Conservative Reading Comprehension

[Moksha]

Is reading comprehension really that important to Republicans when their sole intent is to tell lies?

[Some Schmo]

Is reading comprehension really that important to Republicans when their sole intent is to tell lies?

Well, they need to read up on what lies to tell. So there's that.

[canpakes]

In K-12 education, a community of practice is a group of folks working and collaborating on theory and practice in some area they are all interested in (for example: 'How the hell are we going to teach these new math concepts?'). These days, however, there are often social justice overtones when someone uses the term.

Well. I don't really see the problem with educators trying to get people smart through sharing tips and tricks of the trade. Perhaps Conservatives simply feel like it's at the expense of White children, but I'm not sure how they would get that from OP's copypasta.

- Doc

It’s a well-known scientific fact that some people say that when a black child gives the right answer to a math problem, he psychically sucks that knowledge out of the nearest white kid in proximity, forcing that white kid to answer incorrectly on his/her own test, causing a chain of failure that then prevents the white kid from getting into Harvard, to which they were surely bound otherwise.

[Morley]

One of the major arguments of the movie is that in most school districts, it is basically impossible to fire a teacher who isn't good at teaching, and that teacher unions are more concerned with job security for mediocre teachers than they are with rewarding great teachers or with providing kids with the best possible education. According to the film, “ ...in Illinois, 1 in 57 doctors loses his or her medical license, and 1 in 97 attorneys loses his or her law license, but only 1 teacher in 2500 has ever lost his or her credentials.” Personally I doubt these statistics are comparable, but it does point to teaching being different than the corporate world where, for example, Jack Welch would famously rank all his employees and would routinely fire the bottom 20% of all employees every year.

Yeah, it's pretty hard to fire teachers, though that's not as much the fault of unions as it is the culture that surrounds education. Teaching is a fairly low-pay, low-prestige job that is still seen has having good benefits and solid job security. Districts and administrators are loath to mess with either of those.

Usually, bad teachers are just tolerated because we don't have enough people going into education to really be picky. Genuinely bad teachers are often forced out using methods like serial transfers and unsavory job assignments, because no one wants to stay in a job where it's obvious that everyone hates you. Some administrators are willing to do the hard work to terminate rotten teachers, though this is an emotionally draining and tediously drawn out ordeal.

Back when I was in the game, my efforts to terminate one of our teachers was a multi-year process of hearings, detailed documentation, and exhaustive attempts at remediation. Looking back, I kind of think that's how it should be, though at the time I would have punched anyone in the nose who would have suggested as much.

A couple months ago I saw the documentary "Waiting for Superman" which goes into a lot of details about the problems with the public school system. The basic message was that if you lived in the wrong school district, your kid's only shot at success was going to a charter school.

Years later, I was at a university, teaching administrators and writing about educational policy. My cohort and I had two big pushes: 1) Students should be in school for more days each year (this 'summer learning loss' research was shown to be especially true for disadvantaged and low SES students); and, 2) School district funding should be equalized in each state, so that districts with low tax bases would receive more money and perhaps better teachers (see, for instance, Canada). At some point, I concluded that here in the US, these things will never change (to my knowledge, only Alaska and Hawaii are outliers on funding).

I eventually became disillusioned enough to find a new profession. I salute those better than I, who endure and stay.

.

[ajax18]

According to this "pathway to equitable math", the "white privileged" way of teaching math is to do what Mr. Carrier did--he explained that the correct way was to follow the algorithm he provided, and that we needed to show our work so that he could see that we followed to algorithm correctly. Apparently, the pathway to equitable math folks believe that white kids who speak English as a first language are better at following cookie-cutter algorithms to solve cookie-cutter math problems.

