7 ms·

The problem in American education isn't dumb teachers, but dumb teacher training

88 points by tokenadult 11y ago

Afton 11y ago
" When asked to identify the number of phonemes in a word, they were correct 62 percent of the time. They struggled more with morphemes, correctly identifying them 27 percent of the time. " I'm surprised. When I was TAing morphology and phonology courses, people generally had more trouble learning the inverse. That is, identifying morphemes was relatively easy compared to identifying phonemes (although you could choose your examples to get a similar spread. People take a nontrivial amount of training to ignore how things are spelled)
- ktRolster 11y ago
  There are many problems with the US education system, but it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English, not because of "failure to fully understand phonemes." The main point of the article is a proposal of a new way to evaluate teachers. It says, "let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers (it’s tempting to use student outcomes instead)." To me that seems like a reasonable part of a good method of evaluation.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > but it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, Depending how you define illiteracy many children can't read. About 20% of children are functionally illiterate when they leave US highschool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
  - jstanley 11y ago
    > it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English Then how do you know it's the teachers that are teaching the kids to read, and not the parents?
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      Is that a real question? How many parents do you know who've taught their kids to read? If you're like me, it's a couple here and there, but most kids learn to read from school. You can compare data of literacy rates before we had widespread schools in the US, and after.
      - Kluny 11y ago
        What? Everyone I know who reads books for pleasure had books read to them as children and was taught to read by their parent before they started school. Yes, I asked. People who don't read for pleasure are usually people who weren't read to as children.
  - qaq 11y ago
    Look up US literacy rate you'll be surprised
  - Afton 11y ago
    The point I was making is that it is odd that when teachers are evaluated for their ability to identify phonemes and morphemes, that their abilities don't seem to match what I saw in first and second year university students taking linguistics classes. Just that, that it is odd.
  - nsxwolf 11y ago
    Do schools really teach kids to read? I remember reading lessons, but they presumed some existing ability to read. I think I learned to read by reading things on my own. Does anyone really get "taught" how to read?
Afton 11y ago
"First, let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers. " Oh. Uh... Can I agree that testing teachers is a sensible part of an evaluation plan instead?
Avshalom 11y ago
Cause yeah, dumb teacher training is the root cause of absentee students, housing insecurity, hunger, abusive home lives, systematic poverty, terrible funding decisions...
platz 11y ago
Yet most teachers I know have Masters degrees for teaching things special ed, and it seems they need to get those degrees or at least it's competitive that they have them.
- douche 11y ago
  A.) There's usually a generous bump in salary if you get a master's degree B.) Many school districts have reimbursement programs that heavily subsidize getting master's degrees. C.) Far too many Education master's degree programs are baby-town frolics level of difficulty, when they aren't straight degree mills.
  - pc86 11y ago
    A.) This sort of goes hand-in-hand with the Intelligence Community PhD article that was also on the front page today. "Oh you have a Master's so clearly your time is worth another $2-10k (the MS supplement range for 2007-08)" It's just another box to check and as long as getting one earns you $x a year more there's little to no reason not to spend 2-3x once even if it does nothing to help your students. C.) I'm sure it varies by institution and geographic area, but at my High School about half the teachers with a Master's had one in "Instructional Technology." They still struggled with basic computer and projector operation, so I'm not quite sure what that degree got them in the end.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  Teaching licensure by itself already requires at least a year of post bacc courses, IIRC.
  - pc86 11y ago
    There is no such requirement in my state.
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    Requirements for teaching are defined differently by each state and vary widely.
dforrestwilson 11y ago
So the solution is basically "teach to the test" for teachers? I don't agree. The problems in our education system go way, way beyond teacher quality. Several of my friends are teachers, they're brilliant people, and they're hindered by the very structure of the system: standardized testing, unions, the very notion that one person lecturing to 20 students - a "push" educational supply system really works. We have the internet now... I prefer to pull what I want to know when I need to know it. Remember that the U.S. education system has only really been around for what? 150 years? Our species has been learning for 10,000 years.. we got along OK before it. We shouldn't take anything about that system as holy writ. How much institutional learning do we use in our everyday lives? I would argue very little, and that the best way to learn how to do a job is generally to go do it, and to ask questions along the way.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Marcus Aurelius wrote fondly of having avoided public schooling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius#cite_ref-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius#cite_ref-35
- shriphani 11y ago
  Push models work well when you have an established career and know what is needed to advance. We've been stumped by Meno's paradox since Plato's time. I wouldn't trust the average high-schooler's judgement about educational choices. At that age it is far too easy to give up. Skip calculus, differential equations and the whole shebang and suddenly you're woefully underprepared for that dream career building drones and military aircraft. I certainly am happy there was some structure to my curriculum (even at the expense of a low student:teacher ratio). I was a very stupid kid - thought myself above the curriculum and all that. Were I allowed to chart my own course I would've been in a very bad place.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Indeed, the only complete solution to the schooling system's deficiencies will be its abolition. Education and the accumulation of knowledge should be understood as a subsidiary and decentralized activity, one heavily driven by autodidacticism. Autodidacticism is and always has been the primary force of education, not any formal regimented institution. One does not enter a school and come out "educated" by the receipt of a degree. In fact, the very idea that there can be such a thing as an "education system" is a complete perversity, a self-negating ideal of a social planner. Schooling should be strongly differentiated from the formation of academic and learning communities. People can still partake in seminars, gather for lectures and conferences, form study groups and even build schools with regular curricula to voluntarily participate in, if such a structure is deemed useful. The accreditation process should be repealed, and a boom in alternative schools (free, democratic, Sudbury, etc.) would likely follow. Research universities should remain as academic communities, rather than be bogged down by an auxiliary function of serving as ritual prerequisites for entering the labor market.
