all the 3rd graders were supposed to dress in camo
At least they picked something they knew all the kids would already have.
Did barbecue become daddy issues? It's an improvement.
yeah, it did. Thanks! I reread it, and BBQ is one of those dumb things that Texans think is unique to them but clearly, clearly isn't. (Along with fickle weather. It drives me batty that we think we've got unusually fickle weather. I think the weather here is not particularly fickle.)
Yes. Everybody thinks they have fickle weather and a unique meat preparation methods.
They're pretty much done with militarizing the police. I guess militarizing the public schools is what comes next.
That sounds completely surreal.
Washington, D.C., is a weekend daddy that dutifully sends in support checks on time, accepts reasons why this holiday has to be spent elsewhere even though that's not what everybody agreed to in the settlement, and will offer patient advice on finding a job to the budding white supremacist the kid is dating to get back at him for leaving mom.
3: Texas does have those rivers that are dry 90% of the time and then when it rains they fill up with water and wash cars off the highway.
Yeah but that hasn't happened here in several months.
When I grew up in Florida, we took the California Achievement Test from time to time, and there couldn't have been less hype about it. I barely knew it was coming up, and then it was this big dumb drag but just sort of boring, and that was it.
(I meant to put that in the OP but forgot.)
I think we took the Iowa Basics test. Or maybe that's what my son takes now? Anyway, I think measuring intelligence in units of Iowans is easier than something artificial like IQ.
If you say, "I'm as smart as an Iowan" or "My intelligence is 1.5 Iowans," everybody know what you mean. Most people don't even get that an IQ of 100 is average.
We also took the Iowa Test, which mostly just served to prove that we were smarter than the average Iowan.
Before I knew about Congressman Steve King, I thought that was impressive.
11 gets it right. My friends in New York State had something called "Regents" that they legitimately got worried about every couple of years, but in PA we just got pulled out of class for the CAT test and then never heard about it again. There was also a memory test every couple of years including the classic phrases "A baloo is a bear. A younker is a young man." That one was kind of fun.
Trying to imagine being forced to spend half of our school hours preparing for the CAT test because the school needed to do better than other schools to be funded.
This reminds me of my fool-proof, scientific method of defining middle-class whiteness. If you show one a picture of a classroom of black and white kids, they will start talking about the vital importance of standardized testing but if you show them a picture of a classroom of Asian and white kids, they will shift to topic to the importance of kids being well-rounded and how test scores aren't everything.
Before you know it your kids will be at school until 9pm learning Mandarin from random Chinese layabouts.
Is the Common Core opposed to guns and daddy issues?
Regents are a little different -- they're content-based tests for high school classes, sort of a check on whether the school's grades/course names correspond to what a student should have learned in that class. The same kind of thing as an AP exam, but for all the standard high school classes.
Grade-school tests, when I was a kid in the seventies, I think we took the CAT, but it wasn't important at all. My kids' grade school didn't seem to insanely overemphasize the new standardized tests; they'd have free breakfast in the classroom beforehand, but not a huge freakout.
I don't even know what the Common Core is anymore. Certainly not everybody opposed to it is right wing.
Anyway, if you aren't careful, you can get stuck at a birthday party listening to two parents who are both teachers talking on and on and one about Common Core.
Kids in MA get worried about the MCAS (our local torture instrument) without having to have bootcamps and parades and cheering students.
So: wasted effort on Texas' part.
Possibly related: If you say things like 16 at a birthday party, everybody kind of drifts into silence.
If you show one a picture of a classroom of black and white kids, they will start talking about the vital importance of standardized testing but if you show them a picture of a classroom of Asian and white kids, they will shift to topic to the importance of kids being well-rounded and how test scores aren't everything.
My math ed friend does remind me that before it got hijacked by NCLB, there was a progressive wing of the ed community that was pro-standardized teaching because teachers are so susceptible to the soft bigotry of low expectations, and would provide these easy soft classes where barely anything was covered, and standardized testing was supposed to be a way of quantifying the differences in pace. The other half of this is that standardized testing was meaningful if: 1. it was in no way tied to the individual student and just served to create a profile over time of the school, and 2. I forget. Something else that made it the exact opposite of high-stakes individualized testing.
For the life of me, I can't remember how Common Core and NCLB are related to each other.
I don't even know what the Common Core is anymore. Certainly not everybody opposed to it is right wing.
All I know is that in math, the Common Core is a completely reasonable set of guidelines and standards, which reflect the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and other group standards. And nothing more. Just a set of guidelines.
The test makers and textbook writers are free to create whatever the fuck materials and tests they want, in service to those standards, and that's when things get ridiculous, and CC gets blamed.
26: I think CC was created under the implied threat of federal intervention if states didn't get their act together, to stave off the feds.
I'm sort of generally in favor of the sort of testing represented by the Regents, and of standardized curricula (either nationally or at the state level, but mostly schools shouldn't be making up their curricula individually). In a class that's supposed to convey a particular body of information, it makes sense to figure out if the students understood it.
At the grade school level, though, much less so.
"Common Core" seems to be something only teachers like. Whatever your political affiliation, across the entire spectrum of American politics from extreme left to extreme right, if you aren't a teacher, you see Common Core as something imposed by your political enemies to make things bad. It's the rare all-purpose conspiracy theory.
I also forgot to mention that the 3rd graders all got to put the black paint under their eyes as part of their camo garb.
Maybe the test will be taken in a really sunny room.
4: Selah and I are eating the local unique meat product while waiting for her antibiotics to be ready. Luckily it's only a sinus infection and not strep or I'd have to get the older girls swabbed as soon as school ended today so they could be out tomorrow if positive but back in school by Wednesday when testing starts. Haaaate, but I still worry.
31: Why settle for just a bit of black paint? Why not go for full on camo face paint? And honestly, wouldn't the kids feels less threatened by the test if they had actual firearms? Where's the Texas NRA when you need them?
I'm off to have the local unique meat product, chicken tenders.
