Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021
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Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.
Schools were only given incentives to make kids pass, not to help them excel.
The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot.
It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
More likely, segregation happens because parents don't always want the best for their kids. A lot of it is simply self-segregation, driven by varying parental attitudes to education and the like.
In my view, there's a degree to which such lopsided admissions represent a greater Asian American cultural emphasis on education (good) coupled with a marginal standardized test score advantage produced by many hours of after-school test prep (bad). As repeated studies have shown, the advantage of e.g. SAT test prep courses is consistently relatively small, but enough of an edge to matter when you're looking at a ~10% admissions rate [2][4]. Not all applicants have parents who can afford or are aware of the value of such test prep, so it represents an uneven advantage. Crucially, this advantage is not inherently racial, but rather an artifact of culture, parental choice, and socioeconomic background. To mitigate this uneven advantage without completely eliminating merit-based admissions, a blurring filter e.g. random lottery might be applied to the top X% of test scorers.
And there is absolutely value in merit-based admissions. It makes these magnet schools what they are [5]. Despite their distorted demographics, it's what enables schools like Stuyvesant to still function as effective ladders out of poverty for many students:
>What makes these schools so good? The general consensus is the academic rigor. But what’s come out clearly in our interviews with Stuyvesant graduates is something arguably more important: a peer-driven expectation of achievement. What Stuyvesant does is take 3,000 pretty bright kids and put them in a building together. Then magical things happen. They push each other, they strive to be like each other, they learn from each other.
>Nearly all of these kids went to college, often selective ones, and most went on to do well professionally. The poorer students became middle or upper-middle class, and the middle-class students often did better than their parents. And they were happy—most (though not all) felt that Stuyvesant had had a big effect on their lives. For instance, Elizabeth Reid Yee, a white 1985 graduate who grew up poor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fully credits Stuyvesant with keeping her from a life of poverty.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County,_Virginia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
[4] https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cos...
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/new-yo...
To paraphrase MLK "judged not on the colour of their skin but on the size of their parents' bank accounts". So many doors magically open to you when your parents have money.
To a significant extent, Asian American parents and students have shown that merit-based admissions _do_ work as a socioeconomic equalizer (see above Atlantic article). The problem as I see it is how to replicate this success among other demographics, including white Americans of middle and working-class backgrounds. Another part of the solution in my view is just making more magnet schools.
It is also bad recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who are neurotypical white privileged background kids.
I went to pretty good primary and secondary schools which actually tried to get the best out of pretty much everyone. Remedial teaching was taken seriously and wasn't just a bin into which difficult children were dumped. But even then the results left a lot to be desired. It's really difficult even in the absence of political interference.
The surrounding society makes a big difference. I count myself as lucky growing up where and when I did.
But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids?
The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.
The public school system goes behind education because it's the only state service where most children can be reached. They're crucially important for providing food security and shelter to millions of children whose parents can't or won't.
The contrary is also true. When we don't effectively use schools as these crucial public services, we wind up with the "school to prison pipeline" as it's called.
In my opinion the notion of "no child left behind" shouldn't equate to every kid going to college or becoming a doctor. We can design schooling metrics better than test scores and academic outcome. Like criminal justice outcomes, health outcomes like obesity, voting or civic participation, or even social outcomes. The goals of schooling shouldn't be wholly academic. That is why secondary education exists.
As far as I can tell, in most of the world and for a long time, school has been a place for academic education. Those that could not be educated for whatever reason were dismissed.
The idea that school should be a general social service for children seems popular among politicians and school administrators, but less accepted among parents and teachers. Furthermore, there was no explicit decision to move away from a focus on academics, it just kind of happened. That's not a recipe for good results.
Right now we are in limbo. The meaning of "school" is drifting and that obviously creates confusion and arguments, as well as bad results.
Families getting fed at school like getting fed. They aren't opposed to eating.
Goals are unclear right now. That, by itself, is bad. We need an explicit decision here, and that needs to be communicated to everyone involved.
As the child of a public grade school teacher (early childhood), I would suggest you go visit some Title I schools and ask lower income parents there what they expect from the school with respect to their children.
What you're being told in this thread: they will say they're happy to have a place that will take care of their kids while they're working, keep them reasonably safe, provide them food, keep them busy, and educate them
What you seem to think they would say: education their kids to the highest level possible
When there aren't consistent meals, access to health care, or clothing at home, and when home is a place of violence and/or substance abuse, priorities look a lot different.
All of these are things that were not uncommon, year after year. That's the reality public school teachers and administrators have to deal with.
They either have learning disabilities or difficult family/social situations that lead them to either not try or not care about school.
To say that teachers should put less effort into these kids due to "low ROI" is frankly very privileged.
Schools do very little to help these kids. There are ways to teach low-performers efficiently (they go under the general rubric of "direct instruction") but they go unused simply because teachers do not want to feel regimented in such a rigid structure, even if that's exactly what yields the best outcomes. (So, I'd definitely disagree with GP that "this segment is by its nature low ROI". It's not 'natural', it's pure dysfunction.)
Much of that money and effort is simply wasted if teachers aren't going to adopt effective approaches towards teaching and helping these kids.
The problem is that performance is exponential. That same 1-on-1 instruction will take a well performing kid to "surgeon".
It will take the incorrigible ... maybe ... to only quit school at 10th grade. Which does directly translate to money for the school these days.
What teachers/schools also effectively like about the incorrigible is that any (lowest wage) idiot that sticks to it will help the incorrigible. Not to surgeon levels, but better than before, sure. For obvious reasons you don't need much math. Some, yes, but not much. Whereas it takes a capable teacher to get good performers even higher.
Teachers are protecting the incompetent among them by doing this.
At my school of ~2,000 I'd say at any given moment there would be at least 30 of these kids (they didn't last long). They were violent. They hit teachers. They were regularly dragged out of classes by police officers. After a few of these interactions, they would be transferred to the problem child school. Our school actually had some great teachers that really cared about the students, but many of these kids were broken. Their home lives were just horrid. Most ended up in juvie and later jail.
Those were the worst of the bunch, but a good 20% of the school was beyond help. Daily fights, constant police presence, tons of kids brought weapons to school, lots of theft, vandalism every day, I could go on... That school was a nightmare, and it wasn't even the worst one in the city.
Point is, there is nowhere near enough teachers and resources to fix these broken kids. Their broken homes are what need to be fixed.
The problem with that is if you can't fix their environment for 8 hours a day (most schools are more like 6 these days but for argument's sake), and you propose fixing their environments 24 hours a day ...
This is not going to work for those kids.
So it depends who you want to help. You want to help disadvantaged kids? This will, certainly in the short term, make it worse for them and make life better for advantaged kids.
No one is saying you can’t fix it for 8 hours a day, its saying that fixing the 8 hours a day environment doesn’t address the problem because that’s not the environment that’s brokenness is causing the problems.
1) it's double or quadruple the time (8/6 vs 24h) vs school
2) kids aren't arranged per 20 (or 40 these days). You really need someone in a location per 2/3 kids.
(e.g. https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820... )
Which leads to:
a) we can't "fix the home situation", beyond providing some education on how kids should be raised
(seriously, someone in government make a fucking youtube series about it ... talk about useful spending of CPS budget!)
b) current attempts to do just that anyway make the situation worse for everyone involved (toxicity + crime + lack of opportunities), and don't improve things for those kids.
c) I don't see b changing.
d) we *still* do want to "fix" those kids
And not helping those kids do better is not acceptable. Even aside from the obvious observation that homelessness, drugs and crime don't just impact the people directly involved.
It's important to distinguish kids who just do not care at all from kids who are struggling, but it's also important to recognize that the former really do exist.
We should definitely take care of them as a society built on solidarity, but we can be efficient about it too.
It sounds like you want to just pay people to stay alive without helping them to gain the skills necessary to make that life worthwhile to themselves.
Before we try to be efficient we need to agree on what we are being efficient about.
The idea that we can push water uphill, and bring the most struggling students up above an ever-rising bar, is becoming a controversial one these days. There is a small but growing chorus of voices saying “enough already”, on both [1] sides [2] of the spectrum.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36319077-the-case-agains...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51087394-the-cult-of-sma...
For the record, I did not even try to dehumanize. I just applied the language of technology adoption to adoption of knowledge. It seemed applicable.
https://ondigitalmarketing.com/learn/odm/foundations/5-custo...
I agree that words have meaning, but IMO we want to focus the narrative on people who may have been unfortunate through no fault of their own. We want to treat them with compassion and take the time to find the right words for them. Words that they might describe themselves with. ...But they might say "I'm dumb" and think nothing of it.
The goal is to remove friction from the path to policy change, because we desire an outcome of improved efficiency. We may have to be creative with language to do it.
This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? I know that was the attitude of the schools of yesteryear - but they were wrong.
There are lots of reasons for remedial classes: Dyslexia, for example. A kid might have anxiety issues that make finishing homework near impossible: ADHD is a real thing that folks struggle with. All of these can be worked through - but back in history, they would be sent away to rot. Lots of them are bright kids, and a fair number of them can be a future surgeon or researcher.
You injected the words "learning disability". That's not that OP said.
I haven’t read all the replies yet but I’m surprised at the lack of reactions to OP classifying some children as losers because of their performance at school.
That's not true, some kids are just shitheads and don't feel like listening to anyone or doing what they're told. Personal responsibility has to come into play at some point, you can't just blame every problem on external factors.
I had some good friends in high school (a large, below-average public school in CA) who were solidly middle class or better, had supportive parents, and were just shitheads when it came to education. They were disruptive in class, didn't do homework and just generally didn't care.
I'm all for giving kids who are struggling the benefit of the doubt and trying to help them, but if they don't want that help, at some point you have to weigh the cost of trying to force it on them against the cost of wasting the time of the students who are actually there to learn.
Results?
The kids who were failing still failed because no matter how much teachers do, it's still up to them to study.
Schools need resources for both kinds of students, and if they have to choose who gets the attention they are simply underfunded.
That's a genuinely curious question. I haven't researched any specifics about those schools or how they use their money.
It's possible for a vicious cycle to develop between waste/corruption in a school system and poor academic performance, wherein additional money doesn't help improve outcomes. That doesn't mean that withholding resources is the solution; rather, it means that a more fundamental restructuring than American municipal governments may be comfortable with is in order.
If the function of education is to provide an even starting point for kids regardless of their personal environment, it stands to reason that in places where those personal environments are worse you'd need brutal amounts of resources, since you'll indirectly be covering for parents' neglect, psychological issues, and other factors that should have been handled somewhere else but are being stuck in the education budget. If you see it under that scope, absolute numbers might not tell you much.
One kid has access to books and parents who read with them at home every night.
Another kid has no books at home and no learning support after they leave school.
How much is it going to cost to teach each child to read at the same proficiency level?
A school can only do so much to offset the negative impacts of poor home-life. Learned helplessness is real and debilitating and it is often learned at home at a young age. I empathize with the tax payers in this area who see above-average taxes for below-average results.
The point is that even if you get those kids even 10% of the way of others, that might be what buys you one less person between bars. Or suffering from substance abuse. Or fueling Ponzi schemes, MLM or cults as a victim. Or living in the streets. Or voting irrationally for the next populist policy maker (in any part of the political spectrum, not being political here).
The moment you renounce to killing all of those who misbehave, you have to accept that these people are going to be your neighbors for the foreseeable future, and so it really pays to take care of the problem as early as possible, because frankly, you'll be spending resources either way.
Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now.
Let me guess, your kids definitely fall into the future researcher category, don't they? Just imagine, these other kids have parents too!
Obviously, social dynamics will be different in lower tier schools. I do have the impression that we are not discussing those here.
Also, being bullied is a poor excuse of becoming a bully yourself.
Teachers are not parents. They have limited time and resources to devote to a specified area of instruction divided amongst a number of students. Some parents are extreme failures in their responsibility which performs the greatest disservice to a child. This is how I ended up with a foster child with emotional trauma. Teachers must not be expected to perform the job of a parent just because some parents are so horribly bad at being parents.
Higher educated parents have it easier helping their children with homework. They have the money and time for extra tutoring. Lower education equals less capabilities to support with homework, most often less time and certainly less money for extra tutoring. If a system is such you only succeed when you fall in the first group, it sucks. Supporting such a system, wholeheartedly as some on here seem to, is just cold hearted.
Quality foster homes are in extreme low suppply.
Children need care, and schools are whar we have. We need more therapists and parental substitutes, not fewer.
