I don't doubt for a second that the school systems are letting kids down, at least somewhat. I'm a huge critic of public education, based on bitter experience. On the other hand, schools cannot be expected to produce great results no matter what else is happening in a child's life.
If we were to look at the demographics of these schools, would we find that 99% of the students are black? It matters in this case because there's an epidemic of fatherlessness among American blacks, and it's known to be very detrimental to the development of children. Who knows how much of a role this factor plays, but not mentioning it seems like a doctor not mentioning smoking might be the culprit in a patient's cancer.
If I'm wrong and there's some other more likely smoking gun in this situation, please tell me. I would like to know about it.
Does culture matter?
Most people on Hacker News will breathlessly tell you it does, at least when running a company.
Well how about a community, a school, a neighborhood, a family?
There is a cultural problem, with many layers. 72% of of black children are raised without fathers.
Do people think that might have some impacts on culture, education, discipline, crime, poverty?
To be fair, it's a massive problem (and growing) in latino and non-latino white populations as well. Black populations experienced the issues first, but it's an across-the-board issue for lower middle class and impoverished communities now.
2. Men actually bring some things to family and neighborhood culture. Some people might get offended at this notion, but it's not controversial to say that femininity is wonderful, distinctive, and has special things to offer. But this must also be true of masculinity. I'd argue that men, generally speaking, have different ways to approach the problems you list. This is applying the "diversity makes us better" principle in a place really needing some new ideas and new strength.
What is it exactly about highlighting this disparity so offends people's sensibilities?
Do you think avoiding this aspect in discussion is helpful?
Extreme poverty comes to mind.
However, none of it will magically change all that much unless school system changes fundamentally. As of now, schools with most difficult students get less funding and less experienced overworked teachers. They can not suceed, realistically.
How about poor test results because you are too busy learning and abiding by the complex and demanding rules of the street, out of fear of being shot, to worry about another set of comparatively pointless and inane rules inside the classroom?
And maybe not having a father due to the "War on Drugs" practically relocating entire communities of black men into the prison system?
Or maybe not striving to excel in school because even though you're intelligent, resourceful, caring, etc., you've grown up watching your family and friends get murdered by the police in their own neighborhoods for petty crimes or no crime at all, so you end up feeling the same apathy and hopelessness towards your country that your country feels towards you.
Or here's another one: perhaps the tests are rigged. The news segment in the original link alludes to this towards the end - was anyone on HN able to find the video explaining this?
Do you think this doesn't matter?
You just spelled out exactly why it would...
edit: I don't think the strong argument is "because you're black" but moreso "because you're not growing up in a two parent / married household"
(Correlation is not causation.. but there's quite a bit of correlation)
http://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/marria...
Navon Warren grew up in West Baltimore. He was three months old when his
father was shot to death. Before his 18th birthday, he would lose two uncles
and a classmate, all gunned down on the streets of Baltimore.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/free-or-reduced-price-lu...
Currently, to receive mental health services, parents usually need to initiate these requests by navigating through a bureaucratic maze
Or (speculating whildly on something more complex than I'm representing) maybe they could set up some sort of online videochat therapy so those kids who could afford a £35 android phone and wifi could access therapy from outside school?
> Last year, not one student scored proficient
> in any state testing.
>
> “That’s absurd to me. That’s absurd to me,” says
> Warren’s mother Janel Nelson. “That’s your teachers
> report card, ultimately.”
Children need to be taught to take on more autonomy for their grades and other outcomes in their life. It's okay if they need to be spoon-fed a little bit when they first join a school, but they must be weaned off this if they are to have a chance in the "real world".
No.
You are profoundly misunderstanding the situation these kids are in. This isn't happening because these kids are getting "spoon-fed" at school or at home.
Having lived in Baltimore and seen the home life of youth, I can tell you that you would not even believe the appalling, multifaceted dysfunction that is rampant in poor urban neighborhoods.
> Having lived in Baltimore and seen the home life of
> youth, I can tell you that you would not even
> believe the appalling, multifaceted dysfunction
> that is rampant in poor urban neighborhoods.
For context, my position on this come from the UK education system. My fiancé has worked as a teacher in poor urban neighborhoods in London (Hackney, etc.) for several years so I hear a huge amount about the politics of working in a school and the relationship between teachers and children. I've also spoken to a lot of her teacher friends about this, and what I've said is more-or-less verbatim what they tell me. 'Spoon-fed' was the literal word someone used to describe teaching in an inner London school to me last night.
Baltimore and the United States might be completely different, and I would love to hear your experience on this and whether you have teacher friends there?
