– eliminate homework and weekly tests from counting toward semester grade
The homework part I would have appreciated. I did not need to do all those homework problems to learn the material, as my test scores proved, and giving me a C because I didn't do the homework was, in my opinion, lying.
1To the react: There were several classes in which I didn't do the homework, which accounted for something like 15% of the grade, and I got something like 92% on the tests and projects; but since they took away 15% for the homework, the result was 77%, a C instead of an A. To my mind, a grade should be something like the best estimate of a student's abilities and knowledge of a subject, and since the homework problems don't measure anything the tests don't (I'm distinguishing "answer these 5-20 short problems" from a major project), other than obedience, it seems to me inappropriate to mark someone down for not doing the homework.
I had exactly one teacher, a professor in college, who understood and acted on this idea. His grading formula was such that acing the final always meant you got an A. But, the better you did on homework and tests before that ('achievement points'), the less the final exam counted for. And the more effort you put in (homework, office hours, class participation), the more leniently your exams would be graded ('effort points'). And the more effort the class as a whole put in, the more leniently everyone's exams would be graded. But I think something like that only works if you're willing to actually let students fail.
On grade level books and learning to read: Wow that's some serious insanity I had not been aware of. When I was in 6th grade one of the vice principles had a bookshelf in his office full of (I think donated?) books. Anyone could borrow one, and keep it if they read it and wrote a report on it. The first one I borrowed was the a compilation of Plato's dialogs and the Republic - that was my first real introduction to Philosophy as an academic subject. Also, my brother-in-law was reading chapter books at 3. And my whole first grade class was expected to be reading chapter books.
On even 'gifted' schools mostly not wanted kids to get far ahead: Many (in my limited personal experience, most) teachers are not experts in the subjects they're teaching. A 7th grade math teacher is, if you're lucky, an expert at teaching 7th grade math to typical 7th graders. They hopefully have a familiarity with 8th grade math and should be able to explain it, but I expect many would struggle to explain 10th grade math. Similarly, I wouldn't expect them to be prepared to teach 7th grade math to even very bright and curious 4th graders - I would think doing that may require a deeper level of mathematical understanding and also social/psychological awareness in order to adapt the approach to where the students are.
The purported main purpose of school, and even of childhood, is educating children.
Many people are actively opposed to this idea.
Either they have other priorities that matter more, or sometimes they outright think that your child learning things is bad and you should feel bad for wanting that.
Some even say it openly. They actively and openly want to stop your child from learning things, and want to put your child into settings where they will not learn things. And they say that this is good.
Or they simply assert that the primary point of education is as a positional good, where what matters is your relative standing. And then they pretend this doesn’t imply they both should and are going around preventing children from learning.
In other places, we simply epicly fail at education and don’t seem to care. Or education ‘experts’ claim that things that obviously work don’t work, or things that obviously don’t work, do work.
An Introductory Example
Consider this section some combination of peek into this alternative universe of thought and the fun of multiple meta levels of shooting fish in a barrel?
I present, HT to Pamela Hobart who makes many of the same points: Freddie DeBoer writes the long ‘Education Doesn’t Work 3.0’ which is ‘a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps.’
What? Was it supposed to do that? Would you want it to?
Very obviously the only way to close academic gaps fully is to go all handicapper general and ban bright kids from getting educations. Thus, The War on Education.
Freddie starts off saying we can’t admit some kids aren’t smart, and some kids will naturally do better at school than others, to which I say you just admitted it, and I’m happy to admit it, and everyone I talk to is willing to admit it, so who is this mysterious we. It is, presumably, a Certain Type of Guy who is an ‘education expert’ of some kind and presumably has a maximum of one child who has gone to school.
Well, it depends.
If you mean ‘those debates’ as in those between those ‘education experts’? Then perhaps yes, they make these types of absurdly stupid assumptions. If you mean ‘debates among actual regular humans,’ then no. Obviously not. One would question whether Freddie has met such people.
Um, again, what exactly were we trying to do? Educate the children? Or make sure we don’t educate the children? Half and half?
I mean, I guess Freddie then does a job repeatedly exposing ‘the contradictions’ as it were in the entire equality project, but the barrel already has a lot of bullet holes, the water is leaking and the fish are dead.
So we get more fun lines like this:
Yes, obviously, also yes the extra money is mostly being wasted but even if it wasn’t the whole point was presumably to (drum roll) educate the children.
Why in the world would we spend tons of resources and time on relative education, which by definition is zero sum and a red queen’s race? That doesn’t make sense. There’s a fixed amount of relative education.
Who thought that was its primary purpose, either the metrics or the thing itself?
Meanwhile, the reason this was brought to my attention is that his ‘absolute learning has value’ t-shirt is raising questions supposedly answered by the shirt:
The next section is ‘I Assure You, You Do Care About Relative Learning.’
