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Common Core in of itself isn't bad, but like many have said... implementation is the issue. And the implementation is complete poo poo. The standards are great when you are dealing with a class of upper middle class white kids with IQs straddling the mean that all come from 2 parent households. poo poo falls apart when wrenches get thrown into the works. For example, special education, speech pathology, and psychology all have to tailor their teaching/therapy to common core standards as well. They must show substantial progress month after month with common core goals. Again, nothing wrong with data collection and analysis, but it becomes pretty pointless with so many confounds. It becomes a real pain in the rear end trying to get a 7th grader with Downs Syndrome to meet a 7th grade goal when they have the mental capacity of a 1st grader. Or, trying to get Benardo to show progress towards his behavior goal when dad got shipped back to Mexico, mom is never home, and older sister is mainlining heroin. And... if you are not demonstrating progress, then obviously something is wrong with YOU and YOU need to be fired. I've literally seen a speech pathologist fudge data and convince herself little Jimmy is doing so much better this week compared to last week just from fear of "Not making progress/getting fired". I've seen the same thing in the private sector with retail. Corporate releases a new "performance metric", and the moment someone finds a way to exploit it, it is exploited to the maximum capacity out of fear. Honesty will just lead to getting yourself fired. Dishonesty means you keep your job. You would think Special Ed Teachers/Speech Paths/Psychs who all require a Masters or Ph.D to teach/practice would have supreme integrity in data collection and metric reporting, but no. They are people too that don't want to be kicked to the street for not meeting a bullshit metric they have no control over.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 06:25 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 09:14 |
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Cantorsdust posted:You know primes. Sometimes primes come in pairs only two apart, like 11 and 13, or 29 and 31. It's been proven that there are an infinite number of such "twin prime" pairs. But what about primes appearing three apart? Or four apart? Some number n apart? Are there an infinite number of "n prime" pairs for any n? If not, which n's? There is only one pair of primes appearing three apart.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 06:33 |
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For all the reasons already brought up; closed class rooms, teaching to the test, and assessing teachers based on student test results, I think there is a growing movement to assess teachers separately to the Common Core. I've only been exposed to CLASS. Which uses a trained observer and videotaping of lessons to collect data and prompt self-reflection on teaching methods. According to my teacher friends, it can be stressful knowing that someone is watching you teach and then slightly embarrassing watching the tapes back and seeing clearly the moments that you could handle better.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 12:08 |
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The problem with teacher assessment isn't the standards or methodology, it's the actions taken based on the results of the assessments. The dominant forces in school reform policy right now don't want to assess teachers in order to help them improve, they want to assess teachers so that they can fire a bunch of "bad teachers". It's not too much different from how No Child Left Behind addresses failing schools by cutting their funding and then firing all the staff. As long as reform policy is centered around punishment rather than helping to improve, teachers are going to resist teacher assessment to their dying breath, because it's being pushed in order to hurt them rather than help them.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 17:30 |
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Main Paineframe posted:The problem with teacher assessment isn't the standards or methodology, it's the actions taken based on the results of the assessments. The dominant forces in school reform policy right now don't want to assess teachers in order to help them improve, they want to assess teachers so that they can fire a bunch of "bad teachers". It's not too much different from how No Child Left Behind addresses failing schools by cutting their funding and then firing all the staff. As long as reform policy is centered around punishment rather than helping to improve, teachers are going to resist teacher assessment to their dying breath, because it's being pushed in order to hurt them rather than help them. Are you implying that replacing teachers with fresh-out-of-college grads won't magic fully formed good teachers into existence, comrade?
