Elementary school teachers don't know how to teach reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-radical-case-for-teaching-kids-stuff/592765/ (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-radical-case-for-teaching-kids-stuff/592765/).
Mississippi, a beacon of hope? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/mississippi-schools-naep.html (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/mississippi-schools-naep.html)
Common Core, another repeat of A Nation At Risk and No Child Left Behind: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/us/common-core.html (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/us/common-core.html)
And who prepares K-12 teachers? Higher education. What goes around comes around?
Kids!
I don't know what's wrong with these kids today!
Kids!
Who can understand anything they say?
Kids!
They a disobedient, disrespectful oafs!
Noisy, crazy, dirty, lazy, loafers!
While we're on the subject:
Kids!
You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still just do what they want to do!
Why can't they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?
What's the matter with kids today?
Kids!
I've tried to raise him the best I could
Kids! Kids!
Laughing, singing, dancing, grinning, morons!
And while we're on the subject!
Kids! They are just impossible to control!
Kids! With their awful clothes and their rock an' roll!
Why can't they dance like we did
What's wrong with Sammy Caine?
What's the matter with kids today!
From the first article:
Quote
Each student was asked to first read a description of a fictional baseball inning and then move the wooden figures to reenact it. (For example: "Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is Whitcomb, the Cougars' left-fielder.")
It turned out that prior knowledge of baseball made a huge difference in students' ability to understand the text—more so than their supposed reading level. The kids who knew little about baseball, including the "good" readers, all did poorly. And all those who knew a lot about baseball, whether they were "good" or "bad" readers, did well. In fact, the "bad" readers who knew a lot about baseball outperformed the "good" readers who didn't.
I know this is an old study, but "research" like this really drives me up a wall. I couldn't solve that task, and I'm pretty sure I can read proficiently. Jargon is just a language of its own and you obviously wouldn't measure English reading comprehension with a text in French either. If you see "drawing conclusions" and you start to "draw clowns," that's when there's a problem.
But the lesson in education is the same as it's always been: send your kids to a school where students compete with each other on academic performance and they'll care about their performance and do well. This is true for pre-K the same way it is for faculty at research universities: when everyone around you is incredibly productive, you're going to feel pretty terrible if you aren't... and if everyone is deadwood, it's demotivating.
Quote from: pigou on December 07, 2019, 09:59:52 AM
But the lesson in education is the same as it's always been: send your kids to a school where students compete with each other on academic performance and they'll care about their performance and do well. This is true for pre-K the same way it is for faculty at research universities: when everyone around you is incredibly productive, you're going to feel pretty terrible if you aren't... and if everyone is deadwood, it's demotivating.
Really? You want 4 year olds competing against each other on academic performance? I wouldn't let my kid within a mile of any place where students that young where he was being encouraged to compete with other little kids. That's a recipe for producing anxious kids without any real love of learning who are going to burn out.
Even in academia, I don't really think of competitiveness as a force for good in the profession. The academics I know who seem to be motivated by a desire to be better than everyone else prioritize volume over quality, they tend to be more interested in doing flashy projects and promoting themselves than in nuanced understanding and they often fail to give proper credit to people whose ideas they make use of.
I'm not talking about ambition, which is something rather different. That's the desire to do good work and be recognized for it.
Quote from: Caracal on December 07, 2019, 11:24:40 AM
I'm not talking about ambition, which is something rather different. That's the desire to do good work and be recognized for it.
Mea culpa for being careless with my terms. I agree that hyper-competitiveness has all sorts of bad consequences and that's not what I'm advocating for.
Let me rephrase it as sending your kids to a school with ambitious peers then.
Quote from: pigou on December 07, 2019, 09:59:52 AM
From the first article:
Quote
Each student was asked to first read a description of a fictional baseball inning and then move the wooden figures to reenact it. (For example: "Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is Whitcomb, the Cougars' left-fielder.")
