6 ms·

That said, standardized testing _would_ make sense if it determined where funding is allocated, i.e. lowest scoring areas get the most funding and the highest p

That said, standardized testing _would_ make sense if it determined where funding is allocated, i.e. lowest scoring areas get the most funding and the highest paid teachers.

josephcsible 5y ago
This is a test for teachers, not for their students. Are you suggesting that teachers who are worse at math should be paid more?
- klyrs 5y ago
  I'd suggest that those teachers need more resources -- in terms of education, and additional helpers in the classroom.
fallingknife 5y ago
Why would you waste your best teachers on your worst students?
- feurio 5y ago
  Because they are the ones who will see the biggest benefit from a good teacher. And concomitantly your country will benefit from a higher level of preficiency in maths of the population.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    Going from 25th percentile to 75th at math does little good. Going from 90th percentile to 99th is more valuable. Better to have a population that has a lower median math skill, but many math geniuses than a population that has a slightly higher median, but few right tail geniuses.
    - nisegami 5y ago
      In a democracy, I strongly disagree. The masses have a tremendous impact on the society that your geniuses have to live in.
    - feurio 5y ago
      If you're a genius, you're a genius - an average teacher would be able to point you in the direction of the more specialised coaching that would benefit you. For the kind of people who don't seem to be able to weigh up basic risk levels and end up dying unvaccinated at six times the rate of those that do, I'd suggest that going up enough percentiles to save their lives would be, yeah, kinda useful.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    > Because they are the ones who will see the biggest benefit from a good teacher. This is a big assertion, and one not well supported by data[1][2]. Money is not the bottleneck at any public school in the West. A student's performance is very well correlated to external factors like parental income and education level, and is NOT well correlated with the amount of money the state spends on education. Utah spends a third of New York per student, and still outperforms in test scores. I agree that the best teachers should go to the students who would benefit from those teachers the most. The students that would benefit most from good teachers are the good students, who exist in an environment that enables them to learn and excel. [1] https://medium.com/@tgof137/increased-school-funding-doesnt-improve-test-scores-here-s-what-might-3d46ebf5c1d https://medium.com/@tgof137/increased-school-funding-doesnt-... [2] https://www.alec.org/article/increasing-education-spending-equal-higher-test-scores/ https://www.alec.org/article/increasing-education-spending-e...
    - sanxiyn 5y ago
      Who said anything about funding? You are attacking a strawman. Money isn't the bottleneck, but teacher quality is.
      - dahfizz 5y ago
        The original assertion was > lowest scoring areas get the most funding and the highest paid teachers. I think using highest paid teachers as a proxy for best teachers makes sense in this context, because that's how the public policy works. A state looking to hire better teachers would raise teacher salaries in order to attract better teachers.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  Since worst students have most to improve, I'd think it's efficient not wasteful.
  - tuesdayrain 5y ago
    This is a fallacy, similar to thinking that a portfolio should be invested into the worst performing stocks because "they have the most room to improve".
    - sanxiyn 5y ago
      Education and stock market are not analogous. The key question is whether current level is correlated with expected improvement. For education it is, for stock market it isn't.
      - tuesdayrain 5y ago
        >Education and stock market are not analogous Why not? A company is just an aggregate of people working towards a shared mission. Not unlike a society.
        tomrod 5y ago
        What is the unifying goal of the community you live in? We don't have one in mine, the US. We have anarchists and right-wing stochastic terrorists and suburban dwellers engaged in the rat race and college professors seeking tenure and veterans working to find good healthcare and teachers paying way too much out of pocket for their classroom supplies and business owners often cheating to milk PPP loans or other shady revenue streams and public work officials making side deals and..... If the bottom line is GDP, let me introduce you to GNP, and both of which miss cottage industry generally. We don't have a shared mission, because society does not have a tangible owner.