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 00:16 |
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Main Paineframe posted:The problem with teacher assessment isn't the standards or methodology, it's the actions taken based on the results of the assessments. The dominant forces in school reform policy right now don't want to assess teachers in order to help them improve, they want to assess teachers so that they can fire a bunch of "bad teachers". It's not too much different from how No Child Left Behind addresses failing schools by cutting their funding and then firing all the staff. As long as reform policy is centered around punishment rather than helping to improve, teachers are going to resist teacher assessment to their dying breath, because it's being pushed in order to hurt them rather than help them. I think the narrative lot union-busting/teacher resentment/etc. is implicitly tied to the idea that the profession of teaching (or medicine or the academy or whatever) has some intrinsic value. But does it? Do teachers really "know what's best for their classroom"? Pro-teacher (and pro-physician) arguments seem to be that "it's not their job" to deal with social problems or "it's not their fault" that their students/patients are more disadvantaged than others. Maybe so, but if we have this population of beneficiaries that needs to be catered to in new ways, why are the professional concerns of teachers/doctors/professors/etc. always paramount? In short, why do we care about professional autonomy so much?
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 01:13 |
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Lightanchor posted:There is only one pair of primes appearing three apart. You are correct, I should have revised that to primes some 2n apart.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 01:23 |
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Slobjob Zizek posted:I think the narrative lot union-busting/teacher resentment/etc. is implicitly tied to the idea that the profession of teaching (or medicine or the academy or whatever) has some intrinsic value. But does it? Do teachers really "know what's best for their classroom"? No one argues that it's not their job, they correctly argue that it is not possible for their job alone to make up the difference, not even close. Your post will sound absolutely absurd to anyone who actually works in schools with these populations.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 05:08 |
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Slobjob Zizek posted:I think the narrative lot union-busting/teacher resentment/etc. is implicitly tied to the idea that the profession of teaching (or medicine or the academy or whatever) has some intrinsic value. But does it? Do teachers really "know what's best for their classroom"? Probably because professional autonomy is a completely separate than much broader social ills that honestly need to be handled at the political level. It doesn't help that the political class seems to be ignoring social ills while reducing autonomy...most likely for ideological reasons. If anything reducing teacher autonomy is most likely going to make those ills worse because the current ideological underpinning of most of the reforms is very damaging and teachers have no ability to resist whatever new scheme is cooked up.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 05:28 |
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Main Paineframe posted:The problem with teacher assessment isn't the standards or methodology, it's the actions taken based on the results of the assessments. The dominant forces in school reform policy right now don't want to assess teachers in order to help them improve, they want to assess teachers so that they can fire a bunch of "bad teachers". It's not too much different from how No Child Left Behind addresses failing schools by cutting their funding and then firing all the staff. As long as reform policy is centered around punishment rather than helping to improve, teachers are going to resist teacher assessment to their dying breath, because it's being pushed in order to hurt them rather than help them. The thing that no one wants to address (probably because it will cost a lot of money to fix) is that education, at all levels, is a function that can't deal with lovely inputs. All the top-rated universities only produce such good output because they only accept the best input. During my academic career, I attended a very highly-rated university and a much more middling university (according to rankings); what I found was that the "middling" university had equal or better instructional quality across the board (though there were one or two really awesome profs at the top-rated university who were heads and shoulders above the rest; knowing what I know now, it was sheer luck that I got them and not some other humps), and they really did try harder. The reason their ratings suffered was only due to the fact that they were less selective with incoming students, because, in most other respects, the actual instruction was far superior, as was the course selection. Now, obviously, this applies to universities, where all the applicants have already been more or less vetted for quality; now, think about the differences one might see between public school in North America or around the world. To measure output with no reference to input is so monumentally ignorant that it boggles the mind as to how any sane, educated person could think it's a good metric. Either we need to figure out how to measure actual teaching ability without regard to the quality of the "raw materials" (sorry if that's an insensitive metaphor), or we need to give up on the concept altogether. Nothing good can come from measuring educational achievement alone.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 06:36 |
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PT6A posted:Either we need to figure out how to measure actual teaching ability without regard to the quality of the "raw materials" (sorry if that's an insensitive metaphor), or we need to give up on the concept altogether. Or do like the guy who developed EVAAS did and just pretend it doesn't exist.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 07:24 |
