7 ms·

Big Ideas That Don't Work in Education

79 points by tokenadult 11y ago

tokenadult 11y ago
I can't remember which of my Facebook friends the other day recommended this article, but I'm glad I read it. I read John Hattie's book Visible Learning a few years ago on the recommendation of a school board candidate (who succeeded in getting elected) in my local public school district. As an observer of my children's learning in the local public high school (I have mostly been a homeschooler, but my second son and third son have recently been enrolled in the local high school), I see that "formative assessment" (testing learners on material they are only beginning to learn does indeed seem to be a very helpful way to prompt learners to learn more. I expect to do a lot of formative assessment for the new students I will have the week after next at a school where I am about to begin classroom teaching of middle school mathematics during the regular school day. I have read another book by Hattie, co-authored with Richard Fletcher, called Intelligence and Intelligence Testing, which is also quite good. Those of you who find this article intriguing and would like to learn more about ideas that work in education are likely to enjoy reading the longer linked paper by John Hattie, "What Doesn't Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction,"[1] which provides more details on the ideas he thinks work and what other ideas don't work and why. [1] https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html
- lfowles 11y ago
  > but my second son and third son have recently been enrolled in the local high school Just curious, but why the change? (if not due to Life)
  - tokenadult 11y ago
    They felt like trying out the local high school. That has had some distinct trade-offs. The local high school is on an improving trend line, so it has been a better experience for my third son than it was for my second, who is now done there and about to start his university studies.
- bsder 11y ago
  > [1] https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html Am I missing something? This PDF was very long on political rhetoric and short on actual concrete advice to improve things.
com2kid 11y ago
The world already has a proven educational model that works, the quarterly college system. Three 5-credit classes per day. I wouldn't suggest it for grade school, but at least for high school, why not? No grade levels, you have 3 quarters (and use quarters, semesters are just a cost saving measure) per regular year, 4 years. (FWIW, a quarter of math in a community college is roughly a year in high school.) Tell students that they have 3 quarters of math to complete at minimum in 4 years. If they fail one quarter, there is lots of time to take it again. Why have the idea of grade levels at all? Remove 80% of responsibility from teachers for passing or failing, remove all standardized tests, and let's go to a model that we know works. Edit: To clarify, I am not suggesting we import the ivy league "Make half the students drop out through stress" system. I am proposing a quarterly system of learning where students are free to take the level of course work that is most appropriate to their needs.
- x5n1 11y ago
  1/2 students quit after the first year. 1/2 those left over never complete. yeah it works. the reason we have the modern schooling system is because most apes of our species are not meant for school or jobs. it's a way of training them for both.
  - com2kid 11y ago
    > 1/2 students quit after the first year. 1/2 those left over never complete. For what reasons though? I am advocating a more community college model, smaller introductory class sizes, with a faster paced, but shorter term curriculums, that don't hurt as much if any one particular course is failed. A more targeted model than "grade level". Traditional universities have a high attrition rate not just due to course work, there is a huge cultural shift, a complete loss of one's traditional support network, a lack of structure that used to be imposed by parents, and many new opportunities for distraction. I'm not proposing we add any of that to high school! :)
- tokenadult 11y ago
  let's go to a model that we know works I'm all for doing what works. What data tend to show that college education works better than secondary education or primary education? (For a demonstration of having received a college education, what data tend to show THE OPPOSITE, which all thinking people have to consider when deciding what policies to support?) I note that you say that your model might not work for grade school. If so, is there something else we can do at the margins to improve primary education by a little or by a lot?
kaa2102 11y ago
Great article and food for thought as politicians and education reformers push school vouchers, Common Core, union-busting, etc., and other theories without really measuring, testing or optimizing the option's ROI. The idea has been "well let's just try something new" without rhyme or reason.
WalterBright 11y ago
> Hattie argues that if parents had the right to select the best teacher in a given school, that could truly be empowering. It would also be challenging to implement. Challenging is an understatement. I suggested that once, and my what blowback I got!
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  Because that many students can't all be assigned to the same teacher? Because it pushes people towards making choices based on internal details vs outcomes?
  - tjl 11y ago
    There's one professor I was a TA for who was loved by the students. He taught the course more like a high school physics course than a university course. But, when his students got to higher level physics courses, they were lacking in the basic skills taught in those courses so we'd have to spend extra time covering that material. Also, to break them of bad habits they had. He was the only professor to directly contradict me in front of the students. I had been marking like I had in other courses (he hadn't given any guidelines) and students complained so he made me re-grade everything, totally undercutting me in front of them. He should have let the assignment mark stand and change the marking going forward. I have no doubt that students would have preferred that professor, but their skills and knowledge would suffer from that choice. Taking the easy road will catch up to you eventually.
    - syntheticnature 11y ago
