
A warning to college profs from a high school teacher - chwolfe
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/09/a-warning-to-college-profs-from-a-high-school-teacher/
======
DanielBMarkham
The problems with this essay are legion. I find it ironic to be correcting an
essay of a teacher complaining about the lack of critical thinking in the
youth. Or perhaps "sadly ironic" would be a better phrase.

I think the worst offender is the idea that people who don't do X cannot sit
in judgment of those who do X. Our entire system of democracy -- of
jurisprudence -- rests on informed citizens making judgments about areas where
they spend their money. Nobody gets a free ride. I get to vote on whether the
fire station gets a new truck whether or not I've ever been a fireman, whether
or not I've ever driven a truck, and whether or not my house has ever been on
fire. To do this any other way is insane.

The saddest part is that the public education system took a reasonable request
-- measure your performance -- and turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare. I
hate to be blunt but I'll just say it: these folks shouldn't be trusted with
sharp objects, much less our kids' education. They (the administration, the
consultants, the "blob", the politicians) are part of the problem, not part of
the solution. Testing has nothing to do with anything.

As sharp as my criticism is, I mean it in the aggregate. There are no bad
people here, only a bad, overly complex system that is failing our children.
It's a scandal, and removing testing isn't going to do anything but make it
less visible. This is very much akin to the attitude of "Why do we need
testers? All they ever do is complain!"

I'm not going to continue my analysis because this is an old, tired road, and
full of little homespun essays like this which are supposed to make us take
sides. I refuse to. We need tests. Period. In my mind once the tests leave,
the teachers leave, because I'm not writing a check for something I can't
measure. The rest of it? I'm perfectly open to discussions about the kinds of
tests, the types of measurements that would be acceptable, and so on. We've
taken a good idea and made a monster out of it, yes. But that doesn't make it
a bad idea, that just is another indication of how totally screwed the system
we've created is.

~~~
john_b
The author is complaining that non-educators are trying to tell him _how_ to
do his job, not that they are judging him and his fellow teachers based on the
results: "Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never
worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to
teach."

There's a big difference between judging others based on the objectively
observable results of their actions and ordering others to do things a certain
way. If a non-programmer complains about slow or buggy software from a vendor,
that's fair, but if he tries to tell the vendor how to write it, it's a
completely different matter.

~~~
jerf
Everybody in the debate has worked full time in a school for at least 12
years, and probably more like 16 to 20 or beyond if they are seriously
participating in this debate. Sure, they were on the student side, but that's
long enough to gain a breadth of experience that at least qualifies them to
sit at the table. I'm really not sympathetic to "We're teachers and you
aren't". Yes, you are, I value your feedback, but we're talking about a system
that almost everyone is mandated to participate in for years. Of all the
debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is
least suitable here. We've _all_ been school professionals.

~~~
king_jester
The author of the post is lamenting that while these boards and panels put
teachers on them, their input is completely ignored in favor of whatever is
politically in vogue for the other participants. It doesn't make sense to
invite a professional for their input and them ignore what they say.

> Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're
> professionals" card is least suitable here. We've all been school
> professionals.

No, we haven't. Having gone to school does not make you a professional. That
would be like saying anyone who has used a computer is a computer
professional.

~~~
jerf
No, the computer metaphor breaks down; programs are not a dialog between a
teacher and a class, nor is there any reasonable way to translate that.

Honestly, think about what you're arguing there; 12 _years_ or more in an
environment, one _ostensibly teaching critical thinking_ , but you _still_
don't have enough experience to apply critical thinking to that process
itself? If that's the case, why did we bother with the schooling process in
the first place if it's so incapable of being applied to the thing you've
spent the largest part of your life doing up to that point? That's ridiculous.

~~~
mjmahone17
What percentage of the people involved in the debate had 12 years of education
in public schools with high stakes testing? Unless you're a teacher, or a
student who went through that system and have the ability to critically
reflect back upon it, then no, you aren't an expert in it. And even for
students: we wouldn't say that you should be telling Google how to create new
products, simply because you've used their phones and search engine for 10
years.

------
jug6ernaut
While I agree with most if not all of what was said in this piece I think
there is something it misses on completely. While this is my opinion I believe
it to be true.

Our schooling systems have there faults, large ones, but they are NOT the main
issue. I firmly believe that any student who wants to learn will learn.
Students have to WANT to do well. The way our society has (progressed?) over
the last few decades this drive to do well has pretty much evaporated. Since
probably after WW2.

IDK if this is still the case but when i was in HS some 6-7 years ago i came
into the start of "No Child Left Behind". We had the standardized tests, the
passing grade was 30%. Students still failed, and these students were still
allowed to progress to the next level. While I understand these baselines were
increased this is still very shocking.

In another example of rewarding failure we have sports, where we hand out
trophies no matter the placing. This could not be further from reality where
everything we do is base on our performance. We have to let our youths fail so
that they can strive to improve and to do/be better.

So long as we promote failure our school systems will never get better,
because as much as it is the teachers and the system behind them it is up to
each student to want to learn. More today then ever there is no excuse, with
the internet and its practically infinite resources information is never more
then a few seconds away. If a student wants to learn they can, teacher/no
teacher and school/no school. But the students have to WANT to learn and be/do
better.

~~~
betterunix
"I firmly believe that any student who wants to learn will learn"

Not if they are punished for it, and students in America are routinely [edit:
punished] for any attempt to learn outside the confines of a narrow
curriculum. Students routinely lose points for answers that are not based on
what they were taught in class, even when their answers are correct and their
techniques are logically sound. A student who is bored in class will be in
_big trouble_ if they skip class and spend their time learning independently.

The problem is not that students do not wish to learn, but that our education
fails to prioritize learning and actively discourages it. A student who wants
to learn will be just as poorly served by the education system as a student
who has no interest in learning. The only students who succeed are those who
have mastered the art of compliance, as the primary purpose of American
education is to produce compliant people.

~~~
teach
"Students in America are routinely published for any attempt to learn outside
the confines of a narrow curriculum."

As a public school teacher, I strongly disagree with your opinion. I suspect
your opinion has been formed based on a relatively small sample size. I'm
sorry your experience was poor, but you simply don't have to data to implicate
tens of thousands of schools.

I do agree with one tiny piece of it, however: the biggest crime you can
commit in an American public school is insubordination. No amount of
intelligence or work ethic will save a student who refuses to do (or stop
doing) what faculty and staff ask.

I don't disagree with this policy because it's a simple matter of safety. My
school employs slightly fewer than 200 faculty/staff. We have over 2000
students, most of whom are physically stronger. If students won't do what we
ask them, it gets Lord of the Flies in a hurry.

~~~
waterlesscloud
How did we get from talking about learning outside the curriculum to students
physically overpowering teachers?

Such a blatant attempt to muddy the waters of the discussion does _not_ help
your position.

~~~
teach
I included the example that I did because betterunix's comment included two
trigger phrases for me: "big trouble if they skip class" and "produce
compliant people".

I've been teaching CS for more than 15 years; the brilliant but unconventional
student is literally who I work with all day. betterunix's choice of language
brings to mind many dozens of students I've taught over the years.

It's the "I'm smarter than them and I can see the Game is bullshit but they
get rewarded for blindly following orders and I get in trouble if I want to
learn" trope.

(Apologies to betterunix if I've misjudged you, but I've seen it SO MANY TIMES
I'm probably not wrong.)

The thing is, yes, some of what students are being asked to do in public
schools _is_ bullshit. I try to minimize that in my own classroom, and I
literally teach seminars to other teachers trying to convert them as well.

But basic compliance is absolutely necessary. Your average public school is
not a police state. Asking students to complete a worksheet, even if it
utterly lacks value, is not a violation of their fundamental human rights, and
you are not a brave free-thinker for "standing up to The Man."

Schools absolutely DO NOT make a goal of "produc[ing] compliant people." It's
just that the average student must comply in order for public schools to work
at all. And if that's in place, then we can try to actually teach something
worthwhile.

~~~
betterunix
"basic compliance is absolutely necessary"

Basic compliance is necessary for what? Here you are, claiming that the goal
of school is not to produce compliant people, yet you claim that compliance is
"absolutely necessary" in a school. You are claiming that time-wasting
assignments with no educational value are a necessary thing for students to
work through, because at some point you might be able to teach. How about just
skipping the things that you admit are pointless, and just teaching?

