My brother in law is finishing up at the U of O and nearly everyone who went to college with him from his small town Oregon high school washed out of college. The high school system left the kids completely unprepared.
I was the high school valedictorian and discovered upon entering college that I was horribly underprepared. I barely got through my freshman year. I got comments from professors like "you're right on the edge here, and I really should fail you, but I'll give you a break. You'd better get better, fast."
Is that anything new though? I’d describe my university experience similarly and in my case it happened 15 years ago, in a completely different part of the world.
Grades are more a regional reflection of who gets to graduate and who doesn't. If you are running a terrible school, that doesn't necessarily mean it makes sense to graduate just 10% of the students because only that many students are competent.
The SAT and ACT tests have been under constant attack as being unfair for many decades. The attacks have recently been successful in getting many universities to disregard them.
I regularly read in the local paper about union teachers complaining about "high stakes testing".
So the funny thing, looking say these from EU, Polish perspective, they are supremely easy and when applied here would have low statistical discriminatory power.
Our tests are new and statistically validated. That still does not mean they are good.
Even our more advanced tests have issues there, so you get university admission packed with people in the top percentile, with single digit sometimes deciding whether you're in or out.
It helps that pupils have a choice of their test for wherever they want to apply, so they generally pick what they're best at.
Basics (language and maths) regularly get >80% except for special cases. Extended similarly.
Special cases tend to completely flunk it, that usually being less than 15%. Latest COVID bumped it up somewhat.
The problem is not really the testing, it's what the tests are testing for. The maths basics test some rote memorization of basic trigonometry and application thereof, including linear equations.
Language test reading comprehension and whether you read a book in the syllabus, plus can write mostly coherently and logically, plus some analytical techincalities.
The reading comprehension on basic is literally on the level of newspaper column. Extended does not test an unfamiliar technical text either.
Physics and chemistry likewise test mostly rote pattern application.
History, geography, even more so.
And the problem is that university requires more than that. You start getting more open ended maths tasks, unfamiliar language in unfamiliar subjects in books...
None of them tests basics of being able to learn, as that is not taught.
(As to test results, there's a clear gradation between academic middle school, technical middle school and finally faulty system of job middle schools. It's mostly about filtering and focus of the pupils there. They tend to get worse grades too. Usually people get failed on maths.)
I know that the tests are all considered "not good". But I've found a consistent pattern that people who fail those tests don't understand the material. The people who do understand it do well on the tests.
The tests work.
At Caltech, the tests were open book open note. That means that memorizing rote rules did not work at answering the test questions.
> with single digit sometimes deciding whether you're in or out
That's inevitable when you've got 100 people applying for 10 positions. The same thing happens in sports, where one thousandth of a second distinguishes the winner from the forgotten loser.
> That's inevitable when you've got 100 people applying for 10 positions. The same thing happens in sports, where one thousandth of a second distinguishes the winner from the forgotten loser.
This is not universally true.
Eg the world's richest and second richest (or 10th and 11th richest) persons differ in their wealth (or income etc) by more than a fraction of a penny.
Grade inflation in private schools is even worse, since they don’t want to risk a parent pulling their kid (and losing the $10,000s in annual tuition fees that parent pays).
Overall: “The average yearly tuition at one of the 22,440 private K-12 schools in the United States is $12,350 in 2021. This includes the average tuition at a private high school of $16,040 and the average tuition at a private elementary school of $7,630 (Hanson, 2021).” https://research.com/universities-colleges/average-cost-of-p...
It also gives a breakdown of expensive and cheap states.
Can confirm, in the great expanse of flyover country it's mostly relatively-cheap Catholic schools (most not especially good, but sometimes better than the local public schools, if those are unusually bad), things like Montessori schools that cover grade school ages as well as preschool (and sometimes even handle high school) and come in around that price and are very hit or miss, non-Catholic religious schools that are almost all bad and are around that price, and a few schools that are at least trying to be what the rich mostly-coastal prep-type schools are (those are like $30k-50k/yr, not counting boarding if applicable) that are in the $15k-$35k range, generally (day rates).
My city has (I think) six of the last type (but not all are full k-12, some are high school only, and two are actually Catholic but they're the better variety than the common ones, and pricier)—and I'd say 20 or more of the cheaper varieties, with most of those being religious schools. Drags the average down.
That doesn't seem right. Homeschoolers are required to take standard tests at the end of every year. I'd imagine private schools are the same and the truth would come out then.
Private schools are not required to take those standard tests (at least in California).
In addition, there is a very strong bias to wealthier students in private school, and these students tend to score above average in any case, so these schools would perform well enough.
But then we have to raise our kids in this culture and explain to them why just because it’s okay for their American friend doesn’t mean it’s okay for them. It’s frustrating for us.
