> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50%
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism".
The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions.
Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.)
But I'm not sure I would consider it a complete success. It looks to me like he stole them then people surrounded him and forced him to give them back a minute later.
At the point when he was confronted, had he already stolen the petitions. The fact that he gave them back doesn't turn that successful theft into a mere 'attempt'. It doesn't matter whether he was confronted a minute later or an hour later.
I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.
> The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes.
I'd like to expand on this one, as it's been a particular frustrating one. It launched San Francisco's school system into the national spotlight as our Board of Education debated this publicly and initially planned to spend millions of dollars before the outrage and backlash canceled these plans.
Amongst other issues, they did short, haphazard research on the origins of the names of the schools, instead typing common Hispanic surnames into Google/Wikipedia, finding the first result, and deciding that the word colonizer being mentioned in the Wikipedia article was sufficient to rename the school. They problem? Wrong person, they didn't bother to look so far as the school's website to determine who it was named after. Here's a video of the full deliberation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1jj33NBAH8
Kids don't need to be vaccinated. Adults who are concerned about it, including teachers, should be. Keeping schools closed because children aren't vaccinated is irrational.
A large unvaccinated reservoir population in constant contact with the vaccinated population is how you breed variants that are, e.g., more dangerous to young people (like Delta already is) and more likely to break through existing vaccines (which Delta also is, though not intensely so from the information I've seen.)
What the heck are you talking about? Brazil variant for example is pretty brutal on kids, death is not so uncommon result. School is one of the worst places for spreading, since tons of kids lack will/discipline to behave consistently, and are cramped in various classes. Once 1 member of household is sick, the chance rest will get it is pretty high.
Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used only when really unavoidable, but to claim kids are a-OK and shouldn't be vaccinated ain't based on science I've read so far.
> Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms.
> Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction.
> Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
> A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate.
SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.
Something that is often overlooked in these conversations is the elementary schools should perhaps be considered completely differently from high schools. There were zero transmissions between students at my kids elementary school this whole year, despite the school opening as quickly as possible and despite several kids with asymptomatic COVID showing up at school and only being detected belatedly. I don’t think the same outcome would necessarily be expected at a high school.
This is relevant because younger kids need more supervision and are less likely to spread COVID, while older kids need less supervision and are more likely to spread; therefor keeping older kids home and sending younger ones in might be totally rational. But it doesn’t seem like this gets brought up.
The San Francisco Board of Education have made many displays of incompetence and malice this past year which have been covered by both local and national media.
During the pandemic, the Board of Education announced that 44 schools were named after oppressors (many were justified, but the names committee also made numerous errors) and that principals and families needed to come up with new names for their schools over Zoom. Board member Gabriela Lopez defended even the egregious mistakes, demonstrating that she only cares about “uplifting” and “holding” people of color but not facts https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Unfortunately, Lopez is not up for recall yet, but her enablers are.
Alison Collins led the resolution to remove academic admissions to San Francisco’s magnet high school Lowell High. But instead of debating the pros and cons of having a magnet school, she caricatured the school as bed of “toxic racism” and dismissed the Asian parents who supported an admissions criteria as “a bunch of racists”. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?l... Afterwards, people discovered her previous tweets stereotyping Asians and her pattern of abusing her power (https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352). When her colleagues selected a different Vice President, she lashed out with a lawsuit calling her opponents racists (https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-...)
The other board members haven't done anything offensive but haven't shown any leadership either. They just enabled the radicals. We don't know exactly why SFUSD didn't open the schools this year (negotiations were behind closed doors), but I suspect it has to do with the board members' extreme deference to the teachers' union that endorsed them.
I encourage anyone who is a San Francisco citizen to print out the recall petitions and mail them in https://recallsfschoolboard.org/
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted my child to go back to school ASAP, but then I reminded by a teacher friend that their health was important, too.
I believe no one should be forced to work if the health conditions are unsafe, why should teachers exempt form this? There are too many examples of teachers who did die from COVID-19.
I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we assume that high grades, extracurricular activities or essay tutoring are not correlated with family wealth.
If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
This kind of narrow thinking is what has caused schools in SF to suck for everyone. Because Lowell doesn't exist in a vacuum and the arguments that privileged people have a leg up doesn't really make a difference - it is similar logic to burning libraries because some folks can't read.
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
As a graduate of the high school in question, I support the idea of selectivity everywhere, not just as a "magnet school" or "honors track".
There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.
But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.
>So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Vast swaths of the country get by without having any choices in high schools. The idea that need a selection of different schools with different levels of prestige and focuses is such an urban entitlement.
Not having better options doesn’t mean they don’t exist. For some parents, their children are their greatest investment, and they won’t accept a lesser educational environment even if superior options aren’t available in some geographies.
If I need heart surgery, I’d rather be in NYC (Mount Sinai specifically) then BFE fly over country, and if I have the means I’m on the next flight. Same with education. Hard to find fault imho with those who want more than the lowest common denominator for their children.
Good for those parents, but I don't think it's the job of society to optimize for the preferences of a small set of very involved parents. If anything we should optimize against them: bringing the gaps in school choice low enough that most parents won't prefer one over another anyway.
