The problem in American education isn't dumb teachers, but dumb teacher training

As a parent of two school-aged children, I couldn't agree more.

At the same time, as a single parent, I have to say that it's hard to ignore the effect that ubiquitous divorce and single-parenting is having on children's schooling.

In a single day I have to drag my kids out of bed, make them breakfast, make them lunch, get them to school (all the while they're complaining and dawdling), get to work myself, work a full 8 hour day, get to the daycare and pick up my kids, get home, and make dinner for us. And then do everything else that needs my attention, like bills. And then hound my kids to do their homework, help them with it, and then cajole them to do extra studying in math or writing.

It's exhausting and demoralizing having to do this all on your own. And I make a lot more money than is the average where I live, so I can only imagine what it must be like doing all of this with money pressures.

Are you a parent yourself? (I am, of four children, two now adults.) Have you ever been a parent in more than one country? (I have both here in the United States and in Taiwan.) Do you regularly communicate with other parents about how well school programs are working for their children? (I participate in a national online network of parents of gifted children every day.)

Parent involvement of a certain kind is necessary, but it is not sufficient (unless it takes the form of homeschooling, which is something I did for the primary education of all four of my children). With equally involved and caring parents, pupils and students do better or worse depending especially on curriculum design, and depending also on teacher training and school administration. Studies of school districts that had forced changes of administrators of schools under the now-expired No Child Left Behind law showed that changing administrators in a school can improve learning outcomes for the same group of children brought up by the same group of parents. Moreover, teachers often increased their job satisfaction after such administrative changes.[1]

Almost every thread about education on Hacker News has a top comment saying, "Parental involvement is the most important thing." I could agree with that statement (I largely do, as a homeschooling parent) without thinking that statement is any more than a middle-brow dismissal[2] of the submitted article's detailed text unless we have something to discuss here about a) what brings about more parental involvement and b) what else can be done at the margin to improve schools for parents who are already well involved. Let's discuss those issues here rather than be dismissive.

AFTER EDIT: I have my own top-level in this thread with substantive response to what the original article author said, but it is pushed far down below the fold by the long subthread development here.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/27/443110755/no-child...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692598#up_4693920

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103985#up_10106466

Not really: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak.... It's a common myth, though.

I don't buy it. Parental involvement has some value in early education (learning to read and write, for example). But beyond that, I suspect "involved parents" is a proxy for wealth.

(source: The Smartest Kids In The World http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0061NT61Y)

This is being too harsh on parents. My parents were very much involved with my own brother's education. They tutored him, got him extra help, set up incentives, etc, etc. But he still did far worse than me. Meanwhile they had to pull me away from the books. I never got help with math homework because I never had any trouble with it. School just came naturally to me. I was just born much smarter than my brother. My parents never had to pressure me to learn programming, I picked it up because it was fun and I was good at it. Heck, I taught myself calculus because I found the problem solving fun.

And I see this observation over and over again. If a person is naturally good at cognitive work, sooner or later they will go whole hog on learning some economically useful cognitive skills. If a person is just naturally a bit slower, it will always be an uphill battle.

These personal observations are corroborated by adoption studies and twin studies. Twins raised separately end up closer together than non-twins raised together. Adopted children end up closer to their biological parents than their adopted parents. Etc. (sources; http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023048987045774784... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/genes-dont-just-influ... )

He learned in after school classes, at home, etc.

The problem was that public schools are focussed on underperforming kids and my son was above grade level so they did not bother to teach him. He did have a fun time at recess. Lots of time for reading fiction during class.

This is glib and easy to say, but I don't buy it.

When parents try to intervene in their child's education, schools are increasingly hostile. They are beginning to treat school children in a manner similar to how the TSA treats travelers.

Here's an example: my parents have a young daughter in middle school in the Midwest. She is active in a school choir, but also wants to do the science fair and many other activities. My parents are lucky because here is a kid who actually wants to do these things.

Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday in order to travel 45 minute to a nearby school to do a choir competition at 7:30 am. Further, even though my sister's performance is over at 7:45 am, she has to stay with the school until well after 11:00 am and be bused home. The parents are not allowed to pick up the children early or give them a ride a home at all. This is for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.

At the same time, my sister is expected to do work on her upcoming science fair project (which must adhere to an egregiously onerous template provided on the school's website) and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right).

When my parents spoke up about the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning, and also disallowing their parents from even picking them up early or anything, the school was borderline militant in their reply. They chewed out my parents, said they had no business questioning the choir director's choice of which competitions to attend or what the scheduling was, and basically said that the choice was either to put up or shut up. The school was not willing to compromise or even discuss any of their points about how unhealthy and overly burdensome the whole set of affairs was.

In smaller ways, this extends to classroom homework (which is at levels way higher than when I was a child, and yet the kids themselves say (and test scores seem to indicate) that they are retaining less and less of it). If a parent writes in to say the homework is too much, that it is stressing out their 6th grade kid who is staying up until 10:30 pm, crying and self-doubting the whole time, just to keep up with a single day's homework, you don't get any degree of reasonableness whatsoever.

