The definition of "good teacher" they seem to be using is some variant of the "value-added" model, by which teachers are evaluated based on how much the test scores of their students improve. However, the tests are only barely valid (if at all), and don't measure much (if anything) worth measuring.

Meanwhile, the reading and writing go by the wayside in favour of multiple-choice "comprehension" questions, math becomes an exercise in gaming in the arithmetic, and science (held up so high in theory and so low in practice) becomes a glorified exercise in vocabulary memorization.

This isn't even beginning to mention the arts.

I'd have more faith in Superman if I thought schools knew what they wanted to do, or if there were a cohesive and coherent philosophical approach.

As it is now, there is a system which reduces good teachers, protects bad teachers, and hamstrings learning in favour of that which can be easily measured and that which can be taught with only a modicum of thoughtfulness required.

Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach.

Consider it a necessary, but not sufficient, start. Right now, getting rid of a teacher that is committing actual crimes is a challenge in many places, getting rid of a teacher who merely objectively doesn't teach to any standard you care to name is a challenge everywhere. You can play with all the other knobs on the system you like, but until you change this you've already lost.

I would argue that exactly because of this fact, the blundering around the rest of the system has done is the expected result. No matter what the system does, this means the problem just gets worse every year as more dead wood is accumulated. Therefore, the system never gets any feedback about the value of what the changes were. When everything uniformly produces the same negative result, you can't get any information from the results. (At least human systems are less prone than individual humans to learned helplessness and things are still being tried.) Until you fix this problem, the question of what changes actually work can not even be properly asked, in a way that can actually obtain useful and actionable answers.

(I have simplified this for internet-debate purposes; in fact some schools sometimes manage to improve, there's always variations, etc. But I don't think I need to go too far in defending the premise that the system as a whole has been sinking for decades now.)

I'm not exactly sure what the solution is, but I don't think simply firing teachers will do much. Even firing teachers and raising pay, while both are probably necessary (if you're offering $30k/year, don't be surprised that you get $30k/year types of applicants), doesn't solve the worst problems. Some schools are just a mess of poor discipline that's hard to get a handle on; you could have strict performance reviews and pay $70k/year and I think there are schools that will still be difficult to fix.

One particular problem with giving administrators more authority to fire people is that I have this sneaking suspicion that they'll actually fire the best teachers! The best teachers I had in high school were mostly not very popular with the administration, because they deviated a bit from the official line and were actually effective at teaching, instead of treating the entire class as year-long prep for a multiple-choice test, Kaplan-style. Principals and superintendents are by and large like a less competent version of your stereotypical corporate middle-management, rotating in and out of schools and districts in 2-4 years, changing policies arbitrarily to leave their mark on things and not staying around to see them through, all aimed at moving up the ranks. Anything that gives them more power without first greatly reforming that system is bad imo.

http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf

Looking at something like that it's pretty easy to believe the premise of the documentary.

I have no experience with the US HS education system (or any part of the US education system for that matter) but two things strike me as odd:

1. How high school is portrayed in the media (film, TV, etc). It is portrayed as difficult but how does the syllabus compare to other countries? I've seen anecdotal evidence that maths, physics and chemistry that I learnt in HS (in Australia) aren't taught until college but this proves nothing; and

2. The GPA system. So many students seem to get GPAs of 3.8+ and an A is what? 90+? My experience with education was that marks that high were highly unusual (eg in a group of 80 you might get 2-5) and if you got 75 you were doing pretty well. My understanding is that the US education system relies heavily on scaling (bell curve) of marks. The UK does this too, leading to grade inflation (eg in the UK GCSE they now have an A* grade above an A because everyone was getting As). How does grade inflation compare between the US and elsewhere?

When I was living in the UK I saw a reality show where they subjected 16 year olds to the education system of the 50s including exams from that periods. Students that were getting 11 GCSEs As struggled to pass 4 of the old O-levels.

What particularly shocked me was students who had gotten an A in GCSE French couldn't conjugate the verb "avoir" ("to have" in English). Oh and since grammar isn't really taught in English speaking countries is almost anachronistic, that means:

- I have: j'ai

- We have: nous avons

- Thou hast (deprecated): tu as

- You have: vous avez

- He/She/It has: il/elle a, c'est

- They have: ils/elles ont

(if memory serves)

It's times like this where the old Republican (conservative) philosophy makes sense: that education is a state not Federal issue (as it isn't specifically enumerated in the Constitution). The Federal Department of Education is just a much bigger bureaucracy. Sadly, that philosophy is now dead in the Bush ("No child gets ahead")/neocon era.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html

"Under the agreement, teachers the city is trying to fire will no longer be sent to the rubber rooms, known as reassignment centers, where the teachers show up every school day, sometimes for years, doing no work and drawing full salaries. Instead, these teachers will be assigned to administrative work or nonclassroom duties in their schools while their cases are pending."

I hate to ask for links, but -- got a link for that? I'm hearing anecdotally that inner city schools have an almost 0% firing rate. Perhaps the suburban and rural areas make up for that.

If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to see that data. Would be handy to study a bit.

One thing it's missing is what proportion of teachers in each state are tenured--- it gives a total number of teachers, total "dismissed ... or did not have their contracts renewed based on poor performance", and then breaks down the dismissed numbers by tenured/untenured, but doesn't break the total number down by tenured/untenured. That information might be available elsewhere though.

Particularly with teachers who are committing actual crimes, though in fairness, I think that difficulty is overstated (point of note: I'm in the midwest, where the unions are not as strong, so that colours my perceptions a bit).

That said, though, I don't think we have any way of determing who is/isn't a good teacher if we haven't yet determined what good teaching looks like (in turn, we can't determine that until we figure out what we actually want out of school).

As a teacher, I've been on all sides of this; while working in a large public school, I've had lots of freedom and leeway (so long as I could justify it to my administrators, who were either down with it or completely and totally indifferent).

I've also worked in a small school where the "system" I was expected to carry out was complete and utter rubbish ("Students should not write at all until at least their junior year. They should spend the time prior to this diagramming sentences and memorizing the parts of speech, so that they understand what good sentences look like. They may only begin writing AFTER they have mastered identifying these patterns.")

When you couple that with an authoritarian administration, I was a "bad teacher" in the latter system, and had I not resigned I'd have likely been the first to go when budget cuts rolled around the summer after I left (as it was, my successor was let go instead).

I agree that incompentent teachers are a problem, but there's more to it than just that. Frankly, so many things have been screwy for so long (William Pinar, out of the U of British Columbia, places it at about 4 decades) that I'm amazed that anything gets done.

The same problem exists in almost any non-manufacturing job; certainly in the field of software development. We've got piles of bad metrics, like KLOCs (about which, the less said the better). We could count bugs, but different systems are prone to different levels of bugginess, and when we're all teaming up, it's not necessarily practical (let alone advisable) to "blame" someone. Yet by and large, we do a pretty good job of determining who are really good, and who aren't.

You mention that the standards themselves are, in some cases, bad. That may be true, but you should be trying to get out of such a district ASAP. The fact that they can't get good teachers, and the fact that the parents are hammering on the door because the kids aren't learning, should force change -- but for the fact that the system now gives parents no alternative.

It seems like the teachers' unions are hanging onto a fig leaf of rationalizating, but it's really a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. We could do a lot better than we are, but we're not allowed to go that far because it may fall somewhat short of perfect.

