[Doomsday Education] A nation of temporarily embarrassed competitive HS football teams

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Okuteru: Nov 10, 2007; Choose this life you're on your own

If the pandemic taught us anything, it is a drinking bird could be a better admin than a lot of the ones we have in schools already

# ? Dec 4, 2023 07:24

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# ? Jun 8, 2024 14:06

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

500 bad dogs posted:

lol your serious arent you

that guys gimmick is being wrong about everything

# ? Dec 4, 2023 07:59

captainbananas: Sep 11, 2002; Ahoy, Captain!

Al! posted:

this is a common phrase encouraged in academia by tenured professors to keep the workers from unionizing. in one college i worked for, the adjuncts (the real teachers) were in the same union as the administrators and it was a good thing for all involved. if you're talking the heads of the college like the deans, yeah i agree

as far as i can tell that's a very special place if it allows adjuncts to be union members and/or benefit from CBAs. but i also just have to hard disagree: the administrative bloat in education, K-PhD, is a real problem. not necessarily the most urgent and definitely not so in every instance. but it's real fuckin bad.

and yeah, that money should be put to better use like funding real positions for adjuncts and then outlawing the use of the adjuncting model, etc. any tenured/tt faculty that oppose adjunct relief are the enemy. intuitively/from experience i'd guess that most of the opposed tenured faculty are nth-generation professorial legacy bourgeois trash

# ? Dec 4, 2023 11:42

blatman: May 10, 2009; 14 inc dont mez

Nonsense posted:

Public Schools = Military Schools, it's time.

service guarantees citizenship

# ? Dec 4, 2023 14:29

Chad Sexington: May 26, 2005; I think he made a beautiful post and did a great job and he is good.

FlapYoJacks posted:

I took electronics as an elective at my vo-tech senior year and it turned me into a degenerate professional computer toucher.

My high school had a variety of very hands-on computer classes. I met my best friend in a computer repair class where we got all up in the guts of some old desktops and it laid the foundation for us to build our own gaming PCs, so probably a net-negative. The same teacher though also taught like architecture and autoCAD, so it was kind of our bougie version of shop.

It was a mix of computer nerds and the traditional vo-tech cohort of non-college-track kids and while he definitely treated people differently based on their track and you basically got what you put into it, it was overall a safe space. I'm sure some kids picked up skills at drafting that wouldn't otherwise. As one of the nerds, it also had good knock-on effects of letting me make friends with kids that probably otherwise would have treated me like poo poo.

I imagine literal computer touching is as passe as shop now though.

# ? Dec 4, 2023 15:51

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

captainbananas posted:

as far as i can tell that's a very special place if it allows adjuncts to be union members and/or benefit from CBAs. but i also just have to hard disagree: the administrative bloat in education, K-PhD, is a real problem. not necessarily the most urgent and definitely not so in every instance. but it's real fuckin bad.

and yeah, that money should be put to better use like funding real positions for adjuncts and then outlawing the use of the adjuncting model, etc. any tenured/tt faculty that oppose adjunct relief are the enemy. intuitively/from experience i'd guess that most of the opposed tenured faculty are nth-generation professorial legacy bourgeois trash

nah even the admins get paid nothing and the bloat described usually looks like dire understaffing for underpaid workers. the real real problem is the foundations, which have just millions sitting in them for use as a slush fund by the college board. ever wonder why a college could be in a budget freeze yet somehow build multi-million dollar capital projects? well investing in people doesnt make money for the foundation (and therefore the board), but investing in real estate does

# ? Dec 4, 2023 17:52

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

its classic capitalist "the reason we cant pay you is because these other workers over there are making too much money" division feeding.

# ? Dec 4, 2023 17:53

KirbyKhan: Mar 20, 2009; Soiled Meat

Al! posted:

nah even the admins get paid nothing and the bloat described usually looks like dire understaffing for underpaid workers. the real real problem is the foundations, which have just millions sitting in them for use as a slush fund by the college board. ever wonder why a college could be in a budget freeze yet somehow build multi-million dollar capital projects? well investing in people doesnt make money for the foundation (and therefore the board), but investing in real estate does

# ? Dec 4, 2023 17:56

spacetoaster: Feb 10, 2014

Okuteru posted:

If the pandemic taught us anything, it is a drinking bird could be a better admin than a lot of the ones we have in schools already

My school has 3 administrators. They hate being at the school so much that they rotate, 2 off while 1 is at the school.

Al! posted:

nah even the admins get paid nothing

These admins are making quintuple what I make as a teacher with a master's.

I really wish I could sneak into our school system's HR department and look at personnel. I get the feeling that we have a lot more non-classroom staff than normal. There's a lot of PHDs in charge of a lot of things it seems.

spacetoaster has issued a correction as of 20:20 on Dec 4, 2023

# ? Dec 4, 2023 20:17

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

introduce microsoft-style stack and sack performance management for schools

every year, each grade level for the entire district ranks all children. get 5% that get an A, 20% that get a b, 40% that get a C, 20% that get a D, 10% that get a D- and have their eyeballs glued open clockwork orange style at summer school, and the worst 5% are sent to prison

# ? Dec 4, 2023 21:51

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

believe me if you win your crusade to pay the admins less the college will be happy to take those savings and reinvest them into the foundation

# ? Dec 4, 2023 22:44

Al!: Apr 2, 2010

i mean you might want to ask yourself why a tenured professor who doesnt need to teach or publish anymore is making more than the college president before you wonder where all that departmental salary budget goes but ultimately trying to balance the pay division between administrative laborers and academic laborers within a college system is the wrong question. the only thing that will solve it is a card check on both sides

# ? Dec 4, 2023 22:59

spacetoaster: Feb 10, 2014

I work in a public elementary school. I didn't realize we were talking about colleges.

