Assault on education

[dfitzo53]

@Destino In your opinion, what should schools be doing?

[PeterMP]

10 hours ago, Destino said:

https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-public-schools-is-closing-its-highly-capable-cohort-program/
 

the more I read about equity leadership in public schools the more it looks like their critics were right. They are trying to manipulate outcomes and that does include slowing down high achievers. I’m not buying this crap that there’ll just elevate every classroom and it will be the same as the gifted program thing anymore. They’re bull****ting and people need to stop supporting this ****. Especially being that’s it’s failed to lift the floor. 

 

its also become evident to me that changing curriculum, like the disastrous three cueing system, is more driven by selling training and books than actual evidence. Let’s all remember to act surprised when Jo Boaler falls out of favor and the next school of education rockstar pops up to sell a new method, for a steep price. One that’s entirely inline with the current political winds of course. 

 

 

I'm not sure that the 3 cueing system is about selling books (though I don't think many schools actually have books any more).  No matter how kids are being taught to read schools are going to have buy content/material.  I don't think we need to go to that level to explain the what has happened with the 3 cueing.  People sometimes strongly believe they are right without much evidence.

 

In terms of homogenous vs. heterogenous classrooms/schools, why do you think they aren't raising the floor?

 

And also, does it matter if they don't raise the floor if they also don't hurt high achieving students?  If you can keep kids together and not hurt the top, why pull out the top?

 

Just like 3 Cueing, shouldn't people that want to create a special system with special schools for high end students have to show some benefit to them?

 

(The research on the effect of heterogenous classes on the low ability students is mixed.  Some studies find no effect, some find a positive effect, and some actually find they hurt the low end student.  But they almost all universally find no impact on high end students.  You seem to be arguing for the continuation of a policy that there is little evidence that it is beneficial to anybody and might hurt low end students.

 

e.g.  

 

In this study, low ability kids did worse when they weren't mixed with other kids.  That is low ability kids did better when they were mixed with better students.  But there was no impact on high ability kids.

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1747938X18301039

 

"Between- or within-class homogeneous ability grouping had a small negative effect on low-ability students, but no effect on others."

 

Heterogenous classrooms (not pulling out the top into a special classroom/school) isn't a magic bullet to pulling up the floor, but in some cases it seems to help.  And I don't think there's really any evidence that it actually ever hurts the top.)

Edited April 4 by PeterMP

[Jabbyrwock]

12 minutes ago, PeterMP said:

 I don't think there's really any evidence that it actually ever hurts the top.

 

I haven't surveyed the evidence, so I can only speak anecdotally from experience regarding my son, but this conclusion seems very metric dependent.  If the metric is grades and standardized test scores, duh.  Most top students dont actually do most of their learning in the class proper, so the environment is fairly irrelevant in that regard.

 

If, however, the metric is maintaining a drive and interest in a subject the student has an affinity for, breaking out the classes and letting the top students push and learn from each other is critical.  Too many of my son and his friends lost interest in one thing or another ranging from science to music because they were forced to be in "the stupid classes".  They still passed with exceptional grades, of course, but you could watch the interest they had in the subject evaporate in real time as they were forced to endure the boredom of the subject being presented years below their level.

 

The social aspect of learning, finding a click at your level, was utterly destroyed within the school, and that propagated into the out of school world as well.  That social aspect is honestly such a huge part of maintaining childrens interest in subjects.  In particular in the teenage years.

[PeterMP]

9 hours ago, Jabbyrwock said:

 

I haven't surveyed the evidence, so I can only speak anecdotally from experience regarding my son, but this conclusion seems very metric dependent.  If the metric is grades and standardized test scores, duh.  Most top students dont actually do most of their learning in the class proper, so the environment is fairly irrelevant in that regard.