I assure him that I don’t.
His first argument is that relative learning indicates absolute learning. That is true but saying this means therefore you care about relative learning (checkmate, liberals?) is not how logic or words work. Caring about the territory does not mean you care about the (not very accurate) map.
I don’t understand why this is supposed to be a relevant argument here. It seems like he’s saying I care about [X], but actually [X] is hard, so instead I care about [Y]?
There’s saying the quiet part out loud, and then there’s this.
The purpose of education is… to do well on applications?
He concedes that one might learn to drive and then use this skill to usefully operate a moving vehicle, but says this type of education is rare – that most education has no actual use whatsoever, other than as a positional good to grab a larger share of stuff.
Then he goes through that schools are ‘not guilty’ because improving educational outcomes is impossible anyway. Transferring does nothing. Charter schools don’t work. Interventions don’t work (literally “Nothing “Works””), full null hypothesis.
All right, so now we have a section ‘So What Should We Do?’
Very obviously, if you actually believed all that, you would want to dramatically reduce spending, both in money and in the time of children, on school, since school is almost entirely about relative position. Spending more on school, trying to achieve more or improve performance, in this model, is a defection against everyone else. So we should ban attempts to educate children, beyond some basic skills, and focus on practical stuff like learning to drive. Completely reorient childhood.
So having pre registered that, let’s see what he recommends.
Then he tries to pivot back to ‘actually education matters.’
So absolute learning of something does matter after all, then. I mean, this description does not match what I know about actual schools, nor would I design anything like a current school if those were the goals. And he doesn’t seem interested in a redesign or asking how to maximize the things that he thinks matter. But hey.
Meanwhile, here’s the top comment, so yes things do get pretty insane:
I mean, yes. It means you support tracking because tracking is good. It means you don’t believe in them in the sense that you don’t believe in things that aren’t real.
So no, in that sense Freddie isn’t arguing with a strawman. Which means that the entire system of education is being run by people who are at war with education.
Total Failure
A Tennessee teen is suing his school for ‘compensatory education’ after graduating with a 3.4 GPA, but being unable to read, or even spell his own name, and the school system has the audacity to defend against that lawsuit.
If you can’t read, using ChatGPT is kind of crazy – you’re presumably scanning or copy pasting in text you don’t understand, then copying out text you don’t understand and hoping for the best.
Partial Failure
Scott Alexander asks: What happened to NAEP Scores? He says they are ‘not good’:
Well, they’re not great obviously, to the extent you can trust the scores to map to Reality, but they are still above the start of the graph in 1998, and we’re talking about a seven point difference. That’s less than a fifth of a standard deviation. This is nothing, if anything this shows that Covid didn’t change things much?
The comments section of Scott’s post is full of despair about classroom conditions getting worse, shifts to teaching strategies that don’t work (see the Mississippi reforms but in reverse), discipline collapsing and teachers having no tools if kids don’t play along, many teachers quitting, chronic absenteeism happening and being accepted and tolerated, and many families not prioritizing education, on top of the continuing trends involving smartphones. That’s on top of the obvious ‘Covid took away a lot of schooling’ concern that Scott starts with.
What seems more meaningful than the overall smaller drop is the widening gap between low and high performers, another trend predating Covid. Scott has several graphs showing this, and I am convinced this is real, with a variety of causes. If you are properly equipped and motivated, you can avoid the pitfalls described above, and you have access to the entire web and world and a lot of new resources, now even including AI. Whereas when the bottom falls out, the bottom falls out.
Meanwhile in 12th grade, nearly half scored below ‘the basic level,’ which involves things like ‘using percentages to solve real-world problems,’ and reading scores hit a new low. What we are doing, including adding funding, is clearly not working. Or rather, it is working hard, only not at the goal of children learning academic skills.
The War on Algebra
The War on Algebra in particular is still perhaps the craziest thing I’ve ever seen, actively preventing children from learning math out of spite. In the sense that it both very clearly purely destructive and evil, and also horribly unpopular across the board, and also high salience to a lot of voters. Yes, I do know what their arguments are for doing it, and they very much do not make it any better.
And yet it still happened, and it happens across the board, straight up Handicapper General style.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, the war rages on. It seems the city has not yet been retaken by sanity on all fronts yet, although there are some promising signs. All of this seems like it has to be beyond unpopular, in a ‘cause families to move out’ way, yet here we were again not too long ago (it got better, for now):
The War on Evaluation
I don’t get how this falls under ‘you can just do things’ but it seems it did, at least until people sounded the alarm?
