My mother taught high school chemistry for many years. Having learned to speak Spanish while living in Latin America, she also occasionally spent summers teaching in government funded educational programs for children of migrant workers. Today, I’m going to relate a little story about the summer my mother taught pre-schoolers. I’m relying on possibly inaccurate memories, but I thought some of those debating educational practices might get a kick out of the story.
As I wrote, Mom ordinarily taught chemistry. Her training was in chemistry and methods to teach chemistry. Mom has often taught middle school children less advanced science classes in the migrant worker program. She’d felt comfortable with that; those running the program were thrilled because bilingual teachers were rare in the 60s-70s. Classes were taught primarily in English, but a teacher who could switch to speaking in Spanish was good to have around.
One summer, there were no openings to teach middle school children. But the program did need teachers who could teach either 1st grade, kindergarten or preschool. Mom had no experience with any of these. But she wanted to work that summer and some of the positions were at risk of going unfilled. So, after some discussion with Mr. K. who headed the program, she landed the job of pre-school teacher. During conversations at dinner, she readily admitted she had no specific training in teaching pre-school, but she thought she could do a good job with. In contrast, she would not have taken 1st grade which specifically required teaching reading, and so might need specific training in pedagogical methods related to that.
Summer came. Children were assigned to Mom’s class.
Some sort of expert who worked for the funding agency arrived to pre-test all the children. Evidently, there was a plan afoot to compare children’s improvement during the summer. The outcome might influence funding for future summers.
That night at dinner, Mom was upset. It seemed the expert had been aghast to learn that Mom was a chemistry teacher. Mom had no training in dealing with pre-schoolers. The expert made quite a stink and was going to write someone or other. Mom was worried she might lose the gig. The expert wrote letters but somehow, Mom did not lose the teaching gig. I don’t know the reason for the decision– possibly the fact that Mom was one of the few teacher who was bilingual might have done the trick. After all: in addition to teaching, Mom sometimes translated when non-English speaking parents wished to speed to non-Spanish speaking teachers.
Whatever the reasons for failing to give her the boot, that summer Mom went about teaching preschool. Having no preschool teaching experience, Mom looked up which items the kids were were supposed to learn, and found suggested activities. She set up activities.
Along the way, Mom implemented some of her own ideas. Fancy that?
I remember some of them well because Mom was willing to treat us as slave labor esteemed assistants who helped her implement her plans. We often spent as much as 30 minutes a week on her “little projects”. Plus there was all that dinner conversation.
Anyway this is one of the ideas. Motivation first: Mom knew that most of these kids came from two parent families all of whom loved their kids and wished well for them. Many of the parents had some education, but had, for various reasons, decided to work as laborers in the US. This meant the parents were exhausted at the end of the day; many spoke little English. But many knew how to read. In Spanish.
Mom also believed that involving the parents in the children’s education is always helpful and it wouldn’t hurt to encourage the parents to learn some English. So, she decided to do something that might encourage both things. She decided at the end of the day, she would pin a note on every child’s outfit telling the parents what the child had learned that day. In Spanish.
So this is where the slave labor efforts of eager volunteers comes in. Mom’s plan required creating something like (5 days) *(20 notes/day) little notes a week. Day one’s notes might say something like “I learned colors today. Ask me how to say blue in English!” Of course this was written in Spanish. Day two’s note might say something like, “I learned to count today! Ask me to count to 10!” If the parents took up the suggestion, they became involved with their kids and learned the word for “rojo” in Enlgish.
While writing 100 little notes isn’t exhausting, it is time consuming. So if one of her kids was around, we would be asked to help write make duplicates of the notes.
Naturally, while writing this, we also gabbed. So one of the kids might ask something like, “What do you do to teach them colors?” Mom would tell us what she did– and might mention they didn’t have enough color cards. In the course of the conversation, someone might point out we could do the same thing with colored yarn. Mom might say, great idea. Check the basement. Yarn would be found. We would make bows. Extra color practice sets were created from old leftover yarn.
Why do I remember the yarn activity? Needless to say, that was one of the days I was helping write the notes. I ended up tying little bows of yarn. We also discussed “What if the kid is color blind?”
Us being us, we also would start saying things like, “Now that you have so many color sets, you can say something like ‘pick 2 red bows’ or ‘pick 3 blue ones’. They’d practice with numbers!
Mom would say something teacher like, “Yes. That would be reinforcement.” We’d laugh and say, “That and extra practice too!” Anyway, over the summer Mom got all sorts of pre-packaged activities and extra ones, went to school and “taught”.
I’ll also report the slave labor eager volunteers would giggle at the thought that activities we kids thought of as “fun things baby sitters do” could be “lessons”. That said: these did seem like useful things to help 4 year olds whose parents didn’t speak English well learn English words. How else would they learn it?
As we were involved in writing the notes, Mom also brought home notes returned by parents who’d written “Thank you” on back of the note we’d written and pinned that to their kids to show the teacher. Those were nice to see.
The end of the summer came. The expert returned. She remained cold and distant to Mom. If my memory serves me correctly, as a concession, the expert had convinced her boss to let her present statistics based on groups taught by all teachers…. excluding Mom. And to report the improvements of Mom’s students separately. This separate reporting as now a mandated feature of the reprot.
After all– so the expert reasoned– it would hardly be fair if the programs benefits to students was deemed inadequate because this clearly unqualified person was teaching these poor unfortunate pre-schoolers. Mom was sort-of ok with that. Not that her opinion mattered. Her kids were post-tested. Exit expert stage left.
Mom was somewhat worried about the results. After all: it would be embarrassing if your students did worse than others and your results were highlighted. Who wants that? But still, it would be useful to see how things went. Did it really make that much difference she didn’t have training in pre-school pedagogy?
In any case, it was the end of summer. The migrant program ended. High school chemistry season began. Mom returned to her high school teaching, a task that did not involve getting her children to create little bows from bits of colored yarn.
Eventually, we heard the results of the pre-post test comparison. Mom’s kids improvement did differ from the average. In fact, they were an outlier; their performance stood out like a sore thumb. I never read the reports, but sounds like an event that was something like 3-sigma from the mean in a test involving some number of teachers. (20? 10? Probably not hundreds.)
Remember the expert had negotiated permission to highlight the difference. So the difference was highlighted in the report– just as had been agreed. The expert came to Mom’s high school office to deliver the report personally. Mom was called to the office. Yikes!
Worried a bit she entered the office. The secretaries in the office were standing around grinning. This formed a sharp contrast with the sheepish looking expert who handed Mom the report.
Turned out Mom’s students hadn’t done worse; they’d done better. The expert was now asking Mom to do her a favor. The expert’s boss wanted Mom to present a talk discussing Mom’s “methods” and had sent the expert to make the request. Mom accepted. 🙂
🙂 I liked that story even setting aside the discussion, Lucia. TY.
It occurs to me that maybe it’s difficult to do research on the differences between education methods. It’s sort of experimenting on humans in a sense. So maybe the experts have some justification for not really knowing what works. (Maybe not, pure speculation). Still, I’d hope for experts to exhibit less arrogant certainty that pedagogical training is necessary for good results.
Your story highlights an example of how a teacher can tailor methods to be effective in a specific scenario; good example IMO of the potential benefit of giving a greater degree of autonomy / authority to teachers at a local level. I wonder if the expert really understood why it was effective, and that such an approach might be less effective in another situation. There’s no substitute for intelligently adapting to conditions, IMO!
Also, touches on parent involvement and support. I think this is a big part of the killer, but I’ll refrain from remarking too much on that when it’s probably obvious to everyone and I don’t really have much that’s original or interesting to say on that subject.
Thanks Lucia.
[Footnote: I wish my kids’ teachers would pin notes on them. They seem to expect kids to remember and voluntarily relay important information. Maybe this is reasonable, maybe it’s even a good idea. But. If this is the case, my kids need improvement in this area!]
Uhm. I meant to say ‘preschool pedagogical training’ above.
Cool story, Lucia. Sadly innovation and adapting to the needs of students is not always a priority. Natasha teaches preschool at a private inner city school and I and my kids have been drafted into similar service. I enjoy helping come up with creative ways to get the kids to learn.
Mark
I think even those whose exposure to 4 year olds is restricted to “I babysat one once” know that they aren’t necessarily going to voluntarily relay important information. Also, exhausted parents might not pick up on it. But a note is concrete and people might end up talking sometime during the evening.
But like you, I don’t know that much about the ‘best’ ways to teach kids. Still, there are some lessons in this story. I’ll refrain from commenting on the all for now.
I didn’t interact with the expert and so am open to other theories.
For example: if the expert was doing a study, she might have feared this would cause the program to look like a failure when picking “qualified” people would work better. Heck, even Mom wasn’t sure it would be ok for her to teach this. But she figure– preschool is things like colours, numbers. She was a mother and had dealt with us. And she’d seen what passes for pedagogical training ‘in vitro’ and knew things changed quite a bit ‘in vivo’. Plus, lets face it: it was a job.
But I do think that there are difficulties with trying to develop good theories of what works in practice in education. It’s a field where it is very difficult to do good field studies that don’t have obvious (to others) short comings.
Caring, compassion, awareness, and most of all, love, are more important than any theory of education, if you want kids to learn.
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Slave laborers…. err… dedicated volunteers, probably help.
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I would surely like your mom.
I’m afraid I wasn’t as creative as I would have liked when our church’s men’s group tutored inner-city kids. But I did do one thing in tutoring math that I’m convinced did some good.
Not all adults know even junior-high-level algebra, and the parents of most kids I tutored were immigrants whose educational level was not high. So when I sent problem sets home with the kids I also sent pages of step-by-step annotated (e.g. “Divided both sides by -2”) solutions and urged the kids to have their parents or older siblings go over those pages with them after they’d tried the problem sets by themselves. (The step-by-step solutions are tedious to prepare, so I wrote a computer program to generate both the problem sets and the step-by step solutions.)
I think I batted only about .500 in getting significant improvement out of the kids, but I also think that a lot of times the parents did actually take an interest in helping once they were empowered by the solution sheets to do so. The downside, of course, is the danger that the kid would peak at the answer sheet before he really tried the problem himself.
Joe
That’s why college textbooks only give answer to the even numbered problems. 🙂
Oops! I see I misspelled “peek.”
And I–blush–never thought of using the even-numbered-problem idea. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be able to put it into practice, because I’m no longer in town enough during the school year to participate in the program. (I don’t think I was that good with the kids, anyway.)
Lucia,
My step kids are 8 and 11 at this point. It’s probably not insane to think they could pass important things on. They just don’t. I sometimes wonder if my older one doesn’t secretly delight in ‘remembering’ at the last minute – oh yeah, I’ve got this massive report to write and it’s due …uhm, let’s see… tomorrow! Stuff like that.
Oh well.
At least the kids can successfully tell me some of what happened at school when I ask these days. Years past, I wondered if they were even there. They remembered lunch and recess, that was it.
a wonderful story, Lucia. thanks much.
Now I can get back to pondering the meaning of “What is you favorite color of the alphabet?” which I saw on a tee-shirt yesterday.
Mark,
I think one problem is it’s hard for learners of all ages to describe in one sentence “what” they learned, at least in a number of subjects. High schools science students might come home and say something like “We did a lab where we launched a ball and measured where it landed.” The kids are probably doing kinematics. But if they’ve already done kinematics, it could be an experiment where they varied the compression of a spring and they’re on either “conservation of energy” or “the mechanical energy equation”. Or maybe they are comparing wiffle balls to cannon balls, and are concerned with air resistance. Or…. something!
Mark I should add: Handing kids a note that says “we covered X” today to give their parents might not be a bad idea even for high school students. Teachers can tell the parents they do that and encourage the parents to ask “What did you do in school today?” at dinner If the kids says, “dunno”, ask to read the note!
My Dad always asked what we did in school today. With four kids someone usually answered. Dad loved history, so if someone brought up a historical topic, he often told some history stories, which was fun. Mom would engage chemistry topics. Like: “Oh great! That’s important for electroplating?” “What’s electroplating?” and so on….
Math didn’t tend to elicit many stories. “Oh. We did trig identities.” What’s to say. Plus, neither of my parents took calculus (as far as I am aware). So, clearly you didn’t get “Oh. Yeah. The chain rule…”
Lucia, I have not read in any detail the in-depth discussion of education that preceded your post here, but my thoughts are that education of children needs at the very basic level motivation and parental involvement. That appears to be at least part of the success of your mother’s summer teaching that you related here. Your mother also appeared to have been motivated to succeed and without following some bureaucratic institutional guidelines but rather by her own creative ideas. She even involved her own family and provided them with a lasting education.
I would like to hear from posters here what it takes to motivate children to learn or want to learn some basic educational skills. I personally have a major problem with politicians avoiding the issue of parental involvement in education – as opposed to simply throwing more money at it. It is much easier for an adult to be motivated to learn where they can more clearly see what is required to be involved in an area of their interest and choice. Children have not had that opportunity or experience although in some cases they have their parents experiences and activities as a guide.
Just curious, Lucia, but were those children your mother taught in summer school children of Cuban immigrants.
By the way like writing I am not a good teacher but I know a good/great one when I see their work.
I liked your story too, Lucia. 🙂 My limited teaching experience was a few years ago when I volunteered to teach basic computer stuff to a group of older folks who had a seniors group in a poor neighborhood.
I had to come up with interesting activites while trying to teach terms and some very limited computer science, which are not easy for a generation who doesn’t have any computer experience or a computer at home to practice on.
It came down to that they would better retain the stuff that was fun for us to do together in class and hopefully they would get some practical usage experience from it, because the conceptual was a non-starter.
Anyway, the fellowship the group had was awesome and I was very blessed to help there. 🙂
Andrew
Lucia, picking up on SteveF’s comment, the influence of a caring personality that rewards with a smile and complement for a successful effort, and loving attention for a sincere effort, might make all the difference. I do admit, however, I also learned from teachers I feared. But the few teachers that make kids look forward to school rather than dread it will be most fondly remembered.
I am not at all sure I understand my own learning process through my school years. My parents were avid readers and my mother worked with me pre-school, but when I first entered school in first grade at 6 1/2 years old I had no idea why I was there – except to have fun. It took several weeks before I figured it out. My older sister by contrast started first grade at 5 years old and was immediately aware of the reasons for being there. I enjoyed all 19 years of my formal schooling partly from the shear joy of learning and partly from the interaction with teachers both good and bad and my fellow students. I am certain that most my learning occurred after my formal education years and that I think was partly a weakness on my part of not being able to see the need at some abstract level – kind of like my first weeks in first grade.
I think I also benefited from a small rural school system that was very flexible and bent rules on a daily basis. I have great memories of our principal and mainly for times he broke the rules.
Kenneth
I also think it needs that. But I think it’s difficult to create a “study” to show it is true. How do you create both control and treated group?
As for my mom’s case with migrants in Grayslake: this “subjects” in this case may have been a subgroup where the effect of doing something to encourage parents was especially strong. After all: in more prosperous communities where stay at home moms were perhaps more frequent (e.g. Libertyville during that time), those parents who ‘cared’ were already asking kids what they did, and being involved. This was most the parents- -but by the same token, those parents who were not doing these things might have a higher proportion of “parents who don’t give a shit” vs. “parents who are merely exhausted because they spent 8 hours doing manual labor” and so on. Of course there would be a distribution, but overall, the effect of the “pin notes on kids” intervention might have been smaller and harder to detect. The language issue may have been a further factor that make the “pin the notes on kids” even stronger for these migrant families in Grayslakes.
All this is speculative. Do we know? Nope. But the specific attributes my mom thought existed in these families were ones motivated her to spend time on the effort of pinning notes. (Note: this would take less time now a days. We could now type the notes, print them, cut the paper and, bam! your done.)
No. In Grayslake, most migrants were from Central America. I also met a lot of these kids because teachers were allowed to bring their kids on outings and different gatherings. Also, Mom was involved in a not-work related program that organized collecting clothes, food and/etc for migrants and farm laborers, and they would have Christmas parties to distribute gifts for kids. We would often go to those. Anyway: at the time, mostly Mexico, but I’m sure there was a fraction from other countries in central america. (Those people would have had to traverse mexico to get here, so the fraction was low in the 70s.)
Lucia, we have been caring full time for our autistic grandson for the last 4 months because our single parent daughter is disabled to the point of not being able to care for him. He also lived with us for several years previously. I have taken him to school over this time period and notes for and from home have been a very essential part of this process. This process has been made easier by the fact that he requires individual attention.
Just being around a special needs person has been a major learning experience for me. I have almost become a patient person but not enough to be a good teacher. I have been able to see that many of those educational personnel dealing with these children do best when they are given the time to determine the abilities of these children. Unfortunately this does not occur very often and in most cases those involved under estimate the child’s abilities. Part of that problem can be overcome with better communcation between the educators and those who observe the child many hours of the day and over their entire life.
We are attempting to place our grandson in a residence school as my wife and I are fast running out of energy. Dealing with the bureaucracy of the state of IL is another learning experience that I will not discuss in polite company.
Lucia,
I can identify with your comment about the 2, red, bows. My mom read to us every night. When I learned to read I asked if I could read the evening storybook to my younger siblings. My mom took a photo of me with them on the couch sitting next to me as I read. Judging from my smile, it was one of my proudest moments.
Years later, after taking some child and educational psych courses in college, I talked at some length with my mom about the methods she used with us. A couple of things she stressed about reading to little ones: 1) There is a wealth of stuff on each page to talk about beside the few words printed on the page of a picture book. Don’t be limited by the text. Talk about/ask about details and the story. And even before they have learned to count or learned their colors, don’t say “look at the birdies”. Say “look at the two blue birdies.” The last thing kids learn is how to tell us what they know. They may be just beginning to get a feel for numbers and colors. Our use of fuller descriptions helps them learn, even before they can identify the numbers or colors verbally to us. 2) Ask kids what they think regarding the pictures — “What do you think the little girl is thinking?” “She’s happy.” Why do you think she is happy? The smile. Yes, what made her smile? Yes, she got a present. Etc. Such questions encourage imagination and enhance the reading experience.
I used a lot of my mom’s stuff when my kids were little. We did a lot of puzzles. It is really interesting to watch a child’s mind work while doing a puzzle. So much of it is trial and error. Something I learned while working with my eldest doing puzzles was how much differently they can go about solving them. He is now an engineering student in college and outstanding in math (36 ACT in math). He was always really good at puzzles, but young minds do develop over time.
What was intriguing when he was a toddler was to watch how he would try certain pieces to see if they would fit. He focused on shape much earlier than color. E.g. if he were doing a 100 piece Batman puzzle that had a blue sky, he might try to fit a piece that was light blue in the midst of the black and gray costume section of the puzzle. The shape of the piece might look to be a very good match for that part of the puzzle, but the color was wrong. This indicated to me that when looking over available loose pieces for possible fits, he was drawn to shape instead of color.
I have no idea if this is typical of all kids, but it was kinda cool to realize that observing the process by which he choose pieces to be possible candidates to fill in a puzzle could give insight into how his brain was developing.
Probably the easiest way to improve schools would be to eliminate the requirement for an education degree, and eliminate the union contracts that pay all teachers the same based on seniority.
MikeN,
I like to see vouchers, charter schools and so on. Eliminating the need for an education degree is pointless if it only means current schools can hire the principal’s unemployed sibling or such. Union contracts wouldn’t be much of a problem if the schools weren’t public employers, and the competition between schools so slim.
Eliminating tenure would be helpful too. It should be easier to fire a teacher than it currently is. Oddly, if charter schools existed, teachers who were let go for reasons other than performance could more easily find replacement positions. As it stands, I suspect it’s pretty hard for a teacher who might, hypothetically, be fired one CPS job to pick up another teaching job. Apart from the private schools that do exist, the entire city is CPS!
