Can't upvote this enough, learning for learning's sake. This is what a true education is supposed to be about - the wanderlust, lifelong journey of learning and knowledge-seeking. I wish more schools and teachers would go this route.
That being said, it's becoming increasing clear that nowadays most education is overwhelmingly viewed as how well it translates to a well-paying job and high standard of living. That's not for no good reason mind you, everyone needs to make decent money in order to live a decent life. But it also sort of dilutes and detracts from the whole point of education itself, learning for learning's sake. I'd be interested to hear how you think these two often incongruous philosophies about education can exist in harmony in the modern world?
One of my favorite quotes from John Adams:
"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculature, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine."
The transformation of four year colleges and universities into glorified trade schools has lots of unpleasant ramifications. Enrollment in the humanities is plummeting, which makes all sorts of economic sense. When college grads are few and far between somebody with a degree in English Lit. stands a pretty good chance of getting a white collar job. When there are too many degree holders (Peter Turchin's overproduction of elites) following your passion is less justifiable compared to a major that employers may find more directly relevant for hiring (business, engineering, etc.).
Couldn't agree more, 4y colleges shouldn't be the 'minimum requirement' for a good life. Not sure how it got that way really.
Actual trade schools are where more students should go, and there's even a strong demand for them. The problem to me seems to be that a) those jobs tend to not pay as much as college degree jobs (which is asinine imo), and b) they have a definite social stigma associated with them which shouldn't be discounted - not good enough for a 'real' education, blue-collar dumb, too poor, etc.
Like I said, I'm not sure how we got to this point where only 4y college degrees are considered a minimum requirement. I would probably argue that it's Master's degrees now that are considered a requirement, especially by the PMC, but that is another argument. I would guess some of it has to do with rampant credentialism, and plain old money, but I'm not really knowledgeable enough on the matter.
That's a good point. I know demand is high now, but I would guess it wouldn't take that long for a large influx of new trades people to drive pay down.
But isn't this just the logical and necessary result of a society encouraging 75% of students to attend college? It's an important market signal about why these students are attending college. If every public voice in society is pushing the notion that the ticket to a higher standard of living is a college degree, you need to expect that an ever greater percentage of people attending college are expressly doing so to achieve a higher standard of living.
I think the real problem is that a sizable percentage of college grads end up underemployed--the "overproduction of elites" I referenced. There's a real question as to whether or not there are actually enough white collar jobs around to support everyone with a college degree. If there's slack in the job market college students are able to spend four years studying Sanskrit or English Lit. When competition for jobs means college grads spend years working in restaurants and retail sales then a major becomes one more bullet point on a job resume.
I think this is an accurate description of the problem with the growth in non-selective colleges and universities, but not the explanation for the shift away from humanities or less marketable liberal arts degrees at selective and highly-selective colleges.
The problem is that if you went to a state school you can get away with a public service job making $40k a year to start working down your debt. On the other hand if you went to an elite university your student loans could easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There the competition is for employment in the top 20% of the economic spectrum.
If anything economic considerations are even more critical for graduates of expensive private universities for anyone who's not in the trust fund set.
As a fellow performing musician who went through 2 degrees knowing I could never put up with the public education sector, my heart will forever go out to you ❤️
There are multiple confounds, notably that schools for black and low income students schools stayed virtual longer and the article does not mention any multivariate analysis that looks both at socio-economic factors and prior individual student standing.
That said, it would hardly be surprising if remote learning hit students with a less stable home learning environment harder than it did students with a more stable and less interruption prone environment available. And the results are consistent with that outcome, are they not? It'd be interesting to look at high performing low income students and seeing how they fared. I believe your book mentioned air conditioning as a somewhat impactful intervention and this seems similar.
This doesn't conteadict Freddie's point, just wanted to point out that there is preliminary evidence that while remote learning depressed outcomes across the board that it was especially terrible for poor minority students who were already lagging behind their middle class peers.
Of course - and because children in lower income families were set up to fail remote learning from the word go. They were less likely to have stable internet, multiple quiet, dedicated workspaces, parents available to help, and consistent home routines; they were *more* likely to have younger siblings or elderly relatives to care for, breadwinners laid off in the pandemic, crowded and distracting workspaces, etc.
Many benefits of schools are non-educational, especially for high-needs population. For some families, it's not that remote learning was especially bad for poor students, it's that they missed out on the meals normally provided by the school. This doesn't mean that education closes gaps, but that schools are used by the government to meet basic needs like food and shelter that cause those gaps.
One of the biggest benefits of schools for those with challenging home lives is the mere fact of socialization with peers who demonstrate there's a different way to live.
I guess we missed out on a perfect opportunity to put Freddie's theory to the test.
We should have made the 'smart' kids suffer through remote learning, and let all the other kids attend school in person. This may have actually closed the achievement gap.
That was in fact almost exactly the opposite of what happened. White (high cognitive ability on average) students were by far more likely to be in person because that's what the parents wanted, while black and Hispanic (lower ability on average) and Asian (always the outlier) selected remote overwhelmingly.
Also, "closing the achievement gap" only is practical if capacity isn't an issue, and capacity is an issue.
I am not so sure that "black and Hispanic..., and Asian... students selected remote overwhelmingly". For families with kids in public schools, they didn't get to "select" anything. The decision was made for them by the school system. In the largest cities, the decision for public schools to remain remote was driven by the teachers' unions and absolutely ignored the wishes of the parents to send their kids back to school.
My guess is, if you wanted to try to find one criteria for how soon kids were able to go back to school it would be whether the Republicans or Democrats were in charge.
Well, I am sure and the data makes it clear. And yes, families in public schools did get to "select" their mode, and majority of parents got what they wanted. The decision was not made by the school systems but by the wishes of the majority of parents. In no district whatsoever was the decision to remain remote driven by the teachers' unions and the only parents whose wishes were ignored were parents in wanted in person instruction in a district where a majority of parents wanted remote. Research shows that's about 15% of parents. They were just very loud.
The only difference between most Republican states and Dem states is that Republican states let ALL parents choose and Dem states were hard cheese for parents in majority non-white districts who wanted in-person instruction. But even that wasn't so much a matter of politics as it was that Dem states have far more majority-minority districts and it's *much* easier to teach remote and in-person if most of your students are in-person than it is if most are in remote. Dem states that were mostly white were in-person.
Blacks and Hispanics in Republican run states did very badly because blacks and Hispanics in Republican run states did just what blacks and Hispanics did in Dem run states--select remote in overwhelming numbers. So did Asians, but they didn't do as badly because capacity matters.
So don't guess. Look at the data. Most people are idiots on this topic.
Thanks. Do you have any links for this data? I haven't seen any data that supports your argument. I am not saying it doesn't exist or you're not correct, but I'd like to see the data.
I recall seeing many news articles about Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago, just to name a few, having to delay going back to in person instruction because of objections by the teachers unions. So, I may be mistaking anecdotes for data. It happens sometimes.
Living in a "Dem state" (albeit a moderate Dem state), I don't recall anyone getting to choose anything. The state set the guidelines, and the schools had to follow those guidelines. Most of the schools in our state (public and private) wanted to go back to full in person instruction in the fall of 2020, our state only allowed that to happen in late spring of 2021.
