
The problem in American education isn't dumb teachers, but dumb teacher training - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/opinion/teachers-arent-dumb.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
======
ThomPete
The key to succesful education is involved parents. It's really that simple.

No amount of training or methods is going to change that simple but important
fact. Involved parents means involved kids which means they will learn.

That isn't to say that the education system shouldn't be optimized (it should)

But there is no problem with education as such. There is a problem with how
parents are involved with their kids education.

Edit: To clear up confusion. No I am not saying parents are a substitute for
education I am not talking about parents intervening either.

I am saying that by being involved intellectually in their kids education they
are providing their kids with the best kind of foundation possible and it will
fix a lot of the issues that comes out of parents not being involved or
outright harmful to their kids education.

~~~
nickbauman
Studies have found that this is not completely true. US kids who have parents
who volunteer at school (like PTA) actually have poorer academic achievement
on average than parents who don't. They have also found that the smartest kids
in the world have parents who are not terribly involved at school, at least
compared to their US counterparts. The strongest correlative of a child's
academic success in the US is _the income level of their parents._

(source: _The Smartest Kids In The World_
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0061NT61Y](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0061NT61Y))

~~~
ThomPete
Tried to expand on what I mean with parents involvement.

------
dforrestwilson
So the solution is basically "teach to the test" for teachers? I don't agree.

The problems in our education system go way, way beyond teacher quality.
Several of my friends are teachers, they're brilliant people, and they're
hindered by the very structure of the system: standardized testing, unions,
the very notion that one person lecturing to 20 students - a "push"
educational supply system really works. We have the internet now... I prefer
to pull what I want to know when I need to know it.

Remember that the U.S. education system has only really been around for what?
150 years? Our species has been learning for 10,000 years.. we got along OK
before it. We shouldn't take anything about that system as holy writ.

How much institutional learning do we use in our everyday lives? I would argue
very little, and that the best way to learn how to do a job is generally to go
do it, and to ask questions along the way.

~~~
shriphani
Push models work well when you have an established career and know what is
needed to advance.

We've been stumped by Meno's paradox since Plato's time. I wouldn't trust the
average high-schooler's judgement about educational choices. At that age it is
far too easy to give up. Skip calculus, differential equations and the whole
shebang and suddenly you're woefully underprepared for that dream career
building drones and military aircraft.

I certainly am happy there was some structure to my curriculum (even at the
expense of a low student:teacher ratio). I was a very stupid kid - thought
myself above the curriculum and all that. Were I allowed to chart my own
course I would've been in a very bad place.

------
ergothus
I have a friend who is a high school teacher, and I was shocked to learn how
they evaluate him. (No idea how true this is for other schools).

They compare the standardized test scores of this years group of students with
those of last year's. If these students do better than those, he must have
improved, and if they do worse, he must have slacked.

Now, he'll have between 20-100 students each year. Any teacher will tell you
that the variation between one year's group of students and the next is
considerable. (indeed, among my teacher friends I've learned it's a major
point of gossip - not individual students, but the collective lot)

This seems insane to me. Why not compare this years students with THOSE SAME
STUDENTS' SCORES from last year? Or find something else less likely to be so
"swingy".

~~~
MarcScott
We compare this way in the UK. The same students are compared each year with
the assumption that some progress will be made, and that students will
eventually reached a predicted level that is set externally and based on past
performance and socio-economic factors.
([http://www.fft.org.uk/](http://www.fft.org.uk/))

It's still ridiculous and leads to teaching-to-the-test, fiddling with data,
and undue pressure on teachers and learners.

------
js2
Whenever I see one of these articles, I reflect back to this report from 2007:

 _How the world’s best-performing schools come out on top

To find out why some schools succeed where others do not, McKinsey studied 25
of the world’s school systems, including 10 of the top performers. The
experience of these top school systems suggest that three things matter most:

\- Getting the right people to become teachers;

\- Developing them into effective instructors; and

\- Ensuring the system is available to deliver the best possible instruction
for every child._

[http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-best-
performing-...](http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-best-performing-
schools-come-out-on-top/)

This essasy doesn't conflict with the report, but it's only a tiny piece of
the puzzle.