Dedicating resources equally has never been how government works in any area. If that's how government works, why have government at all? Just let people handle themselves.
It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.
The US attracts talent whether they were educated here or not. The US got to that place with poor schools while only heterosexual cisgender men were working. While the rest of the marginalized population was a drag on society and its security as they fought for scraps. The US becoming more inclusive in all facets amplifies its society much more, it doesnt mean turning any troubled youth into a surgeon or researcher. It means giving them a baseline to be productive at all.
If you want your child to be doing something else, look elsewhere.
Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.
I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.
I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.
:Continued below:
Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
Admin churn and policy changes have a direct and deleterious impact on teacher, student, and school performance. I can't focus on teaching academics if I am supposed to reteach classroom policy changes at random times throughout the year. Policy changes can take weeks to months to integrate into a classroom. Teachers who are whipped back and forth between admin and policy changes don't have a moment to settle in and focus on what they were hired for. Instead they juggle the ever changing classroom culture, incorporating morphing policy decisions about how their classroom should be run, and socially adjusting to staffing and admin changes. There is no time to settle in and so burn out and nihilistic expectations take shape in many teachers. This description is only a small part of the problem with admin and policy churn in school systems.
Parents and parenting styles are other pernicious issues that are extremely controversial. These issues directly affect students and indirectly affect teachers. Whether it hurts or not to admit, parents have power over the school system. Many people outside of the school system focus on teacher unions and large scale public school administration as a main pain point.
Yet when teachers and school administration are under threat from being sued due to happenings in class because parents don't like what occurrs, the school system adjusts to accommodate those parents' wishes. At some point the school system begins to become an inane policy labyrinth to avoid lawsuits. There are plenty of lawsuit examples if searched on any search engine. These lawsuits set precedents in our county for how policy will look in coming years. As for parenting styles, these are varied and diverse. Every household has their way of rearing children. Yet when you take diverse children and put them into a class of 20+ students and typically one teacher the varied rearing styles become a pain point when applying teaching standards. In one highschool class you can have students reading on a college level, while others are emerging eighth grade. Has the system failed them? Sure, the system didn't catch them in time before they moved on and moving them now would take months due to admin churn and County backlogs on the other hundreds of thousands of students issues weighing down a bloated inept system. Or maybe the previous school was worried that funding would be cut causing admin to push through many students that should have been retained because if not the "greater good" of hundreds of other students would be impacted by funding cuts. But it isn't just the school systems that have failed students, so have the parents. Sometimes students aren't held back because of parental intervention. These interventions can be lawsuits or putting up enough of a fight that the county relents and allows the student to progress. The latter has happened four times in my classes and many more times to my other teaching peers. When teachers hold students back and parents put up a fight by bringing in the county, the school's admin and teacher have to follow the county dictates, which almost always fall on the parents' side. A cause for this is teachers are not considered experts when it comes to education. There are a myriad of reasons for this ranging from poorly funded college education degree programs, to society's mistrust of experts, to a belief parents know their children the best. As exemplified by the recent pandemic and social media post hating "lazy teachers who want to get out work" , mistrust in teachers and their teaching abilities are pretty apparent.
The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.
The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.
Though I agree we'd be better off with something more like Germany or the UK, with coalitions.
Gotta appreciate the irony of this statement. The Idiot Tribe are victims of The System, not driving it. They are not my enemy.
Sorry, have you seen the educational record of the guy at the top right now?
> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as...
> Our recent report, “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,” [1] concluded that, on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.
Now we could use a performance based pay system that could pay teachers more. Some of those systems fail to capture the right metrics. All of them are opposed by the teachers union. I think a slightly below average salary (factoring in benefits which are not typically seen in industry) with the potential to make more than average based on performance would be a good system.
Higher pay under a pay for performance structure and the ability to remove ineffective teachers would be good. This would bring it more in line with industry. It can be tricky to get the right metrics. The bigger issue is that the teachers union opposes any of them.
If you are a private school, sure. This is not the case for unionized public schools. Did you hear of that famous case where a superintendent fired multiple teachers for abysmal performance and even abusive behavior and was forced by the courts/union to reinstate them with back pay? It's very eye opening.
I'm sure there are states where teachers are underpaid. My state is in the top ten and that is not an issue here. I know a teacher making more than I do as a developer. The local district spends $14k per student per year (about average for the state). Money is not a problem here. There are still districts that have poor performance and test scores.
Instead if just trying to throw money at problems, we need to change the structure. Pay for performance would be a great way encourage good teachers and discourage people who perform poorly. It can be tricky to get the right metrics. The biggest issue is that the teachers unions oppose this.
I'm definitely a subject matter expert. And I'm able to get pretty deep content into middle school and high school classrooms. And working with smaller subgroups of students is a lot like mentoring junior engineers.
But man, dealing with a lot of kids in the room is a challenge-- keeping the lower third of students motivated; modulating strictness up and down so that you can have exuberance but not disruption; picking up on the subtle signs that there is a problem from outside spilling over into the classroom while multitasking and doing 3 other things. And... just coping when there's an entire class period that felt like a waste and you don't know why.
It is -hard-, and I'm dealing with an unusually easy teaching environment (classes of ~18-20 of well-behaved and academically advanced private school kids). I'm also not a core teacher and so I have the benefit of leaning on other professionals to do the heavy lifting in these areas. I still have hope I'll get good at it (this past year was a difficult one for me to self-assess my performance).
I do think that being an expert/having passion for what you teach is a bonus: if you have students that are already inclined to be engaged, that spark will help a little in getting and keeping their attention. But it is not the most important thing day to day.
Actually, my best performance lately was when I was a long-term sub in science classes teaching subject matter that is not my core competence. I could geek out and learn deeper stuff than I knew about volcanoes and share my surprise with the students, and that felt really good for engagement.
You're mostly correct though, that they are separate things. For teaching technical topics well, both are needed.
Is there data on the average effectiveness there?
Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.
If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores.
Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. You’ll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.
You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference.
As a teacher, you have no control over your classroom.
Disruptive students that destroy everybody else's learning environment? Too bad. No Child Left Behind! Wait, that's the old slogan, what's the new one? Equity Uber Alles? Equity Macht Frei?
It changes so often, I keep forgetting.
Assaulted by the kids? Suck it up, we don't want to be sued! Better to have a battered teacher -- the Unions will keep them in check -- than a lawyered-up parent.
I have seen this first-hand.
Want to actually teach kids things they need to learn to succeed? This is the wrong job for you.
I know a lot of motivated folks that went into teaching, with big salary bonuses, full scholarships for their degrees, everything. None of them lasted more than four years.
Public education in the US selects for Dolores Umbridge, and against Remis Lupin.
I sincerely doubt that. Having a teacher who isn't struggling financially would be a huge improvement.
If so, maybe you’ve hit on a kernel of truth: we can’t risk paying teachers enough that they’d have the financial security to leave a bad work situation.
So when the workers have not other options, working conditions can stay low?
(I'm all for financially rewarding good teachers, but because their work is incredibly valuable. It's just ab incredibly hard context in which to separate the good and the bad without creating perverse incentives)
Also investment bankers have as much autonomy as a client allows them to. And MDs and VPs are as much responsible for their subordinates and client relationships (although not in the same way as teachers are for students).
I had several high-school teachers who weren't financially comfortable, yet still chose to spend hundreds or even thousands on their students during a school year.
Of course, those teachers would have been much more effective if they were in a financially stable position. I also would have had fewer quality teachers leave.
I teach at a community college and for years I've told newcomers to profession that one thing this job is not about is teaching.
So, what is about then?
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
The teachers as a group research and plan curriculum. They coordinate across grade levels and determine how to roll out changes in the most effective way possible for students and parents as well. They rolled out common core math over 5 years with great success well before it was forced on public schools.
In other words, they let the people who have studied to be professional educators make decisions about the best way to…educate. There’s no school board, no state level involvement, no federal disruption every time there’s an election.
And it’s fantastic. I see this work and my first instinct is that EVERYONE should have an option like this, not just the people who can afford it.
For that reason, I support some type of voucher program that could achieve these goals. Yet for some reason in the US this is a political hot button, which doesn’t make any sense to me. Currently, the only people who have all the options are people who can afford them out of pocket. Everybody else is stuck with either public school or home school and home school is on the rise.
> Vouchers are a great way to permanently cement the cradle to prison cycle.
I could as easily say they are a way out of the cradle to prison cycle for many at risk youths.
Of course, it still takes thought to make sure that the public schools improve in this scenario, because they will also be fighting an adverse-selection headwind of being stuck with students from lower classes and those that the private schools don't want. But if you can shrink classes and cater classes to similar ability levels, I'd think this would win out.
In other words is it simply a case of $10 000 per child per year, so here's a voucher for 10k, go wherever you like?
There are no extra resources here for underperforming schools - in fact there are likely fewer resources. Public shools won't get smaller though, they'll just merge together to create fewer schools, and the bad teachers will go away.
And perhaps therein lies the root of the resistance to vouchers. It starts to measure school, and by extension, teacher quality. And that's not a rabbit hole teacher unions want to go down.
When vouchers were proposed in California in 1993, it was to be half the amount spent by the state on each child for public education. In 2000, it was to be $4000/year, when the state spent about $7000/year per student.
Of course, there's the big existing population in private schools that would also have been eligible for vouchers-- about 7%-- so these amounts probably still would drive down per-pupil spending in public schools. You'd need to roughly double private school enrollment to "break even" in per-pupil spending.
I favor something like 20-33%-- that might reasonably be expected to both make it significantly easier for parents to send their children to private schools and increase resources per student in public schools.
You don't solve a problem by making it worse. Making smart and/or motivated kids stay in the same classrooms as disruptive and demotivated kids just turns the motivated kids into more disruptive and demotivated kids. Right now it looks like we can choose between some people getting educated, and almost nobody getting educated because of the disruptive environment.
You want the brutal truth? Yes, that's exactly the solution. Want an education? Learn to behave in class.
And note that this is the only workable answer even in public school systems that aren't insolvent. No amount of money can educate a kid who refuses to be educated.
Who’s the job to teach those kids how to behave in class ? Their parents ? And what do you do if their parents don’t care (which is the common case with those kids) ? What do you do if the student has undiagnosed mental illness ? Entire generations of misbehaved children were in fact suffering ADHD. How do you manage a misbehaving children that is bullied every single morning when he comes to school ?
Not educating a kid is ruining its life and, since you speak with « brutal truth », yeah, just sentence those students to jail for life already, at least they’ll not have to struggle with hunger and homelessness during years.
A lot of countries have dedicated schools for those children, so they damage nothing around them and can be treated individually. And in lot of cases, since it requires removing them from families where their problems comes, it’s a breadth of fresh air for them.
I agree, that special programs and schools are required for challenging students. But that is a different question.
I am sympathetic to the thought process behind it but the end results are hard to argue with.
Who pays for the specialized schools? If it's we, the taxpayers, then we have a right to expect that those schools do their jobs. Do they? Do you have any specific references you can give?
Yes.
> what do you do if their parents don’t care
Then other family members should pitch in. Or other adults in the kid's life should pitch in. Or, if you believe the government can exercise such power with good judgment (I personally don't), you could have the parents' rights terminated and put the kids up for adoption.
What you can't do is ask schools to do the job, because that isn't what schools are for. Schools are not supposed to be rehabilitation centers for kids who can't be educated because they have bad parents. They're supposed to be places where kids who can be educated, are educated. Trying to make them into rehabilitation centers just ruins the education of all the other kids who can be educated.
> Not educating a kid is ruining its life
I entirely agree. But that doesn't change the fact that a kid who refuses to behave in class cannot be educated. Even if it's not the kid's fault, that's still the fact.
Also, if kids who can't be educated are put in schools, now you don't just have them not being educated, you have all the kids not being educated because of the constant disruptions. How is that an improvement?
[Edit: I see you mentioned specialized schools elsewhere in the thread. I'll respond to that point there.]
> just sentence those students to jail for life already
I didn't do that; the kids' parents did, by making them unable to be educated. So why aren't you all on fire to hold the parents accountable? Why are you going after me, who had nothing to do with it?
Are they getting an education now?
According to most metrics - including this article - more and more students are passed without meeting the requirements for their grade level.
I share in your bafflement. Charitably, perhaps they reason that parents will pick schools that are worse on average than public schools, but I suspect it is more of a “equality demands poor schooling regardless of class” with a side of “the state gets to determine the values your child is taught”.
