... Assuming that Bronx Science and Stuyvesant (which has some of its own Nobelists, but no physicists) sorted out all of the physics talent in NYC ...
They didn't. Far Rockaway High School has two Nobel Prize in Physics alumini, Feynman and Richter. Plus one in Medicine. Not to mention Bernie Madoff.
Huh. I didn't even look and assumed that Feynman was Bronx Science.
So that makes it look even more as if Bronx Sci had some sort of physicist producing effect. (Or, I suppose, that NYC generally had an effect producing physicists, and Bronx Sci just collected them. But it's suggestive.)
Also Townsend Harris High School , Schwinger.
Yglesias' own success is an interesting case. Or Ross Douthat's. They do what they do very well, but it's hard to escape the feeling that their success is a product of something in addition to Internet meritocracy.
2
... Or, I suppose, that NYC generally had an effect producing physicists, ...
According to wikipedia 9 out of the 10 Nobel Prize winners in Physics referenced so far were Jewish. So the effect seems to have been attracting Jewish immigrants.
May I say, duh? That's almost certainly no different from a significant chunk of successful media types -- it's not a knock against Yglesias particularly at all. But it's how things work.
Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School , Murray Gell-Mann.
Yglesias' own success is an interesting case.
Fruit, low-hanging, responses to:
1. No, it isn't.
2. If so, it would be the first interesting thing about him.
3. Does anyone know where Yglesias went to school? He never mentions it.
4. I cannot be the only one who thinks of Lucille Ball's oft-abandoned crazy schemes when I see a link to Yglesias' new "urban planning" dodge.
Brooklyn Technical High School , Penzias.
Also, to the OP, your post seems sort of tangential to the point of the study. The study only purports to show an absence of "improved learning" (for marginal students). So the test scores are absolutely the right measure. That's interesting in its own right (and in line with a lot of other similar research), and entirely different from the question of network effects. Of course there could still be (and would be expected to be) networking benefits from close association with a talented peer group.
I think the main benefits of selective schools is that nerds get to socialize with other nerds.
I don't think that is the kind of thing that shows up standardized test scores. In fact, its probably a countervailing force... test scored get driven up by the rigor of the school, but driven down again because some proportion of the smart kids found other smart kids with whom they could get high.
James Monroe High School , Lederman.
Does anyone know where Yglesias went to school? He never mentions it.
Harvard. He mentions is all the fucking time.
14: The nom de typing isn't Sarcasmer, but come on.
15: Oh, you meant HS? The Dalton School in New York City.
Harvard is the Ohio State of the east coast.
May I say, duh?
You may. I know I'm dumb about this, but I'd genuinely like to understand how this works. Yglesias may still have been in college when I started reading him. What caused me to start reading his stuff?
I mean, I'm all meritocratic and shit. I read people because they have a perspective or information that I lack. Why does it happen that most of the folks I read come from a narrow socioeconomic slot, even with the allegedly level playing field of the Internet?
Oh, wow, I get it now. It seems I need more coffee.
2, 12: Socialization, signaling, and building trusted networks are all valuable and legitimate functions of schools.
Academic performance is arguably the least educable thing we ascribe to schools. (Socialization depends on your peers and instructors, but the amount of physics you can learn doesn't.)
Not sure I literally believe that, but it's probably less untrue than most people think.
18: How did you find out about him? Presumably someone linked to him. It helps to know already-influential people.
Also he was acculturated to a certain style of writing and thinking that seemed "better" to you (and I think it actually is better) than many of the alternatives who were elsewhere, part of this acculturation was doubtless received at Harvard, at Dalton, and of course at home by the sort of parents who sent their kids to such schools.
Also also he probably benefited from a culture of achievement and entitlement that made it easy to think starting a blog was a good idea.
To the OP: I sort of hate the existence of that sort of networking, and that it's so important to who gets to run things. On the other hand, to the extent we can't get rid of it, isn't it better that access to it shouldn't be limited to people whose parents could pay astronomical sums for private schools?
I felt guilty about getting my job through school connections, but once I started paying attention to who's good at their job, our top performers are those who got their jobs through networking. The quality of candidates we see through the posting -> resume -> job route is significantly lower.
Also, people you trust and know personally are cheaper to hire than people who are actually qualified.
Some of this is an institutional problem with HR and networking is the kludgey workaround. It probably differs from industry to industry.
Sort-of relevant. Warning: moderately ugly infographic. Als this comment uses an ugly neologism but it's too late to warn you about that. Sorry.
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Bay Area commenters: Are you looking for the most kick-ass fucking roommate that ever lived?
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This is of course interesting to me, as a graduate of a hotshot magnet high school. It does seem likely that the standardized test measure would basically measure the fact that you've sorted the students; the fact that the initial sorting has a large standardized-test component itself would reinforce this.
One of the articles or comments about this study mentioned the idea that the schools were considered sinecures of a sort by teachers, since the teacher bureaucracy was similar or identical but the discipline issues (which certainly seem like they're the most draining part of being a schoolteacher) were greatly reduced. Not clear what effect that really has on the students. Doesn't quite match my experience, since my school had some (limited?) ability to hire faculty from outside the usual teaching system.
11: It's tangential to the point of the study, narrowly construed, but the study broadly construed suggests that selective schools don't do their students any good at all, and that seems unlikely.
This is the kind of question that would involve actually reading the study, but how fine is the discrimination in test scoring at this level? It seems like the population in question is the population that would be most likely to max out the tests, or otherwise be difficult to measure.
I'd guess that isn't much of a problem, if being a marginal admission correlates with not being one of the top students in the school (which I'd guess it does). Only the top chunk of the class at Hunter was maxing out standardized tests (everyone was doing pretty darn well, but not maxing out). And my sense of Stuy is that they were so much bigger that the bottom half of their class went down lower than ours did, academic achievement-wise. Again, the worst performers at Stuy were still mostly pretty darn successful, but not maxing tests out.
the study broadly construed suggests that selective schools don't do their students any good at all, and that seems unlikely
That seems unlikely, sure, which is only one of many reasons that it would be silly to construe the study that broadly.
30 is an effect I was wondering about. My school district had, maybe, 8000 students graduating per year spread out over 20 or so schools. My high school had about 500 students graduating per year in 4 magnet programs. So naively the lowest 10% of those could probably have been in the top handful of students at a more local school. (In reality, I doubt it's that clear-cut, but let's go with it.) This means that along with the quality of education, you also have the confounding factor that instead of being recognized and rewarded for being the best, urged to do well as the pride of their local school, they're surrounded by people doing better than they are. I could imagine this could be demoralizing.
I could imagine this could be demoralizing.
This is a real effect, but I tend to think that it was better to take that hit to the ego in high school than in college, where I watched lots of other people freak out at suddenly not being the smartest person in the room.
I've mentioned watching that happen at U of C, where it cracked me up. It must have been happening at MIT too, but I didn't notice it as much -- I think the deflating egos weren't as transparently huge to begin with.
31: Isn't that the point of bringing it up at all? These elite schools are demonstrably useless, shut them down?
you also have the confounding factor that instead of being recognized and rewarded for being the best, urged to do well as the pride of their local school, they're surrounded by people doing better than they are. I could imagine this could be demoralizing
Didn't the study acknowledge this as a potential issue?
Harvard is the The Ohio State University of the east coast.
Isn't that the point of bringing it up at all? These elite schools are demonstrably useless, shut them down?
Isn't that who's point in bringing it up? Yglesias'? I don't think so.
33 I tend to think that it was better to take that hit to the ego in high school than in college
But whether it's personally better is a different question from how it impacts test scores and whether it's part of the "no academic benefit for marginal students" story.
36: I'm supposed to read the study? Blog commenting is too much work these days.
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Completely OT, sending this from an actal Kindle. Does it work?
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So of a group of similar students, those chosen to attend a good school where they will likely be near the bottom did only as well as their peers sent to a school where their ranking will be higher. Is it possible that how a student perceives his abilities relative to those around him affect his performance?
Yes, chris y, it does. Just be careful with your typing. You missed the "u" in "actual."
My understanding is that Yglesias's big break was that he was the first person to post to the internet the content of my class's (one year older than his class) graduation speech "My American Jihad." This was spring '02 and there was a bit of a hullabaloo because only the title had been leaked, and the speaker was palestinian. That said, I think Yglesias is such a good blogger that he would have gotten noticed in the early days of blogging one way or the other. But certainly as things played out in reality Harvard helped.
35
Isn't that the point of bringing it up at all? These elite schools are demonstrably useless, shut them down?
One point is there isn't much difference between schools. And most of what difference there is, is from peer effects not the quality of the teachers or the facilities. So much of the talk about "fixing" schools is nonsense, the schools aren't broken. You have your smart kids and your dumb kids and expecting schools to teach dumb kids to be smart is like expecting schools to teach short kids to be tall.
My public school system didn't have magnet high schools when I was there. I was probably the top student as far as academic achievements in my school's graduating class, and I guess there was something nice about that. But there were downsides: First, my school just wasn't set up to send people on to good colleges, since so few of its students were remotely prepared for the level of work that would be required. Between that and my parents' limited horizons, I didn't really think much about going anyplace besides Big Mormon U. Also, there's been no positive networking effect for me at all.
I think with Douthat the main advantage of Harvard is that it gave him an opportunity to work at a high quality newspaper. Newspaper op-eds are a weird format, and he's been doing that since he was 19 or so. My recollection at the time (when I was pretty apolitical) was that he was clearly the best writer at school at the time. (For some reason this piece has always stayed with me.) That said, I'm not convinced that his career would have been demonstrably different if he had been a regularly columnist at a good newspaper and ran the conservative newspaper at another boston area school. (I'm not sure whether any of the BC/BU/Tufts/Brandeis schools have a great paper, but I'd bet one of them does.) Surely the Atlantic would have still hired him. Maybe he wouldn't have sold his first book as easily without the Harvard hook, but he is a conservative and they don't seem to have trouble getting book deals.
I vaguely think Yglesias didn't like the schools that he went to and wishes he'd gone to more "normal" schools where he would have been able to do more drinking, watching sports, and bedding women by impressing them by being smarter than the other people there.
That said, I'm not convinced that his career would have been demonstrably different if he had been a regularly columnist at a good newspaper and ran the conservative newspaper at another boston area school.
Would have been different, obviously you can't tell. But that his odds were much better having come out of Harvard seems very likely.
46: If he believes what? That the schools don't meaningfully raise test scores or that they're demonstrably useless? (I don't see anything in his post to suggest that the former implies the latter, which is what you seem to be arguing against. And I don't think you're wrong to argue against that idea, I just don't think there's anyone taking the other side of this argument. (Oh, I'm sure they're out there. But no one here, nor Yglesias (much less the study itself, which seemed to be your initial suggestion).) It's sort of obviously right and well accepted that at least a large part of the benefit of selective schools is the networking opportunity.
49: I'd agree with you more if he weren't also conservative. Conservatives have their own affirmative action system and network of connections. There are lots of successful conservative writers who are way way less talented than Douthat.
50: Well, look at this from Yglesias's post:
Consider it your daily reminder that when it comes to education, good outcomes are not the same as great teaching.
He's talking about outcomes generally being unchanged by the selective schools, rather than test scores specifically. And that seems wrong to me. If you did think it was right, there'd be no reason not to shut them all down.