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Nice post. I think that content knowledge is a real problem that people like to push aside because it's so hard to bring up to teachers. No one wants to tell someone who's been teaching for 30 years that they need to work on content knowledge because it sounds like you're saying that they don't know fractions. But still there's a difference between knowing fractions and really mastering them. There's one guy at Berkeley who wrote a 100 page text just on fractions in all their incarnations. Similarly, in college many education majors do not want to take content knowledge courses. The best books for teacher training are the ones that sneak in content knowledge under the umbrella of manipulative training like Beckmann's book.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 12:25 |
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I just graduated with a degree in elementary ed. It's really hard to implement new CC standards and "You, yall, we" that colleges are teaching now when,in a actual classroom, every school just insists on hammering in I, we, you techniques. Like I tried my first couple days of student teaching to have an interactive classroom and was promplty informed (by the new Master TAP teacher) that it's I, We, You and if a student is talking while you are it's a failed class. So don't blame how colleges are teaching. Blame k-12 schools who tell you to be good at CC but then force you to operate under old standards.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 17:21 |
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Slobjob Zizek posted:I think the narrative lot union-busting/teacher resentment/etc. is implicitly tied to the idea that the profession of teaching (or medicine or the academy or whatever) has some intrinsic value. But does it? Do teachers really "know what's best for their classroom"? Can you explain how firing experienced teachers and replacing them with poorly-trained fresh-faced interns will somehow fix social issues or improve the lot of students? I'm not saying that teachers "know what's best for the classroom"; after all, the original topic of this thread was largely about how teachers are failing to properly adapt to new teaching styles thought to be more effective. I'm saying that rather than addressing those problems and helping teachers to improve their teaching style and fix their problems, most "reform" attempts primarily concern themselves with firing and replacing teachers every year till test scores go up. In addition to completely ignoring the non-teacher-related factors in education and being unlikely to actually have a positive impact on teaching quality, it turns teachers into a reactionary group by teaching them that "education reform" is just a code-word for "screwing over teachers".
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 17:42 |
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Skeesix posted:Nice post. I think that content knowledge is a real problem that people like to push aside because it's so hard to bring up to teachers. No one wants to tell someone who's been teaching for 30 years that they need to work on content knowledge because it sounds like you're saying that they don't know fractions. But still there's a difference between knowing fractions and really mastering them. There's one guy at Berkeley who wrote a 100 page text just on fractions in all their incarnations. Similarly, in college many education majors do not want to take content knowledge courses. The best books for teacher training are the ones that sneak in content knowledge under the umbrella of manipulative training like Beckmann's book. I would say, based on post-test hallway discussion, a solid half to two-thirds of my elementary math content class struggled to maintain the C-average necessary to stay in the program. Everyone says "It's just elementary math," but actually understanding it and being able to explain it to children is harder than it sounds. Hell, I didn't really understand why you cross-multiplied to divide fractions until I took the course because it didn't stick in fourth grade. I knew you had to do it, but I didn't know why and it led to a lot of stupid fractions mistakes later on. There's no way I could have effectively taught the concept to students if I hadn't learned it myself, and a lot of my classmates didn't pick it up because they just "aren't a math person" and blamed the professor for making them feel stupid. It's a difficult problem to solve because the common attitude was "I'm going to pass the course/certification and then teach the way I learned it because that makes sense to me," even though clearly it doesn't make enough sense to translate into solving word- or multi-step problems. Education classes can be really frustrating. Avalanche posted:Common Core in of itself isn't bad, but like many have said... implementation is the issue. And the implementation is complete poo poo. The expectations placed on special ed. by NCLB are probably the worst part of the entire law and nobody's in any hurry to fix it because "we need to have high expectations for all students." Data collection and analysis are wonderful, but turning them into a bar for teacher evaluation makes the data a punishment rather than a tool. In regards to implementation, I guess I'm arguing over semantics. I see the fight for teacher evaluation/charter schools/union-busting as existing prior to and in spite of Common Core. I worry that, by lumping all of it under one umbrella, people in power will jettison the easy part - the standards themselves - and leave the actually bad things, like Louisiana has. I think we all agree that the implementation has been really lovely, though, and that drags the entire enterprise down.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 17:50 |
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Asiina posted:Oh man, I'm so excited that people are talking about math education. I'm a researcher in math education! drat, do you have a blog or something? I would love to link and share that with my non-forum-reading friends.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 18:05 |
