The sorry state of 'murrican education.

[Jenne]

I teach introductory biology at the local community college as an adjunct. I can attest that memorization is fundamental. Understanding is not really understanding when you understand that the thingy is made of other thingies and performs some functions like it does some stuff to other thingies or makes thingies or something...but I understand it, deeply. You have to memorize the names of the thingies, sorry. Also, a lot of my non-majors are older (non-traditional) and they can be worse than the kids in terms of not wanting to learn. Everybody needs a college degree now like its a ticket to a job. What people don't realize is that they have to want to learn, to be scholars, intellectuals, thinkers. They just want to pass the class so they can get a promotion. Older people (>30) tend to have a personal narrative that tells them they are too old, it has been too long since they were in school, they aren't science people, excuses, excuses, excuses.

I can't really speak to younger grades, but I will say that it is very important that I am able to fail someone for not doing their work. Learning takes work on the part of the learner to build knowledge in their own minds. The model that teachers can impart knowledge upon their students while students sit passively and receive this knowledge is bullshit. This means some students need to fail if they don't do their work. I speculate that teachers might spend too much time trying to cram the minimum amount of required knowledge to pass the standardized test into the slower kids heads while everybody else sits and waits for the dumb kids to catch up. Teachers need to be allowed autonomy and be given the tools to increase learning effectiveness in their classrooms, starting with a better cognitive model of how learning takes place in the human brain, and leading to more playful interaction with concepts so that students can develop their own understanding.

It's actually pretty complicated, and politicians and people in general hate complicated things, so they pretend they are simple. 

Most excellent reply to a very harsh, and yes tangled skein of a problem.  Huzzah, to a fellow lecturer!

[Disco Pickle]

And this is why American "conservatism" in particular tends to target education most viciously.  It is not enough to simply control education, like the Soviets tried to do, as education tends to find ways around these rules.  Short of sticking a political officer in every classroom, a good teacher will find ways to teach the cirriculum they deem necessary, not the one they have necessarily been taught to teach.  So you overwork teachers.  Give them larger and larger classrooms.  Cut their budgets.  Cut their staffing.  Put their unions under attack.  Do everything in your power to make the job less attractive, to the point the only viable teaching positions will be ones at elite academies...where staff are directly reliant on oligarchical interests for payment, and where dismissal of "inappropriate" staff is usually much easier.

I'm actually a little surprised to see you repeat that meme, Cain.  In my entire political lifespan and any conservative I have ever discussed American education with, not a single one has ever expressed anything other than a strong desire to see improvement, results, and accountability.  There is also a strong belief that DoE policies that result in teaching to the lowest common denominator have been gutting the quality of primary education since it's inception.  

Not a single person ever implied we should be making education worse to keep the poor down.

They aren't going to SAY it... but watch what they do.

So these people, who have families and children of their own, attending these same schools.  schools THEY went to.  They're secretly hoping the quality of education gets worse, their communities get worse..  why?

I'm having a hard time putting on my lefty hat for this one.  What's the thought process for this particular lefty meme.  That there's an unspoken conspiracy by conservatives to destroy their own communities by making the quality of education worse?

Help me out here.  

[Scribbly]

I think the point is that most conservatives - at least the ones in a position of decision making power - do not go to the same schools that they destroy.

This is certainly the case over here, where a ridiculous proportion of our top politicians go to 'public schools' (which are actually private schools, confusing name), pay tens of thousands of pounds for the privilege, and then go on to Oxford or Cambridge as a matter of course.

Private education is a thing in the states too, right? I'd be pretty surprised if it wasn't... and I'd be pretty surprised if a similar state of affairs isn't the case across most countries, to be honest.

[Triple Zero]

And this is why American "conservatism" in particular tends to target education most viciously.  It is not enough to simply control education, like the Soviets tried to do, as education tends to find ways around these rules.  Short of sticking a political officer in every classroom, a good teacher will find ways to teach the cirriculum they deem necessary, not the one they have necessarily been taught to teach.  So you overwork teachers.  Give them larger and larger classrooms.  Cut their budgets.  Cut their staffing.  Put their unions under attack.  Do everything in your power to make the job less attractive, to the point the only viable teaching positions will be ones at elite academies...where staff are directly reliant on oligarchical interests for payment, and where dismissal of "inappropriate" staff is usually much easier.

wait, they do that on purpose?

i mean, I can understand that this would be the logical thing to do to preserve status quo of the rich conservatives, etc.

but how can a status quo operate with such purpose, like this?

