What we're invested in is the idea that someone has found a magic bullet that can ease our consciences of the deep injustice done to kids in poverty. The semblance of success makes it possible to say, "well, I guess all those failing schools are failing because they're not doing what Ballou is".
Public schools are very good at the facade of success - graduation rates, course descriptions, claims of excellence, glitzy buildings, education levels of teachers, money spent, committee reports, etc. But any measurement of educational results in students is relentlessly dismissed and attacked.
I think private schools use a lot of the same signals for success as public schools, however their students are often shielded from the downsides due to circumstances out of their control (their parents/family background), and upsides amplified.
Since parents are paying the tuition to private schools, the parents are in a strong position to demand results. Having paying customers makes for a very different dynamic.
Because they’re paying, private school student bodies are self selected to be students with higher chances of being successful. I’ll go out on a limb and say that few private school students are missing meals at home, for instance.
Have you ever met a private school student who came from a well off family and their parents didn't demand "results" from them, and they still have a nice life than most people?
Because the opposite is less likely to be true for those who didn't come from a well off family, regardless of the "results".
These "results" increasingly are meaningless when most people are just prodded through mindlessly to the next step and even more so when family member / family friend was already going to give you a nice job anyways…
I guess it also doesn't help either when people increasingly conflate the "results" with knowledge or education in of itself… at best they are mere approximations, however from the article, i seriously doubt we're anywhere near the the best…
The real question here is what colleges are admitting kids that can't read or write? Is affirmative action really so strong that these colleges accepted every kid from a HS where the average SAT score is in the 16th percentile? Or did the high school also help the kids fudge their applications?
Some community colleges (and even a few state colleges) in the USA are required as part of their charters or funding to accept any student who graduates high school in that area for at least one “trial” semester.
There's very little likelihood affirmative action has anything to do with it. There are schools that are not selective as a matter of principle/mission/policy.
>183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall.
It's almost as if the school got with each student to have him or her apply to the school. If the students were having trouble with reading, writing, and attendance, they probably wouldn't go out of their way to fill out a college app without oversight.
Why does it have to be "affirmative action"? Why is that the go to? Community colleges will often admit almost anyone who graduates but they have to take remedial courses.
At my high school they pulled bs like this too. We all had to apply to our local community College, which had a 100% acceptance rate. They also had a 100% graduation by changing anyone who wouldn't pass to a junior.
Both sound like good ideas to me. Community college is generally better than ending your education in high school.
And allowing people to graduate without passing their grade level seems like a bad idea. (Unless you're saying they were changed to juniors but then no longer went to the high school).
Unfortunately, it seems merely being accepted is the wrong metric. From the article:
The school district won't know how many Ballou graduates enrolled in college overall until May, a spokesperson says. We know of 183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall.
It seems to me, and the part of the story that’s missing, I would bet that the Administration applied on behalf of the “graduates” to the community college with a 100% acceptance rate.
I think what’s most impressive is how they’ve convinced themselves their fraud is actually all in the best interest of the students.
I think you misunderstood what he was saying. The school claimed they had a 100% graduation rate by retroactively claiming students that failed their senior year were juniors. Nothing really wrong with making students repeat grades until they pass, but doing it in such a way that you advertise a 100% graduation rate when 100% didn't graduate is deceptive.
e.g. you can use items like this as support for "send everyone to college" as a societal goal. People like pushing the message that "with the right investment, even total idiots can be college material!"
> Playing by the game can have financial benefits. If an evaluation score is high enough to reach the "highly effective" status, teachers and administrators can receive $15,000 to $30,000 in bonuses.
If their base pay is just above the poverty level, not really.
There is not some mass of people out there clamoring to be teachers. The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence. Then they get told they will lose their job unless they pass people they know they shouldn't, and are routinely told that tests that students aced 10 years ago are so difficult the students can no longer pass.
I agree that teachers should not put up with the charade, but it's totally unfair to put teachers' livelihoods at risk just because parents refuse to accept any responsibility and administrators cow down to political pressure.
I think it's unfair to blame the parents, en masse. Of course there are some crappy parents. But in many cases, they are just yesterday's underserved children, born into a situation where the prospects of escape are extremely slim. The cycle thus continues to their children.
If we actually care about today's children, we have to acknowledge the reality that not every parent is fully equipped to help their kids succeed and commit to trying to intervene this generation, to hopefully help many future generations of children.
As a teacher in Baltimore, I met parents and guardians of just about every stripe you can imagine. Almost every one of them wanted the best for their kids. A lot of them lacked the savvy, wealth and social capital to navigate a better path for their kids.
I blame the parents, even when they aren't directly to blame, when they abuse teachers and administrators for not passing their obviously unqualified child. Parents don't seem to care if their child learns as much as whether they can leave the school system.
Really though, the politicians are exacerbating the problems. Not only do they abandon communities in need, they cut education funding across the board, and then put price tags on the schools - pass students in my district or we cut the money even more. Meanwhile, they spend more on the military and kick the can down the road.
I never once had pressure from a parent of a failing student. The only time I was pressured by a parent was from one of my more well adjusted students. The "what can we do to make this B an A type thing". Most of the parents I had put a frightening amount of faith in me to open opportunities for their kid and trusted my judgment.