# ? Dec 4, 2023 23:11

motherbox: Jul 19, 2013

Arglebargle III posted:

Nothing is going to work until schools start enforcing attendance and discipline again. A dual track system would help a lot as getting rid of the bottom 20% of the school would help reduce teacher and admin workloads enormously. But until you build up the institutions around enforcing attendance laws and removing violent or non-compliant kids from the room, teacher and admin workloads will remain insurmountable.

If you haven't been a teacher at a struggling public school, you don't know how much school effort and resources chronically absent, violent, and terminally lazy kids soak up. It's drowning the system. Truly violent kids are rare, less than one in fifty, and problem kids are maybe one in twenty, but they easily absorb half the staff's effort every day. And the minority of lazy and rude kids is growing as they see that there are no consequences to being rude and defiant.

Standards are in free fall. If you didn't teach over the pandemic you'd be shocked at who high schools are graduating. Kids well below the state legal attendance requirement are graduating, straight F kids who never learned anything after 6th grade are graduating, and the system is collapsing trying to cope with discipline problems and track down absentees

Gonna engage with this post in good faith because beyond idea of "getting rid of the bottom 20%," I think it actually hits on an interesting confluence of issues, even if the proposed solution has been thread-titled.

To give some context: let's start with the standard of the least restrictive environment, a legal standard that came into being with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. What that standard stipulates is that any student with individualized learning needs should be placed in the environment that meets their needs that is as close to a general education classroom as possible . This is an objectively good and necessary thing; without it, it's really easy to just "get rid of" any student who is inconvenient by shuffling them off into a separate classroom that does not provide them with an appropriate education and calling it a day. I'm not arguing against the standard of the least restrictive environment, and no good educator would. It's been the guiding philosophy of how we separate or don't separate kids since 1990 and was literally one of the first things I learned in my education program.

To accommodate this standard, a lot of pressure has been put on teachers to make learning as accessible as possible to all students. Again, objectively a good thing. Practices like universal design are bog-standard for teacher training and anyone who's been in the game for less than 20 years is more or less accustomed to teaching in a way that meets a lot of different learning styles. This makes the curriculum more accessible to more students, which benefits everyone, but particularly benefits the students who need those accommodations things to thrive. The basic notion is that it is incumbent on the teacher to make learning accessible to all students. A fine ideal, and one that I don't disagree with.

But what happens when that ideal gets combined with the political and economic realities that surround it? To list off a few things that seem relevant:
-No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top establish non-negotiable English, math, and science standards: the number of credits students need to take in these areas is made uniform, and the assessment of those standards is linked to standardized tests
-COVID-19 fucks everything up in every loving conceivable way. Learning loss, physical and mental health, social regulation, technology addiction, gently caress.
-Budgets do not keep up with costs, creating an incentive for administrators to cut expensive programs and find cheaper solutions (that often aren't as good)
-Social welfare and support systems outside of school are cut, putting more and more pressure on schools to cover the gap
-Consistent demonization of teachers as lazy, uncaring, untrained, etc.

What essentially results is the notion that a student cannot fail, only be failed. Which is fine, if not for the fact that we have actual standards of failure and a strong incentive to push kids along rather than actually stop and look at what's holding them back. If a student is not thriving in what has been determined to be their least restrictive environment (by administrators who have incentive to keep the student in a cheaper general ed classroom; why pay for an expensive out of school placement when you can throw a TA in English 101 and call it a day?), it must be the teacher's fault. A standard section of 10th grade English in my school this year has roughly 25 students. About a third of them have intense individual accommodations that a teacher is expected to enact without support. Two or three others just immigrated to the country and don't speak English at all. All of those students are taking the standardized test 15 weeks from now. And once or twice a week, a student from outside of the class will bang on the window threatening students in the class and will not leave. Repeated restorative justice practices between that student and the student being threatened have yielded no results, but because of a recent state law, the student making the threats cannot be suspended: she has a documented disability that relates to the outbursts, and therefore she cannot be disciplined for it without following an onerous process that the administrator is not willing to follow. The remaining 20 or are multiple grades behind on reading. Their performance reflects on you as a teacher. And you can't go answer their questions because the one kid at the window is still causing a scene.

Any time you hear a teacher say anything like the original post, the situation I've described above is what's causing it. You can call it burnout, lovely teaching, whatever, but it is a reality than many teachers are facing. Budgeting, idealism, and standardization have decided that the general education classroom needs to work for every student, and now every classroom has every student; but class sizes, support systems, and resources have not evolved in a way that allows teachers to individualize instruction for so many different types of learners in a single environment. It's an impossible tasks and you're constantly told if you're not doing it you're neglecting your professional and ethical responsibilities.

Things that might actually improve these areas without totally writing off kids include:
-Figuring out how to offer more variety of structure and specialization within the public schools: charters rightfully get a lot of flack, but there is some evidence that their ability to meaningfully reimagine the fundamental structure of school can be beneficial. Vocational schools are highly successful. We need to expand on that model and provide more options and approaches for students.
-Destigmatizing holding kids back: there's a ton of administrative, social, and parental pressure to avoid failing grades. Rethinking how grades work and actually admitting it's okay for students to move at different paces rather than insisting both the pace and the environment must be exactly the same for everyone would take a lot of the system-wide pressure off.
-Give teachers class sizes and solo/collaborative prep time that allows them to individualize within a general education setting.

