As a former member of a board of education in a major city, I learned a few things:
1. There is no one-size-fits-all plan that could possibly work for education. Everyone is different (duh);
2. Centralization of primary and secondary education institutions is a very bad thing (think fewer and fewer large school districts);
3. Teachers' Unions are possibly the single biggest barrier to innovation;
4. There is no simple, easy answer to improving education.
Unfortunately, I don't have a prescription for fixing things, but I'm sure that centralizing both administrative bureaucracy and delivery standards is not it.
Can you elaborate on some of your personal experiences in teachers' unions stifling innovation?
I don't know too much about this topic, and the few friends of mine who are "in the know" are teachers. Not exactly the best place to get an unbiased opinion.
I can't really give a concise treatment of the issue on here, but suffice it to say that the leadership of the teachers' unions are very, very change adverse. They are first and foremost a union and trade organization that exists to protect jobs and the status quo. Anything that threatens that status quo is usually immediately dismissed. For instance, the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.
Another issue I noticed was a strange aversion to letting anyone other than state-certified teachers do any teaching. The most striking example I came across was a brochure I picked up while waiting for my obligatory teachers' union candidate interview when I was running for office. I flipped through the brochure on teaching your child to read. The brochure explicitly stated that parents should not correct their child's improper spelling or pronunciation because that would somehow stifle learning or take away from the "professional's" ability to "properly" impart knowledge to the child. It was stunning. And weird. And that's why the issue of teachers' unions is complex and at time perplexing.
> Anything that threatens that status quo is usually immediately dismissed. For instance, the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.
Its kryptonite to union leadership because student outcomes involve more than just what teachers control, including what administrators control and how administrators interact with the individual students. No one wants to be held accountable for outcomes when someone else -- particularly their counterparty in the relevant contract -- has the ability to interfere with their ability to influence the outcome.
>the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.
My initial reaction to that was "but surely teacher quality isn't a major issue, when there are so many other problems to solve", but then I noticed that the arguments my brain was marshalling didn't reflect my true objection. At about the same time, I thought back to high school and how I stopped taking Spanish after having a particularly awful teacher for third semester.
That's when I realized that my objection was actually about fairness, not the importance of teacher quality. It's not fair that someone can dream of helping kids learn, study for years in college to achieve that goal, accumulate student loan debt, and then in the end, when they finally stand up in front of a classroom ... be so terrible that they cause kids to drop the subject entirely. It's downright tragic, but it's also true.
I do have some qualms about the idea of evaluating "student outcomes". It sounds difficult to do well (how would they have measured my dropping the teacher's subject?), and prone to unintended consequences. There are a few absolutely phenomenal teachers out there, and not all of the results of that are easy to quantify. If a set of evaluation guidelines axed 70% of bad teachers (optimistic) but also reduced or shackled 20% of the really good teachers, I'm not sure that would be worth it.
Those are some practical issues related to the proposed solution. But I think a lot of people, like me, initially flinch away from considering the problem. I've probably thought about this specific concept at least a dozen times, and I only just now noticed the flinch.
Aside from how do you do it, and unintended consequences, a third issue is anyone who's ever worked in a large bureaucracy knows that the mapping between people who generate results and people who generate great numbers is never 1:1 and in toxic environment (like K12 .edu?) its often -1 correlation.
Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district.
Its a near universal that smart people focusing on turning in good metrics will turn in good metrics rather than doing their job... after all, they're not being paid to teach, but to generate good numbers. So you'll get good numbers. Pity the kids won't learn anything, but ...
>Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district.
Not unlikely. And she's a good example in that she wasn't particularly bad with the material (except insofar as all foreign language education is kind of broken, but that wasn't her fault). But one of the most important things (if not the most important) teachers can do is cultivate in their students a genuine interest in learning about their subject. Instead, I came away with associations of being shamed for not getting things wrong, and of being accused of cheating for trying to extrapolate. This is, to put it mildly, averse to language acquisition.
Anyway, the point is that you're absolutely right. Most of us in her class knew the material at the end of the semester. But knowledge is not very useful in and of itself. Unfortunately, I think that simple fact may be a very big piece of the puzzle, and it's one that the general public seems very far from flipping over.
