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I think it has less to do with bureaucrats than parents. Any meaningful change to K12 pedagogy is met with vigorous opposition from parents because to so many people, the only right way to teach is the way they were taught. See the New Math of the 70s, the Common Core, etc. You cannot make a major change to K12, good or bad, and get away with it.

I see parents talking like this all the time. "Who can understand how they are teaching kids to add these days?", but when I look at it what they are teaching my kids, it fits with how I do it in my head vs. how I was taught to do it on paper.

People are resistant to change even when they say they want change (politics is a great of example of wanting "change" but having a fit when things actually change).

And generally, when you see something that looks really odd, if there's someone around who's experienced in teaching it to put it in context, it becomes obvious fairly quickly. There seems to be a belief that just because it's elementary that anything a parent might see of their child's work should be immediately understandable. That may be true of the question and answer, but it's not necessarily true of the process.

Imagine though that it doesn't match how everyone else does it in their heads. So, you are telling kids there is a right or wrong intuitive approach to a question- teaching an intuitive approach as a mechanical approach, which misses the valuable step of developing the intuition.

I have no problem with showing kids different ways to conceptualize a problem, but marking 5 x 3 = 5 + 5 + 5 wrong is just madness.

Yeah I get really frustrated with this. It is one of the biggest struggles I have with trying to figure out how to disagree forcefully, because I strongly disagree with this sort of intransigence, without giving offense, because many of those who hold these views are loved ones.

I feel like there is some deeper cultural problem afoot. Why don't educators get the benefit of the doubt that other professions are given? I never hear people decry the way in which their doctors are going about their doctoring!

> Why don't educators get the benefit of the doubt that other professions are given?

On a practical level, people understand adding but they don't understand how the endocrine system interacts with the immune system and how diet affects that interaction.

If it makes you feel any better, the programming profession isn't much better.

Personally, I love educators for sticking in there, but:

1. There has been basically no major disruption in this field in at least a hundred years. I have a hard time thinking of another field like this.

2. I have no confidence that changes would happen even if someone figured out how to teach kids twice as well with half as many teachers.

3. Educators, as a community, aren't exactly scientific. For example, many of them push for universal pre-K, which isn't exactly settled science.

"Every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves." - Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change

Speaking of parents, there's also the time proximity effect.

It doesn't matter if its stupid or effective, there's a common theme of very early adult learning experiences such as military basic training, young doctors 36 hour shifts, apprentices in the crafts, where something akin to hazing turns teens into productive adults. So you do pushups in the mud until you puke, suture lacerations until you collapse asleep, and sweep floors and other grunt work for your first months with the journeymen and masters. Programmers haze noobs by forcing them to recite algorithms in whiteboard interviews.

Now I emphasize that its probably a stupid way to train a doc or a plumber or an attack helicopter mechanic, but its just how we haze while telling ourselves its learning, and wrapping it all up in layers of rationalization. And for parents, critically its the most recent example of learning. Even if their own school experience didn't suck, their internship or apprenticeship or basic training sure did, and that's how its supposed to be, in an abused grow up into abusers mentality.

So "obviously" the kids need to do timed arithmetic worksheets for hours until they cry, or stay up half the night writing essays the teachers won't read anyway. That's what "real learning" is all about, right?

I dunno, there are huge institutions of scholars who study and prescribe changes to educational system. If it becomes a choice between making a school better or listening to them and defending the institutions, its going to be a tough sell.

Also, the idea of homework is that the kid will try to learn the material at home and parents will help. If you remove that, you put more pressure on the teacher to teach them the things they are supposed to know. You've already got them testing or preparing for tests for a large part of the day, teaching them things is really going to cut into watch-a-video time.

A lot of those changes come from politically motivated attempts to "fix" education and have no input from teachers and no basis in science. Common Core comes to mind.

I'm not an educator or an expert in any way, but I've found many of the pro- Common Core (math, at least) arguments made by Keith Devlin[0] to be very compelling. So far, I can't figure out what the hubbub over Common Core is about, besides the usual "that's not how I learned it" nonsense. Alternative resources welcome!

[0]: http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/

Common Core itself is a scapegoat for a lot of those efforts. People have been misled by politicized media and social media memes into thinking that it's far more rigid and detailed than it really is.