35: yeah, not goetta. There's a chili parlor right across from the Walgreens and I figured it would be easy to eat with a sore throat.
We also had school events to gear up for tests but it was "dress like a rock star to rock it" and "wear a sports uniform because you'll be a test star" and "dress like your favorite teacher" I think. No overarching theme. Lee is mad at me for telling Mara last year that these tests are racist and I don't really care how she does. She does fine anyway, but she gets to plenty of anxiety on her own and I didn't want to worsten it.
I'm thinking none of you teach or have kids in schools similar to the ones my wife works at.
Math Common Core is quite good. If only all teachers understood that it's not a set of methods you're supposed to use to make arithmetic "easier."
I bet abia doesn't stand for Austin-Bergstrom International Airport then.
31: Why settle for just a bit of black paint? Why not go for full on camo face paint?
Extra credit for emerging slowly from the river and infiltrating the school during the water buffalo ritual killing.
Kids shouldn't be taught arithmetic until they really understand set theory.
See, 40 could actually be a useful life skill.
4: Uniquely bad drivers, too.
Pretty sure Pokey could light up the 2018 Dodger bullpen. Does he need a confidence booster?
I'm on the record here as a fan of common core. That's still true. The basically unrelated high-stakes testing is extra awful this year because the evil governor is going to use it as leverage to bring in charter schools, but that's not something any of us on the ground can really change.
40 raises the obvious question: As the kids head into the exam room, should the school loudspeakers play Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries or O Fortuna from the Carmina Burana?
Speaking of Norse mythology, this is my favorite thing of the week.
AFAICT Common Core is great and its opponents are a rainbow coalition of morons from a diverse range of moronic viewpoints. I'm not an educator so there could be some legit criticism or I could be wrong but from what I've seen of common core it is fucking fantastic.
Camo wasn't even allowed at my school. Of course, that was a Quaker school.
Camo is also not allowed in Trinidad. There are signs in the airport that say you can't bring it in to the country. I think that law got put in place after an attempted coup a couple decades back.
My complaint against Common Core is that the education reform people should have to fix the damage they caused with No Child Left Behind before they get a new policy toy to play with.
46 The Doors' The End, of course.
You need 15 out of 100 questions correct on a multiple choice test where you have a 1/4 (or 1/5) chance of guessing each question correctly, but 50% failed? That is an interesting math question, because it would imply kids are able to intentionally pick the wrong answers at an impressive rate.
The top of the class always listen to the Goldbergs.
I liked and still like NCLB, too. Why wouldn't you, unless you think reading and math are unimportant. It was probably underfunded, but even there it got the focus right -- improving performance in the most struggling schools.
Math Common Core is quite good.
I agree. I'm not a teacher and don't have kids, but come into contact with Math CC on a professional basis. Its focus on number sense is a generally a good thing, and it's doing a lot to promote comfort with mathematics. Yes, some parents might have to learn a new way of doing things, but those parents should consider that "math is the same as it ever was why does it have to change" and "I'm really not a math person, I'm just not comfortable with it for some inexplicable reason" are in opposition.
Of course, it can be mis-implemented by focusing too much on specific procedures instead of the gestalt, but unless the curriculum is over-specified that's probably unavoidable.
Honestly, I think there's something for everyone in CC. It's based around the concept that expert knowledge is meaningful and should be respected, so liberals should love it. Conservatives should like that it's voluntary and all about states rights*. Everyone should like that it promotes efficiency in government programs.
* Assuming a conservative with half a clue, who doesn't equate multi-state with federal.
If you don't teach kids math, they can't understand evolution or climate change.
57: But its actual metrics were insane. That is, there is some point at which a school is doing the best job that can be reasonably expected given its student body, and NCLB was set up to identify schools as 'failing' if they didn't improve to perfection. I'd have to do some reading to remember details, but in operation it was a mechanism for identifying reasonably well-functioning public schools as failed to build support for looting their funding for-profit charters.
Why wouldn't you, unless you think reading and math are unimportant.
Because my kid, as a first grader, spent a shitload of time preparing for standardized tests and didn't even get to have recess. The experience trained him early-on that school is to be hated, imparting serious, long-term damage to his academic career.
Why wouldn't you, unless you think reading and math are unimportant.
Also, reading and math really aren't that important in comparison to socialization, which is what the reading and math are coming at the expense of.
I took the Iowa tests before some of you were born.
Mesopotamia. Cradle of Civilization.
Back when being an Iowan really meant something, I'm sure.
As I say, probably underfunded, but actually identifying performance was a necessary first step, and IIRC essentially all cases of not meeting the standards and suffering consequences were fixed via waivers (which might be a problem, but isn't the same problem).
Charters are a different issue, but one of their biggest problems (I'm not reflexively anti-charter, but certainly anti-charter as implemented and anti-charter as a union-busting strategy) is precisely the relative lack of transparency.
Not an education expert, but the criticisms overall of NCLB on net have always looked extremely weak to me.
60: Just came across that myself and had a similar reaction.
Iowa only got in the the standardized testing business because the first tools used were similar to those used to assess the moisture content of harvested corn.
|| NMM Margot Kidder. I was on several conference calls with her last year, a distinct voice. |>
I guess most people identify her with Lois Lane, but I'll always remember her as Barb in Black Christmas.
Interrupting with a question for below the food do to speak -
Is it possible for a person in the US to be prescribed methadone *without* previously having been addicted to an opioid, in other words is methadone sometimes prescribed as a pain medication?
Please tell me 69 is for real.
I'm afraid it would detract from 76 if I did.
Stop toying with me, you magnificent bastard.
On topic, 62 is for real where this road goes. It just beats all the curiosity and all the initiative out of the students.
I recently was shown the 6th grade science textbook for a public school in CA. Shit, they had a section on taking standardized tests! There's a "law of organizations" or something, that says that whatever you measure, that's what the organization will optimize to produce. So it's not surprising that schools will spend so much time&energy on standardized tests -- they're not measuring life-outcomes of their students, but rather this year's standardized test-scores.
