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I like the idea that examining applicants for a position is to be unbiased. That is, circumstances not directly related to the duties of the position are not considered. For instance, race, religion, sex, age, size, sexual orientation, gender identification, and so forth, are seldom relevant to an individual's qualification to perform satisfactorily in some position. Winning a competition for a given position that is based on merit is a good idea.
That is the level playing field. That is what the social justice activists have been struggling to achieve for decades.
In public education, creating a level playing field is more limited. Why? Because in public education there is no scarcity of positions. EVERY CHILD GETS A POSITION in the public schools.
There is still plenty of ways "a level playing field" applies, however. Title IX, for instance. Resources provided to one sex shall be provided to the other sex. However, in public education, a level playing field -- a poor metaphor in public education -- means removing arbitrary barriers to success.
There are plenty of artificial barriers in public education, regardless of the US codes, state codes, state and district policies.
Here are a few of the things that drive me to distraction about public education.
Grading The goal is to have students achieve a defined level of knowledge and, presumably, a measurable level of critical thinking. For instance, the state has standards for a student's ability to read and write that are established by grade level. How does one grow proficient in reading and writing? One reads and writes with guidance and encouragement and not by just ranking them during the course of a year. Ranking the students from most to least successful will be translated by most young children and adolescents as a measure of their value as human beings. Ranking children is a very bad idea.
Grading on a curve Besides my distaste for grading systems, this special case is truly disgusting. First, there are established standards of performance by which a child's progress can be measured. Grading on a curve more or less abandons that standard in favor of measuring a child's progress compared against the progress of the peer group. I can clearly remember the applied pressure to not do too well on exams so as to not ruin the curve for other students. Hell, you either know what you need to know or you don't. The job of a teacher to make sure each and ever student knows what they need to know. Ranking children on a scale that uses the group performance as the standard is ludicrous.
Teachers are prone to curves and grade inflation because it matters in their evaluations. Either way, it does not measure against the standards.
Busy Work Homework has value, there is no denying that. But not all homework is created equal. Some students will struggle to learn certain concepts or skills and others will breeze through those same lessons. Homework that doesn't support the struggling student's understanding of the material or that covers knowledge or skills mastered by other students is busy work. In both cases, it will be work that demoralizes the students. Busy work is assigned to provide the "fair" basis for the ranking process of grades. it is not intended for forward a young person education, but to give an appearance of fairness.
Community Culture Other ways to say this are "school spirit" and school pride." I have always been upset with schools for providing incentives and special privilege to students who "demonstrate" their school pride is designated ways. My real problem with this, though, isn't that there are school functions, like ASB, sports, year book committee, etc., that grant these privileges, but that there is a small (and at Serra, shrinking) pool of these kinds of activities. It is another way of ranking. And what is worse, to my way of thinking, is that it is direct social ranking.
Civil Service There are a few misdeeds that will get a teacher fired, subject to civil service review, within minutes. But general incompetence isn't one of them. It is damn near impossible to fire a teacher for failing his or her students. It is even harder to fire an administrator for failing his or her faculty and staff. Add to this a near total lack of teacher supervision and we have a recipe for disaster. It is down to this: If the parents aren't complaining, the one or two scheduled "observations" are good, and most students pass the standards exams, give the teacher a good review. But parents don't complain when they should. Generally, parents aren't complaining until a lot of damage has been done. Also, the Peter Principle is in full effect in public education. Promote the competent until they stop being competent. A great classroom teacher might be a horrible counselor and a worse administrator. But money follows promotions and not excellence. The teachers unions and the civil service system ensure that "merit pay" is dead on arrival. (it would be very difficult, though, to create a merit pay system that didn't immediately fall prey to favoritism and cronyism.)
Prison Schools This is in small part a reaction to "unsafe schools" and more a function of how schools are funded in California (and maybe the whole country). We don't give schools a fixed amount of money per student (with some fixed minimum). Nope. We give schools money for contact hours. That means the number of hours each and every student is sitting in a classroom. There are some exceptions to missed days, but mostly, the school gets money for having students in their seats. An unexcused absence costs the school state and federal money. BAD IDEA. As an example, Hunter had a college Econ course that met three times a week during first period. What about the other two days? The students were required to be at school in the library. This would be fine if there was a structure for those days, but it was just to get "contact" time even though there was no actual contact happening.
