Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/why-innovation-cant-fix-americas-classrooms/249524/

by adamtmca • 15 years ago

32 62 15 years ago

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

From the submitted article: "The top-performing nations boost the quality of their teaching forces by greatly raising entry standards for teacher education programs. They insist that all teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach, apprenticing new teachers to master teachers and raising teacher pay to that of other high-status professions." This is a basically correct description about teacher selection and teacher professional development in several countries with schools that outperform schools in the United States. One way that teachers have the time to meet with more experienced teachers during the school day for mentoring and discussion of lesson plans is by setting higher class sizes. If the staffing ratio of a school (total teachers hired per enrolled pupils) is roughly the same in two countries, but in one country class sizes are larger, the teacher will have time during the school day to do lesson preparation in collaboration with other teachers. That better lesson preparation can result in more engaging lessons that deliver better education to the larger classes.

I've read a longer article by the same author (Marc Tucker) called "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform."

http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Standing-on-t...

I just tested to see if that had been submitted to HN before, and it had not, so now it is linked to from a new thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3321124

Tucker underestimates, in my opinion, the importance of learner choice, but based on international comparisons he correctly identifies several management practices that would make the school system in the United States better for most learners. I have rather more fondness, based on life experience, for learner choice in schools because I live in a state with statewide public school open enrollment,

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/JustParent/SchChoice/index....

which has encouraged Minnesota school districts to offer innovative programs to draw in students.

rubashov• 15 years ago

> figure out what the top-performing countries are doing and then, by capitalizing on our unique strengths, develop a strategy to do it even better.

The top performing countries' strategy is to have mostly Asian or Northern European students, and very few of third/second world extraction.

ajross• 15 years ago

I'm all but certain that's not the case. Obviously the US has higher immigration rates and higher poverty rates. But almost all studies of educational achievement correct for this. US students perform poorly in comparison to the rest of the world across income levels and ethnicities.

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

A Hacker News participant who kindly checked the facts in another recent thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3319177

was able to verify what I had read in other official sources on international testing programs, namely that United States students underperform (because their schools underperform) on an ethnicity-matched basis. One detailed report on the issue that I think you will find to be interesting reading is the Education Next report on mathematics learning opportunities for top mathematics students in the United States,

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

which shows that United States students miss opportunities in school to develop their abilities to the fullest. A look at the content of mathematics textbooks in different countries, and specialized studies on differences in teaching practices

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

in different countries have helped me understand the differences I frequently observe between people of the same ethnicity who received their primary and secondary education in different countries.

yummyfajitas6• 15 years ago

You overstate your case again. US students of Asian origin slightly underperform Asia in math (but outperform all non-Asian nations). Also, US students of European origin outperform all but 6 countries with similar demographics.

The other participant did not verify that it was caused by school underperformance, merely that I misread the numbers. The correction puts Asian Americans at #5 in the world rather than #4. It does not change the fact that Asian Americans are still 32 points higher than the first non-Asian nation (Hungarians). Nor does it change the fact that European Americans are #1 among European nations + Anglosphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...

Incidentally, any claims one makes to the inherent superiority of Asian education systems must be limited to math and science. Asian Americans are #1 in combined literacy (#2 if you consider Shanghai as a separate group), and European Americans are #2 among primarily European-descended nations.

(See tables R1 and R3. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004_1.pdf )

(As before, I'm only posting this so others are not misled by tokenadult's logical fallacies and intellectual dishonesty.)

jessriedel2• 15 years ago

I appreciate your research here, but I hope HNers don't downvote rubashov's unsourced but more-or-less true statement because you've thrown up some links to articles.

You point to the fact that Asian Americans underperform most all east-Asian countries. This is certainly interesting, but it hardly shows that the US's underachievement isn't mostly explained by ethnic make up. In particular, one would expect that a hypothetically strong group to perform worse when educated in a diverse system than when that group is educated in a system designed just for it.

jerf• 15 years ago

Opinion: The thing that has saved the American school system is that everyone around the world has fully copied the deeply flawed Prussian schooling model, and in many cases has doubled down on the flaws. Higher performing schools are often "teaching to the test" even worse than we are, which is how they get measured as "higher performing" in the first place.

If the Prussian model is soooo spectacularly wonderful, then you have nothing to fear from it being exposed to a competitive environment. It'll win. No worries.

