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Bill Gates: U.S. Education Harder to Improve Than Infant Mortality Rates (xconomy.com)
gthuang88 writes:
In a Q&A with Harvard students, Bill Gates said his foundation's work on K-12 education in the U.S. has had little impact, at least compared to its success in reducing infant mortality in developing countries. The challenge with education, he said, is that it is "essentially a social construct" that depends on creating the right culture of accountability and interactions -- and funding, of course. Gates said if he had a magic wand for the U.S., he would fix education, and for the rest of the world, nutrition.
He also said if he were a college student now, he would study artificial intelligence -- and that he was jealous that someone in the room could solve the problem of creating an AI that can read a book and pass an AP exam.
Gates predicted this generation of graduates will "solve" cancer, as well as the pesky problem of infectious diseases.
And even though his foundation's 20-year effort has failed to improve educaion -- "we'll keep going."
He also said if he were a college student now, he would study artificial intelligence -- and that he was jealous that someone in the room could solve the problem of creating an AI that can read a book and pass an AP exam.
Gates predicted this generation of graduates will "solve" cancer, as well as the pesky problem of infectious diseases.
And even though his foundation's 20-year effort has failed to improve educaion -- "we'll keep going."
I'd say Windows IS a pesky problem of infectious disease.
That's the moron who says the Common Core madness is an improvement. It's not.
He has failed because his ideas were moronic and untenable. He needs to keep his grubby billionaire fingers and ego off of it and let actual educators do their work. Why anyone ever equated this silver spooned douche's wealth with intelligence or depth of understanding is a bad, bad joke. Go away, Bill.
He's trying to fix problems 30 years in the making to destroy US Education. Lots of up hill battle and nimbyism fueled ideology.
IIRC the Netherlands did it but I might be getting my countries wrong. You mandate equal funding for all schools, public and private. Then the rich are forced to properly fund education. Next make public Uni & vocational schools tuition-free. Lastly do a few social programs so kids aren't getting beaten up (literally and figuratively) at home when the economy sucks. Problem solved.
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This is all about his fear of liberal professors teaching him how to spell properly. A whiny excuse for lack of higher education.
Somewhere in all that, parent participation is left out. Parents are the key to a successful education program. That's why some cultures do better than others.
Remove "teacher decides all" mentality. Replace with standard cirricula and make sure you hire teachers who can help students learn.
None of these will happen because it would crush "academic free" (aka the scummy slime of modern education)
No, the challenge is that it's much harder to define an objective methodology for measuring the success of education than it is for measuring an infant mortality rate.
Why would abyone believe anything this asshole says? His "charities" only exist to serve his stock portfolio. Fuck the 1%.
What's hard about measuring "capable of fully functioning in a modern society"?
The education system is fixated on teaching all students the same curriculum. That will never work; any teacher will tell you that a small percentage of the students are really fast learners, some will get by, and some are just plain dumb. Teachers refer to students among themselves as Track 1, Track 2, and Track 3.
The way to fix education is to pour as much resource as you have into teaching the Track 1 kids, because they'll get the most out of it. Quit forcing the rest of the class to put up with Track 3 students who are disruptive or slow. The idea of paying the most attention to the best students is an anathema to liberal/progressive thinkers who believe everyone is equal and should be given an equal chance.
While it's true that infant mortality has declined substantially in certain emerging economies around the world, I'm not sure how much is due to Bill Gates' efforts, per se. A more compelling narrative is that these countries used to have really really bad governments and that once the government situation got a bit better then a large fraction of the population has been able to lift themselves up out of poverty into an emerging middle class - where they can afford to provide basic healthcare to their own infants.
It's not hard to see that the problem with U.S. education is that it's a vast pool of political patronage. If you are spending 20k+/year on a student it's hard to imagine how they can't get a reasonable education unless the system is being robbed every step of the way.
Seems Gates is just now learning this one.
