" When asked to identify the number of phonemes in a word, they were correct 62 percent of the time. They struggled more with morphemes, correctly identifying them 27 percent of the time. "
I'm surprised. When I was TAing morphology and phonology courses, people generally had more trouble learning the inverse. That is, identifying morphemes was relatively easy compared to identifying phonemes (although you could choose your examples to get a similar spread. People take a nontrivial amount of training to ignore how things are spelled)
There are many problems with the US education system, but it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English, not because of "failure to fully understand phonemes."
The main point of the article is a proposal of a new way to evaluate teachers. It says, "let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers (it’s tempting to use student outcomes instead)."
To me that seems like a reasonable part of a good method of evaluation.
> it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English
Then how do you know it's the teachers that are teaching the kids to read, and not the parents?
Is that a real question? How many parents do you know who've taught their kids to read?
If you're like me, it's a couple here and there, but most kids learn to read from school. You can compare data of literacy rates before we had widespread schools in the US, and after.
What? Everyone I know who reads books for pleasure had books read to them as children and was taught to read by their parent before they started school. Yes, I asked. People who don't read for pleasure are usually people who weren't read to as children.
The point I was making is that it is odd that when teachers are evaluated for their ability to identify phonemes and morphemes, that their abilities don't seem to match what I saw in first and second year university students taking linguistics classes. Just that, that it is odd.
Do schools really teach kids to read? I remember reading lessons, but they presumed some existing ability to read. I think I learned to read by reading things on my own.
> The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
Cause yeah, dumb teacher training is the root cause of absentee students, housing insecurity, hunger, abusive home lives, systematic poverty, terrible funding decisions...
Yet most teachers I know have Masters degrees for teaching things special ed, and it seems they need to get those degrees or at least it's competitive that they have them.
A.) This sort of goes hand-in-hand with the Intelligence Community PhD article that was also on the front page today. "Oh you have a Master's so clearly your time is worth another $2-10k (the MS supplement range for 2007-08)" It's just another box to check and as long as getting one earns you $x a year more there's little to no reason not to spend 2-3x once even if it does nothing to help your students.
C.) I'm sure it varies by institution and geographic area, but at my High School about half the teachers with a Master's had one in "Instructional Technology." They still struggled with basic computer and projector operation, so I'm not quite sure what that degree got them in the end.
So the solution is basically "teach to the test" for teachers? I don't agree.
The problems in our education system go way, way beyond teacher quality. Several of my friends are teachers, they're brilliant people, and they're hindered by the very structure of the system: standardized testing, unions, the very notion that one person lecturing to 20 students - a "push" educational supply system really works. We have the internet now... I prefer to pull what I want to know when I need to know it.
Remember that the U.S. education system has only really been around for what? 150 years? Our species has been learning for 10,000 years.. we got along OK before it. We shouldn't take anything about that system as holy writ.
How much institutional learning do we use in our everyday lives? I would argue very little, and that the best way to learn how to do a job is generally to go do it, and to ask questions along the way.
Push models work well when you have an established career and know what is needed to advance.
We've been stumped by Meno's paradox since Plato's time. I wouldn't trust the average high-schooler's judgement about educational choices. At that age it is far too easy to give up. Skip calculus, differential equations and the whole shebang and suddenly you're woefully underprepared for that dream career building drones and military aircraft.
I certainly am happy there was some structure to my curriculum (even at the expense of a low student:teacher ratio). I was a very stupid kid - thought myself above the curriculum and all that. Were I allowed to chart my own course I would've been in a very bad place.
Indeed, the only complete solution to the schooling system's deficiencies will be its abolition. Education and the accumulation of knowledge should be understood as a subsidiary and decentralized activity, one heavily driven by autodidacticism. Autodidacticism is and always has been the primary force of education, not any formal regimented institution. One does not enter a school and come out "educated" by the receipt of a degree. In fact, the very idea that there can be such a thing as an "education system" is a complete perversity, a self-negating ideal of a social planner.
Schooling should be strongly differentiated from the formation of academic and learning communities. People can still partake in seminars, gather for lectures and conferences, form study groups and even build schools with regular curricula to voluntarily participate in, if such a structure is deemed useful. The accreditation process should be repealed, and a boom in alternative schools (free, democratic, Sudbury, etc.) would likely follow.
Research universities should remain as academic communities, rather than be bogged down by an auxiliary function of serving as ritual prerequisites for entering the labor market.
> We have the internet now... I prefer to pull what I want to know when I need to know it.
This meme needs to be put to rest; preferably with a stake thru the hearth, the head chopped off and the mouth full of garlic.
Information is just an encoded sequence of symbols, but knowledge inside a living mind is structured. Beyond a certain point[1], you cannot just pull whatever you want to know - Matrix style, please - because in order to decode the information you need to have built an scafold of prerequisite knowledge over the last few years. And your past self did not have any way to predict with both precision and accuracy what you would want to learn today.
And that is the reason why, every kid must be forced to learn a basic set of common facts and skills at an early age. The purpose is to create the foundations of an scafold that is good enough for most people purposes, and to develop the skills to keep growing it as needs arise.
One could argue that the US so-called-education system has strayed away from that noble goal to such a degree that it is almost impossible to recognize it's original intent. And yes, that is a shame. But it is simply false that you can "pull whatever I need to know, on demand, from Google"... and for every person for whom this is still more or less true, there is one of us here at Hacker News waiting for the chance to automate their job away and split their wage with their boss.
Damned, it is hard enough even to google what you think you need to know if you don't know what's the name of the thing you are looking for!!!
[1] There's a triving industry of Infotainment that makes their money by puting together mildly interesting facts, packaging those in an engaging presentation and selling it to customers that like to think of themselves as "well learned". The difference with true knowledge is that the consumers of such products lack the context to put that information to good, practical, use. In the same way that looking at a lot of martial arts movies does not make you a good fighter, looking a lot of documentaries do not make you a scientist.
I thought the problem was the push towards standardized testing, and its effect on the kids. Instead of teaching it's become drilling principles that are on the test, and that's it.
Yes, and it's compounded by the limited time in a school day. Having an extra 30-60 minutes a day to focus on the unique needs of your class would help, but as it is, the teachers are put in a position to churn through the material to get to the testing. But, from my semi-outsider perspective, there is lower hanging fruit to improve performance at the elementary school level.
"The problem" is that there's dozens of different problems each with their own sub problems.
Off the to of my head two more problems in addition to the half a dozen mentioned already in this topic: money being spent on useless technology (Smartboards; my mother [along with every one of the 100+ teachers at her school] was issued an ipad, one ipad for classes of 30-40 and told to integrate it into her teaching) instead of things like fixing the heat and lack of physical activity as PE and recess get stripped from the curriculum.
I would like to offer an alternative viewpoint. Downvote me if you like, but it's a slice of the world of opinions, and you'll need to deal with that.
There's nothing wrong with American education.
The job of American education is to sedate the masses, while letting the legit geniuses rise to the top (create the next Google, etc.). It is very effective in doing this.
In what specific way is the American education system effective in fostering the above? I think you may have it exactly backwards.
It seems to me that the opportunity afforded to an individual simply by living in the United States is the real driving force behind most successful endeavors like the above, and "geniuses" (I use that very loosely) rise to the top DESPITE our education system.
i think thats exactly what he was saying. the part about 'sedating the masses' is also very apparent when u look at the robotic and homogenous modes of behaviour and 'exploration' promoted at school. they are also trying very hard to reduce interaction of kids with people outside their age group or level (including parents) which drastically cuts down on learning things in life that school will never teach u.
There isn't really a "problem" in American education, in the sense that it's unusually bad compared to other countries. Looking at PISA scores, Latin American / European / Asian students in the USA do as well or better than in their mother countries.
I'm not disagreeing with you per sé, but it is possible that some crucial stuff is learned in the 15 years before these tests were administered?
The reason I'm asking is that purely based on a 'hunch', I feel that the most useful years of my education were before the age of around 12-13 and after the age of 20. I have no solid evidence to support this, just my experience and that of my peers.