"the average student"

If you are willing to acknowledge that some students are different from
others, that some students have different needs than others, why not grade
talented students differently? If you have a student who has clearly mastered
the material of the course, to the point where your assignments and lectures
are just wasting their time, why not give them an A and then teach them more
interesting / advanced material? Why demand that students who are not in need
of your instruction be just as obedient as those who would be lost without
you?

~~~
teach
Basic compliance is absolutely necessary in _any_ working environment. It
sounds like you're advocating anarchy as a viable education model.

"You are claiming that time-wasting assignments with no educational value are
a necessary thing for students to work through."

I am absolutely not saying that. I had hoped your reading comprehension was
better than that.

I said: "asking students to complete a worksheet, even if it utterly lacks
value, is not a violation of their fundamental human rights." I stand by this
statement. Note that I am not in any way advocating time-wasting assignments.

Time-wasting assigments may indicate a poor teacher. However, refusing to do
them and/or skipping class is more a reflection on the student than the
system.

Regarding your final paragraph: there are a LOT of assumptions there based on
how you _think_ I run my classroom. You have assumed incorrectly at almost
point. I do _literally_ everything you suggest in my classroom.

Edit: here's evidence of that from a couple of years ago [1]

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093221>

~~~
betterunix
Well I did not mean to imply anything specific about the way you run your
class; those were more rhetorical questions than anything. On the other hand,
I am not sure how you can defend the idea that a student who fails to complete
a time-wasting assignment should be punished, which is what you seem to be
saying, when your own teaching style seems to be based on trying _not_ to
waste students' time. Nor am I sure how you can reconcile the idea that time-
wasting assignments indicate a poor teacher with the notion that students
should be completing those assignments.

Now, as for my reading comprehension, the way I read what you wrote is this:
students should do as they are told _because_ compliance is necessary for a
school to function, even if they are told to work through a time-wasting
assignment. I am still not sure that is the wrong way to interpret what you
are saying. What I see in your comments is the idea that it _should_ be
entirely the teachers' responsibility to ensure that students are learning,
and that students should just do what their teachers command regardless of
whether or not they actually learn anything from it (feel free to correct me
if this is not your view). Thus a student who does not bother with pointless
exercises that have no educational value is just as wrong as the teacher who
gave those exercises, regardless of whether or not the student is learning in
lieu of doing their official assignments.

For what it's worth, if I had you as a teacher back in high school, I probably
would have done well, at least based on what you said elsewhere.

~~~
teach
"Well I did not mean to imply anything specific about the way you run your
class."

Except for when you said I "approach school _like prison_." :)

"On the other hand, I am not sure how you can defend the idea that a student
who fails to complete a time-wasting assignment should be punished, which is
what you seem to be saying."

In my opinion, a student who doesn't complete a time-wasting assignment ought
to expect to receive a grade of zero on that assignment. I think either fewer
or more consequences would miss the mark. I'm not sure if you would consider
this "punishment"; I would not.

I think we're missing each other because we're using the same words but with
different definitions.

I don't consider failing to complete a worksheet (time-wasting or otherwise)
to be a matter of compliance. Notice that in my original comment I used the
word "insubordination", which is important.

(I do think that there's a place for requiring a specific method. When I give
my kids programming assignments, I sometimes restrict how they're allowed to
complete the program. If I say "You must use a while loop", and the kids uses
a for loop, there's no credit, even if a for loop would be better. I gave you
this assignment because I want to MAKE SURE you can solve it using a while
loop. Sometimes my curriculum requires me to make sure you can solve the
equation using "completing the square" even when other techniques might work
just as well. I think I'm justified in not giving points if you don't complete
the square.)

I'll use a different example: in my school, hats are prohibited by dress code.
(This is a dumb rule.) If I am walking through the halls and see a student
wearing a hat, I ask him to remove it. If he removes it, we are good. He has
"complied" with my perfectly legitimate request. If he refuses to remove it,
we have a problem. He is insubordinate, aka "non-compliant".

I maintain that this sort of compliance is ABSOLUTELY necessary. I don't make
very many outright _demands_ of my students ("Johnny, I need you to sit
down.") but when I do they damn well better comply.

Now, as I've said, I _much_ prefer to let natural consequences rule the day.
But some students want to break rules and then ALSO avoid the consequences of
those rules, and that's what I object to. It's like, you understand that Rosa
Parks was arrested, right? She didn't just refuse to move to the back of the
bus; she also gracefully accepted that she was going to get arrested for it,
too. And that's why civil disobedience works.

In the case of a "completing the square" worksheet, I think it's justified to
not award points for getting the correct answer if the method wasn't what was
specified. If my curriculum prescribes that "students must demonstrate mastery
of solving equations using completing the square" (which would be a bad
curriculum, agreed) and you refuse to demonstrate that you can do that, then I
can't in good conscience award you points. And if you're a dick about it, then
we may have an insubordination issue on top of it.

So it's not as simple as just ensuring students are learning. Sometimes we're
required to make sure they can get their answers in a specific way.

To give a real example from my classes: I think object-oriented programming is
WAY overrated. But I have to teach it. When I do so, I apologize to the kids
for making them do it, because OOP doesn't make sense for the small programs
they're using it on. Using OOP for a 50-line program is almost always BAD
design.

But when I ask kids to write Tic-Tac-Toe in an object-oriented way, and they
turn in a perfect but non-OO solution, they get zero points. And if they try
to argue with me about it, then we're getting into disrespect territory.

I suspect that this is what happened to you. You got into a lot of power
struggles with teachers. (Those teachers were probably also bad teachers,
which is only partly related.) Then you got tired of fighting about it and
just started skipping class. But you didn't hate the curriculum, just the
methodology.

So, to deconstruct: "Thus a student who does not bother with pointless
exercises that have no educational value is just as wrong as the teacher who
gave those exercises, regardless of whether or not the student is learning in
lieu of doing their official assignments."

A teacher who gives exercises with no educational value is the most wrong.

(Important caveat: you probably are not a perfect judge of which exercises
have educational value, because 1) you had a bad experience, 2) some of your
teachers were bad and treated you badly, so even if the assignments were okay
in and of themselves, they were received badly, and 3) you didn't do some of
them anyway. Like, who knew that eating kale could improve your eyesight?
You'll never know if you don't eat it.)

A student who cares about learning is better than one who doesn't, even if one
does assignments and the other doesn't.

A student who doesn't care about learning but completes assignments anyway is
probably slightly more likely to succeed than a student who DOES care about
learning but refuses to do classwork. This is a shame, but statistically true.

Always remember that Rosa Parks would never have accomplished anything if she
had run from the cops.

And finally, for what it's worth, I have the following sign posted in my
classroom:

The Best Students in my Class

* Ask questions until they understand deeply * Want knowledge more than grades * Accept consequences gracefully for their choices * Don't quit (They have grit.)

------
tunesmith
As someone who doesn't have kids, I always feel ridiculously uninformed about
the whole education debate. From a distance it seems to be:

\- administrators correctly determine we need to use metrics

\- administrators then choose crap metrics

\- teachers rightly point out that crap metrics create an incentive to tune
performance towards those crap metrics

\- teachers then conclude that metrics in general are a bad approach

So then presto, we have an argument where one side is defending crap metrics,
and the other side is attacking the general idea of metrics.

~~~
jlarocco
The part that gets me is that teachers always complain the government is
imposing testing requirements on them, but if anybody mentions taking the
government out of education, or switching to a voucher system, then the
teachers unions are the first ones rallying against it.

They can't have it both ways. If they're going to be part of the government
then they have to accept the fact that voters get to decide how their
performance is measured.

~~~
te_chris
That's a ridiculous argument. The binary decision is not crap govt. schools or
a voucher system. You american's are crazy the way that that has become a
culturally conditioned, rational response to such situations. The solution is
to make govt. provided education better. Like it is in New Zealand where I was
publicly educated. Reading stuff about the american school system is quite
horrifying from over here: children never exposed to music and art? 160 Public
schools with no libraries? What the hell kind of system is running over there
when one can be part of the wealthiest nation in human history yet that nation
is incapable of delivering quality public education to all its citizens?!