      My favorite EE professor, in hindsight, was the one that had quizzes every week, and only semi-scheduled. Friends who had gone through her course before warned me about how 'awful and strict' she was. At the time, I hated it, until I realized come the final that I'd never been permitted to slack off and so needed to do much less to get myself ready for it.
      - tjl 11y ago
WalterBright 11y ago
"We never have a debate of relativity — why are we spending billions on things that have small effects?" Because there is hardly any topic more intricately entangled with politics and emotions.
- mjevans 11y ago
  The article mentions a comparison of spending and effect on outcome. Establishing that there seems to be a decided minimum effort required to educate a child to any degree; but that past that point there are examples of other countries having /more/ success with less funding spent (than the US). I think more granularity of data in that statistic would be useful; is this money actually being spent on the child or is it instead being squandered within a bureaucratic structure? Or does some externality that is a cost in one model but not the other left out of view?
mixedmath 11y ago
I've long been fascinated by what does and doesn't work in classrooms. I'm a graduate student in mathematics and I end up teaching elementary calculus courses to undergrads. This also means that I tend to think about what does and doesn't work in college classrooms. Two things stuck out to me in this article. Firstly, Hattie says "Holding students back a grade really does hold students back, with an effect of -0.16." What does this actually mean? Does this mean that at graduation, these students perform 1/6 of a standard deviation below their peers? I'd be more interested if we were also presented with the alternative: how do students who didn't meet whatever minimal standards for grade advancement but were advanced anyway (and thus could have been held back a year, but were not) perform? As an early college math instructor, I'm very familiar with students who are incapable of performing mathematical operations from classes which they've previously passed. The more I think about it, the more I wonder about what it means to perform at some number of standard deviations above or below others. Is this based on standardized test performance? The second thing I wonder is related. As an alternative to the common policy of "Achievement Standards", he suggests "The alternative: a focus on growth and progress for each student, no matter where he or she starts." How might one implement this? For instance, suppose Albert and Beth are entering basic 6th grade math. Beth performs really well and for whatever reason Albert is very distracted and learns almost nothing. The next year rolls around, and Albert and Beth are entering basic 7th grade math. The teacher cannot teach them the exact same, as Albert doesn't understand prerequisite ideas. Is the teacher to instruct normally and then devote additional time to Albert, trying to incrementally increase his understanding? Does Hattie actually advocate Montessori-style schools with self-paced work? Perhaps schools should have a lowest-tier math class which is entirely based on individual students instead of central instruction? Or in this case, should Albert have been kept back a year? In many other ways, I like and/or understand Hattie's approach and ideas.
- pbreit 11y ago
  Alt School is shooting for personalized teaching. That's where smaller class sizes might help. Apparently each students has a "feed" of lessons to work through.
- lfowles 11y ago
  > I'd be more interested if we were also presented with the alternative: how do students who didn't meet whatever minimal standards for grade advancement but were advanced anyway (and thus could have been held back a year, but were not) perform? From [retention]: That is, the groups of non-promoted/retained students scored .15 to .26 standard deviation units lower than the promoted comparison groups on the various outcome measures. So it does sound like the comparison was between two groups of students that didn't meet standards. This does make me wonder how large the opposite effect is... I had the chance as a kid to take higher level math classes at my school, but was so intimidated by the thought of not being with my peers (since Kindergarten.. small school) that I refused. [retention]: http://intranet.niacc.edu/pres_copy(1)/ILC/The_Retention_Debate.pdf http://intranet.niacc.edu/pres_copy(1)/ILC/The_Retention_Deb...
littletimmy 11y ago
I don't get why Americans have to reinvent the wheel here. There are countries in the world (Finland, Singapore...) who have public education figured out. Just put aside your pride and do what they do. It involves less testing, hiring and retaining better teachers, and making sure kids are not in poor broken homes.
- jff 11y ago
  > It involves less testing, hiring and retaining better teachers, and making sure kids are not in poor broken homes. ah, hide the hard one at the end :)
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > ah, hide the hard one at the end :) Income equality isn't "hard" if you look at it logically versus emotionally. Raise taxes, ensure a proper social safety net, widen the middle class. Then again, this is America. We try everything else first before the right way (apologies to Churchill).
    - Goladus 11y ago
      > Income equality isn't "hard" if you look at it logically versus emotionally. Raise taxes, ensure a proper social safety net, widen the middle class. Income equality is hard when you start tracing where the income actually comes from. Furthermore, the parent said "broken homes," not merely income inequality. A poor household can still be a stable and positive environment.
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  It might have to do with the difficulty of changing from a large country with somewhat varied standards of living, into a small relatively uniformly rich country. And I suppose that trying to impose uniform policies on a not-culturally-uniform group doesn't help either, especially when you add in hypersensitivity and the polarization that comes from everyone not knowing everyone else.
- peterfirefly 11y ago
inguinalhernia 11y ago
