Slashdot Mirror
Professors: US "In Denial" Over Poor Maths Standards
thephydes (727739) writes "The maths skills of teenagers in parts of the deep south of the United States are worse than in countries such as Turkey and barely above South American countries such as Chile and Mexico. From the article: '"There is a denial phenomenon," says Prof Peterson. He said the tendency to make internal comparisons between different groups within the US had shielded the country from recognising how much they are being overtaken by international rivals. "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor," he said.'"
if you teach kids to add, pretty soon they'll start wanting to think for themselves and only bad things can come of that.
No wonder other countries count better, they don't just have math, they have maths!
"South American countries such as...Mexico"
Other countries than the US do not only count better, but more and more other countries are beginning to count more....
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
When did Mexico become a South American country?
Morgan Spurlock made the idiotic comment about how Norway is "homogeneous" right before transitioning to his piece on a charter school with minority students who were excelling.
SES or "Socio-Economic Status" is the most common race bait thrown around in the education system. Anyone who has experience outside the public education system figures out real quick that you can't look at the skin color or bank account of a student to see how well they're doing.
Racism is the last excuse that our failed public education system still clings to. That and "we don't have enough money."
It's just one of the many reasons why despite being certified to teach high school math, I have no intention of ever teaching in a public school. I'm more interested in helping out at my daughter's small private school. My summer project is overhauling their library system. I've already fixed all the laptops as well as they can be. If possible I'd like to go into a part time teaching role to help out.
The school is filled with students from a variety of racial backgrounds and financial circumstances and oddly enough I can't judge their grades by any of that.
Work Safe Porn
I remember a completely normal kid in high school who couldn't tell time on an analog clock when he graduated high school. I went to MIT, he went to the NFL, we're both rich. F*ck Chile and Mexico.
Despite quadrupling per-pupil costs of public schools since 1962 (inflation-adjusted), the education remains the same or is getting worse. In some particularly well-managed cities, the costs are even higher and the results — even worse, than national average. This article is about Math, but ability to read remains rather sub-par as well — with only 30% of 8th-graders, for example, considered "proficient" readers.
Clearly, we need to spend more money...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Teach the teachers mathematics.
Just because you're too thick to recognize dialects doesn't mean that a word you don't use isn't a real word. Maths is a word. Aluminium is a word. Noo-kyuh-luhr is a sign of illiteracy.
Translation: With the exception of California (pro-science) and Texas (anti-science), states that promote creationism or suffer endemic poverty, fail maths. I wager those failing states have money-rich athletic programs as well.
Someone remind me: What was 'No child left behind' going to achieve?
It was law that every high school student had to pass algebra, geometry, trigonometry before they could graduate.
They also had to take a class on the constitution.
Please explain how the link you provided supports your claim of a quadrupling of inflation-adjusted per-pupil costs since 1962.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The US is doing about average for OECD on math (and other areas), which isn't bad given the large number of immigrants and diversity of students and backgrounds. And given that our public school system is not all that different from public school systems in those other countries, we shouldn't expect ours to perform any better. Are there identifiable groups and regions that are below average in the US? Of course there are. That's true for other large countries as well.
The US could do better if we did things differently from other OECD nations; if we reduced our reliance on public K-12 schools and encouraged innovation, self-reliance, and diversity of approaches in education. But as long as people like Obama advocate mediocre European systems as a model, all we will produce is the same kind of mediocrity that Europe produces.
This is a BBC Article, so "maths" is the correct term in the article - and for that matter in most of the English speaking world.
Only the USA and Canada use math. Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India and the rest of the English speaking world use maths.
Of course, one should point out that English was defined in Great Britain with American being a regional bastardisation, a minor dialect.
From the article:
Southern states Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are among the weakest performers, with results similar to developing countries such as Kazakhstan and Thailand.
Yeah, I teach math at a large university in the deep south, and this doesn't surprise me at all. Students are unprepared for college math classes, and I see a lot of behavior that I wouldn't have expected in a math class. For example, I always have students that try to memorize their way through class, mostly in calculus 1. They don't practice any problems, they don't try to understand the material, but they've got flash cards and highlighted notes and sticky tabs out the wazoo.
It's like they all had a bunch of "study skills" drilled into them in high school and no one ever bothered to explain that these are supposed to aid actually understanding the material. They're so used to just regurgitating things onto tests that I guess a lot of them really do think memorizing is understanding.
Now I realize the following is just anecdotal, but I know several people who teach high school math throughout the deep south, and all of them say the same thing: they aren't really allowed to teach. School administrators have a death grip on teachers' jobs. Teachers are told what, when, and how to teach the material. They're basically reading scripts. And of course they're all teaching to the state end of course tests too, probably because those are used to measure administrators' performances.
I'm Canadian its always been maths in my classes..
I was so eager to learn but there weren't many options back then.
Wait, you went to school before books existed and you're still alive???
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Even FDR recognized public employee unions would be fatal to the US. That time has arrived.
When public schools fail, parents have to step up with home schooling, private schooling, private lessons. Our kids finished calculus at 15-16 with some out of public school lessons. It was important to burn through the middle school and lower high school classes that are anchored by remedial students mixed with the average and superior students. Also getting the better teacher in a subject is important, No excuses, parents.
Prof Lynn and Vanhanen wrote the literal book on this subject. Average IQs: Ashkenazi Jew 115, NE Asian, 105, NW White 100, Mestizo 88, Black US and Western Hemisphere 85, Sub Saharan African 70, Kalahari Bushmen and Australuan aborigines 60.
These findings are robust, averaging over 100 years of psychometric studies, and are quietly accepted as reliable by social scientists though never opnely discussed. Absent massive coerced dna mod there is no way to close the Black White achievement gap. None at all.
Admitting lots of low iq people into the West is problematic bc they demand reasonably a Western standard of living but can never with an average ... many are far lower ... iq of 85-88 ever earn one. Thus money must be taken by force from Whites and Asians to pay fr Blacks and Mestizos. A recipe for Balkan style wars.
I spent a couple of years teaching in the Boston Public Schools. Your analysis is too simplistic. I had students who had recently immigrated from Cape Verde, who were fluent only in Cape Verdean Creole and whose parents never completed the 8th grade. I also had a student who had been in foster homes her entire life. I discovered after awhile that she couldn't see the board and that her foster parents were unwilling to pay out of pocket to buy glasses - she had broken two pairs of glasses and hit the limit for what MassHealth would pay for that year.