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Relevant to this discussion: the American Statistical Association published a statement on the use of value-added models (what most people are talking about when they say "test scores") as a tool for teacher evaluation.quote:Many states and school districts have adopted Value-Added Models (VAMs) as part of educational accountability systems. The goal of these models, which are also referred to as Value-Added Assessment (VAA) Models, is to estimate effects of individual teachers or schools on student achievement while accounting for differences in student background. VAMs are increasingly promoted or mandated as a component in high-stakes decisions such as determining compensation, evaluating and ranking teachers, hiring or dismissing teachers, awarding tenure, and closing schools. https://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 18:15 |
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I don't actually think many teachers would turn their noses up at a genuine opportunity to improve their craft. But there are substantial practical barriers to teacher training. One is cost. The other is time. Training, review, self reflection, and rewriting ineffective lesson plans all take time. Potentially a lot of time. Most American teachers are already working ten hour days. To do it over the summer wouldn't be as effective and once again would cost money districts don't have. But convincing the public and policy makers that schools could improve if teachers spent less time with students seems like a hard sell. quote:VAMs are generally based on standardized test scores, and do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 19:29 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Can you explain how firing experienced teachers and replacing them with poorly-trained fresh-faced interns will somehow fix social issues or improve the lot of students? I'm not saying that teachers "know what's best for the classroom"; after all, the original topic of this thread was largely about how teachers are failing to properly adapt to new teaching styles thought to be more effective. I'm saying that rather than addressing those problems and helping teachers to improve their teaching style and fix their problems, most "reform" attempts primarily concern themselves with firing and replacing teachers every year till test scores go up. In addition to completely ignoring the non-teacher-related factors in education and being unlikely to actually have a positive impact on teaching quality, it turns teachers into a reactionary group by teaching them that "education reform" is just a code-word for "screwing over teachers". Okay, without going down the rabbit holes of postmodernism (e.g. measurement of social benefits is impossible, cost-benefit analysis is evil, etc.) or statism (e.g. the state should just expand it's powers to fix any social problem it encounters), I'll try to summarize the situation. The US federal government is currently budget-constrained, and has been so for a while (the idea of a balanced budget was important since at least the mid-80s. During that same period, many of our social services (healthcare, education, prisons, etc.) have been getting shittier. If the federal government had directly control over employees for these services, it could just fire them or raise standards if needed. But it doesn't. The federal government transfers money to the states, but it's powers are greatly constrained by (1) federalism, and (2) in the case of many social services, professionalism. First, federalism: the federal government has very limited powers over state departments of education, school districts, schools, etc. All it can do is threaten these entities with money to force them to adopt whatever standards it thinks are currently the best. And here's where testing comes in -- federal officials do not run schools, so they have to force schools to produce some metric that shows they are performing well. The most common metric is test scores, which everyone hates. But what else could the feds do? More subjective metrics would be very difficult to implement (send inspectors to every school?) or very prone to falsification (have students rate their teachers?). So, so long as we have a federal system where money is transferred from the federal government to state and local entities in a constrained fiscal environment, we will have performance measurement. Next, we have the issue of professionalism. Teachers are direct employees of districts, but they are unionized and individual districts cannot force them to teach a certain way. They are not like employees of a retail business; the line of authority is much more diffuse. Okay, great, teachers have academic freedom, tenure, etc. That's great for them. Maybe great for students, but only if the teacher's freedom leads him or her to teach better than the standards. If not, then the freedom is a net negative for students. Again, the federal government cannot do anything about this anyway, it can only effect teachers through several layers of management by holding funding hostage at the school-, district-, and state-level. How would you run things differently, given these constraints? It would be as if you ran Subway at the corporate-level and franchisees were free to use your branding and products, but turn down certain directives as they saw fit. Obviously, this would lead to some Subway locations being shittier than others, and the brand might sag as a whole. Maybe great for certain franchisees, but not for the whole company. Same thing happens with US education as a whole and the individual schools that is composed of.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 21:05 |
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Slobjob Zizek posted:The US federal government is currently budget-constrained, and has been so for a while (the idea of a balanced budget was important since at least the mid-80s. During that same period, many of our social services (healthcare, education, prisons, etc.) have been getting shittier. The mantra of balanced budgets (however much lip-service it's usually been) actually goes back to at least the early 70s.