If I got syq-ed into half-justifying some lovely reddit post and am gonna be the next thread title so be it. I do think a lot of teachers, though, whether we'd want to admit it or not, share in the frustrations it expresses.

motherbox has issued a correction as of 00:29 on Dec 5, 2023

# ? Dec 4, 2023 23:57

Greg Legg: Oct 6, 2004

spacetoaster posted:

My school has 3 administrators. They hate being at the school so much that they rotate, 2 off while 1 is at the school.

These admins are making quintuple what I make as a teacher with a master's.

I really wish I could sneak into our school system's HR department and look at personnel. I get the feeling that we have a lot more non-classroom staff than normal. There's a lot of PHDs in charge of a lot of things it seems.

It really was a shock when I found out how much the administrators make in one of the districts I work in. The board office has new furniture, carpet, and air conditioning and the school across the street has a bare concrete floor. Not good!

# ? Dec 4, 2023 23:58

spacetoaster: Feb 10, 2014

motherbox posted:

Gonna engage with this post in good faith because beyond idea of "getting rid of the bottom 20%," I think it actually hits on an interesting confluence of issues, even if the proposed solution has been thread-titled.

To give some context: let's start with the standard of the least restrictive environment, a legal standard that came into being with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. What that standard stipulates is that any student with individualized learning needs should be placed in the environment that meets their needs that is as close to a general education classroom as possible . This is an objectively good and necessary thing; without it, it's really easy to just "get rid of" any student who is inconvenient by shuffling them off into a separate classroom that does not provide them with an appropriate education and calling it a day. I'm not arguing against the standard of the least restrictive environment, and no good educator would. It's been the guiding philosophy of how we separate or don't separate kids since 1990 and was literally one of the first things I learned in my education program.

To accommodate this standard, a lot of pressure has been put on teachers to make learning as accessible as possible to all students. Again, objectively a good thing. Practices like universal design are bog-standard for teacher training and anyone who's been in the game for less than 20 years is more or less accustomed to teaching in a way that meets a lot of different learning styles. This makes the curriculum more accessible to more students, which benefits everyone, but particularly benefits the students who need those accommodations things to thrive. The basic notion is that it is incumbent on the teacher to make learning accessible to all students. A fine ideal, and one that I don't disagree with.

But what happens when that ideal gets combined with the political and economic realities that surround it? To list off a few things that seem relevant:
-No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top establish non-negotiable English, math, and science standards: the number of credits students need to take in these areas is made uniform, and the assessment of those standards is linked to standardized tests
-COVID-19 fucks everything up in every loving conceivable way. Learning loss, physical and mental health, social regulation, technology addiction, gently caress.
-Budgets do not keep up with costs, creating an incentive for administrators to cut expensive programs and find cheaper solutions (that often aren't as good)
-Social welfare and support systems outside of school are cut, putting more and more pressure on schools to cover the gap
-Consistent demonization of teachers as lazy, uncaring, untrained, etc.

What essentially results is the notion that a student cannot fail, only be failed. Which is fine, if not for the fact that we have actual standards of failure and a strong incentive to push kids along rather than actually stop and look at what's holding them back. If a student is not thriving in what has been determined to be their least restrictive environment (by administrators who have incentive to keep the student in a cheaper general ed classroom; why pay for an expensive out of school placement when you can throw a TA in English 101 and call it a day?), it must be the teacher's fault. A standard section of 10th grade English in my school this year has roughly 25 students. About a third of them have intense individual accommodations that a teacher is expected to enact without support. Two or three others just immigrated to the country and don't speak English at all. All of those students are taking the standardized test 15 weeks from now. And once or twice a week, a student from outside of the class will bang on the window threatening students in the class and will not leave. Repeated restorative justice practices between that student and the student being threatened have yielded no results, but because of a recent state law, the student making the threats cannot be suspended: she has a documented disability that relates to the outbursts, and therefore she cannot be disciplined for it without following an onerous process that the administrator is not willing to follow. The remaining 20 or are multiple grades behind on reading. Their performance reflects on you as a teacher. And you can't go answer their questions because the one kid at the window is still causing a scene.

Any time you hear a teacher say anything like the original post, the situation I've described above is what's causing it. You can call it burnout, lovely teaching, whatever, but it is a reality than many teachers are facing. Budgeting, idealism, and standardization have decided that the general education classroom needs to work for every student, and now every classroom has every student; but class sizes, support systems, and resources have not evolved in a way that allows teachers to individualize instruction for so many different types of learners in a single environment. It's an impossible tasks and you're constantly told if you're not doing it you're your professional and ethical responsibilities.

Things that might actually improve these areas without totally writing off kids include:
-Figuring out how to offer more variety of structure and specialization within the public schools: charters rightfully get a lot of flack, but there is some evidence that their ability to meaningfully reimagine the fundamental structure of school can be beneficial. Vocational schools are highly successful. We need to expand on that model and provide more options and approaches for students.
-Destigmatizing holding kids back: there's a ton of administrative, social, and parental pressure to avoid failing grades. Rethinking how grades work and actually admitting it's okay for students to move at different paces rather than insisting both the pace and the environment must be exactly the same for everyone would take a lot of the system-wide pressure off.
-Give teachers class sizes and solo/collaborative prep time that allows them to individualize within a general education setting.

If I got syq-ed into half-justifying some lovely reddit post and am gonna be the next thread title so be it. I do think a lot of teachers, though, whether we'd want to admit it or not, share in the frustrations it expresses.

I think a lot of it is staffing too. My school is at 50% of its certified teaching staff. We just hope subs will show up (they mostly don't), and when they don't I double my class size with random students from other classes.

This isn't even getting into the fact that there are many classes that just have a sub every day. Every. Day. Not even the same sub. Whatever sub shows up and will sit in a room with them.

