You speak the truth. If only you could get the evidence in front of every progressive policy maker in North America (although I have to doubt what difference it would make).
Demanding "the highest quality" is a predictable form of lawmaker incompetence. Who wants to be accused of "not supporting high-quality schools" in attack ads? They could demand certain minimal standards of competence be met and have a chance of success, but they are rewarded for promising the moon and failing.
I also agree with the conclusion that pre-K is more about day-care than education. I don't know if Pre-K improves educational outcomes. Apart from metrics like "reading skill at age 7", I doubt it will do much. And the studies you point out suggest it doesn't do much for educational outcomes. Yet it is still a good thing to have.
I'm a biologist with no educational policy background, so this is definitely spitballing based on anecdotal stuff from other friends in humanities higher ed.
I wonder whether one of the unacknowledged background problems with all these American studies is the almost universal poor quality of our teachers. It seems to be taken as a given that we'll be staffing public schools with education majors, who happen to be from the subject area with students with the lowest IQ in the studies I've seen...add to the lowest IQ the uselessness and deranged ideological bent of many education curricula, and you get some pretty bad teachers...now fast forward this 20-30 years now and you get a new generation of teachers who were taught by these un-gifted, poorly educated teachers, and you get something like a ratchet effect--I'm coming from biology, so I'm thinking of something like "Muller's ratchet" in which deleterious effects simply compound over time until you get a sort of "meltdown" into inviability.
I have a friend who teaches in a remote-learning Education Masters program that helps high school English teachers get a Masters degree so that they can teach AP classes. The students--current high school English teachers--do not like to read. They do not believe students should be made to read anything difficult. They basically refuse to read assigned texts unless all the characters are "relatable". In short, they should not be teaching the subject, much less at the AP level.
I have a background in genetics, so far be it from me to discount genetic effects on educational attainment, but I would like to know whether school effects are so miniscule in countries with highly paid, well educated teachers...the Nordic countries, for example. I guess I wouldn't be surprised either way.
"I wonder whether one of the unacknowledged background problems with all these American studies is the almost universal poor quality of our teachers. It seems to be taken as a given that we'll be staffing public schools with education majors, who happen to be from the subject area with students with the lowest IQ in the studies I've seen...add to the lowest IQ the uselessness and deranged ideological bent of many education curricula, and you get some pretty bad teachers...now fast forward this 20-30 years now and you get a new generation of teachers who were taught by these un-gifted, poorly educated teachers, and you get something like a ratchet effect--I'm coming from biology, so I'm thinking of something like "Muller's ratchet" in which deleterious effects simply compound over time until you get a sort of "meltdown" into inviability."
1) Beginning in 2003, all teachers have to pass credential tests. Education majors were deemed preliminary until they passed the credential test for their desired topic.
2) High school academic teachers have had to pass a test for their credentials since the mid 70s. In 2003, middle school teachers had to pass the same test as high school teachers.
3) A large chunk of high school teachers in all states are not education majors. The state with the most teachers (California) does not even have an education major for any grade. All teachers have to get a BA and then take a series of courses. And before they enter the credential course, they have to pass the credential test.
4) Most of the research showing that education majors have the lowest SAT scores are from declared majors, which is kind of worthless (see 1).
5) All available evidence shows that America's teachers are, on average,*smarter* than they were in previous years. Certainly they are smarter than teachers of 40 years ago through 2003, and are at least as smart as the teachers from 60-70 years ago, when we had far fewer of them. While it's true that many smart women were teachers in the old days, it's also true that a lot of dumb women were as well.
6) Far be it from me to cast doubt on your friend's observations, but there is absolutely no requirement that English teachers have Masters to teach AP courses, and while their political opinions are regrettable, have little to do with their teacher quality. And if your friend passed anyone who refused to read the texts then he's not one to talk, is he? Otherwise, they read the texts they needed to graduate.
7) This comes as a shock to people who aren't familiar with ed school, but they don't teach you your subject matter in ed school. They don't even really teach you how to teach. You spend a year exploring different theories of education that the professors would like you to adopt. But it's not indoctrination. The people who believe that stuff would do it anyway, and the rest of us just shrug and look for different insights into teaching.
8) There is a ton of research showing that teacher intellectual ability has very little impact on student outcomes, if any. (My own hope is There is likewise a ton of research showing that teacher race is highly influential with black students--specifically, black teachers have better results on average with black kids. That is, if the teachers wailing about not teaching relevant texts they can't identify with are black, then odds are they will have better results with their black students than the righteous objective readers you admire.
I trust you can connect the dots between these facts and your spitballing.
If you look down this page a bit, you'll see all my writing on credentialing.
The massive increase in "teacher quality" instituted in 2003 led to higher SAT scores for credentialed teachers, but not better student outcomes, which stalled. Meanwhile, the number of black and Hispanic teachers cratered. As a result, many states are now rolling back credential tests, which is a terrible idea. But after 20 years of rejecting teachers of color because they couldn't pass credential tests that showed no impact on student outcomes, it's not surprising.
If you don't know anything about credential tests, you should probably not be opining about the poor quality of teachers. For decades education reformers literally ignored credential tests and even now, barely acknowledge them. Perhaps stop cribbing from the Big Book of Ed Reform bullshit.
Neither "side"--union or ed reform--is honest. You look really silly when you rely on them (for example, saying "universally poor quality of our teachers" followed by "credential test? What's that?")
6) Far be it from me to cast doubt on your friend's observations, but there is absolutely no requirement that English teachers have Masters to teach AP courses, and while their political opinions are regrettable, have little to do with their teacher quality. And if your friend passed anyone who refused to read the texts then he's not one to talk, is he? Otherwise, they read the texts they needed to graduate.
He passes the students who read the assignments. They hate reading though--their biggest complaint is that he's not giving them syllabi they can use in their classes. They don't seem to understand the idea of taking a graduate-level literature course.
Now, as far as your "he's not one to talk, is he?" quip--this brings me to my own experience as a science tutor in local high schools while I was in graduate school. My state has a dumb test that everyone must pass to graduate...you can probably guess where this is going. Teachers would send their worst-performing students to me for tutoring. The test we'd prepare for was dumb, dumb, dumb: multiple choice with just four choices, two of which were so outrageously silly as to be dismissible out of hand. The students who sent to me were illiterate. All of them. They did not require science tutoring at all. *Someone* had been passing these students every year such that they reached 10th or 11th grade completely illiterate.
"They hate reading though--their biggest complaint is that he's not giving them syllabi they can use in their classes. They don't seem to understand the idea of taking a graduate-level literature course."
That sounds like a different issue. They have different goals for their program than their professor.
"*Someone* had been passing these students every year such that they reached 10th or 11th grade completely illiterate."
By "illiterate", I imagine you mean they were reading at a very low level. And as you are a biology major, I submit you aren't the person to decide which questions are "dumb". But if you don't understand (as you clearly don't) that any graduation test must be very,very easy or too few students will graduate and the schools will be sued. In fact, most states abandoned their graduation tests for just this reason.
Graduation tests--and high standards--are insisted upon by people who can't really comprehend what the left side of the bell curve is like. They are smart, but foolish, people who are somehow convinced that if you fail kids, they'll learn it the next time. They can't even conceive of kids who will never, ever, pass. they will never be able to learn. And so they continually invent higher standards in the delusion that this will help more kids learn, when in fact the opposite is true: we would be better off teaching less intelligent kids less info, more slowly, givingn a kid who is 15 and reads at 4th grade level the learrning to help him try to get at 8th grade level.
But alas, too many people are foolish, and think that the reason these kids are "illiterate" (ie, not as smart as you want them to be) is because someone passed them, when in fact there is no choice *other* than to pass them, because failing them would just lead to 16 year olds in fifth grade.
This is true- it's probably better to promote them on and get them the high school credential, which doesn't mean much and hasn't for a long time. In terms of life results, i can't imagine what benefit is gained for the lower-performing child failing. I don't think making a few more new adults unemployable is actually going to make employers start taking a high school diploma seriously.
But there should be other options. We should be able to teach kids where they are, rather than where some idiots who want better test scores think they should be to get those test scores.
"Higher standards", like "good schools" and "high quality teachers", are shibboleths people spout without understanding what they mean. (and "high quality preschool", of course.)
By "illiterate", I imagine you mean they were reading at a very low level. And as you are a biology major, I submit you aren't the person to decide which questions are "dumb". But if you don't understand (as you clearly don't) that any graduation test must be very,very easy or too few students will graduate and the schools will be sued. In fact, most states abandoned their graduation tests for just this reason.
I submit you are incorrect on every point here, because you can't properly read an argument--you reflexively assume that the arguments you encounter are identical to ones you have encountered before, but let's take the chunk cited above:
--"reading at a very low level"...is this a hill to die on? Yes, these students can order from the Taco Bell menu. Can they read the test? Nope. The tutors have to read the questions aloud or they students just freeze up and stare at the page.
--'you aren't the person to decide which questions are "dumb"'. There was a shortage of tutors so I was given many subjects that I was unqualified to teach, e.g. physics--I have never even taken a physics course--and the two dumbest answers were always obvious to anyone who could read, e.g. the physics question would be about how long it took to run a certain distance, and two of the answer choices would involve "gallons". I tutored English and social studies too--the questions were equally ridiculous.
--you get yourself into an odd knot here...you want to tell me that I don't know what a dumb question is, but you also want to say that of course the questions have to be dumb and that people like me can't understand why. Bad argument.