"I recall seeing many news articles about Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago, just to name a few, having to delay going back to in person instruction because of objections by the teachers union"
New York City went back to inperson instruction quite early relative to, say, California. So did Chicago. In both NYC and Chicago, districts that are overwhelmingly non-white, the vast majority of students who returned to school were white. Basically, NYC and Chicago were under tremendous pressure by white parents (who they don't want to lose) to open at all. But the vast majority of the parents wanted remote and this gave the teachers considerable power. So for example, when Chicago tried to bring back in-person instruction in early 2021, the teachers were able to delay it by two weeks simply by not showing up. All Lightfoot would have had to do is close off remote education, which would have put the teachers in work stoppage mode. She didn't. Why? Because 80% of hte parents wanted remote, and she would have been cutting off the education method that a majority of parents wanted. The conflict was still resolved in 2 weeks and teachers went back to school. A year later, when a majority of Chicago parents were *very* much in favor of remote and the teachers refused to show up at work, Lightfoot cut off remote education? Why? Not the parents. Not the teachers. Illinois had changed the law and banned remote education. The teachers were thus stopping work and had to go back much sooner. Not parent outrage. Law change. Functionally, what fixed the problem was not allowing schools to give in to parents.
"Most of the schools in our state (public and private) wanted to go back to full in person instruction in the fall of 2020, our state only allowed that to happen in late spring of 2021."
First, every one I know who says "we weren't allowed to go back until...." is wrong. California had by far the most onerous laws in the country and California schools were opened in places as early as October (they were all rural and white or rich and white).
Next, most people who say "we weren't given a choice" is wrong. They were surveyed. The school district went with the majority.
Finally, what most people mean is that they wanted full-time and were forced into part-time. That was a Dem governance issue that involved following cdc guidelines. It was impossible to open schools full time and follow CDC guidelines. That had very little to do with teachers or teachers unions and everything to do with progressive political pressure on Dem governors.
I just read the articles. I never would have guessed any of this. Thank you so much. I highly recommend these two articles to anyone that thinks they know what happened with schools reopening during the pandemic. You'll probably learn something you didn't know.
The last paragraph of the second article nailed it:
Of course, most of the arguments in the media were between white
people–white parents and white progressives opposing them. The
non-white parents whose preferences were keeping schools closed
didn’t often participate in these debates. No need to. They had what
they wanted. Like most public debate, the battle to get out of remote
instruction was conducted white on white.
But, I guess I don't understand why non-white families were opposed to going back to full-time in person instruction. It seems counterintuitive, especially if you accept the argument that remote instruction caused problems for the families, including issues with daycare, jobs, lack of access to support, etc.
I am a teacher for the Los Angeles USD. If you’re interested, here’s what happened. We went out for quarantine and started zoomskool in March2020. Stayed w/it through the end of the year and into the fall sem. Talk of going back was live but it didn’t happen until mid-spring sem. The union did not stand in the way. Various protocols were in place including weekly testing and a ‘daily pass’ digital check-in for self-reporting of symptoms. We weren’t really offering a full and normal program (zoomskool 2.0, w/most teachers on campus broadcasting from empty classrooms)but kids could come back if they chose to. They were essentially doing study hall + zoomskool. That lasted through the end and last fall we were back 100% but w/masks, weekly testing and digital check-in. This year back to normal, though many kids still wear masks. Make of that all what you will. It was the story from March 2020 through June 2021 in the second largest district in the nation. Could say more but lunch is over and I’ve got kids to teach.
No, that's very typical of California. In fact, three large CA districts were remote all year, which is why I find it kind of amusing that everyone picks on LA. LA schools opened!
Also, ironically, for all the wailing about Randi Weingarten, she's the head of AFT and NYC and Chicago were back in school long before NEA schools in CA (I think UTLA is NEA, anyway). But that's because union heads had absolutely zilch to do with opening schools. Weingarten could give CDC marching orders all she liked. Following CDC guidelines was entirely optional.
It was a very mixed bag in LoCali. I live in Orange County, where most districts went live in fall 2020. LAUSD offered a zoomskool option - separate from students’ home school zooming - and it continued into last year (2021-22) but may be moribund now, am not sure. FWIW, UTLA allows membership in either AFT or NEA. It’s leadership is vocal but they do seem aware of overall public sentiment.
This is a very curious reversal of what I would have assumed to be the case, based on my assumption that black and Hispanic parents, being more likely to be poor, would be more likely to work on-site jobs rather than work-from-home jobs, and therefore would be more likely to want their kids to attend school in-person so they could be supervised.
Do you have any insight into why this intuition is incorrect?
As a teacher in LA schools I know of one factor that is significant but rarely mentioned in public discussion is the higher proportion of multi-generational households among non-whites. So, if granma lives in the next room - or above the garage or even down the block - its safer for her if Jr. & Jr. Miss stay home. Also, medical care is much spottier in the inner-city than in suburbia, at least in South Central LA.
What Tim says might be true. But I have no idea other than, simply, whites were less worried than other races were. I went looking for it because in schools, you should always wonder about race first. And I've been following the data since late summer 2020. From the beginning the skew was there.
To everyone that liked this comment - thank you. But I highly recommend that if you have the time that you follow the links that Education Realist posted below. I am amazed at how poorly informed I've been on this topic. I was wrong on all accounts.
I think we disagree on a lot of the politics but this point has been an epiphany to me. Once you see, or maybe should say accept, this pattern the world makes a lot more sense. It’s like you suddenly have the right encryption key.
And although I (think I) disagree with your political believes I think we share the interest in a decent society where the place of your crib is not your destiny. I do think we need incentives to get the competent to go the extra mile to further society but we should reduce the ceiling and use the excess to improve the lives of the others. But above all, we should get rid of the corrosive identity politics driven by people that seem to not have even a remote clue about statistics.
This doesn't disprove Freddie's argument in any way (if anything, it strengthens it), but you could replace the word "schools" in the last sentence with a lot of other stuff and it'd still hold.
Instead of a bloated and mostly useless Department of Education (thanks Jimmy C), let's have a bloated but useful Department of Handicapper General (DOHG) to start cracking down on smart and/or hard working students.
The problem is that government spending is a leaky sieve. Any time it moves money around it skims some off the top to fund the bureaucrats. The problem is bad enough at the state level but my sense is that the federal bureaucracy is larger and requires more skimming.
Plus what carrots the DoE does offer changes with political regimes. Arne Duncan and Obama may have been fixated on education as a tool to fight poverty but the policy they chose to pursue was charter schools, widespread testing and the common core.
Oh, I agree. I'm just saying that the federal goverment makes a lot of demands on public schools and doesn't pay for a lot of them, so either remove the requirements or accept that someone needs to pay for some of those demands.
But if we acknowledge inherent differences, certain groups would only longer be able to get money for ineffective programs!!! We might even have to eliminate affirmative action.... oh, well.
Not every person has the ability to be a brain surgeon. Why do we insist on forcing college prep on kids that can't handle it? Let's get them skills they can use and get them jobs.