Edit: to try and support my hunch: in my country 12-13 is the age where the 'sorting hat' is applied and you move to middle/high school (physically different location, on of three levels based on earlier performance), and 20 is generally around the second or third year of 'higher vocational training' or 'university' where the non-motivated are sorted out and (generally) the ones who are going to finish college are left. It's also the point where classes become less general, multiple-choice, massive (300+ classes sometimes) and instead become more focused and interesting.
Those PISA charts don't say what you are summarizing them as saying. It used to be that people would cite a certain blog post to make the same point you are making here, but the data don't back up the blog author either. I have lived in another country, and the students there do better than their cousins who study in the United States.
What do they say, then? Because I read, for instance, the highest-scoring Latin American nation (Mexico) as having a lower mean (424) than US Hispanics (478). Other PISA components show similar results.
I have a friend who is a high school teacher, and I was shocked to learn how they evaluate him. (No idea how true this is for other schools).
They compare the standardized test scores of this years group of students with those of last year's. If these students do better than those, he must have improved, and if they do worse, he must have slacked.
Now, he'll have between 20-100 students each year. Any teacher will tell you that the variation between one year's group of students and the next is considerable. (indeed, among my teacher friends I've learned it's a major point of gossip - not individual students, but the collective lot)
This seems insane to me. Why not compare this years students with THOSE SAME STUDENTS' SCORES from last year? Or find something else less likely to be so "swingy".
We compare this way in the UK. The same students are compared each year with the assumption that some progress will be made, and that students will eventually reached a predicted level that is set externally and based on past performance and socio-economic factors. (http://www.fft.org.uk/)
It's still ridiculous and leads to teaching-to-the-test, fiddling with data, and undue pressure on teachers and learners.
The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.
No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn.
That isn't to say that the education system shouldn't be optimized (it should)
But there is no problem with education as such. There is a problem with how parents are involved with their kids education.
Edit: To clear up confusion. No I am not saying parents are a substitute for education I am not talking about parents intervening either.
I am saying that by being involved intellectually in their kids education they are providing their kids with the best kind of foundation possible and it will fix a lot of the issues that comes out of parents not being involved or outright harmful to their kids education.
No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn.
As a parent of two school-aged children, I couldn't agree more.
At the same time, as a single parent, I have to say that it's hard to ignore the effect that ubiquitous divorce and single-parenting is having on children's schooling.
In a single day I have to drag my kids out of bed, make them breakfast, make them lunch, get them to school (all the while they're complaining and dawdling), get to work myself, work a full 8 hour day, get to the daycare and pick up my kids, get home, and make dinner for us. And then do everything else that needs my attention, like bills. And then hound my kids to do their homework, help them with it, and then cajole them to do extra studying in math or writing.
It's exhausting and demoralizing having to do this all on your own. And I make a lot more money than is the average where I live, so I can only imagine what it must be like doing all of this with money pressures.
> The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.
This is glib and easy to say, but I don't buy it.
When parents try to intervene in their child's education, schools are increasingly hostile. They are beginning to treat school children in a manner similar to how the TSA treats travelers.
Here's an example: my parents have a young daughter in middle school in the Midwest. She is active in a school choir, but also wants to do the science fair and many other activities. My parents are lucky because here is a kid who actually wants to do these things.
Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday in order to travel 45 minute to a nearby school to do a choir competition at 7:30 am. Further, even though my sister's performance is over at 7:45 am, she has to stay with the school until well after 11:00 am and be bused home. The parents are not allowed to pick up the children early or give them a ride a home at all. This is for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
At the same time, my sister is expected to do work on her upcoming science fair project (which must adhere to an egregiously onerous template provided on the school's website) and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right).
When my parents spoke up about the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning, and also disallowing their parents from even picking them up early or anything, the school was borderline militant in their reply. They chewed out my parents, said they had no business questioning the choir director's choice of which competitions to attend or what the scheduling was, and basically said that the choice was either to put up or shut up. The school was not willing to compromise or even discuss any of their points about how unhealthy and overly burdensome the whole set of affairs was.
In smaller ways, this extends to classroom homework (which is at levels way higher than when I was a child, and yet the kids themselves say (and test scores seem to indicate) that they are retaining less and less of it). If a parent writes in to say the homework is too much, that it is stressing out their 6th grade kid who is staying up until 10:30 pm, crying and self-doubting the whole time, just to keep up with a single day's homework, you don't get any degree of reasonableness whatsoever.
I feel that schools and teachers have way too much authority over how children are treated and evaluated, what they are required to do, and so forth. They argue that they have to make it this way to comply with state and federal standards, and that's a big part of the problem. But regardless, it doesn't matter if you are a proactive and supportive parent if your attempts to provide a healthy and nurturing learning atmosphere are constantly and aggressively thwarted by the very teachers and school officials you want to try to work with.
You are talking about something very different though.
The point is not about parents intervening it's about parent being interested in their kids education. That it matters what they learn, that you see their test scores, have adequate responsens and ways to deal with both good results and bad results.
I'm not trying to be even more glib, but imagine just how much harder this would all be on your sister in the event your parents didn't care about her education and weren't involved as much as they are.
I hear what you're saying, but for the kids who don't have active parents willing to fight these battles, they pretty much just don't do any activities. In the short term, their lives are actually arguably better. They have more time to devote to homework, fewer obligations.
Later on, their prospects for college and scholarships may not be as good, depending on what else they do. But at least in the short term, having disinterested parents sort of just means you get to have a comfortable childhood.
It's really quite sad that there is such fierce downward pressure to begin the processes of employment competition and mate selection at younger and younger ages that we end up bottomlessly compromising away our children's ability to stop and enjoy life for a few years. If the downward pressure led to more well-adjusted, gainfully employed adults who benefited from the early crucibles, then I might be somewhat OK with it. But while parents are busy with the downward pressure, society is also busy making sure the kids can only get a job in some shitty start-up where they'll be lucky to have adequate health insurance, let alone ever having enough money to afford a standard of living that we collectively view as acceptable.
Conditioned upon the inevitable shit-world that executives and political elites thrust upon us, if we really loved our kids we should probably teach them to value foosball tables and extroverted work spaces above all else. Then we'd at least prepare them for the real world.
> the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning
This could just as well be "the unreasonableness of signing on for an activity then not wanting to do what's required to participate", and/or "the unreasonableness of signing up for more activities than one is (apparently) able to find time for". I thought she wants to participate in choir. I'd certainly get up early on the occasional weekend for something I wanted to do, and it wouldn't even occur to me to complain, ya know?
As for letting her leave early, 1) they probably don't want to safely coordinate a bunch of individual pick-ups in an unfamiliar place _while trying to keep everyone else on schedule_, and 2) they may consider sticking around for the rest of the event to be important. It's really, really easy to imagine a world in which their refusal isn't primarily due to their being assholes.
Maybe you're right about all this being an example of a hostile school, but your description of events makes it seem more like a case of whiney, entitled kids/parents. Again, maybe that's wrong, but that is definitely the impression I get from this tale, as written. I mean, this: "Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday". I actually LOL'ed at the parenthetical exclamation point. Or: "and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right)." I mean—yeah, of course. What's weird about that? Quit signing up for extra crap if you're having trouble meeting basic obligations. You cannot have/do everything.
> This could just as well be "the unreasonableness of signing on for an activity then not wanting to do what's required to participate", and/or "the unreasonableness of signing up for more activities than one is (apparently) able to find time for". I thought she wants to participate in choir. I'd certainly get up early on the occasional weekend for something I wanted to do, and it wouldn't even occur to me to complain, ya know?
No, it cannot. Asking young minds to wake up for a performance (that the school is not required to participate in) is not reasonable. It doesn't matter how busy the student is; it doesn't matter that you voluntarily signed up. None of that matters. The point is that it's too early. It's an unreasonable burden to place on any child.
Your attitude also strikes me as needlessly aggressive about it. Why should the child pay the penalty of being disallowed to participate, grow, and learn (and incur the future costs of what scholarship committees and colleges will think of someone who didn't do those things) just because they think 5:15 am on a weekend morning for children who can't yet drive is too burdensome? What is the point of the school choir if not to provide culturally enriching experiences to the very students who wish to join it? You're acting as if the platonic idea of "the choir" exists totally independently of the bang-simple basic life constraints of its participants.