K-12 Education has so many variables, not least of which is the state of a developing mind. I get sick of listening to "advice" from parents of kids who sleep through the night from day one, or have a great circle of friends all through their school life, who are un-fazed by deadlines or allergens or self image issues or any of the legion things that can trouble a kid even if they have attentive supportive parents and are in good health. K-12 is a social maelstrom and some of those issues are not eligible to be "fixed"
However if Gates and his foundation can create a more level playing field that would be great - the schools up the hill have better student:teacher ratios etc.
And if he could do something about the condescending parents of the "perfect" kids that would be a bonus - maybe a gulag
Nullius in verba
One of them got a job.
I logged onto yahoo yesterday when I'd heard about N Korea and it was buried under a bunch of celebrities that I'd never heard of doing something that I did not care about. I grew up in a poorer area of town and all of my Asian friends did well (very well in fact) in school, everyone else was a mixed bag, but tended to be on the lower side of educational attainment.
Bill gates "tried to improve" education by giving computer to schools, with full Microsoft software suite more or less mandatory... I'm not sure that learning to use these dumbing down tools and environment will really help in improving education...
If he had recommended Linux use, it could have given better results... If he looked in non-IT help to schools (more teachers, paper and pen furnitures, ...) it could have been even more effective.
Let's face it, IT and teaching are not meant to be mixed... computers make people stop thinking while school should make them think more.
Now that those who rebelled against education can get encouragement from others over social media, they don't want their kids to get too educated. They fear that they will have less influence over their kids than conniving, and plotting brain washers/educators. And they vote accordingly.
So you're saying that introducing faux-"free market" fappery is the right solution to this, just like "uncle milty" thinks it's a good idea for bloody everything, even if he had to force-feed it to the population by kicking the system when it's down? Because privatisation works so well for everything, always, ever now and forever? Been in a US hospital lately, or tried to pay for medical insurance?
Some things just don't privatise well, and you shouldn't even try.
Which is not to say that the US schooling landscape can't be improved. Pretty sure it can, but not with "vouchers" -- it's been tried in the wake of Katrina and go look how well that worked out. Nor do I think that notorious huckster and faux-"philantropist" (and convicted criminal, for racketeering) billy g. is the right man to fix this, or any problem. Like any very public rich hombre very publicly in the "philantropy" racket, he is really in it for himself, so you get results about the same as you get from MCSE-certificate mills: The right answer is the one that brings him the most money. Actual understanding entirely optional and not really welcome at that.
It will never happen by anyone who lives in a country like the US. Besides the decline in education, the mindset is wrong.
Capitalism ensures that an ongoing treatment of a disease is far more profitable than curing one.
As a result, the Nobel for curing something like Cancer will never have an American name attached to it.
Because god had them stand and put their hands on the wall to stay still when he was spray painting them black.
It seems after getting rich on screwing the whole world with an overpriced bad OS and office package, he finally cares about doing at least something good. The US education system is beyond fixing though, it does serve primarily as a mechanism to teach conformity and already pre-select the next prison generation. It is not about qualifying anybody to be a responsible, capable, insightful person. Why do you think the US has to import so many academics? US citizens are not more stupid or more intelligent than other people, but they are almost universally really badly educated.
On his predictions, I think he is right on cancer, but infectious diseases are a moving target and may actually get mostly unsolved (for those that still respond to antibiotics) in the near future. I would really like to be wrong on that though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Get rid of loans / cap payback based on imcome with an max time say 10-20 years.
As today, we had (1960s) students from all levels of intelligence. Teachers couldn't seem to realize that there were differences in student IQs. Everyone was supposed to perform the same way in every class. There was a program for people who were obviously not going to make it through high school. It was called something like the General Education Program and it had students in it that were in the same classroom for 3 hours in the morning to be taught English and basic math. Afterwards, they went out to different jobs and worked the rest of the day. They were actually given a degree at the end of high school.