From the article: "In a new paper, "What Doesn't Work In Education: The Politics Of Distraction," published by Pearson Education" So the NPR piece is based on a publication from Pearson, who has a huge financial stake in the US education market. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026.html http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-1150... How curious.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Akamai has a huge financial stake in the Internet, so do you ignore their "State of the Internet" reports? By virtue of Pearson's business they also have huge systematic insight into the education system. Not worth dismissing the results of the study simply based on that association.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Did anyone say that they should be ignored or dismissed?
- bsder 11y ago
  > So the NPR piece is based on a publication from Pearson, who has a huge financial stake in the US education market. If the publication is based on data and the method is open, the source doesn't really matter. I'm going to assume they have an agenda and keep an eye out for it, but Pearson is not inherently anti-education.
rewqfdsa 11y ago
There is no problem in education. Our only problem is that we keep lying to ourselves about it. Not all children are equally gifted. Not all _groups_ of children are equally gifted. The only reason we have such a hard time tackling with contemporary social problems is that their real solutions are at odds with political correctness. The challenging task isn't coming up with solutions that will help, but finding solutions that will both help and not violate certain taboos. Never in all of history has society ever benefited from lying to itself.
- blakeja 11y ago
  Exactly what I would have said. Most of my friends and family are teachers and the stupidity of ideas like "no child left behind"..."teach to the lowest common denominator"...are the kind of complaints I have been hearing about for quite some time. Stop with the Orwellian political correctness and teach kids the level they are capable of. End of story.
- bsder 11y ago
  > Not all children are equally gifted. Not all _groups_ of children are equally gifted. The only reason we have such a hard time tackling with contemporary social problems is that their real solutions are at odds with political correctness. Not really. Most of the solutions to contemporary social problems are quite politically correct. Universal healthcare. Decent minimum wages. Birth control. Sex education. Ending the drug war. Ending the criminalization of victimless crimes. We have the data on many of these things. We know what works. However, it is politically unpalatable to a significant subsection of the country. See the recent kerfuffle over thre Colorado teenage pregnancy reduction program (http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/30/colorado-republicans-say-teen-pregnancy-prevention-program/ http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/30/colorado-republ...) When a significant chunk of your people are willing to ignore the facts and reject something known to work, it's hard to make progress.
animefan 11y ago
Odd that the conclusion of such a meta-analysis would be a list of what doesn't work. Surely we should be as interested in what does work.
- rndn 11y ago
  It's more of a hyperbole for food for thought and to kick-start discussion.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- _delirium 11y ago
  One of the links goes to a chart from the study author that ranks interventions by estimated effect size: http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/ http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect... There's a definition of some of the terms here: http://visible-learning.org/glossary/ http://visible-learning.org/glossary/
- zanny 11y ago
  Its a list of what doesn't work and recommendations to counter them. It is giving options for what can work, but isn't practiced enough to be certain of. Also, circumstances are different everywhere, so you can't just solve everything with an easy answer.
timthorn 11y ago
If you're interested in education policy and research, the Festival of Education is a great event to hear many of the leading thinkers. This year, as well as this report being given out in hard copy, we had Dylan Wiliam (referenced in the NPR article), Carol Dweck, Ken Robinson and many others speak. A definite English flavour but plenty that's entirely transferable. http://www.festivalofeducation.com/ http://www.festivalofeducation.com/
- tiglionabbit 11y ago
  Can I watch videos of the talks online?
  - timthorn 11y ago
    Unfortunately they aren't recorded. :(
- clips 11y ago
  Are you aware of an US equivalent?
reuven 11y ago
One of my favorite books from the last few years is "The Smartest Kids in the World." The reporter visits three countries that do very well on the international PISA test, and talks about what can indeed work in the US and other countries. She (and the locals) are very negative about South Korea, but very positive about Poland and Finland. And she points out that all three countries use a fraction of the budget that the US does on education, with much better results. She also points to the fact that outside of the United States, extracurricular activities -- not to mention sports -- are not a part of the school curriculum. If you want to play basketball, then that's great, but don't expect your high school to care about it, because their job is to worry about your education, not sports. I have a PhD in learning sciences (roughly "technology and education"), live in Israel, and have three children. And the way that the schools here run depresses me more each year. As the book points out, and as we probably already know, the forces in charge of schools (e.g., politicians, teacher unions, and taxpayers) are basically aligned against any real reform. Gimmicks such as technology look great, but are virtually useless -- a form of "education theater," as it were. Israelis talk nonstop about class sizes, but I think that a much bigger problem is that we pay our teachers nothing, and give them no respect or power -- and are then surprised that the quality of teachers has declined precipitously. From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  As an Israeli what effect do you think the rise of religious fundamentalism has had on education outcomes? I may be wrong, but I am under the impression that a large percentage of school age children are born into fundamentalist families that do not value a secular education.
  - sampo 11y ago
    Wikipedia says that fundamentalist parents can put their kids in separate fundamentalist schools, if they want. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Israel#Educational_tracks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Israel#Educationa...