--you seem to think, without any evidence--that I want to keep these kids in 5th grade. Shocker: I do not. I do think, however, that if it's easy to determine that these kids are illiterate (and it is easy to! and they are!), then a specific intervention needs to be aimed at that rather then sending them to a science tutor or whatever. Why is there no other choice than to pass them? Isn't that what all this chatter today was about, other choices for the education system? What to change, what can't be changed?
First, I wasn't calling you an idiot. I was referring to the people who got us in this position. You agree with them, but it's pretty clear by this point that you've never really thought about this at all with any degree of underlying knowledge, so there's that.
"you get yourself into an odd knot here...you want to tell me that I don't know what a dumb question is, but you also want to say that of course the questions have to be dumb and that people like me can't understand why. Bad argument."
Did I use the word "dumb"? And no, it wasn't a bad argument. Point 1) you are not the person to decide what is "dumb" for a minimal high school standard. It might be sufficiently challenging for the range of abilities that a high school graduation test has to deal with. Point 2) the range of abilities a high school graduation test has to deal with is very broad. In other words yes, I am certain the questions were easy to a biology major, and also easier than most people would like for a high school graduate to know but no they are not "dumb" questions. S
Protip: "Dumb", along with "stupid", is a really pointless word to use when describing standardized test questions. What I presume you meant to say is that the questions didn't require as much intellect as you would like.
"The tutors have to read the questions aloud or they students just freeze up and stare at the page."
I am absolutely certain this isn't true. No kid gets to high school without being able to read at all. Full stop. Read at a 3rd or 4th grade level? Yes, in some schools where reading at 8th grade level is average. But you are incorrect. The kids you were tutoring could read. It's possible that they understood you thought they were "dumb", and thus decided to make life as difficult for you as possible.
"you seem to think, without any evidence--that I want to keep these kids in 5th grade."
Wrong. I think you believe teachers "* had been passing these students every year such that they reached 10th or 11th grade completely illiterate. I think this because you said it.
So there are two ways to interpret this: 1) that the teachers were lazy and passed kids who were capable of learning without actually teaching them or 2) teachers gave them a passing grade even though they were "illiterate", meaning they should have been failed. If there's a third interpretation, do tell.
Either of my interpretations assumes the kids are capable of learning the material. Therefore, the people who righteously complain about low skill kids "being passed along" are assuming that teaching the kid properly will result in him learning the material OR failing the kid until he learns will eventually result in the kid getting motivated and learning the material. But IN FACT, I say, OPPOSITE to your belief, the reality is that forcing kids to meet a standard will result in 16 year old fifth graders.
See? Careful reading shows clearly I did not accuse you of wanting 16 year old fifth graders, but of being too naive to understand the outcome of your desired policies--the policies that say teachers must teach, and must not "pass along".
"I do think, however, that if it's easy to determine that these kids are illiterate (and it is easy to! and they are!),"
As stated, no kids are illiterate. But we do know which kids have low reading scores and low math scores.
"then a specific intervention needs to be aimed at that rather then sending them to a science tutor or whatever. Why is there no other choice than to pass them? "
We're not allowed to intervene. Unless the kid is special ed, we can't say hey, this kid is reading at 5th grade level so let's put the kid in a class that will get him up to 8th grade. So we either fail them until they aren't going to get enough credits and will be sent to alternative school where they also won't get enough credits but can do it faster, or we pass them. Rarely do we pass them for doing nothing. We generally pass them for trying and for learning what they can.
" Isn't that what all this chatter today was about, other choices for the education system? What to change, what can't be changed?"
Discussing change begins with understanding the current system, which is not how I would describe your understanding. For example, in addition to not knowing about credential tests and thinking teachers are stupid, you think teachers need a master's degree for teaching AP courses, describe kids as illiterate because they refuse to read aloud in tutoring session (with a tutor who apparently doesn't think much of them) , you think a low achieving student is a) caused by low quality teachers and b) fixable by some combination of better teachers or higher standards and finally, you don't understand that high schools are actually prevented from offering lower tier courses to their students.
I have a whole blog arguing for change. But it starts with recognizing that America's schools do a good job with the constraints they are handed. Simply recognizing that the average high school teacher has a higher SAT score than the average college graduate would force you to rethink your priors.
I don’t wish to get involved in y’all’s argument, but I feel compelled to say that my best friend, a 6th grade public school social studies teacher, has repeatedly expressed frustration that he is forced (by the district) to pass kids who aren’t even showing up. H doesn’t agree with it, he doesn’t want to.
Especially with the pandemic and remote learning, numerous kids just ghosted. Or they’d refuse to turn on their cameras, so there was no proof they were actually in attendance. Not to mention how unsafe it was for public officials to lose track of the health and well-being status of so many kids.
Parents have a litany of excuses for why their kids couldn’t attend, or couldn’t do their work, or whatever. And public schools, though held to account for all of it, don’t have the legal backing to take on poor parenting. Just the opposite.
At the end of 2020 school year, many teachers were forced by their states to give students a passing grade. Districts can't force teachers to do it, so far as I know. 2021 was different. We had the ability to fail kids. I failed more kids last year than ever before. I don't know of any state or district that forced teachers to pass kids. However, they can pressure teachers to pass kids by saying things like "I know he's been gone all year, but can't you give him assignments to make up" and so on. Best to avoid those conversations as much as possible.
But just to be clear, I'm talking about something different. Middle school has been a real problem since common core, as it's gotten much more difficult and a lot of kids realize that they don't have to do anything and will still pass on to the next grade. (which may be what your friend is talking about, now that I think of it). In high school though, kids are required to take courses despite having abilities far lower, and they have to take these courses to graduate. You start passing kids that try hard. Teachers that don't will generally find themselves getting really crappy course assignments.
I found your "Teachers and Cognitive Ability" section interesting and helpful. I wish you hadn't felt the need to deliberately mischaracterize my thoughts (e.g. "the righteous objective readers you admire")...that was tacky.
As a STEM professor at a decent state university for 38 years, and as a parent who raised children through the local public school system, I completely agree with everything Education Realist writes below.
"I wonder whether one of the unacknowledged background problems with all these American studies is the almost universal poor quality of our teachers."
If the research is correct that quality in early education doesn't matter much once some basic needs are met — a physically-healthy environment where the kids aren't being abused by the grownups and get enough supervision not to abuse each other, then why would poor academic quality in early-education teachers matter much?
Among kids with genuine academic interests (and that's not every kid, and that's fine), I think finding teachers and programs who "click" matters, but for most kids, including ones likely to benefit from early talent development, that development can still wait till elementary school.
My own children are likely to have genuine academic interests, based on their parents. Since a day has to be occupied somehow, I figure for young kids, it can't hurt to have the occupation include what are called pre-academic skills. But if research shows inculcating those skills is far less important than basic safety and health at that age, then that's what research shows. Maybe we can worry less about academic qualifications for early childcare, and spend money on more achievable goals, like ensuring the physical space is adequate and the care is, if not meeting haut bourgeois notions of "quality", at least non-abusive.
Given the astounding cost and the likelihood that the education establishment will just use the additional years to stuff more woke nonsense in the little muffin heads of the youngsters, anything less than scientific consensus on there being profound net positive benefits should warrant scrapping this one more expensive social service idea to the scrap heap.
My kid attends a pricey Montessori preschool. We just received his first progress report, and it’s 17 pages. They are tracking so many things. For example, he has improved in the area of “plant polishing.” I didn’t even know you were supposed to polish plants.
I am willing to believe pre-K makes no difference in longterm education outcomes. Most research that claims effects is plagued by selection bias, and the few with random assignment aren’t promising. But I do find value in the experience he’s having this year, just as a 4-year-old, verses what he’d be doing in daycare. They’re paying so much attention to his development, working with him on social skills (key for an only child) and providing a huge variety of indoor and outdoor activities for him to explore. Plus there is a ton of communication with parents on how he’s doing.
It has value beyond the impact on his future grades, or his future anything. I’m glad he’s having a good experience this year because that matters to me all by itself. So I’ll never say that we shouldn’t bother with pre-K just because it doesn’t improve future scores. (Not that Freddie is saying that.) I’m glad it exists.
Ideally, all parents should have the option of preschool or daycare, and both should be free.
It’s frustrating that we need to claim effects on future test scores to justify funding for families, because all of the false or inflated claims just lead us further into fantasyland where school solves social and economic problems.
Anyway, it looks like the pre-K funding in BBB had been gutted (source: Matt Bruenig’s Twitter). Same with childcare funding. So not much will change.
Same thing with education in later years. I remember my high school physics teacher who was so happy to teach physics. He never said he did it to make the next generation of engineers or whatever. Teaching physics was an end to itself.
I have ADHD, attended Montessori school through 3rd grade. I think it saved my life. I had a very hard time sitting still to complete work--the teachers understood this and would send me outside to hammer nails into a stump when I got really restless...then I'd have enough of that and come back inside to finish my work. If I'd been sent to a crappy local public school I'd have been pathologized severely--some combination of medication, constant disciplinary action, being discarded into special ed and/or kicked out of school. I would not have graduated from high school, gone to a good college, and gotten a PhD.
That’s great to hear. Whatever the merits of the Montessori education, they are committed to nurturing and accommodating all children in a way that’s reassuring to me. Of course the small class sizes and economic privilege of the students makes it more feasible than it would be in public school.
