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X-Prize Founder Wants Ideas For Fixing Education
An anonymous reader writes "X-Prize Founder Peter Diamandis, speaking at SXSW, says he wants to set up a $10 million prize for fixing education — but he needs help figuring out how to target the problem. From the article: 'He said he has considered multiple directions that an Education X Prize could take, such as coming up with better ways to crowd-source education, or rewarding the creation of "powerful, addictive game" that promotes education. But he isn’t sure which way to go. There’s no shortage of high-tech visionaries and tycoons these days, running around with ideas about how to fix education. Many of them are finding, though, that technology alone isn’t enough. Exciting ideas founder quickly if they don’t sustain motivation in students who perform at widely different levels. Other challenges include the need to engage effectively with school districts, teachers and parents.'"
Kids need more financially rewarding (and stable) jobs to aspire to than drug dealer.
Personally, I think parents and teachers unions are the biggest parts of the problems, or are certainly high on the list.
$10 million for the first contestant to get a chimpanzee through ed school. Or is that too easy?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So . . . you think you want to fix education. So how are you going to fix the moron parents who DON'T CARE?
Easy. Fuck the union. Make it a system where you can get fired if you don't do well. Base pay on performance, not seniority.
What's that you say? Performance evals might not be fair? Welcome to every other business in America. Deal with it. If the manager doesn't give you good evals, find another company (district). If you move from district to district and keep getting crappy evals, guess what? The problem is YOU.
Likewise, if parents hate your school so much that they are willing to drive 2 hours into another district, guess what? Your school should go "bankrupt", just like companies do. Not your fault you say? Tough place to run a school? Good. Find another district.
So the district has no school, or the school always sucks? Guess what. It's not a problem with the administrators OR the teachers. It's your city. It sucks. There could be any number of reasons your fine city has turned into Crackville. Fix that, and the schools will fix themselves.
These are the problems with schools. Everybody knows what has to be done to fix them. The hard part is forcing them to do it.
Why are we trying to innovate to fix education? A quick search indicates we are around 15th in reading and science, worse in math. Doesn't that mean there are 15 countries doing it better which we could try to emulate them rather than spending money trying to create something cool and new?
The problem is schools are damm little about education anymore. They are babysitters.
That and 'no child left behind' means most classes move at the speed of the stupidest kids.. And you know.. Some of those precious little snowflakes actually ARE stupid.
Between all that bs. The standardized testing which is all the schools really care about because their funding is tied to it. And the teachers unions that prevent actually getting rid of bad teachers... Thats the problem.
It's gotten alot worse in the last 30 years.
How to fix it? Pay teachers more. FIRE the crappy ones. Get rid of no child left behind bs and standardized testing/funding ties.
The world is a hard place. School should be preparing them for that reality. Not this bullcrap that 'everyone gets a medal'.
But some peoples feelings might be hurt. So it's not going to happen anytime soon. Not in my lifetime.
From the article: 'He said he has considered multiple directions that an Education X Prize could take, such as coming up with better ways to crowd-source education, or rewarding the creation of "powerful, addictive game" that promotes education.
This isn't a game or something that is fixed by simply throwing money at. It is a social problem first and foremost. The culture of this country does not appreciate education, and the idea of studying as hard as South Koreans or Japanese is seen as if it were child abuse or something like that.
But he isn’t sure which way to go.
Look at Japan, South Korean, Germany, Finland. Copy, adapt, rinse and repeat. Moreover, for changes specific to our country, I would suggest the following:
1. Get rid of summer school (or provide vouchers for low-income people to put their kids in summer camps.)
2. From that above, increase the number of school hours during the year, like in Japan or Germany, or like in almost any other country, developed and otherwise.
3. Teach kids to stand up when a teacher enters and leaves a room, and teach them, no, put them to clean their own class rooms as part of their daily school day.
4. Give teachers better pay and better training.
5. Don't pass kids to the next grade unless they have actually demonstrated they are capable off. Enough of giving HS degrees to kids who LITERALLY cannot read or add fractions.
6. De-emphasize 4-year college degrees. Instead, emphasize vocational training at the HS and community college level. That is, implement something akin to that the Germans and Japanese have.
7. Increase the number of commercials that laud education. Increase the number of educational programs (.ie. musicals and documentaries) in TV. Compare the number of educational programs and commercials in Japanese TV to ours, and you'll see the difference.
Do that and in a generation you'll see a change, all without throwing the coffers out of the window and without looking for the next e-silver bullet.
You can throw billions at the problem, but if we don't change our culture and the basic nature of our curricula, it ain't gonna count for shit.
A simple, one-three hour test can only quantify certain types of ability. Academia, how ever, use these tests to measure almost every type of ability...and that is incorrect. It HAS to be incorrect, because of the broad nature of human knowledge.
I'm not saying we need to devise ways to make education painless. Life isn't painless, and neither should be education. But, devising accurate ways to measure a student's ability should decrease students' perceptions that tests, and therefore education, aren't worth the hassle.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Why become educated when your only future is to compete with others in an increasingly adversarial society where the aim is to beat everyone else? Why play a game in which the best way to win is to subjugate a people and use them to make you rich and powerful?
The problem is capitalism: the idea that people should fight each other rather than work together. And as things have moved further to the right in the last 30 years, everything has got worse. Yet still we're surrounded by the foolish and the short-term reward seekers who whine that we're not far enough to the right.
You're going to have to specify what you mean by "unions" being the problem.
Parents can cause problems by not providing a stable home environment and emphasis on learning. Or parents can help by providing those. So "parents" being a "problem" ... again, you have to specify what you mean.
But first off, someone needs to define the "problem".
What, exactly, needs to be improved?
Are there other countries that are doing better?
If so, what are their approaches?
1: Education needs the parents back in charge. Yes, that means some bad decisions, but it will have more people involved with the education of their own children. As a parent of a 4th grader, I can tell you I am all but excluded from a lot of the decisions that get made for him at school.Too much money is being spent in administration of the school system, and that takes precious resources away from the teachers themselves. Parents can be counted on to do more for their children. We are waiting for the opportunity.
2: Technology could make schools more interactive for the purpose of easing the burden on teachers. Teachers don't need home rooms, students do. Then you only have to move around teachers to the virtual desk they have in the system. The result is less time in the halls for the students, and more time in a familiar place.
The problem is not that our education system is broken. The problem is that the students don't get the education reinforced outside of school. Either because of their friends, that their parents aren't at home, or their parents just don't care, these students are being told-through words and actions-that they don't need an education, or getting an education is too hard, or that its stupid. They can make more money playing sports, or dealing drugs, or robbing houses, or whatever. They are being told this by their family, their friends, their peers, and their society/culture. It doesn't matter how you change the system, how much money you throw at it, because the problem does not lie within the system. It exists outside of it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
http://ketchumgroup.net/blog/skills-needed-skills-defined/
founder (intransitive verb) , To fail utterly; collapse
What's wrong with that?
The biggest problem I see is the lack of streaming in education. Trying to give everyone the same education is simply stupid. There is no way that you can teach at a level such that the slowest students are keeping up while the top students are stretched - someone, somewhere has to suffer. However the moment you try to stream students there are cries of discrimination and unfairness. Frankly I do not think that education will be fixed until there are governments willing to tackle this politically sensitive issue.
The curious thing is that, somehow, this does not apply to sports. Nobody would think it sensible that footballers, athletes etc. are held back and denied more advanced training because it is discriminatory against those who have less physical ability...but the moment it comes to academics it is a completely different story. I think the key difference is that society can easily see the benefit of a good sports person - they entertain. However the benefit of a good academic - jobs created, industries founded, science discovered etc. - is less clear and being smart is perceived as benefiting the individual only.
So perhaps that X prize should go to the best idea for turning academic subjects into a spectator sport. The moment we have people interested in watching teams of physicists competing there will be no problem in getting a more rigorous education for those who need it.
Back in 2002, I was doing some theorizing on True Artificial Intelligence, and one of the applications I realized is that it'd make a perfect teacher. But more importantly, I realized we could create a computerized teaching system without having achieved AI. Lets start:
1) Digitize all education books saying copyright is holding us back. Suddenly you have about a million dollars in worth of ebooks for every student at the cost of 100 dollars for an ebook reader or laptop. This in itself would be an education revolution. Never before could we store or transport so much information in such a compact and cheap device.
2) Have K-college teachers teach their course to empty classrooms with a video recorder. You'd have about 10+ redundant lectures on the same stuff. Kids can then watch these lectures in their own homes.
3) Important "Tutors"- Have chat rooms or live QA with tutors on duty. This way when a kid wants to ask a question he can get it answered promptly. These would be like call centers with qualified teachers on duty.
4) Then the spice comes when you introduce software that teaches them through trial and error. I fondly remember learning how to count,add,multiply from TI-99 computer. The advantage that little piece of software gave me in math, allowed me to crush through to some of the highest levels in math an undergrad can take.
Now you can't count on the government to ditch copyright so I think the only way this will happen is through self sacrificial IP donations and rewriting books, open source K-12, and you can revolutionize education so everyone even in the third world can get an education if they want to put forth the effort. I think education and hunger are the two problems we can solve in this generation. Lets do it.
God spoke to me
So if you're in an area where children aren't "performing" due largely to the attitude of their parents, and your performance evaluation is bad, all the teachers should leave and go somewhere else?
What you're saying is that people who live in an area where most parents don't care about their childrens education (even if they themselves DO care about their childrens education) don't deserve to have a school.
Also, it means that a teacher who lives (works) in an area where parents are move involved in their childrens education will have to work "less hard" for a greater pay cheque than a teacher in a "worse" area would.
Not everything should be run like a business.
I think that the Traditional College system is not the best fit for lot’s of jobs and there are better ways to learn and to show that you have skills.
Harvard Study: Too Much Emphasis On College Education?
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0202/Does-everyone-need-a-college-degree-Maybe-not-says-Harvard-study
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/02/harvard-study-hey-maybe-were-placing-too-much-emphasis-on-a-college-education/
“It would be fine if we had an alternative system [for students who don’t get college degrees], but we’re virtually unique among industrialized countries in terms of not having another system and relying so heavily on higher education,” says Robert Schwartz, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Emphasizing college as the only path may actually cause some students – who are bored in class but could enjoy learning that’s more entwined with the workplace – to drop out, he adds. “If the image [of college] is more years of just sitting in classrooms, that’s not very persuasive.”
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a “qualification” that has real currency in the labor market”
“It would be fine if we had an alternative system [for students who don’t get college degrees], but we’re virtually unique among industrialized countries in terms of not having another system and relying so heavily on higher education,” says Robert Schwartz, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Emphasizing college as the only path may actually cause some students – who are bored in class but could enjoy learning that’s more entwined with the workplace – to drop out, he adds. “If the image [of college] is more years of just sitting in classrooms, that’s not very persuasive.”
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a “qualification” that has real currency in the labor market”
That's your answer? Ban collective bargaining rights and privatise education? The reasons why that is totally wrong are too numerous to mention. I realise that you are probably from the US where teachers not being fireable is a major problem, and where many schools perform poorly without any consequences. But even if you solved both of those problems, that only gets you on par with the standard school system functioning efficiently, like say in Germany. This is a system that was created over a century ago to create a society of workers to fuel the industrial revolution, which in turn was based on a system for the nobility to educate their children to rule over the peasants. The idea that new ideas are needed and better systems are possible is not restricted to the problems of your local elementary school. This is a worldwide issue and if your society is having problems getting the current system to work, you should be even more in favour of coming up with a new one.
The biggest issue of all, is to come forward with a definition about what quality education is about. It can vary widely from culture to culture and, even within the same culture from time to time, say, across decades. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia article begins with: "Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next.". Just putting such information together is a challenge on its own. Redistributing and delivering it at young people's minds, is another. In between, you have lot's of legitimate objection about what "knowledge, skills, customs and values" really are.
What the prize could really target would rather be knowledge and skills and, yes, games could deliver either in a fantastic way. Anybody else around here who got a serious kickstart in organic and inorganic chemistry via a computer quiz game? Could a game Spindizzy teach logic except for controlling the joystick?
The education system in this country worked fine in the past. Why is it such a boggle to look at how things used to be done, observe what has changed, analyze it, and determine when things started going wrong? This solution is so obvious that it seems only an (capital-I) Intellectual could possibly not see it.
This then also means pour lots of funds into science and technology R&D. (Its so hard to get grants now that it is turning many students away...) Now will make it easier to get jobs in STEM, which will drive the imperative for students to get a better STEM education, which will drive improvements in schools for STEM. And the parent will be onboard as they will now all believe the imperative for their children and the country's welfare and economy, that everything is geared toward excellence in STEM.
How to convince the average American that STEM is of the highest priority? Difficult, but it should be something quite forceful, probably Darwinian (i.e. make it painfully obvious that survive depends on it). The US population has been lulled into a false sense of security that the US will always be on top and that Americans have the "freedom" to do as they choose and they will be okay regardless of what they choose. That part of the "American Dream" has to be torn down -- because it is untrue. It is not okay to believe in views that are contrary to science and still expect the future to turn out well.
nice dream, huh...
