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My wife teaches in a high poverty school and it just mystifies us that so much of the public debate about how to deal with the achievement gap focuses on blame.

My wife teaches in a high poverty school and it just mystifies us that so much of the public debate about how to deal with the achievement gap focuses on blame. We want to blame people. Teachers, parents, administrators, we're all looking for a scapegoat and there's no consensus which group is to blame. But it's not that simple. There aren't any bad guys for us to nail to the cross. The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality. Kids in poverty are kids not learning. The only way to deal with the achievement gap is for us to be brave enough as a society to deal with that. Failing schools are a symptom of disease of poverty, not the disease itself. I strongly recommend everyone read this article: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school_in_texas/ http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school... My wife didn't write it, but it strongly resembles her day to day experience where she teaches.

cheatsheet 12y ago
1. When you are poor, school feels like you are trading pleasing an adult for the slim chance of getting out of poverty. It feels less like you are working in a real system with an honest chance and more like you are playing in someone's half psychotic maze. The adult world seems like a careless game where no one cares about anyone besides themselves once they've made it. 2. Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think, and have a more realistic understanding of the real world than their wealthy counterparts. It's just the side no one likes talking about, because honestly, it's something society in general is ashamed of. We can build all this great stuff but we can't scale equality. Look at the lives the parents have. Who do you think the kid is going to listen to and learn from the most? What someone says, or how reality is?
- true_religion 12y ago
  > Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think, When you say something like this it comes off as pretty antagonistic, unless you're about to explain out where specifically someone has said or implied anything about a students intelligence.
  - cheatsheet 12y ago
    Then read it like a 12 year old girl would read the statement.
vixen99 12y ago
Not much hope for the rest of the world then given that in the UK (Wiki: In terms of global poverty criteria, the United Kingdom is a wealthy country, with virtually no people living on less than £4 a day. There is both significant income redistribution and income inequality; for instance, in 2008/09 income in the top and bottom fifth of households was £73,800 and £15,000, respectively, before taxes and benefits. After tax and benefits, household income disparities are significantly reduced (to £53,900 and £13,600 respectively)one third of kids fail to achieve a C grade in a very undemanding exam (GCSE) at least compared to its predecessors 'O-level/GCE'. Moreover 2000 stats from BBC say 1 in 5 people are functionally illiterate. Judging from the standard of written comments in UK newspapers I'm surprised it's even that high. Meanwhile in 2013 - 'England's young adults trail world in literacy and maths' [ http://www.bbc.com/news/education-24433320 http://www.bbc.com/news/education-24433320]. Poverty is the fundamental problem? I don't think so. Let me add, I accept that there will be circumstances where family poverty will be a significant factor in educational attainment.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  "...one third of kids fail to achieve a C grade in a very undemanding exam (GCSE) at least compared to its predecessors 'O-level/GCE'." Might be worth pointing out that the GCE O level was only taken by around 30% to 60% of population depending on the policy of the Local Education Authority in which the child lived, the other half (roughly) took the CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education). A grade 1 CSE certificate was regarded as of a similar standard to a pass at GCE O level. So the figures were not that far away from one third not achieving a pass in the good old days when you think about it. These exams were/are taken at age 16. It might also be worth pointing out that the change from GCE O level/CSE to GCSE took place in 1984. Therefore anyone under the age of (rougly) 47 would have taken GCSEs, and then if academically inclined, would have progressed to GCE A levels, which have remained the main public exam taken at 18 for University entrance. We seem to be managing OKish despite continuous negative commentary on the education system. GCSEs themselves have changed significantly over the years (pre-National Curriculum, first 14-target NC then various reconfigurations of the NC based on subject after that, then the 2010 and 2012 changes, and now, in England, the 2017 changes). The UK PISA scores are (currently) bang on the average for OECD nations, and a point or so higher than France in Mathematics and the national language. I'd invite all here to have a look at the PISA sample test questions for Maths, their format and content might surprise you. At present, I think that the experience in the UK seems to support the thesis in the OA that socio-economic factors are quite significant in educational achievement in the sense that poor (depending on your definition of poor) children don't do especially well on average. I shall dig around a bit more about this whole historical data thing as I feel an essay coming on...
Jach 12y ago
The achievement gap is maybe ~25% due to socioeconomic factors, if you're being generous. Take everyone out of poverty, you're still going to have an achievement gap that's already mostly (~70%) due to IQ and one's Conscientiousness. Instead of throwing even more money at the socioeconomic problem (seriously that's been the 'solution' for years and has had many implementations in many forms) why don't we try something different, like making sure pregnant mothers are consuming enough iodine, or novel research into cheaply manufacturable nootropics?
- kristofferR 12y ago
  The cheapest and safest "nootropic" there is is exercise. Students dramastically improved their grades in several schools once they were made into exercising with a heart rate monitor (higher heart rate - higher grade) every day: http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/0316113514 http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B...
