Here's the type of comment that's come up numerous times:
Quote from: Puget on July 16, 2019, 06:18:17 AM
Our students are generally well-prepared, but a number of them have skated through HS just being smart and not having to study much, and a lot of our international students are used to just rote memorization, so the fist exams in college come as a real shock to some.
Since in most Western nations, high school completion is more or less "guaranteed" to everyone, this is the result; in order to make sure the weakest students can "succeed", it means having a system where decently strong students can breeze through without much work,
and thus they develop lousy work/study habits. Is there a remedy to this? I feel like it's a third-rail topic that can't really be discussed.
Some high schools make their students work hard. It is probably related to how rich the district is. But yes, plenty of high schools just graduate the students so they don't have to see them again.
I thought this sort of topic had been discussed ad nauseam in books, editorials and discussion boards.
It's not really democracy that sets this up, is it? That is, it's not having an elected system of government. The truth is, I don't think any system of government has an educational system in which only the brightest succeed at education. Or are granted education. The American (and Western world) system provides secondary education for all; the alternative systems, elsewhere in the world, restrict secondary education to those who can afford to pay for it. That doesn't do anything to guarantee that the students will be dedicated, or that the teachers will only give good grades to the accomplished students. If anything, the pay-for-play system may lead students to demand good grades "because we're paying your wages!", as we've sometimes seen in university education.
I think what you're getting at, Marshwiggle, is that in some regions in which education is not free, and hence is rare for poor people, many of the poor students are desperate to succeed because their education is a sacrifice on the part of the family, and often their only hope for climbing out of poverty. I don't know anything about whether those systems have grade inflation or teachers that give students an easy pass.
What's probably needed to give students more incentive to study hard is a system where studying hard makes a genuine and noticeable difference in future prospects. Of course we see the down side of such a system in places like Japan and China, where a leg up is gained by private tutoring — often by mothers, who then can't have careers because their intensive tutoring doesn't allow time for a job. And where the pressure is intense and can lead to breakdowns. An intermediate system might be something like England, where the results of GCSEs (at around 16) and A-levels (at around 18) can make a big difference in career direction and university admission. Once again you get the problem that underfunded schools and disadvantaged students don't have the same opportunities to do well. I went to an inner-city school in the U.S., and when the teachers themselves were illiterate, how are the students expected to learn and "better themselves"? The only reason I succeeded was that I came from a stable, book-reading, middle-class family. Many of the other students would have accomplished something, given half a chance, but they were not given half a chance. So it's a bigger problem than free high school, or nominal system of government. Many many factors.
Quote from: Hegemony on July 16, 2019, 07:40:43 AM
It's not really democracy that sets this up, is it? That is, it's not having an elected system of government. The truth is, I don't think any system of government has an educational system in which only the brightest succeed at education. Or are granted education. The American (and Western world) system provides secondary education for all; the alternative systems, elsewhere in the world, restrict secondary education to those who can afford to pay for it. That doesn't do anything to guarantee that the students will be dedicated, or that the teachers will only give good grades to the accomplished students. If anything, the pay-for-play system may lead students to demand good grades "because we're paying your wages!", as we've sometimes seen in university education.
I think a real problem is the assumption that virtually everyone should be able to succeed
in the same amount of time. Decades ago, students could fail and then retake courses (which is arguably not as good as simply having longer to complete, but that's another matter). Many, of course, would simply drop out. But instead of trying to adapt the system to allow weak students to take a couple (or more!) extra years to graduate, while allowing the brightest students to finish in a couple
fewer years, the powers-that-be just decreed that with the appropriate "supports" (educational assistants, individual education plans, etc.)
any student could complete in the prescribed time.
(I "blame" democracy since any action taken by government must cater to public opinion. And no-one wants to think that
their kid may need a few extra years to graduate.)
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 16, 2019, 06:30:55 AM
Here's the type of comment that's come up numerous times:
Quote from: Puget on July 16, 2019, 06:18:17 AM
Our students are generally well-prepared, but a number of them have skated through HS just being smart and not having to study much, and a lot of our international students are used to just rote memorization, so the fist exams in college come as a real shock to some.
Since in most Western nations, high school completion is more or less "guaranteed" to everyone, this is the result; in order to make sure the weakest students can "succeed", it means having a system where decently strong students can breeze through without much work, and thus they develop lousy work/study habits. Is there a remedy to this? I feel like it's a third-rail topic that can't really be discussed.