While ADHD, along with many other quirks, including plain physical health problems, is partly heritable, I wonder whether how grownups handle kids with these quirks can be caught in standard measures, or whether it's still part of the "unshared environment" factor Freddie describes:
"The point is not that environment doesn’t matter. The point is that a) the so-called 'shared environment,' the behavioral genetics term that more or less refers to the family and parenting effects but also can refer to school effects, has consistently shown little influence on outcomes by adulthood; b) the so-called 'unshared environment,' which more or less refers to all of the random things that influence a person that we can’t quantify, controls more;"
Whether a school pathologizes a kid's traits when it shouldn't sounds like it ought to be a "school effect", but it's so dependent on the specifics of the kid's situation that standardizing for it sounds tough. (Not just for schools, but parents, too.)
It really is incredibly specific--I was sent to a child psychiatrist who did not like to medicate 4 year old children. I knew other boys my age who were medicated. I have often wondered whether my life would have been better or worse had I been medicated at an early age.
As a gardening enthusiast, I’m pleased to know there’s a cohort of 4yo kids polishing plants. As a parent, I’m amazed the teachers have the bandwidth to track individual plant polishing technique.
Man (or pronoun of your choice, but I say "man" a lot) the teacher to student ratio in Montessori is awesome. Plus have you ever cleaned the dust off the leaves of your houseplants? I have several and the hardest ones are the palm varieties. They get this sticky shitty dust that I haven't the faintest clue where it comes from.
But yeah Montessori is trying to keep kids focused on the environment and nature which I think is cool.
“ I’ll never say that we shouldn’t bother with pre-K just because it doesn’t improve future scores. (Not that Freddie is saying that.) I’m glad it exists.
Ideally, all parents should have the option of preschool or daycare, and both should be free.
It’s frustrating that we need to claim effects on future test scores to justify funding for families….”
I don’t so much disagree as I see it differently, I guess?
Yes in my ideal world everyone would have access to affordable pre-K and/or daycare and could choose their choice.
But if we’re pragmatically deciding where limited dollars should go, it really matters to me that pre-K doesn’t actually do what it says on the tin. If spending lots of extra dollars on highly qualified early childcare educators doesn’t actually have long-term effects, but we can make children happy and keep them safe and fed by letting them blissfully make mud pies at a childcare center for much less money…..well, I want to know that.
Just think of all the language your kiddo is exposed to by "polishing plants" and exploring the outdoors and the arts, as is popular in Montessori programs. I'm not sure if the 17 page reports are really necessary, but I do believe that high context, play-based early childhood programs do provide a wonderful educational environment for the young ones!
1. What lots of people really mean when they talk about this is it should be easier to fire teachers and harder for teachers to unionize and get fair wages and protection against unfair dismissal and stuff. Needless to say, I don't support that.
2. I'm with Freddie that kids have natural limits (as someone who went to a school for intellectually disabled children this is the most bloody obvious thing in the world) and no kind of superstar teacher can push them above that. I think however there is an effect where teacher quality can make a difference in getting kids up to that limit.
Take for example a maths lesson on the power law, that thing in algebra where a^x * a^y = a^(x+y), and not a^(xy) as is often seen. What I would call a "good teacher" is someone who understands the law they're teaching well enough (or at least reviews it before the lesson on it) that they don't write out the wrong one on the blackboard while explaining it to the class, get an annoying kid like me put their hand up "Sir isn't it x+y", tell me to shut up because they're the teacher and know their stuff, come back next lesson and apologize and explain it's x+y after all please cross out what we did last week, and then get it wrong again next week. Then when the class answers pretty much at random on the test, he gives 0 marks for the ones who wrote xy anyway, and when someone complains "but that's what you said" he simply shrugs "that's not what the sample solution to the test says" (both the test and the sample solution come from a third-party, the equivalent of Pearson in our country). Yes, that's a real story.
There will be kids who will never learn the power law however hard you try, and kids who never need to learn it and still have a successful life, and there'll be kids like me who know it already and just ignore the teacher - but then there's the others in the middle where a teacher who actually knows his stuff might have got them to not be hopelessly confused, rather than just convincing them that maths is hard and illogical and not even teachers are good at it.
(I don't necessarily want to blame the teacher either - in a culture where teachers had better working conditions and enough time for professional development, the same teacher might have managed to not mess up the lesson.)
And yet you think the xy teacher should get to keep his job, because the union you support will protect him? Sorry, no, it should be possible to politely dismiss this teacher as incompetent. That's why there is opposition to teachers' unions, because they never ever agree to dismissals for incompetence.
You should know better than to ever believe someone on the internet who confidently describes some Dickensian scenario. There's no way a high school math teacher didn't know distribution. For example:
"that thing in algebra where a^x * a^y = a^(x+y), and not a^(xy) as is often seen."
Often seen? Insane. One thing most kids know how to do is distribution, and as I said, the idea that a math teacher who had to pass a credential test would say so defies belief.
It is very hard to fire a teacher for incompetence, but the incompetence is generally about classroom management or grading. Teachers have to pass fairly difficult credential tests to teach.
It doesn’t seem like too many topics taught in high school require a huge level of expertise, the hard part is communicating the subject and getting kids excited to learn it, like with most jobs motivation, work ethic and social skills will get you a lot farther than subject knowledge.
On the one hand, I know many math teachers, enough to agree with you that a^x * a^y = a^(xy) is not an "often seen" mistake for them to make. On the other, the admonishment that we "should know better than to ever believe someone on the internet who confidently describes some Dickensian scenario" seems strange to me, since Dickensian scenarios do sometimes happen. They may not be representative, but that's different from unbelievable.
(Maybe I'm touchy on this. I'm part of a population with an "unbelievably" rare tissue abnormality, so unbelievably rare it's routinely dismissed as too unlikely to screen for, even though there's screening that's cheap and low-tech. Our patient experience is unrepresentative, sure, but also routinely dismissed as "unbelievable" when it wouldn't be if gatekeepers could doubt their disbelief just enough to bother with screening sometimes!)
And the scenario described was from personal experience (though, I believe, not in the US).
When I was in high school half a century ago (in the US, semi-rural Ohio), the chemistry teacher had me explain pH to the class (that I was taking!) because he did not understand logarithms, and he knew that I did.
Right. I decided to get DiffEq, known for being a cookbook class anyhow, out of the way one summer at a local community college. The teacher's subject expertise was not, by itself, deficient, but he was in over his head exercising authority over a group of kids with very mixed motives, some brazenly cheating from the outset, and he'd start insisting he was right just because he was the teacher.
This culminating in him insisting, apparently without bothering to check, that all characteristic polynomials on the final exam had real roots when they didn't. Well, that got me brazenly cheating: Once I was confident (my arithmetic skills aren't the best, so at first I wasn't) he'd base a fair chunk of our final grade on a problem we shouldn't be able to solve according to his standards (the roots were complex), I shared my answer with the whole class. I was about the one student left in the class the teacher trusted not to cheat, and there I was, cheating at last, because he wouldn't back down and he was just wrong. Nothing bad happened to me. To this day, I think the teacher's problem was with classroom management, not subject-matter expertise.
The top 100 results or so from searching for "reddit worst math teacher" can get quite Dickensian. Representative? Hopefully not. Real? Probably, I'd say.
You don't need to believe me, but it's my own experience not something I heard on the internet. Not from the US though - I'm on a different continent to you, and where I went to school subject-level credentialing for schools outside the state system doesn't exist.
The "often seen" part is my own experience from students who should know this before they come to my current classes.
This is the painful part of teachers unions. I strongly support their demands related to compensation and workload, but working in public education I was horrified by some of the teachers we couldn’t fire. It’s easy to say “protect workers” until it means subjecting a group of vulnerable children to a soul-sucking experience for a year. I don’t know the solution, but it complicated my otherwise pro-union views for sure.
I am pro union for the private sector, anti union for the public sector (and FWIW I am a public sector employee without a union). There is some theoretical justification for this, having to do with public sector bosses being answerable to elected officials who are answerable to the public. Of course it doesn't work perfectly well in practice. But IMO teachers' unions and (especially) police unions are a net negative to society.
the dismissal rate of states with strong unions or weak unions, or tenure or untenured, is roughly the same. It's relatively easy to fire teachers that are actually bad, less so to fire one who's merely not very good. However, the main reason teachers aren't fired is because there's a shortage. If principals could be assured an equally good replacement, they'd probably fire more.
Also, letting principals fire teachers with no reason would lead to massive class action age discrimination lawsuits.
Yes, I think that's the lesser evil. The small reason is that, where I went to school, there wasn't exactly a glut of qualified candidates applying - the school had to take who they could get.
The big reason is that, although I'm not in the US, where I am we also have these constant initiatives and campaigns by the education authorities to make sure all students are showing excellence - which of course doesn't work for the very reasons Freddie and Ed Realist mention - and of course teachers get blamed when that doesn't happen, so by those standards all teachers are incompetent but especially all teachers who work with disadvantaged children.
As long as the choice is between unions and being able to dismiss a teacher for insufficiently Cultivating Academic Excellence Through Growth Mindset or whatever it is this month, I'm with the unions. And we're getting closer and closer over here too to the day when a teacher is at risk for insufficient wokeness, so I'm even more with the unions.
No less a hardass than Charles Murray pointed out that preschool would be a great way to help poor kids stay in a warm, safe, place and should be funded on that basis. Or, as I put it:
"Maybe we’d stop holding preschool responsible for long-term academic outcomes and ask instead how it helps poor kids with unstable home environments and parents with varying degrees of competency, convincing these kids that their country and community cares about them and wants them to be safe."
