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Betsy DeVos doesn't know the difference between growth and proficiency
- Thread starter Socivol
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My issue with charters is the narrative they are better than traditional public schools which isn't true. People act like charters are the savior of public education when that's not the case at all. I currently work with some amazing charters (one of the best charter networks in the country) but we also work with some of the worse charters. I also hate that charters don't have the same rules and regulations as public schools. Without fail 2 weeks before testing my school would get an influx of low students that just so happened to get "kicked out" of school.
So?
There are hard verifiable statistics in that article that are sourced from non-partisan sources.
Whatever his political bias, the numbers show objective improvement.
Even if there was no objective evidence of improvement and the outcomes were only equivalent, I'd look at the fact that parents seem to highly prefer charter schools and think that maybe they should be available. We are supposed to live in a democracy after all.
Or we could sell out poor families for the benefit of the teachers unions because the unions are big donors and the poor families aren't.
UberTag
Member
Perhaps they can roll that into guidance counselor treatment regiments. They can electroshock all of the gays in learning institutions as soon as they're identified by their teachers or outed by their peers.
Add that to their list of "improvements" after bringing in a mandatory lord's prayer and banning the teaching of evolution. Perhaps get Breitbart, LifeZette and Fox News airing at schools across the country and have classes so students can be coached on how to suss out fake news.
Competency isn't a pre-requisite for Donald's cabinet. All that matters is loyalty and the size of their bank accounts.
we're selling out poor families by pulling out money from public schools to give to wealth managemeny systems for the 1%
If the results are at worst equivalent and the parents who choose to send their kids to these charters prefer them, who exactly is getting sold out here?
GravityInsanity
Member
Do we really got to put up with this for 4 years? This is fucking terrible.
The kids in public school. In the district I taught in the money for kids was given out in October. If that kid got kicked out of school we had to take them at my traditional public school but the money doesn't follow them so after October our school would have extra students but no additional funding to support them.
This isn't just a 4 year thing. We will be trying to piece our education system back together for at least a decade if Betsy DeVos does anything. She pretty much destroyed Michigan's education system which is still suffering.
The real problem isn't even fully funding as much as it is how funding is distributed. It doesn't matter how much money we throw at education if it remains distributed at like a 90/10 ratio to advantaged and disadvantaged schools.
They make a reasonably good argument that the charter system is performing better than the district schools.
That is not, however, a very complete argument for the system actually working well. There are a huge number of relevant questions that the article doesn't address.
Earthstrike
Member
Aren't charter schools essentially schools for rich kids? Aren't the performance of these schools related to a selection bias, where if you pick out the kids that are better off, and measure their progress, then of course they will be better off?
GhaleonQ
Member
"Now, let me get politically incorrect in discussing the political parties.
Let's start with Republicans. Many Republicans in the suburbs like the idea of education choice as a concept...right up until it means that poor kids from the inner city might invade their schools. That's when you will hear the sentiment – 'well...it's not really a great idea to have poor minority kids coming to our good suburban schools.' Although they will never actually say those words aloud."
http://www.federationforchildren.or...Betsy-SXSWedu-speech-final-remarks.pdf?e40fe9
I work at the best voucher school in Wisconsin (it's Lutheran *gasp*), DeVos did poorly in the hearing (that proficiency/growth was a howler), but this go-to NeoGAF nonsense should be corrected.
If anything, what backlash happened to Duncan will happen to her, and I'm sure her response that no choice would be "forced" onto states was not just for the Democrats but for the Republicans, too. Incentives sound like the plan, not compulsion.
Choice in states is nearly always for low- and lower-middle class children. Huh?
Wrong religion.
Sure, and in a bad classroom, that happens. I've had that happen to me. In a GOOD classroom, you're able to create a culture that is massively beneficial for everyone. Is it probably slightly less beneficial to the smartest kids? Yes. But the total classroom gain is far better than if they were separated. So, you just let the smartest kids do extra outside of class or in specialized programs.