Oh, and 15 years ago I had a long conversation with the head of remote learning for a major university, who had been in the field for 30 years. He freely admitted it was a failure. He said that for long term learning retention, remote was horrible. "A hungover frat boy who comes to class after an all night bender who didn't read the assigned work will learn more long term than the most diligent remote student. There is just something about being in the same classroom as the teacher."
Yes. There’s something magical about the teacher/student connection.
An old saying at Williams was, “the ideal classroom is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other.” And clichéd as that is, it speaks to something true.
Maybe it depends on the subject being taught? My online section of a university course on programming always outperforms the in-person one. The last time I taught the course, not only did my students do better but my evaluations were better than my counter-part. I'm not saying this to brag (some of my colleagues are so much better at this than I, as in top of the department consistently even though they teach exclusively online, that I want to, and do, cry thinking about how I could be a better teacher), but rather to relate a couple of anecdotes that completely contradict the ongoing backlash against online education.
A lot has changed in fifteen years, as well. I was taking online classes fifteen years ago and began teaching them ten years ago...the experience is completely different. We design courses with the communication medium in mind and it's easier to provoke interactions and have them.
1) every individual has their own unique achievement level, and
2) where you live and the type of schools you attend (especially early on) can readily affect your achievement level.
Also, both of these things can be further altered by individual drive and determination...so perhaps a third factor. What is unclear to me is how much personal drive can close the gap on differing education qualities. Something tells me it can do a lot, but rarely completely make up for it in any substantial way. I could be wrong though, this is just my brain meanderings.
But I would remind you that what matters from the point of view of policy is SCALE. I've always allowed for the possibility of individuals to move around in the distribution, including thanks to the influence of perhaps a truly exceptional circumstance/teacher. But in politics and policy what matters is the broad trends, the masses. And there I think my argument resides.
Oh I would certainly agree with the broad trends being where the policy meets the road.
Perhaps where I think the crux may be is something like this:
If statistics showed that achievement gaps were completely arbitrary (that is to say unrelated to anything like zip codes, poverty, race, sex, etc.) then yeah I would think everyone would agree that there is nothing to be done about that gap. That is due to individual achievement and in fact the system is working as intended. However, if statistics show that there ARE definite links to those broad things I mention, then I would think that is something that needs attention. Because those are things that policy could probably affect.
Regardless, I definitely would agree with you on the notion that this apt sarcastic line from your article is NOT true: "all students are made alike and that you can just pour equal amounts of learning into the brains of different students." That is just plain nonsense to me, and I would think any sane person would understand that.
I view the education achievement gaps like car accident rate: We can and should do reasonable things to lower it, and sometimes even spend a lot of money on it if the data is that bad in a certain area. But we should all definitely realize that we're never going to get it to zero...that's just an impossibility. I think there's a sweet spot for the achievement gap that we should all be comfortable with. Perhaps less than what it is now (depending on which variable you are talking about), I think that's doable from a policy standpoint. But for anyone who thinks it should be absolute zero or go home...those people aren't rooted in reality and quite frankly shouldn't be making any mass educational decisions.
"But we should all definitely realize that we're never going to get it to zero...that's just an impossibility."
In practice, what that means in a competitive "merit-based" society is that almost no blacks and Hispanics will become doctors or lawyers or engineers or pilots or anything in which people compete for high scores to get access.
Even if we do what I'd like, which is set minimum benchmarks and then lottery or access for all who meet that benchmark, there will be a lot fewer. And we can't say "oh, that's a problem" but "hey, that's how it goes."
I meant not quite getting the achievement gap to zero in terms of individual achievement only. For instance, let's say we somehow get everything else equalized in terms of pre-college education (hypothetical), and then we see one demographic of students (let's say redheads for a nonsense example) having slightly higher scores every other demographic, what more can we possibly do for that?
I mean the closer you get to zero the harder it is to close it, and at some point you have to rely on the individual students themselves. If you're going to say something like "10% of the population are redheads, therefore 10% of doctors should be redheads"...that just doesn't work in reality. The determination factor of the student is always going to be part of the equation. And you can't take that off the table because to do so would also make achievement and excellence in a given field completely pointless. That's a non-starter for most people.
We're never going to get anywhere near that. The actual gap between whites and Asians is pretty small and shruggable. The gap between non-poor blacks and poor whites is in favor of poor whites, and non-poor Hispanics just barely touch out poor whites. These are massive chasms.
Whether or not it’s your position, Freddie, some have read into you that only relative performance affects economic outcomes and so it’s the only kind that matters. This is probably true in the small, but in the large it really is the case that a better educated population can sustain a more advanced society with higher paying opportunities for more people. Conversely, pandemic learning loss is perhaps not a factor in social mobility, but still a factor in our overall prosperity.
I think a diverse economy, with numerous opportunities for both white collar as well as blue collar workers, is a healthy economy. Unbalancing the labor market in one direction or another is probably not only economically inefficient but extremely disruptive to the social order as well. Academics like Peter Turchin posit that underemployed college graduates are as bad as large populations of surplus young men who cannot find mates.
One could almost say that the first case leads to political explosions and the second to physical explosions... if one wanted to push those concepts to the extreme
Education is not only for "the labor market", it is also (as Eleanor Roosevelt - at the time citing the Archbishop of York - noted) “... to produce citizens.”
The ability to read and process information is an absolute good - not just a relative one. The decline in this skill over the past 30 years is a major contributor to many current ills.
"You can't learn Algebra if no one teaches it to you"
I think they were actually going to try this at some school in San Francisco, in order to close the achievement gap. One of those articles that as I was reading it I thought I might be having a stroke or something. As you said, just make sure no one can run fast, that'll solve it!
They did it as part of the Common Core initiative in 2013-14, because they were having trouble with kids taking Algebra I in sixth or seventh grade and then wanting to start Algebra 2 in high school and while that might sound great, a lot of the kids weren't ready and hadn't really learned as much and SF didn't really like being used as little more than a transcript delivery system. Also, high school teachers were complaining that the kids who were taught by middle school or private summer school programs didn't know as much, and they were being forced to reduce what they taught. Meanwhile--and of course this was also part of it--other kids were starting algebra 1 in 9th grade.
COmmon Core 8th grade was so much more advanced than normal 8th grade math. It's basically algebra 1. So much so that by and large, high schools ignored Common Core math demands. We still teach A1 as it used to be and A2 as it used to be, rather than A2 as A1 and A1 as 8th grade math.
So SFUSD and another heavily Asian district used this fact to get out of an annoying behavior that was pissing off math teachers, rather than try to stop kids from learning.
Honestly, all the obsession about "getting to calculus while in HS" is kind of bullshit.
That makes sense, and thanks for such a detailed reply! When I first read about it it seemed outrageous to not allow kids to learn algebra if they were ready but I guess it’s more complex than I imagined.
I don't want to argue in *favor* of either side. What Asian parents do is ridiculous, and I get really pissed when people talk about their pursuing excellence or merit based whatever. They are in search of an impressive transcript and schools need to stop allowing that.
On the other hand, SF progressive politis are batshit crazy and they are doing everything they can to distort reality. However, so is everyone else. SF isn't particularly unusual in that regard. What made the story is the large Asian population and every other school district with that particular feature faces that particular problem.
