Are we lying to ourselves about education?

[aruvqan]

@Kimera757

I heard that in Ontario if you fail the test you can take a special course to still graduate from high school. Said course is taught by the school and is not standardized, so we probably have students graduating who should not be graduating.

But that is historically the case pretty much everywhere. I also vaguely remember running into foreign exchange students that had a less than stellar grasp of the English language - and for someone to be in a program where they come to a foreign country and can not seem to read, write or verbalize in a language has got to be terrifying. Not to mention the cultural differences between say at home in China or Moscow of Tokyo and small town western NY state …

@Voyager

Me elementary school 60 years ago had only a few categories and lots of teacher comments. But they were tracking us in more detail than this, since some got nominated for SP (kind of GATE) programs for junior high.
In junior high you get to understand grades which won’t matter for college.
But at no time is a person, graded, only the work - though I can understand people feeling graded.

school 1966-1980. We also had ABCDF and a comment section.

@squidfood

The thing that bothers me is homework itself, as a concept. At least for elementary school. I know that practice on some subjects is needed outside of class time, but it teaches that work can’t be left at work and has to come home and cut into family time, lessons that IMO set up cultural patterns of overwork at an early age (I think I read recently that the value of homework was being questioned in some education circles but don’t know details of any studies etc).

I agree entirely. I got into trouble [to a degree] at more than one job because I absolutely refused to deal with work issues when I was not at work. I will not come in, I will not break vacation plans, I barely entertain the idea of a phone call asking where something is in the system/office/desk. I actually think that something like a reading assignment can be detrimental - current politics is an excellent example - if a kid does his evening newspaper article reading from some white supremacist rag [um, Jews and Wetbacks are flooding the country, kill them all] another kid reads some uber liberal snowflake rag [um, The US is the cause of every problem in the world, we need to self flaggilate and give everything we own to everybody else to compensate] and a third kid reads something in the middle [Today Wherethefucckistan made Female Genital Mutilation illegal and how it impacts their relationship with the surrounding countries] there is nothing uniting the information the kids are getting in. When we did the whole read an article in the newspaper, for the most part we got similar information whether it was the New York Times, the Washington Post or Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

@Voyager

We should distinguish between homework needed to reinforce the concept and busywork. One teacher said that if a kid gets all the words right on a spelling test, they shouldn’t be forced to write all the words in sentences. They should either get an enriching assignment or be able to use that time for their own ends.

The homework we most detested for our kids were the damn art projects they got. We figured it was for kids who couldn’t write

Art projects always sucked, IMHO - though the ones that make sense are if you are in an art enrichment class [go ye hence and sketch a cow in the style of Dali] I can remember the SRA Reading Comprehension boxes in 6th grade - if the kid in class got done with whatever insane project the teacher assigned as do in class work, we got to go and pick a module to read and do as a reward [?] My problem was that in 6th grade, I read 600 words per minute [as tested by the school system] and was reading at a college level of comprehension. I finished the entire box in 4 days, it took me roughly 3 minutes to do them and that included walking over to the corner and selecting a new module. They are supposed to take something like 5 minutes of reading and 1 minute for the handful of questions and about 15 seconds to self grade.

@Voyager

Top student athletes get in the paper, top academic students rarely do. It’s more like pulling the kid into a dark alley and saying “psst - you’re a National Merit Finalist.”

ROTFLMAO love the mental image =)

@Velocity

My gripe with homework is that every teacher seems to imagine that they are the only source of homework for students. If they are going to give homework, make it something light and short. Six teachers each assigning something short and simple still adds up to something considerable.

SUpposedly it is to be a certain number of minutes per year the kid is old of homework. And you are right, when you have 5 or 6 classes with homework, and then you add parents who aggressively enrich the kids life [after school music lessons, sports team, dance class, language lessons, college entrance exam tutoring or whatever] there is no time left to be a freaking KID.

@ENugent

I am 51 years old and have a PhD and a JD from extremely reputable schools. I have been practicing in my area of law for more than twenty years. When I was applying for jobs in the past year, law firms still wanted a copy of my transcript from undergrad before they would consider me. My transcript is fine, but the fact that I still need to produce it sucks.

Pretty much. As an inside/outside mechanic on the other hand, get certified, stay certified and nobody gives a shit about my degree in Poly Sci in college or what I did in high school Yay for manual labor?

@MrDibble

Finland is basically acting as a whole-country study for things like drastically reducing homework and not emphasising grades or competitiveness, higher teacher professionalism and valuing non-academic study as highly as academic subjects.

Results so far seem quite promising.

And I have been following it with great interest. Almost would make me consider [if we were young like 21 or 22 and just started the family] learning Finnish and figuring a way to move over. They seem to have a very sane approach to school.