I also went out of my way (as is typical in impoverished schools) to let them know as early as possible if their kid was falling behind. As the teacher, it's on you to figure out how to make time to try to coach kids back on track. It's unbelievably overwhelmed to try to do this for a couple dozen kids at a time, each with unique failure patterns to address.
The pressure comes from administration, whose asses are on the line to have good looking metrics.
> The median annual Teacher High School salary in Washington, DC is $65,020, as of January 30, 2018, with a range usually between $51,518-$76,373 not including bonus
Bachelors degree with no experience (but presumably a teaching certificate) 56K. Tops out with a Phd and 20 years in at about 135K (not including bonuses). Not the end of the world, but median household income in DC & PG County is around 75K, Montgomery County 85K and Fairfax VA 105K. Unmarried, or with a family in a two income home, that's solidly middle class income.
> The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence.
That overstates it a bit, but that is the crux of the issue. DC public schools are administered so poorly, with such a legacy of failure, despite the great pay they cannot attract decent teachers, and they have outrageously high rates of turnover, as anyone who can get a job elsewhere does.
Those figures are for 2019, and certainly there are extremely few (if any) teachers that have a PhD and stick around for 20 years. DCPS loses about 25% of its teachers every year, with the highest poverty DCPS schools losing 40% per year. The rate nationally has been increasing over the past decade. But let's assume six years of experience, which puts their salary with a bachelors at $62,771.
The median cost of a home in DC is $545,000 according to Zillow, with property tax approximately $8,992.50. A 30 year mortgage minimum plus the property tax would be around $3,535 a month. Around 68% of the teacher's gross salary is going to housing. This is over double the suggested amount anyone should spend on housing, and definitely not middle class.
If they live outside of DC (almost no teacher can afford to own a home alone in DC) the median cost of a home goes down to only $385,000. But state taxes vary; they're generally higher in Maryland, whereas in Virginia you pay more tax to own a car, for example. The monthly mortgage plus property tax in Montgomery County would be only $2,320 per month, so a more affordable 37% of salary. Now we can start adding on the extras, like insurance, transportation, food, etc in an expensive metro area.
Speaking of turnover, it's nice that teachers in DC are allowed to live in surrounding areas. In states such as NJ, all public employees must live in the state, and NJ property taxes are the highest in the country. After adding on home insurance (which might already be high) and then extras like mandatory flood insurance (depending on where you live), this leaves teachers faced with potentially paying more on property tax and insurance than their mortgage, or renting an apartment.
This is one of many potential reasons for a high turnover rate. Around the country, teachers face not only low salaries and completely unreasonable expectations, but various challenges like the above. I don't think administration is the sole cause of these problems, as administration is usually responding to outside pressure.
When you financially incentivize teachers to hit measurable data targets, don't be surprised when they game the system to hit those targets. The same happens in every industry and job. If I were to tell software developers that their bonus was dependent on hitting story point metrics, they would suddenly be exceeding the story point metrics I desired, despite in reality the same amount of work being completed.
The real problem here is that the stakes are the students' education, and in truth their futures. I wish I could think of some easy solution to this problem but it's so damn hard. I believe a lot of it comes down to the parents and their values, but that's a tough problem to fix.
I guess thinking about this increases my sympathy for search engines and spam filters not being transparent about the algorithmic bases for their rankings, even in a week when I've had some personal e-mail blocked as a spam false positive. The resources that are getting put into discovering how to game those scores are staggering.
I assume there are also exceptions to Goodhart's Law in terms of metrics that effectively can't be gamed, or that otherwise better manage to align different groups' incentives.
The best case in business is when you tell a sales professional that they will get a percentage of whatever business they bring in, judged the moment when it's in accounts receivable. It's difficult to game a wire transfer from another company.
Education is very different than sales. I don't know what the solution is, especially when measuring "learning" itself is very difficult if not impossible.
> The best case in business is when you tell a sales professional that they will get a percentage of whatever business they bring in, judged the moment when it's in accounts receivable. It's difficult to game a wire transfer from another company.
I've seen the result of this. The salesperson oversells, and the engineering team death marches to attempt to build what the salesperson has already received their commission for.
Especially high school math can be gamed effectively. For "word problems" you can drill students to look for keywords and they will arrive at the right result without understanding the problem.
My wife teaches at a 4-year state school and tells me that one of her students did just that, she looked for plausible keywords but then didn't know what to do next, this was chemistry, not math.
Test-taking strategies are definitely possible without learning the material. Hunting for keywords is a common one; learning to recognize the kind of answers that show up as confounders is also pretty common. Even free response questions can be gamed, if you learn how to come up with plausible answers that can rack up partial credit.
It is difficult to game your way to an A without knowing a fair amount of the material, but it's definitely possible to get a passing grade and possibly as high as a B. And students are often very eager to try to claw as much partial credit on a test as possible.
This comment is a fantastic example of not knowing enough to know how ignorant you are - to start with, you appear to be conflating “knowledge” with “learning”.
It's not that hard to think about how to game that and the culture and incentives that will develop outside of very limited utopian circumstances.