~~~
robotresearcher
"You american's are crazy", "american school system"

Perhaps the NZ school system could have spent a bit more time on the
capitalization of proper nouns and the where to put a possessive apostrophe
with a plural.

It's easy to criticize. Harder to find solutions. NZ's history, culture and
scale are quite different. Got any ideas?

~~~
te_chris
Nitpicking grammar on a casual internet forum is a great way to win an
argument. I post on here (like most I'd imagine) as a distraction from the
more mundane parts of my job, forgive me for not applying enough rigor to my
grammar in such a context...

While you were busy being condescending and not making a point, you ignored my
main point that, with the amount of money the Americans (happy?) have
available to them, the answer should not just be blow up the entire system
because GP has a hardon for libertarianism, but to use the vast resources
available to make the system better, and allocate more if need be.

~~~
robotresearcher
My point was my last sentence. I was attempting to ironically point out that
you were criticizing from a position of assumed superiority without offering
anything. My means of doing so was self-referential, until the last sentence
which was intended to give the game away. I guess I was not clear enough, and
I didn't mean to offend.

Anyway, surely you can enjoy the irony of messing up grammar during a fierce
critique of another country's education system?

Meanwhile, the trouble with the argument you're using with libertarians that
since the US is so rich they could afford better public services is that
libertarians can easily counter with "America is so rich (partly) _because_ we
don't waste money on that stuff."

I don't believe that, but it's very hard to refute.

------
jbattle
This has a whiff of the perennial 'kids today' rant. I know Google NGrams is
hardly a robust research tool, but a few phrases that are fun to speculate
about ...

'Failing student' - big in the 30's, went out of fashion?
[http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=failing+student...](http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=failing+students&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=)

'Unprepared student' - relatively constant over time
[http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=unprepared+stud...](http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=unprepared+student&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=)

'Underprepared student' - what happend in the 70's to get people writing this
way?
[http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=underprepared+s...](http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=underprepared+student&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=)

~~~
teach
I think this shift in word use is natural. Words become popular, and then get
overused to the point that using them calls to mind a lot of connotation. To
avoid that, speakers looks for a comparable word and start using that instead.

Then, eventually most good words (small enough to be known by the average
person) get used up and speakers end up creating new words for the same
reason.

Witness 'comment / commenter / commenting', which in the sports world has
completely given way to 'commentate / commentator / commentating' to the point
that those 'new' words past Google Chrome's built-in spell-checker.

------
lists
For the last ten years I've been coaching a form of high school debate in a
Chicago public school. This activity involves arguing for and against federal
government action on various issues and so requires, as a minimum for success,
reading comprehension, an ability to express thought in writing, and the most
basic familiarity with your grade school history textbook.

Let me tell you right now: A lot of kids can't do it. And by a lot I mean
almost all, at least with respect to Chicago public schools, and this goes all
the way up to the selective enrollment schools, one of which I coach.

As a volunteer with limited time, it kills me to see kids eager to join the
activity only to find they lack the aptitudes to present and defend rational
arguments, and I just don't have the time to reverse years of standardized
education. The problem gets compounded if you're not attending a selective
enrollment school, where general neglect at all levels is mandatory.

Now, the school I coach is also my alma mater, and yet, my own aptitude for
debate was fostered precisely because I gave two shits about schooling in
general and basically attended just to debate. All of my teammates were in the
Top 50 of my class but couldn't debate to save their life. I had a student who
was the number two student in a class of nearly 1000 and it was the same story
- and she went on to attend the University of Chicago!

------
jbellis
The college professors I know would laugh bitterly at the suggestion that
underprepared college freshmen was a relatively new phenomenon.

~~~
jskonhovd
I remember myself in my freshman Calculus 1 class. Wow... I was not prepared.

~~~
mikevm
In our CS program they had us start from Analysis 1 and Linear Algebra 1
(proof based course). I sure as hell wasn't prepared.

------
fnordfnordfnord
I'm at a small rural community college. Fall 2012 was the most challenging
semester I've had. The students were impossible to motivate for any length of
time. I've had to involve the college's counselors who have made calls to
parents, had meetings with them. The parent meetings with admissions
counselors is the only thing that's had any noticeable effect. It's terrible.
It continues to be a challenge to motivate this group. It can't go on like
this.

~~~
rglovejoy
I upvoted you, but I really have to ask why you can't just fail those students
who aren't motivated to study or work for their grades. I assume that the
students you are teaching are over the age of 18 and are paying tuition to
attend your college. They're adults and should be treated as such.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>I really have to ask why you can't just fail those students

Who says they didn't fail? I didn't get into detail. For one thing, I don't
want students to fail. Another thing, it is stressful to have more than half
your class fail, even for a self-righteous ass like myself. Here are the
grades from my freshman (Fall 2012) course, (IIRC):

A, 1 < Non-traditional student, ex-convict, age 30-ish.

B, 1 < Probably this student's first non "A"

C, 2

D, F, W, x 10

------
up_and_up
Standardized testing is a complete farse.

Here's one reason (amongst many I am sure).

I have a relative who was a Professor at Eastern Michigan and got her PhD in
Education. For her dissertation she looked at standardized testing in USA as
well as internationally. She was in Finland, doing research at a school there
when she noticed a discrepancy in their testing statistics, specifically, the
number of students being tested as compared to the total population.

Particularly, she noticed that NONE of the children with special needs were
taking the tests. When she inquired as to why, the administrator was pretty
blunt: "Well, they are not tested because they are handicapped."

I question why the USA is reacting (maybe even over-reacting) to a situation
that is not apples for apples.

EDIT: I realize this is an anecdotal story. But the gist is that education in
the USA is an inclusive opportunity for everyone and every student undergoes
standardized testing. The same can't be said across the world so how can a
true comparison be made?

~~~
themgt
If you go out and meet gen x/y Finnish people they are in general shockingly
more educated, intelligent, and well-informed about reality and events in the
world around them than are Americans in the same age group. Most also know at
least 2-3 languages and have traveled and met people of many different
cultures/languages. They are in general also significantly more physically and
mentally healthy.

America really is not doing well as a society at the moment.

~~~
lelandbatey
I have found that young adults who are in an environment similar to those of
the "Gen x/y Finnish" have similar traits. However, the United States does not
have the luxury of having nearly the entire country living an environment like
that (compared to the relativity small and highly metropolitan European
countries).

To draw a comparison in the way you have is disingenuous.

~~~
jessaustin
I'm just as suspicious of Scandinavian comparisons as the next American, but
this is not a valid objection. We are specifically comparing the privileges
and services that each society provides to its citizens, for the citizens'
well-being and that of the society as a whole. To say, "we don't have that
luxury" (of what? a "metropolitan" environment? our urban kids do worse than
our rural kids!) is to admit in damning fashion that our privileges and
services aren't as good as those the Finnish receive. I could understand this
sort of whining from Bangladesh or the Congo, but coming from the USA it's
pathetic.

~~~
gamblor956
It's a lot easier for 17 million people to live in (relative) privilege than
it is for 300+ million. Scale matters when dealing with tangible requirements.

~~~
jessaustin
I'm not sure what "scale" is supposed to indicate in this context; if you rank
nations by population density then Singapore is at one end and Finland is at
the other, and they both have better results than the USA. In 2011 Finnish per
capita GDP was less than 80% of ours. I don't doubt they'll pass us eventually
(Singapore already has), and our woeful system of elementary and secondary
education is a principal reason why.

------
NateDad
You have to test, or you can't know how kids are doing. Maybe the tests need
to be changed, but saying testing at all is the problem is wrong. You _must_
test if you want to improve outcomes, otherwise you're just twiddling knobs
with no idea how they're affecting the kids.

~~~
falcolas
Are you saying that they weren't testing before? That the grades I received
all throughout school meant nothing, because they weren't controlled by the
government?

We had a measure of how kids were doing: The report card.