It turned out that prior knowledge of baseball made a huge difference in students' ability to understand the text—more so than their supposed reading level. The kids who knew little about baseball, including the "good" readers, all did poorly. And all those who knew a lot about baseball, whether they were "good" or "bad" readers, did well. In fact, the "bad" readers who knew a lot about baseball outperformed the "good" readers who didn't.
I know this is an old study, but "research" like this really drives me up a wall. I couldn't solve that task, and I'm pretty sure I can read proficiently. Jargon is just a language of its own and you obviously wouldn't measure English reading comprehension with a text in French either. If you see "drawing conclusions" and you start to "draw clowns," that's when there's a problem.
But the lesson in education is the same as it's always been: send your kids to a school where students compete with each other on academic performance and they'll care about their performance and do well. This is true for pre-K the same way it is for faculty at research universities: when everyone around you is incredibly productive, you're going to feel pretty terrible if you aren't... and if everyone is deadwood, it's demotivating.
Um...so the kids who played baseball understood the scenario, those that didn't play baseball and didn't know the terminology didn't understand the scenario no matter how well they read.
And this proves what exactly about education?
Quote from: pigou on December 07, 2019, 11:44:33 AM
Quote from: Caracal on December 07, 2019, 11:24:40 AM
I'm not talking about ambition, which is something rather different. That's the desire to do good work and be recognized for it.
Mea culpa for being careless with my terms. I agree that hyper-competitiveness has all sorts of bad consequences and that's not what I'm advocating for.
Let me rephrase it as sending your kids to a school with ambitious peers then.
My kids all went to an IB school for high school. When parents of younger kids asked me about it, I always said the same thing;
the best thing about IB was the culture-it was OK for kids to care about doing well.That is the biggest problem with a lot of normal schools; that being apathetic is expected.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on December 07, 2019, 12:12:30 PM
Um...so the kids who played baseball understood the scenario, those that didn't play baseball and didn't know the terminology didn't understand the scenario no matter how well they read.
And this proves what exactly about education?
Along with volumes of other evidence, the logical conclusions include:
1) Critical thinking is not transferrable; one must know enough about the subject matter to do much of anything in a given area.
2) Focusing on the skills, like reading comprehension or basic computation, separate from applications can mean that people end up with neither the skills nor anything for the applications. Thus, insisting that people keep practicing things like making an inference and drawing a conclusion separate from good subject matter like literature, history, and science means a lot of wasted effort and frustration.
3) Literacy or computation also isn't really as transferrable as one might hope and require mastery of significant amounts of material to be valuable to anyone doing anything outside of trivia contests.
In short, much of what has passed for "education" for decades wasn't really all that effective at teaching anything, but did contribute to huge separations in life outcomes between children who have homes where academic subjects are used in non-academic settings and those children who had to rely on skills-based teaching focusing on the low-level learning of the skills separate from the material and never getting to the material.
Quote from: polly_mer on December 07, 2019, 03:41:38 PM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on December 07, 2019, 12:12:30 PM
Um...so the kids who played baseball understood the scenario, those that didn't play baseball and didn't know the terminology didn't understand the scenario no matter how well they read.
And this proves what exactly about education?
Along with volumes of other evidence, the logical conclusions include:
1) Critical thinking is not transferrable; one must know enough about the subject matter to do much of anything in a given area.
Was it ever in contention that one needed to know enough about a particular subject matter in order to do anything in a given area? I thought this was the reason we have certificates, majors, master's, and doctorates. And that seems like a pretty broad deduction from very limited evidence.
I'm not sure that I agree that critical thinking is nontransferable. I think the idea is that one learns critical thinking and then apply it to a given area. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the idea of education. I'm pretty sure I've done this in my own life actually.
Quote
2) Focusing on the skills, like reading comprehension or basic computation, separate from applications can mean that people end up with neither the skills nor anything for the applications. Thus, insisting that people keep practicing things like making an inference and drawing a conclusion separate from good subject matter like literature, history, and science means a lot of wasted effort and frustration.
