
The Real Problem with Waiting for Superman - duck
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/waitingforsuperman
======
gfodor
I found this article pretty hilarious in that it goes on and on about how the
movie fails to provide any clear examples of what makes a good teacher and
then _fails to provide any clear examples of what makes a good teacher_. It's
like the author not only assumed that we knew what he was talking about, but
that we already agreed with him and hence didn't need to be persuaded by
examples. This wasn't really an argument so much as a long-winded expression
of a single persons opinion.

Also, the last time I checked, you can't just "memorize" your way into passing
standardized tests outside of perhaps spelling and vocabulary tests.

~~~
scott_s
A good start. Building a Better Teacher:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html>

~~~
mattmcknight
Lemov's book is solid. [http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-Techniques-
Student...](http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Champion-Techniques-
Students/dp/0470550473)

------
pg
I recommend everyone see this movie and decide for themselves.

I don't know if it will have this effect on everyone, but I haven't been able
to stop thinking about it since I saw it. For me, seeing this movie was one of
those experiences that divide your life into the part before it happened, and
the part after.

~~~
Alex3917
It's largely propaganda designed to promote Bill Gates' version of white
supremacy dressed up as school reform. They're not advocating that Exeter
replace its curriculum with KIPP, what they're advocating is for low-income
minorities only. And the curriculum isn't designed based on the best practices
from educational research, but rather it's designed to change the culture of
minorities (to quote the NYT).[1]

The fact is that poor kids learn just as much or more in school as wealthy
kids, they just start several years behind because of bad parenting.[2] And
over the summers when wealthy kids are learning and going forward, the poor
kids are actually going backwards.[3] Which is why the average 13 year old
white kid has the same standardized test scores as the average 17 year old
black kid.[4]

In addition, one of the most famous findings from all of education research is
that within-school effects are greater than between-school effects.[3] That
means that school tracking has a much greater impact on how much your child
learns than whether they go to a good school or a bad school. (The movie
touches on tracking but doesn't really explain it.) Especially since kids are
sorted into tracks based more on their race and looks than on their ability.
[5]

Anyway all the problems the movie mentions are completely true, and they need
to be solved, but spreading good parenting best-practices and the changing
systemic design of school itself are much better solutions than implementing
KIPP, which as far as I can tell (after reading a bunch of articles and a book
on it) is a huge step in the wrong direction. There is zero evidence that the
program works at all in the long term, especially since it conflicts with all
of the research on intrinsic motivation. These kids might make some academic
gains in the short term, but in the long term it's hard to believe that
they'll be anywhere near as well off as even middle class Americans. The fact
that these programs produce decent test results in the short term has
basically zero predictive value for determining the long term outcomes. Maybe
they'll be better than I think, who knows, but advocating replacing our
current school system with this for only low-income minorities without having
the longterm data is a huge scam.

It's a shame because the Harlem Children Zone actually has a great baby
college program for parents, but the movie just mentions this in passing. In
reality programs like would be an excellent use of tax dollars because they
are actually consistent (for the most part) with the current research on best
practices for parenting, unlike KIPP which is just completely pulled out of
some guy's ass. (Although most of these programs don't yet show good longterm
results, so more tweaking is needed.)

It says a lot about America that our most popular school reform movie is
targeted at people who don't read books.

/rant

[1] "Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if
so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the
ability, or the right, to take on?"
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html>

[2] C.f. What It Takes To Make A Student

[3] C.f. Equality And Achievement

[4] It Take A City

[5] <http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/index.html>

~~~
defen
I haven't seen the movie and I haven't read nearly as much on education as you
have, but if this is an issue you are passionate about, you shouldn't accuse
Bill Gates of "white supremacy". That marks you as a crackpot and makes people
much less likely to take you seriously.

~~~
Alex3917
Right now wealthy white kids and low-income minorities are educated in pretty
much the same way. It's a terrible system, but at least it's more or less
equal. What Bill Gates et al. are advocating is creating a completely separate
system for low-income minorities, with dramatically more hours spent in
schools and away from parents/community. If that's something we want to have
an open and intellectually honest debate about then I'm all for that once we
have the data, but forcing this program on minorities in secret in bullshit.