..not to mention that this is itself an issue caused by poor education. there is nothing quite like 'on the job' learning and evaluation to weed out competence, caring, and understanding from mere intelligence.
looking back, there was no single defining feature of bad teachers I had, but every one of my good teachers were over the age of 40, had previous careers/jobs, and not a single one had a degree (in teaching)..
edit: I think the issue with home schooling is a societal one, we want to set a minimum standard and encourage a minimum level of interaction. I agree that a couple of good teachers make up for a whole lot of mediocre ones.
The strictures of institutional schooling in mandating same-age classes, teaching to test score metrics, and preventing interaction between schools (public/private/home) unfortunately also have the effect of turning this minimum standard into a maximum standard.
>looking back, there was no single defining feature of bad teachers I had, but every one of my good teachers were over the age of 40, had previous careers/jobs, and not a single one had a degree (in teaching)..
One of my favorite teachers my drama teacher, probably somewhere on the younger side of 25-35. The year I quit taking drama classes was the year that she was forced to go back to school because she "wasn't qualified" to teach permanently, having not completed a teaching degree.
It's an interesting matter of perspective. I've been on the teacher's union side of things for a long time and our main complaint has been how the school board is change adverse and is the greatest impediment to fixing the schools.
For instance, back in the eighties, a local district did implement a performance based system for teachers. High performing teachers were rewarded with salary bonuses, while poor performing teachers did not even get raises to match inflation. Then, after a couple of years, the school fired all of the high performing teachers as a cost cutting measure. The incompetent teachers, whose salaries were much lower, were kept on and promoted to fill the departmental roles previously filled by the competent.
As much as you hate lazy, incompetent teachers, we hate them even more. After they waste a year teaching the students nothing and handing out the As like candy, we're the ones stuck teaching all their material on top of our own curriculum to get the students up to speed. We want these idiots to get fired.
Our problem is that the school board never fires them. They give As to all the rich kids, Cs to all the fat kids, and Bs to everyone else. This makes the parents happy, so the idiots keep their jobs year after year. When the competent teachers then grade the students on the little they've actually learned, they're the first on the chopping block.
This is similar to the aversion to non-certified teachers.
I knew a brilliant teacher who taught French for twenty years. During the summer, she'd do consulting work for the french consulate. You couldn't ask for a better French teacher. Unfortunately, this isn't a story about the quality of her French. Instead, this is a story about lowering qualification standards. One year, the state lowered the certification requirements for foreign language education. Initially, this seemed like a great plan. Until the day came that this incredible French teacher was told that she would now be teaching Spanish. The new, lower licensing requirements qualified her as a Spanish teacher, despite her not having even spoken the language in twenty years. Due to her professional pride and dedication, she spent her own money on a three month summer immersion plan to gain some proficiency, but she still wasn't at the level of competence required by her professional pride and she resigned at the end of the year. The teacher who replaced her was just as (un)qualified to teach Spanish, but didn't have the professional pride and is still teaching. While changing the certification requirements has the potential to bring in some brilliant teachers from industry backgrounds, its mostly used to hire a whole new class of idiot.
Granted, I'm not naive enough to believe that it's this way at every district. I've heard the horror stories of teacher union defending complete monsters. I don't want that to happen any more than you do. However, reading a proposal from the school board is like reading an e-mail from a Nigerian prince: no matter how great the plan seems, you know that it's all part of a larger scheme to screw you over.
As much as I dislike teachers for carrying out the orders of their bosses on children, it is nevertheless the case that the whole framework is set up by those at the top; the bottom are naturally employees who do their jobs and are least empowered.
Bosses naturally hate unions because even a weak union carries the possibility of underlings saying "No" to their commands — and getting away with it. A form of defiance.
Evaluating teachers "based on student outcomes" is obviously a trap against teachers, if bosses are the one who define "student outcomes". That means teachers will do awful things like teach to tests. (Clearly, education management isn't about to check "student outcomes" in any reasonable manner.)
I don't exactly know how you go from "Teacher's Unions are stifling to innovation" into "...teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes..." and straight into "...strange aversion to letting anyone other than state-certified teachers do any teaching." So somehow innovative teaching is connected to teacher evaluations, but you will only accept evaluations that link student results to teachers (apparently ignoring things like the impact a student's home life or economic situation will have, regardless of how good the teacher is) but ignore the idea that the state-certified teachers have been evaluated, at least at a basic level, in order to become state-certified? Because requiring a teacher that teaches at the most needy schools to be evaluated on the same criteria as a teacher that teaches at the richest school seems pretty unfair--why would I want that job? The students are more likely to be difficult, the parents are more likely to be absent or adversarial (as opposed to constructive with their child's education), and I'm less likely to get higher raises because my students are less likely to do as well? Particularly in a profession that often requires working late nights and early mornings for relatively little pay? Wooo, where do I sign!
