[dudleysghost]

Originally Posted by blazerboy30

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying the best thing to do is figure out where the money more efficiently helps the situation. The orginal poster seemed to make the claim that throwing more money at the education system would help. I'm saying we need to understand where the money should be wisely spent. Maybe it isn't a need for MORE money, just smarter spending of the money.

[begin-dumb-idea]
Maybe we need to put the money into somehow incetivizing parents to be involved in their childrens' education. Can we give a tax credit to those parents who can motivate their kids to go to school every day and graduate? [\end-dumb-idea]

I don't think the original poster was disregarding the idea that additional money into the system should be well-spent, he was merely implying that additional money could or would help improve outcomes. Again, the ideas are not mutually exclusive.

As to what the best way to improve outcomes is, with any given amount of money, that's a tough question. The toughness of the question I think is one reason people tend to argue for increased funding, because it clearly isn't so easy to correctly reallocate resources in a way that was more efficient.

Providing incentives for parents may be effective. The school can only do so much to discipline and work with a child, but the parent has a lot more leverage and leeway, so it seems like an opportunity waiting to be exploited, although I'm not sure how it would be structured, or if anyone out there is already trying it.

I have heard of programs in some cities that punish parents when their kids get involved in crime and truancy. I think that was a recent development, and will certainly run into court challenges and such, but it is a conceptually similar idea that I know some areas have tried to implement.

Also, in the City of New York, and perhaps in some other places, they are talking about creating incentives for the students themselves. If they achieve certain grade levels and attendance marks, they get cash or cell phone minutes or something.

People are getting creative, and hopefully they are also keeping good data to find out what actually is effective.

If it were me running a system though, what I'd be most focused on is developing a process of teacher evaluation. People criticize the tenure system, but really, we don't have an easy way to quantitatively evaluate teacher quality. Using test scores is a tempting option, but very few people I've talked to in education seem to think they are effective, because they encourage "teaching to the test", which is an ineffective way of imbuing students with functional knowledge and intellectual capability. It also tends to result in bad teachers whose students have good demographics looking good, while good teachers in tough situations look worse.

What may work is a process based evaluation method. Instead of scantrons, teachers would be evaluated on their techniques in monitored classrooms. How well do they engage the students. How well do they respond, and anticipate problems, and deal with disruptions. What kind of return rate do they get on assignments, and are the grade distributions meaningful. It all sounds a bit fuzzy, but it's basically a best-practices method of evaluation, which is an accepted standard in many fields. It's difficult to quantitate, and time consuming to administer (as in costly $$), but I think it could give one a good measure of how good the teacher really is. With that in hand, one could take on the teachers unions and implement some system of performance based hiring, firing and compensation.

[mook]

Originally Posted by dudleysghost

What may work is a process based evaluation method. Instead of scantrons, teachers would be evaluated on their techniques in monitored classrooms. How well do they engage the students. How well do they respond, and anticipate problems, and deal with disruptions. What kind of return rate do they get on assignments, and are the grade distributions meaningful. It all sounds a bit fuzzy, but it's basically a best-practices method of evaluation, which is an accepted standard in many fields. It's difficult to quantitate, and time consuming to administer (as in costly $$), but I think it could give one a good measure of how good the teacher really is. With that in hand, one could take on the teachers unions and implement some system of performance based hiring, firing and compensation.

I wonder if there actually are automated ways to measure teacher best practices. with current technology you could actively measure:
• how often the teacher's eyes are focused on the students
• how many questions the teacher asks students
• how varied is the teacher in interacting with favorite students vs everyone else
• student ambient noise (more chatter indicates a lack of control/interest from students)
• student body temperature (a drop often indicates drowsiness)

you could also evaluate how teachers evaluate classwork. have peer reviews of essay grading, etc., randomly applied.

down the road you could even imagine a monitor of brainwave activity among randomly chosen students.

I bet if you profiled the best teachers in America, you'd find a number of common behaviors and practices that aren't quite so difficult to quantify.

[dudleysghost]

Originally Posted by mook

I wonder if there actually are automated ways to measure teacher best practices. with current technology you could actively measure:
• how often the teacher's eyes are focused on the students
• how many questions the teacher asks students
• how varied is the teacher in interacting with favorite students vs everyone else
• student ambient noise (more chatter indicates a lack of control/interest from students)
• student body temperature (a drop often indicates drowsiness)

you could also evaluate how teachers evaluate classwork. have peer reviews of essay grading, etc., randomly applied.

down the road you could even imagine a monitor of brainwave activity among randomly chosen students.

I bet if you profiled the best teachers in America, you'd find a number of common behaviors and practices that aren't quite so difficult to quantify.

That's the hope. I don't think collecting data on those measures is by any means simple or inexpensive, but whatever way we can procure information on teacher effectiveness might be worth pursuing. There is some risk there, using a process based evaluation, that participants will "game" the process to achieve better metrics without achieving better educational outcomes, but judicious choice of metrics, and using lots of them, should alleviate that problem.