Also, if more charter and private schools existed, it would be easier to identify the ‘competitive salary’ level. How can you show teachers their salaries are fair when their negotiators go around making comparisons to whatever other job happens to pay more? During strikes, I’ve read articles where unions leaders decree pay is poor because teachers make less than average CEOs. Well, everyone does. Or they’ll say things like “haven’t had raises in ‘N’ years.” But that’s not really true. Individual teachers have all been getting raises by moving up the pay scale. In the real works those are raises. People get more money as they gain more experience. By “no raises” union leaders mean things like the pay scale itself hasn’t been ratchted up. During times of no inflation… why should it? The existence of other schools would permit people to suggest that if a teacher thinks they can get another salary, they should submit their resume to one of the schools with a better pay scale. If none exist, that’s a clue their current system is not under-paying. (If they can’t get a job at the schools that pay more… well.. that happens in other professions too. For various reasons.)
Great story! My parents were both high school teachers. My dad taught chemistry, and occasional other sciences and my mother taught English, economics and American history. I know they struggled against the shift to standardized curricula. My father, especially, tended to ignore them and teach the way he felt was best.
I’ve been the slave labor. My grade school teachers used to remark on my advanced vocabulary. It was easy to learn new words after you’d graded 100 9th grade vocabulary tests. 🙂
Just wonderful, Lucia.
When my son was learning to talk, I did a little drill with him involving three different colored candles. He learned the 3 colors, I thought. It occurred to me to change the position of the candles, and discovered he thought the position was the color name I was teaching! Yellow was left, red was middle…. He is an architect in Austin, TX, having survived my unskilled teaching.
My wife and I contribute to charities, and one of them is Casa de Amigos. I will send them a copy of this article, with a gentle, FYI note. They do good work.
Your mom’s pre-school teaching experience came from dealing with her own “slave laborers.” That and common sense are most of what you need to do a good job. Too many novice teachers haven’t benefited from that and so follow the often-poor advice of experts. The charm of this story is how everyone learned something important and valuable.
Gary,
I agree. Bear in mind: this was pre-school. A fair amount of what pre-schoolers benefit can come out of things that look like ‘play’.
Lucia,
Mine too. We were a rowdy, loud, and competitive bunch of kids, so we’d compete for the opportunity to get a word in edgewise about our day.
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Kenneth,
Yes. I’ve said many (probably too many 🙂 ) times back on the last thread that I don’t think my kids even really understand that what they are learning is going to eventually relate to their lives and their work. I tell them this, but it’s pretty abstract for them. My main idea in getting them interested is to show them that it’s possible to do / make things that they might find interesting by learning in depth about specific things.
.
But this is harder than it sounds. I work full time, and after work I’ve got projects I’m working on. The kids have their own activities (maybe they shouldn’t) ice hockey and karate, etc. They still have to do their regular homework. Life takes time. Groceries, shopping, chores, cleaning, yardwork, so on.
.
Two things then. First, I think there might be something to having grandparents around. Or extended family. There’s more potential that somebody will have extra time for teaching the kids stuff. The other thing, on a completely unrelated note, is that there was a time that children were apprentices. Life wasn’t easy enough that kids had the luxury to pick and choose what to learn, generally they’d learn what their parents did by doing. Maybe there was something to this.
Those are my thoughts anyway.
Mark Bofill,
I think it’s good for kids to have some activities. The only question is how many and what features. Generally, good features include:
(1) largely dissimilar to what is emphasized in the rest of school. Band, sports, 4-H, future farmers of america, investment club etc. are good for kids who otherwise spend most of their time on academics.
(2) Students can jump into and out of the activity over 3 months, but could also continue. So: almost any summer program.
(3) Students themselves (rather than parents) are permitted fairly wide latitude in picking from among activities that are available within reasonable commuting distance (or walking/ biking etc.)
(4) Just hanging out is permitted for reasonable amounts of time. ( In the past, walking home with friends or taking the bus might provided a degree of ‘hanging out’ time. Parents driving kids to school might be good for parent/kid contact, but then the kids needs to be given some “hanging out time”.)
(5) Whatever is done, there needs to be some time for physical activity. Sports tend to good in this regard (though some very competitive teams bench kids, in which case, depending on what happens in practice, they may lose some of that function. They might still fulfill some different beneficial function.)
Something. And not something. Advances get made if kids learn some things by doing and also learn somethings their parents or bosses don’t know.
Lucia,
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Yes. I don’t think apprenticeship is an optimal system by a long ways, merely that it has positive aspects. Specifically tying learning to something concrete and (presumably) practical.
.
The more I read about it, the less sure I am that there’s really an ‘issue’ with quality of education. It sounds to me as if at least some of what drives this is comparison with students of other countries. Asian kids do better in math and science. Apparently some (I don’t know exactly who) feel that this is a problem and that we will lose our competitiveness with technology. Well, maybe. But this isn’t the same (to me) as saying there’s a problem with our educational system so much as saying that there are those who think the outcome isn’t in our national best interests for fairly specific reasons.
.
I read that compulsory education had its roots in child labor laws, and that it was Lydon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education act that really got the Feds involved in education. Apparently ‘No Child Left Behind’ was an offshoot of the re-authorization of this bill in Bush’s time. I could pick on ‘No Child Left Behind’, but maybe that’s the extent of the problem. I am mystified as to why so many states have adopted the unpopular Common Core standards; this appears to be voluntary on the state level.
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I carp about the government running things and doing a poor job. But then again, if it’s doing a good enough job that people don’t want to be bothered to take over what government is doing, I guess that’s that. Perhaps that’s the case here.
Mark Bofill
There are plenty of people who want to provide other options for education. Charter schools are popping up, and moves to give parents flexibility in picking which schools their children attend are picking up.
I think schools in well-off suburbs are largely good. Possibly they could be better. Likely some of the teachers are poor and others good. But largely, those schools are good.
Could they be better? dunno. But in these regions, the local population tend to vote to raise real estate taxes to support schools and if they are dissatisfied with schools will sometimes spend money to send them to private schools. The linkage between tax-base and schools is pretty tight in my district. If the schools took a nosedive, I suspect some lots of parents might send kids to private schools, and if enough were doing so, support for real estate hikes to support the public schools would nose dive. Plus, everyone would be supporting vouchers to send kids to charter or private schools of some sort.
I suspect there is an ‘issue’ in large cities. In a large city, the linkage between real estate taxes and quality of the school a person’s kids goes to is not as tights as in the burbs. After all: the part of taxes for real estate goes into the ‘CPS’ fund for all of Chicago, not “CPS for my neighborhood”. This means local tax payers don’t have much of a ‘stick’ to hold over schools. That situation presents a potential for schools to be run in a way that is not especially responsive to parent and student needs; I think is some cases this potential manifests itself.
Large cities do have challenges that are not present or barely present in wealthier suburbs. So I’m not going to pretend the ‘issues’ are entirely due to the lack of influence of parents. But I suspect giving parents vouchers, permitting charter schools and letting parents avoid those schools they deem “worst” for their kids would tend to improve schools. Basically: vouchers put a stick in the hands of the families.
There have been some studies that linked early childhood lead exposure to increase crime rates and poor academic perfomance. I looked at one that I would need to go back and find the author, but I could not find any major flaws in it. I have always wondered why more discussion has not been been given these studies in the MSM. Maybe like the studies showing that Head Start has no lasting beneficial effects it goes against the modern day liberal orthodoxy.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/
Rick Nevin was the author I was trying to remember.
Lucia,
I think that’s pretty much dead on correct. At least I couldn’t find anything to disagree with. I did try too.
Is there a reasonable argument against vouchers that anyone is aware of? I’m having a hard time seeing a downside, and most of what I read googling ‘problems with educational vouchers’ is pretty obvious garbage, IMO.
Mark,
From my experience you are correct. There is no good faith argument against vouchers. All arguments I have heard or read against vouchers boil down to reactionary interests defending their power and money.
Thanks Hunter. Vouchers put a stick in the hands of parents, and the complaint I read mostly seems to boil down to the fact that vouchers put a stick in the hands of parent. Sometimes the public school system gets beaten with that stick. But, uhm, yeah. That’s what it’s for.
Edit: I read other arguments. But they appear to me to be about other things. Here’s Cato, but they’re really saying government involvement is a bad idea period. Here’s a hodgepodge that talks around the issue; vouchers mess up standards (well, they don’t have to), threaten schools (back to the don’t beat us with a stick), voucher lotteries are bad, vouchers increase stratification (so what), so on.
hunter,
Like you, the main arguments I’ve heard against vouchers is that if parents used them to take their kids out of schools parents disfavored, those schools would lose money and so on. This means parents would have a method of … well… causing money to flow to schools parents favored.
On another thread oliver seemed to advance another argument I sometimes see used to block vouchers which is that parents don’t really have the capacity to make good choices. I’ll highlight the relevant bit.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2015/climate-communication-a-more-likely-scenarios/#comment-138091
Oliver wasn’t discussing vouchers– but basically the idea that parents aren’t really equipped to make choices seems to be suggested by the above.
Now: I agree that parents can’t “evaluate an entire school system or curriculum in detail”. In fact, it’s quite likely no one can. In fact, I don’t think Arne Duncan can– not even with the help of the entire department of education working at it. If no one can, the fact that parents aren’t equipped to do that isn’t much of an argument against vouchers.
Beyond that, I would suggest that the bar of “evaluat[ing] an entire school system or curriculum in detail” is too high anyway. In many cases, parents don’t need to be able to do anything remotely approaching that that to make good decisions for their children. In the cities we are often considering schools that are markedly different in quality. Some metrics are obvious: disorder in classrooms, poor physical facilities, kid a assigned to a poor teacher– with no ability for parents to get a switch.
If the quality of two schools is markedly different, parents can often tell that one school is providing a better product for their children. They don’t need to be experts. Our system would benefit from vouchers if parents in the aggregate do move their kids from less successful schools to more successful schools. No parent needs to be an expert or make a perfect choice.
FWIW: I have no idea what the ‘practical’ or ‘socioeconomic’ reasons for limited choices in schools are supposed to be. Without knowing what they are supposed to be, I can’t begin to judge whether the degree of limitation we currently have is excessive or appropriate. As it happens, we do provide choice– to parents who have money to send their kids to private school or parents who chose to home-school and so on. The question with vouchers is one of who gets choice.
If parents are not capable of making decisions about their childrens education then we have the same problem with those parents deciding who represents them in a public school.
It would be easy to misrepresent as parents lack of capabilities in deciding what is best for their children in a public school with parents disinterest because they have little or no influence.
One of the advantages to the scenario where the parents make the decision is that the decision can be tailored to the child. Different kids learn different ways, different strengths, weaknesses, interests, etc. A parent can keep track of his/her 1-5 kids individual characteristics and tailor their choices accordingly. I’m skeptical that this advantage can be realized without giving parents the choice.
Lucia,
This is a great point. Presumably, most people pay taxes, why should the options only be available to those who can afford private schools.
I am apparently to the left of most (all?) of you.
I can offer no defense of how the U.S.educates children of lower income families in lower income districts. None.
I have no objections to vouchers for people in those areas.
Recognizing that use of vouchers to increase choice will lead to disruption (even if that disruption is desirable and perhaps necessary) should be part of the debate.
We have a public school system that does a roughly adequate job of educating the large majority of students in the U.S. Systems in many countries are apparently better and the U.S. system should work to improve. But many of what are labeled deficiencies of our educational system seem to me more like poor choices made by students, parents and a few local districts regarding time management, secondary education choices and assessments of career opportunities.
The U.S. has, pretty much since Peter Drucker published, adjusted their response to educational reality by relying on on-the-job training to correct deficiencies in education and training. By and large it works. Periodically, brilliant people in brilliant companies decide to stop training. It saves large sums of money and time. They sound surprised when they later report their performance has suffered.
I would advocate giving every family with lower income and every family living in poor performing school districts regardless of their income vouchers and funding that follows their voucher choices.
But I would also find a way to deal with the consequences of those choices. I confess that I haven’t identified a really, really good way to do that yet.
I’ll bite. 🙂
Tom,
What sort of consequences do you foresee?
Obviously, it’s a tough sell when a parent whose kid is in a terrible school doesn’t have an option to send his/her kid to a better school, but the research that I’ve seen (that controls for things like SES status) indicates that charter schools, on average, do no better than traditional schools.
Seems to me that thinking that charter schools will solve problems with our educational system on some widespread basis is ill-founded.
I would recommend that anyone interested in the issue consider reading DIane Ravitch (a major player in the development of the charter schools movement whose position evolved over time) on the topic of charter schools.
In general, schools in our country where the poverty rate is below 20% do OK by international standards. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t strive to do better. But on the other hand, the task assigned to schools is an enormously complicated and difficult one, and the failure of our schools should be viewed from within that context (as indeed should the successes).
IMO, good teaching is a combination of art and science. I have certainly known good parents who would not make good teachers and good teachers who would not make good parents. One of the problems with teaching is that it is easy for people to think that they’re an expert (by virtue of some anecdotal experience) – even when they haven’t taken the time to study educational psychology, educational theory, developmental psychology, epistemology, etc. Of course, there are some teachers who are good and who are not particularly well informed about educational theory, but IMO, many of the best teachers mix a solid background of theory into their practice. There is a problem in that like in many fields, the practitioners often think that the theoreticians don’t know what they’re talking about and the theoreticians think that the practitioners don’t know what they’re talking about.
I know that a lot of “skeptics” aren’t huge fans of Gladwell, but here’s an article that I think can serve as an introduction to thinking about the task of figuring out what makes for a successful teacher:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/most-likely-to-succeed-2
I would also recommend that people read up a bit on some of the fairly easy to find information on Finnish public schooling. Of course, cross-national comparisons of educational outcomes are fraught with apples and oranges situations…but still, I think that reading about Finnish schools can help to dispel many mistaken assumptions about what we can or should do to improve OUR educational outcomes.
Meant to link this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch
and this:
http://dianeravitch.net/
The latter link might be a good place for people to explore their ideas about education.
One more thing.
It’s also worthwhile to look at the “return on investment” in spending on education statified by the age of the students.
Here’s an (IMO) interesting link:
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/fedgazette/early-childhood-development-economic-development-with-a-high-public-return
Here’s another:
http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/rolnick.htm
Joshua
OMG. Endless goings on about football …Are people really supposed to wade through all that tossed salad of stuff? Could you give me the cliffnotes versions about whatever point about education you think he made.
Could you point to some of that research? Because my impression is the opposite. Generally, I read articles reporting charter schools had better standardized scores, better graduation rates were cheaper and so on. Then only ‘counter’ is that critics claim the comparison isn’t fair. Admittedly, I read newspapers, but if you are reading research papers, it might be helpful if you point to them so we could read them too.
Re: lucia (Comment #138167)
Hi lucia,
The context in that thread was about having educational standards set my committees vs. letting “shoppers†decide. It had nothing to do with vouchers. I brought up some reasons why I don’t think the “informed shopper†paradigm fits well, certainly not as well as in the case of buying an iPad as several posters had suggested. Taking my comments out of context and reading into them a somewhat extreme suggestion seems a bit unfair.
I am not arguing that parents are not really equipped to make choices. What I am arguing is that many if not most parents do not have the time or background to evaluate a school and its curriculum on the level of detail that a committee would be expected to fold into a standard.
You brought up an example a few posts up. Parents currently have limited choices in many places because they have to be able to afford to live in districts with significantly better schools. If vouchers suddenly became generally available, it wouldn’t solve the problem if parents couldn’t afford (for economic and/or practical reasons) to transport their kids to the school in the different district. If more private schools became available, it also isn’t clear that they would be built in the districts with the worst schools. I happen to be in favor of vouchers, at least notionally, but I don’t think vouchers and shopper’s choice obviate the need for educational standards.
Also, my other point seems to have been left by the wayside: parents are making decisions which are ultimately not for themselves. Just to take one fairly obvious example: suppose the educational standard says you have to cover evolution in science class. The parent chooses to send their kid to a school that teaches only young earth creationism. Was the parent is unequipped to make choices? Net necessarily. Does this mean the standard set by the committee would have been better for the student? Arguably yes.
Would vouchers make it affordable for a parent whose kid currently goes to one of the markedly bad schools you were talking about to send their kid to a very good school, public or private? What happens when you get a voucher from your school district and want to send your kid to a place with a much higher average “education tax� Do you have to pay the difference?
Lucia –
===> “Could you give me the cliffnotes versions about whatever point about education you think he made.”
Skim to the second section of the article – the one clearly demarcated by the big and bold “O.”
==> ” Because my impression is the opposite. ”
Have you read empirical research on the topic, or formulated your opinion about what the empirical research says from other sources? It shouldn’t be too hard to find empirical research – and I stress the importance of reading research that controls for things like SES of the students, resource expenditure, %’s of special needs kids, etc. One of the big factors related to evaluating the success, or lack thereof, of charter schools is to consider the self-selective nature of parents who want to send their kids to charter schools and the enhanced ability of (some) charter schools to cull students who are more likely to be successful, expel students who aren’t likely to be successful, etc. Of course, the issue of whether they are private/public charters is of relevance there.
Again, if you’re interested, I’d suggest reading Ravitch as a place to start.
I might have some time to look for some links tomorrow or over the next couple of days. If I do, I’ll post some. But do find them I’d mostly just be Googling as I’m sure you are quite capable of doing.
I would appreciated it if you could link me to empirical research that shows otherwise.
And of course, the point of “on average” is key there. I’m not saying that there aren’t successful charter schools.
W/r/t that…one of my teaching gigs was working at a “prestigious” undergraduate college with underrepresented demographics of students (mostly minorities)… Many of those students came from some of the more successful, inner city charter schools. Those students were very impressive in many respects, and I think that many of them gained some incredibly valuable skills from their charter school experiences. But at the same time, many of them were still quite unable to bridge the “achievement gap” that manifests in higher education achievements. There are of course, many reasons for that and some of that, IMO, is explainable by “stereotype threat” that is more prevalent at the kind of school where I was working than at HBCUs…and so it doesn’t really speak to the effectiveness of charter schools, per se. But my point is that translating the success of even the best charter schools (I worked with some students who came from charter schools you are likely to have read about in newspapers) into success within a larger domain (success in life, success in higher education) is probably a lot more complicated than what a lot of charter school proponents believe to be the case. This goes back again to the question of validity of standardized testing – in the sense of measuring what people think that it’s measuring. “Success” in charter schools a indicated by better test scores can look much more useful on paper (and on the admission form to the school where I worked, and as rhetoric for arguing a political agenda) than it does when you are trying to leverage those test score achievements into other contexts.
oliver
Sorry. I didn’t mean to say you’d made that suggestion. Mark had wanted to know the sorts of counter arguments people have made–and the inability of parents to make choices is one I have heard. I did note you weren’t talking about vouchers– and didn’t intend to imply you had any opinion one way or another. Sorry that it came across like that.
With respect to transportation: First, I think vouchers would benefit us even if people didn’t cross districts. Chicago Public Schools is a single district; it’s huge. Some of the schools are better than others; public transportation exists. My cousins took public transportation to magnet schools in Manhattan– kids do that in Chicago too. The system already provides transportation within the city and that could be expanded.
Of course that doesn’t suddenly permit kids in the inner cities to attend New Trier in the north suburbs– but it still could give them many choices within a practical commuting distance and within a single district.
I don’t either. I think schools would need some form of accreditation. But I think we already have that for private schools in Illinois.
