We also need to hold back students who are not ready to graduate. I know it can be tough on those students, but auto-graduating everyone isn’t preparing them for academic development. If they can’t grasp 3rd grade math and reading, they’re going to struggle in 4th grade, and so on. They’ll start to lose motivation as they can’t figure out why they’re always struggling when teachers have told them that they are ready for the next year.
Finally, there’s only so much even good teachers can do if parents aren’t willing or able to provide a good learning environment at home. I know some teachers only assign minimal homework because anything that can’t be done during study hall wouldn’t be completed anyway because parents aren’t checking in with their kids. That’s no way to ensure kids retain in-class instruction.
In my experience I’ve too often seen teachers doing “fun” activities during the day and leaving the parents to actually teach the material.
Before any homework is assigned, the material should be covered in class, there should be checking for understanding and demonstrated understanding(successful in class assignments). In grade school homework should be repetition rather than extension, IMO.
Ideally the student should be able to complete the work themselves, but of course many home environments are challenging and disorderly.
We argue a lot about schools. I can’t quote a bunch of studies but from my limited sample (one daughter is a teacher), it seems a lot of the issues in schools are down stream from issues outside the school building (poverty, kids showing up hungry, parents on drugs, unstable home life with frequent moves, etc, etc.). Good teachers certainly matter. My daughter has been at it for 15 years and is a saint. She moves mountains to get help for her kids (she is a deaf educator). She also deals with endless insanity on the administrative side.
Public Education note to my friend and 2x boss, Jeff Immelt.
Hi Jeff,
I have a very different policy proposal. Based in part on my amazing public Parkersburg High School. 1969-72. We had 1000 kids each in 10th, 11th and 12th. Scale gave us state championships in Football, wrestling, basketball. But it also gave (myself) state and regional and International Science Fair winners.We had an 80 piece orchestra (I sat 1st chair Oboe).
Jeff, you are fabulous wonderful man and leader. What you are doing for your old High School is giving back and fabulous.
But, Jeff Immelt is not scalable. Individuals are the micro solution. we need the Macro solution.
There are very very Jeff Immelts, across the nations public education system. The few have invested are far outweighed by the many middle and upper income parents who fled public education for private and charter schools.
At the individual level, it is understandable that parents want to maximize their children educational experiences.
But so do all parents.
My dad was a shift working chemical laborer at Union Carbide. Parents divorced before I went to HS. I worked at 15. To get off welfare and food stamps. Yet, at High School, this kid sat next to the wonderful sons and daughters of bankers, chemists, doctors, lawyers, business owners.
Not today. That rich experience for poor and less wealthy children, like science fairs, robotics, Orchestra rarely exist now in public schools.
We can have great High schools again for most of America. But we need to think on national strategic level. The need for big change is evident today.
I propose:
a. Eliminate local school property tax that segregated by class, unfair to retirees, and is obviously inadequate for the education needs of America
b. Fund all public schools from the federal government
c. Create a Make America Educated national investment fund of a trivial $50 billion
d. Scale scale scale reduces administrative overhead, allows extracurricular orchestra, band, computer club, football etc all.
e. Build large campuses. Smaller classes. In 75% of America, large 4000 to 8000 sized High Schools
f. 1 football team, 1 basketball team etc instead of 5 to 10.
g. Orchestra or 2, many science and other clubs
h. Vocational Education!! Have 2 to 3 year tracks that lead to excellent careers America needs that don't require 4 years of college. Just 1 or 2 years
I. Medical Tech, Veterinary Tech, Machinist, Computer Drafting and engineering, Electrical, Mechanical assembly.
J. Plumbing, Electrician, Carpenter, HVAC. Ready for work at their respective apprenticeship level.
K. Teach and have management and team learning labs. Because Food Service and many businesses would love young people who have been exposed and taught the early principles. Run a campus McDonald's or Dominos.