As a side note, I'm curious to see this brochure. Is it possible that the brochure was saying parents shouldn't correct their child's improper spelling or pronunciation because, in education, one of the parent's prime roles would be as their child's cheerleader, whereas the child's teacher should be the one to correct their child's improper spelling and pronunciation? It's hard to say, of course; context is key.
I have two teachers in the family. The primary observation is their management is intensely toxic. So "changing the rules" is primarily oriented around, well, basically screwing over management's enemies using some new rules. It has nothing to do with punishing the "bad" teachers and everything to do with punishing the ones who don't kiss up or are in certain protected or unprotected demographic groups.
Student outcomes is ridiculous because given a reasonably small class size all you're doing is grading the randomness of the kid distribution aka you'll be rewarding / punishing teachers based on which specific kids they get that year. Sometimes a good year, sometimes bad. Statistically its far more valid to grade folks at a higher level aka a larger sample size, so obviously this should be implemented to grade district leaders and principals first... LOL that will never happen because it'll only exist as a weapon.
Making it an even worse weapon, most of the people doing the coaching are the ones in charge of assigning kids to teachers. So you can't fire a teacher for being a black woman, even if you hate black women. But if coincidentally you hate black women and are in charge of assigning kids and the 24 year old single hottie white woman just happens to "randomly" get all the angelic gifted and talented wonderkids, and the uppity black woman happens to have assigned to her all the village morons and wannabe gang members, well I guess the black woman's numbers are going to suck. And thats how, if you hate black women, you legally fire black woman teachers. There's a thin veneer of BS about accountability as a marketing technique to deploy the weapon, but its all about another weapon for toxic management.
Your reading example is ridiculous as I recently completed the same age range with my kids. The argument is that English as a language is completely screwed up with innumerable exceptions. So when the teacher is trying to teach basic phonic sound #17 or whatever, its not helping matters if you confuse the kid with peculiar exception 34 B subsection W item 6.
I understand there are perfectly phonetic languages where what you see is what you get. And there are languages situations where you just have to memorize Kanji. But at least in theory you can teach English to most kids successfully by gradually piling on first basic rules and later weird rules and finally shoveling exceptions on.
Frankly I learned how to read English from pure raw memorization and lots of reading. That's not how kids are taught today. There seems to be little point in blaming teachers or unions for the decision of middle managers in the admin building who selected a particular curriculum. You can homeschool kids using this curriculum you're making fun of if you want, it's a policy decision that has nothing to do with licensing the front line workers or their union or frankly even their immediate supervisors...
>I learned how to read English from pure raw memorization and lots of reading. That's not how kids are taught today
How are kids taught today? I don't remember how I learned English (it is my native language) but I think I know how I mastered it, lots of practice. Writing, reading, reading, and more reading.
I feel compelled to respond as I have been involved with a teachers' union to some extent, albeit as an outsider, and have also studied education.
leadership of the teachers' unions are very, very change adverse [sic]. They are first and foremost a union and trade organization that exists to protect jobs and the status quo. Anything that threatens that status quo is usually immediately dismissed.
Teachers' unions, like any organization or interest group, are at once agents of change and agents of conservativism. Which side of the line they fall on fully depends on the issue at hand and the will of their members. It is interesting to note that unlike organizations with typical top-down mandates for decision making (governments, corporations), teachers' unions like many other unions tend to vote referendum-style on current issues in a democratic way. Such votes are sourced from teachers who actually have the practical in-the-field experience within current era systems, not the "Why don't you do it my way? [but I have little to no experience with the issue at hand, except for my own kids Alice & Bob]" general public.
the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.