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# ? Jul 29, 2014 23:57 |
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Balanced budgets have been important to conservatives since the time money was first invented, anytime someone wanted to spend some to try something new.
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# ? Jul 30, 2014 00:31 |
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Slobjob Zizek posted:How would you run things differently, given these constraints? It would be as if you ran Subway at the corporate-level and franchisees were free to use your branding and products, but turn down certain directives as they saw fit. Obviously, this would lead to some Subway locations being shittier than others, and the brand might sag as a whole. Maybe great for certain franchisees, but not for the whole company. Same thing happens with US education as a whole and the individual schools that is composed of. This analogy is totally useless. Subway franchises are not akin to schools with student populations of wide socioeconomic variances. Sadly, one can predict academic "outcomes" of a school quite accurately depending on the socioeconomic make up of the students, regardless of what half-cooked reform policies a school has or hasn't chosen to employ. Students who live in violent inner city communities within large metropolitan areas (Chicago, LA, DC, SF) are literally suffering from PTSD - it doesn't require a leap of faith to reason that this has a direct affect on a young person's brain chemistry and brain development and her ability to learn. This isn't postmodern posturing - it's actually being studied by the CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy. I'm extremely skeptical about how market driven reform solutions or directives can really help these students - unless these magic market solutions can roll back deep economic inequality, reduce gun violence in inner cities and provide social workers/therapists for these kids and their families. mA fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Jul 30, 2014 |
# ? Jul 30, 2014 07:58 |
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No one would have heard about this program if they named it the %State_Name% State Curriculum Program or whatever. No one would get frothy mouthed about the Iowa State Curriculum Program but "common" and "core" are both scary words. The name doomed them, I'm serious.
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# ? Jul 30, 2014 09:11 |
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Trabisnikof posted:No one would have heard about this program if they named it the %State_Name% State Curriculum Program or whatever. No one would get frothy mouthed about the Iowa State Curriculum Program but "common" and "core" are both scary words. The name doomed them, I'm serious. What an asinine argument. "Common core" is two words about as innocuous as you can get. They're downright wholesome. Now, calling something the "state curriculum", what are you some kind of Soviet communist who wants the state to dictate what schools teach? The point is, the problems arising from common core are complicated and systematic, and you'd have frothy mouthed detractors no matter what you called it.
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# ? Jul 30, 2014 13:19 |
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Slobjob Zizek posted:How would you run things differently, given these constraints? It would be as if you ran Subway at the corporate-level and franchisees were free to use your branding and products, but turn down certain directives as they saw fit. Obviously, this would lead to some Subway locations being shittier than others, and the brand might sag as a whole. Maybe great for certain franchisees, but not for the whole company. Same thing happens with US education as a whole and the individual schools that is composed of. How about increasing the amount of federally-provided mandatory training to go along with the new curriculums being sent out? Regardless of which Subway location you work at, Subway requires all newly-hired franchise employees to go through a corporate-run online training program. Subway employees are also required to follow certain procedures and policies, and inspectors from both Subway corporate and the government are regularly sent to Subway locations to ensure that employees are following government rules and Subway policies, ranging from "wash your hands after you take out the trash" to "put the right amounts of food on people's sandwiches and follow the corporate recipes". It's not at all difficult for a centralized authority to influence semi-autonomous locations not under their direct control.
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# ? Jul 30, 2014 20:12 |
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Main Paineframe posted:How about increasing the amount of federally-provided mandatory training to go along with the new curriculums being sent out? Regardless of which Subway location you work at, Subway requires all newly-hired franchise employees to go through a corporate-run online training program. Subway employees are also required to follow certain procedures and policies, and inspectors from both Subway corporate and the government are regularly sent to Subway locations to ensure that employees are following government rules and Subway policies, ranging from "wash your hands after you take out the trash" to "put the right amounts of food on people's sandwiches and follow the corporate recipes". It's not at all difficult for a centralized authority to influence semi-autonomous locations not under their direct control. I think the issue here is that the federal government has no legal way to regulate teachers. It can force institutions that accept federal money to institute new curriculum/rules, but teachers are licensed by each individual state. I don't know as much about education as I do about healthcare, but I do know that the federal government has a ton of opportunity to regulate doctors and hospitals because it runs the largest insurer, Medicare. The government can just add pile on regulations to docs/hospitals as a condition of Medicare participation. In terms of education, I'm pretty sure the feds would have to blackmail all the states like it did with the drinking age or speed limits.