The logical outcome is that the biggest parasites will look to attach themselves to the biggest flows of money with low levels of elasticity relative to their input.
And they will do whatever they can through side-channel methods and attacks, whether it be destructive to other employees or the company itself, to stop others getting into the position, including navigating/manipulating the hierarchy to maximize flows through them.
Half of finance/executive remuneration is literally built around that strategy (manage big flows of money unrelated to your personal input), and I'd guess a huge number of toxic companies and employees are directly attributable to people who believe they've successfully implemented that incentive scheme.
Except we all know what happens in that case. Sales promises whatever they need to in order to get the sale, and then engineering is left to pick up the slack, working unpaid overtime to compensate.
Maybe it has something to do with the systematic impoverishment of black communities and the destruction of black families through mass incarceration, and "innovative teaching" will do little to fix these inequalities, which require much deeper and more structural policy change.
On a related note, Washington D.C. specifically has a massive lead pipe problem which has been ignored for decades.
A lot starts with criminal justice reform and getting rid of the "War on Drugs". You can't help but to notice that once drugs started affecting rural and suburban American, that it became all about "treatment" and less about locking people up.
This reminds me of things like https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ and when I was (briefly --- thankfully) involved in teaching CS courses a few years ago. More than half the class clearly hadn't actually passed the prerequisites. Lots of begging for leniency and remarking, some extremely emotional appeals. It's a difficult situation because if you let them through, it only creates problems further down the line; and if you don't, then everyone questions your teaching ability (but strangely enough, not the learning ability of the students, which most certainly has a huge effect on how well they do.) I chose the latter and don't regret it --- and left that industry before long, although not before accumulating a pretty negative reputation, because my class' grades would always be a strongly bimodal distribution with one of the peaks well below the failing point.
School district leaders, including Wilson, defend the use of makeup work, arguing they want to give students "multiple opportunities" to show they understand material.
Contrast this with the attitude of some more demanding professions like piloting an aircraft: "If you don't get it right the first time, it could be the end of your career, or even your life."
> if you let them through, it only creates problems further down the line; and if you don't, then everyone questions your teaching ability (but strangely enough, not the learning ability of the students, which most certainly has a huge effect on how well they do.)
American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability.
Our government passed a bipartisan law, to great fanfare, entitled No Child Left Behind, which assumes that every child is capable of graduating … when of course that's complete nonsense.
"no two people differ in learning ability" != "every child is capable of graduating". Your reply is barely related to my request for citation.
And it's not clear to why it's complete nonsense either. Do you have some sort of data about what the cognitive needs are to graduate secondary school, and what percentage of the population lacks them?
Considering real world schools have varying grades and varying tracks of difficulty from remedial to advanced, it seems like they recognize a wide range in learning ability.
One-to-many (one teacher, 20 students) might superficially appear to be efficient, but one-to-one is where the real teaching happens. Mentors are highly underrated. Over the next 20 years, I suspect peer-to-peer mentoring will gain huge appeal, and the number of people going to college will decrease.
It does have its weird quirks though. My daughter is in 4th grade. At the beginning of 2nd grade she was assessed at about 1.5 grade levels behind. She was just assessed again and is about 1.5 grade levels behind. We raised the possibility of holding her back a grade and were immediately told that was not an option.
This was all very foreign to me since I was held back in elementary school, at my teacher's recommendation.
It just seems to me that the amount of extra work they have put in to keep her advancing while in a classroom where most of the work is above her ability could be put to better use.
> American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability.
No, its dedicated, depending on how cynically you view it, to either bringing up the performance of the lower-end of the distribution or to painting public schools as failing to support privatization. It is absolutely not dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability, and, in fact, rather directly addresses the existence of learning disabilities.
It is dedicated to bringing the performance of the lower end all the way up to the level of the higher end. This can't be done if you're willing to concede that the higher end might be able to learn faster.
If an innovation in education improves outcomes by 3% for stupid students and 5% for smart students (you know... because they respond better to education), that's actually a bad thing from the conventional viewpoint, because "the gap" has widened instead of narrowing.
> It is dedicated to bringing the performance of the lower end all the way up to the level of the higher end.
No, its not. (Though if it continues without change it will probably have the effect of narrowing that gap to near zero, but largely by bringing the higher end down through neglect rather than by bringing the lower end up to it.)
> This can't be done if you're willing to concede that the higher end might be able to learn faster.
Its quite possible if you acknowledge that but then consciously plan to neglect serving the upper end.
I think you’re referring to the No Child Left Behind act - is that still relevant today? I was hoping that Obama’s education secretary rolled-back the worst parts of that.
People have definitely died due to programming errors, if that is what you mean. The classic example that comes to mind is Therac-25[0] accidentally giving thousands of times the radiation dose.
It’s a miracle these kinds of consequences aren’t more common, given how much code runs machinery and how undisciplined many engineering firms are.
Please show me this mythical world where there is no confusion and no huge overlap between computer science and software engineering, a magical place where you can have one without the other, and where they have no bearing on each other.