It is difficult to deny that school safety is a current issue. But it has been a current issue for all my life and longer. Prison schools is more a reaction to unreasonable fears than a natural consequence of unsafe conditions. I think prison schools have actually made matters worse.
credentialing Teachers must pass a subject matter test to qualify to teach a given subject. The skills and knowledge to actually teach, on the other hand, is primarily OJT. A year of education classes that are more like the history of public education, the rules and regulations regarding professional conduct (cover your ass course) and a bit of learning theory followed by "student teaching" under the supervision of a working teacher. It is OJT. There is little to no education on dealing with young children or teens. No psychology courses required. No stages of human development. Teachers get to bring their unchecked biases and assumptions right into school with them. Credentialing is a great idea. In practice, it sucks. Also, having a Ph.D. gets an automatic credential. A Ph.D. Nobel Laureate mathematician may or may not be a good teacher. A MFA may or may not be able to teach art to an 8 year-old. A Ph.d. chemist may or may not have a clue how to inspire a bunch of 15 year-olds or to engage their curiosity about the world around them.
Many teachers became teachers because they LOVED school. How in the world, are they qualified to work with kids who are cynical, resigned, and frustrated by their whole experience of school. I'll tell you. For the most part, they aren't qualified. Check the dropout rate and the dropout population. Kids don't dropout because school was so hard they just couldn't cut it.
School size There is plenty of discussion about class size, but very little about the size of the school in total. It is my opinion that the latter is more important than the former. A school with 3, 4, 5 or more thousand students is problematic. It is the size of a small town and it will develop an enduring culture. It is ponderous and difficult to steer. It is BAD news.
It is easy enough for a student in a swarm that size to believe they are just another unimportant drone forgotten by the queen. That student would not be entirely wrong. (There is one large charter school, SPCA, in San Diego at which the kids are known and nobody slips through the cracks.)
The size of schools is a money consideration. Basically it is the cost of land and and the added support costs -- more administrators and offices to house them. We are, once again, trading good practices for reduced cost. And that is always a losing game. It is a downward spiral which requires a complete meltdown in order for meaningful reforms to be enacted.
Class size This is only an issue because we rank children. If we weren't in the business of making education a competition, class size wouldn't be a problem. Plenty of private schools (elementary through post secondary) understand this. The way to make large classes work is to foster cooperation among students. Create small (five students max) groups and mix them up regularly. Those groups do group work. It has worked well for Harvard and Yale. There is a body of research (plenty of it conducted at UCSD) to prove the concept. A hundred students per teacher? Not a problem because peer pressure is working for you rather than against you. It stops being students against the faculty.
Inflexibility Students get treated like products on an assembly line. They have very little say about what is happening in their school life. What decisions they do make are often made without the requisite information to make an informed choice. Parents have only slightly more control. Counselors are woefully under-trained and over worked. Counselor case-load is more critical than class size, but schools have been shedding counselors at an alarming rate in the last 20 years. It is still possible to finish high school in three years. Most people don't know that, but it is possible with the help of summer school (also a dieing concept). That means a student has some options and the student should get to make decisions with guidance but not interference. Students are being denied a sense of ownership about their own education. No wonder it is difficult to motivate them.
And not every student wants to rush right out of high school and right into college. Vocational schools, internships and other programs provide a path for students with no (current) interest in college. We push a record number of students into college and we have record numbers failing out of the freshmen year. They are left with nothing. They are now adults and the system is done with them. And it has done them in. A life time of "Do you want fries with that." All well and good to say, "Pull yourself up by your boot straps," but that is mostly a superstition and faith than an accurate assessment of human behavior.
The community college system -- which started life as a kind of vocational school system -- is shifting rapidly to an alternative way to do the first two years of a four year program.
Moralizing Schools seem to think they have the right and responsibility to teach a moral code to children. For the most part, this is not necessary and is counterproductive to the real reason for public schools. Kids will, more or less, have the moral codes of their parents and of their local social culture unless pushed by their circumstance to create a substitute code. It's just part of growing up.
But schools set up all sorts of arbitrary rules that are then used to dispense punishments and rewards in an effort to herd them through a series of obstacles in a regimented fashion. Rules that have everything to do with control and little to with education. Rules that often impede education. I think educators need to take an educated look at what lessons arbitrary and capricious rules really provide. Rules like general dress codes are simply harassment to gain conformity. Rules only applied to interrupt a secondary non-proscribed behavior are simply harassment and foster resentment and rebellion.
For instance, teenagers are all about learning social skills. It is a natural part of the adolescent stage of development. (Does not apply all of us, equality. My high school years were mostly spent as a hermit, but it did apply to some small degree, nonetheless.) A student struggling with school work might find they don't have grades high enough to allow them to attend a school dance or play in their team sport. Seems like a good idea, right. It's not. It comes with assumptions. The first and biggest LIE is that a struggling student is willfully performing poorly and the proper application of punishment will turn that around. That just isn't what motivates behavior in human beings. Social Learning Theory concerning behavioral motivators just put the lie to it. It can turn it around if the punishment is strong enough to overcome whatever the real difficulty is. However, the student's motivation to learn and their moral will go right through the floor. In the long run, it won't work. Punishment moves the body in one direction but moves the mind in the other direction. How much more fucking research do we need on that!
