Generally, you just add 6 to the grade year for the age the kid will turn that year. redfox and I once had a mutually baffled conversation where I was saying, "Well, you add 6 for the age of the student." "No, you add 5." "6." "5." and so on. All was revealed once it came out that my birthday is in January and hers toward the end of summer.
Maybe heebie's friend needs to spend some time in a country where large swaths of the population haven't any schooling past 6th grade. Of course kids don't want to go to school. Teenagers are idiots and don't want to do a lot of things. Too fucking bad.
7th is too early. Make it 9th. 15-16 is the break point in many countries.
The promotion of small independent business may be the key. A place for guilds, crafts, apprenticeships. But no nation is doing well on this.
Of course I am thinking of, for instance, the dual system in Japan, but there will be costs and downsides to providing a place for transient and precariat labor.
Thoroughly deal with barriers to re-entry into the educational system. First, logistically -.... Second, financially
There's a third set of barriers to school reentry, centered around culture and habits. I'm not sure what the best name for this is, but I definitely see it in my returning students. For some students returning to school comes naturally. Women generally do it better than men. People who were in the military, men or women, transition very naturally to school.
Older men with no military or previous college background, on the other hand, are frequently just lost in school. I'm not exactly sure what they need. Maybe its all in their attitude--if they felt more comfortable they would do better. Maybe there are some specific habits or skills they need. I had a student with 20 years on the police force who simply couldn't figure out how to write a college essay. "I write reports at work every day," he said, "I can't figure out why I can't do this."
Decreasing the amount of mandatory secondary schooling will almost certainly increase these cultural-habitual barriers to school re-entry. That alone I think makes it a very bad idea.
"The upper class keeps moving the goal posts" is one interpretation; "standards get lowered so adults can keep the teaching/administration jobs that they aren't doing very well" is another.
Maybe heebie's friend needs to spend some time in a country where large swaths of the population haven't any schooling past 6th grade. Of course kids don't want to go to school. Teenagers are idiots and don't want to do a lot of things. Too fucking bad.
This makes my point much more succinctly.
the American upper class is masterfully brilliant at sabotaging any effort to level the playing field
I'm confused by this. Who are these people? Are they gleefully lurking around every corner waiting to laugh at the students too?
In any system where you have a large group of applicants there needs to be a way to separate the group into levels. In law school there was the general population, the people with grades in the top 20%, people with law review, and people with moot court. When the economy is really bad law firms want people in the top 20% with law review and moot court. It's not a conspiracy, it's a method for hiring.
Are they gleefully lurking around every corner waiting to laugh at the students too?
Yes.
Also, it will very rarely make any economic sense to delay schooling. What's going to maximise your earnings: working from age 12 to 18 with a sixth-grade educational background, then going back to school from 18 to 24 - or staying at school until you're 18 and then getting a proper job?
And let's be clear; this won't lead so much to children making their own decisions about whether to go to school, but to parents pressuring their children into attending, or pressuring them to drop out.
Which sorts of students would be taken out of school at age 12 by their parents? Do we really want to institute a policy which would have the effect of making these students even less well educated?
What do you do with miserable, unhappy teenagers who will oppose anything and everything that gets them off the couch?
The traditional solution? Childhood ends around 7-10, and after that it's off to work, in the fields or the factories. Don't want to work? Starvation is free.
But really it depends on what class you belong to. I guess that's really the problem your friend is pointing to with universal education, though, right? Schooling was originally just for the right sorts of people, to make them into the next generation of masters. Naturally that isn't going to work when you let in just anybody.
So yes, this is the price of trying to educate everyone. But what the heck, the gilded age is back; why not dive still deeper into the miserable swamp of history?
I'm confused by this. Who are these people? Are they gleefully lurking around every corner waiting to laugh at the students too?
She has very specific examples of this. That the teachers/administration/parents in a given school district will routinely, predictably, outmaneuver any well-intentioned policy designed to level the playing field. Off the cuff, she rattled off a half-dozen different ways that schools beat standardized testing. That standardized testing was originally introduced in order to get schools to quit ignoring the bottom third of their students.
"Ok, fine. We'll pressure them to drop out." So policy-makers mandate that you report drop out rates. "Ok fine. We'll shuffle them off to special ed classes." So policy-makers limit the number of students that may opt-out of standardized testing. "Ok, fine. We'll focus intensely on teaching test-taking skills to the kids who are borderline on the test, rather than dealing with the bottom third." Etc.
(I was left feeling like she could recite this kind of example until she was blue in the face.)
I guess that's really the problem your friend is pointing to with universal education, though, right?
Actually, she's not an asshole.
7: Though to be fair, the standard college essay, modeled as a kind of training-wheels version of the academic journal article, is a strange thing. It's not clear to me that it's the best vehicle for teaching writing or critical analysis. Not that surprising that returning students struggle with it. (No, I don't have a better general purpose replacement in mind.)
I would still be amazed if it were the case that the bottom third does not derive any benefit at all from spending an extra six years in school.
What do you do with miserable, unhappy teenagers who will oppose anything and everything that gets them off the couch?
King's Letter Boys?
("Seventeen? Too old, Mr Hornblower! You must start at twelve if you want to be a proper seaman.")
Also, it will very rarely make any economic sense to delay schooling. What's going to maximise your earnings: working from age 12 to 18 with a sixth-grade educational background, then going back to school from 18 to 24 - or staying at school until you're 18 and then getting a proper job?
But those choices are being posed within a world of mandatory eduction. If you worked in childcare from ages 12-15, then went back and finished up your schooling by age 18, you'd be just fine.
Currently kids drop out at age 16 all the time. There is no requirement to graduate high school
Although, now I think about it, mandatory education while aboard ship was part of the deal for Mr Hornblower and his fellow midshipmen, so that's not really a solution.
18: but you're still trading three years on the sort of wages a teenage childcare worker gets for three years on the sort of wages that a fully educated adult gets.
I didn't think her answers to your questions were particularly responsive. That the status quo isn't perfect (or even close) doesn't mean it should be abandoned for a system that's even less likely to achieve the goals you mentioned in your questions.
Designing an education system that serves both the best 20% and the worst 20% is very difficult. I hate our system, and am counting down the last 7 days I have to deal with it directly. But I haven't heard any solutions that seem to me to be likely to produce better outcomes at both ends.
15: Ok, fair enough. Though the proposal does have a distinct devil-take-the-hindmost vibe.
To be more constructive, it's worth separating motivational and classroom management issues (the kids don't want to learn and they're unruly pains) from goalpost-moving (a BA is now required for jobs that used to only need a high school diploma) and from standards-gaming (administrators are highly motivated to get around bogus testing requirements). Those are all problems, but they're separate problems, and it's not clear that making schooling "voluntary" will help with any of them--except the first, by leaving teachers with only the clever, polite, motivated students of relatively well-off parents.
I would still be amazed if it were the case that the bottom third does not derive any benefit at all from spending an extra six years in school.
I can't imagine that being treated like a prisoner, who is at the bottom-of-the-barrel and is despised by all authority figures for six years does not significantly harm the bottom third.
Compared to being given some responsibility and freedom to pick how to spend your time productively?
Actually, she's not an asshole.
She's just dumb like a fox in socks trying to open up a big can of dinner.
23: Because a 12-year-old school leaver certainly won't be at the bottom of the barrel in the workplace?
22: I agree that it's a bogus to imagine that the second problem - the moving goalposts of employment - would reverse itself if mandatory schooling were removed.
We would not see meaningful employment opportunities created for the bottom third of students. I do think those could be created, though. Childcare, nursing homes, small-scale farms, etc. (The problem would be to keep this extremely well-supervised and regulated, because it's an easily exploited population.)
Compared to being given some responsibility and freedom to pick how to spend your time productively
And a pony. They can grow up to be cowboys!
Her answer was that we're not achieving either of those right now.
No, but that doesn't mean making it optional couldn't undo a lot of the gains we've made in the past 100 years.
If there were a lot of vocational options and primary education were very efficient at teaching literacy and numeracy, I could imagine making 10th grade and up optional - that is still the case in Japan.
In the past generation, "let's replace our longstanding social-welfare-promoting system with various other novel programs" has pretty much always been a bait-and-switch.
25: There's a difference between having the least responsibility in a workplace and being thoroughly despised by your teachers.
What ajay said. This is the kind of thing I hear proposed by people who don't actually deal with the bottom third of 13 year olds and their parents.
re: 21.last
Which I why I think [see education threads passim] that it tends to make sense to concentrate on the bottom 20% and the let top 20% fend for itself.
22.last is good.
by leaving teachers with only the clever, polite, motivated students of relatively well-off parents
And I don't even think it would work for that purpose. The lazy, rude, and unmotivated kids of well-off parents would mostly stay in school too.
In the past generation, "let's replace our longstanding social-welfare-promoting system with various other novel programs" has pretty much always been a bait-and-switch.
Sure. This is so far from implementable on any level. It would be eaten alive by Republicans and used to fuck over the bottom third. This is just a pure idealistic conversation about how do you create a system from 12-18 year olds that doesn't merely warehouse the bottom third as prisoners.
This is the kind of thing I hear proposed by people who don't actually deal with the bottom third of 13 year olds and their parents.
She actually spent many years teaching geometry to 13 year olds in the public school system.
29 -- Teachers who "despise" their students need to find another line of work. It's a hard job. Work in childcare, elder care, or on a small scale farm if you don't want to do it.
31 -- Letting the top 20% fend for itself isn't realistic. Ignoring them means your reform proposal will fail.
We would not see meaningful employment opportunities created for the bottom third of students. I do think those could be created, though. Childcare, nursing homes, small-scale farms, etc.
Obviously 12.last wasn't explicit enough: countries without mandatory secondary education serve as a pretty good natural experiment here, and what happens is that the daughters of the poor get the minimum necessary education and then get taken out of school in order to help look after the house and/or their siblings. Which implies another obvious source of employment for these people: domestic service. Pay would be low because they'd still be living at home, and their skills would be low as well. All you'd have to pay them is slightly more than what they'd get for being in school.
It may be the case that the US is currently suffering serious problems as a result of a lack of available semiliterate 14-year-old kitchen maids, but that's not the impression I had.
Teachers who "despise" their students need to find another line of work. It's a hard job.
All teachers despise some of their students.
Also, I think you're underestimating how unpleasant the classroom becomes when a critical mass of students are there against their will.
What if we, as a nation, run out of people who don't despise everybody else? That seems to be the endpoint of current trends.
...a BA is now required for jobs that used to only need a high school diploma....
I'd be terribly happy if the Internet serpent shed this and other shibboleths like "journalists used to be rough-and-tumble blue-collar types who drank with cops" like so many dead scales.
countries without mandatory secondary education serve as a pretty good natural experiment here, and what happens is that the daughters of the poor get the minimum necessary education and then get taken out of school in order to help look after the house and/or their siblings.
Right. This is why financial incentive was built into #2: pay people at least minimum wage to stay in school, so that it's financially viable for them to forgo a job.
34: maybe it would be better to have a streamed school system? If you try to handle everyone with the same system, you're going to neglect the top or the bottom. Is there a good argument against this, as long as the bottom set aren't underfunded?
26: So it's a choice between finding ways to get disadvantaged, disaffected, and frankly often unpleasant students to be more invested and engaged for a few years versus finding or, more likely, creating a chunk of the economy where they can carve out a living? And this latter proposal involves "small-scale farms" (of which there are none) or letting them be our babysitters and elder-care workers. Because everyone trusts uneducated youths with demonstrated poor foresight and impulse control in those jobs.
For my money, I'd rather face up to the first set of challenges than turn these kids into the trash at the bottom of the employment barrel.
As I understand it, Japan and Germany both have a well developed vocational track, with separate schools starting for HS age students. Of course, they also have domestic manufacturing jobs to send those kids to.
One problem with the Yglesias "we can all teach each other yoga" economy is that a lot of people really aren't suited to be yoga teachers.
re: 36.last
As per lots of other threads, I don't literally mean fending for themselves in some sort of 'out on the streets in the cold, will work for algebra lessons' sense. It's nothing more dramatic than making sure greater resources are directed at the point of greatest need, and really bright-people and/or people with lots of economic and social capital aren't the point of greatest need.
At this point the usual response is, 'well that's politically impossible'. Which may well be true of course, but only in a 'it's hard to do good things when a lot of people are arseholes' sense.
42: This is a hard conversation to have, because "What, ideally, is the best system" conflicts with "What is the system that will be hardest for people who want to screw poor kids over to manipulate to that end?" A tracked system probably has an awful lot to be said for it, but I immediately think of it as something that's going to be used to keep poor kids uneducated.
40: Yeah, fair enough--not endorsing the truth of the claim, just distinguishing it from the others in the bundle.
re: 46
As per previous threads, it sort of works in other countries. Imperfectly of course, but it's not totally ineffective.
Another important consideration is you absolutely have to discourage people from thinking of their children as a source of family income, rather than someone they need to develop into an independent adult. When that catches on as a norm, it's self-perpetuating, like in India, where they haven't even banned child labor across the board.
Alternative education tracks, or just better education, would make more sense at a macro level.
So it's a choice between finding ways to get disadvantaged, disaffected, and frankly often unpleasant students to be more invested and engaged for a few years versus finding or, more likely, creating a chunk of the economy where they can carve out a living? And this latter proposal involves "small-scale farms" (of which there are none) or letting them be our babysitters and elder-care workers. Because everyone trusts uneducated youths with demonstrated poor foresight and impulse control in those jobs.
It would take something on scale with the current public education system, to be sure. A gigantic government program giving these kids entirely different ways to structure their day.
I mean, middle school is an unmitigated disaster on the Lord of the Flies scale. For everyone. If I could have played with babies one day a week? Or worked in the garden attached to the middle school? Abso-fucking-lutely. Let kids burn off all that energy being physically active.
41: fine. So you have a population of semiliterate kitchen maids being paid just slightly more than what they would get in school.
Oh, and you need to be prepared to pay minimum wage or better to 24 million teenagers. A thousand hours a year average schooling, times 24 million, times $7.25 an hour - $174 billion a year. More than the current budget for Medicare, Medicaid and the Department of Education combined.
Though I suppose if the plan is for the bottom third to all drop out and become kitchen maids, you can reduce that cost by 33%.
I mean, middle school is an unmitigated disaster on the Lord of the Flies scale. For everyone.
No, you're exaggerating. It's an unpleasant experience for most kids, and horrible especially for low-SES, but that doesn't mean it's a failure from a societal standpoint.