 

If, however, the metric is maintaining a drive and interest in a subject the student has an affinity for, breaking out the classes and letting the top students push and learn from each other is critical.  Too many of my son and his friends lost interest in one thing or another ranging from science to music because they were forced to be in "the stupid classes".  They still passed with exceptional grades, of course, but you could watch the interest they had in the subject evaporate in real time as they were forced to endure the boredom of the subject being presented years below their level.

 

The social aspect of learning, finding a click at your level, was utterly destroyed within the school, and that propagated into the out of school world as well.  That social aspect is honestly such a huge part of maintaining childrens interest in subjects.  In particular in the teenage years.

 

So this would seem to require that we do some tracking over the longer term to look out comes beyond what you can see at school.  It seems that would require knowing things like what jobs people end up in.  To my knowledge, that hasn't been done.  But I doubt it would change much very much.

 

We don't have an issue with too few people getting advanced degrees in science/math in most fields where having the extra background in high school matters.  We have too many in most fields.

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03439-x

 

That there are people out there losing interest in science/math that then would go onto need that science/math and impact society is unlikely.  If you are the sort of person that is losing interest because you aren't being pushed in your middle school classes, my guess is that you don't actually have the curiosity/drive/motivation to push science forward to any great extent.  In my experience, people that can really push forward science aren't going to lose interest being in a heterogenous classroom through middle school.  And to my knowledge, nobody is talking about killing things like AP programs at high school levels.

 

My kids have gone to heterogenous schools, but been pulled out for some classes through the years so they are in advanced science/math classes.  My oldest daughter is a senior in high school taking classes like AP Calc II and AP Comp. Sci.  She's planning on going to college to be a nurse.  The resources put into getting her to where she is in terms of science/math have almost certainly been a waste.  It's great she knows what an integral is, but she's almost certainly never going to use it.  From my perspective and in my experience, we're massively over educating many people for very little upside.  And realistically, I could have told you at 12 she didn't have have the intellectual curiosity to be really successful in science.

 

Realistically, we do the same thing at the college level.  Most of the people I went to college with don't use their upper level math today (e.g. diffi q). 

 

Maybe at the very high end nationally, it might make sense to pull out the top and get them into advanced schools/programs.  But for every school system/district to have such a program, I doubt it makes any sense.  That Seattle has 3 high schools worth of people that getting them advanced high school education by pulling them away from high schools that are closer to them and putting them into special programs and schools seems very unlikely to me.  My guess is if you put the vast majority of those people in a heterogenous high school that have AP classes, the final out come doesn't really change.  There might be some exceptions, but there are likely exceptions the other way too (i.e. people that got stuck in a lower class/school that if exposed to high ability students would be able to make the transition to more advanced subjects).

 

I could be wrong and absolutely would support longer term studies on different teaching and educational approaches.  But given what we know that's my take currently.

Edited April 4 by PeterMP

[Destino]

4 hours ago, dfitzo53 said:

@Destino In your opinion, what should schools be doing?

Not spending three decades or so teaching kids a reading system so flawed that it made children feel stupid, wonder if there was something wrong with them, and end up diagnosed (wrongly) with a learning disorder. Yet that’s what happened. State’s had to ban three cueing to get schools, who spent fortunes on this new reading system to move away from it despite the evidence. Colombia’s famous and respected school of education just closed Lucy Calkins office down a few months ago. 
 

The fact that this hasn’t lead to a tidal wave of rage from parents is only because the media largely stayed quiet on what happened. There was no front page news for several weeks telling everyone that the school they trusted has been teaching kids how not to read, but pretend they could, and then passing them from grade to grade anyway, for decades. Most parents, don’t know.
 

They shouldn’t be following pop trends and should make moves supported by evidence. Then check to see if the new methods are working as intended. Not blindly change everything, ignore the downsides, and then pretend not to see when it doesn’t work. 
 

they should also stop lying and I do think lying is the right word. When they claim not to want to hold anyone back, but remove math classes in certain grades in the name of equity, they’re lying. They are intentionally holding high achievers back in hopes to narrow a gap…. But the gap does not narrow and then they lie about that as well. Trying to keep everyone in the same class has largely failed to achieve anything but force brighter kids to spend more time in extra courses outside of the regular school year. 
 