Our system doubled the substitute pay, but it still won't get people to come into this environment and stay. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/substitute-teacher-shortage-living-wage/

spacetoaster has issued a correction as of 00:26 on Dec 5, 2023

# ? Dec 5, 2023 00:23

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

Al! posted:

i mean you might want to ask yourself why a tenured professor who doesnt need to teach or publish anymore is making more than the college president before you wonder where all that departmental salary budget goes but ultimately trying to balance the pay division between administrative laborers and academic laborers within a college system is the wrong question. the only thing that will solve it is a card check on both sides

we're talking about principals and superintendents

# ? Dec 5, 2023 01:49

Fortaleza: Feb 21, 2008

Al! posted:

nah even the admins get paid nothing and the bloat described usually looks like dire understaffing for underpaid workers. the real real problem is the foundations, which have just millions sitting in them for use as a slush fund by the college board. ever wonder why a college could be in a budget freeze yet somehow build multi-million dollar capital projects? well investing in people doesnt make money for the foundation (and therefore the board), but investing in real estate does

Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard Bloom was a regent of the University of California and has a direct quote about investing in teaching instead of research facilities not having good ROI and thus not worth it. Can't find it anywhere since he was also literally an investment banker so he used those words a lot. Lol.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 05:31

Fortaleza: Feb 21, 2008

I *did* however manage to find an NYRB article I'd been searching for that I thought this thread would appreciate. It's about a method of teaching kids to read that gained popularity in the 90s but apparently doesn't work well but it still sticks around because education funding isn't about what works

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/02/09/misreading-the-cues-sold-a-story-emily-hanford/

Not sure if it's behind paywall so here ya go:

quote:

One night, while searching in the woods for food, Frankenstein�s monster discovers a leather suitcase containing three books: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch�s Lives, and Paradise Lost. Goethe is a source of �astonishment� but also alienation; the monster can sympathize with the characters, but only to a point�their lives are so unlike his own. From Plutarch he learns about public virtue. It is Milton who expands his soul. Paradise Lost �moved every feeling of wonder and awe,� the monster says. As a created being, he identifies with Adam, but Satan is �the fitter emblem of my condition, for�when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.�

It may move us to wonder and awe that the monster is able to read Milton at all, let alone form a complex analysis. But fate took a hand in his education when, alone and wandering in the woods, he happened upon a cottage where two children were teaching French to a visitor. Listening and looking through the window, the monster became a pupil, too. �While I improved in speech,� he explains, �I also learned the science of letters.� He learned, in other words, how to read.

It�s possible that absent those lessons and with knowledge of the alphabet alone, the monster might have puzzled over Paradise Lost long enough to figure it out for himself. As Bruce McCandliss, a cognitive neuroscientist interviewed on the recent podcast Sold a Story, puts it, some people are just naturally good at �hearing all of the individual sounds within words.� In time, with enough exposure to text, �they start to make all of these connections��decoding and pronouncing and mastering, by intuition and practice, the contradictory and exception-ridden rules of written English (the language Sold a Story concerns). As Milton might put it, with wandering steps and slow, they make their solitary way. In common parlance, they figure it out. But the phrase �science of letters� suggests that Frankenstein�s monster was more like a member of the greater majority, the 60 percent who, as Emily Hanford, an education reporter and the host of Sold a Story, explains, require �direct and explicit instruction� in phonics to learn to read.

Phonics, in the words of the reading researcher Reid Lyon, is �nothing more than a relationship between sound structure and a print structure.� It�s breaking down the word �cat� into a spoken hard k sound, followed by the short vowel a, and finally putting the tip of your tongue on the front roof of your mouth and letting go to make that little burst of t. Phonics teaches you how to handle consonants, long and short vowels, digraphs (sh, ch), diphthongs (ow, ou), and so on�and to smoothly blend phonetic units, repeating them like the characters on Sesame Street who push letters from one side of the screen to the other until a word is born and sense breaks through sound.

In Reading in the Brain (2009)�which Hanford recommends on the Sold a Story website, writing, �I�ve never filled a book with so many sticky notes��the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene identifies three stages of learning to read: the pictorial, where children memorize a few words as if they were pictures (these are likely to be the child�s own name or a familiar brand logo); the phonological, where they �decode graphemes into phonemes�; and the orthographic, where �word recognition becomes fast and automatic.�

Ultimately there are two distinct neural pathways that are used in reading. The �phonological route� is used for words that are �very regular, rare, or novel.� In the beginning, of course, all words are novel. But even when we become fluent at reading and are not aware of using the phonological network, it still operates at the �nonconscious level.� The other network, the �lexical route��in which the brain sees letters and �takes a direct route that first recovers the identity and meaning of the word and then uses the lexical information to recover its pronunciation��is used for words that we encounter all the time or whose spellings are irregular. Without this network, we would not be able to distinguish between words like �maid� and �made,� or �board� and �bored��a whole world of puns and double meanings would be lost.

If you are not born with the gift for phonological understanding or taught it, you can try to memorize words or rely on the lexical route. But you�ll stall out. Memorization is laborious and doesn�t take advantage of the efficiencies in how the brain maps written words for automatic retrieval. Kids who need phonics instruction and don�t get it may pore over a page of Paradise Lost till Christ returns�or Frog and Toad, or Go, Dog. Go!�and never become fluent readers. They might stumble or fake it through �easy readers,� but as texts grow more sophisticated, they will grow more frustrated and confused, spending all their energy trying to figure out what a given word is rather than what it means, skipping and skimming to get by. They are likely to feel stupid, ashamed, or angry, and to avoid books altogether. They may be diagnosed with a reading disability, when the only problem they have is that their education has failed them.

