even before the cheating scandals. To borrow again the language of a different profession, someone who is eager to begin treatment before confirming a diagnosis makes me suspicious, and someone who prescribes the same treatment for all diagnoses is a quack.
Davis X. Machina 04.18.13 at 5:08 pm
….I think there’s some good points – but the question is whether America really wants a professional teaching body
They’re public schools. They are, to a first-order approximation, as bad or as good as people want them to be. And only something like one household in four or five has a child in the public schools.
It’s entirely possible that they’re more useful, to all but those who work and study there, as a club to belabor some other faction with in larger struggles, than they would be if they were fixed. (Assuming arguendo they’re broken.)
Harold 04.18.13 at 5:10 pm
wiki: “Pineapple-Gate”
In the spring of 2012, tests that Pearson designed for the NYSED were found to contain over 30 errors, which caused controversy. One of the most prominent featured a passage about a talking pineapple on the 8th Grade ELA test (revealed to be based from Daniel Pinkwater’s The Story of the Rabbit and the Eggplant, with the eggplant changed into a pineapple). After public outcry, the NYSED announced it would not count the questions in scoring.[4] Other errors included a miscalculated question on the 8th Grade Mathematics test regarding astronomical units, a 4th grade math question with two correct answers, errors in the 6th grade ELA scoring guide, and over twenty errors on foreign language math tests.[5
MPAVictoria 04.18.13 at 5:12 pm
Hi subdoxastic,
Thanks for the reply. The UofA definitely requires work on assessment and evaluation though it maybe be part of some other course of a different name.
Cheers
MPAV
Marc 04.18.13 at 5:19 pm
It’s a mistake to filter topics through a purely ideological framework, although it is tempting. You can think that the skills of teaching can be learned and reinforced more effectively without buying into, say, high stakes testing.
A complication that I find important is that education theory is very prone to fads and sweeping reversals of existing practice, and this has been true for decades. Open classrooms; new math; whole language vs. phonics; drill to the test; and so on. Decentralization is actually a virtue, to the extent that it limits the harm from poorly conceived but popular programs.
However, there are a couple of areas where we could benefit enormously from higher professional standards for entering the field and better evaluations and mentoring. Many K-12 teachers have little actual training in the subject that they teach – especially in science and math. You can be a biology teacher without having been a biology major, for example. In early education a single teacher deals with multiple subjects and a lot of them struggle with topics – again, for example, math – that they’re simply not very conversant in. Raising standards would help a lot here, as would continuing education to keep people up to speed with new developments in their field.
You also need to be able to give teachers better feedback on the craft of teaching. Standardized tests as a weapon are a terrible idea; you’ll do much better by focusing on improving the skills of existing teachers than you will by firing them. Yet the alternative shouldn’t be “no feedback on whether what you’re doing is working.”
Main Street Muse 04.18.13 at 5:27 pm
“But teachers still, mostly, don’t align curriculum or instruction with standards, learn from each other, get much infrastructural support, and principals are still, mostly, prison wardens who run an athletics program. OK, that’s harsh, but you get the idea.”
I don’t “get the idea.” The post Harry links to does not supply details, just links to blog posts that talk about studies that talk about the tutoring parents use for children who attend affluent schools. I know affluent school communities where parents utilize tutoring – not because schools “outsource” problems, but because the affluent parents want their child to have a leg up on the competition – type A parents wanting a type A life for their children. They hire college application consultants, etc. and so on – not because the school is a failure, but because their bank book allows them the luxury of indulging in additional services for their children.
Have YET to see a school where the principal acts a prison warden in charge of athletics. Highly inflammatory language, particularly if not using data to support the claim. I agree that principals are hugely influential – but as are all heads of any organization.
I do agree that teachers /education as a whole do not get appropriate infrastructure support. Again, there is a political climate today that views this career path as being filled with failures and moochers. And it’s one where budgets are being cut as expectations grow. The meme going around my FB page lately is the one with images of tape, scissors, etc. and a headline that reads: “Teaching: the only profession where you steal supplies from home…”
What does a teacher do? Work with children who come from disparate families, live in widely unequal communities, bring disparate skills to a classroom; have a range of IEPs, etc. How can that be standardized? What would the teacher’s test consist of? Are schools perfect? NO. But is creating yet more testing the answer? That has not been shown by that dreadful NY Times article.
What does an accountant do? Work with numbers, stats, etc. Usually for companies that can afford to pay for an accountant. Pretty concrete. The CPA exam is designed to “provide reasonable assurance… that those who pass the CPA examination possess the level of technical knowledge and the skills necessary for initial licensure in protection of the public interest.” (From AICPA website.)
Let’s look at how the accounting industry – well-regulated and highly trained as it is – helped the public interest recently – and let’s do this by looking at the accountants who worked with Enron, Lehman Brothers, AIG, etc. Oh wait. All that training didn’t really help all those accountants at Arthur Andersen… nor did it protect the public interest. Repo 105 anyone?
But let’s look at how those who just “wing it” are ruining everything, working as they do in that “failed profession” of teaching.
Harold 04.18.13 at 5:30 pm
According to what I understand, under Common Core, kindergarteners will be expected to be writing research papers; and if first graders are not reading fluently by the end of the first few weeks of term they will be considered failures. First graders are also supposed to be dealing with compound sentences. This is crazy.
Marc 04.18.13 at 6:11 pm
@47: I’d be very surprised if that this is an accurate reflection of the actual standards. Reference?
Harold 04.18.13 at 6:16 pm
@48: Research to Build and Present Knowledge
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/K
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.K.7 Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., explore a number of books by a favorite author and express opinions about them).
Marc 04.18.13 at 6:20 pm
Thanks. The abstract concept does sound silly, but the stated examples (my favorite book is…..with a picture) are more reasonable than demanding an actual research project. I do honestly wonder whether kindergarten should be amped up so much given the range of backgrounds that such young children have.
I also found http://textproject.org/assets/news/Hiebert_Getting-the-Size-of-the-First-Step-Right.pdf
which is a useful critique of the concept of raising the reading level in early elementary grades by too much.
marthe raymond 04.18.13 at 6:21 pm
The biggest problem with most of the schools in the majority of countries is that they are not designed to educate, but to indoctrinate.
A few support points:
1. Any school whose program of studies is not approved by the government of the country does not receive accreditation, and its diplomas are not accepted as valid.
2. In most of the planet the pedagogical model is what Paulo Friere called The Banking Model: where students memorize facts deposited to them and those facts are withdrawn through the vehicle of exams. critical thinking is taboo, because the government doesn’t want to have any of its postures or decisions questioned by citizens.