But look at the bigger picture. What's a more serious failure: (a) not giving a teach a raise quite commensurate with what he/she deserves; or (b) not educating a whole classroom full of kids because they're stuck with a lousy teacher?

You may not be able to tell whether someone is a good mechanic but you may know bs when you hear it. And you may recognize very smart people who care about their kids whose opinion's you respect.

And we have all kinds of ways of rating things and we tell which ones work well over the long haul.

We make these murky decions all the time. Its the fact that we do not use these resources when our decisions are turned over to the state that is the problem.

In the interests of being complete- any time you are visiting someone's house for the first time? i.e. "do you mind if I use your restroom?"

Is it really like that nowadays? I have heard this said before, but it doesn't match my experience a mere ten years past. When I was in school, sure, there was a general curriculum of the sorts of things we ought to learn in class. But the means and methods of conveying that knowledge did seem to be at the teachers' discretion.

Any teachers on this web zone care to comment?

And, depending on the grade and on the school, it is like this.

The professor whom I work with has this as one of her primary research areas, and has told me story after story of going into elementary schools (particularly on the western, less populated half of our state) in which teacher-student interactions are scripted down to the minute, and teachers are evaluated based on whether or not they follow the script.

The major high school across the street from where I live (~1500 students) has a science department where none of the teachers have written their own lesson plans in about 3 years; they use the lesson plans in the district binder (I've taught from those lesson plans; they're barely rigorous, and conflate superficial knowledge memorization with actual learning).

A friend of mine is a language and communication arts teacher in a middle school; if he wants to deviate from the lesson plan binder, he has to submit a proposal for the new unit (there can't just be one lesson) during the summer, at which point it's at the mercy of the committee.

While I was teaching in Kansas, my lesson plans were written for me, and I was punished any time I went away from them, even when it was clear that my students needed more time with something before they understood it ("If you were a good teacher, and if they were paying attention, they'd get it the first time. Make them come in during lunch.").

There are plenty of holdouts, thankfully; schools which serve mostly affluent students (particularly schools with strong enough test results that they can get away with it) seem to have done well. Additionally, there are a lot of more urban schools which serve students who are not quite so affluent and which have managed to hold out, though I suspect some of this is an accident of the difficulties of administrating a big school in which math is the least of most students' worries.

And no one in administration thinks that possibly the reason they're getting strong test results because they're not following the district-mandated lesson plans?

We all know that some programmers are 10x more effective than other programmers. What we don't know is why. I suspect the same is true of teachers.

Otherwise, ++ for your comment about teachers having to follow scripts. The best programs aren't scripted, and the modern "money" solution (not necessarily supported by teachers or teachers' unions, by the by) is to tightly tie down the curriculum so that teachers have minimal impact on the delivery.

Teacher friends who have taught in England have said that it's to the point of "it's November 4th, so we must be doing Triangles"; every student is supposed to be learning exactly the same thing on the same day. Nice in theory, but it doesn't work.

But I think most advocates of changing the way teachers are hired and fired would tell you that one must follow the other.

Details on Dewey's approach, which is pretty much gospel in American education, can be found at http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm

Thinking is not a social function; communicating is. If you wonder why politicians spend less time thinking and more time following polls--look no further. If you wonder why our country fails to enlist math and science--here's your answer.

Any top-down system suffers the weakness that a choice made from on high might not be the best for everyone, or that competing approaches might never be explored.

It's true there are huge disparities between good teachers and bad. And maybe a meritocratic injection would do the system a whole lot of good. But to boil the entire problem down to this is simply naive.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

In the interest of full disclosure, this was a very good school that had high expectations of both its students and teachers.

Perhaps compared to doing nothing, 7:30 to 6 is a hardship, but if you're coming from a normal NYC office job where it's not uncommon to work 9am-10pm it sounds like a vacation. Also, you don't actually have to be at the school from 7:30 to 6. You typically can go home by 3:30 and do whatever grading you need to at home.

On the other hand, being stuck in a room for 8 hours with NYC teenagers sounds like one of the most exhausting and frustrating tasks in the world. Maybe all that down time is necessary for recovery? I certainly would (and do) choose 10 hours a day futzing with C++ over 8 hours a day with teenagers who don't want to be there. Would be nice to have summers off, though.

It's also worth noting that most of the people here don't spend 6 solid hours presenting to adversarial clients every day and then move on to 6 more hours of coding. In fact, most of us likely have jobs that allow us to take breaks whenever we'd like. That's a luxury teachers don't have for at least part of the day.

However, there is something to be said for the benefits and job security.

That same amount of hours over a "normal" year with 4 weeks of vacation (note: nobody actually gets 4 weeks of vacation until they've been working for a while) is only 52.5 hours a week.

A lot of people put in way more than 52.5 hours a week, all year, and most of them don't have 4 weeks of vacation. Or benefits that match anything approaching teachers. Not to mention the job security and union benefits.

Not to mention when teachers are off for 10 weeks, they are OFF. Most people take a 1 week vacation and are answering their blackberry and email becuase they have projects that span the vacation.

Also where I grew up, teachers had exactly 184 teaching days a year. That is only 37 work weeks. What the hell? I work 49 weeks a year, they get 12 more weeks of vacation than me, so even at 11 hrs a day, they are coming out even more ahead of me.

And it sounds like your wife is the outlier, and I doubt she puts in 60 hrs/week every single week. And what about the guys who have been there forever teaching the same class off the same notes they worked out 15 years ago?

My wife worked for a school that was an outlier - I admitted that (see my original comment). I can vouch for the fact that her average work week was 60 hours (for what that's worth). Roughly 30 of those were in front of students if I remember right. It's certainly easier when you aren't a new teacher, but good teachers constantly change their lessons and approaches creating additional prep work.

I've met very few good teachers who weren't putting just as much time into their jobs as everyone here is putting into their startups. Passion is passion.

Incidentally, for the average to be 38.5 hours/week, that means that for every teacher working 60 hours/week, there must be about 6 teachers working only 35 hours/week or so (the study I referenced only counts full time teachers, i.e. those working at least 35 hours/week).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html

As PG said in his essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" [1], American high schools are popularity contests. The focus is not on actually learning anything, but on keeping us confined in one room while the adults go do work.

Of course, the system is WAY too complicated for that to be the only cause. For example, another cause is apathy amongst the students. My high school senior class was 250-300 students large. My high school graduating class was about 150-200 students large. This is because ~100 students simply didn't care enough. Of the 150-200 students graduating, most went on to a community college, very few - about 50 or so, actually went to a 4 year university.

Again, that's only barely scratching the surface, but I have class to go to, and that's of a higher priority than this comment. Because caring about your education is half the battle.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Filtering the concerns and wisdom of parents through multiple political layers serves the layers and not the parents.

If someone does a really shitty job parenting, they're not the big loser in that equation. A lot of really bad parents can and do wash their hands of their ill-behaved children, who become ill-behaved adults, who eventually become a drain on society in general.

If we had a social system with a really hard floor -- not just 'no welfare' or modern social services as we think of them, but something where you basically don't spend any money on imprisonment but just execute anyone who begins to look like a net cost -- then you could really let things go. Bad parenting styles would get weeded out pretty quickly, I'd imagine.

