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Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

• nla 5y ago
  I would give this 10 votes if I could. Great read!
  • lightgreen 5y ago
    You can create 10 accounts if you think you deserve more votes than others.
• shoto_io 5y ago
  > And the plagiarism detection software was indeed fooled! What the student didn’t realize is that teachers don’t need software to be able to tell the difference between honestly composed sentences and computer-generated gibberish. Hilarious.
• underseacables 5y ago
  This is sad. It reads more as though teachers and school employees are doing whatever they can to keep/justify their jobs, but not to improve learning. It is almost as if a teachers first job is self-preservation. If students can’t pass the test, then the test must be made easier, that way more students can pass and the teacher doesn’t look bad.
  • brandmeyer 5y ago
    That's an incentive alignment problem. It is the responsibility of management (state and district admin) to ensure that what is best for the teacher's career is also what is best for student education.
    • P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 5y ago
      Who's responsibility is it to ensure that what is best for the management (state and district admin) is also what is best for student education? I'm not too familiar with the details of management here, but is it even possible for public schools (and other government operations) to have proper incentives given voters don't care about results? I suppose "school-choice", which happens to be vehemently opposed by Democrats, would be the only way.
      • marcinzm 5y ago
        Parents who have money and care enough already pick the schools by simply buying a house in a slightly different place. Cupertino used to be the hot place for tiger parents in the bay area to go but I'm not sure if it still is. The issue is that then the rest of the schools get even worse which eventually results in bad social issues in 20 years. The kids from those schools grow up and everyone has to deal with them.
        • saagarjha 5y ago
          I don't think Cupertino's character has changed much. If anything, housing prices continued to skyrocket…
      • schoolchoice 5y ago
        "School-choice" is great for optimizing local maximums at the expense of just about everyone else. Public education should focus on the lowest common denominators to maximize education per tax dollar. It's not the smart people with lack of opportunity that drag down society, it's the massive amount of undereducated adults that become dangerously suceptable to manipulation.
        • fallingknife 5y ago
          If you want to maximize education per tax dollar then you need to separate out the smart kids into their own schools. Benefits of education are not evenly distributed. It is heavily weighted towards the right tail.
          • bombcar 5y ago
            Pretending that the outcome for everyone should be college and a degree is part of the problem - admitting that outcomes may be different allows you to create different paths adjusted for abilities (think trade school instead of high school, etc). Forcing everyone into the same mold results in a broken mold.
        • sxg 5y ago
    • underseacables 5y ago
      But which comes first, the teachers career, or the students education? I would contend that in the available evidence it is the former.
      • Wistar 5y ago
        Teacher's choice of curriculum and how, and when, subjects are taught are ever more regimented and regulated.
    • sbierwagen 5y ago
      What evidence do you have that management cares about student education?
  • titanomachy 5y ago
    It’s probably a bit more complicated than that… if failure rates went way up because of COVID, it would probably be an honest representation of how little students learned, but it would also screw over a lot of kids and affect their futures. It’s not really their fault that society didn’t adapt well. I’m not saying they’re right to just pass everyone, but it might not be purely selfish on the part of administrators.
  • LanceH 5y ago
    I would say most teachers pass students so hell doesn't rain down upon them in the form of administrators, parents, and the school district/city itself.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      I think this is the defining distinction - if the child is disciplined or fails, who do the parents blame? If they blame the teacher or the system, you’re going to get bad outcomes on average as you’re removing the tools the teachers need.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • an_opabinia 5y ago
    > Most teachers seem to take it as a given that of course half the class is going to wander in half an hour late during first period— it’s so early, you know!— and during fourth period I don't know. What does this have to do with keeping teacher's jobs and not improving learning? Late start is, as far as "clinical outcomes" can be measured in education, like, the cheapest win there is.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Moving to late start may help with the chronically late - but it doesn’t solve the intentionally tardy and the scofflaws.
  • Yoric 5y ago
    Let's rephrase this. If you had a choice between: a. doing your job as well as you can, then losing it (and being unemployable forever, quite likely); b. doing it somewhat worse, but keeping it (and hopefully having a chance to help more students). What would you do? Please blame whoever forced this conundrum on teachers. Nonsensical bureaucratic decisions like this are the reason for which I left the profession.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      The teachers who choose A mostly have already left for private schools where they have a bit for flexibility at the cost of lower pay.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    > It is almost as if a teachers first job is self-preservation. That is simply the top priority of most employees.