Perhaps. But I’m not sure a system where we have parents perpetually trying to interfere with teaching of evolution in public schools is a better one. To some extent, if parents who really want to their kids to learn creationisms do sent their kids to other schools that nevertheless do teach math, physics chemistry and so on, things might be on the balance better.
These parents already can send their kids to private often religious schools (provided they can afford them). So it’s not like the current system really prevents parents from making these choices anyway.
I saw you say that earlier, but I don’t see it as an important point. After all, parents make lots of decisions that are ultimately not for themselves. These include what foods to stock at home, whether to let kids pay certain sports, whether to let them join the local pool and so on. The fact that many of these decisions ultimately affect the child more than the parent doesn’t imply that parents aren’t nevertheless better equipped to make these sorts of decisions than the state.
That would depend on how program was set up, wouldn’t it? The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have set up a limited voucher program. That’s not going to get kids into schools in the suburbs because the suburbs aren’t in that system. CPS can’t force other districts to take kids.
But there’s no reason a voucher program can’t permit kids to go to private or parochial schools. Historically there have been lots of parochial schools in Chicago, and they’ve often been pretty good. They are found in all sorts of neighborhoods and generally happy to take most local kids. So the fact that a kid couldn’t be sent out to Winnetka doesn’t mean he couldn’t benefit from going to a parochial school if the voucher made that possible. If that parochial school is better than the local public gradeschool that strikes me as a win for the kid.
A bigger problem seems to be that some programs envisioned would only give a parents a fraction of what a public school would get to that that student. Even when vouchers are provided, the schools that accept the vouchers don’t get as much to cover costs as the public school gets. (See for example
http://eagnews.org/chicago-tribune-chicago-kids-deserve-to-have-a-private-school-voucher-program/ )
Joshua
You mean the bit that starts with
No… really. Could you tell me what points Gladwell is making that you think are important? Because that article is just… a meandering endless ramble. Which on the one hand is ok, but you seem to be wanting us to get something specific out of it. If his point is “It’s hard to measure performance of individual teachers”. Uhm… yeah. Same with lots of jobs. Is he making some other major point you think I should be attending to? Because I have no idea what you think is important in that article. (And note: you have not said what you think is important in that article.)
I said I’ve read articles– I meant news paper articles.
Because you’ve seem to have said you’ve read research I thought you might do us the favor and provide some links?
Often, asking people who are knowledgeable to cite some is a good way to start finding things. So if you have read empirical research… could you do us a favor and link? (Please note: Gladwell’s article at the New Yorker is not empirical research. Nor is the wikipedia article on Ravitch. )
Reading what article, book, paper etc. Her blog http://dianeravitch.net/? A name is not very helpful. A title might be. Beyond that: I would be more interested in reading studies, scores and so on. (Please, nothing remotely like that Gladwell ramble!)
Ok… I’m puzzled. You seem to have suggested upthread that you’ve read actual empirical research. That ought to make it easier for you to use Google to find material you are actually familiar with. But instead, in response to my asking you point to some empirical research, you are suggesting I google. I haven’t claimed I read empirical research. In fact, I asked if you might share some of the titles of papers etc. that you seem to be familiar with.
odd thing – I woke up this morning and immediately thought about what I wrote before going to bed… and thought of how using “empirical” was a bit of a brain fart…just meant research that attempts to control for the influence of any number of variables.
Joshua,
“One of the big factors related to evaluating the success, or lack thereof, of charter schools is to consider the self-selective nature of parents who want to send their kids to charter schools ”
.
For sure. Same rational applies to lots of things.. Tiger’s dad being an avid golfer, Archie Manning’s sons turning out to be football players, etc. And let’s not forget another obvious one: people with strong ‘green’ beliefs self selecting to go into climate science.
.
One of the arguments in favor of vouchers is that it helps poorer parents who want their kids to get a good education select a school consistent with that goal. The flip side is that the ‘culture’ of some public schools will become less conducive to education when motivated parents pull their (likely more motivated) kids out via a voucher plan, and so at least potentially hurt the kids who remain.
Lucia –
==> “Which on the one hand is ok, but you seem to be wanting us to get something specific out of it.”
Actually, no – I’m not. Since the discussion was, in part, about how difficult it is to identify what makes someone a good or effective teacher, and I thought that the article is something of a good *introduction* into the research on that topic. Sorry if you don’t think so. I won’t take it personally.
==> “So if you have read empirical research… ”
It’s been a few years since I’ve looked at the research…so I don’t remember of the top of my head what I was looked. When I looked at it, I mostly did so online…I don’t have hard copies, didn’t save links, etc. I’m not at home and so the records I have are not accessible…I am mostly on the road or away from any place where I have access to wifi…and searching online isn’t practical…
You can choose to believe me or not that I have read the research and what I’ve seen shows that when you balance out the good charters with the bad there is no clear added benefit over traditional public schools in terms of outcomes. Obviously, that’s up to you and I can certainly let go of the whole issue if you don’t believe me. In the meantime, if you do find some research that shows something different, I’d appreciate some links. I’ll read it.
But given your tone and implication that I lied when I said about my impression from having read the research (your cute little use of italics in … “if you have…”), I’ll rescind my offer to spend some time looking around. If you or others are interested (there – I’ll use italics also) in something other than confirming your biases, I’m quite sure that you’ll be able to find some stuff on your own. Oh, and you might also want to look at the research that’s been done on the outcomes of private market educational programs where they’ve been implemented on a large scale by schools systems, as well as what is for for me perhaps the most interesting related literature, the studies of whether private schools in general have better outcomes when controlling for things like SES).
It’s been fun as always, Lucia!
Lucia,
Your irritation with a lack of substantive data is almost palpable; kinda underlines the differences in the way people think about complicated problems. It’s a little like the requirement to “show your work” when solving a math or physics problem. Maybe there is less showing of your work in education. The contrasting styles bring a smile to my face.
Steve –
==> “”One of the arguments in favor of vouchers is that it helps poorer parents who want their kids to get a good education select a school consistent with that goal”
Yes. That’s what I was referring to earlier when I spoke of the “tough sell” component (in my first sentence in this thread).
I have a number of friends and extended community who work in charter schools. They do good work and they are providing a valuable opportunity for a lot of kids that they work with. I’m certainly not going to tell them that they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, or that they aren’t providing a much needed service for people who deserve what they’re being provided.
This is a really, really tough issue, IMO. Another example of what’s tough – questions of whether it’s a good thing or bad thing to give administrators more local control over hiring and firing of staff (who might not have any training) and over expelling kids who are problems (or for, perhaps other reasons) are examples of the tough kinds of issues that are inextricably linked to the arguments about the charter school movement. As someone who has worked in schools with bad teachers and with kids who disrupt the educational environment, and with bad administrators, I have experienced those questions from different sides. These questions relate to philosophical outlook and political outlook about the purpose of schooling, about which pedagogical approaches are best, about the role of schooling in our society, about what makes a good teacher and what is the best way to make our teachers and schools better, etc.
==> “The flip side is that the ‘culture’ of some public schools will become less conducive to education when motivated parents pull their (likely more motivated) kids out via a voucher plan, and so at least potentially hurt the kids who remain.”
Yeah, that too. As you point out, there are two angles from which to view the outcomes when motivated parents move their kids. I was going to get into that in answer to Mark’s questions about “consequences” but kind of thought it would just lead to the kind of responses I just got from Lucia and didn’t have the energy. Thanks for bringing it up. It is certainly one of the important arguments as to why, if charters in general don’t produce better educational outcomes, justifying a large-scale move towards vouchers and charter schools could be problematic in the long run.
Joshua,
Culture is a huge factor in educational success, and so anything which shifts culture toward less successful outcomes will have an impact. The issue is fundamentally philosophical… do we owe kids who want to excel the ability to do so by giving them better options, or do we force then to stay in a public school to improve the educational environment of those who are less motivated? My personal preference is to reward those who are motivated.
.
Daniel Moynihan recognized the problem early on: dysfunctional families have low achieving kids; nothing has changed since Moynihan jokingly suggested educational success was assured if all schools were near the Canadian boarder. How to impact the culture (priorities, expectations, goals, etc.) in places with lower average SES is the fundamental question, and one that seems to have no good answers.
Joshua
Research? It was too rambling for me to find any “research” discussed in the Gladwell article. It looked like “musings” or “opinion piece”. I’d be happy to read a long article if it’s actually discussing research and findings.
Unlike many blog exchanges, my motive in asking isn’t to get you to prove anything. It’s to obtain the information!
It’s not a question of believing> you or not. It’s a question of wanting a way to start finding the actual research rather than opinion columns or musings. I actually am interested and would like to read stuff myself– and not just other peoples impression of what they thought they read or remembered– I’d like to see it. You appear to have read stuff– so I thought perhaps you might be a resource who could point to citations. That’s it.
You are mistaking my tone!!!! I’m italicising because:
1) I firmly got the impression you think you do know where the research is.
2) I know I don’t.
3) I asked for citations so I can get a quick start in finding stuff.
4) My request for a citation is replied to with what appear to be “You could find that yourself” combined with
5) Your reflected reply for citations.
So my intention for italicizing was to try to convey I am desparately trying to get you to provided me citations so I can learn more.
Lot of people here seem interested. If you have citations, they would be welcome.
SteveF,
I’m sure data on performance of charter schools exists.
Newspapers report on studies– and my impression has been (possibly incorrectly) that charter schools get higher standardized scores, have better graduation rates and so on. The general criticisms is this is a self-selection issue. As with most newspaper articles, there are no citations to underlying research. (We all know this is the way the climate announcements are. It’s no different for other topics.)
So I know research must exist– and I’d like to find it. If someone knows any, I would welcome citations. Otherwise we are pretty much all in the same boat– musing. I have nothing against musing– but if someone does have references it would be nice to read them.
SteveF
Mine to. In my view, there would need to be some stupendous obvious benefit to holding smart and/or motivated kids hostage to the goal of them lifting up the less smart or motivated before I would favor it.
I absolutely do not think kids who otherwise could end up taking things like calculus, advanced physics chemistry etc. should be held back with some goal of raising the boat for other kids who, for some reason are seen as not being able to do those other things.
Joshua,
As I said: you are misunderstanding my tone and intention. I am asking for citations because I actually believe you work in education and are a resource. I’d like to encourage you to do something other than link to some actual research because you appear to be the only one claiming to be familiar with it!!
Joshua,
I should add, as an article musing about “what makes a good teacher”, Gadwell does qualify. So for that– yes — interesting. But his rambling style, and lack of substance just makes it such a hard boring read.
My parents used to subscribe to the New Yorker and may other magazines. My feeling as a teen was “what a crummy magazine. Good cartoons though.” That feeling does not change whenever I’m sent to one of their actual “articles”. New Yorker: Good cartoons. Long, windy, rambling, nearly pointless articles.
Ok.. and to show I am interested in finding the actual research…this site seems to at least point to research..
https://credo.stanford.edu/
I did find one of the news articles I’ve read (as Joshua seems to like the idea I should link what I have seen– and that’s fair enough.)
I found a link to an article I remember reading.
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702303725404579461121157868830-lMyQjAxMTA0MDIwOTEyNDkyWj?mobile=y
Among the things it stated
(This happens to fall in line with what I would expect to happen as charters begin to open. Some will be good, some bad. But the rule is: close the bad ones. That’s actually one of the purposes of allowing charters. )
Anyway, that particular article at suggests charters perform well.
I’m not jumping to the conclusion they do. Rather I’m curious and would like to be pointed to contrary information not as some sort of “challenge” that others are lying etc. I’d like to be pointed to other info so I can read it.
The most recent article linked from the CREDO site:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/03/19/study-boston-charters-should-open-some-minds/PxLouEPiO3d4bsa4Tv5PuK/story.html?s_campaign=email_BG_TodaysHeadline
The news article points to the recent CREDO results: Charters are great in Boston. Better than public schools in some states; worse in others.
This seems to be the newest CREDO study:
http://urbancharters.stanford.edu/download/Urban%20Charter%20School%20Study%20Report%20on%2041%20Regions.pdf
I haven’t read it. It evidently focuses on urban areas the place where I think charters are most needed and most likely to be beneficial. My notion is that they are not as likely to be beneficial in large suburbs where the public schools are already generally good, and where parents reasons for having kids attend private schools are often unrelated to academics, and rarely related to the notion the actual academic level of the local school being low.
Lucia,
.
.
I think this is highly relevant. The argument against vouchers appears to be the proposition that on the whole charter schools aren’t that good. It’s not clear to me that, even if this is the simple truth, that it’s a good argument against vouchers. Suppose some charters are good and some are poor. Giving people an option still potentially allows them to ‘improve’ their kids education in at least some cases. The truthtable goes like this:
.
Public school charter school decision
Good Good doesn’t matter
Good Bad stick with public school
Bad Good use voucher to switch
Bad Bad tough break…
.
Also, note that having a choice still allows parents to decide based on the priorities they consider most important. In other words, if Johnny learns best using method X and that’s offered at one of the options, this option is ‘good’ for Johnny even if the school that offers it isn’t generally considered ‘good’ by some other standards.
.
P.S. Joshua, FWIW Lucia basically always talks in good faith AFAICT.
Mark
It seems to me this “CREDO” report done by standford is worth reading. It’s pretty thorough and doesn’t have an axe to grind. It isn’t musings or opinion piece. It seems to suggest in urban environments with the sorts of demographics most people consider correlate with “bad public schools” the charter schools are mostly better. In contrast, in places where the public schools are already pretty good, they don’t out perform. That’s what I would expect, so perhaps it’s just my confirmation bias telling me how to interpret as I skim.
Also, I’m seeing some sections discussing issues of critical mass. It may be that if charters have too few students, they don’t do better. (I need to read more to see why.)
But I’m only just skimming now, so perhaps I’ll find I’m misreading. (Obviously I’m also going to need to find the criticisms of the study. Doubtless they exist as criticism of this sort of thing always do exist.)
I can see why Joshua interpreted the way he did. Often, at blogs, asking for citations is meant to communicate “I don’t believe you”. It just doesn’t happen to be my intent. I would like to be better informed, and my view is I have to read the articles myself. Not just hear what other people impression was based on their recollection.
Actually, this was the article I was looking for in my bookmarks when I came across the Gladwell article…I know I had it somewhere…this one was stuck in the wrong folder:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?_r=1
There is much in article that jibes with my experience.
Mark –
=> “Suppose some charters are good and some are poor. Giving people an option still potentially allows them to ‘improve’ their kids education in at least some cases. ”
Yes, at the individual level that may be the case. But there’s the question of what happens on a larger scale. Some students benefit but the poor quality in some schools gets even more concentrated. And why not just say to close the bad traditional public schools (or focus energy on improving them) and supporting the good ones? The question is whether there is anything inherent about charter schools that makes them better on average? Choice is, certainly, an attractive and important component – but athat benefit doesn’t exist in a vacuum. IMO, there are probably better and more efficient ways to improve the system, overall, and focusing on the issue of vouchers is more an ideological battle (proxy for other ideological battles) than an issue of pedagogy.
Joshua,
I’m not sure I understand you here. Is it the students who’d switch to charter schools that are improving the quality of education for other students? In what sense? I have a couple of guesses as to what you mean, but I’m honestly not sure and why guess. 🙂
Sounds reasonable, I’m open to suggestions there.
Maybe for some. I’m not sure this is an ideological thing for everyone. Myself, I like what works. I think Tom Fuller chimed in a little while ago and said he had no issue with vouchers, and he claims to be left of center.
Hmmm. Arrgh.
That’s not the article I”m looking for either. The one that I’m looking for looks more in-depth at the difficulty of (and controversy related to) finding metrics for measuring teachers’ abilities over time (i.e., with different classes in different years) and which stresses some particular qualities in teachers: an ability to perceive the emotional state of the many students in a classroom and to know at any given point in time which students are doing what. I think of it as Wayne Gretzky or Larry Bird “field sense” abilities…as both of them had an extraordinary ability to tell you at any particular time where the other players on both teams were, to anticipate where they were going to be next, etc.
Don’t seem to have it bookmarked, though.
Let me qualify that.
My ideology certainly has a fundamental impact on what I think is a ‘good idea’. This said, and I think we touched on this over at Climate Etc, most people share many common values, regardless of political viewpoints. To the extent that my ideology is concerned with what I consider ideal, it’s related to values I think most Americans would share regardless of political orientation. Aside from this, I think my viewpoint on this is pragmatic.
Mark –
I was talking about what Steve described as the “flip side” in his 2:19.
==> “Maybe for some. I’m not sure this is an ideological thing for everyone. ”
I’m not suggesting that is for everyone (or for any person in particular). But you have a whole lot of people who are very convinced and quite animated one way or the other about the benefits or costs of charter schools even though they aren’t really very familiar with much of the evidence. That suggests a proxy battle, IMO.
Sound familiar?
So you more or less mean:
I’m not sure I buy this. I’ll think about it.
[Edit: first thoughts, ok. To some extent. To a large extent? I’m not sure about that. I remember school as being ‘cliquey’. I wasn’t part of the ‘academic’ clique in the first place. I don’t think their presence, absence, or quantity had all that much to do with anything from my perspective. Actual mileage may vary, everybody isn’t me.]
Joshua,
“Sound familiar?”
.
Are you trying to draw a parallel with climate science? If so, you are on very thin ice. Many of the people you denigrate by claiming they are unfamiliar with the scientific evidence are exactly the opposite…. not only familiar, but able to see the strengths and weaknesses in the evidence, and able to critically examine how main stream climate science evaluates and publicizes that evidence. Even more importantly, many of the people you disagree with can see how uncertain (and tilted!) the projections made by climate science really are.
Mark –
Consider how much you hear about how our schools are failing, and that it’s a crisis. I’m sympathetic to the concerns. But also consider how something like “Simpson’s Paradox” plays into perceptions.
If we look at something like SAT scores, we might find that they’ve dropped over time, or remained stagnant. People think that we spend a lot on education, and the lack of improvement in SAT scores is obviously an indication that the money is wasted. But consider that SAT test-takers were more disproportionately white and upper class in the past. Thus, while scores among whites have been increasing, and scores among minorities have been increasing even faster, a greater representation of minorities (who score lower on SATs than whites) among the entire test taking population results in the overall average dropping or remaining stagnant.
Minority students are actually making gains. For example:
https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/zinshteyn-feature-naep-1.png?w=610&h=475
That isn’t that I don’t think the rate of gains shouldn’t be higher. And I don’t reject charter schools out of hand. As I’ve said, how to you refuse a parent the ability to put their kid in a better school? But our schools and teachers face an overwhelming and daunting task. One of the obstacles, IMO, is that some people think that the an incredibly complex problem can be solved by something as simple as providing vouchers.
I am very much in favor of educational reform. Personally, among other considerations, I’d like to see people focusing on creating more supportive environments for teachers (in particular the better teachers) and improving teacher training. Again, while cross-national comparisons are very problematic, those are some of the takeaways that I get from looking at education in some other countries that have good results.
I’d also like to see more focus on becoming better at identifying which pedagogical approaches net the best returns. A blanket support for charter schools and vouchers does not really further that goal, IMO (there are a lot of bad and mediocre charter schools out there). Also, I think it is important to stress that focusing resources on very early stages of education has (IMO) clearly been shown to give a much greater on investment.
SteveF,
Where does Joshua do that? Seriously, not rhetorical. If he does, I’d like to be aware of it.
Joshua,
I’ve got no quarrel with that.
I wasn’t aware of that. I’d better look into it.
Thanks.
Steve –
==> “Many of the people you denigrate by claiming they are unfamiliar with the scientific evidence are exactly the opposite….
Despite that you claim that your don’t read my comments, and yet obviously do read my comments, you also don’t read my comments with much focus.