45: Hey, if you want to be enraged, try this, from Laura McKenna (usually of 11D, but guestposting for McMegan). I was pissed off, but I figure you'll be spitting nails.
This is a hard conversation to have, because "What, ideally, is the best system" conflicts with "What is the system that will be hardest for people who want to screw poor kids over to manipulate to that end?"
Thanks for making this distinction. I am definitely not trying to tackle the second question. Mandatory schooling is best for the actual world we're in, May 22, 2012.
Nevertheless, mandatory education has negative consequences. Good policies still have bad consequences. I'm just trying to explore those, and shifting into the first quesiton.
She actually spent many years teaching geometry to 13 year olds in the public school system.
If she's not ignorant then she's kind of an idiot on this topic. Granted, geometry would probably be one of the harder things to engage these kids on but yes, even the bottom third can be engaged on educational topics. IME even the most jaded 13 year old will pay attention to "we've talked about parasites, now let's watch this video of a bot fly being pulled out of someone's neck".
All teachers despise some of their students.
IME lots of teachers have the same problem a lot of cops have. Their disdain is all too obvious.
Of course, at least part of the reason some kids do not want to be there is that a lot of what is going on there is training kids to take standardized tests. Rory's class spent like two solid weeks doing test-prep before the past round of standardized testing, plus the week of testing itself, plus the endless string of assignments that are clearly designed to make sure she and her cohort kick the ass of the ACT/SAT when their time comes... Making school voluntary probably serves the same goal of making the school/school district's test scores prettier. Which is a game I don't really favor playing.
I mean, middle school is an unmitigated disaster on the Lord of the Flies scale. For everyone.
Not the school I went to, and not the school Sally's going to.
45 -- You're going to need the parents of the top 20% to be more than merely tolerant of the choices your public school administration is making. I find, though, that the candor of 34 has sapped my interest in the topic for the day. See you on the next education thread (hopefully more than 7 school days hence.)
Remember, from the point of view of most of the kids, Lord of the Flies was a success. As long as Sally isn't fat and doesn't have ass-mar, she'll be OK.
Gswift, I know a lot of public high school teachers. I don't think the answer is that they're universally ill-suited to their jobs.
I'm not a big fan of mandatory education, hierarchical education or state-sponsored education. All of them tend to wind up creating teachers-as-prison-guards, and los olvidados.
The experiment in place in many US states right now is kinda the worst of both worlds: Pull the middle and upper tranches of students out of the worst, most underfunded public schools and stick them in corrupt, unsupervised, deunionized charter schools where they get a little extra carrot of elective classes to balance the stick of conforming to test score expectations or being booted.
This leaves the bottom third (or bottom fifth, more often) warehoused in the worst of the worst schools, which have no money and can attract only the most idealistic teachers, who burn out quickly, or burnouts who are just marking time till retirement.
That bottom tranche is pretty fucked any way you look at it.
I wonder if the "keep 'em in school at any price" folx have an idea of what it is like to be a street-smart and book-dumb 16 year old who fails every test and homework assignment? How does that improve people's economic prospects, exactly?
57: What makes those different?
62: What made your middle school experience unmitigated Lord of the Flies disaster?
44: One problem with the Yglesias "we can all teach each other yoga" economy is that a lot of people really aren't suited to be yoga teachers.
I've been thinking, recently, that I might be ideally suited to being someone who sells bored rich ladies $80 yoga mats.
I liked middle school, possibly because I was with the same people I went to grade school with. It was just more of the same except that we had access to vending machines and there were no more grades for penmanship.
63: I was bored and staring at the clock in most of my classes and despised my classmates but simultaneously wanted them to like me, and ended up spending an ungodly amount of time contemplating the concept of popularity and pining for summer camp, where I was liked.
Not quite Lord of the Flies, but I think you could have condensed everything I learned into an intense two weeks.
I've joked in the past about farm labor being the only option for middle-schoolers...
The main worry I'd have about non-mandatory schooling is that we'd be permitting and encouraging dropouts at an age where they can't really see the long-term consequences of the decision. I teach a lot of non-trad college students, and when they break down in my office crying, and many of them do, 90% of the time it's because they made a series of decisions when they were eighteen or nineteen that limited their options for the next decade. (Here, forgoing education because they married at nineteen is the big one.) Tacitly approving of that decision at age twelve is going to push a lot of people to make choices that really are going to shape the rest of their lives before they have any idea of what they want or need.
I've joked in the past about farm labor being the only option for middle-schoolers...
The main worry I'd have about non-mandatory schooling is that we'd be permitting and encouraging dropouts at an age where they can't really see the long-term consequences of the decision. I teach a lot of non-trad college students, and when they break down in my office crying, and many of them do, 90% of the time it's because they made a series of decisions when they were eighteen or nineteen that limited their options for the next decade. (Here, forgoing education because they married at nineteen is the big one.) Tacitly approving of that decision at age twelve is going to push a lot of people to make choices that really are going to shape the rest of their lives before they have any idea of what they want or need.
Middle school for Rory isn't quite Lord of the Flies. Mostly, it's pretty great because she is really engaged in the music program and for the most part has a solid, grounded group of friends. The painful part has been the intensity of the pressure to achieve, some self-imposed, some pushed by the school, some probably the fault of her parents. That latter part is kind of Lord of the Flies-y, and from talking to at least one mom of a high school kid, it's going to take a ton of pushing back to keep it from getting worse
Middle school for Rory isn't quite Lord of the Flies. Mostly, it's pretty great because she is really engaged in the music program and for the most part has a solid, grounded group of friends. The painful part has been the intensity of the pressure to achieve, some self-imposed, some pushed by the school, some probably the fault of her parents. That latter part is kind of Lord of the Flies-y, and from talking to at least one mom of a high school kid, it's going to take a ton of pushing back to keep it from getting worse
The main worry I'd have about non-mandatory schooling is that we'd be permitting and encouraging dropouts at an age where they can't really see the long-term consequences of the decision.
This is very, very real. But it would be great if there was a meaningful path back into education - logistically, financially, and stigma-free - later on. (And a pony. But this whole conversation is about ponies.)
I wonder if the "keep 'em in school at any price" folx have an idea of what it is like to be a street-smart and book-dumb 16 year old who fails every test and homework assignment? How does that improve people's economic prospects, exactly?
I'm glad Minne showed up. I find it exhausting to be the only one defending an idea here.
US schools always sound utterly inhuman when described by Unfoggeders. I don't really recognise the description of the social experience of school that people give.
59: It's really hard to tell, and I do think about it. Sally's a big strong witty athletic pretty academically successful kid (she's not perfect. Untidy, ill-groomed, she gets zits, and while she's not as introverted as I am, she's not the sort of extreme extrovert who ends up running things socially) so she'd be fine even in a Lord of the Flies kind of situation. But from interacting with her friends and listening to her talk about school, I think it's a very gentle place -- the neighbor kid who is if not somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum, at least the sort of odd kid who invites that kind of lay diagnosis, is, while still odd, cheerful and happy there.
I work hard on not despising any of my students. It takes effort, but you can do it if you realize that it is part of your job. Far too many of my colleagues do not realize its part of their job, though.
A lot of jobs can put you in an adversarial relationship with the people you are supposed to be serving. Gswift's example of police work is the most extreme. In general, you have to overcome that.
Per 34 and 71, I guess I don't know how to answer the question anymore, since there's no "universal pony". There are lots of good solutions to the problem of how to organize education, work, and the transition from one to the other in a way that respects the normal human developmental trajectory and makes room for exceptions based on individual ability, interests, etc. Which one is best turns on the fine historical, sociological, political, and economic details. But it's not a well-defined optimization problem.
Anyway, since this looks like it's now the thread for middle-school memories, I should probably get out before the flashbacks start.
I'll come back and talk more, but this program would also need to build in some kind of support for babies these working kids would have.
Oh, and I'm glad LB posted the link to Laura/McMegan's post. I'd read it this morning and have been fuming.
Mara's student teachers are all working on Associate's Degrees and have been absolutely fantastic. I would have had a harder time feeling comfortable with self-selecting 12-year-olds doing that job.
Which is to say, "I'll babysit/mother for five years, and pick right back up where I left off" doesn't work all that well now, sometimes.
US schools always sound utterly inhuman when described by Unfoggeders.
We are a bitter lot all around, and it is easy to focus all of our anger at American society on the institution where we first encountered it.
Also, there is only so much a school can do to compensate for the fact that puberty is painful and awkward.
I work hard on not despising any of my students. It takes effort, but you can do it if you realize that it is part of your job. Far too many of my colleagues do not realize its part of their job, though.
And your students are there voluntarily. I'd argue that involuntary situations are a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
My kid's high school does community service one day a week. Every Tuesday they go someplace and work. They've done the food bank, the science museum, a day care center . . . I think they talked about a farm, but couldn't make that one work yet. I think it would be wonderful if every kid had that option. It's great for the kids, they get interesting insight into the world outside of school, they usually enjoy the community service days, they experience different work places, and I think it's pretty safe to say that none of them would choose to drop out of school and do five days a week of work, having really experienced it. But I don't know how you'd make it work on a large-scale.
That said, school is voluntary for kids older than sixteen and in some places the drop-out rates are probably much higher than most of us are aware of. In Florida, I think it's about 20%. One of the ways my county keeps its positive NCLB rating is by shunting kids into alternative schools before letting them drop out so the real rates might be even higher.
Which is to say, "I'll babysit/mother for five years, and pick right back up where I left off" doesn't work all that well now, sometimes.
It seems to work better than "I'll work in the stamping plant until it closes, then pick up school where I left off." I'm not entirely sure why.
Mandatory education should not be the same thing as mandatory schooling. If kids hate classrooms and are disruptive, there ought to be a means of providing a different learning environment. Being forced to sit at a desk for six hours a day for years on end is perhaps not the best way for every child to learn.
That said, school is voluntary for kids older than sixteen and in some places the drop-out rates are probably much higher than most of us are aware of. In Florida, I think it's about 20%. One of the ways my county keeps its positive NCLB rating is by shunting kids into alternative schools before letting them drop out so the real rates might be even higher.
Exactly. There's not a lot of acknowledgment in this thread for how dreadfully we're already failing these students.
I'll come back and talk more, but this program would also need to build in some kind of support for babies these working kids would have.
Absolutely.
what it is like to be a street-smart and book-dumb 16 year old who fails every test and homework assignment?
What does street-smart actually mean, in this context?
Exactly. There's not a lot of acknowledgment in this thread for how dreadfully we're already failing these students.
I'm pretty sure everyone's aware of current shortcomings. What we're disputing is that letting a bunch of 12 and 13 year olds voluntarily drop out would result in some kind of improvement.
86: Looks both ways and then crosses.
I'm acknowledging it, but I don't see that pushing the decision point back earlier (and making it a choice sanctioned by society) helps.
82: I think it's more acceptable to think of intensive motherhood as having an ending point once the kids are in school all day. The young men are having to decide to give up a job, IME, or to cut back on hours, to try to go to school. The young women are looking for something to do now that one task is complete. There isn't the equivalent of the stamping job or the roughneck job for the young woman.
I'm acknowledging it, but I don't see that pushing the decision point back earlier (and making it a choice sanctioned by society) helps.
82: I think it's more acceptable to think of intensive motherhood as having an ending point once the kids are in school all day. The young men are having to decide to give up a job, IME, or to cut back on hours, to try to go to school. The young women are looking for something to do now that one task is complete. There isn't the equivalent of the stamping job or the roughneck job for the young woman.
My 7th grade(1st year of Junior High School -- what is this "middle school" you speak of?) was the year of Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, mood rings, and pet rocks. The teachers were all youngish, and a few of them seemed mostly concerned that we would think they were cool. Some kids probably learned a lot about social hierarchies and the art of making out, but that was about it for education that year.
but this program would also need to build in some kind of support for babies these working kids would have.
There's a selling point, "who wants to see more barely literate teenage parents?"
What we're disputing is that letting a bunch of 12 and 13 year olds voluntarily drop out would result in some kind of improvement.
Are you complacent with the current system?
A problem (and this is obvious with tracking/remedial education/what do you do with that street-smart but book-dumb kid is the relationship between kids who are academically behind and kids who are interpersonally difficult or disengaged from school somehow. Any kid who's bright enough to qualify as 'street smart' is perfectly capable of catching up to the sort of solid literacy and numeracy they need to get out of high school with, so long as they're being taught at an appropriate academic level.
But tracking those kids so that you've got a classful to teach on the same appropriate level means that you've concentrated the interpersonal difficulties into a single classroom, and that seems likely to me to make it prohibitively hard to get anywhere teaching them. I don't know what to do other than gold-plated remedial classes, with ridiculously high teacher/student ratios. But of course that's going to be politically implausible to fund, and I don't even know if it would work.
I guess the main thing for me is this idea that dropping out at 12 vs 16 is some kind of immediate and 100% guaranteed way to sabotage the lives of the people who would do it. The thing is, those lives have by and large already BEEN sabotaged. We're not talking, I think, about the average 'fogger here, who might have been tempted to drop out early, but ultimately came from a background where that was severely deprecated and so stuck with it. We're talking about the urban underclass. There's already a pretty explicit understanding, as evidenced by the proliferation of alternative high schools, that it takes a lot to keep folx in that bracket in school and engaged all the way to graduation. If we're talking about reforms that could happen and might actually work, creating more alternative high schools (and alternative Jr. Highs) would probably be the option that would work for the most people.
Still don't have time to talk, but I'm trying to get Lee to hook up with our local Cristo Rey school, which is explicitly about taking low-income kids and giving them college prep education but also getting them used to working in a white-collar environment. There are problems with that approach, of course, but I think having it as an option is a good thing.
There's not a lot of acknowledgment in this thread for how dreadfully we're already failing these students.
I agree with Charlie's response to this in 21: That the status quo isn't perfect (or even close) doesn't mean it should be abandoned for a system that's even less likely to achieve the goals you mentioned in your questions.
Close the parenthesis after 'obvious', if you would?
There's a selling point, "who wants to see more barely literate teenage parents?"
They don't actually say that at the strip bars, do they? I'm too moral to go to one so I don't know.
Are you complacent with the current system?
With the idea of forcing kids to be in school past age 14? Absolutely.
What, ideally, is the best system" conflicts with "What is the system that will be hardest for people who want to screw poor kids over to manipulate to that end?"
A system with lots and lots of fucking job openings. As in, 2% UI-3.
