I love Tom Lehrer, and it’s a great song. Good enough, in fact, that it’s easy to forget that, uh, a lot of the specific things he complains about have been part of the standard curriculum for decades now, and you and I both learned them without special difficulty. Seriously, he starts off bashing the notion that understanding the technique is more important than getting the right answer every time. Granted that’s probably bad for architects, but for seven-year-olds it’s entirely correct.
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I’ve been a teacher. If a teacher has half a brain and the ability to see, it’s pretty easy to tell which students fit into 3 categories - average comprehension and need some help, quick studies who could probably help others, and strugglers who need all the help they can get. You don’t need any tests for that.
“Teaching to the test” is a useful concept ONLY if the only thing you are teaching is the ability to retain and reguritate cold, bare facts, like the atomic weight of niobium or the date the Magna Carta was signed. If you’re trying to teach comprehension, the kind of standardized testing the government wants is utterly useless. The only thing that produces useful metrics there is giving the students a chance to exercise their skills and seeing how well they do. And the “metrics” that come from are necessarily subjective.
If a teacher needs to see numeric scores from rigidly designed tests in order to get an idea of how the students are doing, that is a 3rd-rate teacher who should be doing something else for a living.
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He’s a parent who cares about his kids and sees it is bullshit. It’s not an invalid perspective.
I know the accountability movement is targeted at teachers but let me assure you bullshit still rolls down hill. It rolls down hill onto kids and parents.
The level of stress transmitted to the kids, the the manipulative things teachers are doing to get children and parents to comply. It is truly awful.
I’m not sure if it’s common core or it’s just what schools have become. Just like you the schools don’t care about the parent’s observations. They don’t care about what any one kid needs. At this point they care most about what the state requires.
Even in a “good school” it honestly feels like a sinking ship, you can feel the terror and people are doing all sorts of horrible things to each-other out of self preservation. Then justifying it with heaping helpings of blame after the fact.
I understand what he has said 100% and I am farther along the disillusionment than him. I pulled my oldest out of school - it was not a safe place for her it was abusive and stifling. There were kids -teachers- and parents lashing out in very unpredictable ways.
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Welcome to BoingBoing.net. 
As someone who enjoyed tests myself, tests were, in my mind, basically the equivalent of jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, and other similar “challenge” games. They were also, for the most part, exceptionally easy, and thus enjoyable in the same say jigsaw puzzles and crosswords were.
Learning, of course, was far more enjoyable, but that generally happened on my own time outside of school hours (generally by shirking off homework I’d get halfway through in homeroom the next day). I probably spent a lot more time taking tests in school than I did learning (and this was at least 20 years back), so ignoring the last two years of high school (where I managed to get into several Advanced Placement and legit college courses, and actually learned a lot and had a lot of fun as a consequence), I would say that tests probably were one of the most enjoyable parts of school - or at least class - for me.
This isn’t because tests where great, but more because school was, for the most part, godawful, and doing well on tests was both enjoyable (in the same way solving a puzzle is) and rewarded.
Projects were generally far more fun than tests, but they were almost exclusively done outside of school even if they were for school, so I’m not sure if they should count.
I think that Federal piece of the puzzle is that national spending on education has mushroomed with minimal to no effect on scores and standardized performance.
The slightly dismissive tone regarding taxpayers being “shareholders” kinda misses the point. Shouldn’t we worry that our income is being funneled into an ever-increasing slush fund with only negligible results? And outliers or no, the role of the unions tends to run contrary to the interests of the kids.
My sympathy lies with the teachers first and foremost: dealing with clueless administration, standardized tests and parents that have little to no involvement with their children’s education… It’s a perfect storm of depressing choices.
Well, I meant in aggregate across all students, teachers, and schools. I didn’t mean an individual teacher needs a test to know how a particular student is doing.
Do you want lots of hands on, example problems, peer work, whatever to teach math? Does reading, presentations, or field trips work better to teach history? What works most effectively for most students and can be applied in general to more schools? You need some sort of metric to quantify that. Ideally, you’d want different methods taught to different students in different areas to get a good randomized study to show what works and what doesn’t. You need some sort of metric to compare.
Like I said, I can’t think of a better way of doing that than administrating a test. I wouldn’t want preparing for such a test to take up a lot of time. I wouldn’t want teachers or schools money to be on the line. Hell, I wouldn’t even want the kids to know their grades. Keep it anonymous. I just want “School A taught this way, School B taught that way, School A did better, lets see if we can apply that to School B”.
But that process of conservative people resisting progressive ideas has been going on for all of human history and we’ve consistently implement progressive ideas. I’m sure the conservatives have kept us from implementing some really stupid progressive ideas by being opposed to them. I think that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Every solution creates new problems, but they don’t usually create problems worse than existed before. However, every generation thinks the solutions of the next generation are worse than the problems so every generation complains that the next generation is lazy and foolish and destroying the institution of marriage.