But from what I understand, these tests don't actually -count-. They have no influence on your child's educational advancement. So just keep your children out of it, no? I mean, you can insist that they tell you the dates when activities center around the tests (the tests themselves, this pep rally/bootcamp, etc) and just take your kids to the zoo instead? Sure sure, when they're in late middle school, they should practice. But heck, for that, get practice SATs and PSATs -- don't use the bullshit tests that NCLB uses.
I don't see the downside of this. Any school that has a requirement of passing the standardized test for promotion to the next grade, and doesn't have an alternative, is a school to which one's child should not be sent. Period.
P.S. Get a bunch of your kids' friends to join you.
There's a "law of organizations" or something, that says that whatever you measure, that's what the organization will optimize to produce.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" is how I've heard it.
So just keep your children out of it, no? I mean, you can insist that they tell you the dates when activities center around the tests (the tests themselves, this pep rally/bootcamp, etc) and just take your kids to the zoo instead?
The problem with this is that as an UMC educated parent, taking my kid to the zoo - and out of contributing to the average school score - has a destructive effect on my kid's individual hard-working public school before it has any effect on any governing legislative body.
Taking your kids to the zoo perpetuates animal abuse.
Opt out of the bullshit, but not the tests themselves?
My proposed first step towards meaningful education reform is to require every university school or department of education in the country to be renamed "School/Department of p-Hacking and Buzzword Studies".
Couldn't hurt to try, could it?
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
This seems like nonsense, or at least an overstatement. Sure, organizations will optimize to produce what is measured. But if what is being measured has any connection to real-world value, that is not necessarily a bad thing! It is certainly possible -- indeed, likely -- that kids aren't just taking fundamentally useless test-taking classes, but are actually learning things that they wouldn't have otherwise learned. The alternative is measure nothing, in which case you have a system optimized for, basically, nothing.
You do need to be careful about how robust the measurement is to abuse.
Run them by a hospital administrator and see if he smiles.
89: That's true in principle but actually a very slippery slope in practice. I've taught two whole curriculums which on paper have meaningful connection to reality, and seen students emerge with 90%+ scores, literally unable to speak a word, or to parse an arbitrary sentence. They aren't the majority, but almost all the students are on that spectrum.
89: It comes up for us with assessment. At what point are you just gaming the assessment instead of measuring student outcomes? Especially if you demand progress along your metric without granting room for the actual pace of meaningful progress.
Who are the standardized tests actually for? AFAICT, real estate agents who want to tout the high performance of the local school. Any teacher worth his/her salt already knows what kids know and don't know and often results come WAY too late to be actionable anyway. Oh, and there's the whole issue of teachers helping kids take the tests and other such cheating. It all makes the whole thing pretty pointless, IMO.
Not giving teachers their metaphorical salt is part of the reason for some of this.
A highly standardized curriculum is actively corrosive to teaching. If the students don't master the standardized responses, the standardized assessments take more time to grade, and that creates a very strong incentive to teach by rote at the expense of meaningful ability. It's really deeply insidious.
90 - Sure, that is a key question. But there is good evidence that NCLB and other testing -- while subject to abuse! -- has had extremely significant positive outcomes, and particularly for the lowest-performing schools and under-served groups.
One way of assessing NCLB's impact is to compare the growth of student achievement using NAEP Long-Term Trend data before and after the passage of NCLB. For example, in the 28 years between 1971 and 1999, the scores of 13-year-olds on the NAEP Long-Term Trend reading assessment increased just four percentage points. In contrast, in just the eight years between 2004 (the first set of tests after NCLB passed) and 2012, scores for 13-year-olds jumped six points. In math, the scores of 13-year-olds rose 10 pointsin the 26 years between 1973 and 1999, and they rose six more points in just the eight years between 2004 and 2012.
....
There is also evidence that NCLB in particular produced positive outcomes for students. Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob found that the accountability provisions in NCLB generated large and significant increases in the math achievement of fourth graders. John Chubb and Constance Clark found that student achievement on NAEP improved for all students during the first 10 years of NCLB. They found that the composite gain in NAEP average scale scores post-NCLB was nearly three times that of the eight years preceding NCLB. The average annual NAEP gains during NCLB years equated to approximately a half-year of achievement gains in fourth and eighth grade math and reading.
Just as important as overall improvement are the gains experienced by traditionally lowperforming student subgroups. Dee and Jacob found that gains in fourth-grade math were concentrated among African-American and Hispanic students and among those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Chubb and Clark found that black students, Hispanic students and those eligible for subsidized lunch gained even more than national averages.
In addition to mandating specific testing and accountability requirements, the law served to shine a light on persistently low-performing schools. Research has found positive effects behind the mere act of notifying schools in need of improvement that they faced the potential of sanctions. For example, Thomas Ahn of the University of Kentucky and Jacob Vigdor of Duke University analyzed the impact of NCLB's accountability sanctions on school performance in North Carolina. They found that the "strongest association between failure to make AYP and subsequent test score performance occurs among those schools not yet exposed to any actual sanctions." In this case, the failure to meet AYP and the threat of imminent sanctions was a catalyst for schools to improve. For those schools that failed to make AYP for multiple years and entered NCLB sanctions, researchers found that the threat of the "ultimate penalty" implementation of a restructuring plan--also had a strong positive impact on test scores. In a report on the effect of Florida's accountability system....
There's no question that NCLB-style accountability systems have drawbacks as well. Concerns about over-testing, curriculum narrowing, and prescriptive policy interventions have been well documented by researchers. But these unquestionably legitimate concerns also have the potential to cause policymakers to overlook an important fact: Student performance did improve in important ways during NCLB's tenure.
94. At the low end of the spectrum, potentially identifying schools/teachers who are not doing their jobs.
In a context of basically capable kids from basically supportive family environments with teachers who do OK or better, they're not useful. Most of the people who talk about a curriculum or the real corrosive effects of standardization are from this group.