post_break 11y ago
I thought the problem was the push towards standardized testing, and its effect on the kids. Instead of teaching it's become drilling principles that are on the test, and that's it.
- ryanhuff 11y ago
  Yes, and it's compounded by the limited time in a school day. Having an extra 30-60 minutes a day to focus on the unique needs of your class would help, but as it is, the teachers are put in a position to churn through the material to get to the testing. But, from my semi-outsider perspective, there is lower hanging fruit to improve performance at the elementary school level.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  "The problem" is that there's dozens of different problems each with their own sub problems. Off the to of my head two more problems in addition to the half a dozen mentioned already in this topic: money being spent on useless technology (Smartboards; my mother [along with every one of the 100+ teachers at her school] was issued an ipad, one ipad for classes of 30-40 and told to integrate it into her teaching) instead of things like fixing the heat and lack of physical activity as PE and recess get stripped from the curriculum.
hackaflocka 11y ago
I would like to offer an alternative viewpoint. Downvote me if you like, but it's a slice of the world of opinions, and you'll need to deal with that. There's nothing wrong with American education. The job of American education is to sedate the masses, while letting the legit geniuses rise to the top (create the next Google, etc.). It is very effective in doing this.
- kingdomcome50 11y ago
  In what specific way is the American education system effective in fostering the above? I think you may have it exactly backwards. It seems to me that the opportunity afforded to an individual simply by living in the United States is the real driving force behind most successful endeavors like the above, and "geniuses" (I use that very loosely) rise to the top DESPITE our education system.
  - indians_pro 11y ago
    i think thats exactly what he was saying. the part about 'sedating the masses' is also very apparent when u look at the robotic and homogenous modes of behaviour and 'exploration' promoted at school. they are also trying very hard to reduce interaction of kids with people outside their age group or level (including parents) which drastically cuts down on learning things in life that school will never teach u.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
fiatmoney 11y ago
There isn't really a "problem" in American education, in the sense that it's unusually bad compared to other countries. Looking at PISA scores, Latin American / European / Asian students in the USA do as well or better than in their mother countries. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_5a.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_... http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_5e_1.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_...
- mercer 11y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you per sé, but it is possible that some crucial stuff is learned in the 15 years before these tests were administered? The reason I'm asking is that purely based on a 'hunch', I feel that the most useful years of my education were before the age of around 12-13 and after the age of 20. I have no solid evidence to support this, just my experience and that of my peers. Edit: to try and support my hunch: in my country 12-13 is the age where the 'sorting hat' is applied and you move to middle/high school (physically different location, on of three levels based on earlier performance), and 20 is generally around the second or third year of 'higher vocational training' or 'university' where the non-motivated are sorted out and (generally) the ones who are going to finish college are left. It's also the point where classes become less general, multiple-choice, massive (300+ classes sometimes) and instead become more focused and interesting.
- tokenadult 11y ago
  Those PISA charts don't say what you are summarizing them as saying. It used to be that people would cite a certain blog post to make the same point you are making here, but the data don't back up the blog author either. I have lived in another country, and the students there do better than their cousins who study in the United States.
  - fiatmoney 11y ago
    What do they say, then? Because I read, for instance, the highest-scoring Latin American nation (Mexico) as having a lower mean (424) than US Hispanics (478). Other PISA components show similar results.
ergothus 11y ago
I have a friend who is a high school teacher, and I was shocked to learn how they evaluate him. (No idea how true this is for other schools). They compare the standardized test scores of this years group of students with those of last year's. If these students do better than those, he must have improved, and if they do worse, he must have slacked. Now, he'll have between 20-100 students each year. Any teacher will tell you that the variation between one year's group of students and the next is considerable. (indeed, among my teacher friends I've learned it's a major point of gossip - not individual students, but the collective lot) This seems insane to me. Why not compare this years students with THOSE SAME STUDENTS' SCORES from last year? Or find something else less likely to be so "swingy".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- MarcScott 11y ago
  We compare this way in the UK. The same students are compared each year with the assumption that some progress will be made, and that students will eventually reached a predicted level that is set externally and based on past performance and socio-economic factors. (http://www.fft.org.uk/ http://www.fft.org.uk/) It's still ridiculous and leads to teaching-to-the-test, fiddling with data, and undue pressure on teachers and learners.
known 11y ago
Real winners do not compare.
ThomPete 11y ago
The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple. No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn. That isn't to say that the education system shouldn't be optimized (it should) But there is no problem with education as such. There is a problem with how parents are involved with their kids education. Edit: To clear up confusion. No I am not saying parents are a substitute for education I am not talking about parents intervening either. I am saying that by being involved intellectually in their kids education they are providing their kids with the best kind of foundation possible and it will fix a lot of the issues that comes out of parents not being involved or outright harmful to their kids education.
- slig 11y ago
  > The key to successful education is involved parents. That seems to be the case with asian parents/children and they usually get better GPA. Is there any source that proves or disproves that?
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    I don't know how conclusive the studies are but here is something to go with http://www.nea.org/tools/17360.htm http://www.nea.org/tools/17360.htm However I think it's misleading to focus on their scores as a proof of good education, but that's a whole other discussion.
- CountSessine 11y ago
