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.
The coverage of the California debacle talked about this too. Those kids who were passing Math classes without knowing Math - the teachers were like WTF are we supposed to do when you put kids in an Algebra class who don't even know fractions?
Advancing in material needs to be conditional on learning the prerequisites! This should not be so hard for people to grasp.
Absolutely. Unfortunately credentialism and progressive politics meant some schools were required to promote kids to the next level no matter what for the sake of equity. Instead of investing in focused tutoring to help kids catch up, as this cost $$$, schools just made kids the universities’ problem. I understand the pressure to keep kids moving on to university, as the latter is (was?) perceived to be the gatekeeper to successful careers. But there were other pathways progressives could have taken such as tutoring and addressing truancy. Unfortunately the emphasis was on mandating equal outcomes rather than actually helping kids achieve milestones.
Of course, conservatives also include parents who will go batshit insane at school admin if little Hunter or Beretta aren’t lauded as geniuses even though they couldn’t read at grade level or who cared more about bathrooms and book bans than academic outcomes. But progressives need to own up to their failures more because they controlled larger, highly resourced districts and dominated public discourse on education.
"Focused tutoring to help kids catch up" isn't going to solve things either. As long as the education system tries to fight the obvious reality that people just fundamentally have very different intelligence levels the whole enterprise is doomed to failure.
I mean just saying “fuck it dumb kids be dumb” isn’t exactly an answer either. Not everything is coded into your genes from the outset. In any case, we used to have more kids who could read at grade level and do basic math, ergo we are able to get back to that level of proficiency. The Southern states that improved test scores as well as DC used tutoring as well as holding students and teachers accountable. Sure, there are always kids who just aren’t able to keep up because of disabilities, wrecked home life, etc., but we’re talking about the student body as a whole rather than the worst of the worst.
This is such an underrated thing. Honestly we need to stop stigmatizing holding kids back, or actually make them catch up in summer school programs instead of just passing them on. holding kids back is better for them from a learning perspective, obviously parents will hate it. But there has to be a mechanism for dealing with kids in public schools who are disruptive or poorly behaved (expulsion), or who aren't learning the material (special classes and holding them back) in my opinion. I also greatly agree with your second point, there is only so much school systems and teachers can do if parenting is not aligned.
I've been a teacher in public schools (mainly SPED) for about a decade now, & can tell you that there is near-zero support from parents for holding kids back. I get insane pushback from parents for not passing their kids even if they fail! The threat of litigation in SPED is so high that we're literally instructed to just pass them along no matter what. IEPs are dense enough that an enterprising advocate can always find some tidbit that wasn't implemented to 100% & then of course all of the student's struggles are tied to that. If only that teacher had "checked for understanding" one more time, the student wouldn't have 8 zeros, they'd be a Rhodes scholar!
The uncomfortable truth is that not everyone is suited to academics, and some kids are more intelligent/have longer time horizons/more ability to delay gratification than others. However this implies that everyone is not born perfectly equally in terms of cognition & capacity for pro-social behavior, which is an idea that the public is so loathe to admit (while privately all understanding that it's true) that we're simply doomed to perform this dance forever.
You raise a good point about homework. To compound that the use of AI means that endemic cheating is going on. Basically, anything that is not done in a proctored environment can't be trusted to be the work of the student
The solution is going to be to get rid of homework and link in the school day. So all that work that was previously given as homework is now done at school. In a proctored environment.
That needs to be combined with getting rid of smartphones at schools along with the chromebooks
The computers at school that the kids use cannot have internet access. Only access to a school database for doing reports and stuff
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.
No, wrong. Must disagree. There is no learned or innate quality one has with 37 kids in a classroom, 12 with special ed services, 7 who are ESL, a girl in a tether, and an autistic girl who requires back rubs. Yes, i got them all to pass by the skin of my teeth and worked my ass off. But it wasn’t good. Whatever studies people keep pulling out their asses that great instructors can handle scads of kids and teach well too and grade those papers in a timely manner is missing a common sense ratio-more of them than you, and you can’t do it all at once.