UMC liberals: "I am very concerned about inequality."
Also UMC liberals: "We in no way should standardize or measure education or perform routine testing in education, even though better standardized, more equal education is one of the only proven pathways to reduced inequality. Kids' creativity will be stifled if teachers teach to the test, we need to let local conditions that in no way depend upon or reify existing inequality be the controlling factor in how we structure education. Plus my kid who definitely would be fine whatever we do to the system was bored."
A highly standardized curriculum is actively corrosive to teaching.
I think you're thinking about something fairly specific in terms of 'highly standardized' here, that I don't think applies to, e.g., Common Core, which is a fairly general set of standards.
99 was pretty unfair, there are totally legitimate concerns about ways to balance in and counteract a tendency to teach to the test. But there is a core of truth there.
98: To be clear, I am in favor of judicious standardized testing, for just the reasons you give. But by "judicious" I'm thinking like two exams in 12 years of schooling.
100 is probably true. But to the extent CC is responsible for producing the stuff described in the OP it's fucking insane.
to be clear I am in no way in favor of bizarro quasi-fascist military drills for the standardized tests
What if the standardized test was training an owl to catch a newt?
That joke is somewhere between Dreadful and Troll.
Also, I feel the utter bugfuck craziness of the OP is being insufficiently addressed here.
This month is full of bugfuck craziness.
Like, if Verhoeven had had the runtime, he would've put that in Starship Troopers.
Having kids respond to standardized testing like it's a war is nothing compared to removing penalties on a Chinese company that were imposed because of illegal trading with Iran in the same week that you threaten allies for continuing to trade with Iran legally in a agreement you pulled out of because you are so opposed to trading with Iran.
It really is bugfuck crazy -- like, I looked at that and thought that if you can tell a classroom's worth of parents to send their kids to school in camo without prompting a huge "WTF" backlash, Texas is more different than I'd realized.
You could probably just keep the kid home and when the school calls about the absence just say you didn't buy the shitty Walmart camo that only keeps you hidden in a forest.
After our inevitable next ten gruesome mass school shootings, Wal-Mart will presumably start selling blend-into-a-public-elementary-school camo.
They already sell bulletproof backpacks, don't they?
Also, in defense of standardization, the UMC assumption lw mentions maybe isn't just that the students are resourceful and autonomous like us, but that the teachers are like that too, and that isn't necessarily the case. Teaching to the test may often be the limit of the teacher's ability, or close to it.
I don't know anything about education policy, but I grew up in the era of New Math, and my kids are getting a much better math education than I did.
117: Really just bullet resistant.
Bulletproof if you carry enough test prep sheets.
It really is bugfuck crazy -- like, I looked at that and thought that if you can tell a classroom's worth of parents to send their kids to school in camo without prompting a huge "WTF" backlash, Texas is more different than I'd realized.
Even in Texas a "WTF, we have to buy camo?" seems warranted.
We sent Hawaii in in a 1960s batik shirt from my own childhood.
Camo is in the standard bag of tricks they call on for dress up days: wacky socks, college day, etc. These all have half-hearted participation already so I wouldn't think anyone batted an eye at this, but also no one went to buy camo if they were disinclined. There's a healthy hippie parenting contingent here but also a high level of "right wing norms are immutable" complacency.
Although the Common Core State Standards Initiative was adopted with little controversy in forty-eight states, it soon became the target of attacks both on the right, for the mistaken perception that public education was being taken over by the federal government, and on the left, in response to the institution of an all-too-real draconian testing regime that served the needs more of the testing companies and other corporate agents than of students or teachers... My position is that real national standards--not simply state standards--are a desirable goal for the United States today, and long overdue. The "local control" of public education by states and school districts has been, let us admit, the greatest flaw of the K-12 system and a powerful obstruction to the reform of that system. On the other hand, I agree with many (Bryant; Hacker and Dreifus; Ravitch) who see the Common Core as a misguided effort at reform, fatally undermined by the use of punitive, high-stakes testing as the driver of implementation (Loveless). Opting for this strategy, the promoters of the Common Core unfortunately imposed a top-down procedure just where it is least appropriate. Testing, by its very nature, ought to arise from the classroom, the scene of a unique relation between teacher and students. This is not to deny that universal testing is possible and even necessary but rather to acknowledge that the more distant tests are from the scene of teaching, the more limited their informational value.
If there's one group we should definitely let inform our views about effective K-12 education, it's the MLA.
Opinionated Grandma could give John Guillory a lesson in brevity.
"Former MLA President" is kind of not a big deal. I vaguely remember Guillory's lively, stylish prose from early in grad school. Proust could give him a lesson in brevity.
You now have a wealth of presidential pseudonyms at that link!
Let's all say how many of the people in 129 we've heard of. 6 for me.
99
Inequality isn't a hard problem except politically; take money from some people and give it to others. Converting inequality into an education problem is pure insanity given that :
1) we don't know how to make education better
2) improvements in education don't translate into reduced inequality
The "local control" of public education by states and school districts has been, let us admit, the greatest flaw of the K-12 system and a powerful obstruction to the reform of that system.
Actually, I rather like local control of the school system. And, for better or worse, its already deeply woven into the culture of how we do things.
On what dimension would federalizing it supposedly make things better? Are there good reasons other than "that yahoo community over in _______ is educating its children wrong!"?
Local control I could go either way. Local funding is racist as hell. Unfortunately if funding is from a state or national level they're going to want control too.
132 - pure bullshit. Every society that's had both (a) reasonable modern economic growth and (b) a reduction in inequality has done so via educational policy. Your simplistic bullshit fails to take account of any way in which a modern society can be run. Broad-based quality education has to be part of any reasonable modern egalitarian movement.
Oh, and both other parts are also bullshit. Increased education does increase both social and economic equality and, within limits, we know how to (and have!) improved education.