  No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn. As a parent of two school-aged children, I couldn't agree more. At the same time, as a single parent, I have to say that it's hard to ignore the effect that ubiquitous divorce and single-parenting is having on children's schooling. In a single day I have to drag my kids out of bed, make them breakfast, make them lunch, get them to school (all the while they're complaining and dawdling), get to work myself, work a full 8 hour day, get to the daycare and pick up my kids, get home, and make dinner for us. And then do everything else that needs my attention, like bills. And then hound my kids to do their homework, help them with it, and then cajole them to do extra studying in math or writing. It's exhausting and demoralizing having to do this all on your own. And I make a lot more money than is the average where I live, so I can only imagine what it must be like doing all of this with money pressures.
germinalphrase 11y ago
Teaching remains a craft-based occupation, but we're haven't yet developed tools that actually support the job of a teacher. There's no way that Universities/k12 school administrators will be capable of providing the level of detailed feedback necessary to teach teachers how to be effective, so we need better methods for teachers to self-assess and improve independently. So much effort is being put into one-off, discrete solution to a curriculum problem (like leveled non-fiction texts, grammar instruction, etc.) - but what we really need are tools that allow me to understand what my students are capable of, support my development of curriculum materials/activities/assessment, and discover/remix the multitude of learning resources that are being created in classrooms just like mine all over the country. I want a VisiCalc, because I'm tired of running these numbers by hand.
x0x0 11y ago
I majored in math, and had several future math teachers in my homework group. One answer is future high school math teachers are some of the worst math students. I'm sure that's totally unrelated to the pay being completely shit. I have a friend who teaches in a Belmont (peninsula in the valley) school. He also works as a receptionist at a gym 4 days a week after working at the school, and he still spends half his take home pay on rent. So he's at the school where he teaches by 6:55AM and leaves the gym at 10PM, then does grading. The only reason you would legitimately struggle to understand why it's hard to hire teachers or why skilled people don't do it is because you're a startup founder (why aren't engineers jumping take a $50k paycut in exchange for most-likely-worthless 0.1% options? Engineering shortage!) In the bay area in CA, teaching is a cute hobby that has to be supported by a spouse or a second job. If you want to draw more high-quality people into the profession, change that. And then maintain the changes and wait 10+ years at least for the knowledge to percolate and another generation of teachers to come up through high school and college.
- smokey_the_bear 11y ago
  I majored in math as well, and had lots of secondary mathematics education majors in my classes. While it's true they were weaker than the math majors in the advanced classes, they were certainly bright and enthusiastic enough to teach math up to basic calculus.
- Thriptic 11y ago
  Yup, people follow incentives. I was friends with someone in college who majored in chemistry and could have easily gotten into a good PhD program or gone right into industry. She chose instead to teach high school chemistry and did a fantastic job until she burned out 3 years later. The work load was enormous, the pay was shit, many of the kids didn't want to be there, and the goals of her school administration were completely decoupled from the general purpose of teaching. She is now in industry making much more money and living a much better lifestyle.
- pc86 11y ago
  You're going to have a really hard time getting anyone over to your side when your argument is basically "we need to throw a ton of money at the problem and wait a decade before suggesting maybe that didn't help much." Not saying I disagree with your goal, but politically that's just not going to happen.
Alex3917 11y ago
> It’s true that the average SAT score of high school students who plan to become teachers is below the national average. If you ever take education classes, the first thing you'll notice is that the people leading them tend to go out of their way to follow best practices for teaching / learning. Since most other classes only incorporate a handful of evidence-based teaching methods, and many times are structured around blatant anti-patterns, a lot of the ways these programs are structured are going to feel wrong to outside observers. But often there is some sort of theory / research behind why they are the way they are. Granted this applies more to Ivy league teaching programs and not random Internet diploma mills, but for what it's worth.
js2 11y ago
Whenever I see one of these articles, I reflect back to this report from 2007: How the world’s best-performing schools come out on top To find out why some schools succeed where others do not, McKinsey studied 25 of the world’s school systems, including 10 of the top performers. The experience of these top school systems suggest that three things matter most: - Getting the right people to become teachers; - Developing them into effective instructors; and - Ensuring the system is available to deliver the best possible instruction for every child. http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-best-performing-schools-come-out-on-top/ http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-best-performing-... This essasy doesn't conflict with the report, but it's only a tiny piece of the puzzle.
tokenadult 11y ago
I'll give an example based on my international experience. I studied Chinese in my undergraduate major, among other languages I studied as elective subjects, and while in university I learned the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)[1] in linguistics classes. Few Americans know IPA. When I began studying in Taiwan after graduation, I observed that all students in Taiwan in those days learned IPA in seventh grade, in their junior high English classes, and young people with just a secondary education could reliably read aloud English texts written in IPA--a skill that amazed many of my fellow foreign students from English-speaking countries. Today, as Taiwan has moved that skill down to the primary school curriculum, most United States reading teachers have never, ever learned IPA, which is helpful for explaining the vagaries of English spelling. Similarly, in primary mathematics instruction, it is well known how do instruction well with multiple representations of mathematical concepts for pupils,[2] and generally it is very well known that teachers of mathematics need to have "profound understanding of fundamental mathematics (PUFM)"[3] and pedagogical content knowledge, but few teachers in the United States gain that from their professional training in teacher education courses.[4] I try to do my part to help teachers already in the classroom by participating in online discussions with other teachers (I myself am a math teacher in private practice) to guide them to helpful resources for learning more mathematics. Simply put, the author of the original article submitted here is correct. The United States could and should do better in teacher education to help teachers do their job as well as they desire to do it. [1] https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa... http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/ http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-... [2] http://singaporemathsource.com/making-math-masters-a-brief-overview-of-singapore-math/ http://singaporemathsource.com/making-math-masters-a-brief-o... http://www.thedailyriff.com/2010/11/singapore-math-demystified-part-3-the-famous-bar-models.php http://www.thedailyriff.com/2010/11/singapore-math-demystifi... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Understanding/dp/0415873843 http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf [4] https://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleId=5974 https://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleId=5974 http://www.maa.org/programs/faculty-and-departments/curriculum-department-guidelines-recommendations/teaching-and-learning/preservice-teachers-conceptions http://www.maa.org/programs/faculty-and-departments/curricul... https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/ https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/