I mean, I thought it was all a combination of rich conservatives power politicians that think their lobbies are more important than whatever, and clusterfucks and stupid decisions and chaos and religious shitheads and people acting really shortsighted and only in their own self interest race for power and wealth.

but the thing you describe sounds more like a deliberate very long-term operation that spans multiple generations as well as politicians and terms?

are there actually politicians literally thinking "so we need to stop the population getting educated to gain power and wealth, history has shown it doesn't work to dictate teachers to teach stupidity because they won't, so we'll have to wear them down by budget cuts and larger classrooms. let's draft a few bills that seem well-intentioned on the surface to achieve this goal ..." (not putting words in your mouth here, just trying to formulate my question)

because that's really devious.

I mean, I can imagine there must be some politicians being that devious, but I'd expect to be able to count them on one hand. And that just seems too little of them to affect change in such a large fashion?

Sorry if this is a really stupid question, but I was always under the impression that these sorts of degenerative tendencies in society are caused by, well, "The Machine", complicated systems clusterfucking themselves, people getting promoted until they reach a position they cannot handle, that sort of thing, monkeys being shitheads.



Seems DP is wondering the same thing.

[Doktor Howl]

are there actually politicians literally thinking "so we need to stop the population getting educated to gain power and wealth, history has shown it doesn't work to dictate teachers to teach stupidity because they won't, so we'll have to wear them down by budget cuts and larger classrooms. let's draft a few bills that seem well-intentioned on the surface to achieve this goal ..." (not putting words in your mouth here, just trying to formulate my question)

Some pretty much say it out loud.

[Jenne]

DP, it's not that they say "keep brownie down" or whatever.  What they say is this:

YOU CAN'T FIX EDUCATION BY GIVING IT MORE MONEY!  WE SPEND MORE ON EDUCATION THAN WE DO ON ANYTHING ELSE--AND LOOK AT WHAT IT GETS US!  SHIT! SO WE'RE NOT GOING TO SPEND MORE THAN WE *HAVE TO*...

and this

IT'S ALL THOSE ADMINISTRATORS!  CUT THE FAT!  THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING, GIVE LOCAL CONTROL!

The thing is, most don't know what the fuck they're talking about, and that second sentence above highlights that.  Local control *is* the administrators.  The fact is, there are less superintendents, less counselors, less area administrators THAN ever.  But the population is increasing, and the principals (who start out NOT as administrators, mind you, but as teachers) end up with more on their plates than ever.  There are less vice principals to help carry the weight.  And the laws are trickier.  I think I've posted before about how the efficacy of public education would be helped out by teaching teachers and administrators alike a good, solid course on what they are legally able and not able to do....

but I digress...

Everything Cain said is spot on.  And everything Phlogiston said gels with what my experiences at UCLA and environs taught me about teaching as well.   The part that gets me is not the failure of NCLB (that's been well known in the education circles for the better part of a decade), nor the fact that teaching to the test is the new all-important curriculum (Cram's explanation was excellent--and in fact, it's unfortunately highly and despicably practical). 

NO, the thing that gets me is what Rog touched on in the realm of equalization of funding.  The fact that public education has no REAL standard of funding leaves it a "haves" and "have-nots" proposition...nationwide.  The various formulas states use to calculate how much per-pupil spending is to be allotted for each school is amazingly complex, and therefore quite assinine, whem you are talkinga bout any sort of reform.

Because attracting the better teachers out of the spectrum, hiring the better people to run the schools and districts, and creating a learning environment that can suit the greater number of pupils rather than a small minority...that takes a bit of dough. 

And it's not all about money, of course, but when there's a lack of fucking desks or textbooks (in fact, I was shocked to learn about 7 years ago just how many states RENT their textbooks to their students in K-12), there's something fundamentally wrong.  Especially if we have the so-called "richest" nation in the world. 