• P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 5y ago
  Not quite as good as this one: https://www.amren.com/features/2020/05/after-twenty-years-working-in-multiracial-public-schools-a-white-teacher-tells-all/ https://www.amren.com/features/2020/05/after-twenty-years-wo... I'm a bit surprised that the Bay Area, one of the wealthiest places in the world, has problems with public schools too. "Public schooling is child abuse" gains more steam every day.
  • astrange 5y ago
    California can't fund any of its public schools properly because of Prop 13. None of the wealthy homeowners care about this, because they're all too old to have kids in school.
    • P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 5y ago
      It's not clear to me how funding plays a leading role in policies such as "let everyone pass".
      • astrange 5y ago
        Don't ask me, I was responding to "one of the wealthiest places in the world". Though I think schools with rich enough families attending do have attached foundations and just ask for charitable donations. The easiest way to live in the area as a schoolteacher is to marry an engineer or someone else with a home, too.
      • rcpt 5y ago
        Well, if you're an HJTA fanboy then you can justify any sickening anti education policy you want by pointing to "let everyone pass"
        • P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 5y ago
          To be clear I've never heard of HJTA. Letting schools continue to suck with the excuse that they just need more funding is the sickening anti-education policy. Yes, an organization that is shitty due to bad policies won't improve, and might become worse, when given more funding.
• linuxftw 5y ago
  Wow, lot's to unravel in this one. First, the kids are trying to skip out on mindless work like book reports. Most of the students aren't bright enough to fool the teacher in the anecdotes, but probably there are some that do. Next, there's the discipline issue. Yes, they stopped suspending kids in a lot of places because they realized those kids would just be left alone at home all day, and the only reason those kids were at school at all was because it was in some way convenient for their parents. Finally, there's the homework issue. Yes, homeless is pointless busy work. If something is worth learning, make sure you block off enough time during classroom hours to teach it, otherwise most kids aren't going to learn it at all. Yes, the students are overwhelmed. We have millions of kids that are from completely broken homes, basic needs like food and housing aren't met, and this person is complaining about book reports? Society is broken.
  • newbie2020 5y ago
    You think homework is useless? That’s the main way to learn…
    • throwaway17_17 5y ago
      I don’t particularly agree with GP’s comment, but homework is not the main way everyone learns. Maybe some individuals do learn that way, but others absolutely do not. I personally did not do a single homework assignment other than a senior term paper throughout all of high school and still learned the material presented. I think it’s too broad to just assert that homework == ‘way to learn’.
    • LeegleechN 5y ago
      Actually doing the material (as opposed to sitting in a lecture) is the way to learn, but that could be done in class.
• pacbard 5y ago
  > With half the term remaining, teachers of seniors received a notification that they would not be allowed to fail students unless they filled out a form right then and there declaring that the student was certain to receive an F. I think that OP is misconstruing the reasons behind this notification requirement. This notification has to do more with a "cover your ass" policy than lowering expectations for seniors. The California Education code [1] requires school districts to develop procedures to notify parents of a failing grade. All the CA districts that I worked for had some procedures in place for when and how notify families of failing grades in response to this law. From a quick search, it seems that SFUSD policies 4.2.5 [2] and 4.2.6 apply in this case. The policy clearly states that teachers have to notify parents of grades either 1 or 2 times during the semester (i.e., mid-semester report cards-if you went to school in CA you will remember receiving those). It seems that OP's school was on a 9-week reporting period, requiring teachers to notify parents of grades mid-semester and that their school added a requirement of filling out an additional form outlining that the student was in danger of failing the class specifically for seniors (probably because most families stopped looking at report cards for seniors). This form is required to be in compliance with the CA ed code as parents have the right to appeal failing grades and not being notified is probably an enough reason for the district to change a failing grade to a passing one in case of a lawsuit/complaint. I would imagine that failing a class is more "high stakes" for seniors than other students, so they have more paperwork involved for seniors if you want to fail them. Families might be more "litigious" if a student ends up failing a class required for graduation. It is simpler to complain to the board/suing that having to repeat a school year. The bottom line is that the CA ed code gives teachers final say in grades and even the superintendent cannot change a grade without the teacher's consent. On the other hand, the CA ed code gives some rights to parents to appeal grades and has some notifications guidelines so they shouldn't be surprised of failing grades. OP will be able to fail as many seniors as they want, but they just have to notify their families that they are in danger of failing the class at some point before the end of the semester. At the end of the day, if they have enough evidence for failing a student (that would stand up during a public board meeting/lawsuit), notifying the student's family 9 weeks before the end of the semester shouldn't be too much of a burden. Links: [1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=EDC&sectionNum=49067 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio.... [2]: ]https://www.sfusd.edu/services/know-your-rights/student-family-handbook/chapter-4-student-academic-expectations/42-academic-guidelines/425-grading-period https://www.sfusd.edu/services/know-your-rights/student-fami...