3. The only educational programs that are successful are those which prioritize critical thinking–including the analysis by the student in regard to what he/she wants to learn. FOLKS ONLY LEARN WHAT THEY WANT TO LEARN.
Whoever promotes more standardization is promoting fascism. Most governments, which are puppets of savage multinationals such as Big Pill, Big Guns, Big Bucks, Big Oil and a few of their subsidiaries such as Big Pimp, would prefer to have their subjects–and don’t kid yourselves, folks: you are a long way from being considered citizens with rights–march in lockstep (or goosestep) to be cannon fodder, techie grunts and prison guards. Professional standardization in regard to education is the optimal mechanism to achieve that.
Go for it!
It’s in the interest of indigenous folks to have you do that, as you will have so few real skills and so little ability to reason that you won’t even be able to circle the wagons when we come to take back our land….
Harold 04.18.13 at 6:43 pm
My son and daughter and were late in learning to read, as were the children of several of my friends, and it didn’t harm their SAT scores or affect college entrance. By the end of third grade they had mostly outstripped their peers in reading. The reason is that informal learning is often more effective than formal learning.
marthe raymond 04.18.13 at 6:47 pm
Wrong conclusion, Harold: Not only do folks learn what they want to learn, they learn it WHEN they want to learn it.
Not a question of formal and informal here.
roger nowosielski 04.18.13 at 6:48 pm
Looking back at the past fifty years, the only time higher education in US was worth a hill of beans was during the turbulent sixties.
I consider myself fortunate to have been educated then.
Harold 04.18.13 at 6:50 pm
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/04/standards-based-tests-and-public-schooling
Harold 04.18.13 at 6:57 pm
First grade language arts standards:
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/L/1
Harold 04.18.13 at 6:59 pm
Particularly: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.1.1j Produce and expand complete simple and compound declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences in response to prompts.
marthe raymond 04.18.13 at 7:08 pm
This week every high school student in Mexico will present a standardized exam called ENLACE. In the past they have shown poor results, and the government blames that on the teachers because they are trying to dismantle the teachers’ union.
The programs of studies are developed by the government. As an educator (all levels from elementary school to graduate school) I can say that their plans of studies are a farce. The foolks who develop them are not educators, but bureaucrats who have received their jobs because they campaigned for the current president.
Roger, I graduated from high school in 1962. We did well as a group on SATs and other standardized tests because we were part of the post-Sputnik push to create whiz kids. It would be interesting to see, however, how many of us who entered university that year on math and science scholarships actually went on to become scientists.
My first quarter at university was marked by the Cuban Missile Crisis and by my reading the transcripts of the J. Robert Oppenheimer hearings. At the beginning of my second quarter I broke the news to my academic adviser/calculus professor that I was not going to devote my professional years to building a better nuclear weapon in Los Alamos Natinal Laboratory. I changed to English and Philosophy, where I was far less likely to, in the words of Oppenheimer, “become Death”.
I started teaching university students in 1968, with no training whatsoever as an educator and the strong intution that if I threw out almost everything my own teachers had done in the classroom and gave students the responsibility to find what excited them and learn it and teach it to everyone else, that I might have a chance of creating an educational project. And thanks to my background in math and science, I measured the hell out of the results.
Since I got good results, I refined the process over the years and got even better results.
I think that’s what an educator should do.
Barry 04.18.13 at 7:25 pm
roger nowosielski 04.18.13 at 6:48 pm
“Looking back at the past fifty years, the only time higher education in US was worth a hill of beans was during the turbulent sixties.”
A statement worthy of a Harvard Ph.D. – no facts whatsoever.
roger nowosielski 04.18.13 at 7:26 pm
Well, I too started about the same time (1961) with the NYC college system, which was quite good at the time, also in physics and math; but since Kent State, changed to sociology and philosophy, and I don’t regret it one bit.
marthe raymond 04.18.13 at 7:36 pm
Since I was teaching at a large state university in the Midwest when the Kent State massacre occurred, and we responded with outrage and barricades and protests and a strike and the national guard goons did their intimidation dance, I saw a galvanizing effect on my students. They became much more politicized. Until then most of the impetus against the genocide being committed in SE Asia came from young folks on the two coasts. Kent State was a turning point in many respects.
My adopted niece’s partner here in Mexico is a big fan of Neil Young. Sunday night we were watching a dvd of his 1971 Massey Hall concert in Boston, and I explained to Enrique the circumstances that created the song Four Dead in Ohio. It’s been in my head all week.
lupita 04.18.13 at 8:23 pm
Why not hold doctors accountable for the rising numbers of obese and ADHD children and for lagging other rich countries in life expectancy, access to health services, and infant mortality? Why not close hospitals and practices when health statistics do not improve yearly until they are the best in the world?
Imagine the US with the same health and education statistics it has now but with the difference that it is number one in the world because the rest of the world is poorer, at war, or whatever. Would Americans be happy? I think so. This is because the goal seems to be to compete and win rather than to develop better educational and health systems.
I do not think that building a body of knowledge in either teaching or medicine, and training people in that knowledge, will improve the educational and health systems of the US. The answer, I think, is for universities and society as a whole to stress social responsibilities at least as much as rights are. Notions that should be questioned are that education is an investment that should have monetary returns, that rich people are successful whereas the poor are losers, that one should always be as independent as possible, and that a person’s responsibility to society ends with earning enough to get health insurance and a private education. That is, to question and revalue the ideological and cultural underpinnings of neoliberalism.
marthe raymond 04.18.13 at 8:27 pm
Good points, Lupita. Savage capitalism has created this tar pit. If we do not encounter and support the humane in humans pretty damn soon, we will be as extinct as those dinosaurs in the LaBrea tar pits.
Tim Worstall 04.18.13 at 8:35 pm
“has estimated that other fields spend 5 percent to 15 percent of their budgets on research and development, while in education, it is around 0.25 percent.”
I will admit that I’d like to see someone propose this. That between 5 and 15% of the entire education budget in any nation should be spent on research into education. The UK education budget (all levels) is of the order of £100 billion. Total teaching budget for universities is around £5 billion. Add a couple of billion for research.
Yes, I really would like to see someone propose that the entire government university budget should be spent on academics researching the effectiveness of teaching methods. I’d give it about 10 minutes before lamp posts and lengths of hempen were being discussed.
Rather more seriously, WTF is Bryk talking about? Accounting spends 5-15% of everyones’ tax and audit bills on research? Legal research is equal to 5-15% of tort damages? What?