cloudwizard 11y ago
American education is not designed to maximize student performance. As soon as a child meets the minimum, they are ignored. All the effort goes into improving the performance of the underperforming kids. no child left behind = no child does really well Involved parents replace school. They act as the real teachers. They pay for after school classes where the child will do all the real learning. The US education does what it is designed to do. Help as many underperforming kids as it can. The problem is that it claims to help all kids which it is not actually designed to do. If the US wants higher performing students, it needs to change the design. More education of gifted students will bring the average up. Higher standards will raise the minimum bar that the schools try to reach. I have 2 kids and I treated one of the top elementary schools in SV as a daycare.
jackcosgrove 11y ago
Maybe the problem is not so bad as is commonly believed. http://www.newgeography.com/content/001955-the-amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa-beats-western-europe-ties-with-asia http://www.newgeography.com/content/001955-the-amazing-truth... tl;dr Comparing Americans of European descent with Europeans, Americans are above the European average. "The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded." Americans of Asian descent tie with Asians. Note the provisos. "For Asian-American students (remember this includes Vietnam, Thailand and other less developed countries outside Northeast Asia), the mean PISA score is 534, same as 533 for the average of Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Here we have two biases going in opposite directions: Asians in the U.S are selected. On the other hand we are comparing the richest and best scoring Asian countries with all Americans with origin in South and East Asia."
- tokenadult 11y ago
  The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students." But this is factually incorrect. 1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mrs.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr... and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science. Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mrs.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr... shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources. 2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis, http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-Language/dp/0826404049 http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L... which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons. 3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented" http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests." The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them," http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-comparison_x.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu... The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too. 4. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The latest TIMSS report, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not tie with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4, page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity. This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country." 5. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct (even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post. Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors, Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdiffs.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi... so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States. http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
nsxwolf 11y ago
Teaching is the hardest job in the world. That's why so many teachers suck at it.
kohito 11y ago
Lots of people here are pretty certain the "key" to a "successful education" are parents. But one successful teacher's view is this: "...Like all the teachers I talked to in Washington, Mr. Taylor laments the lack of parental involvement. “On back-to-school night, if you have 28 or 30 kids in your class, you’re lucky to see six or seven parents,” he says. But when I ask him how that affects his teaching, he says, “Actually, it doesn’t. I make it my business to call the parents—and not just for bad things..." h/t u/jseliger, who linked to a helpful article at the Atlantic, where I'm quoting this from.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Lots of people here are pretty certain the "key" to a "successful education" are parents. Most studies I've seen on the topic show that the best predictor of one's educational success and attainment is one's parents educational attainment, so there is something to that that an anecdote from a teacher that, aside from not being a systematic gathering of evidence, doesn't even describe an experience of what drives outcomes, but simply relates a personal practice, isn't really sufficient to rebut.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  If the teacher's secret sauce is "if the parents aren't involved on their own, I get them involved" that means the teacher's secret sauce is parents.
lazyant 11y ago
The key to good education is motivated students, motivated teachers and motivated parents, in pretty much that order. Of course some teaching methodologies are better than other ones, but all the success stories I read, stripped from the fluff are based on enthusiastic and energetic teaches and supportive parents. For the students we just need to not kill their natural learning predisposition. The parents, well, it depends on their culture etc, little to do here as well. So for things we can change were left with the teachers. If they are respected, have a good salary, had a good education, have opportunities for growth, are not strangled by bureaucracy and come from the best of the students, then we'll have good teachers. If they are poorly paid, not recognized, fighting with paperwork and red tape, fighting with entitled parents and coming from the less smart student pool, well, looks a bit like US public system.
PhilWright 11y ago
I have never understood why we have so much duplicated effort in teaching a standardised syllabus. At the moment (in Australia) each teacher does preparation for a lesson and then gives that lesson. Lots of duplicated effort. So 1000 maths teachers all prepare for the same lesson which introduces fractions, as an example. Instead have a great teacher prepare and then record a presentation. At lesson time every class gets to watch that presentation. This takes up maybe 75% of the lesson time. Then the remainder of the time deals with questions and extra clarification. You just saved a huge number of hours of prep and have a top notch presentation.