I agree with Hegemony that this isn't about democracy. Note that marshwiggle left unbolded and uncommented upon the part where I note this being a particular problem with international students, who are largely Chinese students (i.e., not from a democracy)-- it's not that they aren't smart, or haven't had to work hard (indeed, they have worked really hard in high school), it's just that what worked in HS and what works in their new US college environment don't match, because rather than just memorizing, our assessments ask them to do things like synthesize and apply concepts which they have usually not been asked to do before (my understanding is that there are efforts to change this in the Chinese education system).
For our US students, the problem is slightly different. Because we are highly selective, they all come in used to being at the top of their classes. Many worked hard to be there, but some were able to get away with suboptimal study skills and/or limited study time because they could just figure things out on the fly. Then we throw all those students together, with commensurately higher expectations, and they can't all be above average anymore-- what used to produce As produces Bs and Cs, and they are shocked ("surprised and confused" is used so often it has become faculty shorthand for the student suffering the first B of their life ungracefully).
Again, I don't think this has anything to do with democracy. No matter how high the standards are for high schools, there is going to be a distribution, and if we then skim off the top of that distribution into a selective college there's going to be an adjustment period where they need to recalibrate their study techniques and effort to the new standards.
And "lousy study habits" come in multiple types. At my low-to-mid-tier R1, a number of students come in without any real interest in education. They probably have been told that a college degree gets you a better job, a higher income, etc., but it all seems distant and abstract to them. The thing that especially surprises me — being a moderately ambitious type myself — is that they simply don't care if they fail. You give them an F on a paper; they grumble and roll their eyes, but do nothing to improve their habits, and even fail to come in to office hours as requested or to submit a revision for a higher grade if offered. Then they fail the course, and they don't care about that either. Then they fail out of the university, and sometimes they get raked over the coals by their parents, but the actual part about failing doesn't seem to bother them much one way or the other. They just drift on. I don't know what might light a fire under these students — if I knew, I'd be lighting it. For whatever reason, in my experience most of them are male.
Quote from: downer on July 16, 2019, 07:30:00 AM
Some high schools make their students work hard. It is probably related to how rich the district is. But yes, plenty of high schools just graduate the students so they don't have to see them again.
I thought this sort of topic had been discussed ad nauseam in books, editorials and discussion boards.
Back when a literate population -- at least the white population, especially the male portion -- was regarded as an important public good, and income inequality (among whites) wasn't as great as it is now, a K-12 system under local control, funded via property taxes, worked pretty well (for whites). Now you can pretty much identify how bad a high school is by looking at the percentage of non-white students.
So I would say that a root cause is lack of democracy, not the converse.
I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906. The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom). Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students. It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated. If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again. But.
Quote from: Hegemony on July 16, 2019, 06:00:13 PM
I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906. The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom). Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students. It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated. If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again. But.
Still, it seems that with the advances in science and technology and mathematics and all, someone with an 8th-grade education was pretty far along with all the knowledge in the world to do most jobs out there. Farmers, factory workers, even accountants and doctors and lawyers and scientists didn't have as much to learn 100 years ago as they might today.
Does this make sense? Or am I not giving 100 years ago enough credit?
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 16, 2019, 08:14:05 PM
Quote from: Hegemony on July 16, 2019, 06:00:13 PM
I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906. The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom). Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students. It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated. If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again. But.
Still, it seems that with the advances in science and technology and mathematics and all, someone with an 8th-grade education was pretty far along with all the knowledge in the world to do most jobs out there. Farmers, factory workers, even accountants and doctors and lawyers and scientists didn't have as much to learn 100 years ago as they might today.
Does this make sense? Or am I not giving 100 years ago enough credit?
From the numbers, it's more a question of "Would the
top 1/3 of those who finish grade 8 be able to do much?" I'd bet those 15 students going into grade 9 were way ahead of our average grade 9 students
because the bottom 2/3 were eliminated. All of the classes could move at a faster pace when it's not the school's responsibility to get everyone through.
Quote from: Puget on July 16, 2019, 11:49:28 AM
I agree with Hegemony that this isn't about democracy.
Note that marshwiggle left unbolded and uncommented upon the part where I note this being a particular problem with international students, who are largely Chinese students (i.e., not from a democracy)-- it's not that they aren't smart, or haven't had to work hard (indeed, they have worked really hard in high school), it's just that what worked in HS and what works in their new US college environment don't match, because rather than just memorizing, our assessments ask them to do things like synthesize and apply concepts which they have usually not been asked to do before (my understanding is that there are efforts to change this in the Chinese education system).