I also think there's a value to be had in having the over-acheivers and under-acheivers together in the same social setting of school, if not in the same classes.
The school still exists, it's just that it's being forced to change how students are selected for entry. The same debate is happening in NYC with Stuyvesant. No one is talking about getting rid of the high-prestige schools. Only who is in them.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.
Many European countries have public high schools with admission tests that cover math, general knowledge and language. Some are more competitive than others.
In some countries, the differentiation starts even much earlier than that, with 8 year long "gymnasiums".
In Germany, when you finish primary school, your teachers give an advice on which school you can attend: Gymnasium, Realschule or Hamptschule, depending on how good they think you are.
First of all you don’t have to attend the school your teachers advised, you can still attend a Gymnasium if your teachers said you should go to a Hamptschule. So it’s significantly different from the selection criteria of that American high school.
Then this selection process is known to be biased against children of foreigners. Somebody said that without strict competition in high school admissions we wouldn’t have playstations and covid vaccines, so it’s useful to know that the founder and CEO of BioNTech (who is a Turk-German) was advised to go to a Hamptschule by his primary school teachers. So he wouldn’t have been able to attend university.
Said that, having a brother that works as a teacher in a Gymnasium, I insist that these kids are not learning anything esoteric or peculiarly complicated. If the average kid in an upper middle class neighbourhood returns an assignment with less than one typo per row, he would be remembered for years.
> In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly).
They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else.
Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care; the problems of the article are virtually nonexistent at Lowell. I don’t think Lowell was particularly selective (I think something like 50% of applicants get in) and there were plenty of poor students (including myself) who benefited from an academic public school that does have both wealthy and non-wealthy students who care about learning (as opposed to private and suburban schools which definitely do discriminate on the basis of wealth/income).
> either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination
The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
> Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care
What do we do about these 10 year olds? We assume they are not "high school" material and we put them in the school for dumb kids? Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them and so the school system can't do anything about it?
> The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism. We are talking about a high-school, which enrols 12 year olds to teach them basic trigonometry and some basic notions of history and literature (in the best case scenario) and not about Hydra hiring PhD candidates to build a death ray. When properly motivated, everybody with a 80+ IQ can succeed in high school, one may argue that you could pick them at random.
> Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them
Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork.
> The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism
No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
It’s an example for teens, not 10-year olds. If you can’t imagine an age-appropriate example for 10-year olds, allow me to suggest an alcoholic, drug addict, homeless, or abusive parent that gets in the way of a 10 year old studying and getting to school on time.
> Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork.
Ok, but you haven't answered my question
> No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
Children not being able to write a good essay when they are 10 because they have to work, is quite a degenerate case and I hope it is not the norm for those who are not admitted at this special school. The majority of 10-year-old kids, who aren't employed in violation of child labour laws, are smart enough to attend highschool without the need to make schoolwork easier.
> In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
This wokeness movement is not something I'm familiar with or affiliated to.
Your question was “Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them”.
I did indirectly. To be more explicit, I suspect the common answer is no: They do not care about school because they have other, more pressing needs besides school.
> when they are 10 because they have to work
If you want to focus solely on 10 year olds and not teenagers, and ignore that I wrote working is “just one example of many possibilities” , then you are probably purposely missing my point.
I agree most 10 year olds are not working. Substitute “working” or “poverty” with some other problem at home and you’ll get the same result. Alcoholic parent, drug addicted parent, parent with major mental illness, homeless parent, absent parents, foster home life, etc.
> Your question was “Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them”.
> My indirect answer is not necessarily, although there may be some for whom the answer is yes. I suspect the more common answer is no: They do not care about school because they have other, more pressing needs besides school.
So, the answer is: no, these kids are not broken.
> If you want to focus solely on 10 year olds and not teenagers, and ignore that I wrote working is “just one example of many possibilities” , then you are probably purposely missing my point.
You said kids can't write essay because they have to work. It sounds rather absurd to me.
> I agree most 10 year olds are not working. Substitute “working” or “poverty” with some other problem at home and you’ll get the same result. Alcoholic parent, drug addicted parent, parent with major mental illness, homeless parent, absent parents, foster home life, etc.
Fine, so we are excluding them because they are poor or disadvantaged, which was my initial point. And we are calling it "merit" because we ask them to write an essay.
It sounds like you’re arguing about who deserves the prestige of going to Lowell rather than who actually benefits and contributes to the experience of attending classes at Lowell, which is the most populous school in San Francisco and has fairly large class sizes and tough grading.
Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
> It sounds like you’re arguing about who deserves the prestige of going to Lowell rather than who actually benefits and contributes to the experience of attending classes at Lowell, which is the most populous school in San Francisco and has fairly large class sizes and tough grading.
As we agreed that social economic background is a major predictor of admission, claiming that poor kids can’t benefit nor contribute to the experience of attending this school is a weirdly classist statement. It is also based on the assumption that to be able to read 3 novels in a year and to learn the cosine law, one must be a particularly gifted kid and not just a random 10, 13 or 16 year old.