L. Education is the pathway to an American workforce.
Great teachers won't have much of an effect if basic classroom discipline and stability are compromised, and in almost all lower-class/lower-income schools this is the case...with the exceptions tending to be charter, private, or magnet schools that are opt-in, as those select for kids with better (or at least engaged) parents.
Anecdata, but I know several teachers that are outstanding at their profession, but they all complain about the same thing - discipline, and administration that won't back up teachers on discipline, and their inability to remove disruptive students from the classroom without jumping through numerous painful time-consuming hoops.
If the problem students have an IEP (which they can get almost at will just for poor discipline) they are almost immune from consequences.
One of my best classes from college had around 450 students in it - Human Behavioral Biology by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford. I had other classes with 5-10 and while they had their place I agree that there isn’t a direct correlation with education quality and class size.
Isn't it funny that we will always remember the names of our best teachers. I still remember names of teachers from grade school. One of the worst I remember was a history college professor who's name was... I kid you not Dr. Dull.
Read The Smartest Kids in the World. Finnish and South Korean education results are great because teachers are paid better and have higher prestige than in America. Even though the pedagogy in the two countries is much different.
What I found frustrating about the piece is Hannah-Jones checked the grades but somehow didn't gauge her child's mastery of math. My sense is her own math skills may not be particularly strong.
If so, that would translate to the attachment to stories of inequity while being unable to parse the data to determine if the inequity exists as she tells it.
Like a lot of parents she expects that education is the school’s job and that whatever they do is just fine (if it is good enough for NEA/AFT it was good enough for her)
She seemed very disengaged. Everyone with any sense knows it would be insane to trust the school, and that parents are ultimately responsible for making sure their kids are well-educated, which often means extra/outside work. Unfortunately, these parents are in the minority, except in certain ethnic communities.
I think teaching is like a lot of professions that require a "calling" to do it. Nursing, the military, police officer, etc. I imagine these are jobs you don't necessarily go into because you have a desire to make big money. The motivation has to be the passion. So it doesn't surprise me at all that throwing money at the problem doesn't solve it. I remember when I was still figuring out my career path and a guy told me "get a teaching degree because you will always have something to fall back on." No matter public or private, we'll funded or underfunded, students will suffer if the profession of teacher becomes a job people take for summers off or great benefits or as a backup plan.
I think we have an over-credentialing problem when it comes to teachers. A teaching degree seems to have a significant negative effect on supply with no effect on quality. Any thoughts how to fix the pipeline and identify/promote good teachers, over and above just raising pay across the board?
Sack the ineffective ones, including “senior” teachers just mailing it in. Promote and pay the good ones on merit rather than seniority.
That’s not the way unionized “professions” work. They believe anyone with a credential is automatically qualified and ideally should never be sacked and pay is based on seniority…:oh, unless you get another useless credential.
Even at the University level teaching is not a highly valued skill in our society. The skills to be a great teacher are rare and hard to evaluate a-priori. The E part of DEI has been a disaster for education. When I was in public school in California in the 1960's and 70's we segregated kids by ability and I was in a special middle school program based on IQ where students from across the district went to a single school with special programs. As an example in 7th grade I had a math class in algebraic logic where the work was writing lemmas and proofs. Then for 3 weeks at the end of the year we covered all of 7th grade algebra. I don't have the data on what happened to all of us, but I know of quite a few, and while there have been no Nobel Prizes, these students have done well (including starting a digital music company [Pro Tools is still the industry standard for music production] after graduation from UC Berkeley which was sold to Avid netting, in today's world a paltry $160M each for the two former students).
At the college and grad school level I am sure I speak for most that there were only a handful of truly great teachers, a lot of good teachers, and some really bad teachers. My first year of grad school we had a semester of Quantum Mechanics taught by a new assistant professor (Harvard PhD) that to this day is a standing joke among my grad school classmates for how the only thing you learned in class was confusion, and a second semester with another theoretical chemist which for many of us was like turning on a bright light about understanding quantum mechanics in chemistry. Almost black and white in terms of teaching skills and transferring knowledge to others.