Basically, you're asking for a country like China. Shanghai! Amazing! Everywhere else! Garbage!
I'm not saying that there are no unfairly funded districts, depending on state and local circumstances. BUT correlating educational outcomes to spending never seems to come up with the answer that you want.
Honest answer: no, that's obviously illegal. Most places use lotteries, and the parents who lose the lotteries often despair at being trapped for another year in an awful district school.
An accusation that is unprovable but which can happen is that they'll "strongly encourage" bad students to consider "a better fit" before the date on which students are counted or tested. So, life is supposedly made more difficult for the student (suspensions, detentions, leaning on a student in class) to get them to voluntarily pull out so one doesn't break the law but gets the superior result.
The Jackdog
Member
Just some clarification from what I've read in this thread, while there are issues and debates about this measuring students, it really becomes an issue in evaluating TEACHERS.
Let's say 90 on a state test is proficient.
If all my students come into my classroom and scored 95 on a state test, and left the classroom scoring a 95 average, nobody improved, but everyone is proficient.
Where it becomes an issue is for most especially disadvantaged schools. Say kids come unto another classroom at the start of the year and all average a 40, and that teacher takes them all up to 89. That's fucking incredible growth, but because we're measuring proficiency, this teacher shows getting a classroom with no proficient students and leaving with none.
Let's say 90 on a state test is proficient.
If all my students come into my classroom and scored 95 on a state test, and left the classroom scoring a 95 average, nobody improved, but everyone is proficient.
Where it becomes an issue is for most especially disadvantaged schools. Say kids come unto another classroom at the start of the year and all average a 40, and that teacher takes them all up to 89. That's fucking incredible growth, but because we're measuring proficiency, this teacher shows getting a classroom with no proficient students and leaving with none.
Oh she has experience in destroying people's lives so she is actually perfect for Trump's cabinet.
There's a ton of research behind it. My wife and I are both educators, her for elementary me at the university level. We've both seen it work. The trick is that the best way to challenge someone is to have them teach. Have somebody ask a question of them where they have to synthesize new knowledge to answer.
GoldenEye 007
Member
She will destroy what is left of the US Department of Education and education system in the US. She's also batshit insane and dumb as rocks.
Sounds like the perfect person for the job. She'll get confirmed no issue I'm sure.
GOP are 100% fucks and fuck anyone who supports them after this clown show.
Sounds like the perfect person for the job. She'll get confirmed no issue I'm sure.
GOP are 100% fucks and fuck anyone who supports them after this clown show.
"I'm ignorant and proud."
ehh
Earthstrike
Member
Thanks for this. I guess my only concern then is the injection of religion into the public education sphere. Who created everything? If god is a correct answer, the student may still score high which says that is the answer, but they are certainly getting a worse education.
The Jackdog
Member
I love that everyone has an opinion on how schools and classrooms should work. Like they have any fucking idea what they are talking about.
Can you imagine a parent walking into an operating room or hell even a mechanics garage and trying to tell them how they think the best way to start the surgery or that they feel wheels are just optional.
The people with the loudest criticisms of teachers have always never taught a day in their life.
Can you imagine a parent walking into an operating room or hell even a mechanics garage and trying to tell them how they think the best way to start the surgery or that they feel wheels are just optional.
The people with the loudest criticisms of teachers have always never taught a day in their life.
PREACH 🙌🏽
OriginofHysteria
Banned
At least she tried to BS an answer.
Can't say the same about Tillerson lol.
Can't say the same about Tillerson lol.
Vicetrailia
Member
Can't believe that she doesn't know the definition of proficiency though (nevertheless the term in education, which ain't different), holy fuck. How do you measure anything statistically not knowing that.
Sorry, but your anecdote doesn't reflect reality. Getting held back once drastically increased overall drop out rates, and a substantial percentage were held back more than once. All the people that were spanked in school "learned their lesson" too and never acted up again, right? Those things weren't changed because the whole world suddenly got soft. Those things were changed because we learned they didn't actually work.
cpp_is_king
Member
Is that what they do in countries like Russia, China, and Japan that are destroying us in science and math?