Today some school systems (Florida) are requiring students to take a state final-final exam to get their degrees. This has not served to better their education system, but has served to cause many poor students to early quit and drop out of high school without even trying to graduate. They know that they are never going to be able to pass the state final-final exam.
Another very bad thing that schools do today is give homework. People in jobs only have to work by law 8 hours a day. But after a student spends 8 hours in school, they are expected to go home and spend another +- 4 hours doing homework. I was fortunate enough to not have this scourge, having lived in Houston and Corpus Christi in the 50s where they didn't believe in it. I didn't even know that such a thing as homework existed until I entered into junior high school in Dallas.
Probably the biggest scourge in the education system is that it is mainly based on memorization. If you are good at memorizing data, then you will probably be a good student. If you are not good at memorizing data, you will be a bad student. Education should be based on allowing a student to have any and every means to show that he can do the task given. This means open book teat, calculators, notes, anything that can be used to prove that the task can be done. I went to college, but was not a good memorizer, so I didn't get a degree. However, afterwards I got the chance to be a software engineer and excelled way beyond everyone in the companies I worked for. The reason was because I had access to everything I need in reference manuals and utensils. I didn't have to have everything memorized to succeed.
IQ is mostly (80% by adulthood) genetic and is not significantly influenced by education[1].
Expecting education to make someone more intelligent is the same as expecting them to become taller by joining a basketball team.
Immigration and reproduction in the US are dysgenic for IQ: https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country
These are "hate facts" because you don't have the emotional maturity to deal with them.
[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=iq+genetics&btnG=
It's going to be way easier to improve something from "crappy" to "not-so-crappy" as compared to improving something from "all right" to "good."
At the top end you are right. But defining success in basic education is easy: can they so simple maths, communicate simple ideas effectively, understand simple concepts.
There are global standards and yearly reports on this stuff.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
U.S.public spending on education is already the second-highest of any OECD country. The problem isn't funding. The problem is most of the increase in education funding over the last 50 years has gone to ballooning non-teaching administrative staff.
It's the administrators who control the school budget. Any time education funding is increased, they sop it up by raising their own pay and benefits and hiring more administrators, while passing a token amount down to teachers. Every time education funding is cut, they send it straight to the teachers, so they'll generate news stories about how they had to buy paper and pencils for their students out of their own wallet, to pressure legislators into increasing education funding even more. I even crunched some numbers from the Dept. of Education website a few years ago, and dividing the salary + benefits by the number of teachers yielded an overall average pay for teachers over $100,000/yr. There's no way that's possible. What probably happened is administrators shifted some of their pay and benefits into the teacher category, to try to hide how much of the school budget they were sopping up.
The problem isn't funding, it's how the funds are spent.
[I'm Canadian] When I was in university we held a protest asking for more funding for universities. We had 3 politicians come to speak to us. The first two were very sympathetic and said that funding for university was a priority for their parties and if elected they would spend enough to keep tuition the same or lower. The third politician was the former head of my university's student council and a member of the ruling federal party. The protest was in one of the engineering lecture halls where he had been a student years before. He very directly and truthfully explained that we were the most privileged sector of the Canadian population and that for those of us taking degrees that would lead to well paying jobs the cost of tuition could be higher almost all of us would still pay. He then called us selfish and self-entitled and that if he had extra money in the budget to spend there were lots of other groups where the money would make a bigger difference.
The room was silent, the protests ended. I think everyone felt like they were 10 years old and had just been caught doing something wrong.
The major reason we fail when it comes to education is that we keep trying a one size fits all. This is ridiculous.
We actually do a pretty good job of teaching certain gifted students. We offer lots of gifted classes.
But we fail the poor, the homeless, and the less gifted.
I was horrified by the tale of Kalief Browder. Arrested, held at Rikers for 3 years without trial, he commits suicide. This was a 16 year old kid accused of stealing a bicycle and the disgusting, vile, evil prosecutor asked for bail. As part of an attempt to blackmail the kid into pleading guilty for a crime that should have gotten 1 year in jail, he spent 3 years.