I’ve worked in public schools for the past 18 years, and I can honestly state it’s never been so nuts as it is now. I have always been a big supporter of Freddie’s views on education, and loved the Cult of Smart. But I am honestly wistful for the bad old days of believing that every child can succeed, as compared to the woke pessimism I see around me.
Since the pandemic, my district has become obsessed with DEI to the point of distraction.
I have been to nearly 20 hours of DEI in services, and 0 on providing remedial math and literacy instruction. I have been provided hours of pre-made lessons on racial and gender identity, but have struggled to get my principal to authorize an order for a reading curriculum that addresses the 6 components of literacy.
My district has been very conscious in adopting activist language, but it’s all window dressing. Our head of Special Education opened the year by committing to end White Supremacy, then transitioned seamlessly to how we would address this by using standardized naming conventions when uploading signature pages from IEP meetings.
I’m on board with everything in this column, but for the love of God we need to teach kids to read, and I am honestly afraid to express this opinion at my job
Teacher here, and I totally saw this shift at my previous urban schools job. I preferred the achievement gap stuff, because at least it was optimistic. I didn’t believe in it, but I definitely don’t believe in endlessly haranguing kids about race and class. They need to be taught to be curious! I now work in the suburbs, and I’m just teaching curiosity and basic critical thinking, and no one seems to care how far left I am as long as I’m not lecturing students about it.
My children attend/attended (2 out, 1 to go!) a fancy private school in Westchester and I saw the same thing. If you just read the emails to parents or listened to the speeches of the head of school, you would think it was the most ridiculous, woke school in the country. When you ask the kids however, they have no idea what you are referring to. Nothing had changed in the actual instruction at all. There were no racial struggle sessions, none of their teachers thought that it was white supremacist to expect students to turn in work on time, and expectations of 3-4 hours of work per night remained unchanged. Students evidencing an inability to keep up (almost exclusively those admitted in elementary school) were still being pushed to consider whether a different type of school wouldn't be in the student's best interest. It's clear that in at least some places, some of this new messaging is performative, for public consumption only.
Hmmm...I don’t think this sounds the same? Grandpa’s school is actually changing, and mine isn’t woke at all, even in public. Actually the opposite: it’s in the reddest area of a blue urban area in a red state. The issue we’re talking about is how urban schools in blue areas serving mostly poor kids used to be really worried about whether they could read, and now they’re really worried about whether their teachers and schools systems are racist. This probably isn’t good for teachers or kids in urban schools!
Fancy private schools are just gonna virtue signal, like all of our corporate overlords do.
Perhaps I misread the relevance of your employment change, but I understood your comment to be that you were witnessing the same type of messaging changes from the administrators, but as an actual teacher you were doing what you have always done.
Maybe this is my own bugaboo but I think you’d get less pushback on this topic if instead of saying, “It’s just that not everyone has equal potential,” you said, “It’s just that not everyone has equal potential TO SUCCEED AT SCHOOL.” Perhaps it should be obvious because your writing on this issue is always in the context of schooling but I think talking about talent, intelligence, and potential in the abstract without specifying that you are referring to a particular type of ability is what makes people queasy. That slight caveat or disclaimer might clarify your stance.
It's a caveat he has offered repeatedly in longer works on the subject. But...success in school is correlated to success (or good outcomes, in any event) in plenty of other categories and matters. Academic achievement is not solely a reflection of IQ, but is also heavily influenced by personality traits such as conscientiousness.
The reform of education should begin with a simple and straightforward mission statement:
"To sufficiently prepare each student for the next step in their path to be become economically self-sufficient adults."
Even the arts and humanities would benefit from this focus. It can incorporate the broader considerations for developing creativity, humility, empathy and emotional intelligence... but everything with a focus of getting the kids to become well-functioning adults that can provide for themselves.
If education can not deliver on that, then it is not providing societal value as education... and should be labeled as something else.
While I agree, completely actually, that each child is an individual and that a school and teachers cannot be held accountable for whatever genetic or environmental factors might cause variation among students so that there is a "gap," at the same time, our education system is worth less than dirt. While there are good educators, many of them, the school systems are littered with people who are so hopeless, incompetent, and lazy that they would not survive in any other profession, outside maybe politics. The functional literacy rate in this country is ridiculously low (https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-literacy-levels-among-us-adults-could-be-costing-the-economy-22-trillion-a-year/?sh=7a3115034c90). Schools are so worried about creating "good citizens" and "teaching" kids *what* to think that they don't teach children the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic) and *how* to think. And while I know that many issues contribute to our lousy education system, part of it is the educators. I proofread for a publishing house, and I can tell you that for every book or article you find that works toward reasonable solutions to better educate children in the basics and critical thinking skills, you'll find two more that talk about raising "global citizens" or "responsible citizens" and seven more that whine about why teachers shouldn't be held "accountable." Spend some time reading education journals. You won't look at "education" the same way and you will have little patience for any discussion of "education gaps and failures" that isn't a highly nuanced discussion that makes teachers at least somewhat responsible for the situation.
That seems an overly broad statement. So you disagree that each child is an individual?
And, yes, teachers are partly to blame for our failed system as they are part of the system, in fact one of the most foundational and pervasive parts. It only is logical that they are not 'innocent" in all this.
You can’t blame the average teacher for being average than you can blame the average student for being average. It’s just the nature of reality. That’s why so many reforms succeed on a small scale but fail when they try and expand - they can’t scale as only 10% of teacher are in the top 10%.
So why is it that the "average" teacher and the "average" student knew so much more even forty years ago? While we can have all these philosophical discussions we like shifting blame, the reality is that our society is much less literate and capable than it was a half century ago. Something happened, and there are only so many players involved.
Have you ever looked at the test they took at the end of the eighth grade? And it's just empirical. I knew a lot of working class, agrarian people. They all could comfortably converse about topics that leave college graduates stumped today. Everyone invented; everyone read, a lot. Maybe you should get out and talk to people born before 1970 or so. You'll discover all this excuse making is getting us nowhere, and it's all excuse making.
And I find it rather offensive that you assume only "dumb" people drop out. Dropping out of school has more to do with life circumstances than intelligence. Everything you learn in school (and this is and always was true) can be learned on your own.
The main point of this post is entirely correct and I have seen some small number of people make the argument it refutes. It is worth pointing out, however, that the main thrust of most school reformers is not trying to eradicate individual differences in achievement, but raising absolute achievement levels closer to potential.
Can't upvote this enough, learning for learning's sake. This is what a true education is supposed to be about - the wanderlust, lifelong journey of learning and knowledge-seeking. I wish more schools and teachers would go this route.
That being said, it's becoming increasing clear that nowadays most education is overwhelmingly viewed as how well it translates to a well-paying job and high standard of living. That's not for no good reason mind you, everyone needs to make decent money in order to live a decent life. But it also sort of dilutes and detracts from the whole point of education itself, learning for learning's sake. I'd be interested to hear how you think these two often incongruous philosophies about education can exist in harmony in the modern world?
One of my favorite quotes from John Adams:
"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculature, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine."
