Totally sad. The announcement said that they hadn't actually made any new episodes in a long time, but now there willbe no more repeats. They're taking down the website too. I'm surprised that more foundations aren't willing to support it. Wouldn't they charge some of the member stations the way that NPR does?
The shift to only teaching 'how to read' and not 'why to read' fits well with the No Child Left Behind test-oriented philosophy. You can test how well a child reads easily. To gauge how much a child likes reading you need to do other things, like survey behavior. In general, one the first casualties of test-centric teaching is any emphasis or even thought about the affective outcomes of education.
And all this from the Party of Values (tm).
To gauge how much a child likes reading you need to do other things, like survey behavior.
Or even trust teachers to interact with their students on an individual level. Crazy.
Trust teachers? Those overpaid, unfireable, unionized slobs? Why, I wish I could get my hands on them.
I have such fond memories of that show. I remember when we got the Ancient Egypt centered show out on VHS I watched it at least 3 times in a row. Nostalgia.
At the elementary school where my mom works, many of the teachers have told her that they don't like to read. If this is at all representative, trusting teachers to instill a love for reading in children may not work so well.
What about the teachers who teach reading?
Why, I wish I could get my hands on them.
One of my colleagues teaches a course on children's literature to future school teachers. She reports that typically her students don't have a favorite book and don't read for pleasure.
Not to rag on teachers again,* but most of the teachers I knew, with a couple of exceptions, were not the most intellectual curious bunch. This used to drive on particular teacher of my acquaintance fairly crazy.
* one of my ex's is a teacher, so for quite a few years a substantial chunk of my social circle were all teachers.
Having a research requirement for teachers at the post-secondary level definitely helps select for people who are actually intellectually motivated. This is another aspect of the general cultural divide between secondary and post secondary teachers: college teachers are teachers because they love the subject; primary and secondary school teachers are teachers because they wanted to work with kids.
primary and secondary school teachers are teachers because they wanted to work with kids. couldn't think of anything better to do.
I didn't know it was still around. There will never be a better theme song, never ever ever.
12 is unfair, but I'm thinking of some of my middle school teachers who clearly hated their work and despised their students. Perhaps that's just because they were stuck teaching middle schoolers, though.
12: This is the theme of a very funny series of PSA parodies by Armstrong & Miller.
I know for a fact that there are many middle and high school teachers who chose their job because they wanted to be an authority figure and boss people around. I don't know if this is a significant part of the population, or just a few individuals who stand out because of their unique combination of assholishness and low aspirations. But they are out there.
I know more than a few people who loved their subject matter in college but didn't know how to turn it into a career, so they decided teaching was the way to go; unfortunately, there are lots of such English and History majors out there and competition is fierce, so they get shunted into teaching things that aren't their beloved subject material and thus, well, are not the best of teachers for that particular subject.
LeVar (I mean Geordi) used to freak me out on ST:TNG when he wore that band around his eyes.
Hey, have I mentioned that I have a teaching certificate from a very fancy program at a private school? Well, I do. Obviously I don't teach--I'm not good at it, I didn't like how my character was changing as I did my student teaching, I found I despised most of the programs in my field and my very fancy and expensive program really, completely screwed me over on student teaching. (Could I teach in the gifted program that specifically requested me? I could not. Could I have an assignment more than two days before the start of the semester? I could not. Could I be assigned to an underfunded program for kids who had been kicked out of every other last-chance program in the metro, located in a basement classroom kept dark by the presiding teacher who would, as it turned out, completely refuse to help me prepare lessons? I could.)
But anyway, intellectually curious people generally don't go into teaching because the certification work is incredibly boring and requires signing onto a lot of stupid orthodoxy; you have to spend your time around other teachers; schools are insanely micromanaged; and a substantial number of your students and their parents will have zero intellectual interests themselves and will fight you every step of the way. Also, at least in the early 2000s it was doxa that gifted programs were bad and (essentially) that smart kids had to be discouraged from doing anything faster than their peers. If smart kids finish their work early, they should teach their peers! Plus, lots of group work.
But anyway, intellectually curious people generally don't go into teaching because the certification work is incredibly boring and requires signing onto a lot of stupid orthodoxy; you have to spend your time around other teachers; schools are insanely micromanaged
Definitely this.
In contrast, sailing alone around the world? Whatever its other pros and cons, guaranteed learning experience.
If smart kids finish their work early, they should teach their peers! Plus, lots of group work.
Wait, I run my classes using both these principles. Are you saying I've accepted a foolish orthodoxy?
I had some teachers who were pretty intellectually curious--and this was at a school where being able to coach a sport or do theater construction was a basic job requirement. Of course, one of them did have a Ph.d. in Ancient History, and I bet that many of them had subject-based masters degrees. My A.P. US history teacher seemed interested in history, and he was definitely into the Japanese history elective he taught.
Did Reading Rainbow start after I was too old for it? Because I have no memory of doing anything but changing the channel.
I'm too old for it, and I just turned thirtyeight.
22: I took an elective philosophy class in H.S. from a teacher who wrote his dissertation on Dewey. It pretty much determined the course of my life.
I was 8 when it started, and I watched it occasionally with my little sister. I always ignored the kid recommendations, and I already loved reading, but I thought it was fun.
21: It means that the smarter kids spend a lot of time in class doing annoying work and not learning as much as they could if they were allowed. Those were the principles my grade school teachers worked on, and most of my memories of grade school are of being in trouble for sneaking books to read under my desk after my work was done. I was supposed to do the work I was assigned, and if that was done, sit there until told otherwise. I got sent to tutor reading in the special ed class some, which was frustrating and difficult.
I am not a teacher, I just play one at the middle school.
grade school are of being in trouble for sneaking books to read under my desk after my work was done. I was supposed to do the work I was assigned, and if that was done, sit there until told otherwise. I got sent to tutor reading in the special ed class some, which was frustrating and difficult
Well, we don't get to use any of these techniques at community college. Also, we can't announce it is nap time and pull out little squares of carpet for everyone to lie down on.
But I do take the "smart students help the weaker students" approach many classes, especially symbolic logic, where students quickly group into "totally get it" and "totally lost" groups. I've even considered group grading, so that the good students can improve their grade by raising the grades of the low performing students in their group. That would probably make me too unpopular though. The basic principle behind this seems sound to me: You don't really know material until you know it well enough to teach others.
27
... Those were the principles my grade school teachers worked on, and most of my memories of grade school are of being in trouble for sneaking books to read under my desk after my work was done. ...
I guess I was lucky, my grade school teachers didn't care if I read during class.
27: Those were the principles my grade school teachers worked on, and most of my memories of grade school are of being in trouble for sneaking books to read under my desk after my work was done.
I never got into trouble for that - I got into trouble for not doing my homework and reading instead. Or something like that.
B was way down on teh gifted program thing since she saw it as a way for white people to evade school integration, which I think it certainly was, additionally.
max
['What a program does and why it started can be two different things.']
I had a fraught and unpleasant relationship with grade school. I'm continually astonished and pleased that my kids aren't miserable little outcasts who hate school at this age.
29: Tertiary education really is different -- students are supposed to be learning your class's curriculum in your class, and if they want to learn something more they take a different class or go to the library. And you don't actually have physical control of the students for more than a couple of hours a week. So that kind of teaching doesn't bother me much at all in your situation, and I can see it having some educational value, as you say, for the better students. (Group grading would still piss me off, admittedly.)
In my HS, the special ed classes were for blacks, the regular classes were for poor whites, and the gifted classes were for rich whites and asians. It was extremely difficult for anyone to break out of this classification system, although I did manage to move from the rich white and asian classes to the poor white classes, mostly by giving the strong impression that I used drugs.
And you don't actually have physical control of the students for more than a couple of hours a week.
And even then, no carpet squares for naptime
34: Mmm. I think gifted education is a good idea in theory, but in practice it's often precisely what you describe.
I hate the term "gifted and talented." I got asked whether I was ever in any gifted and talented programs. It was hard work not to show my disgust at the term. I said that I had not been, but that my grade school was a selective one.
In my elementary school the gifted program was called "HEP" (for "High Educational Potential"). The term "gifted" was problematic, largely because the parents of the kids who didn't qualify didn't like the implications of it.
And the students therein were known as 'HEPcats'?
We weren't, but we totally should have been.
Wait, I run my classes using both these principles. Are you saying I've accepted a foolish orthodoxy?
Maybe!
I do remember that both group work and peer-explaining worked much better in math and geometry. For me, of course, this was because I was either at class-average level or only slightly above it, so I was either getting help or explaining something to someone who knew nearly as much as I did. In other classes, I was an intolerable little nerd interested in the material and had a good background already; it got really dull really fast to reread things I'd read several times before or else to try fumblingly to explain some literary concept.
It's funny to me that I had to spend two of the most boring and stressful years of my life "learning" to teach even though my teachers confidently expected me to be able to "teach" my classmates without any practice or instruction. It's sort of easy, I think, to explain how to do a math problem if you understand it yourself. To explain why someone's paper is poorly structured is difficult.
Also, I was the fat, weird, comparatively poor kid in my classes [Unfoggetariat: "Really, Frowner? You've never said!"] and so my experience in groups was usually one of fear, shame and misery.
One of the things that scared me while I student-taught was that I wasn't seeing some of the bullying that I deduced was taking place. I didn't want to be the teacher who puts everyone into groups and leaves the nerd, the class fat kid, the borderline-developmentally-delayed kid and the girl who developed early to suffer while everyone else has productive learning time.
Of course even now I have trouble with small group work because my perspective tends to be so different from everyone else (No, really! Not better, just different! I recently took a class with a bunch of other activists and learned to keep my mouth shut!). Merely trying to explain and then sort out the differences in my approach ends up being a giant derail....I work best alone, or maybe with one other trusted comrade. So maybe it's just me. I still hate group work.
The one time group work went well, it was astonishing and miraculous and so fun that I would do any project ever with that group just to recreate the dynamic. On the other hand, I remember the one time group work went well.
I add too that I was placed in the gifted program several years after everyone else because my family was not fancy. It took direct parental intervention and waving my test scores and report cards around to get me included.
Maybe it's a regional thing--I grew up with the perception that being a good student/liking to read was this huge liability, not important, not valuable. So the gifted program was a tiny compensation where I got to be around other nerdy people and (most of the time, except for the communism thing) not get made fun of. Of course, then everyone else went off to the Illinois Math and Science Academy (Absolutely free! Was I allowed to apply? No.) so there were very few nerdy people in my year after 7th grade. This actually made a huge difference in my junior high and high school experience.
44: Yeah, going to a selective high school from seventh grade forward was immensely misery-reducing. I was still socially awkward, but no longer intrinsically bizarre. Boo hiss to your family not letting you apply.
Where I grew up it wasn't "gifted and talented", it was "advanced program". Which then led to them calling Advanced Placement classes "APP" to distinguish them from the existing "AP" classes, and to guidance counselors trying to "correct" people who mentioned AP classes on their college applications by explaining that they meant "APP", an abbreviation no one outside the county would recognize.
