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> Because the United States lacks a centralized system for teacher training or distributing quality instructional materials to schools, Professor Koretz said, s

> Because the United States lacks a centralized system for teacher training or distributing quality instructional materials to schools, Professor Koretz said, states and districts did not always effectively carry out the Common Core or other reforms. I’ve only got a decent sample for one state, but here the state decides what its common core standards and teaching methods will be (rewriting the national standards, I suppose to justify someone’s job) then those are filtered through districts (admin, curriculum advisors) which hopefully turn that into something useful for classroom teachers, who are to use what the district provides. Materials, plans, and so on, are typically not among what’s provided. Districts usually whip their focus or emphasis between tested subjects (fuck untested ones, who cares, obviously) based on whatever did worst in the most recent test results. Districts can implement all kinds of their own practices or frameworks for discipline and classroom management, materials, teaching methods, class scheduling, class structure in a broad sense, and so on. These are often drawn from popular or trendy books from education researchers and consultants. Admin (principals, superintendents) are often not much on systems or game thinking so tend to partially implement whichever of these they’ve decided on (because some part is inconvenient or otherwise not something they want to do) usually in such a way as to cripple them. Nepotism is common. Small- to medium-scale fraud is common. Administrators will find a way to spin all their decisions as positive to protect their jobs and pad their résumés for the next one, and no one with the power to correct the record will do so because it’d make the district look bad. Principals do similar things as they all want to be superintendents or at least a principal in some district easier & better known than the one they’re in now. It’s a mess and it’s impressive it works as well as it does.

throwawaymath 7y ago
Most of your comment also acutely describes the NYC Department of Education (DOE).
rossdavidh 7y ago
My first thought on this was, "our reform efforts haven't worked well in most places they were tried, and you think the problem is we didn't have a centralized enough system?" Centralization and standardization is generally only useful when you know what needs to be done, it just needs to be done everywhere. There is considerable evidence that we _don't_ know what needs to be done differently, so centralization is the last thing we need.
- shantly 7y ago
  I think it's a fact that our system, even for relatively high-profile "centralized" efforts, is in fact very decentralized already. I don't think we've tried centralized command of instruction methods and various things about how schools run that have way more to do with the experience of a student than someone in Washington saying "do Common Core, uh, somehow", really, so far as I'm aware, aside from some very high-level directives. I know lots of school administrators are effectively incompetent at implementing reforms & any kinds of systems, really, directed from higher up or otherwise (frankly, it's usually even worse when "otherwise"), due to some combination of ignorance or misaligned incentives (the balance of these varies but one or both are often present in some quantity). Whether it's worth bringing the few who have a clue and are choosing to use it to-heel in order to attempt to fix the many who don't and aren't, I do not know, but so far as I know anything like that's pretty far outside the Overton window so I wouldn't worry about it either way. Just recording how this stuff looks when it hits the state, district, and school level, since not everyone has insight into that, and it's largely a mess. Probably it's worth looking at how schools are run and their governance structured in other countries that are doing better than us, if the core motivation of all this anxiety is our falling behind them.

throwawaymath 7y ago

Most of your comment also acutely describes the NYC Department of Education (DOE).

rossdavidh 7y ago

My first thought on this was, "our reform efforts haven't worked well in most places they were tried, and you think the problem is we didn't have a centralized enough system?" Centralization and standardization is generally only useful when you know what needs to be done, it just needs to be done everywhere. There is considerable evidence that we _don't_ know what needs to be done differently, so centralization is the last thing we need.

shantly 7y ago
I think it's a fact that our system, even for relatively high-profile "centralized" efforts, is in fact very decentralized already. I don't think we've tried centralized command of instruction methods and various things about how schools run that have way more to do with the experience of a student than someone in Washington saying "do Common Core, uh, somehow", really, so far as I'm aware, aside from some very high-level directives. I know lots of school administrators are effectively incompetent at implementing reforms & any kinds of systems, really, directed from higher up or otherwise (frankly, it's usually even worse when "otherwise"), due to some combination of ignorance or misaligned incentives (the balance of these varies but one or both are often present in some quantity). Whether it's worth bringing the few who have a clue and are choosing to use it to-heel in order to attempt to fix the many who don't and aren't, I do not know, but so far as I know anything like that's pretty far outside the Overton window so I wouldn't worry about it either way. Just recording how this stuff looks when it hits the state, district, and school level, since not everyone has insight into that, and it's largely a mess. Probably it's worth looking at how schools are run and their governance structured in other countries that are doing better than us, if the core motivation of all this anxiety is our falling behind them.