As someone living in one of those countries, I want innovation. If your country has no interest in participating that's fine, but don't presume to speak for everyone.
Hire Mr. Rychek as teacher from Starship Troopers!
Make all kids earn their education by keeping their skool clean.
I heard this on the radio last week:
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/05/147980299/tough-love-reading-laws-target-third-graders"
They were debating should they spend $10,000 to have a child repeat the 3rd grade because they can't read at grade level OR pass them on to 4th grade and spend $10,000 on tutoring for two years. So flunk a child, and punish the child with shame OR pass the child, and punish the child with an unrealistic sense of accomplishment. Both ideas punish the taxpayer. If a child cannot read by that age, in my very humble opinion, we should be looking to punish the parent.
Education begins at home. That is where it needs to be fixed. A child is like an investment: if you invest nothing you should expect to get nothing. If this debate is about developing a recipe for success, let's try to stay away from the topics of public education and unions and focus on those recipes. My recipe includes having lots of books and spending lots of time reading them to my children.
Well, I learned something today.
Thank you!
lack of Vocational and to much college is doing it now if they had a good Vocational / tech system to take the not college material people and the not college material (job trading / skills) on to there own track then that can free up the systems for the people and skills who are college material. Better then jamming them all though the same system.
If you're on the high school football team you practice football after school with a coach dedicated to improving your skills.
Where's the after school coach for math? If you have a tutor it is usually to bring you up to the level of the other students. Not to help you become better than the math students in other schools.
Yet someone skilled in moving a ball down a field gets paid a LOT more than someone skilled in math.
Easy. Fuck the union. Make it a system where you can get fired if you don't do well. Base pay on performance, not seniority.
Ok, so how do you want this to be measured? It's easy to scream "performance", but much harder to actually quantify. By student performance on tests? That what we have now, and we have teachers just teaching tests. And what if a teacher's class has a large number of students that are bad test takers? Are they SOL? Observations? Unless you are constantly observing the class, those would be worthless. Student evaluations? If the teacher actually disciplines their students, the students will give them bad reviews because they dont like the teacher. But a teacher that let's the students run the class will get a good eval because the students like him. So if you say performance based, you better have a good system in mind. Otherwise you contribute nothing.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That's all that's needed. Not people who know everything about the subject, but people who can pass that knowledge onto the students. People who can teach.
1. lower the Teacher to kid ratio to less than 20:1 so each child that needs the extra one on one attention from the teacher receives it. 2. Make sure that teacher providing the attention is well paid and well educated themselves to deal with different learning models 3. restart and make mandatory the non traditional activities that stimulate the mind & body outside of education like art, music & drama 4. a computer built into every school desk and a computer issued for home use to every single child, stripped bare of extras and used for educational purposes only.
Up to age 8 or so. Focus on reading comprehension and writing well, sprinkle with basic math skills. Lots of paper very little computer stuff. flash cards, writing, etc. Focus your attention here, extremely low student to teacher ratio for these important years. Lots of games and fun to keep the young ones happy. For the older students. 1. Test that basics are up-to par. 2. Help students who haven't gotten the basic down until they pass basics tests. 3. Computer based self paced learning with as much labs as possible. You'll need some teachers to help students when they struggle. Also lots of labs. Teachers don't need be super qualified but need a good understanding of their specialty field. 4. Don't let students progress who haven't passed the steps below. No biology without proving good basic science understanding. Allow students to graduate early. 5. Allow young people to get jobs but make sure to give the opportunity to return to study, aka if 16 year olders don't want to learn advanced math don't make them, etc. But if they want get HS diploma before 30 let them come back for free. 6. Don't tolerate cheating from anyone. Also fund schools based on number of students only. Don't give rewards for good schools or extra help to bad school this create more problems then it solves. 6. Fire and replace staff at failing schools.You can then give funding boost for a few years to bring schools up to par only after get rid of the problem.
Spend the money convincing parents and govt busybodies that education is intensely personal and each child will, no matter how much effort is spent on them, achieve only to their own maximum potential. There is a huge difference between the top 10% and bottom 10% in academic achievement, but right now the big thing seems to be to force all kids to learn exactly the same amount and then measure the schools on how closely they come to making all students perform to a mythical average standard.
Nothing could be more harmful to our kids.
Above average kids need an extra challenge, and those kids with the potential for some seriously high-end education should not be held back in public schools, and their parents should not have to resort to putting their kids into expensive private schools. Likewise, kids who are at the lower end of academic potential should not be made to feel inadequate if despite all their hard work, they do not achieve to the standards set. Forcing a standard that all kids can achieve is simply enforcing mediocrity on our children.
Instead, an approach similar to the one I first saw in my own high school ought to be considered as a model for all public schools. My school had a 4-track system. The primary tier was for the 60% or so students who were "average". These courses challenged these students without either boring or embarassing them, and the classes were structured to minimize the effects of the "average" disruptive student as well. The next track had about 20% of the students, those who were either a bit above average in capabilities or who simply possessed a better focus for the school environment. Classroom disruptions were almost non-existent mostly because students who disrupted these classes were placed back in the primary track. The next track was for those 10% students who were clearly above average, and who consistently performed well with their grades, comprehension, and in various types of tests. There were ZERO disruptions in these classes, and students who qualified for these classes (mostly through testing and observation) loved the extra challenge. The final 10% track was for students who were getting no benefit from the normal classes, for various reasons. Some simply could not sit still through a class, some simply progressed slowly. These students were taught in much smaller classes by highly talented teachers (often the ones teaching the "top" track classes) and their education focused on things that could help them succeed later in life.
One thing was VERY clear in all of the classes... Nobody was given a free ride, and the teachers and faculty did not say or imply that failing to go to college was somehow a failure to succeed in life. All students were encouraged to apply to college if they wanted, and some of the classes in all tracks, especially in the junior and senior years, were targeted specifically at preparation for college entrance. But the career counselors presented both college and direct entry job prospects after high school with equal respect. Because they realized that some students simply wouldn't benefit from college and might even be badly harmed by an unsuccessful college attempt. This is why the school included vocational elective courses for everyone.
So my suggestion is to give the $10 million to someone who can figure out how to convince the meddling govt busybodies to get their fingers out of public schools, and let the schools set their own priorities and standards based on the student populations they have. Because each student is going to have different capabilities and trying to force them all into one single mold, or even trying to prepare ALL of them for college, is pretty destructive to almost every student including both high and low achievers.
So X (what is wrong with education here) has not been defined ... ...
Which means that a plan to fix X is sort of impossible at this point
But you've already determined that there needs to be a way of "weeding out the bad teachers" in the plan.
Sounds to me that your REAL goal is "weeding out" some teachers. And then basing a "plan" around that.
How about we stick to finding X first?
What, specifically, is WRONG with education today?
Is any other country doing it better? How?
What we need is a holodeck.
Where we can simulate every posible learning experience.
Having recently joined a major world-wide IT company that strongly uses and defends agile methods for development projects, I got my self thinking: what if we try to apply agile concepts for the educational scenario?
For instance, my team does daily stand-up meetings, where each member of the team talks about whatever tasks he did for the project in the last 24 hours, pointing out difficulties that could warrant help from others; in education, we could have multiple students assigned different tasks, and have they quickly elaborate on what have they learned and what are they struggling with, so that the other students and the teacher may help him. We could also copy the idea of pair programming, and have students pair up randomly to complete their tasks on a daily basis, so as to foster cooperation and communication skills.
Sure, we would still need some measure of actual lecture being given by the teacher/professor, but more focus should be given on teaching students to build their knowledge by their own research. I think that most of the time the teacher should be going rounds around the class to help students and assess their progress. Alike agile, everything should be continuously tested; instead of big, stressful exams every two months or so, students should be able to demonstrate their acquired knowledge - both orally and in written - on daily basis.
All of this may sound a bit alike constructivist method, but I want to avoid that road; in my opinion, constructivism's exaggerated leniency/freedom is a recipe for disaster; my approach would have the teacher in a stronger guidance position (such as a project manager), closely watching the group's performance and enforcing a pace. The concept of a student failing should still exist, and should actually be much more common than currently, making it less traumatic; as in agile, we have to fail fast: advancement cycles could be MUCH shorter (think a fortnight), and a failing student should be brought to some reinforcement class on the specific subject he is behind.
I also think it's important to make learning environments as flexible as possible. Allowing students to broadly specialize as early as possible is good for students and for overall productivity. I'm thinking of highly specialized online components mixed in with more traditional classes.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds -- Albert Einstein
Well, if I had a magic wand to wave, I'd abolish every College of Education at every university in the U.S.A, and require that all teachers have degrees in the subjects that they teach (e.g. mathematics, history, physics, etc.).
Degrees in education boomed beginning in the late 50's to early 60's, which happens to correspond very nicely with the start of the decline in K-12 education. Based on my own observation of many B.S.Ed. graduates, I believe there's a great deal of causation behind that correlation.
Hiring teachers on the basis of "knowing how to teach" has been about as successful as hiring managers on the basis of "knowing how to manage". The consequences have been even worse - a badly run company can be turned around by new management, but badly-educated children are much, much harder to fix.
60 minutes - http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57394905/khan-academy-the-future-of-education/
conversely, fix the economic engines, create the jobs needed, education fixes follow BUT you cannot allow people to coast along sucking off the system not following this track. There needs to also be a strong disincentive for the choice of being an unproductive member of society...
I find it disappointing how often people keep trying to duct tape a textbook and a video game together. It inevitably ends up the worst of both: a boring game with some shallow facts littered around.
Compare this to the Exploratorium: lots of things set up that are perfectly fun to play with in their own right, and only a minimal amount of writeup and lecture surrounding them in a nonimposing way... But all of them intriguing in a way that makes you stop and think: "wait... How does that WORK?". Once that moment strikes, there is absolutely nothing that can keep a kid from wandering around the machine a dozen times, pulling the lever and watching carefully to see the result, sometimes given a hint by someone wandering by, until they figure it out.
My idea of the best education ever is to just keep tantalizing kids with something neat that's suited to their level to get their curiosity going, then just keep giving them the resources they need to learn about it.
Before someone mods you down, the head of the Finish education system (rated at the top), completely agrees with you -- they specifically avoid the competition aspects of education:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
It's about cooperation, not competition. They let the teachers judge the progress, not standardized testing from on-high. There are no private schools. There are no fees for education (other than taxes).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This isn't a game or something that is fixed by simply throwing money at. It is a social problem first and foremost. The culture of this country does not appreciate education, and the idea of studying as hard as South Koreans or Japanese is seen as if it were child abuse or something like that.
>SNIP<
Do that and in a generation you'll see a change, all without throwing the coffers out of the window and without looking for the next e-silver bullet.
Wow, it's a good thing you're here and reading this! It sounds like you have this all figured out!
Increasing the number of hours, having children stand when the teacher enters and leaves the room, de-emphasizing college in favor of vocational training - all of that makes perfect sense!
It's almost like, dare I say it, you've got the answers in hand! All of your suggestions strike at the very heart of why education sucks in this country - have you contacted Peter yet? You should, you know...
Three things, though.
Firstly, children are naturally learners. Given the chance, they will drink from the fountain of information for as much as they can hold, and then come back for more the next day. Anyone who has raised children knows this - they are insatiably curious and inventive and experimental.
Secondly, learning is inherently fun and rewarding. This is an evolutionary survival trait, and is the reason for point #1 above. It takes a decade or more of forced, spoon-fed boredom before they come to associate learning with pain.
Thirdly, today we know a whole lot more about the psychology and physiology of learning than we did when the school system was first implemented. For example, do you know why the standard courses include trigonometry and not, for example, probability? Trig is important, but Prob is much more useful in daily life.
Your points are just a rehash of the authoritarian view commonly held by the American school system. It amounts to nothing more than insanity: since the techniques aren't working, let's do them even more!
The post, and Peter in particular, is looking for alternatives to the current system, not more of the same. It expresses the opinion that maybe there are ways that are better than what we are using.
More of the same won't solve anything. STFU.
If teachers can teach kids to pass a sufficiently rigorous test, I think we could all be pretty satisfied. The problem is the test, not that performance is linked to testing.
Make the test much, much longer. It should be 4 or 5 days long at the end of each year. Make the tests much more broad as well. Then let the teachers teach to it.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
My first suggestion would be to go back over the work of those who have studied this problem in depth. Recommended reading: Maria Montessori, Ivan Illich, Rudolph Steiner (That last one is a bit fruity but there are still some interesting ideas in it).