But that's not how things work and most people wouldn't be really keen on living in a system that did that. The cost of having 'safety net' arrangements that spread out the cost of fucking up is almost always a loss of freedom of action, due to the safety-net-related externalities that fuckups now involve. There are lots of cases where that might be a fine tradeoff, but it's a tradeoff nonetheless.

Having and raising children are actions so fraught with externalities, and the trend of societies seems to be in favor of greater 'safety net' systems, that I doubt very much that the trend towards greater state involvement in child-rearing will reverse itself.

But when society holds people accountable for their own actions, enforces property rights and maintains order at the expense of the disorderly, we can have a civil society and people are more likely to do what is right and do right by their children.

Why everyone must suffer this mediocrity and pay a fortune for it so that we can continue with an even higher crime rate than before its creation is beyond me.

Plenty of cultures have done that at some point. In medieval England there was no welfare net and hanging was the punishment for most crimes. There were still criminals and beggars, probably more so than today.

I wont even comment on the idea of executing people based on some arbitrary measure of worth.

Historically, such persons have received help from others but not entitled to such help. there was an element of responsibility required on the part of the person getting help. Now they are entitled and demand it and protest it if they don't like what they receive.

that seems pretty unjust to me, considering people providing the resources have no choice.

Also politically, it's the unfortunate reality that parents are not the only interests that must be served. All parents want the highest quality teachers for the lowest costs, of course that's just impossible.

in most markets, many approaches to solving a problem are tried. and when evidence that something works appears, more and more people try it and find it useful.

but thats not how collective decision making works. you've got to convince a majority that something works. you need a campaign and evidence is often ignored in politics. ok, often is being generous

I remember when Spanish speaking parents in California wanted their kids taught in English. Educators opposed it. It took a state wide vote to make the change. Parents couldn't simply select this approach for their child.

And lo and behold, kids did better and educators were surprised.

Its a simple matter for folks to make dozens of decisions every day about their kids, selecting from many competing options. How could some dumbed-down centralized decision making system working with a tiny fraction of the information and a tiny fraction of anything personal at stake possibly make a better decision? Its pure group think in my opinion.

and its not just about savings. its about better teaching, teaching what parents want and less of what the unionized want you to believe. And less using kids to promote your politics, such as dragging grade school kids to political protests as has been done here in California

this whole system stifles independent thought. We need more independent thought and more questioning of the educational cliches incessantly repeated throughout schooling and in the media.

If government and unions were in charge of our technology, we'd still be waiting for DOS 2.0.

And I know what how? That teachers are underpaid? Do you really think such an important job is only worth a paltry $30k year? The kind of people we actually want teaching can make 3 times that by either going into technology teaching or staying out of teaching all together. That classes are overcrowded? Because I see reports in the various papers every other week about how the classes are overcrowded?

The rest of your message seems to be against apologetics for the current system. I hate the current system, I think it's complete garbage. I was simply calling out the bizarre claim that making it better would make it cheaper.

If the goal of education is to produce 18 year olds with social adjustment, like and work skills, and the ability to work or get into college, let's be explicit about that! If there's a clear goal, a market, and competition, costs always go down.

Web browsers are free because both companies and non-profits can build them, benefit from providing them, and can't charge more than free. Computing used to be done by hand by humans, now you can buy millions of person-equivalents of computing for less than the cost of coffee. Why is it so cheap? Because companies wanted the dollars people would give in exchange for fast computation. Horses aren't used as transportation because someone invented cars, people fly across the ocean instead of taking ocean liners, etc because companies wanted the money people would spend on fast travel. Pens exist because companies wanted the dollars people would spend on fast, clean writing. Look at anything around you and it's there because someone outperformed other people in the competition for the dollars you spent on it. Every time, you either got the same product for less money (think Dell laptops), a better product for the same money (think of how Apple provides the best product they can at basically fixed price points), or often a better product for less money.

Schools districts spend between $5-15K/student/yr. We're doing it the same way we have for 100 years. Lack of competition or even an opt-out policy has given us a worse product for a higher cost (http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/16/money-is-not-what-scho...). It is very, very, very reasonable to expect that open competition with well-defined expectations would be both cheaper and better.

It really seems like there are a lot of people talking about what the market will do who haven't done even cursory studies of what market theory actually is. Do you know what market elasticity is? Without it the market can't work. That's why, for example, the market can't save us with health care. Health care is fundamentally inelastic (you'd pay any price for a life saving operation because without it you, to quote a movie, lose everything you've ever had and ever will have).

I believe we have a similar situation with education. You can't just opt out if it costs too much.

EDIT:

>No matter how important teaching is, teaching 20 kids per year is worth about $30K.

How do you know this? We know that we pay $30K/year now. We know that our teaching quality is awful. Doesn't that actually demonstrate (or at the very least strongly suggest) that it is in fact worth more?

By opt-out I mean opt-out of your standard assigned school district, not out of education. You should be able to take your $X per-child that would go to the district and spend it on any educational program that meets defined standards.

Teaching 20 kids per year is worth $30K by definition, because that's what we pay people to do it. There is a high, positive return on additional money invested in better education, but we as a society are not opting for it.

Nope, I never made such an illogical assertion.

>By opt-out I mean opt-out of your standard assigned school district, not out of education.

I was pointing out why education may be inelastic. Not assuming you didn't want your children educated.

>Teaching 20 kids per year is worth $30K by definition

Extremely bizarre logic. If we pay $30k for something and fail then it obviously something is wrong. If other systems pay more than this and don't fail (or at least not as badly) then that makes a rather strong case that the pay is too low.

>but we as a society are not opting for it.

That doesn't mean it's worth less, that means you're not paying enough and it shows. This furthers the argument that education may not be an elastic market. If people are simply incapable of acting in their own best interest (given the choice, always picking the crappy cheap education for their kids) then there must be intervention.

The only reason I'm not convinced that this is indeed the case are grandalf's posts.

If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compensation.

Professions that are a natural part of human life and thus simultaneously enjoyable and in demand as a career for a lot of the population will always have lower salaries. Like all careers, there is a competitive marketplace and many components to compensation.

And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them. And if they are not, perhaps we should not be entrusting out children to them.

Of course, none of this applies to a unionized situation. The pay is dependent on how much political pressure can be applied not on mutual benefit.

I wish people would stop trotting this nonsense out all the time. It's not specifically a myth or a fallacy but rather an occurrence so rare as to be useless. Worse, it's usually presented by people trying to justify paying too little for a given job. There are simply not enough people willing to forgo a nice comfortable middle class lifestyle just to be able to pursue their passion of teaching children. And why would they? Most people probably have more than just one passion, so why choose the one that pays the worst (not to mention dealing with passion-killing bureaucracy day by day)? As a result, the US public school system actually gets made up of a mix of genuinely passionate teachers and people who see it as a safe government profession where they have to read silly books to stupid kids all day. In my experience, the mix heavily favors the latter.

>And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them.

They have. That's why the people best at teaching are usually somewhere they can be compensated for it. Are you seriously suggesting the people we should be entrusting our children to are the lowest bidders? If these people are passionate and don't care about keeping up with the Jones' then there are probably other places they could donate their time that don't have such miserable politics to deal with.