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    I love dramastically as a portmanteau neologism, but I guess you meant dramatically AND/XOR drastically.
    - kristofferR 12y ago
      Hehe, I was in a rush while writing that post, it wasn't intentional. I'm not sure which word I intended to write (probably a little bit of both). :) That being said - it's a fun new word that's actually pretty accurate in this situation. The improvements were drastic, and how drastic they were shocked a lot of people (the drama).
- learnstats2 12y ago
  Nope. If I have to put my energy and resources into feeding and caring for myself and my family, then my "IQ" - my ability and experience in engaging with abstract data - suffers. Yes, there will still be an achievement gap - that the achievement gap currently reflects socioeconomic factors is unfair.
huj123 12y ago
>The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality. The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker came out in 2002 and showed why this thinking is flawed. The achievement gap is significantly caused by genetic differences, and the correlation to income is not totally causation. The term used by geneticists "heritability" gives the proportion of differences between people (within a population), on some trait, that is caused by genetic differences. The traits that will determine your success at school, like personality and IQ are significantly heritable. Here's a recent study from the UK that looked at identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins and gave heritability estimates for different school subjects: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273 http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273 Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.ht... >The researchers found that for compulsory core subjects (English, Mathematics and Science), genetic differences between students explain on average 58% of the differences between GCSE scores. In contrast, 29% of the differences in core subject grades are due to shared environment -- such as schools, neighbourhoods or families which twins share. The remaining differences in GCSE scores were explained by non-shared environment, unique to each individual. >Overall, science grades (such as Biology, Chemistry, Physics) were found to be more heritable than Humanities grades (such as Media Studies, Art, Music) -- 58% vs 42%, respectively.
- tim333 12y ago
  There's a big difference between variations in ability within a group which probably have a large genetic component and differences between different populations, say a poor area and a rich area or different races which appear predominantly non genetic and probably to a large extent cultural.
- Lorento 12y ago
  It's surprising to hear that heritability can be so significant for individuals but races somehow never diverged in those same traits, while they did diverge in other heritable traits like skin color and height.
- barrkel 12y ago
  You've pointed to a study that found a link between individual's grades and genetic differences in one country. But it's a big leap to go from there, and explain why a particular school would have bad grade averages, especially schools in different countries - unless you're making the argument that schools are composed of people from large groups of genetically similar people, and these people are necessarily very distinct from people at schools that have better grade averages. Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little intermixing.
fit2rule 12y ago
I think that what most people identify as wanting to blame someone for something can also be looked at as people wanting them to be responsible for something - not responsible in the 'you did this, go to jail' sense, but rather the 'take hold of this, be in control of it and improve the scene' sense. Its one thing to blame someone for something - this is just a base, banal version of wishing they'd be more responsible for that thing. Alas, the tone of the discourse often degrades to the lower levels of human interaction, when really there is an undercurrent to the discussion that is just as valid. So finding fault in others, assigning blame - these are all just frustrated attempts to recognize that people do need to take responsibility for their lives, their actions. Its hard for teachers to be blamed for the state of poor education when they're not allowed to be responsible for it - when they have standards pushed upon them by fabian government kafka-lovin' "employees" who have never taught anyone a thing in their lives. Alas, however, there is another factor here, and that is the poor need to be responsible for their lives. They need to take control - however they can - and lift themselves up. If it requires help, then so be it - but you can't help someone who isn't willing to help themselves, and thats the first step. Calling for the poor to 'accept the blame' is one thing; asking the poor to be more responsible for their lives, another thing entirely. The same result is desired - its the degree of help, versus hostility, that makes the difference whether someone is willing to accept the claim, however.
- xamuel 12y ago
  Individual poor families might have the possibility of 'pulling themselves up by the bootstraps', on an ad hoc basis. But that'll never work as a general policy to deal with the problem. Even if you could get them all to try, the existing opportunities which make it possible for individuals to climb up, would immediately be swamped. We can't all work three fulltime jobs to save up enough money to buy a food stand, or whatever.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    I think you're wrong about that - or if it were the case, how would our modern world even be possible? Only a few of us can do big things and change our lives? Clearly there are enough examples of people who did not have the universe on their side making big changes regardless, to negate this perspective - I know far more people who started with nothing and built their prosperous lives through hard work than those who just inherited it by luck or fortune. Its therefore important to point out that there is a further responsibility in the equation, beyond just 'blame the poor', and that is 'make the rich more responsible for the poor', too. Its not a single equation, but rather a set of them .. linked together in order to function. And when these links are made and functional, we have a healthy society which boosts the standards of living for all of its citizens. There are enough examples of this to warrant optimism that in fact we can improve our own lives by improving the lives of others, and to ignore the desire to just be defeated by entropy, which is the natural state of the universe.