Recalcitrance "This is the way we have always done it." The teaching profession is no place for obstructionists and traditionalists. (This is part of the problem in inflexibility.) A teacher that can't engage in a dance with the ups and downs of teen life is doomed to be mediocre at best and damaging at worst. Teens are going to make all sorts of decisions. Some will be good and some will be bad. Teachers that can't or won't be flexible about that are a problem. Also, teachers need to be upfront about motives. A teacher who refuses to take late work might say, "There are deadlines in the real world and the student needs to learn that," but that isn't likely to be the real or only motivation. It is much more likely to be "Late work increases my workload."
That is a better thing to say. Make a deal with students to be mutually considerate -- teacher-student and student-student. Students mostly are not turning in late work, for instance, just to make it harder on the teacher. They are far to self-absorbed to think that many moves ahead. They might be disruptive in class for that reason, though, if they decide the teacher hates them.
Outright lies I have no doubt this is still going on in schools and it pisses me off. As students progress from one level to the next in, say, math, they are given this set of "truths" that often turn out to be less that fully the real truth. (I use math, because I have a couple of clear memories about it. The first was the answer, "You can't do that" to the question "What do you get when if take 5 away from 3?") It is also true, though, in other subjects. Kate's history book is a prime example. So much opinion delivered as fact. History is either a form of cultural anthropology which is all theory and supposition supported by known facts (dates, places and people) or is it JUST dates, places and people. Her book is a series of statements that declare the how and why of what happened. Some of it, the events I lived though, I believe the authors are incorrect in the assumptions. It is also a textbook by committee. (Oh, the holocaust was a couple of paragraphs in the section of world war two.)
Kids are not stupid. They will not forgive and forget. They will grow ever more distrustful of education when fed a series of lies.
Enough for one post.
That is the level playing field. That is what the social justice activists have been struggling to achieve for decades.
In public education, creating a level playing field is more limited. Why? Because in public education there is no scarcity of positions. EVERY CHILD GETS A POSITION in the public schools.
There is still plenty of ways "a level playing field" applies, however. Title IX, for instance. Resources provided to one sex shall be provided to the other sex. However, in public education, a level playing field -- a poor metaphor in public education -- means removing arbitrary barriers to success.
There are plenty of artificial barriers in public education, regardless of the US codes, state codes, state and district policies.
Here are a few of the things that drive me to distraction about public education.
Grading The goal is to have students achieve a defined level of knowledge and, presumably, a measurable level of critical thinking. For instance, the state has standards for a student's ability to read and write that are established by grade level. How does one grow proficient in reading and writing? One reads and writes with guidance and encouragement and not by just ranking them during the course of a year. Ranking the students from most to least successful will be translated by most young children and adolescents as a measure of their value as human beings. Ranking children is a very bad idea.
Grading on a curve Besides my distaste for grading systems, this special case is truly disgusting. First, there are established standards of performance by which a child's progress can be measured. Grading on a curve more or less abandons that standard in favor of measuring a child's progress compared against the progress of the peer group. I can clearly remember the applied pressure to not do too well on exams so as to not ruin the curve for other students. Hell, you either know what you need to know or you don't. The job of a teacher to make sure each and ever student knows what they need to know. Ranking children on a scale that uses the group performance as the standard is ludicrous.
Teachers are prone to curves and grade inflation because it matters in their evaluations. Either way, it does not measure against the standards.
Busy Work Homework has value, there is no denying that. But not all homework is created equal. Some students will struggle to learn certain concepts or skills and others will breeze through those same lessons. Homework that doesn't support the struggling student's understanding of the material or that covers knowledge or skills mastered by other students is busy work. In both cases, it will be work that demoralizes the students. Busy work is assigned to provide the "fair" basis for the ranking process of grades. it is not intended for forward a young person education, but to give an appearance of fairness.
Community Culture Other ways to say this are "school spirit" and school pride." I have always been upset with schools for providing incentives and special privilege to students who "demonstrate" their school pride is designated ways. My real problem with this, though, isn't that there are school functions, like ASB, sports, year book committee, etc., that grant these privileges, but that there is a small (and at Serra, shrinking) pool of these kinds of activities. It is another way of ranking. And what is worse, to my way of thinking, is that it is direct social ranking.