K-12 education in the US most definitely needed "fixing" in a huge number of areas. The research on K-12 math, in particular, is abysmal [0][1]. A huge percentage of students have trouble understanding fractions, moving beyond rote use of formulas (binomials and the stupid over-emphasis on the FOIL method offer a great example of how you students can get stuck because they don't understand the concepts behind those formulas), and when they start learning algebra, there's a huge drop in performance as fundamental problems start to boil to the surface. Then they give up and try to find a way to skate through their remaining math courses. Look at how common the sentence "I'm not a math person" is in contemporary America. There's literally no such thing [2], but millions of Americans believe it to be true and fall prey to a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy. Or look at how common the ridiculous notion that "Asians are better at math" is. The evidence of how problematic this is can be found in the proliferation of remediation at both community and four-year colleges. Even tier-one schools that, on average, admit higher-achieving students have to deal with the consequences. And then there's the geographic and socioeconomic disparity in achievement in math, writing, and other areas.

I hated math in high school, mainly because of how it was taught to me. Even as someone who was a proliferate reader and was quite inquisitive, I never realized just how much I was missing until college. By the time I experienced math and got the chance to see the beauty in its concepts, I had effectively wasted years dealing with formulas and memorization. Even now, I get angry when I think about how poor my math education was and everything that I didn't get a chance to enjoy at the time. And that's coming from what was a pretty good school district. I shudder to think how much worse my experience could have been at a bad one.

Anyhow, what are you talking about with Common Core? CCSSI wasn't written by politicians. It was written by subject field experts. Teachers had a great deal of input, but in general, teachers can only offer anecdotal data. You need to take that anecdotal data, combine it with findings from educational researchers who have undertaken rigorous research using the scientific method, and use that data to guide subject field experts in developing educational standards. Especially for elementary education, where teachers have to--by definition--be more generalists than anything else. Common Core did that, and every analysis I've seen over the past few years supports the conclusion that they're a significant improvement over previous state standards.

Most of the arguments against Common Core are either largely political themselves or significantly misinformed about what Common Core is. The ones against the math standards in particular can largely be summed up as "you're doing it differently than I learned it." No shit. That's the point. And the arguments against state and national standards are particularly amusing, as if fucking math changes based on the state you're in.

0. http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/report/final...

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-...

2. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the-myt...

Oh man you should see how people flip out over Common Core teaching number sense to high school kids. Even something as simple as split-difference subtraction brings out the loons saying that the schools are teaching the kids devil math and that God's subtraction carries the one.

Well i dont know about where you live but the changes madd to how reading is taught have been a complete disaster. The amount of kids around 10 who are unable to read properly has never been so high in recent history. Change is not always for the best.

> The amount of kids around 10 who are unable to read properly has never been so high in recent history.

What's your source?

http://apprendrealire.eklablog.com/alerte-sur-le-niveau-des-...

The actual link from LeMonde is at the bottom but it's behind a paywall.

I've always thought that early education should be more of a You-Are-Here orientation: bringing new humans up to date on what they are, their place in the world, where humanity as a whole is going and the challenges facing us.

Think Neo being pulled out of the Matrix, only in reverse.

Of course different nations are going to have their own biased version of the things listed above, but I suppose that's okay.

What's undeniable is that we have reached the point where it's impossible for any human to even be able to consume all the art produced by mankind, let alone understand all our technology, in a single lifetime.

Until we figure out medical immortality, children should be informed of all the options available to them, as early as possible. Fluency in tools that are a de facto requirement of modern society; cars, computers, smartphones, even things like Facebook and online privacy – should be taught as soon as possible.

How does that prepare a child for living in the world, or will that all be taken care of by Matrix style robots? And what do you do with the 0-9 year olds (34% of whom still believe in Santa Claus) that are not developed enough to understand their place in the world? Do they get any Education in the meantime?

Teaching broad concents seems better than fluency in any individual techology (that will be complete outdated before the kid reaches adulthood). I'm not even sure how that would work: Here kid, here are all of the technologies that we think are important to you (and whose companies have supplied us with training materials). You shall learn an iPhone, the internet through Bing, a Honda car, and how to use Facebook. We won't teach you how any of these work, or even any of the basic concepts behind the world you live in, you can figure it out yourself by using Bing.