88 points by tokenadult 11y ago

Afton 11y ago

" When asked to identify the number of phonemes in a word, they were correct 62 percent of the time. They struggled more with morphemes, correctly identifying them 27 percent of the time. " I'm surprised. When I was TAing morphology and phonology courses, people generally had more trouble learning the inverse. That is, identifying morphemes was relatively easy compared to identifying phonemes (although you could choose your examples to get a similar spread. People take a nontrivial amount of training to ignore how things are spelled)

ktRolster 11y ago
There are many problems with the US education system, but it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English, not because of "failure to fully understand phonemes." The main point of the article is a proposal of a new way to evaluate teachers. It says, "let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers (it’s tempting to use student outcomes instead)." To me that seems like a reasonable part of a good method of evaluation.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > but it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, Depending how you define illiteracy many children can't read. About 20% of children are functionally illiterate when they leave US highschool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
- jstanley 11y ago
  > it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English Then how do you know it's the teachers that are teaching the kids to read, and not the parents?
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    Is that a real question? How many parents do you know who've taught their kids to read? If you're like me, it's a couple here and there, but most kids learn to read from school. You can compare data of literacy rates before we had widespread schools in the US, and after.
    - Kluny 11y ago
      What? Everyone I know who reads books for pleasure had books read to them as children and was taught to read by their parent before they started school. Yes, I asked. People who don't read for pleasure are usually people who weren't read to as children.
- qaq 11y ago
  Look up US literacy rate you'll be surprised
- Afton 11y ago
  The point I was making is that it is odd that when teachers are evaluated for their ability to identify phonemes and morphemes, that their abilities don't seem to match what I saw in first and second year university students taking linguistics classes. Just that, that it is odd.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  Do schools really teach kids to read? I remember reading lessons, but they presumed some existing ability to read. I think I learned to read by reading things on my own. Does anyone really get "taught" how to read?

Afton 11y ago

"First, let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers. " Oh. Uh... Can I agree that testing teachers is a sensible part of an evaluation plan instead?

Avshalom 11y ago

Cause yeah, dumb teacher training is the root cause of absentee students, housing insecurity, hunger, abusive home lives, systematic poverty, terrible funding decisions...

platz 11y ago

Yet most teachers I know have Masters degrees for teaching things special ed, and it seems they need to get those degrees or at least it's competitive that they have them.

douche 11y ago
A.) There's usually a generous bump in salary if you get a master's degree B.) Many school districts have reimbursement programs that heavily subsidize getting master's degrees. C.) Far too many Education master's degree programs are baby-town frolics level of difficulty, when they aren't straight degree mills.
- pc86 11y ago
  A.) This sort of goes hand-in-hand with the Intelligence Community PhD article that was also on the front page today. "Oh you have a Master's so clearly your time is worth another $2-10k (the MS supplement range for 2007-08)" It's just another box to check and as long as getting one earns you $x a year more there's little to no reason not to spend 2-3x once even if it does nothing to help your students. C.) I'm sure it varies by institution and geographic area, but at my High School about half the teachers with a Master's had one in "Instructional Technology." They still struggled with basic computer and projector operation, so I'm not quite sure what that degree got them in the end.
ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
Teaching licensure by itself already requires at least a year of post bacc courses, IIRC.
- pc86 11y ago
  There is no such requirement in my state.
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  Requirements for teaching are defined differently by each state and vary widely.

dforrestwilson 11y ago

So the solution is basically "teach to the test" for teachers? I don't agree. The problems in our education system go way, way beyond teacher quality. Several of my friends are teachers, they're brilliant people, and they're hindered by the very structure of the system: standardized testing, unions, the very notion that one person lecturing to 20 students - a "push" educational supply system really works. We have the internet now... I prefer to pull what I want to know when I need to know it. Remember that the U.S. education system has only really been around for what? 150 years? Our species has been learning for 10,000 years.. we got along OK before it. We shouldn't take anything about that system as holy writ. How much institutional learning do we use in our everyday lives? I would argue very little, and that the best way to learn how to do a job is generally to go do it, and to ask questions along the way.

maxerickson 11y ago
Marcus Aurelius wrote fondly of having avoided public schooling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius#cite_ref-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius#cite_ref-35
shriphani 11y ago
Push models work well when you have an established career and know what is needed to advance. We've been stumped by Meno's paradox since Plato's time. I wouldn't trust the average high-schooler's judgement about educational choices. At that age it is far too easy to give up. Skip calculus, differential equations and the whole shebang and suddenly you're woefully underprepared for that dream career building drones and military aircraft. I certainly am happy there was some structure to my curriculum (even at the expense of a low student:teacher ratio). I was a very stupid kid - thought myself above the curriculum and all that. Were I allowed to chart my own course I would've been in a very bad place.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Indeed, the only complete solution to the schooling system's deficiencies will be its abolition. Education and the accumulation of knowledge should be understood as a subsidiary and decentralized activity, one heavily driven by autodidacticism. Autodidacticism is and always has been the primary force of education, not any formal regimented institution. One does not enter a school and come out "educated" by the receipt of a degree. In fact, the very idea that there can be such a thing as an "education system" is a complete perversity, a self-negating ideal of a social planner. Schooling should be strongly differentiated from the formation of academic and learning communities. People can still partake in seminars, gather for lectures and conferences, form study groups and even build schools with regular curricula to voluntarily participate in, if such a structure is deemed useful. The accreditation process should be repealed, and a boom in alternative schools (free, democratic, Sudbury, etc.) would likely follow. Research universities should remain as academic communities, rather than be bogged down by an auxiliary function of serving as ritual prerequisites for entering the labor market.

