education Archive

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No Waiver Left Behind

By
Trevor Macomber
– February 9, 2012

Once upon a time, George W. Bush and Co. had the respectably commendable idea to improve our national education system. They gave the legislation behind this hoped-for improvement the noble (if somewhat melodramatic) name of “No Child Left Behind,” then set about making it The Law of the Land, which it became in early 2002. Understanding that no system as broken as the unwieldly, hydra-headed, state-determined beastie currently in existence could be fixed overnight, the Bush Buddies generously gave the states — and, by extensions, their schools — more than a decade to reach this pre-determined level of improvement.

Then they went and screwed everything up by

requiring 100% of students (including disadvantaged and special education students) within a school to reach the same state standards in reading and mathematics by 2014. [emphasis my own]

This, of course, made no sense, because no large group of people taken at random will ever achieve 100 percent proficiency in any skill or subject, least of all something as variable as reading and math. A special needs student who starts eighth grade at a third grade reading level should be applauded for finishing the year at a sixth grade reading level. Instead, his scores could cause the entire school to be labeled as failing.

Given the dire consequences of becoming a failing school — budget reduction, staff replacement, etc. — rather than pursue a morally justifiable but politically useless act of rebellion, schools made the situation worse by cutting or eliminating

classes and resources for many subject areas that are not part of NCLB’s accountability standards. Since 2007, almost 71% of schools have reduced some instruction time in subjects such as history, arts, language and music, in order to give more time and resources to mathematics and English.

Fortunately, (minor) progress in reversing this myopic idiocy was made today when President Obama freed

10 states from the strict and sweeping requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, giving leeway to states that promise to improve how they prepare and evaluate students…The first 10 states to receive the waivers are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, NewJersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Ten states out of 50? Big frickin’ whoop. Twenty percent of people object to a lot of things: why should we let that sway national legislation? Well, how about because

A total of 28 other states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have signaled that they, too, plan to seek waivers — a sign of just how vast the law’s burdens have become as a big deadline nears.

Of course, now every individual state that has been approved for a waiver must come up with its own plan to

prepare children for college and careers, set new targets for improving achievement among all students, reward the best performing schools and focus help on the ones doing the worst

which is a brilliantly efficient use of resources, but so be it.

(Take my word for it: when your significant other is a teacher — especially a special ed teacher — increasingly exasperating updates about how effed up this whole process is become a way of life.)

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Don’t go to law school

By
Tom OHare
– December 7, 2011

Campos has been on this for a few months now, but it really bears repeating (especially to people my age, who may be hoping to weather the recession in academia): going to law school, unless you’re going to one of the elite ones, is a really bad idea right now. Like, really, it’s not smart. Don’t do it. There are plenty of fun ways to saddle yourself with ungodly amounts of debt (travel the world and charge it all to your AmEx, e.g.). Why you would want to hang out in some third-tier law library cramming for tort finals on your way toward inevitable unemployment and life in your parents’ basement is beyond me.

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Prank Phone Call of the Day

By
Tom OHare
– November 10, 2011

This is hilarious.

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Teach for Hysteria

By
Trevor Macomber
– October 4, 2011

Three recent articles with three different takes on the state of education today.

From the, “It’s about damn time” files, MSNBC informs us that

States are lining up to drop out of No Child Left Behind, the education initiative that was promoted as a historic achievement of the Bush administration.

Since President Barack Obama announced last month that he would sign an executive order allowing states to request waivers from mandatory participation in the program, at least 27 have signaled that they will ask to opt out, and most others are reviewing their options.

But why would these pinkos want to start leaving children behind? I mean, especially when the system has been so flawlessly designed! (Hey, that rhymed! Hey, that rhymed again! Not that time though.)

Oh.

What officials want to fix is the rigidity of the current law, which set standards so restrictive that entire schools are deemed to be failing if only a relative few students don’t meet test standards.

Under current rules, a school’s success is based on a statewide test that assesses 40 categories. If just one subcategory — such as students with disabilities or those who are economically disadvantaged — doesn’t make its federal Adequate Yearly Progress benchmark, then the entire school fails.

