4 ms·

I have a friend who is an administrator at the Las Vegas School District and he was just telling me about this program. In his words, it sounds all well and go

I have a friend who is an administrator at the Las Vegas School District and he was just telling me about this program. In his words, it sounds all well and good that students have all the time they want to learn the materials. In practice though, you now have no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter. There's no way to actually catch them up, so the solution has been to drop testing standards as well. Teachers themselves aren't complaining so much about it because it's a lot easier for them - less grading, less conflict with students, and they can stick to their planned curriculum without slowing down for students. The "equity" piece of it is mostly window dressing - outside of some grading chicanery there is no reason to believe that it would do anything other than increase the disparity of outcomes between students later in life.

legitster 4y ago
A lot of the trends we are seeing in education are mostly driven by the economics. Good teaching is a highly-skilled profession. And it requires a lot of very robust interpersonal skill - (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at). This skill is rare, getting rarer, and becoming expensive. Because these workers are expensive and rare, districts can only respond by making the jobs easier and more attractive. And a lot of the "equity" initiatives are just that - at their heart most of them sell teachers on a justification that methods which require less rigour are better. And at current trends it is getting really hard to argue that a high school is much more valuable than just a daycare for teenagers (depending on who you ask, this may already be the case). If there is not much rigor or motivation being offered the students, there will be a natural regression towards student success entirely being driven by home life.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  > (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at) Let me remind you that the average Millenial is in their mid-to-late thirties now. Hardly the "new" batch. For that matter, I see no reason that robust interpersonal skill should be distributed unevenly across generations other than the younger ones haven't had as much practice yet. They'll get there, though.
  - legitster 4y ago
    Sure. And I 100% accept there could be survivorship fallacy at play here. But I am just repeating what I have been told by SMEs - that teachers and administrators are less equipped for their jobs than they might have been a generation or two ago. If there was a uneven distribution it would pretty easily be explainable as an inverse relationship to social media and screen time.
    - VyseofArcadia 4y ago
      In the US at least I'd be more inclined to suspect brain drain than something generational. Almost everyone who could teach is doing something that pays better instead. I suspect we'd have better teachers if school systems didn't have constant teacher shortages. Being able to select teachers on merit would be an improvement over hiring anyone who can fog a mirror.
      - DiscourseFan 4y ago
        This is very much the case, the US is quickly becoming a playground for the wealthy who can pay to put their kids through private school, and skilled workers from abroad who didn't have to suffer through the American educational system. The only essential difference between education in a place like the Japan and the US is the level of funding--their school system is based off of America's, and yet their teachers are competent, their students often score far higher on standardized tests. I suppose I learned something in HS, but I was an absolutely shit student and my district did what they could for me but in the end it was my own drive to succeed, after graduating, that led me to becoming a top student at college and transferring to a very respectable university. The whole system is fucked up, and while I might be one single individual who "pulled myself up by my bootstraps," there are perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions of young students just like me who either dropped out of highschool or barely finished and couldn't cut it at college and ended up doing unskilled labor. They suffer with no chance for a better life, no shot at a more comprehensive education, and no consciousness of their labor conditions such that they never even think about trying to fundamentally alter the system that has placed them in such an awful social position. I am not a success story, I am the exception that proves the rule.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Can you actually point to the data that says Millennial and Gen Z teachers have worse interpersonal skills than those of previous generations? Let alone point to data that says on aggregate Millennials and Gen Z workers have bad interpersonal skills? From the teachers I have come across within these 2 generations, they seem to be incredibly intelligent and personable. You saying that good teachers with robust interpersonal skills are expensive and rare just shows that you haven't stepped into a school recently, or haven't conversed with a teacher for more than 20 seconds.
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    I'd like to piggy back on that and ask about any data that even supports the general thesis that Gen Z and younger Millennials have poor interpersonal skills, as that's how I took the assertion.
  - legitster 4y ago
    It's a hard thing to find hard data for, but it's documented: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2868990/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2868990/ (We do however, have lots of studies that show grade inflation is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation) > From the teachers I have come across within these 2 generations, they seem to be incredibly intelligent and personable. I wouldn't argue that millenials are dumber or meaner (my generation, btw), but I think it would also be wrong to mistake our expressed sensitivity and aversion for conflict as actual interpersonal skill. And if we are talking about needing to pay teachers more so that we can attract better skilled teachers, what other skill would we be talking about?
