5 ms·

I'm not "anti-union," but frankly almost all of the issues he complains about are supposed to be things that the union helps with, especially professional devel

I'm not "anti-union," but frankly almost all of the issues he complains about are supposed to be things that the union helps with, especially professional development. It sounds like the whole system is falling over in that area, not just the district and not just the union.

intended 14y ago
Err, I read the article and I have no idea how you found this to be the most important part. I studied in India, and had a chance to study abroad as well. Currently, for reasons that escape me, you lot (Americans) seem to have decided to import those banes of thinking and real learning - standardized tests. Perhaps in order to have some sort of proxy or measurement for what is inherently a chaotic and un-measurable system of children. From experience - this is generally a BAD IDEA, but its one whose pernicious subtle problems show up after years and possibly generations of being married to it.At which time it becomes too hard to get rid of it. Firstly - everyone will stop teaching, and focus on acing the tests. Learning is irrelevant, and students know it. This will bring in rote learning, and soon - tuition classes. I don't know what you guys will call it but expect kids to start studying year round. Then comes the self fulfilling prophecy - you did well in your tests, so you must be good. You must do well in your tests if you are to be good. And at this point you aren't even creating or nurturing students, but manufacturing mental athletes with specialization in testing well. IF you throw in STEM fixation - (Well he should have known better to take a degree in humanities) and you damn students with no interest in science or commerce to do exactly that.
- dkarl 14y ago
  Currently, for reasons that escape me, you lot (Americans) seem to have decided to import those banes of thinking and real learning - standardized tests. Standardized tests aren't the bane of thinking and learning. Drilling children over and over with questions identical to those on some test is the bane of thinking and learning. The United States has had standardized tests at least since I was a child (I took standardized tests in elementary school almost thirty years ago) and U.S. education has continued to be progressive during that time. College admissions were very heavily influenced by standardized tests when I was in high school, but my classmates and I were not taught by rote, because our teachers did not believe rote learning was effective. Let me give you a concrete example. My ex-girlfriend grew up in South Korea. She did very well in calculus in high school, where she learned to solve problems by rote. They were shown different kinds of problems to solve, they memorized the steps to solve them by rote, and then they practiced solving those problems. That's all they did: memorize the steps and then apply them over and over to thousands of problems. Then they were tested on exactly the same kind of problems. She got excellent grades and test scores, but she cannot tell you what a derivative or an integral are or why you would use them. I was taught entirely differently. I was taught the concept of the derivative and the integral. I was taught from pictures before I was taught with symbols. The motivation for the concepts was discussed. I don't remember if we discussed it in class, but the textbook even described some of the historical context. We often learned computations in the context of applications: a tank filling with water, a car accelerating, etc.[+] Do you know what? Calculus was tested the same way in my school system here in the U.S. as in Korea. Each test had a bunch of problems. The more problems I solved, the higher my score. That's it! Nothing creative or touchy-feely or magical about it. Not really any different from the way my ex was tested in Korea. At the end of the course, there was a standard test administered uniformly across the nation (the Advanced Placement exam.) American teachers routinely invoke the idea of "teaching to the test" to imply that there are bad teaching methods that lead to better test scores than good teaching methods. Basically, they threaten to teach more and more poorly the more their students are tested. The truth is that under pressure to produce good scores, teachers continue to use the techniques they believe are effective. Teachers in the U.S. are taught that rote learning is not effective, so they don't use it. Teachers who believe that rote learning is effective will use it regardless of whether their students are tested or not. tl;dr My ex-girlfriend and I were TESTED the same way, but we were TAUGHT entirely differently, because our teachers were trained differently. [+] Of course, it turns out that in order to learn how to do the problems, I had to actually do the problems, and to a limited extent, the more problems I did the easier they became. In the United States education system, we are taught to be horrified by this evil, poisonous art of getting better at something by practicing it, but we still do it. Teachers universally disapprove of it, but they have not figured out how to eradicate it from their classrooms. (Getting rid of testing would be a good first step, I suppose, since then we wouldn't have to worry about whether the students can actually demonstrate competence at anything; we could teach them to attain pure, perfect internal understanding untainted by any outward manifestation.)