• pmichaud 5y ago
  This is terrifying. How representative is this actually?
  • xyzzyz 5y ago
    In public school systems of coastal liberal cities? Very representative.
  • tastyfreeze 5y ago
    Im afraid it is widespread. My highschool in Alaska implemented a graduation competency exam around 2000. Less than half my class passed what I thought was an easy test. So... they made next years test easier to meet the desired pass target.
• fitzie 5y ago
  if I was a teacher I would give an extra five points on any handwritten assignment, and an extra ten points if it is cursive.
  • qihqi 5y ago
    Too easy to game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvIvPARVRUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvIvPARVRUQ
• fallingknife 5y ago
  > Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50% > And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
  • nerdponx 5y ago
    I don't get it either. People have learning and thinking differences, we know that and have known it for years. Accommodating those differences is important. Living out a real-life version of Harrison Bergeron is not the only way to do it.
    • api 5y ago
      Yeah but a real life version of Harrison Bergeron may be the cheapest lowest effort easiest to bureaucratize way to do it. Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
      • rsj_hn 5y ago
        The problem is that "learning style" is not a thing. There are good students and bad students, and there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still. So it's not like if you change "teaching styles" you will be able to get the slower student the same information as the faster student. The only way to do that is to do a disservice to the faster student. What you can do, is create tracks so that everyone is challenged but not put in a hopeless in a situation, and the disruptive students you need to either expel so their parents handle them or put them into some kind of separate environment where they don't prevent others from learning. That's going to result in large inequalities in outcomes because there are large inequalities in how fast students mature and what their learning capabilities are. Neither of these things -- student intelligence or student maturity -- is something that the teachers can influence.
• nerdponx 5y ago
  This sounds like something out of a surrealist novel. > consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes US-International keyboard layout, maybe. Maybe the student doesn't know what umlauts and acute accents are, so maybe they think they're valid equivalents to " and '.
  • rjsw 5y ago
    Is that down to the pupil ? Sounds like another MacOS "why not use random unicode characters that look similar to the one you really want" feature to me.
  • fzimmermann89 5y ago
    or the text went through latex at some point, which can easily lead to a"->ä. letter+quotation mark is a common way to write umlauts...
  • blamazon 5y ago
    Perhaps copying from another source, creating a wacky encoding error?
  • bdowling 5y ago
    I was confused when I read this because reader mode on Safari converted the umlauts and acutes into quotation marks and apostrophes.
• jl2718 5y ago
  Just say no to this garbage. Your kids will only learn how to be like them.
• jdhn 5y ago
  Stuff like this is why I roll my eyes every time I hear that schools are underfunded and how we need to give them just a little more funding, and surely things will get better. If they're just going to pass students anyways, what's the point of increasing the funding?
  • pydry 5y ago
    maybe because this isn't the only problem schools have and some of them absolutely will be fixed by money.
  • bradlys 5y ago
    I mean, my school where I went could only afford four days a week. We had so many budget cuts that the school decided the only way to go forward was to cut the fifth day. This lasted for years and I don’t know if they’ve ever returned to a normal schedule.
  • TMWNN 5y ago
    New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (<https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-city-spend-on-each-student.html https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...>). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
  • kyboren 5y ago
    That trope needs to die. California's schools are not underfunded. California spends a record amount on education[0], over $18k per child. "Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021-22 reflects the significant allocation of one-time federal funds in 2020-21." [0]: www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Education.pdf
    • 5y ago
• kowlo 5y ago
  It's sad but it's only going to get worse. UK universities are already worse.
  • ivan_ah 5y ago
    Yeah I remember being very surprised at the undergraduate level of math/phys at Bristol (I was there for one year on a student exchange). My classmates (2nd year and 3rd year) had trouble with basic calculus, because they didn't learn it in high school, and then their first year courses had to go easy (superficial) so that not everybody fails. The fact that you choose which questions to answer on the finals is also weird (answer any 3 out of 4 questions). It doesn't make sense to me that a whole nation skips math (unless you take math A-levels). I talked to a professor and he explained UGRADs are below level, but then when starting grad school they force everyone up to international level. He showed me a huge room with grad student desks and was like "look, we don't let them get out of here until they learn math properly."