To me, that's what this gentleman is asking for. A return to previous teaching
standards, not teaching to some standard written & defined at a government
level by people who don't teach.

~~~
betterunix
"We had a measure of how kids were doing: The report card."

Report cards are as deeply flawed as standardized tests. If I were to tell you
that I received a D in middle school algebra and an F in English, would you
assume that I found algebra challenging and that I had literacy problems when
I was 12? If so, you would be utterly wrong: I was beginning to understand
limits and integration was I was in 7th grade, and I was reading at a "post-
high-school level" according to my school.

The reason my grades were not even remotely related to my aptitude was simple:
grades are not meant to reflect aptitude. Aptitude gets you a D- if you do not
turn in your homework, even if you did not bother with homework because you
were busy learning more advanced material. I am neither the first nor the last
person to have been given grades that did not reflect my understanding or
talents in any subject.

Report cards try to give a one-dimensional view of a student's academic
performance, and in doing so they favor a particular kind of student. Obedient
students who do exactly as they are told and nothing more, who only learn what
their teachers expect them to learn, receive the best grades. Second best are
those who try really hard to be compliant but who lack the talent or
understanding needed to answer every question to their teachers' satisfaction.
Last place is reserved for students who either do not care about being
educated or those who care but fail to properly follow instructions or fit
into the neat view of people that American teachers have.

Our education system is meant to train people to follow directions to the
letter, and the switch from report cards to standardized tests has not changed
that.

~~~
abraininavat
Oh, I see now. You are advocating we use psychic powers to know that a student
didn't turn in his homework because he was off learning more advanced topics.
You're right, we should get started on developing nation-wide psychic tests.

~~~
betterunix
No, I am saying that either people need to recognize that grades are not a
reliable indicator of ability, understanding, or aptitude, or else teachers
need to start assigning grades that _are_ a reliable indicator of such things.
Right now, we have grades that are interpreted to mean one thing, but in
reality mean something else.

Your comment starts with the assumption that having grades that are based on
_whether or not homework is turned in_ is how things should be. My point was
that teachers should not be giving bad grades to students who did not do their
homework, they should be giving bad grades to students who do not demonstrate
an understanding of the subject.

------
ScottyE
I am a high school student who cares about learning. I value the content of my
subjects in school. But I am actively discouraged from learning at school.

For example, I have a chemistry teacher whose sole goal is to get us to pass
the test. I'll ask something like, "So this ratio applies under a set,
standard pressure and temperature?" And she'll reply, "What!? This has nothing
to do with pressure or temperature, just multiply this number by this
number...."

Other times, I'll ask a question and she'll say, "You don't need to know that
for the test." She actively discourages inquiry into the "why" behind the
material and instead prefers to teach robots.

I love learning, but I can't stand some classes in school. My learning is
literally being shut-down by teachers.

~~~
acuozzo
Anonymously complain about her to someone higher up in the school hierarchy.
Keep climbing until you see some change.

------
brigade
It's kind of interesting how every teacher I've talked to that's taught for a
decade or three agrees that NCLB is awful, yet among the general populace (HN
comments), that's considered more evidence that teachers are incompetents.

Possibly the best thing I can say about NCLB is that it's fueling demand for
good exclusive secular schools. Which is all well and good if you live near an
urban center, but too bad for you if you're growing up an hour away from the
nearest magnet school.

~~~
aetherson
Almost all teachers dislike NCLB. Almost all policemen dislike right-to-
record-the-police laws. Almost all doctors want to limit malpractice. Almost
all taxi companies dislike Uber.

It's as though there's something going on with those groups besides their
greater familiarity with the subject. Some kind of... incentive.

~~~
brigade
These teachers also had some of the highest average standardized test scores
in the county. How does that fit in with your personal worldview?

~~~
aetherson
It fits... fine? My worldview doesn't suggest that only bad teachers hate
NCLB.

~~~
brigade
Yet you did basically say that the reason teachers hated NCLB was because it
would reveal them not doing their job properly, in the same paragraph as you
basically saying that police hate recordings because it would reveal them not
doing their job properly, or doctors hate malpractice suits because they
reveal them not doing their job properly.

Which I guess isn't exactly the same as saying that only bad teachers hate
NCLB, but the distinction is minor and irrelevant.

~~~
aetherson
Well, what I actually said was not that "they reveal them not doing their job
properly," but rather, "they have incentives."

All of those things are a nuisance and a threat for those groups of people.
Even if you're a good policeman whose conduct is objectively awesome, when you
see someone recording you, you have to wonder, "Will this guy catch me on
camera screwing up, even though the last hundred times I've done everything
right? Will the people who view this recording understand that I'm doing
everything right if I do? Why doesn't this guy trust me?" And even if you're a
good policeman, you know your buddy Bob, well... he doesn't have as exemplary
a record as you do, but you think that on balance he's a good guy.

And, I don't know if this is true of the police, but for the teachers at
least, they have the unions, their representatives and advocates, spending a
LOT of time saying, "Testing is of the devil." They hear it day in and day
out, from other teachers, from the unions, from a lot of politicians.

Those things matter. They matter a lot. If they didn't matter, teachers
wouldn't be human.

And the fact is, there are downsides to all of those safeguards. They aren't
perfect. Some of them may need to be reformed. Some may need to be reformed a
lot.

But that's all beside the point, which is that teachers have a huge incentive
to hate NCLB outside of its merits or faults as a program.

------
tokenadult
I see this guest blog post was kindly submitted here today after making the
rounds of my Facebook friends yesterday. What I have to say about this is that
ill prepared college freshmen are a well known phenomenon in the United
States. But I think the author of the guest blog post submitted here has not
correctly identified the underlying cause of that problem.

I have read some of the curriculum standards adopted in various states over
the last decade and have examined the item content of some of the No Child
Left Behind Act state tests implemented during the same period. The curricula
were often quite lousy, and the tests rather poorly constructed. But neither
so constrained teachers that we can conclude that they made things WORSE for
teachers than before the Act and the associated tests. Teachers are in the
classroom to help pupils and students learn something. Defining part of what
that something is by no means prevents teachers from teaching more. A teacher
who self-educates about good quality research on human learning

<http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html>

and about effective teaching

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/united-
states/Pages/measures-...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/united-
states/Pages/measures-of-effective-teaching-fact-sheet.aspx)

can help learners learn better even if the surrounding pattern of school
regulation is less than ideal.

I am a teacher of prealgebra-level mathematics in private practice. (In
earlier years I was a classroom teacher of English as a second language or of
Chinese as a second language.) My elementary-age pupils come to me for lessons
after attending their regular school lessons each week. All my clients have to
pay me (my nonprofit program also offers financial aid, up to a full fee
waiver, for families with financial need) after already paying their taxes for
my state's friendly public schools, and some of my clients come to my program
after paying out of pocket for a privately operated classroom school or as a
supplement to family homeschooling. I don't give my pupils letter grades, and
tests I offer to the pupils are from national voluntary participation
mathematics contests, which they take (or not) as one of several reality
checks on how they are learning the course material. Parents from a wide
variety of school districts have told me that their children do much better on
various kinds of school tests after taking my course, even though my course is
explicitly NOT test-prep, and even though I don't align my curriculum to the
curriculum presupposed by any testing program.

Children who learn how to use their brains to think

<http://www.epsiloncamp.org/ProblemsversusExercises.php>

<http://www.epsiloncamp.org/LearningMathematics.php>

can handle novel problems and are not afraid of tests. Children who are
overprotected in school from learning challenges outside the standard
curriculum often get scared and shut down when tested, even when tested on the
curriculum content they have studied over and over. I'm all about helping
young learners be unafraid to take on challenges. If a teacher is not doing
that, what is the teacher doing?

It's probably worth noting for other HN participants that the blog from which
this guest post was submitted has had guest posts before that many Hacker News
readers caught omitting many of the key facts of the described situation,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314676>

until that hiding the ball was outed by more thorough bloggers who checked the
facts.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3327847>

AFTER EDIT: btilly kindly asks, in the first reply to this comment, what class
size I teach. The class size I teach is lower than the typical class size at
the schools of regular enrollment of the pupils I teach, and more to btilly's
point, my total enrollment of students at a given time is less than the
typical student load of a full-time teacher in the local public schools.
That's a fair contrast between my situation and theirs. On the other hand, for
the first several years of my program I was writing the whole curriculum from
the ground up (as no suitable textbooks were avaiable from United States
publishers) and sometimes gathering materials from three different countries
just to put a lesson plan together.

More to the point of teaching large classes, it has been done and done well in
many parts of the world. When my wife was growing up in Taiwan, the typical
elementary school class size was sixty (60) pupils. An unusually small class
would have only fifty (50) pupils enrolled. The differences in school staffing
practices and teacher training to make that possible are described in book-
length works

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

[http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-
Class...](http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-
Classroom/dp/1439143137)

but boil down to letting classes be extra large, so that teachers can be
scheduled to have joint prep time together each day in which new teachers
learn from master teachers and plan lessons together. My teaching would be
better if my program were big enough that I had a colleague to confer with
each week, or especially each day.