The transformation of four year colleges and universities into glorified trade schools has lots of unpleasant ramifications. Enrollment in the humanities is plummeting, which makes all sorts of economic sense. When college grads are few and far between somebody with a degree in English Lit. stands a pretty good chance of getting a white collar job. When there are too many degree holders (Peter Turchin's overproduction of elites) following your passion is less justifiable compared to a major that employers may find more directly relevant for hiring (business, engineering, etc.).
Couldn't agree more, 4y colleges shouldn't be the 'minimum requirement' for a good life. Not sure how it got that way really.
Actual trade schools are where more students should go, and there's even a strong demand for them. The problem to me seems to be that a) those jobs tend to not pay as much as college degree jobs (which is asinine imo), and b) they have a definite social stigma associated with them which shouldn't be discounted - not good enough for a 'real' education, blue-collar dumb, too poor, etc.
Like I said, I'm not sure how we got to this point where only 4y college degrees are considered a minimum requirement. I would probably argue that it's Master's degrees now that are considered a requirement, especially by the PMC, but that is another argument. I would guess some of it has to do with rampant credentialism, and plain old money, but I'm not really knowledgeable enough on the matter.
That's a good point. I know demand is high now, but I would guess it wouldn't take that long for a large influx of new trades people to drive pay down.
I don't have an answer to that, I'm stumped.
But isn't this just the logical and necessary result of a society encouraging 75% of students to attend college? It's an important market signal about why these students are attending college. If every public voice in society is pushing the notion that the ticket to a higher standard of living is a college degree, you need to expect that an ever greater percentage of people attending college are expressly doing so to achieve a higher standard of living.
I think the real problem is that a sizable percentage of college grads end up underemployed--the "overproduction of elites" I referenced. There's a real question as to whether or not there are actually enough white collar jobs around to support everyone with a college degree. If there's slack in the job market college students are able to spend four years studying Sanskrit or English Lit. When competition for jobs means college grads spend years working in restaurants and retail sales then a major becomes one more bullet point on a job resume.
I think this is an accurate description of the problem with the growth in non-selective colleges and universities, but not the explanation for the shift away from humanities or less marketable liberal arts degrees at selective and highly-selective colleges.
The problem is that if you went to a state school you can get away with a public service job making $40k a year to start working down your debt. On the other hand if you went to an elite university your student loans could easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There the competition is for employment in the top 20% of the economic spectrum.
If anything economic considerations are even more critical for graduates of expensive private universities for anyone who's not in the trust fund set.
As a fellow performing musician who went through 2 degrees knowing I could never put up with the public education sector, my heart will forever go out to you ❤️
There are multiple confounds, notably that schools for black and low income students schools stayed virtual longer and the article does not mention any multivariate analysis that looks both at socio-economic factors and prior individual student standing.
That said, it would hardly be surprising if remote learning hit students with a less stable home learning environment harder than it did students with a more stable and less interruption prone environment available. And the results are consistent with that outcome, are they not? It'd be interesting to look at high performing low income students and seeing how they fared. I believe your book mentioned air conditioning as a somewhat impactful intervention and this seems similar.
This doesn't conteadict Freddie's point, just wanted to point out that there is preliminary evidence that while remote learning depressed outcomes across the board that it was especially terrible for poor minority students who were already lagging behind their middle class peers.
Of course - and because children in lower income families were set up to fail remote learning from the word go. They were less likely to have stable internet, multiple quiet, dedicated workspaces, parents available to help, and consistent home routines; they were *more* likely to have younger siblings or elderly relatives to care for, breadwinners laid off in the pandemic, crowded and distracting workspaces, etc.
And also *more* likely to have parents who demanded remote education.
Many benefits of schools are non-educational, especially for high-needs population. For some families, it's not that remote learning was especially bad for poor students, it's that they missed out on the meals normally provided by the school. This doesn't mean that education closes gaps, but that schools are used by the government to meet basic needs like food and shelter that cause those gaps.
One of the biggest benefits of schools for those with challenging home lives is the mere fact of socialization with peers who demonstrate there's a different way to live.
I guess we missed out on a perfect opportunity to put Freddie's theory to the test.
We should have made the 'smart' kids suffer through remote learning, and let all the other kids attend school in person. This may have actually closed the achievement gap.
That was in fact almost exactly the opposite of what happened. White (high cognitive ability on average) students were by far more likely to be in person because that's what the parents wanted, while black and Hispanic (lower ability on average) and Asian (always the outlier) selected remote overwhelmingly.
Also, "closing the achievement gap" only is practical if capacity isn't an issue, and capacity is an issue.
I am not so sure that "black and Hispanic..., and Asian... students selected remote overwhelmingly". For families with kids in public schools, they didn't get to "select" anything. The decision was made for them by the school system. In the largest cities, the decision for public schools to remain remote was driven by the teachers' unions and absolutely ignored the wishes of the parents to send their kids back to school.
My guess is, if you wanted to try to find one criteria for how soon kids were able to go back to school it would be whether the Republicans or Democrats were in charge.
Well, I am sure and the data makes it clear. And yes, families in public schools did get to "select" their mode, and majority of parents got what they wanted. The decision was not made by the school systems but by the wishes of the majority of parents. In no district whatsoever was the decision to remain remote driven by the teachers' unions and the only parents whose wishes were ignored were parents in wanted in person instruction in a district where a majority of parents wanted remote. Research shows that's about 15% of parents. They were just very loud.
The only difference between most Republican states and Dem states is that Republican states let ALL parents choose and Dem states were hard cheese for parents in majority non-white districts who wanted in-person instruction. But even that wasn't so much a matter of politics as it was that Dem states have far more majority-minority districts and it's *much* easier to teach remote and in-person if most of your students are in-person than it is if most are in remote. Dem states that were mostly white were in-person.
Blacks and Hispanics in Republican run states did very badly because blacks and Hispanics in Republican run states did just what blacks and Hispanics did in Dem run states--select remote in overwhelming numbers. So did Asians, but they didn't do as badly because capacity matters.
So don't guess. Look at the data. Most people are idiots on this topic.
Thanks. Do you have any links for this data? I haven't seen any data that supports your argument. I am not saying it doesn't exist or you're not correct, but I'd like to see the data.
I recall seeing many news articles about Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago, just to name a few, having to delay going back to in person instruction because of objections by the teachers unions. So, I may be mistaking anecdotes for data. It happens sometimes.
Living in a "Dem state" (albeit a moderate Dem state), I don't recall anyone getting to choose anything. The state set the guidelines, and the schools had to follow those guidelines. Most of the schools in our state (public and private) wanted to go back to full in person instruction in the fall of 2020, our state only allowed that to happen in late spring of 2021.
