Where I live, Hoboken, NJ, the high school math and reading proficiency rate are 8% and 44% respectively, while the graduation rate is >95%
What the hell are they doing if they're not even teaching kids math and reading? And why are they graduating them?
Grades aren't meant to be a feel good merit badge. They're supposed to be an accurate reflection of your level of knowledge relative to your peers. If it ceases to be that, then the selection just happens elsewhere. So now high school diploma isn't worth anything because everyone graduates. Hiring a high school graduate doesn't even guarantee you the person can read. Same thing happens in bachelors as schools become less selective and inflate grades.
My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however.
If we wanted to succeed here, we would likely need to invest more money to hire more or superior teachers that could work individually with these students that struggle to meet the requirements. The worst part would be that even with that investment it may not even be enough. Some portion of the students who don't achieve are not interested in excelling, and individual attention may not help much there.
In addition, for several reasons, teachers no longer control their classrooms. They have no authority.
You can’t let students get ahead, because equity, and you can’t give special help, because it looks like condescension.
Everyone’s a winner, everyone graduates.
NYC, for instance, regularly reports lead paint exposure in schools.
Education starts at home and without a learning culture with displine these children are setup to fail.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02765...
Just one example of many.
Everybody's talking about the problems with schools, but the issue is the enormous gap in economic inequality that is just growing larger and larger. Parents who have to work 2-3 jobs to support their families don't have the time or energy to devote to supporting their children in their academic lives.
Teaching at the rural school I grew up in really changed my perspective. I was very abnormal when growing up there, and all my friends were too (I can only think of one good friend who's parents were divorced, and her mom and remarried when she was fairly young), and I was super insulated from the realities of things there. Coming back as a teacher made me see how much worse it is, and it's a clear difference between the kids; even those kids whose parents want them to do well struggle if the parents can't be at home.
Harry Potter was pried from that little dusty cupboard closet beneath the stairs and sent to somewhere to reach success.
Send kids that don't have a good home life to someplace where the adults care and have the resources to see that they do succeed.
Rather, I think it was Hermione Granger that embodied the role model of the student from an underprivilged background who works hard to achieve academic success.
And sometimes (many times?) the financial calculus is such that _leaving your job/career_ is the cheaper of the two options. Daycare is already more than our mortgage with 2 and the private school elementary age prices that I've seen in my area are _more_ expensive.
I went to mostly black and poor public schools my entire childhood. Back then there were a few teachers who clearly didn't care and were never held accountable. Most of the teachers were pretty good though. It's increasingly shifted towards the opposite.
I was blown away by how pathetically run my children's public schools are here in Colorado so I put them both in private school. They get less than half the money per student that the public school system I live in gets, and are vastly more efficient. The operations, the instructors, it's all just run correctly.
When my daughter was still in a public elementary school I walked in one day to try to get her iPad fixed when they were doing full remote learning due to the pandemic. There was a large meeting taking place amongst all the staff. None of them had bothered to return my calls which is why I had to go in person. They looked like they were having a party because I didn't see any work getting done.
At the end of the day it's a government school. Name a single government agency that is efficient with their money. Name a government agency that's good at hiring, or keeping good talent.
We should just do a voucher system and let the private sector deal with this. As a taxpayer I'm deeply resentful of having my money get taken from me and given to unionized teachers who refused to work for a full year and then had the nerve to take summer vacation as if it had been a normal year. These were the same folks who were put at the front of the line for vaccinations independent of their age groups. And then they proceeded to act like they were still in danger and couldn't open schools.
USGS!! The amount of benefit they give to the public and the data they make available for free, used by every weather station, civil engineer, surveyor, geologist, etc. etc. relative to their budget is insane! And so much of it is mission critical life-and-death stuff.
It's amazing to me. The updates to mapping alone are mind-boggling since they came from the pre-satellite and drone days.
How about NASA?
I'm not a US citizen so apologies if I got that wrong but I figured NASA always had the goods, in terms of personel, even if they also had some bad apples in there.
That was a private company, btw. I think large companies have problems with personel like that, whether public or private. They have problems, in that their understanding of the labour market has stayed in the 1930's. Anyway I think the same thing that happened with me happened to your friend in NASA.
Sucks that they did that to you. Utter garbage.... but yeah, waste is what big orgs do.
... though I might change my mind if I'm 60 and one needs my COBOL SKILL$$ :P
The vaccine wasn’t really available till a few months into 2021, and I can understand the hesitation on some to be the first to take a new vaccine.
Yes private schools might run better. Shockingly richer and generally two parent families are going to have children that been primed to respect learning and have less trauma so much easier to deal with. Public schools teachers don’t have this luxury.
There certainly could be improvements to public school, some of the curriculum is dumb, but again they have to serve all customers, private schools don’t.
I don’t begrudge public school teachers their vacation.
I also realize this past year+ has been extremely stressful on parents, especially those who can’t work from home
Exactly. OP acts as if it's such a great surprise they're run better. Obviously they would be, because they can pick and choose who they take and usually only get those kids who's families are well off enough to afford it; those kids already all have huge advantages when it comes to learning. It's exactly why the voucher system would do no good either -- it'd just make the public school worse as the private schools take those kids who are already borderline on affording it.
You can either afford to:
1. Pay out of pocket for private school
2. Afford to have 1 parent be responsible for participation in some type of home school education (group or otherwise)
3. Relocate your house to somewhere zoned for a “good school”
If you can’t afford any of those things, you don’t have a choice. That’s why people want vouchers.
So basically it goes from those 'with a lot of money hav[ing] a choice' to 'those with some money having a choice'. It doesn't fix the underlying problems at all, and would actually make them worse for those who are left behind.
Most people hear vouchers and they think "the other large public school across town or the existing private school". The real goal is many more small schools.