At some point the buck stops. It might be when they are failing college classes. It might be when they can’t get into grad school. Or it might be their first job interview, or their first job.
Eventually someone who can’t read or add simple numbers just can’t succeed at a professional level. Schools can claim whatever they want, water down grades, eliminate standardized tests. Eventually reality hits. Once you send an email and it’s grammatically moronic and full of typos, the jig is up.
Or nobody ever cared, since forming an opinion of someone or an organization solely based on whether they can reproduce standardized spellings is myopic at best.
Having an egregious misspelling on a prominent sign in letters 8 inches high that every student sees going into the building every day reflects what on the school?
That the school does not care about education.
After all, if I find a misspelling on a headline on one of my web pages, I fix it. Wouldn't you?
It is true that it will make one's passage through society easier if they are able to reproduce standardized spellings. Insofar as this sign is a signal that teachers are failing to equip students for life in that way, sure, it's concerning.
Spelling is different from other domains of education like mathematics, however: an explanation of "correct spelling" is not to be found in natural law, but rather in a Katamari ball of historical contingencies of chance, intervention, and everything in between. (Why'd we keep the _-ough_ in words like _through_? What if the Simplified Spelling Board had succeeded in its aims and totally reformed English spellings? What if Scots, not the English, had had linguistic dominion over the United States? Etc.) Moreover, in large part because "correct spelling" is derived from one very peculiar and privileged variety of English that not everyone speaks, your ease of access to correct spelling is going to be facilitated or hindered by facts about your SES, race, and ethnicity.
This is why I don't really care when I see a spelling error anywhere, unless genuine confusion results, or stakes are high enough that adherence to a rigid standard must be maintained. In many ways, nothing is gained from imparting it to a small child compared to something like basic arithmetic. And moreover, in some contexts I think it's not unfair to call an evaluative insistence on standardized spelling a vehicle for linguistic and therefore ethnic chauvinism.
I understand your original reaction--having proper spelling is a display of fitness to teach, in the same way that, say, having won some Kaggle tournaments is a display of fitness to do data science. But spelling is a rather peculiar thing to insist on, and I'd have been much more interested if the teachers had been writing out multiplication tables on sandwich boards. Spelling is sociologically thorny, and there are bigger fish to fry.
Full-throatedly acknowledging that people with nonstandard language practices are discriminated against is not really the look I think you want to have.
As I already mentioned, the 2010's are over! This tactic of trying to belittle people with words like "insecure", is so, so tired. Good luck out there!
For what it’s worth, dialects in the US tend toward word pronunciation differences and regional nomenclature differences (water fountain vs bubbler, soda vs. pop, etc…). You don’t see spelling differences. Obvious misspellings of common English words would be recognized across the dialects.
I suppose if the height of achievement we are targeting is "elementary school administrative assistant", then, yes, perhaps our under-educated, grade-inflated students are well on their way to ride that wave of success. But if we are hoping for something a bit more ambitious in the domains of medicine, law, or engineering, I think our students will in fact one day discover that, yes, the jig is up.
It’s been nearly 30 years now…but I recall getting a note home from the teacher when my son was in second grade communicating about his poor spelling test scores. Her note itself was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. My wife took out a red pen, marked it up and sent it back to her.
> Once you send an email and it's grammatically moronic and full of typos, the jig is up.
No? That's what QuillBot is for, and QuillBot, like, exists. It's already the world we live in. Anyone for whom English is a foreign language, anyone with sense anyway, already is using QuillBot before sending an email.
Well, based on the amount of elementary grammar and spelling mistakes that we see in social media sites, people are not learning anything from these tools.
And even a grammatically correct email might be confusing, etc.
That's mostly because people don't care about their social media posts.
What I am saying is that it is demonstrably the case, that writing with stupid grammar and spelling mistakes is not a problem for working professionally. Tools exist that can fix it adequately, and people actually use them.
I'd like to think so, but I'm getting the sense that maybe not. I've been observing businesses having to be incredibly tolerant of the poor performance of new hires, I guess because they can't find better. In academia, it's been getting harder for decades to hold to past standards.
I want to think that but I'm old enough to observe that often it doesn't. If someone has connections or some other unfair advantage, they can go through life succeeding higher and higher without any competence.
If the buck doesn't stop with me, then I really don't care where or when it stops. This is the key issue with free markets and why they fail totally at anything long term, complex or socially important (like healthcare and education).
And that is assuming there even if a buck. Plenty of people are entirely happy to destroy their kids future as long as they can pretend they didn't know (or that it hasn't actually happened). That's true for education. LA parents are happy with low test scores as long as they can get low taxes and high grades to point at if anyone starts asking questions. The same is true nation wide and internationally in the anglo-sphere west at least. If one citizen cannot read or add up, that is a problem for them. If no one can, that's a problem for society/government/employers etc.