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# ? Jul 30, 2014 22:21 |
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I teach and I'll say that educational issues are always money issues. You have to pay people to produce more because teaching is a time intensive area. There is literally no way I can reflect on my practice, revise lessons, implement interventions, collaborate in a PLC, stay on top of my content, and etc in the regular working hours. But at the same time, I'm expected to do all that on my own time. I don't even get paid a 12 month salary (10 months for classroom instructors). If you said, hey teachers here's an extra 10% if you lead a PLC, people would fight for it. And it would probably be a source of favorism/nepotism. But teachers would want to improve their craft. If you offered free dinner for PLC meetings, most teachers wouldn't be so reluctant to plan together and wouldn't require NON-NEGOTIABLE threats from administrators. The best thing about Common Core in my state is that it encouraged professional learning communities. I believe good teachers produce good teachers. But most good teachers don't have the time or willingness to collaborate and teach an extra period a week for free to other teachers who don't value it. My district provided paid off-campus planning for Common Core teachers. Little things like that factor into the success of an initiative. However, when schools require SO MUCH and expect you to do it for free, a lot of things don't get done. It doesn't help that teachers are treated and paid like children.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 18:55 |
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One of the things that aways annoys me in discussions of Common Core are parents who are somehow engaged enough to throw a fit that their children's curriculum is different from what they learned 30 years ago, but not engaged enough to take 10-15 minutes and figure it out. Like they always circulate these examples where it's like "oh God this is so ridiculous how are our kids supposed to understand this New Math" but the examples make plenty of sense if you look at them for a minute to two, much less if you go over with the kid what the teacher said in class or look at the textbook or online resources or whatever.
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# ? Sep 4, 2014 21:50 |
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Slobjob Zizek posted:Pro-teacher (and pro-physician) arguments seem to be that "it's not their job" to deal with social problems or "it's not their fault" that their students/patients are more disadvantaged than others. Maybe so, but if we have this population of beneficiaries that needs to be catered to in new ways, why are the professional concerns of teachers/doctors/professors/etc. always paramount? In short, why do we care about professional autonomy so much? Because that's how you manage high skill employees in situations with difficult and complex tasks?
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 00:01 |
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Jackson Taus posted:One of the things that aways annoys me in discussions of Common Core are parents who are somehow engaged enough to throw a fit that their children's curriculum is different from what they learned 30 years ago, but not engaged enough to take 10-15 minutes and figure it out. Like they always circulate these examples where it's like "oh God this is so ridiculous how are our kids supposed to understand this New Math" but the examples make plenty of sense if you look at them for a minute to two, much less if you go over with the kid what the teacher said in class or look at the textbook or online resources or whatever. Parents? My friend is a teacher and she complains about Common Core new math being so stupid she can't understand it or teach it to the kids.