foolinaround 12y ago
> Kids in poverty are kids not learning. I would be a bit slow to just point to poverty as the only cause. There is no debate on whether poverty stunts education. Consider all the other countries with more acute levels where the children, when provided with opportunities, grab for them. One such would be the increasing percentage of money allocation to functions that are not core to teaching, such as administration, etc... Another would be the attempt to force uniformity in curriculum down the throats to a deeply suspicious audience...
coryrc 12y ago
If I understand its message correctly, /Waiting for Superman/ argues it isn't poor communities causing poor students, but poor schools failing communities. Demonstrated by the charter programs in poor areas exceeding test scores in the best areas.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
There are two extremes. 1) Teachers drastically effect student outcomes. In this case teachers deserve blame for poor student outcomes, and we should focus our efforts on finding and rewarding the best teachers. 2) Teachers don't matter and don't deserve the blame. In this case we should focus on spending as little money on teachers as possible - just find the cheapest warm body for the front of the classroom and focus our efforts on stuff that does matter. Which is it? [edit: Upon rereading it sounds like I'm arguing that we must live at one extreme. I actually just mean we need to live on some linear combination of these extremes. The key point is that we can't live at the distant endpoint (teachers don't deserve blame, teachers should be rewarded).]
- rmxt 12y ago
  Why don't we find and reward the best teachers while promoting socioeconomic integration in school systems? (As suggested by the article.) It's a little disingenuous to think that we have to go to one of those two extremes in order to have positive outcomes.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    I didn't say we had to go to any extreme, I'm simply pointing out that the universe lives somewhere on a line between them. If you argue that teachers don't deserve the blame you are also arguing that teachers don't matter.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
Human beings don't have the capability to solve poverty. Sure, depending on how you measure it, poverty sometimes decreases and sometimes increases, but without being able to tease out the exact causes of these fluctuations there are no levers to pull. Those who claim to be experts in these matters have so far failed to created profound, lasting economic prosperity. You'd do better to blame it on gravity, we know how to defy that. Besides which, if we go to some place like Africa where those students are in far deeper poverty, they sit there listening attentively to their teachers. So I don't think your theory pans out. It's not poverty itself that is the problem (especially not in a country where every child gets a textbook), but a culture that is associated with poverty. And culture is such an impossible problem to solve, right about now you and I should be hoping that it was still the economic problem you originally claimed. We at least have a slim chance of figuring that out. Have you ever wondered, kethinov, why it is that we think education is something that can be solved the same way that we solved the problem of "how do we make millions of cars"? We send children to a big institutional building 5 days a week for the 8-to-4 shift, where workers try to pour factoids into their head in assembly-line style, then QA comes around and rejects those with defects for rework. And at the end of the line, a conveyor belt cranks out something that has no spirit, no inspiration, and nothing unique about it? Maybe the same sorts of systems that crank out mass produced retail products is a bad system for teaching our children.
- kethinov 12y ago
  Just because some cultures living in poverty still place a strong emphasis on educational attainment doesn't mean that poverty plays no role in the achievement gap. Poverty produces cultures that are hostile to education. Not 100% of the time obviously. There are exceptions. But those exceptions prove the rule. I don't think we're incapable of solving poverty. We've been steadily eroding it piecemeal for centuries. There are new, innovative policy proposals being thrown out all the time to erode it further, of which my personal favorite is a universal basic income, or citizens dividend. That would completely end poverty. All we need is the political will. The way I see it, if it happened for Social Security, it can happen for that some day.
MarkMc 12y ago
I read the article you linked to but didn't find it convincing. It seems to be saying, "I was a teacher who failed to have much effect on poor students. Therefore, teachers cannot have much effect on poor students". We seem to disagree about how much impact a teacher can have on poor students, but I wonder if there is an experiment we can agree on which will settle the matter. For example, imagine there are 400 schools which have two math teachers, and that the students are assigned to one of the two teachers at random. Now imagine that each year we give an award to one (out of the two) teachers whose students performed best. If teachers have no impact on student outcomes, we would expect that random chance means after 3 years about 50 teachers have won the award three times. But if we find that 125 teachers have won the award three times wouldn't that suggest that teachers have significant impact on student outcomes?
- kethinov 12y ago
  The only way to do that experiment in a properly controlled environment would be to have the entire student body come from identical socioeconomic backgrounds. The lesson of the article I linked is that the more poverty a child experiences, the less effect a teacher will have on their lives. You can choose to ignore that reality all you want, but it doesn't stop it from being true.