There is only one skill to teach in core education. The ability to think critically using verifiable facts and proven mathematics and logic. Everything else is built upon this. People have different abilities at this, and some people need a lot more teaching to develop this skill. Equity is rejecting the reality of facts and logic. Having a student like me in a music class because of equity, holding the entire class back, hurts the students who have far more musical ability than I have, but so would have an equity math curriculum in 7th grade have hurt me.
On the other hand Diversity is important. Friends who run or have run research groups for some of the largest technical corporations in the US will tell anyone that diversity of staff is an important factor in developing cutting edge technology. For logical reasons you want a diversity of backgrounds and approaches which then provide the critical thinking manager more options to move forward.
This is one of those times when I read down a list of study results, even if I want to consider myself a smart emperical person, I remain kinda suspicious.
I think this is because one should come in with a massive prior that reducing class sizes helps. It's like first order common sense. That doesn't mean it's correct - the world is full of unintuive truths - but I would need like a complete theory of why it doesn't matter to believe it.
Consider that we stopped teaching phonics no doubt partially due to a barrage of papers that purported to prove it didn't help.
This seems directionally right, but: it seems clear that the best and fastest way to learn anything is one on one with an expert coach. The analogy / deduction from that intuition/observation to “smaller class sizes are better than larger” is faulty. Or anyway, one could reasonably be convinced that it is faulty. But the reason that it is faulty has to do with the quality of the coach and that adding any number of students after one changes the nature of the experience to “a classroom” which is less efficient than one-on-one expert coaching.
In a well-ordered classroom in an organized school which enforces standards of behavior, and where the school and the teacher are accountable for results, and when results are lacking there is communication, escalation and intervention, even a mediocre teacher can get results.
We don’t need heroes if we have a system oriented for results.
We do need a few good managers - whether department heads or principals.
And the definition of “good” should have zero to do with seniority.
We also need to hold back students who are not ready to graduate. I know it can be tough on those students, but auto-graduating everyone isn’t preparing them for academic development. If they can’t grasp 3rd grade math and reading, they’re going to struggle in 4th grade, and so on. They’ll start to lose motivation as they can’t figure out why they’re always struggling when teachers have told them that they are ready for the next year.
Finally, there’s only so much even good teachers can do if parents aren’t willing or able to provide a good learning environment at home. I know some teachers only assign minimal homework because anything that can’t be done during study hall wouldn’t be completed anyway because parents aren’t checking in with their kids. That’s no way to ensure kids retain in-class instruction.
In my experience I’ve too often seen teachers doing “fun” activities during the day and leaving the parents to actually teach the material.
Before any homework is assigned, the material should be covered in class, there should be checking for understanding and demonstrated understanding(successful in class assignments). In grade school homework should be repetition rather than extension, IMO.
Ideally the student should be able to complete the work themselves, but of course many home environments are challenging and disorderly.
We argue a lot about schools. I can’t quote a bunch of studies but from my limited sample (one daughter is a teacher), it seems a lot of the issues in schools are down stream from issues outside the school building (poverty, kids showing up hungry, parents on drugs, unstable home life with frequent moves, etc, etc.). Good teachers certainly matter. My daughter has been at it for 15 years and is a saint. She moves mountains to get help for her kids (she is a deaf educator). She also deals with endless insanity on the administrative side.
Public Education note to my friend and 2x boss, Jeff Immelt.
Hi Jeff,
I have a very different policy proposal. Based in part on my amazing public Parkersburg High School. 1969-72. We had 1000 kids each in 10th, 11th and 12th. Scale gave us state championships in Football, wrestling, basketball. But it also gave (myself) state and regional and International Science Fair winners.We had an 80 piece orchestra (I sat 1st chair Oboe).
Jeff, you are fabulous wonderful man and leader. What you are doing for your old High School is giving back and fabulous.
But, Jeff Immelt is not scalable. Individuals are the micro solution. we need the Macro solution.
There are very very Jeff Immelts, across the nations public education system. The few have invested are far outweighed by the many middle and upper income parents who fled public education for private and charter schools.
