11 ms·

The reporting on this scandal has focused on NCLB as the evil outside influence which corrupted the garden of Eden that was Atlanta public schools. That is lik

by patio11 12y ago

The reporting on this scandal has focused on NCLB as the evil outside influence which corrupted the garden of Eden that was Atlanta public schools. That is like blaming the coroner's office for a spate of murders. Atlanta schools were ineffectual, corrupt money pits which failed generations of poor students, and that was not a problem until Washington upset the apple cart and put a number on it.

haberman 12y ago
I think the question is whether the intervention from Washington actually made things better.
- tankenmate 12y ago
  Indeed, when the stats themselves say that between 1% to 14% of the students' mark was determined by the quality of the teacher. One has to wonder if as much time and effort was put into the other 86%. It brings back to mind a similarly minded statement made by my Uni stats professor; make sure you're measuring what you think you're measuring.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    It seems very useful to know how much of the students' performance is up to the teacher. If very little, than we don't need to worry about quality teachers, and just get the minimum level necessary to keep the peace in the classroom. If a lot, then we should worry a lot about teacher quality, and work hard to make sure that we are only recruiting and keeping very effective teachers.
    - zarify 12y ago
      I know we love to harp on about teacher quality, but there are plenty of other factors that are just as important like access to the right learning programs, classroom mix and so on. As a teacher I'll be the first to admit that for some students about the best we can hope for is to keep the peace until the mature or find something compelling that gives them a reason to succeed. It's not as simple as "all teachers make $difference%".
      - danielweber 12y ago
        I admit that I said that comment from a place of annoyance: during pay analysis, teacher quality matter a lot, and during results analysis, teacher quality doesn't matter. But as you point out it's not uniform. It's reasonable that teachers make a big difference in some scenarios and not in others.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  In Atlanta's case, yes. It revealed just how bad education was and is in Atlanta and most likely most city schools. So bad that instead of removing bad teachers and administrators they simply cheated. The sad part is that when attempts are made at fixing these problems all that is thrown back in the face of reformers are the accusations of racism and bigotry. States should take control of all school systems within their borders and there should be no such thing as teacher's unions. Nepotism and union thuggery have doomed more children to middling educations if any than racism or bigotry. NCLB like the follow ups by the current administration were handcuffed attempts to fix a broken system. The handcuffs were that you could not remove unions over teachers and you could not interfere in certain districts because of race
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    >Nepotism and union thuggery have doomed more children to middling educations if any than racism or bigotry. Saying this shows an ignorance of the history of public education in the US. I don't think you're equipped to judge whether accusations of racism aimed at "reformers" are accurate.
    - existencebox 12y ago
      I can't address the entire parent post, but I can address judging the current state of accusations of racism aimed at reformers in public schools, I was able to view it firsthand at a Philadelphia public school for years on end, where ANY data on an education gap (a widening one), both racial or economically divided, would be met with "you clearly hate black people", regardless of if that has any bearing on the discussion. This occurred during school board, PTO, UPG, and student teacher meetings. It was appalling to me how much racism/classism was thrown around as a reason to not apply any sort of response to the current broken state of education, and for how appalling it was, it was equally effective at stopping change. So in this at least, there is really no question as to the accuracy of whether these things occur and harm the students, for me. They do occur, they do harm students, and like other deep set prejudices and dogmatic belief, I have no idea where to punch that glacier to address the problem
samdk 12y ago
NCLB tried to fix those "ineffectual, corrupt money pits" by giving enormous, overriding importance to a small set of easily gamed statistics. Creating a single performance metric that people Must Meet Or Else is an exceedingly naive approach to performance problems. It creates perverse incentives that reward cheating and short-term hacks over sustainable long-term solutions, and it doesn't actually do anything to help solve the problem at all. I'm not, to be clear, saying that trying to use statistics as a tool to solve problems in education is a bad idea, but laws like NCLB are comparable to non-technical managers trying to measure software dev performance with metrics like "lines of code produced" or "number of bug tickets closed". (And I don't think I have to explain to anyone here why that's a bad idea.)
- frozenport 12y ago
  >>easily gamed statistics. Nope. If they were easily gamed Park would have survived? The failed at teaching to the test and had the cheat the old fashioned way.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Please be concrete. How do you game standardized tests? Sample tests can be found here, so make sure your proposed method would actually work. https://www.georgiastandards.org/resources/Pages/Tools/TestingResources.aspx https://www.georgiastandards.org/resources/Pages/Tools/Testi...
  - samdk 12y ago
    Did you read the article? The entire thing is about a school that for years did things like have teachers change test answers after the fact in order to increase their overall test scores. That's what I mean by gaming statistics. edit: clearly I should have chosen a different word. I think you're all focusing on one specific word I used, and not on the actual argument I'm making, which is that if your model of assessment depends on a single Big Important Number, people will find ways to make that number what they need it to be.
    - 12y ago
stefanve 12y ago
I guess the deeper question is, what is it what we expect schools to do for our children? Personally I think a profound focus on scoring well on test is shortsighted. while I do think it is important to learn basic math and languages skills I think it is equally important to learn to think and learn to learn. For some reason children are treated like they are similar to one and other while later in live you are able to choose different types of schools with different interest and different ways of learning. While I don't think a child should make profound live choices the idea that every child learns the same way and has the same background is just wrong and by doing so children will be left behind
- danielweber 12y ago
  I guess the deeper question is, what is it what we expect schools to do for our children? Ask ten people and you'll get eleven different answers. Schools serve a lot of different masters, and also are used as proxy battlegrounds for both sides of a culture war.
  - Havvy 12y ago
    Infinite sides of the infinite culture wars.
higherpurpose 12y ago
This is why I don't believe in the idea that "more money is needed for education". The system is obviously extremely bloated, and needs to be revamped before we even begin to think about giving them more money. It's our tax money after all. We shouldn't just throw money at anyone who screams "we need more money to do better". We need to first look at what can be changed so more money isn't needed. when all of that has been evaluated and the changes made, then we can start thinking about whether we need increased education budgets or not to increase performance.
- zarify 12y ago
  With the utmost sincerity I wish you the best of luck with that. We've recently had two in-depth studies here in Australia on resourcing for schools, and neither have made it past the politicians without getting butchered. In Western Australia we've had an outright rejection of federal funding for one study (Gonski) and lip service paid to the second (Teese) resulting in slashes to funding for language studies, music, the arts and assistance for students with special needs (probably more, that's what I know of directly). If there's some strategy to do more with less here, the government is playing it so close to their chest they're not letting those of us in schools know about it.
swasheck 12y ago
My understanding (from a close friend who is a teacher) is that these metrics are difficult to implement for the more abstract disciplines such as the arts. These, then, are being eliminated from curricula since they are difficult to measure. This may not initially appear to be an issue but the article itself illuminates a greater need for holistic perspectives on education. Putting educational disciplines in silos is damaging the experience (can't read a word problem for math) and phasing out arts may be stunting the ability to learn.