You can't just ignore the impact that these experiences have on a child's ability to learn. It's completely unfair to compare outcomes from private schools, which would never accept a student who barely spoke English or a sullen, resentful product of the foster care system (not that these children would ever apply) to schools that are required to accept all comers.
There are many problems that public schools create for themselves and have nothing to do with students, but the idea that socio-economic status doesn't effect student outcomes is just not accurate. c.f. this NYTimes article on the University of Texas for a week ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-graduate.html?_r=0
My high school math teacher should have been teaching at a university, Jack would fill the room with equations and students had to pay attention to keep up. Algebra, plane geometry, solid geometry, euclidean geometry, matricies, and then Q.E.D.!.
Given that most international academic testing doesn't control for admission criteria, the testing itself is defective. Countries that engage in mandatory streaming can look better academically(Europe, Asia) versus those that accept about everyone(US mostly).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Seriously. I've looked at the problems CC curriculum presents as "math".
The way they lay out and ask you to solve problems is insane. Absolutely and utterly BONKERS (and not in a good way).
If you think the US is bad at math NOW, wait until CC has had a few cycles to sink its hooks in.
You're going to have people actively HATING math in a way that'd be ludicrous even today.
And these people who'd be able to solve even a SIMPLE concrete math problem to save their lives.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Me too, eh?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Well... think US vs Russia & China instead. I bet that raise and fall of empires could be correlated to math skills of their citizens.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I was hired to develop a fairly large scale Common Core platform. I walked away out of disgust once I reviewed the actual content. The U.S. public education system has problems, and from my experience, Common Core is /not/ the solution.
And yet all these better-performing countries have more leftist governments, stronger social safety nets, more concern about equity, and less economic inequality.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Thousands of apologies. I had that page book-marked, but — employing the best web-masters there are to be found, no doubt, the Department of Education has rearranged their pages. The information is now here, or, if you (like myself) are having trouble accessing the Windows-powered site, here the Google-cache of it.
On the page, there is a table. In 1962 the "total expenditure" per pupil per year was (in 2011 dollars) $3,915. In 2010 it was $13,692...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
a place isn't exclusive if it doesn't start excluding people.
Hilarious. Dialect includes pronunciation. By your example "cah" is a sign of illiteracy, not just the way a Bostonian pronounces car.
A different time, and for a different objection completely - but don't let that get in the way of your rant.
Then again, you're asking for an educational model that is not only less free, but also reduces opportunities for the rest of one's life based on that lack of freedom. If you want mandatory streaming in education, move to another country.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Scientists and techs are portrayed as either evil or socially inept in the movies. Why would anyone value any form of education that led to that? As long the perception exists people aren't going to value maths, or any other, education that lead them to be enablers of society.
And those perceptions are bought to us by the same people who want DRM everywhere so they continue to harvest money for crap movies that have nothing new.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The students who excel at math will go on to become engineers, scientists, statisticians, etc. and the ones who sit in class all day drooling will get a job digging ditches. You want to see the average math scores go up? Let kids who hate math choose between a trade or college bound course schedule for highschool. God forbid parents actually admit their special little flower isn't college material.
I've often wondered why the public education system spends four years hammering this shit into people who have no interest in learning it. Replace it with one class explaining how you do math on an iPad, should the need arise and that's good enough. Sure, there's always the argument that if society goes to hell in a handbasket that there won't be iPads around to do math on, but let's be realistic - in a hypothetical post-apocalyptic zombie ravaged wasteland, basic survival skills will be more useful than being able to solve a quadratic equation in your head. Last I checked, they still don't teach marksmanship, water purification, shelter construction and gardening in public school, so they're clearly not worried about what would happen in a world where every computer suddenly disappeared.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
What you need to do is get rid of that "no kid left behind" crap. Recognise that some kids learn faster then others, some kids learn differently to others (some learn by watching, some by doing, some by having it explained in excruciating detail over and over) and some kids just don't have the mental ability to do certain stuff well. Separate your kids into streams, with each group being of the same learning type, make sure no group gets too little attention. Have a higher teacher to kid ratio in the streams where the kids need more attention, give the fast learners more advanced stuff to learn, etc.
Finally, talk to your unions and make sure that crappy teachers get weeded out. The biggest shortcoming of any kid's education is having a bad teacher (we all have at least one teacher that we still remember decades after schooling that was bad). Having one crappy teacher can negate or waste an entire year of schooling...
It doesn't mean it isn't true.
And furthermore, you're missing the significance of the statement.
We are not one people. You might as well look at the math standards for the whole northern hemisphere.
The United States is a polyglot society. If you can't grasp that then you have no business doing a statistical analysis of the united states.
The point is that parts of the US are doing just fine. Parts of the US are doing terribly.
If you want to improve the situation, focus your efforts on the portions that are doing badly and leave the rest of the country alone... you're as likely to retard those areas as help them.
Savvy?
Stop trying to generalize. Focus on the areas with an issue... do not waste resources on areas that are performing to standard or above.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Not sure what all this means when you put it together, but it seems like government policies are out of touch with reality of grooming candidates in the US, even to meet their own needs.
No, streaming does not make results look better. Countries that stream early, such as Germany, have found that while their top tier do very well, as expected, but the PISA results from other tiers do not perform as well as they might. It's partly due to early streaming greatly disadvantaging migrants, who might have caught up to their peers in higher level maths classes had they had the chance. PISA is not about heavy maths, it's about numeracy. It tries to measure the maths and literacy skills needed to navigate in modern society at school leaving age across a population. The countries that look better than they should are the ones who exclude large segments of the population from schooling at all (like excluding girls or particular minorities or rural populations from education). There you have children who become adults who are innumerate, but are not measured by PISA. As these countries start to educate their entire population, they will look worse before they look better.
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
Well that's unusual. Math is what I had in my classes.
When i was in high school back in the early 90ies in France, it was the same : people were trying to remember stuff by rote learning, not only in math but also in physic. With the predictable result that by the next year , for many very little was left of it. I have come to think that the few of us which aced the math/physic, we did it because we understood the problem and how to solve it, rather than learn the solution. And once you understand something, it is incredibly easy to remember how to do it. I don't think this is a special problem from south Alabama or where ever, I think it is a general problem in many country that many student are firstly taught rote learning in small school, and later in middle/high school are never taught to understand a problem properly.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
He knows that becuase he has worked in the education system?
Have you?
circa 1988
The US is Number One! Anyone who disagrees is a communist!
The US has an insanely powerful culture of avoiding self-criticism.