Harold 04.18.13 at 8:57 pm
“Its not as though these countries have developed technologies for teaching the kinds of student that American schools educate. But he makes an interesting point about why we know so little …
We know a lot. We just don’t want to do it for other people’s children.
Finland’s reforms stated working right away. Our market-based reforms have failed consistently for 30 years.
The one percenters know that they wouldn’t be caught dead sending their own kids to the KIPP schools that teach “grit” and test-taking. They send their own kids to the Lab School, founded by John Dewey or to Dalton, founded by Miss Parkhurst as a progressive school with no marks dedicated to educating and enriching the whole child as a social being.
SamChevre 04.18.13 at 9:28 pm
The one percenters know that they wouldn’t be caught dead sending their own kids to the KIPP schools that teach “grit†and test-taking.
Somehow, I got this idea from people in favor of equality that people with less resources may need forms of assistance that people with more resources do not need.
James 04.18.13 at 9:32 pm
In general, the model used judge teachers is flawed. The current model is to judge teachers on an absolute standard based on a fixed set of student results. In fact, teachers should be judged in the same manner as the sports coaches. Coaches are judged in a three part scale:
1. Absolute fixed results (e.g. wins),
2. Development (e.g. player improvement),
3. Understanding of the game.
For teachers this would correlate to:
1. Standard test results
2. Student improvement from year to year
3. Knowledge of subject mater.
Right now test results are the only factor.
Harry 04.18.13 at 9:49 pm
Harold — Last time I looked Finland has a child poverty rate of somewhere around 3%. US somewhere around 25%. What this means, though, is that almost no children in Finland grow up in neighbourhoods in which disadvantage is concentrated the way it is int he neighbourhoods that, I don’t know, 15% of American children grow up in. The Finns don’t know anything about teaching children like this, because they don’t have them. That is a (sensible and just) social decision, and we have made a different (stupid and unjust) one. But, given that decision, we have to learn how to teach those children, and the Finns can’t help us. I am sure the Finnish reforms would, indeed, help if we could get them. But, for example, no-one proposes to pay teachers like lawyers and doctors or to reduce the pay of the latter to that of teachers.
Main Street Muse — the language was flippant, not inflammatory. Sorry if it annoyed you (esp the prison bit — the point is just that nobody goes to school but that someone has forced them to go there, and a great deal of the time of assistant principals is spent in corridors monitoring the students’ whereabouts and preventing/halting infractions). If you’ve been in lots of schools with principals who know and think a lot about teaching and learning and devote their attention to improving it, that’s just great. But next time you monitor an AP, note down how much time s/he spends talking to athletic directors/coaches about athletics and actually at games/meets, and match it to the amount of time s/he spends talking to teachers about learning and actually in classrooms.
Harold 04.18.13 at 10:14 pm
Right. The Finns don’t know anything about teaching “children like this.” because they don’t have them. So the Finns (who implemented American progressive reforms recommended by the American philosopher John Dewey, and used to this day by the US upper crust) “can’t help us”. So it’s grit and marathon, three-day testing fill-in-the-bubble sessions for the “children like this” and John Dewey for the children of the wealthy “reformers”.
Metatone 04.18.13 at 10:34 pm
Not realistic, but important to put into the discussion:
Why are we still treating education as a race?
If the economy of the future is based on a well-educated workforce then the first thing we need to do is to decouple content/curriculum from age. There’s an insanity about pushing kids through the system according to age and “graduating” them when they haven’t picked up the skills they need…
roger nowosielski 04.18.13 at 10:55 pm
@62, 63
Judging by the tenor of most comments on this thread, one gets a distinct impression that none have been exposed to the postmodernist critique of the Project Enlightenment, whereby the production of (official) knowledge is a means of social control.
Perhaps revisiting Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard is in order.
Harry 04.18.13 at 11:01 pm
Harold — clearly, neither Mehta nor I draw that conclusion.
Tim — thanks. Ok, I’ll scrutinize the figure. Just curious, does anyone know what other service sector industries spend on quality control. (more than 0%, presumably..)
subdoxastic 04.18.13 at 11:05 pm
@Metatone:
You rightly identify the problem of ‘social promotion’ when it’s decoupled from targeted, individualized interventions. Unfortunately, the literature on ‘grade retention’ is pretty clear, holding students back is not effective in creating better outcomes for students (best results I’ve seen is 1/3 get some benefits, most research suggests far worse), this again because retention is not coupled with the appropriate interventions. Retention is also viewed as catastrophic by students, ranked by them as second worse to losing a parent and tied with going blind.
The jurisdictions I’m familiar with have as their philosophy, ‘individualized instruction’, with students learning at their own pace but being kept with their peer group. Of course, this rarely occurs in practice, stressing teachers particularly, with teachers confronted with between 20-30 students all performing at different (sometimes very different) levels.
Of course, this situation requires teachers to deftly use differentiated assessments effectively to meet their students needs. Hence the focus on assessment in my previous comments.
Cranky Observer 04.18.13 at 11:28 pm
This is about as far from the reality of the modern US exurban public school district[1] as it can get.
I’m starting to think that many who comment on these threads are stuck in that weird – and admittedly educationally sub-optimal – period from 1970-1990 in the US where the traditional (very successful) large urban school districts had broken down, the historic Industrial Age fusion of the educational theories of Bismarck and Dewey [2] had been abandoned but no new general theory had taken its place, and the nation was in the midst of the final transition from “inner ring suburb close enough to Grandma’s house in the city to visit” to full cornfield exurb.
That era is over. The nation has exurbanized (may not last, but that’s where we are today). Some of the historic urban districts are still hanging on (NYC), but only a small minority of the population lives in them / attends them. City of Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis public schools are regularly hauled out as whipping boys by the hard Radical Right but are essentially irrelevant for the larger discussion (not irrelevant for those abandoned in them, obviously).
Except in the most intensely hard-right areas – and often even then – educational practice (esp for K-8) has coalesced around “each child to his potential, multiple intelligences, teach how to think, respectfully multi-cultural”. [3] The community school aspect does get a little too intense IMHO but the idea that a powerful central government is decreeing taboos in order to create cowed Betas and Gammas is 180 degrees opposed to modern educational practice across locally-controlled middle class exurban public school districts.