post_break 11y ago

I thought the problem was the push towards standardized testing, and its effect on the kids. Instead of teaching it's become drilling principles that are on the test, and that's it.

ryanhuff 11y ago
Yes, and it's compounded by the limited time in a school day. Having an extra 30-60 minutes a day to focus on the unique needs of your class would help, but as it is, the teachers are put in a position to churn through the material to get to the testing. But, from my semi-outsider perspective, there is lower hanging fruit to improve performance at the elementary school level.
Avshalom 11y ago
"The problem" is that there's dozens of different problems each with their own sub problems. Off the to of my head two more problems in addition to the half a dozen mentioned already in this topic: money being spent on useless technology (Smartboards; my mother [along with every one of the 100+ teachers at her school] was issued an ipad, one ipad for classes of 30-40 and told to integrate it into her teaching) instead of things like fixing the heat and lack of physical activity as PE and recess get stripped from the curriculum.

hackaflocka 11y ago

I would like to offer an alternative viewpoint. Downvote me if you like, but it's a slice of the world of opinions, and you'll need to deal with that. There's nothing wrong with American education. The job of American education is to sedate the masses, while letting the legit geniuses rise to the top (create the next Google, etc.). It is very effective in doing this.

kingdomcome50 11y ago
In what specific way is the American education system effective in fostering the above? I think you may have it exactly backwards. It seems to me that the opportunity afforded to an individual simply by living in the United States is the real driving force behind most successful endeavors like the above, and "geniuses" (I use that very loosely) rise to the top DESPITE our education system.
- indians_pro 11y ago
  i think thats exactly what he was saying. the part about 'sedating the masses' is also very apparent when u look at the robotic and homogenous modes of behaviour and 'exploration' promoted at school. they are also trying very hard to reduce interaction of kids with people outside their age group or level (including parents) which drastically cuts down on learning things in life that school will never teach u.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

fiatmoney 11y ago

There isn't really a "problem" in American education, in the sense that it's unusually bad compared to other countries. Looking at PISA scores, Latin American / European / Asian students in the USA do as well or better than in their mother countries. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_5a.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_... http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_5e_1.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_...

mercer 11y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you per sé, but it is possible that some crucial stuff is learned in the 15 years before these tests were administered? The reason I'm asking is that purely based on a 'hunch', I feel that the most useful years of my education were before the age of around 12-13 and after the age of 20. I have no solid evidence to support this, just my experience and that of my peers. Edit: to try and support my hunch: in my country 12-13 is the age where the 'sorting hat' is applied and you move to middle/high school (physically different location, on of three levels based on earlier performance), and 20 is generally around the second or third year of 'higher vocational training' or 'university' where the non-motivated are sorted out and (generally) the ones who are going to finish college are left. It's also the point where classes become less general, multiple-choice, massive (300+ classes sometimes) and instead become more focused and interesting.
tokenadult 11y ago
Those PISA charts don't say what you are summarizing them as saying. It used to be that people would cite a certain blog post to make the same point you are making here, but the data don't back up the blog author either. I have lived in another country, and the students there do better than their cousins who study in the United States.
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  What do they say, then? Because I read, for instance, the highest-scoring Latin American nation (Mexico) as having a lower mean (424) than US Hispanics (478). Other PISA components show similar results.

ergothus 11y ago

I have a friend who is a high school teacher, and I was shocked to learn how they evaluate him. (No idea how true this is for other schools). They compare the standardized test scores of this years group of students with those of last year's. If these students do better than those, he must have improved, and if they do worse, he must have slacked. Now, he'll have between 20-100 students each year. Any teacher will tell you that the variation between one year's group of students and the next is considerable. (indeed, among my teacher friends I've learned it's a major point of gossip - not individual students, but the collective lot) This seems insane to me. Why not compare this years students with THOSE SAME STUDENTS' SCORES from last year? Or find something else less likely to be so "swingy".

deleted 11y ago
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MarcScott 11y ago
We compare this way in the UK. The same students are compared each year with the assumption that some progress will be made, and that students will eventually reached a predicted level that is set externally and based on past performance and socio-economic factors. (http://www.fft.org.uk/ http://www.fft.org.uk/) It's still ridiculous and leads to teaching-to-the-test, fiddling with data, and undue pressure on teachers and learners.

known 11y ago

Real winners do not compare.