I’ve been teaching for 27 years, and I’m willing to hear out ideas, but this is one of those zombie dead things that keeps rising up. Yeah it’s a bummer that more teachers in some places didn’t work, but stuffing a classroom full of kids with a “quality” teacher one was somehow able to cultivate in teaching school is a recipe for failure. It is simply common sense that it is better to have smaller class sizes. It is safer and better for instruction, guided practice, and one on one assistance. Just like a good parent might be able to juggle six kids at once but most people aren’t Mary Poppins. it’s not ideal. Also i wonder if you’ve noticed the teaching schools have been emptying out and the classroom teachers are becoming harder to come by. Just throw this at the young ones and have fun with it.
agree. You should see how hard they pushed for this type of thing, all the way till making us take entire classes on “inclusion” that had a slew of unimpressive books and research supposedly showing improvement for the kid and even that wasn’t in the subject area. It’s behind the whole “differentiated instruction” push that will never be described the same way in any workshop or presentation and offers very loose frameworks and weak ideas.
More ow especially with the no improvement in the subject area. I am winging it but if it is a matter of one student with one IEP and normal intelligence it might sound reasonable to ask them to do exactly what the non-special ed kids are doing. Once a non-special ed teacher has to deal with 5 different disabilities at once for none of which they have any training that is getting to be too much.
frequently it is reasonable and you can just make small adjustments. But then you get ones that have special behavioral plans and you usually have to have them all up front. I usually keep all mine up front where i repeat things slowly and coax them to write it down. They do learn the material adequately. It’s just the act of doing things is SUCH a slowdown. For some you have to act like it’s the first time they’ve ever been in your class over and over and over again.
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.
"as those select for kids with better (or at least engaged) parents."
This is the biggest reason charter/magnet schools have better results - there is still a self selection that is happening, so the better students, with better, more engaged parents, are there.
Yes. The fundamental problem isn't pedagogy (though it plays a role), but the fact that there is a certain % of students that are disruptive, and we can't seem to reliably get them to behave, and we are collectively unwilling to remove them from the classroom unless a very high bar of evidence is met.
The disruption/behavior problem is mostly caused by (or is at least the responsibility of) the parents, and without frankly authoritarian methods we aren't going to make the parents shape up.
So I think that we should just perform triage and get these kids out of the classroom. It may not be fair to them, and we should give them opportunities for redemption/recovery, but it is even less fair to the remaining non-disruptive students who are having their opportunity for a good education stolen from them.
Also it will help with teacher quality and retention, and generally make their working conditions much much better.
but again, we are going to remove a small amount of "privileged" kids, instead of removing the even smaller disruptive kids. I am not arguing against your solution - it's just crazy to me.
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.
This was my line too. Hannah-Jones and her husband thought that they could just teach the kid what was missing from the school and she would miss nothing but algebra seems to have defeated them.
That detail is particularly horrible ... We don't have a good handle on how to improve how a reasonably-well-functioning school educates, say, the lower half of the distribution of student. But any half-decent standardized testing will reveal a school that is giving out As to students who don't know the material at all, and simply kicking the principal to kick the teachers can stop that.
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.
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.
In college, there are a few large classes with famous performers as instructor (at Stanford I remember hearing about Sapolsky, and also Bill Dement who taught the class on sleep; at Texas A&M my colleague John McDermott was known this way too) but beyond these, there's very little learning that actually happens in large classes - they're not much more than a structured way to get a bunch of students to do homework assignments and tests and fall asleep in lecture. In small classes, a professor can actually figure out what students are and aren't getting, and get individuals to have to defend their ideas and actually learn something. (And even in these large ones with great performers, students tend to *feel* like they're learning from those lectures, but they're not getting as much as they do from struggling with material.)
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.
Easy to say when your teacher is Robert Sapolsky. Also explains why 450 people wanted to learn from him. I'm jealous. (I just finished "Behave" and am on to "Determined"). I went to law school with classes ranging from 125 to 25. Size had nothing to do with class quality or usefulness: it all depended on the quality of the teachers. Period.
Class size probably has more impact in college because professors have way more freedom to design their own curriculum especially once you're not in intro classes anymore.
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.
I agree the credential doesn’t mean anything. Is there a realistic proposal for how to evaluate teachers in both hiring and promotion? I read in a book (“Weapons of Math Destruction,” I think) a story about a district that used a third-party AI model, which was a black box to its users, to test teacher quality based on student performance. When the same teacher rated as one of the district’s worst and one of its best in back-to-back years, it was revealed that outcomes were too noisy to be accurately modeled, and the entire “residual” was misidentified as being due to the quality of the teacher.