Henry – I certainly understand that disinterested analysts can, potentially, offer useful observations and corrections to a closed system. OTOH, I’ve also personally worked for organizations destroyed by Bain Consulting and McKinsey, due in no small part to the “consultants'” absolute lack of understanding of how business really works. A counterexample being Samuel Stratton; the first director of the National Bureau of Standards, was a fantastically successful politician and administrator but each time the Bureau moved he insisted that space be set aside next to his office for a personal laboratory, and when the Bureau grew large enough to need department heads required the same of them. Yet the vast majority of the work I read on educational “reform” is published by people who either haven’t stepped in front of a K-12 class in 20 years – or never have. That’s a real problem if you ask me – and many of the out of touch with current reality comments in this and similar threads illustrates that.
Cranky
[1] Stipulating lower middle class or above. I’m familiar with the right-wing talking point that there aren’t any poor school districts any more, but evidence of the eyes disputes that.
[2] A weird combination, but I can’t think of any other way to describe the way the Chicago Public Schools were run, and I believe that was standard in the big urban districts. Fredrick Taylor should be thrown in there too.
[3] One of the Cranky Offspring use to come home, uncork a devastating parody of his “community school”, and exclaim ‘bolt down the desks, hand out pencils, get the paddle out of the attic, and make these kids do some WORK’ [OK, he got the bolted-down desks thing from me].
Cranky Observer 04.18.13 at 11:39 pm
There’s also the propaganda campaign waged over the last 30 years by the hard Right, its libertarian allies, and an increasing number of neoliberals intended to demonize and destroy first the concept and ultimately the existence of free universal public schooling. Lately I’ve been hearing the “government schools” meme from many directions; combined with the for-profit charter schools “movement” and Obama’s embrace of Duncan and Rhee that probably signals construction of the coffin is underway. That was a very well-designed and deliberately executed plan and yet it simply isn’t discussed.
The parallel for me is the structure of the overall economy. We had a structure and a distributional pattern that served us well, as a whole, from 1940-1970. By 1970s there were some stress points, cracks, failures, and unfairness-es that needed to be fixed. Along came the Reaganauts and the neoliberals: the former told us that by smashing up the New Deal/WWII economic structure and power relationships we could make the pie a lot larger (because markets), and the latter told us not to worry because they would fix it all with redistributional policies later (because microeconomics). We got the smashing and possibly a larger pie, but somehow the redistribution and follow-up reorganization never happened and the pie ended up in many fewer hands. Somehow I suspect the result of “fixing” free universal public schools will be very similar.
Cranky
Jonathan 04.19.13 at 12:37 am
“Before I accept this statement I’d like some hard evidence that there is something there to measure in the first place. Are you sure you aren’t just doing the equivalent of blaming oncologists for all their patients having cancer?”
The question being, do teachers add value. This question, like many raised here, has been extensively researched. The answer is clear-cut; you’re better off with a good teacher in a poor school than vice versa. Sorry, I’m too lazy to look up references.
Anarcissie 04.19.13 at 12:52 am
marthe raymond 04.18.13 at 6:21 pm:
‘The biggest problem with most of the schools in the majority of countries is that they are not designed to educate, but to indoctrinate. …’
That’s not a problem for their ruling classes. One can hardly expect them to conspire in the destabilization of their own regimes (‘critical thinking’), It really is an industry. And in the U.S. at least it appears that it is being pushed in a certain direction consistent with other major institutions.
Harold 04.19.13 at 1:01 am
Harry, you say you didn’t draw that conclusion, but your words say to me that “we” have made this decision. You seem to be saying that, although admittedly it is “stupid and unjust,” the fix is in and resistance is futile.
roger nowosielski 04.19.13 at 1:03 am
You must have missed my #35
Just sayin’
roger nowosielski 04.19.13 at 1:07 am
Again, I refer everyone to #71, to serve as the exclamation mark.
subdoxastic 04.19.13 at 2:02 am
Mark Poster wrote that Foucault ‘floats like hawk over the social historical process ready to swoop down on anything that seems appropriate’. Why not education, eh, Roger N? But perhaps you could provide a bit more substance to your analysis? Something more than, ‘bargle, gargle, state, grrr’?
roger nowosielski 04.19.13 at 2:10 am
Mark Poster is fine, a seminal thinker. But surely, you don’t expect a dissertation on this here format. Shouldn’t a reminder be enough?
Harry 04.19.13 at 2:37 am
No, resistance is fine. And change would be better! But change takes time (maybe I think it will take longer than you do) and while we are pressing for it we have a duty to find out more than we currently know about educating the children we have consigned to lousy neighbourhood environments and who are growing up right now. I find the evidence persuasive that KIPP does, on average, better for the kids who attend than the lousy alternatives. I hope we’ll learn to do better than that — and learn how to change schools so that they do what we have learned. But the Finns don’t know what we want to learn.
Harry 04.19.13 at 2:59 am
Cranky — Harry, not Henry. Used to be a common mistake when I blogged more regularly.
Harold 04.19.13 at 3:04 am
I disagree with you, Harry. Evidence that Kipp does better is very, very dubious, particularly considering the sheer amount of extra hours of study required and money spent and the fact that it is exempted from dealing with handicapped or non-English speakers, as public schools are not. As has been mentioned above@ 37, KIPP gets “good” results by gaming the system (surprise, surprise) by expelling low performers at the beginning of term (while keeping the money given by the states to educate the same expelled students). They have a 50 to 70 percent dropout rate and, although they advertise themselves as a remedy for closing the so-called achievement gap for male students, students remaining in KIPP schools until high school graduation tend to be mostly females, who are more compliant under KIPP’s harshly punitive disciplinary regime. Even so, as I understand it, KIPP reports higher scores only in junior year, not senior year. The Mathematica studies that supposedly validate KIPP have been smoke and mirrors, paid for by the very people who fund KIPP and are usually identified as “works in progress” not subject to peer review. You fell for it, it seems.
Trader Joe 04.19.13 at 12:14 pm
Great points @74 cranky
My sister-in-law is a well recognized educator in our area – she often comments that if more bureaucrats, legislators and ‘theoretical academics’ would just spend a week watching classrooms (or monitoring them remotely) they’d see the sort of issues that come up on a daily basis.
She’s taught in ‘elite’ neighborhoods and ‘disadvantaged’ neighborhoods and both have their issues. For example, although parent involvement is routinely much higher in the hi-rent neighborhoods – helicopter and lawn-mower parents can be as detrimental to what goes on in a class room as disruptive or argumentative students (the later can at least be sent to detention).