• 11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
  The only aspect that is not distressing is that there is at least one public school teacher who can recognize the futility of trying to simultaneously accommodate students, parents and administration. What educational outcome do these groups expect?
• avanai 5y ago
  The umlauts for quotes thing is really interesting. I don’t know why the author went for “these kids haven’t seen enough ‘proper’ text” rather than, say “these kids weren’t taught typing and discovered a creative solution that communicates their intent well.”
  • Skunkleton 5y ago
    That one left me scratching my head. A physical keyboard has a key specifically for a quote, and entering an umlaut isn’t straightforward on iOS. International keyboard maybe?
• splithalf 5y ago
  The soft bigotry of different standards is talked about but rarely is the premise carefully examined. Can there be a single standard? Maybe the problem is expecting a good essay, composed in earnest, by a kid that can “barely string a sentence together.” We ought not be surprised when humans act human. Maybe we should redefine public education to be a bit more exclusive, and not shame those that aren’t on a college track into pursuing mentally challenging work for which we are unfit. Give kids the money that would be spent on their education (loosely defined) and let them invest it, or spend on vocational training or seed money to start their own small business. Too much focus on producing som eidetic notion of the educated individual. People don’t wind up homeless because they weren’t exposed to Shakespeare. Some people will be lucky to attain enough basic skill to stay afloat. If such a person is able to fool plagiarism software, maybe that’s something to celebrate.
• mindvirus 5y ago
  One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed. Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
  • rrss 5y ago
    FYI private schools are not immune to these problems. The administration of some private schools choose to have similar policies (accept late work indefinitely, minimum grade of 50%, etc) at their school.
    • mindvirus 5y ago
      Of course, but it is very much up to the parents which product they want to buy (another problem of private schools to be sure). There are several that focus on rigorous academics, language immersion and even world travel.
      • rkk3 5y ago
        They don't necessarily know what is marketing and what they are buying, and the few truly top schools are selective. Private school teachers are also paid less & have worse benefits. It would be great if the private system had it all figured out but they don't.
        • bombcar 5y ago
          The low pay does somewhat select for teachers who want to teach - as those who don’t can get more money elsewhere. The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them.
          • rkk3 5y ago
            > The low pay does somewhat select for teachers who want to teach - as those who don’t can get more money elsewhere. It ends up selecting for people who are more transient and have less experience, who haven't gotten the better Public school job yet. > The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them. They theoretically have more control over expulsions, but whether or not they use it really depends on the school.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  This school sounds like some sort of weird Kafkaesque punishment for kids. Everyone is trying to game it: kids who don't want to write essays, administrators who don't want kids to fail. Teachers who want kids to both learn stuff and pass. Motivate the kids. Show them stuff about the world, and show them how to find out things for themselves. If you're going to test them, do it in a way that doesn't destroy all enjoyment of the subject. Try to get the kids to want to keep learning after they leave you.
  • rajansaini 5y ago
    In my experience anyone can be conditioned to love anything, and inspiring a love for learning something is the only stable long-term solution.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    No one's gaming anything; it's education theater.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• nixpulvis 5y ago
  > “you’re legally required to assign this much homework, so make sure you do that, only don’t, because the kids are overwhelmed”. That too was in keeping with a theme. I think the underlying theme is that the parents themselves are overwhelmed and the schools that were ill-equipped to handle education before COVID-19 are crumbling. If I take this report at face value (which, frankly, I'm tempted to), it paints an even more broken image of the American school system than the dumpster fire I had on my wall already.
• mindvirus 5y ago
  In the balance, from talking to teachers a lot of students are really struggling this year with COVID lockdowns, and so I wonder to what extent this is to dampen that. I suspect most will be a little bit behind next year, and it feels like we will have to lean into that.
• tastyfreeze 5y ago
  I cant help but think this is tied to the way government funding for schools is handled. Schools dont want to lose funding by having poor performance so the make the performance measures look better.
• arkh 5y ago
  > Colleagues from programs where these moves happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been: kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing recommendations, get into top colleges, and… drop out after about three weeks, saying that they feel like they’re years behind everyone else and don’t know what’s going on, because they are and they don’t. There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    Usurious student debt should be mandated at 0% interest and only paid back via a percentage of income. And such this would require it be issued by the state (as no company would want to) and you could tune it so that it would have to be paid back in 15 years (say) or be forgiven - and so offering it to people likely to end up in middling income jobs wouldn’t be worth while. And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.