  - intended 14y ago
    You are saying that if you have better teachers who know how to teach, then standardized testing doesn't matter - it doesn't have to be about drills. That's essentially waving a magic wand. You are super privileging teacher training as some sort of silver bullet solution, but missing the larger system that works actively against the outcome. You are undervaluing the various pressures which get applied to education, one important one being parent desires to see their kid succeed. It doesn't matter if the kid understands or not. It doesn't matter if he can answer more important questions but isn't able to perfectly prove a theorem. No amount of teacher training can stand in the face of a single determined parent who wants their kid to ace that test. Heck a more trivial point which is still important? - teacher empowerment must come hand in hand with training, because each student is vastly different even from him or herself depending on what time of the day/month or year it is. Teachers must be able to make graded and customized judgement constantly. Tests don't allow for that. Moving the power for measurement into the hands of the test dis-empowers teachers. The test becomes/IS all that matters here, not the education. And Tests only roughly measure learning. They MOST strongly measure whether you could answer that particular test. The test is all that matters. As a result, the kind of teaching you value, becomes deprecated. Its just not economically competitive. As the original article posits. You don't need teachers to pass the test. You need drill Sergeants. Teachers who are good at that are the ones who will come to the fore, other teachers don't matter. You could love your subject and instill it in students. But that doesn't guarantee a good grade. Loving a subject, being involved in it, and testing well in it are different. Especially if you don't "think the test". This is the final pressure - loving a subject or enjoying it is irrelevant. Students care even less, they know that as long as that they get the test - its all good. "I'm getting good marks In a stupid subject like chemistry, who cares?". Do you want those people becoming your computer science engineers? The system you are setting up is concerning, and no amount of teacher training will solve it. ----- Further I think you are talking about standardized tests America had 30 or so years ago. Speaking on behalf of student body of India - we would have loved to have tests like that. At least in America you had the option of making a life if you had some gumption even if you didn't ace those tests. You were a person as opposed to a Frankenstinian mental athlete. Our tests were/are compulsory, for many people not in their first language, and they determined everything from your social standing to your marriage prospects. You started studying for your tenth standard exam 2 years before they started, you had no vacation and you had no spare time. Then 2 years later you would do it for your ISC or IIT or CAT.
- jpiasetz 14y ago
  Arguing against standardized testing is arguing against A/B testing. If you can't measure it there is no way to tell whether it's getting better.
  - glesica 14y ago
    I'm sorry, but this is a completely wrong-headed statement. Standardized testing for school children and A/B testing for web site visitors are completely different beyond the fact that both involve the word "test". When you run A/B tests on a web site you don't tell the visitors which version they are being shown, or even that there are multiple versions at all. That would completely destroy the value of the testing. In psychology research, where ethics generally dictates that the subjects be informed, they are still not told what specifically is being tested, lest they modify their behavior. On the other hand, everyone involved in school standardized tests knows about the tests, knows about various biases that exist within the tests, and knows what is at stake based on the results of the tests. The reason that the current form of standardized testing is destructive is pure economics. If I tell you that I will count how many lines of code you have committed to the repository at the end of each week and that your pay will be based on this figure, what are you and your coworkers going to do? You're going to start writing hundreds of lines of comments, putting each variable declaration on its own line, needlessly re-factoring satisfactory code, etc. This is, as I understand it, a well-documented side-effect of measuring programmer productivity using LoC. Once I implement this evaluation scheme, two things happen. First, you are being evaluated based on an objective metric. Second, you have direct control over the value that metric takes on. Economics, which is, to a great extent, the study of incentives, tells us that you (and your coworkers, at least in general) will game the daylights out of the metric. So why is it any different when teachers, once told that their salaries and very jobs depend on the results of an annual test, teach their students exactly what is on the test, by hook or by crook, even at the expense of "real" learning? The problem is that teachers aren't oblivious (neither are programmers). When they see that they are being evaluated based on the outcome of X, they seek to maximize X. So the trick is, if you insist on quantitative metrics (which is not totally unreasonable, at least as the default) then the metrics must be linked to the behaviors that are desirable, not some vague indicator that approximately tracks those behaviors. Edit: missing word
- kamaal 14y ago
  There is a reason why rote learning to some extent works especially in India. There is so much competition you are likely to inevitably work very hard. So much effort that you will ultimately get it even if didn't want to. I know this is brute force way of getting things done. But it is still far better than getting nothing done.