One reason I like group work is that it forced me to shut up. It is really easy to let lecturing take over a class. I can talk endlessly on the subject, and the students would prefer to sit passively and listen, rather than do any work. Group work forces everyone to take the harder route.
46: It was a rather bizarre situation and probably wouldn't happen under NCLB because it lowered the school's test scores--the vast majority of nerdy little kids just upped and left for IMSA. This probably explains why I found my college friends' stories of finding little groups of dorky people to hang out with in high school so implausible.
So this is an argument against the gifted education that took away all my junior high friends! How happy and well-adjusted I might be today had there been no IMSA.
I seem to remember all of my classes being fairly racially integrated, so I want to say the complaints in 31 and 34 didn't apply where I grew up. But the school system had a pretty byzantine and restrictive desegregation system that made pretty much every school racially well-integrated, so it's possible that the advanced program classes were substantially more white than the rest of the school. I don't remember well enough to say. In any case, it didn't provide a way for racist white parents to separate their children from black students.
||
Healthcare reform myths and facts
MYTH:
People in Britain are deeply unhappy with their socialized medicine system, which ours will become.
FACT:
People in Britain are deeply unhappy with everything. It is their only source of happiness.
|>
38: I should add that I meant to include the fact that this was during a neuropsych exam, and I had a certain snobby disdain for the gosh, gee mannerisms of the post-doc doing the testing. (During the introductory interview, I said something about utilitarianism, and she didn't know what it was, so I lost a lot of respect for her educational qualifications.) But I knew that she would then write up my "poor social skills" so I had to be careful.
Wait, why weren't you allowed to apply for IMSA?
42: Also, I was the fat, weird, comparatively poor kid in my classes [Unfoggetariat: "Really, Frowner? You've never said!"] and so my experience in groups was usually one of fear, shame and misery.
I was the skinny, poor and weird (but not real shy about it!) kid in most of my quote talented and gifted unquote classes - which started in 4th grade. (They had just started up the program and I got shoved in there somehow and stayed in til 9th grade, when the two hour bus ride started looking a little ridiculous.)
Rob: In my HS, the special ed classes were for blacks, the regular classes were for poor whites, and the gifted classes were for rich whites and asians.
I remember the TAG classes being mostly white and... uh UMC, actually, and the regular classes being more mixed, at least in elementary school. I don't remember the special ed classes being all black (more hispanic than black, actually, due to ESL), but the color startification was definately going on.
Rob again: Wait, I run my classes using both these principles. Are you saying I've accepted a foolish orthodoxy?
I would like to point out here that anytime you have a roomful of people under your control (in some sense), that's a big egoboo (narcissitic fun!). That would be the whole 'molding young minds of the future thing'. And that's OK, there has to be some rewards to it, or nobody would be doing it. That said, I'm certain there are a lot of tenured professors with overly large egos, so I don't see the problem being confined solely to primary and secondary education. I'm pretty sure it's a lot worse though.
max
['Nobody gets out of here alive unscathed.']
Hm, I seem to recall my GATE (Gifted and Talented blah blah) program being very diverse, ethnically. This may have been because I went to a school in a poor area adjacent to much richer areas, and the teachers and administration had worked very hard to get a number of grants for many different excellent programs designed to give us a head start. It was sad to see many of my elementary school compatriots in GATE and the like then be ignored in middle school (ie, no encouragement from teachers to ignore peer pressure about the pitfalls of appearing "smart," after school programs, etc.). In an area heavily dominated by Hispanic gangsterism for the poorer, non-"white" students, this meant that many of them slipped into trouble and out of the good classes by 8th grade or so. Our high school picked the mantle back up with AVID, which was designed to help the first-generation college bound (and did a good job with it, from what I could see from my friends), but I think because of a lack of strong programs in our middle schools many students never made the transition that they could have and remained stuck in the "only going to graduate if they're lucky" tracks which, not incidentally, had some of the worst teachers of our school.
Maybe it's a regional thing--I grew up with the perception that being a good student/liking to read was this huge liability, not important, not valuable. So the gifted program was a tiny compensation where I got to be around other nerdy people and (most of the time, except for the communism thing) not get made fun of.
Same thing here, in middle school. Most of the kids in the gifted classes were really quiet and shy girls, or boys who wanted to be engineers or fighter pilots but were totally unathletic and therefore actually spent time on academics. There must have been some test to get in, rather than being the result of parental pressures. Pretty equitable.
In high school the advanced classes became all about the quest to get into selective colleges. Completely different.
By the time we got to the last two years of high school, most of the kids who were still excited about school would migrate out of the year-long gifted English class and into the more subject-specific, semester-long honors classes, leaving the gifted classes with the kids who had tested in at a young age but, in the words of Sam Lipsyte, did not pan out.
Bah, mandatory group work fostered in me an extreme resentment of anyone slower than myself, at least until high school, when we were allowed to escape (for free! well, free for the students, not the public schools we left) to any local college/university. I can't say with any certainty, counterfactually, that I wouldn't have had such a strong resentment without the mandatory group work, though. Also, it's probably not smart to set policy based on the desires of the outliers. But still, ugh.
No more Reading Rainbow, that's a bummer. Lol, moving from 'why to read' to 'how to read'. Reminds me of Carlin: "No child left behind. Oh, really it wasn't too long ago you were talking about giving kids a head start. Head start - left behind, someone's losing fucking ground here."
I was a head start kid, though I couldn't say if it had any effect. And it's likely that I'll be teaching soon -- if not For America (and hopefully not), then for Korea or Japan. So I guess I'll have occasion to start my own "horror file" soon enough.
I am much to traumatized by my school experienced to reflect on it rationally.
Maybe we just need more sexism in professional school admissions and such so that talented women will be forced back into the classroom. What could possibly be wrong with that?
Group work seemed to work okay in AP Calculus, cause doing well at math and science was more respected at my school. (I think that people saw them as useful in the sense of leading to remunerative careers.) A lot more people were at my level in AP Calc. In regular Physics, there were all of the lazy people who goofed off throwing spitballs. (There were 5 or 6 remarkably immature boys in my class who harassed the librarians. One of them told me that she was glad to see our class graduate.) They just mooched off my work. I suppose that the real world can be like that too, but it's still infuriating.
61: Its certainly cheaper than actually paying money to attract talent.
62: They just mooched off my work.
And then your future son came back and punched the ring leader in the nose and it all worked out fine in the end.
Kidding aside, though, I'm not sure that money alone would do the trick any time soon. The culture of public education in this country is pretty messed up in ways that make it an unattractive career choice even aside from the money. More money may be necessary, but it's a long way from sufficient.
I always hated Reading Rainbow because it seemed condescending. "Reading is fun!" No shit.
G&T admissions in my suburban school district were somewhat opaque, but once you were in it, it was practically impossible to get out. Even if you were making Ds and Fs, if you scraped by with a pass for the semester they would still promote you to gifted math or English the next year. Science and history were different; your advancement was based at least in part on teacher recommendations, which is how I got stuck in Advanced Chemistry after a year of Honors Biology in which I ostentatiously read novels all period and then squeaked out a B+ on the tests.
I did really want to apply to TAMS, the Texas equivalent of IMSA, or to Simon's Rock or Mary Baldwin, but the latter two were too expensive and my family assured me that TAMS was for little prodigies or something, not generic smart kids.
This is undoubtedly politically incorrect of me to say, but in my limited teaching experience the advanced classes were the only ones I found tolerable. As the math department chair for a summer program for jr.-high-aged kids one year I recommended strongly that "leveling" (which is what it was called back then in pedagogy) be retained if only so that at least one math class would show some interest.
Yes, I am a terrible person but I had three classes every morning and two of them I was trying every kind of demonstration and explanation I could imagine (which probably wasn't much) to get across basic concepts of pre-algebra and in the third I was being asked - asked! - to run a calculus tutorial after school since I refused to try to make it a part of the existing curriculum. When one of my own algebra teachers' personally guaranteed method for explaining variables turned out to flop when rolled out in my other two classes I simply skipped that and moved on.
Also, to be honest, the "advanced" classes into which I was placed as a kid turned out to be the only ones - other than anything having to do with music - that I at all enjoyed throughout school. I saw them as a refuge and I know some of my own students in various programs felt the same way. I wanted to see them preserved as a safe harbor for the above-average weirdos if nothing else.
And, of course, I loved Reading Rainbow well past the age at which I should have probably stopped watching.
I think it should be noted that I drank my way out of an actual Education degree so anything I say on the matter should be taken with a shot of bourbon grain of salt.
When I was in high school I helped out at the school's tutoring center for a while (resume-padding, as I had been instructed to do to get into college; seems stupid, in retrospect). I recall one day where someone was asking for help with a problem. They were given two angles of a triangle and asked to find the third. I asked if they knew what all the angles of a triangle add up to. Blank stare. I tell them that all the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, always. Blank stare. Finally they ask how to do the problem. I try to explain that if three numbers add up to 180, and you know two of the numbers, you have to subtract them from the total to find the missing one. Blank stare. After about half an hour I thought they finally might have understood the solution to the problem. So they move on to the next one. Same question, two different angles. They didn't know where to begin. Couldn't tell me what the three angles add up to. Didn't know why subtraction would be useful.
I think maybe that was the point where I was absolutely sure I didn't ever want to teach high school.
Alright, I'm going to get all unnecessarily pedagogical on 70, but the thing is - when kids don't get the big picture, they don't retain squat from problem to problem. So you have to ease them in a bit, and set the context, and say things like "We're looking at properties that are true for all triangles. It turns out that you can look at all the angles, at the same time, and they will always add up to 180. Let's look at a few examples." Then, later, "Now, let's change it up a bit. If you know the angles add up to 180, and I withhold a piece of information, how can you use the 180 to your advantage?"
The thing is, good tutoring requires a bit of being able to order the other person around. "Work through this example. It's enlightening." Or "Go ahead and try it, I'll watch, and I'm not going to say anything if you go down a wrong path." Etc. I think peer tutoring is incredibly hard because you aren't an authority figure.
Datapoint: I was sent to gifted after my 2nd grade teacher told my mom that I was visibly bored and miserable, and so I should be tested. My school system had what I still think is the best way of handling gifted, which was 2 days a week to a standalone program and the rest of the time in your regular class. Not isolated from your peers, still responsible for that workload (which was fine, obvs.), and I don't recall any more ostracization than would be the norm for a smart, nerdy kid.
In jr. high it was a class period, and it was stupid. This impression was influenced by the incompetence of the teacher, but I simply think it's kind of pointless unless you have an extra-good teacher - I don't think you can lay out a good enrichment class like that, because it needs to be student-driven yet teacher-guided in a way that can't be made into a strict curriculum.
Oh, and Mr. Rogers is also being dramatically cut back - only aired once a week. Which is simply awful.