------
x0x0
I majored in math, and had several future math teachers in my homework group.
One answer is future high school math teachers are some of the worst math
students. I'm sure that's totally unrelated to the pay being completely shit.

I have a friend who teaches in a Belmont (peninsula in the valley) school. He
also works as a receptionist at a gym 4 days a week after working at the
school, and he still spends half his take home pay on rent. So he's at the
school where he teaches by 6:55AM and leaves the gym at 10PM, then does
grading. The only reason you would legitimately struggle to understand why
it's hard to hire teachers or why skilled people don't do it is because you're
a startup founder (why aren't engineers jumping take a $50k paycut in exchange
for most-likely-worthless 0.1% options? Engineering shortage!)

In the bay area in CA, teaching is a cute hobby that has to be supported by a
spouse or a second job. If you want to draw more high-quality people into the
profession, change that. And then maintain the changes and wait 10+ years at
least for the knowledge to percolate and another generation of teachers to
come up through high school and college.

~~~
pc86
You're going to have a really hard time getting anyone over to your side when
your argument is basically "we need to throw a _ton_ of money at the problem
and wait a decade before suggesting maybe that didn't help much." Not saying I
disagree with your goal, but politically that's just not going to happen.

~~~
x0x0
I dunno, we have no problems wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on
weapons systems or trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars brought about by
liars (where exactly are those WMD?) If this were important to politicians, it
could be done. And the necessary step to making it important to politicians is
voting.

~~~
pc86
The defense budget and George W. Bush have absolutely nothing to do with my
point.

~~~
x0x0
the point is the money is available and will follow the political will
driveable by voting

------
fiatmoney
There isn't really a "problem" in American education, in the sense that it's
unusually bad compared to other countries. Looking at PISA scores, Latin
American / European / Asian students in the USA do as well or better than in
their mother countries.

[http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_...](http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_5a.asp)

[http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_...](http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_5e_1.asp)

~~~
tokenadult
Those PISA charts don't say what you are summarizing them as saying. It used
to be that people would cite a certain blog post to make the same point you
are making here, but the data don't back up the blog author either. I have
lived in another country, and the students there do better than their cousins
who study in the United States.

~~~
fiatmoney
What do they say, then? Because I read, for instance, the highest-scoring
Latin American nation (Mexico) as having a lower mean (424) than US Hispanics
(478). Other PISA components show similar results.

------
Afton
" When asked to identify the number of phonemes in a word, they were correct
62 percent of the time. They struggled more with morphemes, correctly
identifying them 27 percent of the time. "

I'm surprised. When I was TAing morphology and phonology courses, people
generally had more trouble learning the inverse. That is, identifying
morphemes was relatively easy compared to identifying phonemes (although you
could choose your examples to get a similar spread. People take a nontrivial
amount of training to ignore how things are spelled)

~~~
ktRolster
There are many problems with the US education system, but it does a really
good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to
read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the
kids don't speak English, not because of "failure to fully understand
phonemes."

The main point of the article is a proposal of a new way to evaluate teachers.
It says, "let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test
teachers (it’s tempting to use student outcomes instead)."

To me that seems like a reasonable part of a good method of evaluation.

~~~
jstanley
> it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who
> fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive)
> home, or because the kids don't speak English

Then how do you know it's the teachers that are teaching the kids to read, and
not the parents?

~~~
ktRolster
Is that a real question? How many parents do you know who've taught their kids
to read?

If you're like me, it's a couple here and there, but most kids learn to read
from school. You can compare data of literacy rates before we had widespread
schools in the US, and after.

~~~
Kluny
What? Everyone I know who reads books for pleasure had books read to them as
children and was taught to read by their parent before they started school.
Yes, I asked. People who don't read for pleasure are usually people who
weren't read to as children.

------
Avshalom
Cause yeah, dumb teacher training is the root cause of absentee students,
housing insecurity, hunger, abusive home lives, systematic poverty, terrible
funding decisions...

------
jackcosgrove
Maybe the problem is not so bad as is commonly believed.