You're right; probably the word I should have used is
"egalitarianism", which, in principle applies to communist countries as well. However, to the best of my knowledge, Western democracies seem to be much more ambitious at promoting the idea that "anyone can be anything they want to be".
Quote
For our US students, the problem is slightly different. Because we are highly selective, they all come in used to being at the top of their classes. Many worked hard to be there, but some were able to get away with suboptimal study skills and/or limited study time because they could just figure things out on the fly. Then we throw all those students together, with commensurately higher expectations, and they can't all be above average anymore-- what used to produce As produces Bs and Cs, and they are shocked ("surprised and confused" is used so often it has become faculty shorthand for the student suffering the first B of their life ungracefully).
This is, at least in part, because of pushing everyone through the system. To use the numbers above, if only 6 people graduated from your school, and the numbers got smaller each year, you'd probably expect university to weed out even more.
Furthermore, with "social promotion", where kids are advanced even when they're not up to it in order to keep them with their peers, we reinforce the idea that academic performance is secondary to social life. When they get to university, and choose partying over studying, they get it! They've internalized the message perfectly.
Quote
Again, I don't think this has anything to do with democracy. No matter how high the standards are for high schools, there is going to be a distribution, and if we then skim off the top of that distribution into a selective college there's going to be an adjustment period where they need to recalibrate their study techniques and effort to the new standards.
If students were streamed into classes of similar ability all the way through, then there wouldn't be that mindset because the brightest students would only be in classes with other bright students, (
and which would move at a pace which
challenges them), so only the extreme outlier would breeze through.
But doing that means admitting that academic ability, like athletic ability, varies a lot and no amount of infrastructure can make it disappear.
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 16, 2019, 08:14:05 PM
Quote from: Hegemony on July 16, 2019, 06:00:13 PM
I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906. The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom). Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students. It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated. If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again. But.
Still, it seems that with the advances in science and technology and mathematics and all, someone with an 8th-grade education was pretty far along with all the knowledge in the world to do most jobs out there. Farmers, factory workers, even accountants and doctors and lawyers and scientists didn't have as much to learn 100 years ago as they might today.
Does this make sense? Or am I not giving 100 years ago enough credit?
This makes complete sense to me. As Marshwiggle just wrote, egalitarianism is more a problem than democracy. I can think of several factors, some of which have been mentioned by others, that have changed in my lifetime and continue to change in ways that make the same checkbox credential for everyone a terrible idea that undermines education.
I keep thinking of the three-part series of hipsters on food stamps at The Last Psychiatrist. One paragraph in particular keeps resonating:
Quote
But Gerry already had a living wage-- he spent it on the University of Chicago, 41 years of food stamps in 4 years. If everybody knew in advance the outcome was going to be unemployment and living wages, then why doesn't Frase challenge the capitalist assumption that college is money well spent-- could have been used differently? He can't. This thought cannot occur to him, not because he is dumb, he clearly isn't, or because he is paid by a college-- money is irrelevant to him. He can't because his entire identity is built on college, academia. He is college. Take that away, he disintegrates. So in the utopia he imagines, college still exists AND people get living wages.
Source: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps_part_2.html
A second paragraph useful to this discussion is
Quote
When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a hipster we become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but could easily do so-- on account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he went to college. But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color. Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- irrelevant forever. The economy doesn't care about intelligence, at all, it doesn't care what you know, merely what you can produce for it.
<...>
It's hard to accept that the University of Chicago grad described in the article isn't employable, that the economy doesn't need him, but it is absolutely true, but my point here is that not only is he not contributing, the economy doesn't need him to contribute.
Source: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html
We don't need everyone who can get a checkbox college degree by going through the motions to get one. And yet, we have jobs that need doing that we don't have people willing or able to do and that's not just true of picking fruit.