Highschool prestige is a concept that I understand but I that I don't accept. Like I understand why some primitive tribes practiced human sacrifices, but I wouldn’t let them do such thing near me. So I’m not arguing for that. But if we accept that highschool prestige increases your chances in life, then state schools should distribute this privilege equally.
> Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
I insist that we should reason on why some minorities are significantly underrepresented. We may conclude that only gifted kids can attend this very important school and that kids from minorities are less likely to be gifted, but I wouldn’t be too sure of either.
If we find out that, say, blacks are significantly underrepresented because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds, then the admission process is at least classist, knowingly or otherwise. We may also argue that it perpetuates class and racial differences.
Claiming that these kids have inherently different needs is like saying that my child should become an engineer because I’m well off, so he needs to learn advanced maths and whatever, and these children should serve food and clean toilets because they are poor, and they only need to learn who’s the boss. This is, like it or not, very very classist.
> If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true
Is this what the evidence suggests or what you wish to be true?
I would love to see this evidence if you could link it, particularly regarding people of sub saharan african origin. I've been trying to kick my racism ever since I learnt about the measured IQ (and other intelectual achievement) average differences.
If we do not take advantage of the more capable students because of equity, what will the future be without people who can do the sorts of things that require highly capable individuals?
No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can.
The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up enthusiastically working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
> We estimate several models with an extensive list of control variables and high school fixed effects. Results consistently show that high school GPA is a positive and statistically significant predictor of educational attainment and earnings in adulthood. Moreover, the coefficient estimates are large and economically important for each gender.
GPA should be a result of mastering the material. Assuming that is roughly the case, if you ever go on to use any of the skills you were supposed to learn in school (math, computing, etc) you are asking if having learned those skills would help you perform those skills?
I doubt there will ever be a way to satisfactorily control for other variables when it comes to these sorts of real-life studies (there is a reason the majority of social science isn't reproducible[1])
>GPA should be a result of mastering the material.
I know that personally my grades don't tend to correlate with my actual knowledge at all. I've failed things because I've been bored with them, and I've gotten perfect grades on things I don't understand at all outside the tested material.
I would lean more towards this is one of those truths that can be taken as self-evident. But, at the same time I would be skeptical that any published evidence would account for the infinitude of confounding factors.
My guess is it is similar to IQ results - does a good job weeding out people who know nothing, but does worse differentiating between students who are satisfactory and those who are exceptional
Who cares? You're dealing with millions of school kids every year, and need aggregatable data to make important policy decisions about how education is done. As long as it correlates well, it's easy to collect, and can be trusted not to be manipulated for bad incentives like this article implies is happening, we use it.
> If we do not take advantage of the more capable students because of equity, what will the future of the country be without people who can do the sorts of things that require highly capable individuals?
> No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Do we have any data on the correlation between high-school admission criteria and inventing the Covid vaccine or whatever?
We are not talking about taking advantage of excellence, which starts to become visible after highschool. We are talking about 10-year-olds who go to school to be taught the fundamental theorem of arithmetics.
> Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can.
> The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
I don't know what the communists and the nazists have to do with changing the admission criteria of a high school. I suppose it's a way of expressing disagreement in American English?
Coming from a family of turkish Gastarbeiters, I am not surprised. You still have that problem in Germany, and I think it only got worse during the pandemic.
Edit: The Biontech founder comes from a turkish family, I don't. But I see that happening a lot, first during my school days. And now at my children's schools.
Maybe it didn’t get worse, but it still demonstrate what’s the result and maybe the objective of these strict selection criteria: that discriminated minorities end up being excluded. Let it be children with foreign origin in Germany (which doesn’t stop after a generation) or whatever minority is being excluded from this very important American school.
And given that people leave high school barely capable of reading newspaper articles (otherwise Breitbart or the Daily Mail would even be a thing), I don’t see what this selection is for.
The CEO of BioNTech was told to attend a lower level school, which wouldn’t have allowed him to go to university. He claims that if it weren’t for a German neighbour he would not have gone to a gymnasium.
This is a form of discrimination.
First, high school starts with 14 year olds, not 10.
Second, people don't suddenly learn how to write a competent essay at the last minute. Writing a good one is a combination of many skills learned over many years.
BTW, I did not take any college prep courses prior to Caltech, and found myself way behind the other freshman who did. I found out many years later that the admissions committee had taken a chance on me, and they were very nearly wrong. I came that close to flunking out.
If public schools dump their gifted tracks, inequality will only increase as the top schools will wind up drawing only from private schools.
Admission essays are a literary genre of their own, like the weird language used by some state bureaucracies. Knowing how to write these essays is a splinter skill.
Anyway, so you should not have been admitted but you succeeded anyway without being a gifted kid? It seems like you have proved my point.
Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester.
This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no
> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam
> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
> . The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from.
It’s easy to recover from if you don’t use a stupid method if aggregation, but that takes actually thinking about what it is you are trying to measure; for instance, if you grade by % in each of several competency areas throughout the year, and have a final grade catehory standards (cumulative, so you get the highest grade where you’ve met all the standards):
D: median of competency area medians meets minimum proficiency standard
C: median score within every competency area meets minimum passing standard
B: median of competency area medians meets high proficiency standard or median in at least one competency area meets excellence standard
A: median of competency area medians exceeds excellence standard
(standards might be something like passing 70%, high proficiency 80%, excellence 90%, but the exact numbers aren’t the point.)