    • zzzzzzzza 5y ago
      the more you extend debt financing for a given thing the more expensive something gets... mortgages or student debt. debt is where new money comes from in our financial system... now the second part of your proposal, would be interesting. but in practice if you combine both parts probably they would extremely aggressively filter students
• CapitalistCartr 5y ago
  I learned more in two months of USAF Basic Training than any year of school, maybe any two years. As they told us repeatedly, it's a privilege to be here. Although they had the option to boot us out, no one was, and only one guy bailed out of 50.
• hintymad 5y ago
  > And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can't afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those "single student who struggled most", will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn't even pass city college's math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn't even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.
• rossdavidh 5y ago
  So, this seems ludicrous and sad. What I am wondering is whether or not this is an accurate representation of the real situation in SFBay area schools? If we have any parents from the SF Bay area on HN who are sending their kids to public schools, I'd be interested in hearing their take on this.
  • bob1029 5y ago
    I have 2 close family members working public education in Texas - one is a principal and another a teacher. Stories like this are brought up all the time. Something really shitty is going on with how we are raising a lot of our kids and managing public school systems. It's not specific to one state/county/region from what I can tell. My brother in particular is desperately trying to get out of public education. He loves teaching, but they are making it impossible for anyone to do their jobs effectively. Pay is shit, especially since work practically doubled overnight, and you get virtually zero control over the curriculum or policies in your classroom. Then, at the end of the day, some entitled shithead of a parent thinks their little snowflake was dealt a bad hand and parent-teacher conferences ensue which further sap whatever life force remains. After hearing about all of this stuff over the years, I cant help but feel incredibly grateful that I have the kind of career that I do. Public education has been turned into a protracted daycare experience with the sole objective of piping the students into a college debt lifestyle.
  • amha 5y ago
    I teach at an elite private school in the Bay. We're a much better place than the school described here, with kids who like learning, and administrators who are well-intentioned. But many of the author's frustrations are, directionally, exactly the same as what I experience, namely: > .. The emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types. ... my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most, which quite literally would have meant putting students who had signed up for Advanced Placement into a remedial course
• dnndev 5y ago
  Public school is broken and we all know it - in general. We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school. Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.
  • Bostonian 5y ago
    "We need more teachers and smaller classes." That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.
    • Bostonian 5y ago
      For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.
      • dane-pgp 5y ago
        If you think that giving less money to struggling public services is a way to improve those services, then you are part of the problem. Political opportunists rely on that line of thinking to put public services into a death spiral, and their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
      • Shacklz 5y ago
        Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception. Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)
        • 5y ago
• KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  I thought AP classes and a level of general competitiveness stopped stuff like this? Even if the in person classes are easy to pass, the AP scores should be consistent with the rest of the country and should make identifying the relative difficulty between schools pretty easy? ACT and SAT should also make grade inflated school very easily to spot. I think California has a rule requiring that at least X% of their students are from California right? Has that shifted the balance at CA to accepting lower quality students from their own state?
  • almost_usual 5y ago
    UC schools no longer consider SAT or ACT for admissions or scholarships. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/exam-requirement/ https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
    • yhoneycomb 5y ago
      We all know this is because they didn't like it that "too many" Asians were getting in. Remove the objective measures, and it becomes harder to prove that you're racist - even if everybody knows it.
      • gcheong 5y ago
        Standardized and objective are not the same thing.
        • yhoneycomb 5y ago
          https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/objective-test https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/objective-test
    • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      Wait, what? Does that mean they don't use any exam results for admissions?
• staticassertion 5y ago
  School's so stupid. If you give people a grade and tell them to maximize it, with no meaningful rewards that they can understand, they're going to cheat. Duh. I regret not cheating in school, what a waste of time all of that shit was. The teacher is basically like "haha dumb kids, we know you're cheating" and "if only we could punish students more!". There's a lot of "the smart kids are suffering because of the dumb kids" attitude here that I find disgusting. > That too was in keeping with a theme. The teacher email I mentioned above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types. Oh god, how awful that these students won't get to suffer through some idiot's assignment that I'm sure would greatly better their life. There's a lot wrong with school but I feel like this teacher doesn't realize that they're a part of that. > Wow, a 100% pass rate! What a successful school! Yes, it's cheating. They have an incentive, as your students do, to 'pass', and so they cheat. Give students a place to be during the day while their parents work. Give them real, meaningful incentives that matter to young people - money, freedom, social structure, a feeling of productivity - and align those with learning real, practical skills, like how to read, write, analyze context, etc. Hire non-idiots, pay them more, reduce class sizes. Yeah it'll cost more, but the obvious economic benefits will offset that. I can count on one hand how many teachers I had that I respected - the rest were obvious failures.
