9 ms·

The Real Problem with Waiting for Superman

85 points by duck 16y ago

VengefulCynic 16y ago
You can't loudly proclaim that education is a complicated problem that defies simple solutions while at the same time oversimplifying the entirety of the nation's problems in false dichotomies, saying things like: The film has other flaws. It insists all of America’s problems would be solved if only poor kids would memorize more: Pittsburgh is falling apart not because of deindustrialization, but because its schools are filled with bad teachers. American inequality isn’t caused by decades of Reaganite tax cuts and deregulation, but because of too many failing schools. Well, I suppose you can. But you can't if you want me to take your rhetoric seriously.
mynameishere 16y ago
Take ten smart kids and stick them under an oak tree and you'll have a better school than a 100 million dollar facility full of idiots. That's the real problem, and there's no solving it.
- skybrian 16y ago
  The teacher is oddly missing in your scenario.
  - waterlesscloud 16y ago
    Huh.
  - whatusername 16y ago
    I have a feeling - that was the point.
  - borisk 16y ago
    They have wireless Internet ;-)
  - psawaya 16y ago
    Perhaps he was alluding a school structured something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school
    - ollerac 16y ago
      I have a few friends who went to the original Sudbury school, Sudbury Valley School. One of them recently suggested that supplementing their school's non-curriculum with Sal Khan's online exercises (explained here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8) might make for something close to an ideal education.
      - aik 16y ago
        Do you feel like your friends got a good education? Did they feel like they did?
        ollerac 16y ago
        She got an excellent education in being an independent thinker and a very creative person -- but she's been using the Khan Academy over the past few weeks to learn Algebra II.
- mahmud 16y ago
  I am not sure if that's a solution for education, or the summary of a certain Pink Floyd song.
- replicatorblog 16y ago
  What if you just have middling kids? I agree with the gist of your statement, but I'd back up a bit. Put 10 kids from families where education is a key concern under an oak tree and they will do better than 10 similar kids at the fancy school. I'm all for making teacher's unions more responsible, but they aren't whats failing inner city/rural schools. Its culture, family, and community. If a respect for education doesn't exist in a community no amount of money, technology, teacher reform, or grants will make a difference.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    I disagree. While all those things you note (culture and family) are extremely important... remember that kids spend a LOT of time in school. In fact it might be the majority of their waking hours. Schools make a huge difference. And good teachers do too. I've seen great teachers in horrible schools make a huge difference. The tough part though is that follow-up with kids is tough. You see a class make incredible improvements one year and then over the next four years have less than stellar teachers again. They slowly give back what thy've gained. This is why the Harlem Children Zone is an example of the right step.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      You realize that the Harlem Children's Zone was not particularly effective, and simply benefited from a downward drift in difficulty of tests, right? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/education/01schools.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/education/01schools.html
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        I'm familiar with this data. I'm not sure a downward drift is an accurate way to state it -- some said it became too predictable. All they did was simply change the line for what is considered "proficient". The actual test scores from year to year didn't really change though. Here's a nice graphic from the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/08/01/education/01schoools-graphic2.html?ref=education http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/08/01/education/01sch... The real problem is that we have an artificial line for proficiency. If you look at the graphics you can see that they can move that line once again, and again largely affect minority schools downward, even if they make substantial gains over the next few years. It would be far better to have each school release mean/median/stdev or deciles of their scores. This will really give you a much better idea of the improvement in a school. But anyways, back to HCZ. They've still shown great improvement, even if proficiency has taken a step back from 100% in some cases due to a change in the proficiency line.
- dasil003 16y ago
  So what you're saying is that all problems are caused by idiots, and things are as good as they possibly can be given the existence of idiots and the fact that they are apparently in majority, therefore it's futile for us enlightened folks to try to improve education in general, and the best course of action is to join Mensa and home school our kids.
- mfukar 16y ago
  You have a point, but guidance is important. Without it, there's no structure (which is worse than a rigid structure, imo), hence no directed focus, hence no learning except by accident. A teacher, or parent, or anything else that would fulfil the role of a guide in a child's thought process and experimentation yet at the same time "step out of their way", if you will, is what educational systems should be striving for, in my humble opinion. Of course, since I'm so humble, I may be wrong and ignored. :-)
rywang 16y ago
The author, Aaron Swartz, harps on the fact that the film doesn't show enough teaching and instead "hides behind charts and graphs." The author would rather the film show "terrified kids up on the big screen." This seems to me like favoring anecdotes over data. The author also attributes the crisis in American education to standardized tests. He doesn't back this up. Standardized tests work well in countries like China and India, from which so many of our engineering grad students hail. Granted that no standardized test is perfect, it boggles my mind that Swartz would call it the educational crisis.
- blasdel 16y ago
  Those brilliant Chinese and Indian grad students are cream skimmed off the top — there's not just millions of merely good students in universities in their home countries, but also two billion mediocre students doing manual labor.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    If standardized tests didn't work (i.e., didn't separate good students from bad ones), how could they be used to skim the cream off the top?
- aik 16y ago
  I don't think there is any proof that it is specifically the standardized tests that cause that minority to succeed, but rather the value parents and culture places on education. That makes all the difference.
gfodor 16y ago
I found this article pretty hilarious in that it goes on and on about how the movie fails to provide any clear examples of what makes a good teacher and then fails to provide any clear examples of what makes a good teacher. It's like the author not only assumed that we knew what he was talking about, but that we already agreed with him and hence didn't need to be persuaded by examples. This wasn't really an argument so much as a long-winded expression of a single persons opinion. Also, the last time I checked, you can't just "memorize" your way into passing standardized tests outside of perhaps spelling and vocabulary tests.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- scott_s 16y ago
  A good start. Building a Better Teacher: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
  - mattmcknight 16y ago
    Lemov's book is solid. http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-Techniques-Students/dp/0470550473 http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-Techniques-Student...
  - jyu 16y ago
