Muzman on 2/10/2009 at 04:47
That was a bit of a pro "business"/anti union wank that video, but it's interesting all the same.
That US kids are dumb is a bit of a punch-line the world over, but it's funny; most times I've bumped into the sorts of things the kids are supposed to be taught/ learn, the endless testing and grading on the curve and things like that, it seems bloody hard and high standard. I don't know how well anyone would do or why it's not sticking. Something ain't right, but I guess that goes without saying.
However, most of the supposed alternatives in the video have been tried over here and found not to work very well. Free choice of school, rankings that go with it, funding of private schools, real competition (with the end of the school as consequence): they sound great to the libertarian sensibility but generally make the situation worse (private school funding ought to tickle the "why should" nerve of any self respecting individualist; Why should taxpayers' money be spent on schools out of your district when you still can't go there because their fees don't move down far enough thanks to them just spending it on "value adding" like bigger swimming pools and more facilities to fit in more top fee paying students instead. This is what happened here).
All these things might work theoretically if the measures of students and schools were consistently good and parents, government officials etc could be relied upon to use them intelligently. Sadly, neither is true.
A school is supposed to be a relatively stable place, subjecting it to constant scrutiny and the threat of closeure or abandonment by paying students (or sudden influx of others from out of districts because they do well) or cuts in funding or what have you is not the way to achieve that.
This isn't to say they should be left to their own devices. I've been hearing a lot recently about the English model of an external parlimentary body (Ofsted) working rather well as a middle way. Their assessments of schools are apparently transparent and the changes they mandate for weak schools are more hands on, but also arrived at in relative measures of school performance. They have closed schools they thought were too far gone, but it wasn't though economic competition that it was arrived at. I don't know much about it all but it sounded interesting. Took ages to set it up though.
I don't know what to do about it all, of course. Everyone's defensive. The union probably isn't helping (being fairly defensive bodies to begin with). It's easy for me to say parents and everyone pulling out of the public system isn't going to improve things, but ya can't really blame them for doing so.
Prettymuch all the countries that are held up as good parallels that are doing better in this regard have fully or partly national systems and no elected local school boards choosing the books (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District) because they have evolution in them or whatever. It seems like similar oversight is likely to be harder to achieve over there, is that about right?
Chade on 2/10/2009 at 05:12
What are the actual figures re: how well Americans do vs other first world countries?
EDIT: Ok, I've seen the 2003 PISA scores, which are 6 years old. In 2003 the US was the worst of a large group of nations that were all pretty good ((
http://www.coag.gov.au/reports/docs/national_numeracy_review.pdf) pg. 15 and (
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005003_1.pdf) pg. 14).
BTW Muzman, Australia does quite well in those scores, ya' know ... worse then some countries I associate as "leaning to the left", but better then others. I don't see much of a relationship between left/right wing and good/poor education ... but I don't know much about the educational systems in each country, so feel free to prove me wrong.
Thirith on 2/10/2009 at 06:13
Quote Posted by Chade
BTW Muzman, Australia does quite well in those scores, ya' know ... worse then some countries I associate as "leaning to the left", but better then others. I don't see much of a relationship between left/right wing and good/poor education ... but I don't know much about the educational systems in each country, so feel free to prove me wrong.
As a tendency I'd imagine that right-wing countries may talk about supporting education, but the moment it's about putting money in education they're more likely to say, "No, that would mean raising taxes (and spending less money on the army). Sorry, cannot do that." Which in turn is likely to mean fewer teachers, bigger classes, more cases of burnout - and that rarely raises the general level of education.
There are obviously other factors playing into this as well, though - it's not as clear-cut and unidirectional.
Muzman on 2/10/2009 at 07:32
Quote Posted by Chade
BTW Muzman, Australia does quite well in those scores, ya' know ... worse then some countries I associate as "leaning to the left", but better then others. I don't see much of a relationship between left/right wing and good/poor education ... but I don't know much about the educational systems in each country, so feel free to prove me wrong.
I don't know why you'd think I was making such an argument. Given what I wrote up there is kinda all over the place one could pull something like that out of it I guess.
My tone is just a reaction to the video as it seems to be playing unecessarily to a lot of prejudices about government institutions, unions etc and how we should look to corporate America for how to properly run everything in the world. Needless to say, this I tend to disagree with.