54: Wasn't allowed to apply for IMSA because my parents didn't want me to be at boarding school five days a week. (Which isn't entirely incomprehensible, but it was one of so many, many things--starting with the first grade field trip to the aquarium--that were off limits because they were considered too dangerous. Also it was the one desire of my heart for years and years; as soon as I knew that there was an IMSA I begged to be allowed to apply.)
starting with the first grade field trip to the aquarium--that were off limits because they were considered too dangerous.
In fairness to your parents, three kids had been killed by sharks the year before.
That's what happens to kids that tap on the glass.
In my family, "dangerous" basically meant "not the kind of thing we do." Skiing: dangerous. Chain saws: not dangerous (although falling trees of any size was and still is reserved to the patriarch).
Isn't there a PSA where a kid taps on the glass and two of his best friends are killed?
In my family, "dangerous" was reserved almost entirely for vehicle-related crashes. Not driving a big heavy Buick. Not wearing a helmet when you bike. Not being a sufficiently cautious driver. I am incredibly paranoid about car crashes and hitting pedestrians and being hit and all the rest of it, and have no idea how I'm going to let my kids do anything with streets.
Hm. Our little tiny gifted program was one afternoon a week in an unused classroom. Thursdays, if I recall. One was responsible for the regular work too, of course, but this was hardly a problem since it was so dull.
It wasn't a particularly amazing program--we wrote poetry, we learned about architecture (finials!), we took a winter field trip to Chicago for something or other and it was very cold, we learned a little rudimentary computer programming. And of course we also had the "this is why the communists want to kill us" lecture--a turning point in my personal history. (Since I disagreed, people called me a communist, I got upset, people continued to call me a communist because it had initially upset me and--this is the bizarre part--the ingrained anti-communism of my town led people who had never even met me or never met me until long after the initial incident to call me a communist, tell me to go back to Russia, etc. I will never forget having a total stranger walk up to me at the public pool at least three years after the whole thing and ask if I was really a communist. I'm afraid I forget what I said in reply.)
Hoo boy, was the Advanced Education Program in my town ever a means of segregation. (To my parents' credit, they thought the whole thing was dodgy, and the only reason they didn't pull my sister and me out of the program was that we pleaded with them not to, because all our friends were in it.) Admission to AEP was controlled by IQ tests*, which is problematic enough to begin with, but worse, only a handful of kids got tested. My understanding is that the tests were administered at teachers' prompting. Guess which kids were expected to be worth testing? Guess which socioeconomic class had parents more likely to kick up a stink if their kid didn't get picked for testing? Guess which race largely populated that class? In a majority Hispanic town, without (I hope and trust) much active attempt to segregate, AEP was lily-white.
Mostly that didn't have too big an effect in grade school; we didn't have our own classes, but just got pulled out of homeroom for an hour every week. But in high school, there were 2 counselors for the masses (~2400 kids in grades 9-12) and 6 for the ~40 AEP kids. Not surprisingly, we 40 got more help with scheduling snafus and admission to AP classes and admission to college and perpetuation of privilege. There were a few Hispanic kids in the AP classes, mostly the children of doctors. There were a few Anglo kids, mostly the children of farmers, in the euphemistic "college-bound" classes. The honors (middle) track was a mix, at least. Somehow half of my class managed to drop out without my having the first clue, because I never even saw them.
And yet I'm torn about the track system. In the context of a mostly craptastic school system, our AP classes were amazingly good. Is that worth it? From a social justice perspective, pretty obviously not. For the sake of nurturing the next generation of possible contributors to some aspect of human knowledge, dunno, maybe. I would have been terrified of most of the kids in the college-bound track, and was very very glad not to have to be marked as the geek in a room full of jocks + people who'd been carrying knives since they were eight or nine; I would also have been wrong to be terrified of (most of) them, and it probably would have done me good to learn that sooner.
*In one particularly rotten twist, they raised the IQ cutoff when I was in sixth grade, from x to x + 10. None of us knew what our scores were, but word went round pretty quickly when one girl was notified that she would no longer be part of AEP. Poor kid. The other AEP kids rallied around her, at least, but yeesh.
Well, are you a communist, Frowner?
the ingrained anti-communism of my town led people who had never even met me or never met me until long after the initial incident to call me a communist, tell me to go back to Russia, etc.
I am convinced I live in a completely different world than Frowner. I can't even conceive of something like that happening in the last 25 years. (I am, I realize, making an assumption about how old Frowner is here.)
The mind boggles at 80.2. How small was this town?
71 is fair. I'm sure my pedagogical technique was shitty, and in any case, I only had an hour or so to try to get anything across. But the basic thing that it made me aware of was, here was someone in a normal high school geometry class, who seemed to lack a first- or second-grade awareness of what subtraction means. And I just can't imagine trying to teach people like that on a regular basis, especially if they're in a classroom with 20 other people at varying levels of understanding.
70, 71: The thing about the blank stare is that it gives you exactly no information about why the student is confused. It is like the general protection fault of student responses. If you can, the best thing you can do is get the student talking about what they do know, either the earlier stuff in the class that they did understand, or something they know from their ordinary life or anything. This will let you know where things broke down and tell you a more general context that the student understands that you can relate the material to. The problem is that once students are giving you the blank stare, they have pretty much shut down anyway.
83, etc: This would have been in the mid-eighties, so just about 25 years ago. My recollection of the actual talk is a bit hazy, but I'm confident that it was not in the context of anything else in the program (that is, we weren't doing any kind of Russian history, we weren't doing any kind of contemporary news stuff, etc) and it conveyed to me that the Russians (and it was the Russians, not the Soviets) were ideologically committed to attacking the US--all of them, not just the government. I'm sure it was more nuanced than that, but then I'm also sure that the nuances were pretty much lost on my peers and me.
In retrospect, I imagine that it was a friend of one of the teachers, some YAF-er or something. Nothing officially associated with the program.
My town wasn't that small--just an average Chicago railroad suburb. But it was very conservative, very hick, very racist.
I can't even conceive of something like that happening in the last 25 years.
I was punched out in the hall of my HS for saying in a history class that Joe McCarthy was a bad person who hurt America. This would have been 1984 or 1985.
I've apparently killed two threads, let me try for a third: Having functioning classes in a not-very good school with somewhat unfair admissions is a step up from having a separate school. It's a stopgap, a way to prevent defection to private schools.
87, 88: I live a privileged, post-cold war life, I suppose. (I was 8 when the Berlin wall fell.)
When you consider that the cold war has been over for ~ 20 years, it is not surprising that things like my experience and Frowners have not happened recently.
However, I bet white suburban kids today who express some sympathy or tolerence for Arabs or Muslims get it much much worse.
88: Really? What led to that? Tell all!
And yet I'm torn about the track system.
If it makes you feel any better, I think most of them don't so absurdly put their fingers on the scales to help the aristoi.*
In the context of a relatively neutral system - basically, different materials taught to each track, but otherwise equitable in terms of resources - I don't actually see how you can argue against it. It's kind of Harrison Bergeronesque to insist that human justice requires the smartest kid in school to be in the same English class with the dumbest kid in school, being taught the same material. There's no way that either kid can optimize her potential in that scheme.
* Is it OK that I'm making it plural, but otherwise failing to decline? That would require memory-dredging, and seems superfluous. I decline to decline.
91: I still think it was a bit odd--that all those kids over such a long period of time would think that "communist" was an awesome insult (the last incident must have been in 1988 or 1989) when they had a vast array of fatty/badly-dressed/ugly/nerdy/"gonna die a virgin"/four-eyes insults available to my classmates. I mean seriously, choosing "communist" over "you're so ugly no one would even want to rape you" is a bit weird if your basic purpose is to hurt the feelings of the victim.
A friend's brother was beaten up repeatedly in the early 80s for refusing to join the youth arm of the KKK. The family decided to leave Oklahoma.
On the flip side, another friend reports encountering, in about 2006, an MIT student who couldn't see why an Afrikaans word should be included in English dictionaries. The word was "apartheid".
fatty/badly-dressed/ugly/nerdy/"gonna die a virgin"/four-eyes insults
You know, I have no idea how I escaped bullying. Maybe I was just oblivious, or just exceptionally lucky, because most of those epithets would have applied to me in grade school. (Seriously, the gigantic plastic glasses of the 80s did no one any favors in the looks department.)
I think most of them don't so absurdly put their fingers on the scales to help the aristoi.*
I don't know about that. New York City, there are a million different little elementary school programs for gifted kids, and my impression is that the admissions requirements for most of them are having parents who can figure out the deliberately confusing applications process -- they're really shelters for the nice UMC kids from the rest of the rabble. (There are also a couple of programs for legitimately very very bright children. But that's not most of the 'gifted' seats in the city.)
I'm really torn about this -- the Harrison Bergeron argument is a good one, and I was a miserable, isolated child until I hit a selective-admissions high school, where I blossomed into being merely socially inept but reasonably contented about it. But most people I've heard talk about the typical three-track high school make it sound like they're mostly very strongly class-based.
(96: Hipsters in the giant plastic glasses of the eighties still give me a bit of a start when I see them--I can see the fashion purpose but they're a bit flashback-inducing. Since I am addicted to fashionable spectacles, I have had to compromise on a sort of eighties-fifties Buddy Holly pair in a nice mottled gray.)
It's a stopgap, a way to prevent defection to private schools.
Is it? At least where I come from, there are two main "advantages" of private schools: they have good sports teams, and they have wealthy students. They were clearly academically inferior to the better public schools. People who went there did so to play sports or because they were part of that UMC community that felt it was necessary; they didn't do so to get a better quality education. (Well, they might have said that was the reason and some might even have believed it, but if so, they weren't paying much attention.)
99: Private schools in my area were renowned for academics, not athletics.
I decline to decline.
There's a line from The Mill On The Floss where an unpleasant teacher teases Maggie's dim older brother at dinner by asking him "Would you rather decline roast beef, or the Latin for it?"
Private schools in my area opened the year desegregation was enforced.
93: With the powers vested in me by, uh, Euripides and Da/vi/d Gr/e/ne, I pardon you.
1. I would never decline based on position in an English sentence. Just as to number -- as you did.
2. If I asked you to conjugate, JRoth, would you decline?
||
Gah. A student just told me that her father is being taken off life support this Wednesday, after not coming out of anesthesia after surgery this weekend.
Same student who, along with her twin sister, has custody of their 8-year old nephew. Good lord.
|>
104.2: After your generous 104.1, yes. Or perhaps no. Whichever one is naughtier.
In the context of a relatively neutral system - basically, different materials taught to each track, but otherwise equitable in terms of resources - I don't actually see how you can argue against it.
Well, sort of. But IME good teachers are the most important resource, and they nearly always teach the top track.
It's kind of Harrison Bergeronesque to insist that human justice requires the smartest kid in school to be in the same English class with the dumbest kid in school, being taught the same material. There's no way that either kid can optimize her potential in that scheme.