Just a look at the U.N. education data (try http://www.gapminder.org/) and you will see 3rd world nations rising HUGE amounts. As everybody gets to the top, the relative differences are smaller and rankings should fluctuate more as it takes so little to decide between them. The spread is much smaller now. The difference between 1st place and 20th place is small.
Then you have metrics; that was just the distribution of the results and how it's glossed over completely, with metrics you have measurement issues like the demographics (does the top nation only test the top students?) what things you measure and how those differ (sometimes the test changes) and lastly, what should they know? If you teach concepts in math at a young age (which can include calculus and algebra) without technical drudgery until they are older (and better able to sit still) you are going to do poorly when the measurement expects you to learn in a certain prescribed order.
Mediocre is just fine. As long as most people are in the middle of the bell curve and that is "mediocre" which is enough for most jobs, then what is the big deal? We actually have much bigger problems than education that are not being solved. What good is it to have plenty of decent IT workers when industry will claim otherwise simply so they can suppress wage increases or perhaps they just want the best in the world and refuse to make do with mediocre? Even if that mediocre is better than the planet, they still can want more and for less. (In which case who says your top people will stay in the country? Especially when it is not going to be the best place for them to live? We've got a lot of brains here because they moved here and stayed here; so far.)
If you want to work at McDonalds, move to the EU where they make at least $20 and hour; with better healthcare. Middle income profession? Move to Canada, they make more than Americans + better healthcare + it's still a democracy.
The education system here for the most part, isn't so bad that it prohibits upward mobility for most students - IF THEY WORK AT IT. The culture will do them more harm than the education system. When kids get tried as pedophiles or jailed for nothing or shot or ...TV...games...food...legal drugs...consumerism... not to mention available JOBS... doesn't matter how good you teach them; they have bigger problems...
There is nothing wrong with a non-college educated half illiterate person doing construction work at a decent wage; or whatever - not every job requires the education and none should pay so little the economy is borked- which is what is happening among other things.
Yeah, that good STEM degree will make life wonderful and easy for sure! http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
With a sufficient injection of frictionless ropes and massless pulleys, by George, you could be onto something.
I see that nobody has mentioned the elephant in the room. That's expected...otherwise it wouldn't be an elephant. Let's use critical thinking and examine the words used: "in parts of the deep south of the United States".
It means African-Americans. Any time you see "education" and "deep South" in the same sentence, it's dog whistle racism. This article is criticizing their scores and compares them to other countries without discrimination. This article is racist and should not even be here. Shame, shame on Slashdot editors.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This is very unexpected news to me. I didn't realize Turkey had such poor math standards.
Mexico is in South America, right?
I don't think Marxism invented the idea that rich and poor people live differently, and their interests might sometimes be in opposition. Even the Bible has some pretty long sections about it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The US is so heterogeneous that you have to look at different groups, or you are just being stupid.
The rest of the world is technically wrong. Mathematics is a singular noun, due to the way -ics is handled by the original latin/greek. On the other hand, -th indicates a singular verb as well, so when you throw that s on the end of it, you're making it (incorrectly) plural.
However, I said it was technically wrong for a reason. Language is dictated by usage, not semantics. It's the reason why the word "ain't" is in the dictionary today. So even though maths may not be technically correct, the widespread usage of the word dictates that it is.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
("Seduced by apologists"?) The outlier is Texas. Oddly, despite being part of the Confederacy, children in Texas with poorly educated parents perform inexplicably well. Of course, according to this Harvard University School of Government study, Massachusetts children are the most proficient in mathematics in the United States, second only to Germany and Switzerland...
tempus fugit
Whatever you do, don't look at the relative cost of college tuition. Public education has outstripped consumer inflation (which is what you quote - the cost of milk and TVs and popcorn) for 4x, but private college tuition has outstripped it by 7x. So, if you use colleges as the benchmark, the relative expense of getting a person ready for college has dropped by nearly half. And you wonder why they're not prepared?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
deny our performance relative to the rest of the world?
We deny the age of the earth.
We deny the existence of climate change or global warming and man's effect on it.
We deny the concentration of wealth and power among a few and its potential and real harm.
I could go on...
USA! USA! USA! USA!
Really, 'cause I border the south, and I read "rednecks" not "blacks." Inner city results is the euphemism for failing African-Americans. Border or southwest results is code for Latin-American immigrants. Get your dog-whistle racism correct. ;-)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Once the students see a guy crucified on a plus sign, they'll know we are serious about our math.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
a place isn't exclusive if it doesn't start excluding people.
Who says private schools want or need to be exclusive? Some do, but certainly not all. The one my son went to for a few years wasn't. And it was excellent.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I have a series of math text book from the 50's that I bought at a garage sale for $10, when I was homeless high school drop out. I used them to brush up on Algebra Trig and Calculus as preparation for teaching myself higher mathematics, compiler theory, and etc. CS theory. They are far superior to today's mathematics books.
A few years after me, my younger brother became a sophomore in high school and was struggling with mathematics. I tried to help him with his homework, but the terminology was wickedly alien. I said, "Is this even algebra? What the hell are they on about?" I showed him how to solve the problems using the methods that worked for me but he said, "No, you don't get it, I can't do it that way I have to do it the way my teacher wants or it doesn't count." That's asinine, if the solution fits then it's equivalent. However, I had experience with such oppressive systems myself, so I knew the only thing to do was start from the first chapter and re-learned their bullshit terminology so I could show him the book's particular way of performing and wording the calculation. I realized that the textbook sellers changed the wording and methods of teaching mathematics over the years, not only to yield more book sales for newer curriculum and re-assert copyright anew, but also to make mathematics more in line with the (supposed) way girls learn.
It's unconscionable for teachers to remain willfully ignorant that boys and girls think differently in general; Only a complete moron would think that brains were immune to sexual dimorphism that had such drastic effects on the rest of the human body. It was common knowledge that men and women have different personalities in general, but strangely research was lacking in the area of sex differences in behavior. However, the feminist mantra that men and women are not different drowns out opposing facts. Strange when you consider that they lobbied for changes to the way mathematics and sciences were taught to make them more easy for girls to learn them. Drop the damn stereotyped learning, everyone goes at different rates and different methods are better for different folks, and yes, sexual dimorphism will cause a trend in certain graphs, but that doesn't mean we can't embrace outliers too. Just consider the student as individuals for once: If a boy or girl is having trouble learning via one method, then teach them the other. If that means you wind up more girls or boys in the class that teaches more event based and auditory methods vs visual and hands-on methods then THAT'S OK. If you want to end sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. you have to consider the individual's experience regardless of any group you classify them as being; Stop using identity politics, they only create more inequality in the name of equality.