    For those that don't want to login: http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com
  - gfodor 16y ago
    Great article, thanks.
- TGJ 16y ago
  I read your argument, and then thought about what you wrote while reading your comment again. Then I realized that your argument is an argument against your argument. Good teachers engage their students and make them think about problems around them and how to solve them. They present history as then ask if it's happening again around them. They teach English and then explain why learning the proper way to talk and write helps make their own expressions more poignant and well received. In today's school system's the teachers are judged solely on the test scores of students and it's unheard of that a student might simply be a 'c' student instead of being the teachers fault. Teachers have to teach the tests and no longer have the proper time to teach theory and critical thinking. School lengths change at the whim of the school board depending on why survey has been read saying that 50 min classes are better than 90 min and so on. The school system has become a political playground and we are seeing the result of focusing on 'grades' over education.
petermarks 16y ago
I agree standardized tests focused on memorization aren't educational, but surely tests that require problem solving ability (math) are worthwhile. Without standardized tests, how else are we supposed to quantify how well students and by extension their teachers are performing? The author doesn't suggest an alternative here.
- adamc 16y ago
  Your question more or less assumes that standardization is the right answer. Let's start a step or two back: Do we need to measure students and teachers at all? Presuming we do, why do we need to do it via standardized tests? Do they even measure what we want to know? My daughter goes to a school that does well by these measures. It _is_ a good school, but the teachers basically teach to the test* -- given the rather punitive structure of the laws, they don't have much choice. Performance is directly tied to funding. Is that really the best way to teach kids? I'm doubtful. I think we do need good teachers, but I'm not at all convinced that test scores are a good way to measure that, anymore than lines of code are a good way to measure programmers. I do want kids to learn, but I'm not very convinced this is the best route to that. I don't think there is any easy solution. Kids with parents who value education tend to do better -- that's a huge factor. Resources certainly help; those of us who care tend to live in better school districts (often with higher tax rates) -- is that really a sensible way to run the schools? I mean, it works for me, but why should we under-resource kids whose parents don't care about education? But there is no doubt that you can pour money at this problem and get nowhere if you spend it poorly. (That's true of all problems, though.) All this emphasis on education can go overboard. Where I live, even in grade school they get only one short recess a day (unlike the two, slightly longer, ones I grew up with). Does that make sense? In a nation with a national obesity epidemic? And, even in very early grades, they come home with a LOT of homework. When are they supposed to go outside and play? *I don't mean they literally teach the tests, but they certainly spend a lot of time structuring their materials around the way test questions are phrased, and in teaching kids test-taking strategies. Do I think fourth-graders should need to learn how to take tests? No.
  - nkassis 16y ago
marze 16y ago
Maybe someone who has voted this confusing essay up could explain why. The author is saying, the problem with education in the US is not that poor teachers are nearly impossible to fire, but is really something else? It seems an improvement making it easier to fire poor teachers would be of great help. Why is the author highlighting this idea as an example of a bad idea? To me, this would be the most positive single change that could be made.
- pyre 16y ago
  The point being that the worth of a teacher is measured by their students' scores on standardized tests. So which teachers are 'good' and which are 'poor' (i.e. what the 'correct' method of gauging teaching success), seems to be the arena of disagreement.
  - Empact 16y ago
    Well, switching our schools to a model of choice, where parents choose where to send their kids, really is a meta-solution beyond test scores. Test scores are used to exemplify kids' behavior because it's easy, it's concrete (in the "what gets measured gets managed" sort of way), but I doubt most parents who flee district schools for charter schools start or end with test scores: instead they consider culture, goals, outcomes, safety. The test scores are used to prove good charter schools can be, and are better than district schools, but they aren't the only measure - just the most compact one to communicate. There's a more general problem that judging a teacher concretely, fairly, consistently, is damn-near impossible. I don't think there's an easy answer to the question of what an administrator would use in the absence of value-added education (i.e. the application of test scores), but I'll bet the parents act independently of that system, and serve as a check on it.
    - pyre 16y ago
      I think that depends on the quality of the parent, and the values (and/or critical-thinking ability) of the parent(s) in question.
rbranson 16y ago
Here in Memphis, where we recently received a $90 million grant from the Gates Foundation, it would be nice JUST to graduate kids who could read on a middle school reading level. Forget sending them to college or trying to create some kind of creative class out of these kids, they don't even have the basics. THAT is the problem. We aren't even getting these kids a mediocre education where they can read, write, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
apollo 16y ago
In terms of actual solutions, I think programs like KIPP are promising. If someone can demonstrate the right way to run a school system on a small scale, we can learn from it and encourage adoption of those changes nationally.
- mattchew 16y ago
  KIPP does well, but it is very much at odds with the way a normal school is run. KIPP schools demand a hell of a lot from the teachers who work there. You need people of high ability and dedication who are mostly motivated by the intrinsic reward of a job done well. These people are like the Special Forces of education, and I don't think there are that many of them. I'd love to be wrong.
  - WalterBright 16y ago
    It's true that you cannot mass replicate a system that depends on exceptional people. It's sort of like vast quantities of high quality goods were not produced until people figured out how to produce such without requiring highly skilled craftsmen.
  - piguy314 16y ago
    Most of the reason KIPP is successful is because they eliminate the summer performance gap between rich and poor students. When you don't let poor students sit at home playing x-box and watching TV all summer they don't forget things you've taught them. This is why I believe one of the simplest and most effective solutions we could implement would be universal year round school (not 12 months of school, but 3 months on 1 month off schedule). We no longer have an agrarian society, there is no compelling reason to allow for a 3 month break in school during harvest anymore. And summer is absolutely detrimental to the learning of poor students. And because schools would still be closed 3 months out of the year (just not in a row) the operating costs of the schools would be the same (electrical, maintenance, free lunches, salary, etc...)
pg 16y ago
I recommend everyone see this movie and decide for themselves. I don't know if it will have this effect on everyone, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it. For me, seeing this movie was one of those experiences that divide your life into the part before it happened, and the part after.
- Reclix 16y ago