You haven’t seen me make those claims. Never. Not once.
Mark –
http://kidsnow.ky.gov/PublishingImages/roiinvestment.jpg
Oh. I sort of knew that.
I knew early development was very important. I guess it should have stood to reason that focusing resources there would be a good idea. It’s the idea that this has been studied and results measured that I wasn’t clear on / familiar with.
Thanks.
[Edit: reading here about Heckman]
Mark –
Sorry for the tiny graph. 🙂
But there’s a lot of info out there on the relative benefits of return on investing in education over childrens’ educational lifespan. I would suggest the link I provided earlier as a good place to start: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/fedgazette/early-childhood-development-economic-development-with-a-high-public-return
Rolnick and Grunewald have written quite a bit on the subject, and they’re pretty heavy hitters.
Lemme know what you think.
Yes, Heckman’s probably the best avenue into looking at that. Thanks for adding the link. FWIW (not saying that who’s right), I’ve seen people peg the ROI at levels higher than Heckman’s “equation.”
I thought vouchers could be used for more than charter schools though. Probably it depends on the specific voucher program? Also, I’m pretty sure not all charter schools depended on voucher programs. It seems like the two (charter and voucher) are coupled but maybe not as tightly as one might think.
But. Anyways.
Here’s a link to a overview of State voucher programs that unfortunately doesn’t seem to have the information I was looking for in this regard.
Actually I might be misunderstanding badly, but I get the impression vouchers don’t have anything to do with charter schools. Aren’t charter schools just publicly funded schools that run as if they’re private?
Mark Bofill,
You would have to read Joshua’s many (many, many) comments at Judith Curry’s blog to understand. Joshua routinely claimed that Judith was only advancing an agenda…. even on the most technical of subjects. Judith, wisely, finally put him on moderation…. because he was disrupting discussions of subjects about which he knows absolutely nothing. I have no problem with people contributing to a discussion, even when they are factually mistaken. I do have a problem with someone who knows nothing about the substance of a technical subject claiming those who do are only advancing an agenda. Since moderating Joshua, discussions at Judith’s blog have become more substantive….. and that is, IMO, no coincidence.
Joshua,
I read your comments which are not about climate science.
.
At Judith’s, i quickly learned to ignore most of them…. usually the first sentence was enough to see if it was just another rant about things you do not understand, or more commonly, a personal attack on Judith’s integrity. I think Judith did the right thing by placing you on moderation; as far as I could tell, you had nothing to contribute to most discussions. I rather suspect you disagree, but I honestly don’t give a hoot. I do give a hoot about the quality of a technical discussion, and moderating you was a huge step in the right direction for Judith.
SteveF,
I didn’t get that from reading Joshua at Climate Etc. I didn’t agree with Joshua and thought he was applying an inhumanly severe standard to Judith, but. Whatever.
I’m sorry I asked in a way. I’m not much interested in talking about Joshua, stupid for me to invite the discussion with my question. My apologies.
Mark Bofill,
“I didn’t get that from reading Joshua at Climate Etc.”
.
Well, I sure did. I guess we will just have to disagree about this.
Mark –
Good point – we’ve been discussing them as if they’re directly linked…
Maybe this helps…or maybe not?
https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/charter-schools-are-public-private-neither-both/
Mark –
I get that you don’t really want to get into it, and neither do I…and I can understand if you had said something like “unrealistic” standard…but inhumanly severe standard?
Really? Maybe somewhat hyperbolic?
Just a smidgen? 🙂
Joshua,
.
Well, let’s see. I meant ‘inhuman’ in the sense that I don’t think anybody (any human) could meet the standard. Hyperbole being ‘language that describes something as better or worse than it really is’ or ‘obvious and intentional exaggeration’, nope, I don’t really agree.
.
I might be wrong in what I’m saying (as I often am), but I said what I meant to say. I might have been grammatically wrong, now that I consider it, or at least ambiguous. ‘Inhuman’ was meant to modify the standard, not the applier of the standard, was that the right ordering? No, I think that was OK too. I see you understood it to modify the standard too.
.
At any rate, thanks for the link. The more I read about charter schools the less I think I like them. I understand that you clarified that you believe there’s more to the problem and the solution than vouchers. I only want to note that arguments against charter schools are not exactly the same thing as arguments against vouchers.
.
Thanks Joshua.
[Edit: OCDS strikes. ‘Inhumanly’ modified ‘severe’. A standard so severe that no human could meet it is what I meant.
Perhaps it was poorly worded.]
Mark –
I knew what you meant… Inhumanly, as I understand it, means cruel or barbaric or merciless…so even when applied as a modifier for “standard” is seems a bit hyperbolic…but I knew that you meant a standard that no human could live up to. Of course, I don’t agree…but I’m not really interested in getting into it.
I was just giving you a hard time. . Perhaps even an inhumanly hard time?
[so one compulsive edit deserves another. Even as a modifier of “severe” … it strikes me as a bit hyperbolic…
but it was just a joke on my part. Like I said, I knew what you meant and I didn’t really think you were accusing me of being sadistic or merciless…
(at least I think I didn’t think that. :-)]
You’re trying to trick me into revealing that I’m a robot. This is a Turing test in disguise, isn’t it.
It won’t work. :p
Uhmphf.
Maybe I do have an OCDS problem.
I don’t think it’s something to make light of Joshua, I’m reluctant to smile and laugh about it. I think you gave Judith Curry an unreasonably hard time in comments. To borrow a phrase from Willis Eschenbach, I think that makes you a poopy-head and not very nice. It’s a free country, and it’s not place to censure you for how you treat people. I like talking with you and I try to keep things civil, but since you joke about it I feel compelled to make this clear; I don’t think your treatment of Judith Curry was fair, and that makes you a poopy head.
No particular reason you should care. I explain all of this because of my own odd notion of ethics and so I can sleep tonight.
There. Sorry to digress onto an unpleasant and probably boring subject. I’ll leave this alone now.
Joshua–
As I complained about the Gladwell article, I should say the NYTime article is quite good. 🙂
It’s late so I may not have time to engage a few other things you said. But to some extent, some things aren’t either/or.
Well, if you’re going to keep going…
I don’t see how a blog commenter can give the proprietor an unreasonably hard time. There has never been any sort of material harm caused to Judith from any of my comments. I certainly don’t think that by criticizing her arguments, I am being “unfair” to her. And besides, Judith is quite capable of taking care of herself, in addition to holding the moderation hammer.
[ Material harm is hardly the point. It is a sign of stupendous bad faith to come to a blog and grant yourself permission to be rude to the host or to derail conversations. I’ve googled your at Judy’s blog. Found some posts: Mosher pegs you seems to have you pegged here. -LML
I criticize Judith’s arguments and her logic. They’re opinions on a blog. I think that people take all this stuff waaaaaay too seriously.
I will point out, however, that while my comments are rarely personally focused (I criticize arguments), I never impugned Judith’s motives, and I’ve always said that I take her description of her motives at face value, I have been attacked personally over and over at her site, by people who misrepresent what I say (Steve’s attacks here are a good example – notice how he never backed up his false claims about what sorts of claims I’ve made?
[ No I don’t see any false claim and you didn’t elect to tell us what which of SteveF’s claims was fals. I see he said you questioned Judiths integrity. Which you did, at the very least, here. That you might think flinging out constant accusations of motivated reasoning at a particular person while also indulging in sarcasm and other insinuation is not questioning integrity is, to use the word you like to use, interesting. -LML
) and quite often she has moderated out my non-personalized responses to those attacks even as she allows the attacks to remain up on her blog. This has happened countless times…there are some folks who practically never comment there except to attack me, or at least have attacks against me comprise the vast majority of their comments.
But I don’t think that any of that is “unfair.” It’s a blog, for god’s sake. Every participant is a willing participant. No one is subjected to anything that they didn’t willfully take on.
At any rate, I think it’s all rather amusing when “skeptics” get so puffed-up about the “unfairness” and “unethical” treatment that I’ve given to Judith, given that my comments directed toward her at her blog are almost all simply criticisms of her reasoning – something that “skeptics” supposedly support.
If people don’t like my comments, they can simply just not read the freakin’ things. Honestly, no harm will come to anyone for skipping my comments. I promise (the best is when they write comment after comment to complain that my comments are off-topic)…
I don’t criticize Judith’s technical expertise or the soundness of the technical arguments that Judith makes because I am certainly in no position to do so. I criticize her logic when I think it is poor – in particular when she is talking about the non-technical aspects of the climate wars.
But hey, I’m not going to claim that I”m not a poopyhead. But which of those among us here, Mark, isn’t a poopyhead?
Oh, and Mark – I also think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone among us here that doesn’t have an OCSD problem.
It’s the nature of the beast. I’m sure that you’ve seen this:
http://laughingsquid.com/someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet/
.
You’re correct, my mistake. I drop this.
==> “I drop this.”
Fine.
==> “You’re correct, my mistake.”
Don’t know why you consider it a mistake, but AFAIC, It’s all good, Mark. I’m glad that you told me your opinion. No point, IMO, in not letting me know your impression. Obviously I think you’re wrong, but it’s information.
Joshua,
focusing on the issue of vouchers is more an ideological battle (proxy for other ideological battles) than an issue of pedagogy.
What sort of ideology battle? Vouchers (as opposed to charter schools) are a mechanism to let kids with limited resources to go private schools. In constrat charter schools are public— but an alternate to those run by the school district.
As I see it, vouchers provide the potential to permit poor students students or students in bad districts to move to already established private schools. I don’t see why this ought to be an ‘ideological’ battle unless someone thinks those kids are property of the state or their local school district. If someone sees it that way, I would suggest their ideology is wrong and it ought to go.
It’s true that vouchers aren’t a direct debate about pedagogy. But that’s hardly an argument against them. The argument in favor of them is no matter what theory of pedagogy one might have, if a school is currently broken, it’s better to give kids an option to go elsewhere while whoever wants to debate pedagogy works out theories or pedagogy or training might be under debate.
But in any case, arguments about pedagogy and fair treatment for teachers strike me as equally ideologically driven. So I don’t see the possibility that ideology affects people’s views on vouchers as a reason to prefer discussing those particular alternate topics.
Welll… why not close the bad public schools? You won’t see me objecting. (BTW: I should remind you of “the rule”. If you ask a rhetorical Q, please provide the answer immediately.)
As for anything inherent making them better? Well, one difference is that as a practical matter charter schools can be closed relatively easily if they turn out not to work. The same can hardly be said about the bad traditional public schools. It’s all well and good to ask “why not just say to close the bad traditional public schools?â€. Lots of people who are for charters would love to close the bad public schools. It’s a dang tough haul politically, and permitting a charter school to open means that children aren’t trapped at that bad school during the multi-decadal period required for political action to get a bad school closed. So: an inherent difference: Charter schools can be closed if they are substandard and also if parents end up finding them so unappealing no one wants to send their kids there. Public schools as currently constituted, not so much.
First, that’s speculative.
Second: I don’t think the kids of parents who pull them out ought to have their educational choices be restricted because of the view that their kids ought to be some sort of sacrificial lamb to possibly help other kids whose parents chose not to pull them out.
Third: To me, this sounds like a good argument for why charter schools, if supported, would grow over time. If funding for the charters is sufficient, charter schools would likely grow, new ones would open, and if the other parents found the (generally already bad) public school became even worse but found they had options, likely many would exercise them. Of course, this is just as speculative as the notion that public schools would become worse as kids left for charter schools.
This is a feature not a bug.
Who’s saying the whole problem can be solved by vouchers alone? I haven’t heard a single person suggest that. The argument is more that by letting parents pick schools that function better, school administrations would have an incentive to take actions that make schools better.
Vouchers and more supportive environments for teachers is not an “either or propositionâ€. In fact, unless you can advance a good argument that vouchers or charter schools would help to create more supportive environments. Schools with incentives to attract students and flexibility in hiring might be more open to better teacher training. So, teachers would likely get the support they don’t get at some of the worse public schools. The result could very well be the way to get this better support for teachers you find necessary is to have vouchers or charter schools.
Beyond: not having vouchers or charter schools doesn’t seem to be any sort of magic bullet that causes school administrations or the government to focus on creating more supportive environments. We’ve managed to not have much focus on that activity while simultaneously not having vouchers or charter schools.
So wanting better enivironments for teachers hardly an argument against vouchers or charter schools.
Once gain: this focus and vochers are not either/or. We can have vouchers or charter schools and also focus more on identifying better pegagogical approaches. In fact, the existence of competing schools would provide a test bed for seeing which ones work better ‘in vivo’ rather than merely in vitro. So, vouchers may be the a mechanisms to achieve the goal of better identifying good pedagogical approches.
In any case, I certainly don’t see how not having vouchers magically causes anyone to focus on better pedagogical approaches. We’ve not have vouchers for a long time now— and that voucher-less period is hardly a glorious periods during which we learned boat loads about pedagogy and tested it in the field!
And once gain: not either/or. Options for early education could involve giving parents vouchers to pick early education options.
Voucher programs often involve private schools. Often these schools already exist. (For example: parochial schools.)
Charter schools are actually public. Just run by a private entity of some sort.
Mark:
Which thing made you not like them? Reading the broad study from CREDO made me like them better. The results of actual studies suggest better outcomes for students who attend the charter schools.
See: https://credo.stanford.edu/
Full study here http://urbancharters.stanford.edu/overview.php .
I’d be happy to consider other studies if any had been linked by anyone.
But if the complaint is that charters have a limited number of slots (which appears to be the first complaint of Barker at the article Joshual linked: that could be largely remedied by granting a larger number of charters. He seems to have other complaints, but most of those strike me as features not bugs.
Lucia,
After reading the link Joshua supplied here I thought…
huh.
I’m glad you asked me to explain, otherwise I’d have never noticed my error. My remark was based on a misunderstanding of the material there.
Limited public access but paid for with public funds is what bothered me. But I see re-reading that they are funded on the basis of their enrollments. So if I’m thinking about this properly, it might as well be the tax dollars of the people who enroll there paying for the benefit the kids receive.
I don’t think I’m explaining this all that well; past my bedtime.
If it was the case that charter schools got a chunk of money independently of the number of students enrolled, I had an issue with the justice of that. But since I read now that it’s proportional, so long as it’s not more than each of those parents would pay to support public schools in taxes, my objection doesn’t pertain.
[Edit: I haven’t read CREDO yet. Running my mouth instead of learning something. :/ I’ll make a point of looking at it, thanks!]
Joshua,
Thanks for the cartoon link, actually I had not seen it. My wife particularly enjoyed it, considering we just more or less repeated that conversation. 🙂
Nite all.
Mark
Me too. But that’s not the case.
I think with respect to how much the schools get: they get the amount a public school would get. This may be more or less that the parents of those kids pay in taxes. After all, I don’t have kids and I do pay taxes for schools.
Joshua,
There was this little gem from before Judith put you on moderation:
Nicely putting words in Judith’s mouth. That came from the first thread I checked before you were moderated. I am sure there are many more, but I will waste no more time looking. You consistently impugn the motives of people you disagree with politically, often implying things they did not say, while tirelessly defending people like Schnieder, who’s famous and very clear quote about his ‘ethical bind’ is both intellectually indefensible for a scientist, and as clear an explanation as I am aware of why climate science became so politicized: climate science and advocacy are intimately linked, and always have been.
.
IMO, you are a culture warrior of the left, but represent yourself as someone who does not advance a political view. That is utter rubbish; advancing your politics seems to me just about all you do. Since you are not a scientist or engineer, I find it difficult to imagine what other than promoting your politics you might hope to accomplish at Judith’s, or for that matter, hope to accomplish here. Like many, Judith finally grew tired of it, and IMO, rightly so.
Lucia –
You make some interesting points (as well as some I think aren’t particularly interesting)… I’m not inclined to respond in-depth right now (each of the sub-issues are very complicated and multi-faceted, IMO, and require a lot of energy to discuss in-depth)…may do so later… but thought I’d leave you with another link: This has some information relevant to the question of charter schools and supportive environments for teachers (I provide this particular link despite its length and the anecdotal aspect, because I respect Turley and because he provides a lot of references relevant to the topic) [EDIT: oops…just realized that the article was written by a guest blogger…either way, thought, the referencing is quite good)…]
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/09/07/should-the-high-teacher-turnover-rate-in-charter-schools-be-a-cause-for-concern/
Of course, the implications of a higher attrition rate for teachers at charters are multi-faceted also…as are the implications of approaches to teacher training like TFAs approach…
Oh, and one more can of worms are the implications of student attrition at charters….
http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014attritioncharterpublic.pdf
Lucia,
” The flip side is that the ‘culture’ of some public schools will become less conducive to education when motivated parents pull their (likely more motivated) kids out via a voucher plan, and so at least potentially hurt the kids who remain.
First, that’s speculative. ”
.
Yes, it is, but it is an argument I have heard made before. I do not myself support this argument, and I think that offering vouchers or charter schools to poor kids is a legitimate way to drive improvement in publicly funded education. But there are no panaceas. Teachers’ unions have and will continue to vigorously oppose these plans via politics. Worse, while charter schools and voucher plans will help some ‘disadvantaged’ kids, they do not address what I see as the more important important cultural and behavioral issues which lead to poor educational and employment outcomes for many kids from families with low SES. If doing well in school is not considered important and not expected/required within a family (or within a community), then educational achievement surely will suffer.
Lucia –
While I’m at it
http://educationalchemy.com/2015/03/19/who-wrote-the-new-credo-study-and-what-do-they-really-want/
Contained within that, a link to Ravitch writing some stuff about CREDO…
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/an-inside-the-doe-view-of-the-nyc-credo-study/
This was something I thought useful for framing the 2015 CREDO study…
https://millermps.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/some-dissection-of-the-latest-credo-study-on-charter-schools/
In fact, the earlier CREDO studies were some of the material I was thinking of when I said that the research I’d seen indicated that on average charter schools did not return better results. The RAND study also..
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9433/index1.html
…..haven’t looked at the 2015 report in any depth.
It’s an interesting question as to whether charters’ results (on average) might improve over time relative to traditional public schools…which could help explain the evolution in CREDO’s research findings.
I’m not a big fan of making assumptions about research based on funding source (of the sort of constant refrain I see among “skeptics”). IMO, research should be examined based on its methodology and conclusions…but it would seem relevant to consider that CREDO is a part of the Hoover Institute if you’re going to determine whether or not they have an axe to grind.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/12/12/major-charter-researcher-causes-stir-with-comments-about-market-based-school-reform/
Mark –
An interesting article related to funding in Philly:
http://thenotebook.org/blog/158505/multiple-choices-how-are-charter-schools-funded
Also –
More on phunding in Philly:
http://thenotebook.org/blog/158128/approve-quality-charters-or-reject-them-all-which-is-irresponsible-move
Joshua,
I’ll address your links and address them after you find time to discuss my points. Otherwise, the conversation really isn’t very interesting for me if your role in the conversation is to make points, ignore my responses and then make more points you think interesting to you. I’m rather disinclined to spend time on conversations structured to be boring for me. Until you do engage my points, I’ll spend time chatting to others and you can talk with whoever does find your points interesting.
Also: your comments would be more interesting to me if they were rather more substantial than “Contained within that, a link to Ravitch writing some stuff about CREDO…” without your giving some info about your diagnosis of CREDO and whether you agree with Ravitch’s points.
Long ago, I decided that I’m happy to discuss issues with people here. But if someone thinks their role is to just link drop and not state the points the thin are important to the link and does so habitually, I consider that sort of conversation boring. I don’t ban it… but I find other people to talk to. Bear that in mind.
Fine with me, Lucia. I’m not particularly looking for new insight from your comments anyway. If something of interest does come up from reading your interactions with others, I will be appreciative.