Just from a scientific perspective, more experiments that are able to learn from each other and adapt things they see working elsewhere into their approach should naturally lead to constantly improving schools.
A single lowest common denominator that nobody is allowed to escape from is doomed to failure by comparison.
Right now, the only parents with a choice are the ones who can afford all the options, including moving to a better public school district.
> Just not being dragged down from low scoring kids is worth it.
It depends on the kind of society you want to live in. I would rather live in a society that prioritizes decreasing inequality rather than exacerbating it.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/success-academy-charter-sc...
And anyway, why would "discriminating based on competence" exacerbate inequality? Shouldn't competence-based discrimination lessen inequality e.g. by giving bright, poorer schools a shot at more prestigious institutions while financially-but-not-intellectually privileged kids move to more middling institutions?
Given the choice between wealth discrimination and merit discrimination, I would prefer the latter.
It is often related to efforts to create charter schools which are essentially private schools funded by taxes but run by a commercial or non-profit management company. These schools are usually regulated similarly to other private schools, having fewer regulations than the public schools and not under any direct authority of elected officials.
This system does not exist today, but there are many who would like to see it. Lots of people are fed up with what they perceive as the failings of public schools. Very few who advocate for vouchers seem to advocate for education funding in general - most seem to simply want their kids somewhere else.
Historically, the push for vouchers is a right-wing, small-government kind of effort intended to further undermine the public school systems, and also to allow government funds to support religious education which, under the current system, is not permitted.
I'd be interested in seeing data showing this.
No.
> Even worst: you can manipulate parents, and perverse incentives all but guarantee that evil people will be attracted to this opportunity.
Of course, those evil people would never think of becoming teachers or professors in order to brainwash thousands of students over their careers.
Because that would be, what, wrong and stuff?
A kind of "choice-based" market system within a school.
I agree. I have a friend that took a lower paying job because he could not stand the handcuffs that the administration placed on teachers. Stuff like you have to give people a 50% if they put their name on the paper, you can't discipline students effectively, etc. I also know many teachers at private schools that make less than the public school counterparts but would not switch due to similar reasons.
I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead.
Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.
This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast...
> The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1]
> This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers.
[1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness
Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
This is orthogonal to what he is discussing; he's just discussing the relative pay picture (in-profession vs. out of profession) for one who holds such a degree.
> > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees
This is -further- orthogonal and off-topic, because we're not talking about the relative merits of graduate education for teachers compared to bachelors degrees.
Not necessarily. It might just be an artifact of mandatory certifications. Suppose that teacher training were completely useless (debatable), but nevertheless legally required (mostly true, esp. for public schools) and expensive in terms of time or money (definitely true). I think you’d still expect increased earnings in those who obtained the certification, if only because they are now eligible for jobs where the supply of potential employees is limited. If they leave the industry, however, that certification often counts for very little, and the pay bump disappears. None of this, of course, tells you anything about conditions across industries.
The quotes in your comment are missing some important context. As §2.1 of the linked paper says, nearly all teachers in the US are somehow licensed, but this can be part of an education degree or an “alternative certification” for those with other degrees. Those two types of training are what the paper compares, not trained vs totally untrained. Critically, both take time and money.
The advanced degree data is also hard to interpret. It could be that a masters is totally worthless. However, selection effects also seem possible: teachers with more training could be given more challenging students or courses, or, as the paper proposes, underperforming teachers could preferentially do a masters to shore up their skills. They could also have more out-of-classroom responsibilities (e.g., curriculum development or admin), which would be consistent with how advanced degrees work in many other fields.
Anyway, all this is to say that “haha teachers are overpaid dummies” is, IMO, too simplistic and not supported by the data either.
Taking things to an obviously absurd extreme, being unemployed is clearly not worth $400k/year: people work for far, far less.
As you say, longer blocks of vacation time definitely open up new possibilities, but perhaps there’s an inflection point: an 11-week trip seems like it’d be very nearly the same as a 10 week one.
Things get weird when much of the total comp is in benefits. For example, if your cash salary is $50k, that limits what you can do with your $100k “worth” of vacation.
> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.
Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.
I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.
Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.
There is no good source on "this kind of thing"!
This is a type of "Wicked Problem"[1] and also a political darling of every political group.
And since every social scientist is just a person, with political, personal, and moral beliefs, any papers that they are willing to release typically reflect that. Further, any "peers" that review those papers will have similar beliefs because they know which places they would like that info published.
If you have pretty progressive beliefs, you will "know" that more money, in combination with identity awareness and additional help to those that match historically oppressed identities, is the answer.
If you have pretty conservative beliefs, you will "know" that it is the environment, "brainwashed" and "lazy" teachers and students (but not your kids, of course!) that are the blame. Vouchers and private schools (letting the market work) are the answer.
And there are people with beliefs everywhere on that spectrum. And not matter your beliefs, you can find research to back it up.
Education is just something that will forever be argued about and there is no clear-cut solution, even though nearly everyone thinks that there is, if only everyone else could just understand their point of view!.
If you have better facts, please provide them. Disparaging a source of information adds nothing to the conversation.
Color me skeptical that it's a specialized profession. It does not appear to me that decades of education majors have done any better than those who didn't possess such a degree, or that there are any special skills involved beyond knowing the subject and good interpersonal skills. When I think back to my best teachers, none of them had any special skills. They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read. [1]
Let's try a model where yes, we pay teachers more - much more. But instead of hiring "teachers", we hire experts who are passionate about their subject and want others to learn about it. Let's do this from middle school onward.
In elementary school, we can focus on getting kids to read and do basic arithmetic, and otherwise let it basically be daycare. A lot of underperformance at that age goes away if you simply give the kid more time to mature - for some mad reason at least in my school district, kindergarteners are expected to already know their letters and numbers and be able to read a few words.
> none of them had any special skills
Great teachers make it look easy. What you don't see is the preparation and the previous iterations of their ideas. It's like acting - good actors make it look like an easy profession. But try "acting naturally" in front of a camera sometime. For most people, even walking becomes awkward.
Or programming. Behind most great programmers is a trail of terrible code that they have written over the years.
>They were just passionate. It doesn't help that when you delve into it, all this 'specialized knowledge' about how to learn turns out to be junk science: cf. 'learning styles' or 'three cueing', which destroyed the ability of millions of kids to actually read.
There are quite a few people who can read, even at a high level. But how do you teach it, and teach it in a scalable way? It's not as easy as you think.
Also, what field doesn't have fashion and missteps? Doesn't HN regularly complain about how various programming paradigms and languages were terrible ideas? What makes you think that anyone can do something complex by going from zero to the best implementation in one iteration?
We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job.
The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers.
The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs.
The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote.
You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.
Its exactly what I'd expect if tecahers were underpaid but most switches from other jobs into teaching were from jobs taken as a student pre-qualification for entry-level teaching jobs and most switches out were post-retirement-from teaching “have something productive to do” jobs.
[0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-..., the US starts out below the bar for tertiary-educated workers and gets even lower
Is this true? I have several friends who are teachers in the US and they say they get pay raises for experience and for any extra accreditation they pursue. Which isn’t to remark on whether the pay is satisfactory, but I get the impression that the pay does increase and can do so pretty significantly.
Meanwhile my anecdotal rebuttal is I graduated with 6 folks who went into teaching. All 6 left to do other things and within 5 years were making more than they would have at the end of a 30 year teaching career.
"We just need better teachers" says a group composed of people who are entirely sure the profession is beneath them.
Ultimately, teachers alone can't solve the problem. As seen in both poor white rural schools and poor non-white urban schools alike, if the parents don't care about schooling or enforcing any discipline at home, there will be significant problems at school.
Why do you think you need to be a teacher to direct how our schools are run?
Seems technocratic and anti-democratic.
The same way we have civilian control of the military, we should have civilian control of our schools.
Did you know in the UK there is actually a structure called governors to ensure that schools are being directed by the community, not by education insiders?
It would be enough to have have the top brass of education elected. You can even make the curriculum part of election campaigns.
But at the same time it sounds technocratic and anti-democratic, right? The teachers' job is to teach as the people want. It's not their job to set policy. It's to get on and teach as directed.
Do you have a way you square that in your mind, as I'm struggling myself?
Sure, some teachers go on to set policies ay the ministry. Those are actively teaching anymore. Of course there is so much more nuance to it, but in a nutshell that's it.
You have an elected government setting policies. You have public servants acting on those. Democratic and surely somewhat technocratic. But it works.
(Again, I don't necessarily agree with devolving as far as possible, but isn't it philosophically hard to argue against?)
Philosophically, I would say that a country or nation can only be successful if some common things are equal for everyone. Letting individual groups opt out and in of stuff as they want, just destroys the overall community. And you end up with "haves" picking the cherries while the "have-nots" are left with crap. And nothing in between.
Why is decision making at a lower level wrong? And why is decision making at a higher level not better? Why did you pick 'state' level and go with that?
Ok but I can say 'maybe country B is richer, then country B might not want to fund schools in country A, leaving those desolate'.
Why's that not the same?
Places like Singapore have a different attitude toward this that's worth understanding (not saying it's right, just different and worth understanding, like comparing OSX to Windows). There are parts of the US government that operate this way, like the Federal Reserve.
One interesting proposal from the book is having congress pass a tax law that's very simple, something like "the top 10% of income-earners should pay 15% of all revenue" and giving the IRS (career tax experts) much more leeway to write the tax code, in a way that complies with the stated (democratically accountable) objectives, but maximizes simplicity and ease of enforcement. I think there's something to that.
There's a place for technocrats. But in today's extremely "power to the people" moment that gives us Trump and Sanders, it seems like a harder sell.
I know it's a problem and I don't agree with some sides of that argument myself... but in a democracy aren't these issues supposed to be devolved to the demos? Isn't that the whole point? Do the teachers 'know better'? Who's determining who knows better?
This is basically what happens in all areas when practicing democracy, right? For example, the president is only elected because a substantial portion of the population agree with their positions, or more likely the positions/identity of their party, from their prospectives as a laymans.
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
In nuances ...
Teachers are well paid in Canada, and in many Canadian mid sized cities a teacher with 10 years experience will make more than a software developer with similar years experience. Additionally they have a strong pension, and incredible job stability.
e.g. A teacher in Saskatoon would make about $92K with 10 years experience with a defined benefit pension, and 2 months off in the summer.
It is tougher for teachers in high COL cities like Toronto and Vancouver as they make roughly the same as they do in the rest of the country. (But similarly a Vancouver software developer doesn't get a USA west coast salary)
Source: My wife teaches, and I write software!
There would be some higher paying opportunities in Van/Tor/Mtl. But an $200K individual contributor software dev is a truly a Unicorn in Canada.
Lots of reasons, but the biggest is that simply don't have the ultra profitable FAANGs that drive up salaries.
I feel that the main issue is that the wrong things are being taught. How about things like personal finance, basic mechanical and electrical skills (like for DIY repairs), and logic or philosophy of argument classes? It would also be good to teach the basics of civics since a substantial portion of the population can't pass the citizenship test.
But something being required and something being preserved is very different. It's very normal to lose a lot of that knowledge after a couple years so if your goal is they pass a civics test/know basic finance it'll probably continue to fail even with all states requiring it.
The used to have shop or home economics as required classes.
I do agree that it is up to the student to maintain proficiency. I just feel like many of the tests and classes are ridiculously easy, like to the point of being geared to passing people rather than teaching. But I do also acknowledge that I forget about stuff I don't use, like complex fractions and fraction multiplication.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/questions...
The test is longer than many classroom tests but also only needs a 60% to pass. The topics covered are already ones that US government classes cover so new requirements won't help here. You could add a state standardized test for this although still doubtful it would be remembered even a year or two later. I'd also guess it's a toss up on whether current government classes are easier/harder than that.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/26/5654020/awkward-americans-cant...
My biggest issue is how can we improve the knowledge of the citizens since this sort of knowledge is necessary for a strong democracy? I'm not sure what the best answer would be, but teaching/testing in school seems like a good start. Looking at the format and rigor would be good, especially if it is already supposed to be taught and we are seeing such low retention.
The test itself isn't even very long - 10 of the 100 possible questions.
I hope school civics classes are more than just rote memorization in the US...
I think the meme about teachers being underpaid is mostly unuseful in conversations like these.
Second the pay also usually includes retirement benefits that can pay you 100% off your salary after 30 years. This is hard to compare to private industry since 401ks have replaced pensions. This is probably worth 2-5m when mature, and is accounted for in their pay. I think this is the biggest issue, since private employers pay higher expecting you to invest in your retirement.