It’s not any different than hiring for any other position:
1) Interview for personality traits that matter to teaching
2) Hire with a probationary period
3) Rapidly get rid of anyone who doesn’t teach well if you don’t think they’re coachable
One of the things that is often overlooked in this sort of thing is that you need to train people in hiring and have a consistent interview script to allow you to get consistent results.
Oh, and everyone makes mistakes hiring. The above just reduces your odds of making a bad hire. That’s why rapidly fixing mistakes it’s important.
I like to make the analogy of hiring being similar to getting married to someone after knowing someone for a couple of hours.
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.
My guess is that if the studies Noah mentions hold up, it's because there's something counteracting the improvement due to smaller class size (like decreasing teacher quality as you have to scrape the bottom of the applicant pool).
The problem is that we can't pay good teachers more because of the unions, so paying more for quality won't work (unless we can simultaneously aggressively fire for performance).
Honestly living in Chicago has radicalized me against public education. Just give me the money so I don't have to pay twice to educate my kid.
Interesting findings! The best argument for improved staffing ratios in my mind is more granular student tracking; if you can split a group of 40 kids into an advanced and standard class that seems like it would be the most beneficial use of an additional teacher. I'm not sure how splitting them randomly would improve things, unless it's easier to enforce discipline with fewer people.
Freshman intro classes in university can have 200+ undergraduates in them, given that everyone has the same basic aptitude level and familiarity with the material (and, of course, everyone wants to be there and is paying five figures per semester to be there)
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.
The amusing part about Finland is that other countries copied what Finland was doing when it topped the charts. But Finland had changed its methods, and chart-topping was due to prior methods - there's a 15 year delay, generally speaking, between system-wide education changes and academic results. So countries that copied Finland during its chart-topping years also often later saw declines.
I kinda hate the Finland storyline. Go check the data - Finland didn't really outperform Massachusetts, or white kids in the US, or Asian kids in the US.
Most of US education is actually fine by international standards, and if we want better rankings we need to focus on helping Black and Hispanic kids.
What I read about it was that they didn't actually achieve this by paying teachers more, and I never did figure out how you raise the prestige of a profession any other way.
In East Asian countries teachers pay aren’t actually all that high, but centuries of Confucius teaching gave them social prestige. IMO that is not replicable in western countries.
It's worth reading NHJ's article in full to get an idea of how bad the schools her daughter attended were. We're not talking the difference between a good teacher and an excellent teacher. NHJ's daughter's teachers were awful.
They didn't check her in-class math work at all. Or her writing.
They didn't assign homework.
They gave 'A' grades for work that would get a failing grade at better schools in the same school system.
NHJ had to repeatedly reach out to the teacher and eventually the school's principal to see a copy of her daughter's work (in grade 4 IIRC).
We're not talking about the difference between an inspirational teacher and a regular teacher. We're talking about the difference between a teacher doing their job, and one doing pretty much nothing at all.
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.
Skills diversity is good. Racial/ethnic diversity is at best neutral and at worst a negative. The only exception is when ethnic group is a reasonable proxy for understanding a foreign culture or language (which isn't always the case).
Personal anecdote: I once worked on a smart device team that had to scramble to patch the digital clock software soon after release. Why? The product reviews were tanking in Germany because Germany uses a 24 hr clock and the America-brained team shipped only the US's 12 hr clock. If even one person on the team had known anything about German culture before shipping it they could've spoken up and avoided the embarrassment.
I read somewhere that the quants who came up with the pricing methodology for the sub-prime mortgage derivatives that crashed the banking system in 2008-9 had bailed out from a joint NASA-ESA project that accidentally launched a multi-billion Euro comms satellite into outer space because they hadn't realised that all the measurements they were getting from their European colleagues were metric not imperial. I don't know if it's true.
From age 10-13, I went to a withdrawal gifted program at a high school. It was far better than my regular school.
Some of my fellow classmates were extremely bright but also had great difficulty relating to others. Unfortunately, about 3/4 of my classmates would commit suicide before age 30.
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.
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.
The coverage of the California debacle talked about this too. Those kids who were passing Math classes without knowing Math - the teachers were like WTF are we supposed to do when you put kids in an Algebra class who don't even know fractions?
Advancing in material needs to be conditional on learning the prerequisites! This should not be so hard for people to grasp.
