The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.
The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.
> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as...
> Our recent report, “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,” [1] concluded that, on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.
> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.
Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.
I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.
Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.
Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.
If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores.
Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. You’ll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.
I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead.
Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.
We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job.
The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers.
The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs.
The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote.
You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.
Its exactly what I'd expect if tecahers were underpaid but most switches from other jobs into teaching were from jobs taken as a student pre-qualification for entry-level teaching jobs and most switches out were post-retirement-from teaching “have something productive to do” jobs.
Meanwhile my anecdotal rebuttal is I graduated with 6 folks who went into teaching. All 6 left to do other things and within 5 years were making more than they would have at the end of a 30 year teaching career.
"We just need better teachers" says a group composed of people who are entirely sure the profession is beneath them.
I agree. I have a friend that took a lower paying job because he could not stand the handcuffs that the administration placed on teachers. Stuff like you have to give people a 50% if they put their name on the paper, you can't discipline students effectively, etc. I also know many teachers at private schools that make less than the public school counterparts but would not switch due to similar reasons.
[0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-..., the US starts out below the bar for tertiary-educated workers and gets even lower
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
Gotta appreciate the irony of this statement. The Idiot Tribe are victims of The System, not driving it. They are not my enemy.
Ultimately, teachers alone can't solve the problem. As seen in both poor white rural schools and poor non-white urban schools alike, if the parents don't care about schooling or enforcing any discipline at home, there will be significant problems at school.
And there are 2.5 months in the summer for r&r or for working additional jobs [3]. You need two wage earners to be solidly middle class, but this is not a "grossly underpaid" profession. For comparison, a university engineering professor salary in Netherlands starts at 65k euros ($77k).
Bottomline: teaching is not going to make you rich but you aren't grossly underpaid.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_211.60.a... [2] https://www.teacherpensions.org/states [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2019/07/11/tea...
Naturally, statement like that usually then gets attacked as 'but not enough'. Based on results alone, CPS teachers are actually paid too much.
Teachers are well paid in Canada, and in many Canadian mid sized cities a teacher with 10 years experience will make more than a software developer with similar years experience. Additionally they have a strong pension, and incredible job stability.
e.g. A teacher in Saskatoon would make about $92K with 10 years experience with a defined benefit pension, and 2 months off in the summer.
It is tougher for teachers in high COL cities like Toronto and Vancouver as they make roughly the same as they do in the rest of the country. (But similarly a Vancouver software developer doesn't get a USA west coast salary)
Source: My wife teaches, and I write software!
I feel that the main issue is that the wrong things are being taught. How about things like personal finance, basic mechanical and electrical skills (like for DIY repairs), and logic or philosophy of argument classes? It would also be good to teach the basics of civics since a substantial portion of the population can't pass the citizenship test.
But something being required and something being preserved is very different. It's very normal to lose a lot of that knowledge after a couple years so if your goal is they pass a civics test/know basic finance it'll probably continue to fail even with all states requiring it.
I think the meme about teachers being underpaid is mostly unuseful in conversations like these.
Second the pay also usually includes retirement benefits that can pay you 100% off your salary after 30 years. This is hard to compare to private industry since 401ks have replaced pensions. This is probably worth 2-5m when mature, and is accounted for in their pay. I think this is the biggest issue, since private employers pay higher expecting you to invest in your retirement.
Benefits are also usually good with small if any employee contribution. Probably worth a few hundred dollars a month.
It’s almost impossible to lose your job teaching. It has a factor of security that does not exist in private industry.
Pay raises are automatic. Primarily it’s based on years of service and level of education.
I’ve run the numbers previously and it starts seeming fairer, but due to the retirement impact it makes buying a home in the Bay Area almost impossible.
In my state, older teachers get these, but newer teachers including some of my friends have been cut out of them and need to invest in a 401k like other job. Their wages are also much lower, around 35k/year to start with, peanuts when you consider that they take work home every night and weekend (correcting homework and lesson planning are mostly done on their own time).