~~~
thedufer
You're extending your experience to that of a public school teacher, and
that's simply not a fair comparison. I'll try to touch all of the ways in
which your situation is different and why this has a bearing on the subject at
hand:

-You have fewer students. This is a _much_ bigger deal than you make it out to be, especially at higher grade levels. When you have to give feedback to close to 200 students (over 200 it not unheard of), you can't make it as meaningful as you'd like. There are things you can do with a couple dozen students that simply does not scale.

-You are dealing with an easier subset of children. If their parents want them to have extra lessons, and are both willing and able to pay for it (or even fill out scholarship forms), then you're not dealing with any of the difficult kids. Parents who don't care about school beget kids who don't care, and they are orders of magnitude more difficult to work with.

-Its clear that you are not aware of how much material these standardized tests expect you to cover in a course. I'm sure it varies by state, but this is from the perspective of VA testing, which is where I grew up and where I know many teachers. For just about any tested middle or high school class, they have the material mapped to within 3 or 4 days of the length of the school year. A couple of unexpected days off and they have to start cutting material that the test expects to be covered. There's absolutely no time to do the things you're talking about unless you want to blow off the tests - and then you're out of a job.

Standardized testing, _in its current form_, is an unmitigated disaster for
students' educations. If you can say otherwise having actually faced the
system you are so happy with (or even talked to a few who have), then we have
a conversation.

~~~
robinh
I would like to point out that 200 students per class in a public high school
does not appear to be a worldwide phenomenon. High school classes in Europe
appear to be much smaller.

~~~
thedufer
Sorry to not be specific. This article is about the US, as is my comment.

I also was talking about 200 students per teacher, not per class, which comes
about because middle and high school teachers generally teach 5-7 classes, of
20-35 (although sometime) students.

------
MaggieL
I find myself unmoved by the argument "if you have standarized tests we won't
have time to teach anything but what's on the tests".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule>

~~~
bdunbar
It's all about the funding.

Standardized tests are not new. I took them in the 70s and early 80s: a few
days of sitting in home room, filling out circles with a number two pencil.
Big deal: they had no affect on my actual grade. What they were was a
benchmark for the school.

As I understand it, what _is_ new is the pressure on the schools to produce
kids who can pass the test.

Since there is now a great deal on the line for the district ( funding ), a
lot more time is devoted to producing students who can pass the tests. This is
only natural, and was easily seen as a consequence of no child left behind.

~~~
jessaustin
My experience in the late 80s and early 90s matches your own, except I got the
impression that poor teachers did teach to the test extensively. I didn't get
that impression from good teachers; they just seemed like good teachers.
Looking back, I hypothesize that _merely competent_ school administrators used
standardized tests to identify problems, while _smart_ administrators
identified problems with the tests but then didn't actually cite the tests
when dealing with those problems. Because after you've put a few losers on
performance plans and blamed their test results when they asked why, the other
losers in your school might catch on. (This seems to imply that administrators
at schools I attended were merely competent, which implication I cannot
contradict.)

If such a dynamic did exist, one could predict it would take hold on a
national level with the advent of NCLB. Then one would expect that NCLB had
the effect primarily of making standardized tests less accurate...

------
ctdonath
_We have very little say in what is happening to public education._

Sheer raging nonsense. You're the front line. You're delivering the education.
The Nuremberg Defense doesn't work.

If a student is incapable of and unready for the next course, you do him a
moral wrong promoting him thereto. Passing the incompetent condemns that
student to being "left behind", drifting thru an "education" leaving him
completely left behind in the real world. If enough teachers held the line,
policy would change.

------
euroclydon
He can't give individual attention to 160 students. If only every student had
a personal mentor/advocate who could coach them to understand what to focus on
in high school and what to let slide, someone who could argue with them at the
dinner table until they developed a better ability to structure their
thoughts, someone who could give then better material on writing than their
school's text books or test preparatory guides. If only some parents could
step up and help this poor teacher out a bit...

~~~
Spoom
My wife runs a teen drop-in center. Believe me, sometimes the teacher (and any
other decent adults in the kid's life) is the only way that kid is going to
get any intellectual stimulation whatsoever. Sometimes the parents are
useless.

------
chernevik
"I apologize because they made me do a lousy job." Well, why didn't you leave
earlier, to go somewhere and do a better job? Because you would have made less
money and gotten less retirement.

Now the OP sounds like someone who _deserves_ more money. But this is
impossible in the current education regime, the teachers' unions are adamantly
opposed to this sort of thing. And not entirely without reason, public schools
are political institutions with political accountability. It's only a matter
of time before discretion over compensation is used not for institutional
purposes but political ones. Because whether a public school does well or
poorly, it will continue to have students and budget to pay salaries.

Salaries are currently politically controlled, by unions, to subsidize a
large-proportion of subpar workers. Currently the alternative is
administrative political control, where principals and superintendents will
vary salaries for who knows what purpose.

No Child Left Behind was an effort to improve obviously sub-optimal results by
imposing some kind of "standards", a regulation of the quality provided by
these centrally planned institutions. It's no surprise that these regulations
proved as brain-dead and counter-productive as any other management by
regulation.

But if we remove the standardized testing, we'll be right back at trusting the
discretion of _some_ political entity for the management and control of the
schools. The miserable track records of these entities is what lead to
standardized testing in the first place.

The root problem in the schools' governance the public schools' effective
monopoly on education. Schools are accountable to _politicians_, not parents,
because they get budget from politicians. Giving parents control of the
politicians only changes the politics. Only when parents control where their
children go, and the budget with them, will we move towards governance that
actually cares what parents think, and thus acquire a focus on educating kids.
Because only then can administrations have the necessary discretion to pursue
real qualities, within a check on the usage of that discretion for its
intended purposes.

Until we fix that, all the complaints about education and its obvious problems
will be so much water under the bridge. The schools are lousy because no
effective actor has an interest in making them good. Give the parents
effective power to hold schools accountable and things will change. And not
before.

In the meantime we'll have pious complaints from the politically indoctrinated
about how they were forced to do a bad job. No, sir, not so. You chose to do
that job, and you chose it for the money. You were free to do better, albeit
at a price, and you chose not to. The responsibility for that is yours.

~~~
jbooth
You're going to blame him for not quitting to devote himself to some quixotic,
unpaid battle against testing? Of course he's going to finish his years and
get his pension. He's not any more obligated to die on a cross than you are.

RE: unions, they have a lot of problems, most of them centered around
protecting bad teachers and pensions at the cost of good teachers and young
teachers. But the funding problem for teacher salaries is about 80%
healthcare-driven, it's not the unions' fault that healthcare has had 2
decades of >10% annual cost inflation (do the math on that).

------
johngalt
Teacher: "Measuring results is the reason we are recording poor results."

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I could make a Heisenberg joke here, it's hard not to laugh, but I'd rather
not make light of the fact that the act of measuring the students' progress is
almost certainly having a negative effect on their progress. I wouldn't argue
for an open-loop system, I like the idea of assessments. But somehow, despite
all the recent effort that's gone in to education reform, it seems to be going
wrong.

------
stcredzero
In 1992, I was living with a bunch of college-aged folks in a big house in
Olympia, WA. My best friend at the time was a big square-headed bruiser who
pushed me to do too many drugs. (I'm a lightweight, so not much.) He was a
great guy, and a loyal friend where it mattered, but it was awkward when it
came to talking about his writing. He was proud of his writing because he
could correctly form sentences, but didn't seem to manage much beyond that.
Apparently, this put him near the head of his writing class at the community
college he had attended. Yet his writing lacked any coherence at all in areas
like subject-verb agreement, agreement of tense, logical structure, and so on.
This was serious writing which he carefully revised, not off-the-cuff like my
comments on HN.