[http://www.newgeography.com/content/001955-the-amazing-
truth...](http://www.newgeography.com/content/001955-the-amazing-truth-about-
pisa-scores-usa-beats-western-europe-ties-with-asia)

tl;dr

Comparing Americans of European descent with Europeans, Americans are above
the European average.

"The mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in
Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded."

Americans of Asian descent tie with Asians. Note the provisos.

"For Asian-American students (remember this includes Vietnam, Thailand and
other less developed countries outside Northeast Asia), the mean PISA score is
534, same as 533 for the average of Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong
Kong. Here we have two biases going in opposite directions: Asians in the U.S
are selected. On the other hand we are comparing the richest and best scoring
Asian countries with all Americans with origin in South and East Asia."

~~~
tokenadult
The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as
the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want
to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the
2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant
margins and tie with Asian students."

But this is factually incorrect.

1\. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant
margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data
from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education
Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about
high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,

[http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-
mr...](http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mrs.asp)

and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United
States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics
(especially), and in science.

Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students

[http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-
mr...](http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mrs.asp)

shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal
schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-
performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions
of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages
with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the
author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.

2\. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has
acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly
publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It
amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States
are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school.
Way back in the 1980s, the book _The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the
Foreign Language Crisis,_

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-
Confronting-L...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-
Language/dp/0826404049)

which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States
appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a
Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In
those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the
United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was
that an American could go to many different places and expect university
graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working
knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still
surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their
Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language
other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked
with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a
second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in
my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual
primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which
schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational
goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal
American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics,
and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language,
that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international
educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability
acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank
misleadingly high in those comparisons.

3\. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA
mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for
demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a
peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"

[http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-
talented/](http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/)

dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion:
"Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of
2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries
with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of
the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International
Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s
industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the
international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."

The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the
same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels
of public spending on the school system,

[http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf)

with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income
economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of
classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based
on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the
bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"

[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-education-
comparison_x.htm)

The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome
their backgrounds in national school systems,

[http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf)

and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this
regard too.

4\. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise
belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United
States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The
latest TIMSS report,

[http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf](http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf)

consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his
blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth
grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not tie
with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group
average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who
reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which
is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4,
page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States
students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of
countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity.

This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories
"Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of
persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from
an Asian country" or "from an African country." 5\. The blog post author is
counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct
(even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied
national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and
differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a
discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of
group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis
published well before the blog post.

Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's
hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence,
35, 155-173.

[http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf](http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf)

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic
literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38,
1-20.

[http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf](http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf)

Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according
the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental
factors,

Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E.
Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am
Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdiffs.pdf)

so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved
for learners in some social groups in the United States.

[http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-
kenschaft.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf)

~~~
jackcosgrove
Your first two links as well as the "Teaching Math to the Talented" link are
about high and low performing cohorts. The author is slicing the data along
national origin lines, which includes the entire ethnic population, not a
slice of students that crosses national origin boundaries but differentiates
based on relative performance. You can define "demography" in multiple ways,
as aptitude (or environmental factors thereof) or national origin and
associated culture. Both are valid demographic distinctions. However, you
can't compare population slices based on aptitude with population slices based
on national origin. Comparing by national origin catches all percentiles of
the population, while only comparing the top and bottom percentiles to each
other misses the comparison made between the middle cohorts, which are most
students.

I did not see anything in that blog post which suggested ethnic or national IQ
differences. The author was more concerned with learning cultures between
national groups, and how those cultures are carried over to new educational
regimes, and how those shared cultures can be used to compare different
educational regimes.

------
lazyant
The key to good education is motivated students, motivated teachers and
motivated parents, in pretty much that order.

Of course some teaching methodologies are better than other ones, but all the
success stories I read, stripped from the fluff are based on enthusiastic and
energetic teaches and supportive parents.

For the students we just need to not kill their natural learning
predisposition. The parents, well, it depends on their culture etc, little to
do here as well.

