L.A. students have high grades but low test scores
latimes.com
latimes.com
Eventually someone who can’t read or add simple numbers just can’t succeed at a professional level. Schools can claim whatever they want, water down grades, eliminate standardized tests. Eventually reality hits. Once you send an email and it’s grammatically moronic and full of typos, the jig is up.
I don't think anyone ever noticed.
That the school does not care about education.
After all, if I find a misspelling on a headline on one of my web pages, I fix it. Wouldn't you?
Spelling is different from other domains of education like mathematics, however: an explanation of "correct spelling" is not to be found in natural law, but rather in a Katamari ball of historical contingencies of chance, intervention, and everything in between. (Why'd we keep the _-ough_ in words like _through_? What if the Simplified Spelling Board had succeeded in its aims and totally reformed English spellings? What if Scots, not the English, had had linguistic dominion over the United States? Etc.) Moreover, in large part because "correct spelling" is derived from one very peculiar and privileged variety of English that not everyone speaks, your ease of access to correct spelling is going to be facilitated or hindered by facts about your SES, race, and ethnicity.
This is why I don't really care when I see a spelling error anywhere, unless genuine confusion results, or stakes are high enough that adherence to a rigid standard must be maintained. In many ways, nothing is gained from imparting it to a small child compared to something like basic arithmetic. And moreover, in some contexts I think it's not unfair to call an evaluative insistence on standardized spelling a vehicle for linguistic and therefore ethnic chauvinism.
I understand your original reaction--having proper spelling is a display of fitness to teach, in the same way that, say, having won some Kaggle tournaments is a display of fitness to do data science. But spelling is a rather peculiar thing to insist on, and I'd have been much more interested if the teachers had been writing out multiplication tables on sandwich boards. Spelling is sociologically thorny, and there are bigger fish to fry.
It's not a sign in front of a coffee shop. It's a sign in front of a school that's supposed to care about teaching the kids.
No? That's what QuillBot is for, and QuillBot, like, exists. It's already the world we live in. Anyone for whom English is a foreign language, anyone with sense anyway, already is using QuillBot before sending an email.
And even a grammatically correct email might be confusing, etc.
What I am saying is that it is demonstrably the case, that writing with stupid grammar and spelling mistakes is not a problem for working professionally. Tools exist that can fix it adequately, and people actually use them.
I'd like to think so, but I'm getting the sense that maybe not. I've been observing businesses having to be incredibly tolerant of the poor performance of new hires, I guess because they can't find better. In academia, it's been getting harder for decades to hold to past standards.
I want to think that but I'm old enough to observe that often it doesn't. If someone has connections or some other unfair advantage, they can go through life succeeding higher and higher without any competence.
And that is assuming there even if a buck. Plenty of people are entirely happy to destroy their kids future as long as they can pretend they didn't know (or that it hasn't actually happened). That's true for education. LA parents are happy with low test scores as long as they can get low taxes and high grades to point at if anyone starts asking questions. The same is true nation wide and internationally in the anglo-sphere west at least. If one citizen cannot read or add up, that is a problem for them. If no one can, that's a problem for society/government/employers etc.
Healthcare is very heavily interfered with by the government. Public education is totally the government. Isn't it amusing that those are the poster examples for "failure" of the free market?
Let's take the software industry. It is nearly completely unregulated. It's been a resounding success.
We tried private healthcare, it failed and the government had to step in. The same for education. The idea of using the free market for education is already defunct because education isn't software development. It's much harder to measure success or failure.
It didn't fail. Healthcare was cheap, plentiful, and advanced until the government stepped in.
> The same for education
How/when did it fail?
I don’t think we’re necessarily contradicting the parents post though. You need some people with some amount of competence to get work done. If it’s more valuable for individuals to play political games instead of delivering value, and the people who deliver value are ostracized, the team, or organization will fail.
If the organization is one of those too big to fail companies, of which our country has many, the buck will stop at our nation being over taken.
Thankfully state standardized tests haven't yet been watered down.
Test scores are often comparable internationally.
- less than half of 11th graders meet or exceed the state standard for math
- almost 90% of high schoolers graduate
What does 'graduate high school' mean? Does it just mean you showed up?
I regularly read in the local paper about union teachers complaining about "high stakes testing".
Even our more advanced tests have issues there, so you get university admission packed with people in the top percentile, with single digit sometimes deciding whether you're in or out.
It helps that pupils have a choice of their test for wherever they want to apply, so they generally pick what they're best at.
Basics (language and maths) regularly get >80% except for special cases. Extended similarly. Special cases tend to completely flunk it, that usually being less than 15%. Latest COVID bumped it up somewhat.