Full disclosure: I’m married to a special education teacher, so my mostly second-hand opinion of No Child Left Behind is undeniably biased, but I defy you to find a teacher working today who thinks its current standards are remotely achievable. (Hint: one of its goals states that “By 2013-2014, all students will reach high standards, at a minimum attaining proficiency or better in reading/language arts and mathematics.” Right, because, you know, look at all the real-world examples where 100 percent of a sub-population can achieve some sort of uniform minimum standard. Especially those with a learning disability.)

So what are we to do about it then? Besides leave everyone behind, I mean. (That’s the Rapture’s job!) Enter: my creative idol, Dave Eggers, who — along with bald Jason Bourne — has a new documentary out suggesting that

paying teachers more—say, $125,000 annually—would, by attracting more talented college graduates to the classroom and encouraging them to stay there, be the single best way to better prepare American students for the global economy.

Slate’s Dana Goldstein is skeptical, however:

The problem is that American Teacher elides almost all of the pressing and controversial questions animating the teacher pay debate. Absurdly, the film never mentions the word union. Viewers without prior knowledge will be left totally unaware of the role teachers’ unions have historically played in all this—first, by ensuring teachers (the vast majority of them female) fair pay and due process, and second, by resisting, until very recently, efforts to pay teachers at least in part based on how well they do their jobs.

Although “merit pay” has a decidedly thin record when it comes to actual student achievement gains, it is a policy idea the filmmakers appear to support, judging from the fact that they approvingly cite performance pay schemes enacted in Denver and Washington, D.C. What American Teacher doesn’t explain is why such programs can be hugely controversial: Most American merit pay plans rely in part on student test scores to judge how “effective” teachers are at their jobs, while teacher performance pay plans in the nations that academically out-perform the United States, such as Finland and Canada, tend to downplay the importance of test scores and instead pay educators more for taking on other duties, such as mentoring peers or developing curricula.

So we’ve acknowledged there’s a problem and that solutions are tough to come by. At least we know what not to do, right?

Right. Take it away, Time:

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

[...]

South Korea’s hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country’s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. “One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable,” President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. Before toothbrushes or printing presses, there were civil service exams that could make or break you. Chinese families have been hiring test-prep tutors since the 7th century. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore’s Education Minister was asked last year about his nation’s reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: “We’re not as bad as the Koreans.”

Maybe we shouldn’t feel so bad anymore about all those global studies ranking the United States behind South Korea in academic achievement…

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College Students: Not Necessarily Altogether Too Bright

By
Tom OHare
– September 15, 2011

K. So let’s say you’re a university professor, and you’re talking one day in class about, oh, I dunno… intellectual ivory tower matters… and you’re doing, like, a thought experiment — or something equally crazy and academic!!! — and, perhaps maybe suppose it’s about “opinions” (whatever those are). And let’s say you’re playing Farmville on the old Facebooks (amirite? i’mrite) when you hear your professor say, and here I use the scholarly quotation methodology, “Jews should be sterilized.” Do you:

a) Assume that this is a genuine sentiment your Jewish professor is espousing before the class, and launch a national media campaign against him denouncing his outrageous beliefs?

b) Assume that because you’ve been playing Farmville you might have missed some relevant context?

c) Ignore it, because “no big deal” (you play an anti-Semite in this scenario).

Ding, ding, ding! The answer is A, sheeple.

Yesterday, we brought you the story of Sarah Grunfeld, the 22 year-old student at York University who ran out and publicly accused her (Jewish) sociology professor of anti-Semitism when he said the phrase “Jews should be sterilized”—as an example of a bad opinion. Grunfeld’s reasoning: “The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”

So we would be remiss if we did not bring you the following STATEMENT from Sarah Grunfeld, which B’nai Brith Canada is circulating, apparently under the misguided notion that Sarah Grunfeld is deserving of sympathy. If she apologized for the simple misunderstanding, then sure. But Sarah Grunfeld is doubling down on her outrage. And victimhood!

The worst part of Grunfeld’s aforementioned STATEMENT is the opening paragraph, because it shows what a detestable twit she is. Here I quote:

TORONTO, 14 September 2011 : Sarah Grunfeld, fourth year York University student has made the following statement relating to the recent incident in Professor Cameron Johnston’s class at York University, and has asked B’nai Brith Canada to circulate it to interested parties on her behalf. This statement of her position is onlyto be used in its entirety…

She’s kind of asking for anything that follows with a salvo like that. To which I say, Come at me, Sarah Grunfeld. Bring the pain!

