How K-12 Gets Us The Students We Get

[spork]

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/.

Mississippi, a beacon of hope? 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

[Cheerful]

And who prepares K-12 teachers?  Higher education.  What goes around comes around?

[Wahoo Redux]

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!

[pigou]

From the first article:

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.

[Caracal]

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.

[pigou]

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.

[Wahoo Redux]

From the first article:

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?

[marshwiggle]

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.

[polly_mer]

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.

[Wahoo Redux]

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.

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.

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.

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. 

[pigou]

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.

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.

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.

[Hegemony]

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.

[Caracal]

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.

[marshwiggle]

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.

[polly_mer]

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.