Benefits are also usually good with small if any employee contribution. Probably worth a few hundred dollars a month.
It’s almost impossible to lose your job teaching. It has a factor of security that does not exist in private industry.
Pay raises are automatic. Primarily it’s based on years of service and level of education.
I’ve run the numbers previously and it starts seeming fairer, but due to the retirement impact it makes buying a home in the Bay Area almost impossible.
In my state, older teachers get these, but newer teachers including some of my friends have been cut out of them and need to invest in a 401k like other job. Their wages are also much lower, around 35k/year to start with, peanuts when you consider that they take work home every night and weekend (correcting homework and lesson planning are mostly done on their own time).
> software developers
Those are very different jobs, with very different skill sets.
I'm not sure how much you can infer about one from the other.
You can certainly infer how much a largely capitalist society values each skill set at this point in time. The GP is claiming that "suburban Chicago teachers make as much as Chicago-area software developers do", presumably implying that capitalist society in the suburban Chicago area values the labor of teachers and software developers equally.
This is a claim that I want to understand better, since I don't think it reflects the statistical reality. Typically, such claims cherry-pick tenured teachers with 15+ years of experience, and compare their wage with the average software developer wage, which is itself a very unclear number – for example, a lot of developers go on to be managers in 15+ years whereas teachers largely remain teachers.
Glad to be wrong on this though, and might consider moving to an egalitarian society like suburban Chicago.
School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well. However, it'll be a rising ship, which raises all boats IMO. You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.
How does school choice allow for increased teacher wages? Presumably they get the same per-student funding.
When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in?
> You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.
Shutting down schools is highly disruptive for students currently attending that school. Seems preferable to intervene and improve failing schools before it gets to the point of shutting them down.
I'm not convinced school choice improves results for students overall. The easiest way for a school to improve its results are by attracting parents who are highly invested in their child's education. Those whose parents don't have the knowledge to work the system or the time to transport their children across town for school every day are less likely to apply.
The raw number of dollars per pupil isn't the only variable here, if it were the US would already have the best schools pretty much everywhere (the US spends WAY more than the average in this category).
There's also what percentage is spent on administrators instead of teachers (frees up money for teacher salaries), various QoL improvements that could be made such as less paperwork, more latitude in how they teach, hiring a few full-time graders to take some of the load off teachers (generally a big time-sink and a source of a lot of overtime for teachers).
> When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in?
Presumably either entrance exam or lottery depending on the philosophy of the school.
> Seems preferable to intervene and improve failing schools before it gets to the point of shutting them down.
Do we know how to do this in practice? I haven't heard of any tactics that reliably improve a school that has started going downhill, but if you have some examples, I'd definitely be willing to consider them.
...funding them, equitably. Simple as that. Public school funding is derived from local property taxes, so rich areas have good schools and poor areas are just boned.
Invest in schools and good education results. Look at the States in the 60s and 70s! California was #1 in the nation. Prop 13 passes, capping property taxes (and thus school funding), and now it's at the bottom of the heap. It's not hard to draw the line between inputs and outputs here.
Vouchers will only further weaken our already-starved public education system.
That’s roughly what my 32 year old accountant wife gets, and they get nearly 3 months vacation a year and much better benefits and retirement stuff than she does. Considering I know more people that have gone in to the teaching profession than anything else, that seems more than fair.
Also, a lot of those older teachers that I looked up would have been fired from any other job if their performance was the same. I’d only be ok with a massive increase in teacher pay if teacher’s unions were abolished. The only firings that have happened to tenured teachers here in the past 20 years have been for sexual misconduct.
The school system is a failing monopoly that should be broken up.
Money Follows the Person (MFP) Rebalancing Demonstration is part of a comprehensive, coordinated strategy to assist U.S. states, in collaboration with stakeholders, to make widespread changes to their long-term care support systems. This initiative will assist states in their efforts to reduce their reliance on institutional care, while developing community-based long-term care opportunities, enabling the elderly and people with disabilities to fully participate in their communities.
Federal representative
Provincial representative
Municipal representative
Mayor
School board trustee.
The PM? Head of the party with the most seats. Same with provincial premiere. Judges, crown attorneys, controllers, senators, the governor general, etc? Those are all appointed by our elected representatives.
A central ethos of Canadian governance is that our representatives are there to make decisions and bouncing questions to the public is a tool of last resort.
With that on mind, why the hell do we have elected school boards? We have a provincial ministry that runs education. We have municipalities that manage land-use.
Voters are basically flying blind in trustee elections. There are no debates, no media coverage, no political parties, just a list of names. If they don't happen by your doorstep, you don't get to know who these people are... And even if they do, you've only got their word to go on.
Ax this anachronistic institution and let the education policy professionals within the state/provincial government and school boards do their jobs.
Any perspective how these things work in countries that have a well-regarded, high performing education system, like Finland (apart from having well-trained, highly regarded, and highly trained teachers with a large degree of autonomy)?
Most typically administration != board. An elected or appointed board will be made up of politicians, who can also class members of parents, teachers, community members, all of the aforementioned, etc.
Expecting a board to be entirely made up of people who have served in the organization's service delivery doesn't make sense. Would you expect a police board to be entirely made up of cops? There is an inherent conflict of interest.
Let me fix that for you - get rid of government schools, let anyone teach.
The solution is to get rid of the monopolistic education system which is prone to imbalances and subpar results.
Charter schools/private school/school choice. Recruit the best teacher, pay the best salaries, achieve the best educational outcomes.
No wonder the educational system looks like it does given the incentives at play.
And there are 2.5 months in the summer for r&r or for working additional jobs [3]. You need two wage earners to be solidly middle class, but this is not a "grossly underpaid" profession. For comparison, a university engineering professor salary in Netherlands starts at 65k euros ($77k).
Bottomline: teaching is not going to make you rich but you aren't grossly underpaid.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_211.60.a... [2] https://www.teacherpensions.org/states [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2019/07/11/tea...
Naturally, statement like that usually then gets attacked as 'but not enough'. Based on results alone, CPS teachers are actually paid too much.
The formative years age just that. Disrupt that significantly, and the individual is forever lacking. Society needs people in all roles, we'd die of plagues, and disease from vermin, without garbage pickup. Incredibly vital, that job is.
Yet who will create new vaccines, new tech to clean up the planet, get mining and resource production into space, and more? Only those with certain genetic gifts, but the "feel goods" want to believe everyone is identical.
Equality is not this. Equality comes from things like providing access ramps for those who cannot climb stairs, providing tools for those to make the best of what they have.
You don't "pull down" people to make equality, you lift up people. And this means that you see who needs help, and give it.
And you can't do that of you pretend everyone is the same.
As a side note, plumbers, electricians, those working in construction, arborists, on and on, there are many very comfortable, well paying jobs open to those without advanced science, math, language skills.
In my public school, both at grade and high school levels, we had shop class, and in high school, auto, electrical wiring, art, A/V, environmental science (farming), and more. There was something for everyone to excel in, and I took most of these, on top of advanced sciences/math, for fun, for the sheer sake of knowledge.
Don't remove potential, instead, seek how to enable every child's capabilities.
Lift up, don't pull down.
Like electing judges and sheriffs, this seems to be a peculiarly American thing. Most other countries appoint professionals to manage their education systems, and for good reason.
The problem with this solution is that there is barely enough interest in most places to fill a board when almost everybody is eligible. I've been married to a school board-er. It's a thankless job, far more thankless than being a teacher, which is a job with an actual salary and very good job safety.
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
What you can do, is create tracks so that everyone is challenged but not put in a hopeless in a situation, and the disruptive students you need to either expel so their parents handle them or put them into some kind of separate environment where they don't prevent others from learning.
That's going to result in large inequalities in outcomes because there are large inequalities in how fast students mature and what their learning capabilities are. Neither of these things -- student intelligence or student maturity -- is something that the teachers can influence.
These students would benefit from a different teaching style, no?
The students around them (who can sit still) would benefit from not being in the same classroom as students who are disruptive, obviously. The disruptive students might benefit from something like shorter classes and time spent outside doing sports or other physical activities that don't require sitting. But let's not pretend that they will learn the same material. They will learn less material, at least until they mature enough so that they have more self-control and are able to sit still, which might not happen before they leave high school, or it may only happen in their senior year, etc. Thus you put them into a different high school entirely or at least a different diploma track.
By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades.
Other styles for example, can include things like not changing subjects every hour, but rather continuing until the student is ready to change.
So the issue is that whenever anyone has come up with intervention based on "teaching styles", it has always failed. That is what I mean by "it's not a thing". Here's the APA, in the article "Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental".
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...
But if we extend the notion of learning styles to "some kids lack self-control" or "some kids have trouble keeping attention", then I think that's pretty obvious and is another symptom of some kids go through puberty at different times and to different levels of intensity, some people have different levels of self-control or time preference than others. That's just life. Then, the recommendation that kids who disrupt classrooms should be removed from the same classroom as kids who don't makes a lot of sense. Kids who can't sit still should be removed from the class in which they have to sit still, and maybe they can do some outdoor activity. Kids who struggle with a subject should be removed and put into a class where the subject is taught more slowly, etc. That allows kids to reach their potential rather than teaching just to the lowest common denominator. A world in which institutions are geared towards excellence rewards the society as a whole -- perhaps the student who struggles with math can do well in a vocational program and do really well in life. While allowing the kid who can do math really learn as much as they can, so we can have a society in which you can get your home renovated by a general contractor and you can have world class chip fabs, whereas right now, for both we need to import foreign labor since our domestic schools produce neither good vocational skills nor good math skills.
That’s situating the problem in the wrong place. Everyone lacks self control, or has trouble keeping attention depending on the circumstances.
I agree with you that our schools are crap. I also agree that not all kids can be taught everything to the same level.
However that is orthogonal to the notion that kids can be taught to their potential if you allow them to be taught in an appropriate manner.
That ‘teaching styles’ link is accurate, but it deals with a straw man that results from not being willing to question the constraints of school.
I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system.
*or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
I can see why schools likes it. But it's terrible policy and hurts the higher-achieving students, who will be the backbone of our increasingly winner-take-all knowledge- and services-based economy.
Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job. The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have. You want us to choose the high achievers so that these early winners can turn that lead into even greater success later. Unstated in your post is what happens to those low achieving students. But it's pretty easy to assume that they're going to be the losers in the winner take all economy.
The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
> Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job.
On the contrary, people can be quite explicit about this.
> The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
Why do you think society is becoming more "winner take all"? Even if there's truth to society trending in that direction, I'm skeptical it can be solved in the education system if the causes don't lie in the education system. It's easy for me to imagine a world where schools eliminate their advanced programs, then the same students go on to become low-wage workers and the same (or fewer) go on to become scientists.
That's precisely why low achieving students are separated out. To give them extra help.
High achieving students are easy. Just point them and they go. This is why the second they started standardized testing and separating the students they were able to achieve results with high achievers. But their primary goal with these top-down programs was to actually help the slower students, that were graduating without being literature and whatever. Turns out it's just a really hard problem. It isn't that everyone in education somehow lacks the desire or common sense.
Investing in the most talented can give society outsize returns in terms of innovation, skilled and talented public servants, captivating art, and scientific discoveries.
There's only so much resources you can invest into a single person. Their time is limited, so if their leaning rate is slow, there's really nothing else that can be done beyond some point to speed it up. Forrest Gump will never be Stephen Hawking.
The reality is that this equity movement is motivated specifically by pushing down high-performers. They're removing (or wasting) resources just so that they don't get to the top 10-30%.
I beg to differ! If I have two products and one sells 100x more than the other, I don’t spend my time optimizing the unpopular one.
Wow, I had never read that before:
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
This really captures so much of the current thinking around "equity".
Fortunately, my K-12 education included it as assigned reading :)
It’s been ruled that it’s better that all students get to 20-80% knowledge then some get 100% and some get 0%.
Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.
Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
In schools with blended ability levels, the worst students do better (pulled up by the higher students), but the best studends do worse.
Good if you are in the bottom, bad ify ou are in the top.
Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools available to top set comprehensive school kids.
It is wrong that children get educations that don't really make the most of their brains because they have parents that couldn't afford it.
Also, I think the sociological benefits of having pupils from all backgrounds occupying the same space and learning from each other as opposed to being segregated is extremely important.
So many of the rich people in charge of the country have absolutely no understanding of poverty because they have not had the opportunity to grow up around it.