~~~
defen
I understand what you're saying, I'm just suggesting that your message might
get more traction if you phrase it differently, or consider what his
motivations might actually be. The guy has donated $1.5 billion to fund
scholarships for minority students in the U.S., $750 million for vaccines in
Africa, and many other initiatives that I can't remember right now. The idea
that he is a white supremacist is laughable. He's practically Robin Hood -
extracting wealth from mostly white, mostly corporate America via illegal
means, in order to give it to minorities who are poor.

On an interesting side note, Steve Sailer has said something like what you're
saying about this topic, although I imagine he's coming at it from a different
angle than you: [http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/05/todays-universal-
preschoo...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/05/todays-universal-preschool-
conventional.html)

~~~
riffraff
while i agree with your basic point (personal judgement on Gates not adding
value to the comment) I'd like to point out that even if someone does some
good to non-wasp people he can still be a white supremacist.

E.g. Cecil Rhodes was held in high estimation from the Ndebele people to the
point of receiving a king-like burial ritual from them, but he still thought
that british were god's gift to mankind.

------
VengefulCynic
You can't loudly proclaim that education is a complicated problem that defies
simple solutions while at the same time oversimplifying the entirety of the
nation's problems in false dichotomies, saying things like: _The film has
other flaws. It insists all of America’s problems would be solved if only poor
kids would memorize more: Pittsburgh is falling apart not because of
deindustrialization, but because its schools are filled with bad teachers.
American inequality isn’t caused by decades of Reaganite tax cuts and
deregulation, but because of too many failing schools._

Well, I suppose you can. But you can't if you want me to take your rhetoric
seriously.

------
rywang
The author, Aaron Swartz, harps on the fact that the film doesn't show enough
teaching and instead "hides behind charts and graphs." The author would rather
the film show "terrified kids up on the big screen." This seems to me like
favoring anecdotes over data.

The author also attributes the crisis in American education to standardized
tests. He doesn't back this up. Standardized tests work well in countries like
China and India, from which so many of our engineering grad students hail.
Granted that no standardized test is perfect, it boggles my mind that Swartz
would call it the educational crisis.

~~~
blasdel
Those brilliant Chinese and Indian grad students are cream skimmed off the top
— there's not just millions of merely good students in universities in their
home countries, but also _two billion_ mediocre students doing manual labor.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If standardized tests didn't work (i.e., didn't separate good students from
bad ones), how could they be used to skim the cream off the top?

------
mynameishere
Take ten smart kids and stick them under an oak tree and you'll have a better
school than a 100 million dollar facility full of idiots. That's the real
problem, and there's no solving it.

~~~
skybrian
The teacher is oddly missing in your scenario.

~~~
psawaya
Perhaps he was alluding a school structured something like this:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school>

~~~
ollerac
I have a few friends who went to the original Sudbury school, Sudbury Valley
School.

One of them recently suggested that supplementing their school's non-
curriculum with Sal Khan's online exercises (explained here:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8>) might make for something close
to an ideal education.

~~~
aik
Do you feel like your friends got a good education? Did they feel like they
did?

~~~
ollerac
She got an excellent education in being an independent thinker and a very
creative person -- but she's been using the Khan Academy over the past few
weeks to learn Algebra II.

------
petermarks
I agree standardized tests focused on memorization aren't educational, but
surely tests that require problem solving ability (math) are worthwhile.
Without standardized tests, how else are we supposed to quantify how well
students and by extension their teachers are performing? The author doesn't
suggest an alternative here.

~~~
adamc
Your question more or less assumes that standardization is the right answer.
Let's start a step or two back: Do we need to measure students and teachers at
all? Presuming we do, why do we need to do it via standardized tests? Do they
even measure what we want to know?

My daughter goes to a school that does well by these measures. It _is_ a good
school, but the teachers basically teach to the test* -- given the rather
punitive structure of the laws, they don't have much choice. Performance is
directly tied to funding. Is that really the best way to teach kids? I'm
doubtful.