Here is her statement, as it should have read verbatim.

I stand by my initial concern… that all Jews should be sterilized[.]

I have since been grossly misquoted and ridiculed by the media… to assign blame to me… for [t]his “miscommunication”.

This is in spite of the fact that in a meeting with Martin Singer, Dean, (Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies at York) and Rhonda Lenton (Vice Provost Academic), I was assured that they believed [this] was ‘terribly regretful’, and that they expected and would encourage… an unambiguous in-class apology.

It has been a very painful experience for me to see how the university has closed ranks and reneged on its assurances to me. I understand that there may have been a miscommunication, but… [t]he media has been complicit in allowing a false interpretation of my actions to be circulated widely, which can only have a chilling effect on the ability of students to have any kind of a voice on campus.

END OF STUDENT STATEMENT

Fucking context. How does it work?

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Rick Perry doesn’t care if we teach children things that are wrong

By
Trevor Macomber
– August 19, 2011

Let’s play a game. It’s called, see if you can find the flaw in Rick Perry’s logic. (Hint: it’s a textbook opportunity to reductio his absurdum.)

On the campaign trail in Portsmouth, NH, yesterday, Perry told a young boy asking him about his views on evolution (apparently at his mother’s prompting) that,

It’s a theory that’s out there. It’s got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution, because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one’s right

Ignore for a minute your own strongly held beliefs about the theories of evolution, creationism, and/or the Cosmogonical Pooping Unicorn, and consider the underlying implication of Perry’s statement. He knows that creationism is incompatible with evolution and, therefore, that one of them must be wrong, so his explanation for why the Texas school curriculum teaches both of them (and believe me, just writing that phrase causes me more pain than you can imagine) is that you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right. Can you imagine if every subject was taught this way?

Teacher: Today, students, we are going to study the two competing theories of arithmetic. The first theory, accepted by 99% of highly educated, peer-reviewed mathematicians, is that 2+2=4. However, the second theory, espoused by the remaining 1% — who happen to be as loud as the other 99% — is that 2+2=a baboon’s ass. One of these theories is the right one. In fact, I have a pretty good idea which one it is. But instead, I’m going to “educate” you by spouting a bunch of nonsense about one and actual verifiable information about the other, not tell you which is which, and force you to decide for yourselves. Good luck in college!

Student: Motherfuck.

Somewhat hyperbolic, perhaps, but you see my point, right? It’s one thing for a History teacher to opine on the geopolitical causes behind, say, the Hundred Years’ War. It’s another thing for an English class to speculate on Mark Twain’s actual attitude toward black people while reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But to encourage the promotion of two diametrically opposed top-to-bottom theories in a hard science class is not only asinine — it’s flat-out inefficient. “Remember the Alamo, but forget the scientific method” seems to be the Texas school board motto.

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Noam

By
Ben Nolan
– August 11, 2011

Because I know you have an hour and a half to kill:

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Extraordinary Isn’t Enough

By
Trevor Macomber
– August 2, 2011

That’s the title of a short, though highly compelling, account by Ellie Herman about her experiences teaching in Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in South Los Angeles.

The whole thing’s only two pages, so you should read it anyway, but let me just say that it’s difficult to argue with her closing thoughts after reading everything that leads up to them:

I understand that we need to get rid of bad teachers, who will be just as bad in small classes, but we can’t demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence.

Our children — even our children growing up in poverty, especially our children growing up in poverty — deserve to have not only an extraordinary teacher but a teacher who has time to read their work, to listen, to understand why they’re crying or sleeping or not doing homework.

[...]

I’m willing to work as hard as I can to be an excellent teacher, but as a country we have to admit that I’ll never be excellent if we continue to slash education budgets and cut teachers, which is what’s actually happening in California despite all our talk of excellence, particularly in schools that serve poor children. Until we stop that, we’ll never have equal education in this country.