If the choir said you have to show up at 5:15 am for a concert, and you will not be allowed to use the bathroom or eat food for 6 hours then of course we'd have a problem with it. Kids need to use the bathroom. Kids need to eat. Voluntarily opting-in to participate in the choir doesn't give the choir director the permission to disallow eating or using a bathroom.
But if we just slightly move the needle out to significantly disrupting the regular sleeping habits of a middle school kid, now all of the sudden parents are "whiny" to expect their kid gets to be healthy. Your position is preposterous.
In other words, you're placing a deeply unrealistic expectation of accommodation onto a very young kid, meanwhile not holding grown adults to any degree of reasonableness or compromise.
I'm not sure what you expect the school to do in these situations.
On a school trip, the school is legally responsible for the kids. Trying to keep up with everyone - who came on the bus but is leaving early with their parents, who came with their parents but is riding back on the bus - especially with a large group. And it's even worse today, since most of the kids have cell phones and will be begging their parents for an early pick up, so whatever the kid originally said they were going to do will change mid trip.
As far as the homework, what would you have them do? They already have do much material to cover for standardized tests that they can't thoroughly cover any topics they way they need to. They know it and they don't have a choice. They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
Teachers in the US are in a terrible place right now. On one side you have parents, both bad parents who aren't involved and overly demanding ultra involved parents, and on the other side state and federal officials breathing down their necks about testing. Teachers are literally the meat in the middle of the vice. My mom is a retired teacher, and keeps in touch with a group of friends, almost all of whom she mentored. These are all very good teachers, and all of them are veterans with 10+ years experience. They're all demoralized and every single one of them is counting the days until hit 20 years, so they qualify for retirement and can get out.
> Trying to keep up with everyone - who came on the bus but is leaving early with their parents, who came with their parents but is riding back on the bus - especially with a large group.
It may be difficult to keep track of kids, but even so, the answer to that difficulty is not to do things that make the kids' lives overly burdensome just because that makes the teachers' lives a little better. You can find a way to compromise. If you have enough resources to take a group of kids to a choir competition in the first place, then you have enough resources to figure out some way that the kids are not stranded at the competition with no way to productively use that time until some mandated school transportation takes them home.
The point is that simply mandating a solution like "no one can leave early" is lazy and represents a failure to empathize with the kids or their parents. I agree with you it will have to be some type of compromise -- you can't give every single child or every single parent some customized, preferential treatment. But what the schools do is not at all like a compromise. It's much more of a mandated policy, and they threaten and coerce parents into scared obedience by subtly threatening to take it out on your child via grades, political favors (like who gets which role in a school musical) and so forth. So if you raise an issue and say that some policy is simply going too far (like forcing kids to be at the school by 5:15 am) you're actually putting your own kid at risk even just by making waves.
> As far as the homework, what would you have them do? They already have do much material to cover for standardized tests that they can't thoroughly cover any topics they way they need to. They know it and they don't have a choice. They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
This part really frustrates me. For one thing, the volume of homework and the speed with which you cover material are not at all the same thing. You can cover a lot of material without giving hardly any homework, or you can cover very few different topics while laying the homework on heavily. Measuring progress as "amount of homework completed" is a horrible idea. It's essentially like utterly giving up the idea of teaching people and admitting you're just going to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.
Also, there are at least a few studies out there which suggest that kids get up to three times as much homework as the state guidelines tend to recommend. High volume of homework is not really a symptom of guidelines. Covering crappy topical subjects, or expecting too many subjects to be covered in a year, those can be the fault of the guidelines. Evaluating students on nonsensical rubrics can be a problem with guidelines.
But making sure kids learn effectively with a reasonable amount of homework is perhaps the primary job of the teacher, regardless of the guidelines. What I mean is: conditional on some set of topics given from guidelines on high, the teacher's job is to then clamp the homework level at or below a reasonable amount and then evoke learning. Levering up the amount of homework doesn't somehow magically evoke learning, and often hinders it.
> They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
Yes they absolutely can, and many teachers do, and they absolutely should, even in the presence of state guidelines. If adding more homework volume only exacerbates a problem of not really understanding something, then it cannot be a solution. Keeping homework at the same level, or even speeding it up, would only make things worse. It's like throwing gas on the fire.
I agree with you that teaching is not effectively rewarded in US culture. Four of my aunts were school teachers and another relative is an inner city principal in Ohio. I've heard it all. I absolutely agree...
Myth. Parents are much more involved than they used to be but students are graduating barely able to read and write. The way to fix education is to make poor teachers accountable for their actions. Schools should not be a babysitting service.
Behavioral genetics research has found that "parenting" has little or no effect on most measurable criteria. The scare quotes around parenting are because the definition of it is precise: the component of the child's environment that is shared by siblings.
I am not talking about parenting in the sense that you are somehow interfering I am talking about being mentally involved. I.e. the kid know that you are interested in their education. Not that you are somehow providing your own educational system.
This article highlights that there can be vast differences in effectiveness from one teacher to another. (No surprise, it's true in all professions.) I don't think it's in-depth enough to draw a conclusion about how much of a child's education is due to a quality teacher vs. parents/family/community. In fact, I don't think it is even effective in showing that the one teacher, whose students tended to do better, is a better teacher than the other one. The article just doesn't go into enough detail about the communities around the schools, resources available, the families of the kids, etc.
We have three elementary schools within one mile of each other. The schools have similar profiles with a fairly high number kids on free/reduced-price lunch. The teachers from the different schools train with one another. They come from the same education programs. Yet, my daughter's school significantly outperforms the other schools.
One difference comes from the parents and the culture/education opportunities they can provide outside the school. Parents regularly take their kids to plays, musicals, museums, historical sites, etc. They also read with their kids nightly.
Another important difference is the PTA. Ours is very active. We developed an after school program that offers introductory theater, music, visual arts, sports, marine biology, etc. Thanks to a state legislative grant, we can offer these classes for free to kids whose families can't afford them . Our parents knew enough to look for grants when they started the program. Last year we developed a full theater program for kids who wanted more involved productions.
If you're looking at economic classifications, the other two schools' communities can be described as working and lower middle class. Our community is working, lower and upper middle class.
Again, the stat on free/reduced-price lunches is similar. The schools' budgets are roughly the same accounting for number of students and age of the buildings. We have kids classified as homeless in our school, as I'm sure the other schools have as well. Yet, our school performs significantly better. The difference is the learning that's happening outside the school.
Last year I attended a talk by the president of the principals' association in my state. He cited a study that estimated 48% of a child's education comes from outside the school. There is certainly room for improvement for some teachers. There is also room for modernization in teaching methodology. But, we won't improve education for students as long as we're only looking along one axis for improvement.
(Btw, I'm not an educator. I'm a software engineer who happens to be very involved in the PTA for my daughter's school.)
The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.
Are you a parent yourself? (I am, of four children, two now adults.) Have you ever been a parent in more than one country? (I have both here in the United States and in Taiwan.) Do you regularly communicate with other parents about how well school programs are working for their children? (I participate in a national online network of parents of gifted children every day.)
Parent involvement of a certain kind is necessary, but it is not sufficient (unless it takes the form of homeschooling, which is something I did for the primary education of all four of my children). With equally involved and caring parents, pupils and students do better or worse depending especially on curriculum design, and depending also on teacher training and school administration. Studies of school districts that had forced changes of administrators of schools under the now-expired No Child Left Behind law showed that changing administrators in a school can improve learning outcomes for the same group of children brought up by the same group of parents. Moreover, teachers often increased their job satisfaction after such administrative changes.[1]
Almost every thread about education on Hacker News has a top comment saying, "Parental involvement is the most important thing." I could agree with that statement (I largely do, as a homeschooling parent) without thinking that statement is any more than a middle-brow dismissal[2] of the submitted article's detailed text unless we have something to discuss here about a) what brings about more parental involvement and b) what else can be done at the margin to improve schools for parents who are already well involved. Let's discuss those issues here rather than be dismissive.
AFTER EDIT: I have my own top-level in this thread with substantive response to what the original article author said, but it is pushed far down below the fold by the long subthread development here.
I am originally from Denmark but moved to the US with my family.
My wife is part of the PTA group.
My oldest is in Success Academy a charter school.
I am not saying it's sufficient not sure how you got that idea. I am saying it's what makes the difference for the children getting education is that their parents are involved.
