15 ms·

Why Our Schools Suck, The Movie

85 points by rafaelc 16y ago

andrewce 16y ago
It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality). The definition of "good teacher" they seem to be using is some variant of the "value-added" model, by which teachers are evaluated based on how much the test scores of their students improve. However, the tests are only barely valid (if at all), and don't measure much (if anything) worth measuring. Meanwhile, the reading and writing go by the wayside in favour of multiple-choice "comprehension" questions, math becomes an exercise in gaming in the arithmetic, and science (held up so high in theory and so low in practice) becomes a glorified exercise in vocabulary memorization. This isn't even beginning to mention the arts. I'd have more faith in Superman if I thought schools knew what they wanted to do, or if there were a cohesive and coherent philosophical approach. As it is now, there is a system which reduces good teachers, protects bad teachers, and hamstrings learning in favour of that which can be easily measured and that which can be taught with only a modicum of thoughtfulness required. Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach.
- jerf 16y ago
  "It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality)." Consider it a necessary, but not sufficient, start. Right now, getting rid of a teacher that is committing actual crimes is a challenge in many places, getting rid of a teacher who merely objectively doesn't teach to any standard you care to name is a challenge everywhere. You can play with all the other knobs on the system you like, but until you change this you've already lost. I would argue that exactly because of this fact, the blundering around the rest of the system has done is the expected result. No matter what the system does, this means the problem just gets worse every year as more dead wood is accumulated. Therefore, the system never gets any feedback about the value of what the changes were. When everything uniformly produces the same negative result, you can't get any information from the results. (At least human systems are less prone than individual humans to learned helplessness and things are still being tried.) Until you fix this problem, the question of what changes actually work can not even be properly asked, in a way that can actually obtain useful and actionable answers. (I have simplified this for internet-debate purposes; in fact some schools sometimes manage to improve, there's always variations, etc. But I don't think I need to go too far in defending the premise that the system as a whole has been sinking for decades now.)
  - andrewce 16y ago
    I'll gladly concede that getting rid of incompetent teachers (or otherwise having some ability with which to help those who want to improve improve), or at least securing the ability to do so, is an extremely necessary start. Particularly with teachers who are committing actual crimes, though in fairness, I think that difficulty is overstated (point of note: I'm in the midwest, where the unions are not as strong, so that colours my perceptions a bit). That said, though, I don't think we have any way of determing who is/isn't a good teacher if we haven't yet determined what good teaching looks like (in turn, we can't determine that until we figure out what we actually want out of school). As a teacher, I've been on all sides of this; while working in a large public school, I've had lots of freedom and leeway (so long as I could justify it to my administrators, who were either down with it or completely and totally indifferent). I've also worked in a small school where the "system" I was expected to carry out was complete and utter rubbish ("Students should not write at all until at least their junior year. They should spend the time prior to this diagramming sentences and memorizing the parts of speech, so that they understand what good sentences look like. They may only begin writing AFTER they have mastered identifying these patterns.") When you couple that with an authoritarian administration, I was a "bad teacher" in the latter system, and had I not resigned I'd have likely been the first to go when budget cuts rolled around the summer after I left (as it was, my successor was let go instead). I agree that incompentent teachers are a problem, but there's more to it than just that. Frankly, so many things have been screwy for so long (William Pinar, out of the U of British Columbia, places it at about 4 decades) that I'm amazed that anything gets done.
    - stretchwithme 16y ago
      I can tell when someone knows how to teach me something and if they care. I can't believe somehow most parents aren't just as able to determine when someone is capable of teaching their kids. They just aren't given a chance. You may not be able to tell whether someone is a good mechanic but you may know bs when you hear it. And you may recognize very smart people who care about their kids whose opinion's you respect. And we have all kinds of ways of rating things and we tell which ones work well over the long haul. We make these murky decions all the time. Its the fact that we do not use these resources when our decisions are turned over to the state that is the problem.
- andreyf 16y ago
  Don't forget everything they do teach: being wholly subjugated to the control of a superior (where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom?), unquestioning obedience, working hard without a hint of interest, etc.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    > where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom? In the interests of being complete- any time you are visiting someone's house for the first time? i.e. "do you mind if I use your restroom?"
    - noonespecial 16y ago
      I've never been told no when I ask this as a guest. School, however, presented a very different scenario.
    - tomjen3 16y ago
      That is really a point of courtesy - nobody ever says no.
      - _delirium 16y ago
        It's also often more a roundabout request for directions than request for permission--- "can I use your bathroom?" translates to "so, uh, where's your bathroom?"
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - matwood 16y ago
    Well they don't seem to be doing a good job since discipline seems to be the most lacking quality in todays youth.
    - andreyf 16y ago
      There's a difference between discipline and subjugation. Many kids have the mentality of slaves - disgruntled, fearful, and angry.
- DanielN 16y ago
  The issue of getting good teachers in the classroom and re-organizing curriculum around creativity and "non-test-centric" priorities are very much one in the same. See http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ or http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ for examples. But I think most advocates of changing the way teachers are hired and fired would tell you that one must follow the other.
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  > Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach. Is it really like that nowadays? I have heard this said before, but it doesn't match my experience a mere ten years past. When I was in school, sure, there was a general curriculum of the sorts of things we ought to learn in class. But the means and methods of conveying that knowledge did seem to be at the teachers' discretion. Any teachers on this web zone care to comment?
  - andrewce 16y ago
    I make my living by substitute teaching right now, as well as running creative writing workshops for K-12 students in the state in which I live (I'm in the midwest). In the last calendar year, I've been roughly 25 different schools. In addition to this, I do research with a former professor of education, and maintain a pretty wide network of friends and professional contacts who are teachers. And, depending on the grade and on the school, it is like this. The professor whom I work with has this as one of her primary research areas, and has told me story after story of going into elementary schools (particularly on the western, less populated half of our state) in which teacher-student interactions are scripted down to the minute, and teachers are evaluated based on whether or not they follow the script. The major high school across the street from where I live (~1500 students) has a science department where none of the teachers have written their own lesson plans in about 3 years; they use the lesson plans in the district binder (I've taught from those lesson plans; they're barely rigorous, and conflate superficial knowledge memorization with actual learning). A friend of mine is a language and communication arts teacher in a middle school; if he wants to deviate from the lesson plan binder, he has to submit a proposal for the new unit (there can't just be one lesson) during the summer, at which point it's at the mercy of the committee. While I was teaching in Kansas, my lesson plans were written for me, and I was punished any time I went away from them, even when it was clear that my students needed more time with something before they understood it ("If you were a good teacher, and if they were paying attention, they'd get it the first time. Make them come in during lunch."). There are plenty of holdouts, thankfully; schools which serve mostly affluent students (particularly schools with strong enough test results that they can get away with it) seem to have done well. Additionally, there are a lot of more urban schools which serve students who are not quite so affluent and which have managed to hold out, though I suspect some of this is an accident of the difficulties of administrating a big school in which math is the least of most students' worries.