The good news is that everyone, even monsters, can learn to read. The bad news, as Hanford makes clear in the six devastating episodes of Sold a Story, is that for the past thirty years, despite research that clearly established phonics as the best, the only, way to teach reading, many American schools clung to the pseudo-methods and fantasies of an educational approach known as �balanced literacy��or as Jessica Winter recently put it in The New Yorker, �literacy by vibes.�

The consequences have been grim. According to a 2022 Department of Education assessment, 67 percent of American fourth graders are not proficient readers. �The problem is even worse when you look beyond the average and focus on specific groups of children,� Hanford says. �The most alarming statistic: 82 percent of Black fourth graders are not proficient readers.� Some of these children will never get the help they need. ProPublica recently reported that one fifth of adults in the United States struggle with reading�a �silent literacy crisis.�

Debates over the best way to teach reading, and anxiety that American schools are failing to graduate good readers, go back more than a hundred years. Hanford�s story begins more recently, in 1960s New Zealand, where Marie Clay, a doctoral candidate in education, was studying how children learn to read. At that time, New Zealand schools were using something called the �book experience� method, which was derived from the �whole word� method.

In America, the whole-word method was taught through Dick and Jane books; New Zealand had a similar series, called Janet and John. The book-experience method replaced Janet and John with so-called little books that used more difficult vocabulary. The idea, as Hanford puts it, was that �learning to read is easier for kids�and more interesting�if they start with whole stories, whole sentences�not individual words.�

Calling this a �method� seems a bit grand. It was more like hopes and prayers, and it worked about as well. Clay, who wanted to help struggling readers, observed one hundred first graders and came to the conclusion that the good readers were not using phonics to decode words but were acting as �detectives,� looking for clues and cues in context. She decided to teach poor readers to do the same. The problem was that Clay was dead wrong about what the good readers were doing. They were so skilled at phonics that they didn�t appear to be sounding words out�but they were. The program Clay developed didn�t teach poor readers the secret techniques used by good readers�it standardized and institutionalized the things that poor readers do to cover up and compensate for the fact that they can�t sound words out.

In the 1990s two Americans, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, launched a curricular empire of Guided Reading books, with different levels of difficulty and chock-full of pictures, along with separate assessments based on Clay�s research. Their approach has come to be known as �cueing� or �three-cueing.� The idea is that children should use context to guess at an unfamiliar word�s identity, and then ask themselves the following questions: Does my guess make sense? Does it sound right? And, finally, does it look right?

When Lucy Calkins, who had previously specialized in teaching writing, wanted to write a book about teaching reading, she turned to Pinnell for guidance. Calkins�s �balanced literacy approach,� which involves setting up classroom libraries of leveled books and using cueing to read them, became very popular. (It was mandated in most New York City elementary schools.) Among teachers, Calkins had celebrity status�a Palo Alto school board member is quoted as saying that �if Beyonc� came and gave a private concert in my district, it would not have been a bigger deal��and they applied in droves to attend her weeklong training sessions at the Columbia Teachers College.

Hanford estimates that the Calkins curriculum is used by one in four elementary schools in the United States, but cueing as a strategy is far more pervasive�as Education Week reported in 2020, according to a 2019 national survey, �75 percent of K�2 and elementary special education teachers use the method to teach students how to read, and 65 percent of college of education professors teach it.� But the situation has rather abruptly changed: in the past year, in light of increased media coverage of American children�s abysmal reading scores and a drumbeat of attention on the plentiful research on �the science of reading,� districts across the nation, including New York City, have abandoned or pledged to abandon cueing and return to phonics-based instruction.

Attention to the issue also increased during the Covid pandemic, when parents, who usually know little of what happens inside their children�s classrooms, were able to see for themselves how reading was being taught. Hanford begins her first episode with the story of Corinne, a mother who watched her son�s kindergarten teacher read a book to the class over Zoom in the spring of 2020. In the book, two kids run away from their dad because they don�t like the sandwiches he made. The teacher held up the book to the screen. The next sentence began: �Now they think their mom and dad will�� The end of the sentence was covered with a sticky note, and the teacher asked the children to guess what it might be. She told them they could think back to what had already happened in the story, or look at the pictures sprinkled through the text. �This seemed weird to Corinne,� Hanford says, offering a naive cliffhanger typical of public radio. �Why have kids guess the word? Why not have them look at the word and try to actually read it?�

Fountas and Pinnell�s guided reading program is troubling for many reasons. Their assessments have been demonstrated to be worthless. Students test all over the place, because their understanding depends not on their ability to decode words but rather on how much they already know about the subject of a given book. Most shockingly, Hanford reports that the interventions they offer for struggling readers lead to worse outcomes than no intervention at all.

As for cueing itself, it is almost sublime in its absurdity. Here is Fountas defending it in 2021:

If a reader says �pony� for �horse,� because of information from the pictures, that tells the teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the pictures. His response is partially correct, but the teacher needs to guide him to stop and work for accuracy.

It is good that a child can look at a picture and categorize an animal as belonging to the genus Equus, that he knows the large creature with a long mane is not a sheep or a goat. But it is hardly a radical position to note that looking at the letters h-o-r-s-e and saying the word �pony� is not partially accurate. It is wrong. �Pony� and �horse� are different words, much as �mother� and �child� are different words, as are �trumpet� and �trombone,� �bagel� and �baguette,� �same� and �different,� �correct� and �incorrect.� Ultimately, the examples become less comical. Hanford: �A middle school teacher gave me the example of a kid who thought that in 1939 Poland invited the Germans into their country. That�s a lot different from what really happened. The Germans invaded Poland.�

Sold a Story is a distressing and enraging piece of reporting. It unfolds like a true-crime narrative, but its fascination has much to do with the power of cult thinking. Early on, Hanford says that after she began publishing stories on �the science of reading,� she heard from many teachers who had never been offered an alternative to balanced literacy and �had no idea they weren�t teaching kids how to read.� But what did they think was going on? How did so many people convince themselves that �pony� and �horse� are the same word, or, at least, close enough? How did they convince themselves that the role of the teacher was to help the student slam her head against the wall rather than showing her how to open the door?

