Smart thinking on education

[unixronin]

freetrav came up with what I consider a very smart idea about how to make the US educational system (and the products thereof) competitive again.  Instead of the current navel-gazing of No Child Properly Prepared where schools are basically encouraged to teach to the standardized test and call it done, and if schools aren't meeting the standards, we lower the standards (a strategy the results of which we can all clearly see), he proposes that we treat world educational rankings as the target.  Here's his suggestion, slightly edited for clarity and continuity:

I would set the standards as follows:  Look at the world educational ranking, and require a US student to achieve at a level equivalent to the 80th percentile in the country rated #1.  Exception: for English, limit the examination to those countries where English is either official or the chief lingua franca.  For foreign languages, inspection of countries where the foreign language in question is either official or chief lingua franca.

In other words, if the South Koreans are #1 in math, a US district is deemed failing in math if the average score of its students on the South Korean measure does not come out in the 80th percentile.

I'll even go so far as to allow for 'easing in' to the higher standards - say the educational dictatorship is initiated in 2010:  In 2010, the target is 50th percentile, but rises to the 53rd percentile in 2011, 56th in 2012, and so on until it reaches the 80th in 2020.

I think he has something.

Comments

[meglimir.livejournal.com]

Am I the only one who finds the expression "English is ... lingua franca" ironic?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Nope. In fact, I (for one) occasionally use it intentionally for that reason. I've always found it an amusingly, uh, sort of self-nonreferential expression. :)

[danjite.livejournal.com]

Great idea. I truly love the proposal!

Now if only the US could agree on what consitutes valid edumaction.

This might surprise you folks there, but elsewhere I have been in the past year- and I ask- topics such as "Intelligint Deezine" are non topics.

Apparently the worldwide focus is on hard maths, hard sciences, functional language skills and- get this- the arts! Remember the arts?

Sigh...

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Are you truly in as much distress as your icon indicates?

[danjite.livejournal.com]

What I think you are asking is: "Do I think the decline in the USian educational system constitutes a national emergency, as indicated by my icon"?

Absolutely.

I have watched education in the US decline throughout my life. Objective standards shifting and being lowered or eliminated, budgets being slashed- then when counter-increases do happen having all the money go for administration and operations rather than academics.

When I was a lad there were arts programs, afer school programs, new books on a regular basis, free use of musical instuments, field trips and a host of other things missing from urban and most suburban schools today- except the wealthiest and the whitest.

Now if one wants to hire someone young with top math skills, an understanding of physics and a work ethic, students from USian schools don't measure up. (I mostly hired Indians.)

Now, perhaps the decline of US students can (also) be blamed on societal failures and pressures and a generation of parents who tried to be friends to their kids rather than authority figures and things like a chronic attitude of entitlement, but a good, solid school system would be a fine start.

Yes, I realize in point-of-fact, the public school system was never designed to educate, but that was what it's intent had evolved into for a few decades there. Now, for the most part- population-wise- it is just institutionalized baby sitting.

Do you think that the US public educational system's current state doesn't constitute a national emergency when compared to itself 40 years ago and the rest of the industrialized world (except for the UK) now?

If not, why not?

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I tried to present a balanced view of the demands placed on the US education system further down the page. I believe that the US education system suffers from a lack of focus or goals that the population agrees with. We are fighting over what the schools should teach, hence they teach nothing of substance.

If we can unify just the parents of public school students, we would have functioning schools again within a decade. As it stands now, the institutional inertia, supporting not deciding, is very high. Change will be opposed by those purporting to represent the teachers and staff.

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

I admit I don't have many kind words for the educational system(s) my family has been exposed to so far.

I for one espouse greater parental responsibility and involvement. If you're not happy, don't sit there like sheep...complain! <Wife> and I are not only on a first name basis with all of <Son>'s teachers and important administrators in the school, but also with:

• the head of the district's gifted program for junior high schools,
  
• the head of the district's gifted program (her boss)
  
• the head of the district's school board (her boss), and
  
• the head of gifted education for the state's department of education

All of them are familiar with <Son>; all but the last one have met him personally. When we're not happy with something, they all hear about it. If more parents did the same, then I doubt the schools would be able to ignore everyone.

Along these lines, the parents all need to talk and work together. This is especially important within individual classrooms. I mean, it's one thing for a single parent to whine about a teacher to the principal. It's another thing entirely when parents representing 25-33% of a classroom's students go to the principal as a unified group with a set of shared complaints. That type of cooperation gets bad teachers pulled out of schools.

As for how to improve the quality of education at a wider level, I think more people need to investigate alternatives to public schools. Charter schools, homeschooling, even private schools (financial aid may be an option, if need be). Public schools receive tax money on a per-student basis (well, they do here in <State>, at least); this effectively allows parents to vote with their feet.