- halostatue 16y ago
  Hypothesis: the performance gap between good teachers and great teachers is as hard to quantify and as elusive to define as the performance gap between good programmers and great programmers. We all know that some programmers are 10x more effective than other programmers. What we don't know is why. I suspect the same is true of teachers. Otherwise, ++ for your comment about teachers having to follow scripts. The best programs aren't scripted, and the modern "money" solution (not necessarily supported by teachers or teachers' unions, by the by) is to tightly tie down the curriculum so that teachers have minimal impact on the delivery. Teacher friends who have taught in England have said that it's to the point of "it's November 4th, so we must be doing Triangles"; every student is supposed to be learning exactly the same thing on the same day. Nice in theory, but it doesn't work.
kevin_morrill 16y ago
I think we'd benefit more from taking a critical look at the ideas of John Dewey that pervade virtually all of education. Unions are definitely a blight on education, but a screwed up epistemology is much more fundamental. Details on Dewey's approach, which is pretty much gospel in American education, can be found at http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm Thinking is not a social function; communicating is. If you wonder why politicians spend less time thinking and more time following polls--look no further. If you wonder why our country fails to enlist math and science--here's your answer.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- grandalf 16y ago
  Interesting. The only thing I'd offer as a counter-argument is that if the public education monopoly were broken then chances are there'd be a lot of different philosophies guiding the emerging schools. Any top-down system suffers the weakness that a choice made from on high might not be the best for everyone, or that competing approaches might never be explored.
  - shawndumas 16y ago
    http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/16/money-is-not-what-schools-need http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/16/money-is-not-what-scho...
jlgbecom 16y ago
The most successful schools in the world are in Finland, Americans need to look at their model, put aside our prejudices, and adopt it's best practices. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html
js2 16y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671651 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671651
stretchwithme 16y ago
I think parents should be free to choose what they think is best for their children and not be forced to support what some people think is best for everyone. The parents are the ones who must live with the consequences and collectivism simply enables people who get control to use children for their own political purposes or serve whatever abstractions they happened to be enamored with. Filtering the concerns and wisdom of parents through multiple political layers serves the layers and not the parents.
- Charuru 16y ago
  That's not really practical... There aren't enough schools around, and not everyone can afford private school. Also politically, it's the unfortunate reality that parents are not the only interests that must be served. All parents want the highest quality teachers for the lowest costs, of course that's just impossible.
  - grandalf 16y ago
    How do you know the market price of education when we don't have a market for it? My take is that breaking the public school monopoly (possibly via a widespread voucher system) would result in more competition... this would have the familiar effects... better value, lower prices, etc.
    - stretchwithme 16y ago
      absolutely. in most markets, many approaches to solving a problem are tried. and when evidence that something works appears, more and more people try it and find it useful. but thats not how collective decision making works. you've got to convince a majority that something works. you need a campaign and evidence is often ignored in politics. ok, often is being generous I remember when Spanish speaking parents in California wanted their kids taught in English. Educators opposed it. It took a state wide vote to make the change. Parents couldn't simply select this approach for their child. And lo and behold, kids did better and educators were surprised. Its a simple matter for folks to make dozens of decisions every day about their kids, selecting from many competing options. How could some dumbed-down centralized decision making system working with a tiny fraction of the information and a tiny fraction of anything personal at stake possibly make a better decision? Its pure group think in my opinion.
tkahn6 16y ago
I don't even see how it's possible to claim that 'schools suck' unless you define a) what the purpose of school is and b) what a 'good' education is. Until you have a clear definition, you can't 'reform' or 'fix' anything because you have no goal. I, of course, have very strong opinions about this, but these questions are rarely brought up in the debate about the education system.
- grandalf 16y ago
  The purpose of low end schools is to pay teachers more than they would earn (for less work) in another job and to provide daycare for kids so their parents can work. The purpose of high end schools is to prepare kids for Ivy league colleges where they will learn to work on wall street (about half of Harvard grads) where they'll exploit regulatory failures/oversights for profit. edit: corrected the percentage of harvard grads that go to wall street.
  - natrius 16y ago
    Finance is not the unalloyed evil you're making it out to be.
    - carbocation 16y ago
      I didn't interpret "exploiting regulatory failures" to be a metonym for all of finance.
      - grandalf 16y ago
        It wasn't intended as such. Finance is a very important part of the economy and should be. I actually blame regulators for creating a false sense of security. A more "wild west" environment would have at least led investors/counterparties to question more of the claims that were being made leading up to the crisis.
        Retric 16y ago
grandalf 16y ago
If anyone is interested in starting a school please contact me.
- Reclix 16y ago
  Definitely intending to eventually - but this is a much longer term goal for me - not sure I'd be of much help in the very near future. My long term vision is to blend traditional schooling with both practical skills (how to manage your credit, etc.) and interpersonal, soft skills (self awareness, conflict resolution, etc.) in an effort to empower students to take control of their own lives.
  - aik 16y ago
    Reclix, please send me an e-mail: aikon3390 at gmail. Your long term vision is nearly identical to my current one and I would love to hear how you are preparing for that vision.
    - pchristensen 16y ago
      I'd also be interested to hear about it. Reclix, you should add your email address to your about section - users can't see what you put in your email field.
      - Reclix 16y ago
        thanks for the tip! will e-mail you shortly.
  - matwood 16y ago
    Your long term vision is a good one and one that I have often thought about. Traditional schooling fails many of the practical and soft skills that are so crucial for today. Parents should be teaching these (that's where I learned them), but it doesn't seem to be happening as often as it should. Outside mentors can also help, groups like Big Brothers/Big Sisters as well as coaches, etc... would fall into this category.
nRike 16y ago
We cannot blame the teachers, nor the children. I think it's a big trouble for all humanity. All these things i've lived in varsity was so terrible, i remember something from the career chief of on of the best schools here in Mexico(http://ipn.mx http://ipn.mx). At the final exam, those one for get the degree, we told him that we wanted to do a online startup to begin creating jobs in our country, learn great things and be proactives, we argued if Mark Zuckerberg did, why we didn't?. He answered "Place yourself in your context, this is Mexico and there are nobody who has done something like this, please be realistics." I honestly can understand his thoughs, because he's a person who finished his Master Degree in the same school he studied his career, he never got a job in the industry and by the same, he didn't know anything about what's going on this daily-changing world called internet. I have several things to share here, and also i have my own answer about why the schools aren't working anymore. Why humans created schools? universities and specialized courses of some science? Because they noted if you start giving "education" to people they will be useful for industries and they will generate wealth, and that was true 70 years ago, -ie i've studied as part of Computer Engineer career a subject called "logical circuits" where we built some circuits with some logic gates, and using a protoboard. I really hated these stuff, but if i imagine myself studying these topic 70 years ago, I would be surely fascinated. Today is another history, a history where driven-knowledge is to a few clicks, and where you can learn as fast as you want, a history where knowledge six months ago is no longer profitable,a history where you cannot wait to get information from another guy who calls himself a professor but it really does not love their job, but by money. You cannot depend of what are you learning using such a valuable resource like time from a stranger who doesn't care about what you love to do. We need to start creating yesterday, and the future is today. I think schools need to change the way educate people, because just give knowledge with non sense of application kind of useless(some psychologists says the knowledge is better developed by practicing not just reading or listening), and i personally consider a waste of time these behavior, because we forget knowledge pretty much everything if we don't use it, and also we didn't really own knowledge at all, sometimes it's just an act of imitating your teacher trying to get a high note. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and repeating some old stuff doesn't solve nothing but high average in school. From the other hand, i think internet is such a great tool to start building real knowledge of almost anything, we can search from how to find the g point to build a molotov bomb in a few clicks away. Internet is such an amazing way of share experiential knowledge and give value to other people like HackerNews, somo other tools like Quora, StackOverflow and more to come. We can connect people with the same ideology or same musical preferences. I find my first paid work using Internet, i met my actual girlfriend from internet, i know almost all i do from here, the internet, i'm sharing what i'm learning in a blog post, i've built a community for Mexican and Latin American Android Developers. There aren't barriers here, and those mental barriers you can defeat at a pair of clicks.
