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What Works In Education: Scientific Evidence Gets Ignored
nbauman writes "According to Gina Kolata in the New York Times, The Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, has supported 175 randomized controlled studies, like the studies used in medicine, to find out what works and doesn't work, which are reported in the What Works Clearinghouse. Surprisingly, the choice of instructional materials — textbooks, curriculum guides, homework, quizzes — can affect achievement as much as teachers; poor materials have as much effect as a bad teacher, and good materials can offset a bad teacher's deficiencies. One popular math textbook was superior to 3 competitors. A popular computer-assisted math program had no benefit. Most educators, including principals and superintendents, don't know the data exists. 42% of school districts had never heard of the clearinghouse. Up to 90% of programs that seemed promising in small studies had no effect or made achievement scores worse. For example a program to increase 7th-grade math teachers' understanding of math increased their understanding but had no effect on student achievement. Upward Bound had no effect."
I've yet to see a competently written math book. Most of them are written by and for people with PhDs in mathematics. They'll show one example, fail miserably to explain what they did in any clear way, then later they will refer back to it as what they did in example 3. And the student is expected to be able to figure out what they did. Sure, given sufficient time, a student could reverse engineer the problem, but it's also trendy for teachers to hand out way too many problems as homework, without permitting the students time to understand.
I remember when I was in middle school and high school, the schools were using "integrated math." Which is to say we didn't have algebra, geometry or trig, we had all of them at once and we would start over again the next year. The problem is that just as we were beginning to grasp one of them, we'd move onto the next subject, and the next year, we'd have to start over as we hadn't mastered the material the last time we saw it.
The problem is most education professionals are not so good at understanding Math, and many really do not trust is.
You go to any college and talk to education majors, and ask them why they didn't major in other majors, after they repeat the normal BS, about wanting to help children yadda yadda, It comes down to the fact that many of the other majors that has a clear career path requires much more Math study, and they don't like Math.
Sure we have a few educators like Math and Science teachers who get it, but they are the minority, and the ones who seems to get promoted to positions where they can make decisions, are usually History and English teachers. So they don't know about this research is because they are not looking for it, and they really don't want to find it, because the numbers may contradict what you opinion is, and no one likes that.
We have the State and Unions fighting over these details and little focus on what works.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I took a quick look at the materials they're publishing, and if you can read a vulnerability report, you can read these. (e.g., http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practice_guides/mps_pg_052212.pdf#page=16)
Again for the Nth time I'm going to fall back on my personal education experience.
I had horrible teachers growing up, when I say horrible, all but one of them was even worth her paycheck . An elementary school teacher should be an expert in all areas that they teach.
In my elementary school ( 1992 - 2000 ) we had one teacher for the entire day, that teacher did math, history, english and etc.... For the school system to effectively work what you need is for that teacher to be an expert in all of those subjects, an expert to the point that they don't require a textbook. The textbook is for the students to assist and supplement the information from the teacher, NOT for the teacher to use as a coverup for not knowing the subject.
So often we as students were told to close the textbooks and just understand the material well a lazy teacher sat at the front of the room and simply just read from it. A big secret to good education is that the teacher should never be doing the students job, reading from a textbook simple means that the teacher is only as qualified as the student and not really doing his / her job.
This post talks about the materials that the students can use to assist in there education. Well in my school we had the resources but the teachers and support staff just weren't trained on how to deploy and use the materials. The computer lab was off limits because ALL of the teachers had no clue how to really use them, the science lab was closed because the teachers and staff didn't know how to setup or use the equipment.
This is my problem with the school system, it's setup to protect the teachers and it leaves the students on the side of the road. I pointed this out in my school several times when I was there and every time I was given an excuse, "The teachers work very hard and it's not there job" or "The government wants us to teach this way so we are". It's sad and horrible, the school system ( in Canada ) is in the shitter. I have little cousins right now and from what they tell me the system hasn't changed.
So what's my point? Well here is the big secret to making the education system work, HIRE QUALIFIED TEACHERS AND GET THE RIGHT MATERIAL IN PLACE!!!!!! That's it, it hasn't happened yet at least from what I've seen and been through. Simple answer to a not complicated question.
To any teacher that doesn't fit into what I just explained I don't want to bash you. I know good teachers and good school exist, they do and they are great, just the majority of the system is broke and that shouldn't make the good few look bad.