Additionally, you should read "The Achievement Gap Isn't About Teachers" [0]. As it points out "there’s just not good evidence that the gap in teacher quality between low-income and high-income schools even exists."
[0] https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/no-the-achievem...
I wasn't saying you should blame the students: all schools should teach children to take charge of their education and future. This often doesn't happen.
In this case, the natural response will be for the school system to put pressure onto the teachers. This will cause them to leave. The children will then be educated by supply teachers, and the school will have to recruit new teachers into a highly disruptive environment.
This process already happens without the additional press. Often an excellent teacher can move to a school with more classroom disruption and find that they're unable to get through half of the materials that they prepare. This is frustrating.
It's easy to understand why teachers leave schools like this. They remember the schools in which they got kids from low grades to high grades and had the peace in mind to do creative lessons. It's upsetting to be in a situation in which you can't get control of the classroom, are constantly 'ragged on' to work harder, and are held completely responsible for the results of students who make no attempt at all to take part in the lessons you prepare.
I was the founding math teacher at a brand new turnaround school with a rookie principal. I had 5 weeks of training, and my job my first year was to prepare my students for the very same state test mentioned in this article. To connect that with the typical HN world, I was literally a day 1 employee at a startup meant to replace an institution that had failed in more or less the exact same situation. Despite the intensity of the experience, it was deeply transformative for me.
To briefly react to this article, I am not surprised. Baltimore is a poor and segregated city. But that socioeconomic stratum has many layers. There are many ways to end up at a better school. Some are selective, others are high demand and have a lottery, still others you simply sign up for. So you need to have good academic performance or have someone looking out with you with even just the modicum of savvy required to simply opt for a better school. If you have neither of those things, you end up going to your default neighborhood school (e.g. any of those 6 mentioned in the article), which is certain to be completely swamped with students coming from deep poverty and social dislocation. These are schools that tend to have the same number of 9th graders as 10th, 11th, and 12th combined, due drop outs and transfers.
I'd be happy to answer any questions.
----
I journaled my experience here: https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc.
Another Teach For America Baltimore alumnus wrote a book on her experience. I found it to echo many of my own reflections, almost eerily so: https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Terrordome-Years-Baltimore-A....
One of the schools mentioned, Fredrick Douglass High, has a deep history, and its modern day woes were profiled about a decade ago in the HBO documentary Hard Times At Douglass High: http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/hard-times-at-douglass-high....
The real day-to-day experience was much more mundane and psychologically draining over the long grind of the school year, punctuated by sporadic crises and constant minor disruptions. It's an unbelievable amount of work to buy supplies, plan lessons, physically maintain your classroom, perform your material, engage those students, respond to the dynamism of hormonal teenagers, resolve conflicts, grade work, help administer the school, coach, conference with your colleagues, and follow-up with parents. Somewhere in there, you maybe get attend to your own physical needs. And no matter how badly you fuck up, you wake up at 6am to do it all again the next day, and the next.
The challenges you face are manifold. I had a student arrive that spoke zero English. I had students who were refugees from Iraq, one of whom survived a school bombing. I had multiple students return after stints in the justice system. I had one student who lost his cousin, aunt, and grandma all in one day in a fire. I had a 14 year who had never learned subtraction. I had students with deep psychological issues, including one I believe (unprofessional) to be a sociopath. I had one student quietly stay after class to ask me if he could have one of my soups for lunch, since he hadn't eaten all weekend. I had to report one student's account of sexual abuse. I had students in rival gangs, and far worse, students who were gang wannabes. This is just what I remember off the top of my head, year's later.
Put 25 or so students of these students in a room, and you never know what's going to happen in a given class period. The class, like a sports team, succeeds or fails as a unit. Many of these students come from home lives and neighborhoods where the idea of education lifting them out of poverty is demonstrably a total myth. You need to convince them that their whole experience is false, and get them to buy into the idea that solving for x is worth a damn.
That's what it's like.
Not sure if you're a sports person, but imagine if the NBA had a franchise that was never to participate in the draft at all, and everyone kept asking why they never made the playoffs.
Joking aside, I believe the answer is to reframe the question and ask what society can do. The core problem is that nearly all of our efforts to fight poverty are designed in such a way that the less poor you are, the more you're able to benefit. I believe we need to shift our methods to prioritize the people with the deepest need, at every level.
In such a society, schools like these, which catch by far the most challenging demographics, would be by far the best resourced. The goal would be to rehabilitate these most challenged students to decreasing levels of intervention over time.