Absolutely. Unfortunately credentialism and progressive politics meant some schools were required to promote kids to the next level no matter what for the sake of equity. Instead of investing in focused tutoring to help kids catch up, as this cost $$$, schools just made kids the universities’ problem. I understand the pressure to keep kids moving on to university, as the latter is (was?) perceived to be the gatekeeper to successful careers. But there were other pathways progressives could have taken such as tutoring and addressing truancy. Unfortunately the emphasis was on mandating equal outcomes rather than actually helping kids achieve milestones.
Of course, conservatives also include parents who will go batshit insane at school admin if little Hunter or Beretta aren’t lauded as geniuses even though they couldn’t read at grade level or who cared more about bathrooms and book bans than academic outcomes. But progressives need to own up to their failures more because they controlled larger, highly resourced districts and dominated public discourse on education.
"Focused tutoring to help kids catch up" isn't going to solve things either. As long as the education system tries to fight the obvious reality that people just fundamentally have very different intelligence levels the whole enterprise is doomed to failure.
I mean just saying “fuck it dumb kids be dumb” isn’t exactly an answer either. Not everything is coded into your genes from the outset. In any case, we used to have more kids who could read at grade level and do basic math, ergo we are able to get back to that level of proficiency. The Southern states that improved test scores as well as DC used tutoring as well as holding students and teachers accountable. Sure, there are always kids who just aren’t able to keep up because of disabilities, wrecked home life, etc., but we’re talking about the student body as a whole rather than the worst of the worst.
What do you do with those who are on the lower end of the spectrum?
This is such an underrated thing. Honestly we need to stop stigmatizing holding kids back, or actually make them catch up in summer school programs instead of just passing them on. holding kids back is better for them from a learning perspective, obviously parents will hate it. But there has to be a mechanism for dealing with kids in public schools who are disruptive or poorly behaved (expulsion), or who aren't learning the material (special classes and holding them back) in my opinion. I also greatly agree with your second point, there is only so much school systems and teachers can do if parenting is not aligned.
I've been a teacher in public schools (mainly SPED) for about a decade now, & can tell you that there is near-zero support from parents for holding kids back. I get insane pushback from parents for not passing their kids even if they fail! The threat of litigation in SPED is so high that we're literally instructed to just pass them along no matter what. IEPs are dense enough that an enterprising advocate can always find some tidbit that wasn't implemented to 100% & then of course all of the student's struggles are tied to that. If only that teacher had "checked for understanding" one more time, the student wouldn't have 8 zeros, they'd be a Rhodes scholar!
The uncomfortable truth is that not everyone is suited to academics, and some kids are more intelligent/have longer time horizons/more ability to delay gratification than others. However this implies that everyone is not born perfectly equally in terms of cognition & capacity for pro-social behavior, which is an idea that the public is so loathe to admit (while privately all understanding that it's true) that we're simply doomed to perform this dance forever.
You raise a good point about homework. To compound that the use of AI means that endemic cheating is going on. Basically, anything that is not done in a proctored environment can't be trusted to be the work of the student
The solution is going to be to get rid of homework and link in the school day. So all that work that was previously given as homework is now done at school. In a proctored environment.
That needs to be combined with getting rid of smartphones at schools along with the chromebooks
The computers at school that the kids use cannot have internet access. Only access to a school database for doing reports and stuff
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.
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.
I certainly agree that. What happens outside the school matters.
At the same time, we can see hugely positive results in states like mississippi. Same schools, same disadvantaged kids, but different results
Likewise, we can see those same types of results. When roland fryer took over twenty of the worst schools in houston
It is possible to get good results from disadvantaged kids
No, wrong. Must disagree. There is no learned or innate quality one has with 37 kids in a classroom, 12 with special ed services, 7 who are ESL, a girl in a tether, and an autistic girl who requires back rubs. Yes, i got them all to pass by the skin of my teeth and worked my ass off. But it wasn’t good. Whatever studies people keep pulling out their asses that great instructors can handle scads of kids and teach well too and grade those papers in a timely manner is missing a common sense ratio-more of them than you, and you can’t do it all at once.