[crandc]

I never "memorized" either the multiplication table or the rules of grammar and yet I know both. I learned them, I did not memorize them. There are mathematical regularities in the multiplication table; understand them and you know the table without any need for brute memorization. I learned that because when I was a child I went to summer programs in math and science. I am a professional writer. I really can't tell you if I'm using past participle or past imperfect but I use them correctly. When I was very small I was read to, then I learned how to read. My parents took me to the library every week and had books in the house. I read and later I started to write and I learned, not memorized, grammar. I also learned how to spell (although I'm a lousy typist who needs spell check to catch my typos!)

But, what if instead of college educated parents I had parents who were functionally illiterate? Or who believed that girls did not need to be educated, or could not do math and science? Or who had to put so much sweat into earning a bare living they had no time for library visits? Or if I lived in a community with no library? I realize that my background gave me the wherewithal to withstand bad school experiences (including in 6th grade when I wanted to take advanced math as an elective but that was for boys only so I had to take chorus although I can't carry a tune in a bucket, high school science where the teacher would not teach evolution and spent most of his time trying to grope the girls in the class, and being told to stop reading books that were more advanced than those used in the English class, which I refused to do). I did have a fabulous science teacher in junior high and often wish I could thank him for what he did, including assigning me, an 8th grader, independent lab projects. I had a good algebra teacher but my geometry teacher was so awful that to this day I don't know plane geometry and when I took the Graduate Record Exam had to use calculus to derive all the theorems I never learned so I could solve the geometry problems.

Education reform cannot happen in a vacuum. It's part of social attitudes towards children and for that matter to adults; learning should not stop at age 18. And union busting will not do much for the kid who was told she does not need schooling because girls should just have babies.

A footnote: comparing high school to college classes is another apples & oranges. In college you get the most motivated and serious students, of course the quality of the classroom experience will be better.

[barfo]

Originally Posted by mook

I wonder if there actually are automated ways to measure teacher best practices. with current technology you could actively measure:
• how often the teacher's eyes are focused on the students
• how many questions the teacher asks students
• how varied is the teacher in interacting with favorite students vs everyone else
• student ambient noise (more chatter indicates a lack of control/interest from students)
• student body temperature (a drop often indicates drowsiness)

you could also evaluate how teachers evaluate classwork. have peer reviews of essay grading, etc., randomly applied.

down the road you could even imagine a monitor of brainwave activity among randomly chosen students.

I bet if you profiled the best teachers in America, you'd find a number of common behaviors and practices that aren't quite so difficult to quantify.

If you can do that, you should be able to design a robot teacher. Given the number of teachers necessary nationwide, there would be sufficient scale to manufacture the robots in a cost-effective way. The robots could, in fact, have eyes in the back of their heads, so they could write on the board and watch the class at the same time. Of course, being robots, they could just electronically transfer their thoughts to the board without turning around.

barfo

[barfo]

Originally Posted by crandc

I never "memorized" either the multiplication table or the rules of grammar and yet I know both. I learned them, I did not memorize them. There are mathematical regularities in the multiplication table; understand them and you know the table without any need for brute memorization. I learned that because when I was a child I went to summer programs in math and science. I am a professional writer. I really can't tell you if I'm using past participle or past imperfect but I use them correctly. When I was very small I was read to, then I learned how to read. My parents took me to the library every week and had books in the house. I read and later I started to write and I learned, not memorized, grammar. I also learned how to spell (although I'm a lousy typist who needs spell check to catch my typos!)

Same is true for me, at least for grammar. Somehow, from moving from town to town, I never got any instruction on grammar. Or maybe my schools just sucked - they were in Oregon, after all. But I read an awful lot and as a result I know how to write (I don't make my living from writing, though, so if I make some embarrassing error in this post, so be it). I remember seeing Grammar Rock on TV when I was in high school or college and thinking, "oh, so that's what a noun is" (a person, place, or thing, according to Grammar Rock). I have no memory about how I learned basic math, but I suspect it was prior to school.

barfo

[maxiep]

Originally Posted by crandc

I never "memorized" either the multiplication table or the rules of grammar and yet I know both. I learned them, I did not memorize them. There are mathematical regularities in the multiplication table; understand them and you know the table without any need for brute memorization. I learned that because when I was a child I went to summer programs in math and science. I am a professional writer. I really can't tell you if I'm using past participle or past imperfect but I use them correctly. When I was very small I was read to, then I learned how to read. My parents took me to the library every week and had books in the house. I read and later I started to write and I learned, not memorized, grammar. I also learned how to spell (although I'm a lousy typist who needs spell check to catch my typos!)

But, what if instead of college educated parents I had parents who were functionally illiterate? Or who believed that girls did not need to be educated, or could not do math and science? Or who had to put so much sweat into earning a bare living they had no time for library visits? Or if I lived in a community with no library? I realize that my background gave me the wherewithal to withstand bad school experiences (including in 6th grade when I wanted to take advanced math as an elective but that was for boys only so I had to take chorus although I can't carry a tune in a bucket, high school science where the teacher would not teach evolution and spent most of his time trying to grope the girls in the class, and being told to stop reading books that were more advanced than those used in the English class, which I refused to do). I did have a fabulous science teacher in junior high and often wish I could thank him for what he did, including assigning me, an 8th grader, independent lab projects. I had a good algebra teacher but my geometry teacher was so awful that to this day I don't know plane geometry and when I took the Graduate Record Exam had to use calculus to derive all the theorems I never learned so I could solve the geometry problems.