That wasn't the original goal, given how few kids originally went through high school. However, I do think that it's an inevitable result (which is why I oppose Freddie's goal of letting kids leave school at an early age, although I'd support 16).
"ask instead how it helps poor kids with unstable home environments and parents with varying degrees of competency, convincing these kids that their country and community cares about them and wants them to be safe"
You can make a similar case for environmentalism. "Let's keep our country clean, our rivers clear, our air crisp, and our trees green." Something any non-cartoonish fiscal conservative should be able to agree with.
On some level, as a parent and a citizen, I find the basic conclusion of this piece hopeful, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine why it isn’t seen as hopeful to more people. I like knowing that there isn’t some special method that could optimize my children at a very young age for success if I or the government or some researcher could only find out what it was. It’s liberating to believe that if I keep my children physically safe, give them adequate nutrition, give them enough attention so that they can socialize with others, and don’t do traumatizing things, that I’m actually doing a good enough job as a parent, and that more effort than that has rapidly diminishing returns. Parenting otherwise would be far more terrifying.
I loved attending Head Start, and while this shouldn't affect how anyone views the actual research (my n=1 experience should not sway people's opinions), I always credited Head Start with having a huge positive impact on my life. Did I get an "educational advantage"? I doubt it. I was a bright kid and would have been fine with school tasks either way. But what did I get?
* A predictable routine
* Comfortable surroundings
* Fun activities (I remember crafts, playing organized games outside etc., and don't actually remember any of the academic stuff)
* Kind, predictable adults who engaged with me -- this one cannot be overstated: I think the only such adult I'd been exposed to before this was Mr. Rogers. (Being that young, I believed he was actually speaking to me through the TV and telling me lots of kind, uplifting things. I also credit him with having a huge positive influence on my life -- but that's a totally different story.)
* Food
I frickin' loved Head Start -- so I really want it to be "a good thing" and for other kids to have access to it. However, maybe in light of the data I'm wrong about it -- not wrong that it was great for me, because it was, but wrong that it's generally beneficial.
But a lot of the discussion seem to be on the academic performance, and I never saw the academics as what benefitted me. I liked being in a nice place with nice people and food.
I've heard that Head Start kids are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to attend college (I did), but who knows if that's true either.
I've often wondered if your closing point can't be how we actually reach a consensus on this. We frame schooling equality less around academic outcomes and more as a baseline of childcare in the early years, and a safe, productive environment for socializing in later years. Not to say the teaching doesn't matter, but then we can allow the chips to land where they may as far as test scores go, and instead focus on trying to make schools safe, positive, nurturing places.
We will of course hit many similar roadblocks. Children from chaotic backgrounds will, all else being equal, be more likely to bring chaos with them than kids from Mayberry. The same will go for schools in high-crime areas. But this all seems much more attainable and much less vulnerable to the geennetic factor that our country simply cannot and will not be honest about. You will simply not get the federal bureaucracy, or any mainstream politician with a handle on federal education policy, to acknowledge the issue.
Of course, this is all moot to an extent because once the kid turns 18 and is out in the world, it's still an economy where a Bachelor's is the most reliable ticket to financial security. But that's another bridge to cross.
Pretty much in agreement here. Childcare with caring adults other than the immediate family is hugely important, perhaps even more so for working poor and lower to middle class families. I see no reason to continue spinning the wheels on the impact pre-K care/teaching may have on future test scores or achievement gaps unless the sample size is large enough to matter. And clearly government funded childcare for some socioeconomic demographics (again, poor, etc.) would be a bigger benefit than it would be to others (obviously those with already easily available/affordable childcare).
I'm new to the genetics aspect of this 'debate' though. As such, I have questions that stem from ignorance, including whether there is any case being made for (or against) pharmaceutical or dietary interventions when speaking of genetics. Also, how are a person's genes traceable to IQ when certain gene pools are subject to differing social environmental conditions like poverty, hunger and toxic chemicals in any meaningful way? Say someone's parents genes are recorded along with lower IQ tests (themselves possibly inherently biased) and their offspring is then predicted to have lower achievement results. What about putting a kid on supplements or amphetamines? I've got friends who were horrible students, couldn't keep their train of thought long enough to even complete a test, but were then put on adderall or given certain over the counter supplements and completely turned around and became very successful. Maybe I'm getting into too many topics at once here. Does anyone have any suggested reading material on this genetics angle to achievement so that I can educate myself before asking any more questions?
I'm new to this blog and Freddie, only signed up about a week ago because he was linked at another blog I read. But I did read a few reviews/critiques of his book. I assume there is only one, singular? If so, I believe what I read was over at Jacobin or WWSW, but I don't remember which right now. How deep does he get into the genetics question?
Did a quick read through and it occurred to me that there's another "band" or group of kids, of which I was one. Plenty of pre-K attention, early reader (although in K the head mistress told my parents I was developmentally disabled and gave me some sort of test that said my reading level was already 6th grade), but my problem was always motivation. You can be intrinsically smarter than most of your peers (understanding that these kinds of comparisons are exactly what you're arguing against) but if you don't give a shit about the material, find it boring, or just give up too easily at the first sign of adversity (don't grasp something as fast as someone else), you're not going to do very well in terms of lifetime education. Hell, that plagued me through college and I always resisted trying adderall and the other drugs my peers were using; instead settling on a few 'natural' supplements (choline, glutamic acid, amino acids, etc.) and ended up graduating from an electrical engineering program with a rather mediocre GPA.
The reason I even mention this is that I'm not sure anyone or any of these studies, not the only-environment or only-ability people are accounting for personal motivation and stick-to-itiveness.
I will say that I'm extremely glad I did stick through college and took several liberal arts courses; that's what set me on the path to being a leftist and a compassionate person. Otherwise, had I left school early and not learned some of those things, I am 100% sure I'd be a different person with different social temperateness and different values. It scares me that the things I learned in those liberal arts classes are being vilified but I completely buy your argument that college education in the US has created a stratified caste system of sorts and only plays into the primacy-of-capital narratives we're subjected to from early childhood. Blah blah blah, TL/DR version is that I'm going to buy your book and read it before I comment anymore on this topic.
I love the idea of "childcare" vs. "pre-K." Children should be able to play, scribble and have story book time, cognitively age appropriate activities. They can learn new vocabulary contextually through stories and play. I cannot stand the amped up focus on literacy for the K and below K crowd, seeing the Handwriting Without Tears program applied to 3 and 4 year olds. It's not developmentally appropriate.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about some child rearing policies: People in the know are pushing them for reasons other than they profess.
For example, individuals might push for pre-K because they think it gets children with a bad family situation out of the home for a period everyday, or can provide children with a heated building or food if they aren't getting those resources at home. It has nothing to do with cognitive or social development, however, they can't run the importance of a program as a supplement to family functioning because that would be offensive. So they push this other narrative.
I am lost. Sigh....so when i read paragraph below, Are we saying that having 2 parents isn't significant to outcomes? Because I understand that one-parent families are now typical of lower wage earners, whereas high income tend to stay married. And this, I understand, has significant effect on children. (I think of single parent births by income and race....)
"The point is not that environment doesn’t matter. The point is that a) the so-called “shared environment,” the behavioral genetics term that more or less refers to the family and parenting effects but also can refer to school effects, has consistently shown little influence on outcomes by adulthood; b) the so-called “unshared environment,” which more or less refers to all of the random things that influence a person that we can’t quantify, controls more; and c) there are likely ceiling effects at play here - that is, yes, moving a child from true neglect to a nurturing and supportive learning environment could have major positive effects, but once children enjoy a basic minimal level of safety and comfort the returns from improved environments likely diminish."
Are you familiar with the High Scope Perry study in the 1950s? It found that, a few years later, poor black students who went to pre-school weren't doing any better than the control group that didn't go to pre-school. But 40 yrs later, those who went to pre-school were more likely to have a college degree, own a home, etc. It was a small study but seems like an important consideration --WHEN is the outcome measured?
Also interesting is a bunch of stuff about the ways in which socioeconomic factors impact academic achievement in ch 5 of the book Clash: 8 Cultural Conflicts That Make Us Who We Are
You speak the truth. If only you could get the evidence in front of every progressive policy maker in North America (although I have to doubt what difference it would make).
The policy makers already know the evidence, and what they do with it is hide it, as in the NYT article.
Demanding "the highest quality" is a predictable form of lawmaker incompetence. Who wants to be accused of "not supporting high-quality schools" in attack ads? They could demand certain minimal standards of competence be met and have a chance of success, but they are rewarded for promising the moon and failing.
I also agree with the conclusion that pre-K is more about day-care than education. I don't know if Pre-K improves educational outcomes. Apart from metrics like "reading skill at age 7", I doubt it will do much. And the studies you point out suggest it doesn't do much for educational outcomes. Yet it is still a good thing to have.
I'm a biologist with no educational policy background, so this is definitely spitballing based on anecdotal stuff from other friends in humanities higher ed.
I wonder whether one of the unacknowledged background problems with all these American studies is the almost universal poor quality of our teachers. It seems to be taken as a given that we'll be staffing public schools with education majors, who happen to be from the subject area with students with the lowest IQ in the studies I've seen...add to the lowest IQ the uselessness and deranged ideological bent of many education curricula, and you get some pretty bad teachers...now fast forward this 20-30 years now and you get a new generation of teachers who were taught by these un-gifted, poorly educated teachers, and you get something like a ratchet effect--I'm coming from biology, so I'm thinking of something like "Muller's ratchet" in which deleterious effects simply compound over time until you get a sort of "meltdown" into inviability.