You understand that the primary purpose of a union as with many commercially engaged interest groups is to collectively bargain, though they also perform other functions such as information sharing and legal defense. The notion of constantly evaluating teachers based upon student outcomes is clearly difficult to justify to such a group, because it is basically targeting removing the capacity for teachers to collectively bargain. The assumption behind this assertion is that large scale, standardized, test-based assessments are a valid and useful way to validate teacher performance, which itself is based upon the assumption that they are useful to validate student performance. These assertions are certainly being questioned (some would say demolished) in today's pedagogical research literature.
a strange aversion to letting anyone other than state-certified teachers do any teaching
As well as a venue for basic learning, schools are significantly a tool of the state for communicating normalized perspectives on the nation, the environment, and other areas. As such, most states have some restrictions on replacements for these organs by private parties. Some of these are based on valid concerns (children locked at home exposed to weird perspectives), some are probably not (eg. learning from people from non-pedagogical backgrounds). This is the state's resistance, not teachers' resistance.
I can't imagine that most teachers or teachers' unions would support the notion that parents (who in any sane case clearly teach far more to their children than schools ever can!) should neglect to teach their own kids in favour of the state.
Actually, I believe that your point #4 is wrong. Teachers are underpaid, and the fact that most kids don't really learn anything is the inevitable result. Allow me to explain.
For all the rhetoric about the need for teacher accountability, school principals and district superintendents already have the power to fire teachers. Yes, it's true: Primary and secondary school-teachers do have a form a tenure, but it's not the same kind of tenure that university professors have. In primary and secondary education, tenure simply means that there is a more formalized process for firing a teacher. More hoops to jump through, if you will. But, principals can jump through them if they really want to.
The logical question to ask is, so why don't they? They don't fire the bad ones because, simply put, they need butts in seats. Or, rather, feet in shoes in front of the blackboard. If you have 4 teachers for 100 students in 3rd grade, firing one and increasing the average class size to 33 students isn't a tenable option. As a result, the principal must hire a new teacher to replace the one he just fired, and therein lies the rub.
There simply aren't good teachers on the market at the prices that school districts are willing to pay. That qualifier at the end of the sentence is important, so read it again. Many of my cohort from grad school were fantastic teaching assistants in the classroom (many were bad, too, but we'll save that discussion for another time). That's not to say that they would automatically make good primary school teachers, but if I had kids, I would wish that those excellent TAs were in the classroom. I'll bet that many people on HN know similarly talented people from their time in university, who were natural leaders and mentors.
Unfortunately, very few (read: none) of those people who are good at teaching are employed as teachers. Why not? It has nothing to do with teacher's unions or certification requirements or institutional bureaucracy or barriers to innovation, and everything to do with the labor market. Namely, a good engineer or scientist with a masters or doctorate can out-earn a teacher by a factor of at least two. Then there's the fact that an engineer employed as an engineer isn't required to restrict his use of paid vacation days to just a few weeks each year (a couple high-school teachers with whom I'm still in contact tell me that they've never been able to take their kids on vacation for spring break because their spring break didn't line up with their kid's spring break).
So, I think the solution is easy: Pay teachers a salary that is competitive with other high-skilled professions, and you'll get good teachers.
But let me offer a personal anecdote that suggests pay isn't the only problem. If pay were to remain exactly as it were today, but the bureaucratic bullshit went away, I would very seriously consider looking for a teaching position in a high school after I graduate. (I am currently a 4th year Ph.D. student.)
But all of the bureaucracy that goes on just makes it an absolute non-starter. It almost completely destroys the perks of teaching for me, namely, the freedom and flexibility to mold a curriculum. (The perk of having summers off just doesn't make up for it for me.)
Even if you doubled the pay, I'm still not sure I would go for it. But that's me.
Every time I reach a crossroads in my career, I find myself considering going into teaching. Then I recall the cost of becoming credentialed (somewhere in the $20k-$90k range) and the fact that I would make less than half of what I make now, and I can't bring myself to take the option seriously.
It makes me angry that, if you finish your PhD (and maybe even if you don't), you would be perfectly qualified to teach college students, but teaching seniors in high school is out of the question without you going through still more schooling and hoop-jumping. Myself, I have bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics and applied mathematics, but it doesn't matter. The public schools don't want me. Maybe I wouldn't be a good teacher, but maybe I would be. We'll probably never find out.
Some teachers (talented young ones) are severely underpaid. Some teachers (older, lazy ones) are severely overpaid.
The problem with simply raising teacher salaries is that, due to the tenure system in public schools, most of the increase will accrue to the oldest teachers regardless of skill.