79 points by tokenadult 11y ago

I can't remember which of my Facebook friends the other day recommended this article, but I'm glad I read it. I read John Hattie's book Visible Learning a few years ago on the recommendation of a school board candidate (who succeeded in getting elected) in my local public school district. As an observer of my children's learning in the local public high school (I have mostly been a homeschooler, but my second son and third son have recently been enrolled in the local high school), I see that "formative assessment" (testing learners on material they are only beginning to learn does indeed seem to be a very helpful way to prompt learners to learn more. I expect to do a lot of formative assessment for the new students I will have the week after next at a school where I am about to begin classroom teaching of middle school mathematics during the regular school day. I have read another book by Hattie, co-authored with Richard Fletcher, called Intelligence and Intelligence Testing, which is also quite good. Those of you who find this article intriguing and would like to learn more about ideas that work in education are likely to enjoy reading the longer linked paper by John Hattie, "What Doesn't Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction,"[1] which provides more details on the ideas he thinks work and what other ideas don't work and why. [1] https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html

lfowles 11y ago
> but my second son and third son have recently been enrolled in the local high school Just curious, but why the change? (if not due to Life)
- tokenadult 11y ago
  They felt like trying out the local high school. That has had some distinct trade-offs. The local high school is on an improving trend line, so it has been a better experience for my third son than it was for my second, who is now done there and about to start his university studies.
bsder 11y ago
> [1] https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html https://www.pearson.com/hattie/distractions.html Am I missing something? This PDF was very long on political rhetoric and short on actual concrete advice to improve things.

com2kid 11y ago

The world already has a proven educational model that works, the quarterly college system. Three 5-credit classes per day. I wouldn't suggest it for grade school, but at least for high school, why not? No grade levels, you have 3 quarters (and use quarters, semesters are just a cost saving measure) per regular year, 4 years. (FWIW, a quarter of math in a community college is roughly a year in high school.) Tell students that they have 3 quarters of math to complete at minimum in 4 years. If they fail one quarter, there is lots of time to take it again. Why have the idea of grade levels at all? Remove 80% of responsibility from teachers for passing or failing, remove all standardized tests, and let's go to a model that we know works. Edit: To clarify, I am not suggesting we import the ivy league "Make half the students drop out through stress" system. I am proposing a quarterly system of learning where students are free to take the level of course work that is most appropriate to their needs.