Marc 04.19.13 at 12:14 pm
Harold – some educational methods are worthwhile for a subset of kids. You seem to have a pretty massive axe to grind in rejecting even the possibility that KIPP could have any value whatsoever. If you’re claiming to reject one-size-fits-all pedagogy then you have to open yourself to the idea that some methods that you don’t prefer could be effective for some children/
Anarcissie 04.19.13 at 1:24 pm
@79 — I fear anarchistic models of learning (driven by personal and familial interests) are not going to cut a lot of ice with those committed to state models, that is, the education industry and its satellites. Confusion comes about because the latter often advertise their wares with ideas and language derived from the former, although their fundamental orientation and instrumentalism are uncompromised.
Harold 04.19.13 at 1:45 pm
I used to have an open mind about KIPP until I looked into it, about a year ago. I thought maybe it was a Protestant-type prep-school on steroids, but now I think it is just a scam.
roger nowosielski 04.19.13 at 2:02 pm
@88
What I also see (and I think you’re implying this between the lines) is the unconditional support by the professionals of what Foucault might call “mainstream/disciplinary (as opposed to marginalized) ” knowledge, however willing or unwilling they may be to subject it to their own internal critique.
Harold 04.19.13 at 2:10 pm
It is so wrong.
Josh G. 04.19.13 at 4:48 pm
KIPP isn’t a scalable model. Aside from the self-selection aspects (already discussed on this thread), KIPP relies on using up and burning out young teachers who work 80-hour weeks for meager pay. There aren’t enough self-sacrificing souls to make this work in every disadvantaged area in the U.S.
The bottom line is that we already know how to fix the schools: eliminate child poverty, fund schools properly, and treat teachers with the same pay and respect as other educated professionals. The fact that “education reformers” don’t want to do these things, and in fact are staunchly opposed to them, indicates that they are not interested in actually improving the quality of education. Rather, they are interested in using teachers and public schools as scapegoats for the larger political and economic failures of Second Gilded Age America.
Harold 04.19.13 at 5:23 pm
Josh, does anyone really thing that the Walton family, which supports KIPP in Arkansas, has the best interests of our citizenry at heart? Honestly, why do the NYT and Harvard lend their names to supporting these Dukes and Dauphins? This leads me to believe that the reform of education needs to start at the very top, with the prep schools that produce the so-called best and brightest stenographers for Mathematica’s press releases. Mathematica, by the way, used to state on its studies the names of its funders (the usual suspects). Now, it is too ashamed to do so and calls itself an “independent” foundation. I started looking into this in 2011 — did find this among my notes for that year — not sure if I posted it somewhere at the time. I was looking at articles about KIPP from the local Arkansas papers:
http://parentpower.net/charter-schools-deltas-kipp-shines/
According to Mathematica, three years of intensive remediation (75 hrs. per week) of children at the “difficult” ages of grade five to eight (ages 10-12) “substantially reduces” the income race achievement gap.
At the Helena, Arkansas, KIPP Delta School, founded in 2002, which calls itself a “college prep” school and which I gather now extends from first through 12th grade, and is apparently all black (and run by an all white board), all of the 2010 graduating class of 23 were accepted at college, including the prestigious Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, which appears to have a special agreement with this particular KIPP to provide internships to select students.
According the the Arkansas-Star Gazette: “State exam scores show that KIPP Delta Public Schools students score higher than the state average and their peers at the Helena-West Helena School District” [whatever that means]. http://www.educatearkansas.com/view/184
However:
“When it opened, the KIPP system enrolled 66 students. Eight years later, 23 will graduate. Shirey acknowledged that students either moved away or couldn’t handle the strict regimen and returned to traditional public schools. Three of the graduates will be required to take remediation courses if they attend a public college or university in Arkansas because their ACT scores were below 19.
“We wanted everyone to get over 19 on the ACT,†Shirey said. “But we didn’t hit the mark.
“We can look at numbers, data, percentages and statistics,†he said. “But the most important thing is seeing the kids cross the finish line.â€
***
The principal is saying, “let’s not look at statistics, the important thing is that our kids did graduate.” This is true, but charter schools are supposed to be models that can be copied, so it does behoove us to look closely.
However, according to the same article, ‘”50 percent of Helena-West Helena School District students go on to college. … Statewide, about two thirds of graduating high school seniors enter college, according to the state Department of Higher Education, although about half need remedial work and just more than one third graduate. Arkansas is 49th out of 50 states with college degrees, according to U.S. census figures.”
100 percent of the KIPP school went to college, yes, but they are only a third of the original class and three of these still need remediation.
This KIPP school is described in the local press by a graduating student as “like a jail” but she said she got used to it. Well, a lot of fancy prep schools are also “like a jail” and wealthy parents pay many thousand of $$ to send their kids there. But other countries educate their children to a high standard without their schools being “like a jail”.
***
Barry 04.19.13 at 5:25 pm
Harold 04.19.13 at 1:45 pm
” I used to have an open mind about KIPP until I looked into it, about a year ago. I thought maybe it was a Protestant-type prep-school on steroids, but now I think it is just a scam.”
Pro-‘school reform’ people mean ‘you looked at the data’ when they say ‘partisan bias’. The current version of school ‘reform’ is nothing more than a neoliberal right-wing movement to destroy public education, for a mixture of reasons which get along together. I would say that there are the usual useful honest idiots around (e.g., Yglesias), but by now anybody who’s keeping track of things has got to know better.
Harold 04.19.13 at 5:42 pm
I am sorry to say, I don’t think anyone who supports “reform” can be called honest, unless lying to yourself qualifies.
Barry 04.19.13 at 6:41 pm
I didn’t mean to imply that Matt is honest, but rather that by now the last reasonable doubt is gone. I’ve seen a commenter say that he’s now married, and to a school ‘reform’ advocate. Is that true It would seem to be a variation on what McArdle was doing.
marthe raymond 04.19.13 at 8:35 pm
Cranky Observer:
What part of the phrase, “In most of the planet the pedagogical model” did not NOT understand.
You gringos think everything applies 100% to 100% of Gringolandia, or else it’s not true.
What I wrote still applies in the US, and with the development (sic) of crap like NCLB it applies more than ever, as the focus is teaching to tests, not allowing kids to learn.
And it still applies in most of the rest of the planet, as well. I know because I have been inside of schools in a big chunk of this planet evaluating methods and results.
marthe raymond 04.19.13 at 8:45 pm
Harry I DO believe the Finns know what kids in the US should learn–and HOW.
Hell, Paulo Freire, did a stint in Harvard after getting out of the Brazilian jail that the dictatorship tossed him into. And there is a Paulo Freire Center at UCLA as well as in FINLAND. Why is the one in Finland taken seriously and programs designed from it when the one in LA is not? That’s the question to ask.
Freire did consulting work in a number of spots on the planet–US, Europe, Africa–and was revived in Brazil and Venezuela in the early years of this current century. I myself have applied his methods in Mexico, several countries in South America, as well as the Middle East.