> This is the key issue with free markets and why they fail totally at anything long term, complex or socially important (like healthcare and education).
Healthcare is very heavily interfered with by the government. Public education is totally the government. Isn't it amusing that those are the poster examples for "failure" of the free market?
Let's take the software industry. It is nearly completely unregulated. It's been a resounding success.
We tried private healthcare, it failed and the government had to step in. The same for education. The idea of using the free market for education is already defunct because education isn't software development. It's much harder to measure success or failure.
Where are you working? I've been working in BigCorps for ~10 years and the usual standard is that most people are functionally illiterate and only the accountants can add and subtract fluently. Never once have I written an email with content (as opposed to just "let's meet to discuss" or "you can follow my progress in JIRA-4001") where the other person doesn't ignore the email and reply with their own request for a meeting. Only the most basic literacy is now required in most corporate environments.
I have to say I agree. My corporate environment does not reward competence. It’s much more valuable to be approachable and likable. You don’t need literacy to do that. I work in a large engineering company.
I don’t think we’re necessarily contradicting the parents post though. You need some people with some amount of competence to get work done. If it’s more valuable for individuals to play political games instead of delivering value, and the people who deliver value are ostracized, the team, or organization will fail.
If the organization is one of those too big to fail companies, of which our country has many, the buck will stop at our nation being over taken.
I am a little more charitable and just think that literacy is just literally not very useful the way most companies work. These people would not have been useful white collar workers in 1950 but it isn't 1950 anymore. Yes, they would probably be better served if they (and I -- though just the drafting of long emails is often useful for me, even if the recipients never read them) had the option of asynchronous communication, but they can get business goals done anyway. It's apparently not that big of a deal
How you present yourself to others will always matter. Others may not say something to you directly about it if you dress poorly, or have bad grammar, or cannot do basic math, but the skilled WILL laugh at you quietly. It's human nature to mock incompetence. You cannot legislate or morality police it away. And in corporate America, you will be passed over for promotions and plum assignments. The only "professional" career where obvious ineptitude is publicly rewarded is politics.
You and the GP keep bringing this back to "incompetence" but I want to make clear that I disagree that people who don't want to read my longform emails (or are incapable of doing so) are incompetent. Socrates was probably illiterate. I am just saying that literacy is, anecdotally, not that relevant a skill in 21st century corporate jobs.
> When policy drives such a focus on this testing ... it can lead to a dehumanizing of the classroom and in a way limiting what students can learn because everybody is focused on test prep rather than teaching students more holistically,” said Doron Zinger, director of the CalTeach teacher preparation program at UC Irvine.
Do folks like Zinger seriously believe that these kids are actually getting a good education, and the problem is just that the tests aren’t measuring the right things?
They're never going to admit they're not allowed to do a good job. Throwing the worst-behaving 5% out of the classroom and forcing some discipline on the remaining 95% would both get better results, and make the teachers enjoy their jobs more.
Bad behavior is an issue but not the primary issue. The big issue is allowing deficits to stack year on year without comprehensive intervention involving discipline and diligence from all stakeholders.
Bad behavior is a huge issue. The only reason we pay for private school is because our school is allowed to counsel out misbehaved students. Our studious, obedient daughter would never get equal attention from her teachers in a typical public school.
Yes, the public systems are struggling to manage behavior and iphone addicted parents are not helping the situation. Kids with bad behavior deserve equal attention but should not be sucking all the air out of the classroom, which unfortunately is happening all too often. When that happens ideally there are interventions, discipline, social work, IEPs, medical therapy, and alternate placements. Obviously we cannot ignore such kids (largely boys) or they'll be on their way to prison or otherwise an economic drag on society. I worry especially about all the boys I see who are just not getting out with dad, grandpa, or brothers to get some solid lessons and hard knocks on the playground.
Folks like Zinger believe whatever the narrative prescribed by the institution in which they're very comfortably ensconced require them to believe. In this case we're dealing with someone that directs the education of teachers and awards UC Irvine credits, which automatically deliver higher teacher compensation as per their union contracts. You won't be surprised to learn that these courses are rather easy and short; typically just sitting through a few lectures.
It's a racket, and you're listening to a racketeer.
The solution is clearly more holistic aka qualitative and subjective testing, requiring more administrators who can use their expertise to carefully evaluate their local group of students based on [current important skills of the day]. And those administrators can have individual administrative bodies for each state/county.
Then the universities can take the brunt of the responsibility for figuring out which of those bodies are actually doing their job or not, in addition to the test scores they pump out. Which means, yes, more administrators.
There is a simple solution, but nobody will like it.