135 s/b "has done so in significant part" to make clear that I'm not talking about a sole method. Of course, you could have more equality without modern economic growth, all you need is a devastating war that makes everyone equally poor.
we know how to (and have!) improved education.
What you've show is that we've improved test scores. I'm not at all convinced that corresponds to improving education.
Great point. Do we really KNOW that New Trier High School offers a better education than that of a Burmese village with no running water? Who's to say, really? Do we KNOW that Massachusetts routinely has a better public school system than Mississippi? I mean what even IS education, when you think about it?
Yeah, fuck you. That's not my point and you know it.
139, I've certainly see things written by teachers where a basic premise is that the time they spend on improving students' test scores is time they are not spending on educating the students.
It seems to be an arms race. Other schools spend this much time drilling students for The Big Test, so we have to spend 20% more or we'll fall behind, and every year we fall behind we have less resources to try to do better next year. Other stuff gets squeezed out.
I've certainly see things written by teachers where a basic premise is that the time they spend on improving students' test scores is time they are not spending on educating the students.
I don't doubt at all that this sometimes happens. The question is the effect of that sort of thing, on net, more significant than the improvements you get to education by the increased incentive to teach the substantive material that shows up on the tests, by virtue of having the tests. There's lots of evidence that the net effect is significantly positive, and of course it would be strange (not impossible, but strange) if that were not the case, since the tests theoretically bear some relationship to actual knowledge. That doesn't mean that there's not reason to make the net effect even larger (e.g., by figuring out ways to increase teaching substantive material as opposed to gaming the tests) but it's pretty clear that the net positive effect of having school assessments on overall quality of education is real and important.
And, to 140, I'll also concede that test scores don't equal education! The problem isn't that point per se, it's using that point to then conclude that we don't know how to improve education at all so *SHRUG*. What test scores can do is act as a means of helping to improve education, which is something that it seems like (within limits, and on net) people do know how to do -- and have in fact done. American schools are better today, in the sense that "kids come out knowing more and with higher performance on important skills" than they were 30 years ago by basically any measure.
. . . . which doesn't mean that they don't need to get massively better and more equal, especially given the baseline level of inequality in this country.
And now, into shutting up mode. Not actually an education expert.
There was some standardized test we took at the girls school I went to. Because they knew that all the girls there were anxious, perfectionist overachievers, they told us that it didn't count for anything, meaning, I suppose, our grades. When I asked why we were supposed to take it if it didn't count for anything, I didn't get a satisfactory answer.
There was some standardized test we took at the girls school I went to. Because they knew that all the girls there were anxious, perfectionist overachievers, they told us that it didn't count for anything, meaning, I suppose, our grades. When I asked why we were supposed to take it if it didn't count for anything, I didn't get a satisfactory answer.
75: you have to go to a pain specialist with special privileges, but, moby's answer is correct.
I agree with Spike. Address poverty and stop dumping on the schools. When you account for poverty, our schools are generally great.
American schools are better today, in the sense that "kids come out knowing more and with higher performance on important skills" than they were 30 years ago by basically any measure.
Sure, by the stuff that gets measured. What about the stuff that's difficult to measure? We know how to measure math skills but we don't know how to measure creativity so creativity gets the boot.
If you pulled together a group of paintings produced by 12th graders at a public high school in 2018, and compared them to the same school 20 years ago, and you put the paintings in front of a jury, which group would show a higher lever of artistic merit?
My money is on the group from 20 years ago. That cohort spent more time in art class, had more teachers available to cover the subject, and the endeavor was given a greater level of respect in comparison to, say, trigonometry.
I think its a pretty good bet that the group from 20 years ago came out better artists as a result. Some would argue that the loss to the arts is worthwhile trade-off for an improvement in overall math scores, but I don't agree with that.
My work calls upon creative skills every day, and I can't remember the last time I used a cosine.
I have good credit, so I don't need one.
Actually, come to think of it, the last time I used a cosine was probably around the time I asked heebie for help with factoring a polynomial and she hooked me right up with the quadratic formula. That was five or six years ago.
stop dumping on the schools
"Improve schools through testing to improve them and increase educational equality" is not the same thing -- at all -- as "dumping on the schools."
And there's not really a viable path to substantively ending poverty (in the medium to long term) without improving education. They go together -- you need to improve on poverty through welfare standards to improve education, but you also need to improve education to improve poverty.
Cosines are bullshit. Natural logarithm is important.
Cousins are bullshit. Natural rhythm method is important.
Cosines and other basic vector math are often used in video game development. Which is artsy.
Not only do we not know how to measure creativity, we don't know how to define it meaningfully, or at least not anywhere past the level of a Potter Stewart-esque definition. And how to promote creativity is even harder than identifying it. Maybe schools should be giving people basic knowledge and skills while trying not to do anything to quash whatever creativity might naturally arise from unknown other processes.
And how to promote creativity is even harder than identifying it.
It's not the Olympics. You can use drugs.
152: I went to a 25th reunion for a girls school (5-12). It's gotten extra fancy compared to what it was when I was there. One of my classmates had a daughter there and was thinking about taking her out because the billionaires in the class were changing the culture.
Nevertheless, she said that the things she liked was that there were just as many hours devoted to art (don't remember about music) as to math and English. And the 5th/6th graders were doing serious stuff.
Nevertheless, she said that the things she liked was that there were just as many hours devoted to art (don't remember about music) as to math and English.
Yeah, I'm sure Betsey DeVoss' kids got plenty of arts education. But somehow only STEM is good enough for public school.
I saw an Interesting theory that the Motown sound developed from the then-excellent music programs in Detroit public schools. Conversely, rap developed as a response to 1970s budget cuts in New York City, who ended music education in most schools.
If they want to add art, they do STEAM. I've seen it happen.
My father had a more positive theory: rap grew from the increased concentration in English and creative writing.
One of his colleagues at the College of Staten Island swears that some of the earliest Wu Tang Clan lyrics were first written in her poetry course.
