One of the most honest articles I've ever seen on why educational reform fails to meet it's goals

A real eye opener!

Why School ‘Reform’ Fails - Student motivation is the problem.

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Whenever I hear about a new educational reform, I assume that there is a tacit qualification that it is the best that can be done because there’s no way to get parents to play a more productive role in their children’s education. It’s also unfair to consider student’s motivation as weakened, given your figures that show about the same level of performance after nearly 40 years. Intellectual dishonesty and puffery are hallmarks of any use of public funds. But I do think it is silly to throw money at the problem when there aren’t readily identifiable problems with known solutions. That’s not about research and experimentation, but the wide spread implementation of reforms that wouldn’t change the dynamic behind the problem.

I just think programs like RTT don’t really solve the problem. To me it seems like they would just exacerbate the gap instead. In my experience (on a much smaller scale) the people who propose reforms are people who haven’t stepped foot in a classroom for decades and refuse to listen to the advice of teachers who are actually on their feet interacting with the students on a daily basis. Having to deal with their idealistic idiocy gives me a headache.

Why do lower scores mean that students are less motivated, rather than just that the reform isn’t working? I don’t see any actual support for the position given.

That’s kind of the point, the scores overall aren’t really all that much (if any) lower, they’re more or less static in real terms for the last 40 years despite many more teachers and resources being available per student.

He’s getting at it somewhat obliquely, but his “motivation” point refers to The reality that people (in totality) are only so smart and only so motivated, and throwing more resources against the hard fact that a good chunk of kids just really don’t like school or studying etc. is largely a waste of resources.

Rather than describing it in terms of the inherent limits of the students, I’d rather say that the form of our school system has built-in limits. Plenty of kids who really don’t like “school” or “studying” as those are commonly understood, can still prove to be dynamic learners in other settings. So I’d say the failure is in throwing more resources into trying to do essentially the same institutional things “better” (or with more computers), rather than trying to do something different.

Well, if the schools can’t make the “its/it’s” distinction stick, how can they expect to succeed generally? :smiley:

I think one of the reasons education reform can’t meet its goals is that those goals aren’t well-defined.

Some goals (making parents have to buy books for a second child instead of reusing old ones) are achieved; others (making politicians look like they worry a lot about education) may or may not be achieved. But what’s never set clearly, or if set clearly it’s ill-defined is what effect is each wave of reform expected to have on society as a whole.

An example of “ill-defined” would be the last Spanish reform, which had been preceded by defining “scholarly failure” as “failing to meet educational standards in the minimum alloted time” (1), then defined its goal as “eliminating scholarly failure” and achieved it… by making it almost impossible to retake years, and by eliminating the requirement to pass all your subjects. So, they defined that the goal was “have everybody finish HS on the year they turn 18” but they forgot to take the quality of that finish into account: students are “finishing HS” with 8Fs over 10 subjects, but hey, they’re finishing! The language used by college professors when the first wave of this batch of children got to their classes and ran into “inaction has consequences” for the first time in their lives was not very scholarly, I’m afraid.
1: that had never been our definition, we used to define it as “leaving school for reasons other than changing tracks”: moving from HS to a vocational school, or changing majors, were not “failure”, they were reasonable changes of direction and good on you for having the brains and the guts to do it; neither was retaking one year before college (or even two so long as there had been medical reasons) or dragging some subjects along through college so long as you eventually managed to graduate.

So’s this!

http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-are-tests-biased-against-students-who,17966/

One of the biggest issues I think with schools is how they present learning. Learning to me has been an exciting thing, but that is something I’ve learned for myself. School presents learning as this dry formal thing. I think if schools changed their approach just a bit they’d get much better returns. For example take history, you’ve got people burned at the stake, bloody wars, incest, intrigue, science, accomplishment, dark ages, natives, volcanos!, etc. Pretty exciting stuff if you think about it. Same for science, I mean take black holes, fusion, electricity, dna, evolution, life, planetary formation, etc. How cool are those things? Did you know some neutron stars have magnetic fields strong enough to rip the iron from your body if you somehow survived being crushed to the size of a microbe? Pretty cool. Acid Alkaline reactions? Pretty cool. You can take an acid that would melt your arm, and an alkaline that would do the same, mix them and end up with harmless salty soda water.

However science was generally presented as a list of dry facts you need to memorize. In the 4th grade I ended up in the gifted science class because in the third grade I found a book about atomic physics in the school library. It was a bit over my head but I read it anyway because atoms are pretty cool. Anyway I was the kid who knew what a neutron was and somehow that made me gifted. I used to watch nature and nova from when I was 5, I didn’t understand a lot of but what I did was pretty interesting. I wasn’t smarter than other people, far from it, in the classes I didn’t give a crap I did poorly. For example, as you all may have noticed I didn’t take much on the subject of grammar. Too dry and seemingly meaningless. I do try to learn now.