Why do you think you need to be a teacher to direct how our schools are run?
Seems technocratic and anti-democratic.
The same way we have civilian control of the military, we should have civilian control of our schools.
Did you know in the UK there is actually a structure called governors to ensure that schools are being directed by the community, not by education insiders?
It would be enough to have have the top brass of education elected. You can even make the curriculum part of election campaigns.
That’s roughly what my 32 year old accountant wife gets, and they get nearly 3 months vacation a year and much better benefits and retirement stuff than she does. Considering I know more people that have gone in to the teaching profession than anything else, that seems more than fair.
Also, a lot of those older teachers that I looked up would have been fired from any other job if their performance was the same. I’d only be ok with a massive increase in teacher pay if teacher’s unions were abolished. The only firings that have happened to tenured teachers here in the past 20 years have been for sexual misconduct.
Federal representative
Provincial representative
Municipal representative
Mayor
School board trustee.
The PM? Head of the party with the most seats. Same with provincial premiere. Judges, crown attorneys, controllers, senators, the governor general, etc? Those are all appointed by our elected representatives.
A central ethos of Canadian governance is that our representatives are there to make decisions and bouncing questions to the public is a tool of last resort.
With that on mind, why the hell do we have elected school boards? We have a provincial ministry that runs education. We have municipalities that manage land-use.
Voters are basically flying blind in trustee elections. There are no debates, no media coverage, no political parties, just a list of names. If they don't happen by your doorstep, you don't get to know who these people are... And even if they do, you've only got their word to go on.
Ax this anachronistic institution and let the education policy professionals within the state/provincial government and school boards do their jobs.
Any perspective how these things work in countries that have a well-regarded, high performing education system, like Finland (apart from having well-trained, highly regarded, and highly trained teachers with a large degree of autonomy)?
The school system is a failing monopoly that should be broken up.
Money Follows the Person (MFP) Rebalancing Demonstration is part of a comprehensive, coordinated strategy to assist U.S. states, in collaboration with stakeholders, to make widespread changes to their long-term care support systems. This initiative will assist states in their efforts to reduce their reliance on institutional care, while developing community-based long-term care opportunities, enabling the elderly and people with disabilities to fully participate in their communities.
The solution is to get rid of the monopolistic education system which is prone to imbalances and subpar results.
Charter schools/private school/school choice. Recruit the best teacher, pay the best salaries, achieve the best educational outcomes.
No wonder the educational system looks like it does given the incentives at play.
School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well. However, it'll be a rising ship, which raises all boats IMO. You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.
...funding them, equitably. Simple as that. Public school funding is derived from local property taxes, so rich areas have good schools and poor areas are just boned.
Invest in schools and good education results. Look at the States in the 60s and 70s! California was #1 in the nation. Prop 13 passes, capping property taxes (and thus school funding), and now it's at the bottom of the heap. It's not hard to draw the line between inputs and outputs here.
Vouchers will only further weaken our already-starved public education system.
How does school choice allow for increased teacher wages? Presumably they get the same per-student funding.
When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in?
> You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.
Shutting down schools is highly disruptive for students currently attending that school. Seems preferable to intervene and improve failing schools before it gets to the point of shutting them down.
I'm not convinced school choice improves results for students overall. The easiest way for a school to improve its results are by attracting parents who are highly invested in their child's education. Those whose parents don't have the knowledge to work the system or the time to transport their children across town for school every day are less likely to apply.
The problem with this solution is that there is barely enough interest in most places to fill a board when almost everybody is eligible. I've been married to a school board-er. It's a thankless job, far more thankless than being a teacher, which is a job with an actual salary and very good job safety.
Most typically administration != board. An elected or appointed board will be made up of politicians, who can also class members of parents, teachers, community members, all of the aforementioned, etc.
Expecting a board to be entirely made up of people who have served in the organization's service delivery doesn't make sense. Would you expect a police board to be entirely made up of cops? There is an inherent conflict of interest.