I've written a lot about it and gone through the data. The bulk of it is here:
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2022/04/04/the-real-reason-for-school-closures/
Some of it is here:
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/the-pandemic-school-policy-power-differential/
"I recall seeing many news articles about Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago, just to name a few, having to delay going back to in person instruction because of objections by the teachers union"
New York City went back to inperson instruction quite early relative to, say, California. So did Chicago. In both NYC and Chicago, districts that are overwhelmingly non-white, the vast majority of students who returned to school were white. Basically, NYC and Chicago were under tremendous pressure by white parents (who they don't want to lose) to open at all. But the vast majority of the parents wanted remote and this gave the teachers considerable power. So for example, when Chicago tried to bring back in-person instruction in early 2021, the teachers were able to delay it by two weeks simply by not showing up. All Lightfoot would have had to do is close off remote education, which would have put the teachers in work stoppage mode. She didn't. Why? Because 80% of hte parents wanted remote, and she would have been cutting off the education method that a majority of parents wanted. The conflict was still resolved in 2 weeks and teachers went back to school. A year later, when a majority of Chicago parents were *very* much in favor of remote and the teachers refused to show up at work, Lightfoot cut off remote education? Why? Not the parents. Not the teachers. Illinois had changed the law and banned remote education. The teachers were thus stopping work and had to go back much sooner. Not parent outrage. Law change. Functionally, what fixed the problem was not allowing schools to give in to parents.
"Most of the schools in our state (public and private) wanted to go back to full in person instruction in the fall of 2020, our state only allowed that to happen in late spring of 2021."
First, every one I know who says "we weren't allowed to go back until...." is wrong. California had by far the most onerous laws in the country and California schools were opened in places as early as October (they were all rural and white or rich and white).
Next, most people who say "we weren't given a choice" is wrong. They were surveyed. The school district went with the majority.
Finally, what most people mean is that they wanted full-time and were forced into part-time. That was a Dem governance issue that involved following cdc guidelines. It was impossible to open schools full time and follow CDC guidelines. That had very little to do with teachers or teachers unions and everything to do with progressive political pressure on Dem governors.
I just read the articles. I never would have guessed any of this. Thank you so much. I highly recommend these two articles to anyone that thinks they know what happened with schools reopening during the pandemic. You'll probably learn something you didn't know.
The last paragraph of the second article nailed it:
Of course, most of the arguments in the media were between white
people–white parents and white progressives opposing them. The
non-white parents whose preferences were keeping schools closed
didn’t often participate in these debates. No need to. They had what
they wanted. Like most public debate, the battle to get out of remote
instruction was conducted white on white.
But, I guess I don't understand why non-white families were opposed to going back to full-time in person instruction. It seems counterintuitive, especially if you accept the argument that remote instruction caused problems for the families, including issues with daycare, jobs, lack of access to support, etc.
I'll read anything you have on that.
I am a teacher for the Los Angeles USD. If you’re interested, here’s what happened. We went out for quarantine and started zoomskool in March2020. Stayed w/it through the end of the year and into the fall sem. Talk of going back was live but it didn’t happen until mid-spring sem. The union did not stand in the way. Various protocols were in place including weekly testing and a ‘daily pass’ digital check-in for self-reporting of symptoms. We weren’t really offering a full and normal program (zoomskool 2.0, w/most teachers on campus broadcasting from empty classrooms)but kids could come back if they chose to. They were essentially doing study hall + zoomskool. That lasted through the end and last fall we were back 100% but w/masks, weekly testing and digital check-in. This year back to normal, though many kids still wear masks. Make of that all what you will. It was the story from March 2020 through June 2021 in the second largest district in the nation. Could say more but lunch is over and I’ve got kids to teach.
No, that's very typical of California. In fact, three large CA districts were remote all year, which is why I find it kind of amusing that everyone picks on LA. LA schools opened!
Also, ironically, for all the wailing about Randi Weingarten, she's the head of AFT and NYC and Chicago were back in school long before NEA schools in CA (I think UTLA is NEA, anyway). But that's because union heads had absolutely zilch to do with opening schools. Weingarten could give CDC marching orders all she liked. Following CDC guidelines was entirely optional.
It was a very mixed bag in LoCali. I live in Orange County, where most districts went live in fall 2020. LAUSD offered a zoomskool option - separate from students’ home school zooming - and it continued into last year (2021-22) but may be moribund now, am not sure. FWIW, UTLA allows membership in either AFT or NEA. It’s leadership is vocal but they do seem aware of overall public sentiment.
This is a very curious reversal of what I would have assumed to be the case, based on my assumption that black and Hispanic parents, being more likely to be poor, would be more likely to work on-site jobs rather than work-from-home jobs, and therefore would be more likely to want their kids to attend school in-person so they could be supervised.
Do you have any insight into why this intuition is incorrect?
As a teacher in LA schools I know of one factor that is significant but rarely mentioned in public discussion is the higher proportion of multi-generational households among non-whites. So, if granma lives in the next room - or above the garage or even down the block - its safer for her if Jr. & Jr. Miss stay home. Also, medical care is much spottier in the inner-city than in suburbia, at least in South Central LA.
What Tim says might be true. But I have no idea other than, simply, whites were less worried than other races were. I went looking for it because in schools, you should always wonder about race first. And I've been following the data since late summer 2020. From the beginning the skew was there.
To everyone that liked this comment - thank you. But I highly recommend that if you have the time that you follow the links that Education Realist posted below. I am amazed at how poorly informed I've been on this topic. I was wrong on all accounts.
I think we disagree on a lot of the politics but this point has been an epiphany to me. Once you see, or maybe should say accept, this pattern the world makes a lot more sense. It’s like you suddenly have the right encryption key.
And although I (think I) disagree with your political believes I think we share the interest in a decent society where the place of your crib is not your destiny. I do think we need incentives to get the competent to go the extra mile to further society but we should reduce the ceiling and use the excess to improve the lives of the others. But above all, we should get rid of the corrosive identity politics driven by people that seem to not have even a remote clue about statistics.
This doesn't disprove Freddie's argument in any way (if anything, it strengthens it), but you could replace the word "schools" in the last sentence with a lot of other stuff and it'd still hold.
Kinda explains a lot.
Instead of a bloated and mostly useless Department of Education (thanks Jimmy C), let's have a bloated but useful Department of Handicapper General (DOHG) to start cracking down on smart and/or hard working students.
And here I thought that was already a central mission of the DOE.
Good point. Maybe just change the name?
The main thing DoE does is hand out money and give guidance as to what states need to do to get the money.
So if you want to end all the Title I funding and spend a lot less on poor kids, then sure. But that's what the DoE does.
"The main thing DoE does is hand out money and give guidance as to what states need to do to get the money."
Then change their name to the "Department of Handing Out Money with Strings Attached"
Most people understand that without being told, so why spend all the money changing letterheads and business cards?
Um, that was sarcasm.
Um, so was mine.
The problem is that government spending is a leaky sieve. Any time it moves money around it skims some off the top to fund the bureaucrats. The problem is bad enough at the state level but my sense is that the federal bureaucracy is larger and requires more skimming.
Plus what carrots the DoE does offer changes with political regimes. Arne Duncan and Obama may have been fixated on education as a tool to fight poverty but the policy they chose to pursue was charter schools, widespread testing and the common core.
Oh, I agree. I'm just saying that the federal goverment makes a lot of demands on public schools and doesn't pay for a lot of them, so either remove the requirements or accept that someone needs to pay for some of those demands.
But if we acknowledge inherent differences, certain groups would only longer be able to get money for ineffective programs!!! We might even have to eliminate affirmative action.... oh, well.