Give the teachers a base pay. Then, they get a percentage of a bonus amount. The percentage is calculated based on the percentage of the students in the teacher's class meeting grade level standard at the end of the year. The teachers will figure out how to teach them. Money, especially if the bonus could be 20-30000, is a big motivator, but those bonuses are still cheaper than the failed programs usually tried.
Q: what if a teacher gets assigned a poorly performing cadre of students?
A: assign the kids randomly to teachers. The ups and downs will average out.
Q: what if the teacher cheats on the year end tests?
A: have an independent authority do the testing
Q: what if the teacher teaches to the test rather than anything valuable?
A: change the test so that passing it reflects learning
I’m sure I already know the answers from experience after becoming obsessed with KPIs as the solution to startup problems to seeing how companies just game vanity metrics. But could you provide some examples of why it doesn’t work in a school environment?
My best guess: It is possible to weed out non-productive KPIs, they are still extremely useful for breaking down reality distortion fields, but it takes an honest and thoughtful person with a good grasp of both the business and how the stats are collected - combined with management buy in. I have a feeling highly bureaucratic gov organizations won’t have either the talent, iterative approach, nor incentives to actually find the right metrics that matter.
It's too variable. A teacher has a variety of classes with a variety of children that changes completely every year. The outliers are enough to impact the metrics significantly but leaving them out paints an unclear picture. As well you have additional high variability of an individual students performance at any given time. This variability is greatest in the non-outliers which matter the most.
Metrics work when kids are prepared to learn in school, but many are not. Black boys in our worst neighborhoods have a >5% chance of being shot at least once by age 21. In the worst cities, 1/200 Black men and boys are shot every year. If you consider only those aged 13-55 in the worst areas it's more like 1/100 -- per year. This is not a simple environment to educate in. Kids don't have a safe place to play. Kids are in gangs. Kids are obese. Kids don't go to the dentist. Kids fight. Kids have high lead levels, asthma, and various trauma.
I don't follow your point. Are you saying we shouldn't commit to education metrics because a subset of the population aren't capable of fully engaging with education system? What about the kids who are engaged in education? Should they have to put their systems on hold or change it as a way to help(?) those who can't fully participate?
Those seem like two different problems with two different solutions. For ex: solving the environmental issues for the smaller subset and better correlating grades with actual outcomes in education for everyone. Especially if it risks masking problems and may ultimately harm more than it helps.
Oh I think we are referring to two different things. One poster suggested that performance-based pay for teachers is a simple solution and that it could be implemented with metrics. I countered because that is not simple. In addition, many teachers are doing support roles, library, phys ed, social work, reading specialist, etc.
OTOH metrics and objective standards are definitely worthwhile indicators. Agreed. In fact, in the modern age of data I think we ought to look at more things to see if there is a latent pattern positive or negative. Reading and math scores are not enough. I want to see physical fitness data. I want to know how many words per minute kids can type. How many dental cavities do they have. Can they pass a civics quiz on state or federal government. Do they know basic geography and have some literacy about the world.
Yep, or target the incentives based on the composition of the situation on the ground. If your classroom is mixed with 1/3 IEPs for autism and other issues you have different achievable goals.
Not sure what you mean. You don't want disincentives for teachers -- it's already an issue where good teachers trying to improve rough schools get associated with poor performance through no fault of their own.
Incentives need to be based on obtainable goals and targeted improvements. Payouts (bribes!) to students for good grades and scores actually really work. Money helps kids internalize the societal value placed on their performance. Similarly, targeted bonuses for teachers work too, but only if formulated relative to the characteristics of enrolled students. See the literature by R. Fryer, for example
You memorize the answers? Like, I had an entire week of third grade where they wanted us to do a table of 100 basic arithmetic problems, and it was really a test of whether you remembered that 8+9=17 rather than some sort of actual understanding of what “eight”, “nine” and “the combination of eight and nine” meant.
I think arithmetic in general is actually one of the most difficult things to test understanding of, because there’s not a whole lot of understanding involved. It’s kind of axiomatic for the rest of math to build on top of. I would attribute “understanding” more to being able to synthesize useful results from properties like addition and subtraction being inverses of each other, being able to form relationships like “two small numbers added together are always less than two big numbers added together”, etc. But I did actually start this thread by asking how you would test for this, because I believe doing so is quite difficult. I don’t think I’ve seen many a test that people haven’t tried to game without “understanding” the subject.
For the longest time we (and in many places probably still do) literally taught students multiplication tables. That is, hardcoded answers for a * b with a, b <= 10. As soon a double digit integers are involved - tough shit.
Yup. I always thought that people who spent all this effort cheating would expend less effort if they just bothered to learn the stuff. And besides, you get a bonus from having a bit of pride that you did it honestly.
Just let teachers do whatever they want with periodic evaluations, if the teachers suck move them around. Do the same with students. The shuffle will get the good teachers with good students.