Like electing judges and sheriffs, this seems to be a peculiarly American thing. Most other countries appoint professionals to manage their education systems, and for good reason.
The formative years age just that. Disrupt that significantly, and the individual is forever lacking. Society needs people in all roles, we'd die of plagues, and disease from vermin, without garbage pickup. Incredibly vital, that job is.
Yet who will create new vaccines, new tech to clean up the planet, get mining and resource production into space, and more? Only those with certain genetic gifts, but the "feel goods" want to believe everyone is identical.
Equality is not this. Equality comes from things like providing access ramps for those who cannot climb stairs, providing tools for those to make the best of what they have.
You don't "pull down" people to make equality, you lift up people. And this means that you see who needs help, and give it.
And you can't do that of you pretend everyone is the same.
As a side note, plumbers, electricians, those working in construction, arborists, on and on, there are many very comfortable, well paying jobs open to those without advanced science, math, language skills.
In my public school, both at grade and high school levels, we had shop class, and in high school, auto, electrical wiring, art, A/V, environmental science (farming), and more. There was something for everyone to excel in, and I took most of these, on top of advanced sciences/math, for fun, for the sheer sake of knowledge.
Don't remove potential, instead, seek how to enable every child's capabilities.
Lift up, don't pull down.
Let me fix that for you - get rid of government schools, let anyone teach.
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/
There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions.
Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.)
I find this situation baffling.
If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam
> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout.
I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.
I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.
I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.
All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.
If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.
We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'.
HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported.
My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed.
Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc..
The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book!
Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.
Just make the grading period 6 or 9 weeks instead of a "semester".
To be fair, I've never heard of a school that didn't do that. Is this a San Francisco thing?
And, to be 100% fair, if I were teaching this year, I would probably not want to fail anyone, even if I really felt they deserved it.
If you're in my class in person, I can control the environment (mostly). I'll take responsibility if you need to be failed.
However, I wouldn't have taken responsibility for anything this past year given the total chaos and complete lack of support from the school systems.
For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C.
This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself?
So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time.
In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago.
The ultimate kicker was that the following year after the Algebra II disaster, the state changed the grade scale so the grade I received would have been a B. But the old grades were not retroactively recalculated.
There is a good argument to be made that minimum grades are a joke and an affront to teaching, but I would argue that grades in general are bullshit and frequently are not indicative of whether a person has mastered anything. There is a reason many of the best private (not to mention Montessori schools) don’t emphasize grades or tests. Equally, there is a reason that the Montessori and related methods doesn’t scale in the way that US public school systems need to scale.
One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation.
For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school).
They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming.
Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up.
Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.
This seems achievable by the 8th grade.
I really doubt high school helps with this.
Wow, I had never read that before:
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
This really captures so much of the current thinking around "equity".
Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system.
*or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
It’s been ruled that it’s better that all students get to 20-80% knowledge then some get 100% and some get 0%.
Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.
Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools available to top set comprehensive school kids.
It is wrong that children get educations that don't really make the most of their brains because they have parents that couldn't afford it.
Also, I think the sociological benefits of having pupils from all backgrounds occupying the same space and learning from each other as opposed to being segregated is extremely important.
So many of the rich people in charge of the country have absolutely no understanding of poverty because they have not had the opportunity to grow up around it.
Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.
Though I do agree that we should focus on the chance of turning it around. Students who score poorly early on and then score well later should be extra rewarded, not held down by their past performance.
Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.
Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.
I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.
I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.
:Continued below:
Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot.
It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
It is also bad recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who are neurotypical white privileged background kids.
I went to pretty good primary and secondary schools which actually tried to get the best out of pretty much everyone. Remedial teaching was taken seriously and wasn't just a bin into which difficult children were dumped. But even then the results left a lot to be desired. It's really difficult even in the absence of political interference.
The surrounding society makes a big difference. I count myself as lucky growing up where and when I did.
But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids?