I think we do need good teachers, but I'm not at all convinced that test
scores are a good way to measure that, anymore than lines of code are a good
way to measure programmers. I do want kids to learn, but I'm not very
convinced this is the best route to that.

I don't think there is any easy solution. Kids with parents who value
education tend to do better -- that's a huge factor. Resources certainly help;
those of us who care tend to live in better school districts (often with
higher tax rates) -- is that really a sensible way to run the schools? I mean,
it works for me, but why should we under-resource kids whose parents don't
care about education? But there is no doubt that you can pour money at this
problem and get nowhere if you spend it poorly. (That's true of all problems,
though.)

All this emphasis on education can go overboard. Where I live, even in grade
school they get only one short recess a day (unlike the two, slightly longer,
ones I grew up with). Does that make sense? In a nation with a national
obesity epidemic? And, even in very early grades, they come home with a LOT of
homework. When are they supposed to go outside and play?

*I don't mean they literally teach the tests, but they certainly spend a lot of time structuring their materials around the way test questions are phrased, and in teaching kids test-taking strategies. Do I think fourth-graders should need to learn how to take tests? No.

~~~
petermarks
@adamc - I understand you want to do everything you can do encourage your
daughters education and I'm sure that will serve her well. I'm my experience,
however, I had more to do with my own motivation in school than my parents. I
tried harder when scores mattered. Throughout elementary school, I spent most
of my school time day-dreaming and most of my time outside of class blowing
off homework. I could deal with being scolded by parents and teachers. My
parents cared how I did in school, but I didn't.

When grades started to matter in middle and high school, my competitive side
came out. I decided I was going to get better grades than most because that
would lead to a future with more options. I also cared more because my peers
cared more and I was socially self-conscious. When I started trying harder, I
started learning more and became genuinely interested in subject matter. My
grades lead to me getting into a good college where students were far more
motivated on average than my high school. That ended up being where I met my
best friends and eventual startup co-founder.

Did my best learning experiences come from studying for tests? No, they came
less structured classes and from my own programming projects during and after
college. However, I do feel that grades and standardized tests lit a fire
under my booty to try harder and eventually led to me meeting more motivated
people.

------
narrator
I think the problem with education is the same problem we have with health
care. That is, the belief that every single problem can be solved by just
increasing the budget.

------
bryanwb
Let's face it, American kids are generally lazy and poorly-disciplined and
this is the primary reason that our schools suck. We always want to blame the
teachers, teacher unions, school administration when we really have to blame
ourselves.

Even much better teachers and organized schools won't be able to educate kids
who don't want to learn. Subjects like math, science, and English aren't
"boring." American kids are just too lazy to put in the work to appreciate
them.

The real gap in American education is an "effort gap."

I attended a lower-middle income Southern California high school with a
primarily caucasian and latino student population. Neither group of students
cared that much about school and test scores showed it. We did have a great
sports teams. The city over the hill, Rowland Heights, had a primarily Asian
student population. They had great scores, graduation rates, etc. However,
their football team sucked. The asian parents pushed their kids hard to learn.
The parents of students at my high school only pushed them on the sports field
and not in the classroom.

Pedagogy, class size, quality of teachers, testing/not testing - these things
are all important but miniscule in impact when compared to actual student
effort. I think charter schools do well in large part to the fact that they
attract kids who care. Their success will diminish once you include kids who
don't.

Instead of asking "Why Johnny can't read," we should be asking "Why Johnny
doesn't get off his ass and study."

------
DanielBMarkham
I wish I had time to go into this -- it's a critical issue with our life
today. But I don't, so I'll make a couple hopefully pithy and not snarky
comments.

First of all, you have to measure things and you have to have somebody
accountable for things. This is true no matter what the thing you are talking
about. I don't see how much hand-waving and complaining about society's morals
and values is going to get you beyond this extremely reasonable requirement.

Second -- and this is ironic -- folks have been complaining about the quality
of schools for years. Some of you guys act like this is the first you've heard
of it. We've dropped boatloads of money in education. Wake up and see where
all this centralized planning, factory-mentality, and unionized system has
gotten you. I think it's great people are paying attention. We've missed you.
Welcome to the party.

It's a very complicated situation, and I don't see a solution emerging any
time soon, unfortunately. I know I called out unions and such in my graph
above, but in reality it's a very complex situation. The best I can come up
with is that you're better off giving the money to the parents in the form of
vouchers and letting various systems compete against each other. Or you can
keep trying to make one-size-fits-all solutions. Good luck with that.

