It’s not about “trying”. Lots and lots of us “try”, if you mean we want the best for our kids and we work our asses off. But that isn’t enough. We need better systems, better methods. We need to come up with better ways to mitigate the challenges of poverty, of parental non-agency, of unstable populations, of racism and classism and sexism.
Look at your wife’s work. We do SUCH a better job of educating SPED kids now than we did a generation ago–we have better techniques and higher expectations. We now teach kids to read that used to be dismissed as “uneducable”. I don’t see any reason to believe that now of all times we’ve reached the best of all possible worlds right this minute.
I expect every doctor to be capable of saving my life using the most up to date knowledge in the field.
Then why do some schools and teachers get so much better results? We’ve worked for three years to change our methods and, in some cases, people. We’ve had our average SAT scores go up 200 points and our AP passing rate go up to from 55% to 70%. Changing what we did changed how much kids learned.
I don’t like the solutions a lot of reformers propose, because I think they are wrong headed. But education is not something we should ever be complacent about, any more than we should decide that since most doctors are working hard and doing a pretty good job, it’s time to just accept some people are going to die young.
You’re still strawmanning me. I’m not saying anything about resting on laurels or going all Pangloss. Yes, educational researchers have made great strides, and like most fields it is getting more proficient all the time. That should continue. What I don’t believe for a second is that the proficient teachers and administrators are all hanging out in the suburbs, and the ones in poor urban and rural areas are “failing”.
Then you expect too much from doctors as well. There are injuries (from car wrecks, stabbings, or shootings) that the best surgeons at the top trauma centers in the country could save you from, but which will kill you if you’re in 99% of the other other places in the country. That’s just life.
Hell if I know. I have a huge list of things I’d do to fix my problems at my school, and maybe my district, and which I’d do would depend on budget and time frame. I don’t think there is a silver bullet.
Okay. One thing I’d do. I’d make teacher education programs rigorous, competitive, and high status. And I’d only hire teachers that were genuinely interested in the process of teaching and learning–absolute nerds about the minutia of what works and what doesn’t and why.
It’s not that I think that most teachers today suck–I don’t. But at any teacher gathering, there’s a lot of bitching about the kids the kids the kids and how impossible true progress is. I hate that.
I absolutely agree that the divide is not between affluent and poor schools and that there is good and poor teaching both places. But there is a difference between good and poor teaching and we need to find ways to get more of the former and less of the latter–and defensive “but that’s the best anyone could do” is not effective.
And honestly, if you think that the teachers/schools a kid attends has a truly negligible impact on educational achievement–that “good” kids will always do fine and “weak” kids will always do poorly–I think that’s entirely too fatalistic. Good schools and good teachers get better results from any population.
And yes, there are amazing doctors out there, but we don’t tolerate ones that are just entirely incompetent. We don’t get doctors that are entirely incompetent because they very rarely make it to even medical school, let alone practice.
Why would I be hiring fewer teachers? I’m just gonna pay them real well, attract all the people currently going to med school and law school.
More seriously, it depends on the class and the subject and the grade and the school. What is a “larger class size”? More bodies per room at any given time? Or more total students on my roll? (for some reason, that issue is never addressed by educational reformers. But whether or not I have 150 kids to conference with/evaluate/support matters a great deal more than if those 150 kids are sitting in 5 sections or 7).
We may be closer to agreement than we thought. I do think your plan is a good one (although way too expensive as I understand it to get any political traction — more on that in my reply to RNATB below). But I believe that this reform would raise levels at all schools, still leaving poor populations well behind the more affluent ones.
The way I understood her proposal is that she would make university education departments much more rigorous in their admission standards and curriculum, but also significantly raise teacher pay, which should allow the same supply of teachers as long as budgets are increased sufficiently. The new pipeline would take decades to percolate all the way through school systems though, unless you took a much more radical approach that I could not possibly support.
No matter how stupid the student inherently is, we still have to try our hardest to teach them and accept the consequences. People are locked into this mentality that there is always some way, some path to get any student to a high-achieving, valedictorian level. I don’t mind that train of thought, it makes people work hard to teach kids the best way they can. What I do mind is failure is always scapegoated, either to the teacher, the school, or whatever.
Here’s what we need to accept: We should do the best we can to fund school and teachers but there are a percentage of kids that will always fail. Whether a school churns out a 1% failure rate or 50%, as long as we get the school what it needs and the teachers what they need, then its good enough and we just have to accept whatever result we get
I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. I was unaware were were punishing and dissolving under-performing schools, and I agree that in many cases the schools are doing what they can. However, I think you’re getting push back on your “gene pool” hypothesis. There are so many reasons kids in poor neighborhoods might struggle in school unrelated to genes.