One efficient and productive enough, or distributed well enough, to handle the grotesque inefficiencies of maintaining and training a lot of teenagers. The idea is a system that can, for years 14-20, provide decent jobs at attractive wages, as in 3-5 of those a year for the uncertain and pre-mature.
Gov't can do it. $20 per jar of pennies buried and dug up. Don't care if you show up tomorrow.
Or the fucking draft. Provide them housing, clothes, food, and entertainment while they are marching in circles.
I don't think vocational tracks like the German model could work in the US -- they require a greater overall commitment to social solidarity and consistent employment in a field to conceivably work in the US.
I'm no expert, but I believe that a premise of the OP is deeply wrong, in that the schools, on the whole, have actually been improving at a substantial pace and your average bottom third of the class 13 year old learns a lot more now than he would have 50 years ago. Thus the schools, on the whole, are doing a pretty good job at producing a literate population and offering some means of social mobility. What else is there (in the US) besides public education for social mobility? Not much.
I'm also totally unsympathetic to the idea that it's hard for public school teachers to teach the bottom third of their classes. Boo hoo, that's your job. It's not the hardest job in the world. A lot of teachers do it very well.
100: Sure, so make the employment/productive use of your time part mandatory. Are you complacent with how the bottom third's time is being occupied between 8 am and 3?
God, I didn't even consider drafting these kids. I should quit limiting my imagination to first world solutions.
Let's remember that we don't actually have mandatory education in the United States. We have mandatory attendance. There's a difference.
That said, I have a lot of sympathy for both sides of this issue. I have met a lot of young people in my time whose lives were enormously and measurably improved by having an opportunity to do something meaningful and productive between the ages of 12 or 14 and 18 that was not "attend a violent and compliance-oriented school whose authority figures regard you with universal contempt."
In some cases, the mere relief of being taken out of a dangerous or emotionally brutal atmosphere allowed them to develop creative and unusual interests and projects. In this respect, the people who worry about teenagers just sitting on the couch may be reassured by reading the Teenage Liberation Handbook and similar works.
I have also supervised a number of 13, 14, and 15-year-old students from poor neighborhoods with very little social capital. The amount of adult attention and nurturing to facilitate even the most modest "internship" during their high school years is phenomenal.
If I hadn't done it myself, I wouldn't believe how draining it is. You're essentially trying to make up for 15 years of neglect in one 4-hour-a-week mentoring session. It's exhausting for young person and adult alike.
What's even more heartbreaking is watching kids who aren't comfortable reading, writing, or even navigating the spoken English of the white-collar world observe their same-page middle/upper-middle class peers do the same tasks. It's unbelievably sad. In many cases, they've been buffered from the reality of knowing how impoverished their educational experience has been until that moment.
81: I think it's pretty safe to say that none of them would choose to drop out of school and do five days a week of work, having really experienced it
This is another good point: One of my coworkers described the summer he spent working in a factory. After showing him around the floor, the foreman turned to him and said: "Kid, this is why people go to college."
86: I'm sure many of us would have different definitions. "How to get what you need when the deck is stacked against you" would be a big part of it. "Don't act like a victim" would be another aspect. "Everybody's got an angle" is also crucial.
I'm also totally unsympathetic to the idea that it's hard for public school teachers to teach the bottom third of their classes. Boo hoo, that's your job. It's not the hardest job in the world. A lot of teachers do it very well.
A huge number of teachers get burnt out amazingly quickly. A small number of teachers teach the bottom third very well. It's not good policy to count on Jaime Escalante.
I'm also totally unsympathetic to the idea that it's hard for public school teachers to teach the bottom third of their classes.
Totally unsympathetic? Not even a little sympathy for someone who has to spend six hours a day in a room with thirty people who mostly hate being there and transfer a bunch of that hostility to feelings about the teacher? It's a job, but it really is a hard job.
Secondly, and most fucking importantly we have to radically devalue higher education. Make those added years of schooling worth much much less.
We did that after the war by taxing the fuck out of everybody, not just the rich but everybody, so the guy with an advanced degree did not make so much more than the guy without.
This also had strong effects on all compensation schedules. People went miniature golfing with their kids and softball playing, because the marginal hour of work or education did not pay off.
95: That's not what I'm seeing, to be honest. There's a tendency in these conversations to assume that one's schooling is either gold-plated and Ivy-bound or an episode of the Wire. There's a huge middle range, where the schools are decent but not great, where some graduates go to college but a lot don't, and that's where I see the biggest problems with socially sanctioning the idea that dropping out at age twelve to babysit is perfectly fine is going to gimp kids that are presently better served.
E.g., shiv's dad has a sixth grade education. shiv has some college. I see that turning out a bit differently if when shiv was being a doofus at age sixteen and his dad said "if you're going to cut school, then quit like a man and get a job" all his friends had been out for four years doing small jobs.
God, I didn't even consider drafting these kids.
Child soldiers - wave of the future, gswift. bob will explain. It's a big thing in manga.
Not even a little sympathy for someone who has to spend six hours a day in a room with thirty people who mostly hate being there
(1) I'm not sold on the assumption that most of these kids hate being there.
(2) Spending most of your day with people who would rather not be there sounds like a lot of jobs to me. If you think being a teacher sucks more than most jobs, you definitely shouldn't be a teacher.
Spending most of your day with people who would rather not be there sounds like a lot of jobs to me.
I can't even make people be quiet. Teachers can usually swing that for at least part of the day.
104: bob is like Keyser Soze. He's here to show these men of will what will really is.
You want to understand class war?
Social mobility for the top third, by any measure you want, equals negative social mobility for the bottom third. Make your choice.
A huge number of teachers get burnt out amazingly quickly. A small number of teachers teach the bottom third very well. It's not good policy to count on Jaime Escalante.
But is this problem a result of mandatory education? Or of flaws in the ways we recruit, train, and reward teachers?
Also, 67 is important and everyone should re-read it.
Back up at 40: ...a BA is now required for jobs that used to only need a high school diploma....
I'd be terribly happy if the Internet serpent shed this and other shibboleths like "journalists used to be rough-and-tumble blue-collar types who drank with cops" like so many dead scales.
What makes you think this is a shibboleth? My experience over the last decade or so is that employers emphatically are requiring more and more credentials for entry-level jobs. Early childhood ed is being pushed to have the CDA and then an associate's (as Thorn recounts upthread). Hotel housekeeping requires a HS diploma or GED. Hospitals are increasingly requiring nurses with a BSN rather than a 2- or 3-year degree. Receptionist jobs are asking for a bachelor's.
115: no it doesn't, bob. If there's more social mobility in the top third that means more of them dropping out of the top third, leaving more spaces for the ambitious members of the middle and bottom thirds. Zero social mobility at the top means zero at the bottom too, because there's nowhere for them to ascend to.
I'm not sold on the assumption that most of these kids hate being there.
In a remedial geometry class? A critical mass hates being there enough to make the experience extremely unpleasant.
Oh, fuck the freaks obsessed with violence.
Draft them into the new CCC. Gardening and forest management. Care for the aged, as in listening to folk stories. Kitten wrangling.
Yes, in Japan, elementary school kids get credits for listening to 80 year olds tell stories.
There's a huge middle range, where the schools are decent but not great, where some graduates go to college but a lot don't, and that's where I see the biggest problems with socially sanctioning the idea that dropping out at age twelve to babysit is perfectly fine is going to gimp kids that are presently better served.
This is a fair criticism.
elementary school kids get creditsmoney for listening to 80 year olds tell stories
My mistake.
In a remedial geometry class?
The original premise was being stuck in a classroom for 6 hours a day with 30 people who mostly hate being there. If kids are spending 6 hours a day in a remedial geometry class, I think I can see the problem!
121.1: I would like this sentence to be minuted for future reference the next time someone starts talking about the necessity of violent revolution/class war/nuking the Gulf of Mexico.
I was told there would be no octagons on the test.
Sure, teaching unmotivated teenagers in public schools is hard. Teachers are awesome. But there are a lot of hard jobs. The idea that public school teachers are either burnt out shells who can't reach their poor performing kids at all or superheros like Jaime Escalante is a crock.* Most are competent and do a decent job of providing some help for most of their kids.
*I blame Teach for America.
Forcing kids to be miserable in school against their will for years is a horrible thing to do. There may be no way around it. But can we at least agree that it's a horrible cruel thing?
But is this problem a result of mandatory education? Or of flaws in the ways we recruit, train, and reward teachers?
It's really not. There are flaws in how we recruit, train, and reward teachers, to be sure. But cheerleading all day long to students who are angling to sabotage you is extremely demoralizing and exhausting. I've watched it happen to plenty of math teachers.
Not all kids are like this. And not all classrooms in any high school are like this. But high schools track kids really quickly, and the low-end math classes inevitably get enough kids who want to sink the class in there to do so.
We can also agree that Heebie just successfully trolled us, right?
I blame Teach for America.
For everything.
The original premise was being stuck in a classroom for 6 hours a day with 30 people who mostly hate being there. If kids are spending 6 hours a day in a remedial geometry class, I think I can see the problem!
In Texas, if you fail geometry in 9th grade, you get two hours of geometry in 10th grade, when it's assessed. So there are teachers stuck with a 2 hour geometry class of 30 kids who hate being there, yes. Absolutely.
If you are on the rocks with your principal, you could end up teaching two of these classes, and just one of something else. That would be your life, and you would get burnt out, despite how well you might have thrived in a slightly better context.
What does street-smart actually mean, in this context?
My working definition of "street smart" is "able to buy drugs from a stranger without getting shot or feeling like a tool."
But cheerleading all day long to students who are angling to sabotage you is extremely demoralizing and exhausting
See, I'd call that a training and recruitment issue. I know you were just using cheerleading as a figure of speech, but obviously teaching is a hell of a lot more involved than just being a motivational speaker. It's as complex a process as practicing law, easily, but we certainly don't treat it that way.
We can also agree that Heebie just successfully trolled us, right?
Slightly? But I'm also annoyed at how quickly people are willing to rely on knee-jerk liberal talking points instead of engage with an interesting question.
Many people here are accusing me of ignoring what I stated up front, in the two counter-arguments up front in the OP. That makes for a tiresome conversation.
What I was curious about discussing requires - as a premise - that mandatory attendance does cause problems. I'm not saying the bad outweighs the good in our current 2012 society. I'm just interested in exploring ways to tackle the bad consequences.
There's a huge middle range, where the schools are decent but not great, where some graduates go to college but a lot don't....
This, definitely. Particularly for elementary schools, I think parents, and people being overly sympathetic to insane parents (like Laura McKenna in that linked post above) have a tendency to believe that schools are either perfect, or damaging hellholes, when in fact an adequate rather than astonishingly wonderful school is fine for most kids, including most special-snowflakes who are going to go on to grad school eventually.
What I was curious about discussing requires - as a premise - that mandatory attendance does cause problems.
So you wanted a discussion that requires accepting a premise and you are upset that people aren't accepting your premise?
I know you were just using cheerleading as a figure of speech, but obviously teaching is a hell of a lot more involved than just being a motivational speaker. It's as complex a process as practicing law, easily, but we certainly don't treat it that way.
Actually, we do treat it that way. There is an entire field of math pedagogy research. There is a lot known about how to teach teachers. The teachers are somewhat well-trained, because there are also plenty of flaws in the teacher-training program. Students who get certified within a 4 year baccaulaureate program have higher retention rates as teachers than students who get alternative certification to teach. On the other hand, the alternative certification teachers are more likely to be placed in the low-end schools.
People study the consequence of low-student engagement at great length. It is an unbelievably intractable problem, and massively difficult for a teacher, alone, to turn it around.
I'm also totally unsympathetic to the idea that it's hard for public school teachers to teach the bottom third of their classes.
There's quite a lot of truth to that. A lot of my wife's (low income majority hispanic jr. high) classes are well over 30 kids a class. 35 kids in a class of AP students who STFU and actually do homework is a very different scene from 35 kids where it's difficult to get all of the kids to even bring a pencil to class.
And to answer heebie, no, I'm not complacent about how the current 8-3 thing goes. There's room for a lot of improvement. Like you, I spent a lot of time spacing out in jr. high. But I had stable educated parents and a huge affinity for reading on my own. I even had a job! Hell, I might even have benefitted from dropping out for a year or two. I would have been thrilled to have nothing but free time to do my paper route and read Jack London, Asimov, Tolkien, etc. But I just don't see how anyone living in this reality can think that's the kind of results we'll see if the average bottom third 12 year old drops out of school.
So you wanted a discussion that requires accepting a premise and you are upset that people aren't accepting your premise?
Yes. Because taking any policy and claiming "It's all only perfectly good! There are no unintended consequences whatsoever!" is a very boring conversation. Even good policies have some bad repercussions, even if they're still worth doing.
We don't have shared sense of what mandatory public schooling is for. Is it for keeping kids off the streets? Is it for providing parents with guaranteed babysitting? Is it for preparing students to be good citizens? Is it for training them to be good workers? Is it to foster young people's personal enrichment? Is it a jobs program for adults? Is it an avenue for Americans to feel smarter than the rest of the world? Is it to protect young people whose parents have failed them?
Some of these goals are in direct conflict. It's hard to have a discussion about how to fix the problem when you don't have agreement on what the problem is.
There is an entire field of math pedagogy research.
And how much of it are you required to study before you are certified to teach?
135: I'd be happy to discuss the question if it weren't an abstract ponyland question. If we're dealing with existing conditions in US education, given all of the known constraints, there's probably much less room for movement. Solutions positing magic markets that make livable, non-exploitative jobs for those who 'choose' to end their education early are as uninteresting as knee-jerk talking points, no?
See, I'd call that a training and recruitment issue.
I have no idea what this means. Dealing with utter lack of student motivation is a recruitment issue?
Anyway, we have a natural experiment for what happens when kids leave school early in the LAUSD, which I believe has something like a 50% drop out rate after age 16. These people aren't going on to become self-actualized cowboys free from the shackles of the man, and the remaining kids in school aren't having super engaged academic seminars. They are poor, mostly immigrant kids whose poor, mostly uneducated immigrant parents want them to get out and work at crappy jobs and don't see the value of any continuing education, even though they'd benefit from it. They do get the crappy jobs sometimes (including crappy jobs in street gangs). But I'd hope we'd have less of this model, not more.
142: You are not required to study the full academic underpinnings, because there's enough to occupy tenured faculty members indefinitely. It's typical in Texas that you would apply to the school of ed in your 2nd year of college or so. You'd take a curriculum determined by them, who are very well-versed in the field of pedagogy.