Attempts to do this in the US produce results that appear racist.
Try "it's almost as if being societally excluded for centuries is a predictor of social instability," which is both more accurate and descriptive of the problem we're trying to solve here.
How would you do this? It seems like it’s impossible to tax the group of people who would have sent their kids to private school had it been possible.
Equally it seems impossible to force the people who would have chosen teaching careers at private schools to work at comprehensive schools.
That, and the fact that one of the ‘resources’ that private schools have is flexibility to make decisions outside of the comprehensive school system.
Fortunately it is possible to do something very similar, though, which is to tax the group of people who have the level of income that would allow them to send their kids to private school had it been possible.
I suppose you're saying that some people currently are wealthy enough to send their kids to private school, but choose not to (or don't have kids at all). These people wouldn't have a choice about paying the extra taxes that enable these better-funded comprehensive schools. This isn't a new problem, though, as childless people already pay taxes that are spent on existing comprehensive schools.
As for "decisions outside the comprehensive school system", I think that needs to be considered in the context of the government's existing regulation of private schools and the trend of academisation:
Except it isn’t similar.
Saying ‘taxing the rich more and put more money into public schools’ may be a good proposal but it is a completely different proposition from ‘take the resources from private schools and give them to public schools’.
Money is not in fact educational resources.
I can see how it would probably be a more difficult experience for introverts.
Funnily enough, I got bullied more by the rich kids - who knew how to push my buttons and wind me up to the point I'd lash out and get in trouble - than the poor ones.
If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation.
For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school).
They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
I recall one student who flunked thermo. He filed a complaint that the Prof had it in for him, hence the F. The Prof provided evidence that he never did any of the homework, and flunked the midterm and final. Case dismissed. The student dropped out.
In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
Unless/until we figure out a feasible way to make progress not the same pace for everyone, progress will have to be the same pace for everyone.
Colleges have a decent middle ground where if you fail this quarter, there are decent odds your class will be offered again before next year, especially for the earlier classes that really need stricter sequencing. But that’s only really feasible when you have that many students (not to mention tuition $$$).
But the folks making decisions about education in California (including the authors of the California Math Framework 2021) believe they'll achieve better outcomes that way, than they will by grouping students based on their progress in the subject.
I heard recently from a 6th grade math teacher who has students who are 1, 2, 3 and even 4 grades behind.
Imagine orchestrating a single class in which you're teaching some children about adding single-digit numbers, and others about long division.
The older kids helped out the younger ones and the teacher walked around the class and talked to each kid to help them along with thier work if they got stuck.
There wasn’t any lecture style teaching with the teacher explaining concepts to the whole class at once.
We all worked on one subject at a time, but we were all at different points in it.
When my family moved and I left that school I was multiple years ahead of where I was supposed to be in several subjects and normal school was very boring after that.
I guess in Montessori every single student isn't learning something different, but each one is often in a unique state of learning and development. The guide gives lessons in small groups, less than 6. Each kid gets a new lesson every few days and spends the remainder of their time "doing their work" (practicing their lessons and turning the results into the guide, doing small group research projects, etc.). The kid is encouraged to ask others for help understanding the lesson and to mentor others who are working on a lesson the kid knows. Once the guide observes the kid succeeding at the lesson, the kid is invited to the next lesson.
In my experience in elementary school, 3rd grade material is repeated ad nauseum in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Plenty of time to get it. (Being an Air Force brat, I attended 3 different elementary schools, even one in Germany run by the military. All the same.)
Nowadays you also have the internet that can fill those gaps. If a student wants to learn, then there are many opportunities. But students usually don't want to.
If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout.
I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
All this does is make grades no longer a measure used. And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.
California’s strive to force outcome hurts the middle class the most. I just don’t get it.
It's harder to normalize performance across schools without a standardized test.
> those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities
That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems.
> And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.
The upper middle class is where it's actually interesting. There aren't enough wealthy people for the SAT to be a driver of mass inequality. They're already sending their kids to elite private schools, so as long as the Ivies keep favoring those schools, the status quo remains. The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests. Those aren't that expensive. Anyone working class or higher can afford them. SAT classes help somewhat, but less than being somewhat familiar with the test. They're moderately expensive. Tutors are where it's interesting, and that's in upper middle class territory.
Oh phooey. I never prepared for the SATs, and nobody I knew did, either. (Back in the 70s.)
Wanna know how to do well on the SATs? Pay attention in school to readin, ritin, and rithmetic.
As for SAT prep books, I see them all the time in the thrift store for a couple bucks. The notion that only the wealthy have access to them is nonsense.
I have no idea if the relative quality of today's Caltech freshman body is better or the same as in my day.
I flipped through an SAT vocabulary builder book the other day. I knew nearly all the words in it already. Vocabulary is something that happens organically, by reading a lot and looking into complex things. I suspect that memorizing word lists builds a fake vocabulary. Some people have told me they recognize when someone sprinkles their language with the daily word they memorized. It comes off as pretension, not education.
I suspect that if SAT training involves learning fake knowledge and test taking tricks, anyone who gets into Caltech via that method is going to find they're in the wrong place. Students there like to sit in the halls and talk about ways to build a warp drive. Students who don't belong will be watching the game on TV.
One of my good friends there had an apartment off campus. He'd regularly make his special chicken wings and invite all comers (this was not to be missed). The apartment manager would come, too, and he'd just quietly sit off in a corner by himself, munching on chicken wings.
I asked him once why he was there - he didn't participate, and he was way way older. He replied, "oh, this is incredibly fun. I've never ever heard people talk like this before. I just like to listen."
And also - I agree - I never really learned “grammar rules” or the details of writing. I just learned from listening, talking, and reading many many books in elementary and middle school. To prepare for a test by memorizing vocab seems inherently the wrong approach.
I heard something on This American Life, I think, about a "strong student" from a bad high school doing poorly on the SAT. I got the impression she hadn't prepared at all...which seems odd for a strong student when there are free resources.
> memorizing vocab
The College Board got called out for some of this after the "regatta" incident. It turns out rich kids were much more likely to know the term for a boat race. Oops.
I'm really curious to see the outcomes of the no-SAT cohort of college students, once the 2020-2021 year is ignored, data cleaned, etc. Even if GPA was enough in 2020, it seems like it would get harder and harder to compare schools over time without a standardized test.
I was just a kid. I didn't hang out in bars. I had no idea what the contents of a martini were.
I thought it was unfair, and was so annoyed I still recall it :-)
I read a great deal as a kid, too. Mostly scifi :-)
I made the mistake of attempting to learn German by memorizing. But who can remember which nouns go with der, die, or das? Not me. I bet the right way is to simply read the newspaper every day, looking up the words one doesn't know, one by one.
Isn't there a common application, now?
In hindsight, boomers had a really easy time of it, even some we rightly revere for their contributions. Work hard, or be brilliant, or some combination of the two. That’s not enough today. Ken Thompson told the story somewhere of being literally chased down the east coast after graduation by Bell Labs recruiters. That would never happen now.
Things are a bit less competitive on the subject tests. A couple questions wrong was still sufficient to get an 800 on Math level II my year.
Math competitions are nothing like the SAT. Not at all. You can grind your way to an 800 on the math SAT with a basic prep and an understanding of tenth-grade math; getting a perfect score on a math competition is something only a handful of people do each year. The hardest questions tend to be of the type "ok I am not even sure how to start this one" rather than "this one has a bunch of arithmetic and I'm not sure I have time to complete it".
NCLB didn't do that, and expired in 2007.
Is that a SF thing? Because normally that is not true.
> Why do we have grades at all?
Class rankings, scholarships. Even besides that, it lets parents know how well or not their child is learning.
> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam
> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
It’s easy to recover from if you don’t use a stupid method if aggregation, but that takes actually thinking about what it is you are trying to measure; for instance, if you grade by % in each of several competency areas throughout the year, and have a final grade catehory standards (cumulative, so you get the highest grade where you’ve met all the standards):
D: median of competency area medians meets minimum proficiency standard
C: median score within every competency area meets minimum passing standard
B: median of competency area medians meets high proficiency standard or median in at least one competency area meets excellence standard
A: median of competency area medians exceeds excellence standard
(standards might be something like passing 70%, high proficiency 80%, excellence 90%, but the exact numbers aren’t the point.)
That will give you a measure of overall competence that isn't particularly sensitive to outlier scores on a single assignment, even if the assignment has components across many competency areas.
* Several easy math problems
* Unlimited re-tests
* You had to get 100% to pass
The same lesson is not being given over and over again.
There are X tests/assignments/projects for X areas covered.
Each is assessed in its turn.
Of course, there is usually some overall assessment on the content as a whole, at the end of a quarter/semester/year. I think that aligns perfectly with your desire.
I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.
I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.
I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.
All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.
If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
But maybe the reason you could do that is because you had already studied this before. When I look back on school work, they look trivial. Even things that I've forgotten look trivial.
Subjects like mathematics (in high school and earlier) are about experience. Sure, explaining hope to calculate the area of a triangle is very easy, but if your only experience with it is having it explained to you and using it once, then you'll probably forget how to do it or the relation it has to the area of a rectangle. We do the trivial stuff so much in school that you get an instinctual feeling for it. I never felt as comfortable with any of the math I learned in college than I did with earlier topics. I suspect it's because I never got to build up that feel for it.
We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'.
HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported.
My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed.
Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc..
The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book!
Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.
Just make the grading period 6 or 9 weeks instead of a "semester".
To be fair, I've never heard of a school that didn't do that. Is this a San Francisco thing?
And, to be 100% fair, if I were teaching this year, I would probably not want to fail anyone, even if I really felt they deserved it.
If you're in my class in person, I can control the environment (mostly). I'll take responsibility if you need to be failed.
However, I wouldn't have taken responsibility for anything this past year given the total chaos and complete lack of support from the school systems.
So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C.
This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself?
So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time.
In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago.
The ultimate kicker was that the following year after the Algebra II disaster, the state changed the grade scale so the grade I received would have been a B. But the old grades were not retroactively recalculated.
There is a good argument to be made that minimum grades are a joke and an affront to teaching, but I would argue that grades in general are bullshit and frequently are not indicative of whether a person has mastered anything. There is a reason many of the best private (not to mention Montessori schools) don’t emphasize grades or tests. Equally, there is a reason that the Montessori and related methods doesn’t scale in the way that US public school systems need to scale.
But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.
If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.
And it's not like you can get 50s all year and get a few 80s and average it out. It takes a lot of really sustained effort to come back from that. Most kids won't. But at least it's mathematically possible for more of the year.
You’re half right.
Most school districts won’t let a student with a 50% average pass.
That said, teachers will be pressed to give extra points for participation or extra credit or just to change the scores to get said kid over a passing level. Some teachers will do this unprompted just to make sure they don’t have to see the kid next year.
Not to mention that there will undoubtedly be calls of some sort of discrimination if failing grades are common in any given teacher’s class.
You’d be wrong to assume that. Here’s a kid that made it to 12th grade having only ever passed 4 classes. 0.13 GPA, and that actually put him in the top 50% of his class. Things are much, much worse than you think.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-student...
If they can’t do the work you need to let them know at some point. Not sure delaying the news is that helpful!!
Though I do agree that we should focus on the chance of turning it around. Students who score poorly early on and then score well later should be extra rewarded, not held down by their past performance.
The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/
There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions.
Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.)
I find this situation baffling.
The board opened some schools for a single day at the end of the school year, just to qualify for state funding to pay teachers.
The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes.
The board has a member who made racist remarks on Twitter and, despite not losing her position, is suing the school board: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board...
These are other reasons to be dissatisfied.
More concerning to some people is that becoming a member of the SFBOE is a common launching point for the SF Board of Supervisors.
Kids weren't vaccinated.
A large unvaccinated reservoir population in constant contact with the vaccinated population is how you breed variants that are, e.g., more dangerous to young people (like Delta already is) and more likely to break through existing vaccines (which Delta also is, though not intensely so from the information I've seen.)
Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used only when really unavoidable, but to claim kids are a-OK and shouldn't be vaccinated ain't based on science I've read so far.
> Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms.
> Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction.
> Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
> A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate.
SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.
This is relevant because younger kids need more supervision and are less likely to spread COVID, while older kids need less supervision and are more likely to spread; therefor keeping older kids home and sending younger ones in might be totally rational. But it doesn’t seem like this gets brought up.