But forget about the prosecutor's vile behavior - WHY WASN'T HE EDUCATED WHILE IN JAIL? This was a 16 year old, not convicted of any crime, he is legally entitled to an education and we did not give him one.
If he was convicted and sent to juvy, at least he would have gotten computer based training (ineffective as that is). But because he was in jail awaiting trial, they illegally failed to provide him with the education he was entitled to.
We need to do a better job educating the poor, homeless, and, most importantly the criminals. They need the education the most and we give them the least.
Fine, you don't want to give them a live teacher in jail, at least give them a video conference teacher, NOT just software. Software is simply NOT equivalent to a real education, anymore than giving someone a book is the same as attending a lecture.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Infant mortality is directly related to the health of the mother, and care of the child after it is born.
...but not schooling. At least not in the United States. It's a huge fucking government bureaucracy controlled by the unions that does almost nothing for the majority of children that are forced to participate.
It is the direct result of personal choices in food, drink, vitamins, exercise, etc...
You can not improve government. All you can do it burn the fucking government to the ground and start over.
That's why he's failed. All his options are profit-generating approaches that treat teachers as low-skilled workers who recite the same material in lockstep to their classes.
Bill Gates, much like DeVos, want to destroy education so that they can replace it with a for-profit approach. They are sacrificing the intelligence of our nation to make money.
Just how much bullshit much people ram down a child's throat? By law, at least 12 years of bullshit.
Everything else is nibbling around the edges of the problem.
Your comment says a lot more about you than it says about reality. From deep in the trenches of cancer research I have to say that I suspect your tinfoil hat is too tight.
Common Core is not Singapore Math and other quite possibly sketchy methods of teaching.
Common Core just says at different age levels, kids should be able to do X, Y and Z. It doesn't say how you get there. Some states/school districts have adopted weird ways to get there and said it's because of Common Core but it's really not.
It's kind of like HIPPA. I've heard doctors and other healthcare professionals make the most outlandish claims about what HIPPA requires. The worst was a friend was taken to the hospital ER by another friend. A nurse comes into the exam room and says the healthy friend has to leave unless the sick friend, writhing in agony with acute pancreitis, signs a HIPPA release form. In this case, I think it was just plain stupidity. I think in other cases it's become the whipping boy for "you need to do what I want you to do", i.e., a nurse or doctor wants something from you so they throw a bunch of HIPPA flavored nonsense in your direction knowing full well it's wrong.
So in a similar vein, some people have turned Common Core into the whipping boy for explaining away why local educators made stupid decisions.
... (LOL, "sustain" was the captcha!)
...because he's an IT billionaire, we're supposed to unquestioningly accept him as an authority in education? Corporations and schools are organisations that are about as different from each other as you can get. Corporate know-how will get you into deep trouble in education.
There's a long history of education reform and enhancement programmes that have failed. He could've asked about those and why they failed before trying to reinvent the wheel and do it all over again. He could've consulted with the latest research in the learning sciences and education to find out what interventions have been consistently successful.
Finally, Gates could've looked into how the US education system is actually one of the best in the world and that, if you control for poverty, performs as well as any of the other top countries. The problem is that education is uneven and variable mostly due to poverty, poor investment (e.g. spending billions on ICT infrastructure, classroom gadgets, and ubiquitous and inappropriate computer graded tests), and degrading and vilifying the teaching profession (ever since the Reagan era "Nation at Risk" report). Kids in middle-class neighbourhoods get great education, those in poorer ones get terrible education. When you consider that 40% of Americans live in poverty and the USA has the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, it's not surprising that the overall performance of the US education system gets dragged down.