I was in a small rural high school when the state law changed requiring attendance until age 18 or graduation. Prior to that time, a noticeable fraction of people left at age 16 for a job or the family farm. Our middle school required everyone to take shop and home ec as useful life and job skills. In high school, one could select various unofficial tracks (i.e., no one was prevented from mixing and matching classes, but some sets of classes are more typical to group together) that included:
- an apprenticeship track with various local businesses for those who were not planning college
- an industrial arts track for those planning to enter a formal apprenticeship program with one of the area CCs or join the family farm
- a business track for those who probably were going to join a family business with perhaps some CC certificate immediately planned
- a general education track for those who were unsure of their future but probably military
- a college prep track that used the requirements for admission to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as guidance
The smallest enrollment was in college prep, but we really were ready for college when we got there. Because other good options existed for non-academic minded students and most of the town had gone through those tracks themselves, students picked the tracks that resonated with them. We didn't have a big division in perceived personal worth by choosing one path over another. Indeed, we had strong music and arts programs; enrollment in those classes were generally across all tracks. Band met during first lunch in part to accommodate the afternoon apprenticeship schedules.
That "perceived personal worth" by choosing academics or not then means people who aren't particularly interested or even very good at academics choose the socially acceptable route instead of a good-for-them-personally route. For example, in my kid's public school system, there's really only 3 tracks: elite college, state college, and concurrent enrollment in community college for EMT/nursing certificate. A fourth track with an internship with the largest employer in town technically exists, but usually the elite-college-bound kids take it as a jumpstart on their STEM career, not the more average kid working as an apprentice with the skilled crafts or back office business folks.
A huge change in the past 20-30 years is how automation has eliminated jobs for a good enough, diligent enough person who can follow instructions. We no longer have large secretarial pools because everyone, except the top executives, does their own word processing. The back business office at a huge company doesn't have dozens of accounting clerks; it's got a couple accountants doing high-level work and a couple of people who answer questions about how to enter one's own information into the system. At my current job, we laugh sometimes about how the cost accounting works so that the company just spent $500 to $1000 of engineer time to fill out the travel request to ensure we won't be committing fraud at $100 by booking a non-standard flight.
Manufacturing, farming, and even some of the typical apprenticeships have changed so that these are no longer unskilled jobs that "anyone" can be trained to do in a couple months. The automation means that the one human needs to be much better at dealing with the complex system including the underlying computer aspects than being able to learn once as a novice and then slightly expand every decade. If anything, the slap-you-in-the-face-nearly-daily aspects of lifelong learning are much stronger outside of academic settings than anything my formal education prepared me to do. That's fine for people who are very bright and curious who just aren't academically minded; that's a disaster for people who just want to get into a comfortable rut doing basically the same things month after month and be paid living-inside-and-eating-regularly money for doing so. Even the family farm really only needs one or two people with modern, computerized equipment instead of as many warm bodies in the fields as we can get.
Thus, when I think about what I'd change if I had a magic wand, I'd go back to the K-12 system to ensure that people who would be successful at doing things that need to be done, but aren't particularly academic-minded had routes to being productive. I again go back to college general education requirements and how they are probably undermining our ability to have enough good engineers and scientists by putting artificial barriers in the way. Yep, it's vocational education to focus purely on the long path necessary to be competent in those areas.
We're really, really short on people in jobs that require the longest paths and that's starting to hurt us as a society in ways that aren't visible to people who think in terms of "the system", not a series of choices and daily tasks by individual humans to keep things running.
Let me say it again louder
We're really, really short on people doing things that keep modern American society running and have a very long educational path by virtue of everything that really, truly, no fooling' needs to be learned as a foundation. It's not STEM or STEAM; it's certain areas of engineering and other pursuits that either require partial differential equations and other advanced math as the only language that works and likely a computer is involved to solve the PDEs using other advanced math and require a mindset that can go forward in nebulous situations where no equations can be written yet. Artificially winnowing the pool of these folks by insisting on probably-nice-to-have-that-probably-someone-could-benefit general education requirements in high school and college means hurting us all, especially when one considers that 70% of US adults don't have those nice-to-have-general-education experiences and somehow soldier on.
Being an excellent student is not particularly well correlated with success in these particular jobs; we would be much better off starting these folks on other paths as early as middle school--as is done in many countries often cited as doing it better than the US is.
Which countries do it better?
This US NEWS list (https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-education) puts the UK at #1 and US at #2 for education. I'm pretty dubious about what measures they used.
The US is probably one of the least egalitarian countries out there by many measures, comparable to India. (Strikingly, top search results about egalitarian countries are about gender equality, which is not the focus of this discussion.) This Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/datablog/2017/apr/26/inequality-index-where-are-the-worlds-most-unequal-countries)is more about egalitarianism in pay and quality of life. But the wealth or poverty of the nations is a complicating factor.