I’ve been teaching for 27 years, and I’m willing to hear out ideas, but this is one of those zombie dead things that keeps rising up. Yeah it’s a bummer that more teachers in some places didn’t work, but stuffing a classroom full of kids with a “quality” teacher one was somehow able to cultivate in teaching school is a recipe for failure. It is simply common sense that it is better to have smaller class sizes. It is safer and better for instruction, guided practice, and one on one assistance. Just like a good parent might be able to juggle six kids at once but most people aren’t Mary Poppins. it’s not ideal. Also i wonder if you’ve noticed the teaching schools have been emptying out and the classroom teachers are becoming harder to come by. Just throw this at the young ones and have fun with it.
Ow, mainstreaming special ed kids is entirely its own kind of problem.
agree. You should see how hard they pushed for this type of thing, all the way till making us take entire classes on “inclusion” that had a slew of unimpressive books and research supposedly showing improvement for the kid and even that wasn’t in the subject area. It’s behind the whole “differentiated instruction” push that will never be described the same way in any workshop or presentation and offers very loose frameworks and weak ideas.
More ow especially with the no improvement in the subject area. I am winging it but if it is a matter of one student with one IEP and normal intelligence it might sound reasonable to ask them to do exactly what the non-special ed kids are doing. Once a non-special ed teacher has to deal with 5 different disabilities at once for none of which they have any training that is getting to be too much.
frequently it is reasonable and you can just make small adjustments. But then you get ones that have special behavioral plans and you usually have to have them all up front. I usually keep all mine up front where i repeat things slowly and coax them to write it down. They do learn the material adequately. It’s just the act of doing things is SUCH a slowdown. For some you have to act like it’s the first time they’ve ever been in your class over and over and over again.
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.
"as those select for kids with better (or at least engaged) parents."
This is the biggest reason charter/magnet schools have better results - there is still a self selection that is happening, so the better students, with better, more engaged parents, are there.
Yes. The fundamental problem isn't pedagogy (though it plays a role), but the fact that there is a certain % of students that are disruptive, and we can't seem to reliably get them to behave, and we are collectively unwilling to remove them from the classroom unless a very high bar of evidence is met.
The disruption/behavior problem is mostly caused by (or is at least the responsibility of) the parents, and without frankly authoritarian methods we aren't going to make the parents shape up.
So I think that we should just perform triage and get these kids out of the classroom. It may not be fair to them, and we should give them opportunities for redemption/recovery, but it is even less fair to the remaining non-disruptive students who are having their opportunity for a good education stolen from them.
Also it will help with teacher quality and retention, and generally make their working conditions much much better.
but again, we are going to remove a small amount of "privileged" kids, instead of removing the even smaller disruptive kids. I am not arguing against your solution - it's just crazy to me.
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.
This was my line too. Hannah-Jones and her husband thought that they could just teach the kid what was missing from the school and she would miss nothing but algebra seems to have defeated them.
That detail is particularly horrible ... We don't have a good handle on how to improve how a reasonably-well-functioning school educates, say, the lower half of the distribution of student. But any half-decent standardized testing will reveal a school that is giving out As to students who don't know the material at all, and simply kicking the principal to kick the teachers can stop that.
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.
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.
In college, there are a few large classes with famous performers as instructor (at Stanford I remember hearing about Sapolsky, and also Bill Dement who taught the class on sleep; at Texas A&M my colleague John McDermott was known this way too) but beyond these, there's very little learning that actually happens in large classes - they're not much more than a structured way to get a bunch of students to do homework assignments and tests and fall asleep in lecture. In small classes, a professor can actually figure out what students are and aren't getting, and get individuals to have to defend their ideas and actually learn something. (And even in these large ones with great performers, students tend to *feel* like they're learning from those lectures, but they're not getting as much as they do from struggling with material.)
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.
Easy to say when your teacher is Robert Sapolsky. Also explains why 450 people wanted to learn from him. I'm jealous. (I just finished "Behave" and am on to "Determined"). I went to law school with classes ranging from 125 to 25. Size had nothing to do with class quality or usefulness: it all depended on the quality of the teachers. Period.
Class size probably has more impact in college because professors have way more freedom to design their own curriculum especially once you're not in intro classes anymore.
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.
I agree the credential doesn’t mean anything. Is there a realistic proposal for how to evaluate teachers in both hiring and promotion? I read in a book (“Weapons of Math Destruction,” I think) a story about a district that used a third-party AI model, which was a black box to its users, to test teacher quality based on student performance. When the same teacher rated as one of the district’s worst and one of its best in back-to-back years, it was revealed that outcomes were too noisy to be accurately modeled, and the entire “residual” was misidentified as being due to the quality of the teacher.