That will give you a measure of overall competence that isn't particularly sensitive to outlier scores on a single assignment, even if the assignment has components across many competency areas.
I support this. My kids have had a single zero on occasion for a missed assignment and it demolished their grade. No way to recover. This is not a good measurement of whether you grasp the concepts. It’s a good measurement of whether you made no mistakes in the process.
If 50% is a passing grade, and a student neither mastered the topic at the beginning or the end, they would still pass. A better solution is to weight the assignments and exams at the end much higher, to give a students a chance to prove their knowledge, while still failing those who learned nothing.
You weigh the grading such that you could still pass the course by doing well in the end assessments. Something like hand out 30% of the grade during the course and the rest at the end.
Grades traditionally measure mastery of material on an externally imposed timeline under some amount of externally imposed pressure. I support moving to simply measuring master of material in most cases, but it's important to recognize that you lose some signal from those other areas. In real life, sometimes it's better to maximize for mastery regardless of timeline (within reason) while other times it's better to maximize for the best job you can do within a certain fixed amount of time.
> a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning
The same lesson is not being given over and over again.
There are X tests/assignments/projects for X areas covered.
Each is assessed in its turn.
Of course, there is usually some overall assessment on the content as a whole, at the end of a quarter/semester/year. I think that aligns perfectly with your desire.
Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges.
If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout.
I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor. For example those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities. Or those who had an article published in the news…etc.
All this does is make grades no longer a measure used. And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.
California’s strive to force outcome hurts the middle class the most. I just don’t get it.
> You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor
It's harder to normalize performance across schools without a standardized test.
> those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities
That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems.
> And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.
The upper middle class is where it's actually interesting. There aren't enough wealthy people for the SAT to be a driver of mass inequality. They're already sending their kids to elite private schools, so as long as the Ivies keep favoring those schools, the status quo remains. The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests. Those aren't that expensive. Anyone working class or higher can afford them. SAT classes help somewhat, but less than being somewhat familiar with the test. They're moderately expensive. Tutors are where it's interesting, and that's in upper middle class territory.
> The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests.
Oh phooey. I never prepared for the SATs, and nobody I knew did, either. (Back in the 70s.)
Wanna know how to do well on the SATs? Pay attention in school to readin, ritin, and rithmetic.
As for SAT prep books, I see them all the time in the thrift store for a couple bucks. The notion that only the wealthy have access to them is nonsense.
A lot has changed since then, college acceptance rates are plummeting and competition is absolutely cutthroat. I graduated ~10 years ago in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood and basically everyone took at least one SAT class, multiple practice test and many had coaches to help them with the entire admissions process.
Caltech's freshman class size is also about 50% larger than in my day. These days I also hear that people shotgun out applications (much easier to do with a computer rather than a typewriter!) which increases the rejection rate even with the exact same number of students.
I have no idea if the relative quality of today's Caltech freshman body is better or the same as in my day.
I flipped through an SAT vocabulary builder book the other day. I knew nearly all the words in it already. Vocabulary is something that happens organically, by reading a lot and looking into complex things. I suspect that memorizing word lists builds a fake vocabulary. Some people have told me they recognize when someone sprinkles their language with the daily word they memorized. It comes off as pretension, not education.
I suspect that if SAT training involves learning fake knowledge and test taking tricks, anyone who gets into Caltech via that method is going to find they're in the wrong place. Students there like to sit in the halls and talk about ways to build a warp drive. Students who don't belong will be watching the game on TV.
One of my good friends there had an apartment off campus. He'd regularly make his special chicken wings and invite all comers (this was not to be missed). The apartment manager would come, too, and he'd just quietly sit off in a corner by himself, munching on chicken wings.
I asked him once why he was there - he didn't participate, and he was way way older. He replied, "oh, this is incredibly fun. I've never ever heard people talk like this before. I just like to listen."
I’m 18 now and took the SAT two years ago - I scored well without the need to practice too much, but official practice is available completely for free on Khan Academy. You really don’t need to pay anything to improve on the SAT these days, and anyone arguing elsewise is misguided as to how the test actually works.
And also - I agree - I never really learned “grammar rules” or the details of writing. I just learned from listening, talking, and reading many many books in elementary and middle school. To prepare for a test by memorizing vocab seems inherently the wrong approach.
Yup. I was taught to diagram sentences in school, but it seemed a useless skill, and I no longer recall any of it. I know if a sentence is grammatically correct or not just by reading it. There's no conscious thought process to it at all.
I read a great deal as a kid, too. Mostly scifi :-)
I made the mistake of attempting to learn German by memorizing. But who can remember which nouns go with der, die, or das? Not me. I bet the right way is to simply read the newspaper every day, looking up the words one doesn't know, one by one.