Again, not sure I agree entirely. We learn to read, we learn to compute, then we apply. Never heard of anyone making a good inference apart from good subject matter----are you talking about...Twitter or Facebook or some platform where people simply post unfounded opinions? Most education is making inferences from good subject matter.
Quote
3) Literacy or computation also isn't really as transferrable as one might hope and require mastery of significant amounts of material to be valuable to anyone doing anything outside of trivia contests.
So...let's take the good readers who don't now much about baseball; let's teach them about baseball; let's see if their literacy helps them learn and evaluate baseball. Seems likely their relative literacy would help them compute ideas about baseball. In fact, I am certain it will.
Quote
In short, much of what has passed for "education" for decades wasn't really all that effective at teaching anything, but did contribute to huge separations in life outcomes between children who have homes where academic subjects are used in non-academic settings and those children who had to rely on skills-based teaching focusing on the low-level learning of the skills separate from the material and never getting to the material.
So, learners from literate, intellectual households generally do better at school. Again, is that even in contention? I suppose that we'd have to define what "all that effective" means in regards to education. Certainly the baseball experiment above is a very bad example of such an evaluation.
Quote from: marshwiggle on December 07, 2019, 01:29:48 PM
My kids all went to an IB school for high school. When parents of younger kids asked me about it, I always said the same thing; the best thing about IB was the culture-it was OK for kids to care about doing well.
That is the biggest problem with a lot of normal schools; that being apathetic is expected.
There's a wonderful paper offering free SAT prep for students in general level classes and AP classes. Not surprisingly, more people from AP classes registered. But they had another dimension: signups were either public and all students saw you sign up, or private and they did not.
In the AP classes, making the signup public lead to more students signing up. In the non-AP classes, public signup had the opposite effect and fewer students signed up than when it was private. Exactly as you said: in the AP class, students wanted to look like they cared -- and in the non-AP class it was the opposite.
That seems like the #1 thing to fix and it can't be harder than revamping teaching styles.
Quote from: polly_mer on December 07, 2019, 03:41:38 PM
Along with volumes of other evidence, the logical conclusions include:
1) Critical thinking is not transferrable; one must know enough about the subject matter to do much of anything in a given area.
Certainly this piece of evidence doesn't speak to it. Giving people jargon they've never heard of is unrelated to critical thinking or problem solving. The problem there really is just bad writing more so than bad reading comprehension. Perhaps they should have added a paragraph explaining the jargon and presumably, kids with higher reading comprehension would again have done better.
Quote
In short, much of what has passed for "education" for decades wasn't really all that effective at teaching anything, but did contribute to huge separations in life outcomes between children who have homes where academic subjects are used in non-academic settings and those children who had to rely on skills-based teaching focusing on the low-level learning of the skills separate from the material and never getting to the material.
The past decades have also seen quickly growing inequality... so I'm not sure we can separate changing teaching styles from changing inequality more broadly.
I think the general culture in the U.S. also influences it all immeasurably. I belong to a Facebook group to parents of high-schoolers and college students. People regularly ask what presents they can get for their high-school and college-age kids. Hundreds of suggestions are made. Not once, not one single time, have I ever seen anyone suggest a book. Nor when the parents are describing the kind of things their kids like do they ever mention any kind of books. To read it you would think that my son is the only teenager left who reads. To consult my own students, you would think likewise. When I ask them, none of them ever can come up with the name of a book they have read outside of class — ever, since the age of someone reading Dr. Seuss to them. I guess the up side is that a kid who does independent reading has found an easy way to be ahead of the pack.
Quote from: Hegemony on December 07, 2019, 10:49:05 PM
I think the general culture in the U.S. also influences it all immeasurably. I belong to a Facebook group to parents of high-schoolers and college students. People regularly ask what presents they can get for their high-school and college-age kids. Hundreds of suggestions are made. Not once, not one single time, have I ever seen anyone suggest a book. Nor when the parents are describing the kind of things their kids like do they ever mention any kind of books. To read it you would think that my son is the only teenager left who reads. To consult my own students, you would think likewise. When I ask them, none of them ever can come up with the name of a book they have read outside of class — ever, since the age of someone reading Dr. Seuss to them. I guess the up side is that a kid who does independent reading has found an easy way to be ahead of the pack.