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 00:34 |
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Slobjob Zizek posted:Next, we have the issue of professionalism. Teachers are direct employees of districts, but they are unionized and individual districts cannot force them to teach a certain way. They are not like employees of a retail business; the line of authority is much more diffuse. Okay, great, teachers have academic freedom, tenure, etc. That's great for them. Maybe great for students, but only if the teacher's freedom leads him or her to teach better than the standards. If not, then the freedom is a net negative for students. Again, the federal government cannot do anything about this anyway, it can only effect teachers through several layers of management by holding funding hostage at the school-, district-, and state-level. Speaking as a former retail employee, the line of authority is not that much different. I went from Wal-Mart management to inner city public school teacher, and it really struck me how similar the policies, procedures, and due process were in both institutions. In both cases, extreme failure resulted in lengthy documentation processes to terminate the employee. I've seen both happen from up close and they were pretty much equal in terms of duration and burden of proof. It has also seemed to me that in a retail setting, where everyone has a unified goal (make money by selling things) and benefits monetarily from achieving this goal, that the management chain works much more smoothly. In an educational setting, there are no real monetary incentives for doing much of anything other than coaching. Without incentive, then there's no real motivation to change teaching styles. Management can't realistically be in your room enough to fully document you out without months of work, and they're poo poo on too hard by the lunatics above them pushing political agendas to put in that kind of effort. Plus, when they do, you just get another job immediately because there's a shortage of people willing to teach for poo poo money in a poverty stricken educational environment. In retail, there is no shortage of desperate, college-education lacking people willing to work 70 hour weeks for a chance at a middle class life. At Wal-Mart, I managed maybe 20 people at a time during normal business and I would have 2-3 sub-managers assisting, plus regular employees that wanted to take a shot at promotion taking on management responsibilities. At times that would spike dramatically, but during those times all of the regular employees would take on management responsibilities. If I did well, I got a multi-thousand dollar bonus check. If I were a step higher, that bonus would expand to 10k+ if the store does well. It was not unheard of for a store manager to get a 100 thousand dollar bonus check. In school, I have 220 students. I'm supposed to have backup in the form of hall monitors, principals, and inclusion teachers. Hall monitors are a joke, the principals have their own quotas to deal with (drive out the old teachers who don't use technology as much) so they ignore or kick discipline back to the teachers, and inclusion teachers are a myth. I have a security button, in case there's an emergency. These get answered about 20% of the time. We didn't have fire extinguishers in the building for two months at the beginning of one year. If you don't have fire extinguishers in a retail store, the loving firefighters that shop there will potentially write major dollar tickets on your rear end. That kills your bonus. Also, the school doesn't run the loving air conditioner until past 3:00 PM as a cost cutting measure. It was a hundred goddamned degrees outside yesterday in Texas. Nothing I do will increase my paycheck by much other than perhaps becoming a private tutor for the wealthy. That's probably the next step, because the alternative money route in education is going into administration.
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 03:30 |
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litany of gulps posted:Speaking as a former retail employee, the line of authority is not that much different. I went from Wal-Mart management to inner city public school teacher, and it really struck me how similar the policies, procedures, and due process were in both institutions. In both cases, extreme failure resulted in lengthy documentation processes to terminate the employee. I've seen both happen from up close and they were pretty much equal in terms of duration and burden of proof. Call me crazy but I'd hope it would be quicker and easier to fire someone from Walmart than from a teaching job. What you're describing to me is just that, perhaps especially in Texas, there are no more employment protections for teachers than for your average Walmart employee anymore.
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 08:51 |
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Jackson Taus posted:One of the things that aways annoys me in discussions of Common Core are parents who are somehow engaged enough to throw a fit that their children's curriculum is different from what they learned 30 years ago, but not engaged enough to take 10-15 minutes and figure it out. Like they always circulate these examples where it's like "oh God this is so ridiculous how are our kids supposed to understand this New Math" but the examples make plenty of sense if you look at them for a minute to two, much less if you go over with the kid what the teacher said in class or look at the textbook or online resources or whatever. I was a tutor and worked with a lot of tutors, and we all had some difficulty understanding Common Core. We knew the math, obviously, and could very easily teach students how to properly solve problems, but some of the examples and methods used were completely out of left field for us, and given that we were getting second or thirdhand knowledge of what was being taught through a student who didn't properly comprehend the lesson (after all, they're in tutoring because they don't get the concept), it was fairly difficult to get quickly. For the most part, we'd just grab a different textbook and give students example problems from there. My biggest complaint with the common core book we worked with most often is that instead of breaking down example problems by concept like a traditional math book, the examples problems were all mixed review, so if a student understood concepts X and Z, then it was a nightmare to try to find examples for Y that they missed.