The feminists leveraged their sexist ideology and identity politics quite effectively by pointing to the disparity in female enrollment and graduation from college, especially in STEM fields. What they failed to realize is that my mom was in the slide-rule club in high school, and she didn't need sex tailored teaching. Their changes didn't help girls to learn, they merely made it harder for some to learn than others. The textbooks I have from the 50's and 60's teach mathematics in concise and plain terms. They don't use too many ridiculous analogies and mental gymnastics. Word problems weren't a focal point past elementary levels. It wasn't that all girls learn different than all boys, it was that there are different methods to teaching that individuals are better at understanding, and there is a trend in which methods boys and girls favor. However, these changes just muddled the methods and muddied the waters.
Another problem has been brewing in education for a wile now too: Standardized Testing AKA Poor Penalization.
Private schools are the very definition of "exclusive". If you are unwilling to pay their fees (however high or low they are, for whatever reason), then you are excluded.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
To be fair, all of the countries that do worse than the US _also_ have more leftist governments.
The US has the most right leaning government there is. It also has the most racially, socially, culturally, and economically diverse population there is.
I wish I knew what to do about the problem of people not caring about Math and not excelling at it.
I think you and I probably disagree on many things, although I did see elsewhere that you complained about the growth of administrative/managerial positions within the school system. On that issue, I agree with you entirely.
It's frankly not clear how much the school can do for the kids _in general_ to improve outcomes for the broadest cross section of students, but one thing that has good empirical evidence is reducing class sizes.
That means hiring more teachers.
Frankly, given how much less it costs to hire a teacher than it does to hire an administrator, this should be a move everyone should get behind -- fiscally responsible, pro-teachers, pro-students.
The fact that this doesn't seem to be happening suggests that public education is sadly serving some other set of interests...
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
We need more trades / tech schools to free up room in the colleges also that can help cut the student loan loads by having people take say a 1-3 year mixed trades / apprenticeship to learn jobs skills and yes tech / IT can use that.
Right now it can be hard to even get a 4 year degree in 4 years due to the way classes fall in the schedule / fill up. Maybe with less people going to college they will fill up as fast.
Quote: "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor."
Skimming the actual Harvard report, I see no data nor any claims talking about the performance of students in the United States broken down by minority group, socio-economic status or if they live in an urban or suburban setting.
How can we draw a conclusion when there is no data presented?
And I haven't even touched the apparent inverse correlation between those who go off and become successful starting new businesses and their grade point average. How many million-dollar and billion-dollar American corporations were founded by college drop-outs?
That is how empires crumble. In the US, the process is well underway.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
On the other hand, way back in the 70s when I went to High School, I spent a lot of time in the US Military's dependent school system.
Those schools taught Calculus.
My senior year in high school, though, was in a local public high school in Hawaii. That school did NOT teach Calculus.
Which meant I had taken Algebra I before high school, Geometry as a freshman, Algebra II as a sophomore, and Trig/Analytic Geometry as a Junior.
And then had nothing to take as a senior.
Solution, after talking to math teacher: retake Trig/Analytic Geometry, and she'd give me her old calculus book and stick me out in the hall so I could learn Calculus on my own (with occasional help from her when she didn't have to be paying attention to the class).
At least she didn't make me take the trig/anal tests over again, she just gave me an A since I'd already gotten one in trig/anal....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The problem is that we are spending so much time trying to teach to the kids who don't value education we are failing those who could succeed. For example, when I kid falls behind, the school is incentivised to not fail the child. Instead they give the other children in the classroom busywork and pull one or two aside to spend extra time with them. This time is time /not/ spent advancing the smarter kids. Indeed, our ideal of giving all children the same education is simply pulling down the smarter kids. It's a shame that someone in the UK has to point it out to us.
Smart, intelligent, educated women just aren't breeding as much as their lesser counterparts. Why would we expect our nations children to be getting smarter? Clearly it's natural selection gone wrong!
And every single thing you claimed was special about the US and which hurt its rankings applies to many other countries too, and they don't see the problems the US is seeing. Then you come along and claim it's all nonsense, as the article said happens, and don't see the problem. You, and especially the attitude you hold, are part of the problem. But I'm sure you can excuse that too and come up with some incredibly insightful explanation as to how it's fine to ignore problems such as these, and how you are right and the rest of the world is different to how it actually is.
It's funny you should mention basterdisation of the English language as according to Oxford University many subsets of American English are much closer to the original Anglo-Germanic root English language than those dialects of Brittish English that exist today.
Go visit the fishermen in Tangiers Island, or the 7th district in Maryland if you want to hear what "English" actually sounds like.
The poorer the background of the student, the more that should be spent on his education. The way things are now, what with those with the nmost getting the most, is completely backwards for an equality for everyone society.c
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I was hired to develop a fairly large scale Common Core platform. I walked away out of disgust once I reviewed the actual content. The U.S. public education system has problems, and from my experience, Common Core is /not/ the solution.
Thanks for taking an opportunity to make it better, and instead leave it that much worse off.
Private schools are the very definition of "exclusive". If you are unwilling to pay their fees (however high or low they are, for whatever reason), then you are excluded.
Well, certainly, though that interpretation of the phrase undermines the original point the AC above was trying to make. The claim was that private schools won't accept difficult kids, the reply was that to be exclusive you must exclude, and the basis for the exclusion being discussed clearly was not money. Other than the financial issue (which, as you note, needn't be a terribly high bar), there's no valid basis to claim that all private schools are exclusive.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Example, please. The examples I've seen in the press about "horrible" math presentations in CC have actually been presentations that actually try to teach non-trivial mathematical concepts like place value or the number line. The complaints I see seem to be that CC isn't teaching the 'easiest' way to get an answer to a numeric problem. i.e. CC uses a number line to solve an addition problem instead of the rote paper and pencil algorithm. As a degree holder in both mathematics and engineering I've formally studied math for its own sake and as a tool. Perhaps as a tool the only goal is the easiest way to get an answer, but real mathematics is not always about the easiest way to get an answer, but the most insightful. I'm open to arguments that we should teach the kids rote algorithms first and the most straightforward problem solving, since a lot of them only need the tool but that is applied arithmetic, not math.
Please explain how the link you provided supports your claim of a quadrupling of inflation-adjusted per-pupil costs since 1962.
As GP already noted, the table can be found via another link. But also, the table he quotes was in a link at the bottom of the first page he cited -- which would be pretty clear if you scrolled down and read the table heading until you found the one on topic.