ThomPete 11y ago

The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple. No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn. That isn't to say that the education system shouldn't be optimized (it should) But there is no problem with education as such. There is a problem with how parents are involved with their kids education. Edit: To clear up confusion. No I am not saying parents are a substitute for education I am not talking about parents intervening either. I am saying that by being involved intellectually in their kids education they are providing their kids with the best kind of foundation possible and it will fix a lot of the issues that comes out of parents not being involved or outright harmful to their kids education.

slig 11y ago
> The key to successful education is involved parents. That seems to be the case with asian parents/children and they usually get better GPA. Is there any source that proves or disproves that?
- ThomPete 11y ago
  I don't know how conclusive the studies are but here is something to go with http://www.nea.org/tools/17360.htm http://www.nea.org/tools/17360.htm However I think it's misleading to focus on their scores as a proof of good education, but that's a whole other discussion.
CountSessine 11y ago
No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn. As a parent of two school-aged children, I couldn't agree more. At the same time, as a single parent, I have to say that it's hard to ignore the effect that ubiquitous divorce and single-parenting is having on children's schooling. In a single day I have to drag my kids out of bed, make them breakfast, make them lunch, get them to school (all the while they're complaining and dawdling), get to work myself, work a full 8 hour day, get to the daycare and pick up my kids, get home, and make dinner for us. And then do everything else that needs my attention, like bills. And then hound my kids to do their homework, help them with it, and then cajole them to do extra studying in math or writing. It's exhausting and demoralizing having to do this all on your own. And I make a lot more money than is the average where I live, so I can only imagine what it must be like doing all of this with money pressures.

germinalphrase 11y ago

Teaching remains a craft-based occupation, but we're haven't yet developed tools that actually support the job of a teacher. There's no way that Universities/k12 school administrators will be capable of providing the level of detailed feedback necessary to teach teachers how to be effective, so we need better methods for teachers to self-assess and improve independently. So much effort is being put into one-off, discrete solution to a curriculum problem (like leveled non-fiction texts, grammar instruction, etc.) - but what we really need are tools that allow me to understand what my students are capable of, support my development of curriculum materials/activities/assessment, and discover/remix the multitude of learning resources that are being created in classrooms just like mine all over the country. I want a VisiCalc, because I'm tired of running these numbers by hand.

x0x0 11y ago

I majored in math, and had several future math teachers in my homework group. One answer is future high school math teachers are some of the worst math students. I'm sure that's totally unrelated to the pay being completely shit. I have a friend who teaches in a Belmont (peninsula in the valley) school. He also works as a receptionist at a gym 4 days a week after working at the school, and he still spends half his take home pay on rent. So he's at the school where he teaches by 6:55AM and leaves the gym at 10PM, then does grading. The only reason you would legitimately struggle to understand why it's hard to hire teachers or why skilled people don't do it is because you're a startup founder (why aren't engineers jumping take a $50k paycut in exchange for most-likely-worthless 0.1% options? Engineering shortage!) In the bay area in CA, teaching is a cute hobby that has to be supported by a spouse or a second job. If you want to draw more high-quality people into the profession, change that. And then maintain the changes and wait 10+ years at least for the knowledge to percolate and another generation of teachers to come up through high school and college.

smokey_the_bear 11y ago
I majored in math as well, and had lots of secondary mathematics education majors in my classes. While it's true they were weaker than the math majors in the advanced classes, they were certainly bright and enthusiastic enough to teach math up to basic calculus.
Thriptic 11y ago
Yup, people follow incentives. I was friends with someone in college who majored in chemistry and could have easily gotten into a good PhD program or gone right into industry. She chose instead to teach high school chemistry and did a fantastic job until she burned out 3 years later. The work load was enormous, the pay was shit, many of the kids didn't want to be there, and the goals of her school administration were completely decoupled from the general purpose of teaching. She is now in industry making much more money and living a much better lifestyle.
pc86 11y ago
You're going to have a really hard time getting anyone over to your side when your argument is basically "we need to throw a ton of money at the problem and wait a decade before suggesting maybe that didn't help much." Not saying I disagree with your goal, but politically that's just not going to happen.

Alex3917 11y ago

> It’s true that the average SAT score of high school students who plan to become teachers is below the national average. If you ever take education classes, the first thing you'll notice is that the people leading them tend to go out of their way to follow best practices for teaching / learning. Since most other classes only incorporate a handful of evidence-based teaching methods, and many times are structured around blatant anti-patterns, a lot of the ways these programs are structured are going to feel wrong to outside observers. But often there is some sort of theory / research behind why they are the way they are. Granted this applies more to Ivy league teaching programs and not random Internet diploma mills, but for what it's worth.

js2 11y ago

Whenever I see one of these articles, I reflect back to this report from 2007: How the world’s best-performing schools come out on top To find out why some schools succeed where others do not, McKinsey studied 25 of the world’s school systems, including 10 of the top performers. The experience of these top school systems suggest that three things matter most: - Getting the right people to become teachers; - Developing them into effective instructors; and - Ensuring the system is available to deliver the best possible instruction for every child. http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-best-performing-schools-come-out-on-top/ http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-best-performing-... This essasy doesn't conflict with the report, but it's only a tiny piece of the puzzle.