150.2: since I'm pretty sure Instagram doesn't track back links, look at (but don't follow, weirdos!) the art teacher from Selah's school. These are kindergarten through second grade (ages 5-9) students in a low-ranked high-poverty urban school district. The art they make is amazing and their understanding of math and culture and much more is improved by it, plus the school itself looks phenomenal with their work on display. They all identify as artists.
Thank you moby & bostonienne, I am now relieved of the obligation to radically rewrite my understanding of a person-situation, I am going to firmly assume a rx for pain management.
The problem with this is that as an UMC educated parent, taking my kid to the zoo - and out of contributing to the average school score - has a destructive effect on my kid's individual hard-working public school before it has any effect on any governing legislative body.
Heebie, I want to be gentle about this, and please don't think I'm hectoring, but ..... uh ..... you only get one chance with each kid. And this isn't some sort of "I'm protecting them from meeting poor/people-of-color kids" thing -- this is "I'm protecting them from having to endure wasteful and rigid bullshit that is completely unrelated to their actual learning". Your responsibility to help "society" ends where it actively
hurts your child, no?
And if you don't believe that, I'll give you a sneaky "good guy" argument. I'm assuming your kids are smart, and do well in school. By taking them out of the test-pool, you'll lower the school's score, b/c that score will reflect the kids who AREN'T doing so well. And THAT will mean that the school has to spend MORE time educating them, in order to get their scores up, right? You're -helping- the poorer (as in "not as smart/diligent") students in the school, by keeping your kids out! How about that!?!?!?
Think of it as a way to reduce inequality. To reduce the "educational Gini coefficient"!
166: That's the spirit. It's not an unreasonable assumption if they have cancer or something that brings chronic pain. If they're like, "I got my wisdom teeth pulled and the dentist gave me methadone," maybe rewrites are called for.
but ..... uh ..... you only get one chance with each kid
That is completely true and also a great way to drive yourself nuts. Don't think that way if you can possibly avoid it.
153: Sorry, the "dumping on schools" was more at society than you personally - the idea that any time we have a societal problem, blame the teachers.
However:
And there's not really a viable path to substantively ending poverty (in the medium to long term) without improving education. They go together -- you need to improve on poverty through welfare standards to improve education, but you also need to improve education to improve poverty.
I think this is putting the cart before the horse. I'm pretty sure if wages were doubled in Heebieville, and if families were relieved of various housing and medical stresses, a critical number of newly middle class families would prioritize school, show up to PTA meetings, be invested, and the schools would seem to suddenly excel.
Poor schools are filled with kids who are dealing with multiple traumas. Redistribution of wealth and a strong safety net and well-designed social services would help quite a lot preventing those traumas (ACES!) and then the schools would all of a sudden appear to thrive.
167: I don't think it hurts my kid much to suffer through these tests. When all is said and done, I think her personal experience will be similar to mine with the California Achievement Test.
What we're doing to address the situation is roll our eyes, in front of our kids, and let them know that we think the school is doing a disservice by making all these kids super anxious. And just being low-key and shruggy about the test, lighthearted, "Do your best because that's generally a good approach to things, but don't worry overmuch about how it turns out."
I've actually just arrived in Texas. (Houston. ) I'll keep an eye open for weirdness.
"Do your best because after a while people get the idea that you're the kind of person who does their best and then they stop watching you so closely because all the people who obviously don't give a shit have exhausted them."
172: Don't make a mess. They don't like that.
Also, watch out for carcinogens.
170.3 is probably true. 170.2 is wrong, or, wrong without qualification. More money could be used to pay for more education. But over time without investing in education you're condemning people to more poverty. The true fact that it helps people, in the aggregate, be better educated (even without changing anything else) to be less poor does nothing to change the equally true fact that by helping people, in the aggregate, be better educated (even without changing anything else) you are making them less poor. The aggregate individual and social benefits of education are massive. Both can be and are true at once, and education isn't just an epiphenomenon of wealth, its a path to ending poverty.
172: The standard greeting there is, "Houston, we have a problem!" said with a beaming grin. They also sometimes use it at the end of interactions, sort of like "See ya later, alligator!" but specific to Houston. All of this is true.
The history of much Mexico and much of Latin America, for example, is basically a long series of examples in how being (in world terms) relatively rich fucks you in the long term if you don't pay attention to education.
Is that "not paying attention to education" or "deliberately keeping people as peasants for fun and profit"?
Halford, I guess I'm not clear on how having a good educational system lifts people out of poverty on a mass scale.
It feels like in the US, today, the only way to lift oneself out of poverty is to distinguish yourself from others - look, I have fancy relatives! look, I am unexpectedly smart! etc - and that mass improvements in access to education just leads to the creation of new obstacles for jobs. Now you must have a master's degree to cut hair! So to speak.
I am all in favor of having a robust educational system, but I don't really see how mass education compensates for structural disadvantages in a system that's determined to have have-nots.
Because you've decided to make it possible for me to tell if denying education is sufficient or just necessary?
181 - quick, heading into the garage answer - the economy and society is not a static system, and education is one of the best methods we have for growing it AND growing it more equitably. Sure if everything was just a reshuffling of relative status in a closed system that never grew and never innovated and just cycled around status markers, you'd be right. But that is not at all how the world works and mass education is a big part of why. People who know more can do more and get richer, as a whole, and have been proven to do so in many parts of the world over hundreds of years.
Mass literacy (and, I assume numeracy) are indeed vital. I suspect the returns after that are very real, but diminishing.
For example, I'm sure German education is better than most other countries in Europe, but I doubt is it twice as good as Greek education and 15 times as good as Moldavia's.
I'm not entirely sure where Moldavia is, but I feel confident they have a dictator who cares deeply about making sure his people know what a cosine is.
I guess it's now Moldova? Why are they allowed to switch vowels like that/
As I understand it, trigonometry is actually forbidden in Moldavia.
Transnistria, now those guys are into trig.