- Consider what percentage of class time is productive vs babysitting. Not sure where you went to school but in my jr high and high school years, 60% of the classes were 80% babysitting and 20% teaching.

- Now imagine that a school hour could be structured with a 20 minute lecture followed by 40 minutes of supervised study (supervision not necessarily provided by someone capable of teaching the material). Suddenly you have a >100% efficiency improvement for that hour, since the teacher could be teaching another group and the supervisors can be relatively low skilled.

Surely there are some classes/students that would benefit from longer lectures or hour long discussions; the point is intended simply to illustrate that there is substantial waste and inefficiency today.

- Why does the school day operate during the typical school hours? Largely because of the school's dual role as daycare... expensive daycare. Why not have school hours be 8-noon every day and then make the rest of the day a daycare / study hall staffed by non-teachers? This could be done without sacrificing any academic quality.

- Pay distribution. Teachers are paid based on seniority. Switching to merit pay would cut staffing costs significantly while allowing the good ones to be paid a salary competitive with other fields.

- Why are classes overcrowded? Do all classes need to contain 20-30 students? Why not make some classes contain 150 students and others 10-15 students like in college? The problem of overcrowding is due to the unrealistic notion that there should be 20-30 bodies in every room during every period. That doesn't match the distribution of talent and interests, and does not optimize teacher effectiveness.

These are just a few ideas. There are probably many more.

You're right that the kids don't need to be there for learning. We could e.g. have the really good teachers create a pod cast series of their subject material (imagine a series from SPJ!) that kids could watch at their leisure and separately give kids the amount of human guidance/support that they require (the amount required will differ between different kids and even the phase of learning between the same kid).

The babysitting aspect is also important. Accepting that these are two separate things that the school is doing would allow us to no longer combine them. We could merge several of today's schools into one babysitting facility if we wanted, or we could make lots of little babysitting facilities that are closer to where the kids live. There are a lot of possibilities here. Hrm, this sounds like a business opportunity.

>Switching to merit pay would cut staffing costs significantly while allowing the good ones to be paid a salary competitive with other fields.

I don't like the idea of merit pay. If you dangle a carrot people aren't going to go "oh I'll just do everything the right way and get the carrot if I deserve it". Some will, but a lot will take whatever short cuts they need to to get that carrot (e.g. teach kids to memorize useless facts to get artificially high numbers on the important test scores). I've worked in enough big companies to know that the one who gets those big promotions aren't always better, often they're just good at finding out what reports to skew to make it look that way.

I actually do think it's a business opportunity but haven't pursued it yet (though I'd like to in the next year or two).

As for merit pay, the pay plan I came up with for my hypothetical school would simply be a partnership model. You "make partner" when your colleagues decide they trust you, value your contribution, and would like to keep you on board by sharing profits with you. Then, everyone is paid a base salary but partners get profit sharing.

This solves the main problem of tenure while keeping the spirit and benefits of it.

Another idea I had for pay plans is to incentivize teachers to create curriculum materials (this would save huge money on textbooks). Ideally there would be a network of schools so that if a teacher crated an amazing lesson or book chapter he/she would be paid a bit extra every time it was chosen/used. Enough that a moderately prolific teacher could earn a 20-40% bonus simply via curriculum creation. Maybe one decides to teach acoustical physics by analyzing a lady gaga song, and the lesson is a huge hit across a thousand schools.

In my opinion the ideal teachers are the sort of people capable of creating top quality curriculum... curriculum creation is a natural biproduct of energetic, creative teaching, and a large chunk of the way schools currently allocate money goes into paying textbook firms rather than cultivating a valuable skill in their employees.

I would also mention that there will be a potential resource problem. In every field there is a small subset that are the pinnacle of that field. If your system will only pick that pinnacle then you'll be understaffed. Imagine if software development were staffed this way. The software that actually was produced would be much better today, indeed much less would be needed. But we wouldn't have enough.

But most people are paying and are able to pay. They just aren't paying directly.

And there aren't enough private schools around because they've been crowded out and undercut by schools that don't have to compete. They just take the money they want.

And the results have been destruction.

No, it is the current system that is impractical. People have notions about what education should be and despite the bad results are will ing to keep sacrificing the best interests of the children to avoid rethinking their assumptions or engaging in fundamental debate. They prefer to keep repeating the same tired cliches.

other people don't owe me anything and never have. but I have the right to ask for help and receive it on their terms.

Coerced charity is neither moral nor practical. And our public schools are ample proof.

Which means you can get a child in a private school for less than $200/month, which is what people pay for cable in the US.

My long term vision is to blend traditional schooling with both practical skills (how to manage your credit, etc.) and interpersonal, soft skills (self awareness, conflict resolution, etc.) in an effort to empower students to take control of their own lives.

Your long term vision is nearly identical to my current one and I would love to hear how you are preparing for that vision.

Reclix, you should add your email address to your about section - users can't see what you put in your email field.

The business idea is essentially to get investors to fund the school in the same amount as a school voucher for 2 years and then make a push to have the community pass a voucher law to keep it in business.

I'd enjoy discussing further. Perhaps if there are a few people interested we can create a google group and bounce around some ideas/info.

email: 'm' * 3 + 'urf' at gmail

- first half year : Hungary

- grades 1.5 - 4 : Germany

- grades 5 - 8 : Hungary

- grades 9 - 12 : USA, California

- Universities, PhD: Hungary

After the first half year in Hungary, when I arrived in Germany, I was waaay ahead of all the other kids in Math & Sciences and was near the top of the class for most of the 4 years without speaking the language properly.

Then I got back to Hungary, where I had major catching up to do, especially in terms of Math, Sciences, Music and of course Hungarian language. I eventually caught up in Math & Physics, but not in Biology or Music, which never interested me much. (I mention Music because Hungarian schools teach music at a high level from grade 1 to everyone according to the "Liszt system", and for someone like me, who is not musically minded it was impossible to catch up.)

Then I went to University High School in Irvine, Orange County, California, one of the best public high schools in the USA I believe. Even so, that was a fairly shocking experience for me. Initially I was way ahead, but the whole system was so different, neither I not my parents knew how it worked (eg. you have to pick your own classes), the advisors put me into idiotic "English as a Second Language" classes for the first few months, where you really can't actually learn English because all the other kids are Korean. And for some reason they only had ESL for low-level math classes, roughly at the level you'd learn in 6th grade everywhere else. So eventually I did okay at UHS, because we figured out to ignore what the advisors (who seemed completely useless to me) say. But I couldn't really cope with all the freedom, all the activities, or the fact that everybody had cars at age 16, and I didn't, so I got Bs regularly.

Then I got back to a Hungarian University for a CS major, and even though I took all the AP classes in the US and took some CS at the local community college and UCI, I was waaaaaaaaaay behind, esp. in Physics. The AP Calculus classes are not so bad, but the one year AP Physics class is a major joke. In Hungary they study Physics for 4 years straight. So at first I had really bad grades at University. Eventually I went on to do a 2nd degree (another 5 manyears) in Physics, mostly because it interested me and I was so annoyed by my lack of understanding.

Overall, it's clear that the US public HS, even one of the best, was a major waste of time. I didn't learn much, nor were the teachers any good. I eventually enrolled to become a physicist to properly repair the "damage" caused by a lack of proper Physics education at the HS. It quickly turned out I'm so interested in Physical theories that I'm currently doing a PhD.