>So, I think the solution is easy: Pay teachers a salary that is competitive with other high-skilled professions, and you'll get good teachers.
The problem with that argument is that the supply vastly, VASTLY outstrips demand. How can you possibly argue that we should pay these candidates more when you have 100 applicants per position in most school districts?
Doesn't this suggest a real problem with the upstream pipeline?
Except even if you whittle it down to "qualified" based on nebulous standards, you still get everyone applying with bachelor and/or master's degrees in Education - people who have ostensibly gone through training programs to become the best educators they can be.
I don't like the salary argument because it has worked poorly in practice. For example raising tuition per student did not increase the performance of Chicago public schools, nor did my highschool teachers - who were making about 70K teach any better then our fresh out of college teachers who were making 34K.
In addition to down-voting, it would be helpful if you could explain why you think I'm wrong (because, hey, there's a first time for everything ;) Thanks.
I've come to be skeptical of what everyone believes and no one questions, that schools are failing kids. So much hand-wringing has gone into this issue for so long, so many things have been tried and failed; the simplest explanation to me is that the problem simply lies elsewhere. We can try to force-feed kids more and better education, but we can't guarantee them the kind of jobs they want after they graduate. I suspect the problem is economic, but regardless of precisely where it lies, I don't think it can be fixed through changes to education. It's like pushing a rope.
A lot of people are in agreement that the problem begins and ends with teachers, but this sounds suspiciously like scapegoating.
I'm on your side, I think. Some should skip a big chunk of it.
EDIT: My first comment to you is mostly in agreeance with you. I think it's inarguable that school fails SOME kids, because no compulsory system is perfect. But I took your statement of "are schools really failing kids" to mean "are schools really failing the majority or even all kids" or something similar (are schools failing the most important kids for some value of "important", etc).
That doesn't seem to make it more clear, but hell, I'm trying to vigorously agree with you.
Second response: I'm not sure I really answered your concern head-on, so I'll respond again. There's a widespread belief that American schools are fundamentally broken in some way, which has led them to provide inadequate educations. So, that would be basically all kids, with allowances that some kids will probably learn on their own and succeed anyway, and some schools are probably way above average. But the perception is that schools aren't doing a good enough job of preparing kids to succeed as adults. (I wonder if they have considered that ignorance = bliss.)
Maybe that was directed at me. I'm disagreeing with the conventional wisdom that schools are failing kids. I don't know exactly in what way people think it's failing them, but it's such a part of common wisdom that all you have to say is that schools are failing kids and lots of people will agree with you.
That idea could be on to something. I guess it would have to be tried to see what happens.
I think what people really want is the economy to be better, and since the economy isn't what it used to be, the popular theory is that at some point, the education system got infected with some disease and started to fail kids, causing the bad economy. When the economy was humming, I doubt many people thought the education system failed those kids. The simpler explanation is that the education system was in a relatively steady state and the economy just went bad.
Given the ire that's been directed at NCLB, which was specifically designed to potentially label a school as "failing" even if the majority rich, white kids were all doing fine, I think the answer, unfortunately, is no.
1. There is no one-size-fits-all plan that could possibly work for education. Everyone is different (duh)
Why is that? All able-bodied humans have brains, mouths, eyes, arms etc all of which work in much the same way. If you are making clothing, you don't say "everyone is different", you make clothes based on the same pattern in a relatively small range of sizes.
For people who have specific disabilities, we should make adjustments, but I don't understand why a single way of teaching would not work for most people. Leaving aside whether schools are the best way of teaching.
Because they can pay the substantial premium involved. Collectively, our interest in having as many people as possible moderately well-educated rather than just having a few who are outstandingly well-educated imposes constraints.
our interest in having as many people as possible moderately well-educated rather than just having a few who are outstandingly well-educated
I am compelled to note that our existing socioeconomic, and thus educational, systems operate pretty much the other way around: the revealed judgment of capitalism is that it's better to have a small elite of outstandingly well-educated rich people who can confidently exploit the mob of mostly ignorant masses.
1) Because the same effect and the same processes are displayed at the post-secondary level where capitalist forces operate more strongly than social-democratic ones.
2) Because the capitalists control the government, at this point, so government action is a good indicator of what the capitalist class thinks is best.