Enabling "educational entrepreneurship" so somebody who has an idea that thinks will work really well for certain types of kids can start a school teaching exactly that way...and parents can sign up if they think it's best for their child. I want creative teachers to create schools to solve the problems that they see without all of the red tape that makes everyone feel like change is hopeless.
Even with larger schools and bus routes, the solution is to create hubs where you can get off one one bus and hop on the one that goes to your school.
It's certainly different, but it can absolutely be done.
That's not what will happen, though. What'll happen is you'll get big players owning most the schools, all teaching the same way and same stuff (and if there's no oversight, they can also teach anything, even creationism). Capitalism won't allow this to happen.
> Even with larger schools and bus routes, the solution is to create hubs where you can get off one one bus and hop on the one that goes to your school.
This sounds awful, and absolutely won't work for rural areas. I worked at a school where we already had kids on the bus for two hours each way. They had to wake up before 5 sometimes to prep for school. Imagine expanding this so kids can get to their hub and then to another school. That sounds awful.
Really, the only ones who benefit from this system, still, are those who's parents are already borderline being able to send them to private schools or move. It doesn't help the lower socioeconomic groups at all, and, again, will make things worse for them.
Big players owning the schools also becomes a huge risk since parents can easily just go elsewhere. Those big players would have to be doing a very good job to keep everybody, compared with the current situation where most people seem to do it because they have no choice.
Where in the world are you seeing a school bus route that goes 2 hours each way? Ideally, the creation of schools a lot closer to those kids would become possible.
And a transport hub is perfectly normal and even reasonable. It simplifies the entire pickup and drop off process. Who knows, maybe UPS can show us how it’s done?
You seem to keep assuming this, but it's just not true. Parents with means can go elsewhere, and even then to a limit. But all that does is leave the schools and kids that are left behind even worse off. And the big schools can keep buying up the other schools. There's only so many places within a range where parents can take their kids, not to mention there'd need to be a minimum amount of kids to even justify keeping one open.
> Those big players would have to be doing a very good job to keep everybody, compared with the current situation where most people seem to do it because they have no choice.
No they really don't. We see this all the time with other big companies. I fail to see how privatizing education makes it any different than every other private enterprise out there.
> Where in the world are you seeing a school bus route that goes 2 hours each way?
Rural United States. I had students literally have to be on the bus at 5:30 in order to get to school at 7.30. They also didn't get home until 5:30 or later at night, depending on weather.
> Ideally, the creation of schools a lot closer to those kids would become possible.
Population dynamics prevent it.
> And a transport hub is perfectly normal and even reasonable. It simplifies the entire pickup and drop off process. Who knows, maybe UPS can show us how it’s done?
Sure, if you're willing to have kids commute multiple hours a day, and have to switch buses (maybe several times?) and somehow expect that to not impact their success.
You don't have kids in school, do you? It amazes me how many people with absolutely no skin in the game comment on this stuff.
I was one of those kids. My mother was a drug addict, I spent a large portion of my childhood in a trailer park. There was nothing a teacher could do without me having a structured home life. She would frequently interrupt me when I tried to do my homework, and then yell at me 2 hours later for not having it done. She undermined my teachers at every turn, and when they called to complain about my behavior, she took my side instead of theirs. Once I was provided this structured home life (courtesy of the courts finally giving my father custody of me and my siblings and getting us away from our psycho mother) suddenly I was able to focus on school. If I disrespected a teacher, one phone call to my dad, and I was faced with a terrifying man who made my life hell. This was a powerful incentive to behave for the teachers, and do my homework as well. Bad behavior at school resulted in consequences for me at home.
The current public school system isn't capable of fixing this problem. You are just throwing good money after bad, and dragging the kids who would do well in a better school down with the kids whose homes make it impossible for school to do any good.
Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone is an example of a model that works. He keeps the kids at school for very long hours, and minimizes the time they are at home.
Public schools were not designed or intended to replace the role of functioning families. Trying to force them into that role is a bad idea, and very ineffective and wasteful. Society has changed, an increasingly large percentage of kids across all ethnic groups (except for Asian Americans) are living in single parent homes. You were a teacher, so I think you are aware of. the fact that they are going back to homes where they are entertained by screens all night. The parents frequently throw their hands in the air, and ask "how can I keep him off video games?" seemingly unaware of the fact that they can take the controllers/phone/laptop whatever away and god forbid take the TV out of the kid's room. The point is that teachers can't fix this.
Teacher's unions and public school districts are incentivized to pretend they are capable of addressing the problem, provided they get more money. That's what institutions and organizations do, after all. They always want to expand their scope, get more personnel, do more, and get paid for it. It's dumb in this case.
Basically, to fix this problem, we need to fix the societal issues in the country, not the schools. That's something I entirely agree with. My disagreement is that I think switching to a voucher system and things like that only makes matters worse for those who can't take advantage of just moving for whatever reason.
The point being, there is no excuse. The stats on this school district are public, and it's very wealthy.
I live just over the county line from Boulder (I can get to Pearl Street in 13 minutes), and the BVSD is very overrated. They were closed for far longer than other districts were last year. They have a lot of money, but also a ton of wealthy students with overly permissive parents who bring drugs into the schools. (I know the vice principal of Fairview High in Boulder, and the incidence of drug use in the school is mind-blowing, all courtesy of rich kids with rich hippie parents who give them allowances of hundreds a week that they buy drugs with.)
One issue prevalent in all public school systems, but particularly bad in BVSD, is the number of students being falsely classified as learning disabled. Many kids with highly inattentive parents, who are essentially babysat by iPads and video games when at home, are labelled as LD/ADHD/etc when the reality is nobody makes them do their homework or study at home. They are then, due to the disability diagnosis, allocated disproportionate resources and staff to try to bring them up to average level. These resources come at the expense of gifted programs which have fewer seats available than they otherwise would for advanced students with good parents. At the end of the day, most public school systems in the US are investing vastly more resources into bringing poor performers to average than helping gifted students reach their actual potential by actually challenging them.