The two are as intertwined as they can be, you cannot perform software engineering without practicing some part of computer science, and you cannot perform computer science in truth, without practicing some part of software engineering.
Anyway, in the case of Therac-25 it was a concurrency error, so in other words, both a CS mistake, and a programming mistake.
While it may not be possible to have programming without CS, it's certainly possible to have CS without programming. And if you're going to school for CS, you're there to learn math, not software engineering. Many (most?) people who study CS have no intention of writing software or becoming developers.
> Many (most?) people who study CS have no intention of writing software or becoming developers.
Quite the opposite, since most schools offer CS degrees but not Software Engineering degrees. Most students in CS are there to learn to become software developers, not to learn theoretical (i
e., computational) science.
Yes, CS builds upon some areas of Mathematics, such as Mathematical Logic, but you must remember that CS was born out of the wish to develop new algorithms for certain tasks, and to develop frameworks for expressing and formalizing properties of existing software algorithms.
Computer Science may not be practiced very heavily in the field, but many of the results in CS come directly from needs of the engineering field, and vice versa. Think Big O Notation, which attempts to find a theoretical solution to the practical problem of "Which of these two approaches is faster". Or bounds checking algorithms / Hindley-Milner type systems (e.g. Algorithm W, etc.), which are practical implementations of theoretical work, both of which were answers to the question "How can I find specific errors in this program code before they occur at runtime".
This isn't working a profession, It's education. You are supposed to be able make mistakes. And you are supposed to get help to overcome those mistakes and learn.
Some students need more support than others.
If all these kids aren't doing well, it's not a failing of the kids, but of the people who should be helping the kids succeed, and the system that graduated them.
A high income student who struggles with their grade gets tutors and help. A low income student who struggles is passed along without getting support to learn, allowed to fall further and further behind.
If students are missing multiple months of school, I doubt they're going to show up for a tutor.
My university offered free tutoring, and nudged the struggling students toward it. Most of them never showed. Of course, many of them were skipping the normal classes, so not too much surprise in that case.
> If all these kids aren't doing well, it's not a failing of
> the kids, but of the people who should be helping the kids
> succeed,
My favourite "how many" joke goes like this:
"How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but lightbulb need to want to change".
And there is a saying: "one man can lead the horse to the water, but even forty cannot make it drink".
The point being: yes, there are people who "should be helping", but the key word is "helping". The kid should put some effort too.
I find that attitude that everyone around is to blame except the one in the middle quite dangerous. It teaches not to be responsible for your own actions (or inaction).
We had a president a few years back, whose long lasting infamous contribution to the society was the catchphrase "I am not responsible, the environment is".
Right blame a student who had to work at a fastfood job in high school, they're not putting enough effort in life and don't deserve help.
What you're describing certainly isn't represented by the article, what I read is there are students who society is already failing, and so no doubt they don't win by its rules.
It seems like discussions about education always devolve to an unproductive argument about who should be blamed. Who’s failing? Can we assign blame to the student? Can we be angry at teachers? Etc..
Why does this matter at all? Is the goal to inflict shame on students, teachers or their parents? Society has all kinds of people. That means brilliant students who will succeed no matter what, and it also means students who are lazy, inconsistent, distracted, have bad home lives, etc. Our nation prospers when we can figure out how to educate even kids that are difficult to educate because of circumstances or even maybe factors intrinsic to the kid like disabilities.
Blame is useless. Kids become adults and if they are uneducated now it’s a real problem for everyone. Uneducated adults are more likely to be unemployed and more likely to commit crimes and less able to work and pay taxes to support the system. Now, are we going to figure out how to educate kids so that doesn’t happen or are we going to assign blame to them, then throw them into prison / welfare when they get older?
Being interested and getting enjoyment out of learning is crucial. E.g. there are people who are good at math, but terrible at humanities subjects, or vice versa.
That's not the university model everywhere. In the UK, for instance, deep specialisms start at 16, and university undergrad courses all focus on your area of interest or directly relevant subjects.
That’s a very callous attitude, and an incorrect one, I believe.
Not everyone has the same ability to learn about different subjects equally - even amongst groups with the same intellignece levels. It sounds like you’re arguing that one’s entire future career, even in post-secondary and undergraduate level, is decided entirely by their grade-average across all their subjects. This will disqualify many talented individuals from studying (and consequently working in) areas that strongly interest them simply for having an inability to adequately perform in completely unrelated areas. How is that a meritocracy?
Take myself, for example: I have ASD, I have “special interests” and my brain is incredibly stubborn and demotivated to do anything outside certain narrow interest areas. I did exceptionally well in my UK A-Level electives (maths/physics/compsci, etc, getting mostly top grades) compared to my GCSEs that we’re far more broader (English Lit, Biology, Chemistry, Theology, etc) where I got mostly B-grades. After getting my degree I landed a job at a high-profile software company in the US, launching me into a career and a very high tax bracket. Hopefully this means my net societal impact is positive. But under your proposal, my hardwired unwillingness to memorise Shakespeare and compare Dickens with Steinbeck should condemn me to never entering academia to study what I enjoy.