You can't always decide what teachers your kids are getting or what school they go to, who they hang out with and so on. But you can decide if you are going to be involved in your kids education.
I am not saying it's sufficient not sure how you got that idea.
You were the one who wrote, in the higher-level comment you made,
The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.
Now that we have agreement here expressed by each of us that parent involvement is important, but not the whole story of what's important in education, how about let's discuss the specific content of the article submitted for discussion? How could an involved parent, for example, CHECK whether or not a teacher in the friendly local public school has learned enough about reading instruction to know how to distinguish phonemes from graphemes?
I'd be happy to see other readers's comments on my own top-level comment in this thread (it is "below the fold, I think), in which I give examples of differing practice in the other country I have lived in, Taiwan. The schools there did an amazing job when Taiwan was still a developing country of providing good instruction with very limited resources. One big aspect of that was better teacher training.
Maybe I could have been more elaborate in my comment. Fair enough.
The article claims that it's not bad teachers but bad teacher education.
I am following that line of singular reason and saying what I believe comes before that.
I made that comment in the context of discussions about childrens education which always focus on a bunch of other things than parents. (Better equipment, better teachers, better methods etc.) because I believe thats one of the most if not the most important reasons to get good education to the extent that something has to be chosen.
I am not buying the premise that education somehow becomes better if teachers becomes better or children gets better scores. Because I am not buying the premise that education in itself is the goal. It's only part of a much bigger perspective far beyond the reach of the educational system and later in life far beyond parents control.
So I stand by my claim that involved parents will itself make up for a lot of the things that are considered problems with education.
"The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple." Given that statement, and translating it from layman terms ("the key" and "really that simple") into philosophical terms (necessary and sufficient), I would say that tokenadult was fair in having that idea, that "the key" == "sufficient".
There is a problem with how parents are involved with their kids education.
This is being too harsh on parents. My parents were very much involved with my own brother's education. They tutored him, got him extra help, set up incentives, etc, etc. But he still did far worse than me. Meanwhile they had to pull me away from the books. I never got help with math homework because I never had any trouble with it. School just came naturally to me. I was just born much smarter than my brother. My parents never had to pressure me to learn programming, I picked it up because it was fun and I was good at it. Heck, I taught myself calculus because I found the problem solving fun.
And I see this observation over and over again. If a person is naturally good at cognitive work, sooner or later they will go whole hog on learning some economically useful cognitive skills. If a person is just naturally a bit slower, it will always be an uphill battle.
Wasn't my intent to be harsh on parents. I am simply saying that involved parents on average means more involved children who will then learn more.
Of course there are kids who just learn naturally but they aren't a part of the problem the article is discussing and there are parents who aren't involved in their childrens education.
You're looking on the wrong end of the spectrum. The thought is that kids with uninvolved parents tend to have external distractions, behavioral problems, an unwillingness to do homework, underage pregnancies, etc.
> The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.
I don't buy it. Parental involvement has some value in early education (learning to read and write, for example). But beyond that, I suspect "involved parents" is a proxy for wealth.
> Wealthy kids with uninvolved parents do fine? Why?
For one, the school and teachers your kid gets is determined by whether you're rich enough to buy or rent property on the correct street (at least, here in Toronto).
Studies have found that this is not completely true. US kids who have parents who volunteer at school (like PTA) actually have poorer academic achievement on average than parents who don't. They have also found that the smartest kids in the world have parents who are not terribly involved at school, at least compared to their US counterparts. The strongest correlative of a child's academic success in the US is the income level of their parents.
Parents replacing school education works. My son went through 5 yrs of public education and learned almost nothing.
He learned in after school classes, at home, etc.
The problem was that public schools are focussed on underperforming kids and my son was above grade level so they did not bother to teach him. He did have a fun time at recess. Lots of time for reading fiction during class.
Teaching remains a craft-based occupation, but we're haven't yet developed tools that actually support the job of a teacher. There's no way that Universities/k12 school administrators will be capable of providing the level of detailed feedback necessary to teach teachers how to be effective, so we need better methods for teachers to self-assess and improve independently.
So much effort is being put into one-off, discrete solution to a curriculum problem (like leveled non-fiction texts, grammar instruction, etc.) - but what we really need are tools that allow me to understand what my students are capable of, support my development of curriculum materials/activities/assessment, and discover/remix the multitude of learning resources that are being created in classrooms just like mine all over the country.
I want a VisiCalc, because I'm tired of running these numbers by hand.
I majored in math, and had several future math teachers in my homework group. One answer is future high school math teachers are some of the worst math students. I'm sure that's totally unrelated to the pay being completely shit.
I have a friend who teaches in a Belmont (peninsula in the valley) school. He also works as a receptionist at a gym 4 days a week after working at the school, and he still spends half his take home pay on rent. So he's at the school where he teaches by 6:55AM and leaves the gym at 10PM, then does grading. The only reason you would legitimately struggle to understand why it's hard to hire teachers or why skilled people don't do it is because you're a startup founder (why aren't engineers jumping take a $50k paycut in exchange for most-likely-worthless 0.1% options? Engineering shortage!)
In the bay area in CA, teaching is a cute hobby that has to be supported by a spouse or a second job. If you want to draw more high-quality people into the profession, change that. And then maintain the changes and wait 10+ years at least for the knowledge to percolate and another generation of teachers to come up through high school and college.
I majored in math as well, and had lots of secondary mathematics education majors in my classes. While it's true they were weaker than the math majors in the advanced classes, they were certainly bright and enthusiastic enough to teach math up to basic calculus.
Yup, people follow incentives. I was friends with someone in college who majored in chemistry and could have easily gotten into a good PhD program or gone right into industry. She chose instead to teach high school chemistry and did a fantastic job until she burned out 3 years later. The work load was enormous, the pay was shit, many of the kids didn't want to be there, and the goals of her school administration were completely decoupled from the general purpose of teaching. She is now in industry making much more money and living a much better lifestyle.
You're going to have a really hard time getting anyone over to your side when your argument is basically "we need to throw a ton of money at the problem and wait a decade before suggesting maybe that didn't help much." Not saying I disagree with your goal, but politically that's just not going to happen.
I dunno, we have no problems wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems or trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars brought about by liars (where exactly are those WMD?) If this were important to politicians, it could be done. And the necessary step to making it important to politicians is voting.
> It’s true that the average SAT score of high school students who plan to become teachers is below the national average.
If you ever take education classes, the first thing you'll notice is that the people leading them tend to go out of their way to follow best practices for teaching / learning.
Since most other classes only incorporate a handful of evidence-based teaching methods, and many times are structured around blatant anti-patterns, a lot of the ways these programs are structured are going to feel wrong to outside observers. But often there is some sort of theory / research behind why they are the way they are.
Granted this applies more to Ivy league teaching programs and not random Internet diploma mills, but for what it's worth.
Whenever I see one of these articles, I reflect back to this report from 2007:
How the world’s best-performing schools come out on top
To find out why some schools succeed where others do not, McKinsey studied 25 of the world’s school systems, including 10 of the top performers. The experience of these top school systems suggest that three things matter most:
- Getting the right people to become teachers;
- Developing them into effective instructors; and
- Ensuring the system is available to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.
I'll give an example based on my international experience. I studied Chinese in my undergraduate major, among other languages I studied as elective subjects, and while in university I learned the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)[1] in linguistics classes. Few Americans know IPA. When I began studying in Taiwan after graduation, I observed that all students in Taiwan in those days learned IPA in seventh grade, in their junior high English classes, and young people with just a secondary education could reliably read aloud English texts written in IPA--a skill that amazed many of my fellow foreign students from English-speaking countries. Today, as Taiwan has moved that skill down to the primary school curriculum, most United States reading teachers have never, ever learned IPA, which is helpful for explaining the vagaries of English spelling.
Similarly, in primary mathematics instruction, it is well known how do instruction well with multiple representations of mathematical concepts for pupils,[2] and generally it is very well known that teachers of mathematics need to have "profound understanding of fundamental mathematics (PUFM)"[3] and pedagogical content knowledge, but few teachers in the United States gain that from their professional training in teacher education courses.[4] I try to do my part to help teachers already in the classroom by participating in online discussions with other teachers (I myself am a math teacher in private practice) to guide them to helpful resources for learning more mathematics. Simply put, the author of the original article submitted here is correct. The United States could and should do better in teacher education to help teachers do their job as well as they desire to do it.