[MrDibble]

@aruvqan

And I have been following it with great interest. Almost would make me consider [if we were young like 21 or 22 and just started the family] learning Finnish and figuring a way to move over. They seem to have a very sane approach to school.

I hear you. Although I hear Denmark is good for people like us, too…

[puddleglum]

@MandaJo

Because the signals are not accurate, or at least not to the precision they are used. You cannot use the difference between a GPA of 87.5 and 92.25 within a school. Much larger differences in in GPA are meaningless if you are comparing between schools. Likewise rank: at a strong school, a student ranked below the top quartile might be a stronger student than the kid ranked in the top 5 at a weaker school, or even in a weaker class year. And that doesn’t even get into the distortion caused by persistent academic dishonesty. But distinctions like this–distinctions much finer than this–are used to decide who gets hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarship money, who gets admitted into the prestigious programs, who gets internships and opportunities.

Ideology aside, it’s bad data. Yes, the kid with a report card full of Cs probably lacks something that the kid with straight As has. The difference between the two is some combination of work ethic, intelligence, improvement, and compliance. But that’s about all you can say: a difference exists, in something, of some magnitude. Probably.

Teachers assigning grades are like a guy in a lumber yard using a machete to cut boards, and then people come around with laser calipers and decide every distance they can detect is meaningful.

Unless the bias is systematic then much of the bias of having hard vs easy teachers will be cancelled out. Also if the school is systematically biasing grades intelligence tests such as the SAT or ACT are used

Signals don’t have to be perfect to be useful. It is true there is probably no meaningful difference between people with a 2.9 average and a 3.0 average but if you make a cutoff at 3.0 as a group those above will be better students and employees than those who don’t make the cut off. People around the cutoffs will be either arbitrarily helped or hurt by the groupings but most students are not right at the cutoffs.

Furthermore, while college acceptance and employment decisions are binary, life outcomes are not. It is not like everyone who is not accepted at Harvard has to go to Vassar. They could go to Yale, and those who are not accepted at Yale can go to MIT, etc.

[puddleglum]

@MrDibble

Finland is basically acting as a whole-country study for things like drastically reducing homework and not emphasising grades or competitiveness, higher teacher professionalism and valuing non-academic study as highly as academic subjects.

Results so far seem quite promising.

This is not a good study. Finland is different than every other country. What works in Finland may not work elsewhere and what is working in Finland may be different than the treatment.

[Cheesesteak]

@puddleglum

What is the purpose of education? It is twofold, one is to pass along information,

The second is to signal to who is smart and hardworking

What do these two ideas:
-teaching things to children
-signalling which children are smart and hardworking

have in common other than the fact that they deal with children? At best it is a marriage of convenience. At worst, the first idea, the core reason schools exist, gets polluted by the second, and learning takes a back seat to promoting the appearance of being smart and hardworking.

[Jasmine]

@Snowboarder_Bo

Like the man said: this is LIFE; we’re playing for points. And there are a shit-ton of stupid questions.

:LOL

[MandaJo]

@puddleglum

Unless the bias is systematic then much of the bias of having hard vs easy teachers will be cancelled out. Also if the school is systematically biasing grades intelligence tests such as the SAT or ACT are used

Signals don’t have to be perfect to be useful. It is true there is probably no meaningful difference between people with a 2.9 average and a 3.0 average but if you make a cutoff at 3.0 as a group those above will be better students and employees than those who don’t make the cut off. People around the cutoffs will be either arbitrarily helped or hurt by the groupings but most students are not right at the cutoffs.

Furthermore, while college acceptance and employment decisions are binary, life outcomes are not. It is not like everyone who is not accepted at Harvard has to go to Vassar. They could go to Yale, and those who are not accepted at Yale can go to MIT, etc.

This is the second time in my memory you’ve used Vassar as an example of a shit school. Last year, the average student at Vassarhad an SAT of 1450, which is around the 95% nationally. Half of them are higher than that, of course. Over half of the admitted students were in the top 5% of their graduating class, and 95% were in the top 25% of their class. It’s not a shit school. Do you just assume it is because it was for women, years ago? It’s not anymore, you know. 40% of admitted students last year were men.

Past that, you’ve simply hand-waved away all my objections without actually explaining anything. I’m the one generating this data, and I am telling you it is incredibly crude at best and often downright fraudulent. And top schools, as you can see from the Vassar stats, don’t make the cut-off at 3.0. They make it at 3.95.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Cheesesteak

What do these two ideas:
-teaching things to children
-signalling which children are smart and hardworking

have in common other than the fact that they deal with children?

If you’re teaching things to children, don’t you want a way of measuring/assessing how well you are doing so? And won’t there be an enormous overlap between how much children are learning and how smart and/or hardworking they are?