So for things we can change were left with the teachers. If they are
respected, have a good salary, had a good education, have opportunities for
growth, are not strangled by bureaucracy and come from the best of the
students, then we'll have good teachers. If they are poorly paid, not
recognized, fighting with paperwork and red tape, fighting with entitled
parents and coming from the less smart student pool, well, looks a bit like US
public system.

------
cloudwizard
American education is not designed to maximize student performance. As soon as
a child meets the minimum, they are ignored. All the effort goes into
improving the performance of the underperforming kids.

no child left behind = no child does really well

Involved parents replace school. They act as the real teachers. They pay for
after school classes where the child will do all the real learning.

The US education does what it is designed to do. Help as many underperforming
kids as it can. The problem is that it claims to help all kids which it is not
actually designed to do.

If the US wants higher performing students, it needs to change the design.
More education of gifted students will bring the average up. Higher standards
will raise the minimum bar that the schools try to reach.

I have 2 kids and I treated one of the top elementary schools in SV as a
daycare.

------
post_break
I thought the problem was the push towards standardized testing, and its
effect on the kids. Instead of teaching it's become drilling principles that
are on the test, and that's it.

~~~
Avshalom
"The problem" is that there's dozens of different problems each with their own
sub problems.

Off the to of my head two more problems in addition to the half a dozen
mentioned already in this topic: money being spent on useless technology
(Smartboards; my mother [along with every one of the 100+ teachers at her
school] was issued an ipad, one ipad for classes of 30-40 and told to
integrate it into her teaching) instead of things like fixing the heat and
lack of physical activity as PE and recess get stripped from the curriculum.

------
germinalphrase
Teaching remains a craft-based occupation, but we're haven't yet developed
tools that actually support the job of a teacher. There's no way that
Universities/k12 school administrators will be capable of providing the level
of detailed feedback necessary to teach teachers how to be effective, so we
need better methods for teachers to self-assess and improve independently.

So much effort is being put into one-off, discrete solution to a curriculum
problem (like leveled non-fiction texts, grammar instruction, etc.) - but what
we really need are tools that allow me to understand what my students are
capable of, support my development of curriculum
materials/activities/assessment, and discover/remix the multitude of learning
resources that are being created in classrooms just like mine all over the
country.

I want a VisiCalc, because I'm tired of running these numbers by hand.

------
Alex3917
> It’s true that the average SAT score of high school students who plan to
> become teachers is below the national average.

If you ever take education classes, the first thing you'll notice is that the
people leading them tend to go out of their way to follow best practices for
teaching / learning.

Since most other classes only incorporate a handful of evidence-based teaching
methods, and many times are structured around blatant anti-patterns, a lot of
the ways these programs are structured are going to feel wrong to outside
observers. But often there is some sort of theory / research behind why they
are the way they are.

Granted this applies more to Ivy league teaching programs and not random
Internet diploma mills, but for what it's worth.

------
PhilWright
I have never understood why we have so much duplicated effort in teaching a
standardised syllabus. At the moment (in Australia) each teacher does
preparation for a lesson and then gives that lesson. Lots of duplicated
effort. So 1000 maths teachers all prepare for the same lesson which
introduces fractions, as an example.

Instead have a great teacher prepare and then record a presentation. At lesson
time every class gets to watch that presentation. This takes up maybe 75% of
the lesson time. Then the remainder of the time deals with questions and extra
clarification. You just saved a huge number of hours of prep and have a top
notch presentation.

------
kohito
Lots of people here are pretty certain the "key" to a "successful education"
are parents.

But one successful teacher's view is this: "...Like all the teachers I talked
to in Washington, Mr. Taylor laments the lack of parental involvement. “On
back-to-school night, if you have 28 or 30 kids in your class, you’re lucky to
see six or seven parents,” he says. But when I ask him how that affects his
teaching, he says, “Actually, it doesn’t. I make it my business to call the
parents—and not just for bad things..."

h/t u/jseliger, who linked to a helpful article at the Atlantic, where I'm
quoting this from.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Lots of people here are pretty certain the "key" to a "successful education"
> are parents.

Most studies I've seen on the topic show that the best predictor of one's
educational success and attainment is one's parents educational attainment, so
there is something to that that an anecdote from a teacher that, aside from
not being a systematic gathering of evidence, doesn't even describe an
_experience_ of what drives outcomes, but simply relates a personal practice,
isn't really sufficient to rebut.

------
Afton
"First, let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test
teachers. "

Oh. Uh... Can I agree that testing teachers is a sensible _part_ of an
evaluation plan instead?

------
platz
Yet most teachers I know have _Masters_ degrees for teaching things special
ed, and it seems they need to get those degrees or at least it's competitive
that they have them.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Teaching licensure by itself already requires at least a year of post bacc
courses, IIRC.