Quote from: downer on July 17, 2019, 09:09:01 AM
Which countries do it better?
This US NEWS list (https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-education) puts the UK at #1 and US at #2 for education. I'm pretty dubious about what measures they used.
The US is probably one of the least egalitarian countries out there by many measures, comparable to India.
In
practice perhaps, but the myth of "the American Dream" is what drives all kinds of policy and choices. Reality can't compete with wishful thinking.
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 17, 2019, 10:16:34 AM
Quote from: downer on July 17, 2019, 09:09:01 AM
Which countries do it better?
This US NEWS list (https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-education) puts the UK at #1 and US at #2 for education. I'm pretty dubious about what measures they used.
The US is probably one of the least egalitarian countries out there by many measures, comparable to India.
In practice perhaps, but the myth of "the American Dream" is what drives all kinds of policy and choices. Reality can't compete with wishful thinking.
All sorts of things drive policy, but my impression is that most in the US just give egalitarianism lip service. If any policies start to look like they will make real changes to social structure in favor of equality, then those policies get changed or ignored. Obviously a big generalization, but largely true since the Reagan era at least.
Quote from: downer on July 17, 2019, 11:38:28 AM
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 17, 2019, 10:16:34 AM
In practice perhaps, but the myth of "the American Dream" is what drives all kinds of policy and choices. Reality can't compete with wishful thinking.
All sorts of things drive policy, but my impression is that most in the US just give egalitarianism lip service. If any policies start to look like they will make real changes to social structure in favor of equality, then those policies get changed or ignored. Obviously a big generalization, but largely true since the Reagan era at least.
You sort of prove my point, by implying that most of the differences in outcomes are due to differences in environment and opportunity. Even if everyone had exactly the same environment and opportunities, there would be big differences in outcomes based on peoples' natural abilities and personalities. It's this reality that society doesn't like to admit, and that wastes all kinds of resources that would be better allocated helping people achieve what is reasonable and will be useful
to them, rather than some amorphous "universal" ideal.
Quote from: Hegemony on July 16, 2019, 06:00:13 PM
I have my grandmother's school yearbook, from 1906. The elementary-grade classes are large, maybe 45 or so (that might have been more than one classroom). Every year the number goes down — 9th grade has maybe 15 students — until by 12th grade you have 6 students. It's probable that those remaining 6 were fairly motivated. If we still had jobs that could be well performed by people with an 8th grade education (or with what an 8th-grade education covered in 1906, which undoubtedly had much less science!), we could have that system again. But.
My family history suggests that it wasn't just capability or motivation that resulted in the numbers in the class falling. My grandmother would have been in her first year or elementary school when the photograph was taken. She gained a scholarship to enable her to continue her education at high school, but had to leave aged 14 because her family needed her to contribute to the family income. She went to work as the lowest of the servants at the home of the local mine owner. The son of the mine owner was in the boys' division of the same high school. Despite under-performing my grandmother in all subjects and being generally regarded as an indolent idiot, he continued to university, where he was eventually kicked out for passing no exams. Meanwhile my grandmother supplemented her servant's income by also helping to clean the local welfare hall and doing assorted other physical labour jobs. Her disappearance - and the disappearance of many like her - from the photo would have been because of family circumstance rather than lack of motivation (indeed, she was heartbroken at having to give up her ambition to become a history teacher). The mine owners son, who made it through school and to university, was just as lacking in motivation as the worst of my current students.
My grandmother's is not an unusual story, at least for the part of the world in which she grew up. I have several other older friends and acquaintances who had to leave school in order to help feed and house their families. Many are widely read and interesting people who have grabbed an education where they could while working skilled or unskilled manual jobs. I suspect my story would have been very similar to my grandmother's had I not been born at a time when educational opportunities had become much more widely available.
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 17, 2019, 12:02:42 PM
Quote from: downer on July 17, 2019, 11:38:28 AM
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 17, 2019, 10:16:34 AM
In practice perhaps, but the myth of "the American Dream" is what drives all kinds of policy and choices. Reality can't compete with wishful thinking.
All sorts of things drive policy, but my impression is that most in the US just give egalitarianism lip service. If any policies start to look like they will make real changes to social structure in favor of equality, then those policies get changed or ignored. Obviously a big generalization, but largely true since the Reagan era at least.
