How to fix our schools: A manifesto by education leaders
washingtonpost.com
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I'm very curious to see what will come out of it. A lot of harm can be done in periods like this. What I'm afraid of is that the teacher role will be turned into an even more mechanistic role and will kill teacher care and passion even more than it already has with even more endless teaching-for-tests motives. It may increase student learning, but probably only a minuscule amount to what is possible.
Here's one teacher evaluation guide that is being implemented in DC: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2010/10/ok_and_it...
I agree with you that reform movements like what is currently building in education can have disastrous effects. However, in this instance, most of the reforms being proposed are a product of observing what has worked in charter schools, rather than a product of running in the opposite direction of what doesn't work.
I see the current reform movement as an overwhelmingly positive force in education. As long as they stick to the ideal of spreading successful charter school practices to the broader public school community I'll be happy.
PS: All you genius hackers with backgrounds in machine learning, AI, social networking, (god knows what else might be applicable). Don't like the way teacher performance is being quantified? There's a multi-billion dollar industry that could use some disruption.
On the first point, I think we are moving into the right direction, but we have a long way to go. With the changes described here, we will still have schools full of mostly-bored students. School still sounds like it will be a mostly-passive activity for students, which naturally results in low amounts of development.
On a much broader level, I think certain deeply rooted ideas need to be reconsidered. For example, how beneficial is it to split up disciplines like we do, such as have math completely separate from the sciences, or reading separate from the humanities? Or for that matter, is such a ridiculous focus on math and certain sciences and humanities really needed in school to the same degree? What other topics in our world have grown to be more important? Should math be taught in taking one minuscule bit at a time out of any meaningful context, or can concepts be lumped into projects that add contextual and experiential meaning? On a different note, a lot of people can't understand that learning can take place outside of a traditional classroom with a teacher. Do we even need traditional classrooms anymore? What structures would be more beneficial to learning? And, one last point, should structured or semi-structured school take up 9-12+ hours every day of the week (including homework) for a majority of the year? When do students have time for their own thinking, discovering, and involved and time-consuming interests?
You don't understand. The measurement problem is relatively minor compared to the problem of getting measurements used.
Teacher's advocates (lobbyists and the like) will say that teachers support evaluation in the abstract but they oppose any actual implementation. When asked to provide one that is acceptable to them, they duck and start namecalling.
In the ideal world, such a focus on teacher evaluation wouldn't be necessary. One example: In Finland, from the beginning teachers receive maximum education themselves and so administrators trust their judgments. I realize we aren't there, but there may be other ways of getting there.
Firstly, what if all teachers were more motivated? What if all teachers had clear proof that their methods suck? What if clear evidence of superior methods that have clearly better results existed?
What if there was a piece of technology that was so attractive, showed such promise and proved better learning occurred, that teachers themselves took it up out of interest and started using it and improving on themselves and their learning through this new methodology. The lobbyists and the like would probably be against it, but with enough backing and proof of its benefits, they would lose.
Creating a product like this is the kind of technology and innovation we need, and I firmly believe it's possible.
I said lobbyists and teachers organizations, but teachers support them.... And, when evaluation comes up for a vote, teachers vote against it overwhelmingly. They strike to get rid of it, and so on.
There are no technical solutions to social problems.
As programmers, it seems logical to us that if there's something wrong, we can fork the code and submit patches to the repo. Unfortunately, the barriers to entry to running your own school are high; credibility requires accreditation, proper teaching talent, financing.
Most of the time, I don't have a problem with the school. I have a problem with the teacher, for either being unqualified, or just being a bad teacher. I can't submit a pull request like I can in Github to rectify the issue with my own fork. In other words, we're stuck with each other. Even if a teacher is very qualified, the teaching style may be incompatible with a particular student. Sometimes there's nothing wrong with the student or teacher, it's just that neither work together effectively. And it's difficult to move a student to another teacher's class if spaces/funds/instructors are scarce.
School administrators aren't educators today. They're bureaucrats. It's no longer about the education, but how they can optimize business processes. Teachers, as frontline personnel, are fully aware of the problems with education. Talking to a language teacher trying to bring Chinese into a district made me realize that it's very political; teachers teaching German feel threatened, others who have been affected by cuts, such as the music department, feel insulted.
School is a highly subjective issue. Some students weren't cut out to be students. Students ahead of the curve are impeded by the traditional curriculum. No Child Left Behind under the guise of making a "difference" forces schools to play games with its students. Instead, schools don't teach anymore, but teach students to prepare for the metrics that will give them funding (attendance/grade fixing/"standardized" testing).
I'd like to fix the problem when I see it. But unlike software, having forks or different tags and branches are impossible in the teaching world due to the many reasons above.