~~~
hga
To emphasize just how long this has been an issue:

 _Why Johnny Can't Read_ was published in 1955.

"Federal Aid to Education" was a _big_ political issue before "Sputnik ended
that debate" (it was launched in 1957;
<http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view613.html>).

Heinlein also touched on this in _Have Space Suit—Will Travel_ in 1958.

------
rbranson
Here in Memphis, where we recently received a $90 million grant from the Gates
Foundation, it would be nice JUST to graduate kids who could read on a middle
school reading level. Forget sending them to college or trying to create some
kind of creative class out of these kids, they don't even have the basics.
THAT is the problem. We aren't even getting these kids a mediocre education
where they can read, write, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

------
steveplace
This is going to sound a bit Machiavellian, I'm surprised that the fear of
failure has not been brought up as a strong motivator. I'm assuming the
selection bias in the movie shows hard working impoverished children who want
to do better in school-- but are they not motivated when they consider the
alternatives?

My wife works at the best school in the county (not country!). If a student
fails a single test, she is told that the kid will be sat down after school,
retaught the course work, and be given the test a 2nd time. Any student with a
learning disability on record (including ADHD) is all but exempt from any
standards set by the teacher.

Furthermore, teachers are encouraged to "round up" to look better for the
school district. If a student fails a class, they will spend time in front of
a computer for 3 weeks to make up the credit. If a student fails to have
enough credits before graduation, they will still let you walk the stage and
you can simply come back during the summer to sit in front of a computer.

There's no social stigma of failure in the school's culture anymore, and that
also comes from the family life (the F from jamwt's post). The student could
care less about grades because the parents don't care and they will just have
them work at the shop after high school.

This carries on with the teachers. Tenure is a very dangerous asset that a
teacher can have, and it keeps the bad teachers in. Students will come into my
wife's English class without a basic knowledge of sentence structure and many
other things that ought to have been known by this age, and the grade level
below her shows videos for a very large amount of time. They will read 1/4 of
Romeo and Juliet and just watch the rest on TV without any analysis of the
material.

This is a social and political system in which individual failure has been
discouraged, removed, and subsidized. While positive reinforcements (good
grades, more money after graduation) can certainly help, the fact that the
lack of hard work can be shrugged off so easily _has_ to be a component of
school under-performance.

------
stretchwithme
I question the entire notion, seemingly sacrosanct for decades, that one mode
of learning should be made compulsory for all. Did we evolve with this mode of
learning? No.

And what about the idea that government is somehow the ideal institution to
dispense enlightenment? Would we trust it with dispensing the news or even the
authoring of a comic book?

------
marze
Maybe someone who has voted this confusing essay up could explain why.

The author is saying, the problem with education in the US is not that poor
teachers are nearly impossible to fire, but is really something else?

It seems an improvement making it easier to fire poor teachers would be of
great help. Why is the author highlighting this idea as an example of a bad
idea? To me, this would be the most positive single change that could be made.

~~~
pyre
The point being that the worth of a teacher is measured by their students'
scores on standardized tests. So which teachers are 'good' and which are
'poor' (i.e. what the 'correct' method of gauging teaching success), seems to
be the arena of disagreement.

~~~
Empact
Well, switching our schools to a model of choice, where parents choose where
to send their kids, really is a meta-solution beyond test scores. Test scores
are used to exemplify kids' behavior because it's easy, it's concrete (in the
"what gets measured gets managed" sort of way), but I doubt most parents who
flee district schools for charter schools start or end with test scores:
instead they consider culture, goals, outcomes, safety. The test scores are
used to prove good charter schools can be, and are better than district
schools, but they aren't the only measure - just the most compact one to
communicate.