I'm also fairly certain that I got a better University education here in Hungary (esp. Physics) than I would have gotten at a public University in the US, all things taken into account. However, it's clear that no University in any part of the world can compete with top US and UK schools (mostly private and some public like Berkeley).

Overall, I'm still very happy to have spent 4 years in the USA, as it was a major life experience, and I benefit from it every day. I would say it was worth it even though the HS sucked, because the US culture / language is like Rome was 2000 years ago. The United States is the center of the world, and if somebody doesn't understand the United States, they don't understand the world. To get a better feeling for the "center of the world" part, visit the NASA museum in Washington. Everything worth mentioning that has happened after 1940 is there.

Also, the preview of this film seems to discount the self-confidence issue. I can understand this, but the makers should visit a country where kids, and thus people, are not injected with such self-confidence and see how they're doing (like here in Hungary). US self-confidence is one of the major factors why the economy is so great and why you have so many startups. I'm doing a startup right now, and it's no question that it's because after having spent 4 years in California I have a "can do" attitude, completely off the charts compared to my peers here in Hungary. I remember when I was at Uni I overheard someone referring to me as the "American guy" and I asked him how he knew I spent time in the States: he replied he didn't, he just gave me that nickname based on my attitude.

Did you look at dabbledb ? they were in the right direction before being acquired by twitter.

Look at their intro video.... it is really good.

Made with smalltalk

I am interested in learning more.

Parents are notorious for thinking they know what's best for their kids, even though they never studied education. It also doesn't help that historically and by reputation (not necessarily the case now), those that can't cut it in other fields ended up in education, so those parents think that they know better.

I'm pretty sure you heard wrong.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...

Usgovernmentspending.com looks like a great source of accurate, reliable information! </sarcasm>

I guess ad-hominem attacks are easier than actually downloading the spreadsheets yourself and crunching the numbers, right?

(Note: you can only download the spreadsheets for 2008 or earlier. 2009-2014 are marked as guesstimates, since official data is not yet available.

I honestly can understand his thoughs, because he's a person who finished his Master Degree in the same school he studied his career, he never got a job in the industry and by the same, he didn't know anything about what's going on this daily-changing world called internet.

I have several things to share here, and also i have my own answer about why the schools aren't working anymore. Why humans created schools? universities and specialized courses of some science? Because they noted if you start giving "education" to people they will be useful for industries and they will generate wealth, and that was true 70 years ago, -ie i've studied as part of Computer Engineer career a subject called "logical circuits" where we built some circuits with some logic gates, and using a protoboard. I really hated these stuff, but if i imagine myself studying these topic 70 years ago, I would be surely fascinated.

Today is another history, a history where driven-knowledge is to a few clicks, and where you can learn as fast as you want, a history where knowledge six months ago is no longer profitable,a history where you cannot wait to get information from another guy who calls himself a professor but it really does not love their job, but by money. You cannot depend of what are you learning using such a valuable resource like time from a stranger who doesn't care about what you love to do. We need to start creating yesterday, and the future is today.

I think schools need to change the way educate people, because just give knowledge with non sense of application kind of useless(some psychologists says the knowledge is better developed by practicing not just reading or listening), and i personally consider a waste of time these behavior, because we forget knowledge pretty much everything if we don't use it, and also we didn't really own knowledge at all, sometimes it's just an act of imitating your teacher trying to get a high note.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and repeating some old stuff doesn't solve nothing but high average in school.

From the other hand, i think internet is such a great tool to start building real knowledge of almost anything, we can search from how to find the g point to build a molotov bomb in a few clicks away. Internet is such an amazing way of share experiential knowledge and give value to other people like HackerNews, somo other tools like Quora, StackOverflow and more to come. We can connect people with the same ideology or same musical preferences. I find my first paid work using Internet, i met my actual girlfriend from internet, i know almost all i do from here, the internet, i'm sharing what i'm learning in a blog post, i've built a community for Mexican and Latin American Android Developers. There aren't barriers here, and those mental barriers you can defeat at a pair of clicks.

Until you have a clear definition, you can't 'reform' or 'fix' anything because you have no goal.

I, of course, have very strong opinions about this, but these questions are rarely brought up in the debate about the education system.

It is in fact very difficult to come up with a good through definition of the purpose of school, as it varies greatly from person to person and from time to time. My definition changes daily, though I don't think the school system has changed their definition in 100+ years (whatever it may be - basically "mold well-rounded citizens", or better yet, "create consumers who don't cause trouble").

How would you define it?

I believe it encompasses the following:

1. Creating free thinking people. What does this mean?

a. Someone who knows themselves. Who can draw strength from themselves, and isn't afraid of facing their own thoughts when they are alone. This is also someone who naturally would have to be conscious of this particular "self" - something I don't believe a majority are.

b. Someone who is somewhat versed in debate and rhetoric. Someone who can understand arguments, break them down, and can form opinions and rebuttals. This is essential in today's world as we are bombarded with opinions on all sides and often don't know what to think. We naturally conform to the opinions around us when we don't have ones ourselves and don't have what I outlined in a). In addition, this helps us understand the ways in which we are manipulated.

c. Someone who understands the "6 Levels of Moral Development" by Lawrence Kohlberg, or something similar to this. Someone who can see this and contrast it to their own lives.

2. Ensuring a basic level of competency in topics that we come into contact on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis.

3. Teaching what parents don't have time to or aren't capable of doing - with a focus on the above items.

The purpose of high end schools is to prepare kids for Ivy league colleges where they will learn to work on wall street (about half of Harvard grads) where they'll exploit regulatory failures/oversights for profit.

edit: corrected the percentage of harvard grads that go to wall street.

I actually blame regulators for creating a false sense of security. A more "wild west" environment would have at least led investors/counterparties to question more of the claims that were being made leading up to the crisis.

However, think about the role of government incentives. It took decades of tax breaks and other stimuli to get the public to think that real estate prices "just go up" year after year. It was this massive blind spot about real-estate that was (I think) at the core of the failure of firms to appropriately manage systemic risk.

However if you consider the impact that mispriced real-estate had on credit markets, and consider that bad regulation led to over-investment in real-estate, then the massive chunk of the market that went away when the bubble burst was all profiting off of regulatory mistakes.

I consider things like the mortgage interest deduction a massive regulatory mistake, as well as the capital gains tax exemption, etc.

This time the cause is bad teachers protected by the teachers union. I'm all for busting up the teachers union, but I don't for a nano second believe that bad teachers are really the cause of what is being observed.

Instead, what's being observed is deliberately made up, mostly nonsense, mostly to spend still more money on K-12 education which, with some irony, would help the teachers union!

We went through all this just 17 months ago with

McKinsey's report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools, April, 2009,

then but no longer at

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/achieveme...

and

supporting materials (PDF - 1.0 MB)

then but no longer at

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/detailed_...

Cover to cover it is clear that the main concern of this, apparently pro bono effort by some dedicated McKinsey staff members, was to scream that US K-12 educational achievement sucks while what they really meant was that US Black K-12 educational achievement sucks. So, that pro bono effort was to save the US Blacks.

Throughout the two long PDF files, they omitted any view of the elephant in the room until they gave a glimpse on page 26 of

supporting materials (PDF - 1.0 MB)

where they did a little cross-tabulation, that is, started on the main technique in looking for causality in social-economic data.