I know that's asking a lot -- looking at the table on the linked page that actually is on point. But if you did, you'd find (Table 213):
Expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance:
Unadjusted dollars - 1961-62: total $517, current expenditures $419
2009-10: total $13,041, current expenditures $11,445
Constant 2011-12 dollars - 1961-62: total $3,915, current expenditures $2,905
2009-10: total $13,692, current expenditures $12,017
The "current expenditures" excludes things not directly relevant to student instruction, like community services, adult education, as well as expenditures NOT on the current school year, like capital outlay, interest on debt, etc.
So the best numbers to compare would be the inflation-adjusted "current expenditures," which would be $2,905 compared to $12,017. That's actually slightly greater than quadrupling.
From the article: '"There is a denial phenomenon," says Prof Peterson. He said the tendency to make internal comparisons between different groups within the US had shielded the country from recognising how much they are being overtaken by international rivals. "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor," he said.'"
But let's take a closer look at the information in the article and see if this way of thinking about it makes sense.
Southern states Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are among the weakest performers, with results similar to developing countries such as Kazakhstan and Thailand. [...] If Massachusetts had been considered as a separate entity it would have been the seventh best at maths in the world. Minnesota, Vermont, New Jersey and Montana are all high performers.
There are some clear patterns here. The low-performing states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana are poor, rural, and have large minority populations. Conversely, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are wealthy, urbanized states with relatively low minority populations. So maybe thinking about scholastic achievement issues in terms of "white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor" makes quite a bit of sense after all.
And better socio-economic status generally means you are in a safer environment... so I think you just helped the GPs point.
Language is dictated by usage, not semantics. It's the reason why the word "ain't" is in the dictionary today.
And what exactly is wrong with "ain't"? It's a reasonable contraction of the phrase "am not," given that "amn't" (the original) is difficult to pronounce and will tend to naturally morph to something better. The usage war against "ain't" is just another one of those stupid arbitrary battles started by random guys in the 19th century who were often imposing their personal preferences rather than any "rules" based on usage or logic. In this case, it was probably motivated by class differences, rather than any sense of grammatical impropriety.
And don't pretend there are no other contractions like this -- see "won't," for example, as a contraction of "will not," which is much easier to say that "willn't."
If anything, the language police should be after people who utter such grammatical monstrosities as "Aren't I great?" As far as I'm concerned, the MORE CORRECT version of that sentence is "Ain't I great," unless you're the sort of person who goes around saying things like "I are sad. I are going to walk the dog. I are stupid for talking like this."
The BBC article shows a table of countries and their ranks. I'd like to see a couple more columns in the table, including the number of years the parents spent in school and some number relating the average income to the cost of living for the particular area in question. I bet the statistics for certain areas of the "Deep Southern" US would show families below the poverty line with parents who did not complete high school. Also, I'm shocked that Israel (rank #29), a country with a modern and high-tech reputation, is actually ranked below the United States (rank #27).
We certainly do have a right-leaning gov't, but your statement just isn't true. There are lots of gov'ts that are farther right than us. Particularly in the Middle East & Aftrica.
...South American countries such as Chile and Mexico.
This just it, basic geography skills also lacking.
I wish we could walk away. I have two kids in elementary school and the math they're learning sickens me. They don't actually work with numbers, but need to draw "word sentences" to graphically represent problems. If you have 8 + 3, you don't just add the numbers, you draw 8 boxes and then you draw 3 boxes and then you count all of the boxes to get your answer. If this was just the introduction to the concept of addition, it might be fine, but this is how they expect kids to add (and multiply and divide!) even after they've been doing it for awhile.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That his reports on math skills around the world only includes the 58% of children that attend secondary school in the first place, right?
I wonder how the US fares when you consider all the children in a given country, not just those that can afford to attend school... The idea is to educate all the children, not just really educate the (comparatively) rich kids.
Ken
Small wonder Americans are not interested.
If Americans are soooo stupid and lazy then why does the US have *way* more than it's share of substantial inventions? We are practically all major tech companies started in the US - by people educated in the US. Why are foreign students breaking their necks to get into US universities?
I love math. I'm the math geek who, in school, would make up and do math problems just for fun. What's 2 to the 100th power? I'd sit down and multiply it out by hand to find out and would think of it as fun.
Yet, I look at the math my kids are doing (1st grade and 5th grade) and if I was in their place I'd hate math too. It's sad. My oldest has gone from being a math geek who would sneak math into art projects (seriously, he'd have a drawing with 1 + 1 = 2 in there for no apparent reason) to hating doing math. At least, until I show him the "old school" way of doing it at which point he loves it again.
Common Core can't die soon enough!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
From what I understand, the alternative methods are supposed to be taught in addition to the traditional methods, not instead of them. The idea is to get kids comfortable with what the operations actually "mean", not just rote techniques.
The method of using addition to do subtraction is one that I do quite regularly (I'm almost 40). It's handy as an estimation technique, since for a first approximation you can round both numbers to something that's easy to work with, and then factor in the correction if necessary.
As for division, the technique described clearly doesn't scale to the numbers in the example. It was a poor choice of question to demonstrate the technique.
In the interests of "accountability" and "lean" and "metrics" and such there is little flexibility because teachers are forced to "teach to the test".
The problem is not that it's a government-run organization, the problem is that teaching is inherently difficult to standardize. Each kid is different.
Standardized testing is an attractive idea (how do you know how you're doing unless you measure it?) but the problem seems to be that it's *really hard* to come up with effective measurements for everything a teacher does.
blah blah blah the joke was that 99% of people from the USA will answer 'murica.
and then most will fail if asked where it is, because if you say that America is in North America it starts to kind of reel into madness from that point..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Unfortunately, a lot of people who love math or are good at math are really just good at following directions. They learn the little tricks and formulas and they pass the tests and everyone says, oh little Jimmy is so good at math. And they like it because they feel special. But that is not math. I know many people who have gotten to college thinking that way and were in for a rude awakening when they realized that they knew was not math.
Whether you like it or not, common core is teaching kids to think conceptually. They are learning really deep mathematical ideas very early on. In the long run, I think this is going to be great. In the short term, there is a certain "culture shock" that kids are getting who have learned the old ways for a few years and are being abruptly switched to the new ways. It also requires very good teachers who themselves are very comfortable with math, which the old way of teaching did not. There are going to be some growing pains. But in the end I predict it is going to lead to a lot more kids learning and loving math, especially creative types who were turned off by the paint-by-numbers aspect of the old ways.