The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.
You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
Schools were only given incentives to make kids pass, not to help them excel.
Schools need resources for both kinds of students, and if they have to choose who gets the attention they are simply underfunded.
They either have learning disabilities or difficult family/social situations that lead them to either not try or not care about school.
To say that teachers should put less effort into these kids due to "low ROI" is frankly very privileged.
Schools do very little to help these kids. There are ways to teach low-performers efficiently (they go under the general rubric of "direct instruction") but they go unused simply because teachers do not want to feel regimented in such a rigid structure, even if that's exactly what yields the best outcomes. (So, I'd definitely disagree with GP that "this segment is by its nature low ROI". It's not 'natural', it's pure dysfunction.)
We should definitely take care of them as a society built on solidarity, but we can be efficient about it too.
This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? I know that was the attitude of the schools of yesteryear - but they were wrong.
There are lots of reasons for remedial classes: Dyslexia, for example. A kid might have anxiety issues that make finishing homework near impossible: ADHD is a real thing that folks struggle with. All of these can be worked through - but back in history, they would be sent away to rot. Lots of them are bright kids, and a fair number of them can be a future surgeon or researcher.
You injected the words "learning disability". That's not that OP said.
It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.
Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now.
Let me guess, your kids definitely fall into the future researcher category, don't they? Just imagine, these other kids have parents too!
Teachers are not parents. They have limited time and resources to devote to a specified area of instruction divided amongst a number of students. Some parents are extreme failures in their responsibility which performs the greatest disservice to a child. This is how I ended up with a foster child with emotional trauma. Teachers must not be expected to perform the job of a parent just because some parents are so horribly bad at being parents.
Results?
The kids who were failing still failed because no matter how much teachers do, it's still up to them to study.
The US attracts talent whether they were educated here or not. The US got to that place with poor schools while only heterosexual cisgender men were working. While the rest of the marginalized population was a drag on society and its security as they fought for scraps. The US becoming more inclusive in all facets amplifies its society much more, it doesnt mean turning any troubled youth into a surgeon or researcher. It means giving them a baseline to be productive at all.
If you want your child to be doing something else, look elsewhere.
Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.
As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and private system.
Another thing to consider would be the population differences. The US has ~65 times more people than Finland. In this larger group of people there will be Finland sized subgroups that outperform and underperform Finland even though the US as a whole underperforms.
Massachusetts, for example, one of two states in the US to perform and report their own PISA numbers, is pretty comparable to Finland in 2015 (1 or 2 points above or below on scores of ~500 for science and reading and 11 points below on math)[3]. I couldn't find the official OECD results for 2018, but I believe Massachusetts is slightly ahead by then.
1 - https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/education/
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia
3 - https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States-MA.pdf
What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.
The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.
The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.
It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal
This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually it’s a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
So you've got "good" ones and "bad" ones depending on the neighborhood. So, yes, the best high schools are public, in areas with high rents and property prices.
Additionally, the best high schools select their students on academics, proof of residence, cover letter, letters from former teachers, etc. [1]
I don't think voting homeowner retirees sitting on fat Prop 13 tax cuts are going to change their tune because their grandkids can't go to private school.
There’s no budget shortage. There’s a mis use of funds. If you throw more money into the system we’ll just see even crazier pension packages and administration staff overheads.
From a systems point of view though - why would businesses move to SF if it meant bad schools? The answer right now is because the leadership can opt out and go into the private system, but if that wasn't the case, I think there would be a lot of incentive on the city to fix these problems.
Then we would have a direct way for parents to improve the schools their kids attend.
Things are usually not solved by making things worse for everyone.
Instead, the solution, to most problems, is to try to help more people, instead of trying to stop others from being too good at educating their children.
If you ban private schools, people will “group homeschool”. If you ban homeschooling, parents can pack cigarettes in their kid’s lunch sack until they are sent to continuation school where attendance isn’t required. Then the child is free to attend a “group tutoring academy”.