Public education is a good, it IS a commodity.  I have come to the conclusion that the public in general has to fight to change it if they desire that change.  Anyone legislating it has OTHER priorities in mind, not necessarily the improvement of the populace's bottom line.  So, to go back to the OP, the sorry state of our public education will only improve internally--with that point I agree wholeheartedly.

I suscribe to Education Week, and I occaisionally provide articles from it here.  It's a nonprofit watchdog news agency that sort of keeps an eye out on education policy nationwide, the larger cases get highlighted usually, and reformation of public education curricula, trends, etc.  It's very informative about the different debates (like charter schools, for instance) and the various sides of said debates.  And it gives me a more well-rounded perspective on where public education is headed nationally.

[Doktor Howl]

Thing is, Jenne, the money that lined the pockets of the standardized testing company (billions) is counted in the education budget.  That way, they can claim that "there's more funding for education than ever"...But little of it reaches the schools.

[Cramulus]

Which companies do you mean?

[Doktor Howl]

Which companies do you mean?

Those four companies are Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson. According to an October 2001 report in the industry newsletter Educational Marketer, Harcourt, CTB McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing write 96 percent of the exams administered at the state level. NCS Pearson, meanwhile, is the leading scorer of standardized tests.

Even without the impetus of the No Child Left Behind Act, testing is a burgeoning industry. The National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy at Boston College compiled data from The Bowker Annual, a compendium of the dollar-volume in test sales each year, and reported that while test sales in 1955 were $7 million (adjusted to 1998 dollars), that figure was $263 million in 1997, an increase of more than 3,000 percent. Today, press reports put the value of the testing market anywhere from $400 million to $700 million.

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html#ixzz1Ybc0FyHK

That's per year, of course.

[Jenne]

Naw.  Not in CA.  Not how you mean, I think.  Though I'll ask the Superintendent when I meet with him in the next couple of weeks and ask him.  That would be a good thing to find out about.

And some of those measures are useful, just not all.  The part where it gets REAL fucked up is when a state like CA, who teaches the majority of the ESL kids in the nation, has its own system that was well under way for assessment and needs-based curricular changes, and then along comes some fucked up national system that gets in the way of the state's assessments. 

Q:  Which ones do the teachers use? 
A:  The ones that bring the most cash to the table.

And in economic downturns, that can be BOTH.  And when THAT happens...you bet your ass there's no time for painting, sculpting, singing, acting, playing an instrument or playing out on the field.

[Cain]

DP:

I've talked with people, whom I trust, who say they've seen it explicity spelled out in such terms (more than a few of these witnesses are American and British "conservatives", alas of a dying breed who are none too common these days).

In fact, this particular facet of conservative thinking has its roots in the intellectual revolt against the French Revolution.  Not so much Burke (who wasn't so much a "conservative" as an admirably independent thinker who was pigeon-holed into being a "conservative" sometime in the early 20th century) but the likes of de Maistre, Carl Schmitt and so on.

Incidentally, I know more than a few Anglo-American conservatives who are very open about their interest in Schmitt and de Maistre - presumably under the illusion that no-one who went to a private school has actually read these people, or knows what they advocated.

But anyway.  For a movement made up mostly of second-rate academics, the Nouvelle Droit certainly do buy into certain aspects of anti-intellectualism.  Some of them frame it as education = Communism, because, well, educated people tend towards more liberal or soft-left positions, as a rule (and this goes back to de Maistre, again).  Some of the crazier ones then throw in some nonsense about Gramsci and the Frankfurt school, but that is a discussion for another day.

Education has consequences.  A certain level of education is grudgingly admitted as necessary, in such circles, for innovation and so on.  But it is also felt that if the vast majority of people are kept unskilled and unschooled, it will be easier to exploit (in the classic, Marxist sense of the term) their productive value.  This makes perfect sense when you realise how many Neoconservatives are just reverse Communists in expensive suits.

It is also felt that education, especially "multi-cultural" education, makes nations weak, succumb to subjectivism and be unwilling to fight against their foreign enemies.  Which is utterly ridiculous, but there we are.