For what it's worth I grew up reading a lot but we didn't get a lot of books as "presents." Whenever my parents went to the bookstore I could come along and bring whatever I wanted home so it didn't make much sense for them to give me books as presents. It was part of the appeal of reading. I was always saving or scheming about getting some toy but books were just an inexaustible resource.
Quote from: pigou on December 07, 2019, 05:26:56 PM
The past decades have also seen quickly growing inequality... so I'm not sure we can separate changing teaching styles from changing inequality more broadly.
But in my observation, "graduation rates" have probably been rising. It's far easier to hide inequality behind lowering standards than it is to admit to the need for something other than "one-size-fits-all" instruction.
Again, I have to ask the question: what are other people reading/discussing related to K-12 educational research and K-12 practitioners in the field discussing that research as it applies to practice?
Wahoo asked what parts were in contention and then wrote personal opinions that both indicate a contentious part and that bear no resemblance to the views common with those who deal with the accumulated evidence (e.g., explicit scientific studies (qualitative and quantitative), extensive discussions among practitioners about how to educate the next generation of practitioners, extensive discussions among practitioners about what constitute best practices to improve their own work, and research in the meta aspects to compare and contrast what the practitioners say and what other observers see).
I would like to see evidence that backs those opinions because I have spent decades now in the appropriate discourse and research communities for K-12 education so it's pretty annoying to have an expert in an unrelated field continue to spout unsupported opinions instead of providing counter evidence from equally reputable sources to have a nuanced discussion.
Quote from: Caracal on December 08, 2019, 05:46:37 AM
Quote from: Hegemony on December 07, 2019, 10:49:05 PM
I think the general culture in the U.S. also influences it all immeasurably. I belong to a Facebook group to parents of high-schoolers and college students. People regularly ask what presents they can get for their high-school and college-age kids. Hundreds of suggestions are made. Not once, not one single time, have I ever seen anyone suggest a book. Nor when the parents are describing the kind of things their kids like do they ever mention any kind of books. To read it you would think that my son is the only teenager left who reads. To consult my own students, you would think likewise. When I ask them, none of them ever can come up with the name of a book they have read outside of class — ever, since the age of someone reading Dr. Seuss to them. I guess the up side is that a kid who does independent reading has found an easy way to be ahead of the pack.
For what it's worth I grew up reading a lot but we didn't get a lot of books as "presents." Whenever my parents went to the bookstore I could come along and bring whatever I wanted home so it didn't make much sense for them to give me books as presents. It was part of the appeal of reading. I was always saving or scheming about getting some toy but books were just an inexaustible resource.
Anecdotal evidence is not a good control, of course, but I was fairly familiar with my parents' social set on our white-collar side of our typical American town----and while it would be hyperbole to call these adults (primarily born in the '30s and '40s) "philistines" (they were not; they were mostly college educated), the party conversation was routinely football, basketball, business, stories from military service, and occasionally professional boxing matches or movies. Children were seldom discussed outside their athletic performance as bragging about academic performances would have been unseemly. I cannot remember a single discussion or comment about the arts, classical music, music of any kind, or books except for a recommendation of
Johnathan Livingston Seagull by my mom's best friend over coffee; my mother, an English major in college, found the book ridiculous. Bookworms are actually a fairly rare breed, I think.
The elephant in the room = teacher salaries.
If you signal--via low salaries--that you really don't give a damn about the education of the next generation and that you really don't respect the validity of the teaching profession, then it's quite possible that fewer people will aspire to that profession, including those who are best suited to it.
Which is why we in the USA give $35,000 starting salaries to K-12 teachers but six-figure salaries to corporate trainers who provide adult education to adult learners--we value adult education oh so much more.
/snark off
It seems to me, at least based on Pisa test results, that the single most important factor is culture, much along the lines of what someone mentioned about it being OK to be seen to care about doing well vs. expectations of apathy.