He's talking about outcomes generally being unchanged by the selective schools, rather than test scores specifically
No, read the quote again. He's talking about outcomes generally being unchanged by teaching. Which, if the outcomes are mostly network driven, isn't wrong.
49, 51: Let us all pause to remember a singularly witless and untalented conservative writer who came on the scene because his mother arranged it that anyone wanting to hear the Lewinsky tapes had to go through him. I think he even got a NYer byline out of it.
44: You have your smart kids and your dumb kids and expecting schools to teach dumb kids to be smart is like expecting schools to teach short kids to be tall.
Improved nutrition, some of which was provided through school lunch programs, has, in fact, taught many Americans to be tall. Environmental influences matter a lot.
53: Here we're getting into implicature. Under your reading of the study, what's interesting about it from the point of view of a blogger interested in education policy? I can't see a reason to bring it up other than as "Selective schools lack value".
32: those poor dumb bastards?
Here's a possibly on-topic anecdata: I grew up in a mid-sized Canadian city. I went to McGill. My best friend from high school went to Harvard. I got a job with a computer start-up that was in my field; she got a job with a financial services firm on Wall Street (with an English degree! go figure). She is now independently wealthy and "retired" before the age of thirty. I ... am not.
Sometimes, I think that perhaps Harvard would've been worth it. (I was middle-class enough that attending Harvard would have been a huge financial strain for my family; she got financial aid.)
Surely you mean "UMC enough." (I don't think "middle class enough" should be allowed to mean "top 10% family income" which is almost surely how you're using it there.)
(I don't think "middle class enough" should be allowed to mean "top 10% family income" which is almost surely how you're using it there.)
Seriously, why not? It is perfectly reasonable to define the upper class, or the rich, as a very small percentage of the population. I don't really understand the insistence that people who work for a living aren't middle class if they make more than average.
Choosing Yglesias as an example of Ivy-league non-meritocracy seems very odd. I've certainly had my frustrations with him in the past,* but he is very very good at what he does, in many ways helped to pioneer (or, at least took advantage of) the new blogging technology, and is one of the few people from Harvard who didn't rely upon a well-trod, relatively low risk career path. If there's a class-based element to his success, it's probably just that his parents were well off enough to feel like he could take a flyer on a career as a professional blogger, but even that's not that unusual.
To the OP, I am very ashamed to admit it but my initial response was basically Shearer's in 5.
And I think generally if you're going to have elite private schools you might as well have elite public schools; not the most important issue in the world, but it provides for a mild democratization effect.
*MY's blog has improved enormously since he took the urban planning content offline in preparation for his "book."
"New blogging technology" is a dumb way to put it, but I just mean that he was one of the first to really figure out, and be talented at, the mix of wonkery and rapid fire instant-time punditry that he does.
That's why I said "upper middle class enough" because "rich" has different connotations. But people need to be reminded that things like in 58 come up when you're talking about people who could pay full tuition twice over and still be making more than the average family. "Middle class enough" should mean "towards the middle class" not "towards the upper end of middle class." You don't use "average enough" to mean tall.
Under your reading of the study, what's interesting about it from the point of view of a blogger interested in education policy? I can't see a reason to bring it up other than as "Selective schools lack value".
What's interesting about it from the point of view of a blogger interested in education policy is that it's a significant new study about educational outcomes.
Since your reading of the study isn't "selective schools lack value", I'm not sure I understand why you think that anyone bringing up the study must be reading it that way. (Unless, and I guess this might be your implication: you think the the study, if interpreted properly, is basically meaningless and tells us nothing? If that's what you mean, I would disagree.)
Though it's possible here that what's going on is that being Canadian is bad for financial aid at american schools (some combination of eligibility issues and the higher taxes/cheaper schools tradeoff meaning Canadians have less money left to pay for college because they don't need to), and that Marty van B actually meant middle class.
Since your reading of the study isn't "selective schools lack value", I'm not sure I understand why you think that anyone bringing up the study must be reading it that way.
Because I think it would be odd, if one thought that it were perfectly obvious that selective schools were valuable, to bring up a study arguing that they lack one major possible type of value without mentioning other possibilities for where their value lies. Which Yglesias doesn't.
Now, I think it's possible that selective schools do lack value. But a discussion of the effect of selective schools on the achievement as measured by standardized tests of marginal admittees clearly isn't going to capture a lot of possible value that they add, and if you're talking about selective schools, it gives a false impression not to mention that.
MY's blog has improved enormously
I've thought he had a couple great posts recently. I absolutely love that he calls things "bad" or "good."
61: I really don't mean to be slamming Yglesias as not deserving his success -- I think he's very good, and I think most people with prestigious jobs network their way into them. But of the bloggers I was reading and thinking well of in the first half of the last decade, he's one of the few who's getting paid for it, and I think that's probably at least partially due to personal connections that were easier to build at Dalton and Harvard. It's not impossible without them, but having them changes the odds.
66 would be fair if his post were in any way framed around the question of whether selective schools were valuable. But it isn't. The post is titled "Do Exclusive Public Schools Teach Better?" [emphasis added]. His whole conclusion, as you've already quoted, is "when it comes to education, good outcomes are not the same as great teaching".
There's really nothing at all in his post purporting to claim that achievement as measured by standardized tests of marginal admittees is a good barometer for all or even most of the "possible value that they [selective schools] add". His post is claiming that it's a reasonable barometer for the value added by their superior teaching. Which, I'd say, it seems like it would be a reasonable barometer for that. (With the significant caveat that these schools really might be catering to the best students, and leaving the marginal students behind in some sense, which the study acknowledges.)
I just don't see a big "networking effects" difference between Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias. If anything, Ezra Klein has the more impressive network of connections despite not even being from the east coast let alone the ivy league.
Didn't he have a more-or-less identical career to Ezra Klein (except that it's likely that Ezra gets paid more), and I don't think you can attribute Ezra's success to the chokehold that UC Santa Cruz alums have over elite DC discourse.
I think UPETGI and I are over our mock-fighting stage of the romcom and are now into the passionately making out stage.
We've taken this new "agreeing" thing too far.
So close to the elusive double-pwn.
68: Off-topic, but what Gandalf says about death and life applies to success and failure, mutatis mutandis.
70, 71: Eh, hard to tell.
69: You are, as always, from Mars. But if it makes you happier, consider my post absolutely agnostic on what Yglesias's point might have been (indeed, it says nothing on that topic), and merely raising some information on a peripherally related subject that Yglesias's post brought to mind.
Klein was Jesse Taylor's original co-blogger at Pandagon -- Taylor isn't a Harvard guy either, but her parlayed his Pandagon cred into a job in the Strickland campaign and later administration. It was just an easier time to get attention back then, I think.
76: well, that's what I said initially. If your point was just that elite schools can have value apart from increased standardized test scores, that's true but sort of obviously right and, as far as I can tell, uncontested. The benefits of networking opportunities with successful and talented peer groups are fairly well understood.
78: I fold. The post lacked all value, and said nothing that anyone could possibly be interested by. The only topic of any interest is what strange perversity of attention led you to focus on it for long enough to comment, given its utter lack of any content not painfully obvious to any reader capable of successfully drawing breath.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that your post was valueless or uninteresting. Only that your post seemed to be taking issue with the study itself, and your comments seem to be taking issue with Yglesias's take on the study, and I don't think either the study itself or Yglesias are disagreeing with you.
The only topic of any interest is what strange perversity of attention led you to focus on it for long enough to comment
Eh, so now you two are at the mock fighting stage. Get to the passionate making out already!
I will always treasure the memory of the one intensely romantic lunch we shared, and all the different kinds of tomato soup you ordered.
I read the post as part of Yggles' argument that society should put more resources should to the disadvantaged, not to the advantaged. It connects to his argument against giving money to Harvard that he mentions regularly. Not that Harvard was bad for him, just that he would have done fine in life without it, and he can do more good for the world by handing out twenties to panhandlers. He doesn't view creating more opportunities for smart kids to get hired by the New Yorker as a good use of tax dollars.* I agree with him.
84 is 100% right, I think.
Yglesias' argument actually did help persuade me to stop giving money to the elite private schools I attended and use the money for other charity. OK, and to keep some of it, too.
Don't leave us hanging, unimaginative. We need your footnote.
And as a caveat to 84 I do think that as long as we're gonna have super-elite private schools it's a good plan to have elite public ones as well. It would be sad if we had only Harvards and no Berkeleys or UCLAs or Michigans (I know you're trying, state legislatures!).
He doesn't view creating more opportunities for smart kids to get hired by the New Yorker as a good use of tax dollars.*
There's a couple of different issues with that. First, kids who go to these schools are 'advantaged' in an absolute sense, mostly. Not grindingly poor. But they're also mostly not rich enough to buy private-school connections. I think there's a worthwhile argument to be made that it's (while still not socially ideal) better that that sort of networking advantage should be available to the middle class, rather than only the rich.
Second, 'a good use of tax dollars'? I don't think these schools cost anything significant to run that a school for the same number of students wouldn't. Stuy has a nice building it got in the 90s, but it was in a shitty old building before that, and Bronx Science's building is nothing special. (Hunter was absolutely a shithole, physically, and still is.) I couldn't swear that per-student funding is precisely the same as it is for other students, but there's no reason it couldn't be.
That's not an argument for exam schools, but I think the 'tax dollars' argument is a nonsense argument against them.
It is reasonable to believe that the networking benefit of an elite public school isn't all that great. Networking is strongest in prestigious colleges.
If a student gets into a most prestigious college and goes to a highly prestigious college instead he will take about a 10% hit in income.
The sat is set up as a stealth iq test. It isn't surprising that the high school you go doesn't make a difference.
I think the policy implications of these types of things is to leave the public school teachers alone. The "good enough" teacher is all you need.
88 seems Right. An argument against exam schools would need to focus on some of the same arguments that people make against voucher schools--removal of the best and brightest students from the rest of the school system, which is bad for the rest of the schools and the rest of the students somehow, and also inegalitarian, etc. Or something like that. I'm probably not the best person to sketch out the argument, since I'm strongly in favor of exam schools.
Exam schools make your palms hairy.
An argument against exam schools would need to focus on some of the same arguments that people make against voucher schools--removal of the best and brightest students from the rest of the school system, which is bad for the rest of the schools and the rest of the students somehow, and also inegalitarian, etc.
Yeah, ttaM usually makes that one. And I'm sympathetic to it. But I'm also sympathetic to the idea that a smart kid who grew up broke should be able to get to the inside track for influential jobs in the same way a rich kid can.
I don't follow the line of reasoning in 89. It seems to be:
1. Prestigious colleges don't have much effect on outcomes.
2. Prestigious colleges have better teachers
=> 3. Better teachers don't have much effect on outcomes.
=> 4. We shouldn't bother trying to produce better teachers.
But where does '2' come from? In the areas I've studied (math + engineering), prestigious colleges certainly have better researchers, but I'm not convinced that being a better researcher translates to being a better teacher.
I'd really like to see some research on the effect on the rest of a school system of concentrating the top students in a couple of schools.
I'm playing with My Little Pony!
Wait, pony? I meant penis.