My sophomore year, we got a new principal, strongly devoted to mediocrity---a man who both bragged about his record of Cs and Ds and insisted that we address him as Doctor because of his Ed.D. His version of trackless schooling (You're smart? Too bad! Sit still and shut up.) was crap, and the honors and AP teachers and kids and parents all mobilized against it. (I have no memory of what the bottom track was up to, and had not until just now realized that that was true. Urk.) But I've never seen a well-executed trackless system, so it's not clear to me whether they really do require the fastest students to sit and stew in boredom while the slowest get more and more discouraged.* Did anyone here go through a functional trackless system?
*It seems like the different-intelligences stuff could usefully be brought to bear, both to help the less book-smart kids find their strengths in other areas and to give the more book-smart kids the salutary experience of not being quickest at X, even where X ≠ phys ed.
Did anyone here go through a functional trackless system?
I think it would take a Montessori approach or something to achieve this. Or something with substantial self-paced aspects to it?
I have no memory of tracks at my suburban high school. Class of '76.
I credit getting into the magnet program in LA with a turnaround that makes my life comprehensible. I can't think who I would be if I'd been kept in regular classes. I was so bored I wrote my assignments in mirror image. I was in fights. I was friendless. I was insufferable and snotty and would only have gotten worse if I hadn't been put in with kids who were faster and sharper than me. Don't know if they actually saved my life, but I'd be entirely different, in bad ways, without the hard schools. When I got to the magnet programs and found my people, all that went away by itself.
92: In history class, we were discussing the McCarthy era the teacher made one of those lame efforts to create classroom conversation. I made a 17-year-old's effort to explain that McCarthy was destroying the freedoms he claimed to be protecting, and then the rest of the class told me I was wrong, and the teacher smiled and nodded. (There was a dead-head couple in the class who I knew aggreed with me, but they were either silent or absent, I can't remember.)
Between classes at my school, hallways were always jammed shoulder-to-shoulder. As I was walking back to my locker, this tall kid kept coming up behind me and rapping me on the head or shoulders. When I turned around to see who it was, he would fade back into the crowd. He could generally get two or three people between him and me before I turned, so he could plausibly pretend like he wasn't the one doing it. I knew it was him, though. The last time swatted my head, I spazzed out, turned around and tried to hit him with my backpack. He then punched me in the face and landed me out cold.
I never had any interaction with him before. It was only by speaking up in history class that I called attention to myself. It is likely that he was just a bully looking for someone to pick on, rather than a deeply committed Red Hunter. Still.
105: Oh my goodness. Does your school have any sort of support system that you can help this girl gain access to?
The Scottish system, at least as I went through it, had everyone mixed together for the first two years of high school, followed by some degree of 'streaming' thereafter. However, the streaming was subject based, rather than pupil based. Kids taking O levels (or Standard grades) in a subject would obviously not be sharing a classroom with kids not studying that subject at all. Among kids who _were_ taking a subject at O level or standard grade, there was some degree of streaming, but it was fairly broad.
You might find some Maths classes, say, contained rather more of the 'best' students than others but there was no class singled out as the 'top' class. My own maths class, for example, certainly contained the two or three individuals who were probably vying for the maths prizes each year, but the class as a whole was pretty broadly spread in terms of ability. I doubt there was anyone in the class expected to fail, but it wasn't all A students, either.
97: In urban districts, I think there's no doubt that tracking has at least some segregatory (?) intention/effect. But the way I look at it is that, in all-white suburbs, tracking is still done, and serves its ostensible purpose well. I think it's a fallacy to think that, because a system is misused towards bad ends, the system itself is suspect.
Representative democracy turns out to be an effective way of sending more power and wealth to the powerful and wealthy; that would be a bad reason to scrap it.
Shit, that's an analogy. Oh well.
But the way I look at it is that, in all-white suburbs, tracking is still done, and serves its ostensible purpose well.
I'm always still a little surprised that it's possible to have all-white schools in all-white suburbs in most cities, even though I know it's pretty standard. All-white suburbs had plenty of non-white students shipped in from low-income areas, where I grew up.
114: I'm not sure what the norm is over here, but my HS was similar to what ttaM describes, in that there were (for instance) 2 full sessions of honors/AP English but only one semi-full session of AP calc (also 1 session of A-level calc). In math and sciences, you could also get ahead - my honors chem class was about half sophomores and half juniors.
Anyway, there's always* various electives that aren't tracked, so it's not as if the smart/wealthy/white kids are absolutely isolated.
* right?
I'm always still a little surprised that it's possible to have all-white schools in all-white suburbs in most cities, even though I know it's pretty standard. All-white suburbs had plenty of non-white students shipped in from low-income areas, where I grew up.
The county where I went to HS basically had no minorities outside of one small city; it would have taken a hell of a lot of busing to create even token minority populations in the various lily-white* high schools.
* My HS was maybe 1% black, and I don't recall any hispanics at all. Not every HS was that extreme, but it was pretty common out there, 50 miles from NYC.
113: I e-mailed the school crisis counselor person, who I think very highly of, and filled her in.
Huh. All my teachers were ex-hippies who wanted us all to be little pinkos. My fellow students largely disappointed them by being apolitical. (We did a big class project on the presidential election of 1912 and the candidates had to campaign and give speeches, etc. I was Debs and I won. If only!)
108
Well, sort of. But IME good teachers are the most important resource, and they nearly always teach the top track.
Strange how the good teachers always teach the bright kids. More likely the average teacher looks good teaching smart kids and looks bad teaching dumb kids.
I don't remember any gifted programs in the Brookline public schools. I know that they had special Ed and other remedial classes, but no gifted ones. My godmother's son had some trouble reading (he's sort of a dreamy artsy type) so he got some Corey test. He scored really high in one area and low on another, so he got put in some remedial class. His parents were disgusted that he wasn't reading or writing essays in 9th grade and took him out. Now he reads more than his older brother-- though mostly close reading stuff like French literary theory.
121: Or possibly the good teachers find it more rewarding to teach kids who are engaged and interesting, despite what should be a higher workload outside of class time, and the poor teachers just don't give a shit.
123: At least now you can tune your ukulele.
117: In my school, music classes were just about the only area where the tracks would mix. That was good, as far as it went, but there was still something of a class barrier insofar as your family had to be able to afford to rent you an instrument, and there were lots of fees for marching-band uniforms and trips and so on. We did at least have a school mariachi band, which was pretty awesome.
119: Oh good.
you can tune a ukulele but you cant tuna fish.
108
... Did anyone here go through a functional trackless system?
It has been a while since I was in school but I don't remember any tracking. In junior high and high school you had elective courses which attracted different populations. As to how functional this was I think it worked ok for most of the students. As I mentioned before I spent a lot of time reading in class but I didn't actively hate school.
When were you in school, James, and what sort of town did you grow up in? And how many kids went on to college?
128: There weren't honors classes or AP classes?
Re: 128
This is also how it was when I went to high school (a long while ago--i graduated in 1972). We did not have AP or honors classes, but there were, as James describes, electives of varying difficulty and audience. I went to school in a small college town and I think most of my classmates went straight on to college.
129
I graduated from Livermore High School in 1972. As to what fraction of kids went on to college I have no idea. Some did and some didn't. My family was part of an influx brought in by the weapons lab. I believe children from these families were a substantial minority in the schools and were more academically inclined than the natives but I don't remember any particular tension between the groups (which may just reflect my general social cluelessness).
130
There weren't honors classes or AP classes?
Honors English is the only honors class I remember. I don't think the science classes were split perhaps because there were only enough kids for one class anyway. There was no calculus class. I don't remember AP classes.
Having functioning classes in a not-very good school with somewhat unfair admissions is a step up from having a separate school. It's a stopgap, a way to prevent defection to private schools.
It's funny to read that pragmatism literally twenty minutes after a conversation which went, roughly:
- Yeah, we try not to sabotage the idea that public schools should be able to serve all children--
- --but you gotta balance that with the real kid you've got in front of you, and her options right now, not at some hypothetical point in the future--
- --exactly.
(both sigh)
If it makes you feel any better, I think most of them don't so absurdly put their fingers on the scales to help the aristoi.
They almost don't need to; the rest of society is set up to handle that for them.
We didn't have AP classes either, so far as I can recall. You went as far in math as you were inclined, science, etc, but we were all together in English, Social Studies. I could have taken metal shop instead of French, and maybe should have. Ten percent of my HS class went to the same college I did, and probably another 25% to other units of the UC system, or to the CSU system. 5 percent to elite privates, 5 more out of state state schools, and I think you get about to the end of four year college right out of HS.
135:
They started offering AP classes to the high school students in the late 60s, so prob soon after you graduated, Carp.
They almost don't need to; the rest of society is set up to handle that for them.
But that's the whole thing: kids really do have different backgrounds and different needs, and even though it's not their fault, a school that sets out to deliver the best education it can to each individual kid is going to be reinforcing inequality.
I put my year out there, Will. I had the good fortune to attend high school while California still believed in education.
Actually, I attended two different high schools: one for 18 months, and the other, after we moved, for the remainder. We moved within the same district, and the officials of the second acted like there wasn't any difference. But there was a decided drop in SES from one to the other -- the second still being far about mean -- and the difference was very clearly observable, every day, in every classroom.
(That's Orinda to Lafayette, for you Bay Areans. Which might not seem like much of a difference from the outside, but it really was a marked drop in how much time one might expect to spend on a boat, etc.)
137: Yeah, sorry, NPH, I guess my sarcasm didn't come through. We agree.
It took me a long time to realize that my high school was the "poorer" of the two in my middle-class, state government-oriented town, but in hindsight the differences were pretty significant.
141: Yeah, I thought I was mostly agreeing, but the "almost" faked me out a little bit.
9 is my experience teaching children's lit, too. I get English majors in the class who are passionate literary and cultural critics with intense feelings about the books we read, but the half of the class who actually plans to become elementary school teachers are the sort who say they don't have a favorite book, not even Harry Potter. Some of the aspiring junior high and high school teachers are pretty cool, though.
I get so furious with the ones who want to teach elem. kids, though. One of them was talking about how it was the parents' job to instill values of critical thought and learning, and the teachers' job to keep them innocent (I think we were discussing the way "the discovery of America!" or "Thanksgiving!" are taught to kids), and I said something so rude I should have been fired on the spot.
I said something so rude I should have been fired on the spot.
Well, don't just leave us hanging!
Was it ruder than the time I asked a guy who'd been making extremely timid recommendations full of platitudes whether he'd been beaten? "Jesus, were you beaten?", I asked him when he finished his presentation.
144: The larger conversation we were having was about whether reading a clearly sexist (and troubling in a million other ways) book like Peter Pan could be a useful way of prompting kids to have a critical conversation about gender. A bunch of the older students with kids thought it would be a great way to teach something that's hard to "get" about reading, which is that we often read very good, well-written books whose values we disagree with, and learning to make decisions about how much ideology and aesthetics might be in conflict and blah blah.
Future Teacher: Oh, that's fine if parents want to do it. It's not my job to make them question things like that. I'd give them a "kids' version" of Peter Pan, though, because it's a neat story.
Other Student: What do you mean, a "kids' version"? It's written for kids.
FT: Like one without all the violence or scary parts, just the nice story, the Disney version. It's a nice story!
