What Really Happened at the School Where Every Graduate Got into College
npr.org
npr.org
School district leaders, including Wilson, defend the use of makeup work, arguing they want to give students "multiple opportunities" to show they understand material.
Contrast this with the attitude of some more demanding professions like piloting an aircraft: "If you don't get it right the first time, it could be the end of your career, or even your life."
American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability.
That would benefit from a reliable citation.
And it's not clear to why it's complete nonsense either. Do you have some sort of data about what the cognitive needs are to graduate secondary school, and what percentage of the population lacks them?
Considering real world schools have varying grades and varying tracks of difficulty from remedial to advanced, it seems like they recognize a wide range in learning ability.
This was all very foreign to me since I was held back in elementary school, at my teacher's recommendation.
It just seems to me that the amount of extra work they have put in to keep her advancing while in a classroom where most of the work is above her ability could be put to better use.
No, its dedicated, depending on how cynically you view it, to either bringing up the performance of the lower-end of the distribution or to painting public schools as failing to support privatization. It is absolutely not dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability, and, in fact, rather directly addresses the existence of learning disabilities.
If an innovation in education improves outcomes by 3% for stupid students and 5% for smart students (you know... because they respond better to education), that's actually a bad thing from the conventional viewpoint, because "the gap" has widened instead of narrowing.
No, its not. (Though if it continues without change it will probably have the effect of narrowing that gap to near zero, but largely by bringing the higher end down through neglect rather than by bringing the lower end up to it.)
> This can't be done if you're willing to concede that the higher end might be able to learn faster.
Its quite possible if you acknowledge that but then consciously plan to neglect serving the upper end.
CS isn't a profession though, and AFAIK no one has ever died due to a CS mistake.
It’s a miracle these kinds of consequences aren’t more common, given how much code runs machinery and how undisciplined many engineering firms are.
It wasn't.
The two are as intertwined as they can be, you cannot perform software engineering without practicing some part of computer science, and you cannot perform computer science in truth, without practicing some part of software engineering.
Anyway, in the case of Therac-25 it was a concurrency error, so in other words, both a CS mistake, and a programming mistake.
Quite the opposite, since most schools offer CS degrees but not Software Engineering degrees. Most students in CS are there to learn to become software developers, not to learn theoretical (i e., computational) science.
You realise that the many disciplines of CS would not exist without the real life requirements of actual computers?
Indeed, Knuth has written on a tangential topic to this: http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html
Yes, CS builds upon some areas of Mathematics, such as Mathematical Logic, but you must remember that CS was born out of the wish to develop new algorithms for certain tasks, and to develop frameworks for expressing and formalizing properties of existing software algorithms.
Computer Science may not be practiced very heavily in the field, but many of the results in CS come directly from needs of the engineering field, and vice versa. Think Big O Notation, which attempts to find a theoretical solution to the practical problem of "Which of these two approaches is faster". Or bounds checking algorithms / Hindley-Milner type systems (e.g. Algorithm W, etc.), which are practical implementations of theoretical work, both of which were answers to the question "How can I find specific errors in this program code before they occur at runtime".
Some students need more support than others.
If all these kids aren't doing well, it's not a failing of the kids, but of the people who should be helping the kids succeed, and the system that graduated them.
A high income student who struggles with their grade gets tutors and help. A low income student who struggles is passed along without getting support to learn, allowed to fall further and further behind.
My university offered free tutoring, and nudged the struggling students toward it. Most of them never showed. Of course, many of them were skipping the normal classes, so not too much surprise in that case.
> If all these kids aren't doing well, it's not a failing of
> the kids, but of the people who should be helping the kids
> succeed,
The point being: yes, there are people who "should be helping", but the key word is "helping". The kid should put some effort too.
I find that attitude that everyone around is to blame except the one in the middle quite dangerous. It teaches not to be responsible for your own actions (or inaction).
We had a president a few years back, whose long lasting infamous contribution to the society was the catchphrase "I am not responsible, the environment is".
He was impeached. Let's not raise more like him.
What you're describing certainly isn't represented by the article, what I read is there are students who society is already failing, and so no doubt they don't win by its rules.
It seems like discussions about education always devolve to an unproductive argument about who should be blamed. Who’s failing? Can we assign blame to the student? Can we be angry at teachers? Etc..
Why does this matter at all? Is the goal to inflict shame on students, teachers or their parents? Society has all kinds of people. That means brilliant students who will succeed no matter what, and it also means students who are lazy, inconsistent, distracted, have bad home lives, etc. Our nation prospers when we can figure out how to educate even kids that are difficult to educate because of circumstances or even maybe factors intrinsic to the kid like disabilities.
Blame is useless. Kids become adults and if they are uneducated now it’s a real problem for everyone. Uneducated adults are more likely to be unemployed and more likely to commit crimes and less able to work and pay taxes to support the system. Now, are we going to figure out how to educate kids so that doesn’t happen or are we going to assign blame to them, then throw them into prison / welfare when they get older?
Being interested and getting enjoyment out of learning is crucial. E.g. there are people who are good at math, but terrible at humanities subjects, or vice versa.