So, effectively no grading, then. You can do whatever you want all semester, no homework (so perhaps there’s some upside here?), phone out in class every day, whatever, all you have to do to pass is get 21% on an exam you can take multiple times. That was going to be it.
And Maria Su could just do this on her own? What?
It turns out that enough backlash does matter, and this combination of graft and civilizational suicide took the loss on this one.
Well, maybe. They say they are ‘delaying’ the initiative. Which means they’re presumably going to keep paying the consultants, and they are going to try again to destroy all the incentives and measurements involved in education.
The War on Reading
Fighting against algebra and grading is bad enough, but reading?
As in, people who want to ban teaching kids to read until age 6. No. Seriously.
Because they’re ‘not ready.’
In a good school, a 1st grader will be reading quite a lot, actually.
I’m not going to bother quoting more of the evidence because this is so utterly Obvious Nonsense as to be beyond belief. Frankly, if I had a child that was 6 years old and couldn’t read I would not be thinking ‘good it is finally time,’ I would be debating exactly how much to panic and reassuring my wife not to panic far more.
The 3 year old I am currently supervising can somewhat read. I could read before my first memory (which was at 5 and involves reading books) so I don’t know exactly when it happened, and I learned without anyone trying to teach me.
I am going maximum opposite. There is no higher priority than teaching a child to read as early as they can handle it, and every actual parent knows this. There is a reason why the advice is constantly read to them, read with them, push reading. Reading enables everything else. The entire ‘education’ establishment really does need to flat out join the delenda est club.
The War to Enslave Bright Students
In the name of them developing empathy for the people you force them to teach? As long as they pass a certain threshold of knowledge, the rest of their childhood, and indeed life, belongs to the people, and they’re a horrible person if they think otherwise, and the purpose of school is to teach them this?
No, seriously, this is something quite a lot of people, especially those in education, actually believe.
Setting all ethical or moral considerations aside, and even assuming that is the goal, what in the world makes you think this is going to work in the direction you want?
There it is, very explicitly. These people actually believe this. If you’re talented, your purpose in life is to be enslaved, to be forced to help others. Your life does not belong to you. Your labor does not belong to you. Your time does not belong to you. Who cares whether that benefits you? You belong to the people, from each according to their ability, at the barrel of a gun.
Not only that the smart 9you can do it, that they should be forced to do it without pay. While the parent is forbidden to do it, because they are unqualified.
I believe we should treat Joe’s perspective the same way we would treat others who would force people with certain characteristics to labor for no compensation.
The War on Ability Grouping
See my discussion of Alpha School for extensive previous discussions.
I am not a fan of the idea of educating children in 2025 primary via traditional classes. Traditional classes feel like learning a lot more than they actually cause learning.
But I accept that we are going to keep doing this for a while.
Given you are going to have traditionally shaped classes on various subjects, very obviously you want to track their progress and group those children by ability.
Grouping children into classes by ability has the advantages that it, as covered in Education #11:
Ability grouping, done wisely, so utterly obviously works as to make the alternate hypothesis absurd.
The question is how to make it work best, not whether it works. Very obviously, as the next section discusses, it is possible to massively screw it up if you try hard enough.
Exactly. Everyone agrees we want [X], where [X] is tracking. We keep talking about it because [~X] keeps actually happening.
I presume opposition is mostly ideology. Full stop. They want to prevent the wrong kids learning too much. They are sacrificing the kids on their alter.
Academics and education ‘experts,’ despite the literature and all actual observations and everyone involved saying that tracking helps all kids learn better, keep lamenting that parents want tracking, and work to destroy it, often in the name of ‘equity.’
It is common to see people claim ‘the research’ says that ‘downstreamed’ kids who are grouped at lower ability do worse rather than better as a result and that ‘the research’ supports this. As far as I can tell this is simply not true, these people simply think it ‘should’ be true, and seek out ways to say it anyway.
Why do the authors here, like many other academics and education experts and many school principals who somehow end up actually destroying such programs, say that this is bad, despite everyone involved in the actual schools agreeing it helps all of the students?
Because the ‘educators’ who determine policy (as opposed to the teachers whose job is to actually educate children) consistently have decided that they do not care about the life experiences of families and children or helping children learn.
What they care about, other than money, is preventing learning rather than causing learning. Or, as they call it, ‘equality’ or ‘equity.’ Never mind that this ‘equity’ directly hurts the students who are otherwise being ‘denied’ it, what matters is that they be given ‘opportunity to learn and equality of educational opportunity.’ Educational opportunity shall be destroyed until this is achieved. If that leads to everyone getting a worse education, even the worst off kids, well, that’s not their department’s KPI.
I don’t quite agree with Anton that these people ‘hate you and your children.’ They only hate that you and your children might do better than other children, and want to prevent this from happening. They only hate you if you oppose this goal.