Other Student: Yeah, that's called censorship.
FT: Well, if you want to teach your kids to be all critical and stuff, do it at home. My job is to keep them innocent! They're just sweet little kids! They don't know about that stuff!
Me: What exactly do you think teaching is? Making sure children never learn anything that might be useful to them? Preserving them in amber? That's right next door to pedophilia. What made you choose this major, anyway?
Or something to that effect. I apologized. (We were all a little hot at each other that day.) She said it was cool and kind of inspiring. Um, OK. I just called you a pedophile and insulted your career choice?
I just called you a pedophile and insulted your career choice
...but luckily for me you're too stupid to notice!
I actually don't think she's stupid, but I do think that in elem. ed. classes, they talk a lot about how filling babies' heads with pleasant things and not pushing any buttons is the thing to do. It must save some hassle for the public schools with parent complaints, but it's also part of this whole "We just teach them how to read" thing. The instant you get a little "Reading Rainbow" at them, they might start coming home saying multiculturalism is good, or that women have had it hard sometimes, or that there was a systematic genocide of native Americans. Can't have that.
Yeah, that's the sort of thing I was getting at somewhere upthread about the culture of public education being fucked up. I'm not sure which is worse: that everyone thinks they know more about what kids should be taught than teachers do or that too many of them are right.
I admitted in the class that I don't know anything about children, except for having been a child and having known a few, and I don't know what the Ed department is telling them these days. But I do know that students who emerge from them with a love of reading and thinking credit their parents and sometimes their high school teachers, and they all say that elementary school was basically six years of boring babysitters who showed them a little arithmetic.
I hated, hated, hated every moment of elementary school until sixth grade. My teacher that year was really into geography and individual research projects on foreign countries. That was something! (I did Egypt, Cote D'Ivoire, and Belgium.)
I think there's a good case to be made that the increasing credentialism of teaching and the growing role of education schools in training teachers has been a major cause of many of the problems in the American education system.
I remember hearing not to long ago that in some East Coast state (Pennsylvania, I think) you have to have a degree in education (either undergraduate or graduate) to teach in the public schools at all. That just blew me away.
That is, the degree has to be from a school of education, either at the undergraduate or graduate level.
Going back to the topic way upthread, the gifted system where I went to school was exactly like what GB describes, at least for elementary and middle school. (In high school there were a couple of gifted classes the first two years but mostly the gifted kids just transitioned into the honors and AP classes.) IQ test and everything. Hardly surprising, since this would have been the same state at roughly the same time.
154: I don't know about "the major cause," but certainly a significant contributing factor.
PA is unbelievable. I don't know if your specific claim is true, but what I've seen up close is sufficient to convince me that a frightening percentage of the energy in the system is concentrated on protectionism.
"A" major cause, not "the" major cause.
I'm not sure it was PA; it might have been New York. Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic area, though.
And it's not just the teachers that have to come through the ed school credentialling path but also the administrators. Mustn't let anyone pollute the hallowed halls of K-12 education with anything learned elsewhere.
159: Fair enough, I was misreading.
I do think that poverty, racism, classism, violence, and the concept and consequences of the compulsory attendance paradigm outrank teacher credentialing as major causes, though.
I do think that poverty, racism, classism, violence, and the concept and consequences of the compulsory attendance paradigm outrank teacher credentialing as major causes, though.
Well, yeah.
Even at public colleges, I've been told by observers that asking hard questions and encouraging individual research are some kind of psychological torture that "our students" can't handle.
It reminds me of why I got so angry at my own gifted ed in elementary school. I got to spend one day a week being interested in whatever I was interested in--medieval history, computer programming, foreign languages--and when the other kids asked me what I did all day, I said it was wonderful, that I got to learn about all these things that were fascinating to me. And naturally, they were pissed at me. Why didn't they get to research things that interested them? Do only kids with "high IQs" have interests?
IME teaching what often amounts to remedial writing at the college level, the only way to get students who are struggling to give a shit is to give them some room to experiment and be interested in what they're interested in. I was recently at a meeting in which a colleague said students have to be taught how to write, and then told what to research, and then, when they master that, they could conceivably earn time to experiment or follow their own interests. I was employment-threateningly rude to her too.
Did anyone here go through a functional trackless system?
Yeah. Well, OK, most of the people who would have been tracked dropped out by 7th form, so there is that, and not everyone did the Schol prep work. And there was some backdoor tracking in who did what classes --- woodwork vs. Calc, or whatever. But in general, I think tracking is a waste of time. Certainly the lack never did me or anybody I knew any harm.
That is, the degree has to be from a school of education, either at the undergraduate or graduate level.
Er yeah; they have to be taught how to teach...
in some East Coast state (Pennsylvania, I think) you have to have a degree in education (either undergraduate or graduate) to teach in the public schools at all
I know that in Kentucky teachers are required to have a master's degree in education by a fixed number of years after they start teaching, and I think they either have to have a bachelor's in education or some minimum education coursework to begin teaching. But I can't find a clear statement of that online. (And what I can find involves lots of statements about numbers of "semester hours" of graduate coursework required to teach for various numbers of years, which seems like a weird measure, since lots of schools don't use the system of "hours".)
they have to be taught how to teach
Sure, but an entire degree? Other states require certification, but that's generally just a few classes and a student-teaching requirement.
Depends what the degree is: three years is bonkers, but a year long conversion `degree' sounds reasonable.
In the UK you need either an education degree --- fairly common in primary school teachers -- or a post graduate certificate in education, which is more common among high school teachers. The latter is a one year full-time course with a mix of class-room experience and college-based courses. So your average high school English teacher, say, would have a 3 or 4 year undergraduate degree in English plus a 1 year PGCE. You couldn't teach at a state school without an education degree or a PGCE.
Private schools are more lax.
In anecdefense of primary-school teachers, I had a number of intelligent and engaging teachers in preschool and primary school; one of my preschool teachers was in my mom's fairly serious book club, second grade was excellent, and fourth was the sort of teacher who connects individually with every kid in the room. Well done all.
On the other hand, fifth grade---notably, the only time I was in an all-gifted classroom (not in NM that year, teo)---was run by a psycopath, and I was put into private school for kindergarten because the public school district had placed me in the classroom of a woman who taped kids' mouths shut to keep them quiet. Healthy!
Keir, I'm not really seeing how your school didn't use tracks.
Depends what the degree is: three years is bonkers, but a year long conversion `degree' sounds reasonable.
An undergraduate degree would be four years. A graduate Masters in Education is usually two.
In the UK you need either an education degree --- fairly common in primary school teachers -- or a post graduate certificate in education, which is more common among high school teachers. The latter is a one year full-time course with a mix of class-room experience and college-based courses. So your average high school English teacher, say, would have a 3 or 4 year undergraduate degree in English plus a 1 year PGCE. You couldn't teach at a state school without an education degree or a PGCE.
This is basically how it works in most of the US, too, but each state has its own rules. Certification is usually transferable across states; I don't know how the differences between state systems interact with that.
An undergraduate degree would be four years. A graduate Masters in Education is usually two.
That's a bit over the top then.
Keir, I'm not really seeing how your school didn't use tracks.
There was noting stopping anybody who wanted to from doing any subject they wanted, really, and even things like Schol, which were minor parts of curriculum, were open to anyone who'd turn up.
This is opposed to the single sex school on the other side of the Basin, which streamed from the word go based on some very hokey pre-entrance tests.
I think you all are overestimating the importance of reading and education.
In other edumacation news.... (Via Sausagely)
See, all that book learning for what? Wasted t-shirts.
This one time, at band camp, God created the Heavens and the Earth.
172.2: I meant that it seemed like dropping out was one track, and doing Schol (which is what?) was another, and getting by was a third. It's hard for me to imagine that there wasn't some behind-the-scenes sorting of people, even if the boundaries weren't absolute. For us, admission to a given AP class was determined by the teacher, and there were plenty of people who did AP This and honors That. But precious few did AP This and regular That, and I would be surprised if a kid who had taken some AP classes and then tried to sign up for shop didn't have to fight the guidance counselor to be allowed to do it.
I would be surprised if a kid who had taken some AP classes and then tried to sign up for shop didn't have to fight the guidance counselor to be allowed to do it.
Huh. At my school virtually no one did this sort of thing, but I can't imagine it would have been a problem if someone had.
"I was disappointed with the image on the shirt." Melby said. "I don't think evolution should be associated with our school."
Things like this make me get all stabby.
179: Especially since she's described as a teacher in the district. Wonder what she teaches.
"I don't think evolution should be associated with our school."
Don't worry, it isn't.
178: Maybe I exaggerate, but I don't think so. By contrast, they wouldn't object if a kid with AP credit wanted to take a couple of hours of study hall to organize some sort of college-admission-boosting community service project.
[In the UK] Private schools are more lax.
This is how it is in the US, but my understanding was that aside from special fellows, most British independent schools did require the certification. So, there's a Harvard graduate who gets to teach at Eton for a year, and he (and it is by definition always a he) isn't certified. The other difference was that teachers in the independent sector got paid more. In the US they aren't generally required to have education training, but they get paid less.
how brass instruments have evolved in music from the 1960s to modern day
?!
183: I guess my school just wasn't as thoroughly tracked as yours. I suspect the socioeconomic diversity did most of the tracking on its own, without much input from the counselors.
172.2: I meant that it seemed like dropping out was one track, and doing Schol (which is what?) was another, and getting by was a third. It's hard for me to imagine that there wasn't some behind-the-scenes sorting of people, even if the boundaries weren't absolute. For us, admission to a given AP class was determined by the teacher, and there were plenty of people who did AP This and honors That. But precious few did AP This and regular That, and I would be surprised if a kid who had taken some AP classes and then tried to sign up for shop didn't have to fight the guidance counselor to be allowed to do it.
Well, yeah, dropping out was one track. Schol* was a half hour a week after school with the teacher at most, & then an extra exam at the end of the year, which, if you did well, got you some $. But I can't imagine a teacher stopping someone from doing anything, really. Quite a few people only sat one or two Schol exams. And you could do the exams without ever turning up to the `classes'.
* Scholarship.
187: Ah, okay, I see. Withdrawn.
Though I had a really excellent high school biology teacher who was also a fundamentalist and not comfortable with the concept of macroevolution. The class involved no organismal biology at all, though, just biochemistry and cells and genetics, and he was somehow perfectly capable and happy explaining about how bacteria develop antibiotic resistance and that sort of thing. Also very empirically grounded and good at explaining how science works. It's probably the one science class I've ever taken where the lab work seemed worthwhile and really added to the course. So... I don't know. Somehow it can be okay to have a biology teacher with backwards views, if they keep them from affecting their teaching. I'm guessing he was the exception that proves the rule, though.
not comfortable with the concept of macroevolution
This is the key---the stuff it sounds like he did teach can all be lumped under the (made-up) notion of microevolution. Lots of people just draw the line at speciation, and that's such a fuzzy issue with bacteria anyway that the cognitive dissonance is probably tolerable.
I'm guessing he was the exception that proves the rule, though.