I view them as institutions which are, at a functional level, primarily incentivized to serve the needs of their employees over those of their students. They are a massive source of union jobs, and these unions are the largest funders of politicians who then increase the budgets that then fund the unions via wages to members. I'm a huge fan of unions in non-monopolized industries, but like FDR, I vehemently oppose unions for public sector employees for this very reason. I pay these idiots whether I want to or not. And my wife and I were emotionally crushed when we saw the horrific, and frankly sloppy, remote learning that was taking place. The curriculum was terrible, the teachers were not engaged, and it just felt like too many were taking advantage of the WFH to fuck off and indulge their hobbies and personal lives. This was a universal sentiment amongst the parents (and hilariously, the middle school students) in my daughter's school. There was not a single remote learning lesson I witnessed that was remotely as effective as a Khan Academy course. We know this because we ended up supplementing her lessons with Khan, and she was very emphatic that she liked them a million times better.
I know many on HN will disagree with my sentiment, but I've noticed that the people in my friend group who don't share my view are disproportionately childless. People with kids in school tend to be pretty frustrated with the structural deficiencies of the fossilized, mid-20th century institutions that are US public schools.
Reminds me of the Key & Peele sketch 'If We Treated Teachers Like Pro Athletes' [0]
You increase the chances to succeed at the same time you make it more difficult, to overwhelm that aspect.
Reduce the binary outcome slightly so it's not just a cycle of fail and be thrown / throw yourself to the wolves (dropout).
Dramatically increase vocational education training.
Shift to a year-round school system. So you don't fail and abandon. Instead, you never stop until you succeed.
High school et al stops being N year pegs/separations that you must pass each of to move on annually (start year / pass or fail / break / next year). Instead it's year-round, fluid, continual. You are failing at this thing, continue until you are not, no break, no year markers.
The rigid year system is largely bullshit, it's an exceptionally idiotic approach. It's overly simplistic and lacks the nuance of an individual's context and needs.
That's why I say we should move to a more free-market based solution. It would be EASY for a private organization to completely revamp the way the school year structure works! I went to public school myself, but I believe I've heard of such "progressive" or "nontraditional" private schools that offer different structures than the standard "grade" approach.
Of course, the issue with private schools is cost, but I think direct subsidies a la stimulus checks as well as tax cuts could help.
Of course, this would cause mass disruption in the education labor market, but the nuances of that escape me.
The incentive to succeed starts at parents having to pay, ending with the students being quite aggressively challenged to actually deliver on exams.
It may not be fit for everyone, but now that I work in an investment bank in Hong Kong, I dont feel like I m being abused by deadlines, financial objectives, disappointement on failures, high reward on success, expectation that I do more than the minimum etc.
But in France, saying these is an anathema, people can get insane we encourage kids to excel, in silly things such as just being fluent in English, useful in Math, generally aware of physics, careful about historical precedents or able to follow a discussion on philosophy. And it's not even considering accessories like understanding Latin etymology or never making a spelling mistake in French.
We may see education like a sort or right, that happens given enough tax money thrown at schools, but it feels to me like a mindset and a duty: we must understand what's happening around us and we must make our children useful. Too bad if it's a little bit hard some days, but that's this or we whine all our lives the rich are eating OUR cake, when all we ever did was being born and claiming equality.
Mass education is still a relatively new thing. Has there ever been a time when we successfully taught that to the large majority of children? Part of me wonders whether it is a reasonable goal. I don’t think the UK ever achieved the equivalent.
Triple integrals are a bit too hard for 11th grade, but they are usefull to calculate the speed of a sailing boat. If you admit only one sail form exist however, you can make a simple algorithm for your pupils to apply different lenght/height and calculate the ultimate ratios. Thank you Mr Mason.
Microwaves are dangerous, but the powder inside fluocompacte (don't have the translation :/) bulbs does not react dangerously, and that can be used to who how low-consumption light can change our consumption (it was before LED bulbs became a thing, overall i have a lot of useless knowledge from this, but the method stayed with me).
You don't need to learn italian to translate a fencing treaty from 17th century bologna, but translating historical text is hard. At least you can use some positions and attacks in your saber competition, it's not good but surprising enough to get some points. But well, my history teacher introduced most of us to HEMA
There is multiple francophone theater festival a year, some of them not in France, and surprisingly not many French school attend (We were mostly the only one each of the 3 time). Tulsea is a fine city, Agadir is better and Liege is interesting too (budget cut in my last year i guess, we did not take the plane).
My brother was in a private school however. And i can tell you the difference: in public school the floor is low, sometime very low compared to private school. But the ceiling can be much, much higher when your school have a bit of money (like if it's also a public trade school).
I've also been part of "les petit debrouillards" and i've taught some chemistry and engineering (sometime even electricity!) to kids, at different levels. I've been invited to public school, to homeschooling association, but never to private school. It might be anecdotal, but our group was very well known and liked, we had a lot more invitations than we could respond to/attend to, and never once we were called to a private school. It's not a dig, but in my mind, it is exactly why i couldn't have done everything i've done if i went to the same private school my brother went. I would probably have a lot more money than i do now (not that i really care, i'm still in the top 10% income), but with a lot less skills and experiences.
Responsible parents should challenge their kids to learn regardless if the school is public or not, if they care about the future of their children.
The SAT provides a hard deadline which prevents you from de-escalating high school.
College provides a soft deadline which prevents you from de-escalating as getting a degree before you run out of money is an employment filter.
You have to remove college as an employment filter in order to de-escalate the whole thing.
High school _could_ become such a filter if a national standard were developed and _enforced_. Education shouldn't stop until that is met or someone ends up on mental disability status. More help still should be provided if the external environment isn't conducive to success.