    - verall 4y ago
      I couldn't find anything in that article that supports your assertion, but I only skimmed it. It does seem to imply the opposite: > We review these purported characteristics, as well as Millennials’ more positive qualities—they work well in teams, are motivated to have an impact on their organizations, favor open and frequent communication with their supervisors, and are at ease with communication technologies.
- lnxg33k1 4y ago
  Let's say that I agree with you, teaching is a highly-skilled profession and millennials are bad at interpersonal skills. All millennials? All genZ? I've read a while ago "The shock doctrine" from Naomi Klein, and there was a part where schools exploited natural disasters in order to fire all long term employees and hire new temporary employees with worse pay / benefits and contracts, I was wondering, is this lack of quality related to 2 whole generations of people being bad or is it that the offer doesn't attract people who would increase quality... because millennials are a lot of people, if you count genZ they're even, is it possible that billions of people are just bad point blank? Wtf.. maybe they poisoned the running water with some anti social germs that affected the whole generation... or you just said something extremely stupid classifying under a umbrella personality trait a lot a lot a lot of people
Spooky23 4y ago
Any controversial program is wrapped with “equity” to neutralize negative feedback. The reality is that the kids doing the work are overtasked. Right now, Johnny 8th grader is playing school lacrosse, travel baseball or AAU basketball, etc. He gets home at 9pm. Torturing them with busywork doesn’t help anyone. The kids who aren’t performing aren’t doing homework either. If you’re 35-55 years old, you’re a child of the 80s and 90s. You’re the old people now, and our perspectives are as out of touch as our 1950s and 1960s parents were.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  Sounds like the obsession with perpetually-scheduled competitive sports could be just as easily identified as a problem. Intramurals are an option, and immigrant parents who place a larger premium on academic performance like to opt for that instead. That aside, a rec league is, what, 2 nights a week? No reason to believe that paired with homework would lead to burnout. Math and reading takes practice. That's what homework is. The top performing countries don't do any differently. It's interesting that there are people who worry about the quality of public education being under attack by Republicans, but embrace these non-evidence-based ideas for education reform that ultimately will only benefit the upper class.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    It's a huge problem, driven by silly college admissions practices. The top performing countries do not give a shit about your state lacrosse team medal when deciding who gets to enrol in a physics degree.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      My cousins got into Harvard based on their expertise in squash. Period. The fact that they were really smart was just the table stakes.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    > Math and reading takes practice. That's what homework is. The top performing countries don't do any differently. Is it actually proven that homework helps with anything? For elementary school at least. Reading perhaps. Math, when there's no parent at home capable of properly explaining it if the kid gets stuck, doesn't sound like a very productive use of time.
giantg2 4y ago
"The "equity" piece of it is mostly window dressing" "no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter." Yeah, if you don't know who is behind or on what area, then how could you possibly help them?
taeric 4y ago
If the concern is "how well students are retaining the lessons," I have bad news for you on the previous/current methods. At best, folks retain things for the given class they are in, but they drop it ridiculously rapidly afterwards.
- legitster 4y ago
  Okay, sure. But we are talking now about failure to retain within the class. In the previous methods where kids actually got credit for doing the work every day, you would have some sense that students were learning order of operations before you moved onto linear equations. You can generally build off of the ideas.
  - taeric 4y ago
    Ish. I'm not convinced this new way will be better, but I'm open enough to the idea that it is worth a try and I'd like to see strong studies on it. Note that I do not know if said studies already exist. If they do, I'm curious to read them; but I'm not clear on how to find studies of note. I'll also ack that the latest story on phonics that was going around last week has me in a fairly antagonistic view to things. And that is its own form of unhealthy right now. :(
    - legitster 4y ago
      Sure, I would just be skeptical because nearly none of these newer methods actually have any research backing. If we actually care about going off of studies than we already know that the best models for education is Direct Instruction and charter schools. But unless a hurricane literally destroys your city and you have no other option (like it did New Orleans) there is almost no political willpower to actually do it.
      - taeric 4y ago
        Many of the older methods also lack research backing. I'd be curious to see your evidence on charter schools somehow being good, as every one that I have seen is... less than compelling. Unless you completely disregard the selection bias that goes into how kids got into the school. And further disregard that many of them can refuse admission to kids.
tmaly 4y ago
why not just group kids together by similar skill level like they do in many Southeast Asian schools? This way the top of the class can still perform with liked skilled people and no one gets left behind.
- sneed_chucker 4y ago
  If you did this in US, the resultant skill cohorts would end up being largely split along demographic boundaries which is extremely unpalatable to modern American social sensibilities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_th...
jones6ofMont 4y ago
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legitster 4y ago