It’s not any different than hiring for any other position:
1) Interview for personality traits that matter to teaching
2) Hire with a probationary period
3) Rapidly get rid of anyone who doesn’t teach well if you don’t think they’re coachable
One of the things that is often overlooked in this sort of thing is that you need to train people in hiring and have a consistent interview script to allow you to get consistent results.
Oh, and everyone makes mistakes hiring. The above just reduces your odds of making a bad hire. That’s why rapidly fixing mistakes it’s important.
I like to make the analogy of hiring being similar to getting married to someone after knowing someone for a couple of hours.
I like to see your rubric for how to measure “teaching well”. I just don’t think there is consensus there.
Small sample sizes and random noise an issue for sure
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.
My guess is that if the studies Noah mentions hold up, it's because there's something counteracting the improvement due to smaller class size (like decreasing teacher quality as you have to scrape the bottom of the applicant pool).
The problem is that we can't pay good teachers more because of the unions, so paying more for quality won't work (unless we can simultaneously aggressively fire for performance).
Honestly living in Chicago has radicalized me against public education. Just give me the money so I don't have to pay twice to educate my kid.
Interesting findings! The best argument for improved staffing ratios in my mind is more granular student tracking; if you can split a group of 40 kids into an advanced and standard class that seems like it would be the most beneficial use of an additional teacher. I'm not sure how splitting them randomly would improve things, unless it's easier to enforce discipline with fewer people.
Freshman intro classes in university can have 200+ undergraduates in them, given that everyone has the same basic aptitude level and familiarity with the material (and, of course, everyone wants to be there and is paying five figures per semester to be there)
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
The amusing part about Finland is that other countries copied what Finland was doing when it topped the charts. But Finland had changed its methods, and chart-topping was due to prior methods - there's a 15 year delay, generally speaking, between system-wide education changes and academic results. So countries that copied Finland during its chart-topping years also often later saw declines.
I kinda hate the Finland storyline. Go check the data - Finland didn't really outperform Massachusetts, or white kids in the US, or Asian kids in the US.
Most of US education is actually fine by international standards, and if we want better rankings we need to focus on helping Black and Hispanic kids.
What I read about it was that they didn't actually achieve this by paying teachers more, and I never did figure out how you raise the prestige of a profession any other way.
In East Asian countries teachers pay aren’t actually all that high, but centuries of Confucius teaching gave them social prestige. IMO that is not replicable in western countries.
It was claimed repeatedly that Finland achieved it, but no one ever explained how.
It's worth reading NHJ's article in full to get an idea of how bad the schools her daughter attended were. We're not talking the difference between a good teacher and an excellent teacher. NHJ's daughter's teachers were awful.
They didn't check her in-class math work at all. Or her writing.
They didn't assign homework.
They gave 'A' grades for work that would get a failing grade at better schools in the same school system.
NHJ had to repeatedly reach out to the teacher and eventually the school's principal to see a copy of her daughter's work (in grade 4 IIRC).
We're not talking about the difference between an inspirational teacher and a regular teacher. We're talking about the difference between a teacher doing their job, and one doing pretty much nothing at all.
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.
If diversity is an important factor for developing cutting edge technology why has China done so well with basically none of it?
Skills diversity is good. Racial/ethnic diversity is at best neutral and at worst a negative. The only exception is when ethnic group is a reasonable proxy for understanding a foreign culture or language (which isn't always the case).
Personal anecdote: I once worked on a smart device team that had to scramble to patch the digital clock software soon after release. Why? The product reviews were tanking in Germany because Germany uses a 24 hr clock and the America-brained team shipped only the US's 12 hr clock. If even one person on the team had known anything about German culture before shipping it they could've spoken up and avoided the embarrassment.
I read somewhere that the quants who came up with the pricing methodology for the sub-prime mortgage derivatives that crashed the banking system in 2008-9 had bailed out from a joint NASA-ESA project that accidentally launched a multi-billion Euro comms satellite into outer space because they hadn't realised that all the measurements they were getting from their European colleagues were metric not imperial. I don't know if it's true.
From age 10-13, I went to a withdrawal gifted program at a high school. It was far better than my regular school.
Some of my fellow classmates were extremely bright but also had great difficulty relating to others. Unfortunately, about 3/4 of my classmates would commit suicide before age 30.
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.