There's a more general problem that judging a teacher concretely, fairly,
consistently, is damn-near impossible. I don't think there's an easy answer to
the question of what an administrator would use in the absence of value-added
education (i.e. the application of test scores), but I'll bet the parents act
independently of that system, and serve as a check on it.

~~~
pyre
I think that depends on the quality of the parent, and the values (and/or
critical-thinking ability) of the parent(s) in question.

~~~
Empact
I'd argue, in an individual case: yes, in aggregate, you're subject to the
common thought and culture of the group, which is open to change over time as
outcomes present themselves.

------
apollo
In terms of actual solutions, I think programs like KIPP are promising. If
someone can demonstrate the right way to run a school system on a small scale,
we can learn from it and encourage adoption of those changes nationally.

~~~
mattchew
KIPP does well, but it is very much at odds with the way a normal school is
run. KIPP schools demand a hell of a lot from the teachers who work there. You
need people of high ability and dedication who are mostly motivated by the
intrinsic reward of a job done well. These people are like the Special Forces
of education, and I don't think there are that many of them. I'd love to be
wrong.

~~~
WalterBright
It's true that you cannot mass replicate a system that depends on exceptional
people.

It's sort of like vast quantities of high quality goods were not produced
until people figured out how to produce such without requiring highly skilled
craftsmen.

------
jamwt
Sorry for the length. I'd write a tl;dr but I can't stomach the idea of people
reading random shit online being picky about their time.

I try not to generally opine too much. I think maybe I'm too cynical, too
weary of ideologues when I usually just see shades of gray, too ambivalent
given the fact that I feel "public" knowledge (including my own) is painfully
devoid of the real complexities that make these issues difficult to solve.

But I've been feeling strangely compelled to say something on this issue and
this movie because it feels kind of personal. I have several close family
members that have spent significant portions of their career (from teaching to
counseling to administration) in California public education for the last 40
years. (My opinion, however, is based on my observations of their experiences,
but doesn't necessarily directly reflect their own beliefs.)

Now, this is a simplified model, of course, but there seems to me to be this
function that (roughly) determine's your "success", using the common score-
based or elite-college-acceptance-based measure, in educational pursuits:

S = ?I + ?F + ?P + ?T

S is Success

I is Intelligence ("Nature" IQ, Personal Ambition, etc.. innate properties)

F is Family Factors ("Nurture", Education of Parents, Expectations, etc)

P is Peer Group (aka, the ambient F + I of your adjacent students)

T is Teaching (quality of instruction, instructional program, instructional
personnel)

They're not entirely independent, but close enough to do fake science. For the
sake of argument, let's say "I" is fixed for each individual, so I'm ignoring
it.

The big question, it seems, is what exactly the constants are at each question
mark.

I believe these films and essays and ponderances and political campaigns that
focus so entirely on the "T", are focusing on the wrong thing. It probably has
the smallest constant--and the least impact, positive or negative.

Granted: there are numerous, valid arguments to make about tenure being
terrible. There are myraid complaints that can be fairly leveled against
unions. Yes, public educational programs can sometimes be uninspired,
obsolete, and unambitious.

But fantastic teachers in "bad schools" do worse (in their students' aggregate
S terms) than apathetic teachers in "good schools." If you talked to teachers,
and they were in a candid mood, my guess is you'd discover this is widely
accepted.

They know how hopeless it can be to fight upstream in a "bad school"... and
that's because the F and P factors are stacked against you, and those
constants are much larger.

Teachers, even good teachers, seldom can trump the influence of family and
peers.

If we take the charter schools in the film as an example, I think self-
selection bias is at play. It really fits _perfectly_ with the forumla and the
low-T-constant theory:

The parents who elect to enter the lottery are exhibiting a strong "F" factor,
and, if they succeed in winning a slot, their child enters an environment with
a bunch of other kids from high-F families, resulting in a great "P".

And yes, the teachers might be better too, and the instruction might be
better. But the teachers themselves are self-selecting! The very act of
teaching at a school where people fight to get in generally provides a student
body full of willing students coming from encouraging families. Of _course_
those kids will learn!

And the "better" the teacher is, the more mobile they often are and the better
shot they have at the "good" teaching jobs.. aka, the classrooms full of
willing students.