  - chii 14y ago
    > I know this is brute force way of getting things done. now, theres something to be aware of - "getting _things_ done" in this context means getting a high score in a standarized test, not getting a job. Having such a score doesn't necessarily mean you are able. Especially in a creative field that requires genuine interest and passion. This sort of training works for training operators of machinery and/or manufacturing workers that require special knowledge, but for creative fields such as programming (and not the CRUD type!) i think having such brute force method of learning is in fact a barrier. I hear in china that there are so many people who get excellent scores in tests, and yet is unable to find jobs. Simply because jobs suitable for them isn't there, nor are there that many opportunities. The sort of rote learning is really exacerbating the problem, not helping, because the students studied hard (despite not being their "passion"), they get a good mark, but still find themselves in a rathole.
  - intended 14y ago
    That's mixing up measurement for achievement. We make mental body builders. But they make terrible people and thinkers. The idea of educated here is lost. Most of the debate the average person can create is middlebrow at best.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Oh? I can guarantee you that if I went and interviewed any graduates of a high school or university that concentrates on rote learning I could shred any notion that, on average, they had basic competency in the materials they are alleged to know. The sad truth here is that it is possible to "fake it", at every level. For the most part a person can be productive in even the most technical of jobs without fully comprehending most of what they are working with. People talk about cargo cultism a lot, but in the real world cargo cultish behavior often works. A lot of times just going through the motions is enough to get by. But that's no excuse to continue to wallow in mediocrity. We can and should do better.
- smsm42 14y ago
  Test are a consequence of a very real problem of evaluating teachers. Since neither parents nor children have in most public schools any choice over the school and teachers in it, regular consumer-driven quality controls that work on most markets are absent. However, quality problem is still real and existing - there are, obviously, good schools and bad schools, good teachers and bad teachers. Assume you are a well-intentioned educational administrator, and you want to improve the quality of education. How you do that? How you know which school is doing good and which is doing bad? How you know which teacher is beneficial and which is not? How you know which policy is beneficial and which is harmful? And most of all - how you do it in a way that is scalable to state and national levels and can be centralized and processed at huge scales (without which Department of Education has no data on which it can base its policies)? Obviously, standardized tests look like a perfect fit for this problem. So there's no mystery in this, it is a natural result. Of course, there are a lot of deficiencies in this approach, which you can see and teachers can see it too. But given centralized, state-driven education system, what else you can do? You can not have absence of quality controls - this would have immense corrupting potential and the system would have incentive to deteriorate very quickly. You can not have individual approach - DoE can't account for each school in each small town, they just don't have resources for that. So with current approach, testing is inevitable.
  - intended 14y ago
    While I appreciate that you have decided to test the teachers, and that you have unions which come in the way of it, I am greatly amused by the ill conceived plan to achieve your goal. Its remarkable really. Years, decades of seeing kids die to suicide and cram pressure and this is what you choose. So that you can test your teachers? Anyway, your test doesn't test teachers, it tests students. And then you assume it is a good proxy for teachers. So just to be clear. 1) Tests are a perfect proxy for taking that test -> 2) Then they are a proxy for test taking ability in the student 3) Then a proxy for student understanding of the subject 4) And thence a proxy for teacher ability. I'd understand if we were doing chemical analysis with 4 steps involved in the process. But with human beings? Kids? The fundamental chaotic units of society? I really have to point out that this is logic that gets most startups killed, or logic on which they pivot to something smarter. I know you aren't the one responsible, but I really can't help but be perplexed. Once upon a time you guys were known as the place where "stuff just works." Your older education system did a great job. Sure it may not have made everyone a rock star but frankly - not everyone is cut out to do so at that juncture in their life. If you say that there is nothing else that can be done, then I accept and understand. But it is a terrible terrible outcome.
tallanvor 14y ago
Sure, if North Carolina had strong unions they might be able to help more. But even unions can only do so much to influence legislation, especially today where they don't have the resources to compete against rich individuals who can dump millions of dollars into a race without batting an eye.
william42 14y ago
North Carolina teachers have no union.