I guess what I’m saying is schools do an okay job teaching learning, but I think they could do a better job teaching a love of learning. I also think parents have the same fault. Maybe to a greater extent than schools.

I think the best way to do it would be to leverage technology more. Make it more interactive. More real, not just facts to memorize.

Just because the reforms of the last 40 years haven’t worked doesn’t mean that lack of student motivation is the problem. There has been remarkable success in certain educational programs that disproves this theory. If one school can get 85% of its students to go to college, then why shouldn’t we expect the same kind of performance from other schools? If one school can consistently do well with their kids and another can’t, then it’s not the student’s lack of motivation that’s the problem.

It’s also unclear what this article means by lack of motivation. A student can lack motivation because his teacher is terrible. The school can be dangerous and it might not be safe to study and look smart. The teacher might not be doing a good job of getting across why the information he’s teaching will be useful to the student. Therefore the student might legitimately see class as a waste of time. All these motivational problems can be safely blamed on the educators and not the students.

I was unmotivated in high school for all the above reasons. When I got to college all my grades improved. Was it my fault I didn’t want to learn in high school?

This notion that kids don’t want to learn is what keeps teachers from teaching better. They think the problem is with the child and they give up on teaching. If they can understand that all children can be motivated then they would potentially keep trying to change their teaching methods until they find something that works. That is really the best way to succeed as a teacher because social scientists haven’t found any educational method that consistently works on everyone. It’s best to keep trying until the student starts learning. But if an educator believes that the student isn’t learning because he lacks motivation, then the teacher might give up after one method. Not realizing that something else might have worked.

Meta-problems:
We’re a big country. We’re also a parochial country.
We want funding only for schools, institutions, etc., we know and use. Everything else is a bureaucratic sinkhole of taxpayer dollars.

Upshot:
No organization big enough to take on the responsibility for educating a whole country could possibly be trusted to do so.

BTW, this can easily veer into GD territory, and that way I do not pass for my sanity’s sake. Still, I’ll contribute this amount of serious discussion.

What the editorial says does ring true, but what it doesn’t do is offer a solution, only raise a problem with the way things are frequently being thought about and discussed. For example:

I think it’s too facile to say that “more students” (as compared to what, and when?) “don’t like school, don’t work hard, don’t do well”. More telling is the earlier cited figure that in 1950, 40% of 17-year-olds had dropped out, whereas now they are all but forced to remain enrolled - and that the expulsion rate of troublesome students has gone down (the solution is to transfer them to somewhere else), while the promotion or graduation of measurably unqualified students has gone up (“social promotion”). (This not being GD I won’t go cite-digging, but I am “pretty sure” I’ve seen this given as data before.)

Yet simply dumping or flushing 40% of kids from the educational system is a disservice to the public good that a public education system is supposed to be addressing. What are those kids supposed to go do?

In European countries such as Germany or Denmark, high school age students are tracked into those considered prepared/qualified for an academic track (“gymnasium”, most commonly leading to University) versus a path which is a vocational school equivalent for practical training (including periods of apprenticeship) leading to a specific career (a trade such as being plumber or mechanic, or nursing, dental assistant, etc.).

The basic premise is that if they haven’t exhibited the desire and/or talent to apply themselves meaningfully to “book smarts” by then, they’re not going to, let’s reserve the expensive lab equipment and highly paid teachers for those who will benefit from the experience. Worth noting is that this tracking is NOT written in stone; there are students who go from non-Gymnasium tracks to University, especially later in life. But it’s a broad sorting mechanism after elementary school to determine the best use of educational resources measured against the expected benefit to the students.

Could this be done in the US? I don’t see how. Even if the “direct the bottom 1/3rd of students after 8th grade to vocational schools” approach were politically feasible in this country (which I seriously doubt it is), I don’t see there being enough jobs for those people anyway. In the current economy, there’s increasingly little opportunity for manufacturing or manual labor jobs offering a middle class lifestyle.

History shows that a swelling of young people with no hope for the future is not a good thing for political stability. This is not something that can be ignored.

Although I don’t necessarily disagree with the author’s commentary, I don’t think I’d call this an “honest article” on education reform. In fact, it’s a bit more of exactly the opposite–the author intentionally cherry-picks numbers from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to make things look as bad as he possibly can. Let’s look at the actual report and compare to the author’s statements, shall we?