He was insightful and intelligent. I always enjoyed talking to him. However, I
was disturbed that he was apparently in the top 10% of what his school could
produce in terms of writing. I wondered, if this was typical around the
country, what did it say about the quality of education in the general public?

------
haubey
I go to a private school in Florida, so I never had to take the FCATs, or any
of the No Child Left Behind tests. When I was in elementary school, I took the
ERBs, but the tests meant nothing, so nobody really cared about them that much
--or at least the students didn't care. It's hard to remember because that was
so many years ago, but my friend who were in public school would always talk
about the FCATs, and from what I gathered, teachers taught for the FCATs
pretty much the entire year, and almost exclusively for the test in the couple
of months proceeding the examination. Meanwhile, I had teachers teaching me
the subjects, not the tests.

I didn't really have much testing until during middle school, but staring in
freshman year I took the PSATs and AP tests. All the PSAT prep we did was
vocab in English class, and then in Junior year some brief prep in math.
Luckily most of my class sizes were and are small enough that my teachers
could give us individual attention if we needed/need it. As a second semester
senior, I don't need it anymore. My friends had the FCATs up through 10th
grade, after which they changed gears into (P)SAT mode. I'm not sure if their
teachers taught for the SATs, or just taught for the class at that point.

I've had teachers that teach for the APs and teachers that teach the class
topic, and I'm of the opinion that if a teacher teaches for the class, and not
for the test, and does it well, then a byproduct of the class should be good
grades on the AP test. I'm also of the opinion that the AP Lit and Lang tests
need to be remade, because it is incredibly hard to teach critical reading.
Math and science AP tests make sense, because there is a right and wrong, but
language is much more subjective.

Testing is important, however. While the SAT isn't perfect, and while I don't
think it will ever be perfect, it's a necessary evil. It's a standard--or as
close of a standard that we can probably get to, and so we, and colleges,
still need it.

------
mgkimsal
Not sure why NCLB is being blamed here. I graduated high school in the late
80s, and in college writing classes had peers that could not write a coherent
paragraph on basic subjects. This was more than a _decade_ before NCLB.

We've always had poor students. And we've always had bright students. Perhaps
we're measuring more of it now - we have more information, more metrics and
more hand-wringing over it. However, I still run in to bright kids and high-
school students, and I run in to people (young and old) who are not that
bright or can't communicate, and I'm not convinced the numbers have shifted
all that much over the past few decades. But the amount of money at stake in
various industries _has_ changed.

------
cafard
I went to school in a day when the Iowa tests came around every few years
(twice or three times between 1st and 10th grade), and that was it except for
P?SAT and ACT. There was no test to teach to. It was not a golden age. It was
an age of fads, just as our age is. That they came out of the teachers'
colleges rather than federal mandates made them no more helpful. My brother
suffered through more of the junk as being just enough younger. My stepmother
eventually quit working as a substitute teacher because of her impatience with
the continuing professional education courses she had to take.

------
DanBC
Weird that washingtonpost includes kber's email address, with a handy mailto:
link.

I've recently watched the UK Channel 4 programmes "Educating Essex". They
might be interesting to people interested in English education. The official
site is (<http://www.channel4.com/programmes/educating-essex/4od>).

It's interesting that a few pupils can take up so much time. (all that 80:20
stuff), and it's a shame there's no money available for similar high-intensity
interventions for the students who work hard.

------
jimmaswell
"...bad writing— no introduction, no conclusion, just hit the points of the
rubric and provide the necessary factual support."

In other words, no worthless fluff? School writing where it's /encouraged/ to
just get to the point and present your facts in a clear, short, efficient
manner? Regardless of the other issues mentioned in the article, I think that
at least is one good thing, because that is an absolute rarity in today's
educational environment where you tend to fail if you don't express a 10 word
idea in 100 of them.

~~~
mkr-hn
The essay structure is mostly useless in the real world, but it can help
inexperienced writers get started. It's a teaching aid, like simplifying
hundreds of pointless equations to get better at simplifying equations.

------
joedev
Interesting. Haven't seen these issues at my kids' school. In fact, I just saw
a grade yesterday on a report that was specifically broken down with points
for grammar and structure. My boy told me earlier in the quarter a project
that was partly graded on critical thinking and argument skills (regardless of
the "answers" arrived at).

This isn't for me to say that their school must be better, but just to say
that it's obviously not as impossible as this plea would have one think to
teach the way that teachers think is right.

------
ctbeiser
There are certainly issues with this article. As a student, who's been in this
setting for the past dozen years, I've got some thoughts on the matter:

1\. If you want to measure how much is taught, make sure you're measuring how
much is taught. The emphasis on AP scores and ERBs makes for a teaching
environment where you're taught not the actual things you need to know, but
the particular phrasings that the College Board agrees get you full credit.
I'm taking AP Stat, and all of my classmates can parrot off dozens of phrases
regarding interpreting distributions, but most of them don't understand a word
of it. From there...

2\. You need to teach tools that can be used to solve problems, not recipes to
solve specific kinds of problems. Otherwise, you're not learning.

3\. You absolutely must reward creativity and unorthodox questions. Grading
based on adherance to a specific methodology rather than having a reasonable
answer (EG, you're being told that atoms are the smallest elements of matter,
and you say that Quarks are smaller? You get points off. You ask about that,
and are told not to question the Word of Teacher? That's what I'm talking
about), and similarly, punishment for students who are too curious are due for
the course

4\. You need teachers who know what they're talking about. In sixth grade, a
science teacher insisted that yes, Dinosaurs did eat humans. This is in a
high-income neighborhood, in a solidly blue state. When I called her on it,
and she looked it up and found that no, there is a gap of hundreds of millions
of years, she closed the lesson by referencing young-earth creationist ideas
about layers of soil in Texas.

5\. You need to destroy the hierarchy of teachers being superior to students.
Hierarchy is good for producing mass laborers who won't question authority,
and dropouts. It's not good for helping people learn, or fostering curiosity.
Worried about your safety without absolute power? Well, I'd be more worried
about your safety when you're playing the role of prison guard. It seems
incredible, but at, say, Quaker schools, students call teachers by their first
name, they're very friendly with eachother, and the result is vibrant
intellectual discourse, not knifings.

6\. So you're an administrator/the President/ETC, and you want to measure if
students understand material? Ask them. They'll be able to tell you a lot more
than sitting in on a class and gauging metrics or Value Added Teaching ever
will.

Above all, what amazes me most is that while following this debate for years,
not once has anyone ever asked students what they think. If you haven't been a
student in one of these schools within the last ten years, your opinions on
what the real problems in education aren't valid.

------
spikels
I have now read quite a few articles and comments on HN with teachers
attacking either testing or MOOCs (some links below). There comments share a
strange incoherence, tending to ramble on about irrelevant but emotionally
charged issues (e.g. the rant on disrespect for teachers here) while ignoring
pertinent facts (e.g. any evidence pre-NCLB students were better prepared than
today's students). There is also a strange paranoia as if there is some grand
conspiracy to "damage" education and harm students when as best I can tell the
targets of this wrath (e.g. Bill Gates) are tying to help solve what they see
as an extremely critical problem.

Is this really representative of the "thinking" of our teachers generally?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5162105>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2633341>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5124993>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5118174>

------
taproot
"Award winning teacher" waits till after he retires to say the systems fucked.
Thanks bro. Good help.

(yes I know I don't know the full story but it reads bad)

------
Strang
The federal government has no business in education. There is no feasible,
informative way for a single organization to comprehensively evaluate the
education of every K-12 student in America.

Education should between a student, his parents, teachers, and local
administrators. Involving an army of faceless bureaucrats cannot possibly make
anything better.