The test to become certified in math, in Texas, is actually fascinating. The questions do things like give a question and a student's incorrect answer, and ask you to hypothesize a follow-up question that would elucidate what the student is confused about. It's very well designed.
There are also courses specifically designed to help with classroom management. You are also supervised in a student-teaching scenario for 1-2 semesters.
Is this the thread to confess that I have a tiny crush on Sally's science teacher after meeting him at parent teacher conferences? He's a ridiculous cute little bouncy goofy elfin man, and I kind of wanted to take him home and keep him as a pet. But Sally would think that was weird, and Buck probably wouldn't like it. And we've already got a pet.
I'm sure many of us would have different definitions. "How to get what you need when the deck is stacked against you" would be a big part of it. "Don't act like a victim" would be another aspect. "Everybody's got an angle" is also crucial
Really, it is social intelligence tailored to an unusual and dysfunctional subculture. Hollywood likes to glamorize this sort of knowledge, but it is really no different than knowing how to work your way through a bureaucracy. (Actually, in both cases "everybody's got an angle" is important.)
148: Really, you just need to adjust how subtle you are when you threaten people and that's the main difference.
People have this idea somewhere that if people are bad at something they must be good at something else to keep the force in balance, or something. Just because you can't read or subtract doesn't automatically mean you're "street smart."
I'd be happy to discuss the question if it weren't an abstract ponyland question. If we're dealing with existing conditions in US education, given all of the known constraints, there's probably much less room for movement. Solutions positing magic markets that make livable, non-exploitative jobs for those who 'choose' to end their education early are as uninteresting as knee-jerk talking points, no?
It's an abstract ponyland question, to be sure. At most for real-world solutions I would argue for giving kids more autonomy.
I can't even string together a great argument that they need to be taking so much math, except that later on there are difficult barriers to re-entry.
The conversation I'd find interesting is "What would best break down barriers to re-entry?"
Moby is being really funny today.
104: Yeah, the draft. Fix roads, create bicycle paths, parks, pick up trash, whatever. No couch or fuckin' cellphone during daylight.
As long as they're kept off the lawn I'd have if I had a lawn.
Witt's 141 is really good. I don't know what I think The Solution is. My kneejerk response to heebie's friend's program is that I'm not sure how consent plays into it (like, do you need parental permission?) and that it would make it really hard to be a foster parent of teens.
Colton, the out-of-state boy who decided against adoption, graduates from high school in the next month and will head to community college, which I think is absolutely appropriate for him and is a situation where I'd expect him to thrive (with ongoing support from his foster dad/group home) and probably eventually end up at a 4-year school. When he was 12, his life was in crisis and his family was breaking up and I have no idea whether he would have chosen to leave school if he'd had the choice.
I do absolutely think Rowan's abusive parents would have pressured him to leave school as soon as possible and they were already lucky that several of his teachers failed in their duty as mandated reporters when he was 11 or so and made disclosures about his abuse. He, too, apparently graduates soon, though his educational background leaves him at a huge disadvantage. I think if he'd ended up with us or in an education-oriented home, those gaps could have been rectified to a large extent and I very much blame his specific school system for writing him off early on and letting him fall through the cracks. He is a bright kid and an eager learner, but not being able to read at anything near an age-appropriate level had just closed so many doors to him by the time we met him as a teen.
Last anecdote. This weekend I took Mara, her 6-year-old sister, and two of the cousins the sister lives with, who are 6 and 3, to the local museum center. The older cousin, who's in kindergarten, was chirping the whole way over about how the earth revolves around the sun and what sort of animals she likes best and so forth. Meanwhile I'm not sure the sister who's also in kindergarten in the same school can spell her name. (This is also the school Rowan went to.) I have a hard time guessing what Mara's sister is capable of, but I think it's more than she's doing now. There is already tracking of some sort going on and I'm not sure what it's going to mean for Mara's sister, and this breaks my heart. I don't know what it will mean for the cousin later, whether at 12 and 16 she'll still be confident and curious. One of the other aunts attributes Mara's eldest sister's level of academic success to being a "tomboy" (I'm pretty sure code for gay and everyone consistently uses the term) and thus not ending up pregnant and dropping out like the family had expected.
150: I don't think that's exactly it, I think Natilo was alluding to the sort of kid who's doing horribly in school but not because they're stupid in any generalized sense. It's not that it balances, but you can identify a bright kid even if they can't add.
Haha. My friend in question just texted me "Ay-yi-yi!" and I assumed she'd found the thread. I almost responded knowingly in kind. But she was talking about something else entirely.
She knows I blog on something like Unfogged, although I'm pretty sure she's never tracked it down, because she was surprised that I had prepared for coffee with the sociologist last week.
The root of the problem is that in the US we have decided
1) "Middle class" means white-collar, college educated management.
2) The goal for the whole education system is to give people the opportunity to be middle class.
3) Any money spent on people below the middle class is wasted.
The result is that all our HS are either college-prep or holding cells. We can't create a vocational track like Germany or Japan because we aren't interested in having anyone belonging to a working class that lives comfortably.
We think we can all be managers for companies with factories overseas or people who teach yoga to those managers. We want an ocean separating us from the lower castes. It just doesn't work that way.
The problem with education in the US is inseparable from the weird form class struggle takes on here.
It may be the case that the US is currently suffering serious problems as a result of a lack of available semiliterate 14-year-old kitchen maids, but that's not the impression I had.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn's back in France, so you're right.
Broader point: I'm with Ttam. I do sometimes think it would be an idea to merge the academic and vocational tracks completely, but then that's me being geeky and remembering that when I was 12 I really loved the school workshop.
We can't create a vocational track like Germany or Japan because we aren't interested in having anyone belonging to a working class that lives comfortably.
This does seem true.
To tag on to what rob is saying in 157, guidance counselors and others who are positioned at key decision points are often ignorant of pathways different from the ones they took themselves. Since most of them are college-educated SES-middle class or UMC people, there's a whole swath of reality that neither they nor any of their social circle have direct experience of.
They push kids toward college in part because they have no idea what other postsecondary options are out there, and why and for whom they might be meaningful and productive choices.
So, dystopian totalitarian possibility -- mandatory minimum wage CCC-type government labor for twelve-year-olds through eighteen or so. Maybe vocational training, maybe just picking up trash in parks, whatever. Kids can get out of it by remaining in school and meeting some non-trivial academic standard, but if they're not performing adequately on their academics, it's the workforce, and they can always choose to leave school for the workforce. And say they get to take home 10% of their pay, but the rest goes in a trust account they can't access until eighteen, so they're not useful wageearners for their families.
This sounds horrific to me, but it would sort of address your friend's issues.
Also, Bob is right. The solution to unemployment is to employ them, already. Strangely enough, unemployment was much less of a problem when full employment was a goal of policy. Funny that.
when I was 12 I really loved the school workshop.
Sally's very favorite thing about school is the 'Engineering' class where she gets to use power tools.
Kids can get out of it by remaining in school and meeting some non-trivial academic standard, but if they're not performing adequately on their academics,
No. It's fine to make slow and steady progess. The key is that the student is putting themself in the program. Opting in is an attitude shift.
This sounds horrific to me, but it would sort of address your friend's issues.
Why does it sound horrific to you? Coupled with an intense effort towards eliminating barriers to re-entry into education, at any point in your life?
On Rob's point, this Erik Lund post is both fascinating and relevant.
Strangely enough, unemployment was much less of a problem when full employment was a goal of policy. Funny that.
Well, definitely this.
163: Rowan did really, really well in the shop class at his residential treatment center and again at his first rural high school. Especially in the RTC context, for kids who feel like failures being able to create something is a success of its own, though I'm sure being in the class was linked to being at a level where you weren't considered potentially violent.
And I hope I didn't sound like I'm saying everyone should go to college. I see no reason Colton shouldn't and I'm planning to work with Mara's sister to make sure she can go if she wants to, but it's not the only way for them to find success in life. I'm mostly concerned about intervening early so that kids are set up to learn as much as they can and are willing to, because dealing with the deficits (like heebie's friend is doing) is so much harder.
The conversation I'd find interesting is "What would best break down barriers to re-entry?"
That's a good question. Re-entry to what, and for what purpose? Re-entry to high school level education, for those kids who 'elected' to leave early? Well, we have the GED and so on. That all seems do-able, and regardless of what people learn from it, it functions as a credentialing device. That's enough for some purposes.
Re-entry to more challenging forms of schooling (college etc.) for those early-opter-outers? Much tougher. Even if the artificial barriers to re-entry are removed, reacquiring the mental state of 'being in school' and 'being a student' is really hard, especially once you've been away for a long time. It's not clear it's better to spend resources on getting students back in at these later stages instead of focusing on keeping them in early, especially when it's going to be many of the same ones who dropped out earlier who are coming back later.
Also, 157 is great.
Having been sweet to Bob, I'm now going to thrust-vector and point out that he used to love the CCC because he saw it as a revolutionary red guard militia in being.
I've just skimmed the thread, so it is possible that I missed this. But it seems relevant enough to risk mentioning again.
There are a number of studies that use changes in legal school-leaving ages as natural experiments that change the amount of schooling that (some) kids get. These studies find that an extra year of schooling raises later earnings by about 10%. This is more-or-less the same effect found by other studies, using other methods, even though these studies are isolating the effect of extra years obtained by kids who would prefer to drop out and are staying in school only because the law requires it.
In other words, while it seems intuitive that the kids who are just marking time until they are allowed to drop out aren't getting anything out of school, it doesn't seem to be the case.
No. It's fine to make slow and steady progess.
Oh, sure, I was contemplating remedial/tracked classes as an option. But if you were in a class at your level, and you weren't putting in the effort, to the labor force with you!
Why does it sound horrific to you?
The whole forced-labor thing? I get touchy around anything that could be not-incoherently described as indentured servitude.
I'm sure being in the class was linked to being at a level where you weren't considered potentially violent
This wasn't a requirement in the UK, we had some real nut cases playing with the power tools.
Another problem is that work has become so hollowed out between managerial and unskilled labor roles that there isn't that much room left for vocational training. There are definitely still skilled building trades and auto mechanics and the like, but not enough to remotely provide a meaningful solution through vocational education for the bottom 30% of public high school students.
172: Well, I'm talking about a context where he had to take laces out of his shoes after runaway attempts to slow him down, so I'm sure they had protocols. In an open school rather than a treatment school, I'm sure there are nutcases aplenty.
The whole forced-labor thing? I get touchy around anything that could be not-incoherently described as indentured servitude.
Between vocational training programs, traditional educational options, and labor choices, the labor would feel forced to you? I mean, a kid only has to be willing to sit still in the other two situations. If they're choosing to work, they're doing so out of preference to sitting in a classroom or vo-tech training situation.
(And surely there could be some split time, where you take 2 classes and then go off to your job.)
146: Ok, so first, talking about getting a bachelor's degree from the college of ed does not support your argument that we treat education as being as complex a process of law, for which we (in the U.S.) require graduate level education.
I did some time in ed school and while I've no doubt many of the scholars in the field are well-versed in pedagogy, I am less convinced that ed schools are preparing teachers who are adequately versed in pedagogy. Looking at the certification requirements in Illinois, coursework in pedagogy (16 hours) is dwarfed by required general ed/subject area/elective coursework (104 hours). In my mind, that balance is way off if pedagogy is the profession.
161 is a real YA dystopia. Quick, write it up with a chaste love affair and a bit more bloodshed. ("...and if you underperform as a worker, then it's the Arena!")
Different question: If the government were pursuing employment policies, which fields would see the most growth? What would the breakdown of employment look like? Where should we be training people? Nursing?
I am shocked that people here would be in favor of a system in which an army of non-academically gifted slaves is forced to perform manual labor for the academically talented.
Well, would manual labor include pedicures, massages, and fetching drinks? Because that has a certain amount of appeal.
If they're truly gifted slaves, should we deny them that opportunity?
And I haven't had a good scraping with a strigil for ages -- bath slaves are expensive these days. I've tried to train the dog to do it, but the dog hair just gets stuck in the olive oil, and the whole experience is gross.
Speaking of pushing sticks across your skin, I saw some guy massaging (I guess) his hamstring muscles by pushing a stick across the underside of his leg. I don't know if that's a thing for just him.
178 -- Boy, you know what's an unskilled job suitable for vocational-only training where you don't need the skills you learn in high school? Nursing.
Sadly, due to budget cuts, you'll have to make do with a couple of cups of used deep fryer fat and a quick rubdown with a squeegee from a disgruntled Oklahoman.
Starting at 14 ensures that the bath slave supply is suitably lithe.
Though, another problem with the academically non gifted is that they reproduce. I suggest maintaining the population of these "brutals" away from the rest if us, while providing some sort of ersatz God for them to worship -- perhaps with the mantra "the gun is good, the penis is evil."
178: Health professions, truckers, and a lot of shit service-industry jobs.
I read 90-odd comments and then decided to just search the rest of the thread for "troll". I see helpy-chalk got there in 130.
179: To be fair, my preferred solution was always to enslave them for use in our psychological studies. The dark satanic mills of academia always need fresh blood; publish or perish, etc.
I'm with heebie's friend and minne, though I don't suppose that's a surprise.
My eldest is at a very selective girls school - they really don't need most of the (good) teachers they have. She was, not complaining, but bemused, by the student teacher they currently have for maths, who decided to teach them vectors using a 25 minute powerpoint presentation. They don't need that, leave them a maths book and they'll figure it out.
The second daughter is at a "good" (according to Ofsted - a school can be outstanding, good, satisfactory (which means the opposite) or failing) comprehensive. In her maths set, people think the teacher is strict because he doesn't let them talk while he's talking. It's all very different.
Schools here are full of bottom sets who don't want to be there. The ones who manage to behave the worst or drop out most spectacularly end up in Pupil Referral Units or places like this and do far better than the peers they left behind. But those sort of places cost huge amounts of money - although if school wasn't mandatory (and I know it varies state by state, but in the UK, school isn't compulsory, although being provided with an education (not necessarily accepting it!) is), then maybe money would be freed up.
Apprenticeships for 15 year olds (hang on, didn't we used to have them?) sound like a great idea to me. It seems utterly stupid to have one measuring stick, that of academic success, and for those below average to be told for years that they are failing. Find something they can bloody succeed at, and they won't be wandering up my road every day drunk, swearing at each other and looking for something to steal by the time they're 19.
The twelve year olds would probably need some kind of booster seat in the cab of the trucks.
Boy, you know what's an unskilled job suitable for vocational-only training where you don't need the skills you learn in high school? Nursing.