I'd like to expand on this one, as it's been a particular frustrating one. It launched San Francisco's school system into the national spotlight as our Board of Education debated this publicly and initially planned to spend millions of dollars before the outrage and backlash canceled these plans.
Amongst other issues, they did short, haphazard research on the origins of the names of the schools, instead typing common Hispanic surnames into Google/Wikipedia, finding the first result, and deciding that the word colonizer being mentioned in the Wikipedia article was sufficient to rename the school. They problem? Wrong person, they didn't bother to look so far as the school's website to determine who it was named after. Here's a video of the full deliberation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1jj33NBAH8
Some articles summarizing other issues with this process: https://abc7news.com/sfusd-san-francisco-unified-schools-dis...
While here, I'd also like to throw in this article about Alison Collins, the school board member who is suing her colleagues and the city for $87 million dollars: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Alis...
During the pandemic, the Board of Education announced that 44 schools were named after oppressors (many were justified, but the names committee also made numerous errors) and that principals and families needed to come up with new names for their schools over Zoom. Board member Gabriela Lopez defended even the egregious mistakes, demonstrating that she only cares about “uplifting” and “holding” people of color but not facts https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Unfortunately, Lopez is not up for recall yet, but her enablers are.
Alison Collins led the resolution to remove academic admissions to San Francisco’s magnet high school Lowell High. But instead of debating the pros and cons of having a magnet school, she caricatured the school as bed of “toxic racism” and dismissed the Asian parents who supported an admissions criteria as “a bunch of racists”. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?l... Afterwards, people discovered her previous tweets stereotyping Asians and her pattern of abusing her power (https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352). When her colleagues selected a different Vice President, she lashed out with a lawsuit calling her opponents racists (https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-...)
The other board members haven't done anything offensive but haven't shown any leadership either. They just enabled the radicals. We don't know exactly why SFUSD didn't open the schools this year (negotiations were behind closed doors), but I suspect it has to do with the board members' extreme deference to the teachers' union that endorsed them.
I encourage anyone who is a San Francisco citizen to print out the recall petitions and mail them in https://recallsfschoolboard.org/
See also this explainer The Case for Recalling the School Board https://www.engardio.com/blog/school-board-recall-case
> that's not a good enough reason
On the contrary, it's hard to think of more salient reason than that.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted my child to go back to school ASAP, but then I reminded by a teacher friend that their health was important, too.
I believe no one should be forced to work if the health conditions are unsafe, why should teachers exempt form this? There are too many examples of teachers who did die from COVID-19.
https://www.whsv.com/2021/02/17/ny-teacher-dies-from-covid-1...
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/nobody-knows-how-...
The father collecting petitions or the person attempting to steal petitions?
But I'm not sure I would consider it a complete success. It looks to me like he stole them then people surrounded him and forced him to give them back a minute later.
If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
> either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination
The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
What do we do about these 10 year olds? We assume they are not "high school" material and we put them in the school for dumb kids? Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them and so the school system can't do anything about it?
> The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism. We are talking about a high-school, which enrols 12 year olds to teach them basic trigonometry and some basic notions of history and literature (in the best case scenario) and not about Hydra hiring PhD candidates to build a death ray. When properly motivated, everybody with a 80+ IQ can succeed in high school, one may argue that you could pick them at random.
Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork.
> The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism
No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
Ok, but you haven't answered my question
> No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
Children not being able to write a good essay when they are 10 because they have to work, is quite a degenerate case and I hope it is not the norm for those who are not admitted at this special school. The majority of 10-year-old kids, who aren't employed in violation of child labour laws, are smart enough to attend highschool without the need to make schoolwork easier.
> In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
This wokeness movement is not something I'm familiar with or affiliated to.
Your question was “Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them”.
I did indirectly. To be more explicit, I suspect the common answer is no: They do not care about school because they have other, more pressing needs besides school.
> when they are 10 because they have to work
If you want to focus solely on 10 year olds and not teenagers, and ignore that I wrote working is “just one example of many possibilities” , then you are probably purposely missing my point.
I agree most 10 year olds are not working. Substitute “working” or “poverty” with some other problem at home and you’ll get the same result. Alcoholic parent, drug addicted parent, parent with major mental illness, homeless parent, absent parents, foster home life, etc.
Use your imagination.
So, the answer is: no, these kids are not broken.
> If you want to focus solely on 10 year olds and not teenagers, and ignore that I wrote working is “just one example of many possibilities” , then you are probably purposely missing my point.
You said kids can't write essay because they have to work. It sounds rather absurd to me.
> I agree most 10 year olds are not working. Substitute “working” or “poverty” with some other problem at home and you’ll get the same result. Alcoholic parent, drug addicted parent, parent with major mental illness, homeless parent, absent parents, foster home life, etc.
Fine, so we are excluding them because they are poor or disadvantaged, which was my initial point. And we are calling it "merit" because we ask them to write an essay.
> we are calling it "merit"
It sounds like you’re arguing about who deserves the prestige of going to Lowell rather than who actually benefits and contributes to the experience of attending classes at Lowell, which is the most populous school in San Francisco and has fairly large class sizes and tough grading.
Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
As we agreed that social economic background is a major predictor of admission, claiming that poor kids can’t benefit nor contribute to the experience of attending this school is a weirdly classist statement. It is also based on the assumption that to be able to read 3 novels in a year and to learn the cosine law, one must be a particularly gifted kid and not just a random 10, 13 or 16 year old.
Highschool prestige is a concept that I understand but I that I don't accept. Like I understand why some primitive tribes practiced human sacrifices, but I wouldn’t let them do such thing near me. So I’m not arguing for that. But if we accept that highschool prestige increases your chances in life, then state schools should distribute this privilege equally.
> Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
I insist that we should reason on why some minorities are significantly underrepresented. We may conclude that only gifted kids can attend this very important school and that kids from minorities are less likely to be gifted, but I wouldn’t be too sure of either.
If we find out that, say, blacks are significantly underrepresented because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds, then the admission process is at least classist, knowingly or otherwise. We may also argue that it perpetuates class and racial differences. Claiming that these kids have inherently different needs is like saying that my child should become an engineer because I’m well off, so he needs to learn advanced maths and whatever, and these children should serve food and clean toilets because they are poor, and they only need to learn who’s the boss. This is, like it or not, very very classist.
No.
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
Vast swaths of the country get by without having any choices in high schools. The idea that need a selection of different schools with different levels of prestige and focuses is such an urban entitlement.
If I need heart surgery, I’d rather be in NYC (Mount Sinai specifically) then BFE fly over country, and if I have the means I’m on the next flight. Same with education. Hard to find fault imho with those who want more than the lowest common denominator for their children.
I also think there's a value to be had in having the over-acheivers and under-acheivers together in the same social setting of school, if not in the same classes.
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.
In some countries, the differentiation starts even much earlier than that, with 8 year long "gymnasiums".
First of all you don’t have to attend the school your teachers advised, you can still attend a Gymnasium if your teachers said you should go to a Hamptschule. So it’s significantly different from the selection criteria of that American high school.
Then this selection process is known to be biased against children of foreigners. Somebody said that without strict competition in high school admissions we wouldn’t have playstations and covid vaccines, so it’s useful to know that the founder and CEO of BioNTech (who is a Turk-German) was advised to go to a Hamptschule by his primary school teachers. So he wouldn’t have been able to attend university.
Said that, having a brother that works as a teacher in a Gymnasium, I insist that these kids are not learning anything esoteric or peculiarly complicated. If the average kid in an upper middle class neighbourhood returns an assignment with less than one typo per row, he would be remembered for years.
I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly).
They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else.
So it's not random.
There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.
But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.
No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can.
The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up enthusiastically working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
I doubt there will ever be a way to satisfactorily control for other variables when it comes to these sorts of real-life studies (there is a reason the majority of social science isn't reproducible[1])
My guess is it is similar to IQ results - does a good job weeding out people who know nothing, but does worse differentiating between students who are satisfactory and those who are exceptional
I know that personally my grades don't tend to correlate with my actual knowledge at all. I've failed things because I've been bored with them, and I've gotten perfect grades on things I don't understand at all outside the tested material.
> We estimate several models with an extensive list of control variables and high school fixed effects. Results consistently show that high school GPA is a positive and statistically significant predictor of educational attainment and earnings in adulthood. Moreover, the coefficient estimates are large and economically important for each gender.
> No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Do we have any data on the correlation between high-school admission criteria and inventing the Covid vaccine or whatever?
We are not talking about taking advantage of excellence, which starts to become visible after highschool. We are talking about 10-year-olds who go to school to be taught the fundamental theorem of arithmetics.
> Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can. > The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
I don't know what the communists and the nazists have to do with changing the admission criteria of a high school. I suppose it's a way of expressing disagreement in American English?
Caltech requires good grades as criteria for admission. Caltech graduates have a disproportionately high percentage of Nobel prizes.
https://www.caltech.edu/about/legacy/awards-and-honors/nobel...
BTW, I think the mRNA vaccine technology is worthy of a Nobel Prize. Don't you?
Caltech requires 10-year-old kids to write essays?
Again, are we talking about enrolling 10-year-old kids in highschool or are we talking about hiring microbiologists?
Second, people don't suddenly learn how to write a competent essay at the last minute. Writing a good one is a combination of many skills learned over many years.
BTW, I did not take any college prep courses prior to Caltech, and found myself way behind the other freshman who did. I found out many years later that the admissions committee had taken a chance on me, and they were very nearly wrong. I came that close to flunking out.
If public schools dump their gifted tracks, inequality will only increase as the top schools will wind up drawing only from private schools.
Anyway, so you should not have been admitted but you succeeded anyway without being a gifted kid? It seems like you have proved my point.
Edit: The Biontech founder comes from a turkish family, I don't. But I see that happening a lot, first during my school days. And now at my children's schools.
And given that people leave high school barely capable of reading newspaper articles (otherwise Breitbart or the Daily Mail would even be a thing), I don’t see what this selection is for.
Except of course for the founders of BoiNTech: Uğur Şahin, and Özlem Türeci.
Included to the point they got German government-funded PhDs and then other native Germans helped co-found their company.
Perhaps you hypothesis needs more data and less feelings?
Unless, of course, you buy into all that dishwasher to millionaire you can achieve anything if you want but don't expect a helping hand BS.
Is this what the evidence suggests or what you wish to be true?
Yes, evidence suggests that blacks and Indians and whatnot are not dumber than whites and that foreigners are not dumber than the locals.
As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming.
Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up.
Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.
This seems achievable by the 8th grade.
> In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
Schools are often the safety net for youths with a wide range of problems. While schools are the catch all for such problems, they're more expensive than fixing other issues like fair wages for the parents of the students (e.g. having hischoolers needing to get a job to support the family rather than study for school).
This high price tag is the result of shifting around other issues to the place where they're inefficiently handled.
---
The flip side of this is the "schools are often funded by property taxes and areas that are able to collect more taxes are able to spend significantly more per student even if it doesn't result in a better outcome." Many of these areas already have good student outcomes and the money is spent on on... whatever.
Palo Alto spends $24.5k/student ( https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I... ).
Wyoming county schools spends $11.5k ( https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?S... ).
When looking at those, compare the breakdown of revenue sources.
---
So, I'll say "no, we're not - but it's not the fault of the schools."
Most adults don't seem to be able to do these things well though, so I obviously have a skewed perspective.
I really doubt high school helps with this.
One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can't afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those "single student who struggled most", will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn't even pass city college's math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn't even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.
>I don’t know how this happens— I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect.
Look at the Spanish Mexican keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/KBDLA/
It has the umlaut (actually diaeresis in a Spanish context I think) and acute accent mark pretty prominently available.
Look at the Spanish Spain keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/kbdsp
It has them even more prominently available, right on the same key that an English American keyboard would have the single and double quote.
I wonder whether the students' families are from Spain or Mexico, and whether they're using the Spain vs the Mexico keyboard. I wonder how many people from Mexico use the Spain keyboard due to software confusion.
I eventually gave up and just accepted the typos.
Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized.
I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.
Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them.
It ends up selecting for people who are more transient and have less experience, who haven't gotten the better Public school job yet.
> The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them.
They theoretically have more control over expulsions, but whether or not they use it really depends on the school.
I don't think voting homeowner retirees sitting on fat Prop 13 tax cuts are going to change their tune because their grandkids can't go to private school.
From a systems point of view though - why would businesses move to SF if it meant bad schools? The answer right now is because the leadership can opt out and go into the private system, but if that wasn't the case, I think there would be a lot of incentive on the city to fix these problems.