I have a friend who teaches in a remote-learning Education Masters program that helps high school English teachers get a Masters degree so that they can teach AP classes. The students--current high school English teachers--do not like to read. They do not believe students should be made to read anything difficult. They basically refuse to read assigned texts unless all the characters are "relatable". In short, they should not be teaching the subject, much less at the AP level.
I have a background in genetics, so far be it from me to discount genetic effects on educational attainment, but I would like to know whether school effects are so miniscule in countries with highly paid, well educated teachers...the Nordic countries, for example. I guess I wouldn't be surprised either way.
Wow, "the almost universal poor quality of our teachers"...
I wonder how many actual K-12 teachers you know?
"I wonder whether one of the unacknowledged background problems with all these American studies is the almost universal poor quality of our teachers. It seems to be taken as a given that we'll be staffing public schools with education majors, who happen to be from the subject area with students with the lowest IQ in the studies I've seen...add to the lowest IQ the uselessness and deranged ideological bent of many education curricula, and you get some pretty bad teachers...now fast forward this 20-30 years now and you get a new generation of teachers who were taught by these un-gifted, poorly educated teachers, and you get something like a ratchet effect--I'm coming from biology, so I'm thinking of something like "Muller's ratchet" in which deleterious effects simply compound over time until you get a sort of "meltdown" into inviability."
1) Beginning in 2003, all teachers have to pass credential tests. Education majors were deemed preliminary until they passed the credential test for their desired topic.
2) High school academic teachers have had to pass a test for their credentials since the mid 70s. In 2003, middle school teachers had to pass the same test as high school teachers.
3) A large chunk of high school teachers in all states are not education majors. The state with the most teachers (California) does not even have an education major for any grade. All teachers have to get a BA and then take a series of courses. And before they enter the credential course, they have to pass the credential test.
4) Most of the research showing that education majors have the lowest SAT scores are from declared majors, which is kind of worthless (see 1).
5) All available evidence shows that America's teachers are, on average,*smarter* than they were in previous years. Certainly they are smarter than teachers of 40 years ago through 2003, and are at least as smart as the teachers from 60-70 years ago, when we had far fewer of them. While it's true that many smart women were teachers in the old days, it's also true that a lot of dumb women were as well.
6) Far be it from me to cast doubt on your friend's observations, but there is absolutely no requirement that English teachers have Masters to teach AP courses, and while their political opinions are regrettable, have little to do with their teacher quality. And if your friend passed anyone who refused to read the texts then he's not one to talk, is he? Otherwise, they read the texts they needed to graduate.
7) This comes as a shock to people who aren't familiar with ed school, but they don't teach you your subject matter in ed school. They don't even really teach you how to teach. You spend a year exploring different theories of education that the professors would like you to adopt. But it's not indoctrination. The people who believe that stuff would do it anyway, and the rest of us just shrug and look for different insights into teaching.
8) There is a ton of research showing that teacher intellectual ability has very little impact on student outcomes, if any. (My own hope is There is likewise a ton of research showing that teacher race is highly influential with black students--specifically, black teachers have better results on average with black kids. That is, if the teachers wailing about not teaching relevant texts they can't identify with are black, then odds are they will have better results with their black students than the righteous objective readers you admire.
I trust you can connect the dots between these facts and your spitballing.
If you look down this page a bit, you'll see all my writing on credentialing.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/encylopedia-of-ed-part-i-things-voldemortean/
Oh, I meant to add this.
The massive increase in "teacher quality" instituted in 2003 led to higher SAT scores for credentialed teachers, but not better student outcomes, which stalled. Meanwhile, the number of black and Hispanic teachers cratered. As a result, many states are now rolling back credential tests, which is a terrible idea. But after 20 years of rejecting teachers of color because they couldn't pass credential tests that showed no impact on student outcomes, it's not surprising.
I don't know anything about these credential tests, but you believe they are good and helpful? I'm unclear on this from reading your comments.
If you don't know anything about credential tests, you should probably not be opining about the poor quality of teachers. For decades education reformers literally ignored credential tests and even now, barely acknowledge them. Perhaps stop cribbing from the Big Book of Ed Reform bullshit.
Neither "side"--union or ed reform--is honest. You look really silly when you rely on them (for example, saying "universally poor quality of our teachers" followed by "credential test? What's that?")
6) Far be it from me to cast doubt on your friend's observations, but there is absolutely no requirement that English teachers have Masters to teach AP courses, and while their political opinions are regrettable, have little to do with their teacher quality. And if your friend passed anyone who refused to read the texts then he's not one to talk, is he? Otherwise, they read the texts they needed to graduate.
He passes the students who read the assignments. They hate reading though--their biggest complaint is that he's not giving them syllabi they can use in their classes. They don't seem to understand the idea of taking a graduate-level literature course.
Now, as far as your "he's not one to talk, is he?" quip--this brings me to my own experience as a science tutor in local high schools while I was in graduate school. My state has a dumb test that everyone must pass to graduate...you can probably guess where this is going. Teachers would send their worst-performing students to me for tutoring. The test we'd prepare for was dumb, dumb, dumb: multiple choice with just four choices, two of which were so outrageously silly as to be dismissible out of hand. The students who sent to me were illiterate. All of them. They did not require science tutoring at all. *Someone* had been passing these students every year such that they reached 10th or 11th grade completely illiterate.
"They hate reading though--their biggest complaint is that he's not giving them syllabi they can use in their classes. They don't seem to understand the idea of taking a graduate-level literature course."
That sounds like a different issue. They have different goals for their program than their professor.
"*Someone* had been passing these students every year such that they reached 10th or 11th grade completely illiterate."
By "illiterate", I imagine you mean they were reading at a very low level. And as you are a biology major, I submit you aren't the person to decide which questions are "dumb". But if you don't understand (as you clearly don't) that any graduation test must be very,very easy or too few students will graduate and the schools will be sued. In fact, most states abandoned their graduation tests for just this reason.
Graduation tests--and high standards--are insisted upon by people who can't really comprehend what the left side of the bell curve is like. They are smart, but foolish, people who are somehow convinced that if you fail kids, they'll learn it the next time. They can't even conceive of kids who will never, ever, pass. they will never be able to learn. And so they continually invent higher standards in the delusion that this will help more kids learn, when in fact the opposite is true: we would be better off teaching less intelligent kids less info, more slowly, givingn a kid who is 15 and reads at 4th grade level the learrning to help him try to get at 8th grade level.
But alas, too many people are foolish, and think that the reason these kids are "illiterate" (ie, not as smart as you want them to be) is because someone passed them, when in fact there is no choice *other* than to pass them, because failing them would just lead to 16 year olds in fifth grade.
This is true- it's probably better to promote them on and get them the high school credential, which doesn't mean much and hasn't for a long time. In terms of life results, i can't imagine what benefit is gained for the lower-performing child failing. I don't think making a few more new adults unemployable is actually going to make employers start taking a high school diploma seriously.
But there should be other options. We should be able to teach kids where they are, rather than where some idiots who want better test scores think they should be to get those test scores.
"Higher standards", like "good schools" and "high quality teachers", are shibboleths people spout without understanding what they mean. (and "high quality preschool", of course.)
By "illiterate", I imagine you mean they were reading at a very low level. And as you are a biology major, I submit you aren't the person to decide which questions are "dumb". But if you don't understand (as you clearly don't) that any graduation test must be very,very easy or too few students will graduate and the schools will be sued. In fact, most states abandoned their graduation tests for just this reason.
I submit you are incorrect on every point here, because you can't properly read an argument--you reflexively assume that the arguments you encounter are identical to ones you have encountered before, but let's take the chunk cited above:
--"reading at a very low level"...is this a hill to die on? Yes, these students can order from the Taco Bell menu. Can they read the test? Nope. The tutors have to read the questions aloud or they students just freeze up and stare at the page.
--'you aren't the person to decide which questions are "dumb"'. There was a shortage of tutors so I was given many subjects that I was unqualified to teach, e.g. physics--I have never even taken a physics course--and the two dumbest answers were always obvious to anyone who could read, e.g. the physics question would be about how long it took to run a certain distance, and two of the answer choices would involve "gallons". I tutored English and social studies too--the questions were equally ridiculous.
--you get yourself into an odd knot here...you want to tell me that I don't know what a dumb question is, but you also want to say that of course the questions have to be dumb and that people like me can't understand why. Bad argument.
--you seem to think, without any evidence--that I want to keep these kids in 5th grade. Shocker: I do not. I do think, however, that if it's easy to determine that these kids are illiterate (and it is easy to! and they are!), then a specific intervention needs to be aimed at that rather then sending them to a science tutor or whatever. Why is there no other choice than to pass them? Isn't that what all this chatter today was about, other choices for the education system? What to change, what can't be changed?
Be nice to each other, please.
First, I wasn't calling you an idiot. I was referring to the people who got us in this position. You agree with them, but it's pretty clear by this point that you've never really thought about this at all with any degree of underlying knowledge, so there's that.
"you get yourself into an odd knot here...you want to tell me that I don't know what a dumb question is, but you also want to say that of course the questions have to be dumb and that people like me can't understand why. Bad argument."