This Gringocentric exceptionalism you folks are spouting gives me a pain in the butt. If methods Freire developed for alphabetizing poor people in Brazil work in Finland, which by your wn admission is about as First World as you can find, they will work everywhere. They have. And they do.
hardindr 04.19.13 at 9:13 pm
Bob Somerby had a different take:
http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2013/04/mediocrity-all-way-up-reporting-gaps.html
harry b 04.19.13 at 9:26 pm
Harold — I’ve made it a policy to stop conversing after accusations of bad faith. Not worth the time. Nobody would speak to you at all if you talked the way you write — you might want to bear that in mind on any future thread of mine you want to participate in.
Barry 04.19.13 at 11:31 pm
I urge people to read Bob Somerby’s article. He demonstrates that Mr. Mehta is so full of sh*t that he cries brown tears.
You know, after R&R, Niall Ferguson, Gregory Mankiw, Mehta, Rubin/Summers and the deregulation of finance, Andrei Schliefer, etc. I’ve moved to the position that Harvard professors just aren’t to be assumed trustworthy. They have to be proven so.
I’m not saying they’re stupid, I’m not saying that they’re ignorant, I am saying that Harvard’s floor for ethical standards is below water.
Harold 04.20.13 at 12:54 am
I have just read over my comments and I don’t see where I accused Harry of bad faith. In fact, I noted that Harry at least has stated that US educational and social policies are “stupid and unjust.” The person under discussion, rather, is the boon companion of a well known person who is on record as saying (who wrote in their column) that they wished to see antiwar demonstrators beaten with two-by-fours — I am not making this up.
Harold 04.20.13 at 1:16 am
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is not the same as Harvard. I agree, that they trade on Harvard’s name to give an appearance of being more trustworthy than they are.
Kevin McDonough 04.20.13 at 5:08 am
Harold said: “I am sorry to say, I don’t think anyone who supports “reform†can be called honest, unless lying to yourself qualifies.”
Harold said: “I have just read over my comments and I don’t see where I accused Harry of bad faith.”
Hmm….
Harold 04.20.13 at 5:58 am
How can they be considered honest when they engage in shameless deception and refuse to engage with critics who call them on it? Besides, there is nothing in the OP that suggests Harry favors market-based “reform”, other than an enthusiastic endorsement of the misleading article by Mehta and the dubious statement that “KIPP gets results.”
Billikin 04.20.13 at 7:38 pm
Trader Joe: “argumentative students (the later can at least be sent to detention).”
Argumentative students sent to detention?! Aristotle must be turning in his grave.
LFC 04.21.13 at 2:41 am
Harold @103: The Kennedy School (originally the Graduate School of Public Administration, founded 1936) is part of Harvard just as, for instance, the La Follette School of Public Affairs is part of the University of Wisconsin or the Columbia School of Public and International Affairs is part of Columbia, etc., etc. But I’m not sure why you’re even mentioning the Kennedy School since according to the NYT op-ed, Mehta teaches at the School of Education.
Harold 04.21.13 at 3:53 am
I think I saw something connecting him to it, but thanks for correcting me if I’m wrong.
hix 04.21.13 at 4:24 am
German teacher training standards and saleries, especially at the upper end of the 3 tier system are quite high. Society is quite egalitarian. The results are still horrible.
Finnland, while egalitarian still has children with different family backgrounds, poorer/richer, higher/lower educated parents. They all go to the same school and the kids with poorer/lower educated parents, get results almost as good as those with rich/higher educated parents. That is the beautifull thing about Finnish education. Just get everyone on the same well financed school, focus resources on helping the weak students.
Harold 04.21.13 at 8:26 am
Who gives big bucks to the Harvard School of Education?
The Gates Foundation
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/tag/bill-melinda-gates-foundation/
February 2010: ?\”The Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education today announced a $15 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to launch a new, national education initiative to help school district and state leaders increase student achievement and attainment through data-informed decision-making.”
Broad Foundation
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122237756206976343.html
“The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation announced the creation of a new education research center at Harvard University in an effort to close achievement gaps in U.S. public schools. The center, which will be called the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University, or EdLabs, launches with a budget of $44 million with the goal of finding ways to improve education practices across the U.S….. Roland Fryer, a Harvard economics professor and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research [author of several Mathematica ‘working papers’ extolling KIPP], will serve as the center’s chief executive.”
The Kennedy School at Harvard is also heavily invested in so-called reform. Political science professor and “market-based” “reform” advocate Paul Peterson founded and operates a Program on Education Policy at the Kennedy School. He has been described as “true believer” of the efficacy of vouchers, undaunted by the evidence that has piled up that shows they have little or no effect on academic performance. “Peterson’s studies have been funded largely by conservative foundations that have either sponsored private voucher programs themselves or have an interest in seeing them become more widespread.”:
“Peterson says ‘creative destruction’ is necessary to promote improvement in settings where elementary and secondary education persistently fails. Good schools can emerge only if talented educators have incentives to create new learning environments and poor performing schools are eliminated. The recreated environment must include private schools, Peterson says. Public schools cannot be expected to ‘repair themselves,’ he argues in Learning From School Choice, one of the many volumes on choice he has edited or co-edited in recent years.” …
http://www.educationsector.org/publications/market-forces-professor-paul-petersons-influential-protégés
I think these Harvard-based people are doing wicked and dishonest things – also ignorant and cruel — so it doesn’t matter to me if they believe themselves to be in “good faith”. The byways to hell located just outside the gate to the Heavenly City are paved with just this sort of “Creative Destruction”.
QS 04.21.13 at 7:48 pm
Dude, people, there is a huge elephant in the room. While I absolutely agree that poverty and the whole host of issues that conspire to create inequality and broken urban spaces is the predominant impediment to education reform, we do have to mention one thing about teachers themselves.
Teachers emerge with a 4-year degree. That is the first and primary step they make towards being accredited. Now ask yourself this: how ridiculously f***ing easy is it to get a 4-year degree nowadays? You can get a Bachelor’s without knowing a damn thing. Just showing up is enough to get Cs. There are all sorts of perverse incentives in academia that generates this scenario (subordinating teaching to research, fear of student evaluations, tenure deadwood, etc.). Students are very, very well aware that this is how the system works. Sometimes we (the professoriate) act as if we’re the only ones aware of the fact that higher education is broken and a farce — we’re not.