American education is not designed to maximize student performance. As soon as a child meets the minimum, they are ignored. All the effort goes into improving the performance of the underperforming kids.
no child left behind = no child does really well
Involved parents replace school. They act as the real teachers. They pay for after school classes where the child will do all the real learning.
The US education does what it is designed to do. Help as many underperforming kids as it can. The problem is that it claims to help all kids which it is not actually designed to do.
If the US wants higher performing students, it needs to change the design. More education of gifted students will bring the average up. Higher standards will raise the minimum bar that the schools try to reach.
I have 2 kids and I treated one of the top elementary schools in SV as a daycare.
Comparing Americans of European descent with Europeans, Americans are above the European average.
"The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded."
Americans of Asian descent tie with Asians. Note the provisos.
"For Asian-American students (remember this includes Vietnam, Thailand and other less developed countries outside Northeast Asia), the mean PISA score is 534, same as 533 for the average of Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Here we have two biases going in opposite directions: Asians in the U.S are selected. On the other hand we are comparing the richest and best scoring Asian countries with all Americans with origin in South and East Asia."
The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students."
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is al...
Your first two links as well as the "Teaching Math to the Talented" link are about high and low performing cohorts. The author is slicing the data along national origin lines, which includes the entire ethnic population, not a slice of students that crosses national origin boundaries but differentiates based on relative performance. You can define "demography" in multiple ways, as aptitude (or environmental factors thereof) or national origin and associated culture. Both are valid demographic distinctions. However, you can't compare population slices based on aptitude with population slices based on national origin. Comparing by national origin catches all percentiles of the population, while only comparing the top and bottom percentiles to each other misses the comparison made between the middle cohorts, which are most students.
I did not see anything in that blog post which suggested ethnic or national IQ differences. The author was more concerned with learning cultures between national groups, and how those cultures are carried over to new educational regimes, and how those shared cultures can be used to compare different educational regimes.
Lots of people here are pretty certain the "key" to a "successful education" are parents.
But one successful teacher's view is this:
"...Like all the teachers I talked to in Washington, Mr. Taylor laments the lack of parental involvement. “On back-to-school night, if you have 28 or 30 kids in your class, you’re lucky to see six or seven parents,” he says. But when I ask him how that affects his teaching, he says, “Actually, it doesn’t. I make it my business to call the parents—and not just for bad things..."
h/t u/jseliger, who linked to a helpful article at the Atlantic, where I'm quoting this from.
> Lots of people here are pretty certain the "key" to a "successful education" are parents.
Most studies I've seen on the topic show that the best predictor of one's educational success and attainment is one's parents educational attainment, so there is something to that that an anecdote from a teacher that, aside from not being a systematic gathering of evidence, doesn't even describe an experience of what drives outcomes, but simply relates a personal practice, isn't really sufficient to rebut.
The key to good education is motivated students, motivated teachers and motivated parents, in pretty much that order.
Of course some teaching methodologies are better than other ones, but all the success stories I read, stripped from the fluff are based on enthusiastic and energetic teaches and supportive parents.
For the students we just need to not kill their natural learning predisposition. The parents, well, it depends on their culture etc, little to do here as well.
So for things we can change were left with the teachers. If they are respected, have a good salary, had a good education, have opportunities for growth, are not strangled by bureaucracy and come from the best of the students, then we'll have good teachers. If they are poorly paid, not recognized, fighting with paperwork and red tape, fighting with entitled parents and coming from the less smart student pool, well, looks a bit like US public system.
I have never understood why we have so much duplicated effort in teaching a standardised syllabus. At the moment (in Australia) each teacher does preparation for a lesson and then gives that lesson. Lots of duplicated effort. So 1000 maths teachers all prepare for the same lesson which introduces fractions, as an example.
Instead have a great teacher prepare and then record a presentation. At lesson time every class gets to watch that presentation. This takes up maybe 75% of the lesson time. Then the remainder of the time deals with questions and extra clarification. You just saved a huge number of hours of prep and have a top notch presentation.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI'm surprised. When I was TAing morphology and phonology courses, people generally had more trouble learning the inverse. That is, identifying morphemes was relatively easy compared to identifying phonemes (although you could choose your examples to get a similar spread. People take a nontrivial amount of training to ignore how things are spelled)
The main point of the article is a proposal of a new way to evaluate teachers. It says, "let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers (it’s tempting to use student outcomes instead)."
To me that seems like a reasonable part of a good method of evaluation.
Then how do you know it's the teachers that are teaching the kids to read, and not the parents?
If you're like me, it's a couple here and there, but most kids learn to read from school. You can compare data of literacy rates before we had widespread schools in the US, and after.
Does anyone really get "taught" how to read?
Depending how you define illiteracy many children can't read. About 20% of children are functionally illiterate when they leave US highschool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
> The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
Oh. Uh... Can I agree that testing teachers is a sensible part of an evaluation plan instead?
B.) Many school districts have reimbursement programs that heavily subsidize getting master's degrees.
C.) Far too many Education master's degree programs are baby-town frolics level of difficulty, when they aren't straight degree mills.
C.) I'm sure it varies by institution and geographic area, but at my High School about half the teachers with a Master's had one in "Instructional Technology." They still struggled with basic computer and projector operation, so I'm not quite sure what that degree got them in the end.
The problems in our education system go way, way beyond teacher quality. Several of my friends are teachers, they're brilliant people, and they're hindered by the very structure of the system: standardized testing, unions, the very notion that one person lecturing to 20 students - a "push" educational supply system really works. We have the internet now... I prefer to pull what I want to know when I need to know it.
Remember that the U.S. education system has only really been around for what? 150 years? Our species has been learning for 10,000 years.. we got along OK before it. We shouldn't take anything about that system as holy writ.
How much institutional learning do we use in our everyday lives? I would argue very little, and that the best way to learn how to do a job is generally to go do it, and to ask questions along the way.
We've been stumped by Meno's paradox since Plato's time. I wouldn't trust the average high-schooler's judgement about educational choices. At that age it is far too easy to give up. Skip calculus, differential equations and the whole shebang and suddenly you're woefully underprepared for that dream career building drones and military aircraft.
I certainly am happy there was some structure to my curriculum (even at the expense of a low student:teacher ratio). I was a very stupid kid - thought myself above the curriculum and all that. Were I allowed to chart my own course I would've been in a very bad place.
Schooling should be strongly differentiated from the formation of academic and learning communities. People can still partake in seminars, gather for lectures and conferences, form study groups and even build schools with regular curricula to voluntarily participate in, if such a structure is deemed useful. The accreditation process should be repealed, and a boom in alternative schools (free, democratic, Sudbury, etc.) would likely follow.
Research universities should remain as academic communities, rather than be bogged down by an auxiliary function of serving as ritual prerequisites for entering the labor market.
This meme needs to be put to rest; preferably with a stake thru the hearth, the head chopped off and the mouth full of garlic.
Information is just an encoded sequence of symbols, but knowledge inside a living mind is structured. Beyond a certain point[1], you cannot just pull whatever you want to know - Matrix style, please - because in order to decode the information you need to have built an scafold of prerequisite knowledge over the last few years. And your past self did not have any way to predict with both precision and accuracy what you would want to learn today.
And that is the reason why, every kid must be forced to learn a basic set of common facts and skills at an early age. The purpose is to create the foundations of an scafold that is good enough for most people purposes, and to develop the skills to keep growing it as needs arise.
One could argue that the US so-called-education system has strayed away from that noble goal to such a degree that it is almost impossible to recognize it's original intent. And yes, that is a shame. But it is simply false that you can "pull whatever I need to know, on demand, from Google"... and for every person for whom this is still more or less true, there is one of us here at Hacker News waiting for the chance to automate their job away and split their wage with their boss.
Damned, it is hard enough even to google what you think you need to know if you don't know what's the name of the thing you are looking for!!!