Civil Service There are a few misdeeds that will get a teacher fired, subject to civil service review, within minutes. But general incompetence isn't one of them. It is damn near impossible to fire a teacher for failing his or her students. It is even harder to fire an administrator for failing his or her faculty and staff. Add to this a near total lack of teacher supervision and we have a recipe for disaster. It is down to this: If the parents aren't complaining, the one or two scheduled "observations" are good, and most students pass the standards exams, give the teacher a good review. But parents don't complain when they should. Generally, parents aren't complaining until a lot of damage has been done. Also, the Peter Principle is in full effect in public education. Promote the competent until they stop being competent. A great classroom teacher might be a horrible counselor and a worse administrator. But money follows promotions and not excellence. The teachers unions and the civil service system ensure that "merit pay" is dead on arrival. (it would be very difficult, though, to create a merit pay system that didn't immediately fall prey to favoritism and cronyism.)
Prison Schools This is in small part a reaction to "unsafe schools" and more a function of how schools are funded in California (and maybe the whole country). We don't give schools a fixed amount of money per student (with some fixed minimum). Nope. We give schools money for contact hours. That means the number of hours each and every student is sitting in a classroom. There are some exceptions to missed days, but mostly, the school gets money for having students in their seats. An unexcused absence costs the school state and federal money. BAD IDEA. As an example, Hunter had a college Econ course that met three times a week during first period. What about the other two days? The students were required to be at school in the library. This would be fine if there was a structure for those days, but it was just to get "contact" time even though there was no actual contact happening.
It is difficult to deny that school safety is a current issue. But it has been a current issue for all my life and longer. Prison schools is more a reaction to unreasonable fears than a natural consequence of unsafe conditions. I think prison schools have actually made matters worse.
credentialing Teachers must pass a subject matter test to qualify to teach a given subject. The skills and knowledge to actually teach, on the other hand, is primarily OJT. A year of education classes that are more like the history of public education, the rules and regulations regarding professional conduct (cover your ass course) and a bit of learning theory followed by "student teaching" under the supervision of a working teacher. It is OJT. There is little to no education on dealing with young children or teens. No psychology courses required. No stages of human development. Teachers get to bring their unchecked biases and assumptions right into school with them. Credentialing is a great idea. In practice, it sucks. Also, having a Ph.D. gets an automatic credential. A Ph.D. Nobel Laureate mathematician may or may not be a good teacher. A MFA may or may not be able to teach art to an 8 year-old. A Ph.d. chemist may or may not have a clue how to inspire a bunch of 15 year-olds or to engage their curiosity about the world around them.
Many teachers became teachers because they LOVED school. How in the world, are they qualified to work with kids who are cynical, resigned, and frustrated by their whole experience of school. I'll tell you. For the most part, they aren't qualified. Check the dropout rate and the dropout population. Kids don't dropout because school was so hard they just couldn't cut it.
School size There is plenty of discussion about class size, but very little about the size of the school in total. It is my opinion that the latter is more important than the former. A school with 3, 4, 5 or more thousand students is problematic. It is the size of a small town and it will develop an enduring culture. It is ponderous and difficult to steer. It is BAD news.
It is easy enough for a student in a swarm that size to believe they are just another unimportant drone forgotten by the queen. That student would not be entirely wrong. (There is one large charter school, SPCA, in San Diego at which the kids are known and nobody slips through the cracks.)
The size of schools is a money consideration. Basically it is the cost of land and and the added support costs -- more administrators and offices to house them. We are, once again, trading good practices for reduced cost. And that is always a losing game. It is a downward spiral which requires a complete meltdown in order for meaningful reforms to be enacted.
Class size This is only an issue because we rank children. If we weren't in the business of making education a competition, class size wouldn't be a problem. Plenty of private schools (elementary through post secondary) understand this. The way to make large classes work is to foster cooperation among students. Create small (five students max) groups and mix them up regularly. Those groups do group work. It has worked well for Harvard and Yale. There is a body of research (plenty of it conducted at UCSD) to prove the concept. A hundred students per teacher? Not a problem because peer pressure is working for you rather than against you. It stops being students against the faculty.
Inflexibility Students get treated like products on an assembly line. They have very little say about what is happening in their school life. What decisions they do make are often made without the requisite information to make an informed choice. Parents have only slightly more control. Counselors are woefully under-trained and over worked. Counselor case-load is more critical than class size, but schools have been shedding counselors at an alarming rate in the last 20 years. It is still possible to finish high school in three years. Most people don't know that, but it is possible with the help of summer school (also a dieing concept). That means a student has some options and the student should get to make decisions with guidance but not interference. Students are being denied a sense of ownership about their own education. No wonder it is difficult to motivate them.