I admit this doesn't solve the issue of how to improve education, but it will at least draw attention to the issues. It looks really bad when schools have declining enrollment even though the school-age population in their boundaries is increasing.

Is this easy? Of course not. Does it take a bunch of time? You betcha. Are you going to face a metric assload of resistance from the schools? That's a no-brainer. Does it work?!? If you're selfish and look out solely for your particular child(ren), then yes, you can find viable solutions, as decidedly nontraditional as they might be.

(Then again, keep in mind that <Wife> and I are finding that the best preparation for college is...well, college.)

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

What about the ELL classes? Would you exempt them until the students became proficient?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

ELL....?

My personal thought on the subject is not to allow institutionalized exemptions. Because once you create statutory exemptions for one thing, pretty soon it becomes three, then six, then fifteen .... and before long, the entire system is so riddled with exemptions and loopholes that it's worthless — not to mention incomprehensible.
(Just look at the tax code, with its exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions.... it's said it's grown so convoluted that not even the IRS itself fully understands all of it any more.)

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

English Language Learning.
Federally mandated classes to bring immigrants, both legal and illegal, to the accepted standard of english language.
Not having ELL cost Arizona 21 million dollars in fines from the federal court, and would have been more but Governor Janet and the people poked a sharp stick in the rear of the state lege and got them moving.
You can't compare someone who is still learning second language basics to a native speaker. It's not fair.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Ah, aka "English as a Second Language".

You can't compare someone who is still learning second language basics to a native speaker. It's not fair.

Very true. But you can perfectly readily compare their progress to people learning English as a second language in other countries. I fail to see a problem there.

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

That I agree with.

[tabbifli.livejournal.com]

There is a fundamental different between learning a language as a second langauge for "recreational" purposes - if that purpose later turns out to be more than recreational, yay you, but it was recreational to start with - and learning it for right-now-functionality. English as a Second Language (ESL) is Right Now Functionality.

Several of the service people I interact with on a regular basis are trying to figure out ESL. Most of them are one form of Asian or another, although the lawn keeper is Mexican (he just gets his daugher to translate when his pidgin English and my pidgin Spanish isn't sufficient). As near as I can tell from helping them occasionally, they are actually stuck trying to learn ESL the same way I was stuck learning Spanish and Italian - and the majority of them find it less than functional for day to day use. "Your change is 50 cents", "The ladies' room is in the back" and "You need to move your car because the delivery truck needs to park there" are all much more useful than "The bananas are a lovely shade of red today" - but the latter is what you get from the formal course (no, that's not a typo, just a memorable statement).

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you on principal with how to judge the general level of competance in other fields. I am, however, disagreeing with you in this particular instance. People learning English as a second language in other countries are not going to find their livelyhood disrupted if they fail the course, as they would here. Mind, I'm not wholly convinced any longer that folks here would find their livelihoods all that disrupted, either.

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

My questions:

Is this goal at all realistic? My gut instinct is that it isn't.

What is going to be done with districts that "fail" that will give them the resources for succeeding without encouraging struggling borderline districts to underperform in order to get those resources? (Decapitating the management before bringing in the resources is one possibility). Do the solutions address the economic and social issues involved in district performance?

Going back to realism - are the highest scoring countries scoring so high because they place undue emphasis on the subject in question? Is it at all realistic to expect students receiving a balanced education to perform equally to the top 80% of students whose education is highly focused on a single subject?

Do higher scores actually equate to higher quality of life for society as a whole? Are a large percentage of the students obviously negatively effected by the pressure (high suicide and drop-out rates, which would also skew the stats for the higher grades, since only the most academically successful would continue with schooling that long)? In short - do the countries we're attempting to best academically actually have a lifestyle we want to emulate?

Not that I don't think serious school reform is needed, and I don't know any public school teachers who disagree with me, but this suggestion just makes me go "huh?".

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is an issue if trying to "best" other nations academically, nor do I think that driving students to suicide is going to be an issue. If we were demanding that US schools be the best worldwide in everything, sure, that'd be a little unrealistic. But I don't think that dragging our educational system's average performance into the 80th percentile worldwide, instead of the 40th, is an unreasonable goal at all. Then we might be able to graduate kids out of school whose available career choices come down to more than the choice between asking "Paper or plastic?" or "Do you want fries with that?"

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

80th percentile worldwide seems more reasonable. However, what he's saying (direct quote) is "Look at the world educational ranking, and require a US student to achieve at a level equivalent to the 80th percentile in the country rated #1."

