5 ms·
This is another way in which inequality is persisted. Private schools overwhelmingly tend to teach phonics while those who go to public school end up being taug
by zaphar 6y ago
This is another way in which inequality is persisted. Private schools overwhelmingly tend to teach phonics while those who go to public school end up being taught the 3-cueing system.
Getting the schools to change approach requires political action against powerful lobbies. While a private school needs good outcomes to justify it's prices so gravitate to systems that produce that outcome.
- ironmagma 6y agoSometimes you hear these stories and just have to back up two steps and ask why we are obsessed with developing these monolithic curriculums. Can’t we just have teachers use their best judgment? Then we will have a greater diversity of ideas and more opportunity for success in the schools.
- jancsika 6y agoThe ambiguity inherent in your solution is similar to the ambiguity that would come from HN parsing all users comments as innerHTML. I suppose it doesn't have to be a "monolithic curriculum" that addresses this kind of problem. But whatever it is it better be functionally equivalent in its ability to successfully thwart clever bad faith exploits. Otherwise you get the less populated parts of the U.S. "teaching the controversy" in biology classes as part of your "greater diversity of ideas."
- ironmagma 6y agoSo fire those teachers. There’s a difference between teaching a particular opinion and teaching proven falsehoods. University professors are basically free to teach whatever syllabus they like, why is that approach not translatable to the public school classroom?
- bananaface 6y agoI'm really not sure which approach I prefer. If you contextualise it to a company, it's crazy to think you could develop an effective system by having top-level management of a country-sized company devise a monolithic, cookie-cutter plan that gives teams zero autonomy or ability to use their personal judgement. You have to allow the men on the ground to innovate, and adapt to their specific problems. The cost of autonomy is that some teachers will teach creationism, but it also means the people who are closest to & have the biggest stake in the learning of each child have control over how that kid develops, which in general seems better aligned with incentives.
- MereInterest 6y agoThat is great in areas where the correct knowledge or pedagogy is not known. Then you can have different opportunities for success. This is horrible where a teaching or pedagogy is known to be better. As an example from a few days ago on Hacker News, suppose a teacher wanted to teach Roman numerals as the primary method of representing numbers.
- ironmagma 6y agoA counterpoint would be that we apparently don’t know what we don’t know about pedagogies. Someone clearly thought this was the right way to teach reading, despite every intuition telling any reasonable teacher the opposite.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoNot necessarily. It works in the short run, makes things more fun. Kid moves on and fails high school.
- ironmagma 6y agoThis is where tradition clearly is a strength of human intuition. Nearly everyone who learned to read (successfully) learned with the phonics method. If an individual visionary has the idea to use this new method of teaching reading to his five classes, that’s one thing. It’s another thing entirely for that same visionary to have the power to require every single teacher in the district to teach it that way.
- megablast 6y agoYou have to be trolling.
- xpaqui 6y agoI agree, we're not trusting teachers with their abilities. Like someone said on a top comment, there's several ways to teach children to read. I would rather leave this choice to the teacher.
- loco5niner 6y agoI imagine going from grade 1 learning system X, then grade 2 learning system Y, that builds on system Z would be very difficult.
- dmix 6y agoOr, you know, subsidized charter schools.