Not every person has the ability to be a brain surgeon. Why do we insist on forcing college prep on kids that can't handle it? Let's get them skills they can use and get them jobs.
Oh, and 15 years ago I had a long conversation with the head of remote learning for a major university, who had been in the field for 30 years. He freely admitted it was a failure. He said that for long term learning retention, remote was horrible. "A hungover frat boy who comes to class after an all night bender who didn't read the assigned work will learn more long term than the most diligent remote student. There is just something about being in the same classroom as the teacher."
Yes. There’s something magical about the teacher/student connection.
An old saying at Williams was, “the ideal classroom is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other.” And clichéd as that is, it speaks to something true.
Maybe it depends on the subject being taught? My online section of a university course on programming always outperforms the in-person one. The last time I taught the course, not only did my students do better but my evaluations were better than my counter-part. I'm not saying this to brag (some of my colleagues are so much better at this than I, as in top of the department consistently even though they teach exclusively online, that I want to, and do, cry thinking about how I could be a better teacher), but rather to relate a couple of anecdotes that completely contradict the ongoing backlash against online education.
A lot has changed in fifteen years, as well. I was taking online classes fifteen years ago and began teaching them ten years ago...the experience is completely different. We design courses with the communication medium in mind and it's easier to provoke interactions and have them.
I think both things are true at the same time.
1) every individual has their own unique achievement level, and
2) where you live and the type of schools you attend (especially early on) can readily affect your achievement level.
Also, both of these things can be further altered by individual drive and determination...so perhaps a third factor. What is unclear to me is how much personal drive can close the gap on differing education qualities. Something tells me it can do a lot, but rarely completely make up for it in any substantial way. I could be wrong though, this is just my brain meanderings.
But I would remind you that what matters from the point of view of policy is SCALE. I've always allowed for the possibility of individuals to move around in the distribution, including thanks to the influence of perhaps a truly exceptional circumstance/teacher. But in politics and policy what matters is the broad trends, the masses. And there I think my argument resides.
Oh I would certainly agree with the broad trends being where the policy meets the road.
Perhaps where I think the crux may be is something like this:
If statistics showed that achievement gaps were completely arbitrary (that is to say unrelated to anything like zip codes, poverty, race, sex, etc.) then yeah I would think everyone would agree that there is nothing to be done about that gap. That is due to individual achievement and in fact the system is working as intended. However, if statistics show that there ARE definite links to those broad things I mention, then I would think that is something that needs attention. Because those are things that policy could probably affect.
Regardless, I definitely would agree with you on the notion that this apt sarcastic line from your article is NOT true: "all students are made alike and that you can just pour equal amounts of learning into the brains of different students." That is just plain nonsense to me, and I would think any sane person would understand that.
I view the education achievement gaps like car accident rate: We can and should do reasonable things to lower it, and sometimes even spend a lot of money on it if the data is that bad in a certain area. But we should all definitely realize that we're never going to get it to zero...that's just an impossibility. I think there's a sweet spot for the achievement gap that we should all be comfortable with. Perhaps less than what it is now (depending on which variable you are talking about), I think that's doable from a policy standpoint. But for anyone who thinks it should be absolute zero or go home...those people aren't rooted in reality and quite frankly shouldn't be making any mass educational decisions.
"But we should all definitely realize that we're never going to get it to zero...that's just an impossibility."
In practice, what that means in a competitive "merit-based" society is that almost no blacks and Hispanics will become doctors or lawyers or engineers or pilots or anything in which people compete for high scores to get access.
Even if we do what I'd like, which is set minimum benchmarks and then lottery or access for all who meet that benchmark, there will be a lot fewer. And we can't say "oh, that's a problem" but "hey, that's how it goes."
I meant not quite getting the achievement gap to zero in terms of individual achievement only. For instance, let's say we somehow get everything else equalized in terms of pre-college education (hypothetical), and then we see one demographic of students (let's say redheads for a nonsense example) having slightly higher scores every other demographic, what more can we possibly do for that?
I mean the closer you get to zero the harder it is to close it, and at some point you have to rely on the individual students themselves. If you're going to say something like "10% of the population are redheads, therefore 10% of doctors should be redheads"...that just doesn't work in reality. The determination factor of the student is always going to be part of the equation. And you can't take that off the table because to do so would also make achievement and excellence in a given field completely pointless. That's a non-starter for most people.
We're never going to get anywhere near that. The actual gap between whites and Asians is pretty small and shruggable. The gap between non-poor blacks and poor whites is in favor of poor whites, and non-poor Hispanics just barely touch out poor whites. These are massive chasms.
What do you mean, why can't we get anywhere near that?
Whether or not it’s your position, Freddie, some have read into you that only relative performance affects economic outcomes and so it’s the only kind that matters. This is probably true in the small, but in the large it really is the case that a better educated population can sustain a more advanced society with higher paying opportunities for more people. Conversely, pandemic learning loss is perhaps not a factor in social mobility, but still a factor in our overall prosperity.
I think a diverse economy, with numerous opportunities for both white collar as well as blue collar workers, is a healthy economy. Unbalancing the labor market in one direction or another is probably not only economically inefficient but extremely disruptive to the social order as well. Academics like Peter Turchin posit that underemployed college graduates are as bad as large populations of surplus young men who cannot find mates.
One could almost say that the first case leads to political explosions and the second to physical explosions... if one wanted to push those concepts to the extreme
Education is not only for "the labor market", it is also (as Eleanor Roosevelt - at the time citing the Archbishop of York - noted) “... to produce citizens.”
The ability to read and process information is an absolute good - not just a relative one. The decline in this skill over the past 30 years is a major contributor to many current ills.
Presumably reading would be taught somewhere before college.
"You can't learn Algebra if no one teaches it to you"
I think they were actually going to try this at some school in San Francisco, in order to close the achievement gap. One of those articles that as I was reading it I thought I might be having a stroke or something. As you said, just make sure no one can run fast, that'll solve it!
I heard that something like this was proposed but there was huge pushback. I never heard what actually was implemented...
Garrison Keillor described this approach quite well back in 1973. Check out this review of “The Universal Joint Garage & Body Shop.”
That's not what they were trying to do.
What were they trying to do? If you don’t mind saying
They did it as part of the Common Core initiative in 2013-14, because they were having trouble with kids taking Algebra I in sixth or seventh grade and then wanting to start Algebra 2 in high school and while that might sound great, a lot of the kids weren't ready and hadn't really learned as much and SF didn't really like being used as little more than a transcript delivery system. Also, high school teachers were complaining that the kids who were taught by middle school or private summer school programs didn't know as much, and they were being forced to reduce what they taught. Meanwhile--and of course this was also part of it--other kids were starting algebra 1 in 9th grade.
COmmon Core 8th grade was so much more advanced than normal 8th grade math. It's basically algebra 1. So much so that by and large, high schools ignored Common Core math demands. We still teach A1 as it used to be and A2 as it used to be, rather than A2 as A1 and A1 as 8th grade math.
So SFUSD and another heavily Asian district used this fact to get out of an annoying behavior that was pissing off math teachers, rather than try to stop kids from learning.
Honestly, all the obsession about "getting to calculus while in HS" is kind of bullshit.