In other words, we have an entire generation of graduates who don’t know a damn thing and basically learned that the education system itself is a joke. No accountability and low expectations. They then take this mindset complete with their impoverished brains into the K-12 environment. And we then expect them to be effective teachers? Ha. They then run into the buzzsaw which is urban poverty and a culture that disparages learning. They last a couple years in this environment and bounce out. Turnover for a profession that’s supposedly so “lax” in its standards is shocking.
Cranky Observer 04.21.13 at 9:22 pm
Some research and sources, please? Typical postings for a full-time classroom teacher position in our county are drawing 200-300 applicants, many of whom are not only certified teachers with masters degrees but often have 10-20 years’ experience. Not aware of any hirings of idiots who are just slipping by. In which suburban/exurban, lower-middle-class or above district is this happening? Would like to know. Thanks.
Cranky
QS 04.22.13 at 3:30 am
Have you taught or been in the undergrad environment in a public institution* in the past 10 years? That should be sufficient evidence. If not, feel free to google any of the following: “subordinating teaching to research, fear of student evaluations, tenure deadwood, etc.”
*There are exceptional public schools, i.e. Berkeley, but they are not the norm.
Barry 04.22.13 at 2:06 pm
I would like Harry to come back in, and comment on Mr. Mehta’s ‘very good piece’.
Eli 04.22.13 at 3:59 pm
It’s all a joke: high test scores come from high quality students. High quality students come from emotionally and financially stable, educated, relatively happy homes who prepare them for academic success. Their emotional, cognitive and behavioral development is continuously being promoted at home.
Teaching large classrooms of kids who don’t have this is largely pissing in the wind. The few kids who have good homes will do OK, the few others who by God’s grace have the right temperament and luck will do OK. The rest will continue to struggle, even with the best teachers, given the practical realities of the classroom environment.
You want better test scores, fundamentally change the structure of society. Can’t do that? Fundamentally change the structure of schools, with disadvantaged kids actually getting forceful interventions they need/deserve. But education reform isn’t about getting kids either, but rather the neoliberal prospect of working within an economic and pedagogical system in which a teacher must work miracles to overcome enormous gaps in student development due to the realities of capitalist property structure that *depends upon* severe social inequalities.
As long as you have unremediated social inequality, you will have “bad” schools (“bad” parents and kids, really) and poor test scores. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
harry b 04.22.13 at 4:32 pm
Barry — I have other things to do, but I did read Somerby’s critique, which was completely underwhelming, and (wilfully) misrepresented Mehta several times.
The stuff about all Harvard professors being wicked, by the way, is too silly to merit response (beyond saying that it is silly).
Harold 04.22.13 at 4:34 pm
Mr. Mehta’s characterizes the “figures” in the educational debate this way:
“The debate over school reform has become a false polarization between figures like Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor, who emphasizes testing and teacher evaluation, and the education historian Diane Ravitch, who decries the long-run effort to privatize public education and emphasizes structural impediments to student achievement, like poverty.”
Note how the credentials are given for Rhee but not for Ravitch. A deft rhetorical move.
How about this:
The debate has become a a “false polarization” between lobbyist Michelle Rhee, holder of an MA in Public Policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (and currently under a personal and professional ethical cloud) and noted historian and educational policy analyst Diane Ravitch, former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education and Research Professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Anarcissie 04.22.13 at 5:14 pm
‘As long as you have unremediated social inequality, you will have “bad†schools….’
However, we probably want to remember that they’re not bad from certain points of view. The so-called neoliberal ideal toward which some of the r.c. are pushing seems to be favorable to the creation of a large Lumpenproletariat class. This is interesting in that such a class would presumably be harder to control and exploit than the previous model of a stable, stratified working class with some good slots in the upper levels and several channels leading to elite status for at least a few. Maybe it’s an ‘in the long run you’re dead’ attitude — a belief (reasonable to me) that things are pretty near to being wrapped up anyway.
Harold 04.22.13 at 5:32 pm
I would like to know what exactly are the (unspecified) qualities that Harry b asserts render our population of children so essentially different from that of other countries as to require the application of uniquely different (unspecified) educational techniques. Why the coyness?
Harry b is much too busy and important to deign to go into detail.
For those who have not yet looked at Somerby’s article, Somerby deplores the omitted facts in Mehta’s analysis, most importantly, that in the 20 years before the so-called “reform” movement started, black and Hispanic students were already making huge gains under the current system (however flawed) using current techniques (however flawed). He writes:
http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2013/04/mediocrity-all-way-up-reporting-gaps.html
“What do we see when we ‘disaggregate’ scores? We see black and Hispanic students making large gains in both reading and math! From 1971 through 2008, these are the (mammoth) score gains recorded by our black students. Again, we’re adjusting for that minor change in procedure in 2004:
Score gains in reading, black students only, NAEP Long-Term Trends Assessment, 1971-2008:
9-year-old students: 37 points
13-year-old students: 30 points
17-year-old students: 29 points
As we explained yesterday, those are gigantic score gains. Among black students, the large gains exist even among 17-year-old students, where there is a further potential statistical problem (see yesterday’s post).
It’s hard to look at score gains like these and moan about ‘so little change.’ For that reason, Mehta didn’t show you these data. Even though everyone knows you must, he didn’t disaggregate scores!
This is ugly conduct. It keeps Times readers from understanding the shape of their world. It keeps them from drawing hope from those large score gains. It keeps them from admiring black kids and their public school teachers.
In fairness to Mehta, modern “educational experts†all engage in this type of deception.
That said, the “change†displayed by those disaggregated test scores is simply astounding. For that reason, those disaggregated scores are constantly being deep-sixed.
When the Times puts garbage like this into print, it commits a vast fraud on the public. Mehta should be ashamed of himself for hiding the data we have just shown you, while quoting an “expert†who sadly moans about “so little change.â€
roger nowosielski 04.22.13 at 5:49 pm
@ 118
A neoliberal system/ideal caught up in its own contraction?
One could argue, of course, what “bad” means in the present context. Bad for whom?
From the standpoint of standardized testing, especially in math and hard sciences, of course the relationship between “bad schools” and “unremediated social equality” pretty much stands. But what about social sciences, multicultural studies, literary criticism, etc.?
It’s arguable that from the “critical thinking/self-awareness/consciousness-raising” standpoint, classes made of those who are at a social disadvantage (either ethnically of for socioeconomic reasons) are likely to be better. Which confirms Marthe Raymond’s earlier point that kids learn whenever they’re ready to learn and what they want to learn.
roger nowosielski 04.22.13 at 5:54 pm
. . . contradiction . . .