Joshua,
” IMO, research should be examined based on its methodology and conclusions…but it would seem relevant to consider that CREDO is a part of the Hoover Institute if you’re going to determine whether or not they have an axe to grind.”
.
So then research should be examined based on its methodology, unless you happen to not like the results, then you point to their politics. Nice. Actually, hilarious. So in that spirit of careful political neutrality, let’s look at the RAND Corporation, which claims to be politically non-aligned. The reality is, of course, a bit different:
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2011/03/03/think-tank-employees-tend-to-support-democrats
.
The self proclaimed ‘politically neutral’ RAND corp just happened to oppose the West’s vigorous efforts to contain Soviet expansion…. well, at least until there was no more Soviet Union. Don’t you see even a little humor in their continued bragging, even today, about their long publicized criticisms of “dangerous opposition” to the Soviets? I sure do.
Lucia,
“I’ll address your links and address them after you find time to discuss my points. Otherwise, the conversation really isn’t very interesting for me if your role in the conversation is to make points, ignore my responses and then make more points you think interesting to you.”
.
Welcome to Joshua’s world, where he imagines that ignoring reasoned arguments and assigning homework, rather that responding to those arguments, is a productive strategy. It is the leftist mindset incarnate: never acknowledge an opposing political view could have sufficient merit to justify a response. “You make some interesting points (as well as some I think aren’t particularly interesting)”; translation: I will never legitimize your argument by addressing it substantively.
In all fairness, I after reading Steve’s comment, I re-read Lucia’s comment about “axe to grind” and now realize that it was in reference to the report, and not CREDO per se (and she elaborated/qualified that statement by saying that it doesn’t contain musing or opinions). So my reference to CREDOs linkages to Hoover was pretty much a non-sequitur.
Not having read the report in any detail, I can’t comment on whether the report has an axe to grind…I’ll take Lucia’s word for it on that.
There was some stuff about the earlier CREDO, which some critics say over-emphasized the statistical significance of findings [EDIT: w/r/t real-world] significance. I suppose that could be an axe being ground by a report (as opposed to CREDO)…as could questions of whether in their 2015 report, there are issues in terms of the control for variables when making the comparisons. One of the links I provided spoke to that issue…but only with reference to Newark…there was nothing as to whether the poor control for the variables generalized to the entire report.
It is interesting that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of technically-based criticism of the 2015 CREDO report. If that means that the results of charters have improved, that’s a good thing, and important.
SteveF
Agreed. But as with other factors affecting student achievement, this isn’t an argument against improving schools nor one against providing choices to those families who do consider school important enough to look into the issues and chose the better school when the option is available to them.
I endorse your response to Joshua. I would suggest that those who criticize by pointing to who funds something are .. well… boring. For the time being, I’m waiting for him to raise the level of his discourse to not-boring.
Beyond that: the fact of options might make some families on ‘the bubble’ consider education more important. After all: the idea that education is not important can be communicated by the state providing poor quality schools and not giving parents much of a choice.
Also: if one did think schooling is important, the situation is sufficiently demoralizing that some fraction of parents might give up. Sure.. they shouldn’t… but in demoralizing situations, some people do. So there is no benefit to creating demoralizing environments needlessly.
Lucia,
“But as with other factors affecting student achievement, this isn’t an argument against improving schools nor one against providing choices to those families who do consider school important enough to look into the issues and chose the better school when the option is available to them.”
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No, but I think it is important to be realistic about what can be achieved when kids come from an educationally unfavorable environment, with poor language skills being a good example. If you grow up in an environment where English is spoken with many grammatical errors and using pronunciation/accent that is difficult (or even impossible!) for many, if not most, native English speakers to clearly understand, then you start with a huge educational disadvantage, and any school will be hard pressed to compensate for this disadvantage. Books for learning reading are based on (more or less) standard English…. if you don’t speak that language natively, then you’re going to have difficultly reading.
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I was once traveling for a few days with a Brazilian (a chemical engineer) in the USA. He spoke English quite well, and had little trouble traveling in the USA and conversing with most Americans. Before he returned to Brazil, he wanted to buy a compact sound system for one of his sons. So we went to a shopping mall in northern New Jersey, and to a store which sold electronic equipment. There was an African American sales person who waited on us. This salesman’s English was pure ‘ebonics’. After a couple of failed tries at communicating, the Brazilian turned to me and said (in Portuguese) “I can’t understand anything he says; can you translate for me?” I replied (in Portuguese) “I can try, but I can only understand about half of what he says.” This is a problem schools are ill equipped to handle.
SteveF,
Agreed. Although, I think quite a few ebonics speakers are conversant in standard English. Some prefer not to use it.
I knew a woman who spoke “Truck Driver”. She could use standard English. Didn’t want to. There really wasn’t much anyone could do to convince her that using standard English in interviews and so on would help her professionally.
Lucia,
I have no idea what language “Truck Driver” is.
Have read the credo executive summary. I’m trying to get my head around mapping fractions of standard deviations in results to extra days of learning.
mmm.
It seems to me, if I’m thinking about it right, that the usefulness of this
metricmapping depends on how good a correlation there is between test scores and extra days of learning.Setting this question aside, I seem to be reading that there’s some improvement in performance for charter schools, chiefly minorities in urban environments. Sort of what I’d expect.
Oh heavens…. I read the Joshua links:
1) attempts to rebut the 2015 Credo study by telling us who funded it.
2) Links to Diane Ravitch’s 2013 article so doesn’t address the 2015 article. Moreover, the blog post contains no details to let us evaluate whether her criticism have any merit. (Link to data? Tables of data. Nope.) So: the Ravich blog post has very little substance. That’s ok– but if there is something to what she says about the 2013 CREDO report, presumably some time in the past two years Ravitch, her (likely publicly employed)NY city contact someone else might have done a real evaluation and made their version of doing the statistics transparent to others. If so, might have been useful if Joshua had such a link that report. But nope, our time is wasted on this non-substantive item..
3) Worse than being non-sustantive, Ravitch’s article organization suggests a high level of tendentiousness. So for example, she seems to do a lot of “argue by linking” . If we visit the links we see one of the “arguments by link” is to an utterly ridiculous 2013 reuters reports that complains Charter schools “screen” by asking for extensive data. I realize some people who can’t google might be appalled by the need for parents to provide … uhmm.. student records when applying to transfer schools. But in which case, they should be equally appalled to discover the local public elemetary school just two blocks from my house asked for a long list of student records too. See letter to parents for local gradeschool http://www.lisle202.org/vimages/shared/vnews/stories/452263a44a256/150608094404_0001.pdf . Despite the rather breathless reporting by that Reuters journalist and their intimations that charter schools asking for the same stuff public schools ask for represents charter schools “screening”, I’m just not deeming that intimation true. The Reuters report also seems in a tizzy that students are given assessment exams. Evidently that’s also screening. Sorry, but I think assessment exams when transferring schools are a good thing. They help new teachers who’ve never met a kid figure out grade or courses the student is prepared for. )
In any case: since Joshua didn’t tell us what aspect of Ravitch’s article was worth paying attention too, I’m not going to worry about the article which looks appallingly soft in terms of use of data. As Joshua seems to think that article is worthy enough to suggest we read it, I’ll leave the assignment of finding out more about whatever it is that impressed him. Other than “Diane Ravitch wrote a blog post Credo 2013 but didn’t show her numbers and links to tendentious articles”, I’m really not sure what I am supposed to think.”
4) The link to the article that Joshua advises us is “framing” for CREDO. OMG.
https://millermps.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/some-dissection-of-the-latest-credo-study-on-charter-schools/
So… is the frame supposed to be that “Yeah. They did better in the mean. They did better than the median. But Charter schools didn’t out perform every single freakin’ public school. Let’s focus on that. I mean, if charter schools aren’t so perfect that they out perform every single freakin’ school…. Uhhm…
Worse, in a section about the need to make oranges comparisons, that guy writes
SteveF,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epCUkQQGmts
notice the “there aint no ordinance or nothing” before 20 seconds. Lots of that sort of thing. Everyone understands this speech, but it’s not standard, and not helpful during interviews for professional positions.
Mark Bofill
Presumably they have a map between achievement levels and total days in school. It would be easy enough to do if you know days in school for each kids and their achievement level.
In that case, if you know the standard deviation in achievement level, you can map it into days in school. That makes it easier for people to grasp the significance of +1sigma in achievement.
Lucia,
Yeah. I get it I think. Thanks.
Lucia,
“I’m really not sure what I am supposed to think.”
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You are supposed to think that charter schools are bad….. um, because some lightweight wrote an article which is based mainly on “their feelings” about those schools, rather than actual data. If you take the time to follow most any of Joshua’s links (and I don’t suggest you do), you will find they are all pretty much opinion pieces by someone, shockingly, who happens to believe most of the same tripe Joshua does. Fluff and appeals to (non-existent) authority pretty much sum it up.
.
In light of this, it is easy to see why he never engages the substance of a counter argument, but simply waves it away with “I don’t find your comments interesting” or “I don’t have time to respond to your points now”, then maybe adds a couple of irrelevant links to the opinions of people he agrees with. I found trying to engage Joshua on factual analysis very much like trying to bail water from a boat using a sieve…. it is a waste of time.
For those wondering if there is any actual research related to the attrition rate discussed in one of the “slam charter schools opinion piece” linked by
Here’s a actual study of attrition rate in Wisconsin:
http://www.crpe.org/publications/brief-teacher-attrition-charter-vs-district-schools
In other words, if you do an apples to apples comparison matching factors known to be related to higher or lower attrition levels, the teacher attrition rate in charter schools is lower than in public schools.
SteveF
I think have.
As far as I can tell, all but one link he dropped are to opinion pieces. He did link to one study. http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014attritioncharterpublic.pdf
It shows that for most cases student retention rates at charter schools are better than at public schools. So that’s an advantage for charters.
The one exception is special ed.
On the one hand this might be a negative for charters. But on the other hand, special ed kids are a difficult issue, and the fact is: parents who have already switched kids once because the kids themselves have special needs are likely to continue to do so in a vain attempt to hunt for the magic school that can fix them. No school can truly fix them in the sense that the will always lag.
The attrition rates for those kids also seemed to suggest that special ed kids switched out of the NY City public/charter system entirely at quite high rates. (See figure 2– the % of students don’t add up to anything near 100%. So the remainder must have left the NYCity public/charter system.)
This is what I would expect: Parents who are active and involved and have a kids with special needs will switch them around hoping to find a solution.
Those who never switch their kids… well, they might just be the kind who don’t switch around their kids. So the slightly higher switch rate from charters may mean little more than if you sampled one group that consists only of parents who have switched their kids at least once and another group who include parents who never switched, those who switched their kids continue to switch their kids at greater rates.
If this is what’s happening– and I would suggest it’s what we would expect to happen– the difference in attrition tells us very little about charter schools. (Or at least it tells us nothing bad. It does give parents who are desperately looking for help an option inside the publicly funded system.)
Of course, Joshua’s diagnosis of this was “Oh, and one more can of worms are the implications of student attrition at charters….”.
Not sure what the implications are other than “For most students, atrition levels are lower at charter schools, suggesting kids’ parents are more satisfied with the charter than public systems. ” Or. something. Who knows what Joshua meant to imply by ‘can of worms’. Maybe his whole point was “Look. Yet another metric that favors charter schools”!
SteveF,
For what it’s worth, my comments on Joshua’s links are for the benefit of those who might want to know what they will actually find there. Some people jump to the conclusion that because a link was given, that means the contents support some sort of general insinuation in the comment that contained the link.
Of course those who visit the links can visit themselves and see read them themselves.
I don’t think our education problems are limited to low-performing urban schools. The evidence that student performance is linked to a variety of socio-economic factors (single parent, parental education/income, free lunches, etc) is overwhelming. Average student performance in schools or districts with above average socio-economic factors should be just as unacceptable as below standard performance at disadvantaged schools. Unnecessarily low performance in average, above average, and even the top 10%, 5% or 1% is dangerous in a highly competitive world.
The societal problems created by poor performance at disadvantaged urban schools, however, are worse, especially in a society concerned with social justice that wants to believe upward mobility is possible for everyone. The problem is that average, caring teachers in today’s schools aren’t succeeding with too many disadvantaged students. By the time such students get to 4th-6th grade, they aren’t prepared to learn the state-mandated curriculum being taught in all classrooms, especially in mathematics. I think we need alternative tracks for such students – not for “failing students”, but for students the “system has failed” to teach: a) A track that gives a failing student three years to cover 5th and 6 grade material with plenty of time to review basic arithmetic, develop vocabulary, and motivational activities. b) Or a “Kipp track” that demands the extra effort and parental involvement needed to recover from a bad start. c) Or a track intended to keep student in school through 12th grade and prepared to succeed at junior college. Getting any government-funded system to admit failure is nearly impossible.
According to the company that produces the ACT, the tests that they write to assess 7th graders are highly predictive of the scores they will achieve half a decade later. The ACT is designed to predict grades the grades student will get in their first year at a four-year colleges. For the vast majority of our student, their destiny in our educational system has been written before adolescence. Charters provide an opportunity to escape this destiny.
Frank,
” For the vast majority of our students, their destiny in our educational system has been written before adolescence.”
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I suspect their destiny is mostly written before they walk into kindergarten. That is why the problem is so vexing; inheritance and culture constitute most of educational destiny. Everyone wants kids to reach their maximum potential, but there is no clear path from here to there: there are no easy ways to change culture.
Well, I missed this entire comment (#138258) from earlier..
So I will respond on this one point contained with that comment as an illustration of why I feel there’s no point in spending energy in actual discussion with Lucia on what was contained in the various links:’
Here’s one of Lucia’s comments:
Which is in reference to the part of a comment in the article that I linked that discusses, the 2009 CREDO study.
Now here’s the relevant quote from the executive summary of the 2009 CREDO study:
Now, OK, it seems to me that what the guy who wrote the article the Lucia objected to so strongly was pretty much on target here, when he said this:
He was specific about “those advocates who ignored the 37% underperforming” as missing the point, and indeed, the CREDO executive study explicitly calls for a focus on dealing with that 37%. He didn’t say there should be an exclusive focus on that 37% (as Lucia implied). He said, in essence, people should not leave out that 37%.” Of course, he wasn’t specific about “those advocates” and perhaps in reality there weren’t any who might fit that description….but I would certainly think that the 37% figure should be a part of any meaningful discussion about the results of that study and how they related to the merits of charters.
As a way forward, if the argument isn’t boiled down to a for/anti ideological struggle, the question of the meaning of the 37% is, indeed, vitally important. Indeed, it is worthy of focus. Which schools/states produced that 37%? How can we identify the explanatory factors that differentiated the 37% from the 17% and the ‘almost half.” Of course, with reference to the 2009 study, the 17% is also relevant as is the “nearly half.”
Is the guy who wrote the article and anti-charter advocate? Looks like it to me. Does that mean that everything that he wrote is of great value? No. Does it mean that nothing that wrote is of value? No. If the point is to find fault with his article, then that’s a discussion that some might want to have. But IMO, that is the boring and irrelevant discussion.
Indeed, I could go through each of Lucia’s responses to that article and the other articles in a similar fashion. But defending or arguing about the articles is not particularly interesting, IMO. I did it in this case to be illustrative.
Oh, and btw Lucia…
==> “So… is the frame supposed to be that “Yeah. They did better in the mean. They did better than the median. But Charter schools didn’t out perform every single freakin’ public school. Let’s focus on that. I mean, if charter schools aren’t so perfect that they out perform every single freakin’ school…. Uhhm…”
Is that a rhetorical question with a forgotten question mark? Or a misplaced “is?”
IMO, perhaps the most interesting, and potentially useful, aspects of the CREDO studies are the changes over time in their results.
It’s a bit hard to pull out a lot, as the cross section of the samples differs – particularly the recent study that looks at urban charters only. And I think it’s important to place CREDOs findings within the larger research literature, but what explains the changes in their findings over time? In the long run, particularly given that charters are here to stay (and likely to accrue more support if I read the political tea leaves correctly) that is the most functionally useful focus for looking at the CREDO studies, IMO. The changes over time should reveal something if we can identify what changed. How can we use the changes over time in their findings to inform practice?
[EDIT: But perhaps no. What’s more interesting is to bicker about who likes the article, and whether my linking reveals my deep dark secrets. 🙂
Joshua,
Yes. It asks a question. My proposed answer is’ uhhmm’ . You suggested that article was a frame. So, frame do you think that article creats. (Real question.)
Because the frame the article seems to suggest sounds utterly moronic. But perhaps you are seeing a non-dumb frame please share.
(The entire article seems rather moronic. And I checked out Ravitch’s books. They are nearly as hard to read as Gladwell. Is she ever going to get to anything meaningful? Yeah.. aspects of the history are interesting. But what a ramble!!)
Seems to me CREDO decided to focus on the region most in need of charter and most likely to benefit, ignoring other regions. This decision also permits better apples-to-apples comparisons. These both seem like sensible reasons to me.
If that means it’s hard to compare the results to what they found when they didn’t focus on the areas most in need for improvement I don’t see how that’s a problem.
Do you have a theory? I do. But as you asked the question, I’d like to hear yours first.
I strongly suspect what explains the change in findings is the change in cross-sectional samples. CREDO modified the method to (a) make apples to apples comparisons and (b) focus on the schools of greatest concern. That is those in urban neighborhoods, which have been the areas with the the greatest dysfunction.
If you think this is not what changed or not an explanation for the changes, perhaps you can share a plausible theory of what caused the changes. Or failing that, explain why it is remotely mysterious that changing the samples studied might change the findings. As I don’t see anything remotely mysterious in finding changing when the samples are changed. Changing samples to take out confounding effects is a rather well known and well understood reason why one might get different findings.
Sorry, but what does “that” refer to in the above. That is: When you write “that is the most functionally useful focus for looking at the CREDO studies” what are you suggest is the “most functionally useful focus”? Are you suggesting that finding out what caused the results to change is the most useful focus? Or is something else the “most functionally useful focus” in your view. (Because: it looks like the change in findings are due to the change in samples. They now focus on the relevant samples.)
The relevant samples changed. So the findings changed. But I repeat myself.
See, Lucia, here’s the thing.
I am interested in discussing the questions you askedwith people, but I have a very strong feeling that it would prove to be uninteresting and an energy drain in the long run to discuss them with you, because IMO you have established a track record of engaging in bad faith. I don’t see much mutual benefit to be gained, and I think in the end it just be kind of annoying. It’s easier to just snark with people that I think engage in poor faith and limit my more serious exchanges with people who I think are exchanging in good faith.
[ I would suggest that your notion that you can visit a blog and refuse to discuss topics with the host of the blog demonstrates nearly unimaginably bad faith on your part. I would also note that your refusal to support your support points or engage the blog host came pretty darn early on. –LML]
I have to think about this..taking Mark’s comments under advisement. Perhaps the way out is for me to discuss your questions with Mark. 🙂
Oh. Ok. So “uhmm” is an acceptable answer to a rhetorical question. I’ll have to remember that.
[edit: As this is a comment on a rule. Yes. ‘uhmm….’ with the nuance of that’s ridiculous is an answer. That’s ridiculous is also an answer. -LML.]
Joshua,
I implied no such thing. Your insinuating it demonstrates your bad faith.
The CREDO report mentioned in their 2009 report. So this can hardly be a criticism of the CREDO report. At best it is the criticism of some unnamed individuals– who for all I know may not exist. I consider criticizing unnamed individuals and painting them as having done something that may have been done by no one a hallmark of “lack of substance”. So this merely supports my criticism of the article: It is a nonsubstantive opinions piece that contains nothing interesting.