Not everyone has the same ability to learn about different subjects equally - even amongst groups with the same intellignece levels. It sounds like you’re arguing that one’s entire future career, even in post-secondary and undergraduate level, is decided entirely by their grade-average across all their subjects. This will disqualify many talented individuals from studying (and consequently working in) areas that strongly interest them simply for having an inability to adequately perform in completely unrelated areas. How is that a meritocracy?
Take myself, for example: I have ASD, I have “special interests” and my brain is incredibly stubborn and demotivated to do anything outside certain narrow interest areas. I did exceptionally well in my UK A-Level electives (maths/physics/compsci, etc, getting mostly top grades) compared to my GCSEs that we’re far more broader (English Lit, Biology, Chemistry, Theology, etc) where I got mostly B-grades. After getting my degree I landed a job at a high-profile software company in the US, launching me into a career and a very high tax bracket. Hopefully this means my net societal impact is positive. But under your proposal, my hardwired unwillingness to memorise Shakespeare and compare Dickens with Steinbeck should condemn me to never entering academia to study what I enjoy.
The real problem here is that the stakes are the students' education, and in truth their futures. I wish I could think of some easy solution to this problem but it's so damn hard. I believe a lot of it comes down to the parents and their values, but that's a tough problem to fix.
I guess thinking about this increases my sympathy for search engines and spam filters not being transparent about the algorithmic bases for their rankings, even in a week when I've had some personal e-mail blocked as a spam false positive. The resources that are getting put into discovering how to game those scores are staggering.
I assume there are also exceptions to Goodhart's Law in terms of metrics that effectively can't be gamed, or that otherwise better manage to align different groups' incentives.
Education is very different than sales. I don't know what the solution is, especially when measuring "learning" itself is very difficult if not impossible.
I've seen the result of this. The salesperson oversells, and the engineering team death marches to attempt to build what the salesperson has already received their commission for.
Incentives are tricky.
That's ridiculous. Math, science, vocabulary, history, and reading comprehension can all be tested effectively, with little risk of "gaming" it.
(at least at the level of a tpyical high scholl curriculum)
My wife teaches at a 4-year state school and tells me that one of her students did just that, she looked for plausible keywords but then didn't know what to do next, this was chemistry, not math.
Reading comprehension is harder to game.
> she looked for plausible keywords but then didn't know what to do next
That doesn't sound like she arrived at the right result.
It is difficult to game your way to an A without knowing a fair amount of the material, but it's definitely possible to get a passing grade and possibly as high as a B. And students are often very eager to try to claw as much partial credit on a test as possible.
The logical outcome is that the biggest parasites will look to attach themselves to the biggest flows of money with low levels of elasticity relative to their input.
And they will do whatever they can through side-channel methods and attacks, whether it be destructive to other employees or the company itself, to stop others getting into the position, including navigating/manipulating the hierarchy to maximize flows through them.
Half of finance/executive remuneration is literally built around that strategy (manage big flows of money unrelated to your personal input), and I'd guess a huge number of toxic companies and employees are directly attributable to people who believe they've successfully implemented that incentive scheme.
On a related note, Washington D.C. specifically has a massive lead pipe problem which has been ignored for decades.
But you might coast through those elections on a happy lie. Particularly if you make the papers by getting everyone admitted to university.
As horrifying the idea of career ending bugs sound to me, we probably need to appreciate the fact that there's a level where adding "coders" to the pool is doing more harm then good when we look at what it will do to the understanding of what's "acceptable".
And allowing people to graduate without passing their grade level seems like a bad idea. (Unless you're saying they were changed to juniors but then no longer went to the high school).
The school district won't know how many Ballou graduates enrolled in college overall until May, a spokesperson says. We know of 183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall.
I think what’s most impressive is how they’ve convinced themselves their fraud is actually all in the best interest of the students.
If not for the investigation, would anyone have ever noticed?
Have you ever met a private school student who came from a well off family and their parents didn't demand "results" from them, and they still have a nice life than most people?
Because the opposite is less likely to be true for those who didn't come from a well off family, regardless of the "results".
These "results" increasingly are meaningless when most people are just prodded through mindlessly to the next step and even more so when family member / family friend was already going to give you a nice job anyways…
I guess it also doesn't help either when people increasingly conflate the "results" with knowledge or education in of itself… at best they are mere approximations, however from the article, i seriously doubt we're anywhere near the the best…
It's almost as if the school got with each student to have him or her apply to the school. If the students were having trouble with reading, writing, and attendance, they probably wouldn't go out of their way to fill out a college app without oversight.
One can study better from home anyway. Also considering that it's a poor school, the teachers are surely not that great either.
This is a puff piece. If the teachers taught better, students would come. This just shows how broken the system of failing due to low attendance is. These kids obviously worked hard in spite of school and that should be celebrated, not investegated.
The teacher's attitude is weird to say the least.
Good kids but didn't deserve to walk across that stage?
The teacher ought to be sacked.