But for the most part these leftists are not dedicated to playing one ethnic and social group off against the other. The left in the US is dedicated to maintaining separation and division between the races because they know they can exploit it, and have gone into hyper-drive on the concept in the past, say, 6-7 years, to pick a random time frame.
As I understand it, the problem that CC is trying to solve is that most kids don't have a gut-level understanding of what numbers actually *mean*.
I went to school with a lot of people that just memorized the rules, but didn't really have a feel for them. And so when the circumstances changed they couldn't adjust the rules to deal with the new circumstances. (Dealing with binary or hex, for example. Or curved space, or alternate coordinate systems.)
So with CC they're trying to give kids a more intuitive feel for numbers. That said, the alternate techniques are supposed to be *in addition* to the ones that we all learned, not instead of them. And the alternate techniques are not as efficient as the traditional techniques (which are optimized for the common case) but they're more flexible. So some questions (like those involving large numbers) don't mesh well with techniques involving counting/drawing/reordering/etc.
Lastly, some of the issues are due to bad question design, bad teaching, etc. We've got centuries of experience teaching the traditional techniques, not so much with the new stuff.
I have a lot of friends with kids who complain about common core, and I've long suspected that what you just said is the reality here. I hope the public backlash does not stop our teachers from teaching students these valuable tools just because their parents don't understand it.
Republican troll fail. Republicans love, love, love vouchers because they take public money and funnel it into private institutions.
Sorry, I fell into the trap of using "right and left", but these mean different things to different people.
When I say "right", I mean "laissez-faire", "capitalist", "individualist", "deregulated"
When many people say "right", they mean "authoritarian" and "nationalist"
That's not what I mean at all. I detest authoritarianism.
There are many places that are more authoritarian than the US (but we're working hard to catch up! (grumble))
There are no places that are more pro-individual liberty than the US. There are a few places which have better pro-business environments, and more economic freedom, but they tend to have fewer civil liberties than the US.
fwiw, my ideas about individual rights may also not be what yours are. I think "hate speech" should be legal, and like any other speech, should only be prosecuted when it is threatening or slanderous. And I think individuals ought to be able to keep machine guns without any government knowledge of oversight. Finally, I think homeschooling is a critical way to pre-empt the historical evils of government indoctrination, and so support homeschooling and parental rights to an essentially unlimited degree -- not because I think all parents are good, but because I think most governments are bad :)
I take individual rights _very seriously_, and so for me, a nation that offers a high degree of individual liberty has the following characteristics: few laws restricting the content of speech, few restrictions on private gun ownership, few restrictions on how children are educated outside of state control.
The US ranks quite well on all 3 of these individually, and taken together, far and away better than anywhere else.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
When I was in gradeschool in the 80's, "touch math" was all the rage at my magnet school. I'm pretty sure it damaged me for life. I kid you not. To THIS VERY DAY, I cannot do simple math functions without actually drawing out and touching numbers - or imagining myself touching them in my head. My brothers who had standard math and memorized times tables are far better than I am at math. I really wish I hadn't been some experiment for the latest and greatest teaching fad.
If you did your research, you would know that "maths" is a very recent invention in Great Britain. It only started in the 1970's, and didn't become common until the 1990's. That doesn't change the facts of what I stated, which is that mathematics is not a plural word, and the abbreviation, according to the rules of English as the British themselves define them, is math. This isn't an American vs. British issue, this is about a misunderstanding of the language. Just because it has taken foothold in Britain and some of its former colonies doesn't make it correct.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
You are using a contrived example to "prove" your point by taking a trivial problem and taking the most absurd route possible to solve it. The "Common Core" method (which, by the way, is the method that most people will use intuitively) is used to reduce the complexity of nontrivial problems, not to make a mockery of the trivial ones.
By way of example, what's 426 - 298? Well...
298 + 2 = 300
300 + 100 = 400
400 + 26 = 426
And now... drumroll please... 100 + 26 + 2 = 128.
And you and I both know that if you had faced this problem in the real world that this is exactly how you would have solved it. You probably wouldn't have drawn a box or any such nonsense, but you would have reduced it to manageable chunks like that because that's the sensible way to solve it.
Sorry to have rained on your common core bashing session.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I think the bigger issue in there is a parental culture shock when they can't help the kids with their homework. Getting help at home is really key to a child's early academic growth and many implementations of CC are making it hard. There really should be some resources that help the parents with the transition. I'm loving seeing the stuff my kindergartener was exposed to this year, but there were times when we got a sheet with some numbers and maybe some boxes and instructions with words that had no contextual meaning to us.
I didn't say we don't have a problem. I didn't say we don't need to improve. I didn't say we the statistics are wrong.
What I did say is that its more complicated and that the problems are not systemic but localized in specific areas where there is a very bad problem. My point was that some parts of the US need to be given a crash course in how to add 2+2.
My point has always been that statistical analysis is impossible if you don't understand how to read statistics.
The people analyzing these statistics yourself included sadly do not understand the numbers or what they mean. This leads you to make erroneous conclusions again and again and again because you've over simplified the information.
You cannot do that and retain accuracy.
You must retain the complexity. The complexity is data. If you throw the complexity out you throw the data out.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The teenagers in the "deep south" dragging down those results probably can't read all that well either. There are all sorts of systemic problems in for example rural Mississippi that go way beyond good math scores but at the same time those kids lead very different lives from the average suburban or urban teenager so I don't think it really tells you much to get an "average" math test score including these groups and then extrapolate something about about the US education system -which granted has its problems.
Exactly; as an illustration, take those three "unreasonable CC homework" questions for his 3rd grade daughter comedian Louis C.K. posted on twitter, and got a storm of support for in the "finer" media. Ignoring the fact that the homework questions were not part of the CC as such, I disagreed on all 3 accounts:
- first question: you get 6 boxes (the picture showed only the top 3 of them) and are asked to write "A" in half of them, "B" in 1/3 of them, and "C" in 1/6. For crying out loud, what kind of number-dyslectic moron thinks this is a difficult assignment? He must be hoping his daughter aspires to also be a comedian (or a journalist apparently), because she sure as hell won't get into higher education if she's being led to think she shouldn't learn to solve that. The media storm that followed was eerily reminiscent of idiocracy...
- second question: sure, you and I, as a parent, may not know what a "pictograph" is. However, you and I hopefully know how to use Google. After a 30-second search, I discovered "pictograph" is just a scary term for an innocuously simple concept. I bet his daughter was drilled in class on what a pictograph is and how to construct one before being given that assignment; not the teacher's fault if she wasn't paying attention, and as a parent, you shouldn't balk at a word you don't know unless you never want your offspring to learn more than you know.