I didn’t say it contained no value because of the point of view of the person who wrote it. I didn’t suggest the fact that the article was written by someone with that particular point of view means it can contain nothing of value. So your insinuation that I made such a suggestion when I did no such thing only demonstrates your bad faith.
I said it contains nothing of value because it contains nothing of value. As far as I can see, you’ve made no attempt to demonstrate it does contain any interesting information. But perhaps you can: I invite you to identify anything that is of value actually in that article.
Well, you could go through. But perhaps you could just try to show the one you discussed contains a shred of value before you move onto the other ones.
I suggest if you do want to demonstrate it contains something of value, do it this way “I think the writer made a valuable point when he wrote [x]”.
Joshua,
In which case, if your view is that your wish is to be discourteous to me and persist in your perpetual demonstrations of bad faith, which begun with your very first post on the previous thread, but which I overlooked because I thought it best to give you the benefit of the doubt: I dis-invite you from the blog entirely. Of course you should feel free to discuss these questions with whoever it is you feel is worthy of your discussion. But if it is your policy is to not discuss questions I raise with me, I would suggest that really truly demonstrates your bad faith. I invite you to take your discussion elsewhere.
Joshua,
If your policy is to aim nothing but snark and rudeness at your hostess, I suggest you go elsewhere.
Mark Bofill,
As you invited Joshua, who I believe has revealed that he not only acts in bad faith but officially grants himself permission to be rude to blog hosts, I am letting you know I have inserted some inline comments in his posts. These are mostly placed to highlight blog rules, highlight a discussion where he pretty much decrees it’s ok for him to treat a blog host the way he rudely (though I don’t think he considers what he does rude.)
I also responded to one of his more recent comments in line. Ordinarily, I don’t like that practice, but with him I think that’s more useful than cutting and pasting and making a new comment. Should he return despite my dis-invitation for him to visit, I will likely respond to him in line in the future (at least until he decides to act in good faith toward people here, myself included.)
Joshua lasted longer than I thought he could.
For me there is something insightful on many levels when hear Garrison Keillor’s famous quip about his hometown:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/garrisonke137097.html
“Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Lucia,
You may be a little less patient than Judith. It took hundreds of insults directed at her, and the pleading of other commenters, before Joshua was placed on moderation. AFAICT, his behavior has never changed; he acts as if absolute correctness on all issues means he never has to lower himself to explain what he thinks or why, nor substantively engage with people who disagree with him. The purest PITA I have encountered in a while.
Lucia,
Thank you for taking the trouble to say this to me. I regret the way this went and my involvement in it. Please do not feel as if you ought to accord Joshua any special treatment merely because I invited him to visit here. I understand Joshua can be a royal pain to blog hosts, as I’ve seen firsthand at Climate Etc; I disapprove of this but I do not assume responsibility for his behavior.
Sorry for the mess folks. I’m taking a week off blogging.
Hunter,
Can you explain why you think Keillor’s quip is relevant here?
I actually have a suggestion for Joshua: You obviously like writing blog comments, and feel you should not be required to deal with blog hosts who disagree with you. The best solution is for you to start your own blog; just go to the WordPress site and have at it.
.
Of course, your blog is unlikely to attract many readers (since little of what you write is interesting or even accurate) and even fewer commenters, but why would that matter? You could be as rude as like with anyone foolish enough to comment. Best of all, no one will complain, no matter how bad the blog is. I even have a catchy name for your blog: “Keyboard Incontinence”. That sums it up rather nicely.
Mark Bofill,
Based on his discussion about his own behavior at Judy’s it appears it may be his intention to be a pain to blog hosts. That is generally called “being a troll”.
No one blames you for Joshua. It was fine for you to give it a shot.
Hey, look at the bright side: He is now actually on record saying that he pretty much thinks he can treat a blog host anyway he likes– I put a green highlight under his comments about this topic in your exchange about Judith. He’s on record saying that based on his own mind reading about others intentions he responds by engaging in nothing but snark toward them. I should go green highlight that– I responded in my own comment.
We need no longer imagine the constant stream of apparent snide irony or sarcasms are anything other than what they appear to be: childish taunting that teachers try to get kids to outgrow. He’s granted himself license to do that and he does it pretty regularly.
Yes. This is a fundamental point I disagree with Joshua on.
I appreciate your graciousness in not holding this against me. Rest assured, I hold it against myself regardless. I think I’m in the exact position of inviting an guest into somebody else’s place who misbehaved; this demonstrates poor judgement and lack of consideration for you on my part. I ought to have known better, and I do apologize.
Mark, your expression of regret is unnecessary since the door is open to the public.
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Lucia, BTW, does WordPress give the tool to block a particular IP or email from uploading a comment, i.e. “blocking .” My comments wouldn’t upload on Anders’ site for a few months. I would try periodically and the last time I did I made it to moderation. Was I blocked for those months or was it my computer?
Thanks Ron, that’s true.
Ok… I’m wasting about an hour on reading Joshua’s self-diagnosis at Judiths http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-384738
So here he claims to be always be game if people are interested in engaging him about there beliefs.
But here, he justifies doing nothing more than hurling snark based on his own (rather faulty) diagnosis of their motivations– which he can– evidently detect not from anything they actually said but by his perception of their “… given your tone and implication”. (I can aver I did not imply what he claimed and that he is tone deaf, as he misdiagnosed that too.)
And yet, if one suggests people will form mere theories about what he thinks based on his behavior and what he does write– that is they will try to diagnose what he writes implies Joshua goes off into high dudgeon. It’s as if he has granted himself permission to act on his theories which he bases on his preception of other’s behavior, but others aren’t permitted even form an opinion of what notions he might harbor based on his actions and words!
And worse: he goes off into a high dudgeion despite the fact that if we look for posts, we find he’s actually also written words that suggest he actually does think what they suspected and so the theories supported not only by his behavior (of posting links only to those things that fit a certain type of opinion) but he’s actually expressed that very opinion in words! Oh heavens.
The guy is truly amazing.
Well, it is always interesting to observe a troll in the wild. I’d seen him before, but thanks to you Mark, I got to see him under the microscope. He’s a pretty good example one could use in a comedy. The amazing contradiction between how he behaves and what he expects in others. The transparent example of motivated reasoning at work. Pretty funny! (Now that he’s gone.) If I see him elsewhere, I’ll remember– just chuckle at his ridiculousness. As should everyone. 🙂
Lucia,
You pointed out back here with Kenneth that in places where homeschooling is an option, we might consider education to be non-compulsory. I hadn’t had a chance to get back to this, but it interests me because it didn’t occur to me.
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Unfortunately, it seems to be hard to get good data on overall homeschooler performance, since data appears to only available for self selected participants in studies.
.
I’ve got the impression homeschooling is pretty big in Alabama. I’m going to look into this a little more.
Ron Graf,
I’m aware of the tool. You can also block names and certain words. I block Doug Cotton, many words he uses and the sorts of words he tends to use in email names. As admin, I am white listed– but if you type any number of Cotton-isms, that comment will be moderated. First comments from new emails are also moderated which helps block him also.
This word moderation inconvenient if conversation actually centers on something like Venus or Jupiter. In those case, I have to edit the list and only add the word back in if Cotton comes back. The word cotton itself is also moderated, oddly that rarely causes problems because this site doesn’t have much discussion about fibers.
From things people say, I’m aware Anders blocks a sizable number of people. I have no idea whether I’m blocked there. I guess I could go post ‘test’ to see, but it seems rude to indulge my curiosity in a way that inconveniences a blog host.
Lucia,
Here are two other papers which address the 2003 paper about lower heritability of intelligence at lower SES:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0030320
and Nisbett et al 2012 (easy to find on Google in PDF).
.
From looking at these, it seems there is considerable disagreement in the field about the importance of SES on heritability of intelligence. I get the impression that there is political axe-grinding involved in the entire field; I don’t think it is too hard to pick out which papers “want” certain results to be true, and which “want” the opposite. There seem to be hundreds (thousands?) of published studies, virtually all of which are criticized by one group or another as having inadequate methodology to support the conclusions drawn. The field is probably less politically contentious than climate science, but maybe not much less.
Mark Bofill,
Yes. I’ve read they tend to do well — but I can’t claim I read that from any study. But reading the Illinois page, it doesn’t appear testing is done to watch their progress. I would suspect that would make it nearly impossible to do any study that is not prone to self-selection bias. Beyond that: it might be a bit difficult to try to do account for things like “special needs” vs “no special needs” because it’s possible that parents diagnose their own kids at different rates than teachers or school counselors.
If we were doing Bayesian priors, my prior is that homeschool has the potential for being excellent with elementary school, and not too bad in junior high. But it’s also likely to become deficient in high school but it’s a prior– not based on data.
SteveF
That’s my general impression– but I haven’t read many papers. It’s just that I’m not sure that this newer paper finding a different result when they specifically focus on a sample that happened to not be included in previous ones is a contradiction. It might be a true effect (presuming the claim that the samples differ is true.)
FWIW: Razib who discussed that link has gotten a lot of flak for saying inheritance is largely heritable. So I tend to believe he at least thinks the new result is not implausible on its face.
I agree.
High school is going to be difficult for home schooling. A parent would probably have to be multilingual to teach a language course from only a textbook. Maybe something like Rosetta Stone would work. Dunno.
Then there are the science courses that have labs. Maybe there’s some arrangement with the local schools for that. I can’t see pure home schooling AP Chemistry, Physics or Biology.
DeWitt,
I thin you are probably right. I think in WA state there were sometimes arrangements for students to take selected courses at local schools. I know they could join sports teams. I don’t know if there is similar arrangements in Illinois. But it is very difficult for homeschooling to provide adequate lab facilities for higher level science courses. Mind you: not impossible for parents who are very wealthy, but they would need to devote a room for ‘science lab’s and at least equip it with benches, various modest stuff for newtons 1st-3rd, cons. momentum and so on.
For what it’s worth, some might suggest the availability of online pseudo-labs is sufficient to replace labs. I think these things are not sufficient even when they are good. I think while some of the cartoonlike online animated psuedo-labs I’ve seen can be ok provided they are used as supplements that could be viewed after students have been involved in real physical labs covering the similar concepts. Some have features that almost make them worse than bad particularly even for students who have seen similar things in real life.
Also with respect to my forming an opinion on these things: , I’ve been tutoring — which I enjoy– and been with two students trying to interact with these, and can report they find can find them them very frustrating in a way I and no one I knew ever responded to real physical labs. One student who was getting A’s but dealing with a teacher who created some of the most stupendous time sinks I’ve every seen decreed them worse than useless busy work (and I have to sort of agree).
Obviously observing two students is not sufficient to evaluate whether these things are useful. But my Bayesing priors is that at least as used by these student teacher their major function was be a time sink. I’m open to the possibility they could be used in a useful way.
With respect to homeschooling: my Bayesian prior is they certainly would be of little benefit to students who did not also do physical labs. At a minimum 1 hour of phyiscal lab time would be required for each hour of intentional exposure to these other things– which ideally should happen after the lab time. In that case, the cartoons might represent repetition that permits generalization of things students observed in real labs. But… of course, that’s a Bayesian prior. Could be wrong– and should be subject to modification with exposure to real data collected in an unbiased manner.
My niece home schooled her 3 children until high school. At that point her kids qualified for an advanced laboratory school for which I think they had scholarships. My niece and her husband were both excellent students and have CPAs. I have a cousin whose daughter home schools her children and for reasons I do not understand this appears to raise tensions in the extended (not immediate that I know) family.
Had to google: FWIW, http://static.nsta.org/files/tst1010_46.pdf discusses these sims, and it says
I would agree with this. And I would add that when the guidance of the teacher is not properly timed, these items are worse than useless. They can easily be used to do little more than create busy work for students who are handed “worksheets” prepared by other teachers and which are shared on the UCol site. While this practice has the potential for teachers to spend time thinking and organizing rather than creating exercises, it also has the potential of luring some busy teachers into doing little more than handing out an assignment and behaving as if the student doing little more than following the steps in the assignment will result in learning.
Kenneth
Theory, some people are butt-in-skies who want to run the lives of everyone related to them. Or not.
My cousin home schooled some of his kids. He said why– no idea if those reasons were good, bad or indifferent. He lived in CA. I was unfamiliar with their schools, his kid’s needs and so on. One definitely had some special needs (eyesight issues other issues). The others … dunno. I had no information to judge their choice and didn’t try to do so. No one else in the family seemed to judge either.
His kids are all grown up now all seem to have turned out fine. The one with serious vision issues still has serious vision issues (and some other issues.) I doubt the choice of homeschooling affected her vision– but it might have affected how well or poorly she did in academics. Plausibly the homeschooling benefited her– but how would I know? I don’t.
So, I read here that a study was done in ’99 of 20K homeschool students that found median test scores in the 70-80’th percentiles. I read further that ‘About 52% of those approached agreed to participate in Rudner’s study.’. I find here that there were an estimated 850K students homeschooled in ’99.
My question is this.
Knowing all of this, and assuming that those approached were randomly distributed (which may not be true at all, but just for the moment assume so), is there no way to get a statistical handle on this? The probability that the 52% of those who were approached, who agreed to the study were by chance among the very best?
Also, even if there is a way to do this, am I making some other mistake that invalidates this approach?
It seems to me intuitively that the odds of ending up with the creme of the crop 20K out of 850K when half of those approached (presumably randomly) agreed to the study ought to be rather low.
This is what I’m trying to get at I think.
38,500 homeschool kid parents were approached. Let’s say worst case that 20,000 of the kid parents with the highest scores agreed, and 18,500 of the kid parents with lower scores refused.
So out of a random selection (if those who were approached were really random) 850K kids choose 38.5K, we find that the top half (20K) of those kids averaged 70-80’th percentile.
It seems like we ought to be able to deduce something about the rest of the distribution from this. [Edit: or if not about the rest of the distribution, at least the probability that this could be due to chance. Edit2: Not averaged. ‘Median’ed]
Naw, crud. I’m wrong in my assumption. Here’s a link to the research in question:
http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/rudner1999/FullText.asp
All of the homeschool parents self selected by taking the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills or the Tests of Achievement Proficiency. A subset of these agreed to the study. They weren’t randomly selected at all.
darn.
Mark,
If you had the frequency distribution of scores for the kids who’s parents agreed to participate, you might be able to draw some inferences. I mean, if the distribution of scores was obviously skewed with a sharper cut-off on the low side and a long tail on the high side, then you would have to conclude that self-selection for better students was likely. OTOH, if the distribution was Gaussian, then self-selection by home-schooling parents would appear to be less of a factor. An even better comparison would be the shape of the distribution for the 20,000 kids who parents accepted testing compared to a public school population with comparable average SES to the home schooled kids.
.
I suspect that you would find matching SES would make a difference in this kind of comparison. After all, home schooling parents probably are 1) more committed, and 2) financially better off than the average parent. Of course, they might also want to home school to avoid exposure of their kids to ‘bad ideas’ like evolution…. which might correlate with somewhat lower SES.
.
In any case, without more data, I think you are going to be confined to speculation.
Thanks Steve.
Mark
A bounding test could be done:
1) Assume when approached everyone above the 48 percentile agreed. Everyone below disagreed.
2) Assume the actual achievements are normally distributed.
3) Find where the median would be interms of the overall percentile. (It’s actually not hard. But I’ll fire up R tomorrow if no one else does it. I’m doing something for a student I’m tutoring tonight so I can’t do it now.)
Stupid me: The bounding is easier than that:
If people agreed as I described no matter what the probability distribution looks like, and no intervention was done at all the median in the group studied would be
48+52/2 =74.
For now, assume that the people invited were at least randomly selected.
If the median in the study is higher than 74%, and the number studied is large, that will tend to be pretty good evidence the charter schools had an effect because with a 52% acceptance rate getting a median this high when there is no effect of charter schools requires all parents with kids in the lower 48% to refuse and all parents above that to accept.
While I suspect self selection occurred, I doubt it would have happened with as sharp a break as I suggested.
Mind you: if parents invited were selected in a biased way and there is no control group and so on, those issues would affect things. This calculations assumes those things didn’t cause a problem and we are merely considering the issue of parents accepting or rejecting the invitation.
Lucia,
Ah ha! You have answered the question I asked most reasonably. The question I asked was not what I actually meant to say.
.
I don’t think the 70-80’th percentile ranking was among themselves, I think the 70-80’th percentile ranking was on a standardized test that public school students nationwide take. Considering that I never bothered to define ‘percentile of what?’, your answer (I think) was based on the only reasonable assumption (among themselves).
.
I think the test was a standardized national test anyway, I’d better go look at the HSLDA link I supplied more closely.
.
Thanks Lucia
.
[Edit : no wait. I don’t think I understand what you’re saying at all.]
Off-topic: The Internet makes us smarter. But perhaps not as smart as we think.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150812165920.htm
Mark
This is where the question of whether home-schooled children’s achievement would differ from the mean even if they had been forced to sit in regular schools. Plausibly they do not. One might be able to correct for social economic status by using data like parents income and what local school district the kids live in and so on. But I suspect it’s impossible to correct for “parents who are very involved with kids education” vs “those who are not”. It’s likely nearly all home schooled groups all fall in the former, but public schools are a mix of both. The factor is thought (I would even suggest known) to be quite important, so that’s a big difficulty.
Yeah, I see now. That’s right, 48+52/2 = 74 if you’re taking the percentile from the group selected. Sorry, I had a brain sneeze.
[Edit: But doesn’t this assume that everybody gets a unique score? What if a bunch of people tie, shouldn’t they get the same percentile? I’ve confused myself.]
Median not mean! Or percentile rank. God I’m dense. I get it now.
Frank wrote: “For the vast majority of our students, their destiny in our educational system has been written before adolescence.â€
.
SteveF replied: “I suspect their destiny is mostly written before they walk into kindergarten. That is why the problem is so vexing; inheritance and culture constitute most of educational destiny. Everyone wants kids to reach their maximum potential, but there is no clear path from here to there: there are no easy ways to change culture.”
Frank responds: I disagree here. Great teachers and principals can change how some students perceive themselves. A positive environment for 30 hours a week at school can counteract some problems at home and sometimes change what happens at home. Kipp schools transform the lives of many students headed for failure. However, once a student has fallen behind and is forced by state law to learn without outside assistance a pre-determined curriculum without adequate preparation, the chances of change are slim.
Frank,
Sure, great teachers and great principles can improve the outcome for most any child. But I think you must recognize that a child who enters school severely disadvantaged by their home environment will struggle to catch up with their peers.
In spite of the heroic efforts of some, it seems to me likely that many children in fact never recover from a disadvantaged home life. I would guess that we would do better by thinking as well about how to improve the cultural issues which lead to such disadvantaged backgrounds. As I said before, this is a difficult problem with no simple solutions: it’s hard to change culture.
“a child who enters school severely disadvantaged by their home environment will struggle to catch up with their peers.”
No they will achieve what is their lot in life to achieve, just like everyone else.
You do not have the right to specify what another person’s life must be like.
One of the problems with improving someone is that you actually move them out of their milieu.
Someone who was brought up on and in the docks but becomes “educatized” loses their family, their friends and their environment. The price to pay for success. That is OK for those who have the inbuilt desire or need to improve but it should not be forced on people because they have potential.
The right to education for educations sake is one of the biggest mistakes our society makes.
Everyone is pushed to develop their “potential”.
Our lives are full of graduates for intellectual jobs but no one wants to do the jobs that matter. No one gets kudos for bricklaying, a job that requires zero academic input but is vitally important to all our lives. Roads, walls and river banks are built by people who work rather than academics.