For a long time progressive pedagogy, which is opposed to anything �rote,� had smeared phonics as fusty, top-down, and old-fashioned. Partisan politics was also a factor in the reading wars. George W. Bush was a phonics booster�he was reading The Pet Goat at a school to bring attention to his $5 billion Reading First initiative when the planes flew into the World Trade Center�and many teachers could not stomach being on his side of any issue. (Phonics had been a plank in the 2000 Republican Party platform.) At one point, Marie Clay herself had a meeting with a congressional staffer who told her that her Reading Recovery program would not qualify for funding under the initiative. According to the staffer, �Dame Clay looked at me with steely eyes and said: �We will not change a thing in our program. But we will modify our description of Reading Recovery to comply with the law.��

Fountas and Pinnell warned teachers to be wary of the data on phonics and encouraged them to lobby legislators. (Pinnell likened Clay to Isaac Newton, saying that cueing, like gravity, was an idea ahead of its time.) The death knell of Bush�s program came in 2005, when the Reading Recovery Council of North America�an advocacy group dedicated to Clay�s pedagogy�accused the Department of Education of a �misinformation campaign,� claiming that its programs were being maligned and unfairly excluded from grants. As Hanford explains, an investigation by the inspector general found that the grant review process was biased in favor of phonics instruction and that �some consultants who reviewed Reading First grant proposals had professional ties to commercial reading programs.� The idea that some instruction is worth funding and some is not had no traction, and eventually Congress cut all funding for Reading First.

�Fountas says that asking a child to just sound out a word is simplistic and analogous to telling the child not to think,� says Hanford. But of course the opposite is true: without being able to sound out the words, thinking in any meaningful sense is not possible at all. That�s assuming you want children to think about the text in front of them. As Sold a Story amply demonstrates, for Fountas, Pinnell, and Calkins, reading was an opportunity for self-expression rather than a practice of comprehending text. And it involved a degree of performance. One Calkins lesson told kindergarten teachers to show their students photographs of �avid readers� and then ask them to go into different parts of the room to �practice avid reading.� The children would scatter with their books. The teacher would then check in with each child and call the class to attention to say this: �Everywhere I look, you are reading avidly. I don�t need those photographs of strangers to see avid reading. No way! It�s right here in front of me!�

Much of the power of Sold a Story is in such moments that dramatize scenes of instruction. This one in particular has haunted me. It�s wonderful when a toddler pretends to read or memorizes a book and �reads� it out loud, but it is quite a different thing for a teacher to tell a four- or five-year-old that she is reading when the child knows that she is not. (Most kindergartners do not yet know how to read.) What does that do to a child? Does it make them feel empowered and proud? Does it confuse them as to the meaning of �avidly�? Or does it make them feel anxious and fraudulent, like they can�t trust the adults around them to tell them what�s real and what isn�t?

It wasn�t just money that was behind cueing and balanced literacy, though districts threw plenty of it around. (Pinnell, Fountas, and Calkins all became very wealthy. Pinnell bought a Maserati. Fountas owns or co-owns at least eight properties. The value of Calkins�s LLC, as of last year, was $23 million.) The thing driving it all was a fantasy. That fantasy, or maybe we should call it a delusion, was, Hanford says, that kids could skip ahead to the �good part� of reading�the part where they would �curl up in a cozy nook� and contemplate big questions of story and meaning. In other words, the balanced-literacy advocates liked the part in Frankenstein where the monster is awed and expanded by Paradise Lost. They were less interested in the science of letters that allows him to decipher the marks on the page. But learning how to read, as Hanford says, is the good part. She talks to a little girl whose father sought outside phonics instruction after he observed what her school was doing with cueing. �It was like the best thing ever,� the girl whispers, in awe at the world that is opening to her.

Sold a Story got its hooks into me and did not let go. The thing that has most preoccupied me in the days since I listened to it is the bizarre and pernicious ideology at the heart of cueing�the idea that a good way to know what a sentence says is to assume it echoes your preconceived ideas about the world. Thinking back to the book about the kids running away from the bad sandwich, the next word could have been, as Hanford suggests, �scold�; it could have been �find.� It turns out to be �miss�: the kids think their mom and dad will miss them. But it could have been anything. The only way to know for sure is to read it.

Certainly we all do an amount of cueing when we encounter new ideas. We test what we learn against what we already know and expect of the world. Could it be that this election was stolen? one might think, in the eleventh hour of scrolling. Is it plausible, based on everything else I know to be true, that a ring of pedophiles is operating beneath this pizza restaurant? But leaving aside the fact that we can make interpretations and judgments only if we are reading the words correctly�it�s a pizza restaurant, not a pizza rest stop�the glory of reading, the reason for reading at all, is to encounter the new. To be surprised by where a sentence lands, to trip over an unexpected adjective, to be thrown out of the dullness of habit into a new and unfamiliar place. That�s the whole point�that of all the possible words that could come next, this one does. That of all the possible worlds, the writer�someone who is not you, who has thoughts and ways of expressing those thoughts that you could never have�imagined this one.

