A quick follow-up to yesterday's post on education "reform" – a WaPo column on the relevance of standardized tests through the eyes of an adult school board member who (rather boldly) agreed to take the test and publicize his results. On the one hand, I have a hard time taking seriously his "I've never had to do math in real life, so why should kids learn it?
" argument, which is both explicit and implicit here. On the other hand, it makes you wonder what the average school board member (or Concerned Parent, for that matter) would get on their kids' standardized tests.
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I used to enjoy giving my intro classes the basic test immigrants are required to take in order to obtain U.S. citizenship. The results were…not pretty. "But no one needs to know this stuff!" was a common protest, but they somehow avoided linking that response to the question of why the test should be required of immigrants in that case.
DirtyOldDougJ says:
Well, I've failed the UK citizenship test several times, despite growing up there. You really ought to check it out.
Xynzee says:
The Australian one used to have a question asking who Don Bradman was – class under you Priorities post from the other day.
As soon as they start attacking the 3-R's of education, we have gone from WASF to FUBAR! The end happened, we just failed to notice.
wetcasements says:
I guess the overall story is a good one — pompous blowhard businessman realizes he isn't half as smart or clever as he thinks he is.
But the context and details all rub me the wrong way. First, he immediately starts bitching that schools need to teach "real" stuff — like, um, how to shine your shoes and clean up your office Mr. Businessman? How to operate a drill press in one of your factories? How to ask if you want fries with the shake?
We used to have a lot of that in America, and it was called vocational education or "shop." And we got rid of much of it because it was patently unfair to poor kids (i.e., black and hispanic kids).
As Jefferson wrote, education is the great equalizer in a democracy. Rich kids will always be rich, but poor kids who assert themselves have a shot at class mobility through educational achievement. It won't always work, but it's at least a mechanism that ensures we don't have those nasty things we fought a goddamn war on independence over — dynasties, royalty, entrenched monarchy, etc.
So yeah, good story, and of course the WaPo bends over backwards to draw the wrong conclusions from it.
Middle Seaman says:
You wont make me read that piece of dreck known as WaPo. I am surprised at your disappointment with board members and other people colliding with the education system. We are talking about a population that 50% of which vote for the 1% rich party and the other 50% vote for a party that doesn't exist and its leader is mean and stupid.
We call it life and it happens everywhere. Oh, grow up!
c u n d gulag says:
Well, no wonder he failed – he thought sine and cosine meant you needed two signatures on that form outsourcing his companies jobs to China.
WyldPirate says:
I don't think that there is any particular "sin" in the businessman "failing" or doing poorly on the math.
Math is a mental skill that takes use and practice –not unlike many skills that require physical attributes– to perform well. If skills are not employed on a regular basis, you're going to get less proficient in using them. Like many sports, some folks tap out their mental abilities early when it comes to math and others enjoy it and can excel but risk losing their expertise when they no longer use it. Not unlike football where some reach the peak of their skills in PeeWee football and others are NFL caliber. It's not an excuse–merely a fact.
Now of course people (students and adults) need to have a basic level of achievement to perform certain tasks. There are certain skills that are needed to function in society and fairly basic math should be one of them. Does everyone need to know calculus to function and be successful in society, though? Not really. Even if they learn it and become relatively proficient, they will lose the ability to use it over time if it is not used and have to re-learn it.
Part of education–particularly higher education–is demonstrating you have the tenacity to stick to something and following it through to a conclusion while doing well. Yeah, it's hoop-jumping, ticket-punching, whatever one wants to call it. Education is also partly instilling within one the humility that one can't even begin to learn everything in their field and knowing that there will always be more to learn.
JohnR says:
"But no one needs to know this stuff!"
Translation: "But I'm special!"
Amused says:
There is a tension here between two competing theories of education:
1. Education should consist only of the specific set of skills that a given individual expects to use on a daily basis.
OR
2. Education should consist of exercising the mind by subjecting it to intellectual rigor and stress. So — you may not need or remember Spanish from high school, but the process of learning a foreign language makes the mind more flexible and open to different modes of thinking. Calculus may give you some understanding of mathematical abstractions, even if you don't exactly remember how to solve integral equations.
In the latter case, saying, "But no one needs to know this stuff!" makes about as much sense as telling a gym trainer: "I shouldn't have to do leg curls because I don't use my legs like that in real life."
Unfortunately, I've seen even liberal, pro-education folks occasionally go for Theory #1.
WyldPirate says:
Amused, I think you hit the nail on the head. However, I don't think the ideal approach it is the either/or situation that you outline, but a melding of each approach with much more emphasis on your option #2.
John says:
This is what happens when your society is based in greed and selfishness. "I got mine, fuck you".
Your students that are citizens because they just happened to be born on this particular patch of dirt can't pass the citizenship test, but don't have any desire to think about what it means that they can't pass it while immigrants have to? "I got mine, fuck you."