> You really don’t need to pay anything to improve on the SAT these days
I heard something on This American Life, I think, about a "strong student" from a bad high school doing poorly on the SAT. I got the impression she hadn't prepared at all...which seems odd for a strong student when there are free resources.
> memorizing vocab
The College Board got called out for some of this after the "regatta" incident. It turns out rich kids were much more likely to know the term for a boat race. Oops.
I'm really curious to see the outcomes of the no-SAT cohort of college students, once the 2020-2021 year is ignored, data cleaned, etc. Even if GPA was enough in 2020, it seems like it would get harder and harder to compare schools over time without a standardized test.
College Board worked with Khan Academy to put a free SAT prep course (with practice questions that it uses to figure out what you need to work on) together. Even if you don’t have internet at home, you could definitely get enough prep with an hour at a library or your lunch period a day. I boosted my score 100 points and only did 15-20 hours prior.
I think 15-20 hours of prep is reasonable, especially when it can be over months. I bet it would have taken more like 200 hours for another 100 points (which I why I don't think the test is as easily gamed as test detractors say).
The typical student aspiring to get into an elite college is aiming to get over 750 in reading and math. In my year getting one question wrong on math would reduce your score to 770.
Things are a bit less competitive on the subject tests. A couple questions wrong was still sufficient to get an 800 on Math level II my year.
In my view, we would do better with our educational resources and reform efforts to completely ignore the elite colleges and let them take care of themselves. I would much rather figure out how to support and strengthen the education system from the bottom up, starting with the community colleges, trade schools, and regional public universities.
Times have changed a lot. Your advice might have applied as late as the mid 1990’s, but not much past the turn of the century.
In hindsight, boomers had a really easy time of it, even some we rightly revere for their contributions. Work hard, or be brilliant, or some combination of the two. That’s not enough today. Ken Thompson told the story somewhere of being literally chased down the east coast after graduation by Bell Labs recruiters. That would never happen now.
> That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems.
Math competitions are nothing like the SAT. Not at all. You can grind your way to an 800 on the math SAT with a basic prep and an understanding of tenth-grade math; getting a perfect score on a math competition is something only a handful of people do each year. The hardest questions tend to be of the type "ok I am not even sure how to start this one" rather than "this one has a bunch of arithmetic and I'm not sure I have time to complete it".
Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders.
In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
> In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time
In my experience in elementary school, 3rd grade material is repeated ad nauseum in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Plenty of time to get it. (Being an Air Force brat, I attended 3 different elementary schools, even one in Germany run by the military. All the same.)
A great deal of research has gone into just this concept, often called "mastery-based learning." Sal Khan is one well-known proponent (look for the requisite TED talk).
You could just study using your textbook and workbook. A lot of material relies on what you previously studied in some way. You should be able to learn the things that you missed with your experience and textbook.
Nowadays you also have the internet that can fill those gaps. If a student wants to learn, then there are many opportunities. But students usually don't want to.
That doesn’t get to the student incentive though. If you feel like you’re already going to fail, you may as well give up until next time. But if you’d progress continually, giving up makes less sense.
How does a teacher instruct a class where every single student is learning something different at a given time, based on their progress up to that point?
I went to a tiny mixed age school and basically each kid worked on workbooks at their own pace.
The older kids helped out the younger ones and the teacher walked around the class and talked to each kid to help them along with thier work if they got stuck.
There wasn’t any lecture style teaching with the teacher explaining concepts to the whole class at once.
We all worked on one subject at a time, but we were all at different points in it.
When my family moved and I left that school I was multiple years ahead of where I was supposed to be in several subjects and normal school was very boring after that.
This is a good point, but it highlights the fact that classroom education is a compromise -- economic and social -- and not a moral standard. Thus I think we should at least be conscious of its limitations, even if we can't immediately do anything about them.
Sorry, I tried to be clear that that scenario is an unrealistic ideal. Ideal in the sense of a spherical frictionless student in a vacuum with infinite funding as well as ideal in the sense of good. In that case one solution would be more teachers than students.
Unless/until we figure out a feasible way to make progress not the same pace for everyone, progress will have to be the same pace for everyone.
Colleges have a decent middle ground where if you fail this quarter, there are decent odds your class will be offered again before next year, especially for the earlier classes that really need stricter sequencing. But that’s only really feasible when you have that many students (not to mention tuition $$$).
I guess in Montessori every single student isn't learning something different, but each one is often in a unique state of learning and development. The guide gives lessons in small groups, less than 6. Each kid gets a new lesson every few days and spends the remainder of their time "doing their work" (practicing their lessons and turning the results into the guide, doing small group research projects, etc.). The kid is encouraged to ask others for help understanding the lesson and to mentor others who are working on a lesson the kid knows. Once the guide observes the kid succeeding at the lesson, the kid is invited to the next lesson.
But the folks making decisions about education in California (including the authors of the California Math Framework 2021) believe they'll achieve better outcomes that way, than they will by grouping students based on their progress in the subject.
I heard recently from a 6th grade math teacher who has students who are 1, 2, 3 and even 4 grades behind.
Imagine orchestrating a single class in which you're teaching some children about adding single-digit numbers, and others about long division.
