Schools Should Pursue Excellence
educationprogress.org
educationprogress.org
This is absolutely true. I worked as a secretary at a university that churned out teaching degrees. It took 2 years to finish the degree (which was in addition to a bachelors) and was almost entirely non scientific fluff. I wish more educated, experienced people could become teachers without the beaurocracy of being certified. I think many people would choose to serve their communities as teachers for a few years, especially in retirement. A lost opportunity.
[1] https://www.pa.gov/agencies/education/programs-and-services/...
They're still not paying public school teachers nearly enough anywhere. And school facilities are crumbling in impoverished areas.
NCLBA was a disaster rammed through by the person least qualified to understand education, the bozo GWB, and without asking educators.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-government-expendit...
If GDP doubles and you go from $1 eggs to $2 eggs, GDP didn't actually grow or you are being swindled.
Expenses for a fixed goods and services should decrease as a percent of GDP over time. If they don't, that means spending is less efficient over time.
> In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.
The piece focuses more on encouraging separation of pupils by ability, instead of uniformly teaching to the median.
Some information about the education system which produces these results: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Singapore
In general, I’d caution that presumptuous ideas like “best Americans will always be best” create cultural rot, and then something like DeepSeek happens. The cultural rot deepens when the elites run around trying to save face instead of admitting an opponent’s ingenuity, and aiming to do better. But I am not sure if that’s what you’re trying to imply (that best American students will out compete best students from other countries) but that’s the sense I got from your comment. America is resting on a lot of built-up wealth and power, so even objectively mediocre elites do well here.
I think everyone already knows this, but success in American society is predicated on intergenerational wealth and/or charisma, which is how people like George W. Bush or Trump become presidents despite being academically mediocre. People who make promises of meritocracy would never appoint some natural genius person-of-color as Barron Trump’s boss, for example. How likely do you think that is?
P.S. “person of color” isn’t a category that exists.
Looking specifically at PISA, it's not usually administered at the state level in the US, but when it has, individual states have outperformed national scores, as one should expect.
For example, Massachusetts has scored similarly to Singapore in Reading and Science (zero or small statistical difference between) and not far in Math.[1] It would be a reasonable hypothesis that a PISA score for the Greater Boston schools (pop. 5M) would even further outperform the U.S.
Sweeping country comparisons tend to amplify noise rather than reveal a clear signal, and are often about regression to the mean as much as anything else. It's not impossible to make sound inferences, but it's difficult to avoid motivated reasoning.
> Want to raise reading comprehension scores? Direct Instruction (or direct instruction) is a surefire way to do it.
> But the strengths of the program are also its weaknesses. The program dramatically narrows the aims of education and leaves little room for creativity, spontaneity and joy in the classroom.
It strikes me that the problem here, much like with phonics vs "holistic" learning, is that educators don't want to do it. It's too grim and serious, and culturally, that's not what people who go into education in America are about.
This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
Here’s an interesting example of a school district with a good approach:
https://www.the74million.org/article/dallas-isds-opt-out-pol...
It turns out that many students who are capable of performing above grade level don’t do so because no one signs them up for it. So Dallas ISD tried signing students up automatically, and it works! Achievement appears to be increasing as a result within each major racial group and there’s less inequality.
I'm a bit confused. Was there a missing "not" somewhere in the first sentence? Your second sentence there begins with "instead", which makes it seem like you're saying you don't believe in "introducing intentional unfairness" but the first sentence says you think it is a valid approach.
Overall I agree that tinkering with specific details like test score thresholds is not a great idea, although I think my perspective is a bit different from what you're saying here. My view is that these various manipulations of educational parameters won't work because the differences in educational outcomes are largely a result of differences in parents' economic circumstances. Or, put another way, the "inputs" to the educational system, in terms of where kids are at when they enter it, are at least as important as what the system does once kids are in it. We cannot equalize the outputs without equalizing the inputs.
That's not to say that things like the Dallas approach you linked to are bad or will have zero effect, just that it can only get us so far.
I am indeed missing a "not". That should be "...is not a valid way to do it".
And I kind of agree with you. I spent quite a bit of time growing up kibbitzing conversations with people involved in the now-defunct University of California affirmative action system, and I learned a few things, or at least a few things that the people I talked to believed. There are plenty of things one can measure: SAT scores, GPA, race, parents' income (W-2, AGI, whatever is reportable on FAFSA), statistics about the high school that the applicant went to. And there are goals one can try to meet with one's evaluation and that one can try to estimate: aptitude for college, grit, race (of course), degree to which they outperformed expectations, etc.
So one can be fair in the sense of admitting people only based on their present measurements (SAT score, for example). Or one can be differently fair and throw parents' income into the mix, but this has issues: certain groups, in a manner that is highly correlated with race, have family wealth and resources that are not reflected in W-2 income. You can try to correct for that by throwing race into the mix, and that is a giant rabbit hole and now rather illegal. One can try to account for kids who have excellent aptitude but test poorly because they were at a bad school, and this is hard, and maybe one's analysis indicates that race should be a feature used for this purpose, and see above about rabbit holes. One can strive for racial equality (does that mean equal fraction black and white? or matching population demographics? population demographics where? or just less outrageously imbalanced?), but how does one go about this?
In any case, the laws and judicial opinions changed, and UC had been considering race, and they stopped. And I think this was for the best. Regardless of statistics, considering an applicant's race directly seems very unfair. And it forced the people who wanted to improve equality to find what I think are better approaches: outreach, trying to improve the pipeline, etc. And, frankly, I don't think I'd want my own race to be considered in my applications for things, regardless of whether that consideration would make me more or less likely to be accepted.
We could say the rules of basketball are "internally fair" if what we're trying to do is determine which team played better. But if we start using the results of basketball games to, say, determine who qualifies for a mortgage, then maybe we would say that loan qualification system is not fair.
In a similar fashion, we could say that some hypothetical admissions scheme is fair in that it selects the students most likely to have the characteristics the school is looking for. (If it instead selects students most able to game the admissions process itself, then it's not fair in that way, but let's assume for now that it's fair in terms of selecting for on post-admission performance.) But the overall resource allocation in society, which depends in part on education, may be unfair even if the "internal fairness" of the educational merit system is fair.
My position is basically that it doesn't make sense to get too focused on that education-internal fairness specifically. I'm more concerned with the overall fairness of our society. And I think that if we made our society as a whole more fair, that would make education more fair as a byproduct. If, on the other hand, we do not make society more fair, making education more fair on its own is an underwhelming result. The main reason to make education more fair would be if you believe it will have knock-on effects that make society overall more fair. I think some of the people pushing for increased "fairness" in education (e.g., via affirmative action requirements) believe it can have large effects of that type; but I believe that, while it may have some effects, those effects will be relatively small.