Such a basic qualifying education should be a human right, further the right of anything which can think. Graduation from that filter could be a requirement to being a productive and full member of society. I _still_ disagree, that under the exact circumstances outlined above, where the right to that education and the fulfillment of it's mandate are a per-requisite, in that set of circumstances graduating could be a requirement to vote. Proof that someone is a functioning member of society (because otherwise they'd be a pre-adult protected class of society).
And you of course have all encompassing stats to prove that they were happy. Government education allowed people with limited financial means to give a chance to their kids at least.
Problem is not the government education. Problem is that thanks to political games the priorities got completely fucked up. The goal should be to actually educate people not to make sure that everyone passes.
I don't think that's a good idea. Privatization has a way of making many things worse and more expensive. I can't really see how privatization wouldn't increase the gap between poorer students and students from more well-off families, for instance.
Do you have some links and maybe some elaboration on the point you're trying to make? From my short reading, it sounds like the narrative is that the disaster gave both sides the political cover they needed to make the concessions they've long known they needed, and allowed effective reform to happen. Is that what you're suggesting?
[0] https://www.aft.org/news/truth-about-new-orleans-schools-aft...
It's interesting their article doesn't include the normal dispute of the post-Katrina improvements, the fact that the cohort of students is very different.
One does not simply graduate US HS and come out as an equal to every other HS graduate. The meta these days is to become the most accomplished HS graduate achievable.
As a parent with a partner who also works full time, who who lost daycare for a few months at the start of the pandemic: Babysitting. Teachers main value add is babysitting. It's sad, and education is still highly valuable, but its the truth.
Or, in other immortal words of George Bush, "mission accomplished".
A. Give kids some education (or educayshun, depending on the quality of the school).
B. Act as a sort of daycare, so that both parents can go to work and keep the wheels of the economy turning (or the computer mice clicking, nowadays).
C. Job security for the staff.
B+C can be easily done without accomplishing much of A, and the only thing than can guarantee at least some A is pressure from the parents. But in some places, concerned parents with enough time and energy to do that are so few that they cannot move the colossus. Moving away or finding private school for their kids is simpler.
That was delegated to Sesame Street 40 years ago.
While math has actual course material that needs to be taught, reading tests are more of a general intelligence test. It sounds like there is some serious problem with the math education in Hoboken.
This is one issue that I'm passionate about. Research increasingly implies that homework is probably harmful in elementary; of dubious value in early middle school; and only valuable in high school and beyond.
> and objective performance assessments
I think some of these radical experiments are crazy. But, there's valid reasons to consider e.g. not grading missing absent assignments as a zero. A few of them:
A) If our goal is for grades to reflect demonstrated student mastery --- a missing assignment doesn't indicate that proportion of mastery "missing." Especially if it has been demonstrated satisfactorily on an exam or by other measures.
B) A couple zeroes on a gradebook can be an insurmountable hill to climb-- leaving no further grade incentive at all for students to work hard in the class.
C) Grades are strong motivation for already-strong students with the most involved parents, but can actually be demotivating for the bulk of your class. An effective teacher needs to find other ways to motivate students. For many students, grades are something that can make one feel bad about oneself but not provide an opportunity for positive differentiation.
The classes I teach are "easy A's" in the gradebook for most of my students... and are incredibly demanding compared to normal MS/HS fare. This requires buy-in from my students. I work to build genuine curiosity and in-class competition (on a variety of axes where all students can excel, not just the top couple dunking on everyone else).
Most homework is just something like "read for 30 minutes". Other than that, they do sometimes assign more formal homework, but most of it takes 5-10 minutes, and they explicitly state that if it you spend 30 minutes on it and haven't finished, you can stop.
Every week the kids pick 4 books from a set of books the teacher chose for that individual's reading level. And they get to go to the library and pick any book they want.
And no homework over the weekend, except to "have fun".
It’s so frustrating how worthless it all is too.
For my boys, we went outside school to various providers of math offerings for gifted kids. But quality is rather variable.
Being ahead academically doesn't mean you're ahead developmentally. Rote practice to avoid mistakes and do really systemic work is useful sometime around ages 12-14 -- during first algebra classes for kids on the normal plan. But courses for gifted 10 year olds taking Algebra I at e.g. CTY tend to lean even more into the "rigor", which my kids survived but it was unnecessarily difficult. Instead, they should be looking for ways to shorten problem sets and approach problems from various angles.
That is, whether you can keep a 9 term polynomial straight and avoid swapping signs or coefficients is really a measurement of attention span and focus, not understanding of algebra... and students that are way ahead in math are probably slightly ahead in attention span and focus, but not to a degree commensurate with their mathematical knowledge.
(We really like Art of Problem Solving, though it's pretty intense).
if his situation is anything like mine was, then the answer is likely to maintain good grades to support future educational prospects.
which is unfortunate as this system encourages the pursuit of the grade over the pursuit of knowledge. it took me many years to shake that mindset.
(Indeed, one reason homework may be harmful is the way it can create an adversarial relationship with teachers and condition students to ignore teacher suggestions and feedback).
You have to excel in all coursework on the default track to competing in race of society. There are opt-outs/alternatives popping up, but they're not mainstream.
There are two cultures in the US.
Otherwise this resonates with me so much. Your kids are so lucky to have you.
Everyone's different-- what helps one student may harm a couple others. On average, homework looks bad for the young. One reason why is that there's no one there to enforce correctness, so you could easily have dedicated incorrect practice. There's some neat ideas about this, like flipped classrooms. (You send a video lesson home with 1-2 questions to enforce compliance with watching the lesson, and then have the practice happen in the classroom. But this is extraordinarily effort heavy for the educator and there are other drawbacks).