There's little room for improvement in middle-class schools. They're doing fine. If you want to push up national performance in education, it's more effective to target those living in poverty, because they have the most dramatic gains to be made. But that would mean helping poor people which isn't really a thing in US politics. They'd rather let poor people starve and fend for themselves (boot-straps mentality) and see their economy decline because of it: When people aren't earning good wages, they aren't spending it back into the economy or paying taxes to pay for things like healthcare and education.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
...is that we keep importing third world illiterate, non-English speaking people.
Not to mention entire swaths of Democrat constituents that see education as, "acting white".
Pick any middle class neighborhood and odds are that the school is doing well.
By and large, a successful student is the product of two parent families and a school staff that understands that their job is to teach, not indoctrinate.
My kid came home from second grade saying the class was being taught by an aide all the time because the real teacher was busy. After hearing this for a while I decide to visit. It turns out there are three adults in a room of about 25 kids. One adult is an aide who spends all her time with a kid in a motorized wheelchair who doesn't seem to know where he is: he sleeps most of the time I'm there. The aide my kid was talking about has most of the class doing "seat work" and is seems mainly concerned with keeping the class quiet by "shushing" every 30 seconds or so. The actual teacher is working one-on-one with a kid who is crying and trying really hard to pull out his hair.
I asked the teacher if this was unusual. She said it was like this every day. She estimated that 80% of her time was spent on two students, one of whom she considered "hopeless". The whole mess was created by unfunded state and federal mandates, and influential parents who want the best possible outcome for their learning-disabled kids.
I'm generally pretty liberal, but I'm OK with focusing on Track 1 kids.
Top problems with US education
1. Uninvolved/unhelpful parents
2. Teachers unions
3. Lack of funding
If the education system of the US is too difficult, try some smaller country in Asia, Africa or Latin America. Smaller means more manageable AND cheaper, which means resources could be better allocated. Plus, the third world needs better education more than already successful countries.
Accountability. That's the central problem. My mom is a teacher and she brings in horror stories of parents refusing to accept that their kids are anything less than perfect.
Seriously my generation seems to be fucking awful parents.
Just spent a long time looking for "insightful" thoughts on Slashdot. Today I started with the key words like "divide", "conquer", "property", "elite", and some related terms whose relevance I'll clarify in a moment. Then I went for "funny" in the hopes of finding some disguised insights. Then I went for "insightful", where this brief note by JoeyRox was probably the best of the slim pickings. All in all it felt like a colossal waste of time. Pretty sad.
The fundamental problem with education in America is that public education was deliberately destroyed using a divide and conquer strategy. There are a few residual good schools for the elite or lucky students, but most of the public schools have been converted into obedience schools that you wouldn't send your dog to. Other students were allowed to or even encouraged to "escape" to private schools or home schooling. Sad again.
Why? I used to think that it was mostly to appeal to religious nuts who wanted to insure their own kids were as ignorant as they were, and that has some relevance in terms of capturing their votes. However now I'm convinced the money was much more important. Public education was mostly funded by property taxes, but if you defund and destroy the public schools, it turns out you are eliminating the need for property taxes, which can then be cut more easily. Who benefits? Mostly the large real estate speculators (such as Trump imagines himself to be). More sadness.
Now about those testing standards. Complicated topic. You might start with Head in the Cloud by William Poundstone, even though he's mostly looking in the wrong direction by defending trivia. There really are domains of expertise, but what matters is how you use that expertise to solve problems. You don't need to know all the trivia, but you do need to understand the shape and size of the multidimensional problem space, and sampling your trivia is one way to assess your coverage. Unfortunately, the big problem with that approach that probably negates it is the prior assumption that there is one answer. Any important question is not answered so simply. Yeah, that's sad, too.
Bill Gates of the rose colored glasses? Lottery winners tend to see things that way. Too much sadness.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The dood whose Gates Foundation's Global Advisory Board originally read like a who's who of a criminal rogues gallery?
The dood whose Gates Foundation-funded, Oxitec (now owned by a hedge fund), released genetically engineered mosquitoes at each point there was a Zika explosion?