tokenadult 11y ago

I'll give an example based on my international experience. I studied Chinese in my undergraduate major, among other languages I studied as elective subjects, and while in university I learned the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)[1] in linguistics classes. Few Americans know IPA. When I began studying in Taiwan after graduation, I observed that all students in Taiwan in those days learned IPA in seventh grade, in their junior high English classes, and young people with just a secondary education could reliably read aloud English texts written in IPA--a skill that amazed many of my fellow foreign students from English-speaking countries. Today, as Taiwan has moved that skill down to the primary school curriculum, most United States reading teachers have never, ever learned IPA, which is helpful for explaining the vagaries of English spelling. Similarly, in primary mathematics instruction, it is well known how do instruction well with multiple representations of mathematical concepts for pupils,[2] and generally it is very well known that teachers of mathematics need to have "profound understanding of fundamental mathematics (PUFM)"[3] and pedagogical content knowledge, but few teachers in the United States gain that from their professional training in teacher education courses.[4] I try to do my part to help teachers already in the classroom by participating in online discussions with other teachers (I myself am a math teacher in private practice) to guide them to helpful resources for learning more mathematics. Simply put, the author of the original article submitted here is correct. The United States could and should do better in teacher education to help teachers do their job as well as they desire to do it. [1] https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa... http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/ http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-... [2] http://singaporemathsource.com/making-math-masters-a-brief-overview-of-singapore-math/ http://singaporemathsource.com/making-math-masters-a-brief-o... http://www.thedailyriff.com/2010/11/singapore-math-demystified-part-3-the-famous-bar-models.php http://www.thedailyriff.com/2010/11/singapore-math-demystifi... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Understanding/dp/0415873843 http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf [4] https://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleId=5974 https://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleId=5974 http://www.maa.org/programs/faculty-and-departments/curriculum-department-guidelines-recommendations/teaching-and-learning/preservice-teachers-conceptions http://www.maa.org/programs/faculty-and-departments/curricul... https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/ https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/

cloudwizard 11y ago

American education is not designed to maximize student performance. As soon as a child meets the minimum, they are ignored. All the effort goes into improving the performance of the underperforming kids. no child left behind = no child does really well Involved parents replace school. They act as the real teachers. They pay for after school classes where the child will do all the real learning. The US education does what it is designed to do. Help as many underperforming kids as it can. The problem is that it claims to help all kids which it is not actually designed to do. If the US wants higher performing students, it needs to change the design. More education of gifted students will bring the average up. Higher standards will raise the minimum bar that the schools try to reach. I have 2 kids and I treated one of the top elementary schools in SV as a daycare.

jackcosgrove 11y ago

Maybe the problem is not so bad as is commonly believed. http://www.newgeography.com/content/001955-the-amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa-beats-western-europe-ties-with-asia http://www.newgeography.com/content/001955-the-amazing-truth... tl;dr Comparing Americans of European descent with Europeans, Americans are above the European average. "The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded." Americans of Asian descent tie with Asians. Note the provisos. "For Asian-American students (remember this includes Vietnam, Thailand and other less developed countries outside Northeast Asia), the mean PISA score is 534, same as 533 for the average of Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Here we have two biases going in opposite directions: Asians in the U.S are selected. On the other hand we are comparing the richest and best scoring Asian countries with all Americans with origin in South and East Asia."

tokenadult 11y ago
The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students." But this is factually incorrect. 1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009, http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mrs.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr... and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science. Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mrs.asp http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr... shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources. 2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis, http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-Language/dp/0826404049 http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L... which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons. 3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented" http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests." The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them," http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-comparison_x.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu... The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too. 4. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The latest TIMSS report, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not tie with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4, page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity. This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country." 5. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct (even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post. Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors, Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdiffs.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi... so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States. http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

nsxwolf 11y ago

Teaching is the hardest job in the world. That's why so many teachers suck at it.

kohito 11y ago

Lots of people here are pretty certain the "key" to a "successful education" are parents. But one successful teacher's view is this: "...Like all the teachers I talked to in Washington, Mr. Taylor laments the lack of parental involvement. “On back-to-school night, if you have 28 or 30 kids in your class, you’re lucky to see six or seven parents,” he says. But when I ask him how that affects his teaching, he says, “Actually, it doesn’t. I make it my business to call the parents—and not just for bad things..." h/t u/jseliger, who linked to a helpful article at the Atlantic, where I'm quoting this from.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Lots of people here are pretty certain the "key" to a "successful education" are parents. Most studies I've seen on the topic show that the best predictor of one's educational success and attainment is one's parents educational attainment, so there is something to that that an anecdote from a teacher that, aside from not being a systematic gathering of evidence, doesn't even describe an experience of what drives outcomes, but simply relates a personal practice, isn't really sufficient to rebut.
Avshalom 11y ago
If the teacher's secret sauce is "if the parents aren't involved on their own, I get them involved" that means the teacher's secret sauce is parents.

lazyant 11y ago

The key to good education is motivated students, motivated teachers and motivated parents, in pretty much that order. Of course some teaching methodologies are better than other ones, but all the success stories I read, stripped from the fluff are based on enthusiastic and energetic teaches and supportive parents. For the students we just need to not kill their natural learning predisposition. The parents, well, it depends on their culture etc, little to do here as well. So for things we can change were left with the teachers. If they are respected, have a good salary, had a good education, have opportunities for growth, are not strangled by bureaucracy and come from the best of the students, then we'll have good teachers. If they are poorly paid, not recognized, fighting with paperwork and red tape, fighting with entitled parents and coming from the less smart student pool, well, looks a bit like US public system.

PhilWright 11y ago

I have never understood why we have so much duplicated effort in teaching a standardised syllabus. At the moment (in Australia) each teacher does preparation for a lesson and then gives that lesson. Lots of duplicated effort. So 1000 maths teachers all prepare for the same lesson which introduces fractions, as an example. Instead have a great teacher prepare and then record a presentation. At lesson time every class gets to watch that presentation. This takes up maybe 75% of the lesson time. Then the remainder of the time deals with questions and extra clarification. You just saved a huge number of hours of prep and have a top notch presentation.