An Ex-Teacher Made a Video Game That Skewers the No Child Left Behind Act
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We want to blame people. Teachers, parents, administrators, we're all looking for a scapegoat and there's no consensus which group is to blame.
But it's not that simple. There aren't any bad guys for us to nail to the cross. The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality.
Kids in poverty are kids not learning. The only way to deal with the achievement gap is for us to be brave enough as a society to deal with that. Failing schools are a symptom of disease of poverty, not the disease itself.
I strongly recommend everyone read this article: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school...
My wife didn't write it, but it strongly resembles her day to day experience where she teaches.
2. Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think, and have a more realistic understanding of the real world than their wealthy counterparts. It's just the side no one likes talking about, because honestly, it's something society in general is ashamed of. We can build all this great stuff but we can't scale equality.
Look at the lives the parents have. Who do you think the kid is going to listen to and learn from the most? What someone says, or how reality is?
When you say something like this it comes off as pretty antagonistic, unless you're about to explain out where specifically someone has said or implied anything about a students intelligence.
Let me add, I accept that there will be circumstances where family poverty will be a significant factor in educational attainment.
Might be worth pointing out that the GCE O level was only taken by around 30% to 60% of population depending on the policy of the Local Education Authority in which the child lived, the other half (roughly) took the CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education). A grade 1 CSE certificate was regarded as of a similar standard to a pass at GCE O level. So the figures were not that far away from one third not achieving a pass in the good old days when you think about it. These exams were/are taken at age 16.
It might also be worth pointing out that the change from GCE O level/CSE to GCSE took place in 1984. Therefore anyone under the age of (rougly) 47 would have taken GCSEs, and then if academically inclined, would have progressed to GCE A levels, which have remained the main public exam taken at 18 for University entrance. We seem to be managing OKish despite continuous negative commentary on the education system.
GCSEs themselves have changed significantly over the years (pre-National Curriculum, first 14-target NC then various reconfigurations of the NC based on subject after that, then the 2010 and 2012 changes, and now, in England, the 2017 changes).
The UK PISA scores are (currently) bang on the average for OECD nations, and a point or so higher than France in Mathematics and the national language. I'd invite all here to have a look at the PISA sample test questions for Maths, their format and content might surprise you.
At present, I think that the experience in the UK seems to support the thesis in the OA that socio-economic factors are quite significant in educational achievement in the sense that poor (depending on your definition of poor) children don't do especially well on average. I shall dig around a bit more about this whole historical data thing as I feel an essay coming on...
It's not so much poverty as a direct cause, but rather a culture which acts across all levels of society which is secondary to widespread poverty and what was in the past a basic economic reality of the need for a very large industrial and manual workforce. That cultural assumption (that a large percentage of the population can only ever do that kind of work) is now wrong, because of automation and globalization, but it has its own momentum, and an inertia which gives it a continued reality for someone living in amongst it and trying to make their way.
Let's be clear, most jobs don't require "academic excellence" they require abilities pertinent to the job. Primarily a first degree demonstrates intellectual capacity, motivation, and focus. Some positions require a particular academic attainment but it's a first-pass filter for demonstrating one has the capability to acquire and apply domain knowledge.
For example chemical engineers can have a first class honours degree but no knowledge of the financial world, their degree demonstrates they have the analytic abilities and mental capacities that make them valuable in the financial world.
>The reason why it's so difficult to get a lot of kids to pay attention at school is because they're well aware that they won't need trigonometry or literary analysis in the job that they're going to end up doing. //
I don't believe it's that at all. I don't believe that most children have an idea what they will do for work until late in to their adolescence - beyond when they'll have first come across trig and way beyond when they start literary analysis (which basically starts when you start reading books for yourself). How many athletes have to do a press-up [push-ups] in their career? Yet kids don't say "I want to be a football player I'm not doing press-ups".
IMO those same kids will be more than happy learning to make stuff out of wood, or learning about drawing, or learning to grow plants, or learning to make clothing despite not knowing if those skills will feature in their careers later. We treat all children as if they're academically inclined and I thing this is entirely wrong - yes basic literacy and numeracy are important. Yes the more academic subjects should be open to all those who wish to follow them. But also, those who don't want to sit and do book-work all day should have educational options too.
OT: Britain is always going to be a classed society with a monarchy.
I agree, perhaps I wasn't clear enough that I fundamentally disagree with the system I'm describing. The separation between academic and trade jobs was false even in the 19th century, and it is absurd in the modern economy.