There’s no budget shortage. There’s a mis use of funds. If you throw more money into the system we’ll just see even crazier pension packages and administration staff overheads.
What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.
The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.
The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.
It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.
Source: I homeschooled my sons in California for several years and participated on various homeschooling lists at the time.
I think the third was probably to go through an umbrella school, which my family did initially.
Homeschooling laws vary by state. Some are more stringent than California and others less.
No straw man involved. I don’t think you’ve thought through the implications of ‘getting rid of private school’.
The point is that to ban private schools you’d also have to ban homeschooling.
Why?
You can homeschool your children if you want.
They just have to be at state school during state school hours like anyone else. So you'll have to homeschool in your own time, like everything else you have to do in your own time.
(I'm not in favour of banning private schools, but your argument doesn't make sense regardless.)
No?
Everyone has to go to school during normal school hours. That's a simple flat rule.
What you do otherwise in your own time to teach about your own values is up to you. That seems completely reasonable, and also practicable for people with particular religious or other social requirements for education, to me.
(If you were in favour of requiring attendance at state education, which I'm not.)
I don’t quite understand how restricting a private school of several hundred students affects a parent teaching their children at home.
Clearly rules could be in place to separate those concerns apart.
Huh my understanding is the opposite!
Almost everyone in the US seems to go to public school. Nobody seems to talk about where they went to school - they just went to where was by their home. For example this list of privileged people at Beverly Hills High School is extraordinary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Hills_High_School#Nota...
The US public school system seems to be doing extraordinarily well here - in almost every other country these rich people would have been in a private school wouldn't they? The US system seems unusually egalitarian.
Most homeschooling parents do a variety of things, including teaching in groups with other homeschoolers, and hiring tutors for specialized subjects etc.
If the goal of the ban on private schools as suggested is to force the rich and powerful to send their children to public schools so that they are incentivized to make them better, then you would need to also ban homeschooling because otherwise those people could still school their children privately in cooperation with other rich and powerful parents via the homeschooling model.
If you're making a slippery slope argument - the answer is that there is a difference between a private school with administration, dedicated real estate and staff teaching 100s of kids, and people keeping their kids home to teach them themselves.
If it's a semantic argument, that homeschooling is a form of non-public and therefore private education, by private schools I specifically mean the large institutions. I doubt homeschooled people would say that they went to private school.
If it's a legal argument - a blanket ban on private schools would have impact on homeschooling in California - that's likely true, but I'm not suggesting how a law would be written, just the result of the law.
there's no effective way to ban private tutoring in the sense and effect of this thread that doesn't also involve banning homeschooling
edit: or simply send the kids abroad, the classic rich-person-in-failed-society way
The point is to move the bar for removing yourself higher - systems are complicated, there are no perfect solutions. Of course, people will always find a way - at the very least, they can move to another country. Right now though a significant number of people opt out of the public system and I think that's a huge problem.
No, the point was to make the people with the power to do something about it be forced to use public schools.
Just moving the bar a bit higher would have no such effect.
> Right now though a significant number of people opt out of the public system and I think that's a huge problem.
Why? What’s wrong with thinking the public school system is bad (which it obviously is) and doing something better for you child?
Then we would have a direct way for parents to improve the schools their kids attend.
Things are usually not solved by making things worse for everyone.
Instead, the solution, to most problems, is to try to help more people, instead of trying to stop others from being too good at educating their children.
It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.
As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and private system.
Another thing to consider would be the population differences. The US has ~65 times more people than Finland. In this larger group of people there will be Finland sized subgroups that outperform and underperform Finland even though the US as a whole underperforms.
Massachusetts, for example, one of two states in the US to perform and report their own PISA numbers, is pretty comparable to Finland in 2015 (1 or 2 points above or below on scores of ~500 for science and reading and 11 points below on math)[3]. I couldn't find the official OECD results for 2018, but I believe Massachusetts is slightly ahead by then.
1 - https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/education/
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia
3 - https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States-MA.pdf
You'll see MA scores among the top states in most forms of human development, so it shouldn't be surprising that the schools reflect that trend. The MA school system is likely not doing anything particularly unique that will be the antidote to failing systems in other states. It's likely the best way to replicate their success in other states lies in policy not directly related to school systems.
But let’s me add some counter example for the sake of it.
here is public high school, with « famous »teacher and kids clearly coming from the wealthy élites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Henri-IV
The trick is that the selection process is so stringent that you basically have to be :
- a genious in getting excellent grade according to the French system or … - have parents that coach you to get in there.
Here is another similar public high school.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Louis-le-Grand
Again, I mostly agree with you point. But dépending of the country, a private education can be seen of « bad taste »
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually it’s a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
So you've got "good" ones and "bad" ones depending on the neighborhood. So, yes, the best high schools are public, in areas with high rents and property prices.
Additionally, the best high schools select their students on academics, proof of residence, cover letter, letters from former teachers, etc. [1]
But for instance growing up, the big stink was that those poor projects kids we’re in the same middle school that middle class folks. The trick was to pick German to avoid that and be affected to another school.
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal
This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))
I'm not trying to pressure you or anybody else to agree with me, but personally it was really shocking for me when I realized how segregated the Bay Area actually is: http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea
There's no way I can look at a divide like the one at the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and not think that ease of access to irl mobility is an issue. Once Upon A Time it was imagined that Phase 2 of BART would run alongside that bridge. There is a bus, but it's not of much use for anybody who needs to work later than 9PM, like many service jobs: https://www.goldengate.org/bus/route-schedule/del-norte-bart...
150 years ago...
I don't see what the rest of your comment has anything to do with the discussion at hand. DMVs are terrible everywhere. The DMV in a rich zipcode suffers from the same issues as a DMV in a poor zipcode. Both rich and poor have to use the DMV.
The problem is not that racist white people are trying to run the DMV into the ground to keep black people poor. The problem is that many of our government institutions are run like shit. In many cases, fixing these institutions would benefit the wealthy more than the poor. Yet it doesn't happen. Why? Well, like with any other question regarding complex systems, there are different reasons depending on the case. Trying to distill it down to "racism" does not get as any closer to identifying the cause, nor fixing it.
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
There are still huge discrepancies across public schools.
If you ban private schools, people will “group homeschool”. If you ban homeschooling, parents can pack cigarettes in their kid’s lunch sack until they are sent to continuation school where attendance isn’t required. Then the child is free to attend a “group tutoring academy”.
The solution is to make public education easier to reform by the members of the community.
We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school.
Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.
That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.
Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)
Giving struggling schools less money when they require larger and more diverse funding almost definitely isnt the answer. The average public school teacher still spends a huge amount of money every year to buy stuff for their class to use, and we expect them to continually do that throughout their career.
High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to make trouble.
Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
A pre-recorded video you can pause and rewind would be more beneficial than being corralled into an overcrowded stale box and expected to learn.
IMHO, this is a good thing. Same for France, Austria and most other EU countries I know of. Like healthcare, a public system is working in most developed countries. Except the US.
I see people on twitter and reddit bitch about having to learn calculus and never using it.
But you know? I don't remember how to use calculus at this moment either, but I remember concepts of it measuring infinitesimal increments of change, and how derivatives and integrations relate to rates of change.
I don't remember the mechanisms of all my teachings in school, but it made me appreciate bridges, combustion engines, biology and literature.
The honest question is: How do we determine when a child/teenager has no capacity or will to understand the beauty or utility of advanced learning, and what do we do with them?
Especially as automation takes over in the next 30 years and we have millions more out of work because we don't need taxis, truck drivers, farmers, or 60% of food service?
If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.
Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-average salaries, and teaches topics from the last century.
My university experience was simply a continuation of highschool and being treated like a child. Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding, attendance was obligatory, tech was sometimes >20 years old, and so on and so forth.
Even the systems and curriculums within states (!= country) can vary pretty heavily. The bologna reform supposedly made comparing degrees between countries better, but a bachelor in mechanical engineering may mean something entirely different in Poland and Spain.
Better doesn't automatically mean good.
In France, school is relaxed. It's more about making you an aware citizen than a calculator. The parents always feel the schools are mediocre because they fail all sort of international grading competitions.
Universities are inexistant on the Shanghai Index. You go to class if you want, exams can be compensated by good personal projects (I hated theorical geometry but loved OpenGL so much, that I passed the 3D geometry class with a 10% mark at the exam and a 95% mark at the OpenGL 3D engine semester project that implemented the concept I could not find pleasure in memorizing formally).
Now I have a choice to put my kid in the HK/Chinese system, the French system or the UK/American one, and ... frankly Im so shocked by the lack of focus on kind citizenship, political duty, critical thinking and no alternative to the ever-parent-scaring french "school is not to give you a job, but to give you knowledge" that I still put her in the French system which I used to think was shit.
But well it's not public and some of the things you said on public school apply to France too (unmotivated teachers, often manipulated by unions to think they're so underpaid they have no choice but to interrupt and sacrifice their kids education to fight for their stolen basic rights)
This was the biggest part that got me. I thought university was a place to actually learn things.
It turned out that it's a place for you to rote learn all the required material without any understanding. I saw it firsthand with my friends, who only knew how to follow the steps they'd been taught to solve problems.
Spending per pupil can be a deceiving statistic due to the vastly different needs between poor/middle-class/wealthy students
I would suggest that the students here are doing well due to a combo of the following factors:
Smart parents live here, and they have smart kids
Rich parents spend less time fretting about paying bills and more time helping kids with homework
One (rich) parent works, one stay-at-home parent takes care of the home -> more time with the kids
One parent is involved with the PTA, which correlates well with student success
And to he clear, I'm not casting judgment. I live in Frisco, Tx. We are enjoying ALL of the above benefits
Well educated parents are more likely to have the skills themselves to help with homework and are more likely to put more emphasis on academic performance.
Do you need any more than basic literacy and numeracy to be a retail worker, cook, laborer, driver?
These students would be much better off learning a hands-on trade, or in the workforce.
The school leaving and employment age should be moved to 14. Expulsions should also be properly enforced, including for non-White children.
In my opinion it works quite nicely. The 80-20-split for gymnasium (which requires an entry-exam, but again, region-dependant) ensures a certain level for students in gymnasium, and the "job schools" for the apprenticeships allow for job-specific education. All in all, I consider it a pretty decent system.
Furthermore, there are intangible social outcomes of having kids in school for 12-13 years that can’t simply be ignored.
in retrospect it was a valuable lesson
All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school.
Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my experience.
Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.
At the same time, we should decrease how many hours parents have to work each week (40 to 30?) so that they can actually engage with their kids.
NAEP scores have been more or less flat among 17 year olds since 1970. During that period inflation adjusted spending per pupil almost tripled.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf
> The 0.075 figure reported here suggests that there is essentially no link between state education spending (which has exploded) and the performance of students at the end of high school (which has generally stagnated or declined).
There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.
And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.
now the second part of your proposal, would be interesting. but in practice if you combine both parts probably they would extremely aggressively filter students
I'm not too familiar with the details of management here, but is it even possible for public schools (and other government operations) to have proper incentives given voters don't care about results? I suppose "school-choice", which happens to be vehemently opposed by Democrats, would be the only way.
Not sure what you mean by “optimizing local maximums at the expense of everything else”. It almost sounds like an argument but there’s no substance.
You claim that public education should focus on the lowest common denominator so we can avoid an underclass susceptible to manipulation. That’s both a weak justification to purposely damage public education and condescension shown by elites when poor people don’t vote the way “they should”.
I’m not saying they’re right to just pass everyone, but it might not be purely selfish on the part of administrators.
I don't know. What does this have to do with keeping teacher's jobs and not improving learning? Late start is, as far as "clinical outcomes" can be measured in education, like, the cheapest win there is.
If you had a choice between:
a. doing your job as well as you can, then losing it (and being unemployable forever, quite likely);
b. doing it somewhat worse, but keeping it (and hopefully having a chance to help more students).
What would you do?
Please blame whoever forced this conundrum on teachers. Nonsensical bureaucratic decisions like this are the reason for which I left the profession.
That is simply the top priority of most employees.
"Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021-22 reflects the significant allocation of one-time federal funds in 2020-21."
[0]: www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Education.pdf
Lol what?
What on earth do they do with that money? You could hire a private tutor per four children for that money and have them do it in the children's homes.
Would end up as a private tutor half-time for two-child families, with them doing homework the other half-time. If you had four children it'd be full-time!