> I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.
We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'.
HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported.
My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed.
Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc..
The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book!
Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.
Seems like the simplest solution is to specify that the lowest _n_ assignment or quiz grades will be dropped from the overall grade calculation. I recall taking a few classes in high school and college with such a policy.
+1 I saw this a lot with friends who were less interested in school and would quickly bail on a class once they missed a test or assignment and I couldn't really blame them.
For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
Caltech did it right. Professors were not allowed to grade based on attendance. If you could pass the final, you passed the class. If you could pass the final without even taking the class, you would get credit (although very, very few managed that feat!).
I recall one student who flunked thermo. He filed a complaint that the Prof had it in for him, hence the F. The Prof provided evidence that he never did any of the homework, and flunked the midterm and final. Case dismissed. The student dropped out.
Totally. My freshmen year of high school, I was in the gifted math class for Algebra II. I had actually taken Algebra II the year before in middle school but switched districts (ironically to try to have a more rigorous academic environment), using the same text book, and I received over a 100% in the class. In my high school class, homework was like 20% of the grade. Now, I was fourteen and going through a weird phase and sort of like, didn’t want to do my math homework. It was a waste of my time. It was pointless. I already knew the material. I was bored. The teacher knew this. She knew I knew the material and would frequently ask me to tutor other students. But I still had to do my homework, as pointless and devoid of meaning as it was. Because I was obstinate and going through a number of challenges with various medications for my ADHD and anxiety/depression, I pushed back. Because I couldn’t see why it mattered, especially when it was abundantly clear I had already mastered the material (and this was the gifted class — the honors or regular ed class would have had me doing Algebra I, which I took in sixth or seventh grade) and that homework was strictly performative.
So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C.
This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself?
So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time.
In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago.
The ultimate kicker was that the following year after the Algebra II disaster, the state changed the grade scale so the grade I received would have been a B. But the old grades were not retroactively recalculated.
There is a good argument to be made that minimum grades are a joke and an affront to teaching, but I would argue that grades in general are bullshit and frequently are not indicative of whether a person has mastered anything. There is a reason many of the best private (not to mention Montessori schools) don’t emphasize grades or tests. Equally, there is a reason that the Montessori and related methods doesn’t scale in the way that US public school systems need to scale.
If I could have skipped high school, and went straight to a community college, my life might have been different?
I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.
I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.
I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.
All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.
If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
>I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
But maybe the reason you could do that is because you had already studied this before. When I look back on school work, they look trivial. Even things that I've forgotten look trivial.
Subjects like mathematics (in high school and earlier) are about experience. Sure, explaining hope to calculate the area of a triangle is very easy, but if your only experience with it is having it explained to you and using it once, then you'll probably forget how to do it or the relation it has to the area of a rectangle. We do the trivial stuff so much in school that you get an instinctual feeling for it. I never felt as comfortable with any of the math I learned in college than I did with earlier topics. I suspect it's because I never got to build up that feel for it.
The problem is that parents make a stink when their special little snowflake is given a bad grade, or sent to the principal, or whatever. But parents don't make a stink when their kid doesn't learn, because the teacher is too busy dancing around the kids that s/he can't do anything about because their parents would make a stink.
One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
In SF, the parents are absolutely not the cause here. The issue is a top-down mandate from the school board focus on equity to the detriment of all other objectives.
This looks like a classic "what gets measured gets managed".
If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation.
For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school).
They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles, we can call it a success. If they can say what time is it in a foreign language, they will end up in the school hall of fame.
As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming.
Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up.
Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.
> can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles
It does depend on what we mean by read and write. I don't mean just recognizing letters and being able to reproduce them. An adult should be able to read and understand an article from a decent newspaper (say the Financial Times), and write a 5 line summary. Definitely not all 12 year olds can to do that and, I'd argue, a large fraction of adults can't either.
Most people never retain much of anything past that anyway, in my experience. I’d guesstimate that fewer than 20% of undergraduate school graduates are actually well educated in any meaningful sense of the term.
It raises the question, what are we getting for our money (in the US)?
> In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries...
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
Part of this is in having schools bearing the brunt of other failures in society or by having schools be the ones trying to solve those issues.
Schools are often the safety net for youths with a wide range of problems. While schools are the catch all for such problems, they're more expensive than fixing other issues like fair wages for the parents of the students (e.g. having hischoolers needing to get a job to support the family rather than study for school).
This high price tag is the result of shifting around other issues to the place where they're inefficiently handled.
---
The flip side of this is the "schools are often funded by property taxes and areas that are able to collect more taxes are able to spend significantly more per student even if it doesn't result in a better outcome." Many of these areas already have good student outcomes and the money is spent on on... whatever.
I guess it depends what you classify as being able to read, write and use basic math operations because in my opinion a large majority of 13 year olds can't do these things well.
Most adults don't seem to be able to do these things well though, so I obviously have a skewed perspective.
I don't get it either. People have learning and thinking differences, we know that and have known it for years. Accommodating those differences is important. Living out a real-life version of Harrison Bergeron is not the only way to do it.