> I don't believe it's that at all. I don't believe that most children have an idea what they will do for work until late in to their adolescence
They pick up implicit ideas from their environment and their parents. It is not as conscious as you are making it out to be.
> IMO those same kids will be more than happy learning to make stuff out of wood, or learning about drawing, or learning to grow plants, or learning to make clothing despite not knowing if those skills will feature in their careers later.
Yes, I agree, but the difference is these things feel more immediate than learning trigonometry, which seems like a very long-term investment which is unlikely to pay off, or literary criticism, which feels like a shibboleth for being able to pass for middle class.
I actually think we need to meld the practical and the academic much more - it's not about allowing the 'non-academic' to learn practical skills which will allow them to scrape through, it's about using design, electronics, programming etc to justify picking up useful academic skills which would otherwise seem remote, and also to teach practical skills and practical problem solving to students who would otherwise disappear off into the realms of the ivory tower.
Re your final paragraph - I support that idea though I'm not entirely sure it will be effective. Yes, for some they'll see - "right, if I learn about fluid flows I can move from domestic plumbing [say] to designing optimised mains water fixtures" or "if I learn biology I can help ensure water resources don't negatively impact river ecosystems", but most won't be that inspired, just as most couldn't care less to learn about who signed the Magna Carta just because you told them it influenced the entire legal system from then on. I'm all for child-led learning and have done some flexi-schooling with my eldest child to that end. That said it seems a better basis to move forward on then the current pedagogy - notify parliament and let's make it happen!!
Hah, I was thinking a bit more 'I have ordered a 5x10x7cm electric motor for my model car project, the materials are 2cm wide, so what dimensions do I need to make the casing so that everything will fit'. Or, 'I want to make this computer animation bounce, how do I use maths to tell the computer what I want'.
> notify parliament and let's make it happen!!
We shall inform our MPs, and anticipate legislation being brought forward in the Spring.
Don't most kids look at what their parents do for a living and assume they will be doing that? I know I did, and it certainly affected my perception of the usefulness of school. Why bust ass to make good grades if my future is most likely in something that involves none of the skills I'm being taught?
Coming from a lower-middle-class background, the concept that some people actually enjoy their jobs was always foreign to me. My impression was that a job was some stupid thing that adults have to do to put a roof over their heads. So what I was being asked to do in school was to sacrifice my free time and work really hard now so I can continue sacrificing my free time and continue working really hard in the future. Since sacrificing my time and working really hard were going to be a big part of my future regardless of how well I did at school, I saw no reason not to blow school off and enjoy my life while I could.
I pulled my head out of my ass later on, but hopefully my experience can shed light on why many students who stand to benefit the most from school fail to see the point of it.
It is multi-factoral for sure, but there is also a culture of being fine with saying "I can't do maths", and having people responding with "Yeah, I cannot do maths at all".
The exams I took had trig & literary analysis, but, then the lowest possible grade I could get was a C. The bottom set could get a D or C if they got pretty much everything in the exam right, and being sat next to someone taking those exams, I can assure you there is no trigonometry or analysis of passages in there.
http://filestore.aqa.org.uk/subjects/AQA-43651F-QP-NOV13.PDF
There is still some geometry which I think is a bit futile (questions 12 and 13, particularly memorizing the terminology about 'alternating angles' and so on), and perhaps a bit too much emphasis on specific ways of representing data (the pictogram and the stem and leaf chart).
But in general the emphasis on calculating costs, amounts, sizes, areas, percentages etc is, as you say, about functional numeracy.
Typically, a student who can interpret and answer simple ratio and proportion questions will reach a C grade.
I would expect a student who scores lower than a C grade to have some significant difficulty in answering this type of question:
"Here is an ingredient list for 2 cakes; write an ingredient list for 5 cakes."
As you might understand, students below this level are excluded from almost every skilled career.
In my experience, there are very few students who are intellectually incapable of reaching this level, but there are many (37% of all students in the UK) who don't reach this level because they don't have appropriate educational opportunities.
Universal access to good education is not a solved problem.
Those children are being failed.
The numbers of children who cannot (not just do not) attain grade C in English and math are a rough proxy for rates of innumeracy and illiteracy. The UK has worryingly high levels of innumeracy and illiteracy.
Here's the English national curriculum.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculu...
Here's the maths national curriculum. Key stages 3 and 4 cover the GCSE exam.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...