Ogged's died for nothing, huh?
One difference is that of course, in NZ and most other non-US countries, it isn't so much which classes you took as what you got in the nationwide end of year exams. Which were, of course, the same for every English/Calc/Stats/etc student in the country, so you had to teach everyone a lot of the same skills.
191: Oh no, I used a stupid cliché? I hang my head in shame.
From the article linked in 174:
While the shirts don't directly violate the district's dress code, Assistant Superintendent Brad Pollitt said complaints by parents made him take action.
"I made the decision to have the band members turn the shirts in after several concerned parents brought the shirts to my attention," Pollitt said.
Pollitt said the district is required by law to remain neutral where religion is concerned.
"If the shirts had said 'Brass Resurrections' and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing," he said.
Wow. I don't think I had quite grasped how fully some people see this as a "two religions" struggle. The funny part is that I have somewhat of the same critique myself of blindly faithful scientists,* but it sure doesn't lead me in that direction.
*I'm not calling them all blind, just a small subset. Ditto religiously observant people and their own subset.
neb has apparently never heard of the old maxim: "All creationists make bad biology teachers, except for that one who taught an entity named essear. No parking on Sundays."
Er yeah; they have to be taught how to teach...
Sounds good in theory, but in this country it sure as hell doesn't appear to actually accomplish anything but protectionism. No one's going off to junior colleges or universities and noticing a drop in instruction quality from the lack of education certificates.
in this country it sure as hell doesn't appear to actually accomplish anything but protectionism
Not true! It also helps to maintain a really impressive level of groupthink.
It's actually "no parking on Sundaes." Because hey lay off my sundae.
No one's going off to junior colleges or universities and noticing a drop in instruction quality from the lack of education certificates.
This goes pretty much completely against my experience, and I thought it was a pretty well known problem with higher ed teaching, viz. it's often done by people with no talent or taste for it?
a pretty well known problem with higher ed teaching, viz. it's often done by people with no talent or taste for it?
There's certainly the conventional wisdom that people who are mainly interested in research make shitty teachers, which is pretty much contrary to my experience, but people repeat it all the time, so it must be true, right? (How 'bout all them commas, neb?)
My experience was that junior college teachers were in that sweet spot of well versed in their field + genuine interest in teaching. University was more hit or miss, with the misses being people who didn't seem interested in teaching, but at least knew what the hell they were talking about. High school and junior high were even more hit and miss because there was "not interested in teaching" with the added variable of "doesn't seem to know shit about the subject at hand".
No one's going off to junior colleges or universities and noticing a drop in instruction quality from the lack of education certificates.
Right, although I'm not certain this has a lot to do with primary and secondary educators, because as far as I can tell they are drawing from two very different labor pools.
IME, though, ed certifications have as near a correlation to random with actual quality of teaching as one could possibly design.
Keir's school, if I'm reading him right (Keir: High?), is renownedly liberal in every sense and I would doubt they did any kind of tracking at all. It would violate their principles. Mine was similar. It'd be hell to schedule even if they wanted to. Other schools definitely do try to rig things up though.
"Scholarship" is an extra exam per subject at the end of year 13, on top of the standard ones. Anybody can enrol in the exams though, and there weren't any separate classes for it. The national exam structure probably does make a big difference in what's viable to do.
Yeah, I was at High, which was ridiculously liberal.
Of course, they also changed the national secondary qualification structure around just before I went through, so there was all sorts of nonsense about that. Not so much at school, but argh if I never saw another stupid story in the Listener I would have been happy.
(Did you go to school in wgtn wispa?)
There's certainly the conventional wisdom that people who are mainly interested in research make shitty teachers, which is pretty much contrary to my experience, but people repeat it all the time, so it must be true, right?
I certainly found the math department at my grad department to be replete with shitty teachers. And some great ones. And no real correlation between the quality of their research, as far as I could tell. But I had a lot more terrible teachers than great ones.
As in, there were teachers there who were generally of the belief that the New Zealand state was not exactly legitimate, especially when it came to arresting people in the Ureweras.
Very good school, but definitely related to the Wellington Central result in the CIR, and a bit of an outlier in much the same way.
202.1: But it seems like it ought to be possible to get them to draw from more of the same pool if the job of secondary teaching could be rejiggered to be more attractive to people who are currently teaching in community colleges. If community college educators are spending a lot of their time remedying the deficiencies students bring from secondary school, wouldn't it make sense to move some of those resources down to the secondary level to try to avoid the problem in the first place?
All right, now I'm curious. To the best of my vague recollection, NZ is a country of about 4 million people, making it 1/3 the size of my state. I also have a general sense that it is not only industrialized and prosperous, but generally low on measures of inequality and high on quality of life.
So I'm sitting here puzzling over 192 -- or rather, trying to imagine if the US *did* have some kind of comprehensive national exit exam. All I can imagine is that it would be like the SAT only worse -- all of our social inequalities writ large, with even more life-altering consequences.
But I'm hampered by not actually knowing anything about NZ. Is there an underclass there the way there is in the US? Is the population starting off from wildly different base levels at the age of 5 or 6, or are things significantly more homogeneous?
Every time we get into one of these cross-national education discussions I go round in circles trying to figure out if I am guilty of American exceptionalism or if we really are just that different in terms of population, history, legislative shackles, funding strictures, political untouchables, labor relations....surely that can't be true, right?
Not so much at school, but argh if I never saw another stupid story in the Listener I would have been happy.
The way I achieved that was to stop reading it at all. It's a shame, but the decline has really shown over the last few years.
I went to a school with a similar ethos in the northern suburbs.
As in, there were teachers there who were generally of the belief that the New Zealand state was not exactly legitimate, especially when it came to arresting people in the Ureweras.
There would be some teachers there with similar views, I imagine, though I was gone before all that happened. Probably a little less on that side of things than yours. The twatty parents sent their kids elsewhere, which made for a pretty big selection bias.
I would be surprised if a kid who had taken some AP classes and then tried to sign up for shop didn't have to fight the guidance counselor to be allowed to do it.
Huh. At my school virtually no one did this sort of thing, but I can't imagine it would have been a problem if someone had.
I essentially did this in high school when I decided to drop out of band and subbed in a cooking class. No questions were asked. In fact, I can't ever remember consulting a guidance counselor about what classes I couldn't take.
Though I had a really excellent high school biology teacher who was also a fundamentalist and not comfortable with the concept of macroevolution.
The best teacher I had in high school was for AP Bio; he too was a fundamentalist and had a problem with evolution. I really admired it when he gathered us* around and talked about his difficulties reconciling his faith with his beliefs as a scientist (he left the next year to get a PhD in virology), and then went ahead and taught us the latest research on evolution notwithstanding his issues. It seemed a particularly grown-up way of dealing with that particular debate to me at the time and I still admire him quite a bit.
*A very small class of about 14, I think. Can I go on a moment about how awesome that class was? Two periods long so we could actually do real experiments! The coolest field trips! And when I had to take the same exact class over again in college because they didn't let you count passing the AP exam (no matter the score) stand in as prerequisite to upper division courses, I got an A without studying because I had learned it all so thoroughly in high school.
At my school, it just wasn't possible for people in academic tracks to take heavy-duty vocational classes like auto shop, because they were held at a different campus, and you had to be gone half the day to take them. I really wanted to learn how to fix a car, but no dice.
211: Huh. As a freshman all of us were required to take this ridiculously named course (which of course I can't remember), that lasted for a semester, where basically we got to choose 3 units from a bunch of different vocational type subjects to try them on for size. Auto was one of mine. Of course, this is also the same school that wouldn't let you graduate if you didn't know how to swim, so perhaps they were very focused on instilling specific skills in their students.
Well, it isn't just the one exam; it's an exam in each subject, and these days it is only worth 2/3 of the total credits. (Although you are sitting national exams from fifth form through seventh form; by the end, you are very very good at exam technique if you pay attention.)
Um, NZ does have a definite underclass: Maori & PI achievement isn't what it should be. But isn't as bad as the US.
NZ's odd because the entrance standards for NZ universities are all the same*; individual courses have different entry requirements, but generally speaking, if you want to go to uni, you need to get UE. (Which is, oh god, literacy & numeracy to level two & at least 14 credits in three or four subjects at level three?) So it isn't like the US where you might have to worry about getting into the uni of your choice.
I don't really know enough about the effects of the exams to comment, but it does supposedly cut down on old boys crap; if you went to Manurewa High School your marks are worth exactly the same as someone's from Auckland Grammar.
I went to a school with a similar ethos in the northern suburbs.
I missed out on the ballot to get in there.
* Because historically there was only one university in New Zealand.
I would be surprised if a kid who had taken some AP classes and then tried to sign up for shop didn't have to fight the guidance counselor to be allowed to do it.
I had to fight to take shop. (I think I've told this before.) I think someone administrative quietly took up my cause and made it happen.
Our tracks were very formalized, because it was an IB program located in the poor, black high school. What a thoughtful way to get some cultural diversity in a school without having to offer additional funding to the poor, black students.
213: Ah, thanks.
* Because historically there was only one university in New Zealand.
Wow. That I had not known.
First a quick overview of high school-level examinations, then Keir can take up the argumentative side: there are nationally-administered exams (NCEA, "National Certificate of Educational Achievement") at the end of years 11, 12, and 13. There are separate exams for each subject, and most students will be taking between four and six. The variation is by year and subjects, since some are fully internally assessed.
There are also internally assessed standards taken during the year, that tend to involve actually doing things (say, speeches or scientific experiments). Those are all lumped in with the results from the exam for that subject.
An exam will usually have three to six "achievement standards" within it, which are separate papers on different subfields. The internal standards are also achievement standards. Those standards are all marked independently of each other and all have a numeric credit value, usually in the range 2-6. Most subjects will have about 24 credits total across the year, about two-thirds in the exam and the rest internal, but that can vary.
The standards for what those cover are set nationally and don't change much, and students can either fail or receive one of three passing performance gradations. Any passing grade awards the credits. Ideally, those standards should be pretty fixed and not expose any particular bias - splitting things into chunks does help with that, I think, but they can't be perfect.
The certificates the system is named after are awarded for getting some number of credits at each level - I think it's 80 across the board. So if you get any 80 credits, you get "NCEA 1", if you get any 80 level 2/year 12/eleventh grade credits you get NCEA Level 2, etc. There's also a literacy and numeracy requirement for at least the level 1 certificate, which you meet with some number of mathematics and English or Māori credits.
There's not a lot of room for fiddling results there, since they're mostly externally assessed and the internal marks have to be cross-marked by teachers at other schools. Some schools do enlist students in more or fewer standards if they expect them to pass or fail, which can be a problem.
Importantly, there is no real pass-fail examination at lower levels than those. The university entrance standard is set across the board too, at some number of level 3 credits. A big benefit of the system, I think, is that results from any school are equivalent, and mostly you wouldn't even know where they came from.
This is long and far too detailed so I'll cut it off here, but I'll also throw out there that I think the decile funding system is marvellous (if imperfect) and helps an enormous amount in leveling the playing field.