I think the bottom line is that elite education just doesn't matter that much. If tracked public schools aren't that expensive to set up or run, fine, though they do have costs as Ttam often points out. But we shouldn't really expect them to either drive equality very much or, really, to matter much at all.
I mean in a macro sense, of course; obviously the school you go to has an individually important effect on your life. But compared to the amount of energy and focus and interest it gets, the issue of super-elite education just isn't that important, whereas broader educational policy is.
Hey, I heard a joke today! Want to hear it?
What has two thumbs and is borderline retarded?
THIS GUY!
I suspect that the exam high schools do cost more than the regular ones, lab equipment and such, but perhaps "resources" would be a better word than "tax dollars." The teachers at those schools are better than average. If they were spread out among all of the schools that would be an improved resource for the non-exam champions. There's also an argument that the smartest kids are themselves a resource for the rest of the kids in their own school. E.g. if the top kid at a regular school landed at the New Yorker, his/her average buddies could fiind out about opportunites for copyediting positions, etc. that don't require great intelligence but do require knowing when to send the resume in.
I would be curious to find out what percentage of Stuyvesant and Hunter rejects end up at a private school. I'd guess a significant proportion.
I won't defend Yglesias' preferences for reducing inequality on the bottom end because I don't really believe in it, but it animates many of his quirky positions. E.g. the deregulation of haircutting.
Another objection to exam schools is their relative whiteness (and yellowness), and the effect that has on the racial and demographic balance of the public schools. I'm not clear how much that is still true.
I'd guess that once you get past setup costs labs are cheaper at exam schools: the students are less likely to break, lose, or steal the equipment.
99 to 88. I'm too slow for this site.
That's not an argument for exam schools, but I think the 'tax dollars' argument is a nonsense argument against them.
Per a comment above, MY's post appears to connect to his theme that we can do more by focusing on the lower end than the higher end. Here's a place where JBS can derail the convo! Keeping in mind that connection to his theme, "tax dollars" can also be "tax expenditures" and the charitable donation exemption could be reduced.
Exam schools make your palms hairy.
I suspect that the exam high schools do cost more than the regular ones, lab equipment and such, but perhaps "resources" would be a better word than "tax dollars."
Again, mmaybe, but it didn't look that way from the inside. Not enough lab equipment to go around, old textbooks -- not that it was endless suffering, but it wasn't a spiffy, all the clean new supplies you want educational experience. Now, Hunter's weird because it's 'public' in the free and state-run sense, but not part of the city schools, but my impression is that the same's true for Stuy: they don't get stuff in a different way or in different amount than other city schools.
Better teachers? Again, mmmaybe. Some of ours were good, some were terrible, and some were tolerable (or even good) because we were an easy audience, discipline-wise, but would have been chewed up and spit out by even slightly rowdy students. For that last class of teacher, at least, we weren't using any resources that would have been useful at all in a different type of school.
There's also an argument that the smartest kids are themselves a resource for the rest of the kids in their own school.... Another objection to exam schools is their relative whiteness (and yellowness), and the effect that has on the racial and demographic balance of the public schools.
If there's an argument against them, and I think there may be, this is it. I think there's no question but that the exam schools are richer and less black/hispanic than the rest of the city system.
I would be curious to find out what percentage of Stuyvesant and Hunter rejects end up at a private school. I'd guess a significant proportion.
My guess is significant, yes, but in the 10-25% level of significant, rather than most of the kids. Most of my friends, paying for an elite private school would have been out of reach without a scholarship or something. (I have admitted here that my parents were planning to bankrupt themselves to send me to a ghastly elite girls school if I hadn't gotten in to Hunter. They hadn't considered it for my big sister, who would have stayed in the regular public schools if she hadn't tested in, but I was such a socially strange little oddball that they thought public highschool students would kill me and eat me. But man, would it have hurt them bad, financially.)
Commenting about Exam schools make your palms hairy.
And gives you premature postulation.
On the subject of cost, I went to Townsend (see 3 for all the exciting wikipedia details) and my understanding is that our funding wasn't terribly different than most NYC public schools and a bit less on average since we didn't have as many students with special needs qualifying for various sorts of help. The facilities weren't particularly impressive although there were a few additional resources that were provided with outside funds and through alumni.
I don't think there was much added value from instruction itself (although I did have to learn Latin and take a bunch of college courses senior year, which had benefits but you can get credits from AP classes elsewhere to same effect) but rather from the student body itself. It was stupidly safe and without any serious discipline problems which was very different from my previous public school experiences. There was also a general expectation that you'd apply yourself in high school (the attendance rate was also stupidly high) and then go off to college. While I can see that institutional culture benefiting marginal students most of it was a result of the student body being made up of the kind of smart middle class kids who were going to do it anyway. The safety and discipline was also probably a product of that and the fact that the student body was about 70% female. I don't think the school experience made me any more likely to perform in school or go off to college but it did make my high school experience more pleasant than it would have likely been if I ended up in my neighborhood high school (which was overcrowded enough to require being operated on two shifts.)
I'm not sure there have been any distinct network benefits. Some of that has to do with the fact that the school was shut down in the 30s and reopened in the late 80s so there isn't the same numbers of potentially useful alumni that a Stuy or Hunter has out there.
I was such a socially strange little oddball that they thought public highschool students would kill me and eat me. But man, would it have hurt them bad, financially.
I almost went to private school for this reason, and didn't go for this reason. And indeed, the fears were to some degree justified.
100: -When I was in (suburban public non-exam) high school there was a theft of a significant number of chem lab scales, very useful to drug dealers. The kids in the one AP chemistry class had keys to the relevant storage closet. The principal lost interest in the investigation when he figured out it might reduce the number of Ivy League-bound kids he could brag about. None of the kids were even interviewed.
(No, it wasn't me. I would have reported a lost key.)
I would have reported a lost key.
If you were by me during choir, you'd have never done anything but report a lost key.
I would have reported a lost key.
What about a lost lid?
Don't make me find my "Take A Bite Out of Crime" booklet so I can look up your modern druggie slang terms.
I've always wondered what that ineffable thing is that some teachers have that lets them control a class of badly behaved kids. We had some teachers at high school who weren't the toughest sounding, or the strictest, or, on the other hand, the funniest or the most likeable who just _had_ it. It was like the Force.
'I am not the teacher you will be fucking with.'
'You are not the teacher we will be fucking with.'
In some cases it's obvious. They are hard fuckers, or have the kind of scathing wit that can make kids fear being singled out, or they can be really really charismatic and likeable, but there's a set that have none of those (on the surface) and yet ...
It's not the whole thing, but from teaching the two years I did, one thing I could see but couldn't do is speed of reaction time. By the time something annoyed me enough to make it stop, I'd been tolerating low-level misbehavior for awhile, and then I couldn't get the kids to quit when I wanted them to. Good disciplinarians nipped bad behavior in the bud, before it was even really identifiable as such -- not so much by being harsh about it, just noticing and derailing/redirecting.
I was awful at it.
1. Prestigious colleges don't have much effect on outcomes.
-I think the benefits of the prestigious colleges are largely networking.
2. Prestigious colleges have better teachers
-I don't know whether this is true or not. I was talking about high school and elementary school teachers where people get worked up about teacher quality. If prestigious schools wanted to have better teachers they totally could. Just make it a priority for hiring and retention.
=> 3. Better teachers don't have much effect on outcomes.
I agree with this. Just as better parents don't have much affect on outcomes. Good enough is all you need.
=> 4. We shouldn't bother trying to produce better teachers.
Right now mediocre college students become high school and elementary teachers. I am fine with that. All you need is good enough. Conservatives just want to bust up some unions. Liberal reformers shouldn't help them.
108
Louis ck did that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjEnC9LOuuY
Rhymeswithmaria claims that the keys to classroom management are knowing the students names and not talking while the students are talking.
I took MY's point to be that the better schools don't (necessarily) have better teachers- that they have better outcomes overall, but that that is just because they have stronger students. If they had better teachers than other schools, you'd see an effect in outcome on the borderline kids' outcomes.
I've taught teenagers, but they were either quite large groups of fairly academic and/or rich kids [US summer school students in Oxford], or were being taught one-on-one. So I've no idea how good I'd be with a classroom of ordinary 15 year olds, say. I can produce a voice like a pissed off Scottish Stentor if I want, but it's not like you can control a group of unruly kids that way.
My ex g/friend taught under 12s in the most deprived schools in Glasgow. She had that ineffable thing. With her it seemed to be a mix of amusement, big-sisterly pissed-off-ness, and a vague air that she was capable of something really really nasty if she lost it. But mostly she seemed to deal with them* just by being unflabbable, and faintly taking the piss in a wry way that the kids picked up on.
* I went on a few class trips with them as a helper
116, 118: I bet they both had/have the speed/on-top-of-the-little-stuff thing I was talking about (which includes distinguishing easily between little-stuff that isn't going to be a problem, and little-stuff that is). It's hard to describe exactly, but looking at a successful teacher handling a class, it'd be easy to point out.
My ex had done 4 years of teacher training and could be fairly harsh about the people who'd just done 1 year conversion courses after a standard BA/BSc. Not because of subject knowledge, but because by the time she was out teaching she'd had much more cumulative hours both observing, and being observed in a wide range of classroom environments. I'm not sure if the 4year B.Ed is mostly a Scottish thing, or not.
When I was in (suburban public non-exam) high school there was a theft of a significant number of chem lab scales, very useful to drug dealers.
This must be a very widespread problem. My best friend had a very nice triple-beam-balance, with a very nice "Property of Montgomery County Public Schools" asset sticker on the side.
85 Yglesias' argument actually did help persuade me to stop giving money to the elite private schools I attended and use the money for other charity.
Yep. Me too.
93 prestigious colleges certainly have better researchers, but I'm not convinced that being a better researcher translates to being a better teacher
I am, at least on average when considering teaching to good students instead of mediocre students. Learning subjects from people who don't really understand them is a pain.
Off the precise topic, but something that drives me nuts:
Is there anyone out there at all talking about 'education reform' in terms of curriculum and teacher training and school organization rather than solely about firing teachers?
I have nothing against firing bad teachers. I kind of agree that teaching, while difficult, isn't rocket science, and so the teachers we've got are probably mostly fine, and capable of doing as good a job as necessary. I don't see why the response to that has to be "Guess you don't think there's any point at all in having the schools not suck."
Surely schools can be run better even if not all of their employees are savant/saints? Other professions seem to work fine with normal people in them.
[I'd have to do some work to actually aim this at anyone. So consider it snarled at a strawman, unless you can find a better target.]
Is there anyone out there at all talking about 'education reform' in terms of curriculum and teacher training and school organization rather than solely about firing teachers?
Well, there are people who talk about it in terms of paying good teachers more.
I thought reason people mostly focused on teachers is because all the research shows they're basically all that matters. Class size, curriculum style, etc. don't have nearly the same impact (if any measurable impact at all) on outcomes as good teachers vs. bad teachers. The problem is that we don't really seem to know how to reliably create good teachers. And I do think an awful lot of effort has gone and is still going into that.
I have nothing against firing bad teachers.
If I said you had a poorly informed pedagogical technique, would you hold it against me?
125: Really, there's research showing that curriculum doesn't matter? That seems nuts to me.