intended 14y ago

Err, I read the article and I have no idea how you found this to be the most important part. I studied in India, and had a chance to study abroad as well. Currently, for reasons that escape me, you lot (Americans) seem to have decided to import those banes of thinking and real learning - standardized tests. Perhaps in order to have some sort of proxy or measurement for what is inherently a chaotic and un-measurable system of children. From experience - this is generally a BAD IDEA, but its one whose pernicious subtle problems show up after years and possibly generations of being married to it.At which time it becomes too hard to get rid of it. Firstly - everyone will stop teaching, and focus on acing the tests. Learning is irrelevant, and students know it. This will bring in rote learning, and soon - tuition classes. I don't know what you guys will call it but expect kids to start studying year round. Then comes the self fulfilling prophecy - you did well in your tests, so you must be good. You must do well in your tests if you are to be good. And at this point you aren't even creating or nurturing students, but manufacturing mental athletes with specialization in testing well. IF you throw in STEM fixation - (Well he should have known better to take a degree in humanities) and you damn students with no interest in science or commerce to do exactly that.

dkarl 14y ago
Currently, for reasons that escape me, you lot (Americans) seem to have decided to import those banes of thinking and real learning - standardized tests. Standardized tests aren't the bane of thinking and learning. Drilling children over and over with questions identical to those on some test is the bane of thinking and learning. The United States has had standardized tests at least since I was a child (I took standardized tests in elementary school almost thirty years ago) and U.S. education has continued to be progressive during that time. College admissions were very heavily influenced by standardized tests when I was in high school, but my classmates and I were not taught by rote, because our teachers did not believe rote learning was effective. Let me give you a concrete example. My ex-girlfriend grew up in South Korea. She did very well in calculus in high school, where she learned to solve problems by rote. They were shown different kinds of problems to solve, they memorized the steps to solve them by rote, and then they practiced solving those problems. That's all they did: memorize the steps and then apply them over and over to thousands of problems. Then they were tested on exactly the same kind of problems. She got excellent grades and test scores, but she cannot tell you what a derivative or an integral are or why you would use them. I was taught entirely differently. I was taught the concept of the derivative and the integral. I was taught from pictures before I was taught with symbols. The motivation for the concepts was discussed. I don't remember if we discussed it in class, but the textbook even described some of the historical context. We often learned computations in the context of applications: a tank filling with water, a car accelerating, etc.[+] Do you know what? Calculus was tested the same way in my school system here in the U.S. as in Korea. Each test had a bunch of problems. The more problems I solved, the higher my score. That's it! Nothing creative or touchy-feely or magical about it. Not really any different from the way my ex was tested in Korea. At the end of the course, there was a standard test administered uniformly across the nation (the Advanced Placement exam.) American teachers routinely invoke the idea of "teaching to the test" to imply that there are bad teaching methods that lead to better test scores than good teaching methods. Basically, they threaten to teach more and more poorly the more their students are tested. The truth is that under pressure to produce good scores, teachers continue to use the techniques they believe are effective. Teachers in the U.S. are taught that rote learning is not effective, so they don't use it. Teachers who believe that rote learning is effective will use it regardless of whether their students are tested or not. tl;dr My ex-girlfriend and I were TESTED the same way, but we were TAUGHT entirely differently, because our teachers were trained differently. [+] Of course, it turns out that in order to learn how to do the problems, I had to actually do the problems, and to a limited extent, the more problems I did the easier they became. In the United States education system, we are taught to be horrified by this evil, poisonous art of getting better at something by practicing it, but we still do it. Teachers universally disapprove of it, but they have not figured out how to eradicate it from their classrooms. (Getting rid of testing would be a good first step, I suppose, since then we wouldn't have to worry about whether the students can actually demonstrate competence at anything; we could teach them to attain pure, perfect internal understanding untainted by any outward manifestation.)