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 09:25 |
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Luigi Thirty posted:Parents? My friend is a teacher and she complains about Common Core new math being so stupid she can't understand it or teach it to the kids. I think this is an indictment of the old style of math education for sure. Some of the examples are a little confusing when you first look at them, but you really ought to be able to figure them out if you're even moderately numerate. Still, perhaps it would be worthwhile for someone involved in this to make a guide that explains the Common Core question styles, and vocabulary, so it's less taxing on parents/tutors/etc. to figure out what's going on -- because I think that's where a lot of the frustration is coming from.
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 13:37 |
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The "Johnny got this wrong answer.What mistake did he make?" questions are probably the best "do you understand arithmetic" questions I've ever seen
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 17:18 |
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:The "Johnny got this wrong answer.What mistake did he make?" questions are probably the best "do you understand arithmetic" questions I've ever seen As a teacher, I don't think we spend nearly enough time training students how to identify errors and develop intuitive rules of thumb around material. The step before "Is this correct?" should be "Is this answer not batshit crazy?"
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# ? Sep 5, 2014 23:25 |
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Skeesix posted:Call me crazy but I'd hope it would be quicker and easier to fire someone from Walmart than from a teaching job. What you're describing to me is just that, perhaps especially in Texas, there are no more employment protections for teachers than for your average Walmart employee anymore. The biggest difference was that any given Wal-Mart store has a relatively small cast of long term characters, and a lot of temps or people in a probationary period that just get fired as a matter of course at the end of the probationary period. If you make it to a regular part-time position, you gain the benefits of the due process protections, but they're not obligated to give you any hours. Hence the standard retail firing tactic of cutting someone's hours to nothing until they quit. If you're full time or salaried at Wal-Mart, the process is pretty much identical for firing in that context vs firing a teacher. I would suspect this is true all over. Teachers tend to be a lot more educated than Wal-Mart employees, and they have a union, which offers a modicum of protection. Most of that protection manifests in the form of an understanding of the system and access to legal counsel, which will help guarantee that if you are being fired, the firing party followed the required processes.
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# ? Sep 6, 2014 01:39 |
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Malmesbury Monster posted:The expectations placed on special ed. by NCLB are probably the worst part of the entire law and nobody's in any hurry to fix it because "we need to have high expectations for all students." Data collection and analysis are wonderful, but turning them into a bar for teacher evaluation makes the data a punishment rather than a tool. May God have mercy on all speech therapists and special ed. teachers. Speech therapists who work with all kinds of stuff from plain old stuttering to severe Downs Syndrome even have to closely follow common core based goals. Speech therapists are trained from day 1 to recognize a disorder, write goals that target the disorder's specific impact on speech and/or language, and collect data on the intervention techniques. But noooo, every goal must now be common core based. So you end up with these really hosed up situations where Sally Sue a 7th grader with severe Autism that can only communicate through basic vocalizations like screaming, crying, and 2-3 echolalic phrases has to now somehow meet this standard: L 7.6 Vocabulary Acquisition and Use Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate general academic and domain-specific words and phrases; gather vocabulary knowledge when considering a word or phrase important to comprehension or expression. It's like telling a doctor that he can't treat a child with the flu unless his prescriptions and recommendations meet a common core science standard.
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# ? Sep 6, 2014 02:17 |
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Avalanche posted:May God have mercy on all speech therapists and special ed. teachers. Am I missing something? Why would a child with autism so severe that they are unable to communicate ever be in 7th grade? Or even in a traditional school? Edit: And your analogy makes no sense.
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# ? Sep 6, 2014 03:27 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 09:14 |
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KillHour posted:Am I missing something? Why would a child with autism so severe that they are unable to communicate ever be in 7th grade? Or even in a traditional school? Because public education is compulsory, poor communication skills don't automatically imply the student can't learn, grades are mostly arbitrary as it is when it comes to special needs, and most districts don't have the population, the money, or the staff to run an alternative school. Even if they did, the metrics the students are being judged against are what was just posted. In an ideal world, the speech therapist, special ed. instructor, or someone with some knowledge of this theoretical autistic student's capabilities would have them on an IEP and the regulations would allow them to set useful goals, instead of expecting all students, regardless of background and ability, to meet arbitrary objectives.
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# ? Sep 6, 2014 03:57 |