[MandaJo]

Yes, but using achievement data to evaluate students puts perverse incentives that distort that data, making much less useful for both purposes.

Furthermore, the format of one number for a semester’s performance in class, a number that represents a summation of mastery, improvement, effort, and compliance, is such a rough approximation of anything. Teachers collect and use much more granulated data. There’s no pedagogical benefit to blending it. Blending 4 years into a single number is even crazier.

[puddleglum]

@Cheesesteak

What do these two ideas:
-teaching things to children
-signalling which children are smart and hardworking

have in common other than the fact that they deal with children? At best it is a marriage of convenience. At worst, the first idea, the core reason schools exist, gets polluted by the second, and learning takes a back seat to promoting the appearance of being smart and hardworking.

In order to teach things to people you have to find out how much is being learned either through tests or projects. Since those are going to be generated anyway, why not use them to rank the students since they are going to need to be ranked?

You underestimate the value of the signalling. Most people are going to quickly forget what they learn in school beyond the basics so most of the value of schools comes from the signalling.

[puddleglum]

@MandaJo

Yes, but using achievement data to evaluate students puts perverse incentives that distort that data, making much less useful for both purposes.

Furthermore, the format of one number for a semester’s performance in class, a number that represents a summation of mastery, improvement, effort, and compliance, is such a rough approximation of anything. Teachers collect and use much more granulated data. There’s no pedagogical benefit to blending it. Blending 4 years into a single number is even crazier.

This is where you are incorrect, in order to succeed at a high level in a class a student must be some combination of smart, and hardworking, or lucky. The more classes a student takes the less luck has to do with with it. So while the signal of succeeding at an individual assignment may be very little, once you add up all the assignments they have provide a better signal and once you add up all the classes you get an even better signal.

It is possible to game the entire system by making the entire school easy but that is why colleges require intelligence tests which can be cheated at but not gamed.

[MrDibble]

@puddleglum

Finland is different than every other country. What works in Finland may not work elsewhere and what is working in Finland may be different than the treatment.

This is just a deepity.

[Voyager]

@aruvqan

Art projects always sucked, IMHO - though the ones that make sense are if you are in an art enrichment class [go ye hence and sketch a cow in the style of Dali] I can remember the SRA Reading Comprehension boxes in 6th grade - if the kid in class got done with whatever insane project the teacher assigned as do in class work, we got to go and pick a module to read and do as a reward [?] My problem was that in 6th grade, I read 600 words per minute [as tested by the school system] and was reading at a college level of comprehension. I finished the entire box in 4 days, it took me roughly 3 minutes to do them and that included walking over to the corner and selecting a new module. They are supposed to take something like 5 minutes of reading and 1 minute for the handful of questions and about 15 seconds to self grade.

I was reading Jules Verne in 2nd grade. We had that box in third grade. At the beginning of the year they gave me the hardest thing in the box, I read it and passed the test, and they let me read what I wanted the rest of the time.
NYC schools did a great job for me when I went there. Especially the schools I went to.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Cheesesteak

When I think of education, specifically US K-12 education, both public and private, I think of kids learning things. With a school being defined as an institution for the teaching of children, this seems natural. I think this purpose gets undermined by something else. Grading.

Not testing, but grading, like you might grade a steak. Grading places students in a hierarchy, identifying certain students as smart, other students as… not so smart. Grading, as it’s done today, creates a database of students, tracking their performance in a portable, easy to share report, in convenient card form, so that outside agencies, schools, employers, etc. can be readily provided with performance data about students. We grade students and help these agencies to pick and choose which students are afforded benefits, offered positions, jobs or scholarships, and which are not. Grading changes school from a place of learning into a proving ground for one’s future opportunity. We understand this, it forms a deep undercurrent guiding our activities regarding school, but we don’t often say it out loud. You don’t get an angry parent in front of the school board saying the school isn’t doing enough to differentiate the high performers from the slackers.

Despite this, tremendous amount of effort is put into developing these grades by schools, ensuring their usefulness, from constant testing of students, to the development of standardized tests, to tracking the grades of the students in individual schools or districts. Students cram for tests to get a high score, and we all know full well that they will forget it in a few weeks time, until they cram again for the final. The goal being not necessarily a top notch understanding of the subject at hand, but a good grade to put on the report card. The grade becomes the focus, not the learning.

Now, you’ll say, grades are important because we don’t know how well a student grasps the content without grades. This is a fair point. However, if a student does poorly on a test, the grade tends to just sit there like a mark of shame, and not a lot of effort by the school goes into re-teaching what this student failed to learn, or necessarily even documenting what it WAS they never learned. The grade, though, that is well documented and will remain part of this student’s record, unchanged, whether or not the student eventually learns how to use Sine, Cosine and Tangent correctly. Even if we used grading/testing to directly help students learn more effectively, giving those grades to colleges and employers doesn’t help students learn at all.