At the individual level, it is understandable that parents want to maximize their children educational experiences.
But so do all parents.
My dad was a shift working chemical laborer at Union Carbide. Parents divorced before I went to HS. I worked at 15. To get off welfare and food stamps. Yet, at High School, this kid sat next to the wonderful sons and daughters of bankers, chemists, doctors, lawyers, business owners.
Not today. That rich experience for poor and less wealthy children, like science fairs, robotics, Orchestra rarely exist now in public schools.
We can have great High schools again for most of America. But we need to think on national strategic level. The need for big change is evident today.
I propose:
a. Eliminate local school property tax that segregated by class, unfair to retirees, and is obviously inadequate for the education needs of America
b. Fund all public schools from the federal government
c. Create a Make America Educated national investment fund of a trivial $50 billion
d. Scale scale scale reduces administrative overhead, allows extracurricular orchestra, band, computer club, football etc all.
e. Build large campuses. Smaller classes. In 75% of America, large 4000 to 8000 sized High Schools
f. 1 football team, 1 basketball team etc instead of 5 to 10.
g. Orchestra or 2, many science and other clubs
h. Vocational Education!! Have 2 to 3 year tracks that lead to excellent careers America needs that don't require 4 years of college. Just 1 or 2 years
I. Medical Tech, Veterinary Tech, Machinist, Computer Drafting and engineering, Electrical, Mechanical assembly.
J. Plumbing, Electrician, Carpenter, HVAC. Ready for work at their respective apprenticeship level.
K. Teach and have management and team learning labs. Because Food Service and many businesses would love young people who have been exposed and taught the early principles. Run a campus McDonald's or Dominos.
L. Education is the pathway to an American workforce.
Great teachers won't have much of an effect if basic classroom discipline and stability are compromised, and in almost all lower-class/lower-income schools this is the case...with the exceptions tending to be charter, private, or magnet schools that are opt-in, as those select for kids with better (or at least engaged) parents.
Anecdata, but I know several teachers that are outstanding at their profession, but they all complain about the same thing - discipline, and administration that won't back up teachers on discipline, and their inability to remove disruptive students from the classroom without jumping through numerous painful time-consuming hoops.
If the problem students have an IEP (which they can get almost at will just for poor discipline) they are almost immune from consequences.
It's also important to remember that you won't retain quality teachers if the working conditions are unbearable. Class size plays a role in that, too.
One of my best classes from college had around 450 students in it - Human Behavioral Biology by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford. I had other classes with 5-10 and while they had their place I agree that there isn’t a direct correlation with education quality and class size.
Isn't it funny that we will always remember the names of our best teachers. I still remember names of teachers from grade school. One of the worst I remember was a history college professor who's name was... I kid you not Dr. Dull.
Read The Smartest Kids in the World. Finnish and South Korean education results are great because teachers are paid better and have higher prestige than in America. Even though the pedagogy in the two countries is much different.
Check the latest stats on Finland
What I found frustrating about the piece is Hannah-Jones checked the grades but somehow didn't gauge her child's mastery of math. My sense is her own math skills may not be particularly strong.
If so, that would translate to the attachment to stories of inequity while being unable to parse the data to determine if the inequity exists as she tells it.
Like a lot of parents she expects that education is the school’s job and that whatever they do is just fine (if it is good enough for NEA/AFT it was good enough for her)
She seemed very disengaged. Everyone with any sense knows it would be insane to trust the school, and that parents are ultimately responsible for making sure their kids are well-educated, which often means extra/outside work. Unfortunately, these parents are in the minority, except in certain ethnic communities.
I think teaching is like a lot of professions that require a "calling" to do it. Nursing, the military, police officer, etc. I imagine these are jobs you don't necessarily go into because you have a desire to make big money. The motivation has to be the passion. So it doesn't surprise me at all that throwing money at the problem doesn't solve it. I remember when I was still figuring out my career path and a guy told me "get a teaching degree because you will always have something to fall back on." No matter public or private, we'll funded or underfunded, students will suffer if the profession of teacher becomes a job people take for summers off or great benefits or as a backup plan.