- intended 14y ago
  You are saying that if you have better teachers who know how to teach, then standardized testing doesn't matter - it doesn't have to be about drills. That's essentially waving a magic wand. You are super privileging teacher training as some sort of silver bullet solution, but missing the larger system that works actively against the outcome. You are undervaluing the various pressures which get applied to education, one important one being parent desires to see their kid succeed. It doesn't matter if the kid understands or not. It doesn't matter if he can answer more important questions but isn't able to perfectly prove a theorem. No amount of teacher training can stand in the face of a single determined parent who wants their kid to ace that test. Heck a more trivial point which is still important? - teacher empowerment must come hand in hand with training, because each student is vastly different even from him or herself depending on what time of the day/month or year it is. Teachers must be able to make graded and customized judgement constantly. Tests don't allow for that. Moving the power for measurement into the hands of the test dis-empowers teachers. The test becomes/IS all that matters here, not the education. And Tests only roughly measure learning. They MOST strongly measure whether you could answer that particular test. The test is all that matters. As a result, the kind of teaching you value, becomes deprecated. Its just not economically competitive. As the original article posits. You don't need teachers to pass the test. You need drill Sergeants. Teachers who are good at that are the ones who will come to the fore, other teachers don't matter. You could love your subject and instill it in students. But that doesn't guarantee a good grade. Loving a subject, being involved in it, and testing well in it are different. Especially if you don't "think the test". This is the final pressure - loving a subject or enjoying it is irrelevant. Students care even less, they know that as long as that they get the test - its all good. "I'm getting good marks In a stupid subject like chemistry, who cares?". Do you want those people becoming your computer science engineers? The system you are setting up is concerning, and no amount of teacher training will solve it. ----- Further I think you are talking about standardized tests America had 30 or so years ago. Speaking on behalf of student body of India - we would have loved to have tests like that. At least in America you had the option of making a life if you had some gumption even if you didn't ace those tests. You were a person as opposed to a Frankenstinian mental athlete. Our tests were/are compulsory, for many people not in their first language, and they determined everything from your social standing to your marriage prospects. You started studying for your tenth standard exam 2 years before they started, you had no vacation and you had no spare time. Then 2 years later you would do it for your ISC or IIT or CAT.
jpiasetz 14y ago
Arguing against standardized testing is arguing against A/B testing. If you can't measure it there is no way to tell whether it's getting better.
- glesica 14y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is a completely wrong-headed statement. Standardized testing for school children and A/B testing for web site visitors are completely different beyond the fact that both involve the word "test". When you run A/B tests on a web site you don't tell the visitors which version they are being shown, or even that there are multiple versions at all. That would completely destroy the value of the testing. In psychology research, where ethics generally dictates that the subjects be informed, they are still not told what specifically is being tested, lest they modify their behavior. On the other hand, everyone involved in school standardized tests knows about the tests, knows about various biases that exist within the tests, and knows what is at stake based on the results of the tests. The reason that the current form of standardized testing is destructive is pure economics. If I tell you that I will count how many lines of code you have committed to the repository at the end of each week and that your pay will be based on this figure, what are you and your coworkers going to do? You're going to start writing hundreds of lines of comments, putting each variable declaration on its own line, needlessly re-factoring satisfactory code, etc. This is, as I understand it, a well-documented side-effect of measuring programmer productivity using LoC. Once I implement this evaluation scheme, two things happen. First, you are being evaluated based on an objective metric. Second, you have direct control over the value that metric takes on. Economics, which is, to a great extent, the study of incentives, tells us that you (and your coworkers, at least in general) will game the daylights out of the metric. So why is it any different when teachers, once told that their salaries and very jobs depend on the results of an annual test, teach their students exactly what is on the test, by hook or by crook, even at the expense of "real" learning? The problem is that teachers aren't oblivious (neither are programmers). When they see that they are being evaluated based on the outcome of X, they seek to maximize X. So the trick is, if you insist on quantitative metrics (which is not totally unreasonable, at least as the default) then the metrics must be linked to the behaviors that are desirable, not some vague indicator that approximately tracks those behaviors. Edit: missing word
kamaal 14y ago
There is a reason why rote learning to some extent works especially in India. There is so much competition you are likely to inevitably work very hard. So much effort that you will ultimately get it even if didn't want to. I know this is brute force way of getting things done. But it is still far better than getting nothing done.