Hmmmmmmm . . . .
Developing countries basically have nothing as far as health care for children. So with just a small investment you have huge differences in outcomes. The education is already fairly mature in the US. We turn out fairly well educated individuals compared to most of the world. But Bill wants to turn out top students? Dig deep into your pockets.
...of giving funds to cronies instead of those of actual merit; big surprise the results are so poor.
Gates said if he had a magic wand for the U.S., he would fix education, and for the rest of the world, nutrition.
Well,while there, Gates could also tackle US nutrition problem. It is not the same as developing countries, but it is still the elephant in the room.
You can bet if BG is involved he is working against what he is claiming to fix. He is opposite man and he has 0 interest in making americans smarter or he would be investing to get rid of sodium fluoride in the water and aspartame/high fructose brain poisons.
Maybe start with spelling...
And even though his foundation's 20-year effort has failed to improve educaion -- "we'll keep going."
This is a really obvious comparison. Diseases can be treated and cured because the disease doesn't organize, vote, and get legal representation. Meanwhile, improving education requires one group of people convincing another group of people that they are the problem.
It takes an outsider to criticize the emperor's new clothes and Gates got it exactly correct.
'Useful education' is a poorly defined goal, measured with poorly defined metrics, implemented by a highly tribal bureaucracy, run by administrators with a counter-goal of proving the current system better than the old system, or blaming their underlings for its inadequacies.
There's plenty of blame to go around: Namely, parents failing to contribute to the "social construct" that is education.
Education is another service where the US government doesn't have to measure its own performance and no evidence of failure means no accountability. That allows government to blame the front-line workers (teachers) who have no control over the system.
"Liberals/progressives don't think everyone is equal"
"To put it simply: Liberals have a heart. Conservatives do not."
They apparently know that those who aren't are all heartless wretches.
This is all more of: Good people like me as opposed to the bad people who disagree with me.
Don't feel lonely. The religious right does it too with Godly people like them as opposed to the Godless ones who will be sent to hell.
It's almost like IQ puts a hard limit on what a person can conceive of and process, who'd-a-thunk-it.
Sweden doesn't have our problems with education, They rate teachers very highly and pay them to think and teach.
The late genius professor Feynman wrote about a previous education scam back in the '60s called "New Math" (older geeks will know this one).
These new hype fads hit the education system from time to time and they're ALL unmitigate bovine manure. None of them actually produces a better educated student. They are each just tools the education establishment and the book publishers use to try to dazzle parents while milking the tax payers for more cash.
Sadly, the current generation of students are being taught to have high self esteem and have no idea how monumentally ignorant they are; the SAT system, for example, has been dumbed down TWICE since the 1980s so modern high scores do not properly compare to scores of previous generations.
Education in America cannot be fixed as long as the teachers are unionized and the two major teachers unions of the nation are both corporations with deep ties to the Democrat party. Every teacher in nearly every state is therefore a contributor to Democrat party politics, is represented by Democrat activists, etc and those massive unions funnel huge campaign cash warchests to Democrat politicians. In any education-related negotiations in most American states, the people on both sides of the negotiating table are actually on the same side. In California, for example, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the California School Employees Association (CSEA) together gave more money to elect governor brown than any other special interest. With that sort of one-party political tilt, the education establishment has a built-in inertia that will prevent ANY reform at all. The only change the existing education interests want is "more money" which they keep getting more and more of without producing ANY measurable improvement in their results. Bill Gates, being aligned with these same Democrats, is unwilling to drive any change they would approve of and thus has not been able to improve education in 20 years of trying.
It's just like Marxism (and actually generally supported by the same sorts of people).... Every time somebody points to a failure the excuses roll out and they're all from the following set:
[a] The wrong people tried it!
[b] It was done the wrong way!
[c] Not enough money was spent.