$8,200 per pupil in Cupertino, $24,700 in Woodside
CUSD is considering closure of three schools and eliminating librarians and art and music due to the failure of passing a parcel tax, and low per-pupil funding. Lots of folks on the street argue “it’s the administrator salaries!” but when you actually look at the budgets there’s just not enough money to keep the schools running. Teachers commute from over the mountains. Administrators are paid reasonably, but that’s the cost when their skill sets would easily apply to project management at a local tech company. Money’s not always the solution but sometimes it is.
SF schools went to all-remote education starting in March 2020 and by the end of the 2020-2021 school year, did not yet return for in-person instruction. The effect on children's education has been devastating. [0]
The teacher's union refused to entertain in-person teaching even though SF has reportedly reached herd immunity as of May 2021. Negotiations have yielded almost no progress and well-meaning high-earning parents dedicated to the public school system have been stymied despite organizing as a group. [1]
As a former college professor, I understand low wages are a problem for most teachers. Even as a tenure-track professor, my salary in 2009 was less than 50% of what I was (and am) able to command as a front-end developer in the Bay Area.
Teaching K-12 in public schools in the US is difficult. There are nigh insurmountable problems which, in my opinion, are the product of so few financial resources dedicated to the project of educating children in the US.
The behavioral problems less-endowed schools encounter among their students is an outgrowth of poor funding and poverty economics.
Public school education in wealthy communities (famously Stuyvesant High School [2]) is a different story altogether.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/opinion/remote-learning-f...
Even if the in person classes are easy to pass, the AP scores should be consistent with the rest of the country and should make identifying the relative difficulty between schools pretty easy? ACT and SAT should also make grade inflated school very easily to spot.
I think California has a rule requiring that at least X% of their students are from California right? Has that shifted the balance at CA to accepting lower quality students from their own state?
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
Remove the objective measures, and it becomes harder to prove that you're racist - even if everybody knows it.
Motivate the kids. Show them stuff about the world, and show them how to find out things for themselves. If you're going to test them, do it in a way that doesn't destroy all enjoyment of the subject. Try to get the kids to want to keep learning after they leave you.
The teacher is basically like "haha dumb kids, we know you're cheating" and "if only we could punish students more!". There's a lot of "the smart kids are suffering because of the dumb kids" attitude here that I find disgusting.
> That too was in keeping with a theme. The teacher email I mentioned above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types.
Oh god, how awful that these students won't get to suffer through some idiot's assignment that I'm sure would greatly better their life.
There's a lot wrong with school but I feel like this teacher doesn't realize that they're a part of that.
> Wow, a 100% pass rate! What a successful school!
Yes, it's cheating. They have an incentive, as your students do, to 'pass', and so they cheat.
Give students a place to be during the day while their parents work. Give them real, meaningful incentives that matter to young people - money, freedom, social structure, a feeling of productivity - and align those with learning real, practical skills, like how to read, write, analyze context, etc.
Hire non-idiots, pay them more, reduce class sizes. Yeah it'll cost more, but the obvious economic benefits will offset that. I can count on one hand how many teachers I had that I respected - the rest were obvious failures.
Give parents a voucher, as good as cash, for their child and let them choose the school.
Private companies will compete for those vouchers, aligning focus on satisfying the parents and the children, rather than the government.
"Send your kid to our school, and we promise they'll always score 100% on their tests!"
Unless you think parents value "100% on their tests" more than receiving a quality education.
I trust a parent's judgment more than administrators looking to prop up their numbers.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/22/colleg...
Of course, teaching to the test isn't ideal. But it looks like the alternative isn't a well-rounded education, but not teaching at all.
Hilarious.
I was in college, working on a take-home excel sheet for an accounting class. I was struggling with some of it, so I did my best and filled in the parts I knew and some I could guess at. I wasn't too worried about it because the rest of my grades in that class were good. The professor called me in for a meeting and accused me of cheating because the total column happened to be correct but only some of the inputs were incorrect. I was actually scared I might get expelled for cheating, when I was just following my prior teachers' advice (and basic logic) to guess when not sure.
My brother in particular is desperately trying to get out of public education. He loves teaching, but they are making it impossible for anyone to do their jobs effectively. Pay is shit, especially since work practically doubled overnight, and you get virtually zero control over the curriculum or policies in your classroom.
Then, at the end of the day, some entitled shithead of a parent thinks their little snowflake was dealt a bad hand and parent-teacher conferences ensue which further sap whatever life force remains.
After hearing about all of this stuff over the years, I cant help but feel incredibly grateful that I have the kind of career that I do. Public education has been turned into a protracted daycare experience with the sole objective of piping the students into a college debt lifestyle.
> .. The emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types. ... my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most, which quite literally would have meant putting students who had signed up for Advanced Placement into a remedial course
It doesn't make sense to me that a whole nation skips math (unless you take math A-levels).
I talked to a professor and he explained UGRADs are below level, but then when starting grad school they force everyone up to international level. He showed me a huge room with grad student desks and was like "look, we don't let them get out of here until they learn math properly."
As they told us repeatedly, it's a privilege to be here. Although they had the option to boot us out, no one was, and only one guy bailed out of 50.
> consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes
US-International keyboard layout, maybe. Maybe the student doesn't know what umlauts and acute accents are, so maybe they think they're valid equivalents to " and '.
Sounds like another MacOS "why not use random unicode characters that look similar to the one you really want" feature to me.
letter+quotation mark is a common way to write umlauts...
What educational outcome do these groups expect?
I think the underlying theme is that the parents themselves are overwhelmed and the schools that were ill-equipped to handle education before COVID-19 are crumbling.
If I take this report at face value (which, frankly, I'm tempted to), it paints an even more broken image of the American school system than the dumpster fire I had on my wall already.
I think that OP is misconstruing the reasons behind this notification requirement. This notification has to do more with a "cover your ass" policy than lowering expectations for seniors.
The California Education code [1] requires school districts to develop procedures to notify parents of a failing grade. All the CA districts that I worked for had some procedures in place for when and how notify families of failing grades in response to this law. From a quick search, it seems that SFUSD policies 4.2.5 [2] and 4.2.6 apply in this case. The policy clearly states that teachers have to notify parents of grades either 1 or 2 times during the semester (i.e., mid-semester report cards-if you went to school in CA you will remember receiving those).
It seems that OP's school was on a 9-week reporting period, requiring teachers to notify parents of grades mid-semester and that their school added a requirement of filling out an additional form outlining that the student was in danger of failing the class specifically for seniors (probably because most families stopped looking at report cards for seniors). This form is required to be in compliance with the CA ed code as parents have the right to appeal failing grades and not being notified is probably an enough reason for the district to change a failing grade to a passing one in case of a lawsuit/complaint.
I would imagine that failing a class is more "high stakes" for seniors than other students, so they have more paperwork involved for seniors if you want to fail them. Families might be more "litigious" if a student ends up failing a class required for graduation. It is simpler to complain to the board/suing that having to repeat a school year.
The bottom line is that the CA ed code gives teachers final say in grades and even the superintendent cannot change a grade without the teacher's consent. On the other hand, the CA ed code gives some rights to parents to appeal grades and has some notifications guidelines so they shouldn't be surprised of failing grades. OP will be able to fail as many seniors as they want, but they just have to notify their families that they are in danger of failing the class at some point before the end of the semester. At the end of the day, if they have enough evidence for failing a student (that would stand up during a public board meeting/lawsuit), notifying the student's family 9 weeks before the end of the semester shouldn't be too much of a burden.
Links:
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio.... [2]: ]https://www.sfusd.edu/services/know-your-rights/student-fami...
If this were the reason for the new forms, why would the school only have teachers fill out the form if the student were guaranteed to fail? I'd think the schools would go the opposite direction and make sure to notify all parents whose kids might fail.
"Whenever it becomes evident to a teacher that a student is in danger of failing a course, the teacher shall arrange a conference with the student's parent/guardian or send the parent/guardian a written report. The refusal of the parent to attend the conference, or to respond to the written report, shall not preclude failing the pupil at the end of the grading period. (Education Code 49067)"
The policy clearly states that the student has to be "in danger of failing a course" and not "guaranteed to fail a course". But, if a teacher knows that they might fail a student, they must notify parents by some reasonable deadline (again, it seems that OP's school sets it by week 9 of the semester or by the mid-semester mark). Without this notification, they might not be able to fail a student because they weren't in compliance with the CA ed code and district policy. This becomes even more of an issue when HS graduation is concerned.
I don't know if the forms are new or not. The policy was last updated in 2017 so they are at least 4 years old. What what is worth, I filled out similar forms when I was a teacher 10 years ago in another part of CA, so I suspect that they have been around for longer than that (and the forms were mass produced on carbon paper slips that seemed printed in the 70s). I am also wondering if the word "guaranteed" came up in response to COVID-related changes to grading policies and the district having implemented a credit/no credit grading system.
Links:
[1] Board policy 5121 cf. 6154 para. 4: https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=AKG...
It's my perception that adults involved with schools, especially younger grades, have been penetrated so intensely by woke ideology[1], much more so than the broader subcultures (urban, educated, etc) they belong to that already skew woke. Is this just down to how skewed female this group is?
[1] I mean this neutrally, not as a particular criticism of wokeness or the manner in which it penetrates communities. When thinking about large groups of people, modeling ideologies as memetic viruses moving through a population is a lot more sensible than as emergent entities from the rational decisions of large numbers of intelligent, thoughtful people capable of critical thinking.
I don't know what group you're trying to capture by saying this. You mean the parents as well as the school employees?
>Is this just down to how skewed female this group is?
No I think it has to do with how young both the parents and the teachers are. Someone who is 40 years old today is right on the cusp of being a millennial.
> Someone who is 40 years old today is right on the cusp of being a millennial.
This doesn't fit the data. The median age of a teacher in the US is 41[1], which means that less than half of all teachers are millennials. By contrast, 72% of teachers are women.
I'm having more trouble pulling up the sources I've seen with crosstabs on approval of wokeness[2] by gender and age, but I know it's quite gender-skewed (as well as age-skewed).
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s...
[2] The definition I'm using here is leftism with an identitarian focus, that opposes Enlightenment liberalism's aspiration towards transcending ethnic tribalism. I again mean this neutrally, with no comment on whether this worldview is more legitimate than the alternative.
Administrators multiply like rabbits and obtain higher salaries, teachers unions prevent the firing of bad teachers, and politicians just go along with whatever items powerful special interests demand.
We should dissolve all public schools in their current form at a specific predetermined time, and have new educational institutions built. Then we should set up a recurring mechanism to dissolve completely the existing institution to allow for new innovations.
Maybe we should redefine public education to be a bit more exclusive, and not shame those that aren’t on a college track into pursuing mentally challenging work for which we are unfit. Give kids the money that would be spent on their education (loosely defined) and let them invest it, or spend on vocational training or seed money to start their own small business. Too much focus on producing som eidetic notion of the educated individual. People don’t wind up homeless because they weren’t exposed to Shakespeare. Some people will be lucky to attain enough basic skill to stay afloat. If such a person is able to fool plagiarism software, maybe that’s something to celebrate.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X1878563...
Hell, voucher programs have been shown to lower academic attainment. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21839
If people really wanted to improve educational outcomes, UBI might actually do the most good. The situation at home matters a lot, and it shows up in the data.
> ...students use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes
Those students figured out a way around the plagiarism detection.
It's like generational differences are a new thing, do people really think your teacher back in the day thought progressive educational practices were effective. I mean capital punishment really worked wonders.
Thought yes but after the nobody can get below 50% part I’m less sure
It appears that they still haven't caught up.
I mean, even skipping the moral horror here, it's not even true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
But HN... wants it to be true? What the actual fuck, people?
oh and you saw my comment at the top because the ranking algorithm takes the youthfulness of the comment into account. its rather embarrassing that you dont know this.
Otherwise we wouldn't have so-called feral children - people who never acquired language and thus their intellectual growth was hindered.
Back then private schools were generally regarded as lower quality because of the incentive to keep the parents happy with their "educational product".
Next, there's the discipline issue. Yes, they stopped suspending kids in a lot of places because they realized those kids would just be left alone at home all day, and the only reason those kids were at school at all was because it was in some way convenient for their parents.
Finally, there's the homework issue. Yes, homeless is pointless busy work. If something is worth learning, make sure you block off enough time during classroom hours to teach it, otherwise most kids aren't going to learn it at all. Yes, the students are overwhelmed.
We have millions of kids that are from completely broken homes, basic needs like food and housing aren't met, and this person is complaining about book reports? Society is broken.