The solution is to make public education easier to reform by the members of the community.
There are still huge discrepancies across public schools.
We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school.
Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.
All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school.
Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my experience.
At the same time, we should decrease how many hours parents have to work each week (40 to 30?) so that they can actually engage with their kids.
That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.
If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.
NAEP scores have been more or less flat among 17 year olds since 1970. During that period inflation adjusted spending per pupil almost tripled.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf
> The 0.075 figure reported here suggests that there is essentially no link between state education spending (which has exploded) and the performance of students at the end of high school (which has generally stagnated or declined).
If you had a choice between:
a. doing your job as well as you can, then losing it (and being unemployable forever, quite likely);
b. doing it somewhat worse, but keeping it (and hopefully having a chance to help more students).
What would you do?
Please blame whoever forced this conundrum on teachers. Nonsensical bureaucratic decisions like this are the reason for which I left the profession.
I don't know. What does this have to do with keeping teacher's jobs and not improving learning? Late start is, as far as "clinical outcomes" can be measured in education, like, the cheapest win there is.
That is simply the top priority of most employees.
I’m not saying they’re right to just pass everyone, but it might not be purely selfish on the part of administrators.
"Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021-22 reflects the significant allocation of one-time federal funds in 2020-21."
[0]: www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Education.pdf
> consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes
US-International keyboard layout, maybe. Maybe the student doesn't know what umlauts and acute accents are, so maybe they think they're valid equivalents to " and '.
Sounds like another MacOS "why not use random unicode characters that look similar to the one you really want" feature to me.
letter+quotation mark is a common way to write umlauts...
>I don’t know how this happens— I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect.
Look at the Spanish Mexican keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/KBDLA/
It has the umlaut (actually diaeresis in a Spanish context I think) and acute accent mark pretty prominently available.
Look at the Spanish Spain keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/kbdsp
It has them even more prominently available, right on the same key that an English American keyboard would have the single and double quote.
I wonder whether the students' families are from Spain or Mexico, and whether they're using the Spain vs the Mexico keyboard. I wonder how many people from Mexico use the Spain keyboard due to software confusion.
Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized.
I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.
I eventually gave up and just accepted the typos.
Motivate the kids. Show them stuff about the world, and show them how to find out things for themselves. If you're going to test them, do it in a way that doesn't destroy all enjoyment of the subject. Try to get the kids to want to keep learning after they leave you.
> .. The emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types. ... my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most, which quite literally would have meant putting students who had signed up for Advanced Placement into a remedial course
My brother in particular is desperately trying to get out of public education. He loves teaching, but they are making it impossible for anyone to do their jobs effectively. Pay is shit, especially since work practically doubled overnight, and you get virtually zero control over the curriculum or policies in your classroom.
Then, at the end of the day, some entitled shithead of a parent thinks their little snowflake was dealt a bad hand and parent-teacher conferences ensue which further sap whatever life force remains.
After hearing about all of this stuff over the years, I cant help but feel incredibly grateful that I have the kind of career that I do. Public education has been turned into a protracted daycare experience with the sole objective of piping the students into a college debt lifestyle.
I mean, even skipping the moral horror here, it's not even true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
But HN... wants it to be true? What the actual fuck, people?
Back then private schools were generally regarded as lower quality because of the incentive to keep the parents happy with their "educational product".
There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.
And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.
Even if the in person classes are easy to pass, the AP scores should be consistent with the rest of the country and should make identifying the relative difficulty between schools pretty easy? ACT and SAT should also make grade inflated school very easily to spot.
I think California has a rule requiring that at least X% of their students are from California right? Has that shifted the balance at CA to accepting lower quality students from their own state?
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
The teacher is basically like "haha dumb kids, we know you're cheating" and "if only we could punish students more!". There's a lot of "the smart kids are suffering because of the dumb kids" attitude here that I find disgusting.
> That too was in keeping with a theme. The teacher email I mentioned above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types.