School board member can't pass the tests that they expect children to pass, and starts complaining about how nobody really needs to know this stuff anyway? "I got mine, fuck you".
When the empire falls, very soon, and we're all fighting over basic supplies, you'll see people drop the pretense and simply outright say what they've been saying all this time. "I got mine, fuck you."
Fifth Dentist says:
A few years back at the paper where I worked we asked the superintendent of public schools and headmaster of a private school to take the Georgia graduation test. Both declined.
Peggy says:
As an educator, I'm definitely "enjoying" these posts (and by "enjoying" I mean "appreciating the idea that I'm not the only one who thinks WASF"). And I totally want to steal Amused's #2 and post it on my wall so that I can just point at it every time I'm trying to teach the words "Monsieur" and "Madame" so that we can read a story with French characters and a kid yells "I THOUGHT THIS WAS ENGLISH CLASS, WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE TO LEARN ALL THIS FRENCH SHIT?"
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh public urban education. :)
blahedo says:
It looks like this has gone viral; I've seen three unrelated people posting links to it on Facebook (after previously seeing a link on another message board I read). I've taken to cut-and-pasting the same (initial) response to all of them before diving into any ongoing discussion:
I read that yesterday, and boy does that author have an agenda. Three questions you should ask yourself as you think critically about the piece: Does the guy's credentials and success actually indicate that he is well-educated and/or smart? Does the fact that this guy's friends don't use math on a daily basis mean that math is actually not useful to teach kids? And what does it mean when someone who is guessing gets less than 1/4 or 1/5 of the questions correct?
Feel free to crib and adapt as you find useful.
Undesirable says:
Considering Amused's two competing theories of education:
I wholeheartedly agree in the benefits of option two. I'm am the proud (though often harried) English teacher at a public middle school. Through my curriculum, I try at every opportunity to encourage critical thinking, analytical writing, creative responses, and the like. But then the standardized tests come out and what are the students asked? "Find the noun in the sentence." "Define the word 'grandiloquent.'" "Which of the following is an appositive phrase?"
Through the course of the year, I teach this stuff, but it's a means to a larger goal. I teach appositive phrases so that students can understand how to create more complex sentences in their writing… not so they can identify such phrases.
Many standardized tests mistake the task for the learning goal. Standardized tests should assess a student's ability to think, reason, read, and comprehend. It's the difference between a question that asks, "Which of the following is a synecdoche?" and "Explain how the author shows a relationship between the two objects." Now, if the teacher has discussed synecdoche before, a student will understand different methods of creating comparisons. But they won't have to pull the definition to that term out of their collective ass.
All of that said… the article is a biased nightmare.
Amused says:
Whenever I see people questioning the value of education, or conservatives calling for slashing funds for it, or abolishing it altogether, or diverting the money to parochial schools, I am reminded of something the late Turkmenbashi — known in another life as Saparmurat Niyazov — once said in an interview with a reporter.
Turkmenbashi was a dictator of Turkmenistan for nearly sixteen years. He came to power in a former Soviet republic with a highly educated citizenry, and proceeded first to abolish medical education (arguing that Western medicine did not justify the expense of educating people in it), then to close down universities and disband public libraries, then to replace the public school curriculum with his book, Ruhnama, familiarity with which remains the sole standard for any field of expertise whatsoever in Turkmenistan today. Simultaneously, he made it illegal for citizens to leave the country for any reason, so that even affluent Turkmen found that they could not send their children to other countries to get an education.
When asked about his war on education in an interview in the late 1990's, he gave a disarmingly straightforward answer:
"An uneducated populace is easier to govern."
Tosh says:
Are we missing a (not so subtle) point?
Should members of the school boards and Boards of Education be required to take the test and publish the results? These people are making decisions and crafting policy, WE should at least know that they are attuned to the needs, aspirations and goals for the job
ts46064 says:
"We used to have a lot of that in America, and it was called vocational education or "shop." And we got rid of much of it because it was patently unfair to poor kids (i.e., black and hispanic kids)." Could someone elaborate on this?
Arslan says:
Amused, the purpose of education is to make people easier to govern.
Xynzee says:
After thinking about it and giving it another read, I'm not so sure our conclusions about the article are necessarily correct.
It sounds more like an assault on the standardised tests rather on education per se. That better methods of assessment need to be found — his assumptions about math are BS as the "scientists" he hangs w must either be tech dependent or not from the hard sciences. Even in design I find I use math, granted algebra and geometry with some trig.
I challenge this guy and his mates to a real world contest: Create a basic HappyMeal box. The thought behind that to get the graphics to fall right is pure math. Those aisle headers, take a good look at those the next time. Being able to know math speeds up the process to no end, and also helps prevent a very costly Fup. InDesign's GREP, HTML CSS web design all algebraic nesting.
Something needs to be done with education but these tests aren't the answer. Instead of being used as an assessment tool to find areas for improvement or to target children who need help to succeed they're used to penalise teachers and students. He was spot on with identifying that if he got the scores he did he'd have been put with the "dumb" kids, and told he'd never amount to spit. And as an impressionable sophomore aged kid he'd probably buy that Frame.
