CDZ Educational pedagogy, students' verve, teacher quality and dedication, parental involvement

usmbguest5318

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Jan 1, 2017
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Please be aware this thread is expressly not about what's liberal or conservative in the political and public policy sense of those terms. Accordingly, do not go down the road of "liberals/conservatives this and that."
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This thread is inspired by a conversation I and westwall had in another thread. This line of discussion was off topic for that thread, but westwall made a number of assertions that deserve to be explored. Here is what he wrote (I've made an edit or two to correct the organizational gaffes in the original remarks and make his remarks flow more coherently:

The MAJORITY of schools in Nevada are sub par. Are there some good public schools? Of course there are, but the MAJORITY are not. That is a fact. Even the schools that are "good" are only good for the top 10% of their students. If you are an average student you will get a bit of help, but not enough to blossom into a good student. If you are a poor student you will remain a poor student. That too is a fact.

One of the kids in my daughter's school moved to Carson City, [NV]. Carson High [(CH)] is rated as a good school. The kid involved is a very motivated student and will succeed in whatever endeavor he chooses to engage in. I asked him his impression of CH, and he basically reiterated what we had been told by the parents of other kids who attended that school: the top 10% get loads of help, the average kids get a bit, and the poor students flounder.

My point still stands; if you have the money, you send your kid to a private school. Any sane person would, because the investment in money will generate far more benefit down the road for that particular kid. Now, if I had a child who wasn't smart or motivated, then it would not make sense to send them to a private school. They would get nothing out of it. And that too would be sane. But, those are the exceptions to the rule.

The problem that public schools have is they teach to the lowest common denominator. The teachers have no incentive (other than personal desire, which some have in spades) to ensure that their students do well. The teachers aren't rated by the students as they are in college and if they are a bad teacher the teachers union protects them. In my daughters school a few years ago there was a teacher who wasn't doing a good job. She was fired. It was that simple.
My thoughts in response to those comments are as follows:

The MAJORITY of schools in Nevada are sub par. Are there some good public schools? Of course there are, but the MAJORITY are not.

Okay. I'll take your word for that.

...the schools that are "good" are only good for the top 10% of their students. If you are an average student you will get a bit of help, but not enough to blossom into a good student. If you are a poor student you will remain a poor student. That too is a fact.

the schools that are "good" are only good for the top 10% of their students.

I suppose I can imagine that being so, but even as it may well be so, it's not obvious to me that there's anything in a "good-enough" public school that's preventing a student from joining the top 10% or that prevents enough of them doing so such that performance distinguishing the top 10% from the next 10% is a relevant thing.

Let me clarify. At my own kids' high schools, the average SAT scores were around 2000 -- I think one may have been 19-someting and the other 21-something. All the kids in their classes were, per the headmaster, excellent students. They don't rank the students because literally hundredths of a grade point separate the #1 student from the #20 student in a class; a "whole" tenth of a point may separate highest and lowest ranked kids in a class of ~100-150 kids.

So what I'm saying is that though I think I know what you mean by "top 10%," literally, that's not a good metric for describing high performers in high school because, unless there's something pedagogical that's preventing students from "buckling down" and doing well (earning As), there's always room at the top. I suppose some public high schools, or individual high school teachers, grade on a curve, thus "force rank" the kids. The schools my kids attended don't do that because it's absurd to do in that setting. (In large survey lecture classes in college, of course, the students are "force ranked."

Having written that, I think by "top 10%" you merely meant "high performing students," but maybe you didn't. I don't know; it's not explicitly or contextually obvious whether you did (or didn't) from the rest of what you wrote, so....​

With that clarification out of the way, I'll return to the point I was making. Yes, high performing discipuli will absolutely get the lion's share of magister's attention. A fair degree, but not all, of that has to do with the student. From my own teaching experience, the kids who solicited guidance above and beyond my lectures are without question the kids who got the most out of the class.

Some of those kids earned poor grades (B- or worse [1]) on their first exam and had the gumption to seek help at remediating their understanding of what they didn't grasp in the first quarter of the class so they'd understand how it applied to what came afterwards. The kids who did that improved their grades. Some of the other kids who had poor grades boosted them by their singular efforts. Most of the kids who started out poorly and who didn't seek help didn't improve.

It is from that frame of reference that I considered your statement. I'm not wholly disagreeing with the remark, but I am saying that students who aren't high performing can, if they make the effort, elevate themselves into the ranks of students who get more attention from teachers. To do so, the mostly just have to reach out to the teacher for help. A great way to do initiate that is merely by asking topically relevant questions in class.