~~~
nommm-nommm
Requirements for teaching are defined differently by each state and vary
widely.

------
tokenadult
I'll give an example based on my international experience. I studied Chinese
in my undergraduate major, among other languages I studied as elective
subjects, and while in university I learned the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA)[1] in linguistics classes. Few Americans know IPA. When I began
studying in Taiwan after graduation, I observed that all students in Taiwan in
those days learned IPA in seventh grade, in their junior high English classes,
and young people with just a secondary education could reliably read aloud
English texts written in IPA--a skill that amazed many of my fellow foreign
students from English-speaking countries. Today, as Taiwan has moved that
skill down to the primary school curriculum, most United States reading
teachers have never, ever learned IPA, which is helpful for explaining the
vagaries of English spelling.

Similarly, in primary mathematics instruction, it is well known how do
instruction well with multiple representations of mathematical concepts for
pupils,[2] and generally it is very well known that teachers of mathematics
need to have "profound understanding of fundamental mathematics (PUFM)"[3] and
pedagogical content knowledge, but few teachers in the United States gain that
from their professional training in teacher education courses.[4] I try to do
my part to help teachers already in the classroom by participating in online
discussions with other teachers (I myself am a math teacher in private
practice) to guide them to helpful resources for learning more mathematics.
Simply put, the author of the original article submitted here is correct. The
United States could and should do better in teacher education to help teachers
do their job as well as they desire to do it.

[1]
[https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa...](https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-
chart)

[http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-
sounds/ipa-...](http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-
chart-with-sounds/)

[2] [http://singaporemathsource.com/making-math-masters-a-
brief-o...](http://singaporemathsource.com/making-math-masters-a-brief-
overview-of-singapore-math/)

[http://www.thedailyriff.com/2010/11/singapore-math-
demystifi...](http://www.thedailyriff.com/2010/11/singapore-math-demystified-
part-3-the-famous-bar-models.php)

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-
Mathematic...](http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-
Understanding/dp/0415873843)

[http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf](http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf)

[http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-
howe.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf)

[4]
[https://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleId=5974](https://www.tc.columbia.edu/news.htm?articleId=5974)

[http://www.maa.org/programs/faculty-and-
departments/curricul...](http://www.maa.org/programs/faculty-and-
departments/curriculum-department-guidelines-recommendations/teaching-and-
learning/preservice-teachers-conceptions)

[https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/](https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/)

~~~
crispyambulance
This! Thanks for the nice references for PUFM [3].

------
nsxwolf
Teaching is the hardest job in the world. That's why so many teachers suck at
it.

------
known
Real winners do not compare.

------
hackaflocka
I would like to offer an alternative viewpoint. Downvote me if you like, but
it's a slice of the world of opinions, and you'll need to _deal with that_.

There's nothing wrong with American education.

The job of American education is to sedate the masses, while letting the legit
geniuses rise to the top (create the next Google, etc.). It is very effective
in doing this.

~~~
kingdomcome50
In what specific way is the American education system effective in fostering
the above? I think you may have it exactly backwards.

It seems to me that the opportunity afforded to an individual simply by living
in the United States is the real driving force behind most successful
endeavors like the above, and "geniuses" (I use that very loosely) rise to the
top DESPITE our education system.

~~~
indians_pro
i think thats exactly what he was saying. the part about 'sedating the masses'
is also very apparent when u look at the robotic and homogenous modes of
behaviour and 'exploration' promoted at school. they are also trying very hard
to reduce interaction of kids with people outside their age group or level
(including parents) which drastically cuts down on learning things in life
that school will never teach u.