You sort of prove my point, by implying that most of the differences in outcomes are due to differences in environment and opportunity. Even if everyone had exactly the same environment and opportunities, there would be big differences in outcomes based on peoples' natural abilities and personalities. It's this reality that society doesn't like to admit, and that wastes all kinds of resources that would be better allocated helping people achieve what is reasonable and will be useful to them, rather than some amorphous "universal" ideal.
I've never heard anyone claim that everyone has the same abilities. Maybe there's a claim that everyone has the capacity to succeed. Maybe there's an assumption that everyone can be above average. But egalitarianism is about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. My point is that there's no real belief in egalitarianism in the US.
Quote from: Scotia on July 17, 2019, 02:06:37 PM
My grandmother's is not an unusual story, at least for the part of the world in which she grew up. I have several other older friends and acquaintances who had to leave school in order to help feed and house their families. Many are widely read and interesting people who have grabbed an education where they could while working skilled or unskilled manual jobs. I suspect my story would have been very similar to my grandmother's had I not been born at a time when educational opportunities had become much more widely available.
My mom started teaching about 80 years ago in a one-room school, so I've heard many of these stories. (My grandparents themselves had that kind of experience.) But even into the 50's and 60's, when kids were required to be in school, failing grades was still an option. There were also trade schools and so on for kids who were not able to hack normal "academic" school.
Quote from: downer on July 17, 2019, 04:07:42 PM
I've never heard anyone claim that everyone has the same abilities. Maybe there's a claim that everyone has the capacity to succeed. Maybe there's an assumption that everyone can be above average. But egalitarianism is about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. My point is that there's no real belief in egalitarianism in the US.
In Ontario, until about the 90's, high school was streamed into "essential", "basic", "general",and "advanced". (Someone with more knowledge can correct me if I've got the titles wrong.) Then a government came along who decided that it was better to basically throw all of them into the same classrooms and let teachers manage to tailor things to "individual" students. Sometimes educational assistants would accompany particular students supposedly to give them the extra support they needed to make them "succeed" in the integrated classroom. So students with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and everything else are just all lumped together in the name of "equality". It's only equal in the sense of an equally bad experience for everyone.
Quote from: downer on July 17, 2019, 09:09:01 AM
Which countries do it better?
The steady stream of articles that come across my inbox indicate that Canada, much of Western Europe, and select countries in Asia have much more desirable elementary/secondary/tertiary educational systems than the US in terms of community outcomes for money spent per student (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education-spending-finland-south-korea). Finland in particular is held up as the model for K-12 education (https://www.businessinsider.com/finland-education-beats-us-2017-5).
Test results from various measures indicate the US is not anywhere near the top. For example, the 2015 PISA results* are frequently cited as showing the US as near the OECD average and well behind many other first-world countries (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/). One can quibble if the PISA measures everything worth knowing (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/new-global-testing-standards-will-force-countries-to-revisit-academic-rankings/), but the US isn't being held up as a model to emulate in education.
The US has some of the top higher education institutions in the world, but that's not the same as ensuring consistency of educational experience across institutions in a given category or ensuring that everyone gets a good elementary education before being tracked into more specialized education.
*The 2018 PISA results are expected to be released in Dec 2019.
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 18, 2019, 05:38:12 AM
In Ontario, until about the 90's, high school was streamed into "essential", "basic", "general",and "advanced". (Someone with more knowledge can correct me if I've got the titles wrong.) Then a government came along who decided that it was better to basically throw all of them into the same classrooms and let teachers manage to tailor things to "individual" students. Sometimes educational assistants would accompany particular students supposedly to give them the extra support they needed to make them "succeed" in the integrated classroom. So students with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and everything else are just all lumped together in the name of "equality". It's only equal in the sense of an equally bad experience for everyone.
I can't speak to Canada, but most US high schools
do have three tracks even if we don't call them that, with AP/IB/honors classes, regular classes, and special education (with or without some integration into regular classes with support depending on the student).
The problem is many poorer schools lack the resources to provide many advanced courses, which puts the students who would otherwise thrive in them at a distinct disadvantage, not just in terms of college prep and admissions, but also college credits for good AP/IB test scores. That's why I believe we should have equitable federal (or at the very least state) education funding-- funding schools with local property taxes and voter-approved levies leads to vast funding discrepancies which perpetuate inequality of opportunities.
Quote from: Puget on July 18, 2019, 06:57:48 AM
The problem is many poorer schools lack the resources to provide many advanced courses, which puts the students who would otherwise thrive in them at a distinct disadvantage, not just in terms of college prep and admissions, but also college credits for good AP/IB test scores. That's why I believe we should have equitable federal (or at the very least state) education funding-- funding schools with local property taxes and voter-approved levies leads to vast funding discrepancies which perpetuate inequality of opportunities.