Debugreality 16y ago
Put cameras inside classrooms that parents can login to online at any time of day and I think we will see a vast improvement in schools. Just a thought :)
- aik 16y ago
  I don't think the main problem is that parents have access to what's going on in the classroom, I think it's that a lot of parents don't care or know what to care about. They're too busy working or doing other things.
  - aik 16y ago
    *parents _don't_ have access
- gojomo 16y ago
  ClassroomRoulette?
- iamwil 16y ago
  That probably won't fix what kids are and aren't learning. At best, you'd get evidence for teachers hitting or sexually abusing children (a small small minority). At worst, you'd get lots of parents being backseat drivers about what the teacher should and shouldn't teach and how. Parents are notorious for thinking they know what's best for their kids, even though they never studied education. It also doesn't help that historically and by reputation (not necessarily the case now), those that can't cut it in other fields ended up in education, so those parents think that they know better.
- Debugreality 16y ago
  That was a bit tounge in cheek but after discussing this with my partner I think perhaps a more constructive use of class room cameras would be to facilitate peer review and ongoing skill improvement. Similar to code reviews by programmers.
HilbertSpace 16y ago
Yup, here we go again: US education is falling behind other countries. This time the cause is bad teachers protected by the teachers union. I'm all for busting up the teachers union, but I don't for a nano second believe that bad teachers are really the cause of what is being observed. Instead, what's being observed is deliberately made up, mostly nonsense, mostly to spend still more money on K-12 education which, with some irony, would help the teachers union! We went through all this just 17 months ago with McKinsey's report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools, April, 2009, then but no longer at http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/achievement_gap_report.pdf http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/achieveme... and supporting materials (PDF - 1.0 MB) then but no longer at http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/detailed_achievement_gap_findings.pdf http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/detailed_... Cover to cover it is clear that the main concern of this, apparently pro bono effort by some dedicated McKinsey staff members, was to scream that US K-12 educational achievement sucks while what they really meant was that US Black K-12 educational achievement sucks. So, that pro bono effort was to save the US Blacks. Throughout the two long PDF files, they omitted any view of the elephant in the room until they gave a glimpse on page 26 of supporting materials (PDF - 1.0 MB) where they did a little cross-tabulation, that is, started on the main technique in looking for causality in social-economic data. So on page 26 we finally get the US students, White, Latino, and Black, compared separately with students in many other countries in the world. So, wonder of wonders, the ranking goes: Finland Hong Kong Canada Japan Australia US whites Korea Germany United Kingdom Switzerland Ireland Sweden The US Latinos? Just above Chile. The US Blacks? A little ahead of Indonesia and Argentina. Is there any question how the US Blacks would do against, say, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Zaire, Zimbabwe? So wonder how US students of Finish descent would do against Finland, Asian descent, against Hong Kong, Canadian descent, against Canada, Japanese descent, against Japan, Australian descent, against Australia? The study didn't say. Ah, wonder why? Why oh why? Maybe they followed the old rule, "If you don't think you will like the answer, then don't ask the question.". So the study mostly tried to obscure the obvious cause: For the data they considered, the main cause of good performance is country of origin. Right: In particular, parents are a still more important cause, and it might be possible to dig still deeper. Then the main reason for the low average US ranking is that the US is a diverse country and the other countries are homogeneous. So, Virgina, this statistical pattern has NOTHING to do with education or US education: Instead, take any 100 homogeneous populations, of anything -- kitty cats, puppy dogs, or billy goats. Then pick a measure, any nontrivial measure you want from length of hair, body weight, running speed, jumping ability, whisker length, nearly anything at all. Then from the 100 homogeneous populations, make a diverse population and apply the measure. Then rank all the 101 populations. Presto: Wonder of wonders, the diverse population will be ahead of some of the homogeneous populations and behind some of the others. Obvious. Trivial. And that obvious, trivial observation is so far ALL the screaming is about. How 'bout that. So, if want to tar and feather US education, which for other reasons I'm plenty eager to do, will build the fire to warm up the tar right away, then compare US education with apples against apples. So, compare US education on people from Finland with Finland education on people in Finland. In this way have compared US education with Finland education. Then rinse, repeat for Hong Kong, Canada, Japan, etc. But the semi-, pseudo-, quasi-smart, partly objective McKinsey team last year and the movie people this year showed their grasp of education: All they showed was the same thing would see from 101 collections of kitty cats measured on length of whiskers. There's another big point: Apparently actually there isn't much in K-12 in the public school systems of any of the countries so that at most not much is missed. Another point: Let's compare college education and, there, GRE scores. Bet the top 100 US colleges and universities do quite well, thank you. Another point: Let's compare graduate education and research progress -- as we know, the US by itself totally blows all the rest of the world off the court and out of the arena. Another point: K-12 really should amount to something. So let's move to that. Another point: It may be that the US should take vocational education as seriously as, say, Germany does. We should consider that. Another point: In the classic Democracy and Education, John Dewey made a big point: He defined education as the passing from one generation to the next and mentioned that what gets passed is mostly just what was there, both good and bad, with maybe a little improvement at each passing. So, without some quite special efforts, tough to take teachers from the middle third of US educational accomplishment and have them pass on only the top 10% of educational content. Another point: Once again we see that high accomplishment is mostly the responsibility of individuals and where their best help is from their own families. So, enter the promise of home schooling. Here's my approach to improving US education (listen up billionaires): First, set up educational certification in nearly all subjects of interest from math, physics, and chemistry to auto body repair, grass mowing, all the way down to, say, computer science, and from there way, way down to, say, programming in C++, if could find anyone so weak minded. The CEEB tests should be a good start. Second, get most colleges to agree on the required subjects to be ready for college work. Third, fund some efforts at educational materials and programs to prepare students for the tests. Of course should try to make heavy use of PDF files, video lectures on YouTUBE, Web fora, tutoring, etc. Then, let free enterprise take over and develop still better educational materials. For K-12, leave that to local school boards: Some will get it and let well motivated and guided students just pursue some of the better sets of materials and, then, be ready for college work at age 10 or 12. Then have those 12 year olds compete with 12 year olds around the world. Here we cut out a lot of nonsense: If someone wants to learn, then sit in a cubicle with a computer, work through some of the best educational materials, take the test, and see how well they do, and then all the credit and/or blame is just theirs. For varsity athletics, f'get about it except for the cheerleaders -- wouldn't want not to have the cheerleaders, a crown jewel of the US educational system!