Did I use the word "dumb"? And no, it wasn't a bad argument. Point 1) you are not the person to decide what is "dumb" for a minimal high school standard. It might be sufficiently challenging for the range of abilities that a high school graduation test has to deal with. Point 2) the range of abilities a high school graduation test has to deal with is very broad. In other words yes, I am certain the questions were easy to a biology major, and also easier than most people would like for a high school graduate to know but no they are not "dumb" questions. S
Protip: "Dumb", along with "stupid", is a really pointless word to use when describing standardized test questions. What I presume you meant to say is that the questions didn't require as much intellect as you would like.
"The tutors have to read the questions aloud or they students just freeze up and stare at the page."
I am absolutely certain this isn't true. No kid gets to high school without being able to read at all. Full stop. Read at a 3rd or 4th grade level? Yes, in some schools where reading at 8th grade level is average. But you are incorrect. The kids you were tutoring could read. It's possible that they understood you thought they were "dumb", and thus decided to make life as difficult for you as possible.
"you seem to think, without any evidence--that I want to keep these kids in 5th grade."
Wrong. I think you believe teachers "* had been passing these students every year such that they reached 10th or 11th grade completely illiterate. I think this because you said it.
So there are two ways to interpret this: 1) that the teachers were lazy and passed kids who were capable of learning without actually teaching them or 2) teachers gave them a passing grade even though they were "illiterate", meaning they should have been failed. If there's a third interpretation, do tell.
Either of my interpretations assumes the kids are capable of learning the material. Therefore, the people who righteously complain about low skill kids "being passed along" are assuming that teaching the kid properly will result in him learning the material OR failing the kid until he learns will eventually result in the kid getting motivated and learning the material. But IN FACT, I say, OPPOSITE to your belief, the reality is that forcing kids to meet a standard will result in 16 year old fifth graders.
See? Careful reading shows clearly I did not accuse you of wanting 16 year old fifth graders, but of being too naive to understand the outcome of your desired policies--the policies that say teachers must teach, and must not "pass along".
"I do think, however, that if it's easy to determine that these kids are illiterate (and it is easy to! and they are!),"
As stated, no kids are illiterate. But we do know which kids have low reading scores and low math scores.
"then a specific intervention needs to be aimed at that rather then sending them to a science tutor or whatever. Why is there no other choice than to pass them? "
We're not allowed to intervene. Unless the kid is special ed, we can't say hey, this kid is reading at 5th grade level so let's put the kid in a class that will get him up to 8th grade. So we either fail them until they aren't going to get enough credits and will be sent to alternative school where they also won't get enough credits but can do it faster, or we pass them. Rarely do we pass them for doing nothing. We generally pass them for trying and for learning what they can.
" Isn't that what all this chatter today was about, other choices for the education system? What to change, what can't be changed?"
Discussing change begins with understanding the current system, which is not how I would describe your understanding. For example, in addition to not knowing about credential tests and thinking teachers are stupid, you think teachers need a master's degree for teaching AP courses, describe kids as illiterate because they refuse to read aloud in tutoring session (with a tutor who apparently doesn't think much of them) , you think a low achieving student is a) caused by low quality teachers and b) fixable by some combination of better teachers or higher standards and finally, you don't understand that high schools are actually prevented from offering lower tier courses to their students.
I have a whole blog arguing for change. But it starts with recognizing that America's schools do a good job with the constraints they are handed. Simply recognizing that the average high school teacher has a higher SAT score than the average college graduate would force you to rethink your priors.
Another litany of mischaracterizations. Yikes.
Your attitude has totally undermined whatever credibility you might have had.
I don’t wish to get involved in y’all’s argument, but I feel compelled to say that my best friend, a 6th grade public school social studies teacher, has repeatedly expressed frustration that he is forced (by the district) to pass kids who aren’t even showing up. H doesn’t agree with it, he doesn’t want to.
Especially with the pandemic and remote learning, numerous kids just ghosted. Or they’d refuse to turn on their cameras, so there was no proof they were actually in attendance. Not to mention how unsafe it was for public officials to lose track of the health and well-being status of so many kids.
Parents have a litany of excuses for why their kids couldn’t attend, or couldn’t do their work, or whatever. And public schools, though held to account for all of it, don’t have the legal backing to take on poor parenting. Just the opposite.
At the end of 2020 school year, many teachers were forced by their states to give students a passing grade. Districts can't force teachers to do it, so far as I know. 2021 was different. We had the ability to fail kids. I failed more kids last year than ever before. I don't know of any state or district that forced teachers to pass kids. However, they can pressure teachers to pass kids by saying things like "I know he's been gone all year, but can't you give him assignments to make up" and so on. Best to avoid those conversations as much as possible.
But just to be clear, I'm talking about something different. Middle school has been a real problem since common core, as it's gotten much more difficult and a lot of kids realize that they don't have to do anything and will still pass on to the next grade. (which may be what your friend is talking about, now that I think of it). In high school though, kids are required to take courses despite having abilities far lower, and they have to take these courses to graduate. You start passing kids that try hard. Teachers that don't will generally find themselves getting really crappy course assignments.
I found your "Teachers and Cognitive Ability" section interesting and helpful. I wish you hadn't felt the need to deliberately mischaracterize my thoughts (e.g. "the righteous objective readers you admire")...that was tacky.
Yet you found a way.
Sorry for the double post:
Hard to mischaracterize the thoughts of someone who starts off by asserting as fact the " almost universal poor quality of our teachers".
As a STEM professor at a decent state university for 38 years, and as a parent who raised children through the local public school system, I completely agree with everything Education Realist writes below.
Or above, depending on which ordering you're reading these in ...
"I wonder whether one of the unacknowledged background problems with all these American studies is the almost universal poor quality of our teachers."
If the research is correct that quality in early education doesn't matter much once some basic needs are met — a physically-healthy environment where the kids aren't being abused by the grownups and get enough supervision not to abuse each other, then why would poor academic quality in early-education teachers matter much?
Among kids with genuine academic interests (and that's not every kid, and that's fine), I think finding teachers and programs who "click" matters, but for most kids, including ones likely to benefit from early talent development, that development can still wait till elementary school.
My own children are likely to have genuine academic interests, based on their parents. Since a day has to be occupied somehow, I figure for young kids, it can't hurt to have the occupation include what are called pre-academic skills. But if research shows inculcating those skills is far less important than basic safety and health at that age, then that's what research shows. Maybe we can worry less about academic qualifications for early childcare, and spend money on more achievable goals, like ensuring the physical space is adequate and the care is, if not meeting haut bourgeois notions of "quality", at least non-abusive.
Given the astounding cost and the likelihood that the education establishment will just use the additional years to stuff more woke nonsense in the little muffin heads of the youngsters, anything less than scientific consensus on there being profound net positive benefits should warrant scrapping this one more expensive social service idea to the scrap heap.
This research would also tend to indicate that the woke nonsense isn’t going to work either.
My kid attends a pricey Montessori preschool. We just received his first progress report, and it’s 17 pages. They are tracking so many things. For example, he has improved in the area of “plant polishing.” I didn’t even know you were supposed to polish plants.
I am willing to believe pre-K makes no difference in longterm education outcomes. Most research that claims effects is plagued by selection bias, and the few with random assignment aren’t promising. But I do find value in the experience he’s having this year, just as a 4-year-old, verses what he’d be doing in daycare. They’re paying so much attention to his development, working with him on social skills (key for an only child) and providing a huge variety of indoor and outdoor activities for him to explore. Plus there is a ton of communication with parents on how he’s doing.
It has value beyond the impact on his future grades, or his future anything. I’m glad he’s having a good experience this year because that matters to me all by itself. So I’ll never say that we shouldn’t bother with pre-K just because it doesn’t improve future scores. (Not that Freddie is saying that.) I’m glad it exists.
Ideally, all parents should have the option of preschool or daycare, and both should be free.
It’s frustrating that we need to claim effects on future test scores to justify funding for families, because all of the false or inflated claims just lead us further into fantasyland where school solves social and economic problems.
Anyway, it looks like the pre-K funding in BBB had been gutted (source: Matt Bruenig’s Twitter). Same with childcare funding. So not much will change.
Yes, no one ever seems to care that having a happy childhood is a good in itself.
Same thing with education in later years. I remember my high school physics teacher who was so happy to teach physics. He never said he did it to make the next generation of engineers or whatever. Teaching physics was an end to itself.
Seeing how many educational resources use a growing plant as a metaphor for a child's development, I'm glad you are supposed to polish them I guess?
I have ADHD, attended Montessori school through 3rd grade. I think it saved my life. I had a very hard time sitting still to complete work--the teachers understood this and would send me outside to hammer nails into a stump when I got really restless...then I'd have enough of that and come back inside to finish my work. If I'd been sent to a crappy local public school I'd have been pathologized severely--some combination of medication, constant disciplinary action, being discarded into special ed and/or kicked out of school. I would not have graduated from high school, gone to a good college, and gotten a PhD.
That’s great to hear. Whatever the merits of the Montessori education, they are committed to nurturing and accommodating all children in a way that’s reassuring to me. Of course the small class sizes and economic privilege of the students makes it more feasible than it would be in public school.
I would like to see stats on publicly-funded Montessori and Waldorf programs.