This sounds reasonable for 16 year old children, but don't forget that this work covers clever children who will easily achieve A.
You can get a rough idea of what a grade C means by comparing it to the new numerical grading system to be introduced in 2017. In that system grades range from 1 (low) to 9 (best) (with U still meaning failed). A 4 is expected to be equivalent to a current C.
http://www.aqa.org.uk/supporting-education/policy/gcse-and-a...
> But there are a couple of indicators to help us with this matching. Firstly, a grade four is going to be set at the level of a current grade C. What this means practically is that the same proportion of students who would achieve at least a grade C now will achieve at least a grade four under the new system. We also understand that a grade seven is going to be set at the level of the current A. That means we’ve now got grades four, five, and six to cover C and B… and grade seven, eight and nine to cover A and A. And if we look a bit more at this very top level – where three grades now allow for greater differentiation – we might expect the top half of the current A* students to achieve a nine grade in the new world.
It's great that there is more differentiation between very high attaining students but it's a pretty low bar.
Whether the scale puts a C on 4 out of 10 or 7 out of 10 doesn't really tell us anything about the ability if we don't know how the grading is done.
I happily stipulate that grading to a curve doesn't, in itself, imply that. But the reality is that some students are not mastering the core material, and we should not be okay with that.
Students dramastically improved their grades in several schools once they were made into exercising with a heart rate monitor (higher heart rate - higher grade) every day:
http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B...
That being said - it's a fun new word that's actually pretty accurate in this situation. The improvements were drastic, and how drastic they were shocked a lot of people (the drama).
Yes, there will still be an achievement gap - that the achievement gap currently reflects socioeconomic factors is unfair.
Money doesn't help nearly as much as time, until you have enough money to hire someone else (or not work).
So.. if you levelled the socio-economic part, you'd start a positive cycle of generations improving, rather than the negative cycle of things getting worse.
Of course they are, but the confounding factor is genes shared between the parents and children. What do adoption studies say about those 2 variables?
Conversely if you have super intelligent biological parents... but are raised in a low-socio and low-education level family... your academic results are poor.
In summary: Genes have nothing to do with it.
If you are actually interested in good education policy you should read:
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker came out in 2002 and showed why this thinking is flawed. The achievement gap is significantly caused by genetic differences, and the correlation to income is not totally causation. The term used by geneticists "heritability" gives the proportion of differences between people (within a population), on some trait, that is caused by genetic differences. The traits that will determine your success at school, like personality and IQ are significantly heritable.
Here's a recent study from the UK that looked at identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins and gave heritability estimates for different school subjects: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273
Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.ht...
>The researchers found that for compulsory core subjects (English, Mathematics and Science), genetic differences between students explain on average 58% of the differences between GCSE scores. In contrast, 29% of the differences in core subject grades are due to shared environment -- such as schools, neighbourhoods or families which twins share. The remaining differences in GCSE scores were explained by non-shared environment, unique to each individual.
>Overall, science grades (such as Biology, Chemistry, Physics) were found to be more heritable than Humanities grades (such as Media Studies, Art, Music) -- 58% vs 42%, respectively.
That sounds right to me. Gated communities, luxury buildings vs slums, FiDi vs. Outer Sunset -- communities are incredibly stratified.
Its one thing to blame someone for something - this is just a base, banal version of wishing they'd be more responsible for that thing. Alas, the tone of the discourse often degrades to the lower levels of human interaction, when really there is an undercurrent to the discussion that is just as valid.
So finding fault in others, assigning blame - these are all just frustrated attempts to recognize that people do need to take responsibility for their lives, their actions. Its hard for teachers to be blamed for the state of poor education when they're not allowed to be responsible for it - when they have standards pushed upon them by fabian government kafka-lovin' "employees" who have never taught anyone a thing in their lives.
Alas, however, there is another factor here, and that is the poor need to be responsible for their lives. They need to take control - however they can - and lift themselves up. If it requires help, then so be it - but you can't help someone who isn't willing to help themselves, and thats the first step. Calling for the poor to 'accept the blame' is one thing; asking the poor to be more responsible for their lives, another thing entirely. The same result is desired - its the degree of help, versus hostility, that makes the difference whether someone is willing to accept the claim, however.