Every failure of Marxism we're told was not a failure of Marxism at all.... oh nooooo, that thing that failed wasn't Marxism at all.... the wrong people did it and they did it all wrong and if they'd only thrown more resources at it it WOULD have produced heaven-on-Earth!
Same thing here.
Every failure of Common core is dismissed as a "bad example" whre the wrong people tried it, or they did it wrong, or they did not throw enough money at it.
Face it: The Parrot is dead; it's been nailed to its perch and it's definitely NOT "pining for the fijords". The simple reason that so many people despise Common Core and there are so many bad examples is that there IS NO WAY to "properly" stupify education while rigging it with hacks and scams to convince parents it's REALLY GOOD while actually dumbing-down the population to make them more satisfoactory to politicians and corporations.
>send n!ggers back to apefrica
>education performance skyrockets
>billions saved in welfare
You're welcome.
Says a C student...
Wasnt he a C student?
But it isn't cheap or politically easy.
You need trilingualism starting age 3.
You need many streams and the capacity to not just switch but utilize those to catch up.
You need high quality school lunches and a total ban on junk food.
You need the absolute fewest possible number of tests, no homework (since parents cheat) and proper mediation between teaching and practice. Exams should be at least to the much higher British standard, using floating grades (arithmetic mean score is a C).
You need no fixed reward systems, since kids become addicted to rewards rather than seeking out good work.
Age obsession is unhealthy. If a 13 year old qualifies for university, they need to be in university. 1% of all kids should be at this standard, which means you've enough young students to build a university.
Religion should be banned outside of religious education and history, and restricted to theory not dogma. This includes private and religious schools.
Nationalism should also be banned. No swearing allegiance, no flags in classroom outside of books, nothing from nationalistic perspectives, no filtering. Multiculturalism should be mandatory.
That would fix the problems in American schools.
The problem with Gates is he assumes Clippy and Word are enough.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Im a special education teacher in a middle school. What shocks me is how old our textbooks are. We are using common core, but none of the textbooks are aligned with it.
Secondly, kids dont care as much about educatiin because their parents teach them not to care (without realizing it I believe).
Most teachers dont assign honework anymore. This is mostly reserved for high school these days. Why? Because parents complained and none of the homework comes back finished.
What is biggest component to learning? Time.
At least weve gotten past the blame teachers propaganda from 10 years ago. Now ita blame common core though. Lol.
Finally, Eureka math is awesome. Its hard for adults who have not learned the method themselves, but kids actually excel using it. When I explain the methods to adulta they agree. If i send home a worksheet they dont understand. So, i dont send anything home. I do everything in class - a luxury of sped. I work at each students pace until thwy ubderstand. Getting a years worth of growth from sped students in math where half a year is the goal.
Finally, theres just too much to cover in materials for each grade level. Eureka, for instance, is great but you have to pick and choose. You couldnt possibly do all the grade level math worksheets unless you did 2 per day or 1 in class and 1 at home every night. Thats not feasible.
If anything we need to decide whether LOTS of knowledge with a low level of understanding is better than lesa knowledge but with each student having mastery.
IMHO, we should chop out a LOT, create trade skills courses as a learning track starting in middle school, and focus on mastery instead of cramming insane amounts of knowledge. /shrug
Since the creation of the Department of Education in October 17, 1979 (Gee thanks Jimmy Carter), the United States has fallen from 2nd in the World for education to now 17th!
If it ain't broke why did we fix it?
Faith: Belief in Truth. Superstition: Belief in Falsehood.
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. That fundamental fact is why the delusion that "improving" the educational system will produce better educated stupid people is grossly flawed. Genetics is king.
Meanwhile, medical and social intervention certainly can improve infant mortality rates. Since the dying infants are mainly the progeny of stupid people, improving infant mortality rates will result in ever more stupid people who cannot be educated by the educational system, causing delusional people who think otherwise to look for even more ways to blame teachers and schools for the consequences of the fact that we are popping out more and more stupid people.
which is why places like Oklahoma are on a 4 day school week. In America we use property taxes to fund individual school districts. We do this so the well to do and wealthy don't have to pay for poor kids to go to school.