- watwut 5y ago
  So that you improve the students. So that you give more support to teachers working in harder conditions.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    The right and left tail of the distribution are not equal and offsetting here. The cost to society from one idiot is more than offset by the benefit of one genius. Therefore equality is not a desirable outcome. Optimizing the abilities of the right tail is.
    - watwut 5y ago
      I dont really think so. First of all, math geniuses are fighting among themselves for a few positions that allow them to actually use hard math. We produce more of them then we can reasonably use. Second, teacher able to move kids up from "idiots" is actually saving us a lot of money.
- tuesdayrain 5y ago
  There is a certain brand of person who is obsessed with redistributing resources from the most productive to the least productive. They don't see how allocating the best teachers in the world to students who are disabled or borderline disabled is not beneficial to society.
  - jimnotgym 5y ago
    I suppose you could be the best at teaching disabled people...that might be a different person to the best at teaching maths to the highest achievers.
  - jakear 5y ago
    Yes this. As someone who was “gifted” in school but with a father who teaches mild/moderate learning disabilities, the skill sets of the two ends of the spectrum of teachers are dramatically different. “Gifted” student teachers can take as a given that their students are there to learn and generally speaking want to be there. For my father getting students to begin to think that is a big part of the job. To replace him with a “gifted” student teacher who has no experience with that type of clientele would be absurd.
thirdlamp 5y ago
That would be rewarding incompetent schools and every school would try to have the worst scores to secure the most funding.
champagnois 5y ago
Three things: (1) One genius inventor like Newton is worth more than an infinite number of idiots. No exceptions. (2) If education becomes a meaningless credential where everyone gets a participation trophy -- then educational attainment itself will be completely disregarded as a metric used to compare individuals. Thus, this drive to use the resources of education (while it is currently a prestigious metric) to try and balance for differences in the cognitive abilities given to us by DNA is going to harm the reputation of the credential altogether. (3) When accreditated, public education is reduced to a daycare, the private sector WILL fill the void by producing an alternative system while also calling for defunding the public system as it had been rendered useless by "good intentioned" radical race marxists.
- whitexn--g28h 5y ago
  Have you considered that Jordan Peterson is part of the problem with the education system? I doubt he could pass this math test given the arguments he’s trying to make about marxists.
  - champagnois 5y ago
    I do not think it is worthwhile to engage in cults of personality. I do not obsess over him or anyone else (outside of my family). While the man is accomplished and respected, his ideas are just ideas that he puts out there with the hope that we consider them and improve upon them. You question his aptitude for math. Ok. I see no reason to have a thought on that particular matter. The idea that the education system has a problen at all is an idea that suggests the education system isn't achieving a particular goal. The differences in perspectives all come from having a different goal. Here is a breakdown of the differences in goals: (1) Marxists in our society believe education's goal should be to achieve equal credentials for all people -- they view the contest and competition aspect as a negative. Standardized tests inevitably reveal the different levels of intelligence between groups despite their afforded equal opportunities(which then makes a good argument for why we have disparate outcomes and is thus an ideological threat to marxists). (2) Some marxists also view the aspect of actually training people to reach their maximal potential (IE fostering the genius of someone like Newton or Einstein) to be irrelevant to their goals. They just do not care about this aspect. They would rather advanced math classes be cancelled than see their ideology be dismantled by standardized scientific testing. (3) A rather silent group of, say, "meritocrats" believes people are different, differences are beautiful, and differences create bellcurves of both athletic prowess and brain prowess. Standardized testing is the only way to assess people and see where their brain falls on the intelligence bellcurve. Education is valued as a way to foster our civilization's geniuses so that they reach their full potential.