  • um_ya 5y ago
    I like the school voucher idea a lot. Give parents a voucher, as good as cash, for their child and let them choose the school. Private companies will compete for those vouchers, aligning focus on satisfying the parents and the children, rather than the government.
    • crooked-v 5y ago
      That sounds like a great way to indirectly punish parents who can't afford commutes for their children, since they get stuck with whichever schools the wealthier parents pull their children from.
• DevKoala 5y ago
  Depressing read honestly.
• gregimba 5y ago
  During high school we had had an exchange program with a German college track high school. My family hosted a student for a month and then they hosted me in Germany. I was shocked at the difference in expectations and quality of education compared to an average American high school. I really wish we offered something equivalent of their combination Vocational Tech/High school with industry partnership as a viable career path compared to the 4 year high school only option I had.
• austincheney 5y ago
  I wonder how many of the commentators in here that mention any level of surprise have children. I suspect none.
• wilde 5y ago
  There are a lot of complaints about public school in this thread, but much of the data on achievement says that in the US, private schools don’t do a better job. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X18785632 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X1878563... Hell, voucher programs have been shown to lower academic attainment. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21839 https://www.nber.org/papers/w21839 If people really wanted to improve educational outcomes, UBI might actually do the most good. The situation at home matters a lot, and it shows up in the data.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    Forbidding single-parent homes and demanding only one parent work would also improve outcomes but I doubt the political will for those can be found.
• wutbrodo 5y ago
  > Meanwhile, here’s what it’s like in the teacher email threads. This is a verbatim, non-ironic quote: “I didn’t really hear you at first, steeped as I am in a culture of assumed patriarchal white privilege, rank privilege, and inequitable hierarchy" It's my perception that adults involved with schools, especially younger grades, have been penetrated so intensely by woke ideology[1], much more so than the broader subcultures (urban, educated, etc) they belong to that already skew woke. Is this just down to how skewed female this group is? [1] I mean this neutrally, not as a particular criticism of wokeness or the manner in which it penetrates communities. When thinking about large groups of people, modeling ideologies as memetic viruses moving through a population is a lot more sensible than as emergent entities from the rational decisions of large numbers of intelligent, thoughtful people capable of critical thinking.
  • dqv 5y ago
    > adults involved with schools I don't know what group you're trying to capture by saying this. You mean the parents as well as the school employees? >Is this just down to how skewed female this group is? No I think it has to do with how young both the parents and the teachers are. Someone who is 40 years old today is right on the cusp of being a millennial.
    • wutbrodo 5y ago
      Yea: School boards, teachers, administrators to some degree. Sorry, it was a little awkwardly phrased. > Someone who is 40 years old today is right on the cusp of being a millennial. This doesn't fit the data. The median age of a teacher in the US is 41[1], which means that less than half of all teachers are millennials. By contrast, 72% of teachers are women. I'm having more trouble pulling up the sources I've seen with crosstabs on approval of wokeness[2] by gender and age, but I know it's quite gender-skewed (as well as age-skewed). [1] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s_002.asp https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s... [2] The definition I'm using here is leftism with an identitarian focus, that opposes Enlightenment liberalism's aspiration towards transcending ethnic tribalism. I again mean this neutrally, with no comment on whether this worldview is more legitimate than the alternative.
• glitchc 5y ago
  In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-programs-and-keeping-smart-kids-down-proves-the-silliness-of-inclusivity https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-... The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards. The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.
  • hoka-one-one 5y ago
    It doesn't have to be continuous. You can introduce a virus to kill off some of the illiterate and maintain some balance.
  • DSingularity 5y ago
    You say “until we are dominated by idiot majority” as if it hasn’t happened. Just look at the platforms of the peoples vote to represent Americans. Rarely are they platform that would actually matter to the people and most of the time it is identity politics, nationalism, gun rights, and religion. We can’t even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesn’t devolve into an ideological/tribal argument. I think the US is already dominated by idiots in every state.
    • Judgmentality 5y ago
      I fear I am feeding a political tangent here, but I think most of the problems you mentioned could be fixed in the US by recognizing (admittedly this would be a timely process) an official third electoral party. It's a lot easier for nuance to prevail when the system isn't designed to be binary.