[1] There's a triving industry of Infotainment that makes their money by puting together mildly interesting facts, packaging those in an engaging presentation and selling it to customers that like to think of themselves as "well learned". The difference with true knowledge is that the consumers of such products lack the context to put that information to good, practical, use. In the same way that looking at a lot of martial arts movies does not make you a good fighter, looking a lot of documentaries do not make you a scientist.
Off the to of my head two more problems in addition to the half a dozen mentioned already in this topic: money being spent on useless technology (Smartboards; my mother [along with every one of the 100+ teachers at her school] was issued an ipad, one ipad for classes of 30-40 and told to integrate it into her teaching) instead of things like fixing the heat and lack of physical activity as PE and recess get stripped from the curriculum.
There's nothing wrong with American education.
The job of American education is to sedate the masses, while letting the legit geniuses rise to the top (create the next Google, etc.). It is very effective in doing this.
It seems to me that the opportunity afforded to an individual simply by living in the United States is the real driving force behind most successful endeavors like the above, and "geniuses" (I use that very loosely) rise to the top DESPITE our education system.
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_...
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_...
The reason I'm asking is that purely based on a 'hunch', I feel that the most useful years of my education were before the age of around 12-13 and after the age of 20. I have no solid evidence to support this, just my experience and that of my peers.
Edit: to try and support my hunch: in my country 12-13 is the age where the 'sorting hat' is applied and you move to middle/high school (physically different location, on of three levels based on earlier performance), and 20 is generally around the second or third year of 'higher vocational training' or 'university' where the non-motivated are sorted out and (generally) the ones who are going to finish college are left. It's also the point where classes become less general, multiple-choice, massive (300+ classes sometimes) and instead become more focused and interesting.
They compare the standardized test scores of this years group of students with those of last year's. If these students do better than those, he must have improved, and if they do worse, he must have slacked.
Now, he'll have between 20-100 students each year. Any teacher will tell you that the variation between one year's group of students and the next is considerable. (indeed, among my teacher friends I've learned it's a major point of gossip - not individual students, but the collective lot)
This seems insane to me. Why not compare this years students with THOSE SAME STUDENTS' SCORES from last year? Or find something else less likely to be so "swingy".
It's still ridiculous and leads to teaching-to-the-test, fiddling with data, and undue pressure on teachers and learners.
No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn.
That isn't to say that the education system shouldn't be optimized (it should)
But there is no problem with education as such. There is a problem with how parents are involved with their kids education.
Edit: To clear up confusion. No I am not saying parents are a substitute for education I am not talking about parents intervening either.
I am saying that by being involved intellectually in their kids education they are providing their kids with the best kind of foundation possible and it will fix a lot of the issues that comes out of parents not being involved or outright harmful to their kids education.
That seems to be the case with asian parents/children and they usually get better GPA.
Is there any source that proves or disproves that?
However I think it's misleading to focus on their scores as a proof of good education, but that's a whole other discussion.
As a parent of two school-aged children, I couldn't agree more.
At the same time, as a single parent, I have to say that it's hard to ignore the effect that ubiquitous divorce and single-parenting is having on children's schooling.
In a single day I have to drag my kids out of bed, make them breakfast, make them lunch, get them to school (all the while they're complaining and dawdling), get to work myself, work a full 8 hour day, get to the daycare and pick up my kids, get home, and make dinner for us. And then do everything else that needs my attention, like bills. And then hound my kids to do their homework, help them with it, and then cajole them to do extra studying in math or writing.
It's exhausting and demoralizing having to do this all on your own. And I make a lot more money than is the average where I live, so I can only imagine what it must be like doing all of this with money pressures.
This is glib and easy to say, but I don't buy it.
When parents try to intervene in their child's education, schools are increasingly hostile. They are beginning to treat school children in a manner similar to how the TSA treats travelers.
Here's an example: my parents have a young daughter in middle school in the Midwest. She is active in a school choir, but also wants to do the science fair and many other activities. My parents are lucky because here is a kid who actually wants to do these things.
Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday in order to travel 45 minute to a nearby school to do a choir competition at 7:30 am. Further, even though my sister's performance is over at 7:45 am, she has to stay with the school until well after 11:00 am and be bused home. The parents are not allowed to pick up the children early or give them a ride a home at all. This is for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
At the same time, my sister is expected to do work on her upcoming science fair project (which must adhere to an egregiously onerous template provided on the school's website) and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right).
When my parents spoke up about the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning, and also disallowing their parents from even picking them up early or anything, the school was borderline militant in their reply. They chewed out my parents, said they had no business questioning the choir director's choice of which competitions to attend or what the scheduling was, and basically said that the choice was either to put up or shut up. The school was not willing to compromise or even discuss any of their points about how unhealthy and overly burdensome the whole set of affairs was.
In smaller ways, this extends to classroom homework (which is at levels way higher than when I was a child, and yet the kids themselves say (and test scores seem to indicate) that they are retaining less and less of it). If a parent writes in to say the homework is too much, that it is stressing out their 6th grade kid who is staying up until 10:30 pm, crying and self-doubting the whole time, just to keep up with a single day's homework, you don't get any degree of reasonableness whatsoever.
I feel that schools and teachers have way too much authority over how children are treated and evaluated, what they are required to do, and so forth. They argue that they have to make it this way to comply with state and federal standards, and that's a big part of the problem. But regardless, it doesn't matter if you are a proactive and supportive parent if your attempts to provide a healthy and nurturing learning atmosphere are constantly and aggressively thwarted by the very teachers and school officials you want to try to work with.
The point is not about parents intervening it's about parent being interested in their kids education. That it matters what they learn, that you see their test scores, have adequate responsens and ways to deal with both good results and bad results.
Later on, their prospects for college and scholarships may not be as good, depending on what else they do. But at least in the short term, having disinterested parents sort of just means you get to have a comfortable childhood.
It's really quite sad that there is such fierce downward pressure to begin the processes of employment competition and mate selection at younger and younger ages that we end up bottomlessly compromising away our children's ability to stop and enjoy life for a few years. If the downward pressure led to more well-adjusted, gainfully employed adults who benefited from the early crucibles, then I might be somewhat OK with it. But while parents are busy with the downward pressure, society is also busy making sure the kids can only get a job in some shitty start-up where they'll be lucky to have adequate health insurance, let alone ever having enough money to afford a standard of living that we collectively view as acceptable.
Conditioned upon the inevitable shit-world that executives and political elites thrust upon us, if we really loved our kids we should probably teach them to value foosball tables and extroverted work spaces above all else. Then we'd at least prepare them for the real world.
This could just as well be "the unreasonableness of signing on for an activity then not wanting to do what's required to participate", and/or "the unreasonableness of signing up for more activities than one is (apparently) able to find time for". I thought she wants to participate in choir. I'd certainly get up early on the occasional weekend for something I wanted to do, and it wouldn't even occur to me to complain, ya know?
As for letting her leave early, 1) they probably don't want to safely coordinate a bunch of individual pick-ups in an unfamiliar place _while trying to keep everyone else on schedule_, and 2) they may consider sticking around for the rest of the event to be important. It's really, really easy to imagine a world in which their refusal isn't primarily due to their being assholes.
Maybe you're right about all this being an example of a hostile school, but your description of events makes it seem more like a case of whiney, entitled kids/parents. Again, maybe that's wrong, but that is definitely the impression I get from this tale, as written. I mean, this: "Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday". I actually LOL'ed at the parenthetical exclamation point. Or: "and also do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right)." I mean—yeah, of course. What's weird about that? Quit signing up for extra crap if you're having trouble meeting basic obligations. You cannot have/do everything.
No, it cannot. Asking young minds to wake up for a performance (that the school is not required to participate in) is not reasonable. It doesn't matter how busy the student is; it doesn't matter that you voluntarily signed up. None of that matters. The point is that it's too early. It's an unreasonable burden to place on any child.
Your attitude also strikes me as needlessly aggressive about it. Why should the child pay the penalty of being disallowed to participate, grow, and learn (and incur the future costs of what scholarship committees and colleges will think of someone who didn't do those things) just because they think 5:15 am on a weekend morning for children who can't yet drive is too burdensome? What is the point of the school choir if not to provide culturally enriching experiences to the very students who wish to join it? You're acting as if the platonic idea of "the choir" exists totally independently of the bang-simple basic life constraints of its participants.