Having done that myself to a limited degree, I can identify numerous areas where improvement is possible. Firstly I think the concept that you learn X at age Y should be ditched. If you don't know how to read at age 5Y you should still be able to use the standard education system, as most information in modern society is less prevalent than reading, and there should be nothing stopping me from learning high school geography for example at 29, and nothing forcing me to learn it at 16. Which brings me to the second area, and in my mind the most important: No one should be forced to learn anything, learning should be self directed and interest based. This is where people often jump down my throat and say 'that would never work'. Ivan Illich has many strong arguments for this idea, but I usually go the route of disputing the objections. Axioms: people dont like learning, learning is necessary. Therfore: people must be forced to learn. The problem is axiom 1. People love learning, all animals do, it is called play. This is an artificial distinction in my opinion as play and education were basically synonymous for millions of years, until the education system was invented. If you take an average child before school age, they are generally full of question, always exploring and testing. Then you send them to school. Let's just say that it is not inconceivable that with a better education system people might enjoy learning. They might continue to learn throughout life and without the need for government funding or attendance legislation. The goal of learning should be to teach the value of learning. Another area that could be improved, and the primary one being discussed by other posts in this thread, is the relationship between teachers and education, in that it is clearly dysfunctional in the current system. All of us at one time or another have had teachers that made us worse at the subject they taught. This is not the teachers' fault alone, there are circumstances such as their own education, their working conditions, the attitudes of parents, students and other staff, personal life, health, etc. This is a failure of the system. The avenue I would pursue in rectifying this would be to look at reducing the role of teachers in the system. I am not suggesting their replacement by technology, whilst this seems attractive on the surface, it is severely limited and could even be counter-productive in many cases. I would look more in the direction of students teaching each other. Developing networks of people with similar interests and levels of understanding, and moving the role of teacher to a more passive one. Teachers should be there to oversee the learning, and make sure the correct teaching is being presented and that misconceptions/mistakes don't get caught up in the program. They should also be there as an expert, to demonstrate procedures and answer questions. The idea that the teacher has to regulate every step of the learning process is one of the reasons their role is currently not working. There are many more areas that need work and new ideas, but this is a post on slashdot, not a novel. Oh and Please don't go the addictive games route. If a game has to be addictive to get played then it has no value, if it had value it would not need to be addictive. Games as education is a great idea in general, just remove the word addictive from the sentence.
Here's an idea -- stop wasting money on students who can't learn anything. Vocational training is an answer.
Education can't be fixed by an idea. Education is a cultural, social, and economic "problem".
Psychological tricks like gamifying the system won't change a culture which doesn't encourage learning and sometimes actively discourages it. A Khan Academy won't help students who don't feel at ease at home because their family is riddled with stress and hostility. A Khan Academy won't help a kid who doesn't have access to a personal computer and internet. "But everyone has access to the internet nowadays or will have one real soon, right?" Not even close.
You can't make the teacher a high status vocation as a matter of policy. You can't make teachers respectable authority figures overnight. You can't change the reputation of an education system in the eyes of employers just like that. You can't end racism and discrimination against students with a simple solution. You can't magically eliminate the helplessness and despair of students who know that no matter what they'll do, their lives will turn to shit.
Education is a giant system embedded in society. Innovations are welcomed, but only fools think it can be fixed. If the culture and the society and the economy don't change for the better, the most you can do is patch the education system.
We're monkeys programmed to learn by interacting with things. Any learning system that stuff kids in a classroom 7-10 hours a day, behind a desk staring at books is doomed to failure.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It's not like there's one problem, and therefore only one solution. A lot of things need to be changed. Improvement in any of them is progress.
Meh, I think it's far more damaging to (A) think a school is a business or (B) pay teachers less than any other degree-requiring profession.
The day that a stellar teacher's pay exceeds other professions, you get to talk about how teachers have become too powerful. Until then, engineers and lawyers and doctors and politicians get zero sympathy from me when they rant about invented horrors involving teachers unionizing.
Personally, I also know that opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one, taint nothin' special about yours.
--
(That taint pun was a freebie, BTW. Froth up some lube and a bit of fecal matter and you've got a Santorum.)
Stop trying to "fix" it because every time you do, you just end up fucking it up even more.
if we get ride of bullying and make learning and being smart cool the education of our youth will follow
The problem are parents! Plain and simple, you don't have to debate it.
You either make the time and are involved in your child's education process are you are not.
If you don;t involve yourself and teach them that education is valuable from the beginning you are a failure as a parent.
Its just that simple.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
There is an earlier /. article today on a new way to think about learning.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/11/1927219/a-better-way-to-program
It would be great if there were interactive educational applications like the ones
that Bret Victor talks about.
This article is also very interesting. http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/ It points out that, when we learn we need to focus more on recalling the information. Sites like khanacademy present the information in small chunks that are easy to understand but if the student doesn't practice recalling the information, then she/he is at a disadvantage.
Finally, there is this video by Sir Ken Robinson which talks about the issues pretty well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded#!
Increase teacher pay to the point where it's one of the top-paying professions. Then the best minds will compete for teaching jobs and will figure the rest out themselves.
It's not hard, just expensive.
one of my friends runs the premier english school in taipei and what his philosophy in schooling isn't just educating the students, its educating the parents. he literally has classes that the parents are forced to go to where he teaches them how to parent their children because the majority of parents don't know how to do it right. and his method has been successful. he consistently produces children that score highest in the country and make it into the ivy league schools back here in the states.
I find it amazing that Khan Academy has only been mentioned twice, once dismissively. The idea of flipping the classroom is a paradigm shift and puts more responsibility on the parent(s) to ensure their child is taking their lessons.
Thank you for pointing out the idiotic grammatical mistake. If I were to give a head-full-of steam (and little else) challenge to the space program, I would try not to start by getting the rules of gravity wrong. In this vein, the head-in-the ass behind (hehe) this tips off his incompetence.
The problem, if there is one, in education is not the lack of crowd-sourcing or "powerful, addictive games". These may be part of the solution, perhaps as likely as my toe lint is part of the solution, but addressing the as yet undefined education problem as requiring some of a set of randomly selected edgy-sounding, poorly thought out social experiments, is kinda stupid. That shouldn't discourage the "X-prise"; in fact I may have stolen it from their mission statement.
Is there any chance that these over privileged, self promoting bits of chaff might donate some money to a worthwhile cause to help education as a side effect of their vanity project? If so, all good; pat them on the head, and tell them they made education 20% cooler.
This sort of non-interactive learning works fantastic for about 10-15% of the population.
I suppose we just ignore the rest, yeah?
Seriously, if this was all teaching was, we wouldn't have any problems at all. Even the most simple-minded bureaucrat would have figured it out a long time ago. Sadly (for those people pushing such simplistic ideas), this is a naive view, to be kind. Reciting facts and stories is the easiest part of teaching. Actual quality teachers (in the K-12 range) do everything you describe but monitor the students in real time to try to get everyone --not just the 10-15% who can learn by hearing something once-- to understand.
Furthermore, straight lectures are a poor mechanism for teaching a wide variety of things. Yes, Slashdot is a horrible place to try and get this message across because, despite the high average IQ here, most people have very little experience with people who think about the world in fundamentally different ways. Some of the very best lessons are interactive in nature, challenging students understanding and perceptions at the very moment that it begins to develop. Your pre-recorded lectures just can't do that.
So yeah... your ideas would be fantastic... at creating a broken education system that only serves a small number of students.
There aren't enough smart people in the labor market! I'm trying to run a business here and in order to make anything resembling a profit I need a labor pool full of well-educated, talented people who are happy and excited to accept wages at or below $20 an hour (though actually I wouldn't pay them a wage, but a salary, so I can get those long ours out of them for free).
Supply and demand right? Increase the pool of educated labor and the price goes down, which is exactly what I want.
So get on it!
You have been rated 'interesting' but your post is most insightful. He is indeed looking in the wrong place, and you point out the reason why: this is a social problem, society is the problem; so there are only slow fixes, and the quick-fixers are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem.
Personally, I'd like to ban collective bargaining in jobs where people hold the public hostage like schools, public transportation, and police. Because of it in Ontario we have bus drivers who are paid more than nurses. We also have an abundance of teachers, but supply and demand can't work where a union says you can't pick the best of the bunch.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Problem is ignorant people make bad decisions about things they know nothing about. Politicians generally know nothing of what they talk about and sell people on things they know nothing about.
Everybody seems to think they are a dentist because they had fillings. Education should be the same way and in addition the education experts vastly more difficult profession than some mouth mechanic.
If you want to fix education in the USA the 1st thing you can do is remove political involvement in "fixing" the system. That will not happen because Americans love to shift responsibility from the top on down to the citizens themselves, especially the parents-- their brats can do no wrong and nothing is their parenting! I know teachers, the previous generation was a lot closer to "how hard should I hit my child for misbehaving?" and the next generation was "my little johnny says you are a bad teacher, why can't you teach him?". As the USA goes down the drain even more desperation and blame shifting will happen along with more panic.
Another factor is that the USA thinks it is on the top of the world and their limited world view is WAY behind reality and its not surprising since the general perceptions are about a generation behind. The world education rates have gone up worldwide by huge amounts with many nations on par with the USA that were previously way behind. There is a LIMIT to what can be achieved (and measured) so as everybody progresses the gap between the top and majority gets smaller-- the benefits of being ahead become smaller-- even if your nation is at the TOP the whole time the difference becomes negligible so who is on top then no longer matters as it once did. The great benefits of education the USA had is being minimized as others continue to progress forward; therefore, to some degree a relative judgement error is highly likely.
Plus there is the misconception that education == job. There is a job problem and it will be getting worse people are looking for scapegoats and excuses and education is going to be put under more pressure to be a simple job training program; career is not important if you just need a job and there are not enough to go around.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
1.Eliminate seniority pay and tenure for teachers and make it easier to fire those teachers who are clearly doing a bad job. Pay new teachers more to encourage new teachers who are genuinely interested in teaching to join the profession.
2.Eliminate "no child left behind" and have a culture where teachers CAN and DO issue fails to those students who dont understand the work. And yes, hold students back if that's what it takes. This includes students who fail in class but are allowed to keep going anyway because they happen to be good at Basketball or Football or some other sport.
3.Eliminate standardized tests as a way of measuring student performance or setting school funding.
4.Make it easier for those kids who dont want to go to college but go to a trade school or something similar instead
5.Rewrite curricula to be more than just memorization of facts.
Make the science curriculum fun again and bring back actual experiments the kids can do (and not just classes where the kids watch the science teacher do something and make notes on it)
Make the social science curriculum more than just memorization of facts and find ways to show more.
In math, come up with real world examples (in the textbooks etc) kids can relate to and show kids that yes they will use it in the real world
In English, bring in more creative writing
In general though, we should be encouraging creativity and most importantly we need to have kids that aren't afraid to ask why something is the way that it is and to question the world instead of just accepting what they are told.
6.Get rid of all the soft drinks, chocolate bars, chips, deep fried gunk and other unhealthy food from the schools. Start offering healthier food to students (and yes there ARE ways to offer healthy food that students will eat AND that don't cost too much per serve). Start by removing ALL the vending machines selling all those empty calories.
7.Find ways to make P.E. fun AND provide exercise at the same time (and make sure EVERY student is getting good exercise as part of their school week, not just those that are good enough to be on one of the top sports teams).
8.Introduce some new subjects to schools, particularly health education (which would include education on how to eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle as well as why tobacco and other drugs are bad for you) and financial education (which would include teaching kids about budgets and saving and that credit cards and loans are NOT free money and how much they will end up paying back on those loans)
I'm reminded of the adage about horses, water and drinking. The amount of effort today's students are willing to put forth is pretty amazingly low. That's more or less because even with a low level of effort (and correspondingly low performance) they're in no danger of: 1) being kicked out of school, 2) being held back a grade, or 3) being routed onto a "non-college" track. You're left with self-motivation (which is semi-rare) and external consequences assigned by parents. Only many parents opt out, so often you don't even have that. Most recommendations for "fixing" education deal with tweaking "the water" in the horse analogy so that it's somehow more nourishing. The best, most effective water in the world isn't worth much, though, when the horse won't drink.
The Neatherlands already fixed education. All you do is ban private schools and require all schools receive equal funding proportionate to their student body. When the rich kids have to go to the same quality of school as the poor kids, well what do you know? The schools get better. It's not rocket surgery.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
As in many areas, perhaps the United States doesn't need to invent anything radically new, just copy what works elsewhere.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Getting rid of "bad teachers" is a dog whistle.
Suppose I'm setting up a web site for a business.
The FIRST thing we discuss is NOT how to get rid of "bad programmers".
If I go into an existing business because they're having "problems" with their systems the FIRST thing we discuss is the exact nature of the "problems" they're having.
How to "get rid of bad" employees is NOT part of that discussion.
Yet it keeps popping up in these "education" discussions because it is a dog whistle. It makes no sense in context.
Problem #1: The general practice of the teacher presenting information in lecture / lab / reading assignments and then having have a test on randomly picked facts from lecture/lab/reading assignments is extremely frustrating, futile, and stressful. There is no way for the students to know if they have studied enough or not. If nothing else is ever fixed, fix this PLEASE. This leads to a grading system that grades people well for being able to GUESS or PREDICT whats going to be on the test. Those that GUESS or PREDICT better as to what is going to be on the test WASTE less time than everyone else and study the material more effectively. This system is radically detrimental to someone who is less speedy since everyone has the same amount of time.
Problem #2: The amount of knowledge we have collected on our planet is larger than anyone can learn in a timely fashion. For the rest of the existence of the human race, we will need technology to deal with the volume of what we know. We should modify our education system to use internal (in brain), and external (electronic access) knowledge.