iko371 16y ago
Hey, here's a great idea. Let's cut maybe a tenth of the military budget and put it towards K-12 teacher's salaries. I hear the median income in the military is around $120k. One tenth of the military budget could get teacher's salaries up to that amount, and we'd probably be able to throw in some state of the art learning facilities, smartboards, a computer at every desk, the works in practically every school. We'd have top notch facilities and candidates qualified to use it effectively! Regardless of whether or not we end up using a tenure or merit system for hiring and firing (the benefits outweigh the flaws in the former, imo), schools will, in the end, get the quality of teachers that they are capable of paying for. How many good teachers do you think will work in a run down school teaching unruly students for $30k annual salary? I sure as hell wouldn't want to be that teacher.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I hear the median income in the military is around $120k. I'm pretty sure you heard wrong.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  I don't think an 8% increase in education funding will increase teacher salaries to $120k. You do realize that we already spend 15% more on education than we do on the military, right? http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20.html http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...
  - iko371 16y ago
    I love how when you click on the "about" tab on usgovernmentspending.com, it's basically revealed that the site is run by some guy with a blog. I went to the guy's blog, and prominently on the left side of the screen, there's an image that reads, "proud right wing extremist". Usgovernmentspending.com looks like a great source of accurate, reliable information! </sarcasm>
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      What I love about it is when you scroll down, you can click on links which take you to the original source for the numbers (both official government sources). When you scroll down further, you see an explanation of his methodology in merging two spreadsheets. I guess ad-hominem attacks are easier than actually downloading the spreadsheets yourself and crunching the numbers, right? (Note: you can only download the spreadsheets for 2008 or earlier. 2009-2014 are marked as guesstimates, since official data is not yet available.
Maro 16y ago
I'm Hungarian. Due to my parents, I attended schools in 3 different countries: - first half year : Hungary - grades 1.5 - 4 : Germany - grades 5 - 8 : Hungary - grades 9 - 12 : USA, California - Universities, PhD: Hungary After the first half year in Hungary, when I arrived in Germany, I was waaay ahead of all the other kids in Math & Sciences and was near the top of the class for most of the 4 years without speaking the language properly. Then I got back to Hungary, where I had major catching up to do, especially in terms of Math, Sciences, Music and of course Hungarian language. I eventually caught up in Math & Physics, but not in Biology or Music, which never interested me much. (I mention Music because Hungarian schools teach music at a high level from grade 1 to everyone according to the "Liszt system", and for someone like me, who is not musically minded it was impossible to catch up.) Then I went to University High School in Irvine, Orange County, California, one of the best public high schools in the USA I believe. Even so, that was a fairly shocking experience for me. Initially I was way ahead, but the whole system was so different, neither I not my parents knew how it worked (eg. you have to pick your own classes), the advisors put me into idiotic "English as a Second Language" classes for the first few months, where you really can't actually learn English because all the other kids are Korean. And for some reason they only had ESL for low-level math classes, roughly at the level you'd learn in 6th grade everywhere else. So eventually I did okay at UHS, because we figured out to ignore what the advisors (who seemed completely useless to me) say. But I couldn't really cope with all the freedom, all the activities, or the fact that everybody had cars at age 16, and I didn't, so I got Bs regularly. Then I got back to a Hungarian University for a CS major, and even though I took all the AP classes in the US and took some CS at the local community college and UCI, I was waaaaaaaaaay behind, esp. in Physics. The AP Calculus classes are not so bad, but the one year AP Physics class is a major joke. In Hungary they study Physics for 4 years straight. So at first I had really bad grades at University. Eventually I went on to do a 2nd degree (another 5 manyears) in Physics, mostly because it interested me and I was so annoyed by my lack of understanding. Overall, it's clear that the US public HS, even one of the best, was a major waste of time. I didn't learn much, nor were the teachers any good. I eventually enrolled to become a physicist to properly repair the "damage" caused by a lack of proper Physics education at the HS. It quickly turned out I'm so interested in Physical theories that I'm currently doing a PhD. I'm also fairly certain that I got a better University education here in Hungary (esp. Physics) than I would have gotten at a public University in the US, all things taken into account. However, it's clear that no University in any part of the world can compete with top US and UK schools (mostly private and some public like Berkeley). Overall, I'm still very happy to have spent 4 years in the USA, as it was a major life experience, and I benefit from it every day. I would say it was worth it even though the HS sucked, because the US culture / language is like Rome was 2000 years ago. The United States is the center of the world, and if somebody doesn't understand the United States, they don't understand the world. To get a better feeling for the "center of the world" part, visit the NASA museum in Washington. Everything worth mentioning that has happened after 1940 is there. Also, the preview of this film seems to discount the self-confidence issue. I can understand this, but the makers should visit a country where kids, and thus people, are not injected with such self-confidence and see how they're doing (like here in Hungary). US self-confidence is one of the major factors why the economy is so great and why you have so many startups. I'm doing a startup right now, and it's no question that it's because after having spent 4 years in California I have a "can do" attitude, completely off the charts compared to my peers here in Hungary. I remember when I was at Uni I overheard someone referring to me as the "American guy" and I asked him how he knew I spent time in the States: he replied he didn't, he just gave me that nickname based on my attitude.
smutticus 16y ago
Both of my parents are/were teachers so of course I'm a little biased. But I just don't understand where this teacher hating attitude comes from. Teaching is hard work. In addition to the hours they put in actually teaching they spend lots of time preparing and grading. And since most of them are salaried it's not as if they get paid for all that overtime. It's true there are huge disparities between good teachers and bad. And maybe a meritocratic injection would do the system a whole lot of good. But to boil the entire problem down to this is simply naive.
- antidaily 16y ago
  I'm with you - and Bill Maher: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-dont-fire-the-te_b_497554.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-dont-fire-...
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Overtime? The average teacher works less than 40 hours/week (unlike other professionals) for the 9-10 months/year they actually work at all. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
  - artlogic 16y ago
    This is highly variable. My wife was a high school teacher for two years. She was up and at school by 7:30AM each day, and worked until at least 6:00PM each night just to keep up with grading. Couple that with lesson planning and hard to grade assignments (like essays) and she was easily putting in 60 hours a week. At least half of that time was spent in front of students (who can be a fairly adversarial audience). At no time did I look at her and think she was having an easy time of it. Also, if you do the math, you'll notice that she worked -more- than the average professional, despite the 10 week break. In the interest of full disclosure, this was a very good school that had high expectations of both its students and teachers.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
younata 16y ago
Having just left the US High School system, the problem is that we aren't teaching anything in high school. As PG said in his essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" [1], American high schools are popularity contests. The focus is not on actually learning anything, but on keeping us confined in one room while the adults go do work. Of course, the system is WAY too complicated for that to be the only cause. For example, another cause is apathy amongst the students. My high school senior class was 250-300 students large. My high school graduating class was about 150-200 students large. This is because ~100 students simply didn't care enough. Of the 150-200 students graduating, most went on to a community college, very few - about 50 or so, actually went to a 4 year university. Again, that's only barely scratching the surface, but I have class to go to, and that's of a higher priority than this comment. Because caring about your education is half the battle. [1] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

