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Although I didn't teach math, I taught English in a lovely charter high school and my master's thesis is, in part, about education reform efforts in social studies. I'm close to this subject. In my experience, the poster who mentioned education as a classic intersectional problem is dead on. I'd also like to add that talking about the problems of the American education system is pretty fruitless. Firstly, we don't have a system. We have a few thousand mini-systems. Most schools work more like private bureaucratic fiefdoms than a coherent part of a national system. Efforts like Common Core might help this problem, but so far, nationwide reforms, gloss over the unique problems faced by each individual school. A personal illustrative anecdote: within the miniature chain of under performing charter schools I worked at, with the same curriculum and mission across each school, the problems of each school were still different. One school mostly dealt with poor students and one school mostly with behavior cases. An impoverished student and a student with behavioral issues can have similar educational outcomes and even act the same in a school setting. However, the interventions and solutions end up being different. Making sure every child has breakfast can help with poor food insecure students but won't help a well fed student with PTSD. Since the schools were consistently poorly performing, my state's NCLB implementation required the school to work with outside consultants and the state education department to create a reform plan for the entire chain of charters. This plan didn't account for any of the subtle but important differences between the individual schools. Secondly, in addition to not having a system, we arguably don't have a problem. In the International Mathematics and Science Study of 2011, the US as a whole had above average scores in both math and science. Students in the state of Massachusetts out performed every other country on the planet on the 2012 PISA in reading and came in within the top 5 for math and science. (This isn't counting the various cities and city states the PISA includes in the tests but even including them Massachusetts comes in the top 10.) The US' overall score on the 2012 PISA was 492. The OECD average was 497. But that's sort of like coming in at 11th out of 20 in the Olympics. Comparisons to and within the OECD include only the worlds best and highest performers. On the NAEP scores have risen slowly but steadily since the test began in the 70s. The achievement gap on the NAEP has shrunk across all areas, in some cases quite considerably. While there is still a work to be done to eliminate the achievement gap it's smaller than it was. The trend lines for the NAEP are basically good ones. Pretty much the worst thing you can say about America's systems (and this is a gross generalization) is that if you disaggregate these scores what you find is that the US has a cluster of mostly white and well off students that receive one of the best educations in the world and a cluster of mostly poor and brown students that receive somewhere a mediocre or even bad education. When you combine good and bad you end up with average. There are much bigger questions about the usefulness of these tests and the purpose of education.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:03
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BetterToRuleInHell posted:Forgive me for my lack of fully understanding the structure of Common Core, but my question about it is related to No Child Left Behind, its biggest criticism as far as I remember was that it set up for children to learn enough to pass tests/benchmarks rather than expand and help children learn like what they needed. NCLB created a series of guidelines that states were to use to create quantitative benchmarks that the state's schools then had to meet. These included graduation and attendance rates, and math and English scores. The complaints tended to focus on the elevation of math and reading over other subjects, the reliance on standardized test scores to determine progress in these subjects, the loose standards (some states managed to show test score growth by lowering their standards yearly). The sanctions schools faced were also problematic, since they usually revolved around mass firings or budget cutting. There was also a worry about the erosion of traditional local control. Common Core would be an attempt to fix the loose standards. Some of the objection to CC is based around education system philosophy rather than education philosophy. Another piece of the objection is based around who is pushing common core and how common core is being implemented. wallawallawingwang fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Jul 26, 2014 |
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Jul 26, 2014 23:27
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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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