Problem #3: The education system is paying for access to public domain knowledge in copyrighted books every year, over and over again. Publish all public education material in public non-profit educational learning center website that has NO restrictions on access. Make it available to at least every US citizen, all the time. Make it the JOB of the teachers and students to peer review and upgrade the course material if necessary and teach only from the public learning center.
Wish #1 : Teach how to memorize, learn, and apply wisdom, part of the core of the education system. It should be a class right next English, Math, and Science.
Wish #2 : Make logical deductive reasoning part of the core of the education system. It should be a class right next English, Math, and Science.
I am a 39 year old Mensa member, and have a bachelors degree in Computer Science.
I never said to get rid of the class room system we have, but add this on top of the system.
;)
It'd be great for those who like to read ahead, those who have no teachers to begin with (3rd world countries), and home schoolers.
Maybe someway down the road, you can replace class room systems, but I merely say to increase the functionality of them. If you replace books with ebook readers, it will save school systems an est average of 10,000$ per child for K-12. Surely some one knows where you can use money to increase the functionality of our current class room system.
God spoke to me
Remove all politicians from having any say in education.
Schools should be held to a standard, stop passing kids that cant read, do not be afraid of failing students. Stop putting the football program ahead of the math and science program. School is 365 days a year, get rid of the useless summers off.
In fact, if it's Public school, 20% of all taxes should go to education. time to stop putting as little as possible into the education of our future.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
As a math teacher, I'm tired of every Joe Millionaire stepping up and saying that education needs to be fixed. Education isn't the problem. For the millionaires who don't understand yet...public education is not about raising test scores. Public education is about civilizing our citizens. Without public education, the public will not understand civility en mass. As a teacher in a high-poverty rural school district, and I've seen how uncivil kids and adults can be even when they're educated. If we don't force parents to educate their kids, they'll run free, they'll run wild, and they'll be a plague on our populace.
That being said, if you want to raise test scores, there is one variable that has more correlation than all the others combined. Poverty. And I have the numbers to back it up. Using my home state of Minnesota as an example, look at the state test results hosted by the Star Tribune. Run a correlation study between percent proficiency on either test, and the % of test takers that are low-income. (Remove the districts w/ the small samples of less than 10 -- they're specialized cooperatives & magnet schools whose sample of students taking the test do not follow the same sampling as with general Independent School Districts.) Even better, run it on just the Minneapolis / St. Paul Metro Area districts.
I haven't calculated the results for 2011 yet, but I ran it for 2010 in the metro area. Metro-wide, the correlation coefficient between % proficient and low-income for math was -0.91 and -0.93 for reading. That's insane. You almost never get correlation coefficients that good anywhere in statistics, but it's happening here. Forget teachers. Forget schools. The single biggest factor impacting education is poverty and low-income. (And for those who want to chant, "correlation is not causation," I challenge you to walk into any inner-city school district and witness the behavior yourself. I promise you, there's more than just correlation there.)
If millionaires really wanted to fix schools, they'd have a much greater impact on education (and our society at large) if they gave away their money to the poor. Better yet, set up a stipend program like Brazil and other countries have.
You can still get a high quality education in the US, if you are willing to homeschool or pay for your children to go to a private school.
(Note: There are extremely rare exceptions to the following, they are not absolute, but the exceptions are negligible and irrelevant. The redundancies and misspellings herein are a result of the public schools I attended.)
1. Parents who "don't care" about their children's education, almost always aren't willing to pay for it, and the public school system reflects it. This doesn't make all private schools good, but it does make public schools terrible.
2. If a parent doesn't value school, a child significantly "under-performs." Great teachers, great facilities, and great curriculum do not matter if the parents undermine and sabotage the child.
3. Bureaucrats make terrible and frightening teachers. If you aren't frightened by bureaucrats, it is only because you don't fully understand the threat they pose to society.
4. No amount of money will make a student learn if they do not want to learn. Bureaucrats will still be glad to accept the money, and will still fail to effectively teach even the students who want to learn.
5. Dissolve the Federal Dept of Education. Cost has gone up and school quality and performance has continued to drop. For the US, the federal govt shouldn't be in charge of education, the states should. Any federal tax money spent on education should be payable to the state, in the form of a voucher which the PARENTS register for use at any school the PARENTS choose within that state. State controlled schools again, plus parent choice, but the federal govt can still help out some of the poorest states, like New Mexico and Arkansas. Easy button.
6. Stop pretending that a single solution is the best solution. If someone attempted to make all of the children wear the same size and style of shirt, shoes, pants, underwear, glasses, etc, they would be ridiculed or ignored. It is absurd. People learn at different rates and in different ways. Little Timmy can be at "grade level" 7 for math, 3 for reading, and 8 for science. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. He may be an abstract and visual learner, while Sally needs concrete experimentation. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.
If you treat children like cattle, you'll get the same level of education that a cow recieves. Anything that doesn't conform will be culled. Anything that does conform will be a mindless drone carefully prepared to be led to the slaughterhouse by self-promoting bureaucrats.
Forget the misguided idea that everyone is "equal" no matter their IQ or the effort they put in. "Leave" freeloaders "behind", as it were. Segregate schools into "gifted" and "not", make transition possible for those who want to get to the "gifted" track. Make the "gifted" track hard, but interesting. Sorry, kids, if you don't perform, back to the "crappy" school you go. Put the bar for "gifted" school above the internationally accepted standard, don't admit everyone. Adjust the split of resources between "gifted" and "crappy" track in accordance with the number of kids in each.
Right now the situation is absurd. My second grader is two years ahead of everyone else in his class academically (it remains to be seen if he's gifted or not, he's quite lazy), yet he can't get into a "gifted" program because spots are allocated by (wait for it...) lottery. This is his first year in public school, and probably the last. He will go to a hardcore private school starting next year, and I'll be shelling out something like 20K/year to keep him there. I find it rather unfortunate that smart kids from low income families will not be able to realize their potential. I also find it unfortunate that I'm paying real estate taxes for the shitty schools that don't teach kids anything, and have no real means to change the situation.
If you want better education, then you need to have it be a funding priority. Right now it is a talking point priority, but when it comes to putting real money into education it will usually lose out to inmates in prison. When the states fall on hard times, education always suffers. When times are good schools are the last thing that gets in on it. Becoming a teacher is not the path to fame, fortune and wealth. Typically becoming an educator means sacrifice.
There is the saying:
Those who can do; those who can't teach.
That is part of the problem with education. If you want people who know what they are about you will have to pay for it.
If teaching could compete in the marketplace for top talent, maybe they wouldn't get the brightest because I don't think education is ever going to pay "that" well. But they could get and retain kind, competent and knowledgeable educators who know their stuff and have the respect of parents and the community. That would go a lot farther than any computer software of fancy electronics.
"Fixing" education is a complex issue and will require a complex solution.
To quote Albert Einstein, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
Cooperation over competition (ala Finland) is a fantastic idea.
As is educating PARENTS as well as children.
I'd love to see a national education program with an emphasis on the Constructivism or "discovery" model, where individuals learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction.
Lets start re-educating the average American citizen on things they may have missed (or just didn't understand) during the primary educational period along with introducing new scientific developments and discoveries.
No. THAT would be the point I've been making all along. You have to identify the problem FIRST. In that example, the problem is that the business will be bankrupt ... in a certain time frame.
Right now you have not been able to identify the problem in the education system.
How? Aside from the fact that you want to be able to fire certain teachers? How is is "screwed up"?
I'm not defending anyone.
I'm pointing out that you're using a "dog whistle".
You cannot describe the problem in any specific terms.
But you KNOW that the "plan" MUST include a way to get rid of certain teachers.
I've demonstrated that that approach does not make any sense in this context. It's backwards.
My solution: since corporations are the ones with the money and who ultimately will pay our bills, how about giving them incentives to invest in education and not expecting the public section and others to provide all the training and take on all the risk. This situation is damaging both to corporations and individuals as the corporation receives substandard education and experience for a job, and the individual without a job or switching jobs has nobody to invest in their prosperity. What a waste of talent having children live in cars with their family.
Society use your Sciences
We should take the youth with drive and interest and couple them with folks at different levels of industry. everybody wins!
More rigor, less tree-hugging and hand-holding.
Get better teachers.
Get rid of shitty teachers.
A swift way of dealing with disruptive students.
And finally get rid of the cancerous culture of ignorance some of you may remember from school: peer pressure against succeeding, and total lack of involvement from parents. (That's a tough one.)
Maybe unions are problematic. Maybe not. Seems that it is in the US.
The fundamental problem with education is that the government has it's tentacles all over it. A system based on coercion will never be innovative or effective.
Bring free market principals back to education and it will thrive.
I'm too lazy to present a cause and effect relationship here, but I suggest to anyone to look at what people like Peter Schiff and Stefan Moluneux have to say about the subject if you want a rational discourse.
It was called "The American Dream" and it promised that if you worked hard and gained an education, you could build a better life for yourself and your family. That dream was oversold, and a generation of disgruntled Boomers descended into consumerism, which sells a better dream: buy stuff and it will make you happy. Education doesn't help you get happier from buying stuff, in fact it might do the opposite. What incentive does a student have to become educated when ignorance is bliss?
OK smarty pants. How does Apple computer measure performance? How does the army do it? How does any successful org do it?
I'll tell you. Your manager sits you down and says he likes this or that, and to improve this or that. Yep. The middle layer actually does something. People actually use judgement. Imagine that!
Bring back boarding schools. No point in making the perfect school if they're going home to apathetic and intrusive parents. Just like how the military functions to take the worst individuals you can imagine and mold them into something useful, removing students from a bad environment is really the only method that could help a lot of kids whose lives are spent more busily handling their personal affairs outside of school to be able to focus properly in school.
Of course, then you run the risk of the boarding school becoming that negative environment, but that's something that can take oversight and criticism. Parents only receive attention if they stop feeding their children or run them over with a car; outside of that, simple mental neglect is not a matter of the state.
Make better use of available data so that problem students are distinguished from problem teachers and problem schools. Use standardized end-of-year testing, student grades, seating charts, EVERYTHING that can be mined for additional data.
Any decent teacher can tell you there are some kids who shouldn't be put in classrooms together. They can tell you that certain children do better at math in the mornings, others in the afternoons. Wouldn't it be great if we could take information like that beyond anecdotes and turn it into something useful? Imagine a school where it could be observed that a particular student's grades slipped every time they were in a classroom with their best friend, where a dip in grades across the board indicates problems outside of school and can be approached with counseling, where teachers aren't held accountable for every student who blows off a test when the students can be demonstrated to have a history of bad testing.
The biggest "problem" with our educational system is that kids living in households below the poverty level do poorly in school.
And in the last 30 years or so, the number of children living in poverty has increased dramatically.
Want to "fix" education? Make it so there are fewer poor kids that don't get a healthy diet or enough exercise.
It's that simple. I don't think anything else will "magically" make our schools better.
That's not to say that school doesn't suck for a lot of kids (even ones that aren't poor). It did for me, but lots of things in life suck. It seems to me that the "broken" educational system is probably one of the least of our societal ills. And that's me saying that, as someone who hated school most of the time.
I'll single out one facet of education, and that is mathematics. The pinnacle of pre-college math study is calculus. Arthur Benjamin(of Mathemagics fame) in my view has a simple solution for math education in school. Rather than making calculus the pinnacle, you make statistics the pinnacle. These days I feel that school doesn't teach what regular people need for life skills. We use statistics and probability every day in one form or another. Arthur Benjamin gave his talk about this at a TED convention, and it can be found here: ere http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html . I think if people start breaking down education into core areas and start finding solutions to more specific problems that plague educational system. Art has a simple, but good idea.
Are we talking college or high school? If it's the latter, then quit teaching kids to pass a standardized test and actually educate them. Let the kids who don't want to go to school drop out and get work. Seriously, the world NEEDS toilet scrubbers and burger flippers just like we need doctors and innovative visionaries. We'd save an assload of money to better educate kids who really want to learn than wasting it on kids who go to school because we obligate them to.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I have recently returned to college and I have encountered a lot of waste in modern education. Almost universally the books are of poor quality and massively overpriced with companies spending more on marketing then on having the textbook be accurate and complete.
What we should do is create at least a national textbook standard and have those books available to all students. So we would have one organic chemistry 1 textbook, 1 calc 3 textbook etc as part of a national standard. These standards would all be in ebook format and free for any student. I suspect this would save a few hundred million per year and it would be a fairly easy process to do.
Right now though colleges tell you that you can use an ebook but they don't allow them on exams while physical textbooks are allowed. With a national standard we could have approved ereaders and no longer have this problem. We could eliminate a lot of environmental damage and energy usage by using electronic textbooks instead.
In the end tax dollars are paying for most of the books anyways and a single textbook costs more than a kindle does and a kindle can hold many books. Each student could just be given a kindle and use it for college and we would save a lot of money and could get better textbooks or at least no worse then we have now.
Mostly though the problem is that education is still firmly in the pen and paper world where teachers look at chalkboards and write down information for students to parrot back in an exam. Very little is done for actual understanding since testing memorization is far simpler. Until we move on to the idea that any fact you need can be looked up at any moment and instead test and teach to understanding education is going to continue to be pretty poor and turn out poor results.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Get the government out of education by privatising/deregulating, allowing competitors to fight to offer the best quality education at the lowest prices.