Its therefore important to point out that there is a further responsibility in the equation, beyond just 'blame the poor', and that is 'make the rich more responsible for the poor', too. Its not a single equation, but rather a set of them .. linked together in order to function. And when these links are made and functional, we have a healthy society which boosts the standards of living for all of its citizens. There are enough examples of this to warrant optimism that in fact we can improve our own lives by improving the lives of others, and to ignore the desire to just be defeated by entropy, which is the natural state of the universe.
I would be a bit slow to just point to poverty as the only cause. There is no debate on whether poverty stunts education.
Consider all the other countries with more acute levels where the children, when provided with opportunities, grab for them.
One such would be the increasing percentage of money allocation to functions that are not core to teaching, such as administration, etc...
Another would be the attempt to force uniformity in curriculum down the throats to a deeply suspicious audience...
1) Teachers drastically effect student outcomes. In this case teachers deserve blame for poor student outcomes, and we should focus our efforts on finding and rewarding the best teachers.
2) Teachers don't matter and don't deserve the blame. In this case we should focus on spending as little money on teachers as possible - just find the cheapest warm body for the front of the classroom and focus our efforts on stuff that does matter.
Which is it?
[edit: Upon rereading it sounds like I'm arguing that we must live at one extreme. I actually just mean we need to live on some linear combination of these extremes. The key point is that we can't live at the distant endpoint (teachers don't deserve blame, teachers should be rewarded).]
You'd do better to blame it on gravity, we know how to defy that.
Besides which, if we go to some place like Africa where those students are in far deeper poverty, they sit there listening attentively to their teachers. So I don't think your theory pans out. It's not poverty itself that is the problem (especially not in a country where every child gets a textbook), but a culture that is associated with poverty.
And culture is such an impossible problem to solve, right about now you and I should be hoping that it was still the economic problem you originally claimed. We at least have a slim chance of figuring that out.
Have you ever wondered, kethinov, why it is that we think education is something that can be solved the same way that we solved the problem of "how do we make millions of cars"? We send children to a big institutional building 5 days a week for the 8-to-4 shift, where workers try to pour factoids into their head in assembly-line style, then QA comes around and rejects those with defects for rework. And at the end of the line, a conveyor belt cranks out something that has no spirit, no inspiration, and nothing unique about it? Maybe the same sorts of systems that crank out mass produced retail products is a bad system for teaching our children.
I don't think we're incapable of solving poverty. We've been steadily eroding it piecemeal for centuries. There are new, innovative policy proposals being thrown out all the time to erode it further, of which my personal favorite is a universal basic income, or citizens dividend. That would completely end poverty. All we need is the political will. The way I see it, if it happened for Social Security, it can happen for that some day.
We seem to disagree about how much impact a teacher can have on poor students, but I wonder if there is an experiment we can agree on which will settle the matter.
For example, imagine there are 400 schools which have two math teachers, and that the students are assigned to one of the two teachers at random. Now imagine that each year we give an award to one (out of the two) teachers whose students performed best. If teachers have no impact on student outcomes, we would expect that random chance means after 3 years about 50 teachers have won the award three times. But if we find that 125 teachers have won the award three times wouldn't that suggest that teachers have significant impact on student outcomes?
Sure teachers/school matter, but not as much as the parents from my observation.
Makes me wonder - has anyone built courseware for 5-15 year olds that dynamically adjusts problem topics based on the interests of the student? e.g., maths problems featuring soccer players (angles, speeds, curves, etc) or maths problems featuring rockets or whatever a kid might fancy.
Some of them were smart kids, but they had no proper upbringing. They didn't know what to do, how to act, how to be, and the school sure as hell didn't teach them that. The school filled their head with interesting but useless facts, such as George Washington was our first President. Sure, we should know that, but that won't help us navigate the increasingly complex world that we keep building around ourselves.
To put it bluntly, these kids, some of them I called my friends, had no spiritual health (or whatever you want to call it). They didn't know how to force their minds to focus, they didn't know how to prioritize their goals, they didn't know how to make goals in the first place. They did what they were told.
Some of them have moved out of state and went to college (again, because they were told to, our school pounded it into our heads that we need to do well on tests to get into college, as if college was the end goal, or even a meaningful step on the journey of life), and are most likely now in debt in over their heads. Some of them probably lost their jobs, some of them probably lost their homes, some of them probably had kids and now work at shitty jobs just to keep food on the table.
The ones that didn't move out of state? I know that some of them are in prison or jail somewhere (thanks, grapevine). I know some of them do drugs (some of them did drugs in high school just to deal with how shit their lives were, I doubt they quit when they got out of school; nothing hard though, virtually all of them were potheads).