For thirty years, very young children have gone to school and been told that reading is an exercise in seeking confirmation of what they already know�these children who are at the beginning of knowing anything at all. It�s as if we�ve been training them to be algorithms, honing their ability to make predictions rather than their capacity to enter the minds of others. Listening to Sold a Story, one can only conclude that a kind of crime has been committed, a vast impoverishment. It leaves me less surprised that our world is rife with misinformation.

There is one more text in the suitcase that Frankenstein�s monster discovers. He finds pages from the journal of Victor Frankenstein, his creator:

Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read.

To read is not always to enter a cozy little nook. Sometimes we read to enter the horrors of history and of our own lives. The monster might have been happier if he had never read a single word. But then he would not know where he came from, or where he was going.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 05:37

Crazyweasel: Oct 29, 2006; lazy

I�m a middle of the pack Millenial and I don�t remember many kids needing a helper/aide when I was going, but hear about it all the time now (mostly in the context of aides are needed but there aren�t any).

When I was younger, were these kids just shuttled off to a back room, and that is no longer legal, or are there straight up more kids with learning disabilities these days?

I also always hear about kids acting out and no consequences. What changed with consequences/discipline since past generations?

Thanks I�ll take my answers off air

# ? Dec 5, 2023 06:13

Fortaleza: Feb 21, 2008

I'm curious how they teach kids to read in China since it's not obvious that phonics would be beneficial at all for logographic writing. Do they just learn pinyin and then hanzi when they're older or is there some other system that works for them?

# ? Dec 5, 2023 06:28

Paradoxish: Dec 19, 2003; Will you stop going crazy in there?

spacetoaster posted:

These admins are making quintuple what I make as a teacher with a master's.

When I worked in education I was district IT (technically part of the admin union) without a college degree and I made more with a high school diploma than any teacher's starting pay in our highly competitive district. My office was in an adult ed school because that's where there was space for the district's IT department, and the director for that school made around ~$150k and retired with a six-figure pension. The program coordinator (technically below the director's position) for ESL made substantially more money. Adult ed was also widely considered the dregs where your career went to die.

Anyway, ESL teachers in that school were all part-time and made like $20/hour and could just be straight up sent home for the day with no pay if not enough students showed up to their class.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 09:46

Kreeblah: May 17, 2004; INSERT QUACK TO CONTINUE; Taco Defender

The Oldest Man posted:

introduce microsoft-style stack and sack performance management for schools

every year, each grade level for the entire district ranks all children. get 5% that get an A, 20% that get a b, 40% that get a C, 20% that get a D, 10% that get a D- and have their eyeballs glued open clockwork orange style at summer school, and the worst 5% are sent to prison

School's supposed to be about preparing kids for the workforce and not for actually educating them, right? Might as well get 'em used to bullshit arbitrary performance assessments early.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 09:50

Okuteru: Nov 10, 2007; Choose this life you're on your own

Fortaleza posted:

I'm curious how they teach kids to read in China since it's not obvious that phonics would be beneficial at all for logographic writing. Do they just learn pinyin and then hanzi when they're older or is there some other system that works for them?

Rote memorization of phonics.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 11:54

lobster shirt: Jun 14, 2021

Fortaleza posted:

I *did* however manage to find an NYRB article I'd been searching for that I thought this thread would appreciate. It's about a method of teaching kids to read that gained popularity in the 90s but apparently doesn't work well but it still sticks around because education funding isn't about what works

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/02/09/misreading-the-cues-sold-a-story-emily-hanford/

Not sure if it's behind paywall so here ya go:

i've talked to other parents about this a funny thing about when cueing comes up is that people sometimes misunderstand it - like, the three cueing strategies are what a lot of people, myself included, use when trying to figure out the meaning of a word. but! this is a misunderstanding, because we aren't talking about strategies for decoding meaning, but a strategy for reading the word itself.

like if you came across the word jentacular (a word i just googled) using context to infer its meaning is great. but using context to try to figure out the word is, instead of just reading/deciphering the letters, is going to be impossible.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 14:53

spacetoaster: Feb 10, 2014

Crazyweasel posted:

I also always hear about kids acting out and no consequences. What changed with consequences/discipline since past generations?

Thanks I�ll take my answers off air

At my school the admins want it to all be handled by the teacher. Usually they will say to me: "Well Spacetoaster, make sure they have a consequence and be consistent."

Which is difficult when the behavior is sexual assault, sending kids to the ER with concussions and gashed open heads, full on multi person brawls, guns brought to school, etc, etc.

I don't actually know why a specific admin may be against doing anything, but I have an idea.

1. Any action by an admin to punish a child is tracked (that's bad metrics for the admin on an evaluation)
2. Any action by an admin to punish a child is publicized (the bosses downtown may get mad and yell at you)
3. It's hard dealing with angry parents, especially if you're a pushover when it comes to people you don't control

There's probably more, but I get the sense that the admins at my school just want to look good in front of their bosses/peers, are scared to make hard decisions, and don't like confrontation.

We had a dad physically threaten one of our 1st grade teachers and the admin had the teacher leave the area rather than tell the dad to get off school property. Anything to avoid a "problem".

spacetoaster has issued a correction as of 14:55 on Dec 5, 2023

# ? Dec 5, 2023 14:53

Venomous: Nov 7, 2011

speaking as someone in Scotland who experienced phonics in primary school, it always seemed incredibly boring and pointless to me, but only because I was a hyperlexic idiot and I could read on my own when I was three years old. I didn't realise until a few years ago that the vast majority of my peers didn't know how to read, and practicing lessons in what was then called 'Sounds' (maybe it still is in Scottish schools? idk) was how they learned to read. I would've loved 'literacy by vibes', but I probably would've been the only one, and in hindsight I'm glad that it didn't happen like that.