Barry 04.22.13 at 7:51 pm
Harry: “The stuff about all Harvard professors being wicked, by the way, is too silly to merit response (beyond saying that it is silly).”
Which I did not say, Harry. Please retread what I actually wrote. It wasn’t that complex.
As for Somerby’s ‘underwhelming’ analysis – I await some actual substance.
marthe raymond 04.22.13 at 7:55 pm
Thanks, Roger–but the obvious should not have to be confirmed.
Gringo exceptionalism is the elephant in the room. Implication: gringos believe that they can impose the very same educational model which has failed here in Mexico and expect good results, when the model produces miserable results here.
It’s not about poverty, or multiculturalism, or any of that stuff. If the model sucks, the results will suck. And the Banking Model sucks. Big time.
Since folks learn what they want to and when, it is clear that almost everyone contributing to this thread has not learned, doesn’t want to, and does not intend to–as Freire’s model for teaching has been available since at LEAST 1964.
That’s it for me. You folks have bored me to the point where my IQ is probably in free fall with your determined obtusity. Pretty soon I will be down there with GW Bush, drooling.
Harold 04.22.13 at 8:18 pm
How does one reconcile the fact that black and hispanic children improved their reading and math by 30 percent over the 20 or so years before the reform movement started and hence were on a clear trajectory to closing the “performance gap” under our present (imperfect system) with the same (imperfect) public school teachers now deemed inadequate, with the claim that they (since I assume it is they that the OP was speaking of) (a) are an essentially different population (in ways unspecified) from the children of Finland, Korea, etc., and (b) that they require essentially different (in ways unspecified) educational approaches and techniques from other children in order to show improvement?
Harold 04.22.13 at 8:47 pm
I am going to excerpt from Somerby’s column of today, in which he asserts that in today’s press corps powerful people are routinely allowed to present their preferred set of facts in a deceptive (and according to him, shocking and fraudulent), manner:
http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2013/04/mediocrity-all-way-up-public-schools.html#comment-form
harry b 04.22.13 at 11:32 pm
Harold,
I have a day job, am primary parent to three kids, and you have accused me of bad faith under the mask of anonymity. I’m not important, but my students and children take priority over someone who strikes me as an obsessive ideologue without much knowledge of what you are talking about, and a tendency for the ad hominem. And I specified very clearly the answer to your question in the first para of #119. So, no disrespect, but sod off.
Substance McGravitas 04.22.13 at 11:46 pm
The children of South Korea spend 3 more hours studying than the OECD average in an effort to pass a single exam which defines their lives. Government inspectors are on the lookout to close cram schools operating past 10pm.
I will take my own nation’s approach to producing apparently-somewhat-dopier kids because they are allowed to play.
Harold 04.23.13 at 1:17 am
My understanding is that the children of Korea spend a lot of time sleeping in class and a lot of time studying in after school-cram schools. On the other hand, Korea has decided to invest heavily in education and it has paid off in spades, to judge from the high quality of many Korean televisions series and many of their products, which are superior.
I sent my two kids to local public and high quality private schools and I found that the teachers in both were the very same people, with the same level of values and similar educational backgrounds. If they are experienced teachers, principals want to hire them, so they go back and forth between the two. 80 percent of American’s don’t have college degrees, and the degrees that the 20 percent have are certainly not nothing. I appreciated that the teachers were educated people because it showed. To say that public school teaching is a failed profession is a horrible libel, which is not to say that teaching and curriculums cannot be improved. My spouse and I were quite satisfied with the Waldorf school, which also had a fair share of former public school teachers, and a few former parochial school teachers. The Waldorf school has a very clear, cumulative curriculum and sets aside a lot of time for outdoor play, handcrafts, and music. It also discourages the use of electronic media.
As for Harry, as far as I can make out, he has taken great umbrage at something I said which was directed at someone else.
Substance McGravitas 04.23.13 at 2:06 am
Golly, I wonder why they’re tired.
Public spending is not far from the OECD average, the combination of public and private spending puts it up near the top. Secondary education is not free.
Lots to read: https://www.kedi.re.kr/
Now you’re just trolling.
Don’t let your kids become too astral or they may drift off.
Harold 04.23.13 at 2:39 am
Well, I’m actually a rationalist and prefer Bertrand Russell to Rudolf Steiner. But I really do like Korean TV and the food and shopping in K-town, NYC. There were Korean kids at Waldorf, as well as a lot of Israelis (at that particular one).
Dr. Hilarius 04.23.13 at 3:48 am
Marc@45 hits a couple of concerns I share. Educational theory, is subject to fads while seemingly resistant to evidence-based practice. Why is there still debate over phonics vs. whole word methods of teaching reading? With all the PhDs in education being churned out, this should have been settled decades ago.
The Seattle school district just signed on to a Discovery Math program for obscure reasons. Several UW science professors spoke against it, foreseeing even more poorly educated students coming their way.
In this morning’s Seattle Times there is an article about math teaching at a local high school. One teacher uses older texts with methods based on years of seeing what works and what doesn’t. This includes demonstrations, practice problems and many tests to see if the students have learned foundational material before moving on to more advanced material. His students have the highest Advanced Placement scores in the district and his algebra students have a 92.9% pass rate on the state exam.
The other math teachers use the new Discovery method. Their students have a pass rate of 67.5%. This high school is not a “magnet” school and does not have separate tracks for gifted vs. non-gifted students. No matter, the district is going to require everyone use the Discovery materials.
Having more students beavering away on laptops is another plan to revolutionize learning. I suppose the next step will be to get rid of teachers altogether and have on-line classes exclusively. Solves the problem of teacher assessment while selling more laptops. Win win.
marthe raymond 04.23.13 at 10:02 pm
Dr. Hilarious:
1. Good to see someone posting from Seattle, where I took my undergraduate degree studies.
2. As I said repeatedly on this thread in this “Dialogue of the Deaf”: the model/method is everything in education. Even a mediocre teacher, or a poor one, using the right methodology/model can create successful learning. I know because I have trained plenty of those teachers and the change was instantaneous. And they also stopped suffering in class.
Cranky Observer 04.24.13 at 12:08 am
I was going to cease and desist, but this comment was just too much for me. Try an experiment: pick a half-dozen schools from your county at random. Talk to the teaching assistants (preferably those who are district parents returning to the workforce) and ask them who the best teachers with more than 20 years’ experience are. Interview those teachers (particularly the 30-year vets) and ask them (1) what their experience and professional analysis of educational fads is – not excepting management and political fads (2) why they are resistant to “evidence-based practice”.
You might – you just might – find a correlation there. Just guessing though.
Cranky
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