> Turns out I had undiagnosed ADHD and Autism, and makework was valuable for me early but useless for me as I grew into myself.
I had pretty rough middle school years, too. I'm trying to make it all better for my students.
> Otherwise this resonates with me so much. Your kids are so lucky to have you.
I'm a new teacher (previously an engineer/entrepreneur) and ... definitely one of the weaker members of faculty overall. I'm in awe of the teachers around me. But I'm definitely trying to understand as much as I can from research and my own observations of students.
B) yes, happened to me in higher education, fucked an Electrical Engineering work assigment, got a crushing 0, dropped the whole thing, focused on Maths and CS, changed school, and became a programmer. Gave me a kick to never fail an assignment ever again, so not sure what to do if the 0s are so many the kid just doesnt care anymore.
C) The teacher doesnt need to change how to measure I think, he needs to change how they deliver: if they cant reach the level, either they must move out because they never will and that s fine, or they must be handled specially so they reach at a different speed with a different method. I ve seen first hand you can teach hard math fast and burn most or slow and get most super motivated. Grades and exams being the same.
This is only likely to be effective to the extent that you have extensive support at home and that grades are highly valued by the student.
> B) yes, happened to me in higher education, fucked an Electrical Engineering work assigment, got a crushing 0, dropped the whole thing, focused on Maths and CS, changed school, and became a programmer. Gave me a kick to never fail an assignment ever again, so not sure what to do if the 0s are so many the kid just doesnt care anymore.
Higher education is a far different game than primary or secondary school.
My students tend to complete their work. If I was in a position where I had a lot of not-turned-in assignments, I'd probably look at giving students 2/3rds credit for those parts of the assignment that they'd shown mastery of in some other way (in class or on tests). It's still at best a D, and most likely an F, but it does not pull down the average nearly so much.
> C) The teacher doesnt need to change how to measure I think,
I don't fully understand your comment, but-- what I'm saying is: grades are not a great motivator for most students. We treat them like they are necessary to get hard work from students, but I think teachers who get strong performances from students mostly get them in other ways.
I feel like if I'm relying upon a student's fear of a bad grade as a motivator, that I've already lost.
Isn't the article about removing homework in high school?
Mr. Moreno, the Alhambra High School English teacher, specifically said he no longer gives homework. Doesn't this mean the research indicates he is removing something valuable?
It might all be semantics though.
I assume the "opportunities to improve essays and classwork" is done outside of normal class hours. Perhaps, the work is done at home. And that they addressed your point A by allowing students to resubmit work, and your point B by removing deadlines. I can definitely see how it could be an improvement.
It seems to be broader-- speaking to school district policies that cross the entire gamut from elementary to high school-- but the focus is on high school. Certainly I'd say the case for removing homework is weakest in high school. (I only teach one HS class, and my homework load there is pretty light, too).
> I assume the "opportunities to improve essays and classwork" is done outside of normal class hours. Perhaps, the work is done at home. And that they addressed your point A by allowing students to resubmit work, and your point B by removing deadlines. I can definitely see how it could be an improvement.
I think these are very difficult things to drive as a policy from the top down. Removing deadlines just encourages students to dig themselves into a different kind of hole: an insurmountable backlog of work that makes doing any of it feel less worthwhile.
A small (effectively zero) positive correlation was found between the amount of time a student says they spent on homework in elementary and achievement, but a slight negative (effectively zero) correlation was found when looking at the time parents reported students spending on it.
These measures don't show a causal relationship: "good students" are more likely to do homework. "poor students" are more likely to take a lot of time to complete the same amount of homework.
Elementary student reports of time spent on homework are not reliable. Parent reports are even worse.
The only causal evidence of a benefit in assigning homework in elementary comes from two short-term intervention studies: whether giving a homework take-home worksheet about vocabulary improves performance on the next vocabulary test (it seems so, very slightly). The longest term observational studies show a negative effect.
You are citing research that apparently is stating the obvious, namely that good students are faster at completing homework than poor students. Not sure how that supports the statement that homework is harmful for either group.
Skimming the lit review you linked, homework appears to have a moderate positive effect on the immediate measures of achievement, e.g. grades. Though the effects of lifelong habit of completing one's homework are more interesting than short term grade improvements, and a quick skim of the 60 page lit review you quoted doesn't seem to attempt to quantify this effect.
Food for thought: attempts to scientize every aspect of life, even if the measures used are obviously limited and shortsighted, is perhaps not a good way to steer an entire society forward.
AS SAID: I deliberately sent you the most pro-homework review. Despite being confounded in almost all of the component studies (being based on reported homework completion times rather than amount of homework assigned), no real benefit was shown in elementary.
Grades themselves are truly a mixed bag. They typically conflate work submitted with material learnt, communications skills, work ethic and motivation, as well as any other factors that implicitly seep into the approach the teacher employs (e.g. communicating expectations and meaningful feedback). Grades really should be abolished for more descriptive assessments, unfortunately almost everyone from students to families to schools to boards of education to ministries of education wants quantifiable metrics.
Largely the evidence points towards it being harmful to learning in early educaiton.
> On the other hand, it is mostly intended to promote a certain type of work ethic where those who devote additional time and effort have more opportunities for success.
I think if you ask what homework is "intended" to do, you'll get a million different answers from different stakeholders. I think whether you assign homework or not, there's a massive impact of work ethic upon educational success and attainment of mastery. Some students just go the extra mile and are more successful as a result.
> Grades really should be abolished for more descriptive assessments,
I like grades for MS and up. As much as you talk about the confounds of grading, every criticism you've levied would apply even more to more subjective, descriptive assessments. But I do support emphasizing them less and trying to make what they measure truly be mastery of material.
Do you have a sense of whether that's harmful at the margin (a small reduction from typical produces better results), harmful in total (our results are presently worse than if there was no homework at those ages), or harmful in any quantity?