I thought people focused on teachers because the right hates unions, and particularly hates public employee unions, and it's an excuse to say we're union-busting for the childddrrrren. I can't imagine how there could be research showing that curriculum doesn't matter.
Well, within certain parameters, I'm sure. And by "curriculum", I mostly mean things like classes focused on traditional rote memorization vs. problem sovling, on group participation vs. lectures, etc. None of which is "curriculum" exactly. Although I think tests on things like traditional math curriculums vs. "new math" curriculums, etc. all also make little difference.
There's the claim that teachers are like NFL quarterbacks, there's no way to tell from their training which ones are good and which ones are bad. You just have to let them play and fire the ones who are bad. This argument suggests that we already do too much teacher training, and should stop requiring masters degrees.
I keep on reading that there's research showing that the KIPP schools work wonders. Isn't that curriculum, rather than some mystic hiring ability?
From the first link:
There is much public discussion but almost no evidence on the effects of high school curriculum on postsecondary education and on success in the labor market. I use the large variation in curriculum across US high schools to identify the effects on wages and educational attainment of specific courses of study. The main finding is that the return to additional courses in academic subject is small. One cannot account for the value of a year of high school with estimates of the value of the courses taken by the typical student during the year.
132: But that hasn't got anything to do with different curriculum designs for the same material, that's research on whether it matters which classes you take in high school.
131: I mean, it seems completely implausible that no possible variations in what we teach or how we teach it could have any meaningful impact on learning outcomes, bar some mystic ability of some people who just inherently have the right mojo. The problem is just that (insofar as I understand things) we don't really know what the mojo is, or how to get it reliably from anyone into anyone else. But, as I said, there's lots of research into that question going on, and if KIPP schools have some answers (honestly i have no idea), then I'm sure someone is looking into that.
But that hasn't got anything to do with different curriculum designs for the same material, that's research on whether it matters which classes you take in high school.
Well, I actually thought that's what you were asking. For the former, I actually think there's more research, because it's a little easier to study. See the new maths vs. old maths stuff. etc.
Also, I would hope by this point you probably know that I don't actually have the faintest goddamn idea what I'm talking about with any of this. I'm just shooting from the hip. But I'm pretty sure I'm right.
But think about the plausibility. Every other goddam task in the world, when you talk about how to do it better you talk about training people to do it, developing systems and procedures, managing the people who do it, and so on.
Teaching is the one task out there where the only way to improve outcomes (or even an important component of improving outcomes) is to be quicker to fire the weak performers? That's really, really, really implausible.
My (also totally uninformed) impression is that most of the curriculum-development stuff is kind of tinkering around the edges. You've probably heard some of the same buzz I have about Salman Khan and his youtube videos--his idea is that instead of in-class "teaching" and at-home practice problems and review, the two should be reversed: make kids watch lectures at home and have teachers on hand for as-needed help with the follow up to them.
I expect that this is just the trendy hype of the moment and too simple/pat to be scalable, but it is an interesting idea. I understand he's getting lots of money from Gates to see what he can do.
137: well, 138, but also I think although you're painting an exaggerated picture, management generally is considered to be like this. There are thousands of books you can read, and schools you can attend, and personal coaching you can receive, and all those things might help a good manager become even better or a worse manager become slightly less worse, but at the end of the day when given a team of people and a task to accomplish, some people just seem to have some ineffable skill at motivating people and that others lack. And it's very difficult to figure out in advance who will flop and who won't, or pinpoint exactly why. There's a many different styles and approaches that seem to work for some people and fail for others.
And honestly the parallels between teaching and management don't seem all that much of a stretch.
But for managers, getting fired for not being particularly good at managing is a weird thing to happen. People get fired for showing up to work drunk, for harassing people, all sorts of things. But as far as I know, it's unusual to fire someone for just not being a good manager.
Instead, organizations are designed to work adequately with the managers they've got. And people put a fair amount of thought into doing that, in a way that seems to be rejected in the currently fashionable talk about education reform.
But for managers, getting fired for not being particularly good at managing is a weird thing to happen.
Sort of. Sort of not. But, whether or not it's a common cause of firing, it's very definitely a determining factor in their evaluations, in their pay raises, in their promotions. And of course, even absent actual firing, there's always a real risk that if they perform poorly they will be fired, especially if the performance is consistent. That alone would motivate people to do everything they can to do as well as they can, whether that means reading another book or seeking out some coaching or just talking to colleagues about what's working and what isn't. All the incentives point them towards improving their outcomes as much as possible.
I think most of the complaints about teachers focus on the fact that more or less none of the above is true of them. NCLB was supposed to change that somewhat, although it does so in transparently shitty ways.
I, on the other hand, thought that there was evidence that basically giving teachers a script and telling them to follow it showed better results than allowing discretion in the classroom. Which suggests that standardization is as important as protecting mystical teacher mojo. But I'm just remembering some article I read somewhere.
(And of course, the incentives aren't all downside (firing). Good managers get raises and promotions. I sort of said that but it deserves emphasis.)
My impression (mostly from Rhymeswithmaria's jobs) is that companies only care about evaluations of people by their superiors, not their subordinates. Hence managers can be as bad as they want at managing as long as the next manager up likes them.
Well, they don't have to be liked by their subordinates, no. They are generally given concrete goals and measured on their ability to deliver concrete results, however. Now, certainly, there are times when a bad manager is blessed with a good team, and gets good results through no virtue of her own. (This also seems parallel to teaching.) But overall, there are certainly some people who are better at it than others.
I think what I'm thinking of is called "Direct Instruction.". And that it provides a script even mediocre teachers can follow.
124: I'd have to do some work to actually aim this at anyone.
I think you could hit the broad side of a Shearer with that comment.
Also, I know some people who went to Bronx Science, and they're not as smart as me.
142, 144 -- Urple, you've worked at places that operate this way in reality?
Yes. At least in theory. Don't most large, hierarchical business organizations work that way? At least in theory.
Hence my question about reality.
Places I've worked, a very small sample, the reality was more or less binary: is the manager so bad he/she must be fired? If yes, let's transfer her/him. If not, give him/her a raise. OK, maybe a third option: bad enough to be fired = transfer; just barely better than bad enough = leave in place with nominal raise (to stay ahead of the worker bees); not bad = raise.
142, 144: What worker's paradise do you live in?
In my experience, it takes pretty serious dereliction of duty to jeopardize management bonuses. If you're talking about people on the lower rungs -- team leaders, low-level supervisors -- then sure, they're subject to a huge amount of labor discipline. But if you mean actual middle-management or lower executive-level people, there's almost no part of their compensation or prospects for advancement that depend on them being "good managers". And I don't just mean in terms of what would be good for employees. I mean that once you get into management, you can be pretty much a complete fuck-up, totally unable to manage your employees, totally out of touch with what's happening in your department, and you are still sitting pretty unless you actively piss off your manager. That's just the way life works under capitalism, and its never going to change.
I think the reason that teaching methods (rote or not, new math or old) don't correlate with performance improvements is that they target students with different learning styles (not sure if I should scare quote that). So Johnny thrives under rote while Janie withers, and then the district switches methods, and Janie thrives and Johnny withers, and the district's scores look the same under each method.
I suspect this also explains the success of Direct Instruction that Halford mentions. Many more students are harmed by bad teachers than are helped by good ones, so mediocrity all around is useful. Basically, most smart kids from supportive families will succeed (certainly in blunt measures like standardized tests) regardless of teaching quality, as long as their education isn't actively sabotaged. Kids in the middle (smart with tough backgrounds, dumb with support) just need basic competence to succeed, but as a rule won't excel even with great teaching (some fraction will). And then tough kids only occasionally succeed with great teaching, but never with bad teaching; mediocrity probably catches most of the gain between bad and great. All speculation of course, and I don't really agree that "firing the worst" is the only solution. But it makes a certain amount of sense in a system in which you can't precisely match students with suitable teachers.
As for managers, I think there's an ability to relocate a transparently bad manager into a position in which he does less managing and more something that he is competent at. Pretty much all teachers teach, so you can't just shift them around.
That's just the way life works under capitalismhuman society, and its never going to change.
Seriously, we're social animals, not talent evaluating animals. If you clear the competence threshold and your boss likes you, you're in, regardless of ability.
I have a rough theory that it's often the case that the companies that surge - whether when new or even once established - are better at talent evaluation, but that this is an uphill battle, and eventually they fall into the same social rut as every other company. Look at Microsoft - once innovative and talent-driven, now as culturally moribund as pre-2008 GM. I'd argue that Apple went through this cycle, but that Jobs has somehow reinstated talent-based rewards into the system, and the result has been success (both in terms of products and business). But Apple won't always be a company like that. Someday a guy will get promoted despite shipping a crap product, and then it will be just like every other company.
BTW, the other big tension in this discussion wrt schools is that good principals know exactly who needs to be fired. The trouble is, good principals are about as common as good teachers, and the rest are ignorant jagoffs like most managers, and would, given the opportunity, fire teachers on the basis of personality.
NLCB was supposed to align incentives properly (principals of failing schools get fired, too), but it still assumes that bad principals will act like good ones if properly incented. By this reasoning, of course, we'd all be great baseball players, since the pay is so good.
"isn't it better that access to it shouldn't be limited to people whose parents could pay astronomical sums for private schools?"
YES!! and that's why, as some of us said at the time, Labour should not have abolished the grammar schools before abolishing the public schools. A bas la bourgeoisie!
154: Yeah, I mean, I think we must be talking at cross-purposes then. Every big organization I've worked in has had completely incompetent managers who were absolutely solid in their positions, unless there was some kind of Night of the Long Knives to cut costs.
When I worked in the Parking Department of a large University Medical Center, for instance, the guy who was responsible for my supervisor had, just prior to hiring her, started going through the department files and just throwing everything away willy-nilly. His secretaries couldn't stop him until he'd already destroyed 1/3 of the files for the department. Not only that, but he was extremely familiar with many of the female employees, and he clearly drank. And he was absolutely untouchable.
By contrast, when I worked at the stock brokerage, I knew a fellow who was an extremely competent and on-the-ball manager. He rejected the advances of his female superior and was kicked to the curb faster than you could say Jack Robinson.
There's no meritocracy, it's all a scam.
156: NCLB also assumes facts not in evidence such as competent superintendents and school board members.
but it still assumes that bad principals will act like good ones if properly incented
I'm not sure it assumes that, so much as that if we fire all the bad ones, only the good ones will be left. And if we then recruit more, wash, rinse and repeat through several cycles, in theory we could end up with a much better set of principals.
|| I don't normally read this newspaper, so missed this until now. A little BS for the weekend.|>
161: I cannot recall the federal government's ever banking surplus funds in a protected account, even during the surplus-laden 1990s. If Washington ever digs out of the current hole and runs a cash balance, Congress should likewise put some grain in the bin.
HA HA HA AL GORE SAID "LOCKBOX" WHAT A FUNNY WORD LOOK AT THOSE EARTH TONE SUITS WHAT A LOSER HE INVENTED THE INTERNET YOU KNOW.
161: I like this, Now that federal spending is the country's top issue .... Gosh, one day we all woke up and dagnabbit, there it was a new top issue for the country. Well, no use complaining, let's Git R Done!