Better funding would help, but there is only so much that can be reasonably done for schools with 20 students in their graduating class, some of whom are already spending two hours each day on the school bus, and where none of the students or their parents have any clue as to the educational demands of a 21st century (or, in many cases, even 20th century) economy.
Quote from: quasihumanist on July 18, 2019, 03:49:00 PM
Quote from: Puget on July 18, 2019, 06:57:48 AM
The problem is many poorer schools lack the resources to provide many advanced courses, which puts the students who would otherwise thrive in them at a distinct disadvantage, not just in terms of college prep and admissions, but also college credits for good AP/IB test scores. That's why I believe we should have equitable federal (or at the very least state) education funding-- funding schools with local property taxes and voter-approved levies leads to vast funding discrepancies which perpetuate inequality of opportunities.
Better funding would help, but there is only so much that can be reasonably done for schools with 20 students in their graduating class, some of whom are already spending two hours each day on the school bus, and where none of the students or their parents have any clue as to the educational demands of a 21st century (or, in many cases, even 20th century) economy.
Sure, but that is a tiny minority of students in schools that small-- I'm thinking more about under-funded urban districts, but even most semi-rural areas have larger regional high schools. And regardless of what clue the parents have, if the students aren't being taught the demands of a 21st century economy that's another failure of the schools.
I wonder why people expect anything different when many teachers don't know how to teach (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/04/-american-students-reading/557915/) (public education systems in countries like Japan and Finland are supposedly much more on the ball with incorporating evidence-based teaching methods into classroom practice) and many school districts are terribly managed (https://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PPSD-REVISED-FINAL-002.pdf) (check out the bullet points in the executive summary -- they are essentially the same as how K-12 schools in a state that I lived in were described twenty years ago).
But to swing this back to post-secondary ed . . . state legislatures have disinvested from public university systems for at least three decades now. I haven't seen voters elect officials who have restored state government funding of universities to previous levels.
Quote from: spork on July 18, 2019, 04:48:51 PM
I wonder why people expect anything different when many teachers don't know how to teach (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/04/-american-students-reading/557915/) (public education systems in countries like Japan and Finland are supposedly much more on the ball with incorporating evidence-based teaching methods into classroom practice) and many school districts are terribly managed (https://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PPSD-REVISED-FINAL-002.pdf) (check out the bullet points in the executive summary -- they are essentially the same as how K-12 schools in a state that I lived in were described twenty years ago).
Am I right in thinking that now most pubic school teachers need to have a Master's degree in Education in order to teach? This has been standard in some states for a long time, and is now pretty much a universal requirement as far as I know.
I'm wondering whether there's any genuine outcomes assessment for those Master's programs in education. Do they do any good at all or are they just money-makers for universities? My impression is that while some of those Education schools have good faculty, their programs are not good at producing strong teachers. Their strengths are more in special education.
Quote from: downer on July 19, 2019, 05:29:00 AM
Am I right in thinking that now most pubic school teachers need to have a Master's degree in Education in order to teach? This has been standard in some states for a long time, and is now pretty much a universal requirement as far as I know.
We live in very different worlds. My experience with preparing teachers in college programs in several states bears no resemblance to what you've stated.
A quick browse of https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/reciprocity/ indicates that most states require a bachelor's degree from a regionally accredited school and many states require a teaching certificate/graduation from a teacher's education program.
Waivers are standard in some school districts to allow people to teach because a warm body in the classroom to check a box is better than having to tell the state that certain classes aren't being taught. About 30% of current teachers do not have a formal educational background in their primary teaching assignment (https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real-large-and-growing-and-worse-than-we-thought-the-first-report-in-the-perfect-storm-in-the-teacher-labor-market-series/).
17% of teachers took a non-traditional route into teaching (ibid). People are being encouraged to do that because we're so short on teachers in some areas (https://www.teachaway.com/blog/can-you-become-teacher-without-teaching-degree). Teach for America and The New Teacher Project continue to exist because they are ways for people to try teaching (for even peanuttier peanuts) without the expected background.
The articles regarding public school teachers that cross my desk tend to be a lot like https://birminghamwatch.org/teacher-shortage-educators-support-bill-non-certified-teachers/, regardless of what state I'm in.