The problem is not really the testing, it's what the tests are testing for. The maths basics test some rote memorization of basic trigonometry and application thereof, including linear equations. Language test reading comprehension and whether you read a book in the syllabus, plus can write mostly coherently and logically, plus some analytical techincalities. The reading comprehension on basic is literally on the level of newspaper column. Extended does not test an unfamiliar technical text either.
Physics and chemistry likewise test mostly rote pattern application. History, geography, even more so.
And the problem is that university requires more than that. You start getting more open ended maths tasks, unfamiliar language in unfamiliar subjects in books... None of them tests basics of being able to learn, as that is not taught.
(As to test results, there's a clear gradation between academic middle school, technical middle school and finally faulty system of job middle schools. It's mostly about filtering and focus of the pupils there. They tend to get worse grades too. Usually people get failed on maths.)
The tests work.
At Caltech, the tests were open book open note. That means that memorizing rote rules did not work at answering the test questions.
> with single digit sometimes deciding whether you're in or out
That's inevitable when you've got 100 people applying for 10 positions. The same thing happens in sports, where one thousandth of a second distinguishes the winner from the forgotten loser.
This is not universally true.
Eg the world's richest and second richest (or 10th and 11th richest) persons differ in their wealth (or income etc) by more than a fraction of a penny.
Details depend on the underlying distribution.
Do folks like Zinger seriously believe that these kids are actually getting a good education, and the problem is just that the tests aren’t measuring the right things?
Of course not. They're just never going to admit they're doing a bad job, and need a messenger to shoot.
Folks like Zinger believe whatever the narrative prescribed by the institution in which they're very comfortably ensconced require them to believe. In this case we're dealing with someone that directs the education of teachers and awards UC Irvine credits, which automatically deliver higher teacher compensation as per their union contracts. You won't be surprised to learn that these courses are rather easy and short; typically just sitting through a few lectures.
It's a racket, and you're listening to a racketeer.
Then the universities can take the brunt of the responsibility for figuring out which of those bodies are actually doing their job or not, in addition to the test scores they pump out. Which means, yes, more administrators.
If the solution were more administrators the US would lead the world in test scores, setting new records annually.
https://www.statista.com/chart/11058/bachelor-tuition-fees-i...
Give the teachers a base pay. Then, they get a percentage of a bonus amount. The percentage is calculated based on the percentage of the students in the teacher's class meeting grade level standard at the end of the year. The teachers will figure out how to teach them. Money, especially if the bonus could be 20-30000, is a big motivator, but those bonuses are still cheaper than the failed programs usually tried.
Q: what if a teacher gets assigned a poorly performing cadre of students?
A: assign the kids randomly to teachers. The ups and downs will average out.
Q: what if the teacher cheats on the year end tests?
A: have an independent authority do the testing
Q: what if the teacher teaches to the test rather than anything valuable?
A: change the test so that passing it reflects learning
Weird to say it's simple.
Besides, businesses operate on metrics every day. It's the bottom line. It works. You just have to pick metrics that are the goal of the organization.
My best guess: It is possible to weed out non-productive KPIs, they are still extremely useful for breaking down reality distortion fields, but it takes an honest and thoughtful person with a good grasp of both the business and how the stats are collected - combined with management buy in. I have a feeling highly bureaucratic gov organizations won’t have either the talent, iterative approach, nor incentives to actually find the right metrics that matter.
Those seem like two different problems with two different solutions. For ex: solving the environmental issues for the smaller subset and better correlating grades with actual outcomes in education for everyone. Especially if it risks masking problems and may ultimately harm more than it helps.
OTOH metrics and objective standards are definitely worthwhile indicators. Agreed. In fact, in the modern age of data I think we ought to look at more things to see if there is a latent pattern positive or negative. Reading and math scores are not enough. I want to see physical fitness data. I want to know how many words per minute kids can type. How many dental cavities do they have. Can they pass a civics quiz on state or federal government. Do they know basic geography and have some literacy about the world.
Incentives need to be based on obtainable goals and targeted improvements. Payouts (bribes!) to students for good grades and scores actually really work. Money helps kids internalize the societal value placed on their performance. Similarly, targeted bonuses for teachers work too, but only if formulated relative to the characteristics of enrolled students. See the literature by R. Fryer, for example
How?
2 + 2 = _
How would you determine if a student understands arithmetic?