But in general, professionals, including those who would study autism, would believe that acutely uneven school performance is the suspicious and peculiar phenomena, as opposed to general all-around performance. Rather, children who do well in school do well across subjects, and children who do mediocre in school do mediocre across subjects, and children who do poorly do poorly all around.
I suppose your reply comes from the fact that I missed saying I wasn't teaching in grade school --- I was teaching CS courses to paying students, so presumably they have some interest in learning; yet the amount of "I didn't bother trying to learn anything, but please let me pass" was still incredibly high.
A german friend of mine always used to say:"In any other mission critical profession, if you are a doctor, a craftsman or an airplane engineer, if you fuckup something too badly, you will be forbidden to continue working in your profession for misconduct(atleast in Germany). In our job, people can ruin lives, destroy whole companies and then have that seen as experience on their CV."
As horrifying the idea of career ending bugs sound to me, we probably need to appreciate the fact that there's a level where adding "coders" to the pool is doing more harm then good when we look at what it will do to the understanding of what's "acceptable".
These numbers are not really that different than many underserved communities just this school’s spotlight in the media makes all of this seem shocking. Also let’s just be real here about the reality of future prospects among most people here in the U.S. but even more specifically the kids in the article- many of them know it just doesn’t matter. Not so much that things are desperate or hopeless but the goal at the end may not seem that great so they opt to enjoy their lives in that moment. I’m afraid still this played out scapegoating is the reason collectively everyone will look at a situation like this and think “Well this is why we can’t find super high achieving versions of these kids”. No, they exist and also there are plenty of other situations worse than this and different groups of people involved as well. The solution is actually really simple- stop pretending to be very inclusive while actually being very exclusive. Demonstrate how education can lead to a fulfilling life to these kids. Not speeches or abstract situations but real living examples, people they grew up around, etc.. Really you can only tell yourself so much that your “paving the road” to help people that come after you until the realization sets in this will be as far they let me go and everyone like me too. Just wait a few more years like this and we will see all sorts of people “gaming” all sorts of “systems”.
"It is expected that our students will be here every day," said Jane Spence, chief of secondary schools at D.C. Public Schools. "But we also know that students learn material in lots of different ways. So we've started to recognize that students can have mastered material even if they're not sitting in a physical space."
This is typical of the heads of failing schools. Yes, our kids can’t pass state exams. Yes, our parental survey complain of bullying. Yes our teachers complain in surveys about school leadership. But you’re just not measuring the learning that’s happening here.
That particalur quote is just saying that they don't uphold the commonly seen philosophy (creditted to NCLB and friends' funding requirements) of automatically failing kids who can't get to school almost every day.
This is crap. Here in India at least, attendance has nothing to do with college admissions.
One can study better from home anyway.
Also considering that it's a poor school, the teachers are surely not that great either.
This is a puff piece. If the teachers taught better, students would come. This just shows how broken the system of failing due to low attendance is. These kids obviously worked hard in spite of school and that should be celebrated, not investegated.
The teacher's attitude is weird to say the least.
Good kids but didn't deserve to walk across that stage?
FWIW, in Virginia (not far from DC, but under different laws), the school system I went to had a similar attendance requirement for passing, but it was in a gray area. There was significant legal precedent for disallowing failing students for non-academic (i.e. behavioral) reasons. They kept the policy in place just because very few parents would challenge the grade, but all who did would win.
American school system is absolutely bizarre. I'm from across the pond - I probably cut 80% of classes in my last year of school ( I ended up transferring to a magnet school in 4th grade ). Most of my "will likely succeed" peers cut between 20% to 40% of the classes that year.
Our teachers did not care what so ever: you had to be in for the tests, there were no make up days, your grade was your grade which was an average of all tests given. Age classes were split into sections based on performance. If you were in 5A, you probably did better than you were in 5B and you were definitely miles ahead of 5D. At the end of the every year there was a reshuffling between the letters based on previous year results. No one, absolutely no one, wanted to go down a grade.
If your grade was higher than the minimum, you got to take the final test before graduation. Achieving the minimum score on it allowed you to graduate. If you did not get there, you did not get to do it which meant another year of school. That was in all test subjects: literature, math, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, foreign language (addition only in our class). There was no curve. Hell, entire concept of a curve still baffles me.
Results of the test: me - 2nd at 127% percent behind a girl who never cut a single class at 129%. Our of a graduating class of 142, 140 were taking the test, all 140 achieved the minimum 81% needed. All of people who cut classes that I knew scored over 94%.
I did not realize how weird it was until I got to an American university.
while this may be extreme, don't think that the same types of things don't happen in more affluent schools
- special projects, make up work, multiple times to take a test, parents and administrators pressuring teachers, etc.
The only thing I haven't seen in the more affluent schools is the tolerance for unexecused absenses and tardiness.
> Many teachers we spoke to say they were encouraged to also follow another policy: give absent or struggling students a 50 percent on assignments they missed or didn't complete, instead of a zero. The argument was, if the student tried to make up the missed work or failed, it would most likely be impossible to pass with a zero on the books.
It sounds like the grading system is broken.
Does a zero do the thing that we want it to do?