"Scarce dollars"? There has been literally trillions of dollars poured into public education over the past 50 years, An absolutely insane amount of money is still being spent - but the quality continues to decline. Anyone who cares about education needs to get this through their head - *money does not solve this problem*. The issue is lack of standards, lack of quality teachers, and endless ivory-tower meddling in the educational process. None of those are solved by money.
Very often every system in education becomes hijacked by some interest group. Textbooks are a great example. Looking through my daughters' very expensive textbooks I can see that the science and math textbooks were written by non mathematician/scientists. One of my favorite questions went something like Jamal has 5 candies that are 5 different flavours; how can he distribute them among his 5 friends? Write all the ways. WHAT? Or just the usual questions that are missing some element such as you have a triangle that is 2 units on the bottom side and 3 units high. How long is the remaining side? But there is no picture of the triangle. Is this a right-triangle. Are they talking about the hypotenuse? And then one of the best. A grade 10 math textbook with a section on parabolas. My daughter was assigned the usual questions 1-20 at the end of the chapter. I don't quite remember how to find the vertex or some such so I leaf through the textbook to find out how. All it does is define the parabola and give some examples of how they can be used for things like flashlight reflectors. But absolutely no math involving the parabolas. None. Lots of parabola questions but no math. This was not some kind of workbook but a textbook where they had just been sloppy.
Then there is the technology. They are so lost. So so so lost. They have just grasp at technology. The usual result is that they buy big systems where moodle would be fine. But at no point do they really leverage the technology much. A great example is both of my daughters' schools have robocalls to tell me about things like vaccinations, school trips, etc. This is very annoying in that the calls usually waste most of the call telling me things that I don't care about. The worst part is that the critical bits are at the end. So I hear about things like congratulations to some student for winning a sack race in Kalamazoo and then in the end learn that some critical form needs to be turned in by 9am the next morning. Hello please use at least email. Maybe a website? The 20th century is calling and wants their robocaller back! I wonder how much they pay for this service?
But there is a wonderfully effective way to use computers in education. You look at student's marks. You then look at the pattern of the marks as the student's pass through various teachers. I am not talking about standardized tests but just comparing the marks of various students in the same classrooms. The key being that you can see that when a batch of students hits a truly great or terrible teacher that their marks will thrive or suffer for years to come. Bad teachers are like boulders in the stream; they result in much turbulence and waves far beyond their position in the time stream. Both of my daughters hit the same terrible math teacher. I tutored both of them past this disaster of a teacher but many of their co-students may have lost any hope at a career in STEM as their grade 10 math would then suck with little time left to recover to the point where they could leave HS with a good mark in Pre-cal let alone Calculus.
"Scarce dollars"? There has been literally trillions of dollars poured into public education over the past 50 years, An absolutely insane amount of money is still being spent - but the quality continues to decline. Anyone who cares about education needs to get this through their head - *money does not solve this problem*. The issue is lack of standards, lack of quality teachers, and endless ivory-tower meddling in the educational process. None of those are solved by money.
Yes, scarce, but that's rather beside the point of TFA. So are "quality teachers" and 'ivory-tower meddling" (whatever the fuck that is). TFA seems to make a case for spending more wisely, like buying teaching materials that actually work, or more fundamentally, becoming aware that the data to guide such purchases even exists. Such lack of awareness is inexcusable, but clearly, it is pervasive. How's about we work on that problem instead of parroting the same tired shit you hear on Faux News?
For example: Korea has huge class sizes, and they kick our ass in math and science.
Propaganda from teacher's unions always say to just, randomly, throw money at the problem.
When I was struggling with calculus my first year, and a lot of concepts hadn't gelled, I had an idea. I decided to go to the library and see if there were any better calculus texts. I found Calculus Made Easy and believe it or not, it actually made good on its promise. I aced my first semester calculus exam, with much thanks to that book. The biggest take-away was that they actually showed the relationship between summations, limits, and integrals. All of that material had been covered by other texts, and by teachers of course; but they had never related it. The "genius" of the invention of calculus was in that relationship, not just a bunch of dry examples of limits, series, and integrals.
And yes, this was actually more than 20 years ago. The copy I read was dug from the depths of the multi-story engineering library stacks at UVa, and even then it was an old copy. Now you can probably download it...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Richard Feynman's story on textbooks was eye-opening: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
(Thanks BobTree)
You can't expect a child with dyslexia to learn from the same program that works for an excellent reader. Less serious learning issues have similar effect.
One thing I never understood is why we don't have a public boarding school option for those kids whose parents clearly are the problem.