In fact, I can't ever remember consulting a guidance counselor about what classes I couldn't take.
Well, no. But the counselors had to sign off on your course selections, so it's not like you would have had to seek them out specially in order to be told no.
Vindication in 214.1! See, I wasn't making this up. Well done Heebie for wanting to take the class, and pushing.
I missed out on the ballot to get in there.
Unfortunate. I was in zone, so it was just my default (that or Newlands). The selection effect does have a really positive effect on the school environment.
* Because historically there was only one university in New Zealand.
Wow. That I had not known.
One university with multiple independently-operating campuses, though; it was a historical anomaly that it survived as technically the one structure for as long as it did. They hadn't had much to do with each other operationally since the twenties at least. The national admissions standard is still around because they're all state-run more so than because of the history. You don't even need to meet any standard at all if you're over twenty.
217.1: Yeah, I don't think my school was as thoroughly tracked as yours. Also, we were hugely overcrowded (3,000 + students on a campus built for (and in some ways, staffed) for 1,500) so we simply didn't meet with our guidance counselors very often unless we requested otherwise.
The other thing is that NZ has a very strong public system; private schools don't have mush prestige vs the best of the public system, and there's not much weight put on which school you went to.
Wow, thanks for the detailed explanation, wispa. That was basically all new to me.
the decile funding system
And I had to Google to understand what this was...then found myself kind of back into the soup because the very first thought that came to mind was: "I absolutely cannot imagine such a system gaining approval here."
My bio teacher was the wife of a firebrand preacher and one of my classmates had already stated openly that she was going to protest if the curriculum included evolution and that Mrs. Adams would surely understand. Mrs. Adams, it turned out, started off the unit on evolution by explaining that she didn't tell her husband what to say in the pulpit and he'd damned well better never tell her what to say in class and that if anyone had a problem with evolution they should bring it up in Sunday School.
I love her to this day.
My elementary school teachers consisted of five engaged and engaging people with really intense passions for specific subjects and a generally evident curiosity and two sadists. The sadists almost outweigh the enthusiasts in my memory.
As to career-ending insults dished out in class, in one of the classes where I was observing and occasionally doing the lesson for a couple of hours a week there was a particular student who just drove me up the wall. One day I was going over their homework from the night before while the regular teacher took a break. As I went over a particular problem at one student's request, The Problem Kid started chatting with a friend in full voice. I snapped my fingers to get his attention and said, "You may have been too busy to notice but I'm helping one of your classmates with her homework so I need you to shut your fucking mouth for five fucking minutes and you can't get me fired for saying that because I don't fucking work here." I got thirty gorgeous little pairs of saucer eyes with that one. He did shut his fucking mouth, though, and for more than five minutes.
When the teacher came back towards the end of class - which had gone swimmingly after that - I saw a student practically walk across her classmates' shoulders to tell the teacher what I'd done. She thanked me after class. "I never smile before Christmas," she said. "They think that if they can make you a friend they can manipulate you. Never let them be your friend." Sooooooo creepy. And true. But also creepy.
The sadists almost outweigh the enthusiasts in my memory.
Huh. I've been toying with the opposite theory, that as long as you get a sufficient handful of good and engaging teachers along the way it doesn't matter too much what happens the rest of the time. (Except for general happiness, social development, etc., and who gives a shit about that?)
I was really throwing that out for Keir to pick up and run with, or explain why it's awful capitalist thuggery, but the summary for those who don't Google it: all (state-funded) schools in the country are divided into deciles of parental income in their area, from ten (highest income) to one.The funding they receive is inversely proportional to that, so schools in poorer areas get more. I think it works out to about three times the money as decile one versus ten.
All the schools are administered by boards elected by the parents (mostly), staff, and students, so they can allocate the money as works best for their particular community. The idea is to let the schools try to make up for some of what the students miss out on at home, and what the school will miss out on in fundraising itself. I do think it works out reasonably well; certainly my decile ten school was coping just fine on the lesser money.
But that would mean spending MY TAX DOLLARS on THOSE PEOPLE!!!!!111!!!
I did mention the drinking, didn't I? That's basically my proudest moment in a classroom. I'm such a terrible person.
opposite theory
Note the "almost" there. I have stronger memories of the good ones than of the bad ones and, relevant to above, the good ones definitely contributed to my love of reading (and writing, even if I'm no good at it).
Dear Robust, I love you specially today.
That decile system sounds like an interesting way to organize funding at a higher level while preserving local control. In the US school funding is generally based either directly on local property taxes or on funding formulas at the state level that distribute the money available more or less equally to each district.
Why is preserving local control a good thing?
But good luck trying to scrap it entirely.
Local control is good because it means that High could be all liberal and co-ed and stuff, while Wellington College got to be all fake-English-public-school.
I generally quite like NZ's education system. It's one of the best remaining parts of the NZ Welfare State. It's one of, if not the, best public system in the world, I think.
It has problems, but I generally think they can be fixed by the application of money.
So, speaking of school, I start grad school tomorrow.
My high school wasn't tracked in theory. For the most part you could take any class that would fit in your schedule and nobody would say anything. The subject closest to having a track was Math that had perquisites for most of the classes so if you wanted to take calc your senior year you would have to do some planning starting your sophomore year to get the correct other classes.
There was definitely some self selection going on though so I tended to have a lot of the same people in my classes especially during junior and senior year when people started taking AP courses.
So, speaking of school, I start grad school tomorrow.
It's like you don't even read this blog.
From a social justice perspective, pretty obviously not. For the sake of nurturing the next generation of possible contributors to some aspect of human knowledge, dunno, maybe.
NOT MAYBE. DEFINITELY.
Why is preserving local control a good thing?
The idea is that policy can be adapted to the specific needs of specific local communities and local governments/school districts will have more room to experiment leading to greater innovation.
The subject closest to having a track was Math that had perquisites
Well, that sounds much nicer than having prerequisites.
perquisites
I somehow managed to misspell that as an actual word that I didn't know.
240 is the first time I've heard the "states as laboratories of democracy" argument trotted out at a municipal level. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another about it, but it says something about how entrenched the notion of local control is around here that I'm not actually sure I've heard anyone justify local control of schools with anything more profound than "LOCAL CONTROL = GOOD!!!!!!"
The idea is that policy can be adapted to the specific needs of specific local communities and local governments/school districts will have more room to experiment leading to greater innovation.
The problem being that specific local communities and local governments/school districts are often very bad at it.
I really don't know what I think about local control. On one hand, schools need a degree of autonomy; too much micromanaging to prevent failure also prevents success. On the other hand, damn but the American people, as represented by their duly-elected local education officials, are a sorry lot to be setting education policy.
THE ESSENCE OF AMERICA IS THE FORMATION OF CIVIL ASSOCIATIONS FOR THE WEARING OF SILLY HATS.
I'm all for "local control" in the sense of not micromanaging schools on a statewide/national level. I'm not so much for it as an excuse for inequitable funding regimes.
244, 246: Hence the appeal of the NZ system.
The idea is that policy can be adapted to the specific needs of specific local communities and local governments/school districts will have more room to experiment leading to greater innovation ban the teaching of evolution.
Fixed.
Don't forget banning the promotion of evolution-related t-shirts. Very important.
249: School-supported evolution-related t-shirts. Individual students are still allowed to wear evolution-related t-shirts, teo. Just like it guarantees in the Constitution.
Oh, those two words were part of the sentence?
I blame it on NY City tennis being too freaking late at night.
I really can't see a single thing wrong with local control of schools. It's not like they set the curriculum. It's also not "school board" in the sense that you seem to use it (so I should have clarified), it's the Board of Trustees for the individual school. Teachers' salaries are centrally paid as well, I think, or at least they have specific tagged funding to individual teachers.
Now, if you want something with actual merited controversy that we have: integrated schools! I manage to be at least slightly in favour of their being able to exist, though I'd prefer that none of them wanted to.
Teo,
Further to your comment on highest state low points, I noticed that this article also had mean elevations for states which is something I'm not sure I have seen before and which surprised me a bit. Specifically, I was surprised a bit that 6 states averaged over 5,000 feet (Colorado highest at 6,800 followed by Wyoming at 6,700). The relative ordering of Arizona at 4,100 ft and Montana at 3,400 (with Oregon close at 3,300) was counter intuitive as well, although understandable on further reflection.
Erm, integrated meaning that they are funded by the state but are allowed to have a `special character', i.e. they can teach religion, not integrated meaning desegregated.
I think I support them, but really, it's all a bit of a kludge isn't it?
(the ones that I think should be taken out back and shot are Christ's and Scots and such.)
Decile funding and meaningful national examinations both sound like things that fall firmly into the category of "not local control" for US-values of "local control."
259: Definitely, which is why the remaining type of local control present in NZ seems much more benign than the kind we have here.
259: The first, most certainly. Exams vary quite a bit by state, but there are New Zealand+ sized chunks (ie. individual states) that do have some consistent exams although I don't know if any of the results are used as described for NZ. Are the NY Regents Exams close?
The map is cool too. It's interesting how many high points are on or near state lines.
257: Also, Washington's mean elevation is barely half of Oregon's? Huh.
262: Right, a lot would depend on how the exams are implemented. I guess people have accepted the SAT/ACT racket as not affecting local control, but those tests generally aren't taught to except in special private courses. The statewide tests I remember taking were all very carefully presented as being unrelated to our classroom activities, though they just might cover knowledge that we picked up there. I guess with NCLB that's changed quite a bit.
I guess people have accepted the SAT/ACT racket as not affecting local control, but those tests generally aren't taught to except in special private courses.
A closer parallel would be AP tests, which are at least intended to have some of the same effects as a system like NZ's.
It's probably the coastal lowlands between the Olympics and the mainland that makes the difference. I guess Oregon has a sort of equivalent coast -- mountain -- interior valley -- mountain west -- east geography, but its interior valley is all above water.
Have I looked at relief maps and such before making this comment? I have not.
But I think the NY Regents Exams are probably the closest thing we've got, at least in theory.
Ah, yes, that kind of integrated. An even more important clarification I should have made. Semi-private schools the state pays to teach the state curriculum, but who own and maintain all their own buildings and can teach other things the rest of the time.
It's definitely a kludge, but I'm still in favour of people who end up in Catholic schools getting an actual education, which is really the point of them.
267: Here's the relief map from the article linked in 257. It looks like you're basically right; the two states have similar layouts overall, but the highland parts of Oregon are much more extensive, as are the lowland parts of Washington.
264: Yeah, Oregon's interior is the Great Basin which is high. a lot more of Washington's is in valleys of the Columbia River and its tributaries and other coastal rivers. A number of really nice mountain peaks in the Washington Cascades (like Mt. Index off of Rte 2 at ~6,000 feet) are lower than the interior elevation of Oregon's eastern plateaus.
263: It's interesting how many high points are on or near state lines.
All of the ones that are basically inclined planes for starters. Plus those that just barely touch a mountain range like South Carolina or Maryland (whose high point is still higher than Pennsylvania).