That makes sense, and thanks for such a detailed reply! When I first read about it it seemed outrageous to not allow kids to learn algebra if they were ready but I guess it’s more complex than I imagined.
I don't want to argue in *favor* of either side. What Asian parents do is ridiculous, and I get really pissed when people talk about their pursuing excellence or merit based whatever. They are in search of an impressive transcript and schools need to stop allowing that.
On the other hand, SF progressive politis are batshit crazy and they are doing everything they can to distort reality. However, so is everyone else. SF isn't particularly unusual in that regard. What made the story is the large Asian population and every other school district with that particular feature faces that particular problem.
I’ve worked in public schools for the past 18 years, and I can honestly state it’s never been so nuts as it is now. I have always been a big supporter of Freddie’s views on education, and loved the Cult of Smart. But I am honestly wistful for the bad old days of believing that every child can succeed, as compared to the woke pessimism I see around me.
Since the pandemic, my district has become obsessed with DEI to the point of distraction.
I have been to nearly 20 hours of DEI in services, and 0 on providing remedial math and literacy instruction. I have been provided hours of pre-made lessons on racial and gender identity, but have struggled to get my principal to authorize an order for a reading curriculum that addresses the 6 components of literacy.
My district has been very conscious in adopting activist language, but it’s all window dressing. Our head of Special Education opened the year by committing to end White Supremacy, then transitioned seamlessly to how we would address this by using standardized naming conventions when uploading signature pages from IEP meetings.
I’m on board with everything in this column, but for the love of God we need to teach kids to read, and I am honestly afraid to express this opinion at my job
Teacher here, and I totally saw this shift at my previous urban schools job. I preferred the achievement gap stuff, because at least it was optimistic. I didn’t believe in it, but I definitely don’t believe in endlessly haranguing kids about race and class. They need to be taught to be curious! I now work in the suburbs, and I’m just teaching curiosity and basic critical thinking, and no one seems to care how far left I am as long as I’m not lecturing students about it.
My children attend/attended (2 out, 1 to go!) a fancy private school in Westchester and I saw the same thing. If you just read the emails to parents or listened to the speeches of the head of school, you would think it was the most ridiculous, woke school in the country. When you ask the kids however, they have no idea what you are referring to. Nothing had changed in the actual instruction at all. There were no racial struggle sessions, none of their teachers thought that it was white supremacist to expect students to turn in work on time, and expectations of 3-4 hours of work per night remained unchanged. Students evidencing an inability to keep up (almost exclusively those admitted in elementary school) were still being pushed to consider whether a different type of school wouldn't be in the student's best interest. It's clear that in at least some places, some of this new messaging is performative, for public consumption only.
Hmmm...I don’t think this sounds the same? Grandpa’s school is actually changing, and mine isn’t woke at all, even in public. Actually the opposite: it’s in the reddest area of a blue urban area in a red state. The issue we’re talking about is how urban schools in blue areas serving mostly poor kids used to be really worried about whether they could read, and now they’re really worried about whether their teachers and schools systems are racist. This probably isn’t good for teachers or kids in urban schools!
Fancy private schools are just gonna virtue signal, like all of our corporate overlords do.
Perhaps I misread the relevance of your employment change, but I understood your comment to be that you were witnessing the same type of messaging changes from the administrators, but as an actual teacher you were doing what you have always done.
Maybe this is my own bugaboo but I think you’d get less pushback on this topic if instead of saying, “It’s just that not everyone has equal potential,” you said, “It’s just that not everyone has equal potential TO SUCCEED AT SCHOOL.” Perhaps it should be obvious because your writing on this issue is always in the context of schooling but I think talking about talent, intelligence, and potential in the abstract without specifying that you are referring to a particular type of ability is what makes people queasy. That slight caveat or disclaimer might clarify your stance.
It's a caveat he has offered repeatedly in longer works on the subject. But...success in school is correlated to success (or good outcomes, in any event) in plenty of other categories and matters. Academic achievement is not solely a reflection of IQ, but is also heavily influenced by personality traits such as conscientiousness.
The reform of education should begin with a simple and straightforward mission statement:
"To sufficiently prepare each student for the next step in their path to be become economically self-sufficient adults."
Even the arts and humanities would benefit from this focus. It can incorporate the broader considerations for developing creativity, humility, empathy and emotional intelligence... but everything with a focus of getting the kids to become well-functioning adults that can provide for themselves.
If education can not deliver on that, then it is not providing societal value as education... and should be labeled as something else.
While I agree, completely actually, that each child is an individual and that a school and teachers cannot be held accountable for whatever genetic or environmental factors might cause variation among students so that there is a "gap," at the same time, our education system is worth less than dirt. While there are good educators, many of them, the school systems are littered with people who are so hopeless, incompetent, and lazy that they would not survive in any other profession, outside maybe politics. The functional literacy rate in this country is ridiculously low (https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-literacy-levels-among-us-adults-could-be-costing-the-economy-22-trillion-a-year/?sh=7a3115034c90). Schools are so worried about creating "good citizens" and "teaching" kids *what* to think that they don't teach children the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic) and *how* to think. And while I know that many issues contribute to our lousy education system, part of it is the educators. I proofread for a publishing house, and I can tell you that for every book or article you find that works toward reasonable solutions to better educate children in the basics and critical thinking skills, you'll find two more that talk about raising "global citizens" or "responsible citizens" and seven more that whine about why teachers shouldn't be held "accountable." Spend some time reading education journals. You won't look at "education" the same way and you will have little patience for any discussion of "education gaps and failures" that isn't a highly nuanced discussion that makes teachers at least somewhat responsible for the situation.
Nothing you said is true. Please buy Freddie’s book for details.
That seems an overly broad statement. So you disagree that each child is an individual?
And, yes, teachers are partly to blame for our failed system as they are part of the system, in fact one of the most foundational and pervasive parts. It only is logical that they are not 'innocent" in all this.
You can’t blame the average teacher for being average than you can blame the average student for being average. It’s just the nature of reality. That’s why so many reforms succeed on a small scale but fail when they try and expand - they can’t scale as only 10% of teacher are in the top 10%.
So why is it that the "average" teacher and the "average" student knew so much more even forty years ago? While we can have all these philosophical discussions we like shifting blame, the reality is that our society is much less literate and capable than it was a half century ago. Something happened, and there are only so many players involved.
Evidence that they knew more 40 years ago once you adjust for fewer kids dropping out?
Have you ever looked at the test they took at the end of the eighth grade? And it's just empirical. I knew a lot of working class, agrarian people. They all could comfortably converse about topics that leave college graduates stumped today. Everyone invented; everyone read, a lot. Maybe you should get out and talk to people born before 1970 or so. You'll discover all this excuse making is getting us nowhere, and it's all excuse making.
And I find it rather offensive that you assume only "dumb" people drop out. Dropping out of school has more to do with life circumstances than intelligence. Everything you learn in school (and this is and always was true) can be learned on your own.
The main point of this post is entirely correct and I have seen some small number of people make the argument it refutes. It is worth pointing out, however, that the main thrust of most school reformers is not trying to eradicate individual differences in achievement, but raising absolute achievement levels closer to potential.