It's kind of a fascinating place. They're very progressive about pensions. 700,000 pensioners out of 3.5 million people, 1 million of which fucked off to live somewhere where they could earn more than 1/15th of a German wage.
The literacy rate seems to be higher than that of the U.S.
Moldova is the only country named after a drowned dog.
A dog that drowned while hunting aurochs.
184 is my suspicion as well. You need scientists and musicians, but you also need someone to fill the unskilled jobs and yet not to live in poverty.
The Danubian Principalities. Is there anywhere in the world a wider gap between coolness-of-name and coolness-of-being-there?
Is it just me or is Heinrich Harder way more interested in auroch balls than is healthy?
You're just jealous on behalf of your measly effeminate Nebraskan bovines.
Mass literacy (and, I assume numeracy) are indeed vital. I suspect the returns after that are very real, but diminishing.
This is not really right. It's true that the rate of return to education diminishes with the education level of the population, but what's remarkable about it is how high it is holds even in more developed, educated countries. Returns on education are still, by most measures, huge compared to other things one could invest money in. It's definitely not just a case of paying for literacy and then nothing else matters.
This thing puts an estimate of the social rate of return of investment in education in the contemporary United States -- public benefit for dollar spent, not private "how much do you get fro a degree -- at 7-9% at a minimum. And more likely as high as 14-18% when other nonmarket benefits are taken into account:
https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/conference/47/conf47g.pdf
This thing finds that
Macro growth regressions for a group of 31 (mostly developed) countries yield estimates of a social return to education in the order of magnitude of 11-15%. So when average educational attainment of the labor force is increased by one year, the estimated impact on labor productivity is around 11-15%.
cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp06.pdf
You could cut these developed-country estimates in half and still have incredible returns for investing in better and more education. And, in fact, rates of return in developing coutnries don't look all that much higher, meaning that the story almost certainly isn't "literacy and then not much else matters."
You need scientists and musicians, but you also need someone to fill the unskilled jobs and yet not to live in poverty.
Amazingly, if you educate people broadly your society can have more than just scientists, musicians, and ditch-diggers -- people can produce more and earn more for everyone. It's really really wrong to think that improving education doesn't matter.
This is a good look at the benefits from increasing education in the contemporary US across the board. Poorer people will be richer, and broadly more equal, albeit the equality effect is driven by bringing up the incomes of the bottom 25% to be more in line with the middle, rather than creating better equality of income vs the top 10 or 1 percent
On the testing subthread, I got to experience the first wave of the big run-up in testing and it was pretty shit! And since then the UK has only got much more obsessed with tests, rating schools and teachers on tests, more tests, etc.
However, I am deeply suspicious of assessment based on anything other than well-defined criteria - i.e. exams - because it's too easy to make it into an exercise in prejudice, and an especially pernicious one because by its nature there is nothing you can point to or change other than getting rid of the whole thing and instituting exams.
Matt Bruenig made a good point the other day that the stock criticism of exams - that success on them is correlated with socio-economic status - is really stupid. The only way that the poor wouldn't do worse is if poverty wasn't actually bad for you (or the exams didn't actually test anything). Poverty is bad; therefore exam results are negatively correlated with it. It isn't the exam that's the problem; it's the poverty.
Beyond that I kind of think exam results should only ever be reported with their confidence interval, or plus/minus a small random number, just to remind everyone how loosey-goosey the whole project is.
It seems to be almost traditional that anyone who wants to institute more tests, league tables, etc into the public sector has statistical practices that would have been obsolete in 1914. (Look! This number is slightly bigger than this one! WAHEY! But this number is slightly smaller than this one! BOOO!)
All strong contenders on the suckage front, but the Principalities have such an insuperable lead in syllables.
Hawaii just complained as thus: all kids have free breakfast available before school, but on STAAR test days you go straight to your classroom instead of getting breakfast. Then your entire class goes to get breakfast together at the beginning of the school day. (So far, so good.) The part she got annoyed about is that there was a "no cereal" rule, I suppose to make them eat some protein, and thing she was served was a Blueberry Sausage Corndog.
I too would complain vociferously if anybody anywhere at any time served me a blueberry sausage corndog. You've clearly raised her right.
I don't even understand. Is the dachshund dyed blueberry and fed on corn? Fed on both? Do dachshunds even eat blueberries?
"Blueberry" is what they call the 10 mg Adderall caps.
Fucking last thing a dachshund needs is a stimulant.
204.1: I'm not disputing so much that the returns on education aren't still there, but I'm wondering if the things that go with being willing to spend that much on education (basically, a strong civic society) aren't producing most of the benefits.
215: A stimulant that improves tests scores.
They're supposed to be training owls.
When the owl is ready, the dachshund appears.
People like to focus on absolute test scores, but I wonder if people have looked at variance.
If our anecdotal experience with schools is accurate, there is a huge chasm between the "good" schools and all the rest. The schools/students at the top are ever-more focused on grades, test scores and academic achievement. The parents don't just support the students, they do their homework, hire tutors, volunteer at every opportunity, fret about every missed quiz question, etc. Then there are the other places, where parents tell teachers to fuck off when it's suggested that their child has a behavior problem and many students can't compose anything you'd call a paragraph by high school. Furthermore, teachers (properly in my mind) feel as if making a connection with kids such that they know that someone in their lives gives a shit becomes way more important in these environments than test scores.
If you think that we're divided only WRT politics, you haven't spent much time in a good assortment of today's schools.
I'm not sure that telling teachers to fuck off when a behavior problem is suspected is something you see less of in the schools with tons of parent involvement.
Because schools are linked to the most important values of our society, by which I mean real estate prices, in the high-test score districts, you get lots of very pushy parents because you don't get a $600,000 house by making friends. By reputation, those schools have all the good drugs too, but that might just be spiteful rumors.
$600k house? That would be an awesome bargain.
Nope. That's just the screaming rich.