What seems to me the most salient, and probably also the most important, result of the Pisa tests is how clearly countries are grouped by culture. Confucianist cultures completely dominate the top spots, particularly in math; Finland and Estonia (which have cultural similarities) are next. The English-speaking world (British heritage) does well, as does Poland, but they're not in the same league as the Confucianist countries. The Latin countries do badly, esp. those of Spanish heritage (France and Portugal are the Latin countries that do best); the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas are all below mediocre. Culture clearly matters more than wealth, since PR China does so much better than Norway or Switzerland.
I'm not saying things like teachers' salaries aren't important, but a culture that values and respects learning seems to matter most - and in any case such a culture is more likely to find the political will to fund schools instead of tax cuts for the rich or whatever. I'm not sure what actionable conclusions can be drawn from that, other than at personal level like me considering sending my child to a Japanese school.
Or, in your own home, upholding the values like reading (by reading to children and encouraging them to read and discuss what they've read), music (by making the time, effort, and room in the budget for lessons, instruments, and again listening to and discussing music heard publicly, as well as that played by your children, positively for the most part, and critically, to a reasonable level.
Likewise, upholding visual and physical arts like sculpture, painting, dance and music in the same way--involving yourself in them, and making ways for your children to do so.
You may not know a lot about those things in all their particulars, but you can learn, and instead of decrying specific art activities as stuffy or inaccessible to you and those you know, you can evince a willingness to learn along with your offspring. You don't even have to like the things you help your kids to learn to like.
My mom--who I found out much later, hated bananas--taught us all to eat them on our cereal without ever wrinkling up her nose as she cut them up over our cornflakes or Rice Krispies. She'd just decided we needed to be able to eat them for good health, and bought them and fed them to us regularly.
I've always thought that was an unselfish sacrifice on her part.
M.
Quote from: mamselle on January 05, 2020, 01:15:38 AM
Or, in your own home, upholding the values like reading (by reading to children and encouraging them to read and discuss what they've read), music (by making the time, effort, and room in the budget for lessons, instruments, and again listening to and discussing music heard publicly, as well as that played by your children, positively for the most part, and critically, to a reasonable level.
Likewise, upholding visual and physical arts like sculpture, painting, dance and music in the same way--involving yourself in them, and making ways for your children to do so.
You may not know a lot about those things in all their particulars, but you can learn, and instead of decrying specific art activities as stuffy or inaccessible to you and those you know, you can evince a willingness to learn along with your offspring. You don't even have to like the things you help your kids to learn to like.
M.
All this is fine, of course, but I don't know that there is much need to worry about doing all of these things when it is what upper middle class academic parents do anyway. I never needed to think about making sure to read to my kid, because my parents read to me and everyone I know with kids reads to them. Our baby shower was a book shower where everyone brought their favorite kids books, because...academics. Being open to things you may be less inclined to is fine, but I don't really see the wisdom or necessity of pushing it as a parent. I grew up with parents who found art only moderately interesting. I recall going to a gallery or two, but mostly only when we got older. If I or any of my siblings had shown any interest in dancing or music, I'm sure that would have been encouraged, but we are all pretty tone deaf and none of us went beyond listening to the radio my parents played in the car. Ditto for visual art which I mostly indulged in at school. It seems very unlikely to me that anything more intensive would have changed or bettered my life.
The problems with American schooling are mostly about racial and economic inequality and segregation. Kids of people with wealth and status tend to do fine regardless of where they go to school and I don't really think any kind of intensive parenting beyond what most of us are going to do anyway are particularly important.
Going back to the Atlantic peace, and as someone who grew up (and was educated) in a poor Balkan country under communism, I was really surprised that teaching children reading skills by exposing them to texts devoid of substantial content can be considered a viable way to improve reading comprehension...it simply makes no sense to me.