  I'm excited by the number of people who have said this about the movie, as well as the debate about 'the right education reform' that the movie has spurred. Regardless of which side each person is on, it's clear that everyone is uniting under a common goal - to improve our nations schools - and it's inevitable that we would all have slightly different approaches and goals. What I wonder is how many people like yourself will take that sudden gnawing question and begin working towards the change you believe in. Will it create a new wave of activists, movers, shakers and changers? Or just change the popular topic of conversation at cocktail parties and social news websites?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Alex3917 16y ago
  It's largely propaganda designed to promote Bill Gates' version of white supremacy dressed up as school reform. They're not advocating that Exeter replace its curriculum with KIPP, what they're advocating is for low-income minorities only. And the curriculum isn't designed based on the best practices from educational research, but rather it's designed to change the culture of minorities (to quote the NYT).[1] The fact is that poor kids learn just as much or more in school as wealthy kids, they just start several years behind because of bad parenting.[2] And over the summers when wealthy kids are learning and going forward, the poor kids are actually going backwards.[3] Which is why the average 13 year old white kid has the same standardized test scores as the average 17 year old black kid.[4] In addition, one of the most famous findings from all of education research is that within-school effects are greater than between-school effects.[3] That means that school tracking has a much greater impact on how much your child learns than whether they go to a good school or a bad school. (The movie touches on tracking but doesn't really explain it.) Especially since kids are sorted into tracks based more on their race and looks than on their ability. [5] Anyway all the problems the movie mentions are completely true, and they need to be solved, but spreading good parenting best-practices and the changing systemic design of school itself are much better solutions than implementing KIPP, which as far as I can tell (after reading a bunch of articles and a book on it) is a huge step in the wrong direction. There is zero evidence that the program works at all in the long term, especially since it conflicts with all of the research on intrinsic motivation. These kids might make some academic gains in the short term, but in the long term it's hard to believe that they'll be anywhere near as well off as even middle class Americans. The fact that these programs produce decent test results in the short term has basically zero predictive value for determining the long term outcomes. Maybe they'll be better than I think, who knows, but advocating replacing our current school system with this for only low-income minorities without having the longterm data is a huge scam. It's a shame because the Harlem Children Zone actually has a great baby college program for parents, but the movie just mentions this in passing. In reality programs like would be an excellent use of tax dollars because they are actually consistent (for the most part) with the current research on best practices for parenting, unlike KIPP which is just completely pulled out of some guy's ass. (Although most of these programs don't yet show good longterm results, so more tweaking is needed.) It says a lot about America that our most popular school reform movie is targeted at people who don't read books. /rant [1] "Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html [2] C.f. What It Takes To Make A Student [3] C.f. Equality And Achievement [4] It Take A City [5] http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/index.html http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/index.html
narrator 16y ago
I think the problem with education is the same problem we have with health care. That is, the belief that every single problem can be solved by just increasing the budget.
jongraehl 16y ago
> At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause. There may be some backing argument that would change my mind entirely, but this seems like crazy agenda-before-the-horse thinking.
jamwt 16y ago
Sorry for the length. I'd write a tl;dr but I can't stomach the idea of people reading random shit online being picky about their time. I try not to generally opine too much. I think maybe I'm too cynical, too weary of ideologues when I usually just see shades of gray, too ambivalent given the fact that I feel "public" knowledge (including my own) is painfully devoid of the real complexities that make these issues difficult to solve. But I've been feeling strangely compelled to say something on this issue and this movie because it feels kind of personal. I have several close family members that have spent significant portions of their career (from teaching to counseling to administration) in California public education for the last 40 years. (My opinion, however, is based on my observations of their experiences, but doesn't necessarily directly reflect their own beliefs.) Now, this is a simplified model, of course, but there seems to me to be this function that (roughly) determine's your "success", using the common score-based or elite-college-acceptance-based measure, in educational pursuits: S = ?I + ?F + ?P + ?T S is Success I is Intelligence ("Nature" IQ, Personal Ambition, etc.. innate properties) F is Family Factors ("Nurture", Education of Parents, Expectations, etc) P is Peer Group (aka, the ambient F + I of your adjacent students) T is Teaching (quality of instruction, instructional program, instructional personnel) They're not entirely independent, but close enough to do fake science. For the sake of argument, let's say "I" is fixed for each individual, so I'm ignoring it. The big question, it seems, is what exactly the constants are at each question mark. I believe these films and essays and ponderances and political campaigns that focus so entirely on the "T", are focusing on the wrong thing. It probably has the smallest constant--and the least impact, positive or negative. Granted: there are numerous, valid arguments to make about tenure being terrible. There are myraid complaints that can be fairly leveled against unions. Yes, public educational programs can sometimes be uninspired, obsolete, and unambitious. But fantastic teachers in "bad schools" do worse (in their students' aggregate S terms) than apathetic teachers in "good schools." If you talked to teachers, and they were in a candid mood, my guess is you'd discover this is widely accepted. They know how hopeless it can be to fight upstream in a "bad school"... and that's because the F and P factors are stacked against you, and those constants are much larger. Teachers, even good teachers, seldom can trump the influence of family and peers. If we take the charter schools in the film as an example, I think self-selection bias is at play. It really fits _perfectly_ with the forumla and the low-T-constant theory: The parents who elect to enter the lottery are exhibiting a strong "F" factor, and, if they succeed in winning a slot, their child enters an environment with a bunch of other kids from high-F families, resulting in a great "P". And yes, the teachers might be better too, and the instruction might be better. But the teachers themselves are self-selecting! The very act of teaching at a school where people fight to get in generally provides a student body full of willing students coming from encouraging families. Of course those kids will learn! And the "better" the teacher is, the more mobile they often are and the better shot they have at the "good" teaching jobs.. aka, the classrooms full of willing students. Granted, there are amazing, indefatigable teachers who spend a career teaching in "bad" classrooms, but they're the exception, not the rule. In my observation, the common case is enthusiastic, smart, well-educated