If normal people had to spend $600,000 for a house in a country where real estate prices are directly tied to school test scores, everybody would be in a perpetual state of financially anxiety that would make it impossible to improve education for fear of dropping the value of most peoples' only asset.
|| Working the polls for the first time for today's primary. Pleasantly boring. AMA, I have at least eight hours to kill. |>
If you're on the slag heap, can you just vote for me?
The slag heap with $600,000 houses, not the ones that are still bare slag.
Slag heap voters are on the other side of the gym. My district is north of the elementary school nearer to your bar and west of the park.
The bare slag slag heap is nice, has some good mountain bike trails.
I thought all the slag heap people voted in the community room of the slag heap. I'm still irked they make me vote there. Such a pain to get in and out of there in the morning.
Then there are the other places, where parents tell teachers to fuck off when it's suggested that their child has a behavior problem and many students can't compose anything you'd call a paragraph by high school. Furthermore, teachers (properly in my mind) feel as if making a connection with kids such that they know that someone in their lives gives a shit becomes way more important in these environments than test scores.
Doesn't the fuck-off part go with the wealthy ambitious parents? "Butter wouldn't melt in my lil' snowflake's mouth (because basic science and warmth makes butter melt, not cold)"?
Maybe I'm wrong. Slag heapers vote somewhere that's not with me.
Can only speak from personal experience. Some wealthy, ambitious parents act entitled and superior and treat teachers like imbeciles, but hearing "fuck off" come out of their mouths isn't normal.
Can only speak from personal experience. Some wealthy, ambitious parents act entitled and superior and treat teachers like imbeciles, but hearing "fuck off" come out of their mouths isn't normal.
That's why you go to school. To learn synonyms for "fuck off".
exam results should only ever be reported with their confidence interval
Statistical Full Employment Act of 2018!
Statistical Full Employment Act of 2018 +/- 9.6 months.
His loins will really be loamy now.
A woman spilled coffee over one of our papers. I never knew democracy could be so exciting.
Pittsburgh really needs a news media with an actual liberal owner because otherwise this shit. For local people who don't know who Metcalfe is, just recall all the stories about horrible PA state legislators people have put here. They were all about him.
It's ridiculous. I don't subscribe to the PG solely because of their regressive editorial stance.
They brought down what's his name that was there before Lamb. (I don't subscribe either.)
OT: I just used PLOS ONE for science for the first time.
So who's Kid Anxiety anyway? Jewish Damon Runyon character?
It's funny, I feel like there have to be 1000s of "Kid X" nicknames but I can only dig up two from my brain, "Kid Charlemagne" and "Kid Creole." Putting "Kid" at the end a la "The Say Hey Kid" produces more but feels like cheating.
Kid Nichols, and probably a dozen other nineteenth-century baseball players
The Cisco Kid would be a good name for a network installer.
There is legit a boxer RIGHT NOW who goes by "Kid Galahad". And lots of athletes from a hundred years ago as stated above. And Kid Dynamite.
246 The High Ass Kid from Maurer's The Big Con.
I am apparently way behind the times in estimating the appeal of Fetterman, aka Kid Braddock.
Fetterman disappointed me so much last year, but I'm not really surprised. This is an office that plays on his strengths, and it came at a good time, given how he's gotten his name out. On the other hand, Ahmad seems promising but I had no idea who she was two months ago.
Election working was really fun, but I'm too exhausted after a fourteen and a half hour day to say anything beyond the obvious fact that yinzers are weird. Looking forward to the general.
We voted at the last minute. The poll workers were so obviously zonked.
I might have shanked you for that. In a non-coercive and non-partisan manner, of course.
I was the only one at my district who was there the entire time. Some of the other ones at our polling place had everyone there the entire time. Honestly, that's a bad idea; most people only worked ten or eleven hours, which seems much more reasonable and less error prone. Most of the time you only need two or three people, not five or six. (Fun fact: Allegheny County had 6600 temporary poll workers, paid an average of ~$110 for today.)
All about the Benjamin and Hamilton.
Anyway, by last minute, I mean like 7:30 or something.
Should not have forgotten Kid Galahad.
Also, how did dalriata become a senior citizen?
Did you travel at near light speed recently?
And speaking of boxing, did anyone else see the Linares/Lomochenko fight? hoo boy was that awesome.
260 - yes. I was told it would be more exciting.
259: I decided to write myself in for judge of elections, because why the fuck not? It could be the first step on the road to dictatorship empire dominion well, not much at all, actually, but at least it gives me an excuse to meet my neighbors. To be safe, I asked my wife to also write me in, so I could beat the dumbfucks who didn't think to ask their significant others.
Little did I realize that the incumbent forgot to vote for himself. Turns out he's been doing it for forever and was antsy about it, so I let him do it. I resigned (I had to write a formal letter and what have you), and I took the position of majority inspector instead. The practical difference is $25 and I can blame him for our fuckups.
Anyway, I learned that young people without consistent work, especially musicians, also work the polls.
I am so fucking sick of lice that I want to scream.
Everybody's rooting for Paulette Jordan in Idaho, right.
When Grandma Moses was a youth, she was known as Kid Moses.
He's is--yall have lice? My condolences! They can be a bitch to get rid of
Kid Rock! Now a new reason to hate that guy.
This is the worst, because this is the time that I got it.
Also I don't know what the hell is going on - this is not our first trip to the rodeo - but I'm having the damndest time distinguishing nits from slightly dark specks when I comb out the youngest geebie. The nits are more obvious with me and the rest of the kids - and I should say, we all seem to have under five nits when I comb us out - besides the youngest, who either has 50 nits in his thin, fine hair and no actual lice, or I'm losing my mind. I finally scheduled an eye exam out of frustration.
Think of it this way -- by grooming lice out of your childrens' fur, you are truly in tune with your natural, primate side. Natural-birth moms, barefoot runners, evo-fitness types, all pikers compared to you.
They've called it for Jordan. It's a kamikaze mission, so they're going to let the lady fly the plane.
Plenty of people got into office because nobody expected they could win.
If the kids don't do well on their tests, try this.