While I applaud developing kids to their potential more attention should be given to way in which work is valued.
A nuclear physicist working on the roads for 3 months every year. I would like to see that.
Reading a book on Feynman called Genius, tragi-tragic.
angech,
Whoa, I have to tell you that is about the strangest perspective I’ve ever heard. Physicists working on the road? I can’t see how that is a good use of talent. Perhaps we should just make all the football players play baseball, baseball players play basketball, basketball players play football, and the golfers, well, maybe they should just dig ditches. There’s a plan for you.
There is nothing wrong with bricklaying, I did a fair amount myself when I was younger and stronger. But that doesn’t mean kids should not be given the opportunity to excel to the maximum of their ability. Nobody’s forcing them, but it seems to me reasonable to give them the best opportunity we can. If they end up being bricklayers because it suits them and their talents, that’s fine. It’s not so fine if they are bricklayers because they grew up in a home environment that did not allow them to use their talents.
Speaking as a parent, I want to not only give my kids every chance to develop their potential to the fullest, I encourage it. Some might say I push it. I consider it my responsibility, but more than that on a viseral level I want my kids to prosper.
if they want to be bricklayers, they can decide that when they reach adulthood in my view.
SteveF:
Don’t forget though, Judith doesn’t respond to many comments on her site. She doesn’t even see a lot of them. lucia responds to far more comments (percentage wise), and I’d wager she sees most, if not all that get posted on her site.
lucia:
Do you know if you can you block people by IP address if you’re hosted on WordPress.com? I know you can if you’re self-hosted, but I can’t remember what tools are available if you’re not.
I had a homeschooled student in one of my classes in high school in Illinois for a while. I don’t know any details about his arrangement with the school though. I do know home labs wouldn’t have been any worse than the one lab I had at that school (I was only there a year). I took AP Physics there, and it was a complete joke.
I won’t go into all the details, but my favorite example was the final exam. If you took the AP exam, you could be exempted from the final if you wanted. I had no problem with that, but there was little reason to take the option. I finished the final in 25 minutes. Twenty minutes later, the teacher walked around and asked if anyone was having trouble with any of the problems.
And, you can’t make this up, when a student said yes, she went to the board and showed us how to do the problem he was having trouble with. She then did the same for the other nine questions on the final. She literally did every problem on the final on the board in front of the class, letting us copy down the work and answers.
The worst part? Of the seven of us taking the final, two got Cs on it!
Brandon,
“Don’t forget though, Judith doesn’t respond to many comments on her site.”
.
You are probably right about that. Still, in seeing Judith’s responses to Joshua over a couple of years, I was always amazed how she could remain so calm, with the little worm constantly saying outrageous things about her honesty, integrity, and reasoning. Had it been me instead of Lucia, he would have lasted less time here than he did. But I admit to suffering fools less gladly than some.
Bradon/SteveF,
Right now with light blogging I’m reading nearly all of the comments. That makes a difference. So does knowledge that Joshua was basically here only because he had been diagnosed as a troll by Judith. But more importantly, his own words in which he
(a) explained his notions that appear to indicate he thinks it’s just fine to treat the blog host with disrespect,
(b) explained that he preferred to do little to do more than aim snark at those he, as judge, jury and executioner deemed to deal with him in ‘bad faith’ and
(c) obvious double standard in his complaints about how people treated him vs. how he treated others in conversation
did figure prominently in my decision. I didn’t have to go by behavior alone– his behavior and words he posted right here at my blog show that he not only acts in bad faith, but he has decided that he gets to decide to act rudely to others– including the blog host. That he has a very thin skin blah…blah… irony. But it’s his behavior.
In anycase, he’s gone. I think I’ve realized I have encountered him elsewhere– at Keith Kloors where a guys with the handle Joshua was deemed a troll, and at cultural cognition, where a guy who I did consider to constantly excude a condescending tone hangs out. But neither of those place are my problem. This blog is mine and he is disinvited.
“Speaking as a parent, I want to not only give my kids every chance to develop their potential to the fullest, I encourage it”
But what is their fullest potential?
and where.
And if in developing it you unintentionally harm their happiest life choice, which may involve not learning, will you still be happy?
As in
girls, dancing, talent, ballerina?
The lifestyle is extremely hard and demanding, diet, weight and not able to live a “normal life style”
Everyone’s dream but practically I would hope a daughter would not be pushed [given encouragement in] that line knowing what awaits if she was successful.
Farmers with a farm handed down over several generations. Successful, sustainable, good life style and money in good seasons. hard work 3 children given the best education.
who gets to run the farm?
The one with the least ability?
The third child, [sorry third children] who is kept down and denied opportunities because the first 2 have gone off to College and would not get their hands dirty in a fit?
None of them.
And how do they cope with their new lifestyles, city slickers with a farming background and rural lifestyle trying to live in the cities, leaving their potential partners and their families behind forever.
Nothing wrong with parents wanting their expectations fulfilled, every parent I guess but beware what you wish for.
The fullest potential is only for the winner and all those second bests are not only distressed at not achieving for their parents but also dissatisfied working at Macca’s with their arts degree, if they have a job.
SteveF wrote: “In spite of the heroic efforts of some, it seems to me likely that many children in fact never recover from a disadvantaged home life. I would guess that we would do better by thinking as well about how to improve the cultural issues which lead to such disadvantaged backgrounds. As I said before, this is a difficult problem with no simple solutions: it’s hard to change culture.”
This is the problem that Head Start was supposed to help – and did help in the pilot studies before it was made a nationwide program. The latest study by the Dept of Education of Head Start as it is currently implemented showed no residual benefits by third grade. Nor have the state-wide preK in Oklahoma. More intensive and expensive programs than Head Start apparently have showed lifetime benefits.
Frank,
“More intensive and expensive programs than Head Start apparently have showed lifetime benefits.”
.
Yes, and adoption by a high SES family of a baby from a low SES mother leads to a big improvement in lifetime educational achievement. Which doesn’t seem surprising to me. But that just underlines how difficult a problem it is.
@ SteveF (Comment #138321),
Good question.
I always smile at Keillor’s paradoxical quip because first, it is impossible to have all children above average.
Second, nearly all of us want our children to be above average.
My local school district, Houston ISD, for years had as its stated educational goal to have 100% of children ready for college by graduation. HISD actually fired teachers for not “doing enough” to get kids ready for college.
That is a non-humorous way that Keillor’s paradox can impact education.
FWIW, my wife was a public school teacher for 23 years, certified in Early Childhood, GT (Gifted-Talented), Special Ed, Bilingual and ESL (English as a Second Language).
From her experience she concluded that the dedication of the parents to having high expectations for learning and for the expectation that the child would cooperate with teacher’s efforts is one of the major factors in determining the success of the child. She taught children from very wealthy to indigent. From fresh immigrants to multi-generational native born. From GT to severely handicapped and this appears to be the case.
The other observation she made is that non-teaching Administrators are soaking up far too much of the educational budget, have far too much power over teaching, and really have little idea about what works in a classroom. Most non-teaching Administrators seem to see teachers as a cost center to be reduced as much as possible.
Angech,
Not pushing to develop potential can harm them too. There’s no safe path that guarantees good outcome. Being a parent sucks in this sense. Somebody has to make the call. You can’t just abdicate your responsibility and let a kid do whatever they think they want to do at the moment. That’s not what parents are for.
So two things:
1) In educating children, I don’t see how you are taking options away from them. In what way does understanding calculus prevent a kid from becoming a park ranger? So it’s work to learn. So what? There’s a certain amount of work involved with being alive.
2) Educated folk command more money in general than uneducated folk. You can give me all the platitudes you like, but having money is good. It opens up options to people that they otherwise wouldn’t have, among other things; gives them more power to choose what their lives will be like and what their lives will be about.
Look, I have a daughter who seriously wanted to study opera. I think I understand the point you’re trying to make, but it’s not about education, it’s about having the freedom to pursue the life and career a kid wants as they approach adulthood.
hunter,
Too many non-teaching administrators is a big problem. The same goes for too many non-billable to direct projects type people at any organization. For example: people to make internal news letters, PR web pages, trifold leaflets. Those people are decent people– and some of that type of stuff is good. But there is a tendency for administrators to dream up internal projects, and too much of that just chokes everything.
Heck, often the internal project ends up sucking up the direct-project type people’s time. For example: you decide to create a newsletter. You hire the news-letter writer. They are going to highlight a worker-bee each week. So how does the good newsletter writer write the project? They visit the worker-bee’s office and spend time interviewing them. That’s time the worker-bee can’t be on a project.
So the cost is more than just the reporter and the physical supplies for the letter. It’s the time off project of everyone else whose efforts are highlighted or who needs in some way to assist the letter writer with their “news”.
I pick this one because it’s easier to describe how the newsletter (which might be a good thing depending) sucks up other people’s time– but there are plenty of other dreamed up projects that do also.
Angech,
Maybe a better example than my daughter is one of my boys. What makes him happy is playing with legos and playing with transformers. What do you propose I do there?
I am ~not~ about to let the kid spend his life playing with legos and transformers, even if it seems that makes him happy right now. A little kid does not even have the experience to understand that life requires effort and work, much less have the experience to make decisions about how to prepare himself for a vocation or choose one.
Hunter,
My wife was also a teacher (chemistry) for many years. She chose to retire early, in part, because the burdens of non-teaching duties, which were growing roughly in proportion to the number of non-teaching administrators working for the district, reached the point where she felt she could not do as much actual teaching as she felt she should. The problem appears widespread, and seems to me to reflect a misunderstanding of what conditions effective learning requires. A simple example: chemistry (introductory) requires use of algebra, it makes no sense to enroll a kid in chemistry who is not proficient in algebra… and to be proficient in algebra, the student must have proficiency in arithmetic and basic numerical concepts, etc. Yet lots of students my wife taught were not proficient in algebra, and not surprisingly, they did not do so well in chemistry. Administrators seemed oblivious to problems like this, and focused instead on ‘satisfying standards’, continuing education requirements for teachers, and other peripheral subjects, rather than the fact lots of kids were not learning what they needed to learn. Are some teacher a lot more effective than others? For sure, and the sensible thing would be to identify which are more effective, and more importantly, why they are more effective. It is NOT because of a bunch of silly paperwork or taking a continuing education course. Seems to me too much focus on the organizational details of the process, and not enough on how to improve the process.
angech,
Ballerina and dancing is not everyone’s dream.
I have no idea why any parent would actually push a kid in the direction of ballet or dancing of all things. That’s a direction that has little promise of employment, a skill that has small transferrability to other life or employment opportunities. If someone’s kid doesn’t want to do it, it’s unimaginable that a parent would push that rather than let them take up some other activity.
Becoming the worlds champion Lego builder would likely benefit them just as much as getting an invitation to be Clara in the Nutcracker.
But parents should work to make sure kids who have normal or higher intelligence and academic aptitude learn to read well, do math, process information, know an adequate amount of history and so on. This means that at a minimum American kids should
* Know math through Algebra II.
* Read English well enough to be able to finish a book of the length and depth of “Anna Karenina” and be able to explain the plot and discuss interactions. (You could pick another book. Moby Dick? Gone with the Wind? But anyone whose reading level is below “Sherlock Holmes” needs to improve their reading. And kid who can’t finish a fairly long book needs to improve their reading. I know farmers and they need to know how to read.)
* Understand the broad sweep of history from at least Roman times to know. Not every nit-picky detail, but the major stuff.
* Know 19th-current history with understanding of wars that occurred, what caused them etc.
* Know american history and some aspects of the constitution.
* Be aware of general notions about economics, and economic systems forms of government and how these have interacted. (Capitalism, communism, socialism …. Democratic, Republican, Oligarch etc.)
* Know elements of physics, chemistry, biology. (There is no excuse for someone not knowing how lights in series vs. lights light up. That’s about 4th grade level– but they need to know more.)
* Know how to prepare a few basic meals — crock pot stew anyone? — and sew on a button.
* Become aware of some stuff that is sometimes considered “frills” so they can know what’s out there in the world. (Schools should offer some art, music and so on. But some of this exposure can and should come from outside activities. No specific item is essential– but it’s essential they see some “frills”.)
* Develop sufficient understanding of abstractions to use them. (Maps for instance. But also interfaces on computers these days.)
* Follow well written instruction manuals. (IKEA furniture assembly directions is probably adequate level. Or put together a Weber grill.)
They may forget some of this later. Everyone forgets stuff they don’t continue to do. I’m sure I knew a lot more about the French Revolution when I was in high school than I do now. Obviously, the kids aren’t all going to be class valedictorian. But no one who has base intelligence that is at least ‘adequate’ should be allowed to grow up without being required to learn the sorts of things in the list above before reaching adulthood. Many could achieve it by 10th grade. In good suburban schools these days many do know most of it– the level of understanding that is absolutely required is generally below “AP”.
Kids who really have special needs (like my neighbors daughter with Downs) can and will likely achieve at a lower level. But I would suggest that if parents aren’t watching to make sure their kids achieve learning at the level of the list above, the parents are limiting their kids choices.
Quite honestly, no-one who is allowed to the basic knowledge can possibly make good choices. So the idea that their choices are excluded by achieving competence in the basic knowledge required to function in the world today is wrong.
FWIW: The New York Regents tests in things like physics and math peg a decent level. I’m sometimes puzzled by their choices of questions, but, I’d say a kid who can get 70% on a set of tests that represents a basic high school diploma is ready to be an adult. (Any schools whose top 10% don’t get 90% when they take those tests immediately after completing the relevant course is not doing it’s job!)
Angech,
I’m sorry. I’ve reread your comment and I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to say. In particular, I don’t understand:
1) The ballerina example:
A. Are you saying that I should discourage my kid who thinks she wants to be a ballerina?
B. Are you saying I should encourage my kid who thinks she wants to be a ballerina?
I don’t know squat about ballerina’s. My impression is that they don’t need to develop their academic potential, so the example is confusing to me.
2) The farm example:
I can’t make heads or tails of this. Why is it significant who gets to run the farm? Why do you think the third kids get kept down and denied opportunities? And how do you conclude that nobody gets to run the farm? What parts of this are central to the point you’re trying to make? This made no sense to me.
Lucia,
“Develop sufficient understanding of abstractions to use them. (Maps for instance. But also interfaces on computers these days.)”
.
For sure.
One of the things that has always astounded me when I have traveled in less developed countries is how few people can even begin to understand a map. There are many cities I’ve visited where finding a map of the roads is virtually impossible. The city government may in fact somewhere have a map, but finding a map to use while you’re driving around? Nope.
.
When you show a map to someone of the area where they live they simply don’t understand it, because they are just not familiar with that level of abstraction. If you ask for directions the reply is always something like: “go down to the big brown building, then turn right for three blocks then at the supermarket go left for two”. Street names? Forget it, there are often no street signs at all. Heck, there are lots of people who can’t read a clock face that doesn’t have numbers on it… Once again too high level of abstraction.
.
Perhaps part of the observed increase in overall intelligence is related to economic development, which fairly well demands improved abstract thinking.
SteveF,
I suspect so. I think I tried to say something like this above. I suspect IQ test focus on certain skills which are related to intelligence but which (like most skills) do develop with practice. I think understanding abstractions is one of them. Kids today have more exposure to that and at earlier ages than in the 50s.
Obviously, some American kids saw maps in the 50s. But now? Video games, guis, electronic control panels with symbols to communicate functionality and so on. Some of these have a larger number of concrete elements, some less. But even small kids deal with these daily now. Less so in the past.
Does this make them actually smarter? I don’t know. But I suspect it does increase IQ scores on certain components of the test– and so measured IQ can rise.
Of course, empirical testing of my theory would require. And someone would have to break down the rise into components to get a better bead on my theory though.
SteveF,
I experienced this firsthand in Mexico a few years back. We had rented a house through an online service and the directions provided by the owner were almost gibberish. I printed up a Google map so that the taxi driver could find it. At the airport I handed him the map and he shook his head like he was looking at cuiniform. I handed him the gibberish driving instructions and he took us right to the house. There’s a poignant lesson to be had here but I’m not patient enough to draw it out.
Until I read of it in a piece of fiction, it never occurred to me that there could be people who didn’t ‘get’ maps. I thought it was one of those intuitively obvious things. I expect there must have been a time I didn’t ‘get’ maps, but I’ve got no memory of it, or when I learned the concept.
Yep. Some people don’t ‘get’ maps. There are several levels of the ‘get/don’t get’ range:
1) The don’t even know what they are or how they relate to positions in space.
2) They don’t know what they are, but they have trouble relating a point in the real world to a point in the map.
3) They know how to relate points, but they have trouble orienting so they have trouble using them to figure out if they need to turn ‘left’ or ‘right’.
4– alternate) They haven’t learned details like finding the legend to interpret symbols or scales.
5) They are fairly skilled map users.
Note that ‘4’ is sort of a side issue. You could know 4 and be unable to do 2-3, or vice versa. Those who get 2&3 usually pick up 4 quickly.
Have you noticed Googlemaps gives a ‘text only’ direction option for printouts? People who are below (3) on getting maps are likely to prefer the text directions.
Also, I think part of the attraction for car navigation systems with a robotic voice is that some people don’t ‘get’ maps. Obviously, there are other benefits. But voice is a very important feature if the driver or navigator doesn’t ‘get’ maps.
BTW: my impression is in the US people who don’t ‘get’ maps are at the 2-3 level. The people I know who are at that level won’t admit they don’t. I think some don’t really even know they don’t really ‘get’ maps the way other people have.
Lucia,
Ahhh. I can see people having orientation problems more easily. Not like I haven’t done that a time or two myself. 🙂 so much for my map fluency rating!
lucia:
I have two pairs of pants I currently can’t wear because I gave up on sewing a button back on them. I’ve sewed buttons onto shirts a number of times, but pants are different because of how thick the part of the pants I need to put the button on is. I’m probably just too impatient.
Oh god. I was given a formal test of my IQ (or something like that) a few years back, and I actually wound up quitting the test because they wanted me to pick the “next item in the series.” The problem was they wanted you to understand a certain level of abstraction, but I couldn’t figure out what level. There were questions where three of four answers made an equal amount of sense to me. One question was to give the next item in this series:
2, 3, 5, _
They said I was wrong to pick 7 because the “right” was answer 8. They said 2+3 = 5 and 3+5 = 8, therefore the answer must be 8. That wouldn’t have been so bad except they were asking me the questions verbally. The person giving the test clearly had no idea what I meant when I explained there are an infinite number of possible sequences that can arise given those three numbers, but he was deducting points from my “cognitive ability” because I didn’t give the answer which matched somebody’s intuition.
That’s not just me complaining about my personal experience, either. A significant problem with any measure of “intelligence” is how you define it. For instance, when Dan Kahan of Cultural Cognition created a measure of scientifically intelligence, he required you give wrong answers to get a high score. That’s because there is no objective way to define intelligence. Even when we think about the idea, what one person has in mind may not be what another person has in mind.
in fairness to mysef, usually when I’m lost and guessing which way I’m heading… ~shrug~
Brandon
I had similar questions with “Mrs Johnson” my 4th and 6th grade math teacher. Obviously, “prime numbers” is just a correct an answer as “add the previous two numbers”:
Heck: If we are ‘supposed’ to know the pattern only starts with the 3rd in the sequnce, given what they have it could be:
2,3,5,7,11,13 …. Primes.
2,3,5,8,12,17…. The amount you add increments by 1 each time.)
2,3,5,8,13,21… The sum of previous two numbers.
2,3,5,10,20,40, Add ALL of the previous numbers.