@Peggy and Undesirable: you're comments make think more and more that an educational theory would be correct. That at the same time English grammar is introduced, kids learn a foreign language. That the English teachers and the ForLangs work together to explicitly show the connection. This would improve both scores. I did abysmally in grammar because I was "so what, who cares". In French I was lost because I had no idea what an "appositive phrase" was (thanks to you and Google I now know :) ).
Getting math out of the class room is another tool. After studying GIS and surveying, perhaps all math teachers should have a base in surveying. Teaching kids how to use a theodolite would do wonders for teaching trig. You don't even need expensive equipment, having kids triangulate with a compass turns an otherwise dead subject into a real experience. Just like my packaging test is.
MBL says:
Xynzee is exactly right. The article's an assault on TESTING, not the bloody utility of mathematics.
ADM says:
Like Xynzee, I'm not so sure this is about education reform as code for destroying public education. The article says: "There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.
Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful."
I suppose that second paragraph could be a reformists' way of whistling that it's all the teacher's unions fault, but "corporate driven education" isn't whistled, it's targeted in black and white as a major impediment to learning.
I'm unclear on why this article isn't being celebrated.
Mike says:
One should learn some math in order to learn how to think — but one should also learn some math in order to know how to do math.
The real problem is that "doing well on a standardized test" does not equal "learning a subject."
Same goes for reading and writing. (I gather that history, civics, art, music, and science are no longer taught in American schools, thanks to No Child's Left Buttocks?)
Arslan says:
Teaching English grammar would also do wonders for the educational system. Can anybody remember learning about grammar past grade school? Most of the time you learn only through correction, and if this isn't reinforced at home it doesn't stick. When I studied a foreign language in high school our teacher, a former professor,(that's an appositive) told us that we needed to learn English grammar first. As an EFL teacher, I often have to admit to students that the grammar they are learning isn't taught in English-speaking countries. Sometimes we have to be dicks and mark them off for grammar mistakes that native speakers routinely make. Then there are the so-called "rules" about English grammar which are entirely false. For example, not splitting infinitives and avoiding prepositions at the end of sentences are neo-classicisist rules which have no business being in English. These "rules" stem from the idiotic idea that English should conform to the rules of Latin so as to standardize it and prevent innovation and change.
Students need to learn the formal register of English in order to succeed in life, and teaching them actual grammar would seriously help.
xynzee says:
Sorry to go off topic.
@Arslan:
"When I studied a foreign language in high school our teacher, a former professor,(that's an appositive) told us that we needed to learn English grammar first."
For my own knowledge, were you taught English grammar at the same time, or was it just a suggestion? If it was taught at the same time, did other students find benefit in their English skills even if they didn't progress in the foreign language?
My belief is that part of the reason education fails is that everything is taught in specialised compartments that do not interact with anything else. So by getting out of a classroom with a theodolite and then having to reduce the angles for triangulation helped me to *finally* understand sine, cosine and tan. These things become *real* not a theory.
It's the same as understanding what a past imperfect is in English, which then helps to understand verb tenses in a foreign language. This knowledge now becomes usable in the here and now, not some vague time in the future.
Barry says:
c u n d gulag Says:
December 6th, 2011 at 8:30 am
"Well, no wonder he failed – he thought sine and cosine meant you needed two signatures on that form outsourcing his companies jobs to China."
Good one, but he probably meant that same person signs the loan statement as the lender, and again as the lendee. I'm not sure what the term is for the same person signing for the third time as the notary, but I'm sure that that mortgage companies have a term for it (probably 'normal practice').
mclaren says:
Oh, gimme a goddamn break. The basics of American citizenship are simple and everyone needs to know 'em. For example, the three fundamental branches of government in America: everyone knows what they are. The CIA, the DHS, and the NSA.
Jeez. What a bunch of whiners.
Arslan says:
@xynzee
Basically it worked like this: He was teaching us Russian, a language which most English speakers find incredibly difficult due to it's various forms of conjugation and noun declension. The thing is, while it is not apparent, English has many of the same concepts. So he would relate these concepts in Russian to their best equivalents in Russian. I cannot speak for the other students, but I can say that it helped me immensely when I was training to be a teacher, and it has helped me study many other languages including those which are not even in the Indo-European family.
Jared says:
@Arslan
I actually took 2 semesters of Russian in college, and I found that my experience learning Spanish in grades 7-10 were extremely helpful. Honestly, I had some trouble keeping the two separate in my mind. I'd try to say something in one language and kept filling in gaps in my vocabulary with the other.
Jared says:
I vaguely recall reading a (possibly apocryphal) story about a couple who taught their kids several different languages from the start. Not that unusual, but what was weird was that the children wound up using a fast mix of all of them combined that absolutely nobody else could follow or understand. The parents eventually had to lay down the law, just one language at a time, please.