A lot of the trends we are seeing in education are mostly driven by the economics. Good teaching is a highly-skilled profession. And it requires a lot of very robust interpersonal skill - (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at). This skill is rare, getting rarer, and becoming expensive. Because these workers are expensive and rare, districts can only respond by making the jobs easier and more attractive. And a lot of the "equity" initiatives are just that - at their heart most of them sell teachers on a justification that methods which require less rigour are better. And at current trends it is getting really hard to argue that a high school is much more valuable than just a daycare for teenagers (depending on who you ask, this may already be the case). If there is not much rigor or motivation being offered the students, there will be a natural regression towards student success entirely being driven by home life.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago
> (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at) Let me remind you that the average Millenial is in their mid-to-late thirties now. Hardly the "new" batch. For that matter, I see no reason that robust interpersonal skill should be distributed unevenly across generations other than the younger ones haven't had as much practice yet. They'll get there, though.
- legitster 4y ago
  Sure. And I 100% accept there could be survivorship fallacy at play here. But I am just repeating what I have been told by SMEs - that teachers and administrators are less equipped for their jobs than they might have been a generation or two ago. If there was a uneven distribution it would pretty easily be explainable as an inverse relationship to social media and screen time.
  - VyseofArcadia 4y ago
    In the US at least I'd be more inclined to suspect brain drain than something generational. Almost everyone who could teach is doing something that pays better instead. I suspect we'd have better teachers if school systems didn't have constant teacher shortages. Being able to select teachers on merit would be an improvement over hiring anyone who can fog a mirror.
    - DiscourseFan 4y ago
      This is very much the case, the US is quickly becoming a playground for the wealthy who can pay to put their kids through private school, and skilled workers from abroad who didn't have to suffer through the American educational system. The only essential difference between education in a place like the Japan and the US is the level of funding--their school system is based off of America's, and yet their teachers are competent, their students often score far higher on standardized tests. I suppose I learned something in HS, but I was an absolutely shit student and my district did what they could for me but in the end it was my own drive to succeed, after graduating, that led me to becoming a top student at college and transferring to a very respectable university. The whole system is fucked up, and while I might be one single individual who "pulled myself up by my bootstraps," there are perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions of young students just like me who either dropped out of highschool or barely finished and couldn't cut it at college and ended up doing unskilled labor. They suffer with no chance for a better life, no shot at a more comprehensive education, and no consciousness of their labor conditions such that they never even think about trying to fundamentally alter the system that has placed them in such an awful social position. I am not a success story, I am the exception that proves the rule.
mym1990 4y ago
Can you actually point to the data that says Millennial and Gen Z teachers have worse interpersonal skills than those of previous generations? Let alone point to data that says on aggregate Millennials and Gen Z workers have bad interpersonal skills? From the teachers I have come across within these 2 generations, they seem to be incredibly intelligent and personable. You saying that good teachers with robust interpersonal skills are expensive and rare just shows that you haven't stepped into a school recently, or haven't conversed with a teacher for more than 20 seconds.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I'd like to piggy back on that and ask about any data that even supports the general thesis that Gen Z and younger Millennials have poor interpersonal skills, as that's how I took the assertion.
- legitster 4y ago
  It's a hard thing to find hard data for, but it's documented: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2868990/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2868990/ (We do however, have lots of studies that show grade inflation is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation) > From the teachers I have come across within these 2 generations, they seem to be incredibly intelligent and personable. I wouldn't argue that millenials are dumber or meaner (my generation, btw), but I think it would also be wrong to mistake our expressed sensitivity and aversion for conflict as actual interpersonal skill. And if we are talking about needing to pay teachers more so that we can attract better skilled teachers, what other skill would we be talking about?
  - verall 4y ago
    I couldn't find anything in that article that supports your assertion, but I only skimmed it. It does seem to imply the opposite: > We review these purported characteristics, as well as Millennials’ more positive qualities—they work well in teams, are motivated to have an impact on their organizations, favor open and frequent communication with their supervisors, and are at ease with communication technologies.
lnxg33k1 4y ago
Let's say that I agree with you, teaching is a highly-skilled profession and millennials are bad at interpersonal skills. All millennials? All genZ? I've read a while ago "The shock doctrine" from Naomi Klein, and there was a part where schools exploited natural disasters in order to fire all long term employees and hire new temporary employees with worse pay / benefits and contracts, I was wondering, is this lack of quality related to 2 whole generations of people being bad or is it that the offer doesn't attract people who would increase quality... because millennials are a lot of people, if you count genZ they're even, is it possible that billions of people are just bad point blank? Wtf.. maybe they poisoned the running water with some anti social germs that affected the whole generation... or you just said something extremely stupid classifying under a umbrella personality trait a lot a lot a lot of people