That said, standardized testing _would_ make sense if it determined where funding is allocated, i.e. lowest scoring areas get the most funding and the highest paid teachers.

josephcsible 5y ago

This is a test for teachers, not for their students. Are you suggesting that teachers who are worse at math should be paid more?

klyrs 5y ago
I'd suggest that those teachers need more resources -- in terms of education, and additional helpers in the classroom.

fallingknife 5y ago

Why would you waste your best teachers on your worst students?

feurio 5y ago
Because they are the ones who will see the biggest benefit from a good teacher. And concomitantly your country will benefit from a higher level of preficiency in maths of the population.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Going from 25th percentile to 75th at math does little good. Going from 90th percentile to 99th is more valuable. Better to have a population that has a lower median math skill, but many math geniuses than a population that has a slightly higher median, but few right tail geniuses.
  - nisegami 5y ago
    In a democracy, I strongly disagree. The masses have a tremendous impact on the society that your geniuses have to live in.
  - feurio 5y ago
    If you're a genius, you're a genius - an average teacher would be able to point you in the direction of the more specialised coaching that would benefit you. For the kind of people who don't seem to be able to weigh up basic risk levels and end up dying unvaccinated at six times the rate of those that do, I'd suggest that going up enough percentiles to save their lives would be, yeah, kinda useful.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > Because they are the ones who will see the biggest benefit from a good teacher. This is a big assertion, and one not well supported by data[1][2]. Money is not the bottleneck at any public school in the West. A student's performance is very well correlated to external factors like parental income and education level, and is NOT well correlated with the amount of money the state spends on education. Utah spends a third of New York per student, and still outperforms in test scores. I agree that the best teachers should go to the students who would benefit from those teachers the most. The students that would benefit most from good teachers are the good students, who exist in an environment that enables them to learn and excel. [1] https://medium.com/@tgof137/increased-school-funding-doesnt-improve-test-scores-here-s-what-might-3d46ebf5c1d https://medium.com/@tgof137/increased-school-funding-doesnt-... [2] https://www.alec.org/article/increasing-education-spending-equal-higher-test-scores/ https://www.alec.org/article/increasing-education-spending-e...
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    Who said anything about funding? You are attacking a strawman. Money isn't the bottleneck, but teacher quality is.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      The original assertion was > lowest scoring areas get the most funding and the highest paid teachers. I think using highest paid teachers as a proxy for best teachers makes sense in this context, because that's how the public policy works. A state looking to hire better teachers would raise teacher salaries in order to attract better teachers.
sanxiyn 5y ago
Since worst students have most to improve, I'd think it's efficient not wasteful.
- tuesdayrain 5y ago
  This is a fallacy, similar to thinking that a portfolio should be invested into the worst performing stocks because "they have the most room to improve".
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    Education and stock market are not analogous. The key question is whether current level is correlated with expected improvement. For education it is, for stock market it isn't.
    - tuesdayrain 5y ago
      >Education and stock market are not analogous Why not? A company is just an aggregate of people working towards a shared mission. Not unlike a society.
      - tomrod 5y ago
        What is the unifying goal of the community you live in? We don't have one in mine, the US. We have anarchists and right-wing stochastic terrorists and suburban dwellers engaged in the rat race and college professors seeking tenure and veterans working to find good healthcare and teachers paying way too much out of pocket for their classroom supplies and business owners often cheating to milk PPP loans or other shady revenue streams and public work officials making side deals and..... If the bottom line is GDP, let me introduce you to GNP, and both of which miss cottage industry generally. We don't have a shared mission, because society does not have a tangible owner.
watwut 5y ago
So that you improve the students. So that you give more support to teachers working in harder conditions.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  The right and left tail of the distribution are not equal and offsetting here. The cost to society from one idiot is more than offset by the benefit of one genius. Therefore equality is not a desirable outcome. Optimizing the abilities of the right tail is.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I dont really think so. First of all, math geniuses are fighting among themselves for a few positions that allow them to actually use hard math. We produce more of them then we can reasonably use. Second, teacher able to move kids up from "idiots" is actually saving us a lot of money.
tuesdayrain 5y ago
There is a certain brand of person who is obsessed with redistributing resources from the most productive to the least productive. They don't see how allocating the best teachers in the world to students who are disabled or borderline disabled is not beneficial to society.
- jimnotgym 5y ago
  I suppose you could be the best at teaching disabled people...that might be a different person to the best at teaching maths to the highest achievers.
- jakear 5y ago
  Yes this. As someone who was “gifted” in school but with a father who teaches mild/moderate learning disabilities, the skill sets of the two ends of the spectrum of teachers are dramatically different. “Gifted” student teachers can take as a given that their students are there to learn and generally speaking want to be there. For my father getting students to begin to think that is a big part of the job. To replace him with a “gifted” student teacher who has no experience with that type of clientele would be absurd.

thirdlamp 5y ago

That would be rewarding incompetent schools and every school would try to have the worst scores to secure the most funding.

champagnois 5y ago

Three things: (1) One genius inventor like Newton is worth more than an infinite number of idiots. No exceptions. (2) If education becomes a meaningless credential where everyone gets a participation trophy -- then educational attainment itself will be completely disregarded as a metric used to compare individuals. Thus, this drive to use the resources of education (while it is currently a prestigious metric) to try and balance for differences in the cognitive abilities given to us by DNA is going to harm the reputation of the credential altogether. (3) When accreditated, public education is reduced to a daycare, the private sector WILL fill the void by producing an alternative system while also calling for defunding the public system as it had been rendered useless by "good intentioned" radical race marxists.

whitexn--g28h 5y ago
Have you considered that Jordan Peterson is part of the problem with the education system? I doubt he could pass this math test given the arguments he’s trying to make about marxists.
- champagnois 5y ago
  I do not think it is worthwhile to engage in cults of personality. I do not obsess over him or anyone else (outside of my family). While the man is accomplished and respected, his ideas are just ideas that he puts out there with the hope that we consider them and improve upon them. You question his aptitude for math. Ok. I see no reason to have a thought on that particular matter. The idea that the education system has a problen at all is an idea that suggests the education system isn't achieving a particular goal. The differences in perspectives all come from having a different goal. Here is a breakdown of the differences in goals: (1) Marxists in our society believe education's goal should be to achieve equal credentials for all people -- they view the contest and competition aspect as a negative. Standardized tests inevitably reveal the different levels of intelligence between groups despite their afforded equal opportunities(which then makes a good argument for why we have disparate outcomes and is thus an ideological threat to marxists). (2) Some marxists also view the aspect of actually training people to reach their maximal potential (IE fostering the genius of someone like Newton or Einstein) to be irrelevant to their goals. They just do not care about this aspect. They would rather advanced math classes be cancelled than see their ideology be dismantled by standardized scientific testing. (3) A rather silent group of, say, "meritocrats" believes people are different, differences are beautiful, and differences create bellcurves of both athletic prowess and brain prowess. Standardized testing is the only way to assess people and see where their brain falls on the intelligence bellcurve. Education is valued as a way to foster our civilization's geniuses so that they reach their full potential.