A government feeding and clothing your children is not a sign of a prosperous society but a sign of poverty and control. Why then do you want them (mis)educating all children?
Quantum mechanics, special relativity and general relativity are all very hard to learn, in part because they are so counterintuitive. Imagine a computer game which throws you into a universe where SR (or quantum mechanics or GR) have large, easily measurable effects - e.g. the speed of light is about 50m/s. After you've spent enough time zipping around on your relativistic motorcycle shooting zombies (or whatever), you should be able to intuitively understand SR, and the mathematics will become easy. (Well, as easy as Newtonian physics, anyhow.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Why not just allow competition, it works for everything else we do. And when I say allow charter schools, I don't mean in just poor neighborhoods. The Unions shut down good charter schools and prevent new ones from opening. It seems like an easy fix that won't cost the tax payer a penny more and will hopefully lead to higher teacher salaries.
Just look at how bad the school lunches are, ketchup and pizza are classified as vegetables. It's worse than prison food. It's a horrible disgrace.
18,000 per pupil per year in NJ, 14 student to teacher ratio = $252,000 each teacher brings in. Avg salary, 55,000. What kind of insane overhead costs are those. And these schools are all in the red anyway. Allow charter schools and I'm sure we'll get some great education considering how much we are spending already.
Let us list some of them: -teachers, good or bad, are dealt opportunity based on seniority Seniority obviously is a problem because the length of time a teacher has been teaching has little to do with their effectiveness, if anything, I'd say that the quality of teaching will remain the same since although their experience is greater, their apathy is also greater, in general of course. -teachers are themselves qualified based on the performance of their students Teacher's write and grade exams, leaving the door wide open to fraud (basically they make themselves look good). Sometimes departments will even institute policies that make it difficult for a teacher to fail a student. The problem there is that all students pass but all are most certainly not equal, so you get horribly ambiguous real life results. A lot of people are really quite dense, either from lack of effort or otherwise, and they simply wouldn't get by in a normal education system, but societies say that EVERYONE can get through it and that right there is the problem. Some people would be just fine doing manual labor their whole life, we don't all need to be brainiacs but society says we have to be and glamorizes intelligence while putting down the laymen, who we desperately need working the low level jobs. -Special education programs: my fiancé, who is a special education teacher, has great insight into special education programs. A lot of kids just don't have the skills, and they never will. They can spend 4 times as much time working on problems and exercising but they just can't do certain things, and while some of them might eventually cut it, they'll be so far behind, it'll be too late for a 'normal' education. Yet education is mandated and often these kids get a great deal more attention than gifted students. The problem there is that students who may be gifted are completely ignored, because they don't have problems. The system therefore creates a working class of morons and geniuses who all end up at or around the same level of education. The system basically aims for mediocrity for everyone. -Parents: parents want the educational system to educate their child and often leave it at that. School is just the beginning though and I sometimes wish it wasn't free, so that people would actually care about their child's education enough to provide it and PAY ATTENTION. Too often parents come into school blasting teachers for the child's poor grades, it's not a teacher's job to give a student good grades, it's their job to give each student what they need to succeed on their own and it's parents that should be providing the extra. Parents need to man up and complement the education their children get instead of JUST relying on the social systems that they have no choice but to follow. -Unions: Unions in general are a good thing, the way they function in real life is appalling, I don't need to give examples here but unions are supposed to be there to protect good employees from bad treatment, not bad employees from real life. When you see/hear a teacher who is absolutely out of line keep their job because of their union, you know something is wrong. -red tape: So many faculty members hands are tied in so many ways. Good people with good ideas are often completely helpless to act because the system they work in is 'their way or the high way'. School boards are bloated administrative messes that leach money from schools that schools could use to actually improve facilities, yet even if they did have the extra funds, the school board wouldn't allow the school to do so, because it's not mandated by the school board. The system, where everybody has to play by the same rules, whether they like it or not, whether it works or not, is a problem. I could think of more but I think i've made my point by now and I doubt anyone will have read this far anyway because we live in a society that prizes the short messages that please everyone as opposed to the real complex reality nobody likes to hear.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Teach music for the soul and gymnastics for the body. Start with music. Once these are strong, the rest will come along out of student curiosity.
Funnily enough I've been thinking about this problem for the past few weeks. The more I think about it the more I find that there are many more problems to 'fix'.
Problems:
Schools no longer teach kids in a way that expands their thinking skills. (look at the lack of balance in music, art, PE, dance. Kids need to be required to excise every part of their brain and body in a way that suits them.)
Teachers need to eat.
Teachers need to be encouraged to teach.
Students need to want to learn.
Parents need to be involved in their kids education.
People need jobs out of high school or at least a plan to gain jobs through further education.
The cost to properly teach kids far out ways what parents can afford.
Class rooms today are so big that students get 'lost' and teachers can't give students the attention they deserve.
Kid's won't always have a good home environment conducive to education.
After all of these basic problems I came up with a separate list of encouraging phenomena:
The classic remark that kids who grow up in remote places in China learn those difficult dialects. This directly correlates to a normal kid given the proper environment can learn just about anything.
There are so many 'alternative' teaching methods available that schools don't use. (talk to any home schooling parent and you'll get the list)
Kids can not only learn but if the material is interesting enough, they want to learn. (my biggest example is how kids can pour hours into WOW and me personally how I drove myself to learn piano because I didn't have to worry financially about paying for piano, music history, and music theory lessons)
Teachers want to teach but often are interrupted by things like allotted hours (so when the class is in the zone they have to stop short).
People for the most part are intelligent and when given hard tasks and put in the right environment give results.
Everyone finds at least something interesting. And somewhere in the world people will pay you for your skills. (this list breaks down into cooking, video games, and most every subject.)
Creativity and productivity are positive feedback loops.
With all of that in mind, education is no simple question. I have a few alternative ideas that I would love to see tested, but of course I'm a 20 year old cashier in community college going for a job in Software Engineering. I'm in no way able to put my ideas to the test.
My ideas:
Limit classes to 12 students per teacher.
Give the time expensive and non-crucial grading tasks to computers or teachers aids.
Introduce topics where a subject is to be taught in either one or two month segments, but for those two months at least 3 hours a day could be devoted to that subject. Allow for flexible hours so when a teacher and students are in the zone, there is no bell to disrupt learning. (I do not mean that they should learn without breaks. Fifteen minute breaks every 1:30 to 2 hours is a must to keep your body productive)
Abolish the age discrimination in schools and teach kids what they're interested in. (this would remove redundancies in courses offered and allow kids to shoot for the stars and make it)
ps I hope someone found this an interesting read.
The first step to any corrective actions must be the identification of the root problem. In this case, we're talking about the parents. Parents, in just about every capacity are the problem with modern education. They enable the school administrators to act like the morons they are. They enable the politicians to pass things like NCLB. And they enable their own precious snow flake to act like the thug in class, all the while telling them how special they are without any way to objectively measure it.
Parents need an education on what is and is not acceptable. They need to feel the motivation for making their children high performers. They need to be held accountable for their child's failings.
So good luck with that. I'm not sure there's enough money in the world to fix the parents I've seen ( short of sterilization that is, which in my opinion is the ultimate fix )
Why not have your secondary school marks become like coupons for your post-secondary school courses? Did well in math? Here's a 60% of the registered course fee coupon. This way students that work hard will likely receive the education they need.
Other posters have mentioned it, but I'll throw my two cents in.
Yes, everything from quality of teachers to more vocational training to tablets would be nice (my toddler twins and 4 year old learn a lot on the iPad).
But nothing beats involved parents who care. Almost every homeschooler I knew was well-educated. But this applies to private and public schools as well. It comes down to the parents. And we don't need the stereotypical "Tiger Mom" either.
And what is the government going to do? Force fathers not to be deadbeats? Force good parenting?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
One more practical thing which comes from teacher friends. Any student that is a disruption should be booted from the classroom. The kids that want to learn shouldn't be sacrificed to the few problem kids. Teachers and administrators need the tools to boot these kids.
From what I've heard, even mediocre teachers can do a lot when the bad apples are removed.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The main issue with the public school system is the lack of feedback from the consumer. Taxes for schooling leaves the consumer, i.e. parents, out of the loop. Parents become complacent and in a lot of areas see schools as a daycare. If the parent's money is being spent, there will be a lot more interaction with the school and the child. An open voucher system would be a good way to hold schools accountable. This way the tax dollars would follow the student.
Is there lack of preschools where you live? Usually, the answer is no. Why? There are very few if any tax funded programs for preschools. This allows for a myriad of choices, i.e. price ranges, for consumers. Competing with another business is difficult. Competing with a business which has tax funding and offers the product for "free" is very difficult. The business which is not tax funded must show quality and charge an absorbent amount of money compete with free. Phasing out tax funded schooling would allow private school tuition to normalize over time.
Lastly, grin because you might think this is ridiculous, roll back some child labor laws and mandatory schooling laws. Some people just don't have what it takes to progress further than McDonalds. (Although, I was told at Occupy Portland that "Any one can be a doctor with enough schooling." This gem as well "A garbage man and a surgeon should be paid the same.") Some people also don't have to know more than grade school math and social facts to get through life. This might also open people up to having more children because all I see coming out of a womb is 15 years of my money, your money too if the kid goes to public school, going down the hole.
If that is going to be done, you need to fund the higher education and earmark STEM R & D funds appropriately for the next 30 years or so, or else you get what we have now. It needs to be seen as a liability, same as social security.
I would say this will never be done correctly, so the government should stay out. The other problems are law of diminishing returns and that determining which fields to fund requires a self-preserving bureaucracy with the impossible job of predicting the future.
'ability' in a child is mostly a function of the environment the mother lives in when the child is in the womb. So long as the woman has proper nutrition and avoids exposure to dangerous chemicals most children are quite capable. This is why the United States has WIC. From there it's a matter of them being raised properly.
Vouchers are a terrible idea. In practice they're used to send rich kids to good schools and poor kids to bad schools. You've no doubt seen the statistics that prove how effective they are. What you're ignoring is that the private schools that benefit from vouchers can and will expel any child whose performance falls below their desired metrics. Yes, they don't do this to the rich kids, but then the rich kids have professional tutors to give them the extra attention they need to succeed.
In the end, it's all about money. Money buys a healthy stress free life for the Mom, a safe healthy environment to learn in, the extra attention to grow and develop. The only question is, is there enough money? Well, money is just a representation of the wealth of a society, and I keep hearing about how automated factories are putting people out of work. Why can't these people teach the next generation?
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Stop electing conservative politicians who want the populous to be stupid and obedient for their corporate overlords.
I accept cash.
Isn't Canada, oh, say doing much better than the U.S.? In the running for the Top 5 in 2009-2010 if the information is to be believed.
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf
you need people that can afford to teach. Teachers love teaching. They'll give up a lot for it. But there are limits. In many places teachers are paid so little they can't survive as teachers. This has been the case since the 50s, but for a long time the bulk of teachers were woman and retires. The husbands brought home enough money that their wives could afford to earn less, and the retirees had pensions. As a result we had a pool of highly skilled teachers working for much less than a living wage. As real wages declined in the 70s this wasn't true anymore. People couldn't afford to retire. Woman needed more money to keep the family afloat. Teachers began to want a living wage, which raised the cost of education. We could do without the incentives if we just had an economic base that allowed people to teach.
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That's what "dog whistle" means. You substitute your bias for what is actually being discussed.
That is why you cannot explain the problem.
That is why you keep trying to focus on the dog whistle.
Again, that's the dog whistle. You KNOW what you are talking about ... but you cannot state it in any way except to repeat the dog whistle.
What, specifically, is the problem?
You cannot identify because you are focused on the dog whistle. Otherwise you'd be able to state it before now.
And the best part is that one of us understands capitalization and one of us does not.
Computerized the Rote learning. Simple stuff like flashcards to memorized words and equations. This will hopefully free the teacher to have a more interactive class. Students learn more when their brains are engaged.
Not everything should be run like a business.
COMMUNIST!!!!
1) Documents the children produce for an important grade should not only be checked by the teacher, but another random (but relevant) teacher checks the the documentation. This other teacher is assigned by the government (at least at province/state level). If a dispute arises the government can check the results herself.
2) Discipline lazy teachers. They surface more easily due to the above.
3) Train the teachers properly to deal with aggressive parents. Teachers should also be required to have a relevant education.
4) Give the schools the ability to report parents to youth care for negligence in raising their kids when there is a correlation between bad grades and the behavior of the parents.
X prize was originally called Ansari Prize. It was donated by two Iranian Engineers Anousheh Ansari and Amir Ansari. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_PRIZE. So, what role did peter play? He carried the cheque from Ansaris to Burt Rutan I guess...