I like the idea of looking at multiple ways to solve a problem. It's a great way to check your work. Unfortunately what this too often becomes is a way for kids to neglect learning the way the professor taught you to solve the problem as well because that's too much trouble and requires to much effort. That's often why they like that method better. It reminds me of trying to teach a high school class how to convert grams to moles. You work yourself on the whiteboard showing in painstaking detail how to think about this algebraically. Kids in the front dutifully follow along while there's always a few in the back who refuse to write anything down and take it on step by step. They look for shortcuts and the easy way out. Yeah, they might get a simple problem or two right. But when it gets more complicated and there are no shortcuts and they're lost. Those "bots" in the front end up doing better on the standardized test. The standardized test can't reward you for the wrong answer. It can't reward you for thinking of some different way to solve the problem if you ultimately made a mistake, especially if you weren't willing to write your thoughts out in the first place. And if the kids who aren't willing to write their work out or learn the method the teacher taught happen to not be white, then the verdict is in based on Icarus's data. Math must be a white supremacist subject run by the KuKluxKlan. In reality math is apolitical and as close to absolute fairness as a subject can be. The fact that it's called white supremacist by the left shows you just how biased and reverse racist their perspective and world view really is.

Yeah, it's pretty hard to fire teachers,

From what I hear you can't even get teachers to show up to work in your blue states. Why would they if they're getting paid the same to stay home?

[Morley]

Yeah, it's pretty hard to fire teachers,

From what I hear you can't even get teachers to show up to work in your blue states. Why would they if they're getting paid the same to stay home?

Really? Where did you hear this?

[Analytics]

Yeah, it's pretty hard to fire teachers, though that's not as much the fault of unions as it is the culture that surrounds education. Teaching is a fairly low-pay, low-prestige job that is still seen has having good benefits and solid job security. Districts and administrators are loath to mess with either of those....

I'd be really interested in your reaction to "Waiting for Superman." The basic premise of the film was that kids perform better at charter schools because charter schools have better teachers, and that charter schools have better teachers because the charter schools are free to reward good teachers and get rid of bad ones.

One of the heroes of the movie was Michelle Rhee, who was hired to clean up the Washington DC school district. Her big plan was to renegotiate the contracts with teachers. As I recall, her offer was to give all teachers a raise, and to have higher pay for really good teachers, so that if you were a truly excellent teacher you could make something like $130k a year. In exchange for this, the district would be given significantly more freedom to fire bad teachers.

I certainly don't want to pretend to be an expert on the topic for having spent 2 hours watching a documentary, but the movie was really interesting and painted a compelling picture.

[Analytics]

I like the idea of looking at multiple ways to solve a problem. It's a great way to check your work. Unfortunately what this too often becomes is a way for kids to neglect learning the way the professor taught you to solve the problem as well because that's too much trouble and requires to much effort...

The point of the program isn't to give kids a pass on being lazy. It is to create more rigorous math courses that are driven by rigorous thinking rather than rote mechanics.

This reminds me of a calculus course I took in college. When I went up to hand in my final, the professor had already begun correcting papers that had already been turned in. He handed me another student's paper and asked me to see what he had done wrong on a particular problem. It was an integration problem that was intended to be solved using, as I recall, "u substitution." That is the way I solved it, and the professor said I got the problem right. However, the paper I was given solved the same problem using integration by parts. It was a bit convoluted to do it that way, but I didn't see any mistakes in his steps. Yet the answer was different. A couple other students had solved it that way, and already had big zeros in red ink on their papers. The professor and I both went through the steps these guys were doing, and we couldn't find any mistakes. I then had an idea and tested whether the two answers were identical. It turns out they were, and the folks were given full credit.

Anyway, the point isn't to neglect how to solve problems in the way the professor teaches. The point is to use clear thinking and valid reasoning to solve problems, and to show your steps in order to demonstrate your reasoning. The course you are criticizing isn't about justifying kids in being lazy, much less in justifying wrong answers. Rather, the point is to be more rigorous and focus on valid reasoning that is clearly communicated, rather than rote steps to canned problems.

...The standardized test can't reward you for the wrong answer. It can't reward you for thinking of some different way to solve the problem if you ultimately made a mistake, especially if you weren't willing to write your thoughts out in the first place.