cheatsheet 12y ago

1. When you are poor, school feels like you are trading pleasing an adult for the slim chance of getting out of poverty. It feels less like you are working in a real system with an honest chance and more like you are playing in someone's half psychotic maze. The adult world seems like a careless game where no one cares about anyone besides themselves once they've made it. 2. Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think, and have a more realistic understanding of the real world than their wealthy counterparts. It's just the side no one likes talking about, because honestly, it's something society in general is ashamed of. We can build all this great stuff but we can't scale equality. Look at the lives the parents have. Who do you think the kid is going to listen to and learn from the most? What someone says, or how reality is?

true_religion 12y ago
> Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think, When you say something like this it comes off as pretty antagonistic, unless you're about to explain out where specifically someone has said or implied anything about a students intelligence.
- cheatsheet 12y ago
  Then read it like a 12 year old girl would read the statement.

vixen99 12y ago

Not much hope for the rest of the world then given that in the UK (Wiki: In terms of global poverty criteria, the United Kingdom is a wealthy country, with virtually no people living on less than £4 a day. There is both significant income redistribution and income inequality; for instance, in 2008/09 income in the top and bottom fifth of households was £73,800 and £15,000, respectively, before taxes and benefits. After tax and benefits, household income disparities are significantly reduced (to £53,900 and £13,600 respectively)one third of kids fail to achieve a C grade in a very undemanding exam (GCSE) at least compared to its predecessors 'O-level/GCE'. Moreover 2000 stats from BBC say 1 in 5 people are functionally illiterate. Judging from the standard of written comments in UK newspapers I'm surprised it's even that high. Meanwhile in 2013 - 'England's young adults trail world in literacy and maths' [ http://www.bbc.com/news/education-24433320 http://www.bbc.com/news/education-24433320]. Poverty is the fundamental problem? I don't think so. Let me add, I accept that there will be circumstances where family poverty will be a significant factor in educational attainment.