      • meowkit 5y ago
• eplanit 5y ago
  Meanwhile, China is pushing its children to learn so much more, and is developing one of the most educated populations on earth[1]. They'll win by our own implosion. [1] https://wenr.wes.org/2019/12/education-in-china-3 https://wenr.wes.org/2019/12/education-in-china-3
  • Tade0 5y ago
    > while the country’s tertiary gross enrollment rate (GER) spiked from 7.6 percent to 50 percent (compared with a current average GER of 75 percent in high income countries, per UNESCO). It appears that they still haven't caught up.
• giantg2 5y ago
  I once had a cheating scare. I was in college, working on a take-home excel sheet for an accounting class. I was struggling with some of it, so I did my best and filled in the parts I knew and some I could guess at. I wasn't too worried about it because the rest of my grades in that class were good. The professor called me in for a meeting and accused me of cheating because the total column happened to be correct but only some of the inputs were incorrect. I was actually scared I might get expelled for cheating, when I was just following my prior teachers' advice (and basic logic) to guess when not sure.
• muyuu 5y ago
  I've read somewhere that the affluent don't send their kids to public school in SanFran or anywhere in the Bay Area, is that true? I assume there are a lot of locals browsing this.
  • Jemaclus 5y ago
    Anecdotally, I don't have kids of my own, but none of my friends with kids send theirs to public schools in SF or Oakland. I also live on the same block as two private schools in Oakland and apparently the wait lists to get in are years long.
  • saagarjha 5y ago
    Cupertino and Palo Alto have some of the best public schools in the entire state. Of course, some still choose to send their children to private schools, but the public schools in the suburban south Bay Area are good enough to drive up housing prices by their own right.
• Havoc 5y ago
  Is this real? Thought yes but after the nobody can get below 50% part I’m less sure
• Jondar 5y ago
  > Even before the advent of the internets, catching students cheating was generally not particularly hard. ... Catching this sort of malfeasance has gotten even easier with the development of plagiarism detection software. > ...students use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes Those students figured out a way around the plagiarism detection.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Jondar 5y ago
    This "zoomers are so dumb" argument bothers me as much as the PC culture. It's like generational differences are a new thing, do people really think your teacher back in the day thought progressive educational practices were effective. I mean capital punishment really worked wonders.
• mistersquid 5y ago
  I am close to two families with children in the SF public school system. One family has a 5-year-old boy and 7-year-old girl. The other family has an 11-year-old boy. SF schools went to all-remote education starting in March 2020 and by the end of the 2020-2021 school year, did not yet return for in-person instruction. The effect on children's education has been devastating. [0] The teacher's union refused to entertain in-person teaching even though SF has reportedly reached herd immunity as of May 2021. Negotiations have yielded almost no progress and well-meaning high-earning parents dedicated to the public school system have been stymied despite organizing as a group. [1] As a former college professor, I understand low wages are a problem for most teachers. Even as a tenure-track professor, my salary in 2009 was less than 50% of what I was (and am) able to command as a front-end developer in the Bay Area. Teaching K-12 in public schools in the US is difficult. There are nigh insurmountable problems which, in my opinion, are the product of so few financial resources dedicated to the project of educating children in the US. The behavioral problems less-endowed schools encounter among their students is an outgrowth of poor funding and poverty economics. Public school education in wealthy communities (famously Stuyvesant High School [2]) is a different story altogether. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/opinion/remote-learning-failure.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/opinion/remote-learning-f... [1] https://decreasingthedistance.org https://decreasingthedistance.org [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School
• ta2162 5y ago
  Education and education leadership heavily skew leftist. Part of the leftist creed is destroying the West from within. What better way to do that than destroying the institution that's sole purpose is creating the next generation of citizens?
• contrarian_5 5y ago
  very frequent topic here on HN. i remember a comment about a persons experience with the public schools in the soviet union when it collapsed. all the smart people pulled their kids out and did something else. its the same as everything else because if you want it to be done right then you have to do it yourself. there is no fixing public schools... they are run by the majority and they always will be. the problem isnt the schools, its the majority. after WW2 all the dumbest people fucked like rabbits with no financial or existential limitations to stop them, medicine increasingly spared idiots from the consequences of their actions. this initial seed of stupidity brought the next tooth of the ratchet into place: the popularization and normalization of eliminating all consequences from ones own actions. we just keep getting dumber. we were supposed to be re-galvanized by a major depression and a pandemic in the past 20 years but we postponed it all with technology and massive economic manipulation. eventually the chickens are going to come home to roost... in the meantime dont let the public schools rot out the inside of your kids head.