If your parents are homeless, drug addicts, or convicted felons, you have about a 50% drop out rate. If we just offered them public boarding schools, we could save those kids - at far less cost over the long term than what those drop outs will end up costing the government.
Boarding schools can go for as low as $25k / year, vs regular schools at half that while a year in prison costs over $100k If just save just one out of 8 of those kids from a life of prison, we come out ahead.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If you mean climate control then there are overwhelming boatloads of scientific evidence if you look for it. Years of data compiled and analyzed.
And what do you mean "supports the Bible"? I mean the bible doesn't even support itself with all the endless contradictions. There is no science in that. Not sure what SD is.
The problem in Texas is that they ARE trying to influence the textbook companies and since they are one of the largest purchasers of textbooks they actually could potentially have some success. Except for the whole separation of church and state thing that keeps kicking their ass in court.
I can see why it was buried. You wouldn't want students finding out about a textbook that is only $17! There is no profit in that.
I don’t want to get into a huge tangent on this topic, but rest assured there are plenty of school districts in the US that don’t have enough money. While I agree that throwing money at these districts indiscriminately won’t solve anything, it’s pretty hard to build a quality educational systems without sufficient funding. This is especially true in districts where the educational system has to contend children who have difficult home lives and parents who are themselves undereducated. Money certainly can't solve the problem, but it is a significant part of the equation.
We live in a society where those who sell children toys make exponentially more than the people who educate children. That a very simplistic statement, but it touches on the matter of our shared social value system. This gets into a lot of issues concerning market based vs universal public education, but, again, that’s a tangent. The major point is simply that when we move beyond lip-service and rhetoric, education isn’t a core value for our society.
Maybe.
There was a study about 10 years ago that showed zero correlation between teacher pay, teacher effectiveness, and academic results between states.
Probably what is more important is teacher requirement, training, and management. If you increased teacher pay today without changing the above you would increasing pay to those who are already teachers or are likely to become teachers.
I have issues with how teacher’s pay is structured. The initial pay is low and most of the benefits are at the backend so it encourages marginal teachers to become entrenched and discourages middle aged people from making a career switch into the profession. (I think there is a rich vein of potential people who hold masters in math, science, or engineering who would make great teachers but don’t want to deal with the initial low pay and would not qualify for some of the bigger retirement packages.)
I think this is pretty insightful.
I recently joined a team of other MS employees teaching Intro to CS at a local public highschool. We're bootstrapping the in-service teacher along with the students so that hopefully she can teach the class herself in the future.
htttp://www.tealsk12.org
People who have come up into CS in the "normal way" and who can do CS can make more money straight out of college in the industry than can ever be made in a lifetime of public K-12 education. And for software people who want to make the switch into K12 later in life when they are financially independent; there are a number of tiresome barriers that prevent them from really doing so.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The market forces that bear upon the toy industry do not apply to universal education. If an individual toy company fails, the impact on society is negligible; not so with the national educational system. I made the comparison to emphasis our social value system.
My original point was that proper funding is a necessary condition for a quality educational system, though it is not sufficient. In other words there are reasons our educational system is failing aside from funding, but the answer is not to cease funding the educational system properly.
This is somewhat of a tangent from that point, but since the market comparison has been made, I feel it is important to emphasis the need for public funding of the primary educational system. It is in the public interest to have an educated citizenry, and it is incumbent upon all citizens to both fund the educational system and have a stake in its efficacy. Markets are not well suited to provide a quality universal education system. Markets are excellent at providing quality private schools that augment the base educational system because individuals have a clear and direct incentive to fund the education of kin (kin used here in the broader anthropological sense which exceeds blood relations). There isn’t as clear an incentive to fund the education of perfect strangers. The educational level of perfect strangers, however, is a kind of externality: the educational level of perfect strangers directly impacts the prosperity of the larger society. Moreover, the children who generally need the most educational resources come from families that have the least ability to fund their children’s education.
That isn’t to say that market concepts like incentives, competition, etc. aren’t important in the educational system, but they have to applied in the framework of a publicly funded, universal educational system. Educators should compete for incentives commensurate with the social gravitas of their role. That’s where I got into the point about shared social values; our society underestimates the gravitas of public education when it comes down to things like funding. Educators should be more respected and better compensated, thus incentivizing competent individuals to excel in the service of public education. It’s kind of naive to expect enough educators to excel purely out of a passion to educate (though that shouldn’t be underestimated either).