> harmful in total (our results are presently worse than if there was no homework at those ages)
Most studies compare schools / classes assigning no homework to various "normal" levels of homework, so they imply that our results are presently worse than if there was no homework.
I do assign homework to middle school students. But I don't do it often, and it's typically of the form "think about an idea on the topic of _____ we can discuss" or "do the first couple items of this lab worksheet so that we can use our time in the classroom more efficiently tomorrow." I enforce its completion with social pressure, not the gradebook. "Dude, you were supposed to do the first couple questions on the lab worksheet!"
I have a feeling that there is better homework we could assign that would be useful. But we don't have a lot of evidence of what that would be. Proponents of flipped classrooms think that is the path forward, but the research quality is very dubious in primary education.
I learned the hard way that skipping the homework means bombing the test. You don't learn problem solving skills by listening to a lecture or watching TV. It's easy to imagine you've learned it, till you're confronted by the test.
I remember my highschool chem teacher harping on the class after every test "I'd like to tell you all that if you don't do the homework, you won't pass the test, but toast0 didn't do the homework and did the best on the test so do the work" (or something like that). To be fair, I'd look at the homework, I just didn't feel like writing it down and turning it in, most of the time, so for classes where grading let me skip homework and I felt I had a good grasp of the material, I skipped it.
But, for kids like me, we'll succeed im school as long as there aren't active roadblocks from staff (or other students or other life issues). I think the real question is how to help the kids that need help. How do we get them motivated and engaged and empowered to learn the material?
I certainly was not.
> for kids like me, we'll succeed im school as long as there aren't active roadblocks from staff
I did get some roadblocks from some the staff. I did well in spite of the staff's efforts :-) My biology teacher disliked me (for good reason, I was a jerk), and told me he was going to be very hard on my grades. If an assignment was subjective, he'd give me a bad grade. If it was objective, he was forced to give me As. Fortunately for me, nearly all the assignments and tests were simple checkboxes.
This is true in later education, but it seems to not be so helpful in earlier education. You're far better off with supervised practice than unsupervised, at-home practice in younger students.
The teachers hardly ever filled up the class time, so there was always time to just do the homework.
Typical homework loads today are waaaaaay over 5 minutes per class in MS and HS. Current high school homework loads are on the order of 10 hours per week in many places.
And in fairness, people like you or me, or most of Hacker News-- don't really count. We're outliers and not really predictive of typical experience.
If the school-by-zoom accomplished anything, it gave the parents a window onto what was actually being taught. They didn't like what they saw, hence the pushback in the PTA and school board meetings.
* students in mostly AP classes who were college bound
* students in no AP classes who were mostly not college bound, or were at least limited to community colleges and state schools (Which are great choices! But often have lower success rates and career outcomes)
For the AP students grades were a joke because all the teachers would happily give out extra credit to any student who wanted it, all in the name of college admissions.
For everyone else grades were a joke because all the students cared about was passing, and teachers REALLY wanted students to graduate, and would give grade bumps to any student who needed it.
I believe most schools suffer from this sort of grade inflation, to the point that grades are at best useful for loose categorization (i.e. A+ students, A-C students, F students) and thats it. It never was and never will be a true meritocracy at scale.
Education-first initiatives don't seem to be popular in American politics.
I can understand other valedictorians not doing well in college.
It extremely easy to make it a meritocracy: just impose an externally-graded exam at the end. Then, the students cannot cheat (because it won't be their teachers grading them), and the teachers don't have an incentive to cheat (because high grades with low final exam will reveal their fraud).
Can you be so sure?
What are you really measuring come exam time? It's not an objective measure, that much is sure. Someone who is loaded with work, family, and various other considerations isn't given a due handicap, and even in the event that there is a curve in place, it's still not measuring much. We'd do better to recognize that the measure of man is almost always going to result in spurious data. A D student isn't necessarily dumb, but disinterested, or distracted, perhaps disenfranchised or something along those lines. And grading itself really isn't revelatory, it's easy to game. I just did it, open book quiz with a digital copy, I ctrl-F'd through it and found the answers with ease, I didn't read much of anything, but I did get a perfect score. What does it say, then? That a student can exploit Campbell's law, and the teacher can do the same, so the district can look good and continue receiving grants. It has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with sculpting the metrics to say that someone is intelligent. Grading wasn't always the case, mind you, it was an invention of the late 1700's - and frankly a bad one. But institutional inertia carried it to the present.
What I assure you won't result from dismantling the systematic psuedo-objective measurement of humans is "cognitively handicapped" generations.
...but also completely disingenuous.
Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associates with similar peers.
Student Y is one of n siblings to an illegal immigrant single mom with little to no formal education who works two minimum wage jobs so has no time to help her kids even though she desperately wants to. Y might even be working too just to enable the family to get by, leaving no time for studies at home or homework. (effectively having more work ethic than X, just not for school) Y lives in a dangerous area with sirens blaring and dogs barking all hours of the night and many of his peers are involved with gangs.
Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.
A common objection is "well how are we going to indicate who is the best candidate for a given university admission or job if we don't have grades or other objective measure to filter out the best people!??!???"
But... that's the point we're trying to make: current grades and other "objective measures" DON'T filter out the "best". To an overwhelming degree, they're just proxies for other things. Surely universities and employers can and will find better ways to assess candidates. (or, if that's what they want to insist on continuing to do, filter out underprivileged people, just like they do now)
TLDR the delusion that grades are some kind of objective meritocracy is ridiculous the sooner it's done away with the better.
I don't think that it follows from this that it's unfair for Y/Z to have a lower grade. They did worse. The grade can reflect that. That doesn't mean they're a worse person / student. It means they demonstrated worse performance in the class. How you interpret that later on is a different question, and interpreting Y's lower performance in the context of the environment that caused it is fair.