Even though my PhD is in English (no formal training in education), I have been teaching college level writing for 20 years now and my experience shows that when my students struggle with reading comprehension, it happens precisely because they lack factual knowledge and the tools to fill in gaps through independent learning (google searches for example) or the abstract/college level vocabulary present in most of the readings I assign. I have yet to meet a US-educated student who does not know what inferences are, for example, but that does nothing for them when they read a text in marketing that explains the workings of commercials through the physiological model of classical conditioning and they have no idea what classical conditioning is.
Quote from: Caracal on January 05, 2020, 06:12:17 AM
Quote from: mamselle on January 05, 2020, 01:15:38 AM
Or, in your own home, upholding the values like reading (by reading to children and encouraging them to read and discuss what they've read), music (by making the time, effort, and room in the budget for lessons, instruments, and again listening to and discussing music heard publicly, as well as that played by your children, positively for the most part, and critically, to a reasonable level.
Likewise, upholding visual and physical arts like sculpture, painting, dance and music in the same way--involving yourself in them, and making ways for your children to do so.
You may not know a lot about those things in all their particulars, but you can learn, and instead of decrying specific art activities as stuffy or inaccessible to you and those you know, you can evince a willingness to learn along with your offspring. You don't even have to like the things you help your kids to learn to like.
M.
All this is fine, of course, but I don't know that there is much need to worry about doing all of these things when it is what upper middle class academic parents do anyway. I never needed to think about making sure to read to my kid, because my parents read to me and everyone I know with kids reads to them. Our baby shower was a book shower where everyone brought their favorite kids books, because...academics. Being open to things you may be less inclined to is fine, but I don't really see the wisdom or necessity of pushing it as a parent. I grew up with parents who found art only moderately interesting. I recall going to a gallery or two, but mostly only when we got older. If I or any of my siblings had shown any interest in dancing or music, I'm sure that would have been encouraged, but we are all pretty tone deaf and none of us went beyond listening to the radio my parents played in the car. Ditto for visual art which I mostly indulged in at school. It seems very unlikely to me that anything more intensive would have changed or bettered my life.
The problems with American schooling are mostly about racial and economic inequality and segregation. Kids of people with wealth and status tend to do fine regardless of where they go to school and I don't really think any kind of intensive parenting beyond what most of us are going to do anyway are particularly important.
Fair enough, but it's those very non-verbal communicative forms that carry cultural messages more dimensionally and open up conversation as they are experienced and reflected on.
Nuance and non-binary messages--this music and that music each have some things In common (like I want to dance to both of them, even if in different ways), so I take them into my bodily existence without tension or rancor--are pathways to peaceful sharing and an appreciation of the richness of other cultures. It also creates an imaginative basis for negotiated differences where those exist as well.
Verbal stuff can do that, too, of course.
Sometimes.
What you learn in your body, you know forever.
M.
Quote from: mamselle on January 05, 2020, 01:15:38 AM
Or, in your own home...
It's not an either/or proposition - none of your suggestions in any way conflict with enrolling him in a Japanese school. Plus, while my top reason is a school environment in which learning is valued and respected, there's also the advantage of learning an Asian language (there are no Chinese schools that I know of where I live, although there are schools with Mandarin lessons).
Quote from: Caracal on January 05, 2020, 06:12:17 AM
The problems with American schooling are mostly about racial and economic inequality and segregation...
US public K12 does seem to be the most unequal in the world, as the schools range from world-beating, like Bronx HS of Science, to bad by Third World standards.
Not either/or, no, I agree.
But maybe going to what seems to me like a more extreme mode--a specific private school enrollment plan--isn't really necessary.
I was pointing out that there's a lot you can do without going to that extent.
If you can do both, that's great as well.
But if not, there are less extensive (and expensive) options available, and others might want to consider those if there's no particular private school nearby that meets the goals you're trying for.
M
Quote from: paultuttle on January 04, 2020, 08:23:39 PM
The elephant in the room = teacher salaries.
If you signal--via low salaries--that you really don't give a damn about the education of the next generation and that you really don't respect the validity of the teaching profession, then it's quite possible that fewer people will aspire to that profession, including those who are best suited to it.