While ADHD, along with many other quirks, including plain physical health problems, is partly heritable, I wonder whether how grownups handle kids with these quirks can be caught in standard measures, or whether it's still part of the "unshared environment" factor Freddie describes:
"The point is not that environment doesn’t matter. The point is that a) the so-called 'shared environment,' the behavioral genetics term that more or less refers to the family and parenting effects but also can refer to school effects, has consistently shown little influence on outcomes by adulthood; b) the so-called 'unshared environment,' which more or less refers to all of the random things that influence a person that we can’t quantify, controls more;"
Whether a school pathologizes a kid's traits when it shouldn't sounds like it ought to be a "school effect", but it's so dependent on the specifics of the kid's situation that standardizing for it sounds tough. (Not just for schools, but parents, too.)
It really is incredibly specific--I was sent to a child psychiatrist who did not like to medicate 4 year old children. I knew other boys my age who were medicated. I have often wondered whether my life would have been better or worse had I been medicated at an early age.
Maybe it's the polishing of heavy machinery, or electrical substations? It's never too early to immerse the kids in engineering.
LOL plant polishing is a standard part of the curriculum in Montessori schools.
https://www.howwemontessori.com/how-we-montessori/2016/02/montessori-care-of-the-environment-plants.html
As a gardening enthusiast, I’m pleased to know there’s a cohort of 4yo kids polishing plants. As a parent, I’m amazed the teachers have the bandwidth to track individual plant polishing technique.
Man (or pronoun of your choice, but I say "man" a lot) the teacher to student ratio in Montessori is awesome. Plus have you ever cleaned the dust off the leaves of your houseplants? I have several and the hardest ones are the palm varieties. They get this sticky shitty dust that I haven't the faintest clue where it comes from.
But yeah Montessori is trying to keep kids focused on the environment and nature which I think is cool.
“ I’ll never say that we shouldn’t bother with pre-K just because it doesn’t improve future scores. (Not that Freddie is saying that.) I’m glad it exists.
Ideally, all parents should have the option of preschool or daycare, and both should be free.
It’s frustrating that we need to claim effects on future test scores to justify funding for families….”
I don’t so much disagree as I see it differently, I guess?
Yes in my ideal world everyone would have access to affordable pre-K and/or daycare and could choose their choice.
But if we’re pragmatically deciding where limited dollars should go, it really matters to me that pre-K doesn’t actually do what it says on the tin. If spending lots of extra dollars on highly qualified early childcare educators doesn’t actually have long-term effects, but we can make children happy and keep them safe and fed by letting them blissfully make mud pies at a childcare center for much less money…..well, I want to know that.
Just think of all the language your kiddo is exposed to by "polishing plants" and exploring the outdoors and the arts, as is popular in Montessori programs. I'm not sure if the 17 page reports are really necessary, but I do believe that high context, play-based early childhood programs do provide a wonderful educational environment for the young ones!
My feeling on the good/bad teachers debate is:
1. What lots of people really mean when they talk about this is it should be easier to fire teachers and harder for teachers to unionize and get fair wages and protection against unfair dismissal and stuff. Needless to say, I don't support that.
2. I'm with Freddie that kids have natural limits (as someone who went to a school for intellectually disabled children this is the most bloody obvious thing in the world) and no kind of superstar teacher can push them above that. I think however there is an effect where teacher quality can make a difference in getting kids up to that limit.
Take for example a maths lesson on the power law, that thing in algebra where a^x * a^y = a^(x+y), and not a^(xy) as is often seen. What I would call a "good teacher" is someone who understands the law they're teaching well enough (or at least reviews it before the lesson on it) that they don't write out the wrong one on the blackboard while explaining it to the class, get an annoying kid like me put their hand up "Sir isn't it x+y", tell me to shut up because they're the teacher and know their stuff, come back next lesson and apologize and explain it's x+y after all please cross out what we did last week, and then get it wrong again next week. Then when the class answers pretty much at random on the test, he gives 0 marks for the ones who wrote xy anyway, and when someone complains "but that's what you said" he simply shrugs "that's not what the sample solution to the test says" (both the test and the sample solution come from a third-party, the equivalent of Pearson in our country). Yes, that's a real story.
There will be kids who will never learn the power law however hard you try, and kids who never need to learn it and still have a successful life, and there'll be kids like me who know it already and just ignore the teacher - but then there's the others in the middle where a teacher who actually knows his stuff might have got them to not be hopelessly confused, rather than just convincing them that maths is hard and illogical and not even teachers are good at it.
(I don't necessarily want to blame the teacher either - in a culture where teachers had better working conditions and enough time for professional development, the same teacher might have managed to not mess up the lesson.)
And yet you think the xy teacher should get to keep his job, because the union you support will protect him? Sorry, no, it should be possible to politely dismiss this teacher as incompetent. That's why there is opposition to teachers' unions, because they never ever agree to dismissals for incompetence.
You should know better than to ever believe someone on the internet who confidently describes some Dickensian scenario. There's no way a high school math teacher didn't know distribution. For example:
"that thing in algebra where a^x * a^y = a^(x+y), and not a^(xy) as is often seen."
Often seen? Insane. One thing most kids know how to do is distribution, and as I said, the idea that a math teacher who had to pass a credential test would say so defies belief.
It is very hard to fire a teacher for incompetence, but the incompetence is generally about classroom management or grading. Teachers have to pass fairly difficult credential tests to teach.
It doesn’t seem like too many topics taught in high school require a huge level of expertise, the hard part is communicating the subject and getting kids excited to learn it, like with most jobs motivation, work ethic and social skills will get you a lot farther than subject knowledge.
On the one hand, I know many math teachers, enough to agree with you that a^x * a^y = a^(xy) is not an "often seen" mistake for them to make. On the other, the admonishment that we "should know better than to ever believe someone on the internet who confidently describes some Dickensian scenario" seems strange to me, since Dickensian scenarios do sometimes happen. They may not be representative, but that's different from unbelievable.
(Maybe I'm touchy on this. I'm part of a population with an "unbelievably" rare tissue abnormality, so unbelievably rare it's routinely dismissed as too unlikely to screen for, even though there's screening that's cheap and low-tech. Our patient experience is unrepresentative, sure, but also routinely dismissed as "unbelievable" when it wouldn't be if gatekeepers could doubt their disbelief just enough to bother with screening sometimes!)
And the scenario described was from personal experience (though, I believe, not in the US).
When I was in high school half a century ago (in the US, semi-rural Ohio), the chemistry teacher had me explain pH to the class (that I was taking!) because he did not understand logarithms, and he knew that I did.
Right. I decided to get DiffEq, known for being a cookbook class anyhow, out of the way one summer at a local community college. The teacher's subject expertise was not, by itself, deficient, but he was in over his head exercising authority over a group of kids with very mixed motives, some brazenly cheating from the outset, and he'd start insisting he was right just because he was the teacher.
This culminating in him insisting, apparently without bothering to check, that all characteristic polynomials on the final exam had real roots when they didn't. Well, that got me brazenly cheating: Once I was confident (my arithmetic skills aren't the best, so at first I wasn't) he'd base a fair chunk of our final grade on a problem we shouldn't be able to solve according to his standards (the roots were complex), I shared my answer with the whole class. I was about the one student left in the class the teacher trusted not to cheat, and there I was, cheating at last, because he wouldn't back down and he was just wrong. Nothing bad happened to me. To this day, I think the teacher's problem was with classroom management, not subject-matter expertise.
You showed everyone else the answer in the middle of an exam with the teacher there, and everyone in the same room?
The top 100 results or so from searching for "reddit worst math teacher" can get quite Dickensian. Representative? Hopefully not. Real? Probably, I'd say.
You don't need to believe me, but it's my own experience not something I heard on the internet. Not from the US though - I'm on a different continent to you, and where I went to school subject-level credentialing for schools outside the state system doesn't exist.
The "often seen" part is my own experience from students who should know this before they come to my current classes.
This is the painful part of teachers unions. I strongly support their demands related to compensation and workload, but working in public education I was horrified by some of the teachers we couldn’t fire. It’s easy to say “protect workers” until it means subjecting a group of vulnerable children to a soul-sucking experience for a year. I don’t know the solution, but it complicated my otherwise pro-union views for sure.
I am pro union for the private sector, anti union for the public sector (and FWIW I am a public sector employee without a union). There is some theoretical justification for this, having to do with public sector bosses being answerable to elected officials who are answerable to the public. Of course it doesn't work perfectly well in practice. But IMO teachers' unions and (especially) police unions are a net negative to society.
the dismissal rate of states with strong unions or weak unions, or tenure or untenured, is roughly the same. It's relatively easy to fire teachers that are actually bad, less so to fire one who's merely not very good. However, the main reason teachers aren't fired is because there's a shortage. If principals could be assured an equally good replacement, they'd probably fire more.
Also, letting principals fire teachers with no reason would lead to massive class action age discrimination lawsuits.
"However, the main reason teachers aren't fired is because there's a shortage." This, I think, hits the nail on the head.
Yes, I think that's the lesser evil. The small reason is that, where I went to school, there wasn't exactly a glut of qualified candidates applying - the school had to take who they could get.
The big reason is that, although I'm not in the US, where I am we also have these constant initiatives and campaigns by the education authorities to make sure all students are showing excellence - which of course doesn't work for the very reasons Freddie and Ed Realist mention - and of course teachers get blamed when that doesn't happen, so by those standards all teachers are incompetent but especially all teachers who work with disadvantaged children.
As long as the choice is between unions and being able to dismiss a teacher for insufficiently Cultivating Academic Excellence Through Growth Mindset or whatever it is this month, I'm with the unions. And we're getting closer and closer over here too to the day when a teacher is at risk for insufficient wokeness, so I'm even more with the unions.