So on page 26 we finally get the US students, White, Latino, and Black, compared separately with students in many other countries in the world.

So, wonder of wonders, the ranking goes:

Finland

Hong Kong

Canada

Japan

Australia

US whites

Korea

Germany

United Kingdom

Switzerland

Ireland

Sweden

The US Latinos? Just above Chile.

The US Blacks? A little ahead of Indonesia and Argentina.

Is there any question how the US Blacks would do against, say, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Zaire, Zimbabwe?

So wonder how US students of Finish descent would do against Finland, Asian descent, against Hong Kong, Canadian descent, against Canada, Japanese descent, against Japan, Australian descent, against Australia? The study didn't say. Ah, wonder why? Why oh why? Maybe they followed the old rule, "If you don't think you will like the answer, then don't ask the question.".

So the study mostly tried to obscure the obvious cause: For the data they considered, the main cause of good performance is country of origin. Right: In particular, parents are a still more important cause, and it might be possible to dig still deeper.

Then the main reason for the low average US ranking is that the US is a diverse country and the other countries are homogeneous.

So, Virgina, this statistical pattern has NOTHING to do with education or US education: Instead, take any 100 homogeneous populations, of anything -- kitty cats, puppy dogs, or billy goats. Then pick a measure, any nontrivial measure you want from length of hair, body weight, running speed, jumping ability, whisker length, nearly anything at all. Then from the 100 homogeneous populations, make a diverse population and apply the measure. Then rank all the 101 populations. Presto: Wonder of wonders, the diverse population will be ahead of some of the homogeneous populations and behind some of the others. Obvious. Trivial.

And that obvious, trivial observation is so far ALL the screaming is about. How 'bout that.

So, if want to tar and feather US education, which for other reasons I'm plenty eager to do, will build the fire to warm up the tar right away, then compare US education with apples against apples. So, compare US education on people from Finland with Finland education on people in Finland. In this way have compared US education with Finland education. Then rinse, repeat for Hong Kong, Canada, Japan, etc.

But the semi-, pseudo-, quasi-smart, partly objective McKinsey team last year and the movie people this year showed their grasp of education: All they showed was the same thing would see from 101 collections of kitty cats measured on length of whiskers.

There's another big point: Apparently actually there isn't much in K-12 in the public school systems of any of the countries so that at most not much is missed.

Another point: Let's compare college education and, there, GRE scores. Bet the top 100 US colleges and universities do quite well, thank you.

Another point: Let's compare graduate education and research progress -- as we know, the US by itself totally blows all the rest of the world off the court and out of the arena.

Another point: K-12 really should amount to something. So let's move to that.

Another point: It may be that the US should take vocational education as seriously as, say, Germany does. We should consider that.

Another point: In the classic Democracy and Education, John Dewey made a big point: He defined education as the passing from one generation to the next and mentioned that what gets passed is mostly just what was there, both good and bad, with maybe a little improvement at each passing. So, without some quite special efforts, tough to take teachers from the middle third of US educational accomplishment and have them pass on only the top 10% of educational content.

Another point: Once again we see that high accomplishment is mostly the responsibility of individuals and where their best help is from their own families. So, enter the promise of home schooling.

Here's my approach to improving US education (listen up billionaires):

First, set up educational certification in nearly all subjects of interest from math, physics, and chemistry to auto body repair, grass mowing, all the way down to, say, computer science, and from there way, way down to, say, programming in C++, if could find anyone so weak minded. The CEEB tests should be a good start.

Second, get most colleges to agree on the required subjects to be ready for college work.

Third, fund some efforts at educational materials and programs to prepare students for the tests. Of course should try to make heavy use of PDF files, video lectures on YouTUBE, Web fora, tutoring, etc.

Then, let free enterprise take over and develop still better educational materials.

For K-12, leave that to local school boards: Some will get it and let well motivated and guided students just pursue some of the better sets of materials and, then, be ready for college work at age 10 or 12.

Then have those 12 year olds compete with 12 year olds around the world.

Here we cut out a lot of nonsense: If someone wants to learn, then sit in a cubicle with a computer, work through some of the best educational materials, take the test, and see how well they do, and then all the credit and/or blame is just theirs.

For varsity athletics, f'get about it except for the cheerleaders -- wouldn't want not to have the cheerleaders, a crown jewel of the US educational system!

Furthermore, the educational system you describe already occurs throughout many parts of the US. Test prep and the private sector is not an answer to a societal/cultural problem.

If other countries do not have those groups, they can outperform the US even if their education systems are equivalent.

For those who want to follow my deconstruction at home, I'm going to refer to the original report[1] and the detailed findings[2] that the original poster pointed to but with live links.

[1] The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools Summary of Findings April 2009 http://www.mckinsey.com/app_media/images/page_images/offices...

[2] Detailed findings on the economic impact of the achievement gap in America's schools April 2009 http://www.mckinsey.com/App_Media/Images/Page_Images/Offices....

Let's start with a couple of points that go to history. Fifteen years ago (not too long before I emigrated), Mike Harris was elected in Ontario and started on a massive program of social change from which Ontario has yet to recover. His schools program changes weren't all bad, but could have been achieved much less confrontationally and more smoothly, and could have been done without harming the quality programs that existed before. The basis for all of the changes was rooted in a politicized interpretation of test results that weren't meant for such comparisons by the people who put those tests together (at the time, it was largely TIMSS as the driver).

TIMSS is the "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study" (http://timss.org/), and at the time, the results were interpreted by the Harris government to show that Canadian students (and most especially Ontario students) were performing badly. One problem: TIMSS was supposed to be a universal student study (that is, all students at the grade level in the school system were supposed to be taking it regardless of ability); some of the investigated countries[3] did selected populations (that is, they excluded their worst students) instead of universal.

[3] My recollection is that the above criticisms were laid against some of the PacRim countries and some of the former Soviet Bloc countries.

Canada, the U.S. and many other countries followed the rules and were subsequently ranked much lower than they would have been ranked otherwise (they still would have been middling-to-low ranking, but not as low as they were). The charges of population homogeneity that you make were also made in Canada at the time ("of course our diverse kids didn't do as well as the uniform kids in Korea").

This last makes one of your conclusions nonsense:

"Then the main reason for the low average US ranking is that the US is a diverse country and the other countries are homogeneous."

Canada isn't homogeneous and ranked 5th in science and 3rd in math on the PISA tests (page 4 of the detailed findings); New Zealand and Australia (both also immigrant countries) exhibited good results. The United Kingdom (a diverse country that has some immigration) exhibited average results. It's also worth noting (page 7) that Canada's performance declined by 5 points between 2003 and 2006; the U.S. declined by 9 points in the same period. (Most countries, in fact, declined, with France dropping by 15 and clustering around the U.K. for overall performance.)

It's also worth noting that the statements on page 8 essentially assume that only the U.S. has changed (e.g., it ignores the efforts that other countries have put into improving and focusses solely on the U.S. lag).

The ethnic make-up of Canada is similar to that of the U.S. as we're both immigrant countries. This isn't about race or diversity. It's about socioeconomic disadvantage (sorry, but it's true). Those two things tend to be highly correlated in the U.S. (and to some degree in Canada, too), but school funding in Canada is much more uniform than it is in the U.S. so that socioeconomic differences are smoothed out but not eliminated. See pages 12-13 of the detailed document.