- third question: he apparently deleted that one after a few days because I don't see it on his profile anymore; probably he realized just how stupid it made him look. Anyhow, the question consists of a number of separate, very simple equations. He pretty much admits in his tweet that the equations are not really too hard as such, except for the last one, which doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Just stare at that last one for 20 seconds... right, it's a simple typesetting error ! Specifically, what you're seeing is two equally easy equations that are unfortunately concatenated on one line by lack of a line break. Was this guy drunk when he posted it? And even if not, is lashing out without thinking what he considers "being a good role model"?
...that public schools have to accommodate, often at great expense. It's a lot easier to succeed when you can pick and choose who gets to attend your school.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Your timeframe pick isn't random, and misses the point.
Leftists were doing this in the '60s and '70s.
The right plays one economic and social group off against the other.
And both play these groups against themselves, to extract resources for their cronies.
The right insists on stealing from us for things that go BOOM.
The left insists on stealing from us for things that go AWW.
And both serve the financiers by borrowing to do so (i.e., taxing our futures too).
So why do you abet the misdirection by leaving out most of the culprits with your 'random time frame'?
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
I am not a Common Core expert, but let's change the solution a bit:
12 + 8 = 20
20 + 10 = 30
30 + 2 = 32
8 + 10 + 2 = 20
Getting rid of the 12+3=15 equation makes the solution cleaner and more intuitive. There's no reason to have it in there, it's just more numbers to keep track of. It's noise. Since this equation seems to be a staple in "look how stupid Common Core is!" articles, I can't help wondering if it was ginned up a bit to make it extra confusing. Having said that, some of my daughter's math textbooks made me shudder with their incomprehensibility.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Well, the word 'maths' didn't really surface before 1911, so I guess it's the English that in this case have introduced a break with tradition. The word was 'math' before.
What were the names and authors of those math books? Would love to check them out.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Sounds like 'murica.
You're not supposed to have to study for these damn tests, and you're not supposed to copy the test material, but that's exactly what teachers are making students do.
It struck me in college that studying for tests is a fundamentally flawed idea. Really, all tests should be given at random intervals to demonstrate that you actually are learning the material. If you don't know when the test will be, you don't know when to cram.
Of course, that would be a huge inconvenience for the teachers, unfortunately. Some professors like to write the test once and rotate between 3 different sets of wordings, and just fudge the coefficients around when they loop back.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
We could just use "I'm not" instead of "I amn't." If we're going to mangle it, let's at least do it in a logical, predictable manner, yeah...or else we end up learning that half the verb conjugations in German are Regular and the other half...well, a lot of them are just random vowel replacements (although you could observe there's something of a "sub-regular" shift, too).
You do raise a good point about "won't." I hadn't noticed that before....I don't understand "if I were the king of the world" either. Why isn't it "if I was?" You don't say "I were going to bed," but "I was going to bed." Maybe it would help if we had an actual different-sounding conjugation of it.
Hypothetical case is all crazy-like in German too from what I remember, though, so apparently it's not just us. And "sie" can mean any of "they," "her," or "you (polite)" depending on conjugation clues and capitalization, so hey.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Why do women wear a pair of panties but only one bra?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Interesting essay, my elementary math books are all gone. I still have my elementary algebra book but I've not seen latest books used in today's public schools. I have my great grandfather's textbook he used to when he taught high school math (I need to try some of those exercises!)
mfwright@batnet.com
So, when you're given a shovel and told to fill a hole with shit, it's better to fill that hole with shit than to walk away?
Common core isn't designed to teach kids anything but a touchy, feely "I hate school".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sorry if I ruined your joke. But most Americans know they live in North America. Just like folks who live in West Virgina know they aren't in Virgina.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Did you even read what I wrote? The body that admisters the entire thing is mostly irrelevant if you have a pointy haired boss with an MBA in shouting in charge at the school level instead of someone with teaching experience.
I read what you wrote. I'm telling you you are jumping to conclusions. You assume that you know how schools would deliver better results.
I'm telling you, I don't know how schools can produce better results. There is little evidence about the effect putting teachers in charge, spending more money, or smaller class sizes accomplish that. And pointing to Europe doesn't help because the Europeans are actually not doing better than we are; the differences we see in PISA are minor, and largely attributable to choice of samples and factors that have nothing to do with education.
And we're certainly not going to produce better schools by picking the academic-fad-du-jour, spending 20 years to implement it, only to discover that it didn't make a lot of difference and cost a lot of money and trying to implement another fad for another 20 years. At that rate, it will take us forever to go through all the things we need to try before we accidentally hit on something that works better.
The way to improve schools is to let many schools try many different things, and let parents decide for themselves what they believe works and doesn't work. In fact, Obama and Democrats even play lip service to this, they simply don't actually do it (like so many of their policies, they say the right thing and then do the wrong thing).
I know it's too late now, but I would have looked into this:
http://www.ted.com/talks/yoav_...
If you look at the american culture vs. academics, you will see that for decades academics have had a social stigma attached to them. Especially mathematics which appears to be the most "nerdy" of them all.
Just look at how movie and tv culture ridicules the smart kids and idolizes the athletic, attractive, charismatics. Many stories are about the 'maverik' who doesnt follow the rules and goes by the 'gut' feeling overcomes the odds and wins the day. Even the science fiction buys into this! Examples: Captain Kirk sleeps around, cheats on his tests, has other people do his science and engineering. Spock has a great intellect, but is really a comic character and only wins when he goes with his 'human' side. The android Data really just wants to be human and have feelings.. doesnt care about making scientific breakthroughs even though he has the intellect for it. Luke uses the "force" -a mysterious power that is a metaphor for having a lot of "heart".
None of the stories talk about years of study, winning because you are better prepared, succeeding by hard work, etc.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
I think at least some of what has gone wrong in Math education is that the linguists have infected the teaching of Math with a whole lot of over-descriptive buzz words. One that I recall from my sisters years at primary (elementary) school was the "commutative law of addition". She was 3 years younger than me, and has never really dealt with Math well. I don't think it helps when kids have to learn lots of wordy rules, instead of just getting in and tackling the numbers.
Mathematics is a language in it's own right : you don't need to overload it with extras to make it comprehensible.
What I've read in other comments about Common Core Math seems to simply be a different way of breaking down the numbers into easily handled bits.