That's it. I'm quitting crossfit and taking up swimming.
179: To be fair, my preferred solution was always to enslave them for use in our psychological studies. The dark satanic mills of academia always need fresh blood; publish or perish, etc.
There is a better natural experiment. When I was at school in England, one could leave at 15. Nowadays, one can't leave until 16. I forget what year it changed, but there was a last cohort that could leave school at 15 and a first cohort that was required to attend an educational institution until they were 16. Everything else about those cohorts is comparable. They're only separated by a year.
British social scientists have not neglected the opportunity. There have been long-term studies. On many measures of well-being, the cohort that was compelled to remain in school the extra year does better than the cohort that had the freedom to leave earlier.
Mandatory education may be bad for the teachers, but it's good for the students.
Youth crime isn't a consequence of low self-esteem; juvenile criminals tend to have higher than average self esteem.
187: They reproduce, and all this good free health care keeps them alive to reproduce more. We need the draft, birth sepsis, and a return of the Plague to keep things in balance.
187 is a plate o' shrimp type comment if you know where to look. (LG&M)
British social scientists have not neglected the opportunity. There have been long-term studies. On many measures of well-being, the cohort that was compelled to remain in school the extra year does better than the cohort that had the freedom to leave earlier.
But this is not what I'm proposing. I'm proposing that it only be done in conjunction with eliminating barriers to re-entry.
195 - it's 17 now for (at least) the 14/15 year olds, and will be 18 for the 12 year olds.
I know nothing about the studies, but would immediately wonder whether the doing better has anything to do with the fact that if you left at 15 you wouldn't have qualifications, whereas those leaving at 16 (my mum was one of the first years I think) would have a few O levels/CSEs?
Trying to catch up to this thread . . .
I have also supervised a number of 13, 14, and 15-year-old students from poor neighborhoods with very little social capital. The amount of adult attention and nurturing to facilitate even the most modest "internship" during their high school years is phenomenal.
I will, again, cautious recommend the documentary Pressure Cooker which I found fascinating. It is, in structure, a very formulaic movie of the charismatic and tough (but caring) teacher who works with disadvantaged youth. But is interesting for (a) giving some idea of just how much work it takes to prepare kids without social capital to be comfortable in the "professional" world and (b) because she isn't running an academic program but a successful vocational program within a public HS -- which seems very positive for the people who participate but raises interesting questions.
My other thought is that I recall a movement in the 70s to try to make school less discipline based (looking at wikipedia there are two "Schools Without Walls" listed founded in 1969 and 1971.) Does anybody have a sense of how those experiments worked?
I'm biased because, as I've mentioned, my parents both went to Antioch College and did some work at Antioch West and I think, both, that there's a lot of room for interesting alternative education programs, and that I wouldn't expect "alternative education" to ever replace the mainstream school system -- it requires people who are specifically interested in doing something different.
Anyway, would love to stay and discuss this, but have to cook dinner and then go out to teach maths to a 16 year old, and then a 28 year old who wants a maths GCSE to get on a teacher training course. I love teaching the ones who have come back to studying because they want to.
Bob, I'm now going to thrust-vector and point out that he used to love the CCC because he saw it as a revolutionary red guard militia in being.
I still love the CCC, but well, yeah.
In Scotland one could still leave school at 15 fairly recently. I could have, certainly. You aren't allowed to leave until the Christmas of the academic year you turn 16. So everyone completes four years of high school, minimum. But those, like I was, that are still under 16 at that point have to continue into the 5th year but can leave at Christmas. That'd have meant I was still 15 at that point.
Googling it looks like this is still the case:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2010/01/31130505
[trumpeting more opportunities for Christmas leavers]
Health professions, truckers, and a lot of shit service-industry jobs.
Thanks, Minivet.
Has anyone raised vocational education yet? It seems like the sane version of what Heebie was proposing was a German-style apprenticeship tracking where you get to switch to a strong vocational track at 12-13. Such a track could certainly include part-day on-the-job training as part of the later grades, with participating employers required to really help with the training component.
Traditionally the rap on vocational ed is that it institutionalizes a class system. But I think everyone now understands the problem with the 1990s fantasy where every child gets a four-year degree and becomes a 'symbolic analyst'. Getting the skills to be a contractor, a plumber, a nurse -- those are all pretty well paid professions.
I saw some guy massaging (I guess) his hamstring muscles by pushing a stick across the underside of his leg.
The Stick. My brother has recently started using one and likes it.
On the lowering barriers to re-entry, the same issue comes up in higher education. Traditionally things seem to be handled very well in California, where there's quite a lot of movement between community colleges, CalStates, and UCs. My impression was (and this may have changed with the defunding of California higher education) that delaying starting college, or dropping out after a year if you're not ready for college, really doesn't screw you over forever in California. It's unclear how much of this is institutional culture vs actual policies.
One could certainly imagine having a better system for high school education which allows people to get back on track at 16 or 17. Part of the problem is that high school curriculum is so rigid, combined with the fact that people "pass" classes despite not knowing anything. This means you have students taking "physics" who can't subtract. If you want people to get back on track, you need something like a rapid course on 1-6th grade math. People need to actually understand that stuff before they can take algebra or physics.
207: Thanks. Not only did I learn something, but the ad copy on that site is just a tremendous set of unrealized cock jokes.
Whoops, I missed the whole voc ed discussion above -- too lazy to read the thread. Sorry.
There are a number of studies that use changes in legal school-leaving ages as natural experiments that change the amount of schooling that (some) kids get. These studies find that an extra year of schooling raises later earnings by about 10%. This is more-or-less the same effect found by other studies, using other methods, even though these studies are isolating the effect of extra years obtained by kids who would prefer to drop out and are staying in school only because the law requires it.
I know there were some fairly serious methodological problems with the early wave of these studies in the U.S. (around the validity of the instrumental variables). Also, a number of recent studies looking at continental Europe has found little or no effect of increases compulsory schooling in those countries. I think that the effects can certainly be real but they are both tricky to measure and dependent on the institutional setup in the country (credentialing, labor market institutions).
In general, immersing yourself in the economics literature is a great training in the limits of a 'scientistic' treatment-effect type approach to analyzing complex systems.
Boy, you know what's an unskilled job suitable for vocational-only training where you don't need the skills you learn in high school? Nursing.
the point of vocational training isn't that you don't learn academic skills, it's that you learn them in a context that hopefully provides more motivation through the clear connection to work.
One could imagine a system where there was a voluntary part of the school that you could go to if (and only if) you actually wanted to learn. Teachers in that part of the school would be able to kick you back to the mandatory part easily if you weren't actually trying to learn.
A system where the default is a classroom, and the chosen alternative as "forced labor" is not exactly indentured servitude. The second a kid quits the labor, she's back in a classroom, which where you seem to want her anyway.
This is another good point: One of my coworkers described the summer he spent working in a factory. After showing him around the floor, the foreman turned to him and said: "Kid, this is why people go to college."
This is fairly persuasive to me. Seems to me that a subset of kids who choose manual labor might come to appreciate a classroom in short order.
(Actually, from my experience, it takes six weeks for the best, most beautiful fieldwork to pall. First two weeks, it is so fun, to learn the protocols and find your sites and do the work. Two more weeks, you cruise and can't believe your luck at being outdoors and gathering data. In two more weeks, it is boring and arduous, and you are willing to give up hiking Tahoe for a classroom again. That's the optimal labor setting, and it is how I recharged for grad school during the summers.)
I know it is asking a lot to call for the return of both vocational education and the sort of manufacturing jobs that require vocational education. But I think this is less pony-land than Heebie's suggestion. Also, I don't see any real long term alternatives.
213: I don't know that you need to go as far as hiking in Tahoe for interesting work. I think manual labor that is creative and challenging will staying interesting longer. Not that I've ever been capable of really creative manual labor, but the more skills involved, the longer it stayed fun. Framing carpentry was better than picking orders by such a huge margin that I wouldn't even consider them the same class of work.
Building pig barns and grains bins wasn't as fun. Grain bins are too high and living pigs are unpleasant.
Fixing grain bins is even worse because sometimes you'd have to walk in bins full of grain. I was always worried about being sucked under and drowning in corn. Apparently, that rarely happens if you stand near the edge.
We never heard of a safety harness as mentioned here. My boss wouldn't let anybody go in unwatched or when any machinery was running to empty the bin. He'd had to fix a bin where a guy died (they cut a hole in the side to try to rescue hime) and I think that left an impression.
Lightening is another thing I didn't like about working on grain bins. You're clearly the highest thing for several miles when you on top of some of these bins.
Grain bins for none, crossfit for all, lithe bath slaves for those who can do well in geometry. This is my platform.
If your platform gets high enough, you'll be the one hit by lightening.
That all sounds like a very fucked up retelling of Yertle the Turtle.
I don't think those were really bath slaves he climbed.
As if the original isn't fucked up enough.
That's my daughter's favorite book, but I think she identifies with Yertle, not Mack the revolutionary.
What's a little fascism and subjugation between toddlers, Wafer?
I went into her preschool to read it, and all the other preschoolers were basically like "what the fuck is this shit?"
I can't remember if the point of Yertle the Turtle was don't exploit others to boost yourself or just don't bother trying anything.
More on one of the "School Without Walls" (which I find interesting -- I'd still be curious if anybody has any more specific information about them).
Why it's called a 'school without walls':
A quick history: The school was founded in 1971, part of a concept in urban education at the time to "use the city as a classroom," immediately patterned after Philadelphia's Parkway School and the Chicago Public High School for Metropolitan Studies. Here is the school concept, as explained in a Post story published upon the school's March 1971 opening:
The idea behind the school, based in a small suite of offices on the 12th floor of a building at 1411 K St. NW, is that there are better ways of educating than simply putting students and teachers off by themselves in a school building every day. Instead the "school without walls" intends to use the District of Columbia, with its museums, government offices and universities, as its classroom. The city's people -- its scholars, small businessmen, white and blue-collar workers -- will supplement the professional teaching staff.
Further to 227, because they were bottom 30 percenters and future bath slave/human observation tower material, of course.
Maybe we could give Yglesias a fit by making all restaurant work require a vocational certificate. Beneficial spillover: increase operating costs of fast-food restaurants.
My sister went to this thing, which gives rich fancypants academic kids the chance to spend high school on a farm cleaning up chicken coops and doing other kinds of manual labor. She went in a vegetarian and came out an enthusiastic eater of chickens. I love my sister.
I'm sure you'd love her at least 75% as much as you do now if she were vegan.
I have two friends who went to that high school. Not the farm part, though.
She only went to the farm part. She is significantly less lazy than me, but I don't think that was due to the manual labor requirements in high school.
You went somewhere similar-ish, didn't you? I bet you went to the one that starts with an A.
I believe there's a commenter here who went to Thatcher
At the heart of Thacher's founding philosophy is a belief that students benefit from taking on real responsibility and positive risks. This philosophy is evident in equestrian and outdoor programs that set Thacher apart from other boarding schools. All students are required to ride and care for a horse during their first year. . . .
But that really isn't what I was thinking of when I mentioned SWW -- I was thinking of programs designed to give people academic credit for life experience or projects within the community.
A man should be able to ride a horse, read Yertle the Turtle, and use bin jacks to raise a grain bin.
237: Oh, lord, or maybe the one that starts with a D. Worse!
(OK, I'll stop. I was just doing it to torture you.)
I read an interesting book a few months ago about Hip-Hop High in the Twin Cities. Looking back at the books I've read since 2008, I see I've read a lot of popular non-fiction about education philosophies and especially alternative schools, but I don't think it's helped me come up with any sort of one-size-fits-most theory.
There was one I really liked written by the teacher from a school in upstate NY and the way it used play with young (preschool?) kids that had a great effect on educational outcomes for kids who'd witnessed violence in the home and who had attention problems. Writing this comment finally made me remember the author is Chris Mercoglio of the Albany Free School.
It's entirely possible his approach is bogus and I've put a few more books on hold at the library to see what I think about what they have to say, but part of the problem(?) is that I'm coming at this from the perspective of a parent and thinking about the kind of education I'd want for my child or strategies I could take from the books to use in the home rather than aiming for policy approaches. I'm not sure if that's a peculiar failing of mine or what, but I never seem to believe I know what reforms are needed.
|| Without going into detail, aaaaaaaaaggggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! Really, that's about all I've got. |>
242: That sounds like the bad kind of aaaaaagggggggggghhhh, but I'm hoping it's not.
Don't worry. That dead hitchhiker was probably there before you blacked out.
231 Did anyone else see the recent Yggy post where he expressed his deep admiration for The Mustache of Understanding? A couple years ago that wold only have been possible on April 1.
Re trackin: based on what I've seen in Europe it both greatly increases class mobility for the top five or ten percent of the poor kids, while helping to perpetuate it overall. Think the higher tiers of the US college system applied on a wider scale and earlier age.
who needs those elitist g's.
The trouble with emphasizing vocational education is that there's not as much of a manufacturing base as there used to be, and while those skills are transferrable, there's not a lot of room between unskilled labor and things that are thought to require a college degree. The apprenticeship model works only if there's some skilled labor left.
And, incidentally, if you're the guy that can't do geometry on the construction site, you probably end up assisting the guys who can. You don't need the theory, but you need the practical, certaintly. I can see why not everyone needs calculus but the trades are basically all triangles.
there's not a lot of room between unskilled labor and things that are thought to require a college degree
Thought, falsely, to require a college degree.
heebie, are there people doing interesting math work on whether construction workers who haven't done geometry can eyeball or intuit what they'd otherwise work out with formulas? I know there's been work on knitters and quilters who can do complex math within their craft but couldn't with pen and paper, and I think the same has been shown to be true at some level for traditional African cornrowing. This is probably kind of a trivial point, I know.
246 -- You see the hood's been good to me, ever since I was stopped using the lower case g.
240 -- If you were from where I'm from, then you would know.
Back on the serious tip, I agree with 247.
Oh, then I do know. I was thinking East Coast stylee.
247: The speed square is a remarkable piece of trigonometry turned into hardware. Being able to work it was a real help at getting the real carpenters to take the time to try to teach me stuff.
Jordan attended Pepperdine University in California, where he received a bachelor's degree in communications and became a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. Jordan graduated summa cum laude and was a state finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship.
!!!!! Definitely not a candidate for vocational training, though he achieved success in a nonacademic field.
Apologies for the Econolicious style name listing, and for the foray into 90s r+b tenuously inspired by TKM's comment.