85 points by rafaelc 16y ago

It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality). The definition of "good teacher" they seem to be using is some variant of the "value-added" model, by which teachers are evaluated based on how much the test scores of their students improve. However, the tests are only barely valid (if at all), and don't measure much (if anything) worth measuring. Meanwhile, the reading and writing go by the wayside in favour of multiple-choice "comprehension" questions, math becomes an exercise in gaming in the arithmetic, and science (held up so high in theory and so low in practice) becomes a glorified exercise in vocabulary memorization. This isn't even beginning to mention the arts. I'd have more faith in Superman if I thought schools knew what they wanted to do, or if there were a cohesive and coherent philosophical approach. As it is now, there is a system which reduces good teachers, protects bad teachers, and hamstrings learning in favour of that which can be easily measured and that which can be taught with only a modicum of thoughtfulness required. Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach.

jerf 16y ago
"It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality)." Consider it a necessary, but not sufficient, start. Right now, getting rid of a teacher that is committing actual crimes is a challenge in many places, getting rid of a teacher who merely objectively doesn't teach to any standard you care to name is a challenge everywhere. You can play with all the other knobs on the system you like, but until you change this you've already lost. I would argue that exactly because of this fact, the blundering around the rest of the system has done is the expected result. No matter what the system does, this means the problem just gets worse every year as more dead wood is accumulated. Therefore, the system never gets any feedback about the value of what the changes were. When everything uniformly produces the same negative result, you can't get any information from the results. (At least human systems are less prone than individual humans to learned helplessness and things are still being tried.) Until you fix this problem, the question of what changes actually work can not even be properly asked, in a way that can actually obtain useful and actionable answers. (I have simplified this for internet-debate purposes; in fact some schools sometimes manage to improve, there's always variations, etc. But I don't think I need to go too far in defending the premise that the system as a whole has been sinking for decades now.)
- andrewce 16y ago
  I'll gladly concede that getting rid of incompetent teachers (or otherwise having some ability with which to help those who want to improve improve), or at least securing the ability to do so, is an extremely necessary start. Particularly with teachers who are committing actual crimes, though in fairness, I think that difficulty is overstated (point of note: I'm in the midwest, where the unions are not as strong, so that colours my perceptions a bit). That said, though, I don't think we have any way of determing who is/isn't a good teacher if we haven't yet determined what good teaching looks like (in turn, we can't determine that until we figure out what we actually want out of school). As a teacher, I've been on all sides of this; while working in a large public school, I've had lots of freedom and leeway (so long as I could justify it to my administrators, who were either down with it or completely and totally indifferent). I've also worked in a small school where the "system" I was expected to carry out was complete and utter rubbish ("Students should not write at all until at least their junior year. They should spend the time prior to this diagramming sentences and memorizing the parts of speech, so that they understand what good sentences look like. They may only begin writing AFTER they have mastered identifying these patterns.") When you couple that with an authoritarian administration, I was a "bad teacher" in the latter system, and had I not resigned I'd have likely been the first to go when budget cuts rolled around the summer after I left (as it was, my successor was let go instead). I agree that incompentent teachers are a problem, but there's more to it than just that. Frankly, so many things have been screwy for so long (William Pinar, out of the U of British Columbia, places it at about 4 decades) that I'm amazed that anything gets done.
  - stretchwithme 16y ago
    I can tell when someone knows how to teach me something and if they care. I can't believe somehow most parents aren't just as able to determine when someone is capable of teaching their kids. They just aren't given a chance. You may not be able to tell whether someone is a good mechanic but you may know bs when you hear it. And you may recognize very smart people who care about their kids whose opinion's you respect. And we have all kinds of ways of rating things and we tell which ones work well over the long haul. We make these murky decions all the time. Its the fact that we do not use these resources when our decisions are turned over to the state that is the problem.
andreyf 16y ago
Don't forget everything they do teach: being wholly subjugated to the control of a superior (where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom?), unquestioning obedience, working hard without a hint of interest, etc.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  > where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom? In the interests of being complete- any time you are visiting someone's house for the first time? i.e. "do you mind if I use your restroom?"
  - noonespecial 16y ago
    I've never been told no when I ask this as a guest. School, however, presented a very different scenario.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    That is really a point of courtesy - nobody ever says no.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      It's also often more a roundabout request for directions than request for permission--- "can I use your bathroom?" translates to "so, uh, where's your bathroom?"
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- matwood 16y ago
  Well they don't seem to be doing a good job since discipline seems to be the most lacking quality in todays youth.
  - andreyf 16y ago
    There's a difference between discipline and subjugation. Many kids have the mentality of slaves - disgruntled, fearful, and angry.
DanielN 16y ago
The issue of getting good teachers in the classroom and re-organizing curriculum around creativity and "non-test-centric" priorities are very much one in the same. See http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ or http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ for examples. But I think most advocates of changing the way teachers are hired and fired would tell you that one must follow the other.
houseabsolute 16y ago
> Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach. Is it really like that nowadays? I have heard this said before, but it doesn't match my experience a mere ten years past. When I was in school, sure, there was a general curriculum of the sorts of things we ought to learn in class. But the means and methods of conveying that knowledge did seem to be at the teachers' discretion. Any teachers on this web zone care to comment?
- andrewce 16y ago
  I make my living by substitute teaching right now, as well as running creative writing workshops for K-12 students in the state in which I live (I'm in the midwest). In the last calendar year, I've been roughly 25 different schools. In addition to this, I do research with a former professor of education, and maintain a pretty wide network of friends and professional contacts who are teachers. And, depending on the grade and on the school, it is like this. The professor whom I work with has this as one of her primary research areas, and has told me story after story of going into elementary schools (particularly on the western, less populated half of our state) in which teacher-student interactions are scripted down to the minute, and teachers are evaluated based on whether or not they follow the script. The major high school across the street from where I live (~1500 students) has a science department where none of the teachers have written their own lesson plans in about 3 years; they use the lesson plans in the district binder (I've taught from those lesson plans; they're barely rigorous, and conflate superficial knowledge memorization with actual learning). A friend of mine is a language and communication arts teacher in a middle school; if he wants to deviate from the lesson plan binder, he has to submit a proposal for the new unit (there can't just be one lesson) during the summer, at which point it's at the mercy of the committee. While I was teaching in Kansas, my lesson plans were written for me, and I was punished any time I went away from them, even when it was clear that my students needed more time with something before they understood it ("If you were a good teacher, and if they were paying attention, they'd get it the first time. Make them come in during lunch."). There are plenty of holdouts, thankfully; schools which serve mostly affluent students (particularly schools with strong enough test results that they can get away with it) seem to have done well. Additionally, there are a lot of more urban schools which serve students who are not quite so affluent and which have managed to hold out, though I suspect some of this is an accident of the difficulties of administrating a big school in which math is the least of most students' worries.
halostatue 16y ago
Hypothesis: the performance gap between good teachers and great teachers is as hard to quantify and as elusive to define as the performance gap between good programmers and great programmers. We all know that some programmers are 10x more effective than other programmers. What we don't know is why. I suspect the same is true of teachers. Otherwise, ++ for your comment about teachers having to follow scripts. The best programs aren't scripted, and the modern "money" solution (not necessarily supported by teachers or teachers' unions, by the by) is to tightly tie down the curriculum so that teachers have minimal impact on the delivery. Teacher friends who have taught in England have said that it's to the point of "it's November 4th, so we must be doing Triangles"; every student is supposed to be learning exactly the same thing on the same day. Nice in theory, but it doesn't work.