You choose to focus on the ethnic achievement gaps pointed out by McKinsey, but they don't stop there and go on to point out the income achievement gap. Look at pages 42-45 for how this works. Compare the chart on page 26 (a 3 - 8 times difference in low achievement by race) with that on 43 (a 4 - 6 times difference in low achievement by income). There's strong correlation there.

The entire report is worth reading, not just the bit that you quoted or that I quoted.

You're right, though:

"This time the cause is bad teachers protected by the teachers union. I'm all for busting up the teachers union, but I don't for a nano second believe that bad teachers are really the cause of what is being observed."

The problem is a bad system, not bad teachers (although they exist and should be removed from the system). The problem is local funding that isn't smoothed out so that students with all of the advantages get even more advantages because their schools can afford more and better equipment on the same tax rates. The problem is an over-reliance on quantization of the problem space, when students aren't cogs but are individuals (and if you place performance bonuses, etc. on classroom performance of a test, you get "teaching to the test", not learning). The problem is hunger (hungry children cannot study as well as those who aren't).

There are things to be fixed with how teachers and teachers unions work, certainly, but they should be done with a deeper understanding and NOT by misunderstanding what we do know.

A couple of other points:

"Is there any question how the US Blacks would do against, say, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Zaire, Zimbabwe?"

One might be surprised. I don't know of any particular test for this, but at least some of the countries you named (and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa) might outperform U.S. blacks; they will, at the very least, be better than your off-hand comment suggests.

"So wonder how US students of Finish descent would do against Finland, Asian descent, against Hong Kong, Canadian descent, against Canada, Japanese descent, against Japan, Australian descent, against Australia? The study didn't say. Ah, wonder why? Why oh why? Maybe they followed the old rule, "If you don't think you will like the answer, then don't ask the question.".

"So the study mostly tried to obscure the obvious cause: For the data they considered, the main cause of good performance is country of origin. Right: In particular, parents are a still more important cause, and it might be possible to dig still deeper."

Um, no. The study does say, after a fashion. Your comment is a little nonsensical, though, because you're simply taking the top countries on the first couple of pages and applying them as ethnicities. As I noted at the top, both Canada and Australia are immigrant countries with broad ethnic diversity (but a strong English/WASP contingent, just like the U.S.).

The rest of your comment is nonsense that's easily covered by the summary McKinsey did and the original data (see page 8 of the detailed report for a sample about post-secondary education). Home schooling is mostly a disaster (home schoolers in the U.S. on average perform worse than public school children on all subjects; this may partially be because most home schoolers in the U.S. are nutty Christians who don't want their children to be able to think critically).

What your prescription for education will do is pretty much put the U.S. results 100% in the toilet, as it ensures that only those people with money will have access to education. Education is not a simple subject, and the libertarian approach will fail--and has already (it's why we have public schooling and that the majority of economic growth has happened since public schooling started).

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat..., the US is over 15% Latino and over 12% black (as of 2008). Canada is listed as 1% Latin American, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada, and blacks aren't even listed (implying less than 1%) (as of 2006). Since blacks and Latinos seem to be among the worst performers in US schools (citation needed?), your attempt to paint Canada as having a similar demographic to the US seems pretty bogus to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada#Visible_...

It has south asian: 4%, chinese: 3.7%, black: 2.5%, latin american : 1%, arab 0.9% and total visible minorities at 16.2%

Perhaps not as visibly diverse as the US, but obviously also mostly immigrant based and non-homogeneous as a result (unless by homogeneous you mean only skin color).

It's also worth pointing out that your figures for the US are out of 115%:

"These figures add up to more than 100% on this table because Hispanic and Latino Americans are distributed among all the races and are also listed as an ethnicity category, resulting in a double count."

Unforunately, in US politics, it is taken as an axiom that ethnicity (read: skin color) is not correlated with innate performance, and thus any difference in measured performance must be due solely to inequality of opportunity.

You mention "inequality of opportunity." The linked PDF overviews didn't ignore race; they (like I) indicated that in the U.S., race and poverty are tightly correlated. They also indicate (without touching the third rail of racial politics in the U.S.) that "racial" performance differences exist even within broader socioeconomic groups. This is also unsurprising, as there's a lot of subconscious racism in the U.S. (there's documented bias toward picking white or lighter coloured children to answer questions in class, even when the teacher tries to avoid it, as well as many other examples such as [1][2][3][4]).

Go back to Gladwell for a moment: advantages multiply. Whether you agree with his approach or not, on this part he's right. Canadian hockey players born in January are substantially more successful than those born in December because of the way that junior and senior hockey leagues are organized. This is because they are bigger, play better, have better coordination, etc. and then better coaches become more interested. They get more advantage because they started with a birth advantage. The inverse is also true: disadvantages multiply.

You also mention "measured performance"; many of these measures are unconsciously biased toward a middle-class to upper-class experience. In my wife's teaching experience, she has had students who are raised without religion who don't get (Christian) religious allusions that are present in some of the books that they read. If one doesn't have a particular experience, then one cannot be meaningfully tested on that experience. If your measure of "success" is based on those experiences, then your measure of success is by definition biased. That bias may be good or not, but the exposure to those experiences must be measured and controlled for before you start making sweeping (and wrong) statements as Hilbert Spaces was doing.

In 2010, Hilbert Spaces suggestion that ethnicity is the primary factor involved here is as nonsensical as the idea that girls should think that "math is hard." It's stupid, it's racist, and it's offensive.

--

[1] "One of the more upsetting discoveries is that children as young as three-years-old will associate positive traits with white people and negative traits with black people regardless of the race of the child or the attitudes of the children's parents and teachers." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-samuels/unconscious-racism...

[2] "But inequalities extend beyond UD's African-American students and onto other campus minorities. An American born and raised student, junior Ed Hazboun, has faced discrimination multiple times due to his Arabic ethnicity. 'At one time my advisor for three years was going over my schedule and made a comment about the paper work I would have to fill out. You would think that after three years, that advisor would realize that I was a current student and not a foreign exchange student,' he said. 'Another time my philosophy teacher asked me if the Muslim religion viewed the topic we were discussing about ethics differently. Being born and raised Catholic, I was unable to answer.'" http://flyernews.com/articles/volume/57/issue/36/id/5718

[3] "A 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology took Norton’s research a step further, examining the effects that whites’ attempts at colorblindness had on black participants. Ironically, the negative nonverbal behaviors exhibited by “colorblind” whites were interpreted by blacks as signs of prejudice, making them suspicious of their partners. It is hardly surprising that racial tensions increased among participants." http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_perils_of_c...

[4] "In many situations, from either the dominant or the oppressed, simple unconscious associations may drastically change outcomes. An example is Steele and Aaronson's (1995) work on stereotype threat, in which the performance of African-American students in a testing situation was cut in half by asking them to identify their race at the start of the test. This simple act unconsciously reminded students of the stereotypes connected with their race. Moreover, when asked at the end of the test, the students who were primed to remember their race were unable to identify the reminder as a factor in their poorer test score (Steele 1997)." http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v90/k0901mou.htm

I don't have a cause here, by the way. I am not arguing a negative; it is up to the folks who which to establish a significant correlation to make their case. So far, all of the indicators are against them (genetics per se seems not to play a major role in success later in life).