One does have to wonder what is motivating BS to venture thus. He's term-limited, and has faced his last legislature. There might be a US Senate opening in 2014; he's said he's not interested, but I'm not sure anyone believes that. (I told the first lady in 2005 that they'd dodged a bullet when BS lost the Senate race in 2000. Because, you know, DC and all. She made a face.)
|| I don't know what other people are following, but from my Twitter feed, it's looking like the Libyan war is actually starting to look like it just might turn out.|>
165: Nato, of course, has every reason to paint a positive picture of the rebels' gains.
The BBC misspelled my name!
Why the hell is the BBC so in love with passive-voice constructions? It's very silly.
This bio of Montana first lady kind of relates to the OP. Teachers that make a difference in kids' lives usually do so, IME, outside the curriculum.
And because my son is about to start his senior year in HS, alot the conversation around here is about how to pick a college. What is value? What, as that Montana State guy asked so many years ago, is quality?
What is value? What, as that Montana State guy asked so many years ago, is quality?
Distance from parents.
Lee put herself through grad school by bartending, which I suspect is where she learned the mostly effective classroom management skills she has now. I'm almost surprised approach hasn't already been suggested here.
161: I don't know a thing about Montana, budget-wise and social services-wise and education programs-wise and so on, but I don't know what to make of that editorial. It reads sometimes pro-slashing spending (I don't know what canceling building projects and computer upgrades means, for example) and sometimes pro not being stupid.
Conclusion: it should have been longer, which it couldn't be for a NYT editorial, in order to clarify further!
169.last: And what is well and what is badly-need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?
Again with the questions! "Is it not so, Xanthippe, that the happiness of her husband is a good wife's chief occupation? And does it not foliow that the best wife would be the wife of the happiest husband?" Well, Mr. Gadfly, I have question for you: Who is going to make lunch for you and your aristocratic friends? Because it's not going to be me, I tell you. Those dirty sophists left broken dishes all the hell over the place and I think they did it just so they could argue with me about whether they were broken or not.
Teachers that make a difference in kids' lives usually do so, IME, outside the curriculum.
Totally not the case for me.
Then again, I count my life as having been changed by German poetry, so I'm likely in the minority.
173, 174: Already? Don't you usually let the sun go down before the fireworks start?
What navel-snipper wiped and washed you as you squirmed about, you crack-brained creature?
Taking into account the ruckus your filthy Boeotian relatives kicked up over a few simple questions, is it not undeniable that you should shut the hell up?
What is value? What, as that Montana State guy asked so many years ago, is quality?
That's probably the only part of that book that's stuck with me over the years. And for my tastes, the part most worth reading. I don't remember the book well enough to have opinions on the rest of it.
This is like some kind of opinionated nightmare. But thanks for making it clear that that's the real Socrates, Xanthippe, et al. have not risen from the dead and begun commenting here.
178: First your constant arguing and now I see I was picked for jury duty next week. At least I'll be able to take out my rage on whoever on trial.
124
Surely schools can be run better even if not all of their employees are savant/saints? Other professions seem to work fine with normal people in them.
Of course schools (like anything else) could be run better but there is little reason to believe they are particularly in need of improvement.
125
I thought reason people mostly focused on teachers is because all the research shows they're basically all that matters. Class size, curriculum style, etc. don't have nearly the same impact (if any measurable impact at all) on outcomes as good teachers vs. bad teachers. The problem is that we don't really seem to know how to reliably create good teachers. And I do think an awful lot of effort has gone and is still going into that.
This is not what the research shows. The research shows (that within the range of conditions commonly found in the US) that for purposes of of predicting how a student will do academically what matters most is the quality of the student themself (IQ, parent's income, parent's education etc.). What matters a bit is the quality of the other students. Everything else including teachers makes little difference. And it is difficult to study the effects of other factors because it is difficult to adequately adjust for the above two factors. There have been various inflated claims about how much teachers matter but they aren't well supported.
128
I thought people focused on teachers because the right hates unions, and particularly hates public employee unions, and it's an excuse to say we're union-busting for the childddrrrren. I can't imagine how there could be research showing that curriculum doesn't matter.
It is also because the left is reluctant to acknowledge that people aren't blank slates and there is only so much schools can be expected to do.
130
There's the claim that teachers are like NFL quarterbacks, there's no way to tell from their training which ones are good and which ones are bad. You just have to let them play and fire the ones who are bad. ...
This requires a reliable way to identify bad teachers which does not seem to exist. For meanings of bad less obvious than never showing up or blatent criminal conduct.
134
mean, it seems completely implausible that no possible variations in what we teach or how we teach it could have any meaningful impact on learning outcomes, ...
Well obviously you could deliberately produce bad outcomes. But what's so implausible that differences above a certain floor don't make much difference. As long as you get enough food exactly what food (within reason) doesn't make much difference. Because people evolved to be pretty flexible.
137
Teaching is the one task out there where the only way to improve outcomes (or even an important component of improving outcomes) is to be quicker to fire the weak performers? That's really, really, really implausible.
It should be easier to fire teachers because it is ridiculously difficult now so you get things like a teacher being paid while serving a prison term for raping a student. Which annoys the taxpayers and hurts the reputation of government in general. But it won't improve outcomes much.
I'm not sure it's actually that hard to identify bad teachers. It wasn't hard when I was a kid. I've commiserated with other parents plenty of times over the years about particular individuals, and everyone kind of knows who's crap. The trouble is that administrators are nearly always worse, and so their discretion has to be carefully limited.
If I thought standardized tests measured anything important, maybe I'd agree that teachers don't make much difference in outcome. I just don't believe in them -- if they're basically IQ tests of one flavor or another, then, sure, we wouldn't expect much movement. But they don't measure intensity or passion.
190
If I thought standardized tests measured anything important, maybe I'd agree that teachers don't make much difference in outcome. I just don't believe in them -- if they're basically IQ tests of one flavor or another, then, sure, we wouldn't expect much movement. But they don't measure intensity or passion.
So you don't think IQ is important?
As a way of measuring teacher performance, no I don't. It tells us, as you say, what sort of students are coming into the system.
I more or less agree with 185 and 188, but especially because I think what is being measured is a variable, or set of variables, that is not going to be altered much by teacher performance. Which is not to say that other variables, not being measured, are not affected by teacher performance.
James, did you have a teacher that made a difference for you? If so, I bet it wasn't because they helped you improve a point or two on some standardized test.
[26] Bay Area commenters: Are you looking for the most kick-ass fucking roommate that ever lived?
I'm lucky my roommates haven't seen that, or they'd surely kick me out in favor of that guy. He does seem pretty kick-ass.
Once again James, you should be blaming the poor negotiators who managed to foul things up, and not the unions who secured for their losers the same rights as the their average members.
So, okay: to the people early on in the thread who like Yglesias, what (if someone put a gun to your head) would you say it is that you like about him? He's not a touchstone for me like he is for a lot of Unfoggedtarians -- I lost track of him in his early "even the liberal" days and 8-% of what I've seen from him since looked like empty-headed or at best superficially-clever prattle -- but he clearly doesn't strike the chord for me that he strikes for some people. So I'm curious.
141: There's a confounding factor, which is that managers do more than just manage people. They also define the mission of their team, and in my experience also serve the recruiting function that HR is supposed to.
You can be good at just one or two of these things, and terrible at the other(s), and depending on the circumstances be on balance awesome or terrible.
For example one of my managers is great at recruiting and leadership, but not a very good people manager. But the people he's hired are good enough to do execute his ideas without a lot of managing, so stuff gets done.
You might also be underestimating the role of repeated small layoffs in masking the true amount of "firing" that goes on. When I started at my current employer, everyone knew about managers and whole teams that didn't seem to get anything done, but were fairly inoffensive and nobody wanted to bother firing them. There was also one manager everybody below him hated working with, but he also seemed unfireable.
Then there were layoffs, and guess which people were laid off? The poor performers.
After a couple of rounds of hiring alternating with layoffs, I started to notice the pattern.
Of course, in an institution that grows monotonically, that's not going to be as feasible - so for such institutions (fast-growing companies, government-run institutions), you're going to see some downward pressure on quality as nobody wants to be mean and fire underperformers, and there are no layoffs to serve as cover.
And of course that's probably less true in institutions that are less sociable and friendly, and especially for people at the bottom rung. I imagine you can get fired from even a Wal-Mart that's actively hiring at the time.
195:Well, I feel there is something under the surface of what he writes that I might characterize as post-modern or post-structural neo-liberalism. Deterroritalization and nomadism, D & G, H & N, Virilio. Check the latest threads on beer and unions. Whether of not it is conscious and informed and Y doesn't explicitly mention his influences, or even more interestingly instinctive and intuitive and/or derived from less direct observations and study. I feel originality and connection with the near-future zeitgeist more from Yggles than from any other famous blogger other then Stirling Newberry. No, I am not at all equipped to discuss this intelligently and articulately.
But in connection with the beer thread, let us presume, and I won't presume to put words in Yggles mouth, let us presume that big unions and centralized social welfare programs are not merely historically and practically exclusionary and hegemonic (racist, sexist, heteronormative) but theoretically, structurally so, so in all possible cases. Develop progressive politics and policy from there.
199:Well, I do of course see connections with current philosophy and social theory over at Kotsko's place and the people he links to and talks with, but the new theologians or whatever are much more peripheral to politics and policy.
Europe, Japan, the emerging nations would be the places and blogs to study.
194
Once again James, you should be blaming the poor negotiators who managed to foul things up, and not the unions who secured for their losers the same rights as the their average members.
So I should be voting for Republicans like Walker or Christie who won't give away the store? I will bear that in mind.
195
... or at best superficially-clever prattle ...
Lots of us have a weakness for the superficially clever like his crack that Angela Merkel is lucky that the bar for worst German leader ever is really high. I find him entertaining and sometimes worthwhile, I like his Green Lantern theory.
Now of course I brush against quite a few who have read their Bord and Baud and Agamb and Ziz, but they are way over on the farthest left teetering on the edge.
Some even here know this stuff, although from what I have read, very few seem to understand it enough to come up with a pragmatic useful political program, in micro or macro.
And it may not be required to read those guys, they are reflective of current conditions that the right mind can pick up in other ways. Newberry is into network theory.
And that is what I feel, that MY is somehow reflective of advanced social conditions, but as a pragmatic centrist rather than a leftist.
Have I bored you yet?
Sure James, you do that. It certainly seems that Christie and Walker share your values.
One important way to gain perspective is to look back at the bleeding-edge analysts of say the 1st quarter of the 20th century, all the names from Weber to Durkheim to Spengler Walras Sorel Hobson Pareto Simmel Luxemburg Dewey Veblen ad inf etc and however much we admire them and glean nuggets of wisdom from their work...
...and see how fucking completely clueless and useless they were in their own age as to practical politics and preventing catastrophe.
Everything bad that happened in the middle third of the twentieth century is because Rosa Luxemberg didn't try hard enough.
So, okay: to the people early on in the thread who like Yglesias, what (if someone put a gun to your head) would you say it is that you like about him?
On the policy/politics areas we agree on (which is most of them -- not that there's not loads of stuff he's wrong about, but the spectrum goes so far into the crazy that most of what he says is clearly on the roughly sane side of the ledger) he's got a very nice summary knack of encapsulating the latest controversy with the crazy people and what makes them wrong.