Teachers matter, but your first and most important teachers are your parents. You learn how to be and act through them, and if you don't learn what you're supposed to from them, you're just going to turn into a rather angry human that doesn't really make it in life.
What I'm afraid is, my entire generation isn't going to make it in life, and that is terrifying. I'm 31 now, and if I knew what I knew then, I would have probably kicked a few teachers in the nuts for what they put their students through.
Which is one of the conclusions of series four of The Wire ..
Kids have to be taught how to be normal human beings first, BEFORE school can teach anything. And that education to be a human starts at home, with parents.
How do you fix poverty? By fixing the education.
Oh wait, hang on...
I think there's a distinction between forced poverty and chosen poverty. Are the poor people you're talking about actively trying to become wealthier? If not, then poverty isn't the real problem.
A group of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina got some money from opening a casino. They decided to share profits, giving $6000 a year to each person in 2001 for instance. It's more or less a basic guaranteed income. So what happened to these people who'd lived in poverty before and now got a bit more money?
Children who were moved out of poverty saw behavioral problems declined 40%, crime declined, and high school graduation rates increased. Like magic! See [1] for more. Main takeaway -- money increased parenting quality; parenting is key to success.
Money can solve a lot of problems. Do you know how regular people try to actively become wealthier? They work more hours a week at minimum-wage jobs (ok -- add a second 20-hr/week part time job to your 40 hrs and you make less than 550 extra a month after taxes, and you are working 60 hrs/week so can't care for your own children that well). Or they become real-estate agents. That's a waste of time. If actively becoming wealthier were so easy these scrappy hard-working people would have done it.
I disagree with poverty being the root of the issue. It's one of them, but not the primary one. There are many examples a society was desperately poor but they escaped it with education. Look at some Asian countries. Good example is S Korea. They were desperately poor just barely 1-2 generations ago. The cards were really stacked against the country (no natural resource, infra wiped out by vicious 3 year war, uneducated population, requirement for maintaining large army etc) 6 decades ago, and it was pretty much just improving education that got them out of the hole.
Fake because it was not designed to work - it was designed to require essentially no new funds.
Solutions to school problems exist, are known and were not chosen.
Raise teacher pay, make teaching a desirable career. Provide good school food, provide homework assistance, provide school buildings with low noise levels, provide working ventilation to lower classroom CO2 levels, make sure buildings are not fungus-infected ... the list goes on and on.
Isn't this policy a federal intervention? If school funding is an issue, why not increase it at state or local level?
> Known solutions to school problems exist,
You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane!
Yes, why not? However, as a federal intervention - it was not designed to work.
> You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane!
Evidence contradict your claim. Finland has strong teacher unions. And the measures I mentioned are largely orthogonal to teacher unions.
Finland has been falling on the PISA tests and on other rankings does not do that well.
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-fo...
The answer is clear from the international results. If you want a high performing school have big classes, high stakes tests and loads of repetition like the high performing Asian schools do.
Or you could ponder why with such great schools why developed Asian countries like Korea and Japan don't run rings around the US in, say, software development and if, in the end, average school rankings don't really matter that much.
How about instead of beating people up mentally the whole time we instead focus on actually increasing their levels of job satisfaction and see if this doesn't lead to them improving at their jobs?
Or maybe continuing training for teachers?
Or instead we could just make everyone really easy to fire because this clearly leads to excellence and a real diligence in so many jobs. E.g. see the fast food industry or banking (where vast pay deals are needed to offset the essentially rubbish working environment).
The answer to an educational poverty gap is to remove the ability for teachers to gain support for professional development and to find easy legal representation?
Most teachers have a very strong moral underpin to their desire to teach - they want to help students to attain the best possible outcomes (not necessarily financial wealth); unionisation helps them to voice that desire, as well as avoid unfair employment practices and buy in to a system of professional development.
http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/NEA_Vision_Mission_and_Values... is the "Vision, Mission and Values" of the NEA, the largest labour union (if Wikipedia is right!) in the USA.
If you look at the NEA's website you'll see one of their key issues being addressed is achievement gaps, http://www.nea.org/home/AchievementGaps.html.
I fail to see how preventing professionals from working together helps the situation.