That's a nice map, though it would have been nicer had they just put the international borders in without changing the brightness for the non-US parts. I thought that eastern Oregon was flatter than the map shows, but the Palouse really doesn't include much of Oregon at all.
Plus those that just barely touch a mountain range like South Carolina or Maryland (whose high point is still higher than Pennsylvania).
And those where the state line follows the ridge of a mountain range. But there are also some that look totally coincidental, like Nevada and California. And Utah.
265: The statewide tests I remember taking were all very carefully presented as being unrelated to our classroom activities
I was amazed (and annoyed) at the number of fricking tests of that sort my kids seemed to have to take. A lot of class time essentially wasted as far as I could tell. I didn't even keep tack, presumably some were related to NCLB.
Wait, the image title on that map suggests it's a topographical map. I thought those had to have the squiggly lines.
DW Meinig's Shaping of America series is supposed to have lots of interesting material on state borders. I can't seem to sit still enough to read it. I keep getting bogged down in the Colonial volume, even though it's all really interesting. I guess I just lack follow-through on my geographical interests.
267: I think it's the Columbia Basin that accounts for most of the difference. I'm just used to thinking of that part of WA as roughly at the same elevation as central OR, but the topo/hypso map shows that it's actually much lower.
Pwned on preview. I knew that eastern OR would be higher overall because of the Wallowas and Blues and Steens &c, but the map is still surprising because I'm used to thinking of that vast stretch east of Bend as essentially flat.
There was no tracking at my American elementary schools, other than some in class stuff by the teachers, who generally seemed quite good, and clearly loved reading. At my European private english language school the only tracking was in math (and French - but in a school with people ranging from just arrived no knowledge to native speakers you had to do that). It was an IB school so the last two years you had the subsid/higher classes but that was self chosen tracking. The French language school I did for a year early on had tracking. I was in the low level which was mostly a mix of a couple non French speakers like me and rich kids who couldn't get into the university track program in the public school system. Earned lots of money that year doing math and physics stuff for the rich kids (the class structure in the school was a lot of upper middle class, a lot of rich, and a few middle class and super rich).
I've generally been quite grateful I didn't go to high school in America. In our school the only school sport than anyone cared about was skiing, and even that was no more socially advantageous than theater or classical music. Plus there was a strong social bias towards being perceived as intelligent, increasingly so as you went up, which made life a lot easier for a nerdy socially inept kid like me. The couple nerdy socially inept and not particularly academically skilled kids were miserable though.
Also, for those thinking that lack of tracking necessarily hurts the gifted kids, think of a school with a strong institutional and parental emphasis on academic achievement. The below average kids get screwed. The teachers place special emphasis on the gifted kids, the averae ones get normal instruction, and the less skilled ones are ignored and left to twiddle their thumbs, bored and frustrated as everyone else moves on. And that was true whether you were the middle class kid of a IO secretary or the zillionnaire with the private chauffeur.
I really can't see a single thing wrong with local control of schools. It's not like they set the curriculum.
So local management to a national curriculum and set of exams? That makes a fair bit of sense, but as noted above it's a long way from what USians think of as local control.
272: The full resolution version is very nice. Also, see here for another series of shaded relief maps (which is what I would call it, but see below).
275.1: Contour maps are the most common "topographic" maps, but the use of the term is broader. Some quantitative display of elevation is essential, I believe, but I don't think there is a precise definition. Imagine the squiggles separating the colors in your mind.
And eb, if you're in Vancouver you should see if the Challenger Relief map is back on display anywhere. It was an 80 by 76 foot topographic map of British Columbia.
Rather belatedly: teo, I hope tomorrow and the years tomorrow begins go well for you. Do the NM public schools proud.
279: So local management to a national curriculum and set of exams?
Pretty much. The curriculum is set nationally, as are the various achievement standards. The school boards of trustees are in charge of what their schools do in other regards. Buildings, internal policies like uniforms, extracurriculars.
The only real curricular control they have is in what subjects to offer at all (some are mandatory, and at primary schools I think they all are) and which standards to submit students for within those. They don't have the authority to, say, ban the teaching of evolution, but they do ensure the school fits in with its community.
282: Yes, remember New Mexico has the highest state capital by far (7200 ft., ruthlessly pwning Cheyenne and Denver), so you have a lot to live up to.
PA is unbelievable. I don't know if your specific claim is true, but what I've seen up close is sufficient to convince me that a frightening percentage of the energy in the system is concentrated on protectionism.
The concept "public school teacher" is so resented around here, what with them being the only people who have ever gone on strike in most Pennsylvania counties since about 1960, that I can only imagine they feel a need to double down on protecting their status for fear of nebulous populist backlashes.
281: Apparently it, or its "elements" unassembled, is in storage at the airport, searching for a new home.
The map linked in (the Wikipedia article linked in) 257 was apparently generated by open-source cartography software. Fascinating. I'd like to hope that that kind of thing won't put, say, Raven out of business, but I can't see how people have much use for 20-year-old cartographic technology any more.
The idea is that policy can be adapted to the specific needs of specific local communities and local governments/school districts will have more room to experiment leading to greater innovation.
The problem being that specific local communities and local governments/school districts are often very bad at it.
The "innovation" justification is often used to explain local control, but I think the real reason is that locals want to have control over what their children are learning. And I tend to sympathize with that desire.
The real problem is, of course, money. Rich neighborhoods = rich, successful public schools. Where I'm from, the only option for non-public schools are catholic schools, and they tend to have worse academics than the public schools. But that is because most of the population is college-educated and middle-class.
The curriculum is set nationally, as are the various achievement standards. The school boards of trustees are in charge of what their schools do in other regards. Buildings, internal policies like uniforms, extracurriculars.
I hadn't grasped that these were school-specific boards of trustees. Here (at least in my state) the model is district-wide, which often encompasses a dozen schools.
Just for kicks, here is a not-untypical local-control complaint from a citizen in my state. (It comes from a newspaper comments section on an unrelated story.) I know very little about this particular district, so I take no position on its truth or falsity, but it's certainly indicative of the tangles that tend to come up:
Maybe [the reporter] should look into the shenanigans of the Owen J Roberts school board in Chester Co. Five members (4 of whom lost in the last primary) have virtually made it a dictatorship. At the end of a regular meeting, with no knowledge by the other four members, the five fired the superintendent "because they could." No other reason. Hundreds of citizens came to the next several meetinga sking for her to be reinstated. The five heard nothing and acted like the taxpayers have no right. They did say they were going to save the district money. No one could figure how since they owed the fired super a year's salary and the next one they selected would have cost them more than that. He, at least, had the presence of mind to resign before even getting started. Now the board, always by 5-4 votes, are looking for another super instead of letting the vice-superintendent do the job until the new board comes in after November. [...] It's one thing to be paid to do a job and have these hassles, but another when you are a volunteer.
Gah, 289 was me.
And the Catholic schools thing is interesting too, because where I grew up the paradigm was that the academics were decidedly better than the local public schools, although not to the level of the pricey private schools.
Even as a kid, though, I used to roll my eyes at the "This School is Saving Taxpayers $_____ Per Year" signs they would put up. It requires quite a suspension of disbelief to think that per-pupil funding is mostly the result of an allocation by number of students rather than primarily a slicing of a finite pie.
I am certain that Witt was the kid who was relatively quiet, but rolled her eyes regularly.
My ex is convinced that we should send our son to the local Catholic (military) boys high school. The academics are about equal, but the class size is smaller.
Since they regularly talk trash about my son's relative, I am not convinced that it is the place for him.
The word 'military' would be a deal killer for me.*
* well, the word 'Catholic' would, too, but the word 'military' would cause a more immediate reaction.
291: It's like you were there, Will.
Regarding your son's school, I was going to half-seriously suggest a quick re-read of Catcher in the Rye, but on second thought it seems like a general clash of worldview between you and your ex. Seems to me you have every reason to believe he's going to get an earful of ugly ways to describe his family member. I gather she doesn't agree, or doesn't think that should be determinative?
I have a pretty amazing son. He has heard (and seen graphic depictions) everything nasty that one would ever want to hear about one's relative so I am not overly worried about that. Concerned slightly.
The school is very Catholic-lite and military-lite.
It is two minutes from my house, has small class sizes, and a couple other advantages over the school at his mom's house. Since we share custody, he could go to either his mom's district or mine, but I live in the city and the city high schools are pretty bad. Thus, this school has existed as another option. I am fairly anit-private school, but this one is relatively racially diverse and has some advantages.
I just need to do a lot more investigating.
Sorry I missed a whole bunch, but I just want to clarify something about "tracking":
My understanding is that, as a general rule, education in Europe is (or has been) rigorously tracked, with actual different schools for kids that are chosen more-or-less for them at the end of primary (e.g., Gymnasium, Hochschule). So that's one kind of tracking.
That's pretty rare in the States, partly because a lot of districts only have a single HS anyway. There is sometimes vo-tech (vocational-technical) for kids who want to be mechanics or hairdressers, who get minimal academics and get trained in their field, but otherwise everyone's in the same building, and the "tracks" consist of what classes you choose to take. The biggest difference, near as I can tell, is how rigorous/assholish the school is about access to the honors/AP courses - my HS GF's school treated AP courses as some sort of precious resource, with the result that my HS, identical in size, had like 4X the number of AP English students. I suppose that's sort of like what GB describes, with guidance counselors wielding outsize influence over the students' lives. In my school, I took honors /AP all the way through, but I also took wood shop, mechanical drawing, and architectural drawing*, classes that were full of stoner metalheads ("sweats") and vo-tech types. No one ever said boo about it.
This is why I don't think of tracking as some sort of insidious enforcement of privilege or whatever. In my HS, you could get as much education as you wanted/needed - I was well-prepared for Carnegie Mellon, my locker partner was well-prepared for the merchant marine. I don't see how putting us in the same math classes would have benefitted anyone (I might add that I know for a fact that some of the B-level courses, 2 steps below honors, had fine teachers, and certainly some of my honors teachers sucked; I recognize that's less likely to be true where the lower level students go beyond disinterested to disruptive and even violent).
* Yes, I know, I'm an architect, but the classes were training for draftsmen
I went to a high school where the east Asian ethnicities were easily a majority. Whites the next largest group, and some Hispanics. Very few black students. Mid and lower level classes were chock full of whitey.
289. Individual examples, however horrific, aren't arguments for or against local control of schools. There are always idiots who abuse elected positions, and the only recourse is not to elect them in the first place or de-elect them if they're already in place.
School board members fire a supervisor "because they can"; governments invade middle eastern countries for much the same reason. They're an occupational hazard of democracy.
I hadn't grasped that these were school-specific boards of trustees. Here (at least in my state) the model is district-wide, which often encompasses a dozen schools.
There's nothing like that. Individual schools are run their own board and supervised by the Ministry of Education nationally, but it's not an active role unless there's something wrong. The ERO sends inspectors around every three years or so, who wander around for a week looking at things, but nothing much else unless somebody reports a problem. So they're largely self-run.