If I am not wrong, the one reason we want our children to be educated is to encourage them to think
But ... If the only reason in sending a child to school is to enable him to "find a job", then we might as well get rid of all the school and send that kid to work in the factory straight-away !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I work in public education and on a daily basis see parents who have no interest in their children's education
May I change your sentence above to:
"I work in public education and on a daily basis see educators and parents who have no interest in the children's education"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I used to teach undergraduates when I was doing my PhD and this is what I saw, from both being a student, and being an instructor
The whole thing about education has failed miserably
In many schools (from Primary School to High School to University), the curriculum was essentially "copied" from each others
Essentially, everybody has been copying curriculum from everybody else
Like in math --- Why in hell they make calculus a mandatory subject for students who are interested in mathematics ?
Students would surely benefit more from learning statistics than they would from calculus
Look around if you don't believe me --- how many universities put more emphasis on statistics than on calculus ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The first step in solving the "education problem" is to realize that there are no simple answers to solving the "education problem". If anybody claims they have a simple solution, they are probably trying to sell something. The problems of education go back many centuries. Plutarch, 2000 years ago said that "a mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled". Aristotle said that "the purpose of education is to teach us to love beauty". Our addiction to simple ideological solutions to our problems is I believe at the heart of much of our modern malaise.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It's called the free market. The main problem with education is that innovation is stifled by a lack of competition because everyone wants education to be "fair" and government funded. Quality inevitably declines because all the incentives of those within the system get mixed up. Restore competition in education and solutions will come from the market. Some ideas won't do so well, and yes, some kids will suffer because of it, but the whole will be so much better off in then end. You can't optimize efficiently without allowing experimentation.
Are there other countries that are doing better?
If so, what are their approaches?
First, you need to qualify on what "better" mean?
There are countries like Singapore and Japan that produce students who are extremely strong in math and science
At the same time, Japanese and Singaporean students are infamous for their disability of having independent thought --- the Japanese and Singaporean students strive on "hive thinking" mode
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Seriously...
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
Fundamentally, education is a social (and socialization) process. It has to come from the community. Middle-class teachers commuting to poor neighborhoods will rarely bridge the cultural gap needed to form a successful connection between teacher and student.
Beyond that, metrics get in the way of the intangibles that represent what really matters about learning. Kids these days are super-stressed and need down-time that isn't tied to a performance metric.
Eliminate screen time K-8. They get enough (too much) of it at home. There is zero competitive advantage in having a nation of kids that can use a mouse and click on icons all day. It's the most basic of skills to learn- no one is 'left behind' by an absence of screen time.
Double the time spent on physical education, with a focus on getting *outdoors*. Get some vitamin D and fresh air.
Bring back music and arts programs. So many intangible benefits- de-stressors, creative outlets, social engagement, neural development, etc, etc.
I spent hundreds of hours in band rehearsals. When I wasn't in rehearsal I ran cross-country. I paid a small amount of attention to homework and graduated first in my high-school class and then first in my engineering class. If I'd been educated under some standardized test regime I would have missed out on some of the most educational social encounters of my life. Fundamentally, I was successful because I felt I was part of a community that cared about success. Also, I was taught by teachers I could relate to.
FWIW I went to public school. Private schools were relatively rare, growing up. There was the sense that if you had to go to private school it was because you were struggling in the public system- a weak student who needed more 1:1 time. Times have certainly changed...
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
I have no need to make myself feel superior. I just am. Which is why I find it so amusing that someone demanding that teachers be fired cannot use correct punctuation when trying to support their position.
It is hilarious.
And you still have not identified the problem. How is it "substandard"? Specifically. You don't know what the word "specifically" means, do you? You fail capitalization and reading comprehension. Here, I'll help you out. From TFA:
That is specific.
All you have is your claim about "substandard" and your demand that the "fix" include firing teachers.
To repeat myself, it looks like you are more concerned with firing teachers than with identifying any real problem OR working on any plan to deal with the problem.
Dog
Whistle
I wonder if Diamandis has heard of Mathletics (http://www.mathletics.com/), or the recent World Education Games (http://www.worldeducationgames.com/)? The WEG servers processed 909 million hits last week, suggesting *somebody* is interested, possibly even addicted :-)
(Disclosure: I work for the 3P Learning, the company behind these endeavours. These opinions however are mine, not necessarily those of the company.)
For ideas on education, look at Khan Academy : http://www.khanacademy.org/
There's an interesting story there : he made videos ( on math) , because he was tutoring family members and didn't have time to tutor each.
Their reaction was that they preffered his videos over the real life variation, because they could rewind it, didn't have to ask him, etc...
The idea of Khan Academy are the following :
- Videos are superior to large room lectures ( you can rewind easily, the teacher isn't distracted having to keep the class in order, and you only need to create them once )
- Inversion of homework/lectures : watch the videos at home, and do the homework in the classroom : the videos work better because children can rewind them, and in the classroom, the teacher now has more time to actually help the children with what they don't understand
- Traditional education discourages experimentation, but does not expect mastery . Khan Academy encourages experimentation, but expects mastery :
Slipping shoelaces ?
I think you've nailed it. Students aren't animals to be trained. They are humans aware of their environments and with critical thinking abilities. Appeals to authority on why their scholastic successes "really matter" in the real world had better be supported by reality or you instantly lose credibility.
Trying to find new and innovative ways to get a dog to fetch a ball without actually delivering the promised carrot are well covered territory in business management.
Educators would be better served looking to World of Warcraft and Fallout 3 than a consultant on tricking employees in to thinking their dead end jobs will eventually offer opportunities to advance.
-instant consistent rewards for achievement
-seamless ability to track progress towards goals(leveling up)
-clear and direct relationship between short term goals and long term aspirations
-vanity based rewards(students who get good grades don't have to wear their uniforms and are allowed to show up to class late)
-cold hard cash(this will offend the idiot moralists whose protests from should be ignored)
-the ability to set their own schedule to accomplish clear stated objectives not related to "showing up"/attendance.
The common denominators of all United States public education classrooms:
-piss-poor toolbox of meaningful incentives to motivate students with(Department of Education)
-terrible metrics used to measure academic success and distribute resources/economic incentives(student attendance/standardized tests See: Department of Education)
-horrible relationship between long term outcomes and student performance(Pathetic scholarship market & FAFSA makes exaggerating your poverty & hardship a more rewarding approach to getting money to attend a degree mill/beer pong training academy.
My whole life people told me that the only way to get ahead was
Step 1: Good grades.
Step 2: University
Step 3: Guaranteed cushy job.
The more I learned about the University scholarship application process the more I realized how low the academic barriers to entry for admission in to University really are. Good grades don't make scholarships. Poor crackhead parents make scholarships. While university gpa requirements have barely moved(despite grade inflation making everyone a winner) the financial barriers to entry have gone up at something like 300% over 10 years. Translation: CPI inflation metrics are a fucking joke.
I got my high school diploma and joined the workforce rather than borrowing money to defer adulthood. I spent 6 years watching overgrown children wandering around the college town I lived in, spending money like drunken sailors.
I eventually moved to a different metropolitan zip code and was shocked to see how soft the job market really was. While Occupy Wall St. camps were being built by the people I graduated from high school with, I was getting pay raises and promotions. My peers were promised easy jobs in exchange for leaving their brains and critical thinking at the door. I turned my back on student loans and homework assigned for the purpose of diluting test scores.
Looks like there's more than one way to get ahead after all... I wonder how the finances are working for the people who told me otherwise?
But I can't. Most if not all Slashdotters are not actual teachers. I see the occasional claim that they're a teacher and yet somehow miraculously hate their union, want vouchers, or some other crazy asinine thing that no actual teacher seems to want. In most cases the issue of education is something that scientists can't solve because frankly...they're scientists. I don't pretend to be a nuclear physicist so I don't stray into the nuclear research laboratory telling everybody how to do their job yet I see everyday non-teachers assuming they know how the system works and demand to make changes to it.
Simply put the issue in most cases is class size and level of community participation. Ideal class size is somewhere around 14 pupils. The average public classroom is closing in on 30. Doubling the student body over recommended size has a negative effect. Then through into the issue the lack of community participation through parents and support groups like neighbors and such and you're bond to have a greater issue. Too much of this discussion revolves around cost-effectiveness when we should be ideally looking at effectiveness period. As it stands most in-need education systems are exceptionally poor and suffer from low funding compared to their suburban rivals. This just combines with the overall issues of diversity and classism that runs rampant in society.
So we end up with people like Michelle Malkin strolling around claiming they know the answer when they don't and feed it to the simpletons who want to unravel unions in favor of privately owned schools that turn a profit for owners rather than publicly owned ones that are truly accountable.
If he stuffed his dick in his mouth, nobody would have to figure out how his lame-ass worthless ideas couldn't hurt anyone anyways.
So, if you are near him, jam his head into his crotch and get him sucking quickly.
If you can't do that, bash him into a ceiling pipe so this ends quickly.
You don't think $80,000 (a fairly common salary for teachers after 10 - 15 years) for 9 months of work (plus Christmas and Spring breaks and other holidays) isn't good? That comes out to around $106,500 if they worked a full 12 months. That definitely puts them at a comparable pay for having a masters degree and considering that most teachers graduated near the bottom of their class (stats for the US are that 50% graduated in the bottom third of their class) and most of their masters degrees are a joke obtained from online only degree mills with special programs just for teachers who are required to get a masters, and they're actually earning much more for their actual ability than most people.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
When you teach to the test (standardized, government mandated) you create an environment in which students of any age loose any motivation/passion to learn, and teachers loose any motivation/passion to teach. Sadly, the same mentality is prevalent in most workplaces where management feels it must keep an eye on the workers. This is one reason I prefer the graveyard or back-shift...less probability a manager will be around.
There is a school in Harlem that has dramatic and unusual success in an environment in which children have failed in the past. The first thing they do is to remove children from the home. The children are allowed to visit family on Sunday afternoons only. These kids are in essence, in training from 6 am until about 10 pm and it is a six day a week regimen. It is not that the kids are deprived of fun or exercise but they function in a very controlled environment. They excel instead of failing. They are graduating from college at almost 100% . They have no drop outs or failures in school. These kids are not playing video games or zoned out in front of a TV or working part time jobs or anything else that would detract from their studies. The kids are also not in a situation where mom or dad or a sibling do not read books. In their new world everyone reads a lot. The point being that they take kids who have been expected to be academic and social nightmares and turn them into A students and the kids like it! If we did this in all public and private schools out kids could lead the world in education.
How about making teachers as well-paid and prestigious as engineers, lawyers, doctors, or technologists? W/out talented people being trained as teachers it seems the rest is secondary.
That is complete bullshit. Good students will have a thirst for knowledge no matter how bad their teacher is
Out of 100 students, there might be 2 or 3 students who have the urge (thirst) for knowledge - they are the ones you categorized as "Good Students"
Out of 100 good students, 90% will eventually give up their thirst for knowledge if the system keeps failing them
In other words, out of 300 or so students, there will be ***ONE*** student whose urge for knowledge is so strong that no matter what the system ditches, he or she will keep going against the grains, beating all the odds and eventually triumph them all
The number does not look so good, does it?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Little wee babies. I would have the little suckers adding, substracting, and two's-complementing numbers before they are weaned. U.S. domination of the tech sector to follow in 18-20 years.
.... but many in the US didn't like the answer
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/#.Tv4NA-e7HkY.mailto
A few years ago, I was looking through some studies on educational outcomes, crunched some of the numbers, and came to a conclusion. I don't have the source studies handy right now, but the conclusion I came to was that about 50% of student achievement was attributable to one thing: classroom management. That is, the teacher's ability to keep the students attentive and participating. And the difference between the worst 10% of teachers and the best 10% was about 2x - that is, students would learn about twice as much in a year with the best teachers as with the worst.
The thing about classroom management is that it's largely a teachable skill, like public speaking. There are lots of "tricks" to get people to pay attention and participate that can be taught, and learned. But it doesn't seem that schools (or teachers colleges) are even evaluating teachers on this skill, let alone training them to improve in it.
If we could achieve substantial improvement in most teachers in this area of skill, we could likely realize a great improvement in educational outcomes. Then we could move onto the next-biggest problem (whatever that is).
I suggest that before we worry about firing "bad" teachers, let alone whether unions make it difficult to do so, or arbitrarily try to hold teachers and students to some performance standard without giving them any clue how to achieve it, we put in place some standards relating to things that have been shown to really make a difference in the educational outcomes, and provide training to help them do so.
It seems there's an strong anti-itellectual backlash in lost of western cultures. Change that.make it cool to be clever rather and make ignorance something to be fixed rather than revelled in.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Easy. Fuck the union. Make it a system where you can get fired if you don't do well.
But how do you know when failure is the teacher's fault, rather than something else?
Yeah, the Republican party and the middle/working class fools who listen to them have made teachers' unions the villain in our presumed educational crisis, but where's the evidence? They think *every* union is the villain in *some* drama.
If you want to "fix" education, you need to start by stating what about it you want to fix, and work backwards from there to the actual problem.
AFAICT, lots of people graduate from high school with decent educations. Do you claim that they all went to schools where the teachers don't have unions?
Rather than pointing the finger at some ideological "cause" for some vaguely defined problem, let's find out why some students graduate with decent educations and others don't, then see what we might do about those causes.