x5n1 11y ago
1/2 students quit after the first year. 1/2 those left over never complete. yeah it works. the reason we have the modern schooling system is because most apes of our species are not meant for school or jobs. it's a way of training them for both.
- com2kid 11y ago
  > 1/2 students quit after the first year. 1/2 those left over never complete. For what reasons though? I am advocating a more community college model, smaller introductory class sizes, with a faster paced, but shorter term curriculums, that don't hurt as much if any one particular course is failed. A more targeted model than "grade level". Traditional universities have a high attrition rate not just due to course work, there is a huge cultural shift, a complete loss of one's traditional support network, a lack of structure that used to be imposed by parents, and many new opportunities for distraction. I'm not proposing we add any of that to high school! :)
tokenadult 11y ago
let's go to a model that we know works I'm all for doing what works. What data tend to show that college education works better than secondary education or primary education? (For a demonstration of having received a college education, what data tend to show THE OPPOSITE, which all thinking people have to consider when deciding what policies to support?) I note that you say that your model might not work for grade school. If so, is there something else we can do at the margins to improve primary education by a little or by a lot?

kaa2102 11y ago

Great article and food for thought as politicians and education reformers push school vouchers, Common Core, union-busting, etc., and other theories without really measuring, testing or optimizing the option's ROI. The idea has been "well let's just try something new" without rhyme or reason.

WalterBright 11y ago

> Hattie argues that if parents had the right to select the best teacher in a given school, that could truly be empowering. It would also be challenging to implement. Challenging is an understatement. I suggested that once, and my what blowback I got!

tbrownaw 11y ago
Because that many students can't all be assigned to the same teacher? Because it pushes people towards making choices based on internal details vs outcomes?
- tjl 11y ago
  There's one professor I was a TA for who was loved by the students. He taught the course more like a high school physics course than a university course. But, when his students got to higher level physics courses, they were lacking in the basic skills taught in those courses so we'd have to spend extra time covering that material. Also, to break them of bad habits they had. He was the only professor to directly contradict me in front of the students. I had been marking like I had in other courses (he hadn't given any guidelines) and students complained so he made me re-grade everything, totally undercutting me in front of them. He should have let the assignment mark stand and change the marking going forward. I have no doubt that students would have preferred that professor, but their skills and knowledge would suffer from that choice. Taking the easy road will catch up to you eventually.
  - syntheticnature 11y ago
    My favorite EE professor, in hindsight, was the one that had quizzes every week, and only semi-scheduled. Friends who had gone through her course before warned me about how 'awful and strict' she was. At the time, I hated it, until I realized come the final that I'd never been permitted to slack off and so needed to do much less to get myself ready for it.
    - tjl 11y ago

WalterBright 11y ago

"We never have a debate of relativity — why are we spending billions on things that have small effects?" Because there is hardly any topic more intricately entangled with politics and emotions.

mjevans 11y ago
The article mentions a comparison of spending and effect on outcome. Establishing that there seems to be a decided minimum effort required to educate a child to any degree; but that past that point there are examples of other countries having /more/ success with less funding spent (than the US). I think more granularity of data in that statistic would be useful; is this money actually being spent on the child or is it instead being squandered within a bureaucratic structure? Or does some externality that is a cost in one model but not the other left out of view?