I think arithmetic in general is actually one of the most difficult things to test understanding of, because there’s not a whole lot of understanding involved. It’s kind of axiomatic for the rest of math to build on top of. I would attribute “understanding” more to being able to synthesize useful results from properties like addition and subtraction being inverses of each other, being able to form relationships like “two small numbers added together are always less than two big numbers added together”, etc. But I did actually start this thread by asking how you would test for this, because I believe doing so is quite difficult. I don’t think I’ve seen many a test that people haven’t tried to game without “understanding” the subject.
Besides, work enough arithmetic problems and you'll inadvertently memorize them anyway.
Boston $60k https://btu.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Salary-Grids.pdf
Seattle $65k https://www.seattleschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Ce...
LA $55k https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/doma...
SF $60k https://uesf.org/members/2017-2020-contract/
NYC $60k https://cdn-blob-prd.azureedge.net/prd-pws/docs/default-sour...
Looks like you can add $10-20k with a masters and a few grand per year of tenure.
Key word in my comment was “competitive”, which these aren’t for trained/skilled workers with other options.
Don't get me started though! College is even dumber. 36 weeks of class per year for 18 year-olds? Wtf. Kids graduate high school and ought to be in class or an apprenticeship the next Monday. Most young adults go to non-selective universities to get simple credentials like nursing or education. It's not about fancy internships at Google or other nonsense like gap years. That's relatively decadent stuff most young adults can't indulge in.
Education: Every school has dozens of well-educated and committed teachers; together they can focus on improving quality and streamlining away the BS.
Private school teachers earn less than public school teachers, but private school students get much better educational outcomes.
Good ones may pay more.
Teaching in private schools also tends to be an easier job, mainly thanks to selection bias giving you an easier set of students to teach, and (oddly enough) school admin being both willing and able to tell parents to fuck off and go away if they or their children are being jackasses and won't shape up. Public schools can't do that. Turns out decent-or-better private schools would rather lose one paying student than let them make things worse for the rest, risking several paying students (and the good ones all have waiting lists anyway—they'll fill the slot, no problem).
> the differences between students will definitely not “average out” at this scale
Of course it will. Assigning kids at random will produce an average over time.
> how do you expect to handle poorly performing schools as a whole?
The teachers in that poorly performing school will have a powerful incentive to do better.
> Do you not expect the quality of teachers there to just plummet?
I expect if you dangle $20-30000 if they do better, they'll do better. Monetary incentives work.
And in businesses that pay commissions, the people who are good at getting those commissions (i.e. they're good at their job) want to be there. They're not satisfied with just a salary. High commissions attract the best.
Can you provide evidence of this? CEO compensation is a terrible model that encourages short term tricks like stock buybacks, front-loading revenue, and other tricks to garner short term performance. As for rank and file employees, measuring results is difficult … just like in schools.
> measuring results is difficult
And the better job of that a company does, the more profitable it becomes. Companies have a very strong monetary incentive to do an effective job of that.
> CEO compensation is a terrible model
Is it? Executive bonuses etc. at Boeing crashed along with the MAX crashes.
Jumping to "my solution's just too edgy, and that's why nobody will like it" before having a good grasp on the issue is perhaps premature.
> edgy
It's not about edginess. It's about the public teachers union that blocks any and all attempts at merit pay.
> A: assign the kids randomly to teachers. The ups and downs will average out.
This punishes students who can't get streamed to classes that challenge them at a degree appropriate for their aptitude.
Then you will just need to convince people to vote to (more than) double what we pay teachers (and eat the resulting tax rises) to fund the resulting bonuses for at least some of them.
Clearly grades are worthless here. But that doesn't mean there is a better system. Especially given what people are willing to pay and the complex other inputs...
(Not that I don't see the appeal of your proposal.)
My proposal caters to that desire for equity. Random assignments to teachers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
Grade inflation in private schools is even worse, since they don’t want to risk a parent pulling their kid (and losing the $10,000s in annual tuition fees that parent pays).
There are rigorous private schools, but many are abysmal.
Overall: “The average yearly tuition at one of the 22,440 private K-12 schools in the United States is $12,350 in 2021. This includes the average tuition at a private high school of $16,040 and the average tuition at a private elementary school of $7,630 (Hanson, 2021).” https://research.com/universities-colleges/average-cost-of-p...
It also gives a breakdown of expensive and cheap states.
My city has (I think) six of the last type (but not all are full k-12, some are high school only, and two are actually Catholic but they're the better variety than the common ones, and pricier)—and I'd say 20 or more of the cheaper varieties, with most of those being religious schools. Drags the average down.
In addition, there is a very strong bias to wealthier students in private school, and these students tend to score above average in any case, so these schools would perform well enough.
- Stop scoring the tests, instead give them "Pass", "Fail"
- Get rid of tests completely
- Hire Eric Cartmanez as a teacher