keithpeter 12y ago
"...one third of kids fail to achieve a C grade in a very undemanding exam (GCSE) at least compared to its predecessors 'O-level/GCE'." Might be worth pointing out that the GCE O level was only taken by around 30% to 60% of population depending on the policy of the Local Education Authority in which the child lived, the other half (roughly) took the CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education). A grade 1 CSE certificate was regarded as of a similar standard to a pass at GCE O level. So the figures were not that far away from one third not achieving a pass in the good old days when you think about it. These exams were/are taken at age 16. It might also be worth pointing out that the change from GCE O level/CSE to GCSE took place in 1984. Therefore anyone under the age of (rougly) 47 would have taken GCSEs, and then if academically inclined, would have progressed to GCE A levels, which have remained the main public exam taken at 18 for University entrance. We seem to be managing OKish despite continuous negative commentary on the education system. GCSEs themselves have changed significantly over the years (pre-National Curriculum, first 14-target NC then various reconfigurations of the NC based on subject after that, then the 2010 and 2012 changes, and now, in England, the 2017 changes). The UK PISA scores are (currently) bang on the average for OECD nations, and a point or so higher than France in Mathematics and the national language. I'd invite all here to have a look at the PISA sample test questions for Maths, their format and content might surprise you. At present, I think that the experience in the UK seems to support the thesis in the OA that socio-economic factors are quite significant in educational achievement in the sense that poor (depending on your definition of poor) children don't do especially well on average. I shall dig around a bit more about this whole historical data thing as I feel an essay coming on...

Jach 12y ago

The achievement gap is maybe ~25% due to socioeconomic factors, if you're being generous. Take everyone out of poverty, you're still going to have an achievement gap that's already mostly (~70%) due to IQ and one's Conscientiousness. Instead of throwing even more money at the socioeconomic problem (seriously that's been the 'solution' for years and has had many implementations in many forms) why don't we try something different, like making sure pregnant mothers are consuming enough iodine, or novel research into cheaply manufacturable nootropics?

kristofferR 12y ago
The cheapest and safest "nootropic" there is is exercise. Students dramastically improved their grades in several schools once they were made into exercising with a heart rate monitor (higher heart rate - higher grade) every day: http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/0316113514 http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B...
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  I love dramastically as a portmanteau neologism, but I guess you meant dramatically AND/XOR drastically.
  - kristofferR 12y ago
    Hehe, I was in a rush while writing that post, it wasn't intentional. I'm not sure which word I intended to write (probably a little bit of both). :) That being said - it's a fun new word that's actually pretty accurate in this situation. The improvements were drastic, and how drastic they were shocked a lot of people (the drama).
learnstats2 12y ago
Nope. If I have to put my energy and resources into feeding and caring for myself and my family, then my "IQ" - my ability and experience in engaging with abstract data - suffers. Yes, there will still be an achievement gap - that the achievement gap currently reflects socioeconomic factors is unfair.

huj123 12y ago

>The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality. The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker came out in 2002 and showed why this thinking is flawed. The achievement gap is significantly caused by genetic differences, and the correlation to income is not totally causation. The term used by geneticists "heritability" gives the proportion of differences between people (within a population), on some trait, that is caused by genetic differences. The traits that will determine your success at school, like personality and IQ are significantly heritable. Here's a recent study from the UK that looked at identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins and gave heritability estimates for different school subjects: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273 http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273 Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.ht... >The researchers found that for compulsory core subjects (English, Mathematics and Science), genetic differences between students explain on average 58% of the differences between GCSE scores. In contrast, 29% of the differences in core subject grades are due to shared environment -- such as schools, neighbourhoods or families which twins share. The remaining differences in GCSE scores were explained by non-shared environment, unique to each individual. >Overall, science grades (such as Biology, Chemistry, Physics) were found to be more heritable than Humanities grades (such as Media Studies, Art, Music) -- 58% vs 42%, respectively.