Spooky23 4y ago

Any controversial program is wrapped with “equity” to neutralize negative feedback. The reality is that the kids doing the work are overtasked. Right now, Johnny 8th grader is playing school lacrosse, travel baseball or AAU basketball, etc. He gets home at 9pm. Torturing them with busywork doesn’t help anyone. The kids who aren’t performing aren’t doing homework either. If you’re 35-55 years old, you’re a child of the 80s and 90s. You’re the old people now, and our perspectives are as out of touch as our 1950s and 1960s parents were.

slothtrop 4y ago
Sounds like the obsession with perpetually-scheduled competitive sports could be just as easily identified as a problem. Intramurals are an option, and immigrant parents who place a larger premium on academic performance like to opt for that instead. That aside, a rec league is, what, 2 nights a week? No reason to believe that paired with homework would lead to burnout. Math and reading takes practice. That's what homework is. The top performing countries don't do any differently. It's interesting that there are people who worry about the quality of public education being under attack by Republicans, but embrace these non-evidence-based ideas for education reform that ultimately will only benefit the upper class.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  It's a huge problem, driven by silly college admissions practices. The top performing countries do not give a shit about your state lacrosse team medal when deciding who gets to enrol in a physics degree.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    My cousins got into Harvard based on their expertise in squash. Period. The fact that they were really smart was just the table stakes.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > Math and reading takes practice. That's what homework is. The top performing countries don't do any differently. Is it actually proven that homework helps with anything? For elementary school at least. Reading perhaps. Math, when there's no parent at home capable of properly explaining it if the kid gets stuck, doesn't sound like a very productive use of time.

giantg2 4y ago

"The "equity" piece of it is mostly window dressing" "no way of gauging how well students are retaining the lessons until the end of the quarter." Yeah, if you don't know who is behind or on what area, then how could you possibly help them?

taeric 4y ago

If the concern is "how well students are retaining the lessons," I have bad news for you on the previous/current methods. At best, folks retain things for the given class they are in, but they drop it ridiculously rapidly afterwards.

legitster 4y ago
Okay, sure. But we are talking now about failure to retain within the class. In the previous methods where kids actually got credit for doing the work every day, you would have some sense that students were learning order of operations before you moved onto linear equations. You can generally build off of the ideas.
- taeric 4y ago
  Ish. I'm not convinced this new way will be better, but I'm open enough to the idea that it is worth a try and I'd like to see strong studies on it. Note that I do not know if said studies already exist. If they do, I'm curious to read them; but I'm not clear on how to find studies of note. I'll also ack that the latest story on phonics that was going around last week has me in a fairly antagonistic view to things. And that is its own form of unhealthy right now. :(
  - legitster 4y ago
    Sure, I would just be skeptical because nearly none of these newer methods actually have any research backing. If we actually care about going off of studies than we already know that the best models for education is Direct Instruction and charter schools. But unless a hurricane literally destroys your city and you have no other option (like it did New Orleans) there is almost no political willpower to actually do it.
    - taeric 4y ago
      Many of the older methods also lack research backing. I'd be curious to see your evidence on charter schools somehow being good, as every one that I have seen is... less than compelling. Unless you completely disregard the selection bias that goes into how kids got into the school. And further disregard that many of them can refuse admission to kids.

tmaly 4y ago

why not just group kids together by similar skill level like they do in many Southeast Asian schools? This way the top of the class can still perform with liked skilled people and no one gets left behind.

sneed_chucker 4y ago
If you did this in US, the resultant skill cohorts would end up being largely split along demographic boundaries which is extremely unpalatable to modern American social sensibilities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_th...

jones6ofMont 4y ago

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