249: They certainly can eyeball lots of stuff but for longer pieces of wood, nobody has eyes that good.
And, incidentally, if you're the guy that can't do geometry on the construction site, you probably end up assisting the guys who can. You don't need the theory, but you need the practical, certaintly. I can see why not everyone needs calculus but the trades are basically all triangles.
Are they really using the stuff from a high school geometry class? Besides possibly the Pythagorean Theorem? Isn't that all determined by the designer?
That sounds like the bad kind of aaaaaagggggggggghhhh
I think the good kind is spelled "ooooaaaaaaahhhmmmmm," but people rarely stop to post that to unfogged.
heebie, are there people doing interesting math work on whether construction workers who haven't done geometry can eyeball or intuit what they'd otherwise work out with formulas?
I can't think of what formulas any of them are using.
Or what geometry. I mean, the architect certainly has to know geometry. But the construction worker? Aren't they taking field measurements anyway and not trusting that the length of the side will be exactly cos 45 °xhypotenuse?
255: Mostly the roof is the issue. You've got two board that have to meet at a certain angle. You want them to meet flush at the top and to sit flush on the top of the all (in a little notch you carve). To get all of those right, you can sometimes hold the board against the place you want to put it and mark it with a pencil, but that is often a great deal of work. So, you use a speed square to tell you what angle you need to cut to make the rafters meet flush for a given roof pitch.
s/b "sit flush on the top of the wall"
259: I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out how the sixth-grade education thing would work out. We're waiting for the handyman we hired to come back with how many bricks we'll need to do the herringbone pattern he planned for the little patio he'll be building us and I've never asked him how he does his math. Maybe he doesn't count as a construction worker, but he's not working with architects either.
You could find out using this book.
I'm pretty sure my cousin the high end carpenter uses a lot of math. He was always really good at it, much better than me.
Obviously, the cheaper houses with pre-fab trusses require less math on the part of the builders.
You can see what I mean by a speed square.
From 263:
Whole Numbers. Fractions. Decimal Fractions. Weights, Measures and Conversions. Ratio and Proportion. Percents. Angles and Triangles. Areas and Perimeters. Volume and Surface Area of Solids. The Metric System. Board Measure. Lumber Pricing. Footings, Foundations, and Slabs. Girders, Sill Plates, Bridging, Floor Joists, and Floor Covering. Wall Framing. Roofs I: Common Rafters. Introduction to the Framing Square. Overhangs. Roofs II: Rafters--The Conventional Case. Roofs III: Valley Rafters--The Conventional Case. Roof IV: Jack Rafters. Roofs V: Hip and Valley Rafters--The Unconventional Cases. Stairs. Framing and Covering Gable Ends; Exterior Trim. Wall and Roof Covering. The Estimating Process. For Construction Supervisors, Building Contractors, carpentry/building construction apprentices, unions, trade school students.
I would be thrilled if high school math was able to pay more attention to the math topics in this list. They are hugely important. They aren't, however, geometry.
(What constitutes the curriculum in math classes, and why, historically, it's evolved into what it is today, is a gigantic mess unto itself. But the topics above are usually covered before high school, and the kids don't quite have the chops to make sense of the material deeply, and they should be revisited in high school, because it's good to learn the same topic several times - that's how it starts to make sense - but each teacher feels that would take time out of the topics they're supposed to be teaching. Or so I'm told.)
Angles and triangles are geometry. But I'd bet dollars to donuts that the treatment in that book is not very similar to what's covered in high school geometry.
Volume and surface area of solids? Areas and perimeters? Not geometry?
We have talked here about the GRE going online-only right? I'm pretty sure Witt brought it up recently. That's going to be a clusterfuck.
I've only read the first 84 comments, but they were really frustrating to read, and now I must rant and scold.
Most comments are written under the belief that unless Heebie's provocation is quashed without delay, we will face the return of workhouses and an insurgence of street gangs of freewheeling disaffected 13-year-olds.
Of course there are problems with the idea! But the point of bringing it up is to put creative energy towards the what-if side of the equation. (or the "yes-and" side for all you improv fans out there, say hey-yo.) I'd think that the Unfoggedtariat would instinctively know that it's not a challenging exercise to defend the status quo, but that seems to be the approach attracting the most heat.
I happen to believe that a great deal of schooling is warehousing, that although the current system is an improvement on "a country where large swaths of the population haven't any schooling past 6th grade" it is still not the best of all possible worlds. Is it not at all possible to improve on it, even in ways that risk exploitation by unsavory political elements?
/rant and scold. And when the 2019 mass laying off of 8th-12th grade teachers takes place and was have to pay protection money to Bugs Meany's gang, blame heebie, not me. Now I'll go find out who in comments 85-254 said this shorter/better.
267: Areas, perimeters, and volumes are also geometry. A guy trying to figure out how much cement to order calculates volume in exactly the same way as is done in a high school geometry class.
Also, I'd bet that nearly all of the things about roofing and stairs are how to calculate the right angle.
271: I may be wrong, but I don't think you do much with area/perimeter by high school geometry. Historically it's mostly postulates about parallel lines, and therefore which angles are congruent, and how many sides and angles does it take to determine a triangle - SAS, SSS, etc. Rule of Cosines, Rule of Sines. Two column proofs.
I meant to say "postulates about transversals cutting through parallel lines..."
If I recall high school geometry, we spent a great deal of time making proofs, which has nothing to do with carpentry. But we also spent a great deal of time calculating what a given angle or length was given a whole bunch of other angles and lengths. That is essential for carpentry.
Sure. It is a little odd that we subject every American to geometry, and the best we can say is that carpenters end up using some of it.
273: In the state where I'd been tutoring kids for the graduation exam, areas and perimeter are definitely on the test. They're on the SAT/ACT too, which makes me think they'd get covered in HS geometry. And they're totally baffling for teens who are still counting on their fingers to add and can only multiply or divide by using a calculator. So obviously sending them to high school isn't solving the problem of their not knowing basic math, but sending them out into the world wouldn't solve it either. Sending them to me twice a month for an hour isn't doing them a hell of a lot of good, especially when they refuse to show up, which is part of why I quit tutoring. But I feel really guilty about that and should start up again.
And in Heebie's Friend's Pony World, would we keep the K-6 curriculum basically what it is now or would we need to push some things in sooner to make sure the kids opting to work would have a sufficient education?
I've learned whole bunches of words I hardly ever use except to make puns. Nobody complains about that.
Maybe one of the reasons that school-leaving is such a devastating choice under the status quo is because the options for school-coming-back-to are so limited. Upetgi9 mentioned the (now withering) California system that includes community colleges, Cal State, and the UC; what if there was an equivalent for high school?
Maybe you can split and start working when you're fourteen -- maybe there's a way you can take half-days of classes and start working part time -- maybe you can take six weeks of intensive, single-subject-focused classes once a year. And they're on a farm.
Smart people who neither accumulate educational credentials or start building their careers or in their early twenties aren't necessarily screwed if they start focusing in their early thirties. Why should (is) screwing off from 13-17 be such a check against you?
That is, they complain about the puns, not the wasted time I spent learning words.
Sometimes when I freestyle rap in the car I get a lot of mileage out of cosine/sine, although often as not I just end up doing the old three point one four one five nine rhyme. (Which is not, I just confirmed, the same as Phillip Roth's old Weequahic High fight song.)
Yes, geometry has been very helpful to understand.
Maybe you can split and start working when you're fourteen -- maybe there's a way you can take half-days of classes and start working part time -- maybe you can take six weeks of intensive, single-subject-focused classes once a year. And they're on a farm.
The thing is, the only way I can see that working well is if it's coordinated through the school. If the student is still required to be enrolled in and have some contact with school administration.
I mentioned Antioch earlier, their model is one quarter classes/one quarter work repeated for five years -- but the work isn't just whatever the students can scrounge up for themselves, it's coordinated through the co-op jobs program. Similarly I would be much happier with a program in which schools coordinated with local business to make available temporary jobs for local students (which could, of course, be rotated so the business would always have somebody filling the job even as people rotated in every [X] number of weeks.
... which does, of course, require that the schools be functional and engaged with their responsibilities. I realize that isn't true of all schools, but I still think that sort of model would be way better than just making it easier for people to escape their schools.
I dunno. In general, schools, even public schools serving nonmotivated kids, are pretty good at teaching even the unmotivated a basic grasp of some core academic subjects (they really are! even the bottom 30%!). In general, schools are not particularly competent at managing work externships or providing job-specific education. The obvious risk with programs like that is that you've just created a huge pool of exploitable teen labor for unskilled jobs, and the kids will learn nothing from the work experience while the work experience makes it harder for them to learn the academic subjects. In fact, many (most?) kids have jobs anyway. Vocational training is fine and great, but runs into the problems identified by Cala and others.
I agree that it should be easier to redeem yourself from failure in/dropping out of high school.
For some reason the suggestion of a vocational "tracking" system or apprenticeship program makes me think of the old advice about leaving oneself a line of retreat. I.e., it is difficult for school dropouts to drop back in now, but would it be possible for kids in the vocational track to change their minds (or have their sights raised) and get back into the college-preparatory lane? Am I naive to wonder?
I have not read this entire thread, but I will. There are a lot of jobs that could be done well with only a high school education if it were a really good one.
My Dad's father graduated from high school only. I believe that his father went to ag college, and he was even offered a partial cross country scholarship to Cornell (I think), but it was the Depression and his parents needed the income from his job.
He worked for the same company* most of his life until he took early retirement at 59 and went to work for a startup. He did feel that there was a bit of a ceiling at the very top, but he was a controller and a vice president for contracting. Of course, employers were more interested in training then, because they saw it as a long-term arrangement.
*It was Colonial Radio when he started and Sylvania at one point and GTE Defense Systems when he retired, but basically it was the same.
The most elite highschools seem more rigorous to me now, and they're all doing independent research projects, but his highschool education sounds more demanding to me in a lot of ways than what a lot of people get in college now. This was a regular public high school in Buffalo, NY.
I agree that it should be easier to redeem yourself from failure in/dropping out of high school.
I have the impression that this is one area where American liberals would be wise not to look toward the social democracies of western Europe for guidance.
Right -- my impression is that in France or Germany, failing in high school is basically a career death sentence.
In general, schools are not particularly competent at managing work externships or providing job-specific education.
Okay, I believe that.
Which probably leaves me disagreeing with k-sky and defending the status quo (with some effort made to scale up alternative programs), because I really have a hard time imagining success from, "Maybe you can split and start working when you're fourteen -- maybe there's a way you can take half-days of classes and start working part time . . . " if you don't have an institutional structure supporting those arrangements.
276. ???? Most graphics programmers need to work with rotation matrices. Anyone who programs something representing translations in the physical world needs to understand distance. Programming device controllers for a milling machine, which again, representations of physical space, is this century's shop class.
To the larger post, I agree that making it easy for kids to come back after leaving off would be great for the kids. But teaching heterogeneous classes is harder than homogenous ones.
So, Khan academy with certification tests covering matrix multiplication for all the returning dropouts?
Maybe one of the reasons that school-leaving is such a devastating choice under the status quo is because the options for school-coming-back-to are so limited.
Exactly - I was really hoping for a conversation about what would actually eliminate barriers-to-re-entry.
Also, I'd bet that nearly all of the things about roofing and stairs are how to calculate the right angle.
Even I know that. It's always 90 degrees.
292 - right. They need math way beyond geometry. The question is why is geometry a general high school topic. I'm not saying it shouldn't be a high school topic (although I could be pushed to say that), but it's worth noting that 95% of us are actually never going to use it again.
294: Farhenheit or Celcius, smart guy?
How many places is the dropout age 16? Mass has been talkign about raising it to 18.
I'd think that the Unfoggedtariat would instinctively know that it's not a challenging exercise to defend the status quo, but that seems to be the approach attracting the most heat.
I guess it kind of depends on what you mean by "defend the status quo" -- like HG's repeated challenges as to whether people are complacent with the status quo. It's not hard at all to find problems with the status quo without thinking that the death of compulsory education is a solution worth discussing. I mean, maybe it is. But the premise that mandatory education is the/a problem is a premise I personally find unconvincing.
If you want to get an interesting discussion going about eliminating it, a good place to start would be making a strong argument about why mandatory education is problematic. Because kids hate school and teachers hate dealing with kids who hate school doesn't work for me. Kids hate vegetables*, too, and parents hate making kids eat vegetables, but that's no reason to abolish vegetables.
* I'm not actually convinced of this either.
295: You can't really do trig or calc without geometry. More than 5% of us need one of those. Plus, it is one of the few math classes that is focused on tangible things. I think that helps people become accustomed to doing calculations. At least, I noticed that people who really stumbled doing much simpler algebra problems were able to understand geometry far better.
I would abolish vegetables in an instant, had I that power, if only never to hear again of broccoli rabe. Or beets, of course.
I wouldn't abolish school, I suppose, but I favor with tedious predictability any alternative to large-public-school imprisonment. Expensive private school full of spoiled, promiscuous heroin addicts? Sure! "Metaphysical school of light and freedom" in some hippie's garage? You got it! Hogwarts? Better get some liquid nitrogen!
Expensive private school full of spoiled, promiscuous heroin addicts?
halford will get mad if you talk about Crossroads like that.
(Confidential to halford: I know, silly.)
Because kids hate school and teachers hate dealing with kids who hate school doesn't work for me.
The case would be that education is not occurring in those circumstances.
Two things are being discussed in parallel. One is whether there should be programs combining part-time school with work/externship for kids that don't want to go full-time (or whether kids should just be able to drop out and enter the workforce full time). The other is how to let folks who bailed on school early re-enter in a minimally painful way later on. These could go together but they don't have to, since the second idea applies even in cases where there's just a horrible dropout rate.
Anyway, I'm still unpersuaded that the part-time track idea will work (largely for Halford's reasons in 286). But of course there should be resources devoted towards helping folks who dropped out get the education they missed out on. That's not really being contested, right?
But since we're not in ponyland, resources are horribly limited. So we can either put a lot of resources into creating this basically redundant educational system dedicated to re-tracking adults back into the classes they missed earlier, or we can work harder to keep them in school in the first place.
The latter is, I'll bet, much lower cost. The arguments against it mainly seem to be that kids hate school (so what?) and that kids should have the autonomy to explore the world in various non-school related ways. It's not that the last point doesn't have force. But it relies a lot on the exaggerated description of (for example) middle school as a soul-killing, brutal, prison-like Lord-of-the-Flies scenario.
