Oakland Charter School: Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education

I think a counter point (which I don't agree with) might be a question of slippery slopes - and a problem of many rules based systems. They deliberately avoid allowing for exceptions in an attempt at sending a message to everyone / meeting the needs of the aggregate thinking that it's a true trade off in allowing for individualized approaches/exceptions.

I don't know what the environment is like in Oakland - never been, don't have any reason to think I will, but let's say that it's a very difficult environment, while some of their measures may seem extreme, it's sort of like the broken windows/fences approach to teaching. The thinking would be that by clamping down on the small offences, no one even thinks to commit to the big ones. Personally however, I don't think that that should have been considered an infraction or that it should be considered a broken window.

> My experience in California's public schools suggests that the teachers most likely to get fired are the better ones, and that the administrators making those decisions are obscenely incompetent.

I've no doubt that that's true, but it need not be a problem.

What if we let parents move their kids to a different school and found that, on average, parents move their kinds to better schools?

If we did, we'd find that schools that made bad decisions, regardless of reason, would tend to lose students to schools that make better decisions, improving the herd so to speak.

When kids can't move, bad decisions can survive more easily.

I want folks to try to implement better decision procedures. My point is that granting monopolies and freezing things is almost always a mistake because mistakes will be made. There are very good few things that work only in a monopoly.

Or, to put it another way, independent error recovery matters.

Acceptance of authority and teaching to the test are two entirely different issues, and these guys are teaching to modern American standardized tests, not the recitation-style tests described in the Feynman excerpt. On the standarized physics tests I took, you typically got a somewhat simplified physical situation and were asked a question about it. You had to decide what physical principles were involved, what kind of reasoning to apply, and how to set up the equations (if math was involved.) Sometimes the problems were quite concrete. Sometimes they were abstract. Sometimes they only required simple application of an equation (but you had to figure out which equation to apply!) and sometimes they required deep reasoning. Very often the situations described resembled laboratory experiments, and solving the problem correctly required recognizing factors that the problem description intentionally failed to call your attention to -- like the inertial component of the ball-rolling exercise described by Feynman.

The school in the article is being compared to other schools on the basis of standardized tests that reflect decades of agonizing over how to design standardized tests so that they can't be gamed through regurgitation. Besides cultural bias (which I think is a real, valid problem, but which doesn't materially affect science tests) the primary criticism you hear of standardized tests these days is that tests are too holistic and can't separate out all the variables that affect a kid's ability to choose the right answer. For instance, a kid might have a wonderful abstract understanding of chemistry but not be able to balance a chemical reaction, read an electron dot diagram, find "Cl" on the periodic table, recognize the word "titration," add two numbers, or figure out which end of the pencil to use on the Scantron. Modern testing techniques have not yet developed to the point where they can tease out that magic variable of "conceptual understanding" from the background noise of "functional incompetence."

Sarcasm aside, and acknowledging that lab skills are much too expensive to test and can safely be neglected by test-obsessed teachers, teaching to modern multiple-choice tests isn't such a bad way to teach science.

I think these guys are jerks with a simplistic approach to success, but they're a good foil to current educational orthodoxy. Loopy liberal fuzzy-mindedness really does dominate in the public schools. In fact, as a liberal, I would say that public schoolteachers bear a lot of responsibility for the worst stereotypes of liberals in the US. Teachers have no appreciation for practice and the value of rote learning. If basketball were taught the way most public school subjects are taught, the kids would sit on the sidelines all day discussing "issues" like zone versus man-to-man defense. They'd spend ten minutes on the court every week, and nobody would have to touch the ball unless they volunteered, because you wouldn't want to embarrass anybody.

Best case scenario: the keepers of orthodoxy are so embarrassed at getting whipped by conservative troglodytes that they adopt a few practices from them. More likely scenario: they just stigmatize the effective practices as intrinsically immoral and demand that they be banned.

> These kids are essentially the victims of a crime

I would argue that the kids attending (almost) any American public school are the victims of a far greater crime.

Coerced rule following does not imply blindness.

Plus anyone who can't make it just drops out and attends a regular school. That would help keep the API scores high.

Thanks for that. My mistake.