kevin_morrill 16y ago

I think we'd benefit more from taking a critical look at the ideas of John Dewey that pervade virtually all of education. Unions are definitely a blight on education, but a screwed up epistemology is much more fundamental. Details on Dewey's approach, which is pretty much gospel in American education, can be found at http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm Thinking is not a social function; communicating is. If you wonder why politicians spend less time thinking and more time following polls--look no further. If you wonder why our country fails to enlist math and science--here's your answer.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
grandalf 16y ago
Interesting. The only thing I'd offer as a counter-argument is that if the public education monopoly were broken then chances are there'd be a lot of different philosophies guiding the emerging schools. Any top-down system suffers the weakness that a choice made from on high might not be the best for everyone, or that competing approaches might never be explored.
- shawndumas 16y ago
  http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/16/money-is-not-what-schools-need http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/16/money-is-not-what-scho...

jlgbecom 16y ago

The most successful schools in the world are in Finland, Americans need to look at their model, put aside our prejudices, and adopt it's best practices. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html

js2 16y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671651 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671651

stretchwithme 16y ago

I think parents should be free to choose what they think is best for their children and not be forced to support what some people think is best for everyone. The parents are the ones who must live with the consequences and collectivism simply enables people who get control to use children for their own political purposes or serve whatever abstractions they happened to be enamored with. Filtering the concerns and wisdom of parents through multiple political layers serves the layers and not the parents.

Charuru 16y ago
That's not really practical... There aren't enough schools around, and not everyone can afford private school. Also politically, it's the unfortunate reality that parents are not the only interests that must be served. All parents want the highest quality teachers for the lowest costs, of course that's just impossible.
- grandalf 16y ago
  How do you know the market price of education when we don't have a market for it? My take is that breaking the public school monopoly (possibly via a widespread voucher system) would result in more competition... this would have the familiar effects... better value, lower prices, etc.
  - stretchwithme 16y ago
    absolutely. in most markets, many approaches to solving a problem are tried. and when evidence that something works appears, more and more people try it and find it useful. but thats not how collective decision making works. you've got to convince a majority that something works. you need a campaign and evidence is often ignored in politics. ok, often is being generous I remember when Spanish speaking parents in California wanted their kids taught in English. Educators opposed it. It took a state wide vote to make the change. Parents couldn't simply select this approach for their child. And lo and behold, kids did better and educators were surprised. Its a simple matter for folks to make dozens of decisions every day about their kids, selecting from many competing options. How could some dumbed-down centralized decision making system working with a tiny fraction of the information and a tiny fraction of anything personal at stake possibly make a better decision? Its pure group think in my opinion.

tkahn6 16y ago

I don't even see how it's possible to claim that 'schools suck' unless you define a) what the purpose of school is and b) what a 'good' education is. Until you have a clear definition, you can't 'reform' or 'fix' anything because you have no goal. I, of course, have very strong opinions about this, but these questions are rarely brought up in the debate about the education system.

grandalf 16y ago
The purpose of low end schools is to pay teachers more than they would earn (for less work) in another job and to provide daycare for kids so their parents can work. The purpose of high end schools is to prepare kids for Ivy league colleges where they will learn to work on wall street (about half of Harvard grads) where they'll exploit regulatory failures/oversights for profit. edit: corrected the percentage of harvard grads that go to wall street.
- natrius 16y ago
  Finance is not the unalloyed evil you're making it out to be.
  - carbocation 16y ago
    I didn't interpret "exploiting regulatory failures" to be a metonym for all of finance.
    - grandalf 16y ago
      It wasn't intended as such. Finance is a very important part of the economy and should be. I actually blame regulators for creating a false sense of security. A more "wild west" environment would have at least led investors/counterparties to question more of the claims that were being made leading up to the crisis.
      - Retric 16y ago

grandalf 16y ago

If anyone is interested in starting a school please contact me.

Reclix 16y ago
Definitely intending to eventually - but this is a much longer term goal for me - not sure I'd be of much help in the very near future. My long term vision is to blend traditional schooling with both practical skills (how to manage your credit, etc.) and interpersonal, soft skills (self awareness, conflict resolution, etc.) in an effort to empower students to take control of their own lives.
- aik 16y ago
  Reclix, please send me an e-mail: aikon3390 at gmail. Your long term vision is nearly identical to my current one and I would love to hear how you are preparing for that vision.
  - pchristensen 16y ago
    I'd also be interested to hear about it. Reclix, you should add your email address to your about section - users can't see what you put in your email field.
    - Reclix 16y ago
      thanks for the tip! will e-mail you shortly.
- matwood 16y ago
  Your long term vision is a good one and one that I have often thought about. Traditional schooling fails many of the practical and soft skills that are so crucial for today. Parents should be teaching these (that's where I learned them), but it doesn't seem to be happening as often as it should. Outside mentors can also help, groups like Big Brothers/Big Sisters as well as coaches, etc... would fall into this category.

nRike 16y ago

We cannot blame the teachers, nor the children. I think it's a big trouble for all humanity. All these things i've lived in varsity was so terrible, i remember something from the career chief of on of the best schools here in Mexico(http://ipn.mx http://ipn.mx). At the final exam, those one for get the degree, we told him that we wanted to do a online startup to begin creating jobs in our country, learn great things and be proactives, we argued if Mark Zuckerberg did, why we didn't?. He answered "Place yourself in your context, this is Mexico and there are nobody who has done something like this, please be realistics." I honestly can understand his thoughs, because he's a person who finished his Master Degree in the same school he studied his career, he never got a job in the industry and by the same, he didn't know anything about what's going on this daily-changing world called internet. I have several things to share here, and also i have my own answer about why the schools aren't working anymore. Why humans created schools? universities and specialized courses of some science? Because they noted if you start giving "education" to people they will be useful for industries and they will generate wealth, and that was true 70 years ago, -ie i've studied as part of Computer Engineer career a subject called "logical circuits" where we built some circuits with some logic gates, and using a protoboard. I really hated these stuff, but if i imagine myself studying these topic 70 years ago, I would be surely fascinated. Today is another history, a history where driven-knowledge is to a few clicks, and where you can learn as fast as you want, a history where knowledge six months ago is no longer profitable,a history where you cannot wait to get information from another guy who calls himself a professor but it really does not love their job, but by money. You cannot depend of what are you learning using such a valuable resource like time from a stranger who doesn't care about what you love to do. We need to start creating yesterday, and the future is today. I think schools need to change the way educate people, because just give knowledge with non sense of application kind of useless(some psychologists says the knowledge is better developed by practicing not just reading or listening), and i personally consider a waste of time these behavior, because we forget knowledge pretty much everything if we don't use it, and also we didn't really own knowledge at all, sometimes it's just an act of imitating your teacher trying to get a high note. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and repeating some old stuff doesn't solve nothing but high average in school. From the other hand, i think internet is such a great tool to start building real knowledge of almost anything, we can search from how to find the g point to build a molotov bomb in a few clicks away. Internet is such an amazing way of share experiential knowledge and give value to other people like HackerNews, somo other tools like Quora, StackOverflow and more to come. We can connect people with the same ideology or same musical preferences. I find my first paid work using Internet, i met my actual girlfriend from internet, i know almost all i do from here, the internet, i'm sharing what i'm learning in a blog post, i've built a community for Mexican and Latin American Android Developers. There aren't barriers here, and those mental barriers you can defeat at a pair of clicks.