I ended up being very good at standardized tests by the time I finished high school, and was actually selected to be on the academic decathlon team where the top 1% of geeks from different schools competed with each other taking tests. When preparing for these, we were quite eager to look for alternative ways to interpret questions and get alternative answers that diverged from what the tester was expecting but were still "right", from that perspective. We were told that this is why the questions always said "select the best answer," not "select the correct answer." The test writers knew there could be more than one "correct" answer. So our focus as test takers became selecting the "best" answer, not the "correct" one. And to do that, we needed to look at multiple ways of interpreting problems and see multiple correct answers. I was an elite test taker, and this is what I was instructed to do.

And this is exactly what the program you didn't read about says everybody ought to be taught. It says there can be ambiguous questions, and that as an exercise, they ought to be examined from multiple angles. Through your preconceived notion, you've looked at out-of-context quotes and imagine that the program is about justifying black kids when they get the wrong answer to make them feel good and make you feel bad. Or something. The truth is that professional educators put this program together to encourage teachers to be more rigorous so that the students would do better on standardized tests.

And if the kids who aren't willing to write their work out or learn the method the teacher taught happen to not be white, then the verdict is in based on Icarus's data. Math must be a white supremacist subject run by the KuKluxKlan. In reality math is apolitical and as close to absolute fairness as a subject can be. The fact that it's called white supremacist by the left shows you just how biased and reverse racist their perspective and world view really is.

Nobody called math white supremacist. Do they not teach basic reading comprehension where you come from?

What the course actually says is that certain ways of teaching tend to disfavor blacks more than whites, and consequently tend to put black kids on pathways away from STEM carriers. From what I've read, their suggestions on how to teach math would benefit anybody who is interested in taking AP math classes, passing AP tests, getting high SAT scores, and going to college to study things in STEM majors. Whether the poor teaching methods they criticize can fairly be called "white supremacist" is a provocative claim. Perhaps they hurt black kids more than they hurt white kids. I would presume they have some evidence for this. But regardless, they shouldn't be criticized for instructing teachers on how to teach math in a more rigorous manner.

[ajax18]

They should be criticized for injecting race and crying racism about something that is completely race neutral.

It's really a mental disorder. Everything has to be about white supremacism for these people.

This reminds me of a calculus course I took in college. When I went up to hand in my final, the professor had already begun correcting papers that had already been turned in. He handed me another student's paper and asked me to see what he had done wrong on a particular problem. It was an integration problem that was intended to be solved using, as I recall, "u substitution." That is the way I solved it, and the professor said I got the problem right. However, the paper I was given solved the same problem using integration by parts. It was a bit convoluted to do it that way, but I didn't see any mistakes in his steps. Yet the answer was different. A couple other students had solved it that way, and already had big zeros in red ink on their papers. The professor and I both went through the steps these guys were doing, and we couldn't find any mistakes. I then had an idea and tested whether the two answers were identical. It turns out they were, and the folks were given full credit.

Did you call out the professor's white supremacy for marking these answers wrong that weren't wrong?

You might get away with that in undergraduate school. I had a friend similarly question a professor about question in optometry school. The professor admitted to another student how he keyed the exam. The professor responded to my friend by accusing him of stealing an exam and trying to get him kicked out of school. Even medical school is not hard science and is very political. If my friend were black you'd probably have heard about this 24/7 on CNN as an example of white supremacy in education. In reality it was just a professor who didn't want to be challenged or questioned on how he keyed the exam and had nothing to do with racism or white supremacy. If the professor says the sky is red. Then the sky is red. That's how it works at that level when that much money and investment of your life is on the line. Do you think students get to look at a a board exam and evaluate how the professor graded the scantron?

[Moksha]

It's really a mental disorder. Everything has to be about white supremacism for these people.

Ajax, this should help emphasize your point: https://Twitter.com/i/status/1367536789100126216