  • newacct583 5y ago
    What has happened to this site? We have a topic on the front page of the site for 15 hours now, with almost 400 comments, and the top comment is a nakedly eugenicist screed about "the dumbest people" having too many babies. I mean, even skipping the moral horror here, it's not even true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect But HN... wants it to be true? What the actual fuck, people?
    • contrarian_5 5y ago
      ive been here since 2014. i didnt bring up eugenics, but if you want to broach that topic then fine. intelligence, as well as all other traits or characteristics, of not just humans but all organisms, is subject to natural selection. if you deny this, you deny natural selection and this would make you a science denier. whether we should act on this fact, or the morality of doing so, is completely up to you. but you will not deny science on hackernews. oh and you saw my comment at the top because the ranking algorithm takes the youthfulness of the comment into account. its rather embarrassing that you dont know this.
• Thorrez 5y ago
  >Another thing I’ve discovered is that many students— not just a couple here and there, but several in every class— consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes. >I don’t know how this happens— I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect. Look at the Spanish Mexican keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/KBDLA/ http://kbdlayout.info/KBDLA/ It has the umlaut (actually diaeresis in a Spanish context I think) and acute accent mark pretty prominently available. Look at the Spanish Spain keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/kbdsp http://kbdlayout.info/kbdsp It has them even more prominently available, right on the same key that an English American keyboard would have the single and double quote. I wonder whether the students' families are from Spain or Mexico, and whether they're using the Spain vs the Mexico keyboard. I wonder how many people from Mexico use the Spain keyboard due to software confusion.
  • lostlogin 5y ago
    You have just given me flashbacks of using a keyboard in Italy to type in English. I eventually gave up and just accepted the typos.
  • Sbuu 5y ago
    In my opinion, those wrong characters are probably coming from some OCR software used on badly scanned books. Those "several students" probably all used the same text database which has this particular issue.
    • Thorrez 5y ago
      I sometimes see an acute accent used instead of an apostrophe in reddit comments. People aren't scanning old books into reddit comments. It's the keyboard layout. Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized. I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best colleges for the very top students. There was honors, accelerated, standard, and remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning. Nobody cared what happened to those kids including in many cases their own parents. Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.
  • lalaland1125 5y ago
    This was the explicit and intended result of No Child Left Behind. Schools were only given incentives to make kids pass, not to help them excel.
    • ethbr0 5y ago
      If we're being honest, no one was willing to work at or fund helping kids excel. It's just too huge of a problem.
  • sqrt17 5y ago
    > to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot. It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids. Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
• ArcturianDeath 5y ago
  What is it like to teach black students? by Christopher Jackson https://www.amren.com/ar/pdfs/2009/200907ar.pdf https://www.amren.com/ar/pdfs/2009/200907ar.pdf
• smartbit 5y ago
  https://archive.is/Z1LWH https://archive.is/Z1LWH
• gverrilla 5y ago
  I find this report very funny because it ultimately places responsability upon administration. As if the curriculum and pedagogy weren't flawed to the bones, and as if the body of teachers knew any better. Your students are trying to burn the school, literally. Your classes and your method of evaluation suck. They contain the genesis of both the idiocracy and also the cleptocracy. Your debates are repetetive, meaningless and repetetively meaningless. I hope you never even get even one more inch of power. Eventually the rebellion of the slaves will succeed.
• tsejerome97 5y ago
  imagine posting a day in a life of San Fran Public School Teacher on YouTube and seeing a student deliberately setting the school on fire
• la6471 5y ago
  Ask HN: given that school education in USA is so complicated is there a guide that the good folks here can suggest for kids and parents on how to successfully navigate the education system in USA?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mbrodersen 5y ago
  Here is a modest proposal: copy the best educational system in the world (Finland). Stop thinking you know better.
• silexia 5y ago
  Institutions, like public schools, usually start out with the best of intentions. As the institution ages though, corruption sets in. Administrators multiply like rabbits and obtain higher salaries, teachers unions prevent the firing of bad teachers, and politicians just go along with whatever items powerful special interests demand. We should dissolve all public schools in their current form at a specific predetermined time, and have new educational institutions built. Then we should set up a recurring mechanism to dissolve completely the existing institution to allow for new innovations.