If you visit some of the more insane rightwing blogs on the internet, you will see this kind of thing discussed openly (especially during the "golden years" of 2003-8).  Rightwing bloggers have a distressing tendency, from a certain point of view, to pick up on the implications and dog-whistles of contemporary conservative rhetoric, and make them explicit.  On the other hand, this makes it much easier to understand conservative rhetoric, especially certain memes which may go unnoticed, because the value-laden assumptions of the audience are not shared with the reader trying to discern them.

[Jenne]

Which companies do you mean?

Those four companies are Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson. According to an October 2001 report in the industry newsletter Educational Marketer, Harcourt, CTB McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing write 96 percent of the exams administered at the state level. NCS Pearson, meanwhile, is the leading scorer of standardized tests.

Even without the impetus of the No Child Left Behind Act, testing is a burgeoning industry. The National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy at Boston College compiled data from The Bowker Annual, a compendium of the dollar-volume in test sales each year, and reported that while test sales in 1955 were $7 million (adjusted to 1998 dollars), that figure was $263 million in 1997, an increase of more than 3,000 percent. Today, press reports put the value of the testing market anywhere from $400 million to $700 million.

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html#ixzz1Ybc0FyHK

That's per year, of course.

That's national funding or state?  I need to read up on that first.

[Cain]

And this is why American "conservatism" in particular tends to target education most viciously.  It is not enough to simply control education, like the Soviets tried to do, as education tends to find ways around these rules.  Short of sticking a political officer in every classroom, a good teacher will find ways to teach the cirriculum they deem necessary, not the one they have necessarily been taught to teach.  So you overwork teachers.  Give them larger and larger classrooms.  Cut their budgets.  Cut their staffing.  Put their unions under attack.  Do everything in your power to make the job less attractive, to the point the only viable teaching positions will be ones at elite academies...where staff are directly reliant on oligarchical interests for payment, and where dismissal of "inappropriate" staff is usually much easier.

wait, they do that on purpose?

i mean, I can understand that this would be the logical thing to do to preserve status quo of the rich conservatives, etc.

but how can a status quo operate with such purpose, like this?

I mean, I thought it was all a combination of rich conservatives power politicians that think their lobbies are more important than whatever, and clusterfucks and stupid decisions and chaos and religious shitheads and people acting really shortsighted and only in their own self interest race for power and wealth.

but the thing you describe sounds more like a deliberate very long-term operation that spans multiple generations as well as politicians and terms?

are there actually politicians literally thinking "so we need to stop the population getting educated to gain power and wealth, history has shown it doesn't work to dictate teachers to teach stupidity because they won't, so we'll have to wear them down by budget cuts and larger classrooms. let's draft a few bills that seem well-intentioned on the surface to achieve this goal ..." (not putting words in your mouth here, just trying to formulate my question)

because that's really devious.

I mean, I can imagine there must be some politicians being that devious, but I'd expect to be able to count them on one hand. And that just seems too little of them to affect change in such a large fashion?

Sorry if this is a really stupid question, but I was always under the impression that these sorts of degenerative tendencies in society are caused by, well, "The Machine", complicated systems clusterfucking themselves, people getting promoted until they reach a position they cannot handle, that sort of thing, monkeys being shitheads.



Seems DP is wondering the same thing.

It is my belief that there are certain people who are certainly aware and explicity pushing for such an outcome, and a larger group of dupes/willing accomplices who have picked up on the idea via stimergic learning - usually through expensively funded think tanks with impressive (and utterly flawed) papers on such things.

Most politicians in public office are not smart, nor with as long a view as this.  In fact, they are so busy, they have to rely on staffers, who get their information from such think tanks.  Which are funded by select oligarchical interests.  Some of which do take a more long-term view of things. 

[Disco Pickle]

I always appreciate the depth and volume in your replies, Cain.  Thank you.  I'll start looking for more evidence of this of my own.

[Cain]

It is also a basic rule of politics that winning parties reward and empower their supporters, and punish and disempower their enemies.

As previously noted, a large number of teaching staff tend towards liberalism or left wing ideas.