Debugreality 16y ago

Put cameras inside classrooms that parents can login to online at any time of day and I think we will see a vast improvement in schools. Just a thought :)

aik 16y ago
I don't think the main problem is that parents have access to what's going on in the classroom, I think it's that a lot of parents don't care or know what to care about. They're too busy working or doing other things.
- aik 16y ago
  *parents _don't_ have access
gojomo 16y ago
ClassroomRoulette?
iamwil 16y ago
That probably won't fix what kids are and aren't learning. At best, you'd get evidence for teachers hitting or sexually abusing children (a small small minority). At worst, you'd get lots of parents being backseat drivers about what the teacher should and shouldn't teach and how. Parents are notorious for thinking they know what's best for their kids, even though they never studied education. It also doesn't help that historically and by reputation (not necessarily the case now), those that can't cut it in other fields ended up in education, so those parents think that they know better.
Debugreality 16y ago
That was a bit tounge in cheek but after discussing this with my partner I think perhaps a more constructive use of class room cameras would be to facilitate peer review and ongoing skill improvement. Similar to code reviews by programmers.

HilbertSpace 16y ago

Yup, here we go again: US education is falling behind other countries. This time the cause is bad teachers protected by the teachers union. I'm all for busting up the teachers union, but I don't for a nano second believe that bad teachers are really the cause of what is being observed. Instead, what's being observed is deliberately made up, mostly nonsense, mostly to spend still more money on K-12 education which, with some irony, would help the teachers union! We went through all this just 17 months ago with McKinsey's report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools, April, 2009, then but no longer at http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/achievement_gap_report.pdf http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/achieveme... and supporting materials (PDF - 1.0 MB) then but no longer at http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/detailed_achievement_gap_findings.pdf http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/detailed_... Cover to cover it is clear that the main concern of this, apparently pro bono effort by some dedicated McKinsey staff members, was to scream that US K-12 educational achievement sucks while what they really meant was that US Black K-12 educational achievement sucks. So, that pro bono effort was to save the US Blacks. Throughout the two long PDF files, they omitted any view of the elephant in the room until they gave a glimpse on page 26 of supporting materials (PDF - 1.0 MB) where they did a little cross-tabulation, that is, started on the main technique in looking for causality in social-economic data. So on page 26 we finally get the US students, White, Latino, and Black, compared separately with students in many other countries in the world. So, wonder of wonders, the ranking goes: Finland Hong Kong Canada Japan Australia US whites Korea Germany United Kingdom Switzerland Ireland Sweden The US Latinos? Just above Chile. The US Blacks? A little ahead of Indonesia and Argentina. Is there any question how the US Blacks would do against, say, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Zaire, Zimbabwe? So wonder how US students of Finish descent would do against Finland, Asian descent, against Hong Kong, Canadian descent, against Canada, Japanese descent, against Japan, Australian descent, against Australia? The study didn't say. Ah, wonder why? Why oh why? Maybe they followed the old rule, "If you don't think you will like the answer, then don't ask the question.". So the study mostly tried to obscure the obvious cause: For the data they considered, the main cause of good performance is country of origin. Right: In particular, parents are a still more important cause, and it might be possible to dig still deeper. Then the main reason for the low average US ranking is that the US is a diverse country and the other countries are homogeneous. So, Virgina, this statistical pattern has NOTHING to do with education or US education: Instead, take any 100 homogeneous populations, of anything -- kitty cats, puppy dogs, or billy goats. Then pick a measure, any nontrivial measure you want from length of hair, body weight, running speed, jumping ability, whisker length, nearly anything at all. Then from the 100 homogeneous populations, make a diverse population and apply the measure. Then rank all the 101 populations. Presto: Wonder of wonders, the diverse population will be ahead of some of the homogeneous populations and behind some of the others. Obvious. Trivial. And that obvious, trivial observation is so far ALL the screaming is about. How 'bout that. So, if want to tar and feather US education, which for other reasons I'm plenty eager to do, will build the fire to warm up the tar right away, then compare US education with apples against apples. So, compare US education on people from Finland with Finland education on people in Finland. In this way have compared US education with Finland education. Then rinse, repeat for Hong Kong, Canada, Japan, etc. But the semi-, pseudo-, quasi-smart, partly objective McKinsey team last year and the movie people this year showed their grasp of education: All they showed was the same thing would see from 101 collections of kitty cats measured on length of whiskers. There's another big point: Apparently actually there isn't much in K-12 in the public school systems of any of the countries so that at most not much is missed. Another point: Let's compare college education and, there, GRE scores. Bet the top 100 US colleges and universities do quite well, thank you. Another point: Let's compare graduate education and research progress -- as we know, the US by itself totally blows all the rest of the world off the court and out of the arena. Another point: K-12 really should amount to something. So let's move to that. Another point: It may be that the US should take vocational education as seriously as, say, Germany does. We should consider that. Another point: In the classic Democracy and Education, John Dewey made a big point: He defined education as the passing from one generation to the next and mentioned that what gets passed is mostly just what was there, both good and bad, with maybe a little improvement at each passing. So, without some quite special efforts, tough to take teachers from the middle third of US educational accomplishment and have them pass on only the top 10% of educational content. Another point: Once again we see that high accomplishment is mostly the responsibility of individuals and where their best help is from their own families. So, enter the promise of home schooling. Here's my approach to improving US education (listen up billionaires): First, set up educational certification in nearly all subjects of interest from math, physics, and chemistry to auto body repair, grass mowing, all the way down to, say, computer science, and from there way, way down to, say, programming in C++, if could find anyone so weak minded. The CEEB tests should be a good start. Second, get most colleges to agree on the required subjects to be ready for college work. Third, fund some efforts at educational materials and programs to prepare students for the tests. Of course should try to make heavy use of PDF files, video lectures on YouTUBE, Web fora, tutoring, etc. Then, let free enterprise take over and develop still better educational materials. For K-12, leave that to local school boards: Some will get it and let well motivated and guided students just pursue some of the better sets of materials and, then, be ready for college work at age 10 or 12. Then have those 12 year olds compete with 12 year olds around the world. Here we cut out a lot of nonsense: If someone wants to learn, then sit in a cubicle with a computer, work through some of the best educational materials, take the test, and see how well they do, and then all the credit and/or blame is just theirs. For varsity athletics, f'get about it except for the cheerleaders -- wouldn't want not to have the cheerleaders, a crown jewel of the US educational system!