Even simpler, but less likely to be popular. Pay teachers competitive (six figure) salaries, put a cap on student:teacher ratio (20:1, or even less?), and get rid of tenure.
Uhh,teachers in major cities make 100k with 10-15 years experience on 180 contract days per year, and also get pension. Student:teacher ratio is below 20 in all major cities.
In the most expensive locations I would agree that it is not very competitive, and the same goes for entry-level police and other needed services. (Though nimbys reap what they sow here.) The entire education system is inefficient and anachronistic. School should run all year, simply emphasizing more sports and nature in the summer. Then you don't need to fit the career and compensation structure of the personnel into seven contract hours a day working 180 days a year. You can pay a true salary, end regression and lower criminality in the summer, while also helping working parents be more productive.
Don't get me started though! College is even dumber. 36 weeks of class per year for 18 year-olds? Wtf. Kids graduate high school and ought to be in class or an apprenticeship the next Monday. Most young adults go to non-selective universities to get simple credentials like nursing or education. It's not about fancy internships at Google or other nonsense like gap years. That's relatively decadent stuff most young adults can't indulge in.
Both suggestions are very right-on. I would add: get rid of school boards. They are political dinosaurs who 'know nothing ... nothiiing'. Cut administration to essential (non-educational) needs A superintendant's income could be far more effectively invested in better teaching materials. A couple of good people tuned fulltime to student ecology and parent relations.
Education: Every school has dozens of well-educated and committed teachers; together they can focus on improving quality and streamlining away the BS.
Bad or mediocre private schools—which are the vast majority—pay less than public schools.
Good ones may pay more.
Teaching in private schools also tends to be an easier job, mainly thanks to selection bias giving you an easier set of students to teach, and (oddly enough) school admin being both willing and able to tell parents to fuck off and go away if they or their children are being jackasses and won't shape up. Public schools can't do that. Turns out decent-or-better private schools would rather lose one paying student than let them make things worse for the rest, risking several paying students (and the good ones all have waiting lists anyway—they'll fill the slot, no problem).
This is a remarkably bad idea. No, the differences between students will definitely not “average out” at this scale. And how do you expect to handle poorly performing schools as a whole? Do you not expect the quality of teachers there to just plummet?
Paying people for results works very, very well in the private sector. Why wouldn't it work in the public sector?
> the differences between students will definitely not “average out” at this scale
Of course it will. Assigning kids at random will produce an average over time.
> how do you expect to handle poorly performing schools as a whole?
The teachers in that poorly performing school will have a powerful incentive to do better.
> Do you not expect the quality of teachers there to just plummet?
I expect if you dangle $20-30000 if they do better, they'll do better. Monetary incentives work.
And in businesses that pay commissions, the people who are good at getting those commissions (i.e. they're good at their job) want to be there. They're not satisfied with just a salary. High commissions attract the best.
The problem with saying that teachers will have an incentive to make a bad school better is that they can not hope to compensate for massive socioeconomic differences. If you pay solely on absolute results, all the good teachers are going to go to schools with favourable intake profiles, which are likely to be strongly correlated with house prices. This would be a further driver of inequality. There would have to be a realistic scaling factor, looking at improvement, perhaps, rather than absolute results.
Yes, it’s clearly not working in some regards. Your basic suggestion, however, is also unrealistic - a school in isolation can not make up for all the problems of an area. Similarly, a brilliant teacher can only do so much. If they can move to a better area and bank their bonus for much less stress, they will do just that, leaving a failing area, and its children, with even worse provision. Frankly, there’s no straightforward solution. Better pay is probably part of it, but it’s a far more complex issue and one that has to be considered as part of a wider programme of improvement.
“Paying people for results works very, very well in the private sector.”
Can you provide evidence of this? CEO compensation is a terrible model that encourages short term tricks like stock buybacks, front-loading revenue, and other tricks to garner short term performance. As for rank and file employees, measuring results is difficult … just like in schools.
Every company that has salesmen paid on commission.
> measuring results is difficult
And the better job of that a company does, the more profitable it becomes. Companies have a very strong monetary incentive to do an effective job of that.
> CEO compensation is a terrible model
Is it? Executive bonuses etc. at Boeing crashed along with the MAX crashes.
If you can write a test (or other combination of measurements, metrics etc) that actually measures whether someone is well educated, and tells us how much of that is down to the teacher and not the overall school, family, home life, culture, etc, and cannot be gamed etc, then you will have solved one of the worlds longest standing social issues.
Then you will just need to convince people to vote to (more than) double what we pay teachers (and eat the resulting tax rises) to fund the resulting bonuses for at least some of them.
Clearly grades are worthless here. But that doesn't mean there is a better system. Especially given what people are willing to pay and the complex other inputs...