tim333 12y ago
There's a big difference between variations in ability within a group which probably have a large genetic component and differences between different populations, say a poor area and a rich area or different races which appear predominantly non genetic and probably to a large extent cultural.
Lorento 12y ago
It's surprising to hear that heritability can be so significant for individuals but races somehow never diverged in those same traits, while they did diverge in other heritable traits like skin color and height.
barrkel 12y ago
You've pointed to a study that found a link between individual's grades and genetic differences in one country. But it's a big leap to go from there, and explain why a particular school would have bad grade averages, especially schools in different countries - unless you're making the argument that schools are composed of people from large groups of genetically similar people, and these people are necessarily very distinct from people at schools that have better grade averages. Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little intermixing.

fit2rule 12y ago

I think that what most people identify as wanting to blame someone for something can also be looked at as people wanting them to be responsible for something - not responsible in the 'you did this, go to jail' sense, but rather the 'take hold of this, be in control of it and improve the scene' sense. Its one thing to blame someone for something - this is just a base, banal version of wishing they'd be more responsible for that thing. Alas, the tone of the discourse often degrades to the lower levels of human interaction, when really there is an undercurrent to the discussion that is just as valid. So finding fault in others, assigning blame - these are all just frustrated attempts to recognize that people do need to take responsibility for their lives, their actions. Its hard for teachers to be blamed for the state of poor education when they're not allowed to be responsible for it - when they have standards pushed upon them by fabian government kafka-lovin' "employees" who have never taught anyone a thing in their lives. Alas, however, there is another factor here, and that is the poor need to be responsible for their lives. They need to take control - however they can - and lift themselves up. If it requires help, then so be it - but you can't help someone who isn't willing to help themselves, and thats the first step. Calling for the poor to 'accept the blame' is one thing; asking the poor to be more responsible for their lives, another thing entirely. The same result is desired - its the degree of help, versus hostility, that makes the difference whether someone is willing to accept the claim, however.

xamuel 12y ago
Individual poor families might have the possibility of 'pulling themselves up by the bootstraps', on an ad hoc basis. But that'll never work as a general policy to deal with the problem. Even if you could get them all to try, the existing opportunities which make it possible for individuals to climb up, would immediately be swamped. We can't all work three fulltime jobs to save up enough money to buy a food stand, or whatever.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  I think you're wrong about that - or if it were the case, how would our modern world even be possible? Only a few of us can do big things and change our lives? Clearly there are enough examples of people who did not have the universe on their side making big changes regardless, to negate this perspective - I know far more people who started with nothing and built their prosperous lives through hard work than those who just inherited it by luck or fortune. Its therefore important to point out that there is a further responsibility in the equation, beyond just 'blame the poor', and that is 'make the rich more responsible for the poor', too. Its not a single equation, but rather a set of them .. linked together in order to function. And when these links are made and functional, we have a healthy society which boosts the standards of living for all of its citizens. There are enough examples of this to warrant optimism that in fact we can improve our own lives by improving the lives of others, and to ignore the desire to just be defeated by entropy, which is the natural state of the universe.

foolinaround 12y ago

> Kids in poverty are kids not learning. I would be a bit slow to just point to poverty as the only cause. There is no debate on whether poverty stunts education. Consider all the other countries with more acute levels where the children, when provided with opportunities, grab for them. One such would be the increasing percentage of money allocation to functions that are not core to teaching, such as administration, etc... Another would be the attempt to force uniformity in curriculum down the throats to a deeply suspicious audience...

coryrc 12y ago

If I understand its message correctly, /Waiting for Superman/ argues it isn't poor communities causing poor students, but poor schools failing communities. Demonstrated by the charter programs in poor areas exceeding test scores in the best areas.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