~~~
sajals
I graduated high school in a rural, fundamentalist town. No doubt if this were
to happen, I would have had to listen to why I should accept Jesus Christ into
my heart. No thanks. Sex Ed is already left to the States and look how that's
working. The State's with the highest teen pregnancy rate all teach abstinence
only education.

~~~
Crake
"I graduated high school in a rural, fundamentalist town."

Me too. Also lots of abstinence only education encouraging you to wait until
marriage. What were gay people like me supposed to do? Oh, right. Not exist.
Got it.

------
calhoun137
I feel really bad for kids these days. It's hard to know what to do to help.
If there are any bright, motivated, self-taught young people in your life,
please take the time to tutor them, to correct their amateur mistakes before
they become deadly habits, and to generally be a resource that is there for
them.

There are only so many natural born hackers in this world, and it's up to us
to be there for the next generation of kids who are trying like hell to
succeed in spite of the current state of public education.

Another thing we can do to help is to contribute to projects like the khan
academy and other free online learning tools. There are tons of really smart
kids out there who want to learn, but who just can't afford to go to private
schools because their parents are not rich enough.

It's up to those of us with the knowledge and the passion to make sure these
types of resources are available. In today's economy this is becoming more and
more important.

Public education in this country is literally under assault, and no child left
behind is a big part of that.

The public sector is being chipped away at by wall street, and no child left
behind is part of a strategy to destroy the public education system.

Wall street hates public education for the same reason they hate social
security, because they can't profit from it, and they are so rich that they
don't need it themselves. Here are some links to back up this point.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/albany-
charter...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/albany-charter-cash-
big-banks-making-bundle-new-construction-schools-bear-cost-article-1.448008)

<http://www.democracynow.org/topics/charter_schools>

<http://www.democracynow.org/topics/education/11>

------
ilaksh
When you apply a deeply flawed policy ubiquitously, you get ubiquitous
failure.

You have to measure something somehow. But if you are forcing everyone to
measure the wrongs things at the expense of actually teaching critical thought
or other important skills or providing individualized attention, then you are
screwing everyone.

Centralized policies can be very damaging, especially if they are too
prescriptive and incorrect. Generally speaking, the federal government and
other colluding monopolies have too much power, and this is one glaring
example of how that is causing very serious problems.

This over-centralization is a result of the structure of fundamental beliefs
and institutions. That's just how money works.

Power controls too much without information.

I think its because there is no useful information in money.

------
crusso
Since that entire piece is mostly opinion and devoid of any measurable facts,
it's fair to judge where that opinion is coming from.

Tearcherken's blog is pretty axe grindy, in case the URL didn't give it away:

<http://teacherken.dailykos.com/>

------
smsm42
It's an interesting piece, but I have a problem with one thing that caught my
eye - while explaining what drives the policies that hurt - in his opinion -
the education, first thing he mentions is "wealthy corporations". It's a
common trope, but I'd expect more from somebody who actually teaches
Government - what "wealthy corporations" have to do with this and how comes
they - and not, say, vast government bureaucracy or enormously powerful
educational unions - supposedly set the agenda and ruin everything for
everybody?

------
rasengan0
Why all this criticism to this opinion piece?

The perspective is refreshing but will probably fall on deaf ears to policy:

"Many of us are leaving sooner than we had planned because the policies
already in effect and those now being implemented mean that we are
increasingly restricted in how and what we teach."

[http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_of_the_year/2010/01...](http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_of_the_year/2010/01/teachers_should_be_seen_and_no.html)

Soon creationists can apply their vouchers for real science!

------
wisty
Testing is a good idea, if it's done well. Measurement is always a good thing,
unless it's expensive (tests aren't), or the measurements are used in a stupid
way (which ... they are).

It's like measuring productivity by SLOC. Good programmers write more code. If
you reward programmers for writing more code, though, they'll punch out
boilerplate code which won't really do anything. They'll actually get less
done, because they are writing meaningless lines of code, instead of actually
solving problems. Steve Ballmer claims this a big reason why Microsoft beat
IBM when OS/2 was coming out - as IBM rewarded their programmers for more
SLOC, so they screwed everything up.

If you reward people for good measurements, they'll find ways to screw with
the measurements.

Big tests mean, the students and teachers will focus on beating the test.
They'll teach exam techniques, and stick to what they think will be on the
test. It's fairly easy to teach a "shallow" way of solving problems, if you
can guess the problems. Learning to solve unseen problems is hard - you
actually have to understand the material. But most tests won't have a lot of
difficult questions, so teachers will focus on getting their class to memorise
the algorithm used to solve the basic questions.

Rote learning is good, if it's an enabler. Learning your times tables helps
you do higher mathematics. But if you only worry about rote learning, then you
can go through school without actually understanding what you are doing - you
just follow the rules, and hope there aren't too many trick questions. Rote
learning can be the foundation of higher learning, but creating nothing _but_
foundations is a waste of effort.

It's also a huge waste of resources, as teachers will be spending all their
time trying to figure out the test parameters, instead of worrying about
whether their students actually understand the material.

Finally, there's the opportunity cost. Instead of saying "the good teachers
are the ones which get good test results", they could do some deeper analysis.
How do the "good" teachers control their class? What kind of homework do they
set? What is the format of their lessons? What can the "bad" teachers do, to
emulate their success? The "bad" teachers mostly just don't know how to teach
well. There's probably a few idiots (who can't teach because they don't
understand the topic), a few ones whose personality makes them ineffective,
and some who are lazy or burnt out. But I bet _most_ teachers would be much
more effective if they knew what the "good" teachers were up to.

If the tests are high stakes, you'll just find that the "good" teachers are
the ones who care most about gaming the test, not the ones who are actually
good teachers. If the tests aren't high stakes, then the good teachers will
naturally do well, and it's worth studying how they became so effective.

It would be justifiable, if the incentive of high stakes tests was strong
enough to actually bring the kids up to a certain level, but I don't think it
has. Instead, it just creates bad incentives, and is a distraction from
serious quantitative research into teaching.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Can you point to a real world standardized test, and explain how to game it
without making students understand the material?

 _Instead of saying "the good teachers are the ones which get good test
results", they could do some deeper analysis. How do the "good" teachers..._

How would they know which ones to classify as "good" and "bad" without the
test?

------
gmrple
I suspect a marked increase in cheating will be the fallout, rather than a
huge increase in clueless students.

------
tempaccount9473
tl;dr: As a teacher, you can't expect me to teach students the facts on the
tests AND how to write clear sentences.

------
KenBernstetin
A friend of mine just let me know this was posted over here. I regret that i
do not have time to respond to all the comments - I have received several
hundred emails directly as a result of the posting at the Washington Post. I
will when I have time come back and read through and where appropriate offer
responses. For now I want to acknowledge that many of you are taking the time
to offer thoughtful comments, even if I may think you misunderstand either
purpose of the piece or why I wrote it. Let me offer a few general comments.

1\. No Child Behind does not exist in isolation. Before it there were A Nation
At Risk and Goals 2000, both of which are part of the ethos from which NCLB
flowed. Since NCLB, Race to the Top has if anything made thingsworse.

2\. Unlike its predecessors, NCLB had punitive sanctions that began to distort
the learning process. When the courses I taught in government were in 9th
grade, we began seeing kids arrive at our high school with NO social studies
to speak of in elementary or middle school, because those subjects were not
tested for Adequate Yearly Progress, the standard by which schools were
measured under NCLB.

3\. I did not teach just elite students. My last 7 years I taught both the
regular level government classes and AP US Government and Politics. For the
1st 6 of those years half of my sections were in each course. The last year 4
were AP. Thus I taught a spectrum of abilities. Nevertheless, the gifted
students in my AP classes were decreasingly ready to handle the kind of
thinking necessary for that course.

4\. do not presume that I EVER resorted to drill and kill for tests. But I
fought losing battles. The school system began demanding every teacher in
every course do system designed benchmarks. But in AP there was not a common
curriculum, because each AP teacher had to submit his or her own syllabus to
the College board. I approached the material in a different fashion, one which
served my students well both as to their learning but also in how they
performed on the AP exam. And yet they would be required to sit for poorly
designed tests often on material I had not yet addressed in class.

5\. Because test scores began to matter so much, the school system wanted
interim tests, which scores broken out by indicators, with teachers required
to explain why students had scored poorly on some indicators and to present a
plan of remediation. Again, I did not follow the county pacing guide, which
may be why I had the best performance in any of the 20+ high schools on the
state exam - one year I had 129 students sit for the state exam and 126 passed
- ten of those passing having failed all four quarter with me. Certainly I had
