How K-12 Gets Us The Students We Get

[Wahoo Redux]

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. 

[paultuttle]

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

[Stockmann]

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.

[mamselle]

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. 

[Caracal]

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.

[hesitant]

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.

[mamselle]

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.

[Stockmann]

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).

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.

[mamselle]

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

[pigou]

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.

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

[Caracal]

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.

[Stockmann]

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).

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.

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.

[Aster]

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.

[mamselle]

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.

[wwwdotcom]

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