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Don't look at China, Japan and India. They have high marks in math and science because it's a cutthroat world over there. It's like the Charter Schools in America. If you're grades drop you get kicked out of school. One of the things folks like to ignore when they point out that test scores in America have been dropping is that we're no longer kicking kids to the curb when they can't hack it.
Think of it this way: No Shit a pro sports team can beat amateurs. All the amateurs who tried out got kicked off the team before they even made it. Now that's fine for sports. I don't think it's so fine for education. I _want_ a well educated country. A well educated people are less likely to support fascism.
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All of Microsoft and he can figure out the simplest and easiest way to fix education.
1. The worst form of teaching is lecture.
2. The #1 most used for of teaching is lecture.
What really happens: Teach drones on. Kids hear the first five minutes (if they last that long) and then daydream the rest of the time.
With all the power of Microsoft, he can't engage kids in learning that is actually engaging?
Remove lectures. Teachers should teach, they should organize and project plan existing content.
Letter Factory does a better job teaching my young preschool kids than school teachers do. Go LeapFrog. My kids know their letters because they weren't lectured their letters, they watched a fun (at least fun for the kids) video that teaches them their letters. There are two senses involved: Visual and Audio, plus there is a tune, and some humor, like those old E guys saying, "Ehhh."
Want to teach a kid Math, show them some videos that explains and shows:
1. Who uses this math.
2. How they use it.
3. Visuals of math concepts.
Want to teach them history. Instead of paying a million teachers to drone on about history boringly, pay Hollywood filmmakers to make an educational movie with blockbuster budget. Need to know about George Washington? Watch his movie. Need to know about Egypt, there is a movie for each Pharaoh. Such educational films must be created in an engaging way.
Another way to engage kids that is effective is with games. Why are we wasting time lecturing kids, the least effective form of learning, when they will spend hours playing a game that could teach them the same thing. Video games have one up on movies as they engage three sense, sight, sound, and touch. Touch is powerful. Doing usually is orders of magnitude more effective than only listening.
"IT and teaching are not meant to be mixed... computers make people stop thinking while school should make them think more." I'm not sure about that.
Teaching--any teaching, I'll claim--can be done in different ways. Years ago I taught linguistics in one of the best colleges in a certain third world country. The students were paying a lot to be there (college students who couldn't pay could attend one of the national colleges/ universities), and they'd probably done well in high school. But as in many countries, they had been taught facts, not thinking on their own. So one of my first assignments was to explain why one of the analyses in the linguistics text book was wrong. That the textbook could be wrong was an astonishing idea to them. (Not to me, I'd grown up in the 60s.) I'd like to think that that assignment helped teach them to think, not just regurgitate facts.
What I did with linguistics could, I believe, be done in computing or indeed in any other domain. Teach them programming--the programming language doesn't matter, you could use WordBasic or Excel (don't quote me on the latter, though, my knowledge of Excel--and for that matter of WordBasic--is pretty meager). If you assign a problem to a class with 30 students, there will probably be 25 different programs (allowing for a few students who copy someone else's work, or don't bother to do it). Chose 3 or 4 of these solutions, put them up on the screen or print them out, and discuss which ones are better--and why. There, you're teaching them how to think. It's in a particular domain, and I can't guarantee it will generalize to other domains, but you can--should, IMO--do similar things in all the classes: make the students reason about things, not just learn facts.
Disclaimer: I haven't taught since 1981, so I don't have any experience with today's students, so I could be blowing smoke. But then my suspicion is that people today aren't different in what they *could* learn than people in Plato's Academy.
Education can improve, the problem is that education is tying people to short-sighted econmic needs, not to improve society.
Every single person with big money thinks it knows what's best for the world, like if they weren't product of mostly of luck, lies and unethical or antisocial behavior.