by patio11 12y ago

haberman 12y ago

I think the question is whether the intervention from Washington actually made things better.

tankenmate 12y ago
Indeed, when the stats themselves say that between 1% to 14% of the students' mark was determined by the quality of the teacher. One has to wonder if as much time and effort was put into the other 86%. It brings back to mind a similarly minded statement made by my Uni stats professor; make sure you're measuring what you think you're measuring.
- danielweber 12y ago
  It seems very useful to know how much of the students' performance is up to the teacher. If very little, than we don't need to worry about quality teachers, and just get the minimum level necessary to keep the peace in the classroom. If a lot, then we should worry a lot about teacher quality, and work hard to make sure that we are only recruiting and keeping very effective teachers.
  - zarify 12y ago
    I know we love to harp on about teacher quality, but there are plenty of other factors that are just as important like access to the right learning programs, classroom mix and so on. As a teacher I'll be the first to admit that for some students about the best we can hope for is to keep the peace until the mature or find something compelling that gives them a reason to succeed. It's not as simple as "all teachers make $difference%".
    - danielweber 12y ago
      I admit that I said that comment from a place of annoyance: during pay analysis, teacher quality matter a lot, and during results analysis, teacher quality doesn't matter. But as you point out it's not uniform. It's reasonable that teachers make a big difference in some scenarios and not in others.
Shivetya 12y ago
In Atlanta's case, yes. It revealed just how bad education was and is in Atlanta and most likely most city schools. So bad that instead of removing bad teachers and administrators they simply cheated. The sad part is that when attempts are made at fixing these problems all that is thrown back in the face of reformers are the accusations of racism and bigotry. States should take control of all school systems within their borders and there should be no such thing as teacher's unions. Nepotism and union thuggery have doomed more children to middling educations if any than racism or bigotry. NCLB like the follow ups by the current administration were handcuffed attempts to fix a broken system. The handcuffs were that you could not remove unions over teachers and you could not interfere in certain districts because of race
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >Nepotism and union thuggery have doomed more children to middling educations if any than racism or bigotry. Saying this shows an ignorance of the history of public education in the US. I don't think you're equipped to judge whether accusations of racism aimed at "reformers" are accurate.
  - existencebox 12y ago
    I can't address the entire parent post, but I can address judging the current state of accusations of racism aimed at reformers in public schools, I was able to view it firsthand at a Philadelphia public school for years on end, where ANY data on an education gap (a widening one), both racial or economically divided, would be met with "you clearly hate black people", regardless of if that has any bearing on the discussion. This occurred during school board, PTO, UPG, and student teacher meetings. It was appalling to me how much racism/classism was thrown around as a reason to not apply any sort of response to the current broken state of education, and for how appalling it was, it was equally effective at stopping change. So in this at least, there is really no question as to the accuracy of whether these things occur and harm the students, for me. They do occur, they do harm students, and like other deep set prejudices and dogmatic belief, I have no idea where to punch that glacier to address the problem