About 25 years ago, The Washington Post carried an item on Algebra I grades in the high schools of Montgomery County, Maryland. In the west of the county, one needed to score at or above 90% to get an A in Algebra. Mid-county the cutoff for an A was in the mid-70s. Assigning the kids randomly to teachers, across schools, is called "busing", which has never been popular among prosperous families--just the people likely to turn out at school board elections.
(Not that I don't see the appeal of your proposal.)
Modern public schools cannot stand elitism like gifted programs. The Seattle school district eliminated all gifted programs because they were inequitable.
My proposal caters to that desire for equity. Random assignments to teachers.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadThankfully state standardized tests haven't yet been watered down.
Test scores are often comparable internationally.
- less than half of 11th graders meet or exceed the state standard for math
- almost 90% of high schoolers graduate
What does 'graduate high school' mean? Does it just mean you showed up?
I regularly read in the local paper about union teachers complaining about "high stakes testing".
Even our more advanced tests have issues there, so you get university admission packed with people in the top percentile, with single digit sometimes deciding whether you're in or out.
It helps that pupils have a choice of their test for wherever they want to apply, so they generally pick what they're best at.
Basics (language and maths) regularly get >80% except for special cases. Extended similarly. Special cases tend to completely flunk it, that usually being less than 15%. Latest COVID bumped it up somewhat.
The problem is not really the testing, it's what the tests are testing for. The maths basics test some rote memorization of basic trigonometry and application thereof, including linear equations. Language test reading comprehension and whether you read a book in the syllabus, plus can write mostly coherently and logically, plus some analytical techincalities. The reading comprehension on basic is literally on the level of newspaper column. Extended does not test an unfamiliar technical text either.
Physics and chemistry likewise test mostly rote pattern application. History, geography, even more so.
And the problem is that university requires more than that. You start getting more open ended maths tasks, unfamiliar language in unfamiliar subjects in books... None of them tests basics of being able to learn, as that is not taught.
(As to test results, there's a clear gradation between academic middle school, technical middle school and finally faulty system of job middle schools. It's mostly about filtering and focus of the pupils there. They tend to get worse grades too. Usually people get failed on maths.)
The tests work.
At Caltech, the tests were open book open note. That means that memorizing rote rules did not work at answering the test questions.
> with single digit sometimes deciding whether you're in or out
That's inevitable when you've got 100 people applying for 10 positions. The same thing happens in sports, where one thousandth of a second distinguishes the winner from the forgotten loser.
This is not universally true.
Eg the world's richest and second richest (or 10th and 11th richest) persons differ in their wealth (or income etc) by more than a fraction of a penny.
Details depend on the underlying distribution.
Grade inflation in private schools is even worse, since they don’t want to risk a parent pulling their kid (and losing the $10,000s in annual tuition fees that parent pays).
There are rigorous private schools, but many are abysmal.
Overall: “The average yearly tuition at one of the 22,440 private K-12 schools in the United States is $12,350 in 2021. This includes the average tuition at a private high school of $16,040 and the average tuition at a private elementary school of $7,630 (Hanson, 2021).” https://research.com/universities-colleges/average-cost-of-p...
It also gives a breakdown of expensive and cheap states.
My city has (I think) six of the last type (but not all are full k-12, some are high school only, and two are actually Catholic but they're the better variety than the common ones, and pricier)—and I'd say 20 or more of the cheaper varieties, with most of those being religious schools. Drags the average down.
In addition, there is a very strong bias to wealthier students in private school, and these students tend to score above average in any case, so these schools would perform well enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
Eventually someone who can’t read or add simple numbers just can’t succeed at a professional level. Schools can claim whatever they want, water down grades, eliminate standardized tests. Eventually reality hits. Once you send an email and it’s grammatically moronic and full of typos, the jig is up.
I don't think anyone ever noticed.
That the school does not care about education.
After all, if I find a misspelling on a headline on one of my web pages, I fix it. Wouldn't you?
Spelling is different from other domains of education like mathematics, however: an explanation of "correct spelling" is not to be found in natural law, but rather in a Katamari ball of historical contingencies of chance, intervention, and everything in between. (Why'd we keep the _-ough_ in words like _through_? What if the Simplified Spelling Board had succeeded in its aims and totally reformed English spellings? What if Scots, not the English, had had linguistic dominion over the United States? Etc.) Moreover, in large part because "correct spelling" is derived from one very peculiar and privileged variety of English that not everyone speaks, your ease of access to correct spelling is going to be facilitated or hindered by facts about your SES, race, and ethnicity.
This is why I don't really care when I see a spelling error anywhere, unless genuine confusion results, or stakes are high enough that adherence to a rigid standard must be maintained. In many ways, nothing is gained from imparting it to a small child compared to something like basic arithmetic. And moreover, in some contexts I think it's not unfair to call an evaluative insistence on standardized spelling a vehicle for linguistic and therefore ethnic chauvinism.