Re tenure in particular; is preventing legislatures from firing teachers without a just cause really going to help? You can fire teachers for failing to perform efficiently in their role, for "action unbecoming" of their position; you just can't fire them and not provide sufficient grounds. That doesn't sound insane if you're wanting to provide a stable environment in which to build a professional workforce.
First, if you think that teacher performance isn't evaluated, you're simply too uninformed to be participating in this discussion. Not only is there constant testing, in many districts pay is heavily linked to it. For example, where I live in DC the performance bonus for an exceptional teacher is nearly half of their annual salary!
This has a number of problems: the most obvious being that there are many factors outside of the teacher's control – poverty, attendance problems, untreated medical conditions, etc. – and the most damaging being the fact that you're talking about small sample sizes which means that from one year to the next a teacher's performance will “change” entirely due to the fact that last year they were randomly given better prepared/motivated students than this year. Cathy O'Neill was looking into these numbers for NYC and concluded that nearly 600 teachers a year are likely to be unfairly punished for random variations: http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/03/how-many-nyc-are-arbitrarily-...
Moving on to the questions of unions, again you need to learn more about the field before evaluating anyone's claims for how to fix it. Too commonly people on HN assume that teaching should work just like our high-demand, high-pay programming jobs and that mistake steers everything else badly astray.
Consider what happens in each scenario if you disagree with your boss, and ask yourself why there might be a stronger need for a union to protect workers’ rights in the second case:
Programmer in an at-will employment situation: 1. “We're not doing this right” / “You're fired” 2. Call a friend / actually reply to a recruiter 3. Interview tomorrow, start a new job in a week or two unless you decide to take a break
Teacher in an at-will employment situation: 1. “We're not doing this right” / “You're fired” 2. Since positions rarely open up during the school year, sit around for the next 6 months wondering how to pay your rent. 3. If you don't work in a major city, your former employer is probably the only employer in the same county so you either need to move or your commute just became much longer. Hope you don't have any family to make that complicated… 4. Be prepared to explain why you left, which is quite unusual and disruptive for the students, which is not your fault but will often be held against you. 5. If you do get an offer, remember that since turnover is low in good schools, unless you live an area with rapid population growth most of the positions which open any given year are probably going to be in the more stressful schools
I'm sure the answer is complicated.
People keep saying this, but they leave out the fact that it's not spent equally in all places. In poor neighborhoods, the schools there do NOT get the same amount of funding as they do in wealthier American nieghborhoods.
A friend of mine taught in a poor nieghborhood. She and I had to buy books and supplies for the kids because the damn school was so underfunded.
One major example is special-needs: a single kid who needs an aid or therapist drives up the average massively but that spending doesn't benefit their classmates at all, and urban districts tend to have more of them for various reasons. (This is also an interesting factor in the charter school debate: few of the accusations about cherry-picking students note that some cities don't give the charters the same extra funding for support services, creating a massive penalty for admitting each student)
E.g., some private high schools (for the rich-rich) charge up to $30k and more, that's less than a lot of really good universities for goodness sake.
[1] http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/stud...
Also, The Education Law Center has found that low-income public schools overall spend $3,000 less per student than their wealthier counterparts, amounting to $75,000 less per 25-student classroom, yet low-income districts contain many more students likely to have higher needs due to poverty, English Language Learner status, or disability.
[2] http://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ELC_schoolf...
In other words, I'm sure the right-wing can cherry-pick anomalies (like they do with climate change, etc. and look like fools throwing snowballs on the Senate floor [3]) while disingenuously attempting to prop anomalies as "the norm", but the greater reality is that low-income areas tend to get less funding for students overall -- and, it's a problem.
[3] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-jim-inhofe-throws-snowbal...
Or, to take it further, it's quite likely a Veblen good: because only families that can shrug at $30,000 a year for private school will be going there, your kid will only associate with other rich kids, creating valuable romantic and professional networks.
It's hard to follow your jumbled sentence. However, it appears you're implying low income areas get the most funding.
That's a right-wing myth that's spewed from places like the Heritage Foundation when they attempt to profitably indoctrinate the public into privatizing schools, etc.
The truth of the matter is The Education Law Center has found that low-income public schools spend $3,000 less per student than their wealthier counterparts, amounting to $75,000 less per 25-student classroom, yet low-income districts contain many more students likely to have higher needs due to poverty, English Language Learner status, or disability.
http://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ELC_schoolf...
So, if we are to examine the realities of the situation, we find that the kids with special needs who desperately need more funding -- often get less.