There may indeed be a Platonic ideal of the one-size-fits-all school, but does not mean it is discoverable by central planners, especially central planners subject to the political incentives of the education establishment.
So even though "Everyone is different" may be a canard, it may still be the case that the only practical way to improve schools is through a distributed process of trial and error on a diverse set of teaching methods.
And there will be many people for whom those clothes don't really fit (feel, appearance, etc.). A lot of people will simply make do. But many other will alter the clothing or switch to tailor-made clothing. . .or a different pattern with a different range of sizes.
This is a misleading and irrelevant comparison. Yes, the vast majority of the population has 2 arms, 2 legs, etc. that allow enable clothes manufacturers to follow the same template. But this definitely does not imply that this conclusion is extensible to education.
Have you ever worked in a software development company? You've probably noticed that some of your coworkers work better by being isolated and solving things on their own. Others prefer teaming up with a more experienced developer to guide their work. Some need a very detailed spec upfront, while others are fine filling in the holes as they go along.
Would you force the guy who thrives while doing pair programming to work on his own? Sure, he might get some work done, but he won't be as happy nor as productive as he is pair programming.
And the kicker is that those things change throughout people's careers.
Education is exactly the same. You can force everyone in the same mold, but all it will lead to is people performing sub optimally and becoming frustrated. Should education ignore that?
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It's even worth it to take a step back and ask ourselves what the goal of school education should be. The average parent or teacher will probably answer that it is to develop the child's skills and knowledge in a way that will enable him to attend a good college, to secure a good job, and to live their life comfortably.
The more we advance in society, the more we realize that this definition was perhaps sufficient 50 years ago (when it was very common and accepted to stop your studies after high school), but it is becoming less and less so. As our society starts to be comfortable with notions such as minimum basic income, that many jobs can and should be automated, that there will inevitably be more able-minded able-bodied adults than there are jobs available in the future and so on, we need to revisit what the purpose of education from ages ~3-18 should be.
Things we probably want education "of the future" to be about:
- creating citizens that have the means and the tools to instruct themselves and understand the world and society around them
- enabling the children and teenagers to build & live a fulfilling and constructive adult life (we might have to accept at some point that some people are fine playing the saxophone 10 hours a day, while some are fine programming 10 hours a day - one is not necessarily better than the other)
- building the skills to relate to your peers and help them to work towards the previous 2 points. Having worked in educational settings (think boarding school style, with everyday life mixed with instruction) where teenagers would be in regular contact with younger children (for example helping them during programming workshops etc.), I've noticed how much good it does to everyone involved. The younger kids love having someone just a tiny bit older than they are helping them out, and a lot of teenagers appreciate being handed some responsibilities. The current school system is very much a one way street (teachers teach and enforce rules, students sit down and listen), and it's far from ideal.
>If you are making clothing, you don't say "everyone is different", you make clothes based on the same pattern in a relatively small range of sizes.
Oh wow, you must have a common body shape/type. That range of sizes is actually kinda large, and there is "specialty" size ranges, for example, plus size, petite, big and tall. Bras especially have a giant range of sizes, and I still know woman who have to get custom made bras, and these are woman with natural breasts.
I personally don't fit into off the shelf clothing, period. I've never seen a pair of pants that fit me, I just make due with what is closest, and I've gotten used to constantly adjusting my pants, it is second nature to me.
For people who have specific disabilities, we should make adjustments, but I don't understand why a single way of teaching would not work for most people.
Most Africans have an IQ in the 80s, barely above mentally retarded. Most of them can barely be trained to even go through the motions of algebra, let alone use it to solve problems in new situations.
"College material" kids need to graduate high school with a mastery of algebra so they can learn calculus, which they will be expected to use unbidden to solve novel problems they encounter in other areas.
It seems unlikely to me that the vocational training of the dull can be combined with the education of the near-genius. It is like trying to teach carpentry and structural engineering at the same time.
Kids also have a gigantic range of self control. About 1 in 20 are profoundly delayed, being an average of 3 years behind "normal" in planning and self control. (This is called ADHD to pathologize it, but nothing that common can possibly be a true disorder.) So a typical freshman high school classroom will have pne student who can barely keep their shit together well enough to glue macaroni to construction paper. And will have one student, usually a girl, who operates on a fully adult level.
And then there are the variations in memory. One student learns the entire course in 20 hours, while another has to grind out practice for 150 hours.