Granted, there are amazing, indefatigable teachers who spend a career teaching
in "bad" classrooms, but they're the exception, not the rule. In my
observation, the common case is enthusiastic, smart, well-educated young
teachers can stick it out for a few years. Then, they're human after all, they
capitulate, exhausted, and drag their shattered ideals to a different school
with a more receptive classroom environment (if they remain in teaching at
all). It's job satisfaction; it's self-preservation. (Analogy: generally,
great hackers don't want to be test engineers even if that's possibly where
they could do the most good.)

I say: the real problem is cultural (and literally, cultural, _not_ racial).
Maybe, it's who our heros are, and our parents' heros are, and the dubious-
expected-outcome nature of the "American Dream." Maybe it's what's viewed as
"the way out" by older brothers and sisters and friends. Maybe's it's a
generation's assumption that the last 100 years of American prosperity was
inevitable, predestined, God-given, and not the product of a whole damn lot of
work by their predecessor citizens. Hell, I dunno, cause figuring that out is
the hard part that probably has many potential answers.

If you really look at all those other countries that ourscore the US--I think
it's worth examining the _cultural assessment of the value of study_. The
classrooms, the teachers, the salaries, and the very students, are a natural
outgrowth of that.

But that means it's the F, and consequently the P that have the biggest
constants. The T is--honestly--noise. A blip in the trend line. Good teachers
can accelerate good students, but they don't make them.

So why isn't this the predominant dialog?

Teachers and teaching are an easy scapegoat because, yes, they have evident
problems, and because it's sort of deceptively intuitive that if people aren't
learning, it's because they're not being taught. But I think, really, the
criticism centers on them because teachers aren't us--every family, and
critically, every voter. People want an outlet for their anger when Americans
are undereducated. But what politician will face the camera and say to the
voting population "it's mostly your fault"? Who wants to go see a movie where
the audience is the villain? (Aside: actually, that sounds kind of rad.)

So, shades of gray reality check: I have no idea what the answer is, but the
first step seems to be ensuring we've actually identified the problem. That's
the programmer in me talking.

~~~
aik
Beautiful analysis, thank you.

To take your analysis one more step, I would like to break out the "I"
component of your model a bit further. The "I" could comprise of "N" (inner
nature/general intelligence) and "B" behavior, as I believe behavior can
fluctuate independently of inner nature/intelligence and so should perhaps not
be grouped.

Most behavior (B) early on arises out of primary influences. These influences
are mostly people who one idolizes or looks up to, which depends some on one's
inner nature (N). For some, the family (F) is the main influence and role
model, other times friends/peers (P) are, and other times other societal
influences (movies, media, community, etc.) are the leading influencers.
Within schools, where a large part of a child's life is spent, teachers (T)
are the primary influencers.

Given this, and given that influencing children is easier than influencing
parents/adults/community/media, reeducating or focusing on teacher quality
sounds like a good option. The "T" improvement would then improve the "B", the
"B" improve the "P" and "F", and life would be very hypothetically good.

S = ?F + ?P + ?B + ?T + ?N

So here I'm not saying that teachers are a primary fault for the problems,
however my main point is that I do believe they can supply massive positive
influence (just like the P and F can), which in most cases they aren't doing.
Perhaps this shows that the role of a teacher needs to be rethought from
authoritative instructor focusing on knowledge transfer; to friend, mentor,
care-taker, and personal guide to each individual in hopes of supplying
inspiration.

~~~
lotharbot
Right. Let's not overlook the fact that T can influence both B and P. The
equation is nonlinear, and IMO dominated by cross-terms.

Teachers and teaching methods that are engaging, for example, will tend to
promote better behavior within the classroom. Teachers and methods that
inspire most of the class to think learning is "cool" and worthwhile will
improve the whole peer group. There is a lot of feedback involved.
Unfortunately, as you point out, the expected "role of a teacher" isn't really
well geared to produce excellent teachers using excellent methods.

------
jongraehl
> At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by
> cheating the poor and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

There may be some backing argument that would change my mind entirely, but
this seems like crazy agenda-before-the-horse thinking.