Trying to change the scale leads to the measurement being meaningless, and worse, can lead to bringing back biases that were tried to be balanced for: in evaluating a student for a job who looked like Y and another who looked like X and got the same GPA, which one is the better student? If you believe that the grades were more lenient toward Y, picking applicant X as an employer just makes sense.
In another context: we report the times of runners running the 100m dash in seconds and hundredths of seconds, regardless of if they're in the 100M final of the Olympics or at a local high school track meet. Is 10.8 seconds a good time? In the Olympic 100m mens final? no. In the US collegiate championships for women? definitely.
The unfairness is pretty obvious, if you don't see it I don't know what to tell you.
> That doesn't mean they're a worse person / student > How you interpret that later on is a different question
This is pointless semantics - we all know exactly how it will be interpreted and what it will mean for Y's prospects to have the worse grades.
> Trying to change the scale leads to the measurement being meaningless
This is literally the exact point I preemptively addressed at the end of my reply.
Your analogy with athletes is nonsensical. We're not talking about comparing the best of the best who are consensually opting into competing against each other. We're talking about disadvantaged people who are subjected to (whether they want to be in it or not) an unjust "grading" system that only highlights and perpetuates their "underperformance"... But sure, we can use your analogy:
Take the top 10 100m dash competitors,
put some of them in all inclusive athletic villages with access to world class facilities, coaches, nutrition etc and let them focus all their time and energy on training
put others in a low income country shantytown with no access to any facilities, coaches, with poor nutrition and no time or energy to train because they have to engage in subsistence agriculture to just survive
then, let them race! It's fair because tHe tiMeKeEpiNg is oBjEcTiVe
When we actually do do that, we seem to get world-beating Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes.
Not so many affluent, well-fed Swiss ones though.
1. Y is worse than X. If you give both of them a math task ("how should I launch this rocket so that it lands safely"), then X is more likely to get it right. The reason why is irrelevant; results are relevant.
2. In contrast to what people like you usually think, performance and context are two different variables. If you measure performance objectively, that gives you a chance to influence context and see which interventions make sense! Maybe giving poor kids' families money doesn't help as much as sending the kids to boarding schools, or enrolling them in extracurricular activities. How could you know? By measuring it! Bottom line, objective measurements are THE BEST way of achieving positive social change (assuming it's your goal... it is mine).
Note that this isn't really exactly what grades measure much of the time. In an ideal world they measure mastery-- but they often measure a whole lot of classroom conduct, who's able to spend extra time on assignments at home, details of information presentation, etc.
My students who I'd judge most likely to get a critical problem right aren't always at the top of the gradebook. Sometimes they're near the bottom. And this is despite me weighing demonstrated capability and mastery very highly.
Would you rather undergo surgery by a doctor who learned his craft well or by a someone who has a kind soul and has endured hardships in his childhood?
Analogies with surgeons are nonsensical. With surgeons and surgeries we're talking about people who consensually opt in to a field where there's very good reason to have extreme filters in place to screen out anyone who isn't the best of the best.
But we're not talking about surgeons entrusted with peoples lives on a daily basis, ffs, we're talking about school children who are subjected to (whether they want to be in it or not) an unjust "grading" system that only highlights and perpetuates their "underperformance"...
It also raises the question, how many kids who would otherwise have made excellent surgeons never get a chance because they're filtered out from an early age?
To be clear, schools can't fix all the worlds injustices. Life is unfair and realistically we may never be able to fix that. But we can stop doing this that are making it blatantly more unfair than it has to be...
Same. For me, though, it took going back and becoming a teacher to see how privileged I was. Mom was a teacher, both parents at home and contributed to my education from an early age (like, doing math as soon as I could talk "How many people are in the car? What if your grandparents were here? Your uncle? What if we took the grandparents away?", etc), etc. My friend group was all in the same situation. Two parents at home, etc. It wasn't until I came back to the school that I realized how insulated I had been and how it wasn't me that was the reason I did so well (Valedictorian), but the support I had behind me that enabled me to do it.
I'm also a teacher and, although you can teach college without knowing any formal pedagogical methods, I've at least looked into the works of people like Louis Benezet (setup a middle school without formal arithmetic) and Ranciere (The Ignorant Schoolmaster). And I've come to the conclusion that backing away from homogenized curricula most hurts 1) bad teachers and 2) textbook companies.
Sadly, no. I hate to sound like one of those 'gifted' people, but a lot of it just came naturally. I never learned how to study; university was a rude awakening, though I still didn't really learn until after graduating there when I started self-studying things.
> Realistically, people like you and I who had a stable upbringing probably would be successful in any reasonable system.
Exactly. I'm thinking now to all my classmates and what they did after. The ones who didn't struggle in school (not necessarily excelled, but they didn't struggle), were all those who had stable households. As far as I'm aware, minus a few who got into opioids (rural America!), most are doing well for themselves. It really does impact a lot.
> I personally attended a poor middle school and didn't learn algebra until 9th grade, but still managed to end up as a mathematics postdoc at a very nice place.
Awesome! Mathematics is what I've started self-studying (I did physics, now dong a physics/applied mathematics masters), and it's super interesting. Just proving stuff is so much fun.
> I cannot wrap my brain around the reluctance to make changes to the system in the face of statistics like the one I mentioned elsewhere and have observed with my own eyes (that is, there are very, very few African American PhDs in mathematics).
Exactly! Part of me thinks it's because it forces us to look behind the curtain, so to speak. If we look at why, we realize it's because of the socioeconomic factors, and then we have to look at what caused that, etc.
> although you can teach college without knowing any formal pedagogical methods,
Sadly, I sometimes wonder the validity of education research. Formal pedagogical methods certainly helped me (I did a MAT while teaching, and there was a noticeable difference), but I really didn't become a decent (wouldn't say I'm good yet) teacher until I had a coworker who really was great and took and interest in explaining things and working with me. It really changed my whole outlook on teaching.