Which is why we in the USA give $35,000 starting salaries to K-12 teachers but six-figure salaries to corporate trainers who provide adult education to adult learners--we value adult education oh so much more.
/snark off
Where are you getting this salary from? The average public school teacher makes $60,000, with differences across states largely tracking different cost of living -- e.g. the average is $85,000 in New York: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2019/04/which_states_have_the_highest_and_lowest_teacher_salaries.html
This is comfortably the median US
household income, for a job that requires a Bachelor's degree and comes with job security unheard of in other industries.
Quote from: Stockmann on January 04, 2020, 09:50:08 PM
What seems to me the most salient, and probably also the most important, result of the Pisa tests is how clearly countries are grouped by culture. Confucianist cultures completely dominate the top spots, particularly in math; Finland and Estonia (which have cultural similarities) are next. The English-speaking world (British heritage) does well, as does Poland, but they're not in the same league as the Confucianist countries. The Latin countries do badly, esp. those of Spanish heritage (France and Portugal are the Latin countries that do best); the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas are all below mediocre. Culture clearly matters more than wealth, since PR China does so much better than Norway or Switzerland.
In my mind, the biggest issue with the PISA test is that it really tests
intrinsic motivation for doing well on a test that has no consequences for the test-taker. That is, it doesn't just test what you know, but also whether you care to exert effort. That strikes me as a really flawed methodology.
There's a wonderful paper showing that the racial achievement gap on a test was eliminated when students got paid for each correct answer. The payment was announced right before the exam, so the effect is not because it leads people to study more. It just got (particularly minority) students to exert more effort on the actual exam: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/immediate-rewards-good-scores-can-boost-student-performance
Quote from: mamselle on January 05, 2020, 11:40:59 AM
Not either/or, no, I agree.
But maybe going to what seems to me like a more extreme mode--a specific private school enrollment plan--isn't really necessary.
I was pointing out that there's a lot you can do without going to that extent.
If you can do both, that's great as well.
But if not, there are less extensive (and expensive) options available, and others might want to consider those if there's no particular private school nearby that meets the goals you're trying for.
M
This isn't a critique of anyone's particular decision about what school to send their kids to. However, one of the things that drives school segregation and inequality is wealthier parents feeling that somehow they have to maximize their child's education. The truth is that most middle class kids can get a good education just about anywhere. There are exceptions, and people have to make the right decisions, but it is worth thinking through the assumptions and ideas involved.
Quote from: mamselle on January 05, 2020, 11:40:59 AM
Not either/or, no, I agree.
But maybe going to what seems to me like a more extreme mode--a specific private school enrollment plan--isn't really necessary...
Sorry not to have clarified earlier, I'm not in the US. The public school system here is much worse overall. So enrolling my kid in a private school is basically a given here.
Anecdotally, my former dentist (now deceased) was the daughter of Japanese refugees (Hiroshima) who arrived here penniless and not speaking the language. Their children attended
both a local public school and a Japanese school (morning shift, afternoon shift), my former dentist then got into an elite university and became an excellent (and financially successful) dentist. In contrast, according to polls of HS dropouts here, the top reason for dropping out is simply not wanting to go to school (far ahead of financial reasons).
Quote from: pigou on January 05, 2020, 01:03:23 PM
The average public school teacher makes $60,000, with differences across states largely tracking different cost of living -- e.g. the average is $85,000 in New York: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2019/04/which_states_have_the_highest_and_lowest_teacher_salaries.html
This is comfortably the median US household income, for a job that requires a Bachelor's degree and comes with job security unheard of in other industries.
Performance of an educational system doesn't correlate well with teacher pay (I'm not saying teacher pay is irrelevant). There was an article on World Economic Forum comparing teachers' salaries relative to other professional salaries, in different countries (that's the proper comparison to make IMO, because it accounts, even if crudely, for both varying costs of living and the pay of alternative career paths). France ranked very high (at the very top, IIRC), yet is nowhere near the top spots in the Pisa rankings. Anecdotally, in my country teachers are paid comparatively well relative to folks with a degree overall, and have about the same job security as the Pope, yet the results are dismal. I wouldn't be against pay raises here, but only if the public schools recruitment mechanisms and teacher training were rebuilt from scratch and all teachers in public schools had to be re-certified.