They seem to like the Belgian approach because certain aspects seem to fit with those prejudices as well, but I suspect that's not all there is to it.
The Howard government bascally had a long term plan to dismantle public education as we know it and impliment many of the things this video seems fond of. As far as they got it wasn't working all that well. That's mostly all I'm on about as far as a Left/Right thing goes.
As I said, from a cursory glance it seems to me US school systems want to teach all the right things and then some. So that's not the problem. The countries that beat them are, I believe, a lot more centralised in their education oversight (not to mention smaller). Implimenting something like that stateside could be tough for all sorts of reasons.
Chade on 2/10/2009 at 13:26
Quote Posted by Thirith
As a tendency I'd imagine that right-wing countries may talk about supporting education, but the moment it's about putting money in education they're more likely to say, "No, that would mean raising taxes (and spending less money on the army). Sorry, cannot do that." Which in turn is likely to mean fewer teachers, bigger classes, more cases of burnout - and that rarely raises the general level of education.
It's a decent theory. All I was saying is that, when you look at the five seconds worth of research I did, there isn't any obvious relationship in that data. Well, I didn't see one in five seconds, anyway.
Muzman, the trouble with arguing about macro-education (macro-anything, really) is that you've got a billion variables, and no real hope of untangling them all. Is America's crap education due to decentralization? I would have thought that decentralization would increase inequality but not do all that much to the average, and I suspect that the attitude of the general population is probably more important then the government and/or schools. But I've not got a single shred of evidence for that.
heywood on 2/10/2009 at 14:45
Quote Posted by Muzman
All these things might work theoretically if the measures of students and schools were consistently good and parents, government officials etc could be relied upon to use them intelligently. Sadly, neither is true.
True, but that's no reason not to measure. It seems to me the argument we have here in the US is not whether our measures of performance are good enough - the real argument is whether we should measure performance at all. This is one area where the teachers unions' stance is counter-productive. Instead of engaging constructively with the government to improve measures of performance, in many cases they're just fighting to abolish those measures.
In the state of New York, where I grew up, there was a Board of Regents that established a statewide baseline curriculum and standardized tests. However, these were not graduation requirements. If you took all the required courses and passed the Regents exams, you graduated with a state approved Regents diploma. If not, your school district could still allow you to graduate with a lesser "local" diploma. From memory, I think only 2/3 to 3/4 of students graduating high school had a Regents diploma.
Massachusetts, on the other hand, rolled out a mandatory assessment system called MCAS in the mid-1990s. Unlike the Regents system in NY, you cannot advance or graduate in MA without passing the MCAS. A lot of the education community, especially the teachers union, have been squealing like pigs about it, fighting it in court, etc. But ever since it went into effect, MA student performance has been steadily improving and MA has been at or near the top of the national rankings for the last several years.
The problem according to teachers is that they have to teach to the test. But if the test is measuring what students should be expected to know and how proficient they should be (a big 'if'), then teaching to the test is not such a bad thing. It's better than having teachers teach whatever they feel like with no accountability and allowing students to graduate without acquiring some of the skills and knowledge that society determines to be essential.
One of the other big reasons why Massachusetts is doing well is that parents here generally give a shit and are pretty involved in their kids education. I think that's at least as important as the MCAS.
Quote:
A school is supposed to be a relatively stable place, subjecting it to constant scrutiny and the threat of closeure or abandonment by paying students (or sudden influx of others from out of districts because they do well) or cuts in funding or what have you is not the way to achieve that.
Constant scrutiny is a good thing. But otherwise I get your point. You can't just let everybody go hog wild with vouchers all at once. Not everybody can go to the best school because they can't all fit. So closing bad schools and expanding good schools has to be a managed process. A lot of large public school systems now allow parents some choice in their school, using a lottery system.
Quote:
This isn't to say they should be left to their own devices. I've been hearing a lot recently about the English model of an external parlimentary body (Ofsted) working rather well as a middle way. Their assessments of schools are apparently transparent and the changes they mandate for weak schools are more hands on, but also arrived at in relative measures of school performance. They have closed schools they thought were too far gone, but it wasn't though economic competition that it was arrived at. I don't know much about it all but it sounded interesting. Took ages to set it up though.
That seems to happen here in Massachusetts, managed by a state board. The Boston city school district, for example, has been steadily opening more and more in-district charter schools while closing poor performing schools (also the Catholic church has closed some of their schools). Charter schools which haven't been making adequate progress have also been closed.