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Today in “Our Galtian Overlords”

By
Tom OHare
– May 10, 2011

I don’t much like to comment on the Brothers Koch (pronounced like the soda, not the penis), because for a while there when Wisconsin was raging with righteous labor outrage, it seemed like they were everybody’s favorite scapegoat. Like, sure, they’re dastardly libertarian fiends of the highest magnitude, but they’re symptoms (albeit, self-propagating ones) of a larger cultural problem, not the source of the problem itself. Granted (as I mentioned in my most recent paranthetical), they’re doing their very best to line their own pockets on the backs of working people! But, that’s hardly unique in American history. I mean, rich assholes have been doing that for centuries in the Land of the Free.

Still, the latest news out of Florida State University is a bit troubling!

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University’s economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting “political economy and free enterprise.”

Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they’ve funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it’s not happy with the faculty’s choice or if the hires don’t meet “objectives” set by Koch during annual evaluations.

Oooh, wheeee! I cannot wait for the time when we’ve neglected and de-funded public education enough in this country that behavior like the Kochs’ is brought to its logical conclusion and our children’s futures are entrusted to the ideology of the highest bidder! IT’S GOING TO BE SO MUCH FUN!!!!!!!!!!

We truly live in end times.

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Your Students Don’t Have Copy Editors (Updated!)

By
Ben Nolan
– May 9, 2011

I’m not a teacher. Thinking about it for next year, maybe, but I’m not one now. So maybe I lack perspective, and maybe I’m like a childless person criticizing good parents for being exhausted with this post, but every Spring and late Fall, my Facebook feed becomes peppered with updates from various teacher/professor Facebook acquaintances along the lines of the following:

“Despite the popularity and profit associated with coffee consumption,, coffee growers often do not receive a competitive wage (Valkila, 2009, p. 5)” OMG STUPID FUCKING IDIOT PUT TWO COMMAS IN A ROW! LEARN PUNCTUATION!!!1 YOU BETTER BE THANKING JESUS EVERY DAY FOR SOCIAL PROMOTION!!!!1 IGNORANT!!1!!!one IGNORANT!!1!!!one IGNORANT!!1!!!one

Dood, I want to say, you make typos too. These kids don’t have professional copy editors (and I’ve read your book, some typos got through even that).

Not to say that I doubt a large proportion of them are terrible writers, but I read things engineers write for a living. Your honours seminar students? They got nothing in the typo/punctuation-fuck-up department.

Why am I going on about this? Because sometimes student mistakes can actually be funny, and therefore worth sharing. Evidence:

The rebel and onion armies showed grose negligence by having many of their battles right inside national parks, like Gettysburg.

“Shit My Students Write” is full of gold like that. So, to my professor / teacher friends — take notes: this is how to curate your bitching.

Update: New favorite:

There are many different races of bagels.

Update II: Even better:

Humans who struggle with hunger lose hope, and those with hope don’t have hunger and should give those with hunger, reason to hope.

Update III: Oh man, they just keep coming:

Sodom and Gomorrah really blew the lid off the sexual revolution for people to be more experimental with sex, and the gays getting to have some. But Jesus put a stop to that!

Note that these are hilarious AND all more-or-less grammatically correct — a bit awkward, some punctuation-caused misplaced emphases — but it’s not the punctuation that’s funny, it’s the humorously misplaced emphases; more broadly: the content. Typos aren’t funny, people. Unless you accidentally mistyped a “t” which is, to be fair, right above the “g,” when writing what you thought was “Regards” at the end of like an important e-mail to your investors or something. And even then, it’s not the typo itself that’s funny, it’s that you just accidentally called your investors retards, and retroactively changed the tone of your important e-mail to aggressively derisive.

PS – Forgive any typos in the above, and feel free to mock me on your FB feed if any are legitimately hilarious.

UPDATE (by Tom)!: I have a vague memory of my mother reading a collection of these around the dinner table one day long, long ago. The list was compiled by an apocryphal professor and sent around the world via chain mail (ah, the days before the Internet). Anyway, the best one I ever heard was this (TRIGGER ALERT!!!!):

Cyrus McCormick invented the raper, which could do the work of 100 men.

If that isn’t a funny typo, I don’t know what is.

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