There are two extremes. 1) Teachers drastically effect student outcomes. In this case teachers deserve blame for poor student outcomes, and we should focus our efforts on finding and rewarding the best teachers. 2) Teachers don't matter and don't deserve the blame. In this case we should focus on spending as little money on teachers as possible - just find the cheapest warm body for the front of the classroom and focus our efforts on stuff that does matter. Which is it? [edit: Upon rereading it sounds like I'm arguing that we must live at one extreme. I actually just mean we need to live on some linear combination of these extremes. The key point is that we can't live at the distant endpoint (teachers don't deserve blame, teachers should be rewarded).]

rmxt 12y ago
Why don't we find and reward the best teachers while promoting socioeconomic integration in school systems? (As suggested by the article.) It's a little disingenuous to think that we have to go to one of those two extremes in order to have positive outcomes.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  I didn't say we had to go to any extreme, I'm simply pointing out that the universe lives somewhere on a line between them. If you argue that teachers don't deserve the blame you are also arguing that teachers don't matter.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

Human beings don't have the capability to solve poverty. Sure, depending on how you measure it, poverty sometimes decreases and sometimes increases, but without being able to tease out the exact causes of these fluctuations there are no levers to pull. Those who claim to be experts in these matters have so far failed to created profound, lasting economic prosperity. You'd do better to blame it on gravity, we know how to defy that. Besides which, if we go to some place like Africa where those students are in far deeper poverty, they sit there listening attentively to their teachers. So I don't think your theory pans out. It's not poverty itself that is the problem (especially not in a country where every child gets a textbook), but a culture that is associated with poverty. And culture is such an impossible problem to solve, right about now you and I should be hoping that it was still the economic problem you originally claimed. We at least have a slim chance of figuring that out. Have you ever wondered, kethinov, why it is that we think education is something that can be solved the same way that we solved the problem of "how do we make millions of cars"? We send children to a big institutional building 5 days a week for the 8-to-4 shift, where workers try to pour factoids into their head in assembly-line style, then QA comes around and rejects those with defects for rework. And at the end of the line, a conveyor belt cranks out something that has no spirit, no inspiration, and nothing unique about it? Maybe the same sorts of systems that crank out mass produced retail products is a bad system for teaching our children.

kethinov 12y ago
Just because some cultures living in poverty still place a strong emphasis on educational attainment doesn't mean that poverty plays no role in the achievement gap. Poverty produces cultures that are hostile to education. Not 100% of the time obviously. There are exceptions. But those exceptions prove the rule. I don't think we're incapable of solving poverty. We've been steadily eroding it piecemeal for centuries. There are new, innovative policy proposals being thrown out all the time to erode it further, of which my personal favorite is a universal basic income, or citizens dividend. That would completely end poverty. All we need is the political will. The way I see it, if it happened for Social Security, it can happen for that some day.

MarkMc 12y ago

I read the article you linked to but didn't find it convincing. It seems to be saying, "I was a teacher who failed to have much effect on poor students. Therefore, teachers cannot have much effect on poor students". We seem to disagree about how much impact a teacher can have on poor students, but I wonder if there is an experiment we can agree on which will settle the matter. For example, imagine there are 400 schools which have two math teachers, and that the students are assigned to one of the two teachers at random. Now imagine that each year we give an award to one (out of the two) teachers whose students performed best. If teachers have no impact on student outcomes, we would expect that random chance means after 3 years about 50 teachers have won the award three times. But if we find that 125 teachers have won the award three times wouldn't that suggest that teachers have significant impact on student outcomes?

kethinov 12y ago
The only way to do that experiment in a properly controlled environment would be to have the entire student body come from identical socioeconomic backgrounds. The lesson of the article I linked is that the more poverty a child experiences, the less effect a teacher will have on their lives. You can choose to ignore that reality all you want, but it doesn't stop it from being true.