Anyway, from what I've been seeing itt and on Twitter and that, education in the US sounds like a complete loving shitshow. I seriously empathise. Obviously the end goal is to push living standards for the working class back to the Victorian era, making the populace uneducated, illiterate, and completely subsumed by capital, and clearly the pandemic up to now has just accelerated that push by loving over teachers in particular. I don't know why anyone would want to go into education now.

e: oh yeah, just remembered, we specifically also had a phonics thing called Letterland in my first couple of years of primary school. Again, it didn't do much good for me, but I'm pretty sure it helped a lot of my peers in particular.

Venomous has issued a correction as of 15:53 on Dec 5, 2023

# ? Dec 5, 2023 15:44

Okuteru: Nov 10, 2007; Choose this life you're on your own

spacetoaster posted:

At my school the admins want it to all be handled by the teacher. Usually they will say to me: "Well Spacetoaster, make sure they have a consequence and be consistent."

Which is difficult when the behavior is sexual assault, sending kids to the ER with concussions and gashed open heads, full on multi person brawls, guns brought to school, etc, etc.

I don't actually know why a specific admin may be against doing anything, but I have an idea.

1. Any action by an admin to punish a child is tracked (that's bad metrics for the admin on an evaluation)
2. Any action by an admin to punish a child is publicized (the bosses downtown may get mad and yell at you)
3. It's hard dealing with angry parents, especially if you're a pushover when it comes to people you don't control

There's probably more, but I get the sense that the admins at my school just want to look good in front of their bosses/peers, are scared to make hard decisions, and don't like confrontation.

We had a dad physically threaten one of our 1st grade teachers and the admin had the teacher leave the area rather than tell the dad to get off school property. Anything to avoid a "problem".

That just sounds like your average admin, really.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 15:51

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

Fortaleza posted:

I'm curious how they teach kids to read in China since it's not obvious that phonics would be beneficial at all for logographic writing. Do they just learn pinyin and then hanzi when they're older or is there some other system that works for them?

they teach them pinyin and how to write the characters from pretty early on. rote memorization of how to read out the characters and practice writing by hand with books like these

and then you can start moving onto actual picture books with pinyin alongside the characters

and then picture books without pinyin (sometimes they will include the pinyin for new characters or ones otherwise a bit beyond the level of the book)

and then by the time you're 8 years old they apparently have you on this book (i found this in the bedroom of an 8 year old daughter of some relatives, shes learning it at school this year???)

# ? Dec 5, 2023 16:39

fosborb: Dec 15, 2006; Chronic Good Poster

lobster shirt posted:

the word jentacular (a word i just googled)

this is violence when I haven't even had breakfast yet

# ? Dec 5, 2023 16:40

spacetoaster: Feb 10, 2014

Okuteru posted:

That just sounds like your average admin, really.

Yeah.

# ? Dec 5, 2023 16:48

Shear Modulus: Jun 9, 2010

fart simpson posted:

and then by the time you're 8 years old they apparently have you on this book (i found this in the bedroom of an 8 year old daughter of some relatives, shes learning it at school this year???)

lol

# ? Dec 5, 2023 17:45

woke operator: Nov 17, 2023; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

jelqtacular

# ? Dec 5, 2023 17:49

TehSaurus: Jun 12, 2006

ok but what�s with the mealworms

# ? Dec 7, 2023 13:38

Chad Sexington: May 26, 2005; I think he made a beautiful post and did a great job and he is good.

Kreeblah posted:

School's supposed to be about preparing kids for the workforce and not for actually educating them, right? Might as well get 'em used to bullshit arbitrary performance assessments early.

If they truly want to prepare kids for the workforce they would give them all Cs. And then when the kids challenge them on it say, "Sorry, we're not allowed to give anyone higher than a C this year."

And then give As to the narcs.

# ? Dec 7, 2023 15:31

spacetoaster: Feb 10, 2014

Chad Sexington posted:

If they truly want to prepare kids for the workforce they would give them all Cs. And then when the kids challenge them on it say, "Sorry, we're not allowed to give anyone higher than a C this year."

And then give As to the narcs.

We aren't allowed to give any kids a grade less than 50. Even if they turn in nothing.

And the admins will absolutely go change grades if you fail them.

How is violence in ya'll's schools? We had a boy break the math teacher's arm recently.

# ? Dec 7, 2023 15:40

Milo and POTUS: Sep 3, 2017; I will not shut up about the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I talk about them all the time and work them into every conversation I have. I built a shrine in my room for the yellow one who died because sadly no one noticed because she died around 9/11. Wanna see it?

A bright future in the octagon

# ? Dec 7, 2023 16:41

Koishi Komeiji: Mar 30, 2003

spacetoaster posted:

We aren't allowed to give any kids a grade less than 50. Even if they turn in nothing.

And the admins will absolutely go change grades if you fail them.

Standardized test grading is the same way. If the school isn't getting the passing percentage number they want they complain to the company that grades the tests and they change how the essay part is scored until number go up.

# ? Dec 7, 2023 17:28

Okuteru: Nov 10, 2007; Choose this life you're on your own

Kreeblah posted:

School's supposed to be about preparing kids for the workforce and not for actually educating them, right? Might as well get 'em used to bullshit arbitrary performance assessments early.

John Taylor Gatto, a teacher turned Education critic, came up this exact conclusion.

Then it turned out he is just a libertarian.

# ? Dec 8, 2023 01:27

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# ? Jun 8, 2024 14:06

Second Hand Meat Mouth: Sep 12, 2001

were the kids okay

# ? Dec 8, 2023 01:39

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Doomsday Education] A nation of temporarily embarrassed competitive HS football teams

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