mixedmath 11y ago

I've long been fascinated by what does and doesn't work in classrooms. I'm a graduate student in mathematics and I end up teaching elementary calculus courses to undergrads. This also means that I tend to think about what does and doesn't work in college classrooms. Two things stuck out to me in this article. Firstly, Hattie says "Holding students back a grade really does hold students back, with an effect of -0.16." What does this actually mean? Does this mean that at graduation, these students perform 1/6 of a standard deviation below their peers? I'd be more interested if we were also presented with the alternative: how do students who didn't meet whatever minimal standards for grade advancement but were advanced anyway (and thus could have been held back a year, but were not) perform? As an early college math instructor, I'm very familiar with students who are incapable of performing mathematical operations from classes which they've previously passed. The more I think about it, the more I wonder about what it means to perform at some number of standard deviations above or below others. Is this based on standardized test performance? The second thing I wonder is related. As an alternative to the common policy of "Achievement Standards", he suggests "The alternative: a focus on growth and progress for each student, no matter where he or she starts." How might one implement this? For instance, suppose Albert and Beth are entering basic 6th grade math. Beth performs really well and for whatever reason Albert is very distracted and learns almost nothing. The next year rolls around, and Albert and Beth are entering basic 7th grade math. The teacher cannot teach them the exact same, as Albert doesn't understand prerequisite ideas. Is the teacher to instruct normally and then devote additional time to Albert, trying to incrementally increase his understanding? Does Hattie actually advocate Montessori-style schools with self-paced work? Perhaps schools should have a lowest-tier math class which is entirely based on individual students instead of central instruction? Or in this case, should Albert have been kept back a year? In many other ways, I like and/or understand Hattie's approach and ideas.

pbreit 11y ago
Alt School is shooting for personalized teaching. That's where smaller class sizes might help. Apparently each students has a "feed" of lessons to work through.
lfowles 11y ago
> I'd be more interested if we were also presented with the alternative: how do students who didn't meet whatever minimal standards for grade advancement but were advanced anyway (and thus could have been held back a year, but were not) perform? From [retention]: That is, the groups of non-promoted/retained students scored .15 to .26 standard deviation units lower than the promoted comparison groups on the various outcome measures. So it does sound like the comparison was between two groups of students that didn't meet standards. This does make me wonder how large the opposite effect is... I had the chance as a kid to take higher level math classes at my school, but was so intimidated by the thought of not being with my peers (since Kindergarten.. small school) that I refused. [retention]: http://intranet.niacc.edu/pres_copy(1)/ILC/The_Retention_Debate.pdf http://intranet.niacc.edu/pres_copy(1)/ILC/The_Retention_Deb...

littletimmy 11y ago

I don't get why Americans have to reinvent the wheel here. There are countries in the world (Finland, Singapore...) who have public education figured out. Just put aside your pride and do what they do. It involves less testing, hiring and retaining better teachers, and making sure kids are not in poor broken homes.

jff 11y ago
> It involves less testing, hiring and retaining better teachers, and making sure kids are not in poor broken homes. ah, hide the hard one at the end :)
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > ah, hide the hard one at the end :) Income equality isn't "hard" if you look at it logically versus emotionally. Raise taxes, ensure a proper social safety net, widen the middle class. Then again, this is America. We try everything else first before the right way (apologies to Churchill).
  - Goladus 11y ago
    > Income equality isn't "hard" if you look at it logically versus emotionally. Raise taxes, ensure a proper social safety net, widen the middle class. Income equality is hard when you start tracing where the income actually comes from. Furthermore, the parent said "broken homes," not merely income inequality. A poor household can still be a stable and positive environment.
tbrownaw 11y ago
It might have to do with the difficulty of changing from a large country with somewhat varied standards of living, into a small relatively uniformly rich country. And I suppose that trying to impose uniform policies on a not-culturally-uniform group doesn't help either, especially when you add in hypersensitivity and the polarization that comes from everyone not knowing everyone else.
peterfirefly 11y ago

inguinalhernia 11y ago

From the article: "In a new paper, "What Doesn't Work In Education: The Politics Of Distraction," published by Pearson Education" So the NPR piece is based on a publication from Pearson, who has a huge financial stake in the US education market. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026.html http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-1150... How curious.

rayiner 11y ago
Akamai has a huge financial stake in the Internet, so do you ignore their "State of the Internet" reports? By virtue of Pearson's business they also have huge systematic insight into the education system. Not worth dismissing the results of the study simply based on that association.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Did anyone say that they should be ignored or dismissed?
bsder 11y ago
> So the NPR piece is based on a publication from Pearson, who has a huge financial stake in the US education market. If the publication is based on data and the method is open, the source doesn't really matter. I'm going to assume they have an agenda and keep an eye out for it, but Pearson is not inherently anti-education.