If her name had been that of a country, she could have transformed nations, but the bourgeoisie are picky and so they ignored her.
194
Once again James, you should be blaming the poor negotiators who managed to foul things up, and not the unions who secured for their losers the same rights as the their average members.
And it is interesting that you appear to believe that one-sided agreements are always due to poor negotiators rather than structural factors like a power imbalance between the parties. I will bear this in mind the next time liberals start whining about one-sided overdraft agreements, apparently bank customers are to blame for not negotiating better terms.
204
Sure James, you do that. It certainly seems that Christie and Walker share your values.
My value of thinking teachers should not be paid while serving prison terms for raping their students? I would not have thought this was controversial.
209, 210: Dude, you need to work harder for a good argument. No one's going to mix it up with you for that kind of bait.
One of things I like about Yglesias is that he seems to have accepted as a fact that taxes on the upper quintile are simply not going to be significantly raised any time soon (decade+), and is trying to work with and around it.
I can think of very few others, left or left-center, who can handle this.
So I should be voting for Republicans like Walker or Christie who won't give away the store?
Good God no. They're coalition includes people who's idea of education reform includes abstinence only and creationism. Empowering them is the last thing you should do. Stay on the reality based side and grouse away.
181: . But thanks for making it clear that that's the real Socrates, Xanthippe, et al. have not risen from the dead and begun commenting here.
When fucking Socrates is actually being opinionated it is appropriate to describe him as so.
At first I thought 215 was meant as an emphatic refutation of LB's 212. (And maybe it does, 'cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.)
206: Everything bad which happened in the 20th century is the fault of the Social Democratic Party of Germany for voting for war credits in 1914.
212
209, 210: Dude, you need to work harder for a good argument. No one's going to mix it up with you for that kind of bait.
It appears this particular problem has been fixed (more here ) so perhaps I should stop harping on it. On the other hand paying teachers in prison must have been pretty far down on the Alabama Education Association wish list so one wonders what slightly less obnoxious provisions are still in force.
I'm fairly certain John Stamos is also responsible, but I don't know exactly how.
218:Just an hour ago I was thinking about what might have happened if Max Weber had fully put his reputation and prestige out there in opposition to the war instead of jumping enthusiastically on the blood and iron train. Fucking tool.
And well, some around these parts seemed to think that the differences between Obama and Clinton on the Iraq War, professed or sincere, were like really really important. I never gave a shit.
222 -- Thanks for that.
221.2 -- I don't remember that at all. Hope I wasn't among them.
Paying teachers in jail is a terrible idea, but it's pretty low on the list of what is wrong with American education.
Yes, it drains away support among those looking for an excuse not to support education. No, it didn't affect the education of any single student.
221.1: World War I would have been delayed by up to 15 minutes.
The second story here, about a school district and its superintendent conspiring to cheat the teacher system -- and why not, it's just a bunch of state bureaucrats anyway -- won't have affected a single student either, but somehow I bet it won't get national attention as part of the 'schools are totally out of hand' narrative.
And now I'm going to walk the dog.
If CharleyCarp had one more dog, he'd be bob mcmanus.
(My dad is doing somewhat better. Thanks, everyone.)
224
Paying teachers in jail is a terrible idea, but it's pretty low on the list of what is wrong with American education.
Yes, it drains away support among those looking for an excuse not to support education. No, it didn't affect the education of any single student.
The claim that this didn't affect education of a single student assumes the $164000+ wasn't diverted (at least in part) from some more worthwhile purpose which seems questionable. It is true that in the big picture this sort of thing isn't too important in itself but it is the canary in the coal mine showing how hard it is to fire teachers. So a terrible teacher who manages to avoid committing serious felonies is pretty safe. How bad this is depends on how much you think teachers matter.
By the way what are the top items on your list of what is wrong with American education?
The gum under the desks usually lacks flavor.
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Beignets, filled variously with fresh blueberries, raspberry jam, and Nutella, dunked in raspberry sauce for breakfast. Frying things is a hassle, but man does it taste good.
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(My dad is doing somewhat better. Thanks, everyone.)
Woohoo! I, like everyone, look forward to his full recovery, so we can recommence mocking you for missing meetups for less justifiable reasons.
That my father is sick shouldn't keep anyone from mocking me, I don't think.
226
The second story here, about a school district and its superintendent conspiring to cheat the teacher system -- and why not, it's just a bunch of state bureaucrats anyway -- won't have affected a single student either, but somehow I bet it won't get national attention as part of the 'schools are totally out of hand' narrative.
Actually overpaid school superintendents are definitely part of the school spending is out of control narrative. See here for example. And I remember numerous local (Westchester NY) stories about highly paid school bureaucrats like superintendents (especially when they get dismissed and receive extremely generous severance packages).
But rarely, if ever, addressed by the "So teachers unions must be broken" one-size-fits-all solution.
I's not that the guy was highly paid, but that he and the board decided to cheat the retirement fund.
Glad your dad is feeling better.
When bob says he's going to walk the dog, does he really mean he's going to the dog parks to let the dog run while he flirts with attractive young women who are letting their dogs run? And if so, does having a second dog enhance the human part of the thing?
235. No but it does fit the public employees are overpaid and need to be slammed narrative.
236.3:Not in August in Dallas. Dogs are lucky to get outside. And I don't flirt. Okay, Thursday morning there was a young woman...
But the two matching dogs, big and gentle, active yet mellow, do provide...opportunities.
If it hadn't been for Max Weber, the Northern Pacific wouldn't have defaulted for a second time. But no, he had to jump on that train.
235
But rarely, if ever, addressed by the "So teachers unions must be broken" one-size-fits-all solution.
Anti-union is only part of the "reform" narrative. There is also a lot about highly paid bureaucrats in district headquarters performing useless jobs. The general narrative is the entire public education establishment including superintendents is grossly overpaid (if not corrupt) and unaccountable. Sweetheart contracts for top administrators are definitely part of this narrative. Although the details vary I have seen numerous stories about generous (and perhaps improper) contracts like the one CharlieCarp linked.
Poverty is the number one problem for schools, I think. Stupid conservatism, esp. people who want to use the schools to wage culture war from the right, is a big problem too. I bet more public money is spent on that than teachers in jail.
Surely we can all agree that if Wegener had been given sufficient respect for Continental Drift, Germany would never have bothered anyone.
234: The highest salary mentioned for a superintendent is $225,000. I don't suppose I know exactly what superintendents do, but that seems pretty reasonable for the high-end pay of an executive-type position, especially in a high-cost-of-living area.
185: The research shows (that within the range of conditions commonly found in the US) that for purposes of of predicting how a student will do academically what matters most is the quality of the student themself (IQ, parent's income, parent's education etc.).
So, two good ways to make sure that US students were of higher quality would be to make sure that everyone who was going to be a parent got the highest level of education possible, and to also ensure that all parents had a high guaranteed income? Sounds good to me, although I'm somewhat taken aback that you're supportive of that kind of thing, Shearer.
244: One could achieve the same effects by only issuing child-bearing licenses to couples who pass difficult academic exams and pay a large fee, part of which would go to suppressing illegal "baby-legging".
On a moment's reflection, "couples" is unduly heteronormative, and I apologize for any suggestion that a grim neoliberal biopower dystopia would not be fully accepting of alternative forms of family organization.
Hmm, The Best and the Brightest is playing at the Oaks this weekend. No, not a movie adaptation of that somewhat on topic book, but rather Neil Patrick Harris and Bonnie Somerville starring in a film
Set in the world of New York City's elite private kindergartens, The Best and the Brightest centers on a fresh-faced young couple from Delaware, Jeff and Samantha, who have only recently moved into town, and the extreme lengths they must go to in order to get their five-yearold daughter into school.What could possibly go wrong (4.9 rating at IMDB).
To the OP: My not-so-big high school produced an outsize number of male models. I even came across a blog by one of these fellows talking about what a leg-up he had in the industry for having attended Oudemia High. This cracks me up. (The first guy was discovered swimming shirtless by B/r/uce W3b3r. This cracks me up more.)
If I were going to assign a 'worst problem', I'd say it's lack of standardization/minimum standards from system to system. Not every kid needs the same school, but every kid should have access to roughly the same options and resources.
We've got tens of thousands of independent school systems. Most are fine, mostly, but some aren't, and as Tolstoy says, all bad schools are bad in their own way.
re: 249.last
That looks like a problem we can solve with Big Socialism.
250:I agree.
I sometimes dream of Munich and Red Vienna (and maybe Hungary) joining with Trotsky in Krakow. Poor Poland, I suppose, but they were led by a bunch of reactionary atavistic assholes.
Then the People's Army moves southwest to the Piedmont and up through Provence and starts planning the channel crossing. Kinda like a Crusade.
I'd pick anti-intellectualism, very broadly defined, as the worst problem. Even kids could extract a lot of resources from the libraries & trash of the US, but the deep scorn & mockery towards giving a damn, let alone trying & failing at something, is poison. It astounds me that it often includes engineering now. Good thing we have immigrants who still need to get off the farm.
Exam schools, & tracked education generally, seem to go both ways on this; can either be a mutually challenging nerdvana, or a conspiracy that you never prove a fellow X wrong because it would damage the mystique.
249.2 -- Seems like the solution to this kind of problem would look something like NCLB. Certainly if there are schools that don't meet minimum state accreditation standards, they should be fixed or closed. I don't see a need for national accreditation standards -- is there some state whose standards are just too low? Throw money at them, if that's what it takes.
The poverty I was talking about in 241 was parents' not schools'.
To the extent 253 is a symptom of a culture of poverty (I bet we don't use that phrase any more), working on poverty might help.
Are folks following the tar sands thing? A couple unions (ATU & TWU) signing on to the opposition seems like a step in the right direction.
244
So, two good ways to make sure that US students were of higher quality would be to make sure that everyone who was going to be a parent got the highest level of education possible, and to also ensure that all parents had a high guaranteed income? Sounds good to me, although I'm somewhat taken aback that you're supportive of that kind of thing, Shearer.
I'm not and you are also confused. Just because under current conditions x predicts y doesn't mean forcing x up will move y up. For example if your parents went to college because they think education is important and valuable this means something different than if your parents were forced to attend college. Confusion about this point has led to bad policy. Because success in high school algebra predicts success in later life some moron in the LA school district decided all students should be required to pass algebra in order to graduate with these results .
It wouldn't look much like NCLB. The screwy thing about NLCB is that it ignores processes and resources,i.e., what's actually happening in the schools, in favor of easily cheated on measurements of student achievement with implausible goals.
243
234: The highest salary mentioned for a superintendent is $225,000. I don't suppose I know exactly what superintendents do, but that seems pretty reasonable for the high-end pay of an executive-type position, especially in a high-cost-of-living area.
$225,000 is not the top of the range. See here for example.
Robert J. Roelle, the Ossining superintendent, is the highest paid public school executive in Westchester, with salary and benefits worth more than $345,000 in 2007-8.
254
The poverty I was talking about in 241 was parents' not schools'
How is that a problem with (as opposed to for) the education system?