iko371 16y ago

Hey, here's a great idea. Let's cut maybe a tenth of the military budget and put it towards K-12 teacher's salaries. I hear the median income in the military is around $120k. One tenth of the military budget could get teacher's salaries up to that amount, and we'd probably be able to throw in some state of the art learning facilities, smartboards, a computer at every desk, the works in practically every school. We'd have top notch facilities and candidates qualified to use it effectively! Regardless of whether or not we end up using a tenure or merit system for hiring and firing (the benefits outweigh the flaws in the former, imo), schools will, in the end, get the quality of teachers that they are capable of paying for. How many good teachers do you think will work in a run down school teaching unruly students for $30k annual salary? I sure as hell wouldn't want to be that teacher.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
I hear the median income in the military is around $120k. I'm pretty sure you heard wrong.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
I don't think an 8% increase in education funding will increase teacher salaries to $120k. You do realize that we already spend 15% more on education than we do on the military, right? http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20.html http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...
- iko371 16y ago
  I love how when you click on the "about" tab on usgovernmentspending.com, it's basically revealed that the site is run by some guy with a blog. I went to the guy's blog, and prominently on the left side of the screen, there's an image that reads, "proud right wing extremist". Usgovernmentspending.com looks like a great source of accurate, reliable information! </sarcasm>
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    What I love about it is when you scroll down, you can click on links which take you to the original source for the numbers (both official government sources). When you scroll down further, you see an explanation of his methodology in merging two spreadsheets. I guess ad-hominem attacks are easier than actually downloading the spreadsheets yourself and crunching the numbers, right? (Note: you can only download the spreadsheets for 2008 or earlier. 2009-2014 are marked as guesstimates, since official data is not yet available.

Maro 16y ago

I'm Hungarian. Due to my parents, I attended schools in 3 different countries: - first half year : Hungary - grades 1.5 - 4 : Germany - grades 5 - 8 : Hungary - grades 9 - 12 : USA, California - Universities, PhD: Hungary After the first half year in Hungary, when I arrived in Germany, I was waaay ahead of all the other kids in Math & Sciences and was near the top of the class for most of the 4 years without speaking the language properly. Then I got back to Hungary, where I had major catching up to do, especially in terms of Math, Sciences, Music and of course Hungarian language. I eventually caught up in Math & Physics, but not in Biology or Music, which never interested me much. (I mention Music because Hungarian schools teach music at a high level from grade 1 to everyone according to the "Liszt system", and for someone like me, who is not musically minded it was impossible to catch up.) Then I went to University High School in Irvine, Orange County, California, one of the best public high schools in the USA I believe. Even so, that was a fairly shocking experience for me. Initially I was way ahead, but the whole system was so different, neither I not my parents knew how it worked (eg. you have to pick your own classes), the advisors put me into idiotic "English as a Second Language" classes for the first few months, where you really can't actually learn English because all the other kids are Korean. And for some reason they only had ESL for low-level math classes, roughly at the level you'd learn in 6th grade everywhere else. So eventually I did okay at UHS, because we figured out to ignore what the advisors (who seemed completely useless to me) say. But I couldn't really cope with all the freedom, all the activities, or the fact that everybody had cars at age 16, and I didn't, so I got Bs regularly. Then I got back to a Hungarian University for a CS major, and even though I took all the AP classes in the US and took some CS at the local community college and UCI, I was waaaaaaaaaay behind, esp. in Physics. The AP Calculus classes are not so bad, but the one year AP Physics class is a major joke. In Hungary they study Physics for 4 years straight. So at first I had really bad grades at University. Eventually I went on to do a 2nd degree (another 5 manyears) in Physics, mostly because it interested me and I was so annoyed by my lack of understanding. Overall, it's clear that the US public HS, even one of the best, was a major waste of time. I didn't learn much, nor were the teachers any good. I eventually enrolled to become a physicist to properly repair the "damage" caused by a lack of proper Physics education at the HS. It quickly turned out I'm so interested in Physical theories that I'm currently doing a PhD. I'm also fairly certain that I got a better University education here in Hungary (esp. Physics) than I would have gotten at a public University in the US, all things taken into account. However, it's clear that no University in any part of the world can compete with top US and UK schools (mostly private and some public like Berkeley). Overall, I'm still very happy to have spent 4 years in the USA, as it was a major life experience, and I benefit from it every day. I would say it was worth it even though the HS sucked, because the US culture / language is like Rome was 2000 years ago. The United States is the center of the world, and if somebody doesn't understand the United States, they don't understand the world. To get a better feeling for the "center of the world" part, visit the NASA museum in Washington. Everything worth mentioning that has happened after 1940 is there. Also, the preview of this film seems to discount the self-confidence issue. I can understand this, but the makers should visit a country where kids, and thus people, are not injected with such self-confidence and see how they're doing (like here in Hungary). US self-confidence is one of the major factors why the economy is so great and why you have so many startups. I'm doing a startup right now, and it's no question that it's because after having spent 4 years in California I have a "can do" attitude, completely off the charts compared to my peers here in Hungary. I remember when I was at Uni I overheard someone referring to me as the "American guy" and I asked him how he knew I spent time in the States: he replied he didn't, he just gave me that nickname based on my attitude.

smutticus 16y ago

Both of my parents are/were teachers so of course I'm a little biased. But I just don't understand where this teacher hating attitude comes from. Teaching is hard work. In addition to the hours they put in actually teaching they spend lots of time preparing and grading. And since most of them are salaried it's not as if they get paid for all that overtime. It's true there are huge disparities between good teachers and bad. And maybe a meritocratic injection would do the system a whole lot of good. But to boil the entire problem down to this is simply naive.

antidaily 16y ago
I'm with you - and Bill Maher: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-dont-fire-the-te_b_497554.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-dont-fire-...
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Overtime? The average teacher works less than 40 hours/week (unlike other professionals) for the 9-10 months/year they actually work at all. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
- artlogic 16y ago
  This is highly variable. My wife was a high school teacher for two years. She was up and at school by 7:30AM each day, and worked until at least 6:00PM each night just to keep up with grading. Couple that with lesson planning and hard to grade assignments (like essays) and she was easily putting in 60 hours a week. At least half of that time was spent in front of students (who can be a fairly adversarial audience). At no time did I look at her and think she was having an easy time of it. Also, if you do the math, you'll notice that she worked -more- than the average professional, despite the 10 week break. In the interest of full disclosure, this was a very good school that had high expectations of both its students and teachers.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago

younata 16y ago

Having just left the US High School system, the problem is that we aren't teaching anything in high school. As PG said in his essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" [1], American high schools are popularity contests. The focus is not on actually learning anything, but on keeping us confined in one room while the adults go do work. Of course, the system is WAY too complicated for that to be the only cause. For example, another cause is apathy amongst the students. My high school senior class was 250-300 students large. My high school graduating class was about 150-200 students large. This is because ~100 students simply didn't care enough. Of the 150-200 students graduating, most went on to a community college, very few - about 50 or so, actually went to a 4 year university. Again, that's only barely scratching the surface, but I have class to go to, and that's of a higher priority than this comment. Because caring about your education is half the battle. [1] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html