NYT: Damage from Covid closures.
NYT: Damage from Covid closures.
What was done to children in public schools during the Covid lock-down was inexcusable. There will never be a full accounting, but this article in the NYT gets much of it right.
Category: Education (Page 4 of 7)
This would not be an issue if parents cared about their children enough to get them flip phones instead of smart phones. However, this is a positive step.
Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday gathered school administrators from around the state to discuss how they’ve instituted policies to restrict middle- and high-school students’ cell-phone use while at school.
Speaking at a roundtable discussion, superintendents spoke about how lunchrooms and playgrounds have been falling silent as students focus on their phones instead of each other. Kids use their phones to harass other students, set up fights, or skip class.
NYT Interactive Admissions Plotter
The NYT has this fancy, interactive plotter that shows how many Black and Hispanic students will be admitted based on different criteria.
Treating people differently on the bases of race for college admissions is found to be illegal because it is, by definition, racial discrimination. Universities are looking for legal ways around that.
While browsing the *Teachers* forum on Reddit, I read this post.
If you want to keep your jobs, and preserve the education system as it currently stands, VOTE in the 2024 presidential election.
The text of the post was a rant about how Trump promised to dismantle public education and collapse democracy in America. No one had commented, so I did:
The education system, as it currently stands, ain’t that great.
The original poster and a couple of dozen other people replied. A third were supportive, so I engaged the other two-thirds. Always be polite, but give no ground.
Several other people commented to disagree with the original post and started other threads.
After 200 comments, the original author withdrew her post. My comment has 28 up votes. I figured I’d be deep in negative numbers.
That’s a win. Not only did she withdraw, but many conservative teachers know that they aren’t alone.
“When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year,” wrote the student who sits on Harvard’s honor council, which adjudicates peer academic-integrity violations. “When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her,” as the body declared in a Dec. 12 statement.
WSJ: UW Chancellor Fired for Porn
WSJ: UW Chancellor Fired for Porn
The university system’s board of regents voted unanimously to terminate University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow during a closed session Wednesday evening. UW-La Crosse Provost Betsy Morgan will serve as interim chancellor following Gow’s dismissal, university system leaders said.
What could Gow have done that was so bad?
It isn’t clear what ChatGPT is good for, but that doesn’t stop people from predicting it’s going to take all the jobs. Try hiring a handyman or someone to cut your grass. They are busy and expensive.
This Wired article on ChatGPT, doesn’t help explain anything, but this post on Ace of Spade HQ makes sense.
ChatGPT – LLMs in general – are very good at form but absolutely terrible at function. That’s because they are supercharged autocorrect engines; they know only what words fit where, statistically.
They can make a legal filing that looks correct, but it will reference laws and decisions that don’t even exist.
Physical jobs like home maintenance or lawn care are safe, but knowledge work is where ChatGPT is supposed to be a threat. Teachers talk about this quite a bit.
Radio, television, videotapes and the internet were all predicted to replace classroom teachers. Instead, these technologies are effective for motivated people and tools for a teacher. That got me thinking about what ChatGPT could have helped me with when I was teaching.
Visual presentation, the form part of a lesson, was important to me, but function was critical. I can’t think of any aspect of lesson preparation, presentation or assessment where ChatGPT could help.
For the most part, teachers like their students and want to help them master the concepts. What teachers hate is the bureaucratic bullshit that ineffective administrators may insist on. It’s work that doesn’t advance the educational objective at all, and takes the teacher away from the core objective.
I would have been happy to set ChatGPT to generating lesson plans, curriculum benchmarks and pedagogical objectives to be submitted weekly. The content doesn’t matter because shitty administrators are dumb bullies.
Where they genuinely are transformative is in visual art, because there form largely is function.
I think I might like this ChatGPT ability. My PowerPoints, worksheets and assessments were loaded with copyright infringing images.
Free Press: David Sedaris Punching Down
Words, we are now regularly reminded, are violence. So too is silence. I read not long ago that capitalism is violence, as is misgendering someone. Ignoring someone is violence, but so too is paying them attention.