Quote Posted by Thirith
As a tendency I'd imagine that right-wing countries may talk about supporting education, but the moment it's about putting money in education they're more likely to say, "No, that would mean raising taxes (and spending less money on the army). Sorry, cannot do that." Which in turn is likely to mean fewer teachers, bigger classes, more cases of burnout - and that rarely raises the general level of education.
I think you'll find that's not true.
It's hard to compare education spending per capita worldwide because the standard of living is so diverse. But comparing education spending as a percentage of GDP, I think the US is near the top. And regionally, I think the Middle East closely follows North America & Western Europe in spending. Ironically, Japan's spending is pretty low, but they perform well anyway. And comparing US states: California, which is generally considered left wing by American standards, spends less per pupil than the national average and over the last 20 years it has increased its expenditures far less than the national average. New Hampshire, considered a conservative/libertarian state, spends more than the national average and has increased its education spending far more than the national average.
I should posts some links to data for this, but don't have time at the moment. I will try to back this up later.
CCCToad on 2/10/2009 at 15:27
Quote:
As a tendency I'd imagine that right-wing countries may talk about supporting education, but the moment it's about putting money in education they're more likely to say, "No, that would mean raising taxes (and spending less money on the army). Sorry, cannot do that." Which in turn is likely to mean fewer teachers, bigger classes, more cases of burnout - and that rarely raises the general level of education.
.
The above response is correct(poster above me, not the quoted one). Increased spending is not associated with improved academic performance, which is a statistic I have seen repeated in several studies. I'm a bit too lazy to google them, but the video provides the results of one study. One of them even discovered an inverse relationship: districts which fund their schools less have higher performance.
My hypothesis is that this is a result of the "throw money at it" solution. Areas with under-performing schools think they can fix it by throwing more money at the schools, but in most schools there is no controls to make sure that this goes into improving the quantity and quality of the of the teaching staff and the curriculum. In both of the schools I attended, they spent an increased grant on purchasing four thousand dollar touch-sensitive whiteboards that only several teachers even learned how to use, and they did this in spite of several required classes being bottlenecked by not having enough teachers.
oudeis on 2/10/2009 at 15:39
How can you hire teachers with a grant?
CCCToad on 2/10/2009 at 19:12
Quote Posted by oudeis
How can you hire teachers with a grant?
Eh, my bad, it wasn't a one-time deal, they'd gotten an annual technology grant to spend on anything tech related. Instead of using the money to increase the availability of their high-demand computer classes, they spent (rough guess based on the number they had * $4000 each) about fifty thousand dollars on these whiteboards that nobody used, and even when they were used didn't provide a noticeable increase in teaching quality over a normal marker and board.
Muzman on 3/10/2009 at 23:37
Quote Posted by heywood
It's hard to compare education spending per capita worldwide because the standard of living is so diverse. But comparing education spending as a percentage of GDP, I think the US is near the top. And regionally, I think the Middle East closely follows North America & Western Europe in spending. Ironically, Japan's spending is pretty low, but they perform well anyway. And comparing US states: California, which is generally considered left wing by American standards, spends less per pupil than the national average and over the last 20 years it has increased its expenditures far less than the national average. New Hampshire, considered a conservative/libertarian state, spends more than the national average and has increased its education spending far more than the national average.
Yeah, in this regard it is probably unfair to take the US as one country for educational stats purposes, unless you're comparing it to someone of similar scale.
Regarding measures: it's true they are useful, but I see the teachers' fears. So often things boil down to league tables of schools' GPAs/agregate TEE scores here etc. You end up with stat games and teaching the test a la
The Wire.
I agree though that teaching the test can be ok if the test is right and the system that backs it up. Again with that Ofsted thing (there was some prominent Aus academic involved who's been spruiking it down here of late yasee) they're apparently doing rather well avoiding the simple scoring of schools under some big percentage or other newsy number and avoiding standards being a simple top-down sledge hammer to get governments re-elected.
Education's also an easy talking point for kneejerk reactionary outrage, so you've got to be a bit careful there as well. There was something I read recently where a few of those inevitable "kids these days" tales comparing old tests with new ones to point out how standards have slipped turned out to be complete alarmist beat-ups good for a headline or two.
Not that I'm disputing there's some mess here and there, it's just complicated.