I guess I sound like one of those stodgy status quo types but if we're not paying for this with ponybucks, I'd rather throw money and resources at improving the schools we have than create a parallel system for picking up the pieces later. We may have to do some of this anyway, of course, but a lot less than if we wanted to normalize leaving school early to just sort of kick around from ages 13-17.
I think a lot of the problem with any approach to "drop back in", is that to learn you need to be able to read fluently and to understand how ideas fit together. When you're talking about high school dropouts, you're talking about some people who are just unmotivated, but you're also talking about people who never got those two key things. People who dropped out of college are mostly going to be the former group. It's not really clear to me that it's at all plausible that many people who failed to learn to read fluently when they were 9 are going to ever learn to do so.
I think there are two basic kinds of problems with going back to school after dropping out, or restarting education more generally, like going to college years after high school right away or something: practical problems and cultural problems.
Practical problems are things like red tape, classes not being offered during evenings and weekends when people with day jobs can go to them, no free daycase so people with kids can't go to school themselves, etc. We streamline back-to-school programs and could fund all that stuff better to provide more options, but I think another issue is more teacher flexibility. I'll bet a lot of teachers would be happy to have smart, motivated, mature students who just happen to have scheduling conflicts... but it's harder than it should be for the teachers because so much of their schedule is written by the school board or departments of education. So if teachers had more control over their own classrooms, that would help.
Cultural problems, though, seem much harder to figure out. Things like essays are so artificial in some ways that plenty of adults with professional jobs would have a hard time with one. Way back in 7 rob said, "I had a student with 20 years on the police force who simply couldn't figure out how to write a college essay. 'I write reports at work every day,' he said, 'I can't figure out why I can't do this.'"
I'm tempted to cast aspersions on the writing ability of cops also due to my own experience with it, and point out that this is why English Really Is Important Guys, but it's a fair point that there's a big disconnect between the traditional ways of evaluating many students' understanding of issues... and an individual's understanding of an issue.
I've only skimmed the thread, but I haven't seen any reason to believe that gswift didn't entirely dispose of this topic in 5:
Teenagers are idiots and don't want to do a lot of things. Too fucking bad.
k-sky entreats us to use heebie's post as a jumping off point to ponder alternatives, but mandatory public education has had great benefits, and the only question is how it can be done better; not whether it should be done at all.
If we didn't have it, liberals would rightly be demanding "socialized education."
Spoiled, promiscuous heroin addicts are overrated. Actually I think I've only known spoiled promiscuous cokeheads, spoiled promiscuous alcoholics, and sober but depressed spoiled and promiscuous people, so maybe I don't know. My private school high school heroin addict buddy was surprisingly chaste as a teen!
I guess I only knew him after he'd kicked at age 16, but he was still a virgin.
Said differently, the problems for high school dropouts in NYC are not very different from the problems of high school graduates who fail the CUNY placement exams and end up in remediation Having the high school diploma certainly helps some, but there are ways for people to get a high school diploma later. The problem is that so many people high-school educated here, both graduates and dropouts, have elementary-school level skills. It's very hard to fix that at the high school or college level. What you need is for them to start over with 3rd grade material if they want to get back on track, but that would take too long.
303 -- Put another way, if we had HG ponyland budget, why wouldn't we spend the money on improving the system we have? You could include plenty of vocational options in a well designed and well funded public school, and maybe avoid the effects or segregating away the people destined to be towel boys etc.
(Rather than reinvent Gymnasium, maybe reinvent Gesamptschule).
To the extent that HG wants to spend some ponybucks on general stimulus, so there would be jobs for those well skilled grads, well, I don't think anyone in the thread so far has any objection to that.
Not-so-brief answers to the OP, although I'm sure these have already come up somewhere in the long comments thread:
1. Any proposal to "fix education" that starts from the assumption that mandatory mass education is Bad, and that there is some Better unicorn-and-ponies alternative that will make The Kids Want To Be There, is always bullshit, the moreso if it goes on to claim that teacher burnout is the fault of The Kids Not Wanting To Be There (and not, say, increasing numbers of woefully under-resourced schools and constant schemes to undermine public education by a certain entrenched political movement that's ideologically hostile to it).
2. Any such proposal that further claims that mandatory mass education has not produced mass literacy is even worse bullshit. Basic mass literacy and numeracy is in fact the primary benefit of having such a mandatory mass education system.
If you ever see anyone claiming either 1 or 2, you are being sold a bill of goods, full stop, and you can safely tune out (or tell the party concerned to piss off, if you're not friendly with them). Further:
3. It's been a long time since a mandatory mass education meant simply a completely standardized readin', writin' and 'rithmetic curriculum. One of the notions that motivates the Pink Floyd Theory of Education is that schools are gray, unrelieved masses of non-achievement is that schools are supposed to not offer outlets for students' particular skill sets and learning styles. In fact, the education profession -- certainly in North America -- has put a major premium on tailoring the curriculum to allow for different levels of achievement *while providing a baseline of common skills*. I find it bleakly amusing that the profession should now be attacked -- as by Heebie's friend -- for having put so much work into this angle, along the lines of having supposedly implemented some kind of elitist impulse not to "level the playing field." Your friend's background assumption that standardized testing is some kind of barometer of a "level playing field" is 180 degrees from the actual situation; the best results come from providing programs with a view to common skill-sets, but tailored as far as possible to how people actually learn. That's exactly why teachers habitually try to evade the obsession with "standardized testing."
The case would be that education is not occurring in those circumstances.
As compared to the education that is occurring when they drop out?
Should've refreshed. I hereby endorse 312.
re: vocational education
My brother expressed an interest in becoming a plumber for a while, and gave up when he discovered how rigorous the academic qualifications were to be a fully qualified plumber/installer. Not university entry level stuff, but decent basic arithmetic and geometry was a solid requirement. There's quite a lot of calculation involved in installing heating systems, boilers, and so on.
Here's a sample functional maths level 2 test:*
http://www1.edexcel.org.uk/fs-onscreen-sams/demo_m2_f/f.html
* the sort of thing an apprentice plumber would need to pass.
But Di, those are paired, depending on which you think is worse. If you think they're getting nothing out of school now, (dropping out + options) could be better, and not sandbag their classmates and teacher. If you think dropping out is the absolute bottom, then anything in the classroom doesn't sound so bad.
316: I am still not sold that they are getting nothing out of school now or that they are sandbagging their classmates and teachers. But even if that is true, I am not seeing why dropping out of school is preferable to changing school so they are getting more out of it.
Any proposal to "fix education" that starts from the assumption that mandatory mass education is Bad, and that there is some Better unicorn-and-ponies alternative that will make The Kids Want To Be There, is always bullshit
Okay. What about any proposal that starts from the assumption that mandatory mass education, however much an improvement on historical alternatives, still fails a number of students, and that creative people could come up with some Different Ideas that Some of Those Kids might better flourish in?
Obviously some of this work is being done by charter school proponents, and some of them are union busters and voucher stalking-horses. And some aren't.
The only way you get interesting ideas is by assuming a few unicorns and ponies. If the ideas are attractive enough, people fight for them, and test them out, and learn something. Or you could just assume the worst about the thought experiment, and knock the stuffing out of a straw man. Or did I miss where someone claimed that mass mandatory education has not produced mass literacy?
I am not seeing why dropping out of school is preferable to changing school so they are getting more out of it
what about "changing the school system so that 'dropping out' is not actually the only alternative to going to school"?
Or did I miss where someone claimed that mass mandatory education has not produced mass literacy?
Well, one of the arguments offered by the friend in the OP was that we aren't achieving a literate voting population now.
318.last: Basically I'd like to see any proposed unicorn-and-ponies idea to show some awareness of what actually happens in modern education as a profession, what its real results are and what various theories are already at play to account for such failures as already occur. Without that as a starting point, I am in fact inclined to assume the worst about the thought experiment (or, if not exactly the worst, I'll certainly be extremely skeptical about its claims and speculations).
(320 is right about what prompted to the comment on mass literacy.)
I like the part where you're assuming that two teachers have no awareness of what actually happens in modern education as a profession.
322: Teaching at the post-secondary level (which is H-G's gig, yes?) is not really at all similar to being in the profession at the secondary or primary levels. (In most institutions, you don't need an Educations degree to teach in a post-secondary classroom.) I haven't seen any reference to whether Heebie's friend is a teacher or not -- then again, I haven't read the whole thread -- but there are certainly people of different levels of competency and theoretical understanding in any given profession.
See 35.
I didn't actually know before this thread that Lord Castock was a middle school teacher.
How sad for Heebie's friend's students that they are being taught by someone who must not have the right level of competency and theoretical understanding, given that she offered observations that counter Lord Castock's.
If you think they're getting nothing out of school now
But this is what's so maddening. The assertion that kids -- even unmotivated ones! -- are getting "nothing" out of school is wrong. While social science isn't perfect, it's quite clear that kids, even at low motivation levels, do better with some education vs. dropping out and working in low-skill jobs, and there are plenty of natural experiments that have allowed us to test that proposition. E.g.:
Many studies using various methods have tested whether the education to earnings correlations indicate causation. This body of evidence is generally consistent: the economic return generated by schooling is not an omitted correlation between schooling and other personal characteristics (such as ability). And there is not clear evidence that the effect of schooling on earnings is associated solely with receipt of the credential; higher earnings genuinely reflect the skills learnt in school. There is no strong evidence that this general conclusion varies according to race, gender, or ability level. Thus, wage comparisons across education and age levels are likely to yield reliable estimates of the benefits of schooling.
I absolutely agree with the notion that school could be better, and we should try to make it so, but starting from the premise that school is completely worthless (for some unspecified number of kids) and that therefore the best solution is to make it noncompulsory, is not going to produce useful answers as to how we might improve schooling.
325: I can't speak for H-G's friend's competency. But if in fact her theory about teacher burnout is that it's all or mostly down to the kids not wanting to be there, then her opinions are counter to most research in the field; the subject has after all been under study for at least thirty years. It's not just about my opinion.
What does cause teacher burnout then?
we aren't interested in having anyone belonging to a working class that lives comfortably
I endorse 157, but want to push back on "we" as a rhetorical device. "We" have been pushed around for decades in a very deliberate way by the U.S. Chamber and its particular branch of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
(Similarly, "we" haven't decided that rich people shouldn't pay taxes. "We" have been wildly manipulated for 30 years, since before Proposition 13.)
Twenty years ago, it was possible to start working at the phone company out of high school, earn enough to raise a family and take some vacations, then retire after 30 years with a union pension and health care.
You can still get a decent job at the phone company out of high school, but the reason you won't keep it isn't that anyone has decided it requires a B.A. or you didn't have access to vo-tech; it's that corporations have successfully created a throwaway workforce. Did I say "throwaway"? I meant mobile and freedom-lovin'. Companies (writ large) don't invest in workers or training, don't expect workers to stick around, and they don't.
At the phone company, even though you're working more for less, you'll still see half your work sent to contractors in the U.S. and another quarter sent to contractors in lower wage countries. Working conditions are incredibly shitty in call centers and are getting steadily worse for techs.
More to say, but I need to go home and keep an eye out for snakes.
328: It's complicated, especially because some studies fold together "teacher stress" and "teacher burnout" and others hold that they're different phenomena. Some of the commonest answers I've seen are: escalating demands on teachers, increasing class sizes, declining resources, less administrative and parental support for teachers in disciplining students. (In this kind of situation "the kids not wanting to be there" -- e.g. discipline problems and attention span problems with kids -- seems to loom large but is actually symptomatic of other dysfunctions.) Varies widely based on particularities of school, age of the kids et cetera.
330: Those are certainly the commonest explanations I hear from my friend the 5th grade teacher.
I haven't read the thread in detail, and I've gathered that practical objections aren't really what Heebie is interested in, but I do have a practical question: how would these kids who decided to opt out at age 12 or 14 get to these jobs? They can't drive. They most likely walk or take the schoolbus to school now. It actually strikes me that that may be half the reason for the 'warehousing' structure we currently have in place.
Given the how much college teachers strongly prefer avoiding teaching "service" classes, it seems a bit bizarre to me that there would not be similar preferences among high school teachers. Can you point me to research showing that teaching classes consisting only of students who chose to be in that class does not decrease teacher stress?
I think it's pretty likely that it's stressful for high school teachers to teach kids who don't want to be there (which, on some days, surely includes all of them everywhere). I don't think that's even a remotely good reason for making all education after age 13 voluntary.
I completely agree that making education after age 13 voluntary causes more problems than it fixes. Nonetheless I do think that kids being forced to attend classes *is a problem* and causes problems for those students, other students, and teachers. There may be no good way to alleviate that problem, but it seems clear to me that making education mandatory has bad effects in addition to its good effects.
More to the point, I don't think that the first sentence of 333 proves that you obviously lack a solid grounding the theoretical basis of the field of education, that you don't understand the research, and that your opinions aren't worth listening to.
Honestly, though (reporting here from what my teacher friend tells me), the primary source of stress is having to be so ridiculously accountable in one's teaching methods.
He has to have, in writing, a lesson plan for each day's teaching, for each class. Each lesson plan must be at least one page, and the plans must be put together in a 3-ring binder: one binder for each class he teaches. I think it's 5 classes per day, every day. So he has a big stack of binders on his desk with a page representing each day's plan. At any given time, the administration may ask to see his lesson plan binder, or may stop by one of his classes and ask to see the lesson plan for the day before settling in at the back of the room to observe. Not only does it take an annoying amount of time to produce these lesson plans; for any given class, on any given day, in any given year, he may actually want to have a little flexibility: if the kids clearly weren't getting things in the last class, he may want to repeat some things, or present yesterday's stuff in a different way, or, having observed that a particular approach to the material was gaining special traction with the kids, he might want to shift his approach today and going forward. Then he has to revise his written lesson plans.
If by chance there is an altercation between two students in the classroom, everything goes to hell with the lesson plans, since class was disrupted, someone had to be sent to the principal's office, and so on. This is one area in which the administration fails in supporting teachers when disciplinary problems arise.
I could go on in reporting my friend's teeth-gritting woes. College teachers can ask themselves whether they could function very well pedagogically if they had to produce written lesson plans, in advance, and were spot-checked on them.
To be scrupulously fair to Lord Castock, though, that's not really what he was saying. He said "if in fact her theory about teacher burnout is that it's all or mostly down to the kids not wanting to be there" then she was obviously wrong, which may or may not be true, but is something different than saying that kids not wanting to be there can cause teachers stress.
Sorry that was long. Judging from what my friend says, most of his real job, to his mind, is engineering things in such a way that the kids do want to be there, because what he's showing them is interesting.