Sedaris is a cosmopolitan humorist, so he is describing coastal people and what is written by influencers on social media, but many young people don’t seem very resilient.
Who are these hothouse flowers, all so easily and consistently wounded? People whose parents never hit them, that’s who. People who don’t know what real pain is, but still want to throw the word around. When I was a child, a slap across the face was too minor to qualify as “casual violence.”
I’ve not raised children, but they do seem to benefit from some setbacks when they are young so they can handle setbacks when they get older. Having more family around who don’t treat a child like a precious flower does seem to do them some good.
If our schools are a mess it’s in large part due to these parents who think their kids are special, who get mad if you contradict their brilliance, if you give them a bad grade or, God forbid, try to take their phones away. Had one of my teachers told my mother that I was acting up in class, she’d have said, “Thank you so much for letting me know.” Then she’d have come to wherever I was—in front of the TV, or at the side of the TV making my way to the front of it—and slapped my sister Gretchen so hard her eyes would have crossed.
Most teachers would agree with that sentiment, but any talk of corporal punishment in schools is viewed as giving a student an abusive beating. Having gotten a swat in high school, I know it absolutely wasn’t that.
My swat was a miscarriage of justice, but I went along with it because I certainly deserved it for something. At no point did I consider calling my parents. They never mentioned it, so I’m not certain they knew that it happened.
It was after school. The assistant principal and teacher were present. The AP asked if you knew why you were getting a swat. I told them why. I got one swat, we shook hands, and it was over. Say what you want about corporal punishment, but boys are having much worse outcomes in our current system. Nobody has ever heard of a girl getting a swat.
Children now are like animals who have no natural predators left. Had I arrived at my elementary school with a bleeding head wound, explaining that my father had just thrown me out of his moving car because I was teasing my sister, the teacher would have handed me a Band-Aid, saying, “Well, I hope you learned a lesson from it.” Now, even a scratch on the back of your hand could get your parents locked up for abuse. And children know this!
Every parent I know is aware of this, but most are indulge their children more than their parents did.
In February 2021, then-president Kristina Johnson launched an initiative to hire 50 professors whose work focused on race and “social equity” and “100 underrepresented and BIPOC hires” (the acronym stands for black, indigenous and people of color). These reports show what higher education’s outsize investment in “diversity, equity and inclusion” looks like in practice. Ohio State sacrificed both academic freedom and scholarly excellence for the sake of a narrowly construed vision of diversity.
What one change in public education would you implement to improve the quality of education?
Teachers say, “Get better parents.” That’s true, but not helpful. We teach the students we have. Public schools are a condensed version of the community. If the community is dysfunctional, the children of the community aren’t likely to be much better.
This article touches on the problem. Many schools were doing a decent job before Covid, but the lock down screwed up many students. The tempting solution was for administrators to ask that teachers “show grace”. To normal people, that means lower the standards.
“Rosie” averaged an 83 in core classes and tested more than two months above grade level in fifth grade in 2019. She was absent three days. In 2022, Rosie was 10 months below grade level in math and reading and absent 10 days. She averaged an 83.
Most parents care more about grades than they do about education. Weak administrators push for teachers to lower standards because few parents will object.
For decades at North Royalton, the policy was that every AP student was required to take the AP test. Nobody compiles the stats, but after talking to AP teachers from all over the country, that policy is not wide spread. An AP teacher’s average AP score is inflated if the downer cows don’t finish.
Most of my colleagues at North Royalton expected a student’s AP score to roughly correspond to their final grade. It might go up or down a point, but a ‘D’ student doesn’t get a 5, and an ‘A’ student doesn’t get a 2.
In elementary school, there are several mandated tests. A student reading well below grade level should not be getting an ‘A’ in a reading class.
How can a parent determine if a school has high academic standards?
Ask about the class average. Even in an AP class filled with smart kids, the class average should be about 80%. Yeah, I know. We say a ‘C’ is average, but nobody believes that.
Remedial classes are tougher. The failing students are really failing. They may not do anything, so have a 25% in the class. There may be a lot of them. A decent class average would only count the students who are actually sentient.