Oh god, how awful that these students won't get to suffer through some idiot's assignment that I'm sure would greatly better their life.
There's a lot wrong with school but I feel like this teacher doesn't realize that they're a part of that.
> Wow, a 100% pass rate! What a successful school!
Yes, it's cheating. They have an incentive, as your students do, to 'pass', and so they cheat.
Give students a place to be during the day while their parents work. Give them real, meaningful incentives that matter to young people - money, freedom, social structure, a feeling of productivity - and align those with learning real, practical skills, like how to read, write, analyze context, etc.
Hire non-idiots, pay them more, reduce class sizes. Yeah it'll cost more, but the obvious economic benefits will offset that. I can count on one hand how many teachers I had that I respected - the rest were obvious failures.
Give parents a voucher, as good as cash, for their child and let them choose the school.
Private companies will compete for those vouchers, aligning focus on satisfying the parents and the children, rather than the government.
It doesn't make sense to me that a whole nation skips math (unless you take math A-levels).
I talked to a professor and he explained UGRADs are below level, but then when starting grad school they force everyone up to international level. He showed me a huge room with grad student desks and was like "look, we don't let them get out of here until they learn math properly."
I think that OP is misconstruing the reasons behind this notification requirement. This notification has to do more with a "cover your ass" policy than lowering expectations for seniors.
The California Education code [1] requires school districts to develop procedures to notify parents of a failing grade. All the CA districts that I worked for had some procedures in place for when and how notify families of failing grades in response to this law. From a quick search, it seems that SFUSD policies 4.2.5 [2] and 4.2.6 apply in this case. The policy clearly states that teachers have to notify parents of grades either 1 or 2 times during the semester (i.e., mid-semester report cards-if you went to school in CA you will remember receiving those).
It seems that OP's school was on a 9-week reporting period, requiring teachers to notify parents of grades mid-semester and that their school added a requirement of filling out an additional form outlining that the student was in danger of failing the class specifically for seniors (probably because most families stopped looking at report cards for seniors). This form is required to be in compliance with the CA ed code as parents have the right to appeal failing grades and not being notified is probably an enough reason for the district to change a failing grade to a passing one in case of a lawsuit/complaint.
I would imagine that failing a class is more "high stakes" for seniors than other students, so they have more paperwork involved for seniors if you want to fail them. Families might be more "litigious" if a student ends up failing a class required for graduation. It is simpler to complain to the board/suing that having to repeat a school year.
The bottom line is that the CA ed code gives teachers final say in grades and even the superintendent cannot change a grade without the teacher's consent. On the other hand, the CA ed code gives some rights to parents to appeal grades and has some notifications guidelines so they shouldn't be surprised of failing grades. OP will be able to fail as many seniors as they want, but they just have to notify their families that they are in danger of failing the class at some point before the end of the semester. At the end of the day, if they have enough evidence for failing a student (that would stand up during a public board meeting/lawsuit), notifying the student's family 9 weeks before the end of the semester shouldn't be too much of a burden.
Links:
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio.... [2]: ]https://www.sfusd.edu/services/know-your-rights/student-fami...
If this were the reason for the new forms, why would the school only have teachers fill out the form if the student were guaranteed to fail? I'd think the schools would go the opposite direction and make sure to notify all parents whose kids might fail.
It's my perception that adults involved with schools, especially younger grades, have been penetrated so intensely by woke ideology[1], much more so than the broader subcultures (urban, educated, etc) they belong to that already skew woke. Is this just down to how skewed female this group is?
[1] I mean this neutrally, not as a particular criticism of wokeness or the manner in which it penetrates communities. When thinking about large groups of people, modeling ideologies as memetic viruses moving through a population is a lot more sensible than as emergent entities from the rational decisions of large numbers of intelligent, thoughtful people capable of critical thinking.
I don't know what group you're trying to capture by saying this. You mean the parents as well as the school employees?
>Is this just down to how skewed female this group is?