young teachers can stick it out for a few years. Then, they're human after all, they capitulate, exhausted, and drag their shattered ideals to a different school with a more receptive classroom environment (if they remain in teaching at all). It's job satisfaction; it's self-preservation. (Analogy: generally, great hackers don't want to be test engineers even if that's possibly where they could do the most good.) I say: the real problem is cultural (and literally, cultural, not racial). Maybe, it's who our heros are, and our parents' heros are, and the dubious-expected-outcome nature of the "American Dream." Maybe it's what's viewed as "the way out" by older brothers and sisters and friends. Maybe's it's a generation's assumption that the last 100 years of American prosperity was inevitable, predestined, God-given, and not the product of a whole damn lot of work by their predecessor citizens. Hell, I dunno, cause figuring that out is the hard part that probably has many potential answers. If you really look at all those other countries that ourscore the US--I think it's worth examining the cultural assessment of the value of study. The classrooms, the teachers, the salaries, and the very students, are a natural outgrowth of that. But that means it's the F, and consequently the P that have the biggest constants. The T is--honestly--noise. A blip in the trend line. Good teachers can accelerate good students, but they don't make them. So why isn't this the predominant dialog? Teachers and teaching are an easy scapegoat because, yes, they have evident problems, and because it's sort of deceptively intuitive that if people aren't learning, it's because they're not being taught. But I think, really, the criticism centers on them because teachers aren't us--every family, and critically, every voter. People want an outlet for their anger when Americans are undereducated. But what politician will face the camera and say to the voting population "it's mostly your fault"? Who wants to go see a movie where the audience is the villain? (Aside: actually, that sounds kind of rad.) So, shades of gray reality check: I have no idea what the answer is, but the first step seems to be ensuring we've actually identified the problem. That's the programmer in me talking.
bryanwb 16y ago
Let's face it, American kids are generally lazy and poorly-disciplined and this is the primary reason that our schools suck. We always want to blame the teachers, teacher unions, school administration when we really have to blame ourselves. Even much better teachers and organized schools won't be able to educate kids who don't want to learn. Subjects like math, science, and English aren't "boring." American kids are just too lazy to put in the work to appreciate them. The real gap in American education is an "effort gap." I attended a lower-middle income Southern California high school with a primarily caucasian and latino student population. Neither group of students cared that much about school and test scores showed it. We did have a great sports teams. The city over the hill, Rowland Heights, had a primarily Asian student population. They had great scores, graduation rates, etc. However, their football team sucked. The asian parents pushed their kids hard to learn. The parents of students at my high school only pushed them on the sports field and not in the classroom. Pedagogy, class size, quality of teachers, testing/not testing - these things are all important but miniscule in impact when compared to actual student effort. I think charter schools do well in large part to the fact that they attract kids who care. Their success will diminish once you include kids who don't. Instead of asking "Why Johnny can't read," we should be asking "Why Johnny doesn't get off his ass and study."
stretchwithme 16y ago
I question the entire notion, seemingly sacrosanct for decades, that one mode of learning should be made compulsory for all. Did we evolve with this mode of learning? No. And what about the idea that government is somehow the ideal institution to dispense enlightenment? Would we trust it with dispensing the news or even the authoring of a comic book?
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I wish I had time to go into this -- it's a critical issue with our life today. But I don't, so I'll make a couple hopefully pithy and not snarky comments. First of all, you have to measure things and you have to have somebody accountable for things. This is true no matter what the thing you are talking about. I don't see how much hand-waving and complaining about society's morals and values is going to get you beyond this extremely reasonable requirement. Second -- and this is ironic -- folks have been complaining about the quality of schools for years. Some of you guys act like this is the first you've heard of it. We've dropped boatloads of money in education. Wake up and see where all this centralized planning, factory-mentality, and unionized system has gotten you. I think it's great people are paying attention. We've missed you. Welcome to the party. It's a very complicated situation, and I don't see a solution emerging any time soon, unfortunately. I know I called out unions and such in my graph above, but in reality it's a very complex situation. The best I can come up with is that you're better off giving the money to the parents in the form of vouchers and letting various systems compete against each other. Or you can keep trying to make one-size-fits-all solutions. Good luck with that.
- hga 16y ago
  To emphasize just how long this has been an issue: Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1955. "Federal Aid to Education" was a big political issue before "Sputnik ended that debate" (it was launched in 1957; http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view613.html http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view613.html). Heinlein also touched on this in Have Space Suit—Will Travel in 1958.
steveplace 16y ago
This is going to sound a bit Machiavellian, I'm surprised that the fear of failure has not been brought up as a strong motivator. I'm assuming the selection bias in the movie shows hard working impoverished children who want to do better in school-- but are they not motivated when they consider the alternatives? My wife works at the best school in the county (not country!). If a student fails a single test, she is told that the kid will be sat down after school, retaught the course work, and be given the test a 2nd time. Any student with a learning disability on record (including ADHD) is all but exempt from any standards set by the teacher. Furthermore, teachers are encouraged to "round up" to look better for the school district. If a student fails a class, they will spend time in front of a computer for 3 weeks to make up the credit. If a student fails to have enough credits before graduation, they will still let you walk the stage and you can simply come back during the summer to sit in front of a computer. There's no social stigma of failure in the school's culture anymore, and that also comes from the family life (the F from jamwt's post). The student could care less about grades because the parents don't care and they will just have them work at the shop after high school. This carries on with the teachers. Tenure is a very dangerous asset that a teacher can have, and it keeps the bad teachers in. Students will come into my wife's English class without a basic knowledge of sentence structure and many other things that ought to have been known by this age, and the grade level below her shows videos for a very large amount of time. They will read 1/4 of Romeo and Juliet and just watch the rest on TV without any analysis of the material. This is a social and political system in which individual failure has been discouraged, removed, and subsidized. While positive reinforcements (good grades, more money after graduation) can certainly help, the fact that the lack of hard work can be shrugged off so easily has to be a component of school under-performance.