 

[Busch1724]

Profit motive in schools is a major issue. Programming, curriculum, new research, etc. are often profit driven and data is presented to sell a new product or idea. It's part of the reason schools have become such a tinder fire of political divisiveness. There's a ton of bunk research that five years after the fact gets proven wrong. We tend to over complicate education and meddle in new trends. These companies and others with profit motive, like bunk researchers, take advantage of the whole system and fail kids and society in the meantime. 

[PeterMP]

2 hours ago, Destino said:

Not spending three decades or so teaching kids a reading system so flawed that it made children feel stupid, wonder if there was something wrong with them, and end up diagnosed (wrongly) with a learning disorder. Yet that’s what happened. State’s had to ban three cueing to get schools, who spent fortunes on this new reading system to move away from it despite the evidence.

 

I think you are over playing the effects of the 3 cues reading system for the vast majority of kids.  My kids are part of the 3 cues reading programs, and they read fine today.  And have none of the problems you are suggesting.

 

Something can be not the ideal way to teach kids to read, be used, and not be the worse thing to ever happen to a kid.

 

Also, the idea of using 3 cues was because some kids were struggling to read and are based on older ideas.  Even when I learned to read, teachers talked about using context clues.  It isn't like everybody reads ideally under one method and schools went out of their way to introduce a new method that didn't work for anybody.

[PeterMP]

1 hour ago, Busch1724 said:

Profit motive in schools is a major issue. Programming, curriculum, new research, etc. are often profit driven and data is presented to sell a new product or idea. It's part of the reason schools have become such a tinder fire of political divisiveness. There's a ton of bunk research that five years after the fact gets proven wrong. We tend to over complicate education and meddle in new trends. These companies and others with profit motive, like bunk researchers, take advantage of the whole system and fail kids and society in the meantime. 

 

Doing good studies in education, especially at the level of tracking long(er) term out comes, is hard and there is really minimal support for it.  Getting a grant to track out comes of people over any real time is extremely difficult.  Really, we know very little about how to teach people for longer term retention, or the impact on different teaching approaches on larger society.  There's very few studies that track how well did people really learn a specific topic based on different teaching approaches where they look at the impact more than a month or 2 later.  

 

In terms of larger societal impact, there has been some work done on things like early childhood education (i.e. head start), but beyond that essentially nothing. 

 

(In the context of this conversation, Head Start was dismissed for a period of time as useless because much of the education gains achieved through head start are lost by middle school.  Later studies suggest that head start has larger longer terms impacts that reach into adulthood even if as kids through middle school the kids don't do better in school.  In the context of homogenous vs. heterogenous classrooms, there's been essentially nothing done at that level.)

Edited April 4 by PeterMP

[Destino]

26 minutes ago, PeterMP said:

 

I think you are over playing the effects of the 3 cues reading system for the vast majority of kids.  My kids are part of the 3 cues reading programs, and they read fine today.  And have none of the problems you are suggesting.

 

Something can be not the ideal way to teach kids to read, be used, and not be the worse thing to ever happen to a kid.

 

Also, the idea of using 3 cues was because some kids were struggling to read and are based on older ideas.  Even when I learned to read, teachers talked about using context clues.  It isn't like everybody reads ideally under one method and schools went out of their way to introduce a new method that didn't work for anybody.

a lot of kids read fine today, many of them have good parents that are unaware how much of the reading instruction they ended up doing themselves. A lot of kids are not. Look into the damage. Look at what teachers down stream from kids taught to read this way, are saying about the level of reading proficiency they’ve seen in their classrooms. 
 

but remember this has been going on for a long time, so it’s not limited to kids. There are no studies surveying just how badly schools ****ed up an entire generation of kids. With the best of intentions of course. We know damage was done, but the system that did it is simply going to turn the page and move on. We also know that in the last decade there has been a sharp decline in reading among adults. 