Could there be a different metric, that doesn't weight a zero in a way that knocks students out like in an elimination tournament? What are the goals of grades? It seems like they are structured to rank students in a competition. That's great for the winners. But what do you do with the loosers?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadIf not for the investigation, would anyone have ever noticed?
Have you ever met a private school student who came from a well off family and their parents didn't demand "results" from them, and they still have a nice life than most people?
Because the opposite is less likely to be true for those who didn't come from a well off family, regardless of the "results".
These "results" increasingly are meaningless when most people are just prodded through mindlessly to the next step and even more so when family member / family friend was already going to give you a nice job anyways…
I guess it also doesn't help either when people increasingly conflate the "results" with knowledge or education in of itself… at best they are mere approximations, however from the article, i seriously doubt we're anywhere near the the best…
It's almost as if the school got with each student to have him or her apply to the school. If the students were having trouble with reading, writing, and attendance, they probably wouldn't go out of their way to fill out a college app without oversight.
And allowing people to graduate without passing their grade level seems like a bad idea. (Unless you're saying they were changed to juniors but then no longer went to the high school).
The school district won't know how many Ballou graduates enrolled in college overall until May, a spokesperson says. We know of 183 students accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, the local community college. But only 16 enrolled this fall.
I think what’s most impressive is how they’ve convinced themselves their fraud is actually all in the best interest of the students.
Are there students who benefit? No.
Fraud can pay very well.
There is not some mass of people out there clamoring to be teachers. The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence. Then they get told they will lose their job unless they pass people they know they shouldn't, and are routinely told that tests that students aced 10 years ago are so difficult the students can no longer pass.
I agree that teachers should not put up with the charade, but it's totally unfair to put teachers' livelihoods at risk just because parents refuse to accept any responsibility and administrators cow down to political pressure.
If we actually care about today's children, we have to acknowledge the reality that not every parent is fully equipped to help their kids succeed and commit to trying to intervene this generation, to hopefully help many future generations of children.
As a teacher in Baltimore, I met parents and guardians of just about every stripe you can imagine. Almost every one of them wanted the best for their kids. A lot of them lacked the savvy, wealth and social capital to navigate a better path for their kids.
Really though, the politicians are exacerbating the problems. Not only do they abandon communities in need, they cut education funding across the board, and then put price tags on the schools - pass students in my district or we cut the money even more. Meanwhile, they spend more on the military and kick the can down the road.
I also went out of my way (as is typical in impoverished schools) to let them know as early as possible if their kid was falling behind. As the teacher, it's on you to figure out how to make time to try to coach kids back on track. It's unbelievably overwhelmed to try to do this for a couple dozen kids at a time, each with unique failure patterns to address.
The pressure comes from administration, whose asses are on the line to have good looking metrics.
https://www1.salary.com/DC/Washington/high-school-teacher-Sa...
A $30,000 bonus is almost 50% of the median salary. It's a significant temptation to commit fraud.
Bachelors degree with no experience (but presumably a teaching certificate) 56K. Tops out with a Phd and 20 years in at about 135K (not including bonuses). Not the end of the world, but median household income in DC & PG County is around 75K, Montgomery County 85K and Fairfax VA 105K. Unmarried, or with a family in a two income home, that's solidly middle class income.
> The only ones teaching are the ones who will submit themselves to humiliation and abuse and work 80 hour weeks for the reward of barely reaching a middle class existence.
That overstates it a bit, but that is the crux of the issue. DC public schools are administered so poorly, with such a legacy of failure, despite the great pay they cannot attract decent teachers, and they have outrageously high rates of turnover, as anyone who can get a job elsewhere does.
The median cost of a home in DC is $545,000 according to Zillow, with property tax approximately $8,992.50. A 30 year mortgage minimum plus the property tax would be around $3,535 a month. Around 68% of the teacher's gross salary is going to housing. This is over double the suggested amount anyone should spend on housing, and definitely not middle class.
If they live outside of DC (almost no teacher can afford to own a home alone in DC) the median cost of a home goes down to only $385,000. But state taxes vary; they're generally higher in Maryland, whereas in Virginia you pay more tax to own a car, for example. The monthly mortgage plus property tax in Montgomery County would be only $2,320 per month, so a more affordable 37% of salary. Now we can start adding on the extras, like insurance, transportation, food, etc in an expensive metro area.
Speaking of turnover, it's nice that teachers in DC are allowed to live in surrounding areas. In states such as NJ, all public employees must live in the state, and NJ property taxes are the highest in the country. After adding on home insurance (which might already be high) and then extras like mandatory flood insurance (depending on where you live), this leaves teachers faced with potentially paying more on property tax and insurance than their mortgage, or renting an apartment.
This is one of many potential reasons for a high turnover rate. Around the country, teachers face not only low salaries and completely unreasonable expectations, but various challenges like the above. I don't think administration is the sole cause of these problems, as administration is usually responding to outside pressure.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/...
The real problem here is that the stakes are the students' education, and in truth their futures. I wish I could think of some easy solution to this problem but it's so damn hard. I believe a lot of it comes down to the parents and their values, but that's a tough problem to fix.
I guess thinking about this increases my sympathy for search engines and spam filters not being transparent about the algorithmic bases for their rankings, even in a week when I've had some personal e-mail blocked as a spam false positive. The resources that are getting put into discovering how to game those scores are staggering.