85 points by duck 16y ago

You can't loudly proclaim that education is a complicated problem that defies simple solutions while at the same time oversimplifying the entirety of the nation's problems in false dichotomies, saying things like: The film has other flaws. It insists all of America’s problems would be solved if only poor kids would memorize more: Pittsburgh is falling apart not because of deindustrialization, but because its schools are filled with bad teachers. American inequality isn’t caused by decades of Reaganite tax cuts and deregulation, but because of too many failing schools. Well, I suppose you can. But you can't if you want me to take your rhetoric seriously.

mynameishere 16y ago

Take ten smart kids and stick them under an oak tree and you'll have a better school than a 100 million dollar facility full of idiots. That's the real problem, and there's no solving it.

skybrian 16y ago
The teacher is oddly missing in your scenario.
- waterlesscloud 16y ago
  Huh.
- whatusername 16y ago
  I have a feeling - that was the point.
- borisk 16y ago
  They have wireless Internet ;-)
- psawaya 16y ago
  Perhaps he was alluding a school structured something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school
  - ollerac 16y ago
    I have a few friends who went to the original Sudbury school, Sudbury Valley School. One of them recently suggested that supplementing their school's non-curriculum with Sal Khan's online exercises (explained here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8) might make for something close to an ideal education.
    - aik 16y ago
      Do you feel like your friends got a good education? Did they feel like they did?
      - ollerac 16y ago
        She got an excellent education in being an independent thinker and a very creative person -- but she's been using the Khan Academy over the past few weeks to learn Algebra II.
mahmud 16y ago
I am not sure if that's a solution for education, or the summary of a certain Pink Floyd song.
replicatorblog 16y ago
What if you just have middling kids? I agree with the gist of your statement, but I'd back up a bit. Put 10 kids from families where education is a key concern under an oak tree and they will do better than 10 similar kids at the fancy school. I'm all for making teacher's unions more responsible, but they aren't whats failing inner city/rural schools. Its culture, family, and community. If a respect for education doesn't exist in a community no amount of money, technology, teacher reform, or grants will make a difference.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  I disagree. While all those things you note (culture and family) are extremely important... remember that kids spend a LOT of time in school. In fact it might be the majority of their waking hours. Schools make a huge difference. And good teachers do too. I've seen great teachers in horrible schools make a huge difference. The tough part though is that follow-up with kids is tough. You see a class make incredible improvements one year and then over the next four years have less than stellar teachers again. They slowly give back what thy've gained. This is why the Harlem Children Zone is an example of the right step.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    You realize that the Harlem Children's Zone was not particularly effective, and simply benefited from a downward drift in difficulty of tests, right? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/education/01schools.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/education/01schools.html
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      I'm familiar with this data. I'm not sure a downward drift is an accurate way to state it -- some said it became too predictable. All they did was simply change the line for what is considered "proficient". The actual test scores from year to year didn't really change though. Here's a nice graphic from the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/08/01/education/01schoools-graphic2.html?ref=education http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/08/01/education/01sch... The real problem is that we have an artificial line for proficiency. If you look at the graphics you can see that they can move that line once again, and again largely affect minority schools downward, even if they make substantial gains over the next few years. It would be far better to have each school release mean/median/stdev or deciles of their scores. This will really give you a much better idea of the improvement in a school. But anyways, back to HCZ. They've still shown great improvement, even if proficiency has taken a step back from 100% in some cases due to a change in the proficiency line.
dasil003 16y ago
So what you're saying is that all problems are caused by idiots, and things are as good as they possibly can be given the existence of idiots and the fact that they are apparently in majority, therefore it's futile for us enlightened folks to try to improve education in general, and the best course of action is to join Mensa and home school our kids.
mfukar 16y ago
You have a point, but guidance is important. Without it, there's no structure (which is worse than a rigid structure, imo), hence no directed focus, hence no learning except by accident. A teacher, or parent, or anything else that would fulfil the role of a guide in a child's thought process and experimentation yet at the same time "step out of their way", if you will, is what educational systems should be striving for, in my humble opinion. Of course, since I'm so humble, I may be wrong and ignored. :-)

rywang 16y ago

The author, Aaron Swartz, harps on the fact that the film doesn't show enough teaching and instead "hides behind charts and graphs." The author would rather the film show "terrified kids up on the big screen." This seems to me like favoring anecdotes over data. The author also attributes the crisis in American education to standardized tests. He doesn't back this up. Standardized tests work well in countries like China and India, from which so many of our engineering grad students hail. Granted that no standardized test is perfect, it boggles my mind that Swartz would call it the educational crisis.

blasdel 16y ago
Those brilliant Chinese and Indian grad students are cream skimmed off the top — there's not just millions of merely good students in universities in their home countries, but also two billion mediocre students doing manual labor.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  If standardized tests didn't work (i.e., didn't separate good students from bad ones), how could they be used to skim the cream off the top?
aik 16y ago
I don't think there is any proof that it is specifically the standardized tests that cause that minority to succeed, but rather the value parents and culture places on education. That makes all the difference.

gfodor 16y ago

I found this article pretty hilarious in that it goes on and on about how the movie fails to provide any clear examples of what makes a good teacher and then fails to provide any clear examples of what makes a good teacher. It's like the author not only assumed that we knew what he was talking about, but that we already agreed with him and hence didn't need to be persuaded by examples. This wasn't really an argument so much as a long-winded expression of a single persons opinion. Also, the last time I checked, you can't just "memorize" your way into passing standardized tests outside of perhaps spelling and vocabulary tests.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
scott_s 16y ago
A good start. Building a Better Teacher: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
- mattmcknight 16y ago
  Lemov's book is solid. http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-Techniques-Students/dp/0470550473 http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-Techniques-Student...
- jyu 16y ago
  For those that don't want to login: http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com
- gfodor 16y ago
  Great article, thanks.
TGJ 16y ago
I read your argument, and then thought about what you wrote while reading your comment again. Then I realized that your argument is an argument against your argument. Good teachers engage their students and make them think about problems around them and how to solve them. They present history as then ask if it's happening again around them. They teach English and then explain why learning the proper way to talk and write helps make their own expressions more poignant and well received. In today's school system's the teachers are judged solely on the test scores of students and it's unheard of that a student might simply be a 'c' student instead of being the teachers fault. Teachers have to teach the tests and no longer have the proper time to teach theory and critical thinking. School lengths change at the whim of the school board depending on why survey has been read saying that 50 min classes are better than 90 min and so on. The school system has become a political playground and we are seeing the result of focusing on 'grades' over education.