[Renegade7]

Public School system needs to be federalized.

 

Too many states have weapons their public education system and using our kids as political pawns is decimating their test scores and ability to compete in the world stage.

 

We already tried threatening funding with no child left behind, that doesn't work on states that are still cutting funding anyway.

 

Somethings maybe made sense leaving to states when Constitution was ratified and there were fewer states...now there's 50. This isn't working, it's clear now public education isn't one of them.

Edited April 4 by Renegade7

[Busch1724]

1 hour ago, Destino said:

a lot of kids read fine today, many of them have good parents that are unaware how much of the reading instruction they ended up doing themselves. A lot of kids are not. Look into the damage. Look at what teachers down stream from kids taught to read this way, are saying about the level of reading proficiency they’ve seen in their classrooms.

 

Interesting podcast/read from last year: https://revealnews.org/podcast/how-teaching-kids-to-read-went-so-wrong/

 

Can't remember if it was shared on this board/thread or not. 

Edited April 4 by Busch1724

[Destino]

45 minutes ago, Busch1724 said:

 

Interesting podcast/read from last year: https://revealnews.org/podcast/how-teaching-kids-to-read-went-so-wrong/

 

Can't remember if it was shared on this board/thread or not. 

I’ll give it a look.

 

I like this podcast on the subject. Really captures how a bad idea snowballs based on limited information.

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

 

[PeterMP]

2 hours ago, Destino said:

a lot of kids read fine today, many of them have good parents that are unaware how much of the reading instruction they ended up doing themselves. A lot of kids are not. Look into the damage. Look at what teachers down stream from kids taught to read this way, are saying about the level of reading proficiency they’ve seen in their classrooms. 
 

but remember this has been going on for a long time, so it’s not limited to kids. There are no studies surveying just how badly schools ****ed up an entire generation of kids. With the best of intentions of course. We know damage was done, but the system that did it is simply going to turn the page and move on. We also know that in the last decade there has been a sharp decline in reading among adults. 

 

We have some idea of how well people read over time.  There's data going back to the early 1970s on reading level by 12th graders, and it isn't like there was/has been a big fall off.

 

(The lines are really pretty steady.

 

https://www.winginstitute.org/have-naep-reading-scores924

 

And basic/general literacy rates have gone up.

)

 

I'd generally agree that there really haven't been any real studies done.  But the context of your first post wasn't an indication of a lack of information on the effect.

[Busch1724]

19 hours ago, Destino said:

I’ll give it a look.

 

I like this podcast on the subject. Really captures how a bad idea snowballs based on limited information.

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

 

 

Thank you! Wanted to listen to that. Haven't gotten to it yet. Remember seeing it here before. 

[Destino]

So this is blowing up on social media.

 

Facebook parent being listed as the source on Dr Phil does not strike me as credible. Sounds like total bull****. So I headed over to Reddit teachers, and sure enough it’s being discussed, but the answer is not the clear “no this is bull****” I was hoping for. See for yourself:

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/6PVH884z6I

Anyone here want to dispel this nightmare? Please tell me that no where in US public schools is getting 70% wrong on all submitted work, still passing. 

 

 

[China]

On 8/18/2023 at 11:36 AM, China said:

‘Inconceivable’: WVU’s plan to shut down language department could have detrimental impact on faculty and students, professors say

 

When language professors at West Virginia University heard that the school planned to make cuts in their department, they braced for big changes. Maybe the university would reduce majors to minors or decrease the number of classes taught, they worried.

 

The proposed cuts were far more drastic than they ever anticipated. Last week, these faculty members learned the university plans to eliminate the entire department, putting at least 30 professors’ jobs at risk and ending language studies for WVU students.

 

It was an inconceivable decision, said Russian studies professor Lisa Di Bartolomeo.