There is simply no way for a single process to handle the range of human variation well.
Even the body is like this. My ideal bicycle could permanently cripple another normal person of the same height. Ditto for shoes.
I have recommended before that you read better scientific literature on this subject, but you still come here to HN with ignorant opinions like this. For onlookers, I'll recommend the latest review articles on the topic again. You should read them this time.
OK, let's read. Your first paper quotes an optimistic black IQ deficit of 0.33 sigma. Assume strong STEM students are at the 2 sigma level, which is a percentile rank of 97.72% of whites. If whites are 75% of the population, then 1.71% of the population could be a white strong STEM student.
For blacks at 2.33 sigmas, the percentile rank is 99.01% applying to 15% of the population, meaning 0.1485% of the population could be a black strong STEM student.
Those percentages are in an 11.5 ratio, but the actual population ratio is 5. So blacks are about half as likely to be bright as whites. But in US public schools, they must get good grades at about the same rate to avoid "racism" and "disparate impact". The only way to do this is by severely watering down the curriculum.
This is exactly what I was saying about a one-size-fits-all school being unworkable.
The normal distribution is a harsh mistress. The area under the tail drops off very fast, so a small difference in a subgroup translates into overwhelming victory or overwhelming defeat.
Now let's revisit your -0.33 sigma black deficit. For the strong potential STEM students calculated above, the black:white ratio is about 10%. That means we would expect 2 blacks in every university STEM class, and 1 in a typical all-team engineering meeting. In reality the number is far lower. (I've only had two reasonably bright black colleagues ever.) You find equally few blacks in hands-on intellectual jobs like owning a chain of gas stations. So the -0.33 sigma number does not pass the everyday experience test.
Speaking of recommended reading, you could profitably spend a few minutes studying a normal distribution Z table. The normal distribution is a harsh mistress.
> Most Africans have an IQ in the 80s, barely above mentally retarded. Most of them can barely be trained to even go through the motions of algebra, let alone use it to solve problems in new situations.
trying to debate this guy on the merits is absurd - he's not some misguided IQ guy but, as you'll see if you look at his other comments, a hardcore racist. blocking is the only productive thing you can do here
This is a discussion of science. Kindly take your partisan political posturing elsewhere.
The science on IQ shows that European Jews > far east Asians > Caucasians > Africans. There is still some uncertainty about the exact numbers and rankings, but there is zero controversy about the existence of the intelligence hierarchy.
In a few years we will resurrect the Neanderthals, who had larger brains than any living human race. It is entirely possible that in 50 years they will be winning all the physics Nobel prizes.
An extremely basic knowledge of statistics would show you that for a set of overlapping bell curves with a reasonably sized standard deviation, a difference of a few percent in the median is far too little to make a statement like "Group X > Group Y" on with a straight face. Most people you'd pick at random from any group will be fairly average, and geniuses are uncommon, but exist, in all the groups. Even differences of a standard deviation are fairly trivial compared to the differences that exist within each group; it's not like intelligence medians vary by 5 standard deviations between ethnic groups within one country...
Underprivileged students from minority backgrounds can do quite well at calculus - some teachers, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante , dedicated years to trying, with quite impressive results. This has been demonstrated again and again at schools with poor track records. Simply having a competent teacher and an environment that isn't entirely hostile to learning can do far more than many people tend to realize.
The original question was whether one-size-fits-all classrooms can work.
Most people you'd pick at random from any group will be fairly average, and geniuses are uncommon, but exist, in all the groups.
Our civilization has come this far by cultivating genius. A billion average people sweeping floors will never discover penicillin or invent the transistor. And geniuses are radically less common in some groups.
An extremely basic knowledge of statistics would show you that for a set of overlapping bell curves with a reasonably sized standard deviation, a difference of a few percent in the median is far too little to make a statement like "Group X > Group Y" on with a straight face.
Genius lies at the upper end of the spectrum, where the normal curve drops off steeply. A small difference between group averages becomes a huge difference at the top end, thanks to the steepness. It is basic statistics that the elites are dominated by whatever groups have a small advantage at the average. (This is why airlines are so paranoid about quality control. If a company lets its average slip a little, it will kill most of the people who die in air travel, which turns out to really hurt bookings even if their average is a zillion times safer than cars.)