It's interesting how people complain about the salary of public sector executives -- people who may control thousands of staff and budgets that run into the tens of millions -- but don't raise a fucking peep about the parasitic fucks elsewhere in the economy.
There were a lot of complaints in the UK about the salaries of some inner-city headteachers and 'super heads' [people running several schools] on similar grounds.
For, certainly. With, because it prevents dealing with "for."
257 -- Every school must offer french horn, Italian, and water polo?
I just don't see a standards problem. A money problem, yes.
(262.1 is a Temporarily Humboldt County reference. Only after I hit post did I realize how few folks might read it that way.)
The point about tight standards (or, spinning out my thinking on them) is that it's a route to meaningfully equalizing money. If all schools have to have remedial assistance for kids not up to grade level and a full selection of courses and extracurriculars for kids who are, then you have to spread the money around so that all the kids in the state have all the same options.
That is, you don't get to organize your district around excluding kids who are expensive to educate, and then say "Well, we offer water polo, Italian, and flugelhorn, but our per pupil spending isn't any higher than that high poverty district over there, we've just made different choices." If the state has enough money to fund flugelhorn, it has enough to make it available to any kid with the interest and capacity for it, regardless of where they happen to live. If they don't have enough money for that, they don't have enough money to fund flugelhorn only for the kids in the district that doesn't have to do spending on ESL learners.
CharleyCarp, I don't think anti-intellectualism is particularly part of the culture of poverty -- it's bad among the kids of lawyers who want to get on the gravy train. I'd say that fatalism and seize-the-day and defensiveness are associated with poverty, so there's some reinforcement from it.
Shearer, your claims are nutty for at least two reasons: first, exogenous and deeply unfair factors have broken the effort-success link at least to my generation. When my parents got onto the middle-class ladder, the neighborhood we moved into was still suffering from redlining and 'blockbusting'. Black friends in my school were tracked into the holding classes. I had a huge advantage over them from then on, e.g. when I got to apply my earnings to my education because my parents enjoy their real estate gains. This isn't the past -- this is crazy-well-documented bias that is still having its direct effects.
Second, unearned income for the poor improves outcomes (example paper w/abstract below), so pretending that the effect of rich parents can be wrapped into the innate quality of the students is tendentious at best. Anyway, if it isn't the money, it's the inherited virtue, let's have whopping estate taxes: easy money has wrecked rich kids as well as saved them. (I think freedom from fear is good for people and boredom poisonous, me.)
@article {Akee:2010:1945-7782:86,
author = "Akee, Randall K.Q. and Copeland, William E. and Keeler, Gordon and Angold, Adrian and Costello, E. Jane",
title = "Parents' Incomes and Children's Outcomes: A Quasi-Experiment Using Transfer Payments from Casino Profits",
journal = "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics",
volume = "2",
number = "1",
year = "2010",
abstract = "We examine the role an exogenous increase in household income, due to a government transfer unrelated to household characteristics, plays in children's long-run outcomes. Children in affected households have higher levels of education in their young adulthood and a lower incidence of criminality for minor offenses. Effects differ by initial household poverty status. An additional $4,000 per year for the poorest households increases educational attainment by one year at age 21, and reduces the chances of committing a minor crime by 22 percent for 16 and 17 year olds. Our evidence suggests improved parental quality is a likely mechanism for the change.",
pages = "86-115",
url = "http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aea/aejae/2010/00000002/00000001/art00004",
doi = "doi:10.1257/app.2.1.86"
}
whoops, meant to link all the noise, sorry.
266
Second, unearned income for the poor improves outcomes (example paper w/abstract below), so pretending that the effect of rich parents can be wrapped into the innate quality of the students is tendentious at best. ...
An earlier version of the paper you cited can be found here . It says in the introduction:
... Income depends crucially on parental characteristics, both observed and unobserved. Therefore, simply observing that children from high (low) income families tend to have positive negative) educational, income and employment outcomes in young adulthood tells us little about the actual causation. Parents transmit to their genetic offspring some of their innate abilities and the observed correlation between parental incomes and child outcomes later in life may simply reflect this intergenerational transfer and not the effect of income per se.
This is similiar to my point so apparently the authors didn't find it tendentious. The paper claims to find that children from families that started receiving payments from an Indian casino did detectably better than children that didn't. On a quick scan I didn't find a comparison of how large this effect is compared to the difference between children from families at different income levels. So the effect of raising family income from X to Y was detectable but it is not clear how much of the gap between children from families with incomes of X and Y had been closed. Incidentally the effect was confined to the lowest income levels so the effects of "rich parents" as opposed to average parents were found to be nil.
Also as the authors discuss in the introduction other studies of this question have found varying results. For example Family income and children's education: Using the Norwegian oil boom as a natural experiment. by Katrine Loken found no effect according the abstract:
Parental income is positively correlated with childrens educational attainment. This paper addresses the causality of this observed link. We have a unique data set for Norwegians born in the period 1967-1969, with a measure of permanent family income in the childrens adolescence. This enables us to examine the long-term effect of family income on children's educational attainment. The Norwegian oil shock in the 1970s is used as an instrument, because this- in some regions but not in others- implied a general increase in income unrelated to parents' abilities. This variation in income is used to estimate the causal effect of family income on childrens educational attainment. We fi nd no such causal relationship. This result is robust with respect to different speci fication tests.
So the question is hardly settled.
265
... If the state has enough money to fund flugelhorn, it has enough to make it available to any kid with the interest and capacity for it, regardless of where they happen to live. If they don't have enough money for that, they don't have enough money to fund flugelhorn only for the kids in the district that doesn't have to do spending on ESL learners.
This is crazy. You don't think schools should be allowed to adapt their curriculums to local conditions at all? Every school must offer the exact same mix of advanced and remedial courses regardless of demand? This means a lot of wasted money which isn't good for anybody as funds for education are not in fact unlimited. So you will get bad schools wasting money on advanced courses for which there is little demand while not offering enough remedial courses and good schools wasting money on remedial courses for which there is little demand while not offering enough advanced courses. And you will drive more rich families into the private system.
It's not that every building has to have the same mix of classes, it's that every kid has to have comparable choices. If a kid is attending a bad school without a lot of other kids who are ready for calculus, she should nonetheless have access to a calculus class if that's what appropriate for her. A system that circumscribes her academic options because her schoolmates have different needs than she does is doing her an injustice.
That won't be free, but it's a class of leveling I'm happy with.
270
That won't be free, but it's a class of leveling I'm happy with.
So you are ok with abolishing the Bronx High School of Science et al because not every child has a chance to attend?
272
That won't be free, but it's a class of leveling I'm happy with.
And of course it might be free in the sense that more money won't be spent instead you could just get less efficient use of the existing money. Just because ivory tower liberals mandate programs doesn't mean more money will magically appear, in practice the money may come from existing programs.
Forgive me, but Shearer, you are so damned exhausting on these topics. I admit I haven't followed the thread, and it's likely this has come up already, but part of the problem is that schools are funded in some significant part by property taxes.
Anyway, Natilo's 244 remains important, and your 256 in response is nonsensical.
256: Just because under current conditions x predicts y doesn't mean forcing x up will move y up. For example if your parents went to college because they think education is important and valuable this means something different than if your parents were forced to attend college. Confusion about this point has led to bad policy.
Natilo was not talking about forcing people to go to college, but about providing them with the opportunity to do so, and that mostly means removing barriers by reducing income inequality overall, and increasing need-based funding opportunities. Among other things.
I really don't understand how you can be so dense. Also, with respect to the quoted portion of your 256 just up there: people learn to consider education important and valuable, but for crying out loud, if your parents went to college, it's because they were financially able to in the first place.
273
... but part of the problem is that schools are funded in some significant part by property taxes.
So some districts have more money then others. So what. Why is this a problem? There is no convincing evidence that this (within the range curently found in the United States) makes any difference to educational outcomes.
274: There isn't? I haven't read the thread, so I'm not sure what the "within the range curently found in the United States" means. I'm pretty sure, though, that rural Appalachia, say, has lower educational outcomes than, say, Westchester County. I must be missing something in your meaning, then.
It occurs to me that I've invited James to suggest that Appalachians are low IQ and from less educated family and cultural backgrounds in the first place, and that this explains any discrepancy in educational outcome, so I apologize to all for failing to have chosen an example that might have controlled for that rebuttal.
James, I shouldn't have engaged you. As soon as you say that there's no (convincing?) evidence that money put into an educational system affects educational outcomes, you're lost.
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Yggles says this is The Best of Times
The Pigs won.
Matt's like a fucking Roman citizen of the 2nd century, couching out on the veranda with a Greek feeding him grapes and a Gaul with her head in his lap, staring out at his field slaves and saying:
"Ain't peace fucking great."
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bob, I thought you were just telling us why you found Yglesias enjoyable to read. At least, that was the question DS was posing upthread in 195; maybe it wasn't the question you were answering.
For the linked Yglesias post, I have no comment.
I like how he phrases that as an "one of the oddities" - got to have that contrarian hook. Otherwise, since the post is about long term trends, it's no counterargument to the view that about three years or so ago, life was better for a lot of people, economically at least, than it is now. There's only an "oddity" if you think that all analysis has to be conducted along a single scale.
I think that Yglesias feels the need to drive web traffic to Think Progress, or to his blog in particular. Certainly the apparently felt need by any number of other bloggers elsewhere to link to his remarks as though they're original suggests that there's a drive to maximize cross-linking.
I don't know if a concrete example is needed, but here's one: I was just looking at Jon Chait's column at TNR, where this post quotes Yglesias saying something that a million people have remarked upon and discussed before. I see people linking to and quoting Yglesias time and again in this way, and I can't think that they're doing it because it's the first time they've seen it put so well.
Eh, that kind of linking - the Chait link - doesn't seem like much of an issue to me. Maybe because I don't read most political blogs anymore. For bloggers who are in more or less constant conversation with each other, it doesn't seem odd that they link to each other rather than go search out the one or two best posts on any given topic.
275
There isn't? I haven't read the thread, so I'm not sure what the "within the range curently found in the United States" means. ...
It means the studies were done in the United States. Studies comparing schools with different funding levels within the United States haven't found convincing evidence that funding matters to student outcomes. But of course this just means funding doesn't matter within the range commonly found in the United States, it doesn't mean you could cut funding to zero without bad effects.
Eh in return: it's sloppy. I've no doubt that they're in constant conversation with one another, but honestly, the idea that Matt (as we call him) is the go-to guy on this or that matter is for the birds.
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I am sitting in an airport in August and shivering from the air conditioning. Before we start firing teachers, can we fire all the people who decided that thermostats should be kept at 60 degrees in summer?
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Why do you hate America looking at nipples under light summer blouses?
I've walked over most of this terminal and haven't spotted a single nipple.
The few airports I've been to this summer have all been warm-ish.
I will be in Minneapolis for a few hours in a couple of weeks. If anyone wants to buy a ticket and go through security for a meetup, I'll try not to report the suspicious behavior.
Grab the white phone, press 777, & they'll make it cooler in the airport.
Dialing 666 turns up the volume on the Airport CNN.
I found some hot soup and some people with bizarre Australian accents to try to eavesdrop on.
Otherwise, since the post is about long term trends, it's no counterargument to the view that about three years or so ago, life was better for a lot of people, economically at least, than it is now. There's only an "oddity" if you think that all analysis has to be conducted along a single scale.