- chii 14y ago
  > I know this is brute force way of getting things done. now, theres something to be aware of - "getting _things_ done" in this context means getting a high score in a standarized test, not getting a job. Having such a score doesn't necessarily mean you are able. Especially in a creative field that requires genuine interest and passion. This sort of training works for training operators of machinery and/or manufacturing workers that require special knowledge, but for creative fields such as programming (and not the CRUD type!) i think having such brute force method of learning is in fact a barrier. I hear in china that there are so many people who get excellent scores in tests, and yet is unable to find jobs. Simply because jobs suitable for them isn't there, nor are there that many opportunities. The sort of rote learning is really exacerbating the problem, not helping, because the students studied hard (despite not being their "passion"), they get a good mark, but still find themselves in a rathole.
- intended 14y ago
  That's mixing up measurement for achievement. We make mental body builders. But they make terrible people and thinkers. The idea of educated here is lost. Most of the debate the average person can create is middlebrow at best.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Oh? I can guarantee you that if I went and interviewed any graduates of a high school or university that concentrates on rote learning I could shred any notion that, on average, they had basic competency in the materials they are alleged to know. The sad truth here is that it is possible to "fake it", at every level. For the most part a person can be productive in even the most technical of jobs without fully comprehending most of what they are working with. People talk about cargo cultism a lot, but in the real world cargo cultish behavior often works. A lot of times just going through the motions is enough to get by. But that's no excuse to continue to wallow in mediocrity. We can and should do better.
smsm42 14y ago
Test are a consequence of a very real problem of evaluating teachers. Since neither parents nor children have in most public schools any choice over the school and teachers in it, regular consumer-driven quality controls that work on most markets are absent. However, quality problem is still real and existing - there are, obviously, good schools and bad schools, good teachers and bad teachers. Assume you are a well-intentioned educational administrator, and you want to improve the quality of education. How you do that? How you know which school is doing good and which is doing bad? How you know which teacher is beneficial and which is not? How you know which policy is beneficial and which is harmful? And most of all - how you do it in a way that is scalable to state and national levels and can be centralized and processed at huge scales (without which Department of Education has no data on which it can base its policies)? Obviously, standardized tests look like a perfect fit for this problem. So there's no mystery in this, it is a natural result. Of course, there are a lot of deficiencies in this approach, which you can see and teachers can see it too. But given centralized, state-driven education system, what else you can do? You can not have absence of quality controls - this would have immense corrupting potential and the system would have incentive to deteriorate very quickly. You can not have individual approach - DoE can't account for each school in each small town, they just don't have resources for that. So with current approach, testing is inevitable.
- intended 14y ago
  While I appreciate that you have decided to test the teachers, and that you have unions which come in the way of it, I am greatly amused by the ill conceived plan to achieve your goal. Its remarkable really. Years, decades of seeing kids die to suicide and cram pressure and this is what you choose. So that you can test your teachers? Anyway, your test doesn't test teachers, it tests students. And then you assume it is a good proxy for teachers. So just to be clear. 1) Tests are a perfect proxy for taking that test -> 2) Then they are a proxy for test taking ability in the student 3) Then a proxy for student understanding of the subject 4) And thence a proxy for teacher ability. I'd understand if we were doing chemical analysis with 4 steps involved in the process. But with human beings? Kids? The fundamental chaotic units of society? I really have to point out that this is logic that gets most startups killed, or logic on which they pivot to something smarter. I know you aren't the one responsible, but I really can't help but be perplexed. Once upon a time you guys were known as the place where "stuff just works." Your older education system did a great job. Sure it may not have made everyone a rock star but frankly - not everyone is cut out to do so at that juncture in their life. If you say that there is nothing else that can be done, then I accept and understand. But it is a terrible terrible outcome.

tallanvor 14y ago

Sure, if North Carolina had strong unions they might be able to help more. But even unions can only do so much to influence legislation, especially today where they don't have the resources to compete against rich individuals who can dump millions of dollars into a race without batting an eye.

william42 14y ago

North Carolina teachers have no union.