Frankly, I think grade school teachers get about half the pay and a tenth of the respect that they deserve. It's a miracle we can find anyone to take the job at all. Maybe stronger unions would *improve* our educational system.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
We still have world-class university-level education, because universities have to compete for their customers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Personally, I'd like to ban collective bargaining in jobs where people hold the public hostage like schools, public transportation, and police. Because of it in Ontario we have bus drivers who are paid more than nurses. We also have an abundance of teachers, but supply and demand can't work where a union says you can't pick the best of the bunch.
So, you're saying that supply and demand only works when management has arbitrary power?
If you want to "let the market decide", why don't workers' wills matter as much as management's?
It's time to put the "invisible hand" mythology to rest.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Bill Gates didn't want the 'value-added' data made public - not surprising with data having r squared values of ~0.08.
http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/now-i-understand-why-bill-gates-didnt-want-the-value-added-data-made-public/
If teachers can teach kids to pass a sufficiently rigorous test, I think we could all be pretty satisfied.
And if the kids don't pass, how do you know it was the teachers' fault?
Maybe the kids have low IQs, or some other sort of cognitive disability. Maybe they weren't properly prepared before entering the class. Maybe the teachers weren't given sufficient resources, or had too many bullshit non-educational job responsibilities. Maybe the classes are too large. Maybe the school is in a noisy environment. Maybe the students come from a neighborhood with a gang/punk mentality that gives them the attitude that success in school is un-cool. Maybe they just aren't motivated to work to prepare for a job that will let rich people exploit them for the rest of their lives.
"fire teachers" is an ideology, not a solution.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There are tons of free and low-cost how-to-assist-your-child-to-succeed ( i.e. parenting ) classes in my district. My child excels in school. She obeys her parents. She questions authority. She rejects 90% of consumer pop culture. We sit down with her every night to make sure she can get through the advanced math, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, abacus, violin and piano. She already reads and writes three grade levels ahead so we're not pushing her in that regard. Do you mean to tell me that my wife and I will be forced to take time out of our parenting in order to attend classes?
I am not a teacher. However, I trained as one for a short while (I wasn't cut out for it, as it happens.) - and both my mother and wife are teachers.
I have direct experience of UK classroom teaching, as the vocational part of the teacher training I did. I have gone into my wife's school to run a special lesson on stars when the class started asking questions about astrophysics she couldn't answer (we had lots of fun explaining hydrodynamic equilibrium with groups of kids pushing against each other!)
Despite having more direct contact with education that most of the posters here, I feel far less inclined to offer up a solution. Its called the Dunning-Kruger effect, people.
And this is the problem with this X-prize nonsense. The notion is that teachers are somehow morons, and if only some flashy entrepreneur could jump in with a magic idea, everything would be golden. The contempt for the teaching profession is inherent in the concept (and in the comments here, judging by the number of people who think that teaching unions are the source of all education problems.)
My personal suggest is to first of all, stop using teachers as punchbags and listen to them. Unless, of course, you would improve healthcare by demonizing doctors? In fact, that is the analogy - people who think they can improve education by second guessing teachers are equivalent to those who think they can improve healthcare by second guessing doctors i.e. homeopaths.
Anyone offering a magic bullet here is an educational homeopath.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
In fact, it's pretty easy to improve the system.
You just need to copy the Web 2.0 concept: encourage collaboration, instead of promoting competition !
Grades encourage competition, since you try to classify people. Grades encourage cheating.
Grades only show how a teacher is good or not.
Grades encourage competition.
Encourage collaboration between people, so that everybody shares knowledge.
Instead of focusing on the results (grades), focus on the process (how to learn).
Students should love learning, not hate it.
When you love doing something, it's easy to be good.
If somebody is not interested into learning, find what he likes to do, and orient him in this direction.
In France, the goverment tries to keep students in schools as long as possible, it's just a waste of time and energy.
If somebody hates learning, just let him work.
Let's find ways to improve intrinsic motivation (enjoying learning), instead of extrinsic motivation (grades).
Oh, and stop this dumb idea about using technology to improve learning !
If technology was so efficient, why don't everybody use television to learn ?
When the US is the best at everything, there's no reason to try for improvement, as nobody out there could be doing it better. We are so good, improvement is impossible. So there is no problem, it must be the unions or something.
Learn to love Alaska
Funny how, here on Slashdot where there's so much concern about MS's monopoly status and freedom of choice for computing, very few either notice or care about the government's effective monopoly on grade school education.
The problem is the Gaussian, and what it means. Right now, the middle (100) is populated by people who just aren't that bright. That's the normal state of affairs; you're not going to be pushing a lot of education or critical thinking ability into that zone, much less across the left side. That's a good deal more than half the population. The center of the gaussian has to mean something considerably more elevated, and we need for the left end to never, ever go as low as the center is now.
The solution -- not yet feasible -- is to figure out WTF it is in our genetic software that codes for intelligence, and then make sure that stuff is turned on (gross simplification) for children to come (and for the already present too, if it can help retroactively, who knows.) That'll be the first generation that we can really educate well, without dumbing down everything from preschool to high school so that Smith and Williams can graduate on (cough) "equal terms" with Einstein and Curie.
Once the classroom is loaded with minds of comparable and relatively high power, that's the time to decide how best to educate them. Not right now. Right now, we're completely stuck with trying to get across how to balance a checkbook, what compound interest means, and even *that* doesn't seem to penetrate into a lot of minds -- just look at the debt situation of the average person.
So... if one were wondering where to put dollars in order to bring the human race up to a better educated standard, genetics is the answer. Because, and I know this isn't politically correct, but still... you just can't fix stupid with education. There is no curriculum that will help significantly, no methodology, no encouragement, no special combination of beatings.... no nothing in the mundane process of teaching and learning that will help. What you have to do is eliminate stupid.
Genetics likely holds the keys to a whole lot of benefits on other fronts as well. Health, stability, longevity, that sort of thing.
It is my fondest hope that at some point, having a child without technically seeing to it that it will be as intelligent, healthy, and stable as possible will be considered child abuse.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well, that would have been an awesome reply when you were five. But if you want to play in the adult world you're going to have to do a bit better.
You don't like teachers' unions. I get that. Dog whistle and all.
Or punctuation or capitalization.
And yet you want to argue about education.
Two things will lead to a solution:
- Return control of school completely to local towns and neighborhoods. In particular, get the federal government out of local education.
- Vouchers. If parents in one neighborhood don't care about their kids education, or if the teachers are terrible, or if there are other problems, give parents the chance to move their kids elsewhere. Let the market work, even amongst public schools. Good school will get more kids and more money, bad schools will wither and die.
Many other posters have pointed out that good teachers are essential. I didn't list this, because if you return schools to local control, then each school can decide how to hire/fire teachers. The ones that do it well will have good teachers, the others will run out of students.
However, just for info, two points about teachers:
- Studies by the Gates' Foundation have shown that getting rid of the 10% worst teachers dramatically improves a school. This is true even if no other changes are made - i.e., the students just put into other teachers' classes.
- Beginning at the junior high school level, holding a degree in the subject being taught is vastly more important than holding a teaching degree. People who understand and love their subject are essential, and they can "learn to teach" by taking few classes as a minor.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Math is beautiful and we have been teaching kids to hate it for a very long time. I have been working with my son for a very long time to make sure this is not the case for him. We don't focus enough on the concepts and push a learning by rote curriculum very early. By teaching foundations and explaining why things act that way, kids become much more interested in mathematics. My child understands negative numbers, how to build the multiplication tables, the concepts of additive and multiplicative identities and inverses, loves the number googolplex, and is slowly learning about geometry. He is in Kindergarten and will turn six this year. I firmly believe that memorization can have its place (I've recently been blogging about memory and study techniques), but we don't focus enough on the wonder of mathematics with our children. If instead of showing him how to multiply, I just forced him to memorize his multiplication tables I suspect he would have hated arithmetic for a long time just like I did. I didn't start loving math until I was a 3D device driver programmer and had a calculus class or two under my belt. We must focus on wonder with a good dose of application with our children. I also firmly believe that some classical memory techniques can greatly improve the experience of a child in school. Committing something to memory is a hard endeavor, but the ancients had many ways of making this easier. Our spatial memories are so much better then our memory for words or numbers. We grew up as a species on the savannas of Africa. Knowing where we were was so important to our survival. We also tended to walk long distances, some 15 miles a day, so it is no surprise that neuroscience has found that exercise greatly improves our cognitive performance. The method of Loci is fun to teach to a child, and they remember it because it is so different. Focusing on why we learn, that learning is fun, how to learn, and scientifically proven methods based on what we know about neuroscience could transform education. Imagine if all kids craved going to school. How much better the world could be...
Jeff | MemVance - Memory Advanced | View my blog on memory and study techniques
I'm not saying that this is the number one problem, but the English speaking world - and I mean all of it (the USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean) - needs to learn more about grammar. Here is but a sampling of the nonsense I see all the time from people from all of those countries:
1) There's a mistaken belief that "prolly" is a real word instead of "probably". I asked my nephew, a college student and a better than average student, why he keeps writing "prolly" on Facebook instead of "probably". He insisted that he had never seen "probably" in his life and that "prolly" was the only way he had even seen this "word" spelled. This is a big time education failure when a graduate doesn't know a real, common word and only knows a made up one.
2) Many people think that magically putting 's on the end of any word magically makes it a plural when in fact, the number of English plurals that truly can be made this way is extremely low. It's so low that when in doubt, you should leave it out as you'll probably be right not to use 's any more.
3) Many people conversely do not understand how to correctly express possession in English and just put s at the end of words instead of 's. For example, you might see someone write "Johns car is over there".
4) Many people do not understand contractions and confuse words like there, their and they're, it's and its, etc.
5) Question mark punctuation has completely gone off the rails in the past year or two. Now everybody, and I'm talking about people old enough to have learned better in school and not just recent graduates, puts ? at the end of anything that puzzles or surprises them. So now we have "questions" like this:
That was the biggest dog I ever saw?
I can't believe your mother won't let you go?
If you are under 30 and in the USA, believe me, I get it that the educational system failed you. I'm sorry about that, but I get it. However, I now see people over 40 who learned better in school are writing this way. I even seen foreigners who learned English as a 2nd language do it. That last one just amazes me as they really should know better.
I have talked to recent graduates of US high schools (this is what we call the final years of public school up to age 18) and they all tell me that their last grammar classes were around ages 13 or 14. I had my last grammar classes at age 16 and by then, I was old enough to understand it very well and those lessons got through and for the most part stuck with me. It seems to me that if we continue down this path of ignorance that in about 10 years it's going to be perfectly acceptable at the high school level and maybe even college to write sentences like this: "Mi nam iz Michael. I m 17 yrz uld. I lik 2 pla bezball n mi spar tim. I alzo lik 2 wach TV. Famulee Gi iz mi favrit sho on TV."
I think they need to invent parents who give a crap and then education will matter. Sorry, kids, mommy and daddy don't care about you, so why does it matter how well you do in school? Education has enough problems already, but a great many of them are social.
I don't think AI teaching will ever replace real teachers. But there have been some interesting advances, like summary street. Kids need more feedback, homework doesn't help as much as it could if mistakes are repeated.
I also like Khan's suggestion. Record the lectures and make them homework. In class, work problems with teacher, peer and possible computer support.
I believe in teachers, but I do think that education is a conservative(not politically) field. They tend to be risk adverse, and not try new things to see if they work.
Education isn't broken.
Some parts of society are ill, public financing has issues, expectations are sometimes out of whack, but those are different issues. Many schools and their students are doing just fine.
Would my suggestion of "get rid of private investment, company involvement and sponsorship, 'research projects', and fancy ideas for improving education and get back to the good-old-fashioned teaching that involves: Throwing out the wastrels who don't care about their education and making the others work instead of coast" go down well with the X-Prize founders?
The "key" problem with education, globally, is a lack of standard metrics which allow you to compare apples to apples. What's better - public schools or charter schools? Online learning? Khan Academy? British boarding schools or Montessori?
The prize should be for developing a system which allows the market in education solutions to work more effectively. Develop a system which can non-intrusively test students for true mastery of subjects - grammar, math, science, logic, history, etc. Heck, maybe even test them for more abstract concepts, like creativity or mental attitudes that correlate with life-time success. And then crunch the numbers to see which schools, pedagogies or systems produce maximum mastery in the greatest number of students (not just educating the smart kids, but moving the whole graph to the right).
As a parent in a generally successful urban school, I see some issues, most appear to be âoetoo big to solve.â
Expectation Paradigm -- There appears to be an expectation paradigm for education that wants to make every student a âoecollege graduateâ. This strikes me as failing to take into account student ability, aptitude, and the vocational needs of the society at large. While everyone theoretically could benefit from a liberal arts education, itâ(TM)s a dubious proposition to prove and is of little vocational value to most people, other than people involved in careers that engage liberal arts skills. Adjusting the educational paradigm at a macro level is necessary so that we give everyone educational opportunities that match their aptitude and provide them with vocational skills that translate into the workplace and stop defining educational failure/success as âoegetting people into college.â
Poverty, race and parental engagement â" Many of the children who are failing in schools are African Americans, while some of this is tied to poverty, some of this is cultural and this creates a huge minefield. The school system has become taxed with âoesolvingâ the racial poverty issue. It canâ(TM)t do this â" it lacks the budget, the resources and the political mandate. Yet we consume an inordinate amount of resources trying to achieve âoeracial parityâ without ever addressing parental involvement and social questions at home. Bussing, free lunch, No Child Left Behind, etc canâ(TM)t fix these issues, and many of them may be completely intractable. âoeCivilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it createsâ was said 400 years go.