Unless I'm brain dead, that means he's saying US students on average need to achieve better than 80% of the students in the country rated #1 in a given subject.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Actually, I misspoke there.

I think the reasoning goes something like this: "Find the country that's #1. They're an example of what's possible. We should be able to manage 80% of that."

And again, I don't think that's unreasonable.

Unless I'm brain dead, that means he's saying US students on average need to achieve better than 80% of the students in the country rated #1 in a given subject.

OK, now I see your point. I'm not certain whether this is a misstatement on his part, so I'm going to leave him to address it.

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

By these standards of measurement, is the U.S. in the 80^th or higher percentile in anything right now? Or even the 50^th, for that matter?

If so, then this approach may be viable. The school system (as a whole) has shown it can be successful in at least one subject area, and the key is just to take those strategies and approaches and apply them towards the other areas.

If not, however, then this approach is just setting an expectation without showing the schools how to meet it.

[bratling.livejournal.com]

It also begs the question of how we test to see if we've achieved the 80th (or whatever) percentile. This proposal doesn't -- at all -- avoid the problem of teaching to meet the needs of standardized tests, rather than the needs of students.

Math is (relatively) easy to test. Analysis, writing, creative interpretation ... not so much.

A significant part of the problem is standardized testing. Testing to international standards instead of local standards won't change that.

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

Also, will having more educated students automatically increase the opportunities available for these students? There are plenty of people with excellent educations who have trouble getting a job equivalent to their level of education.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Maybe if more people coming out of the schools are better educated, they'll create more opportunities, and elect fewer stupid politicians who throw the baby out with the bathwater to "be seen to be doing something" even if it's completely the wrong thing.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I started school in the mid Sixties. I will put my broad based elementary education up against any in the world. (I do know that I have a radically better foundation than my college classmates.) We did know how to do it right at one time, we can go back to it.

The direct comparison is skewed. When I was in school, the system served approx. 1.5 standard deviations from the mean. (I was a social and academic outcast.) Today the schools serve closer to four standard deviation from the mean. Only the true outliers are not served by the local school district in some fashion.

Compound the problem in the elementary school by so many kids coming to school unprepared to learn. You may think I am only talking about the inner city schools, I am not. I am also talking about schools served by well to do couples, where both work full time. Those elements of society are demanding that the schools fulfill the role of parent, as well as educator. Schools are responsible for everything except sleep schedules it seems.

The only way to combat the problem is to have parents responsible for their child's education. My children have gone through the public schools. I feel that they have a strong foundation, not just in education, but in thinking for themselves and solving problems. (Something some higher scoring cultures do not emphasize.) We are training our children for something other than getting the highest grades. Parents need to remain engaged in the process.

Before we start directly comparing ourselves to other countries, let's decide what we want our children to know and be able to do. Our best executives are seldom the top scorers in school. The system is broken more because we no longer know what is important to our children, not because we don't know how to teach or care.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

Dude. You want to test french I as taught in freshman high school classes on a LEVEL WITH FRENCH HIGH SCHOOLERS?????!!?!?

okay, look, our system has issues- most of which come from the federalis and apathetic non-communities, but ... aside from the fact that Yet Another One Size Fits All Federal Mandate From Hell isn't going to fix anything (can we just fucking balkanize already?)- this is way extremo. Give people a chance to learn arabic before requiring them to out orate osama, k?

Now, that was probably just an unclear statement, but my comment can be extended a bit. you can put all sorts of insane requirements on teachers and schools- like expecting and undefunded school that's over half immigrant to excel on english exams before the stude3nts have been in the country for 2 full years (NOT uncommon out here. but it's california, so it's not bush's fault.) - and you can add 4th grade trig to that, on top of it. But you aren't going to GET anywhere.

1: Sweeping one size fits all solutions never work. That alone- the 'mass man' automaton idea of education- probably does the most harm, period. It ain't money nor even cheesey ass tests. It's the idea that kids are lightbulbs, or even better, walmart batteries.

2: Test something real. I know a kid who will bomb a trig test over and over and over again, but can design and build a boat that not only floats, but sails well. It's the same skillset in many ways. She's doomed to fail that exam, though. Too bad for her. Humans aren't punch card machines!

I'm not even convinced I buy the world educational rankings, anyway.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

no, your french case is misleading.
It's "french as a second language" (in the US), vs. "french as a first language" (in France and portions of Africa).

Some might suggest relaxing the 80th percentile for fringe subjects, but I suspect this may not be required. How many US kids are taking Arabic classes at a high school level? I'd venture that their average grades far exceed the average grades for the core subjects.

You're right on the testing issue however, you either end up with grade inflation and inequities, or sucky standardized tests.