Thinking back on my own high school and earlier years, it's hard to recall precise details, but I remember enough to say confidently that my classes were nearly as occupied with Q&A and clarifications of nuances as it was with the teachers extemporizing and lecturing.

Part of that, in my own teaching experience at the college level, derives from the students themselves and part of it is

If you are an average student you will get a bit of help, but not enough to blossom into a good student. If you are a poor student you will remain a poor student. That too is a fact.

It seems to me that's a fact for the children for whom it is. It does not at all seem to be an existential reality, an absolute. It doesn't, not only for the reason I described in the prior section, but also because studies have shown that teacher quality/proficiency at educating plays a key role.

According to the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS) and Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project studies:
"Teachers [have] a substantial effect on student achievement. While the Tennessee data from STAR showed achievement gains associated with smaller class sizes, a stronger achievement gain is associated with teacher quality (Nye, Konstantopoulos and Hedges 2004). In addition, differences in student performance were more heavily influenced by the teacher than by student ethnicity or [socioeconomic] class, or by the school attended by the student."

"The positive effects associated with being taught by a highly effective teacher, defined as a teacher whose average student score gain is in the top 25 percent, were stronger for poor and minority students than for their white and affluent counterparts."​
Were it "a fact" as you claim, the quality of teachers at a school or teaching a class could not boost student performance. After all, a 20% - 25% boost is enough to take a middle "C" student to a low "A."

An interesting inference that seems reasonable from the "25% finding" is that the best gains in overall school performance are to be had by placing the best teachers in the schools with the most minorities and poor students. I have to wonder whether that's how school districts assign their teachers? I don't know.

One of the kids in my daughters school moved to Carson City. Carson High is rated as a good school. The kid involved is a very motivated student and will succeed in whatever endeavor he chooses to engage in.

That is plausibly so. Your prediction to that effect is corroborated by the TVAAS and STAR studies. "A second important finding from this work was that the positive effects of teacher quality appear to accumulate over the years. That is, students who were enrolled in a succession of classes taught by effective teachers demonstrated greater learning gains than did students who had the least effective teachers one after another."

My point still stands, if you have the money you send your kid to a private school. Any sane person would, because the investment in money will generate far more benefit down the road for that particular kid. Now, if I had a child who wasn't smart or motivated, then it would not make sense to send them to a private school. They would get nothing out of it. And that too would be sane. But, those are the exceptions to the rule.

I don't know about that, but for the sake of my not having to support my kids when they are grown, I'm going to hope it's so. I sent my kids to private schools for their whole lives. I paid a mint to do that -- college has actually cost me less -- so it had better pay off.
  • HS --> ~$320K/year (tuition, room, board, travel, "their lifestyle," etc.) for all four kids
My point still stands, if you have the money you send your kid to a private school. Any sane person would, because the investment in money will generate far more benefit down the road for that particular kid. Now, if I had a child who wasn't smart or motivated, then it would not make sense to send them to a private school. They would get nothing out of it. And that too would be sane. But, those are the exceptions to the rule.

It might make sense; it might not. It would depend on whether you could find a school -- public or private -- that was able to inspire the child to excel. The child may, for example, be an artsy kid who excels at performing arts and not in traditional academic subjects. It may make sense to send the kid to a performing arts focused high school rather than a "pipeline" type of private school.

I agree that if the kids just a lost cause in all respect, there's no point in paying to educate him/her.

The problem that public schools have is they teach to the lowest common denominator. The teachers have no incentive (other than personal desire, which some have in spades) to ensure that their students do well.

I'm going to have to look into this....I don't have a strong body of empirical knowledge about it that gives me a good reason to think one way or another about it.

The teachers aren't rated by the students as they are in college

I doubt I'd trust the ratings of teachers that adolescents and teens give. Hell, we have "upward feedback" in our firm and that's as often suspect as not suspect. Some people take it seriously and treat it fairly. Others use it as an opportunity to exact their little bit of revenge. Still others treat it like a popularity contest.

if they are a bad teacher the teachers union protects them.

This I suspect is very much the case.




Notes:
  1. Yes, a B- is a poor grade for a college student taking a 100 or 200 level class, which is what I taught. The work doesn't get easier in 300 and 400 level classes, and those classes' content builds on what was learned in lower level classes. Thus if a student completes a lower level class with a B- or worse, it's probably a good idea, for a variety of reasons, that they not major in that discipline.
 

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