No I think it has to do with how young both the parents and the teachers are. Someone who is 40 years old today is right on the cusp of being a millennial.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X1878563...
Hell, voucher programs have been shown to lower academic attainment. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21839
If people really wanted to improve educational outcomes, UBI might actually do the most good. The situation at home matters a lot, and it shows up in the data.
> ...students use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes
Those students figured out a way around the plagiarism detection.
It's like generational differences are a new thing, do people really think your teacher back in the day thought progressive educational practices were effective. I mean capital punishment really worked wonders.
It appears that they still haven't caught up.
Next, there's the discipline issue. Yes, they stopped suspending kids in a lot of places because they realized those kids would just be left alone at home all day, and the only reason those kids were at school at all was because it was in some way convenient for their parents.
Finally, there's the homework issue. Yes, homeless is pointless busy work. If something is worth learning, make sure you block off enough time during classroom hours to teach it, otherwise most kids aren't going to learn it at all. Yes, the students are overwhelmed.
We have millions of kids that are from completely broken homes, basic needs like food and housing aren't met, and this person is complaining about book reports? Society is broken.
All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can't afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those "single student who struggled most", will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn't even pass city college's math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn't even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.
SF schools went to all-remote education starting in March 2020 and by the end of the 2020-2021 school year, did not yet return for in-person instruction. The effect on children's education has been devastating. [0]
The teacher's union refused to entertain in-person teaching even though SF has reportedly reached herd immunity as of May 2021. Negotiations have yielded almost no progress and well-meaning high-earning parents dedicated to the public school system have been stymied despite organizing as a group. [1]
As a former college professor, I understand low wages are a problem for most teachers. Even as a tenure-track professor, my salary in 2009 was less than 50% of what I was (and am) able to command as a front-end developer in the Bay Area.
Teaching K-12 in public schools in the US is difficult. There are nigh insurmountable problems which, in my opinion, are the product of so few financial resources dedicated to the project of educating children in the US.
The behavioral problems less-endowed schools encounter among their students is an outgrowth of poor funding and poverty economics.
Public school education in wealthy communities (famously Stuyvesant High School [2]) is a different story altogether.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/opinion/remote-learning-f...
Hilarious.
I was in college, working on a take-home excel sheet for an accounting class. I was struggling with some of it, so I did my best and filled in the parts I knew and some I could guess at. I wasn't too worried about it because the rest of my grades in that class were good. The professor called me in for a meeting and accused me of cheating because the total column happened to be correct but only some of the inputs were incorrect. I was actually scared I might get expelled for cheating, when I was just following my prior teachers' advice (and basic logic) to guess when not sure.
As they told us repeatedly, it's a privilege to be here. Although they had the option to boot us out, no one was, and only one guy bailed out of 50.
What educational outcome do these groups expect?
I think the underlying theme is that the parents themselves are overwhelmed and the schools that were ill-equipped to handle education before COVID-19 are crumbling.
If I take this report at face value (which, frankly, I'm tempted to), it paints an even more broken image of the American school system than the dumpster fire I had on my wall already.
Administrators multiply like rabbits and obtain higher salaries, teachers unions prevent the firing of bad teachers, and politicians just go along with whatever items powerful special interests demand.
We should dissolve all public schools in their current form at a specific predetermined time, and have new educational institutions built. Then we should set up a recurring mechanism to dissolve completely the existing institution to allow for new innovations.
Maybe we should redefine public education to be a bit more exclusive, and not shame those that aren’t on a college track into pursuing mentally challenging work for which we are unfit. Give kids the money that would be spent on their education (loosely defined) and let them invest it, or spend on vocational training or seed money to start their own small business. Too much focus on producing som eidetic notion of the educated individual. People don’t wind up homeless because they weren’t exposed to Shakespeare. Some people will be lucky to attain enough basic skill to stay afloat. If such a person is able to fool plagiarism software, maybe that’s something to celebrate.
Thought yes but after the nobody can get below 50% part I’m less sure