The biggest problem with middle school is the cologne-drenched dad sitting in front of me at this choral concert. I might die.
332: Given the how much college teachers strongly prefer avoiding teaching "service" classes, it seems a bit bizarre to me that there would not be similar preferences among high school teachers.
That would probably be why the proportion of electives typically increases at the high school level. (In particular since it's fairly typical for high schools to be starting to train students for college and the need for a more self-directed approach to education, as is age-appropriate.) There are of course also foundational subjects that one has to cover at that level -- you can't graduate from Canadian high school without a certain level of education in science, math, EngLit and "social studies," for instance, however minimal -- just as one would have to do for any kind of degree, the level of which would be based on prior patterns shown by the student.
Of course, in any framework kids are "forced" to attend a certain number and basic pattern of classes. The basic idea in the modern profession has been that the classes should be calibrated to their level of aptitude and -- in some degree, increasing towards college age -- to their interests. So, what's the "problem"? To the extent that this system runs into "problems," are "the kids not wanting to be there" really the decisive factor? There is a lot of literature on this. Not a lot of it supports the contention that "the kids not wanting to be there" is the decisive factor; it mostly comes up as a problem when other supporting struts of the schooling system are breaking down (One sample article.)
So, someone contending otherwise and that "kids not wanting to be there" is the big Problem that education has to solve has their work cut out for them. And of course, this is not at all what Halford said in the first sentence of 333.
Halford and I are being scrupulously fair to one another!
336: Yeah, one also often sees cited, as a big source of stress especially among vocationally-minded teachers, the amount of externally-driven and top-down-imposed policy-making and (depending on perspective) busywork. That's definitely a problem worth exploring.
The German apprentice system deserves all the praise it gets here, but it doesn't really solve heebie's problem of substituting for mandatory schooling. For one thing, you need a school leaving certificate to get an apprenticeship--generally at age 16. Also, the number of apprenticeships is limited. Every Lehrstelle has to be sponsored by an employer who takes responsibility for the praxis component of the instruction. Places in apprenticeship programs are in chronic short supply--increasing their number is a perennial issue in collective bargaining talks. In terms of raw numbers of applicants and available spots, it not really easier than applying for higher education.
So yeah: hurray for apprenticeships. But even if we could import the German system in its entirety, which we couldn't for a whole host of reasons, it wouldn't be a panacea.
I should also mention the experience of my father, who taught vocational classes for many years. I'm reasonably sure that "kids who didn't want to be there" were a bigger problem for him than for his colleagues in more traditional academic subjects.
One other channeled thought from my teacher friend: half the battle in success in the classroom is establishing control, or authority, in the classroom. College teachers know this as well. Many students walk in "not wanting to be there": the teacher's first task is to establish his/her authority, and that can be done in very many ways. If, halfway through the school year, the kids still don't want to be there, my friend would say that the teacher has failed in establishing authority and/or control, and at making the material interesting.
My friend is a bit of a hard-ass on this matter: he loses respect for his fellow teachers who can't control their classrooms. But then, he's a guy, and a big imposing one at that. He also inherits other teachers' unruly kids: the administration has figured out that he can fruitfully run a class half filled with students other teachers couldn't manage, so he gets them. This irritates him.
What is my point? Uh, I suppose it's that my friend would say that allowing kids who "don't want to be there" to walk away is idiotic.
26
I agree that it's a bogus to imagine that the second problem - the moving goalposts of employment - would reverse itself if mandatory schooling were removed.
The goalposts aren't moving, the requirement is that you be in the top x% of academic ability.
155
... but you can identify a bright kid even if they can't add.
I doubt that are any great number of bright kids (in the US) who can't add or that educational policy should worry about them.
Did anyone else see the recent Yggy post where he expressed his deep admiration for The Mustache of Understanding?
Thomas Friedman, co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize board.
You can't make this stuff up.
132
In Texas, if you fail geometry in 9th grade, you get two hours of geometry in 10th grade, when it's assessed. So there are teachers stuck with a 2 hour geometry class of 30 kids who hate being there, yes. Absolutely.
This is the real problem. High geometry has little practical value. It is basically just an extended IQ test. When a kid fails it is usually pointless to test him again. Naturally kids hate being reminded they are stupid for two hours every day. The solution is not to let dumb kids drop out but to make their education something other than a constant reminder of how stupid (and doomed) they are. Especially by pretending to try to teach them things of no value to them.
304
12 (not 9) is actually the magic age for reading fluency. It's okay if you can't read at 9, but your reading level at 12 is likely to be your reading level for life. (I cannot cite the research off-hand, but I know this rather random fact through extensive research on learning disabilities. At 12, if a kid with LD isn't remediated, it's time to start fighting for accommodations.)
What the fuck is wrong with Yglesias? Why do people (elsewhere) keep quoting and linking him? It is to laugh.
347: Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, said many news organizations in the next decade will be "covering how we cut things -- how intelligently we use our shrinking resources" and what impact the cutting will have "on businesses, schools, jobs, families and the social fabric."
Our resources are expanding, not shrinking, but for a few quarters in 2008/2009. We've just collectively chosen to spend them on pointless wars and tax cuts for the rich, thanks in no small part to the jackass who chairs the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Fucking no account jackass.
352: Yes, this struck me as well. We've all been bad and most of us will have to suffer for it, and that's all there is to it. Do you dare to doubt the deep understanding of the world on which that sentiment is based?
High geometry has little practical value. It is basically just an extended IQ test.
I totally agree with this. A lot of high school courses seem like stuff that's nice to have, and good preparation for college. But if you hate school, and have absolutely zero intention of going to college, this is clearly not the most useful stuff they could be teaching you.
To put it another way, for me high school was basically preparation for college, and the combination of high school + college was great in many ways, but it was also a luxury, because it gave me lots of time to figure things out. It was a very slow path to adulthood. If your education is going to end at age 18, and that alone has to prepare you for adulthood, then I'd say it's more important to cover economics and government (and give you some genuine understanding of that), rather than (say) calculus. It's the difference between learning stuff that is the foundation for more advanced knowledge, and learning stuff that gives you useful insight about the world.
352: Breaking news: I just cut some fabric! But I did a shitty job and had to recut to deal with the missing chunk from one edge. That measure twice/cut once theory is nice and all but I would have to be in magical ponyworld to be able to cut properly myself. If I were social about cutting fabric, I'd probably do an even worse job.
People should know about areas of rectangles. It's important for understanding buying property.
Traditional high school geometry (parallel lines, angle chasing, two column proofs, compass and straightedge constructions) seems pretty optional to me. It's great for people who love it, but doesn't seem to me like it should be part of the standard mandatory curriculum. My impression was that traditional plane geometry and 2-column proofs aren't particularly strongly emphasized nowadays anyway, but I could be wrong.
Certainly I'd rather 2-column proofs in geometry were replaced by basic programming. They teach a lot of the same skills, but with computers there's something external other than a teacher telling you whether what you did was right.
Area stuff though is pretty important, both practically, and if you ever want to take calculus or understand physics.
255: Architects design things; people in the trades have to make sure they go up. Ideally, this works seamlessly; in practice, you should hear shiv swear about how architects don't get roofs. To 276, construction is still a pretty big industry that employs a lot of people.
And to the overall point, if you want to reduce barriers to re-entry in school and work, you make sure that people get a common foundation that they can build on. That means people have to learn math, not just how to use the calculator to balance the checkbook.
357
Area stuff though is pretty important, both practically, and if you ever want to take calculus or understand physics.
We are talking about people who already flunked geometry once. For the most part these people are not going to be taking calculus or understanding physics (in any advanced way) and it is ridiculous for the education system to be trying to prepare them to do so rather than teaching them something useful.
My grandmother used to long for the days when entrance into high school was by difficult exam, and more than half the kids failed out. (The alternative then was farming, which isn't really realistic for most people in a modern industrialized nation.) My grandmother was also kind of a eugenicist, so take it for what it's worth.
358
And to the overall point, if you want to reduce barriers to re-entry in school and work, you make sure that people get a common foundation that they can build on. That means people have to learn math, not just how to use the calculator to balance the checkbook.
There is a certain amount of basic math that it is truly important to know and which schools are justified in forcing on kids. This definitely does not include high school geometry.
And balancing your checkbook is not a trivial skill. I expect less than half of all adults are capable of balancing their checkbooks and even fewer think it is worth the trouble.
Honestly, even for the kids who are going on to calculus and physics, it's a shame the schools don't make them learn more useful stuff. With honors tracks and weighted grades and competitive class ranking, it's all just a joke because you can't take fun, interesting, practical classes without worrying about how you'll ruin, ruin you GPA. Forget making academics voluntary. How about making non-academic course mandatory? Everyone has to take auto shop. Everyone learns sewing.
I thought it was commonplace for kids to have to choose a couple of mandatory non-academic electives.
I'm all for having schools offer vocational and practical things, incidentally. I just resist the inference that "if I don't use x exactly every day as I did in the classroom, x is not practical and can be ignored."
At least back in my day, you took any electives pass/fail because the non-weighted grades in an elective would drag down the weighted GPA of honors-track academics. And you limited electives because you could only take a limited number of pass/fail classes. Rory doesn't get any electives in middle school because she's taking music and foreign language. which I guess means those are effectively her elected electives. I still have a year left before I can speak authoritatively about HS these days...
352: Alert the mustache, I cut my fingernail off. Not only did I cut my fingernail off, I did it while chopping a radish, and saying "Heebie just"--
-- ah, fudge, I guess I already told you.
Anyway, the doctor says it's never going to grow back because the nail bed's gone, and the very meaty flesh goes and bleeds any time I so much as brush my bandaged finger against something. The best was Sunday when I had a fresh bandage on, so I wore a rubber dish glove in the shower. Then I snapped the glove trying to take it off, and bled all over the place. Thursday will be three weeks since the cut.
Also I think I chemical-burned the skin off the rest of my fingertip by soaking it in hydrogen peroxide instead of just cleaning it with hydrogen peroxide.
you took any electives pass/fail
Yeah, I did that. I decided senior year that instead of doing a second round of AP Physics I would take Photo Science. Then I sucked at taking pictures and switched to pass/fail so I could remain first in the class (tied with six other people, two of whom were in my band).
Three years later my sister took the class and was delighted to learn that the teacher used me as an inspiring example of someone who was book smart but wasn't very good at taking pictures. I think in his story I eventually got better. But I had to work hard.
re: 339
You don't have your watch with the concealed piano-wire garotte on you?
367.last: Guys, please stop applying highly corrosive rocket fuel to your exposed flesh! I know you feel it's effective because it bubbles and everything, but it's still highly corrosive rocket fuel.
369: wouldn't solve the problem. People don't suddenly start smelling nicer just because they're dead. Quite the reverse, especially if they've been garotted.
|| I finally watched Inside Job and while I assume that some of the academics being interviewed were stonewalling or dodging questions, the impression I got was that Mish/kin wasn't even clever enough to do that. That is, unlike just about everyone else in the film - whether right or wrong about the crisis - who at least seemed to pause for thought at times, he just seemed like an incredibly stupid person. Maybe he stopped being motivated in school at age 13. Or maybe he's the cleverest of them all. |>
re: 370.last
I was thinking more of punishment than cessation. Plus a bit of evil satisfaction.*
* I've been reading Kim Newman's excellent Professor Moriarty and the Hound of the D'Urbervilles, so murder may be on my mind.
It's much funnier and better written than I expected. I've enjoyed other Newman before -- Anno Dracula, etc -- but this one seems to get the tone of the Flashman/Conan Doyle pastiche (plus the endless literary in-jokes) just right.
And balancing your checkbook is not a trivial skill. I expect less than half of all adults are capable of balancing their checkbooks and even fewer think it is worth the trouble.
In this country at least, that's because nobody uses cheques and we get itemised statements.
Wait, US banks don't even give you an itemised statement? Just a bit of paper saying "You've got $852.14 now"? Good lord.
376
Wait, US banks don't even give you an itemised statement? Just a bit of paper saying "You've got $852.14 now"? Good lord.
Banks here give itemized statements which is one reason why many people don't bother to balance their checkbooks. However these statements are not always correct (I have found errors) and they only tell you your balance at monthly intervals (although with online banking you can now check your balance whenever you want).
364
I'm all for having schools offer vocational and practical things, incidentally. I just resist the inference that "if I don't use x exactly every day as I did in the classroom, x is not practical and can be ignored."
Even bright people aren't capable of learning everything that might be potentially useful to them so need to set priorities. This is even more true for stupid people. The idea that the best way to educate dumb people is to make them spend 2 hours a day for a year failing to learn high school geometry after they already failed it once is just absurd. It shows a rather astonishing indifference to their actual circumstances and it is no surprise that many of them react with hostility.
I worked as a HS math sub a couple of years ago, and did my share of the remedial courses. The biggest problem was keeping the kids who didn't want to learn from disrupting the class for the handful who did. Memorizing names during attendance was one of the challenges, so I could call the kids by name and credibly threaten to report the kids who misbehaved to the regular teacher. I blessed those teachers who provided photo seating charts, and learned to make my own (minus photos) during roll for those classes who didn't have them.
One class I taught for a day had the kids (mostly seniors) working through formulas for simple interest (memorizing several different forms of the equation), presumably to give them some relevance. The 2-3 kids who were paying attention were aware that the real world used compound interest, and were questioning the relevance of the examples because of this, but they didn't really have the tools to deal with the compound interest formulas.
SOCIETY WOULD BENEFIT IF WE ALLOWED TEACHERS TO BEAT THEIR STUDENTS FOR PLAYING WITH THEIR HAIR IN CLASS. (THE STUDENT'S OWN HAIR, NOT THE TEACHER'S HAIR.)
You wouldn't say that if you had hair of your own, Opinionated Neal.
379 (continued): As opposed to the kids in the same class who decided it would be funny to break a red transparency marker open onto the floor when I wasn't looking, and then claim that the girl sitting next to them had gotten her period. That cut off the interest discussion pretty quickly (though I did make the point that simple interest formulas they were asked to memorize were at least an approximation to the right answer).
Guys, please stop applying highly corrosive rocket fuel to your exposed flesh! I know you feel it's effective because it bubbles and everything, but it's still highly corrosive rocket fuel.
Wait, really? I thought you were supposed to use it to clean cuts so they wouldn't get infected. It doesn't hurt like water does and the bubbles lift the bits of dirt up so you can wipe them away. I've only ever used it on scraped elbows and knees, though, not severed digits.