On the other hand, if the Prussian model is, shall we say, less than optimal for the 21st century, the fastest way to find out is free market experimentation, and rather than giving ourselves the same cultural shackles that everybody else has, the American exceptionalism that will justify our salaries will be our willingness to experiment, learn, and refine from there where everybody else insists on the Prussian model. Unless, of course, a 19th century schooling model is just so damned perfect that it will admit of no significant improvement. In which case we'll still find that out pretty quickly. The maximum downside is sharply bounded and the upside of cracking open the monopoly on education is hard to bound. (I can't call it "unbounded" with a straight face, that's hard to justify, but it really is hard to know how much better truly 21st schooling could be.) Failing to at least try some innovation isn't even remotely justified with a cost/benefit risk profile like that.

Had some other country beat us to the punch and exposed their schooling system to free market competition before us, we really would be up the creek without a paddle.

VladRussian7• 15 years ago

>the fastest way to find out is free market experimentation

>exposed their schooling system to free market competition

not all things can be effectively put under free market framework. Bottom line optimization and profit maximization, natural main objectives of the known free market implementations, don't work well for nuclear weapons maintenance, law enforcement ... healthcare and education for that exact reason that the main objectives in all these areas aren't the bottom line and profit maximization. For example, private prisons and healthcare in the US is highly profitable enterprises, while they serve their main objectives worse then their non-free-market counterparts in comparably developed countries.

yummyfajitas6• 15 years ago

It is a bit disingenuous to compare private goods (healthcare, education) with public goods (law enforcement, defense). In the case of public goods, the mechanism of freeloading prevents an optimal level of provisioning of them from a free market.

What mechanism prevents competition and free markets from providing good performance in health care or education?

cwe2• 15 years ago

I'm pretty tired of this argument. Or at least, including education and healthcare in there. Law enforcement is very different than education. A monopoly of the use of force is soooo different than optimal learning. A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience. Schools that provide the best long-term experience for the students will have the best profits, no shady practices required. If healthcare really was in a free market, then consumers could choose to avoid the providers that try to bend them over backwards for their own bottomline.

rhino422• 15 years ago

The problem is that the "free market" approach works better when it is immediately apparent the quality of the product. The results of teaching high school aren't really apparent for 3-4 years (at the fastest). This makes it hard for a newcomer to be effective against the competition

yzhengyu• 15 years ago

You're being overwhelmingly optimistic. History shows that an education model to be surprisingly resilient and will only collapse if there as seismic shifts in its supporting culture/state/nation.

This is readily apparent in East Asia, where the Chinese system of schooling, civil examinations and the mandarin official/gentry system only began to fracture when exposed to Western schools of thought, particularly the latter's advantages in the sciences.

I predict the current system will only even begin to fracture when it is no longer able to perform its primary function on a massive scale - i.e. to enable people who graduate from college to obtain a job.

JoshTriplett4• 15 years ago

We still haven't really exposed our schooling system to market competition; any competitor in the market has to compete with the existing monopoly, which gets its payment even from people using one of the competitors. Fix that and we'd have competition.

pnathan• 15 years ago

It also is the case that some countries measure a different population of students for 'high school' than the US.

E.g., in Germany at one time, the secondary schools that were measured was the academic track, this was being compared against the US's schools which was the general secondary school population.

I'm not sure if this still holds true but it's something to be aware of - the measurement bias.

Paying teachers well & requiring them to have in-depth knowledge of the subject is good. No argument there!

jcampbell1• 15 years ago

When I see Shanghai listed at the top of the international chart, I always laugh. About 40% of Shanghai's population are non-registered residents that have no access to the public schools, and are not included in the results. To compare Shanghai to the US, you would have to drop the poorest 40% from the US numbers.

lupatus• 15 years ago

Reading biographies on Benjamin Franklin[1], amongst others, makes me seriously doubt the importance of formal schooling on the amount of success a person has in life.

I think other factors like innate curiosity and developed capacity for work are more important.

[1] Franklin's entire formal schooling consists of 2 years at the Boston Latin School, from which he did not graduate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Early_life

metafour2• 15 years ago

I think it's hard to extrapolate over an entire diverse population based on one or even a few examples.

richcollins• 15 years ago

Perhaps he's right depending on your definition of "top performing". He doesn't define it but I'm guessing he means "scores well on standardized tests involving math and verbal skills".