petermarks 16y ago

I agree standardized tests focused on memorization aren't educational, but surely tests that require problem solving ability (math) are worthwhile. Without standardized tests, how else are we supposed to quantify how well students and by extension their teachers are performing? The author doesn't suggest an alternative here.

adamc 16y ago
Your question more or less assumes that standardization is the right answer. Let's start a step or two back: Do we need to measure students and teachers at all? Presuming we do, why do we need to do it via standardized tests? Do they even measure what we want to know? My daughter goes to a school that does well by these measures. It _is_ a good school, but the teachers basically teach to the test* -- given the rather punitive structure of the laws, they don't have much choice. Performance is directly tied to funding. Is that really the best way to teach kids? I'm doubtful. I think we do need good teachers, but I'm not at all convinced that test scores are a good way to measure that, anymore than lines of code are a good way to measure programmers. I do want kids to learn, but I'm not very convinced this is the best route to that. I don't think there is any easy solution. Kids with parents who value education tend to do better -- that's a huge factor. Resources certainly help; those of us who care tend to live in better school districts (often with higher tax rates) -- is that really a sensible way to run the schools? I mean, it works for me, but why should we under-resource kids whose parents don't care about education? But there is no doubt that you can pour money at this problem and get nowhere if you spend it poorly. (That's true of all problems, though.) All this emphasis on education can go overboard. Where I live, even in grade school they get only one short recess a day (unlike the two, slightly longer, ones I grew up with). Does that make sense? In a nation with a national obesity epidemic? And, even in very early grades, they come home with a LOT of homework. When are they supposed to go outside and play? *I don't mean they literally teach the tests, but they certainly spend a lot of time structuring their materials around the way test questions are phrased, and in teaching kids test-taking strategies. Do I think fourth-graders should need to learn how to take tests? No.
- nkassis 16y ago

marze 16y ago

Maybe someone who has voted this confusing essay up could explain why. The author is saying, the problem with education in the US is not that poor teachers are nearly impossible to fire, but is really something else? It seems an improvement making it easier to fire poor teachers would be of great help. Why is the author highlighting this idea as an example of a bad idea? To me, this would be the most positive single change that could be made.

pyre 16y ago
The point being that the worth of a teacher is measured by their students' scores on standardized tests. So which teachers are 'good' and which are 'poor' (i.e. what the 'correct' method of gauging teaching success), seems to be the arena of disagreement.
- Empact 16y ago
  Well, switching our schools to a model of choice, where parents choose where to send their kids, really is a meta-solution beyond test scores. Test scores are used to exemplify kids' behavior because it's easy, it's concrete (in the "what gets measured gets managed" sort of way), but I doubt most parents who flee district schools for charter schools start or end with test scores: instead they consider culture, goals, outcomes, safety. The test scores are used to prove good charter schools can be, and are better than district schools, but they aren't the only measure - just the most compact one to communicate. There's a more general problem that judging a teacher concretely, fairly, consistently, is damn-near impossible. I don't think there's an easy answer to the question of what an administrator would use in the absence of value-added education (i.e. the application of test scores), but I'll bet the parents act independently of that system, and serve as a check on it.
  - pyre 16y ago
    I think that depends on the quality of the parent, and the values (and/or critical-thinking ability) of the parent(s) in question.

rbranson 16y ago

Here in Memphis, where we recently received a $90 million grant from the Gates Foundation, it would be nice JUST to graduate kids who could read on a middle school reading level. Forget sending them to college or trying to create some kind of creative class out of these kids, they don't even have the basics. THAT is the problem. We aren't even getting these kids a mediocre education where they can read, write, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

apollo 16y ago

In terms of actual solutions, I think programs like KIPP are promising. If someone can demonstrate the right way to run a school system on a small scale, we can learn from it and encourage adoption of those changes nationally.

mattchew 16y ago
KIPP does well, but it is very much at odds with the way a normal school is run. KIPP schools demand a hell of a lot from the teachers who work there. You need people of high ability and dedication who are mostly motivated by the intrinsic reward of a job done well. These people are like the Special Forces of education, and I don't think there are that many of them. I'd love to be wrong.
- WalterBright 16y ago
  It's true that you cannot mass replicate a system that depends on exceptional people. It's sort of like vast quantities of high quality goods were not produced until people figured out how to produce such without requiring highly skilled craftsmen.
- piguy314 16y ago
  Most of the reason KIPP is successful is because they eliminate the summer performance gap between rich and poor students. When you don't let poor students sit at home playing x-box and watching TV all summer they don't forget things you've taught them. This is why I believe one of the simplest and most effective solutions we could implement would be universal year round school (not 12 months of school, but 3 months on 1 month off schedule). We no longer have an agrarian society, there is no compelling reason to allow for a 3 month break in school during harvest anymore. And summer is absolutely detrimental to the learning of poor students. And because schools would still be closed 3 months out of the year (just not in a row) the operating costs of the schools would be the same (electrical, maintenance, free lunches, salary, etc...)

pg 16y ago

I recommend everyone see this movie and decide for themselves. I don't know if it will have this effect on everyone, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it. For me, seeing this movie was one of those experiences that divide your life into the part before it happened, and the part after.