 

“We were absolutely shocked,” Ms. Di Bartolomeo said. “No one had anticipated this as a possible outcome. It's just unthinkable that our research 1, flagship, land-grant university would cut all [traditional] language... and linguistics education.”

 

On Friday, WVU announced plans to eliminate 32 academic programs, merge or embed 15 others, and cut faculty positions in 22 departments as the university faces a $45 million deficit.

 

If the recommended cuts come to fruition, undergraduate students would no longer be able to study Spanish, French, German, Russian or Chinese, and graduate students could no longer pursue linguistics and English as a second language degrees. The university’s board of governors will vote on the cuts in September.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

On 8/18/2023 at 2:00 PM, The Evil Genius said:

 

My Masters program (Public Administration) there was recommended for termination as well. WVU is going through a huge financial reorganization but I don't like how bad it's going to be on the existing students. I also don't think some of the recommendations are forward thinking and was surprised to learn that Gordon Gee was extended.

 

Following program cuts, new West Virginia University student union says fight is not over

 

Sophomore Christian Adams expected he would be studying Chinese when he enrolled at West Virginia University, with a dream of working in labor or immigration law.

 

He didn’t foresee switching his major to politics, a change he made after West Virginia’s flagship university in September cut its world language department and dozens of other programs in subjects such as English, math and music amid a $45 million budget shortfall.

 

And he certainly didn’t expect to be studying — or teaching fellow students — about community organizing.

 

But the cuts, denounced as “draconian and catastrophic" by the American Federation of Teachers, catalyzed a different kind of education: Adams is co-founder of The West Virginia United Students’ Union. The leading oppositional force against the cuts, the union organized protests, circulated petitions and helped save a handful of teaching positions before 143 faculty and 28 majors ultimately were cut.

 

Disappointed, they say their work is far from done. Led by many first-generation college students and those receiving financial aid in the state with the fewest college graduates, members say they want to usher in a new era of student involvement in university political life.

 

“Really, what it is for WVU is a new era of student politics,” Adams said.

 

The movement is part of a wave of student organizing at U.S. colleges and universities centering around everything from the affordability of higher education and representation to who has access to a diverse array of course offerings and workplace safety concerns.

 

The university in Morgantown had been weighed down financially by enrollment declines, revenue lost during the COVID-19 pandemic and an increasing debt load for new building projects. Other U.S. universities and colleges have faced similar decisions, but WVU's is among the most extreme examples of a flagship university turning to such dramatic cuts, particularly to foreign languages.

 

The union called the move to eliminate 8% of majors and 5% of faculty a failure of university leadership to uphold its mission as a land-grant institution, charged since the 1800s with educating rural students who historically had been excluded from higher education. A quarter of all children in West Virginia live in poverty, and many public K-12 schools don't offer robust language programs at a time when language knowledge is becoming increasingly important in the global jobs market.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Florida governor signs ‘anti-communist education’ bill on Bay of Pigs anniversary

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference Wednesday morning at a museum in Hialeah Gardens, preceding a bill signing with remarks at a lectern bearing the phrase “ANTI-COMMUNIST EDUCATION.”

 

Noting the 63rd anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, DeSantis signed SB 1264 — “History of Communism” — which he said would make education about communism “much more comprehensive” for Florida students, in part by requiring new instruction in public schools beginning in the 2026-27 school year.

 

“This legislation is adding (the instruction of) history of communism in the United States as well as a review of the tactics used by communist activists and movements here in the United States and throughout history,” DeSantis said.

 

DeSantis was joined at the Hialeah Gardens Museum Honoring Brigade 2506 by Manny Diaz Jr., commissioner of the Florida Department of Education.

 

The governor on Tuesday signed a sweeping education bill in Jacksonville which in part changes the way books can be challenged in school districts, meant to limit the influx of complaints and keep people from making “a mockery” of the review process, he said.

 

Click on the link for the full article