Our teachers did not care what so ever: you had to be in for the tests, there were no make up days, your grade was your grade which was an average of all tests given. Age classes were split into sections based on performance. If you were in 5A, you probably did better than you were in 5B and you were definitely miles ahead of 5D. At the end of the every year there was a reshuffling between the letters based on previous year results. No one, absolutely no one, wanted to go down a grade.
If your grade was higher than the minimum, you got to take the final test before graduation. Achieving the minimum score on it allowed you to graduate. If you did not get there, you did not get to do it which meant another year of school. That was in all test subjects: literature, math, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, foreign language (addition only in our class). There was no curve. Hell, entire concept of a curve still baffles me.
Results of the test: me - 2nd at 127% percent behind a girl who never cut a single class at 129%. Our of a graduating class of 142, 140 were taking the test, all 140 achieved the minimum 81% needed. All of people who cut classes that I knew scored over 94%.
I did not realize how weird it was until I got to an American university.
Are there students who benefit? No.
Fraud can pay very well.
There is not some mass of people out there clamoring to be teachers. The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence. Then they get told they will lose their job unless they pass people they know they shouldn't, and are routinely told that tests that students aced 10 years ago are so difficult the students can no longer pass.
I agree that teachers should not put up with the charade, but it's totally unfair to put teachers' livelihoods at risk just because parents refuse to accept any responsibility and administrators cow down to political pressure.
If we actually care about today's children, we have to acknowledge the reality that not every parent is fully equipped to help their kids succeed and commit to trying to intervene this generation, to hopefully help many future generations of children.
As a teacher in Baltimore, I met parents and guardians of just about every stripe you can imagine. Almost every one of them wanted the best for their kids. A lot of them lacked the savvy, wealth and social capital to navigate a better path for their kids.
Really though, the politicians are exacerbating the problems. Not only do they abandon communities in need, they cut education funding across the board, and then put price tags on the schools - pass students in my district or we cut the money even more. Meanwhile, they spend more on the military and kick the can down the road.
I also went out of my way (as is typical in impoverished schools) to let them know as early as possible if their kid was falling behind. As the teacher, it's on you to figure out how to make time to try to coach kids back on track. It's unbelievably overwhelmed to try to do this for a couple dozen kids at a time, each with unique failure patterns to address.
The pressure comes from administration, whose asses are on the line to have good looking metrics.
https://www1.salary.com/DC/Washington/high-school-teacher-Sa...
A $30,000 bonus is almost 50% of the median salary. It's a significant temptation to commit fraud.
Bachelors degree with no experience (but presumably a teaching certificate) 56K. Tops out with a Phd and 20 years in at about 135K (not including bonuses). Not the end of the world, but median household income in DC & PG County is around 75K, Montgomery County 85K and Fairfax VA 105K. Unmarried, or with a family in a two income home, that's solidly middle class income.
> The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence.
That overstates it a bit, but that is the crux of the issue. DC public schools are administered so poorly, with such a legacy of failure, despite the great pay they cannot attract decent teachers, and they have outrageously high rates of turnover, as anyone who can get a job elsewhere does.
The median cost of a home in DC is $545,000 according to Zillow, with property tax approximately $8,992.50. A 30 year mortgage minimum plus the property tax would be around $3,535 a month. Around 68% of the teacher's gross salary is going to housing. This is over double the suggested amount anyone should spend on housing, and definitely not middle class.
If they live outside of DC (almost no teacher can afford to own a home alone in DC) the median cost of a home goes down to only $385,000. But state taxes vary; they're generally higher in Maryland, whereas in Virginia you pay more tax to own a car, for example. The monthly mortgage plus property tax in Montgomery County would be only $2,320 per month, so a more affordable 37% of salary. Now we can start adding on the extras, like insurance, transportation, food, etc in an expensive metro area.
Speaking of turnover, it's nice that teachers in DC are allowed to live in surrounding areas. In states such as NJ, all public employees must live in the state, and NJ property taxes are the highest in the country. After adding on home insurance (which might already be high) and then extras like mandatory flood insurance (depending on where you live), this leaves teachers faced with potentially paying more on property tax and insurance than their mortgage, or renting an apartment.
This is one of many potential reasons for a high turnover rate. Around the country, teachers face not only low salaries and completely unreasonable expectations, but various challenges like the above. I don't think administration is the sole cause of these problems, as administration is usually responding to outside pressure.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/...
It sounds like the grading system is broken.
Does a zero do the thing that we want it to do?
Could there be a different metric, that doesn't weight a zero in a way that knocks students out like in an elimination tournament? What are the goals of grades? It seems like they are structured to rank students in a competition. That's great for the winners. But what do you do with the loosers?
"It is expected that our students will be here every day," said Jane Spence, chief of secondary schools at D.C. Public Schools. "But we also know that students learn material in lots of different ways. So we've started to recognize that students can have mastered material even if they're not sitting in a physical space."
This is typical of the heads of failing schools. Yes, our kids can’t pass state exams. Yes, our parental survey complain of bullying. Yes our teachers complain in surveys about school leadership. But you’re just not measuring the learning that’s happening here.
The only thing I haven't seen in the more affluent schools is the tolerance for unexecused absenses and tardiness.