Shut them down. Seriously. If you are failing this terribly, the very least you owe taxpayers and the poor kids and parents associated with those schools is honesty. Not spin. Not statistical bullshit. Honesty. Shut the damned schools down. The resources we are allocating there are actively working against the public interest.
I'm sure the cries will come out "What to do with these at-risk kids?"
That's a great question, and folks can have a wonderful public discussion about that. Unfortunately, that discussion gets into winners and losers -- various interests have various goals that they want to achieve.
So let's separate that out, put it aside for a few months. For now, close them down. Immediately. Try some brutal honesty and see if it doesn't move the dial forward a little bit.
In my view, the problem is that every kid is guaranteed a chance to attend school. This is even written into some state constitutions. Thus all of the schools are joined together at the hip, even if they don't want to be. The higher functioning schools depend on selective admissions and operating at near capacity, which in turn requires the government to operate last-resort schools.
This is a continuous government bail-out of the selective schools. So you can't just shut it down because the successful kids need it. In fact, periodic or continuous government bail-outs are probably a feature of any attempt to privatize what is necessarily a public good, such as health care and possibly air travel.
I'd prefer a return to totally public education and more intensive efforts to battle poverty and segregation. But a possible measure for eliminating the last-resort schools would be to take the kids who can't get into any school, and assign them to schools at random, then let the successful schools figure out how to deal with them.
The problem I was trying to address in my comment was organizational inertia. If you have scores of people in a big building creating their own system of doing things, it becomes impossible to change those ways. It's not a matter of policy, philosophy, or whatnot. It's simply the way large groups of people operate.
You might be able to take those same teachers and administrators, put them in tents in a park next door, and have vastly-improved results. Or not. Whatever your philosophy of "how to do good school", if it's not working in a particular instance, you have to deal with the organizational inertia first and foremost no matter how you'd like the rest of the game to play out.
We've invested tens of millions of dollars into each of these institutions. They are not meeting up to the reason for their existence.
Feeding kids, providing a place for them to play sports, and so on? Sounds like we may actually be doing that. Ok, so keep the buildings and fund them to achieve that purpose and that purpose only. Then, immediately afterwards, begin a discussion about education which is separate from the concerns you outline.
The goal here isn't some temper tantrum to punish kids. The goal here is actually being honest about what we are doing and why. If we're honest, we might have a way forward. If we keep up the political bickering, we never will. And the kids will continue to suffer.
Looks OK to me, for an 18 year old. Nothing on integration/differentiation or imaginary numbers, and the use of matrices doesn't really show why they're useful - but that stuff can be covered in the first year of college.
--------------------------------------------- Look at the pattern below.
2.6, −5.2, 10.4, −20.8, . . .
If this pattern continues, what is the sixth term? -------------------------------------------------------
which sound like a bad IQ test where any answer is valid but you need to guess what test designer had in mind that evening.
Probably because they had a checklist of "competencies" and tried to separately test each of them.
Sorry. No matter the shape of their bell curve, the article is sensationalist and cannot possibly be correct. What's their source? How can such an absurd fact be so?
Edit: I thought proficient meant "competent" (one of the definitions). According to the article, "Just one student approached expectations and scored a three." whereas 4 and 5 on the 5-point scale were deemed "proficient.". However, I still have trouble believing it. This includes graduates. At Frederick Douglas, just one of the schools surveyed, "half the students graduate and just a few dozen will go to college". Apparently we are to believe that among all these schools, with all its graduates, and all its college attendees, not 1 student scored a 4/5 in English and Math. That's not how bell curves work.
Out of 150 college-bound students, you believe that exactly 0 had a 4 out of 5 in both math and English?
We are not talking about generalities or averages here. The article makes the extraordinary claim of "exactly 0." This is simply an extraordinary claim. Like saying nobody is over 6 feet tall in an American city of a population of 500,000. I mean sure, the average could be lower - but not one?
Since you seem to know a bit more about Baltimore, could you expand on the reason for this extraordinary fact?
Maybe it is a statistical anomaly based on the total number of high schools and middle schools, that 6 should happen not to have any students with an over 4 in math and English. Plus I note that they say math and English. Perhaps if they said "math or English" they would have.
So it definitely seems a bit fishy to me.
http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index...
The article indicates they're primarily talking about high schools (and one middle school). I'd suspect that the testing questions are not too far removed from the HSA (High School Assessment) tests of prior years. The HSA used to be a required test you had to pass to graduate in Maryland high schools (I believe they've changed to a new testing platform in recent years, to something called PARCC).
If you click on the following link, then click on the "What does HSA look like?" tab, then scroll down for Algebra for 2009.
http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index...