Education reform cannot happen in a vacuum. It's part of social attitudes towards children and for that matter to adults; learning should not stop at age 18. And union busting will not do much for the kid who was told she does not need schooling because girls should just have babies.

A footnote: comparing high school to college classes is another apples & oranges. In college you get the most motivated and serious students, of course the quality of the classroom experience will be better.

It sounds like you've been very lucky to have had parents that cared that much. My focus on the fundamentals is precisely for those that don't have that kind of luck. You can dismiss memorizing multiplication tables, or doing math until it becomes rote as "brute memorization", but it serves a greater purpose: pattern recognition and process (linear) thinking.

I'll refer you to one of the great oeuvres of the late 20th century: The Karate Kid. Miyagi had Daniel-san wax his car, sand his deck and paint his house. Did he do it to get free work done? No, he did it to teach him the basics of martial arts. Knowing your multiplication tables up to 20 isn't so you know off the top of your head that 17 times 18 is 306. It's to train your mind to think in a certain way. BTW, mathematics, grammar (either in the English language or training in a foreign language) and music train the brain in the same way.

Proper grammar serves a further purpose. If we don't have a common language, we can't communicate effectively. Letting students write in slang harms the student. You don't have to teach grammar by nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc. It can be done through reading and writing.

Learning is a lifelong process. It doesn't end once you finish your formal education. Our public elementary schools have the responsibility to do the heavy lifting of learning--reading, writing and arithmatic. Once our students have mastered those disciplines, they can begin to study the subjects that will spark some interest: literature, history, politics, science, math, foreign languages, music, art, etc. If a district can't afford all the flourishes, however, a focus on the basics first is necessary.

BTW, if you want the morons that told you that you didn't need to learn anything because you were a girl out of a job, you should want to bust that union. That person is protected by that very union you support.

[crandc]

Actually, maxiep, you are agreeing with a lot of what I said. I never argued against learning grammar or math; I just said LEARNING it is better than simply MEMORIZING without understanding. And I see too much memorize/regurgitate without the understanding in schools.

Funny, I'm great at math and English but absolutely tin ear tone deaf, a complete failure in the piano and ballet lessons I was enrolled in as a child (which is why I got sent to math class and the library!)

And I acknowledged I was fortunate to have educated and involved parents, who were, BTW, teachers, and knew exactly what children needed to excel.

I agree that learning grammar is important for exactly the reasons you stated. I groan at times when I read what is written not just here but by some supposedly well educated native English speakers. Slang is fine for casual communication but not business and science. And I agree, and said, learning does not stop after 12 years.

As for being told I don't need to learn because I was a girl, I was referring more to parents with that mind set than teachers, although yes, I had some like that including in college. That's one reason why I am a feminist, because I know I had parents who backed me up when I insisted on not taking home ec and taking a science class instead, but other girls often didn't. Women's equality, not union busting, is the answer to that dumb mind set.

[MARIS61]

Since the vast majority of innovative and creative discoverers, leaders, inventers, and humanitarians...were dropouts (at least in some way or another) I think we should embrace this news as a positive.

[crandc]

Originally Posted by MARIS61

Since the vast majority of innovative and creative discoverers, leaders, inventers, and humanitarians...were dropouts (at least in some way or another) I think we should embrace this news as a positive.

Not hardly. John Lennon, Bill Gates & Paul Allen dropped out of college, not high school. Einstein was mediocre in militarized German schools but did go to university and get a Ph.D. Marie Curie and her Nobel-laureate daughter Irene were brilliant students, but Pierre Curie was home schooled.

In other words, you can't over generalize.

And of course even if what you said was true, saying "most high achievers were drop outs" is NOT the same as "most drop outs are high achievers". Maris, I think you know enough logic to know the difference.

[MARIS61]

Originally Posted by crandc

Not hardly. John Lennon, Bill Gates & Paul Allen dropped out of college, not high school. Einstein was mediocre in militarized German schools but did go to university and get a Ph.D. Marie Curie and her Nobel-laureate daughter Irene were brilliant students, but Pierre Curie was home schooled.

In other words, you can't over generalize.

And of course even if what you said was true, saying "most high achievers were drop outs" is NOT the same as "most drop outs are high achievers". Maris, I think you know enough logic to know the difference.

By the same token you cannot say "most dropouts are under-achievers".

A substantial portion, if not a majority, of dropouts due so simply because they have reached the educational point where the school system cannot offer them much due to having to focus on less-educated, handi-capped, or non-English speaking students. The dropout rate for Talented and Gifted students is virtually the same as for dis-advantaged students. Thankfully, most of these promising people have the good sense to avail themselves of other opportunities to educate themselves.

About the only true indication of dropout rates is that the school is failing to meet the community's needs educationally.