If the choir said you have to show up at 5:15 am for a concert, and you will not be allowed to use the bathroom or eat food for 6 hours then of course we'd have a problem with it. Kids need to use the bathroom. Kids need to eat. Voluntarily opting-in to participate in the choir doesn't give the choir director the permission to disallow eating or using a bathroom.
But if we just slightly move the needle out to significantly disrupting the regular sleeping habits of a middle school kid, now all of the sudden parents are "whiny" to expect their kid gets to be healthy. Your position is preposterous.
In other words, you're placing a deeply unrealistic expectation of accommodation onto a very young kid, meanwhile not holding grown adults to any degree of reasonableness or compromise.
On a school trip, the school is legally responsible for the kids. Trying to keep up with everyone - who came on the bus but is leaving early with their parents, who came with their parents but is riding back on the bus - especially with a large group. And it's even worse today, since most of the kids have cell phones and will be begging their parents for an early pick up, so whatever the kid originally said they were going to do will change mid trip.
As far as the homework, what would you have them do? They already have do much material to cover for standardized tests that they can't thoroughly cover any topics they way they need to. They know it and they don't have a choice. They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
Teachers in the US are in a terrible place right now. On one side you have parents, both bad parents who aren't involved and overly demanding ultra involved parents, and on the other side state and federal officials breathing down their necks about testing. Teachers are literally the meat in the middle of the vice. My mom is a retired teacher, and keeps in touch with a group of friends, almost all of whom she mentored. These are all very good teachers, and all of them are veterans with 10+ years experience. They're all demoralized and every single one of them is counting the days until hit 20 years, so they qualify for retirement and can get out.
It may be difficult to keep track of kids, but even so, the answer to that difficulty is not to do things that make the kids' lives overly burdensome just because that makes the teachers' lives a little better. You can find a way to compromise. If you have enough resources to take a group of kids to a choir competition in the first place, then you have enough resources to figure out some way that the kids are not stranded at the competition with no way to productively use that time until some mandated school transportation takes them home.
The point is that simply mandating a solution like "no one can leave early" is lazy and represents a failure to empathize with the kids or their parents. I agree with you it will have to be some type of compromise -- you can't give every single child or every single parent some customized, preferential treatment. But what the schools do is not at all like a compromise. It's much more of a mandated policy, and they threaten and coerce parents into scared obedience by subtly threatening to take it out on your child via grades, political favors (like who gets which role in a school musical) and so forth. So if you raise an issue and say that some policy is simply going too far (like forcing kids to be at the school by 5:15 am) you're actually putting your own kid at risk even just by making waves.
> As far as the homework, what would you have them do? They already have do much material to cover for standardized tests that they can't thoroughly cover any topics they way they need to. They know it and they don't have a choice. They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
This part really frustrates me. For one thing, the volume of homework and the speed with which you cover material are not at all the same thing. You can cover a lot of material without giving hardly any homework, or you can cover very few different topics while laying the homework on heavily. Measuring progress as "amount of homework completed" is a horrible idea. It's essentially like utterly giving up the idea of teaching people and admitting you're just going to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.
Also, there are at least a few studies out there which suggest that kids get up to three times as much homework as the state guidelines tend to recommend. High volume of homework is not really a symptom of guidelines. Covering crappy topical subjects, or expecting too many subjects to be covered in a year, those can be the fault of the guidelines. Evaluating students on nonsensical rubrics can be a problem with guidelines.
But making sure kids learn effectively with a reasonable amount of homework is perhaps the primary job of the teacher, regardless of the guidelines. What I mean is: conditional on some set of topics given from guidelines on high, the teacher's job is to then clamp the homework level at or below a reasonable amount and then evoke learning. Levering up the amount of homework doesn't somehow magically evoke learning, and often hinders it.
> They can't really slow down and take things slower for your kid because you think they're overworked.
Yes they absolutely can, and many teachers do, and they absolutely should, even in the presence of state guidelines. If adding more homework volume only exacerbates a problem of not really understanding something, then it cannot be a solution. Keeping homework at the same level, or even speeding it up, would only make things worse. It's like throwing gas on the fire.
I agree with you that teaching is not effectively rewarded in US culture. Four of my aunts were school teachers and another relative is an inner city principal in Ohio. I've heard it all. I absolutely agree...
Not really: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak.... It's a common myth, though.
That the education system can be optimized is obvious but that does not change any of what I am saying.
We have three elementary schools within one mile of each other. The schools have similar profiles with a fairly high number kids on free/reduced-price lunch. The teachers from the different schools train with one another. They come from the same education programs. Yet, my daughter's school significantly outperforms the other schools.
One difference comes from the parents and the culture/education opportunities they can provide outside the school. Parents regularly take their kids to plays, musicals, museums, historical sites, etc. They also read with their kids nightly.
Another important difference is the PTA. Ours is very active. We developed an after school program that offers introductory theater, music, visual arts, sports, marine biology, etc. Thanks to a state legislative grant, we can offer these classes for free to kids whose families can't afford them . Our parents knew enough to look for grants when they started the program. Last year we developed a full theater program for kids who wanted more involved productions.
If you're looking at economic classifications, the other two schools' communities can be described as working and lower middle class. Our community is working, lower and upper middle class.
Again, the stat on free/reduced-price lunches is similar. The schools' budgets are roughly the same accounting for number of students and age of the buildings. We have kids classified as homeless in our school, as I'm sure the other schools have as well. Yet, our school performs significantly better. The difference is the learning that's happening outside the school.
Last year I attended a talk by the president of the principals' association in my state. He cited a study that estimated 48% of a child's education comes from outside the school. There is certainly room for improvement for some teachers. There is also room for modernization in teaching methodology. But, we won't improve education for students as long as we're only looking along one axis for improvement.
(Btw, I'm not an educator. I'm a software engineer who happens to be very involved in the PTA for my daughter's school.)
Are you a parent yourself? (I am, of four children, two now adults.) Have you ever been a parent in more than one country? (I have both here in the United States and in Taiwan.) Do you regularly communicate with other parents about how well school programs are working for their children? (I participate in a national online network of parents of gifted children every day.)
Parent involvement of a certain kind is necessary, but it is not sufficient (unless it takes the form of homeschooling, which is something I did for the primary education of all four of my children). With equally involved and caring parents, pupils and students do better or worse depending especially on curriculum design, and depending also on teacher training and school administration. Studies of school districts that had forced changes of administrators of schools under the now-expired No Child Left Behind law showed that changing administrators in a school can improve learning outcomes for the same group of children brought up by the same group of parents. Moreover, teachers often increased their job satisfaction after such administrative changes.[1]
Almost every thread about education on Hacker News has a top comment saying, "Parental involvement is the most important thing." I could agree with that statement (I largely do, as a homeschooling parent) without thinking that statement is any more than a middle-brow dismissal[2] of the submitted article's detailed text unless we have something to discuss here about a) what brings about more parental involvement and b) what else can be done at the margin to improve schools for parents who are already well involved. Let's discuss those issues here rather than be dismissive.
AFTER EDIT: I have my own top-level in this thread with substantive response to what the original article author said, but it is pushed far down below the fold by the long subthread development here.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/27/443110755/no-child...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692598#up_4693920
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103985#up_10106466
I am originally from Denmark but moved to the US with my family.
My wife is part of the PTA group.
My oldest is in Success Academy a charter school.
I am not saying it's sufficient not sure how you got that idea. I am saying it's what makes the difference for the children getting education is that their parents are involved.
You can't always decide what teachers your kids are getting or what school they go to, who they hang out with and so on. But you can decide if you are going to be involved in your kids education.
You were the one who wrote, in the higher-level comment you made,
The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.
Now that we have agreement here expressed by each of us that parent involvement is important, but not the whole story of what's important in education, how about let's discuss the specific content of the article submitted for discussion? How could an involved parent, for example, CHECK whether or not a teacher in the friendly local public school has learned enough about reading instruction to know how to distinguish phonemes from graphemes?
I'd be happy to see other readers's comments on my own top-level comment in this thread (it is "below the fold, I think), in which I give examples of differing practice in the other country I have lived in, Taiwan. The schools there did an amazing job when Taiwan was still a developing country of providing good instruction with very limited resources. One big aspect of that was better teacher training.