  1. The author is points out that 17-year-old math and reading scores have only risen 1-2 points from 1971 to 2008, calling that “meager progress.” But of course, he’s begging the question, in the original sense of the term. How many points, exactly, would be “significant” progress? How many points are “meager” progress? Well, 1-2 points is “meager,” because the author says so! And, of course, he’s careful to point out that the test are “graded on a 0–500 scale,” so 1-2 ppoints certainly sounds meager. But that’s not the whole story: the average scores of 9- and 17-year-olds in reading are 220 and 286, and in math are 243 and 306. Those are spans of 60-65 points over an eight-year period, or something like 8 points per year. So is 8 points still “meager”?

  2. It turns out the NAEP revised their assessment format for 2008, resulting in a drop of 2-3 points on each test (meaning, had they kept the same assessment procedure, you would expect the 2008 scores to be 2-3 points higher). The author completely neglects to mention this.

  3. Interestingly, the author does mention the effect of race on the scores: “There’s also been a modest [note more question-begging] narrowing in the high-school achievement gaps between whites, blacks, and Hispanics, although the narrowing generally stopped in the late 1980s. (Average scores have remained stable because, although blacks’ and Hispanics’ scores have risen slightly, the size of these minority groups has also expanded. This means that their still-low scores exert a bigger drag on the average. The two effects offset each other.)” That’s intriguing, because of the parenthetical statement. Sure enough, if you split by race, each set of students (white, Black, and Hispanic) sees an increase in their achievement from 1971-2008 that’s greater than the overall average increase. This amounts to about 4 points (ignoring the assessment change) rather than 1-2 for whites, and 15-20 for Blacks and Hispanics. Still meager?

  4. And, of course, the author focuses on 17-year-olds, rather than younger students. To be sure, he has a decent reason for focusing on the 17-year-olds, but it just so happens that the younger students have more significant performance increases, which the author’s focus allows him to ignore.

Again, the author’s points are not necessarily bad, but it annoys me to see anyone, let alone someone who’s supposed to be a journalist, play fast and loose with the data, and carefully excluding anything that doesn’t completely support his point.

Moreover, I presume (but don’t know for sure) that the National Assessment of Educational Progress test are administered only to kids in school, and not 17-year-olds who have dropped out. If, as the author implies, “high schools have become more inclusive” as time progresses (and thus fewer kids drop out), the inclusion of these kids who otherwise would be drop-outs in the assessment would depress the test scores. Thus, no need to appeal to “lack of motivation” triggered by the mere presence of “non-dropouts” to explain flat test scores; having these “non-dropouts” take the test is explanation enough.

Too few numbers; didn’t read. :wink:

You know this is SDMB. Any substantive discussion of important issues requires a shitstorm of stats, followed by counter-stats from another source, then endless quibbling over whether they’re right.

Rhetorical flourishes like “a swelling of young people with no hope for the future is not a good thing for political stability” are for girly-men and impress no one.

I meant to say:

Rhetorical flourishes like “a swelling of young people with no hope for the future is not a good thing for political stability” are for girly-men and impress no one, regardless of truth or falsity.

again, :wink:

Well, any time I hear or read someone saying that the real problem is that people(kids) are lazier/less moral/more disrespectful/etc. than back in the good old days, I tend to ignore anything they say until they get some data to show that people really are different.

Even if you read the article in the most charitable way, trying as hard as you can to not read it as a cranky old man whining about disrespectful kids these days and their horrible music, he’s saying that the problem with schools is that they’re trying to educate too many uneducatable children, who would have sensibly dropped out of high school in decades past.

But – using his data, here – schools today that address nearly every child are achieving about the same average scores as schools decades ago that only had to teach the top 60% of students. That rather seems like evidence that schools are getting better, not worse.

I can’t help but notice that Mr. Samuelson offers no evidence to support his assertion that student motivation is the main problem. That highly motivated students will achieve better results than unmotivated ones borders on tautology, but he offers no evidence that students are less motivated than they were 40 or 50 years ago.

I find it persuasive that the inability of schools to maintain discipline causes problems, but the recent series in the L.A. Times suggests that a large part of the problem is incompetent and unmotivated teachers.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/15/local/la-me-teachers-value-about-20100815

That may well be, but the countries which supposedly are doing better in educating their students just about all govern education on the national level. The U.S. is the only one I know of that doesn’t.

I think the real issue is that the U.S. is also one of the few countries that expects itself to educate all people to the point where they are all more or less prepared for entry to post-secondary academia. Maybe the goal is just too lofty.