samdk 12y ago

NCLB tried to fix those "ineffectual, corrupt money pits" by giving enormous, overriding importance to a small set of easily gamed statistics. Creating a single performance metric that people Must Meet Or Else is an exceedingly naive approach to performance problems. It creates perverse incentives that reward cheating and short-term hacks over sustainable long-term solutions, and it doesn't actually do anything to help solve the problem at all. I'm not, to be clear, saying that trying to use statistics as a tool to solve problems in education is a bad idea, but laws like NCLB are comparable to non-technical managers trying to measure software dev performance with metrics like "lines of code produced" or "number of bug tickets closed". (And I don't think I have to explain to anyone here why that's a bad idea.)

frozenport 12y ago
>>easily gamed statistics. Nope. If they were easily gamed Park would have survived? The failed at teaching to the test and had the cheat the old fashioned way.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Please be concrete. How do you game standardized tests? Sample tests can be found here, so make sure your proposed method would actually work. https://www.georgiastandards.org/resources/Pages/Tools/TestingResources.aspx https://www.georgiastandards.org/resources/Pages/Tools/Testi...
- samdk 12y ago
  Did you read the article? The entire thing is about a school that for years did things like have teachers change test answers after the fact in order to increase their overall test scores. That's what I mean by gaming statistics. edit: clearly I should have chosen a different word. I think you're all focusing on one specific word I used, and not on the actual argument I'm making, which is that if your model of assessment depends on a single Big Important Number, people will find ways to make that number what they need it to be.
  - 12y ago

stefanve 12y ago

I guess the deeper question is, what is it what we expect schools to do for our children? Personally I think a profound focus on scoring well on test is shortsighted. while I do think it is important to learn basic math and languages skills I think it is equally important to learn to think and learn to learn. For some reason children are treated like they are similar to one and other while later in live you are able to choose different types of schools with different interest and different ways of learning. While I don't think a child should make profound live choices the idea that every child learns the same way and has the same background is just wrong and by doing so children will be left behind

danielweber 12y ago
I guess the deeper question is, what is it what we expect schools to do for our children? Ask ten people and you'll get eleven different answers. Schools serve a lot of different masters, and also are used as proxy battlegrounds for both sides of a culture war.
- Havvy 12y ago
  Infinite sides of the infinite culture wars.

higherpurpose 12y ago

This is why I don't believe in the idea that "more money is needed for education". The system is obviously extremely bloated, and needs to be revamped before we even begin to think about giving them more money. It's our tax money after all. We shouldn't just throw money at anyone who screams "we need more money to do better". We need to first look at what can be changed so more money isn't needed. when all of that has been evaluated and the changes made, then we can start thinking about whether we need increased education budgets or not to increase performance.

zarify 12y ago
With the utmost sincerity I wish you the best of luck with that. We've recently had two in-depth studies here in Australia on resourcing for schools, and neither have made it past the politicians without getting butchered. In Western Australia we've had an outright rejection of federal funding for one study (Gonski) and lip service paid to the second (Teese) resulting in slashes to funding for language studies, music, the arts and assistance for students with special needs (probably more, that's what I know of directly). If there's some strategy to do more with less here, the government is playing it so close to their chest they're not letting those of us in schools know about it.

swasheck 12y ago

My understanding (from a close friend who is a teacher) is that these metrics are difficult to implement for the more abstract disciplines such as the arts. These, then, are being eliminated from curricula since they are difficult to measure. This may not initially appear to be an issue but the article itself illuminates a greater need for holistic perspectives on education. Putting educational disciplines in silos is damaging the experience (can't read a word problem for math) and phasing out arts may be stunting the ability to learn.