Reclix 16y ago
I'm excited by the number of people who have said this about the movie, as well as the debate about 'the right education reform' that the movie has spurred. Regardless of which side each person is on, it's clear that everyone is uniting under a common goal - to improve our nations schools - and it's inevitable that we would all have slightly different approaches and goals. What I wonder is how many people like yourself will take that sudden gnawing question and begin working towards the change you believe in. Will it create a new wave of activists, movers, shakers and changers? Or just change the popular topic of conversation at cocktail parties and social news websites?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 16y ago
It's largely propaganda designed to promote Bill Gates' version of white supremacy dressed up as school reform. They're not advocating that Exeter replace its curriculum with KIPP, what they're advocating is for low-income minorities only. And the curriculum isn't designed based on the best practices from educational research, but rather it's designed to change the culture of minorities (to quote the NYT).[1] The fact is that poor kids learn just as much or more in school as wealthy kids, they just start several years behind because of bad parenting.[2] And over the summers when wealthy kids are learning and going forward, the poor kids are actually going backwards.[3] Which is why the average 13 year old white kid has the same standardized test scores as the average 17 year old black kid.[4] In addition, one of the most famous findings from all of education research is that within-school effects are greater than between-school effects.[3] That means that school tracking has a much greater impact on how much your child learns than whether they go to a good school or a bad school. (The movie touches on tracking but doesn't really explain it.) Especially since kids are sorted into tracks based more on their race and looks than on their ability. [5] Anyway all the problems the movie mentions are completely true, and they need to be solved, but spreading good parenting best-practices and the changing systemic design of school itself are much better solutions than implementing KIPP, which as far as I can tell (after reading a bunch of articles and a book on it) is a huge step in the wrong direction. There is zero evidence that the program works at all in the long term, especially since it conflicts with all of the research on intrinsic motivation. These kids might make some academic gains in the short term, but in the long term it's hard to believe that they'll be anywhere near as well off as even middle class Americans. The fact that these programs produce decent test results in the short term has basically zero predictive value for determining the long term outcomes. Maybe they'll be better than I think, who knows, but advocating replacing our current school system with this for only low-income minorities without having the longterm data is a huge scam. It's a shame because the Harlem Children Zone actually has a great baby college program for parents, but the movie just mentions this in passing. In reality programs like would be an excellent use of tax dollars because they are actually consistent (for the most part) with the current research on best practices for parenting, unlike KIPP which is just completely pulled out of some guy's ass. (Although most of these programs don't yet show good longterm results, so more tweaking is needed.) It says a lot about America that our most popular school reform movie is targeted at people who don't read books. /rant [1] "Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html [2] C.f. What It Takes To Make A Student [3] C.f. Equality And Achievement [4] It Take A City [5] http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/index.html http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/index.html

narrator 16y ago

I think the problem with education is the same problem we have with health care. That is, the belief that every single problem can be solved by just increasing the budget.

jongraehl 16y ago

> At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause. There may be some backing argument that would change my mind entirely, but this seems like crazy agenda-before-the-horse thinking.

jamwt 16y ago

Sorry for the length. I'd write a tl;dr but I can't stomach the idea of people reading random shit online being picky about their time. I try not to generally opine too much. I think maybe I'm too cynical, too weary of ideologues when I usually just see shades of gray, too ambivalent given the fact that I feel "public" knowledge (including my own) is painfully devoid of the real complexities that make these issues difficult to solve. But I've been feeling strangely compelled to say something on this issue and this movie because it feels kind of personal. I have several close family members that have spent significant portions of their career (from teaching to counseling to administration) in California public education for the last 40 years. (My opinion, however, is based on my observations of their experiences, but doesn't necessarily directly reflect their own beliefs.) Now, this is a simplified model, of course, but there seems to me to be this function that (roughly) determine's your "success", using the common score-based or elite-college-acceptance-based measure, in educational pursuits: S = ?I + ?F + ?P + ?T S is Success I is Intelligence ("Nature" IQ, Personal Ambition, etc.. innate properties) F is Family Factors ("Nurture", Education of Parents, Expectations, etc) P is Peer Group (aka, the ambient F + I of your adjacent students) T is Teaching (quality of instruction, instructional program, instructional personnel) They're not entirely independent, but close enough to do fake science. For the sake of argument, let's say "I" is fixed for each individual, so I'm ignoring it. The big question, it seems, is what exactly the constants are at each question mark. I believe these films and essays and ponderances and political campaigns that focus so entirely on the "T", are focusing on the wrong thing. It probably has the smallest constant--and the least impact, positive or negative. Granted: there are numerous, valid arguments to make about tenure being terrible. There are myraid complaints that can be fairly leveled against unions. Yes, public educational programs can sometimes be uninspired, obsolete, and unambitious. But fantastic teachers in "bad schools" do worse (in their students' aggregate S terms) than apathetic teachers in "good schools." If you talked to teachers, and they were in a candid mood, my guess is you'd discover this is widely accepted. They know how hopeless it can be to fight upstream in a "bad school"... and that's because the F and P factors are stacked against you, and those constants are much larger. Teachers, even good teachers, seldom can trump the influence of family and peers. If we take the charter schools in the film as an example, I think self-selection bias is at play. It really fits _perfectly_ with the forumla and the low-T-constant theory: The parents who elect to enter the lottery are exhibiting a strong "F" factor, and, if they succeed in winning a slot, their child enters an environment with a bunch of other kids from high-F families, resulting in a great "P". And yes, the teachers might be better too, and the instruction might be better. But the teachers themselves are self-selecting! The very act of teaching at a school where people fight to get in generally provides a student body full of willing students coming from encouraging families. Of course those kids will learn! And the "better" the teacher is, the more mobile they often are and the better shot they have at the "good" teaching jobs.. aka, the classrooms full of willing students. Granted, there are amazing, indefatigable teachers who spend a career teaching in "bad" classrooms, but they're the exception, not the rule. In my observation, the common case is enthusiastic, smart, well-educated young teachers can stick it out for a few years. Then, they're human after all, they capitulate, exhausted, and drag their shattered ideals to a different school with a more receptive classroom environment (if they remain in teaching at all). It's job satisfaction; it's self-preservation. (Analogy: generally, great hackers don't want to be test engineers even if that's possibly where they could do the most good.) I say: the real problem is cultural (and literally, cultural, not racial). Maybe, it's who our heros are, and our parents' heros are, and the dubious-expected-outcome nature of the "American Dream." Maybe it's what's viewed as "the way out" by older brothers and sisters and friends. Maybe's it's a generation's assumption that the last 100 years of American prosperity was inevitable, predestined, God-given, and not the product of a whole damn lot of work by their predecessor citizens. Hell, I dunno, cause figuring that out is the hard part that probably has many potential answers. If you really look at all those other countries that ourscore the US--I think it's worth examining the cultural assessment of the value of study. The classrooms, the teachers, the salaries, and the very students, are a natural outgrowth of that. But that means it's the F, and consequently the P that have the biggest constants. The T is--honestly--noise. A blip in the trend line. Good teachers can accelerate good students, but they don't make them. So why isn't this the predominant dialog? Teachers and teaching are an easy scapegoat because, yes, they have evident problems, and because it's sort of deceptively intuitive that if people aren't learning, it's because they're not being taught. But I think, really, the criticism centers on them because teachers aren't us--every family, and critically, every voter. People want an outlet for their anger when Americans are undereducated. But what politician will face the camera and say to the voting population "it's mostly your fault"? Who wants to go see a movie where the audience is the villain? (Aside: actually, that sounds kind of rad.) So, shades of gray reality check: I have no idea what the answer is, but the first step seems to be ensuring we've actually identified the problem. That's the programmer in me talking.