You may think that the biases that I cite aren't major causes of performance differences, but that's no different than you saying that you think that green tea tastes good. I may think that they're major causes, but that's no different than me saying that black tea is better. What I know is that there are studies out there that indicate that there are many factors much stronger than genetics will ever be for success.

The top of these is, by the way, family life. These are measurable more in the negative than the positive: children of alcoholics and drug addicts tend to do worse in school than those with non-addicted parents; children of broken homes tend to do worse in school than those with unified families. One of the major positive correlations is reading: children whose family reads, even if they don't read together, tend to perform better in school than those who don't. What families read, especially together? Those who don't have to spend a lot of time working to make ends meet and put food on the table.

You may think that [4] is suspicious, but I've heard about this study a few times and I believe that it has been corroborated by other studies. Yeah, it's surprising, but that doesn't make it wrong. Again, step to Gladwell for a second and look at what Korean Air found out. When the subconscious social status indicators happened in language, accidents were more likely to happen. As soon as the entire cockpit switched to an informal English, accident rates dropped dramatically. So yes, reminding someone of their "social place" can significantly reduce their performance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada#Visible_...

We have at most trivial disagreement on facts. We likely have some unresolvable disagreements on politics.

In a post below, you went on and on with a lot of what I called "nonsense": Do such work as well as you please, and the results will still be nonsense. Sorry: That direction just gets deeper and deeper into stuff for which there is no reasonable solution.

You seem to have some quite broad educational objectives: Those promise to be very expensive and have highly mixed results, e.g., a gigantic waste of time for any very capable student.

We should agree: For the main academic subjects, such as considered in the McKinsey study, etc., it really is possible to have standardized tests that really are in practice essentially the best measure of learning. Indeed, that you take seriously the McKinsey analysis of the results of just such tests implies that you agree.

Are such tests perfect? No. Better than anything else widely available? Yes.

From my experience, the tests of the US Educational Testing Service are about the best measures of learning in K-12 and at least early college academic subjects. The test results are well respected for admissions to both college and graduate school. Net, these tests are a good resource for an effort to make progress in the US educational system.

Okay, have various paths to education. Have classrooms, special education, private schools, guided home schooling, etc. Fine. But, for all the paths, evaluate the learning with accepted, well designed tests, e.g., from ETS. So, the various paths have the same measure, the test scores, and much the same, real educational goals; so, the paths are in competition. GOOD.

Have all the paths you want, but for my kids I'd home school them with the goal of having them be ready for college work by age 10-12 and graduate work about three years later and having them do some research, publish some papers, take GREs, use those and the published papers to get accepted to grad school, take the qualifying exams, submit the published papers as the dissertation, and, thus, after less than two months on campus, one year later get a Ph.D. and to HECK with more in academic education. Only one degree -- Ph.D. Period. We're talking cutting out lots of expensive, time-wasting, psychologically wacko nonsense from nearly irrelevant down to totally upchuck-able.

E.g., some girl 13 gets to concentrate on learning calculus and not her hair style, doing well in her education and not gossip and social climbing.

For your main struggles and concerns, I outlined a simple, special path to the tests that should please you:

"Here we cut out a lot of nonsense: If someone wants to learn, then sit in a cubicle with a computer, work through some of the best educational materials, take the test, and see how well they do, and then all the credit and/or blame is just theirs."

The "nonsense" I'm talking about you described with lots of references: As I mentioned, in that direction the swamp just gets deeper thicker with no hope.

Here's how this simple, special path addresses many of your concerns: As we know, on the Internet, no one can tell if you are a dog, nerd, wearing pajamas, blond, brunette, red head, white, black, brown, yellow, Christian, Jew, Muslim, African, Northern European, Russian, Mideastern, Asian, Hispanic, etc., rich, poor, handicapped, handsome, ugly, too thin, too fat, popular, socially awkward or if you are living with 1, 2 parents, natural or not, previously were an academic success or failure, were good or bad at other academic subjects, were good or bad at athletics, what your sex or age is, are pregnant or have been pregnant, have a bad reputation from siblings that went before, have an address in a good or bad neighborhood, etc. So, study the materials via the Internet, take the tests, submit the scores, and totally avoid any issues about social this and that. Don't look for a simpler solution.

Yes, the cry will go up: "But, but, but, this is too narrow and omits oceans of adult face time just so totally CRUCIAL for social and civics maturations ....". Yup, and also even more crucial for the teachers unions, really high real estate taxes, nearly meaningless or wasteful and even devastating social and athletic, but not academic, competition, making a king and queen out of the quarterback and head cheerleader and social serfs out of everyone else, degenerate pop culture, bullying, etc. That system IS especially good for getting all the students started on drugs and getting the sixth and seventh grade girls sexually active.

Besides, here are some facts of life about learning, especially relevant on Hacker News: Mostly people, for their careers and everything else, have to keep learning all their lives. Nearly all of this learning is self-directed, self-taught, and pursued independently or largely so. In particular, for all of the history of the US computer industry, nearly all the learning in the labor force has been self-taught -- assembler, Fortran, Cobol, APL, PL/I, Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, SQL, C, C++, Dijkstra semaphores, communicating sequential processes, the fast Fourier transform, Java, HTML, MemCache, .NET, etc. So, students who can, should get started on such learning ASAP.

Yes, next the cry will go up: "But, but, but, what about students who for any of a long list of reasons would fall through the cracks and, thus, create problems for decades for themselves and the rest of society? These students need the help of good teaching."

Fine: I did indicate that there should be multiple paths to the tests.

We can't hope to make much progress arguing with the teachers unions or by pursuing arguments about nature versus nurture or genetics. So, for the whole debate, the whole issue, we need to get some clarity, simplicity, alternatives, and competition. So, for these ends, start with some good tests, e.g., from ETS. Then have multiple, competitive paths to the tests. In particular, one of the paths should be very high quality learning materials available via the Internet.

For the teachers unions, let's get to see how well their students do on the tests against students with home schooling and the Internet!

Or, for an example, if want to take part of the movie at the intended face value, then consider the students and parents so eager to get the students into charter schools: Such eagerness should serve well for a student with a computer, using high quality materials on the Internet, working through the materials, doing the exercises, taking the tests right along, AND seeing right then how well they did.

Look, guys: How to learn such material just ain't too obscure: The learning is NOT a spectator sport; all that's required is just working through the material which should be easy enough for any eager student or for any student with determined parents! "Sandra, do well on the test on integration by parts and THEN you can gossip with your friends, go shopping for a new dress, and watch your chick flick. Do really well and you can get two new dresses and two chick flicks. No, you can't go park until 3 AM with that college boy you met at McDonald's.".

E.g., nearly everyone on Hacker News worked through Kernighan and Ritchie with its overly succinct writing, sparse content, the tortured, obscure, idiosyncratic syntax of C, no details on the internals of malloc(), way too little detail on stack usage and its storage usage, too little in exercises, no tests right along, no final test at the quality level of the ETS, and still got it. The required learning work just ain't too difficult. We know we can do such work, for C, high school and college math, science, languages, history, etc.

Let's cut the nonsense, see the tests, prepare for the tests, get on to more, and cut out all the social this and political that.