And not every student wants to rush right out of high school and right into college. Vocational schools, internships and other programs provide a path for students with no (current) interest in college. We push a record number of students into college and we have record numbers failing out of the freshmen year. They are left with nothing. They are now adults and the system is done with them. And it has done them in. A life time of "Do you want fries with that." All well and good to say, "Pull yourself up by your boot straps," but that is mostly a superstition and faith than an accurate assessment of human behavior.
The community college system -- which started life as a kind of vocational school system -- is shifting rapidly to an alternative way to do the first two years of a four year program.
Moralizing Schools seem to think they have the right and responsibility to teach a moral code to children. For the most part, this is not necessary and is counterproductive to the real reason for public schools. Kids will, more or less, have the moral codes of their parents and of their local social culture unless pushed by their circumstance to create a substitute code. It's just part of growing up.
But schools set up all sorts of arbitrary rules that are then used to dispense punishments and rewards in an effort to herd them through a series of obstacles in a regimented fashion. Rules that have everything to do with control and little to with education. Rules that often impede education. I think educators need to take an educated look at what lessons arbitrary and capricious rules really provide. Rules like general dress codes are simply harassment to gain conformity. Rules only applied to interrupt a secondary non-proscribed behavior are simply harassment and foster resentment and rebellion.
For instance, teenagers are all about learning social skills. It is a natural part of the adolescent stage of development. (Does not apply all of us, equality. My high school years were mostly spent as a hermit, but it did apply to some small degree, nonetheless.) A student struggling with school work might find they don't have grades high enough to allow them to attend a school dance or play in their team sport. Seems like a good idea, right. It's not. It comes with assumptions. The first and biggest LIE is that a struggling student is willfully performing poorly and the proper application of punishment will turn that around. That just isn't what motivates behavior in human beings. Social Learning Theory concerning behavioral motivators just put the lie to it. It can turn it around if the punishment is strong enough to overcome whatever the real difficulty is. However, the student's motivation to learn and their moral will go right through the floor. In the long run, it won't work. Punishment moves the body in one direction but moves the mind in the other direction. How much more fucking research do we need on that!
Recalcitrance "This is the way we have always done it." The teaching profession is no place for obstructionists and traditionalists. (This is part of the problem in inflexibility.) A teacher that can't engage in a dance with the ups and downs of teen life is doomed to be mediocre at best and damaging at worst. Teens are going to make all sorts of decisions. Some will be good and some will be bad. Teachers that can't or won't be flexible about that are a problem. Also, teachers need to be upfront about motives. A teacher who refuses to take late work might say, "There are deadlines in the real world and the student needs to learn that," but that isn't likely to be the real or only motivation. It is much more likely to be "Late work increases my workload."
That is a better thing to say. Make a deal with students to be mutually considerate -- teacher-student and student-student. Students mostly are not turning in late work, for instance, just to make it harder on the teacher. They are far to self-absorbed to think that many moves ahead. They might be disruptive in class for that reason, though, if they decide the teacher hates them.
Outright lies I have no doubt this is still going on in schools and it pisses me off. As students progress from one level to the next in, say, math, they are given this set of "truths" that often turn out to be less that fully the real truth. (I use math, because I have a couple of clear memories about it. The first was the answer, "You can't do that" to the question "What do you get when if take 5 away from 3?") It is also true, though, in other subjects. Kate's history book is a prime example. So much opinion delivered as fact. History is either a form of cultural anthropology which is all theory and supposition supported by known facts (dates, places and people) or is it JUST dates, places and people. Her book is a series of statements that declare the how and why of what happened. Some of it, the events I lived though, I believe the authors are incorrect in the assumptions. It is also a textbook by committee. (Oh, the holocaust was a couple of paragraphs in the section of world war two.)
Kids are not stupid. They will not forgive and forget. They will grow ever more distrustful of education when fed a series of lies.
Enough for one post.
no subject
no subject
Money.
There, I said it. Simultaneously the biggest evil and cure-all in the world.
By the way, I agree with you on virtually all of these points. I differ on the how and why about some, but I agree they're a problem that needs fixed, and probably never will.
Ranking Children
Yes! That is a Good Thing
IF
If the ranking is based on something meaningful.
People will always compare themselves to each other and compete for a higher social rank. Its part and parcel of being human.
If the school doesn't provide some meaningful and relevant metric with which the students can measure themselves and compare to each other, the students will provide their own; That almost certainly means that degenerate social popularity contest.
The old familiar, horrid, destructive, miserable, and useless popularity contest.
Grades don't do this very well, but they are better than nothing.
Schooling != Education
_Greg