bryanwb 16y ago

Let's face it, American kids are generally lazy and poorly-disciplined and this is the primary reason that our schools suck. We always want to blame the teachers, teacher unions, school administration when we really have to blame ourselves. Even much better teachers and organized schools won't be able to educate kids who don't want to learn. Subjects like math, science, and English aren't "boring." American kids are just too lazy to put in the work to appreciate them. The real gap in American education is an "effort gap." I attended a lower-middle income Southern California high school with a primarily caucasian and latino student population. Neither group of students cared that much about school and test scores showed it. We did have a great sports teams. The city over the hill, Rowland Heights, had a primarily Asian student population. They had great scores, graduation rates, etc. However, their football team sucked. The asian parents pushed their kids hard to learn. The parents of students at my high school only pushed them on the sports field and not in the classroom. Pedagogy, class size, quality of teachers, testing/not testing - these things are all important but miniscule in impact when compared to actual student effort. I think charter schools do well in large part to the fact that they attract kids who care. Their success will diminish once you include kids who don't. Instead of asking "Why Johnny can't read," we should be asking "Why Johnny doesn't get off his ass and study."

stretchwithme 16y ago

I question the entire notion, seemingly sacrosanct for decades, that one mode of learning should be made compulsory for all. Did we evolve with this mode of learning? No. And what about the idea that government is somehow the ideal institution to dispense enlightenment? Would we trust it with dispensing the news or even the authoring of a comic book?

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I wish I had time to go into this -- it's a critical issue with our life today. But I don't, so I'll make a couple hopefully pithy and not snarky comments. First of all, you have to measure things and you have to have somebody accountable for things. This is true no matter what the thing you are talking about. I don't see how much hand-waving and complaining about society's morals and values is going to get you beyond this extremely reasonable requirement. Second -- and this is ironic -- folks have been complaining about the quality of schools for years. Some of you guys act like this is the first you've heard of it. We've dropped boatloads of money in education. Wake up and see where all this centralized planning, factory-mentality, and unionized system has gotten you. I think it's great people are paying attention. We've missed you. Welcome to the party. It's a very complicated situation, and I don't see a solution emerging any time soon, unfortunately. I know I called out unions and such in my graph above, but in reality it's a very complex situation. The best I can come up with is that you're better off giving the money to the parents in the form of vouchers and letting various systems compete against each other. Or you can keep trying to make one-size-fits-all solutions. Good luck with that.

hga 16y ago
To emphasize just how long this has been an issue: Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1955. "Federal Aid to Education" was a big political issue before "Sputnik ended that debate" (it was launched in 1957; http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view613.html http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view613.html). Heinlein also touched on this in Have Space Suit—Will Travel in 1958.

steveplace 16y ago

This is going to sound a bit Machiavellian, I'm surprised that the fear of failure has not been brought up as a strong motivator. I'm assuming the selection bias in the movie shows hard working impoverished children who want to do better in school-- but are they not motivated when they consider the alternatives? My wife works at the best school in the county (not country!). If a student fails a single test, she is told that the kid will be sat down after school, retaught the course work, and be given the test a 2nd time. Any student with a learning disability on record (including ADHD) is all but exempt from any standards set by the teacher. Furthermore, teachers are encouraged to "round up" to look better for the school district. If a student fails a class, they will spend time in front of a computer for 3 weeks to make up the credit. If a student fails to have enough credits before graduation, they will still let you walk the stage and you can simply come back during the summer to sit in front of a computer. There's no social stigma of failure in the school's culture anymore, and that also comes from the family life (the F from jamwt's post). The student could care less about grades because the parents don't care and they will just have them work at the shop after high school. This carries on with the teachers. Tenure is a very dangerous asset that a teacher can have, and it keeps the bad teachers in. Students will come into my wife's English class without a basic knowledge of sentence structure and many other things that ought to have been known by this age, and the grade level below her shows videos for a very large amount of time. They will read 1/4 of Romeo and Juliet and just watch the rest on TV without any analysis of the material. This is a social and political system in which individual failure has been discouraged, removed, and subsidized. While positive reinforcements (good grades, more money after graduation) can certainly help, the fact that the lack of hard work can be shrugged off so easily has to be a component of school under-performance.