If it is a choice between the form of academia that wants to prevent children from learning, and the form of academia that helps teach useful things, and one or the other must be destroyed?
The choice seems clear.
However, you do have to choose a reasonable implementation. Is it possible we also in some ways are screwing implementation up so badly that adding what we call ability grouping to the mix, as implemented in practice, could make things worse?
The Battle of North Carolina Ability Grouping
North Carolina excluded half its qualified students from advanced math. They tried to pass a law to fix some of this. The schools fought back.
The full post on ‘the Algebra gatekeepers’ keeps outlining all the tactics used to ensure that kids do not learn algebra, especially disadvantaged kids. As you read it, it keeps getting worse.
What North Carolina is doing here, excluding lots of qualified students, does at least seem better than ending algebra entirely for everyone, I suppose.
Pamela Hobart also looked into the same writeup and offers her own thread, notes that this steps fully into cartoon villainy.
The true teaching of algebra to kids who are ready for it is almost impossible to find. Even if you send your child to a ‘gifted’ school, they mostly won’t let kids get more than a year or two ahead of ‘schedule.’ Schools instead think it is better kids be bored for five years, for their own good you see.
Raymond Arnold points to the best objection I have seen, which is that if a more advanced option exists then many parents will push for it even when it is inappropriate for their particular child, or use it to push their child way too hard, and while this means some kids are bored it is saving a lot of families from being forced into a red queen’s race.
This is a real cost, but the prior should be rather extremely stacked against ‘if we let kids learn more then parents would try to have their kids learn too much and this would be bad,’ especially when you can gate the advanced classes with objective tests. Yes, parents can push their kids to study harder to try and pass those tests, but that’s a risk I am willing to take.
The War on Reading Ability Grouping In Particular
What is the steelman case that ‘ability grouping doesn’t work’ or ‘ability grouping has been tried and didn’t work’ in some particular context?
This by Karen Vaites is perhaps the closest, in particular on early reading grouping, convinced me that in practice you really can mess it up badly enough to make things actively worse. This was convincing that we’re messing up badly enough that this is a real possibility.
As in, what happens in practice is that you group kids by a measurement of abstract ‘reading level’ and then focus on ‘achievement’ of ‘reading level,’ forbid them to read anything beyond ‘reading level,’ and don’t ask what actual skills they need, don’t move them between groupings as their skills change, and then wonder why it isn’t working.
One could almost say, if you look at the details, that the teachers are using ‘reading groups’ as a substitute for actually teaching the children to read. You put them in a group and then you did your job. Again, yeah, I can see how that wouldn’t work. Indeed, if you are outsourcing the teaching job to other kids, then at that point you actively want uneven groups, because you want to group students with student teachers.
Whereas once students get to ‘escape velocity’ on reading, which the better students have relatively early, they no longer need a teacher, they just need motivation and permission to read books. Whereas the system seems designed to stop kids from reading books they want to read if they are deemed ‘too hard’? A kid can tell you if a book is too hard, they won’t want to read it.
One big complaint is that it is ‘hard to measure reading level.’ I don’t think it is hard. You can observe a lot just by watching. The problem is that you’re measuring a set of distinct reading skills as if it was one number, and then treating that one number as real, and also abdicating all the real work.
So yes, you group primarily by what aspects the kids need to work on most, and that works better. Sure. I can totally believe that is a better strategy. Skill issue.
Instead of using it to figure out what kids need to do to learn to read and putting them in position to learn that, it sounds like grouping is being used to prevent kids from meaningfully reading? The purpose is to gate reading behind general tests? To spread ‘equality’ to progress on different reading aspects?
I can see why that might actively backfire. This isn’t about ‘ability grouping’ not working. It’s about failing to actually group by the relevant ability, and it’s about the ‘just-right text’ theory that seems to me obviously wrong.
Ignore the ‘this promotes equity’ framing, since you could simply say ‘this promotes learning to read.’ Equity via catching up those lagging is good, and you call it learning.
The theory here is that age matters a lot. That if you are a fifth grader, your ability to learn is inherently much stronger than that of a second grader, whereas the ability of different second graders is alike? Equality (of those at the same age) for me, inequality (of those at different ages) for thee. Whereas the correct model is that each kid has a different ability to learn different things, that usually improves steadily with age.
But also note that this is saying that the best way for many students at second grade reading level to learn reading is to assign them to read fifth grade level books, indeed to mandate it. Yes, I can believe that. So why are we so often telling kids at second grade reading level or literally in second grade or both that they can’t read the fifth grade books even when they want to?
The other theory present in this proposal is, how about using techniques that actually teach kids reading. And yeah, I agree, that would be great.
The War Will Continue
In case you didn’t realize that there is a war. There has been for a while.