So if you design classrooms to "leave no Group Y child behind"—as the U.S. has done—you will necessarily leave behind all Group X elites. Thus answering the original question of whether uniform education works.
Yes, there are African geniuses. The problem is that they are really, really rare. So rare that a typical school has zero of them.
Obviously, one size fits all classrooms don't work - but this must not be used as an excuse to further existing inequalities. I hear a lot more horror stories about people being discouraged from sufficiently challenging material than being pushed into it - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1lrvit/what_memor... has a lot of examples, to pick one random internet thread from this week. One thing that we can fully agree on is that NCLB is horrible policy. Uniform education, with no catering to the genuine interests and capacities, is stupid; only a few alternatives, like not educating the majority of people, or basing education on statistical arguments about amorphous groups rather than individual merit, are stupider.
Our civilizations, for the most part, don't cultivate genius, unfortunately. And geniuses aren't radically less common in some groups, unless you mean groups like "people who suffered severe childhood malnutrition". Normal schools aren't really set up to deal with people with IQs more than a standard deviation, or perhaps two standard deviations, from the norm.
If you define genius to be an IQ of 160+, and model it as a Gaussian with a standard deviation of 15, most schools have no geniuses of any race. If you take a more-reasonable fat-tailed distribution, many schools still don't.
My personal, anecdotal bias: the best school I went to was quite small, and had several geniuses - including a black one. There weren't many black kids, but the ones who were there were exceptional; I wouldn't be surprised if they had the highest average IQ of any ethnic group at the school (and yes, there were plenty of Asian and Jewish students, from several countries).
There are differences in average intelligence between groups, but not in the way I think you're claiming. First of all, the IQ delta between Jews in the US and other white people has collapsed since 1960, and the overrepresentation of Jews in highschool and college level academic competitions has also collapsed. This isn't due to Jews becoming less intelligent on average but rather the average white child becoming more intelligent thanks to the Flynn effect[1]. And you're grouping all white people together, but back in the day all the poor subsistence farmers immigrating from Ireland and Italy and Eastern Europe had IQs in the 80s too. Of course, their children born and raised in US cities had roughly the same IQs as other white people. And during the cold war the IQs of the people in West Germany pulled more than 10 points ahead of the people in East Germany, but with reunification IQs have converged again.
All of which is to say, we have strong evidence of differences in IQ between groups, but we have pretty much no evidence of genetic IQ differences between groups. We know that environmental factors[2] play a huge role in population level IQ and are quite sufficient to explain the differences we can observe. Could one group have a genetic advantage? Sure, but I don't feel I have any reason to believe it's white people who are naturally smarter than black people as opposed to vice versa.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[2]Well, there's vitamin D deficiency but that's so easily fixed by nutrition that I'm calling it an environmental factor despite the role genetics plays.
Thank you. I didn't go into these points in my post for fear of covering too much ground, but you have written them up well. Lead, nutrition, and environment are all big factors.
There is. They are one of the few parts of psychology that are based on hard data. University admissions test are, in fact, mostly tests of IQ. So are military recruiting tests. (The military is super serious about weeding out people dumb enough to crash a boondoggle.)
Yes, standardization, one size fits all, the belief that central planners can determine what's best for everyone. My opinion is that all school administration should occur at the school level. Teachers, principals, and parents are best equipped to know what each kid needs. At the central administration level, accountability is nonexistent and the larger a school district gets, the harder it is to provide dynamic and responsive education.
I'm a fan of the charter school movement mostly in the sense that it radically decentralizes education and that most charter schools are non-union. I've visited traditional public schools and charter schools and the sense of community, engagement, and accountability is palpable at the charter schools. At the traditional public schools, the sense was one of defeatism and calcification.
Now keep in mind that my experience was in a large urban area, so your mileage will vary.
I'm in a large urban area too. One where 85% of the kids in the school on my block failed the state math and english exams. (50% got the lowest score possible) The prison model isn't working for them.
1. There is no one-size-fits-all plan that could possibly work for education. Everyone is different (duh);
2. Centralization of primary and secondary education institutions is a very bad thing (think fewer and fewer large school districts);
3. Teachers' Unions are possibly the single biggest barrier to innovation;
4. There is no simple, easy answer to improving education.
Unfortunately, I don't have a prescription for fixing things, but I'm sure that centralizing both administrative bureaucracy and delivery standards is not it.