I assume there are also exceptions to Goodhart's Law in terms of metrics that effectively can't be gamed, or that otherwise better manage to align different groups' incentives.
Education is very different than sales. I don't know what the solution is, especially when measuring "learning" itself is very difficult if not impossible.
I've seen the result of this. The salesperson oversells, and the engineering team death marches to attempt to build what the salesperson has already received their commission for.
Incentives are tricky.
That's ridiculous. Math, science, vocabulary, history, and reading comprehension can all be tested effectively, with little risk of "gaming" it.
(at least at the level of a tpyical high scholl curriculum)
My wife teaches at a 4-year state school and tells me that one of her students did just that, she looked for plausible keywords but then didn't know what to do next, this was chemistry, not math.
Reading comprehension is harder to game.
> she looked for plausible keywords but then didn't know what to do next
That doesn't sound like she arrived at the right result.
It is difficult to game your way to an A without knowing a fair amount of the material, but it's definitely possible to get a passing grade and possibly as high as a B. And students are often very eager to try to claw as much partial credit on a test as possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_assessment
The logical outcome is that the biggest parasites will look to attach themselves to the biggest flows of money with low levels of elasticity relative to their input.
And they will do whatever they can through side-channel methods and attacks, whether it be destructive to other employees or the company itself, to stop others getting into the position, including navigating/manipulating the hierarchy to maximize flows through them.
Half of finance/executive remuneration is literally built around that strategy (manage big flows of money unrelated to your personal input), and I'd guess a huge number of toxic companies and employees are directly attributable to people who believe they've successfully implemented that incentive scheme.
On a related note, Washington D.C. specifically has a massive lead pipe problem which has been ignored for decades.
But you might coast through those elections on a happy lie. Particularly if you make the papers by getting everyone admitted to university.
School district leaders, including Wilson, defend the use of makeup work, arguing they want to give students "multiple opportunities" to show they understand material.
Contrast this with the attitude of some more demanding professions like piloting an aircraft: "If you don't get it right the first time, it could be the end of your career, or even your life."
American policy is dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability.
That would benefit from a reliable citation.
And it's not clear to why it's complete nonsense either. Do you have some sort of data about what the cognitive needs are to graduate secondary school, and what percentage of the population lacks them?
Considering real world schools have varying grades and varying tracks of difficulty from remedial to advanced, it seems like they recognize a wide range in learning ability.
This was all very foreign to me since I was held back in elementary school, at my teacher's recommendation.
It just seems to me that the amount of extra work they have put in to keep her advancing while in a classroom where most of the work is above her ability could be put to better use.
No, its dedicated, depending on how cynically you view it, to either bringing up the performance of the lower-end of the distribution or to painting public schools as failing to support privatization. It is absolutely not dedicated to the principle that no two people differ in learning ability, and, in fact, rather directly addresses the existence of learning disabilities.
If an innovation in education improves outcomes by 3% for stupid students and 5% for smart students (you know... because they respond better to education), that's actually a bad thing from the conventional viewpoint, because "the gap" has widened instead of narrowing.
No, its not. (Though if it continues without change it will probably have the effect of narrowing that gap to near zero, but largely by bringing the higher end down through neglect rather than by bringing the lower end up to it.)
> This can't be done if you're willing to concede that the higher end might be able to learn faster.
Its quite possible if you acknowledge that but then consciously plan to neglect serving the upper end.
CS isn't a profession though, and AFAIK no one has ever died due to a CS mistake.
It’s a miracle these kinds of consequences aren’t more common, given how much code runs machinery and how undisciplined many engineering firms are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
It wasn't.
The two are as intertwined as they can be, you cannot perform software engineering without practicing some part of computer science, and you cannot perform computer science in truth, without practicing some part of software engineering.
Anyway, in the case of Therac-25 it was a concurrency error, so in other words, both a CS mistake, and a programming mistake.
Quite the opposite, since most schools offer CS degrees but not Software Engineering degrees. Most students in CS are there to learn to become software developers, not to learn theoretical (i e., computational) science.
You realise that the many disciplines of CS would not exist without the real life requirements of actual computers?
Indeed, Knuth has written on a tangential topic to this: http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html
Yes, CS builds upon some areas of Mathematics, such as Mathematical Logic, but you must remember that CS was born out of the wish to develop new algorithms for certain tasks, and to develop frameworks for expressing and formalizing properties of existing software algorithms.
Computer Science may not be practiced very heavily in the field, but many of the results in CS come directly from needs of the engineering field, and vice versa. Think Big O Notation, which attempts to find a theoretical solution to the practical problem of "Which of these two approaches is faster". Or bounds checking algorithms / Hindley-Milner type systems (e.g. Algorithm W, etc.), which are practical implementations of theoretical work, both of which were answers to the question "How can I find specific errors in this program code before they occur at runtime".
Some students need more support than others.
If all these kids aren't doing well, it's not a failing of the kids, but of the people who should be helping the kids succeed, and the system that graduated them.