Yeah but a real life version of Harrison Bergeron may be the cheapest lowest effort easiest to bureaucratize way to do it.
Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
The problem is that "learning style" is not a thing. There are good students and bad students, and there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still. So it's not like if you change "teaching styles" you will be able to get the slower student the same information as the faster student. The only way to do that is to do a disservice to the faster student.
What you can do, is create tracks so that everyone is challenged but not put in a hopeless in a situation, and the disruptive students you need to either expel so their parents handle them or put them into some kind of separate environment where they don't prevent others from learning.
That's going to result in large inequalities in outcomes because there are large inequalities in how fast students mature and what their learning capabilities are. Neither of these things -- student intelligence or student maturity -- is something that the teachers can influence.
If you define "teaching style" to mean things like being in the classroom, but that's not the usual definition. The usual definition is explaining things in different ways.
The students around them (who can sit still) would benefit from not being in the same classroom as students who are disruptive, obviously. The disruptive students might benefit from something like shorter classes and time spent outside doing sports or other physical activities that don't require sitting. But let's not pretend that they will learn the same material. They will learn less material, at least until they mature enough so that they have more self-control and are able to sit still, which might not happen before they leave high school, or it may only happen in their senior year, etc. Thus you put them into a different high school entirely or at least a different diploma track.
> By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades.
So the issue is that whenever anyone has come up with intervention based on "teaching styles", it has always failed. That is what I mean by "it's not a thing". Here's the APA, in the article "Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental".
But if we extend the notion of learning styles to "some kids lack self-control" or "some kids have trouble keeping attention", then I think that's pretty obvious and is another symptom of some kids go through puberty at different times and to different levels of intensity, some people have different levels of self-control or time preference than others. That's just life. Then, the recommendation that kids who disrupt classrooms should be removed from the same classroom as kids who don't makes a lot of sense. Kids who can't sit still should be removed from the class in which they have to sit still, and maybe they can do some outdoor activity. Kids who struggle with a subject should be removed and put into a class where the subject is taught more slowly, etc. That allows kids to reach their potential rather than teaching just to the lowest common denominator. A world in which institutions are geared towards excellence rewards the society as a whole -- perhaps the student who struggles with math can do well in a vocational program and do really well in life. While allowing the kid who can do math really learn as much as they can, so we can have a society in which you can get your home renovated by a general contractor and you can have world class chip fabs, whereas right now, for both we need to import foreign labor since our domestic schools produce neither good vocational skills nor good math skills.
It's not mandating everyone be equal. It's allocating resources to those that need them most. Which is how I think we all do our jobs. You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine.
Or do you invest the most resources on the products, customers, and markets giving you the greatest return?
Investing in the most talented can give society outsize returns in terms of innovation, skilled and talented public servants, captivating art, and scientific discoveries.
Even for people who do have this goal ("helping those who need it most") in mind, this reasoning doesn't make any sense.
There's only so much resources you can invest into a single person. Their time is limited, so if their leaning rate is slow, there's really nothing else that can be done beyond some point to speed it up. Forrest Gump will never be Stephen Hawking.
The reality is that this equity movement is motivated specifically by pushing down high-performers. They're removing (or wasting) resources just so that they don't get to the top 10-30%.
Well, people are funding schools through taxes. Then they send their kid to school. Then the school decides their kid is too stupid* to do much, so they get relegated to dumb class and their future career prospects get nullified.
This is how it works in many countries where schools are segregated by learning ability.
I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system.
*or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
So rather than putting students that learn slowly into classes that move slowly, you keep them in normal classes where they drag along lost behind everyone else, and possibly drag the rest of the class down with them. I don't see how that is better for anyone involved, unless you think the credential is all that matters.
Because in practice concentrating the problem kids into one class tends not to help them. They get warehoused and fall further behind before being dumped onto society at 18.
So instead, let's put them with the high-achievers and force those high-achievers to do the teacher's job of tutoring them at the expense of their own educational opportunity.
I can see why schools likes it. But it's terrible policy and hurts the higher-achieving students, who will be the backbone of our increasingly winner-take-all knowledge- and services-based economy.
Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job. The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have. You want us to choose the high achievers so that these early winners can turn that lead into even greater success later. Unstated in your post is what happens to those low achieving students. But it's pretty easy to assume that they're going to be the losers in the winner take all economy.
The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
> The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
That's precisely why low achieving students are separated out. To give them extra help.
High achieving students are easy. Just point them and they go. This is why the second they started standardized testing and separating the students they were able to achieve results with high achievers. But their primary goal with these top-down programs was to actually help the slower students, that were graduating without being literature and whatever. Turns out it's just a really hard problem. It isn't that everyone in education somehow lacks the desire or common sense.
> The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have
> The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
Why do you think society is becoming more "winner take all"? Even if there's truth to society trending in that direction, I'm skeptical it can be solved in the education system if the causes don't lie in the education system. It's easy for me to imagine a world where schools eliminate their advanced programs, then the same students go on to become low-wage workers and the same (or fewer) go on to become scientists.
Surely this can be solved by streaming? Here in the UK we had bottom sets for the kids that were struggling, and top sets for kids who excelled. This meant that the learning pace could be tailored for each group.
Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools available to top set comprehensive school kids.
It is wrong that children get educations that don't really make the most of their brains because they have parents that couldn't afford it.
Also, I think the sociological benefits of having pupils from all backgrounds occupying the same space and learning from each other as opposed to being segregated is extremely important.
So many of the rich people in charge of the country have absolutely no understanding of poverty because they have not had the opportunity to grow up around it.
I chuckled at "pupils from all backgrounds benefitting from each other". I grew up in a dirt poor family. Some of my classmates in high school were criminal material and many did end up in prison (for murder, not weed) before their 25th birthday. Some classmates were quiet folks with ADHD, some were punctual learners who really valued good marks. All sorts of backgrounds. The only "cross background" learning was bulling lessons that the future criminals were giving to the quiet folks. Teachers were useless and powerless to straighten up the bad apples. Luckily, I correctly guessed what I need to learn on my own to get "segregated away" from that madness, so my college years were decent. My takeaway from that experience was that the cross-background learning happens only when the backgrounds differ only slightly and have something in common.
I grew up poor and have ADHD, so went to state comp. I will say that there were definitely unpleasant sides to it, but I feel like my compadriates and I have a much more rounded and grounded view of society and class than the friends I know that went to private schools. You simply can't expect someone who's never felt poverty, whether it's their own or the people they see day in day out, to be able to be able to truly understand it.
I can see how it would probably be a more difficult experience for introverts.
Funnily enough, I got bullied more by the rich kids - who knew how to push my buttons and wind me up to the point I'd lash out and get in trouble - than the poor ones.
Yes, that statement is the one that appears racist, because it is.
Try "it's almost as if being societally excluded for centuries is a predictor of social instability," which is both more accurate and descriptive of the problem we're trying to solve here.
> It seems like it’s impossible to tax the group of people who would have sent their kids to private school had it been possible.
Fortunately it is possible to do something very similar, though, which is to tax the group of people who have the level of income that would allow them to send their kids to private school had it been possible.
I suppose you're saying that some people currently are wealthy enough to send their kids to private school, but choose not to (or don't have kids at all). These people wouldn't have a choice about paying the extra taxes that enable these better-funded comprehensive schools. This isn't a new problem, though, as childless people already pay taxes that are spent on existing comprehensive schools.
As for "decisions outside the comprehensive school system", I think that needs to be considered in the context of the government's existing regulation of private schools and the trend of academisation:
> Fortunately it is possible to do something very similar, though, which is to tax the group of people who have the level of income that would allow them to send their kids to private school had it been possible.
Except it isn’t similar.
Saying ‘taxing the rich more and put more money into public schools’ may be a good proposal but it is a completely different proposition from ‘take the resources from private schools and give them to public schools’.
The advantage of a private school is not the extra gym equipment or computer or any other resources, it is the social class that matter. If you don't pay for private school you will pay for location. There is no actual mixing, people just pay more to be around people similar to themselves and the cost of that will manifest in house prices instead of school prices.
If you slow down the pace to help the "zero percenters" and only cover 80% of the material in the allotted time, the students who could have handled 100% of the material will be limited to 80%. And that slowdown still won't be enough to help the slowest learners much, so they'll still only learn, say, 20% of the material.
> Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.
Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
I think the 50% rule is okay. I get that it's annoying for the students who tried and got a 55%. But I suspect that the kids who would get score much less than a 50 are probably the least engaged and most disruptive.
If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.
The 50% rule is just changing the meaning of the numbers, no? 50% is the new 0%.
Though I do agree that we should focus on the chance of turning it around. Students who score poorly early on and then score well later should be extra rewarded, not held down by their past performance.
I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade. Idk if there's some arcane No Child Left Behind provision about kids who have been stuck for 3 years, but in general a 50% is a no go.
And it's not like you can get 50s all year and get a few 80s and average it out. It takes a lot of really sustained effort to come back from that. Most kids won't. But at least it's mathematically possible for more of the year.
> I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade.
You’re half right.
Most school districts won’t let a student with a 50% average pass.
That said, teachers will be pressed to give extra points for participation or extra credit or just to change the scores to get said kid over a passing level. Some teachers will do this unprompted just to make sure they don’t have to see the kid next year.
Not to mention that there will undoubtedly be calls of some sort of discrimination if failing grades are common in any given teacher’s class.
> I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade.
You’d be wrong to assume that. Here’s a kid that made it to 12th grade having only ever passed 4 classes. 0.13 GPA, and that actually put him in the top 50% of his class. Things are much, much worse than you think.
The system giving these rules is set up so the two are indistinguishable. Some people can't even tell the difference. Others can, but they keep quiet so their career isn't destroyed.
Parents complain when their kid is "left behind" just because they refuse to keep up. Parents don't complain when their kid is bored but gets As because you're still teaching year 1 material.
I've never understood school either. Now that I'm 40 years old, I understand it less. I think there was a generation of adults who were 'in on the rhetoric' at one point. Telling people that these are places of education, instead of a kind of reformation facility, akin to jail.
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?