Quote
hundreds of schools each year hire educators on a one-year emergency contract. The educators must have a bachelor's degree, but no education training or experience. After that year, the individual can't have another emergency contract with a school anywhere in the state.
...
His bill would make it easier for professionals with real-world experience and ability, but not a certificate, teach for longer, Chambliss said.
In the 2017-2018 school year, more than 1,700 teachers in grades 7 to 12 were not certified to teach the English, math, social studies, science or special education classes they were assigned, according to information from the School Superintendents of Alabama. Some of those teachers may have a one-year emergency certificate or be "teaching out of field," meaning they're certified in other subjects.
Reference: https://birminghamwatch.org/teacher-shortage-educators-support-bill-non-certified-teachers/
In the world I inhabit, master's degrees are for people who have a pretty good job in the suburbs and want the next pay raise. The rural places I live tend to scramble even to get a person with a HS diploma who can pass the background check and the tuberculosis test, the minimum requirements for substitute teachers in some places (http://www.nea.org/home/14813.htm).
Quote from: polly_mer on July 19, 2019, 06:05:23 AM
Quote from: downer on July 19, 2019, 05:29:00 AM
Am I right in thinking that now most pubic school teachers need to have a Master's degree in Education in order to teach? This has been standard in some states for a long time, and is now pretty much a universal requirement as far as I know.
We live in very different worlds. My experience with preparing teachers in college programs in several states bears no resemblance to what you've stated.
A quick browse of https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/reciprocity/ indicates that most states require a bachelor's degree from a regionally accredited school and many states require a teaching certificate/graduation from a teacher's education program.
Waivers are standard in some school districts to allow people to teach because a warm body in the classroom to check a box is better than having to tell the state that certain classes aren't being taught. About 30% of current teachers do not have a formal educational background in their primary teaching assignment (https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real-large-and-growing-and-worse-than-we-thought-the-first-report-in-the-perfect-storm-in-the-teacher-labor-market-series/).
17% of teachers took a non-traditional route into teaching (ibid). People are being encouraged to do that because we're so short on teachers in some areas (https://www.teachaway.com/blog/can-you-become-teacher-without-teaching-degree). Teach for America and The New Teacher Project continue to exist because they are ways for people to try teaching (for even peanuttier peanuts) without the expected background.
The articles regarding public school teachers that cross my desk tend to be a lot like https://birminghamwatch.org/teacher-shortage-educators-support-bill-non-certified-teachers/, regardless of what state I'm in.
That's interesting. I'm struck that although the website https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/ says that people only require a bachelor's degree plus a teacher preparation program, and then passing some tests, in fact the local schools require a master's degree for teachers.
Is there any info on what proportion of teachers went to education school? By state or nationally, and how that compares to other countries?
I was aware that sometimes these requirements get waived or delayed for schools where they find it hard to hire teachers, which are generally ones where the student population is challenging or the pay is low. I wonder what the turnover is of teachers in those schools. I know they tend to find it pretty hard to hold onto good teachers.
The retention aspects are addressed in the series of reports that starts with https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real-large-and-growing-and-worse-than-we-thought-the-first-report-in-the-perfect-storm-in-the-teacher-labor-market-series/ . Even good schools aren't retaining teachers like they used to because educated people have other options that pay better and have more autonomy.
You can use Google as well as I can to search for the answers to other questions. Report back with what you find out.
What? Me?
OK.
QuoteThe percentage of public school teachers who held a postbaccalaureate degree (i.e., a master's, education specialist, or doctor's degree) was higher in 2015–16 (57 percent) than in 1999–2000 (47 percent). In both school years, a lower percentage of elementary school teachers than secondary school teachers held a postbaccalaureate degree.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_clr.asp
Seems pretty high given that these are not required by most states. And it looks like more and more teachers are getting Master's degrees.
That's because in the K-12 systems in many states, a master's degree, in any field, results in a step increase in salary. Salaries for public school K-12 teachers are often rock bottom compared to salaries for other jobs requiring a college degree. So there is a direct incentive to obtain an MA as easily as possible.
Some states, Indiana I think is one, require high school teachers to obtain a bachelor's degree in a subject that corresponds to what they will be teaching. So a high school math teacher needs a B.A. in math, which is good. But anyone with a B.A. in math is better served financially by entering a profession other than high school teaching. So the more stringent qualification probably results in a smaller supply of properly trained public K-12 math teachers.