A high income student who struggles with their grade gets tutors and help. A low income student who struggles is passed along without getting support to learn, allowed to fall further and further behind.
My university offered free tutoring, and nudged the struggling students toward it. Most of them never showed. Of course, many of them were skipping the normal classes, so not too much surprise in that case.
The point being: yes, there are people who "should be helping", but the key word is "helping". The kid should put some effort too.
I find that attitude that everyone around is to blame except the one in the middle quite dangerous. It teaches not to be responsible for your own actions (or inaction).
We had a president a few years back, whose long lasting infamous contribution to the society was the catchphrase "I am not responsible, the environment is".
He was impeached. Let's not raise more like him.
What you're describing certainly isn't represented by the article, what I read is there are students who society is already failing, and so no doubt they don't win by its rules.
It seems like discussions about education always devolve to an unproductive argument about who should be blamed. Who’s failing? Can we assign blame to the student? Can we be angry at teachers? Etc..
Why does this matter at all? Is the goal to inflict shame on students, teachers or their parents? Society has all kinds of people. That means brilliant students who will succeed no matter what, and it also means students who are lazy, inconsistent, distracted, have bad home lives, etc. Our nation prospers when we can figure out how to educate even kids that are difficult to educate because of circumstances or even maybe factors intrinsic to the kid like disabilities.
Blame is useless. Kids become adults and if they are uneducated now it’s a real problem for everyone. Uneducated adults are more likely to be unemployed and more likely to commit crimes and less able to work and pay taxes to support the system. Now, are we going to figure out how to educate kids so that doesn’t happen or are we going to assign blame to them, then throw them into prison / welfare when they get older?
Being interested and getting enjoyment out of learning is crucial. E.g. there are people who are good at math, but terrible at humanities subjects, or vice versa.
Not everyone has the same ability to learn about different subjects equally - even amongst groups with the same intellignece levels. It sounds like you’re arguing that one’s entire future career, even in post-secondary and undergraduate level, is decided entirely by their grade-average across all their subjects. This will disqualify many talented individuals from studying (and consequently working in) areas that strongly interest them simply for having an inability to adequately perform in completely unrelated areas. How is that a meritocracy?
Take myself, for example: I have ASD, I have “special interests” and my brain is incredibly stubborn and demotivated to do anything outside certain narrow interest areas. I did exceptionally well in my UK A-Level electives (maths/physics/compsci, etc, getting mostly top grades) compared to my GCSEs that we’re far more broader (English Lit, Biology, Chemistry, Theology, etc) where I got mostly B-grades. After getting my degree I landed a job at a high-profile software company in the US, launching me into a career and a very high tax bracket. Hopefully this means my net societal impact is positive. But under your proposal, my hardwired unwillingness to memorise Shakespeare and compare Dickens with Steinbeck should condemn me to never entering academia to study what I enjoy.
As horrifying the idea of career ending bugs sound to me, we probably need to appreciate the fact that there's a level where adding "coders" to the pool is doing more harm then good when we look at what it will do to the understanding of what's "acceptable".
"It is expected that our students will be here every day," said Jane Spence, chief of secondary schools at D.C. Public Schools. "But we also know that students learn material in lots of different ways. So we've started to recognize that students can have mastered material even if they're not sitting in a physical space."
This is typical of the heads of failing schools. Yes, our kids can’t pass state exams. Yes, our parental survey complain of bullying. Yes our teachers complain in surveys about school leadership. But you’re just not measuring the learning that’s happening here.
One can study better from home anyway. Also considering that it's a poor school, the teachers are surely not that great either.
This is a puff piece. If the teachers taught better, students would come. This just shows how broken the system of failing due to low attendance is. These kids obviously worked hard in spite of school and that should be celebrated, not investegated.
The teacher's attitude is weird to say the least.
Good kids but didn't deserve to walk across that stage?
The teacher ought to be sacked.
Our teachers did not care what so ever: you had to be in for the tests, there were no make up days, your grade was your grade which was an average of all tests given. Age classes were split into sections based on performance. If you were in 5A, you probably did better than you were in 5B and you were definitely miles ahead of 5D. At the end of the every year there was a reshuffling between the letters based on previous year results. No one, absolutely no one, wanted to go down a grade.
If your grade was higher than the minimum, you got to take the final test before graduation. Achieving the minimum score on it allowed you to graduate. If you did not get there, you did not get to do it which meant another year of school. That was in all test subjects: literature, math, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, foreign language (addition only in our class). There was no curve. Hell, entire concept of a curve still baffles me.
Results of the test: me - 2nd at 127% percent behind a girl who never cut a single class at 129%. Our of a graduating class of 142, 140 were taking the test, all 140 achieved the minimum 81% needed. All of people who cut classes that I knew scored over 94%.
I did not realize how weird it was until I got to an American university.
The only thing I haven't seen in the more affluent schools is the tolerance for unexecused absenses and tardiness.
It sounds like the grading system is broken.
Does a zero do the thing that we want it to do?
Could there be a different metric, that doesn't weight a zero in a way that knocks students out like in an elimination tournament? What are the goals of grades? It seems like they are structured to rank students in a competition. That's great for the winners. But what do you do with the loosers?