When you optimize for creation of wealth for others (products / services) and for yourself (positive life experiences), you end up with a very different solution: http://www.sudval.org/

sgoranson• 15 years ago

I feel like there's an elephant in the room all debates on US education dance around. My experience with school from K-postgrad was that my education was 90% dependent on what I put into it as a student (homework, studying, etc) and everything else (teacher quality, curriculum, etc) was only marginally significant to how much I learned. In other words, I believe there's a much more insidious and intractable problem causing US children to under-perform. The worst part is that I don't believe we even know exactly what it is. But my guess is that it's a combination of issues firmly entrenched in our melting pot of culture.

edit: correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the US is one of the few countries on earth that has had a consistently high standard of living since WWII, right? My guess is that a few generations of unparalleled abundance has helped atrophy a once voracious society.

cwe2• 15 years ago

parents teaching victimhood and no work ethic?

omouse• 15 years ago

rich parents? is that who you're talking about?

evmar• 15 years ago

I found "The End of Education" (http://www.amazon.com/End-Education-Redefining-Value-School/...) an interesting (if not completely persuasive) argument that earlier education should be more about teaching values (for example, consider the "American dream" vs how elementary schoolers learn to ask "will this be on the test?") than facts.

VladRussian7• 15 years ago

>an elephant in the room all debates on US education dance around.

is that

>US children

is pure virtual "statistical" entity. The education in the US is local. Chinese children from Bay Area Cupertino are tigers ( as i heard, don't have direct experience). Children of my Russian or "native" (WASP type) American friends in the Bay Area have no problem being accepted to Stanford, Harward, Berkeley (though one "lazy" one was forced to go to lesser known UC campus).

On the other side, beside obvious case of black ghettos, there are well known areas in the US where school boards decide to teach Creationism, where people "cling to their guns and religion" while waiting for the President to bring back from China and hand them down "good paying jobs". What kind of motivation and resulting education will children get there?

The children must not be held hostages of the local political, religious, economical situation. Alabama didn't want to integrate schools - the real force was apllied to enforce the right of the people. The same way here - the basic education is a guaranteed right and the children don't have a way to defend their right. That means that federal government must step in and apply necessary resources (and force if necessary) to make sure that the children's right for the basic education (and that has very specific meaning in the 21st century, and isn't subject to specific religious beliefs of local school board members) isn't violated.

yummyfajitas6• 15 years ago

One reason why it might not be such a good idea to copy other nations - they tend to have fairly large achievement gaps between natives and immigrants.

The US has an achievement gap of about 20 pts on PISA, compared to roughly 40 for Norway and even higher in Finland and Sweden.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

This isn't a big deal for nations with few immigrants, but it is a problem for the US.

(Of course, for the sake of making a snarky argument, I'm making the same fallacy as the author: if we copy other nations education systems blindly, we'll get the same result.)

jessriedel2• 15 years ago

If you ranked individual US states among countries, you'd find that many of them are near the very top. (As a whole, the US can't compete against tiny countries like Luxembourg because of the law of large numbers.) Wouldn't it make a lot more sense for the badly performing states to look at the well performing states rather than foreign countries? There will be fewer confounding variables and cultural hurdles to applying lessons learned.

In any case, as soon as an author writes something like

>To many in the financial community, these market-inspired reform ideas are very appealing.

I know this is smear job rather than an intellectually honest appraisal. I mean, really. We shouldn't try new models of schooling because they are basically like the financial crisis? Are you kidding me?

metafour2• 15 years ago

I'm in a high school classroom two days a week this semester and next semester is my last before becoming a licensed teacher in the US.

A couple of my math professors at the university I attend went to China over the summer to get an idea of what their primary education classrooms are like and compare them to ours. One of the things I've heard regarding the overall demographics is that there they don't have the expectation that all students are going to get educated to the extent that we attempt to here. At a certain point if students don't perform well enough they are transitioned out to a vocational school instead of following an academic track.

This very well could have a profound effect on comparing scores across countries, their top percent of students is being compared to our entire population of students.

If you consider some of the books that are being tossed around in these threads, e.g. Liping Ma's Knowing and Teaching..., one of the small things that sticks out is a language issue that can have an impact on a young child's number development.

Also, according to that book there is an entirely different mindset when it comes to not only teaching as a profession but in their professional development as well. They are afforded more opportunities for planning and collaboration compared to what is often experienced here.

I think we as a society have to consider whether it is feasible to continue down this road where we attempt to educate everyone to the same level.

Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms

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