rewqfdsa 11y ago

There is no problem in education. Our only problem is that we keep lying to ourselves about it. Not all children are equally gifted. Not all _groups_ of children are equally gifted. The only reason we have such a hard time tackling with contemporary social problems is that their real solutions are at odds with political correctness. The challenging task isn't coming up with solutions that will help, but finding solutions that will both help and not violate certain taboos. Never in all of history has society ever benefited from lying to itself.

blakeja 11y ago
Exactly what I would have said. Most of my friends and family are teachers and the stupidity of ideas like "no child left behind"..."teach to the lowest common denominator"...are the kind of complaints I have been hearing about for quite some time. Stop with the Orwellian political correctness and teach kids the level they are capable of. End of story.
bsder 11y ago
> Not all children are equally gifted. Not all _groups_ of children are equally gifted. The only reason we have such a hard time tackling with contemporary social problems is that their real solutions are at odds with political correctness. Not really. Most of the solutions to contemporary social problems are quite politically correct. Universal healthcare. Decent minimum wages. Birth control. Sex education. Ending the drug war. Ending the criminalization of victimless crimes. We have the data on many of these things. We know what works. However, it is politically unpalatable to a significant subsection of the country. See the recent kerfuffle over thre Colorado teenage pregnancy reduction program (http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/30/colorado-republicans-say-teen-pregnancy-prevention-program/ http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/30/colorado-republ...) When a significant chunk of your people are willing to ignore the facts and reject something known to work, it's hard to make progress.

animefan 11y ago

Odd that the conclusion of such a meta-analysis would be a list of what doesn't work. Surely we should be as interested in what does work.

rndn 11y ago
It's more of a hyperbole for food for thought and to kick-start discussion.
deleted 11y ago
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_delirium 11y ago
One of the links goes to a chart from the study author that ranks interventions by estimated effect size: http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/ http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect... There's a definition of some of the terms here: http://visible-learning.org/glossary/ http://visible-learning.org/glossary/
zanny 11y ago
Its a list of what doesn't work and recommendations to counter them. It is giving options for what can work, but isn't practiced enough to be certain of. Also, circumstances are different everywhere, so you can't just solve everything with an easy answer.

timthorn 11y ago

If you're interested in education policy and research, the Festival of Education is a great event to hear many of the leading thinkers. This year, as well as this report being given out in hard copy, we had Dylan Wiliam (referenced in the NPR article), Carol Dweck, Ken Robinson and many others speak. A definite English flavour but plenty that's entirely transferable. http://www.festivalofeducation.com/ http://www.festivalofeducation.com/

tiglionabbit 11y ago
Can I watch videos of the talks online?
- timthorn 11y ago
  Unfortunately they aren't recorded. :(
clips 11y ago
Are you aware of an US equivalent?

reuven 11y ago

One of my favorite books from the last few years is "The Smartest Kids in the World." The reporter visits three countries that do very well on the international PISA test, and talks about what can indeed work in the US and other countries. She (and the locals) are very negative about South Korea, but very positive about Poland and Finland. And she points out that all three countries use a fraction of the budget that the US does on education, with much better results. She also points to the fact that outside of the United States, extracurricular activities -- not to mention sports -- are not a part of the school curriculum. If you want to play basketball, then that's great, but don't expect your high school to care about it, because their job is to worry about your education, not sports. I have a PhD in learning sciences (roughly "technology and education"), live in Israel, and have three children. And the way that the schools here run depresses me more each year. As the book points out, and as we probably already know, the forces in charge of schools (e.g., politicians, teacher unions, and taxpayers) are basically aligned against any real reform. Gimmicks such as technology look great, but are virtually useless -- a form of "education theater," as it were. Israelis talk nonstop about class sizes, but I think that a much bigger problem is that we pay our teachers nothing, and give them no respect or power -- and are then surprised that the quality of teachers has declined precipitously. From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time.

danieltillett 11y ago
As an Israeli what effect do you think the rise of religious fundamentalism has had on education outcomes? I may be wrong, but I am under the impression that a large percentage of school age children are born into fundamentalist families that do not value a secular education.
- sampo 11y ago
  Wikipedia says that fundamentalist parents can put their kids in separate fundamentalist schools, if they want. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Israel#Educational_tracks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Israel#Educationa...