Even when things seem super bleak, our worst case scenario - other than annihilation - seems to be returning to serfdom under our new batch of kings. But we’ll probably be serfs with 0.3% infant mortality instead of 50%, so it’s still just a dip on an upward climb, most likely.
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Younger than me, then. New Math had its heyday in the 1970s.
How much set theory do you remember from elementary school (and not from, say, “Math for Smarty Pants”)?
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Good God. What sort of person decides that the joy of exercising one’s abilities, be it mental or physical, makes you a self-satisfied narcissist? If we’re throwing around the term narcissism, then I’d have to say that someone who assumes that people having different preferences from themselves are evil (narcissist, astroturfer?) would come pretty close to matching my definition.
And why would matching with the corporate world be some sort of evil? It’s exactly those sort of productive people who pay the taxes that support all the things that we like. I’ve no problem with you opting out of the corporate world. I have no problem with our taxes going to supporting your choice. But I do have some problem with you deciding anyone who’s actually earning a salary in the corporate world is somehow less worthy than you.
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That is something we should worry about, but that doesn’t mean that this is the solution. The run-like-a-business government has a strong motivation to keep teacher salaries low, and to do that they want to keep public perception of the teacher profession as negative, and that is not something that the countries that we seek to emulate in education do.
As for the unions, I don’t know about where you are from, but where I’m from that last several rounds of negotiations it sounded a lot like the teachers were trying to find ways to help students and the government was trying to cut the bottom line. One teachers union said it would take a pay cut to avoid spending cuts that would target classroom supplies and the government had no interest. Teachers unions are made of teachers, and teacher tend to care more about students than politicians do.
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No no, it’s doing a bang-up job. It just needs more control and more money to do things right.
Basically the same argument it’s applying to the internet, security and everything else under the sun these days. But you know, instead we’re going to pin it on the man, partisan squabbling, big business and blah blah blah, instead of horrible, inefficient, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.
The minute you raise your hand to object to shoveling more cash on the pyre of education or security you’re a corporate profit-driven stooge who hates teh kidz and freedom.
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Then you are between 30 and 33 and too young for “New Math”. That was over by the end of the 70’s.
Did no one else think that tweet might be anything other than dead serious?
I mean, twitter. Comedian. Self-righteous, Colbert-like tone. Kids loving math. (Funny!) Math making kids cry. (Funnier!) Classic ‘Thanks Obama’ punchline.
I laughed.
I would agree completely if Common Core taught useful things. . . like critical thinking skills, not to vote for horrible people, and not being an asshat.
I mean, the rest is good too. . . but if you’re going to use it for stupid then I don’t want you to be given the keys to adulthood and the freedom to ruin peoples’ lives.
/rant
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There are some major potential problems with holding teachers “responsible” for students’ learning outcomes, including:
- This discourages teachers from teaching in places where students have socioeconomic disadvantages or other factors that make them less likely to perform well
- This encourages teachers to “teach to the test” since test scores are ultimately what will determine how they will be judged.
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Bold claim, I’d be interested to see how it’s backed up.
Your Google is broken today?
Back-up for this “claim” is too complex for compression into a blog comment. But if you’re sincerely interested, here, try this:
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/reign_of_error_20131206
Major changes in education are made, time after time, by processes that are decidedly outside the legislative process by private foundations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the Broad Foundation, and by organizations that sound like governmental departments—the National Governors Association, for example—but are not. The best illustration of this is the creation and implementation of the deceptively named Common Core State Standards, a federal program funded by the Gates Foundation and written by education entrepreneurs such as David Coleman with little teacher input, that claims, using standards-based reform, to be able to indicate from the age of kindergarten whether or not a student is “college or career ready.” [As Diane Ravitch writes,] "State education departments warned that the enhanced rigor of the Common Core would cause test scores to plummet by as much as 30 percent, even in successful districts. Should this occur, the sharp decline in passing rates will reinforce those reformers’ claims about our ‘broken’ education system. This, in turn, will create a burgeoning market for new products and technologies. Some reformers hoped that the poor results of the new tests would persuade even suburban parents to lose faith in their community schools and demand not only new products but school closings, charters, and vouchers.”
And this one too; such explanations of the corporate grab for profit in the education “industry” are not hard to find:
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The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
Noam Chomsky
I feel the need for a musical interlude now. (Flashing Lights Warning!)
This is great! More people should watch it.
It did a good job of explaining why the current system is flawed, but didn’t really offer any solutions. What would a good school look like? Grouping kids by interest? That’s great except that it you end up with highly specialized kids that don’t have a solid base to fall back on if their original dream doesn’t pan out.