I understand your original reaction--having proper spelling is a display of fitness to teach, in the same way that, say, having won some Kaggle tournaments is a display of fitness to do data science. But spelling is a rather peculiar thing to insist on, and I'd have been much more interested if the teachers had been writing out multiplication tables on sandwich boards. Spelling is sociologically thorny, and there are bigger fish to fry.
It's not a sign in front of a coffee shop. It's a sign in front of a school that's supposed to care about teaching the kids.
That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do this regardless of which ideology they're for or against.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No? That's what QuillBot is for, and QuillBot, like, exists. It's already the world we live in. Anyone for whom English is a foreign language, anyone with sense anyway, already is using QuillBot before sending an email.
And even a grammatically correct email might be confusing, etc.
What I am saying is that it is demonstrably the case, that writing with stupid grammar and spelling mistakes is not a problem for working professionally. Tools exist that can fix it adequately, and people actually use them.
I'd like to think so, but I'm getting the sense that maybe not. I've been observing businesses having to be incredibly tolerant of the poor performance of new hires, I guess because they can't find better. In academia, it's been getting harder for decades to hold to past standards.
I want to think that but I'm old enough to observe that often it doesn't. If someone has connections or some other unfair advantage, they can go through life succeeding higher and higher without any competence.
And that is assuming there even if a buck. Plenty of people are entirely happy to destroy their kids future as long as they can pretend they didn't know (or that it hasn't actually happened). That's true for education. LA parents are happy with low test scores as long as they can get low taxes and high grades to point at if anyone starts asking questions. The same is true nation wide and internationally in the anglo-sphere west at least. If one citizen cannot read or add up, that is a problem for them. If no one can, that's a problem for society/government/employers etc.
Healthcare is very heavily interfered with by the government. Public education is totally the government. Isn't it amusing that those are the poster examples for "failure" of the free market?
Let's take the software industry. It is nearly completely unregulated. It's been a resounding success.
We tried private healthcare, it failed and the government had to step in. The same for education. The idea of using the free market for education is already defunct because education isn't software development. It's much harder to measure success or failure.
It didn't fail. Healthcare was cheap, plentiful, and advanced until the government stepped in.
> The same for education
How/when did it fail?
I don’t think we’re necessarily contradicting the parents post though. You need some people with some amount of competence to get work done. If it’s more valuable for individuals to play political games instead of delivering value, and the people who deliver value are ostracized, the team, or organization will fail.
If the organization is one of those too big to fail companies, of which our country has many, the buck will stop at our nation being over taken.
Do folks like Zinger seriously believe that these kids are actually getting a good education, and the problem is just that the tests aren’t measuring the right things?
Of course not. They're just never going to admit they're doing a bad job, and need a messenger to shoot.
Folks like Zinger believe whatever the narrative prescribed by the institution in which they're very comfortably ensconced require them to believe. In this case we're dealing with someone that directs the education of teachers and awards UC Irvine credits, which automatically deliver higher teacher compensation as per their union contracts. You won't be surprised to learn that these courses are rather easy and short; typically just sitting through a few lectures.
It's a racket, and you're listening to a racketeer.
Then the universities can take the brunt of the responsibility for figuring out which of those bodies are actually doing their job or not, in addition to the test scores they pump out. Which means, yes, more administrators.
If the solution were more administrators the US would lead the world in test scores, setting new records annually.
https://www.statista.com/chart/11058/bachelor-tuition-fees-i...
Give the teachers a base pay. Then, they get a percentage of a bonus amount. The percentage is calculated based on the percentage of the students in the teacher's class meeting grade level standard at the end of the year. The teachers will figure out how to teach them. Money, especially if the bonus could be 20-30000, is a big motivator, but those bonuses are still cheaper than the failed programs usually tried.
Q: what if a teacher gets assigned a poorly performing cadre of students?
A: assign the kids randomly to teachers. The ups and downs will average out.
Q: what if the teacher cheats on the year end tests?
A: have an independent authority do the testing
Q: what if the teacher teaches to the test rather than anything valuable?
A: change the test so that passing it reflects learning
Weird to say it's simple.
Besides, businesses operate on metrics every day. It's the bottom line. It works. You just have to pick metrics that are the goal of the organization.
My best guess: It is possible to weed out non-productive KPIs, they are still extremely useful for breaking down reality distortion fields, but it takes an honest and thoughtful person with a good grasp of both the business and how the stats are collected - combined with management buy in. I have a feeling highly bureaucratic gov organizations won’t have either the talent, iterative approach, nor incentives to actually find the right metrics that matter.
Those seem like two different problems with two different solutions. For ex: solving the environmental issues for the smaller subset and better correlating grades with actual outcomes in education for everyone. Especially if it risks masking problems and may ultimately harm more than it helps.
