There is a set of links from Ed Driscoll over at Instapundit discussing problems in education. You already know what word is missing, the word that cannot be said, because it must have less than 0% influence on educational outcomes.
We're still looking for our keys under the street lamp, where the light is better, rather than where we actually dropped them.
11 comments:
Yes, it's a damned shame. Must be all due to Republican teachers..... And school boards...
There are things that can be done. A majority-minority school where I substituted for 3 years and taught math for a year increased its pass rate over 5 years on the Math section of the state test from about 20% to 65%. I wasn't there for the biggest jump in the pass rate, but teachers told me that it was done by testing for a particular skill and then focusing lessons on what was needed to improve that skill. It was NOT done by mere repeated taking of practice tests- which is what was done the year I taught there. Nonetheless, I believe that after that jump, there wasn't much improvement over the next decade, which implies a certain ceiling had been reached.
Back in 1997, there was a big brouhaha in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights about an article in the high school student paper that pointed out an achievement gap between black and white students. Shaker Heights hired Berkeley professor John Ogbu to investigate. The school board and the town didn't like his report. Among his findings was that black students didn't work as hard. The school district did not follow Professor Ogbu's recommendations.Professor Ogbu published his findings in a book, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement.
Two decades later, it appears that not much has changed in Shaker Heights.
Last year the WaPo published a report on Shaker Heights schools.This trail-blazing suburb has tried for 60 years to tackle race. What if trying isn’t enough? The reporter grew up in Shaker Heights, so the WaPo wanted to have someone with local knowledge for the article. There is no mention of Professor Ogbu in the article. The school district didn't follow Professor Ogbu's recommendations, but didn't improve, either.
The Driscoll link stating that parents can be a problem is on target.
Granted. All your points. But people stop trying hard when they know it isn't going to much matter. I (and my relatives) have terrible fine-motor coordination and could not draw, nor even write even a tolerable cursive hand. My brother taught college but his handwriting looks like a fourth-grader's. My fourth son went to auto tech school in Houston and failed electronics the first time. I knew he had screwed off a bit and had a bad girlfriend and wanted him to succeed, and so told him "No problem. You were close. Take it again and you'll pass this time." He shook his head. "You don't understand. Electronics II is much harder. I could take it three times and not pass it. And even if I did, I'd have to upgrade my skills every year to keep my license, and it's just going to get worse." He would have been a fine shade-tree mechanic in the old days, but it's like rocket science now.
At some point you just back off and say it is beyond you and not worth your time. I have great sympathy for black students who recognise that they aren't going to get there and decide to put their energy into other places. The problem is we don't leave them other places that have value to them, so they go downhill fast. The idea that if we just taught them to have gumption and that good-old American never-quit attitude they'd be fine is not only crap, it is cruel. We teach them that they not only aren't very smart, they also have bad character and are lazy. Young people hanging around with no prospects try to get status, which sometimes means showing off for the girls (boys) in some other way. Nature abhors a vacuum, especially in terms of status with teenagers.
Hard work can get you from an F to a D, or a B to an A. Pretending it can get even two letter grades* is telling ourselves comforting myths at the expense of the poor.
*In the era of grade inflation I know this is an outdated analogy. I have no clue what the real equivalent is now. But my readers are older and can see what I'm saying.
We're not looking for our keys under the light. We're feeling around for them in the dark in the place we were told to search.
The Driscoll link stating that parents can be a problem is on target.
It starts off that way but by the end Dreher backs off to the usual complaints about the culture.
Granted. All your points. But people stop trying hard when they know it isn't going to much matter.
Your point is correct, but it also works in a way you might not have anticipated. Such that students know they are going to be passed, regardless. I taught math for a year at a majority-minority (my one white student was an ADHD horror) school where I had also worked as a substitute teacher.
My principal made it clear that nearly all of the students were to be given passing grades. Given that a substantial proportion of my students were not on task, a substantial proportion were not doing passing work.
I was reminded of a math teacher at another majority-minority school (albeit better-behaved than the school where I taught a year). I substituted for him once. In his two years of teaching, he had earned a reputation as an outstanding teacher . He told me that in his first year of teaching, for the first marking period he handed out failing grades to a third of his students. That got their attention, and goofing off became much less common. (He soon left teaching for more lucrative opportunities in the private sector.)
I suspect that had I done something similar, I could have gotten behavior to improve much faster, but the principal didn't want failing grades handed out wholesale.
To have handed out wholesale failing grades, I would have needed to have improved my act by better documenting achievement and behavior. Had parents gotten a bunch of D-F warning grades after the first 3 weeks, things might have turned out differently.
Twenty years ago this was published: EDUCATING A BLACK ELITE [http://lagriffedulion[DOT]f2s.com/blackelite.htm]. Since then spending fortunes, flooding the Ivys & the like with Blacks, continually dropping standards, and much Happy Talk, if anything, nothing has changed or has gotten worse. O tempora! o mores!
Dan Kurt
@ Richard Johnson. Excellent counter, and I hope I don't forget it and simply revert to my default the next time this discussion comes up. While I believe that genetics matter, I also believe that incentives matter, and a near-certainty of passing no matter what quality of work is handed in changes the equation.
@ Dan Kurt - I'm sure you already know that La Griffe du Lion is disdained in polite circles and you should be careful to whom you reveal this sin against your very eyes. Spies are everywhere. However, I note that the refutations of his commentary largely fall into the categories of calling him names, asserting that he has been disproven without sourcing where this has happened, or citing tangentially-related research.
If the idea is that there are people genetically unsuited to education, then maybe the whole idea of universal education is a serious error--particularly if it leaves the schools incapable of imparting an education even to those with a gift for it. I'd entertain either theory: that universal education is possible, or that it's not, but I've about had it with crippling schools' ability to teach the academically gifted. If they can't do better than glorified child-care-with-a-cafeteria in the service of social justice, I'd as soon do away with public schools altogether. There are a lot better uses to put the taxes to.
In other words, if it's hopeless, I don't care whether it's fair to blame the teachers or not, for the same reason that I wouldn't devote a huge chunk of the public budget to curing cancer with crystals. Cancer's bad and everything, but so is wasting money on things that don't work, and lying to ourselves about it.
Perhaps universal education is fine, but you need different tracks, possibly in different facilities with different approaches. I suspect that the huge black/white "achievement gap" in Madison relative to the rest of the country is due to tailoring schools to allow the gifted and disciplined as much opportunity and flexibility as possible, while not providing discipline to the students who never got it at home--in fact, making excuses for the lack of it.
The despised methods, "drill and kill," memorisation, and phonics all work better on slower students than the exalted, sexy methods educational specialists try to pass off on us. They say they want minority achievement, but their actions say that what they want is to feel better about themselves.
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