Quote from: pigou on January 05, 2020, 01:03:23 PM
Quote from: Stockmann on January 04, 2020, 09:50:08 PM
What seems to me the most salient, and probably also the most important, result of the Pisa tests is how clearly countries are grouped by culture. Confucianist cultures completely dominate the top spots, particularly in math; Finland and Estonia (which have cultural similarities) are next. The English-speaking world (British heritage) does well, as does Poland, but they're not in the same league as the Confucianist countries. The Latin countries do badly, esp. those of Spanish heritage (France and Portugal are the Latin countries that do best); the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas are all below mediocre. Culture clearly matters more than wealth, since PR China does so much better than Norway or Switzerland.
In my mind, the biggest issue with the PISA test is that it really tests intrinsic motivation for doing well on a test that has no consequences for the test-taker. That is, it doesn't just test what you know, but also whether you care to exert effort. That strikes me as a really flawed methodology.
I don't disagree with you about it being biased by intrinsic motivation, although students must know something if they're to answer correctly, no matter how motivated they may be; however, it nevertheless measures something useful. The problem with only having extrinsic motivation is that encourages cheating and gaming the system (not just by students, also teaching to the test, etc), and, particularly in the long term, students who have intrinsic motivation are generally more promising than the ones who don't, so it's measuring something important.
Quote from: Cheerful on December 07, 2019, 07:42:36 AM
And who prepares K-12 teachers? Higher education. What goes around comes around?
Let me correct that for you. It's not Higher Education that prepares (the vast majority) of K-12 teachers in the United States.
Rather, it's the increasingly compartmentalized, increasingly self-isolated, increasingly echo-chambered, Education College subset within Higher Education that prepares K-12 teachers in the United States. Other academic units within Higher Education (e.g. Math, English, History) have little to no control nor oversight over K-12 teacher training.
And those courses, as well as the test packets they teach and push onto state and local school boards, are tied to an insidious group of publishers with lobbies and other ties to those same school districts' boards and State Ed. Committees.
There's the fly in the ointment.
M.
Quote from: pigou on January 05, 2020, 01:03:23 PM
Where are you getting this salary from? The average public school teacher makes $60,000, with differences across states largely tracking different cost of living -- e.g. the average is $85,000 in New York: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2019/04/which_states_have_the_highest_and_lowest_teacher_salaries.html
This is comfortably the median US household income, for a job that requires a Bachelor's degree and comes with job security unheard of in other industries.
The $60,000 figure is the average salary of all teachers including those who've been in the profession for decades. PaulTuttle referenced starting salaries which are much closer to his $35K than the $60K you linked. The NEA reported a mean staring salary of just over $39K in 2017-2018.
http://www.nea.org/home/2017-2018-average-starting-teacher-salary.html
Quote from: Aster on January 06, 2020, 06:27:17 AM
Quote from: Cheerful on December 07, 2019, 07:42:36 AM
And who prepares K-12 teachers? Higher education. What goes around comes around?
Let me correct that for you. It's not Higher Education that prepares (the vast majority) of K-12 teachers in the United States.
Rather, it's the increasingly compartmentalized, increasingly self-isolated, increasingly echo-chambered, Education College subset within Higher Education that prepares K-12 teachers in the United States. Other academic units within Higher Education (e.g. Math, English, History) have little to no control nor oversight over K-12 teacher training.
Are we back to this again?
Quote from: paultuttle on January 04, 2020, 08:23:39 PM
Which is why we in the USA give $35,000 starting salaries to K-12 teachers but six-figure salaries to corporate trainers who provide adult education to adult learners--we value adult education oh so much more.
Will you please name some of the corporate training firms of which you speak? Also, are they hiring? If this is really a thing, why is anyone still working at a college?