The way I was taught was with simple sums at first: 2 + 3 = 5; 7 - 4 = 3. But our Math books had squares, not just lines, so we were taught to structure the sums to give numbers a proper place to simplify the operations we carried out on them:
2
3 +
-----
5
and later
2 3
3 5 +
-----
5 8
The significance of the additional columns to the left was that they were 10 times the immediate neighbour to it's right.
So, a large subtraction operated by adding 10 (in this case) to the number in the "units column", and 1 to the number at the bottom of the "tens column".
Same value (10 units / 1 ten), different number to express it.
[+10]
8 2
3 9 -
[+1]
---------
4 3
So, descriptively it operated as "2 minus 9 won't go, add 10, 12 minus 9 is 3, 1 (to 'put the 10 back') plus 3 is 4, 8 minus 4 is 4".
It's an array, with a handy sub-array, to facilitate operations that rely on the relationship of 1 and 10 and 100 (etc.) each in it's proper place.
The operation described in the Common Core examples is linear, they're "climbing a ladder, a step at a time" using addition to find the value between the two numbers. It teaches a linear operation that is more easily described in words, but is less structured in mathematical terms.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
Inbreeding doesn't help matters. Being Tea Party Republicans doesn't help either.
I had the advantage of using these textbooks when they where new. Actually most of the books I had in elementary school where printed in the 40's. I have a son attending college. Last weekend he drove home to help me celebrate my sixty second birthday. He had to finish some homework for his summer calculus class while he was here. He sat at the kitchen table and spread out his materials, a graphing calculator, smart phone, laptop, and his textbook.
He never attended public schools instead we sent him to a small church based school where they used paced self study booklets. Motivated, intelligent students with involved parents have no problem leaning. Government schools are indoctrination centers where the people in charge only care about bonuses and pushing a political agenda.
My two older children are professionals with advanced degrees. The oldest teaches college English. Half of her students come in ill prepared for the work and think passing grades should just be given to them, even if they don't show up for class.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/07/about-that-common-core-math-problem-making-the-rounds-on-facebook/
Seems better to me. They are teaching math, subtraction for example, the way we actually do math in our heads.
Do you add ten, carry the one, etc... in your head? No, instead you look for shortcuts to round the number, and deal with the round parts first, to make it easier.
Most public schools are exclusive. You have to have a residence in the right area to attend them. Schools in the wrong areas are not exclusive enough and the few disruptive students ruin the education of the rest.
People in education in every country on the planet know what I have written but shortcuts deliver career opportunities for cronies that need to be rewarded.
It's not about a new insight. It's about ignoring an old one and having predictable poor results.
Improvement by ignorant brownian motion instead of getting help from domain experience? Please have at least some respect for the intelligence of people reading what you are writing, and please identify your attempts at humour clearly if it was at attempt at a joke.
A vouncher system? The ones that give tax rebates to the rich that already have their children in private school, but have no effect on the proportion of poor in private schools?
Remind me again how that benefits the poor.
Learn to love Alaska
Sure, government can fund things without providing whole services but even the education they do provide is competing with private schools; they don't outlaw those. No monopoly; which again, doesn't apply to government which is always a monopoly.
The next step people often forget to think about is what happens when you fund something with gov money. You have accountability (real or lip service) and regulations that are necessary. Most private schools would not like vouchers. When they have to treat everybody equally it will not be so great for them. Then you have the whole religion issue where they can't give money to fund religious indoctrination of children; which is one reason many people go private (in my state most the private schools under perform but the faithful have no problem believing their schools are superior... or that the lesser education is not as important than brainwashing their children into not thinking for themselves.) I've been to private school, BTW.
Charters are the current fad. They do not perform any better on average and cost a great deal more money-- this is despite their ability to chuck all the kids they don't like! You'd think they would average out better given that HUGE advantage they have over public accept-anybody school.
As far as the invisible hand of the false god; the market... that is BS. Wake up to reality. Consumers do not have much say or care much - the impact is there but it is not absolute. Look at how Americans screwed their own economy with the rise of Walmart and other corps who ruined everything - it doesn't take much indirection and the consumer will fuck themselves over eagerly. It also has the problems of a direct democracy where only a few people can be experts and nobody can keep up with all the issues going on so people couldn't run anything larger than a single person could run (and while holding another job, having a life etc.) I don't buy a huge list of things but I can't keep up with all the boycotts. Then you apply this to education where parents do not know jack shit about education and the majority doesn't even care enough to get involved like they should be doing (remember, most people have both parents working and more combined hours than in the past; the time constraints alone are a problem.)
So, that private school going to open early so the poor kids who DO NOT EAT at home can get breakfast? nah, they don't allow those people in the school. Voucher schools can add fees on top of the gov money to do away with that... unless you regulate them; then they take in the minimum amount which is likely not enough.
Educators in most states are required to take continuing education themselves. Depends on how the program is run how well that works. The private colleges cater to the teachers the best with lots of pure BS courses that let you off the hook. I know educators. I even taught a course for them which surprised some because it wasn't a BS course like they expected; they made a mistake of not going to a private college. Don't know how bright they were, you don't take a course on robotics and computers in education and think it will be a joke... Like those courses on multiculturalism where they just go around town eating ethnic food (I'm not kidding, that is a course! not at my less prestigious public university but the fancy private college down the street.)
As far as latest education research-- teachers are the worst at learning new things! They are extremely set in their ways. I think it has to be a result of conditioning; they spend decades doing similar things that work well enough for them so it should naturally be hard to get them to change. Even if your great new thing works well, it may not work well for the individual teacher or the subject matter or the demographics. Sure, fire them and get a new sucker who is into the new fads and you might not end up any better for years while they get broken into the job. Although they can have advantages, educational fads do come and go. Some have bad
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
No, they don't know. Nobody knows how to improve education. People have tried a lot of things with no clear path to success. What you state is unfounded ideology, not knowledge.
Yes, improvement by "Brownian motion", combined with selection: that's the bedrock of modern biology (Darwin) and modern economics (Adam Smith).
I do. I assume that people who claim to understand Darwin also understand Smith because they are talking about pretty much the same thing: how mutation and selection lead to gradual improvement. Only people who for ideological reasons are wedded to intelligent design deny either theory.
My daughter is wrapping up second grade. A few months ago, my wife and I had a conference with my daughter's teacher. She was concerned because my daughter wasn't completing her timed tests, and it might impact her annual testing. However, the teacher then commented on how my daughter was the only one in her class to get each answer correct. It's a real shame that we continually place value on completion over accuracy. As an employer, I'd take the employee who took their time, but had accurate work.