There could be more. But yes, to see this requires an obviously low IQ. 🙂
FWIW: I don’t remember if we did this in 4th or 6th grade. But in 4th grade this teacher made one of the girls stand in a garbage can because she lost too many rounds in ‘flash cards’. She teased people constantly. Usually those who exhibitted poor performance. Of course I remember the case involving me… which was sort of funny.
Back in the say, to facilitate grading, teachers assigning multiple choice would have you put all the answers in a column on the side of the paper. Then they’d print their own column of paper, align it, scan across and check.
So we did this on a test turned it in.
Next day, Mr. Johnson reports the range of grades. Some avearge (say 80). With one grade of 30 or so in there. So she then did what she always did — but which had never happened. to. me…..
She announced who got the highest grade. (She always did this.) She then started talking about how stupid whoever got the 30 would be… her eyes roll. As usually, she let us know she wasn’t going to tell us who go the low grade– to spare them doncha know? (This woman was a total bitch. Seriously.) As usually, the class sat around uncomfortably with the kids who ordinarily got lesser grade squirming the most.
So… she hands the tests back.
My paper was marked 30!! How could that be?! I looked: My column has the first few in a row all ok. Then from some question on down, they were nearly all checked wrong. I checked the numbers… uhmmm… look ok to me….
So what happens next? Same thing that always happened. She starts reading the answer. We had been instructed that if our answer was incorrectly marked we should say so right away, so at my first red mark, up shoots my hand. I take the question up….. she checks. It’s ok. She marks that question right…. recalculates. I was instructed to sit down. So I do…
She read the next answer. My hand shoots up. (A few students snicker.) I go to the front of the class, she checks, recalculates….. I suggested maybe her paper slipped while she graded. She told me not to be fresh and sit down. I was instructed to sit down…. go back to seat. (More kids snicker….)
She read the next answer… well…you know what happened. At some point I did get fresh and asked out loud, “Would you like me to erase the 30 from the board?” (More snickering.)
After the test was fully graded a boy I’d know since 2nd grade and who’d been announced as the high scorer pseudo-innocently asked the teacher what the grade ranges were now and whether he still had the high score. She went to the board, erased the previous high grade and the name of the kid next to it and wrote down 100 along with the new grade. (FWIW: She was less mean to boys than girls. But she wasn’t especially nice to them either.)
Oddly, this woman could teach math. But she was such a bitch on wheels. But like your test giver, she too though there was only 1 right answer in these series.
Mark
I mean people who can’t figure it out even in static situations when they have land marks. Lost of people can’t figure it out if you don’t have land marks and are moving. I’ve definitely had trouble when my husband was driving asking me for directions. I might not even know what street we are on yet, I’m looking for cross streets. Then he’ll say “I think we should turn here!”. So then I know the name of the street we are on… but haven’t found it on the map yet. … and so on.
“Have you noticed Googlemaps gives a ‘text only’ direction option for printouts? People who are below (3) on getting maps are likely to prefer the text directions.”
Ability in this area may be higher dimensioned than that comment seems to suggest. I’m great with maps, but I’m absolutely inept at following verbal directions. I’ve entertained the theory that (1) there may actually be some truth to what they say about men tending not to ask for directions but that (2) it’s because (and, yes, I’m projecting here) men are less comfortable with verbal directions.
Actually, I have little confidence in that theory, not least because I’ve seen plenty of counterexamples among men. But my point is that the one skill (ability to follow verbal directions) probably shouldn’t be looked at as lower on some scalar measure than the other (map reading).
My neurologist brother tells me that there does tend to be a correlation among various aspects of mental performance, and I defer to his expertise. But I still wonder whether there isn’t some small degree of idiot savant in a great many of us.
Joe,
I don’t think one skill is higher or lower. They are different skills. Some people have none, some have one, some have both.
I expect that if you are reasonably skilled at both levels, you print out both text and map. If one of the things is useless to you, you print out the one that helps you. If none are useful….. you get lost!! (I have a friend who always gets lost the first time she drives anywhere. Always.)
For me: text is easier to follow while actually driving provided you don’t miss any exits and need to get back to the map. But the map helps if you end up making a wrong turn for some reason and need to get back to the path.
I always print out both. Maps on the smart phone make it less necessary than before. But I still do like to have an overall map in the car when I traveling somewhere new.
Mark Bofill , I don’t understand:1) The ballerina example:
Are you saying that I should encourage/discourage my kid who thinks she wants to be a ballerina?
I don’t know squat about ballerina’s. My impression is that they don’t need to develop their academic potential.
lucia Ballerina and dancing is not everyone’s dream.
I have no idea why any parent would actually push a kid in the direction of ballet or dancing of all things. That’s a direction that has little promise of employment, a skill that has small transferrability to other life or employment opportunities. If someone’s kid doesn’t want to do it, it’s unimaginable that a parent would push that rather than let them take up some other activity.
Most people know very little about being a ballerina yet it is one of a mother’s enduring dreams which is then transferred to to finding that potential ability in their daughters. Millions of young Australian girls are brought up going to dance lessons [how else could one become Queen Elsa].
Boys and dads it is probably the dad’s favorite sport. We push our kids to be sports stars well before we think about developing their potential intellectual abilities [well OK not you guys but you possibly did it in tandem].
The point is most people find their level early, but some parent’s do [sorry Lucia, not inconceivable and in many more areas than dancing] insist on pushing their idea of what their child should develop into without seeing it is not what the child wants, needs or can develop into.
“This means that at a minimum American kids should know”
should be taught I think is what you are saying.
There are unfortunately kids who will never be bright enough or interested enough to take the basics in but I agree this is a minimum of what should be attempted.
Interestingly people develop brain wise long after school, I could sew buttons sort of by 50. I learnt that a tap generally turns off screwing clockwise [clockwise close] by observation at 20 years of age. Feynman had to look at a mole on his right? hand to tell his right from left al his life but had very little trouble with maps.
Angech,
I have no quarrel with your statement. I don’t advocate this. Thanks for clarifying!
I push my kids to do the best they can at more or less everything they try. It’s an open ended system, I always encourage them to try to do better. As my daughter got older, I’d encourage her in the areas she seemed interested in and the things she enjoyed that could be translated into a career and life she’d enjoy. It turns out she had an awful lot of vocal talent. It wasn’t easy to support, but I did. I mean, who thinks as their child grows, ‘oh. No problem. She’ll be an opera singer!’ She went to Mannes in NY for a semester before changing her mind and deciding that she didn’t want to spend her life pursuing becoming an opera singer. Now she’s doing general freshman / junior requirements and thinking about other options.
Thanks for your response.
angech,
I guess ballet must be big in Australia. I didn’t know any girls who took ballet in high school. My boss at the book store had taken ballet. In El Salvador, some of the girls took ballet. Oh– the older sister of one of my younger sisters friends took ballet!
There’s nothing wrong with dance lessons. Or flute, oboe, art, pottery making, tennis, football, socker etc. classes. But I certainly agree that if a parent is seriously pushing a kid who doesn’t enjoy these things the parent should drop it and let them do something else.
I agree. And I agree this is misguided. But it’s a separate issue from emphasizing that your kids need achieve a suitable academic level.
I think the with adequate mental abilities– which are those above the 30 percentile in intelligence– should know these things. The overwhelming majority will require teaching to know these things. The kids will also have to work at their studies to know these things.
I agree some kids will fail. My neighbors have a daughter with Downs, and I would hardly be surprised if she did not achieve at the level I described.
Likely no one taught you how to thread a needle make the knot and so on. I consider this an oversight.
Yeah, I meant to pipe up before when Brandon mentioned it. I’ve got a … theoretical knowledge of the use of needle and thread, but I can’t say I’ve ever tried to sew a button back on. Likely it’d be a mess. 🙂
Brandon,
On sewing pants and jacket buttons, I recall there being a trick involving a toothpick. This I learned from a college buddy who I would classify as the least skilled in the domestic arts. But he knew how to make sure his business clothes looked good.
Lucia –
About your map-reading level 3, I have a friend who is quite intelligent, but can only correlate a map to reality if she faces in the direction of the map “up”. Fortunately, GPS devices have the option of re-orienting the presentation of the map so that “up” is straight ahead, rather than (say) north. Works great for her. I use “north up”.
For myself, I find it easier to anticipate turns when the GPS is set up as “forward up” — we’re coming to a right turn, say — but I can’t “store” a route that way. Forming a mental image of the route seems to require a fixed orientation (for me). [A familiar route can also be “stored” by landmarks.]
Brandon, funny story about 2,3,5,… That’s way too ambiguous to give one a reasonable chance of guessing the generating rule. I would have guessed prime numbers too, but in addition to Lucia’s choices, 9 is also a decent guess for the next element (2^n+1 starting from n=0). Now if they had said “5,8,13,…” I would have thought Fibonacci. [Although 20 is also possible, using a quadratic formula n^2+4.]
A long time ago though, I decided to just assume that a standardized test is looking for a “lowest common denominator” type of response, and guess the simplest sequence. E.g. “2,4,6…” — guess 8, an arithmetic sequence, rather than 10 (sum of previous two numbers). And not worry if it’s “wrong”. Now if it’s a buddy asking me, I’ll try to think of a more esoteric answer, such as 30.
I live in a town with high youth unemployment and a poor socio-economic rating with a range of educational support.
The poor and difficult kids go to the basic government high schools and the motivated parents send their children to the one govt high school with a good reputation, motivated teachers,great program and good exam results. The catholic high school partly private funded has grown incredibly, as has the local private high school; which is expensive to attend.
We started our 2 eldest children at the government schools where they did learn to cook, sew and type but moved them privately for the last few years to increase their chances of university education.
The youngest went straight to the private school.
All boys, they have all done their own thing and they are all green.
Girls wanting to be ballerinas is more a 4-12 year old thing, certainly almost no one at high school, as you said but gosh the mums are keen.
Earl
With thicker fabrics (pants /jackets) using a toothpick as a spacer while sewing is usefule. After mostly sewing the button on, you taken the thread behind the button but not through the fabric and wind around and around to form a shank. Then go to the back and anchor.
This gives the button a sort of shank. It lasts longer and looks a little better.
lucia:
Aye. The joke after I walked out on the test was my IQ was “off the charts.” Not because it was so high, but because their charts just didn’t know how to measure intelligence in the first place.
I’ve heard about mean teachers who could also be good at teaching the material. I’ve never actually seen one though. They haven’t really seemed worse than the nice teachers at teaching though. One of the (normally) nicest teachers I ever had taught college math and insisted the -(49^1/2) = -7, no matter what. He insisted on that even though he had no problem understanding 49^1/2 could equal -7.
The mental contortions he went through to defend that position are still probably the most amazingly dumb things I’ve ever seen in my life. And I wasn’t even mean in my responses! I couldn’t be. I was too dumbfounded.
I think that would probably make more sense if I knew what the words you are using meant. You say you “form a shank” and it “gives the button a sort of shank” (which seems kind of inevitable given the previous phrase), which I’m sure means something simple, but my mind just keeps imagining me walking around with a homemade knife hidden in my pants.
I’ll probably look it up tomorrow. I just got my copy of Mark Steyn’s new book in the mail, so I’m going to start reading it rather than reading about sewing.
HaroldW:
What bothers me the most about their question is when you provide a series, you imply the beginning point of the series is relevant if you don’t include something to show there were items before it. If you want the Fibonacci sequence, it should begin with 1, 1, 2, not 2. When you start your series at 2, the testee should expect there to be no items before 2. (One could argue 1 should count as a prime number, but that argument is irrelevant here as you could count both options as separate series.)
That’s the same reason I would give 20 as the next item for the 5, 8, 13 series. Though in that case, if I weren’t going to worry about the starting point of the series, I’d likely still give 20 as my answer. Then 29, 40, 53.
The problem is determining which is “simplest.” I’d consider primes to be simpler than Fibonacci, but… then the problem becomes:
I’m pretty sure things would have been very different if the test hadn’t had the verbal component. Even if they would have just had me speak, but not given any verbal feedback, it would have been different. I’d have been able to shrug off a bad test score as just being because of a bad test, but repeatedly being told I’m wrong when I’m not irritates me a bit too much.
There was a game some people played in a forum I used to visit where someone would come up with a series and the next person would have to pick the next number. Not guess it, pick it. Everyone else would then have to try to guess what rule that person had used to pick their number.
A lot of people didn’t approve of my rule, “Roll a die with a number of sides equal to the previous number.”
Bradon,
The shank is the metal loop on this sort of button:
Shank buttons don’t have holes in the face of the button, but they also are generally not ‘flat’ which makes them inconvenient under a belt. On the other hand, the shank makes room for thick fabric so that the threads of the button aren’t perpetually under tensions.
Hi Lucia,
My mom used to sew buttons on that would be under a lot of tension (say trouser buttons) by first sowing through the button in a normal fashion but leaving some slack in the thread so that the button would be “standing off” the surface of the fabric by a couple of millimeters. After the button was on she would wrap around the loose thread with more thread, probably 20 turns or so, and then secure the end of the thread by passing it through the bundle a couple of times. This formed a “shank” of thread which was more resistant than a typical sewn on button.
.
Unlike some, I have personally sewn on lots of buttons…… it was one of those things that my mom insisted I know how to do, along with ironing my own shirts and pants. 🙂
Lucia –
Thanks for tip. As it happens, I just lost a button on a pair of pants and have to sew it back on. Now I know how to do it properly!
Brandon –
I can understand why being verbally told you’re wrong during a test would be annoying. I don’t recall getting that sort of feedback when being tested, it doesn’t sound like a good method.
Yes, “simplest” is in the eye of the beholder. In context, it was usually not a problem to think in terms of the curriculum being tested. E.g., primes might not have been covered yet, so you would eliminate that from consideration. I recall it was a great relief to me to understand that there could be ambiguous or poorly-phrased questions on tests, and the test-writer wasn’t trying to trick you.
P.S. Your “random” rule was truly wicked !
Lucia, Brandon, and others,
If a number sequence with a logical pattern has many possible “correct” patterns, then it is just a dumb sequence to have on an oral test. I mean,”1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ?” instead of “2, 3, 5, ?” would seem a better question.
.
I think it is also important to keep in mind that these sorts of questions, if in a written test, are usually multiple choice, so even in the case that the sequence could have many “logically correct” answers, perhaps only one number on the list of answers is among those “logically correct” answers, which would narrow the “correct” answer on a multiple choice test to only one. If two numbers on the list of answers are logically correct, then it is, once again, a stupid question.
SteveF,
That’s the purpose of the toothpick. You lay it flat between the holes which creates a 1-toothpick thick stand off, but you can still draw the thread tight. Once I learned the toothpick trick, I always used it. (It turns out to be convenient to break the toothpick.)
The summer after I graduated from high school I worked in New Jersey and a bunch of other students and I lived in a dorm. One of the guys came in and saw me ironing my shirt and asked if I would teach him. He’d been sending them all to the cleaners to have them pressed and wanted to save money. (Which I could tell he had been doing, because cleaners tend to use starch which is nice. But a college student might not feel the need for quite that level of perfection.)
I told him sure, he could watch while I explained the steps ironing my own shirt.
The funny thing was while I was doing this he said he wouldn’t have the courage to ask any of the other women because they would have told him he was just trying to get then to iron his shirts. I said something like “I’m not worried about that. Notice I’m ironing my shirt which I was doing anyway.”
But afterwards, I stayed while he practiced on his own. Afterwards we had a lesson on ironing pants.
After that, he did start ironing his own shirts. So I suspect he really did want to learn to iron his things.
SteveF,
I tutored a student who had never taken physics and needed to pass an entrance exam for medical school in Poland. We had a list of topics to cover in…. 6 weeks! (Seriously– all of high school physics in 6 weeks.)
Fortunately, the testing was limited to multiple choice, a practice tests made the level look only a bit above “NY Regents”. So we just plowed through material and he practiced on multiple choice questions. I did periodically remind him one of the rules of multiple choice: whoever wrote the test thinks one of the answers is ‘the’ answer.
I also taught him multiple ways to do certain types of problems. For example: one problem had a question that one might interpret as falling in the category of “modern physics” and it was on a practice test he did before we covered any of that. But it was a “pick the right equation” type. So I pointed out that we could get the right answer by “checking whether units cancel” using info on the “cheat sheet” the school had made available. Granted, the student wouldn’t be able to pick the right answer if the test writers had made sure two possible answers had the same units. But of course, the often don’t think to check that sort of thing.
He emailed me. He got into medical school!
Lucia,
I had to take the SAT physics achievement test in the fall of my senior year so I could apply for early acceptance at a few schools. Problem was, I had only started taking physics in September, but the test was, IIRC, in November.
.
So I looked ahead in my book… it was all pretty obvious stuff… and figured I couldn’t do badly. In fact I got an 800 (three standard deviations above the mean), not because of the physics course, but because I had been thinking and reading about such things for a long time.
.
The funny part was that my physics teacher actually suggested to the guidance office that I must have cheated on the test, since in his 20 years of teaching physics, no student had scored 800….. and I had only just started his course. Fortunately, the guidance dept. didn’t believe him. He did give me trouble for the remainder of the year though, nit-picking my answers to problems….. even when they were right!
Well… you beat me! I took some achievement test. I don’t remember which, but I know I took math and some in science. I got above 760 but my highest was 790. Back then it didn’t occur to me to review anything or prepare in any way whatsoever for any of the tests. I don’t remember how the test dates stacked up compared to the classes I took.
I know some ‘test prep’ existed back in the late 70s, but it just wasn’t the industry it is today.
Lucia,
“The funny thing was while I was doing this he said he wouldn’t have the courage to ask any of the other women because they would have told him he was just trying to get then to iron his shirts.”
.
Here is a flip side story: I was once staying for several days at the home of a Brazilian who employed a housekeeper (uma empregada). Since my shirts were a wrinkled mess from being in a suitcase, late one afternoon I asked the housekeeper if I could borrow her ironing board and iron. She was absolutely horrified: “No, you can’t iron clothes!”; “Yes I can, I know how to.”; “No, you really can’t.”; “Yes, I really can… please just tell me where they are.”; “OK, but you must not tell Sra. Luciene;” “I will not tell Sra. Luciene….”
.
My mom had more impact than she could have guessed.
Lucia,
“I know some ‘test prep’ existed back in the late 70s, but it just wasn’t the industry it is today.”
.
I was taking those tests in the late 1960’s. As far as I am aware, there was no test-prep industry.
Heck, when I took the PSAT, they just herded those of us they had deemed destined for auto-body repair, hair dressing, and construction trades into a big auditorium and said “take this test, and try to finish as quickly as you can”. It was very strange; I really had no idea what the test was or if it was important. Those who had been deemed “alpha-class” were separately tested… and they were told what the test was for.
lucia:
Not trying to get into their shirts?
2085 is the answer in theory. sort of a cryptic crossword semi mathematical puzzle that just came to me. Have fun.
Brandon
I think he said some would accuse him of that too. But I didn’t engage that. That accusation was odd on a number of levels. On the one hand: of course a guy who wanted to get to know someone would do something that created an excuse to pass some time in their company. But someone visiting the common room (which also included the kitchen) while I was ironing my own shirts in the common area was hardly something one could object to. Lots of people came in and out of that room. And his asking me to explain the process of ironing at the same time? That would hardly be an aggravating factor. If I wanted to, I could say no.
Beyond that, he was nice looking, cute, well mannered.
As far as I could tell, he never had any inclination to get into my pants or shirt though. If he did, he was way more reserved than most guys who do things like ask people on dates, or start to make moves etc.
Interesting opinion piece in todays WSJ The Battles of New Orleans (paywalled) about the recovery of New Orleans from Katrina. The public school system was taken over by the state and now 92% of students are in charter schools. Graduation rates are up as well as the percent of students testing at or above grade level.