Parents, when they see a bad grade say “work harder to get those grades up”. You got a bad grade in Fractions? You can “fix” it by doing better on the next topic, Geometry. We know that whether or not the kid knows fractions is irrelevant, the class is done with fractions, studying fractions NOW is a waste of time because the damage is already done. Maybe study it again when Finals comes along.

In the adult education world, grades are not really a ‘thing’ the same way they are for kids. If I go to a class to get my CDL certification I don’t get a grade. At least I don’t put down on my resume that I got a 90 in the class, or a 75, I put down that I completed the class to the satisfaction of the instructor, passed the test and can now legally drive large trucks. Nobody is keeping track of the adult classes I took where I didn’t do well, where I decided it wasn’t for me, and then punish me down the line for that failure. But we do this to kids, in addition to just the need to learn new things all day long, they deal with the pressure of knowing that what they do right now, when they’re 13 years old, is going to have a lasting impact on their future opportunities.

Grades are to some extent a sorting exercise.

[Voyager]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Grades are to some extent a sorting exercise.

If the only grade you think of is the GPA, yes. But most of the grades a student receives is feedback, not sorting. If a student ignores the feedback and doesn’t work harder on areas where they get low grades, then they do get sorted out. But they can only blame themselves.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@OldGuy

I always wonder about this claim. Do you feel that school sports teams also should not have MVPs awarded or no lettering their sports? We always seem perfectly fine picking out the best athletes at school and are troubled by picking out those who are best at academics.

People seem to be far less comfortable with the realization that their kids are of only middling intelligence than the knowledge that they are of only middling athletic ability. They know that athletic ability is not likely to translate into financial security.

Fact is, half the kids in this country are below average. In the same way that the star athlete might be the most popular kid in some of America’s schools the star student is the most popular kid in school in other countries where academics are more valued.

It shocks me sometimes how much time effort and money some families expend to get their kid good at some sport but think it’s crazy to spend a similar amount of time and effort on academics. I know one family that is basically bankrupting themselves on youth sports while their kids could use some remedial math instruction. And their kids are probably only good enough to be an average varsity high school player.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Voyager

I was reading Jules Verne in 2nd grade. We had that box in third grade. At the beginning of the year they gave me the hardest thing in the box, I read it and passed the test, and they let me read what I wanted the rest of the time.
NYC schools did a great job for me when I went there. Especially the schools I went to.

Hunter? Stuyvesant? Bronx Sci?

You mentioned being in JHS SP (spoecial progress). Did they have IGC (intellecutally gifted class) in elementary school back in your day? I am about a generation behind you I think.

The EdD’s of the world have decided that gifted programs are bad for education and are slowly trying to get rid of them in favor of more teaching to the lowest common denominator.

[Voyager]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Hunter? Stuyvesant? Bronx Sci?

Nope, Francis Lewis. No one from my junior high went to Bronx Science because it was so hard to get to and Francis Lewis was so good. We had the highest SAT scores outside of the selective high schools. I read an article in the Times that it is still the place parents want to send their kids to.

You mentioned being in JHS SP (spoecial progress). Did they have IGC (intellecutally gifted class) in elementary school back in your day? I am about a generation behind you I think.

No IGC. But there were four classes per grade in elementary school and after third grade they were sorted by perceived ability.

[Voyager]

@Damuri_Ajashi

It shocks me sometimes how much time effort and money some families expend to get their kid good at some sport but think it’s crazy to spend a similar amount of time and effort on academics. I know one family that is basically bankrupting themselves on youth sports while their kids could use some remedial math instruction. And their kids are probably only good enough to be an average varsity high school player.

Too right. I was on the site council of the high school my kids went to, and was invited to a meeting where parents were to give what we were looking for in a new principal. This was a middle class high school, no parents were hoping that sports would lead their kids out of poverty. But parent after parent said that the new principal’s most important job was to support the sports program.
I got up and said that the new principal should focus on what was most important - academics.
The other parents looked at me like I was crazy.
My high school in New York didn’t even have a football team. When they thought about starting one, they started to sell seasons tickets to measure interest.
They sold 7.
My graduating class was over 1500.
Like I said, great school.

[MrDibble]

Hear, hear.

Nothing makes me happier than that my eldest is choosing precisely 0 sports extra-curriculars this term (and just did table tennis for fun the term before). Am totally cool with her doing all the art, drama and a capella she wants. That’s why we picked the school we did, for its academic and arts focus.

Her younger sister is a mix, but judo isn’t fiercely competitive when you’re 7…