I took it to be a counterargument against the narrow-minded focus on the economies of developed countries. It's definitely worth keeping in mind that whatever sense of doom Americans may feel, life really has gotten substantially better elsewhere.
278:Yglesias is "interesting." And useful to me. Informative.
As to whether tragedy or horror are entertaining or enjoyable, I have been working on that for long time.
Maybe maturity is the postponement of catharsis.
Yeah, I just looked up some stats and that's certainly true even across 2008-2011. I was thinking more on the violence (which is also true, but like I said, on another scale) which was what that post was mostly about.
...life really has gotten substantially better elsewhere.
Arguable, tho with difficulty in the hegemony. Urbanization and capitalism has its costs.
Ask the Chinese factory workers who are required to sign the no-suicide contracts. But they are making a dollar a day more than they made in the fields, getting food and health so they can go back on the line.
And people like Matt and you are doing great even in the emerging nations.
296 to 294. Also, I really should be better at looking up economic statistics than I actually am.
I was thinking more on the violence
I guess the reference to 2nd century Rome and the Pax went right past you. Americans seem to think the huge fucking military and death from the air is their little fiscal difficulty.
You have to be a citizen of the Empire with privilege to not see what it means when the frontiers stop fighting you and stop fighting each other.
Qaddafi, Assad, Mubarek, Saddam, Nassar were evil assholes but they were independent evil assholes back when it was still possible to stand up to Transnational Inc. Fucking liberal borgs think it is utopia when resistance is accepted and internalized as futile.
No, fuck no, war and violence aren't the worst things.
I'd pick anti-intellectualism, very broadly defined, as the worst problem. Even kids could extract a lot of resources from the libraries & trash of the US, but the deep scorn & mockery towards giving a damn, let alone trying & failing at something, is poison. It astounds me that it often includes engineering now.
It's not hard to see why it happens though. College is hugely expensive, most programs clearly don't give a fuck about undergrad education, and the four year degree is increasingly just a base level requirement to get the job and what you actually learned doesn't mean shit.
Speaking of learning, here's tonight's lesson from the streets: If you're in the habit of "dry firing" your pistol at various objects in the living room it's best to leave your head off the list of targets. Entry just under the jaw and exit out in the area of the opposite side ear. Full metal jacket rather than a hollow point is probably why he survived but man is that going to leave a mark.
How do you know it's pure idiocy rather than a suicide attempt?
The roommate, along the lines of "oh yeah, he leaves the gun out all the time and is always pointing it at shit and pulling the trigger, including at his own head".
I see. Must be a fun guy to live with.
I disapprove of Saturday nights without threads primed for drunk-blogging.
JUST SAYIN'.
[249] If I were going to assign a 'worst problem', I'd say it's lack of standardization/minimum standards from system to system.
It's rare that I think LB is absolutely 100% wrong, but boy, here's one of those times.
Matt's like a fucking Roman citizen of the 2nd century, couching out on the veranda with a Greek feeding him grapes and a Gaul with her head in his lap, staring out at his field slaves
I have to say, I tip my cap to you, Bob. Well done. Well done.
Oh: I got a job, sort of. Well, something that should pay the rent. So I was celebrating, rather than simply problem-drinking. FOR THE RECORD.
If you're drunk enough, it shouldn't matter what the thread is about.
Also, I'm not sure if it's Saturday night or Sunday morning. Fucking time zones: how do they work?
Hah. No, test-prep stuff.
And the problem with the thread wasn't the content, but the pace; nobody had posted in 2 hrs, and we're now the only two here. Bedtime now.
Well done on getting the rent paid. Next week, food!
307:Except you left out the punchline, "Ain't peace fucking great," which was the important part.
1) When one nation keeps building its military, and everybody else is disarming, it is not peace it is conquest. The world, for instance bond prices and austerity, needs to be understood as acting as subjects of the US/Transnational Empire. Almost all of it.
2) Yggles enjoyment of the "peace" is not "like" it literally is the pleasure of the boss or customer at the end of strikes and worker activism.
And after the unions/resistance are ended, the wage and benefit cuts will continue. And the contradictions and crises of capitalism will accelerate.
312: Right, grapes next and then blowjobs.
For some reason, I imagine bob's thinking as an endless flipbook of "Goofus & Gallant" cartoons. bob is Gallant, I'm sure.
Jane Hamsher imprisoned by Obama for trying to save the Earth and Human Race.
314: I thought grapes went with fucksaws, not blowjobs.
It isn't after Labor Day yet, so no need to get picky.
Huh. I hadn't heard a thing about the Keystone XL Pipeline (and the Tar Sands protests against it) until now.
The Wikipedia article on the pipeline links to this Reuters piece from February 2011 on the Koch brothers' close involvement in construction and operation of the extension.
So, I went to my first baseball game at PNC Park today. We left early because two rain delays and a five year old make 6 innings enough.
Did you like the seats? The one game I attended this year likewise had two rain delays and I left around the 5th inning.
256: Because success in high school algebra predicts success in later life some moron in the LA school district decided all students should be required to pass algebra in order to graduate with these results .
That's pretty much California-wide now, since algebra is a required part of the state exit exam. There is still some local flexibility in how to achieve that, but our district has been pushing all high school kids into algebra classes, ready or not. I've substituted in some of those classrooms, and volunteered in others. The results aren't pretty. In one class I substituted for, I got a look at the third-quarter grades. In a class of 24, four kids had a C or better. That was the better of the two algebra classes I taught that day - in the other one, only one kid had a C or better. Most of the teachers are good, dedicated teachers, who have good lesson plans, know their subject, and care about the kids. But things pretty clearly aren't working, and the kids are paying the price.
Most of the math teachers I talked with were pretty vocal about the foolishness of trying to force kids to take a class they weren't really ready for. It's fine to say most kids should take algebra at some point in their high school careers - but forcing them into repeated failure is demoralizing as all hell. I've seen the way that kids hit a certain point in the course, decide there's no way they are going to pass the course this year, and just give up and stop trying. I think most of them could make it - with more individualized instruction to address their specific weaknesses, with more time to cover the material, with more motivation and support. And some of them do make it eventually - I revisited one classroom a year later, and saw some of the kids who I had remembered as struggling now on a list of high scores from a recent exam. But a lot of these kids are being left behind, and set up to drop out rather than succeed.
322: Very good seats. As close as you could get and stay out of the rain on the third base side.
There is still some local flexibility in how to achieve that, but our district has been pushing all high school kids into algebra classes, ready or not. I've substituted in some of those classrooms, and volunteered in others. The results aren't pretty. In one class I substituted for, I got a look at the third-quarter grades. In a class of 24, four kids had a C or better. That was the better of the two algebra classes I taught that day - in the other one, only one kid had a C or better. Most of the teachers are good, dedicated teachers, who have good lesson plans, know their subject, and care about the kids. But things pretty clearly aren't working, and the kids are paying the price.
Man. What is happening in the elementary and middle schools? I spend a lot of time saying that 'the problem' with education isn't bad teachers, but for elementary school math, I worry that there is a fair slice of the teacher population that's not comfortable with even elementary school math at all. More scripted curricula, maybe?
325: My dad (a math prof) is working on that question in our state. I think he leans toward thinking it's teacher ineptitude compared with just how much worse it gets each time the kid moves to a new level and can't d the math. I'm hoping to talk to him about what he thinks should be done while we're on vacation this weekend, and also what he thinks about the Khan streaming video stuff.
A lot of the high school kids I'm tutoring to be able to pass OH's graduation exam are still counting on their fingers, don't know their multiplication tables. When I started doing multiplication quizzes, all but two of the older kids dropped tutoring. They're coming from bad schools in a bad school system and have had education gaps and lots of other risk factors, I recognize, but it's been sad and often upsetting to see how little they do know. The ones who didn't pass the graduation exam have been pushed into an online school, apparently. I have no idea when/if/how they'll learn there, especially since last I heard the family had no internet access and they had to go wait their turns at the library to get online. I'm supposed to start some intensive tutoring with them in a few weeks and I hope that will help somewhat.
Matt's like a fucking Roman citizen of the 2nd century, couching out on the veranda with a Greek feeding him grapes and a Gaul with her head in his lap, staring out at his field slaves
If only the American empire was this much fun!
325-326: not sure why you guys are reacting to 323 by talking about teacher ineptitude when Dave specifically said that most of the teachers are good, dedicated, and know their stuff.
PGD, I'm just talking about specifically the errors I've seen teachers make in correcting and the garbled versions the students bring. I've heard a lot anecdotally about early elementary teachers in this area (far from California) who are teaching math because they like kids and who don't like or understand the math they have to teach. That, for instance, comes from my dad's 30+ years teaching elementary math teachers who are getting advanced certification. I think Dave's probably right about the high school teachers he's talking about, but clearly something went wrong for the students earlier on, and I suspect that for some of them teachers were a problem.
Further to 328, I was also having a cranky morning and probably being unfair and unkind. Dave's situation sounds really frustrating for him, the other teachers, and definitely the kids. That's the important part.
"elementary math teachers"
Is this a common thing now? As I recall, I didn't have any subject-specific teachers until 6th grade.
(Well, except for music, and phys. ed teachers, but you probably know what I mean)
323
... It's fine to say most kids should take algebra at some point in their high school careers ...
Actually it's not fine. The reason high school algebra predicts success in later life is that it is a good way of separating the smart students from the dumb ones. If you find high algebra easy (or at least not too hard) you will find many complex intellectual tasks easy and this will help you in the modern economy for obvious reasons. It isn't because high school algebra is of great value in and of itself, most people can get through life just fine without knowing how to solve quadratic equations.
So forcing dumb students to take high school algebra is wrongheaded, a form of magical thinking. Even if with great effort they manage to pass the course the material will be of little value to them in latter life (in the unlikely event they retain any of it) and they will still be dumb unable to compete with the brighter students for the better jobs. Their efforts should be directed to areas in which they can succeed and which will be valuable to them.
323: There is also some reason to believe that humans are not predestined to achieve a precise level of mathematical competence that is completely independent of their educational environment. In fact, it may be the case that mathematical skills at one level are based on skills honed at lower levels, including personality traits that are not usually considered to be innate parts of abstract intelligence (such as "I will actually start working on this problem instead of giving up immediately" and "I don't know how to solve this problem but I will persevere by attempting to apply various techniques that may happen to transform the problem into something I do know how to solve.") That said, high school may be too late for most kids.
That's actually directed at 332, not 323.
Their efforts should be directed to areas in which they can succeed and which will be valuable to them.
There's a good chance that "grit" is of great value. Can't tell if anyone has it until they've been challenged.
328: I'm not talking about incompetent high school algebra teachers, I'm worrying about elementary school teachers who are incompetent to teach arithmetic. The students being discussed aren't coming in with a grounding in arithmetic and failing because algebra is too hard, they're described as being unable to do the simplest mathematical tasks.
Talk about varying ranges of ability all you like, anyone of normal intelligence can be taught to do arithmetic fluently, and if these kids haven't been, something went wrong in the schools.
And, of course, what Thorn said.
332, 333: I basically agree with DB, disagree with JBS on this point. I may follow up at more length in the new math teaching thread.