demonstrated that my students were prepared. Perhaps I should have been asked
to draft the pacing guide. At least when it came to AP, I was asked to run a
Saturday course to which students from other schools could come to get
assistance from me. But when I get told that I am REQUIRED to waste time on
tests on material my students have not yet studied and then waste more time
explaining why they did not do well on certain indicators, I think you can
begin to understand some of my frustration.

I was for a while the only teacher on the county wide panel designing how our
school system was going to tie teacher evaluation to student performance, a
requirement under Race to the Top. I disagreed with the notion, but was asked
both by central office administrators and by the executive director of the
union to serve because I understood the literature as well as anyone in the
county. We worked hard, designed a system, did some beta testing, only to have
the state reject it because we did not meet some percentage on one criteria
that they had arbitrarily set at 20% and we had set at 15%, in agreement among
the testing office, the top administration, teachers, counselors, etc.

What is happening to our students as result of educational policy which
focuses on testing - and in this case NCLB is the primary culprit - is denying
them a meaningful learning experience. Because we put so much weight on the
test scores, the focus in the school and the classroom becomes those tests,
increasingly to the exclusion of other things.

My article for Academe only scratched the surface of what is wrong.

My warning, however, is real, and it is not just about the students arriving
on college campuses. There are already proposals to evaluated professors in
schools of education on the basis of the test scores of K-12 students taught
by their graduates. Let me be blunt - this is idiotic. The professional
literature does NOT support evaluating those K-2 teachers by student test
scores, not even when using value-added assessments, which have all kinds of
problems that have still not been solved. To attempt to use them to draw valid
conclusions at one further step away from what the tests were designed to do -
which is to measure what students can do at one particularly moment in time -
is downright dangerous.

As to those who think teachers still have the ability to use their own best
judgment, perhaps to learn the appropriate research and apply it on their own?
That ignores that increasingly we are seeing superintendents who want everyone
on the same page at the same time, with rigid pacing guides, whether the
students can move faster or need to move slower.

Before I was a teacher I worked with computers for 20 years. The old IBM cards
were clearly labeled "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate." At least they were
standard - in size, in how information was recorded.

Our students are not standard. And what we are doing to them is folding,
spindling, and mutilating - their natural love of learning, their ability to
draw meaning from their studies.

It is one reason why they will be less and less prepared for post-secondary
education.

It is why the fastest growing classes on many campuses are remedial courses to
make up for what they didn't learn in high school, even if they passed all the
required tests with flying colors.

------
zanny
I graduated High School in 2009. I want to tell a story about what my
experiences lead to conclude the root problem is in public education and how
NCLB impacts it.

My school was a public high school in a college town, so a large fraction of
students were children of professors or college staff. The school did fairly
well from local taxes so we had a lot of programs other schools couldn't dream
of - for one, we had school provided Macs. Starting in 2004, every student got
a laptop to use in class if a teacher wanted to use them.

I was in 5th grade when NCLB hit the scene, and experienced the _noticable_
shift (though the causaution of this is questionable) I saw a significant
repetition of topics to such a degree that between 4th grade (I was reading at
"12th grade" reading level, had experienced everything up to algebra in math)
and 8th grade, I learned _nothing_ new. They were completely dead years. My
middle school at the time went through a transition into this new model and
structured around standardized tests that moved a significant chunk of the
material I had covered in gifted / advanced classes years earlier into every
classroom in reaction to the tests. That is the fault of the school though,
and doesn't necessarily indicate a systemic issue.

The problem showed itself in high school, and presented itself in two ways -
one, I took AP classes, and it was the _same_ 15 - 30 kids taking _every_ AP
class. I had a few gen ed. classes (Spanish, Art, Technical Writing) where I
got to experience an entire seperate _class_ of student who were thoroughly
disenfranchized with the system and being in school was wasting their time,
and everyone elses. They were in the "basic" of the basic-standard-honors
class placement, they didn't do the homework, they got D's/F's, and got pushed
through an assembly line to meet quotas. Everyone involved behind the scenes
absolutely knew this was a tremendous waste of time, but nobody did anything
about it, mainly because it was systemic and inherent to compulsory
standardized rote education.

I had some _really_ good high school teachers. I got scores in 5/5 AP tests
that placed me out of an entire semester of college courses and I graduated a
year early with my BS as a result, combined with some extra courses to meet
the credit requirement. They had _passion_. They were being _crushed_ by the
mass of the student body that wasn't in that select AP student group.

The laptops actually demonstrated something peculier - state assement test
scores fell _dramatically_ following their introduction. The school went from
top 20 in the state to bottom 50. However, that select group of 30~ students
(in a graduating class of 150, the school was delightfully small) were getting
better scores than ever.

It is much more generic than this story, but from my experiences technology
dramatically enhances the learning potential of an engaged learner, and acts
as the ultimate distraction from the disenfranchised. The 80% of students who
didn't care and didn't want to be in school used the laptops as a get out of
jail free card, intentionally taking classes to get teachers that let them use
them. The AP and honors tier of students had group collaboration projects, we
make power points rather than cardboard posters, we would regularly look up
bios and short stories of famous authors in real time.

That divide comes back to NCLB because the students that _want_ to go further
with good teachers that can promote that lose the capacity under a strict
standardized testing regime. The year I graduated, the freshman class (the 4
years of "honors" students pretty much knew each other) had around half as
many "honors" quality students in a class that was 200 students in size (133%
the size of ours).

I think the perspective of someone who went through the NCLB origin years
might be useful. I agree the article does come off as somewhat circlejerky
"kids these days just aren't as good as they once were" in some aspects. But I
definitely felt the impact of standardization strangling the good teachers and
students and it made it blatantly apparent the root problem in public schools
is that you are carrying around a majority of students who _don't want to be
there_. And the solution to the latter is a harder problem to solve than throw
more tests at them.

------
tkahn6
Formal education, in a lot of ways, is a very dehumanizing experience.

Vanishingly few students give an iota of a damn about critical thinking, about
understanding the implications of what they are reading or studying, trying to
make connections to other facets of knowledge. The emphasis is on throwing
some shit hastily onto a paper (gotta reach that word count), memorizing
mathematical algorithms (just because you can integrate a function, does not
mean you understand what you're doing), passing the exam, and moving on to the
next topic.

 _SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors_

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html?_r=0)

I had to do that. You have 25 minutes to write an essay. But you're not graded
on the quality, you're graded on the quantity. You're rewarded _only_ for
getting as many words as you can onto the paper. Purposely writing like shit
is an absolutely horrible experience. It's like intellectual suicide. Why
aren't there congressional hearings about this? Why is this acceptable?

Occasionally getting a good grade and learning the material are one in the
same pursuit. That's an amazing feeling. You feel like you're not wasting your
time. You feel like you can trust the system to educate you and you can see
your progress and knowledge reflected in your grades.

I don't know if there's a better way to do education. It's not an easy
problem. If you want to maintain your intellectual integrity, the best
strategy is to learn what you can from valuable classes, teach yourself on the
side, and get decent enough grades to get you into a college with a decent
brand, rinse and repeat there. And if you don't care about your intellectual
integrity then you can Google for guides on how to get into Ivy Leagues and
follow the steps there. Note that that is not to say that no one who attends
an Ivy League has intellectual integrity.

Only a year to go and I'm done with academia forever.

/rant

~~~
zanny
I just graduated with my CS BS last year, but I agree whole heartedly that
public education is awful.

But it isn't hard to see why. By being compulsory, and children living in a
culture of school being a hardship and burden rather than a means to create an
educated society rather than sending them to work in a coal mine at age 10,
you breed indifference and hostility. The system itself being the most bogged
down bureaucracy in the nation doesn't help placate that feeling.

I think the most important take away is this: it will be slow. It will take
decades, not months, to fix the absolutely broken public education system in
the US. It is entrenched, and has a lot of powerful figures perpetuating its
execution in its current form. But one day, we will have to realize that the
best way to "teach" is to let the students themselves find passion and pursue
it, and that if you accentuate those passions with supplemental factual and
rigorous training and teaching, you get the best education you can.

The only successful education is when you produce someone who wants to learn,
has passion, and can interact with society to a similar degree of intellectual
prowess. Memorizing the periodic table or knowing how to derive the Sine
function don't contribute to that at all (unless of course the students want
to be Chemists/Pharmacists/etc or Mathematicians / Musicians / Acoustic
Engineers/etc).

But yeah, assembly line education is awful for everyone involved.