The picture I had in mind was more like: Welcome to Earth. [video of the planet in space] You are a human; [video of the children in the class blended in with some graphics of the human body of different races] – a member of Homo Sapiens, the only species on this world to have built civilization. This is the only planet known to have life, and we share it with many creatures. [being shown other animals including our interactions with them]

You are in the United States of America. ...for example, and so on, until moving to: This is our technology. [video showing everything from phones and server farms to planes and space stations]

Then of course gradually explaining how everything works, according to their age, and of course not limiting it to specific products or services, but yes, definitely teaching them to how to look up more information through the internet. Teaching them to teach themselves; how to sift for the factual information from among all the noise.

Why do I have the distinct feeling you haven't had kids yet and treat them as aliens (or new players to an MMO)? Yes a certain level of self awareness is most important (you'd be surprised how many uneducated kids don't even know what country they live in) but the whole thing is a VERY gradual process.

Why are the parents not doing this in day to day life?

How do you reconcile your

    education as an area is 
    incredibly cargo cult-filled.

with your confidence in expressing

    we've known ... homework at 
    that age was harmful

Maybe what "we've known" was cargo-cult to start with?

Presumably that can be reconciled with evidence. The article's first sentence states that there is no evidence that homework at a young age improves outcomes. At least this is a testable statement. Though I bet some students would be pretty unhappy if they came out on the homework side of the A/B testing.

"Cargo Cult" implies a LACK of experimental evidence.

You can carve a block of wood to look like a radio and mutter into it all day, but generally speaking it's not going to summon a cargo-airplane to your airfield of chopped reeds.

> education as an area is incredibly cargo cult-filled

The terrifying thing is that nearly every field (including, eg, medicine) is like this. Once there's a system in place that mostly kinda works, people are extremely reluctant to make any serious changes.

Since the future of people is at stake I find healthy to be "extremely reluctant to make any serious changes".

Making small changes over the years is the right thing to do unless you want to play the mad scientist with other people's lives. Of course do not change anything at all is bad, but the "serious change" approach is frightening, or at least should be.

Some schools in the Seattle area are experimenting with later start times. Hopefully it will catch on?

But isn't that just because of the bus schedules?

Never understood early start times, unless your in farming.

Getting to school is very difficult for some people, especially if they come from a poor family. In high school, just getting there was such a hassle. I took three different busses. I remember getting up a 5 a.m. to get to there. And my student advisor(the principal) told me I needed to work on my attitude.

To take it further, never understood the reason to be at pretty much any job before 10 a.m.

Construction is notorious for early hours. Pretty much nothing gets done before that first coffee break.

It's a general filtering mechanism. Almost nobody wants to get up at 5 AM to get to school or to the jobsite. If that's what you have to do to get in, this selects for those participants who are more highly motivated to participate in the institution, and differentially rejects those who either lack sufficient motivation to comply, or lack the self-control necessary to execute compliance.

A fixed and mandatory early start time serves as a proxy for general discipline and a means to conclusively demonstrate one's willingness to follow instructions and do things in the institutionally mandated way despite personal dislike of them.

It is to give parents enough time to drop their kids off at school and make it to work on time.

I think there's a hidden assumption that regardless when you arrive, you're going home at 5pm or 10pm or whatever.

More realistically, I've worked flex jobs and no matter how much waking up at 4am sucks, going home from work at 2pm rocks so much more that it balances out.

Currently dealing with work start time being 9am but scrum starts at 9:30 so I aim to show up at 9:20. Nobody minds thankfully

Worked in flooring last year. Hours were 8 to 4. Coffee stop was on the way in. Generally started right away, but that's more of a show-up-to-customer-and-get-to-work deal. Couldn't start before 8 because noise

Alfie Kohn said this ten years ago and he's way more prominent, so I wouldn't be overly optimistic.

When I was a kid, elementary school was moved from 8am to 9am. This was in a relatively progressive school. The principal made a decision, put his foot down, the parents cried in outrage, but it happened and a year later everyone thought it was normal.

In high school we normally started at 8:30am. Because my school didn't have enough room for everyone, we started at 2pm twice a week.

The 2pm days were my favourite.