Bureaucracy â" Schools need a bureaucracy to allocate resources and run the organization. But in many cases, above the school level, it appears run amok â" filled with âoeprogram administratorsâ who have the requisite need for offices, supplies, administrative personnel, etc. with little tie-in to the actual educational experience at the school. Many of these programs appear to be associated with the social issues questions, none appear to have any solution for them, and all take resources from the primary mission of education.
I donâ(TM)t think âoebadâ teachers are really the problem, except at maybe the worst schools in the worst districts, and then what do you expect? I also think unions are something of a canard as well, although I donâ(TM)t know how comfortable I am with teachersâ(TM) unions as a concept, especially given their lobbying strength and the kind of feedback loops this creates.
I'm going to against the grain here and say... what education problem?
People have been hammering at 'education' for the past 50 years claiming it solves all kinds of problem... but it doesn't. Just recently... people sit around thinking if only we could be more educated then we can compete with developing countries! All of our jobs can be high-tech and innovative. But as I've said before... these people live in bubbles. Educated, innovative jobs are small in number and service large numbers of people due to computing. This is why an innovation economy can work for small nations like say Singapore or Finland... or small regions like Silicon Valley. But it does nothing for a large region. Always remember... not everyone can be a net exporter.
Most of the gains in 'traditional education' are the basic gains. Getting a society to be able to read/write/arithmetic is a huge step. I don't want to understate this by any means. It is one of the biggest steps a society can take. It is an absolutely huge accomplishment.
Once you get that, you won't get much for more 'education'. More advanced math classes, more computer science classes, more advanced education don't do very much. Almost everything beyond that point is much more influenced by other variables.
For example, your industrial success is much more determined by its industrial policies than by 'schooling' (once you reach basic reading/writing status). The value of your dollar, labor laws, national support... Just a quick note... Germany right now has a program that will pay a portion of a company's manufacturing labor costs to keep them employed.
Even things like PhDs are not purely educational. There were days when employees stayed a long time with a company. So it often made sense for a person to invest in their PhD or Masters while being a part of industry. The shortage of 'American born' PhDs has little to do with the intelligence of Americans and everything to do with the payout (job security, money, fulfillment) vs work required.
Things like early childhood education and child behavior in general have much to do with parenting and morals/culture than 'education' itself. I personally think morals/culture are just as much a part of education... but I know that's not how it is viewed politically and by many people. Those are problems that either need to be solved by bringing culture/morals back into the school (that conflicts with multiculturalism and the idea that all students should attend one public school), or heavy involvement with parents and teaching them how to parent (very messy politically).
I'm personally for much support for things like public health/social services and working with communities outside of the school system to help resolve these problems. We spend way too much money on education while not enough on public health and social services.
At this point, I'd say... stop worrying about 'school' academic education. It's good enough. And our university research system for high-end research is also excellent. Stop trying to solve every problem though the education prism.
It's everything else that needs help.
Sugata Mitra has been doing practical research for 10 years that involves children learning in groups of 4 or 5 through being asked a big question such as "can trees think?", "how does a GPS work exactly", etc, then being given time with a shared computer and broadband connection to answer the question, before having to explain it to a teacher. This is called a self-organising learning environment or SOLE, and appears to work for almost any subject for children up to age 10 or so.
He started with the well-known "Hole in the Wall" experiment where he placed a computer in the wall of a building on the street, and watched what happened - the children taught themselves English as well as how to use the computer. Later experiments involved leaving a PC with English biotechnology materials in a remote village with kids who only spoke Tamil, and telling them to get on with it. Remarkably, they actually learnt a significant amount of biotech.
See http://educationalurbanism.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/dr-sugata-mitra-from-the-hole-in-the-wall-to-sole-self-organized-learning-environment/ - his ideas on "the granny cloud" show how this could scale enormously using Skype etc to have older mentors encourage the children, and perhaps ask or help in creating the big questions that will drive the childrens' learning.
I really hope he gets a chunk of the prize - he is a true innovator and his technique can be applied both inside and outside schools, from developing to developed world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugata_Mitra has references - see his TED talk, he's a very engaging speaker.
Simple. Outlaw teacher unions.
At age 5 give every student a "slate" (basically cheap tablets) and then
1 spend kindergarten teaching the kids how to LEARN (and that they can learn) [note if they happen to learn basic stuff cool]
2 next year start with teaching the basic "bits" (colors numbers letters) and how to THINK THINGS OUT
3 as reading skills develop teach them how to look stuff up on their "slates" (or even how to look stuff up in BOOKS)
4 get them going on a whole thing of I WONDER= look things up on Mr Slate
5 have them make the jump from Mr Slate to Any Computer (with internet connection)
bonus points if you make it possible for individual Slates to give different answers to some questions (creating the question of Why does My Slate say something different from His Slate).
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Obviously you have to do your testing based on deltas. Did the teacher improve the students? How much? The bigger the delta, the bigger the reward. So quality teachers who choose to take on difficult students have the most to gain. Ordinary teachers who teach high achievers likely get nothing.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
- Ban public employee unions to include teachers unions. - Reward good teachers and fire lousy ones. - Stop all the political correct nonsense. - Judge everyone on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. - Quit pushing the leftist propaganda that permeates our schools. - Actually educate our kids. - Use our tax dollars to educate rather than grow bureaucracies and build 'administrative' centers with fancy offices. - Make school go year round like a regular job does, they already get every holiday, break and vacation imaginable, why take the whole Summer off too?
Charter schools are only "cheaper" when they can skimp on services that public schools can't. Special education, for one. Improving public schools isn't rocket science - lower classroom sizes, present a rounded education, and pay decent salaries so you can attract and retain decent teachers.
The real purpose of charter schools is to break teacher unions and to shovel public money into the hands of investors.
Trying to fix or improve pedagogy is the wrong strategy. While there are certainly broad ways of teaching that work better than others, the fact is that each person learns differently. Learning success is also wildly dependent on the skills of the teacher. A fundamental problem with the current education system is that it is (mostly) a monopoly. Worse, the people who select the product (politicians and parents) are not the consumers who benefit or suffer from that choice (students). So, what if there was a way, somehow, to do one or both of these things: 1) Put the consumer of education (students) in a position to make an informed choice about how to be schooled. 2) Make a wide variety of schooling methods* and systems available in a competitive market place. * Not just online education, but face to face, teacher-led education, too.
Problem is: there may be a common cause of both poverty and poor education. Low self-discipline, stupidity, and laziness spring to mind. How do you prove which causes what? My observation is that people run with the cause that most agrees with their previously existing views, and studies are designed to reinforce those beliefs, not challenge them. :-(
I'm a fan of home-schooling for this reason (amongst others) - you know in the end it's the family that is the cause, regardless of the specific reason.
And yet I can correctly predict that you don't like unions. Seems that you are the one that does not understand what a "dog whistle" is.
Well your education has obviously been substandard. You cannot even handle capitalization.
Yet there are hundreds of people posting on /. that appear to be able to handle basic punctuation. So your failure does not seem to be the norm.
So what, specifically, is the problem with the education system? Specifically. Look that word up if you need to.
Oooooh, this is going to hurt.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2719455&cid=39320903Looks like I did post that.
But, as I said, you don't seem to be any more capable at reading comprehension than you are at capitalization.
Is there a reason you have a problem with clearly stating anything other than insults?
Like I keep saying, be specific. Can you do that?
and
So you claim that the school day is not long enough ... but that does not matter because there are not enough good teachers to teach the students in the first place.
And yet other students manage to master basic concepts such as capitalization under those exact conditions.
In fact, as others have posted, the states with the unions seem to do better on the standardized tests than non-union states.
You really do not grasp the magnitude of the humor in that statement coming from someone who fails basic capitalization. All the better because I'm sure it was unintended.
Indeed, what is so hard to understand? Who's going to have more time to invest in their children's education:
A two parent household working 100-140 hours a week between 4-6 different jobs, with no health insurance or vacation time or sick leave
Or
A two parent household working 40-80 hours a week with health insurance and vacation time and sick leave?
So cool! I actually have an idea for this one. I found a way one could do matrix style accelerated learning. So it is possible... I really don't want to give the idea away on here, but basically the problem with teaching is NOT that people are stupid, it's the translation of concepts from one person to another. So while someone may not be smart enough to learn a discipline, they most likely are smart enough to understand it. That might sound really funny, but given any field, many people understand it differently.
One - remove all federal funds and authority to education.
Two - eliminate collective bargaining from education. This does not mean eliminate unions.
Three - all schools shall be "charter" schools, "reform" schools or "private" schools. No other kinds. No more Boards of Education - just boards at the school level. Private schools can get no public money but can have tax credit for grants and tuition.
Four - student misbehavior leads to reform school without any chance to return to previous school. Can apply for other charter or private school, but only right is to stay at reform school.
Five - students are to be referred for college preparation or technical after 8th grade - must meet competitive standards to get into college preparation track.
Six - publicize state success and failure. Watch competition take over.
None of these reforms will pass because unions will oppose them. This is the way that unions stifle education. It is not through tenure.
May I have the prize, please.
There its fixed.
..that's the problem. We have a culture of consuming everything, including education. Throwing money at the situation just creates more education, but not a culture of learning. The decisions are made by the money, not by the culture or the students or the teachers. Life circles the money, rather than the money being a side-effect of a useful culture. Before you can 'fix' education, you have to have some idea of what PEOPLE are FOR. If there is no consensus about people being useful to their own future, then why bother educating them in the first place? Most of the culture is based on people CONSUMING their future, not building it. Creating an efficient education system merely speeds up the process of consuming our future. ..until it doesn't anymore. That's when some new form of culture takes over (barbarians at the gates or inside the System of systems).
Is the education we are presenting to our children actually useful to the future of anything except their ability to consume?
In the Reagan Era there was that 'dumbing down' of education that caused a big rucus. Not sure if it extended further from Reagan's administration, but trying to produce dumber kids when IQ levels are increasing is rather counter productive. (Yes, I realise IQ isn't everything to do with intelligence, as there are different sorts of intelligence, but it is a measure of some problem solving ability). I'd say some of the kids are probably bored senseless with school. Kids need to be challenged, need to learn how to learn (and how to learn on their own) and how to think. Part of the problem was also a shift away from 'correct answers' to giving kids good marks for stupid answers because giving them bad grades when they did bad was 'counter productive' to their self esteem.
There is no band-aid or magic bullet to fix education, and all of the political ranting about teachers unions or the like doesn't get anywhere. The problem is the educational system is fundamentally broken at its core, and it's going to need some serious work to fix.
First of all, change the funding. Most school districts I know of are funded through property tax levies, resulting in some horrific disparities in resources between schools in affluent areas and schools in poor areas. Most teachers I know are hideously underpaid as well. As a society, we give a lot of lip service to the importance of education, then cut funding as soon as the political fatcats spend themselves into a budget problem.
Second point. Change the culture. This is the hard one. Todays schools are largely prisons for the young. They are designed to keep young people corralled in a specific location for the majority of the day, and to condition them towards conformity. The presentation of academic information is largely an afterthought.
To actually engage students, you have to show them why what they do is important. Not just some bland and unverified statement about "you'll need this down the road to succeed in life".. but to make their participation in the learning process important right then and there. They need to be engaged in the teaching process, as well as the learning process. Incentive programs that allow for peer recognition work, and they work well.. so do efforts that allow students efforts at learning to result in practical application. Have them make things, real things, to help the community, the school, each other.. and you'll see interest spike. Pointless busywork is the nemesis of any student. They need something to believe in, something that says they have meaning. Give them that, you have their involvement.
Then engage the teachers. Similar methods work. Give them the freedom and the power to get involved within a certain framework of curriculum needs. Most people go into teaching because they love kids, and they want to be involved in shaping young minds. What burns them out is that their creativity and passion is stifled by endless seas of bureaucratic regulation, stupid politicial infighting at the schools, and a total lack of support from administration or the community.
Thirdly.. go back to classical education. I'd actually suggest a return to the latin and greek classics. Yes, that sounds crazy.. but in the process of learning latin and greek, obsolete as that is these days, one gets exposed to the world of philosophy. This itself tends to teach "how to think".. how to engage the mind in the process of learning and discovery, and not just "what to think" which is where emphasis is currently placed.
I've consistantly found, when working with young people, that if you give them something to believe in, and something that gets them into the world of interesting ideas.. that challenges them to come up with their own solutions, their own expressions, and rewards them for their innovation, they take to that whole "uncool" thinking thing like nobody's business and they truly surprise you.
It's only when you stick them in an environment where creativity and "going outside the box" gets smacked down, where conformity is the law, that stupidity and ignorance become heralded as glorious rebellion.