I think we have an over-credentialing problem when it comes to teachers. A teaching degree seems to have a significant negative effect on supply with no effect on quality. Any thoughts how to fix the pipeline and identify/promote good teachers, over and above just raising pay across the board?
Sack the ineffective ones, including “senior” teachers just mailing it in. Promote and pay the good ones on merit rather than seniority.
That’s not the way unionized “professions” work. They believe anyone with a credential is automatically qualified and ideally should never be sacked and pay is based on seniority…:oh, unless you get another useless credential.
Even at the University level teaching is not a highly valued skill in our society. The skills to be a great teacher are rare and hard to evaluate a-priori. The E part of DEI has been a disaster for education. When I was in public school in California in the 1960's and 70's we segregated kids by ability and I was in a special middle school program based on IQ where students from across the district went to a single school with special programs. As an example in 7th grade I had a math class in algebraic logic where the work was writing lemmas and proofs. Then for 3 weeks at the end of the year we covered all of 7th grade algebra. I don't have the data on what happened to all of us, but I know of quite a few, and while there have been no Nobel Prizes, these students have done well (including starting a digital music company [Pro Tools is still the industry standard for music production] after graduation from UC Berkeley which was sold to Avid netting, in today's world a paltry $160M each for the two former students).
At the college and grad school level I am sure I speak for most that there were only a handful of truly great teachers, a lot of good teachers, and some really bad teachers. My first year of grad school we had a semester of Quantum Mechanics taught by a new assistant professor (Harvard PhD) that to this day is a standing joke among my grad school classmates for how the only thing you learned in class was confusion, and a second semester with another theoretical chemist which for many of us was like turning on a bright light about understanding quantum mechanics in chemistry. Almost black and white in terms of teaching skills and transferring knowledge to others.
There is only one skill to teach in core education. The ability to think critically using verifiable facts and proven mathematics and logic. Everything else is built upon this. People have different abilities at this, and some people need a lot more teaching to develop this skill. Equity is rejecting the reality of facts and logic. Having a student like me in a music class because of equity, holding the entire class back, hurts the students who have far more musical ability than I have, but so would have an equity math curriculum in 7th grade have hurt me.
On the other hand Diversity is important. Friends who run or have run research groups for some of the largest technical corporations in the US will tell anyone that diversity of staff is an important factor in developing cutting edge technology. For logical reasons you want a diversity of backgrounds and approaches which then provide the critical thinking manager more options to move forward.
This is one of those times when I read down a list of study results, even if I want to consider myself a smart emperical person, I remain kinda suspicious.
I think this is because one should come in with a massive prior that reducing class sizes helps. It's like first order common sense. That doesn't mean it's correct - the world is full of unintuive truths - but I would need like a complete theory of why it doesn't matter to believe it.
Consider that we stopped teaching phonics no doubt partially due to a barrage of papers that purported to prove it didn't help.
This seems directionally right, but: it seems clear that the best and fastest way to learn anything is one on one with an expert coach. The analogy / deduction from that intuition/observation to “smaller class sizes are better than larger” is faulty. Or anyway, one could reasonably be convinced that it is faulty. But the reason that it is faulty has to do with the quality of the coach and that adding any number of students after one changes the nature of the experience to “a classroom” which is less efficient than one-on-one expert coaching.
In a well-ordered classroom in an organized school which enforces standards of behavior, and where the school and the teacher are accountable for results, and when results are lacking there is communication, escalation and intervention, even a mediocre teacher can get results.
We don’t need heroes if we have a system oriented for results.
We do need a few good managers - whether department heads or principals.
And the definition of “good” should have zero to do with seniority.
Just like you can run a highly successful company with a staff of mediocre employees if you have the right procedures and compensation systems?
Do you think the smaller class size->little or not effect on student learning plays out similarly in higher ed?
Bigger classes with more TAs.