I feel that schools and teachers have way too much authority over how children are treated and evaluated, what they are required to do, and so forth. They argue that they have to make it this way to comply with state and federal standards, and that's a big part of the problem. But regardless, it doesn't matter if you are a proactive and supportive parent if your attempts to provide a healthy and nurturing learning atmosphere are constantly and aggressively thwarted by the very teachers and school officials you want to try to work with.

That seems to be the case with asian parents/children and they usually get better GPA.

Is there any source that proves or disproves that?

We've been stumped by Meno's paradox since Plato's time. I wouldn't trust the average high-schooler's judgement about educational choices. At that age it is far too easy to give up. Skip calculus, differential equations and the whole shebang and suddenly you're woefully underprepared for that dream career building drones and military aircraft.

I certainly am happy there was some structure to my curriculum (even at the expense of a low student:teacher ratio). I was a very stupid kid - thought myself above the curriculum and all that. Were I allowed to chart my own course I would've been in a very bad place.

Schooling should be strongly differentiated from the formation of academic and learning communities. People can still partake in seminars, gather for lectures and conferences, form study groups and even build schools with regular curricula to voluntarily participate in, if such a structure is deemed useful. The accreditation process should be repealed, and a boom in alternative schools (free, democratic, Sudbury, etc.) would likely follow.

Research universities should remain as academic communities, rather than be bogged down by an auxiliary function of serving as ritual prerequisites for entering the labor market.

This meme needs to be put to rest; preferably with a stake thru the hearth, the head chopped off and the mouth full of garlic.

Information is just an encoded sequence of symbols, but knowledge inside a living mind is structured. Beyond a certain point[1], you cannot just pull whatever you want to know - Matrix style, please - because in order to decode the information you need to have built an scafold of prerequisite knowledge over the last few years. And your past self did not have any way to predict with both precision and accuracy what you would want to learn today.

And that is the reason why, every kid must be forced to learn a basic set of common facts and skills at an early age. The purpose is to create the foundations of an scafold that is good enough for most people purposes, and to develop the skills to keep growing it as needs arise.

One could argue that the US so-called-education system has strayed away from that noble goal to such a degree that it is almost impossible to recognize it's original intent. And yes, that is a shame. But it is simply false that you can "pull whatever I need to know, on demand, from Google"... and for every person for whom this is still more or less true, there is one of us here at Hacker News waiting for the chance to automate their job away and split their wage with their boss.

Damned, it is hard enough even to google what you think you need to know if you don't know what's the name of the thing you are looking for!!!

[1] There's a triving industry of Infotainment that makes their money by puting together mildly interesting facts, packaging those in an engaging presentation and selling it to customers that like to think of themselves as "well learned". The difference with true knowledge is that the consumers of such products lack the context to put that information to good, practical, use. In the same way that looking at a lot of martial arts movies does not make you a good fighter, looking a lot of documentaries do not make you a scientist.

It's still ridiculous and leads to teaching-to-the-test, fiddling with data, and undue pressure on teachers and learners.

The reason I'm asking is that purely based on a 'hunch', I feel that the most useful years of my education were before the age of around 12-13 and after the age of 20. I have no solid evidence to support this, just my experience and that of my peers.

Edit: to try and support my hunch: in my country 12-13 is the age where the 'sorting hat' is applied and you move to middle/high school (physically different location, on of three levels based on earlier performance), and 20 is generally around the second or third year of 'higher vocational training' or 'university' where the non-motivated are sorted out and (generally) the ones who are going to finish college are left. It's also the point where classes become less general, multiple-choice, massive (300+ classes sometimes) and instead become more focused and interesting.

The main point of the article is a proposal of a new way to evaluate teachers. It says, "let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers (it’s tempting to use student outcomes instead)."

To me that seems like a reasonable part of a good method of evaluation.

But this is factually incorrect.

1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr...

and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.

Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr...

shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.

2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,

http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L...

which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons.

3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."

The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system,

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf

with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu...

The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems,

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf

and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too.

4. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The latest TIMSS report,

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf

consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not tie with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4, page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity.

This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country." 5. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct (even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post.

Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf

Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors,

Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...

so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

Off the to of my head two more problems in addition to the half a dozen mentioned already in this topic: money being spent on useless technology (Smartboards; my mother [along with every one of the 100+ teachers at her school] was issued an ipad, one ipad for classes of 30-40 and told to integrate it into her teaching) instead of things like fixing the heat and lack of physical activity as PE and recess get stripped from the curriculum.

Most studies I've seen on the topic show that the best predictor of one's educational success and attainment is one's parents educational attainment, so there is something to that that an anecdote from a teacher that, aside from not being a systematic gathering of evidence, doesn't even describe an experience of what drives outcomes, but simply relates a personal practice, isn't really sufficient to rebut.

B.) Many school districts have reimbursement programs that heavily subsidize getting master's degrees.

C.) Far too many Education master's degree programs are baby-town frolics level of difficulty, when they aren't straight degree mills.

It seems to me that the opportunity afforded to an individual simply by living in the United States is the real driving force behind most successful endeavors like the above, and "geniuses" (I use that very loosely) rise to the top DESPITE our education system.