I agree with both of these last two posts, I regret that my argument got bogged down into something akin to a “race realist” or Bell Curve argument. My fundamental thesis is that teachers and schools in poor areas are getting unfairly scapegoated for things they can’t control, whether it’s genes or parenting or lead or various other possibilities.
Also, I should have made it more clear that I sympathize with the desire to not take a population of kids and demean them by emphasizing their lack of potential. If school reformers didn’t put such pressure on schools and teachers to raise standardized test scores to these impossible levels, I would be totally on board with a kind fiction of “you can be whatever you want to be” and making it easier for disadvantaged students to matriculate with ostensibly the same curriculum as kids from professional families but with the content quietly made more achievable for them. And I think this is what was largely going on until muckraking reformers upset the apple cart…
Interestingly, I would say the opposite. Schools where the parents tend to have college degrees are going to have better access to a culture of reading, a lower incidence of life disruption, fewer occasions of non-educational distractions, better diet, etc. In fact, I would say that the gene pool would be the last thing (in a purely logical and scientific sense) to bother looking at before the other issues are resolved.
The problem with the “reformers,” (as many conservative as liberal), is that our society is currently wired to base conclusions on test results. Thus, every time someone comes up with a proposed solution to school failures, they wind up having to invent a test (or misapply a test), as if that actually demonstrated the success or failure of the program. I do not have an immediately better solution, but as long as we are going to tie performance to tests, (pretending that tests measure much more than the ability to take tests), we are going to be stuck with all the nonsense that results from demanding good test results.
How do we decide what’s “good enough”? In every other field of human endeavor, we are getting better and better results. Why should we decide that educating poor children is something that we’ve just maxxed out, and provided we aren’t entirely abandoning them, resign ourselves to “good enough”?
There’s a ton of schools in my district that are doing “ok”, and so no one worries about how they could do better. I think that’s appalling.
Giving them a dumbed down curriculum and fooling them into thinking they are learning is also demeaning a population of kids. Yes, it’s foolish to use other schools as your exclusive metric to determine if a school is good or bad. But on what planet is the “fair” option to instead make sure that they never get exposed to the tools and skills they need to make a life for themselves, and quietly make sure they don’t even know that.
This is exactly why my whole life has to be about standardized tests. Because even when my kids are skilled and able, well, they are urban and minority, so no one will believe it without the numbers. Everything they do has an assumed asterisk because of exactly that attitude.
But Manda, I assume that even you would not favor spending every nickel of GDP (save perhaps a small amount to provide very basic food and shelter for the American population) on education. Therefore, you too are making some sort of calculation of “good enough”. It’s not realistic to expect 300 million people to all share the exact same view of what that level is.
As for the other part: I have news for you. Sped is already what you called demeaning. The paradigm now is to mainstream as much as possible and have the sped teachers " push in" to the regular classroom rather than taking the kids out to a special room. They may have what you are calling a “dumbed down” worksheet in front of them that is superficially similar to the ones the other kids have but which is much easier. And I don’t think that’s wrong.
I don’t think those are our only two choices. And making education more effective doesn’t just mean endlessly putting more and more money into it. It does mean being open to the idea that the way we do it now is not always the absolute best way, and that we can find new techniques, new patterns, new approaches. That even if we can’t fix all of the problems, we can fix some, and that tomorrow’s kids can be better educated than those of today.
Are you arguing that poor schools should put all of their kids on the same program that wealthier schools put their most learning-disabled SPED kids on?
In any case, I am not saying put every kid on the most rigorous courses possible. But don’t just decide that Algebra 2 is too much for urban kids, and remove it from the graduation requirements, either. We have to find a way for every child to get enough education that they can support themselves, that they can function in society. Right now, we really don’t know how to do that. But we shouldn’t stop trying.
I’m not advocating a one size fits all approach at any school. Whether it’s a wealthy or poor school, each student should be carefully evaluated and placed anywhere from sped to gifted depending on what they can handle.
There should be some standard for things like number of teacher, teacher experience and education, $ spend per student, materials relevant to courses, a standard number and type of course, etc. That’s how we know we’re good enough.
I think we should always strive to improve, but accept that improvement has a large part to do with the student himself. Right now, people are far too eager to blame someone, usually the teachers, and I think we need to shift that mentality away because its damaging to both students and teachers. Instead, I would replace it with a mentality that as long as we are giving a teacher what he needs and the school what they need, and it satisfies basic standards of funding, then the rest has to be up to the student.
It sounds good to say think about the children, but teachers are people too, and they deserve to be thought of. If a teacher has a bunch of great students but some failures, then you accept that some failures will happen, you shouldn’t punish the teachers for not being able to improve the grades of the worst students.