Also, if you've ever had personal experience within schools located in low-income neighborhoods as many teachers and myself have had, you'd know this very directly.
You can certainly find anomalies, but to prop up anomalies as the norm reeks of agenda instead of truth-seeking.
I should also mention that I agree that funding alone certainly isn't the only issue. How the funding is applied is very important as well. However, when funding is woefully short in the first place and kids don't have the materials and supplies they need for a proper education, we have a core problem there.
Finland requires a graduate degree and (I think) a couple of years of on-the-job training in order to be allowed to teach at schools. In America, applying the same standards would mean that the prospective teacher not only has a significant amount of student debt, but would then also be pretty slow about paying it off. In that situation, why not aim for a better-paying job to begin with? It's not that teacher pay is low relative to the average wage in the US, it's low relative to what a college degree can get you.
For similar reasons, France can pay its doctors less than America and still have them be happier with the system.
In short, the US needs to spend more to pay people in high-skill professions because of higher inequality; also, other countries spend money on things that are not accounted for under primary and secondary education (such as free tuition), but later help with keeping down costs.
I'll note that education spending does not in and of itself fix the problem. There are plenty of affluent countries that perform poorly on the PISA. Attracting qualified teachers is only part of any solution. If you can't attract them through pay (which in principle is possible, not everybody wants to be rich), then the job needs to have perks to make up for it; but the soul-destroying bureaucracy of NCLB is pretty much the opposite.
Any reason to believe any of this helps, other than 'common sense'?
The problem with the achievement gap is trying to pretend there's no inborn ability. There's always going to be an achievement gap. The schools should focus on marginal improvement, not average stats.
The meta-problem with schools is you have amateur policy makers (aka Politicians) making decisions based on voting outcomes, rather than expert policy makers making decisions based on student outcomes.
There isn't always going to be an achievement gap. Look at japan's literacy stats...
LMGTFY?
> The problem with the achievement gap is trying to pretend there's no inborn ability. There's always going to be an achievement gap. The schools should focus on marginal improvement, not average stats.
I don't think anyone is pretending that there is no natural variation in ability - however, the natural variation seems like a poor excuse for bad food and fungus-ridden schools?
You made the claim. Do you have anything to support it?
It seems you expect me to spend 20 minutes validating each of your claims for you. I'm not going to produce your argument for you; if it's only your cached thought then just say so, it's fair enough. If you actually have studies backing your belief, it shouldn't be that hard for you to cite them.
1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629611... 2. https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2009-...
Not kidding; from experience.
There are a number of studies showing the physical activity and good nutrition improve school performance. You can start here for nutrition studies (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18336680); the citations are also informative, as usual.
Pretending there is no inborn ability gap is unnecessary when we have conclusively demonstrated that we can create gaps through environment. (Just put a poor kid in a rich school and their performance goes up dramatically, and put a middle-class kid in a poor school and their performance goes down.) It is irresponsible and not scientifically or rationally defensible to just throw up your hands and say poor kids are born dumb, so it's reasonable to have a 62% high school graduation rate in DC and an 85% rate in Massachusetts [1]. Average stats are a fine place to start to identify blatant differences in outcome. We're not at the point where inborn ability is making a big difference, honestly.
[1] http://www.governing.com/gov-data/high-school-graduation-rat...
Throw more money at this problem we've been ineffectively throwing money at for decades[1]. If we just spent a little more money on education, it would work. It's the perfect unfalsifiable position. If you say "spend money and it will fix things," and it doesn't fix things, you can simply say, "oh, you didn't spend enough, or you spent money on the wrong things. You spent money on these issues, but you should have spent it here instead. Try again."
This is not a problem that will be solved by "more money." It will require social and institutional upheaval.
1. http://www.objectobot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/cato_an...
And fixing them will fix rashes and fungus induced problem, will fix CO2-induced drowsyness, will fix excessive bloodsugar variability.
It may not bring world peace, and fix global warming, but why invent excuses to not fix fixable things?
What they're great at measuring is which schools have the most kids in poverty and which schools don't.
Maybe it would be more sensible to reverse the law's provisions. Give schools which test poorly more money, not less. Use that money to mitigate the horrifying effects of student poverty.
One of the problems I see is that this got mixed up, both at school and university level. They say they provide education, but what they actually do is provide training.
As for education vs training, that's a great question. A lot of my students want training initially because they are concerned about their economic futures.