> And I've come to the conclusion that backing away from homogenized curricula most hurts 1) bad teachers and 2) textbook companies.
Absolutely. I'm a huge proponent of public schools, but part of me has really wanted to start a charter school. There would be one major requirement when hiring: the teachers have studied the subject. So your math teachers all have math degrees, English teachers have literature degrees, etc. I think this would really work for lower levels, as you get teachers who are interested in it (instead of being taught math by a teacher who isn't a 'math person', which rubs off on the kids), but because they also understand it at a deeper level and can hopefully find new approaches to it. No textbooks, either. Hopefully it'd be small enough that they wouldn't be needed. Also, at least at a younger level, no homework and let the kids actually be kids and play. I'd argue at least an hour or more recess a day, and a long lunch.
I'd certainly be interested to hear some of your ideas for moving away from the homogenized curricula, and will be looking into those two you mentioned. Thank you!
Using math as an example, you can't master it without a lot of practice, and that practice is homework. Albert Einstein wrote that he was practicing mathematics often and at length from an early age.
what about the kids who, instead of doing the homework, have to do actual minimum wage work and house chores and help raise their siblings? They probably put in a lot more work than you, but it doesn't show in their grades.
If you wanted to help kids from a disadvantaged background, probably the best way would be to make it harder for them to get good grades. Make them work twice as hard as the other kids for the same grade, that will really make up for their background and place them in the lead.
No one is saying "let's teach them less".
> If you wanted to help kids from a disadvantaged background, probably the best way would be to make it harder for them to get good grades
Oh wow I see now there's no point even trying to reply
You're right in the sense that moving away from grades might make it harder for universities to pick out the best students among applicants, but again, defime "best" - is the best student the one with the most knowledge, or the one who was able to systematically turn in homework just good enough to get an A-?
"Black Americans receive about 7 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded each year across all disciplines, but they have received just 1 percent of those granted over the last decade in mathematics."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/us/edray-goins-black-math...
And this is the current production! You don't want to see the statistics regarding the number of African American faculty members in mathematics!
So what else is our current system perpetuating besides inequality? What exactly are we "weeding out" in calculus? Or college algebra?
We don't let kids trust themselves intellectually in the classroom.
Proportional representation of various (tribal, ethnic, gender, religious, racial) groups would actually be the anomaly in nature, not what the parent is identifying as an issue.
It is always math and but never nursing. That alone may shed a little light on our biases.
> There is a cult around intelligence we really need move beyond, given that it is predominately an inherited trait
Just because it's inherited doesn't mean we need to move beyond it. It's the most important predictor of life outcome and should be screened for and nurtured from the moment we find above-average individuals, because they are rare. What we need "move beyond" is allowing people with resources to advantage to their thoroughly average children.
> If kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are not shown how beautiful and useful math can be, what motivation would we expect there to be that could carry them far enough in the subject to get a phd in it?
Right, and the current homogenized curriculum is not great at inspiring very large swaths of the population. It is pretty good at 1) letting people not very interested in mathematics become teachers of mathematics and 2) lining textbook publisher's pockets.
Black people score lowest on IQ tests than any other population group in the world. It's been repeated the world over, dozens of times, over a minimum of 30 years, and psychometricians are dying to somehow disprove it, but have so far been unable to do so. You'll see a lot of assholes who've done absolutely zero reading on this subject post after this saying, "OMG THAT'S NOT TRUE", but if you actually go digging around in Google Scholar and sampling the research, you arrive at the same inescapable conclusion: the highest IQ individuals are Ashkenazi Jews, followed by Asians, followed by Whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by Blacks.
When people read this, they're bothered by it - and rightfully so, because it's troubling - but they don't know what to do about it. No one seems to know. No one seems to know because so far the research is pretty clear on intelligence, IQ, g factor, whatever you want to call it so you can sleep at night... but here's what we know so far:
1. You're born with it or you aren't. Some people have a high g factor, some don't.
2. There's nothing you can really do to "get smarter". Whatever you've got is what you've got. Research consistently shows you can move the needle a few points, and that's about it.
3. There's far, far more variance in population groups than between them, so while Black people collectively seem to score lowest, within that population, there's no shortage of genius-level Black people. Same for every other population group.
Don't ask me what to do about this; I don't know. That problem is beyond not only my capability, but my interest. I just know we have a problem and we need to look into it.
Of course there should be a small part of the education system capable of identifying and guiding the geniuses... but it should be in the context of helping every student identify their internal motivation... which is really the only way to instill the critical thinking skills everyone seems so keen on.
Kids in my classes who are probably not going to be engineers are still having a lot of fun tinkering with engineering problems. Kids in my classes who are probably not going to be computer scientists are having a lot of fun tinkering with ARM-Thumb machine language. Kids in my classes who are not going to be number theorists or statisticians are still going to have a lot of fun playing with elements of number theory and frequencies of elements in English text in my elementary cryptography class.
Some will be superstars and decide they want to do things close to this in the future. Others will decide they want to do something completely different, but understand more of these different paths. And everyone can come away knowing that maybe they won't be at the top but they can still do hard things.
The key is: A) not having a preconceived idea of who's going to be good at something, and B) creating many axes students can differentiate themselves in the classroom, so that someone who is not at the top still has areas to strive and can be a valued member of the classroom community.
So, while it’s possible to have a discussion through slow media like monthly magazine articles, it’s almost impossible to have a constructive discussion on fast social media, e.g. HN.
But we all want and need the other people to be assessed. When we go to the doctor, we want to know they competed for and earned the right to be in that position. A lack of high standards would hurt every identity group. For example, COVID won't avoid or forgive people who are in discriminated groups, or be any easier to heal by a doctor in this group - nature doesn't care.