No less a hardass than Charles Murray pointed out that preschool would be a great way to help poor kids stay in a warm, safe, place and should be funded on that basis. Or, as I put it:
"Maybe we’d stop holding preschool responsible for long-term academic outcomes and ask instead how it helps poor kids with unstable home environments and parents with varying degrees of competency, convincing these kids that their country and community cares about them and wants them to be safe."
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/philip-dick-preschool-and-schrodingers-cat/
"...would be a great way to help poor kids stay in a warm, safe, place and should be funded on that basis."
I've wondered if the later years high school serves a similar purpose. Keep male teenagers busy so they aren't committing crime.
That wasn't the original goal, given how few kids originally went through high school. However, I do think that it's an inevitable result (which is why I oppose Freddie's goal of letting kids leave school at an early age, although I'd support 16).
"ask instead how it helps poor kids with unstable home environments and parents with varying degrees of competency, convincing these kids that their country and community cares about them and wants them to be safe"
Bingo!
You can make a similar case for environmentalism. "Let's keep our country clean, our rivers clear, our air crisp, and our trees green." Something any non-cartoonish fiscal conservative should be able to agree with.
Ope. You said it better than I did.
I quote from your long piece: "Maybe we should give people money instead."
No maybes about it, that would be a much better thing to do.
On some level, as a parent and a citizen, I find the basic conclusion of this piece hopeful, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine why it isn’t seen as hopeful to more people. I like knowing that there isn’t some special method that could optimize my children at a very young age for success if I or the government or some researcher could only find out what it was. It’s liberating to believe that if I keep my children physically safe, give them adequate nutrition, give them enough attention so that they can socialize with others, and don’t do traumatizing things, that I’m actually doing a good enough job as a parent, and that more effort than that has rapidly diminishing returns. Parenting otherwise would be far more terrifying.
Exactly right, IMO. My mantra for my own kids (now grown) is that if they could read by age 18, they would be successfully educated.
I loved attending Head Start, and while this shouldn't affect how anyone views the actual research (my n=1 experience should not sway people's opinions), I always credited Head Start with having a huge positive impact on my life. Did I get an "educational advantage"? I doubt it. I was a bright kid and would have been fine with school tasks either way. But what did I get?
* A predictable routine
* Comfortable surroundings
* Fun activities (I remember crafts, playing organized games outside etc., and don't actually remember any of the academic stuff)
* Kind, predictable adults who engaged with me -- this one cannot be overstated: I think the only such adult I'd been exposed to before this was Mr. Rogers. (Being that young, I believed he was actually speaking to me through the TV and telling me lots of kind, uplifting things. I also credit him with having a huge positive influence on my life -- but that's a totally different story.)
* Food
I frickin' loved Head Start -- so I really want it to be "a good thing" and for other kids to have access to it. However, maybe in light of the data I'm wrong about it -- not wrong that it was great for me, because it was, but wrong that it's generally beneficial.
But a lot of the discussion seem to be on the academic performance, and I never saw the academics as what benefitted me. I liked being in a nice place with nice people and food.
I've heard that Head Start kids are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to attend college (I did), but who knows if that's true either.
I'll have to look into the evidence some more.
Yes. This is a constant theme in my book - there are so many ways for something to be valuable to children other than test scores.
Awesome! Agree 100%.
Fun for children cannot be undervalued. I'm so glad you had a great time!
Thanks! :)
I've often wondered if your closing point can't be how we actually reach a consensus on this. We frame schooling equality less around academic outcomes and more as a baseline of childcare in the early years, and a safe, productive environment for socializing in later years. Not to say the teaching doesn't matter, but then we can allow the chips to land where they may as far as test scores go, and instead focus on trying to make schools safe, positive, nurturing places.
We will of course hit many similar roadblocks. Children from chaotic backgrounds will, all else being equal, be more likely to bring chaos with them than kids from Mayberry. The same will go for schools in high-crime areas. But this all seems much more attainable and much less vulnerable to the geennetic factor that our country simply cannot and will not be honest about. You will simply not get the federal bureaucracy, or any mainstream politician with a handle on federal education policy, to acknowledge the issue.
Of course, this is all moot to an extent because once the kid turns 18 and is out in the world, it's still an economy where a Bachelor's is the most reliable ticket to financial security. But that's another bridge to cross.
Pretty much in agreement here. Childcare with caring adults other than the immediate family is hugely important, perhaps even more so for working poor and lower to middle class families. I see no reason to continue spinning the wheels on the impact pre-K care/teaching may have on future test scores or achievement gaps unless the sample size is large enough to matter. And clearly government funded childcare for some socioeconomic demographics (again, poor, etc.) would be a bigger benefit than it would be to others (obviously those with already easily available/affordable childcare).
I'm new to the genetics aspect of this 'debate' though. As such, I have questions that stem from ignorance, including whether there is any case being made for (or against) pharmaceutical or dietary interventions when speaking of genetics. Also, how are a person's genes traceable to IQ when certain gene pools are subject to differing social environmental conditions like poverty, hunger and toxic chemicals in any meaningful way? Say someone's parents genes are recorded along with lower IQ tests (themselves possibly inherently biased) and their offspring is then predicted to have lower achievement results. What about putting a kid on supplements or amphetamines? I've got friends who were horrible students, couldn't keep their train of thought long enough to even complete a test, but were then put on adderall or given certain over the counter supplements and completely turned around and became very successful. Maybe I'm getting into too many topics at once here. Does anyone have any suggested reading material on this genetics angle to achievement so that I can educate myself before asking any more questions?
You could start with Freddie's book ...
I'm new to this blog and Freddie, only signed up about a week ago because he was linked at another blog I read. But I did read a few reviews/critiques of his book. I assume there is only one, singular? If so, I believe what I read was over at Jacobin or WWSW, but I don't remember which right now. How deep does he get into the genetics question?
start here https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/by-request-the-cult-of-smart
Thanks!
Did a quick read through and it occurred to me that there's another "band" or group of kids, of which I was one. Plenty of pre-K attention, early reader (although in K the head mistress told my parents I was developmentally disabled and gave me some sort of test that said my reading level was already 6th grade), but my problem was always motivation. You can be intrinsically smarter than most of your peers (understanding that these kinds of comparisons are exactly what you're arguing against) but if you don't give a shit about the material, find it boring, or just give up too easily at the first sign of adversity (don't grasp something as fast as someone else), you're not going to do very well in terms of lifetime education. Hell, that plagued me through college and I always resisted trying adderall and the other drugs my peers were using; instead settling on a few 'natural' supplements (choline, glutamic acid, amino acids, etc.) and ended up graduating from an electrical engineering program with a rather mediocre GPA.
The reason I even mention this is that I'm not sure anyone or any of these studies, not the only-environment or only-ability people are accounting for personal motivation and stick-to-itiveness.
I will say that I'm extremely glad I did stick through college and took several liberal arts courses; that's what set me on the path to being a leftist and a compassionate person. Otherwise, had I left school early and not learned some of those things, I am 100% sure I'd be a different person with different social temperateness and different values. It scares me that the things I learned in those liberal arts classes are being vilified but I completely buy your argument that college education in the US has created a stratified caste system of sorts and only plays into the primacy-of-capital narratives we're subjected to from early childhood. Blah blah blah, TL/DR version is that I'm going to buy your book and read it before I comment anymore on this topic.
I love the idea of "childcare" vs. "pre-K." Children should be able to play, scribble and have story book time, cognitively age appropriate activities. They can learn new vocabulary contextually through stories and play. I cannot stand the amped up focus on literacy for the K and below K crowd, seeing the Handwriting Without Tears program applied to 3 and 4 year olds. It's not developmentally appropriate.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about some child rearing policies: People in the know are pushing them for reasons other than they profess.
For example, individuals might push for pre-K because they think it gets children with a bad family situation out of the home for a period everyday, or can provide children with a heated building or food if they aren't getting those resources at home. It has nothing to do with cognitive or social development, however, they can't run the importance of a program as a supplement to family functioning because that would be offensive. So they push this other narrative.
I have a similar theory about breastfeeding.
I am lost. Sigh....so when i read paragraph below, Are we saying that having 2 parents isn't significant to outcomes? Because I understand that one-parent families are now typical of lower wage earners, whereas high income tend to stay married. And this, I understand, has significant effect on children. (I think of single parent births by income and race....)
"The point is not that environment doesn’t matter. The point is that a) the so-called “shared environment,” the behavioral genetics term that more or less refers to the family and parenting effects but also can refer to school effects, has consistently shown little influence on outcomes by adulthood; b) the so-called “unshared environment,” which more or less refers to all of the random things that influence a person that we can’t quantify, controls more; and c) there are likely ceiling effects at play here - that is, yes, moving a child from true neglect to a nurturing and supportive learning environment could have major positive effects, but once children enjoy a basic minimal level of safety and comfort the returns from improved environments likely diminish."
Are you familiar with the High Scope Perry study in the 1950s? It found that, a few years later, poor black students who went to pre-school weren't doing any better than the control group that didn't go to pre-school. But 40 yrs later, those who went to pre-school were more likely to have a college degree, own a home, etc. It was a small study but seems like an important consideration --WHEN is the outcome measured?
Also interesting is a bunch of stuff about the ways in which socioeconomic factors impact academic achievement in ch 5 of the book Clash: 8 Cultural Conflicts That Make Us Who We Are