OTOH metrics and objective standards are definitely worthwhile indicators. Agreed. In fact, in the modern age of data I think we ought to look at more things to see if there is a latent pattern positive or negative. Reading and math scores are not enough. I want to see physical fitness data. I want to know how many words per minute kids can type. How many dental cavities do they have. Can they pass a civics quiz on state or federal government. Do they know basic geography and have some literacy about the world.
Incentives need to be based on obtainable goals and targeted improvements. Payouts (bribes!) to students for good grades and scores actually really work. Money helps kids internalize the societal value placed on their performance. Similarly, targeted bonuses for teachers work too, but only if formulated relative to the characteristics of enrolled students. See the literature by R. Fryer, for example
How?
How would you determine if a student understands arithmetic?
I think arithmetic in general is actually one of the most difficult things to test understanding of, because there’s not a whole lot of understanding involved. It’s kind of axiomatic for the rest of math to build on top of. I would attribute “understanding” more to being able to synthesize useful results from properties like addition and subtraction being inverses of each other, being able to form relationships like “two small numbers added together are always less than two big numbers added together”, etc. But I did actually start this thread by asking how you would test for this, because I believe doing so is quite difficult. I don’t think I’ve seen many a test that people haven’t tried to game without “understanding” the subject.
Besides, work enough arithmetic problems and you'll inadvertently memorize them anyway.
Boston $60k https://btu.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Salary-Grids.pdf
Seattle $65k https://www.seattleschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Ce...
LA $55k https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/doma...
SF $60k https://uesf.org/members/2017-2020-contract/
NYC $60k https://cdn-blob-prd.azureedge.net/prd-pws/docs/default-sour...
Looks like you can add $10-20k with a masters and a few grand per year of tenure.
Key word in my comment was “competitive”, which these aren’t for trained/skilled workers with other options.
Don't get me started though! College is even dumber. 36 weeks of class per year for 18 year-olds? Wtf. Kids graduate high school and ought to be in class or an apprenticeship the next Monday. Most young adults go to non-selective universities to get simple credentials like nursing or education. It's not about fancy internships at Google or other nonsense like gap years. That's relatively decadent stuff most young adults can't indulge in.
Education: Every school has dozens of well-educated and committed teachers; together they can focus on improving quality and streamlining away the BS.
Private school teachers earn less than public school teachers, but private school students get much better educational outcomes.
Good ones may pay more.
Teaching in private schools also tends to be an easier job, mainly thanks to selection bias giving you an easier set of students to teach, and (oddly enough) school admin being both willing and able to tell parents to fuck off and go away if they or their children are being jackasses and won't shape up. Public schools can't do that. Turns out decent-or-better private schools would rather lose one paying student than let them make things worse for the rest, risking several paying students (and the good ones all have waiting lists anyway—they'll fill the slot, no problem).
> the differences between students will definitely not “average out” at this scale
Of course it will. Assigning kids at random will produce an average over time.
> how do you expect to handle poorly performing schools as a whole?
The teachers in that poorly performing school will have a powerful incentive to do better.
> Do you not expect the quality of teachers there to just plummet?
I expect if you dangle $20-30000 if they do better, they'll do better. Monetary incentives work.
And in businesses that pay commissions, the people who are good at getting those commissions (i.e. they're good at their job) want to be there. They're not satisfied with just a salary. High commissions attract the best.
Can you provide evidence of this? CEO compensation is a terrible model that encourages short term tricks like stock buybacks, front-loading revenue, and other tricks to garner short term performance. As for rank and file employees, measuring results is difficult … just like in schools.
> measuring results is difficult
And the better job of that a company does, the more profitable it becomes. Companies have a very strong monetary incentive to do an effective job of that.
> CEO compensation is a terrible model
Is it? Executive bonuses etc. at Boeing crashed along with the MAX crashes.
Jumping to "my solution's just too edgy, and that's why nobody will like it" before having a good grasp on the issue is perhaps premature.
> edgy
It's not about edginess. It's about the public teachers union that blocks any and all attempts at merit pay.
> A: assign the kids randomly to teachers. The ups and downs will average out.
This punishes students who can't get streamed to classes that challenge them at a degree appropriate for their aptitude.
Then you will just need to convince people to vote to (more than) double what we pay teachers (and eat the resulting tax rises) to fund the resulting bonuses for at least some of them.
Clearly grades are worthless here. But that doesn't mean there is a better system. Especially given what people are willing to pay and the complex other inputs...
(Not that I don't see the appeal of your proposal.)
My proposal caters to that desire for equity. Random assignments to teachers.
- Stop scoring the tests, instead give them "Pass", "Fail"
- Get rid of tests completely
- Hire Eric Cartmanez as a teacher