
An Ex-Teacher Made a Video Game That Skewers the No Child Left Behind Act - DiabloD3
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-ex-teacher-made-a-video-game-that-skewers-the-no-child-left-behind-act
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kethinov
My wife teaches in a high poverty school and it just mystifies us that so much
of the public debate about how to deal with the achievement gap focuses on
blame.

We want to blame people. Teachers, parents, administrators, we're all looking
for a scapegoat and there's no consensus which group is to blame.

But it's not that simple. There aren't any bad guys for us to nail to the
cross. The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality.

Kids in poverty are kids not learning. The only way to deal with the
achievement gap is for us to be brave enough as a society to deal with that.
Failing schools are a symptom of disease of poverty, not the disease itself.

I strongly recommend everyone read this article:
[http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school...](http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/i_taught_at_the_worst_school_in_texas/)

My wife didn't write it, but it strongly resembles her day to day experience
where she teaches.

~~~
huj123
>The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker came out in 2002 and showed why this thinking
is flawed. The achievement gap is significantly caused by genetic differences,
and the correlation to income is not totally causation. The term used by
geneticists "heritability" gives the proportion of differences between people
(within a population), on some trait, that is caused by genetic differences.
The traits that will determine your success at school, like personality and IQ
are significantly heritable.

Here's a recent study from the UK that looked at identical (monozygotic) and
fraternal (dizygotic) twins and gave heritability estimates for different
school subjects:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273)

Article:
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.htm)

>The researchers found that for compulsory core subjects (English, Mathematics
and Science), genetic differences between students explain on average 58% of
the differences between GCSE scores. In contrast, 29% of the differences in
core subject grades are due to shared environment -- such as schools,
neighbourhoods or families which twins share. The remaining differences in
GCSE scores were explained by non-shared environment, unique to each
individual.

>Overall, science grades (such as Biology, Chemistry, Physics) were found to
be more heritable than Humanities grades (such as Media Studies, Art, Music)
-- 58% vs 42%, respectively.

~~~
barrkel
You've pointed to a study that found a link between individual's grades and
genetic differences in one country. But it's a big leap to go from there, and
explain why a particular school would have bad grade averages, especially
schools in different countries - unless you're making the argument that
schools are composed of people from large groups of genetically similar
people, and these people are necessarily very distinct from people at schools
that have better grade averages. Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the
society would have to be extremely stratified, geographically and genetically,
with very little intermixing.

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Domenic_S
> _Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be
> extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little
> intermixing._

That sounds right to me. Gated communities, luxury buildings vs slums, FiDi
vs. Outer Sunset -- communities are incredibly stratified.

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dba7dba
As a parent and married to a wife who's a teacher in a public elementary
school in a large school district, I can say all this talk of improving
school, train teachers, etc is missing the mark. More of the responsibility
rests with the parents, not with the school or teachers or administrators.

Sure teachers/school matter, but not as much as the parents from my
observation.

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kethinov
The blame game is unhealthy. As long as our public discourse is about blaming
parents, blaming teachers, or blaming anybody, we won't strike at the root of
the problem, which is poverty. Kids living in poverty simply won't do well in
school in statistically significant numbers. If we solve that, then we'll
solve our achievement gap.

~~~
tom-lord
How do you fix education? By fixing the poverty.

How do you fix poverty? By fixing the education.

Oh wait, hang on...

~~~
kethinov
How do you fix poverty? By having a safety net not full of holes like swiss
cheese.

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A_COMPUTER
As lousy as No Child Left Behind is, it annoys me how many people have
completely forgotten that it was a reaction to terrible schools that couldn't
be fixed, not the invention of them. Everyone just conveniently blames
everything on those stupid tests now.

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biehl
No - it was a FAKE reaction to school problems.

Fake because it was not designed to work - it was designed to require
essentially no new funds.

Solutions to school problems exist, are known and were not chosen.

Raise teacher pay, make teaching a desirable career. Provide good school food,
provide homework assistance, provide school buildings with low noise levels,
provide working ventilation to lower classroom CO2 levels, make sure buildings
are not fungus-infected ... the list goes on and on.

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hotaru29
> Fake because it was not designed to work - it was designed to require
> essentially no new funds.

Isn't this policy a federal intervention? If school funding is an issue, why
not increase it at state or local level?

> Known solutions to school problems exist,

You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of
teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane!

~~~
sien
In reply to biehl.

Finland has been falling on the PISA tests and on other rankings does not do
that well.

[http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-
fo...](http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-former-
nordic-education-star-latest-pisa-tests-focusing-interest)

The answer is clear from the international results. If you want a high
performing school have big classes, high stakes tests and loads of repetition
like the high performing Asian schools do.

Or you could ponder why with such great schools why developed Asian countries
like Korea and Japan don't run rings around the US in, say, software
development and if, in the end, average school rankings don't really matter
that much.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I love how they use Shanghai to represent the whole of China. A few rich
cities don't make for very interesting data points. Education in most of Asia
is even more dysfunctional than in the states and definitely europe. Even
Japan and Korea have mostly horrible schools focused on high stakes testing,
outdated teaching methods, and suppressing as much creative thinking as
possible.

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danielzenchang
I thought the pineapple issue is only in Japan, Korea, China and most of
countries in Asia so everyone's comment was quite surprising to me. Schools
are built to create more workers to fulfill corporate or society's needs. The
technology might make millions of jobs vanish in few decades so more and more
schools will start teaching computer science to young kids and some exetreme
cases might be, "hey, let's start educating our 3 year old boy/girl to learn
coding"... The question would be, what schools provides? Education or
Training?

~~~
kaitai
The real difference in the US is the presence of a substantial number of
schools that are instead on the school-to-prison-or-army pipeline. The "high-
potential" students are encouraged to join the armed forces, while the kids
who have caused trouble are piped into our for-profit incarceration system. I
don't see that so much in Asia.

As for education vs training, that's a great question. A lot of my students
want training initially because they are concerned about their economic
futures.

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skds1433
> ... the United States' No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which further tied
> schools' funding to standardized testing results, by making students your
> biggest problem. > by making students your biggest problem > students your
> biggest problem > school