The article claims that it's not bad teachers but bad teacher education.
I am following that line of singular reason and saying what I believe comes before that.
I made that comment in the context of discussions about childrens education which always focus on a bunch of other things than parents. (Better equipment, better teachers, better methods etc.) because I believe thats one of the most if not the most important reasons to get good education to the extent that something has to be chosen.
I am not buying the premise that education somehow becomes better if teachers becomes better or children gets better scores. Because I am not buying the premise that education in itself is the goal. It's only part of a much bigger perspective far beyond the reach of the educational system and later in life far beyond parents control.
So I stand by my claim that involved parents will itself make up for a lot of the things that are considered problems with education.
This is being too harsh on parents. My parents were very much involved with my own brother's education. They tutored him, got him extra help, set up incentives, etc, etc. But he still did far worse than me. Meanwhile they had to pull me away from the books. I never got help with math homework because I never had any trouble with it. School just came naturally to me. I was just born much smarter than my brother. My parents never had to pressure me to learn programming, I picked it up because it was fun and I was good at it. Heck, I taught myself calculus because I found the problem solving fun.
And I see this observation over and over again. If a person is naturally good at cognitive work, sooner or later they will go whole hog on learning some economically useful cognitive skills. If a person is just naturally a bit slower, it will always be an uphill battle.
These personal observations are corroborated by adoption studies and twin studies. Twins raised separately end up closer together than non-twins raised together. Adopted children end up closer to their biological parents than their adopted parents. Etc. (sources; http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023048987045774784... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/genes-dont-just-influ... )
Of course there are kids who just learn naturally but they aren't a part of the problem the article is discussing and there are parents who aren't involved in their childrens education.
You're looking on the wrong end of the spectrum. The thought is that kids with uninvolved parents tend to have external distractions, behavioral problems, an unwillingness to do homework, underage pregnancies, etc.
I don't buy it. Parental involvement has some value in early education (learning to read and write, for example). But beyond that, I suspect "involved parents" is a proxy for wealth.
Meaning, what? Wealthy kids with uninvolved parents do fine? Why?
For one, the school and teachers your kid gets is determined by whether you're rich enough to buy or rent property on the correct street (at least, here in Toronto).
(source: The Smartest Kids In The World http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0061NT61Y)
He learned in after school classes, at home, etc.
The problem was that public schools are focussed on underperforming kids and my son was above grade level so they did not bother to teach him. He did have a fun time at recess. Lots of time for reading fiction during class.
So much effort is being put into one-off, discrete solution to a curriculum problem (like leveled non-fiction texts, grammar instruction, etc.) - but what we really need are tools that allow me to understand what my students are capable of, support my development of curriculum materials/activities/assessment, and discover/remix the multitude of learning resources that are being created in classrooms just like mine all over the country.
I want a VisiCalc, because I'm tired of running these numbers by hand.
I have a friend who teaches in a Belmont (peninsula in the valley) school. He also works as a receptionist at a gym 4 days a week after working at the school, and he still spends half his take home pay on rent. So he's at the school where he teaches by 6:55AM and leaves the gym at 10PM, then does grading. The only reason you would legitimately struggle to understand why it's hard to hire teachers or why skilled people don't do it is because you're a startup founder (why aren't engineers jumping take a $50k paycut in exchange for most-likely-worthless 0.1% options? Engineering shortage!)
In the bay area in CA, teaching is a cute hobby that has to be supported by a spouse or a second job. If you want to draw more high-quality people into the profession, change that. And then maintain the changes and wait 10+ years at least for the knowledge to percolate and another generation of teachers to come up through high school and college.
If you ever take education classes, the first thing you'll notice is that the people leading them tend to go out of their way to follow best practices for teaching / learning.
Since most other classes only incorporate a handful of evidence-based teaching methods, and many times are structured around blatant anti-patterns, a lot of the ways these programs are structured are going to feel wrong to outside observers. But often there is some sort of theory / research behind why they are the way they are.
Granted this applies more to Ivy league teaching programs and not random Internet diploma mills, but for what it's worth.
How the world’s best-performing schools come out on top
To find out why some schools succeed where others do not, McKinsey studied 25 of the world’s school systems, including 10 of the top performers. The experience of these top school systems suggest that three things matter most:
- Getting the right people to become teachers;
- Developing them into effective instructors; and
- Ensuring the system is available to deliver the best possible instruction for every child.
http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-best-performing-...
This essasy doesn't conflict with the report, but it's only a tiny piece of the puzzle.
Similarly, in primary mathematics instruction, it is well known how do instruction well with multiple representations of mathematical concepts for pupils,[2] and generally it is very well known that teachers of mathematics need to have "profound understanding of fundamental mathematics (PUFM)"[3] and pedagogical content knowledge, but few teachers in the United States gain that from their professional training in teacher education courses.[4] I try to do my part to help teachers already in the classroom by participating in online discussions with other teachers (I myself am a math teacher in private practice) to guide them to helpful resources for learning more mathematics. Simply put, the author of the original article submitted here is correct. The United States could and should do better in teacher education to help teachers do their job as well as they desire to do it.
[1] https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa...
http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-...
[2] http://singaporemathsource.com/making-math-masters-a-brief-o...
http://www.thedailyriff.com/2010/11/singapore-math-demystifi...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf
http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf
[4] https://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleId=5974
http://www.maa.org/programs/faculty-and-departments/curricul...
https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/
no child left behind = no child does really well
Involved parents replace school. They act as the real teachers. They pay for after school classes where the child will do all the real learning.
The US education does what it is designed to do. Help as many underperforming kids as it can. The problem is that it claims to help all kids which it is not actually designed to do.
If the US wants higher performing students, it needs to change the design. More education of gifted students will bring the average up. Higher standards will raise the minimum bar that the schools try to reach.
I have 2 kids and I treated one of the top elementary schools in SV as a daycare.
http://www.newgeography.com/content/001955-the-amazing-truth...
tl;dr
Comparing Americans of European descent with Europeans, Americans are above the European average.
"The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded."
Americans of Asian descent tie with Asians. Note the provisos.
"For Asian-American students (remember this includes Vietnam, Thailand and other less developed countries outside Northeast Asia), the mean PISA score is 534, same as 533 for the average of Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Here we have two biases going in opposite directions: Asians in the U.S are selected. On the other hand we are comparing the richest and best scoring Asian countries with all Americans with origin in South and East Asia."
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr...
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr...
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L...
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is al...
I did not see anything in that blog post which suggested ethnic or national IQ differences. The author was more concerned with learning cultures between national groups, and how those cultures are carried over to new educational regimes, and how those shared cultures can be used to compare different educational regimes.
But one successful teacher's view is this: "...Like all the teachers I talked to in Washington, Mr. Taylor laments the lack of parental involvement. “On back-to-school night, if you have 28 or 30 kids in your class, you’re lucky to see six or seven parents,” he says. But when I ask him how that affects his teaching, he says, “Actually, it doesn’t. I make it my business to call the parents—and not just for bad things..."
h/t u/jseliger, who linked to a helpful article at the Atlantic, where I'm quoting this from.
Most studies I've seen on the topic show that the best predictor of one's educational success and attainment is one's parents educational attainment, so there is something to that that an anecdote from a teacher that, aside from not being a systematic gathering of evidence, doesn't even describe an experience of what drives outcomes, but simply relates a personal practice, isn't really sufficient to rebut.
Of course some teaching methodologies are better than other ones, but all the success stories I read, stripped from the fluff are based on enthusiastic and energetic teaches and supportive parents.
For the students we just need to not kill their natural learning predisposition. The parents, well, it depends on their culture etc, little to do here as well.
So for things we can change were left with the teachers. If they are respected, have a good salary, had a good education, have opportunities for growth, are not strangled by bureaucracy and come from the best of the students, then we'll have good teachers. If they are poorly paid, not recognized, fighting with paperwork and red tape, fighting with entitled parents and coming from the less smart student pool, well, looks a bit like US public system.
Instead have a great teacher prepare and then record a presentation. At lesson time every class gets to watch that presentation. This takes up maybe 75% of the lesson time. Then the remainder of the time deals with questions and extra clarification. You just saved a huge number of hours of prep and have a top notch presentation.