That's a serious question btw, I don't know.
Why can't we just do what they do?
No charter schools are for poor kids. Rich kids go to private schools already anyway.
Shitty district budgetary processes are no excuse for preventing people from being able to choose how to educate their children IMO.
DeVos is not my ideal choice because she has ideological and religious motivations that I don't agree with as a fairly non ideological atheist, but school choice seems to be objectively good to me. If implementing it fucks up some administrative procedures or leads to some bad side effect we can cross that bridge when we get to it, but we can never make any progress if Democrats refuse to even attempt any change that does not directly enrich the teacher's unions.
cpp_is_king
Member
Then why are we declining globally, if the methods we use now are supposedly better?
LudicrousSpeed
Member
1) That's a really bad way to have your classes. Older kids like that are not going to do well in that environment and it's going to be disruptive to everyone.
2) Part of this is the performance metric of the teacher. If you as a 5th grade teacher are handed a kid who reads at a 1st grade level and you manage to teach that kid up to a 4th grade level, that's an unqualified success, but under the standard of proficiency, that's counted as a failure by you, the teacher.
Similarly, if another 5th grade teacher is given a kid who can read at a 7th grade level and after that class now reads at a 5th grade level, that's counted as a success for that teacher even though the kid actually got worse at reading because of the class.
CarpeDeezNutz
Member
You should run for secretary of education and tell us how to run things.
adamsappel
Member
But what if they are fine at 5th grade level math, science, etc.? Should they be playing dodgeball with the 3rd graders, too? You mentioned splitting up grade levels, but I would think that might lead to weird social issues. We can help kids throughout their school career to achieve proficiency without upending their lives and setting them backwards in the areas where they are at grade level.
GhaleonQ
Member
Again, trying to be fair, that is so often not the case.
(And it's never true of charter schools, which are not religious schools.)
I'll ignore the theology part to talk practically. If you're a child whose father died of a heart attack, whose mother is in prison, whose grandmother is laid up but able to house you, and you're the "leader" of a household at 15 with 4 younger siblings, you know what's great? Transformative, even?
Hearing and believing that God created you for a special purpose, that you can let go of your anger at the lack of justice and instead live of a life of love, service, and perhaps greatness, that ”he who loves God has no need of tears, no need of admiration, in his love he forgets his suffering, yea, so completely has he forgotten it that afterwards there would not even be the least inkling of his pain if God Himself did not recall it, for God sees in secret and knows the distress and counts the tears and forgets nothing."
Hearing THAT often creates a substantive change in children's lives, especially low-income ones.
Lutheran and Catholic schools here rock test scores, which is great (and the top schools for science are all Lutheran, ha ha ha), but the change often comes about through softening a heart.
I get you might not care because it's, to you, a false worldview, but you're not given a choice between schools that teach exactly what you think you should be taught. There are horrendous districts schools, and there are often excellent religious schools with underused resources, driven by passionate people who get paid even worse than district teachers but do it for the right reasons.
Which do you pick? Even if I wasn't religious, I'd pick the latter every time. A life saved imperfectly is far better than a life wasted "for the right reasons."
To be fair to you, though, yes, I understand being mad about children being taught some bedrock principles that are demonstrably false to you.
To be fair to me, kids (at least in Wisconsin) can opt out of the religion class because it doesn't fund the religion part. No one does, because they crave it. So, choice.
Don't forget parents whose children who are held back and immediately withdraw to test into another school at the "correct" grade level.
I admire his/her strong view of the way the world works, but education is a 2-way street. You can't compel much in the way you can for a job.
That's pretty much it.
All engineering and mathematics classes in any Australian university are filled with people of widely varying capabilities. But in university class workshops, all students of all abilities are forced to work on problems together. There's no "bad students go here, good students go there" approach there.
This is the easiest way for everyone to learn. Weaker students learn how stronger students approach questions and actually learn the proper way to approach difficult problems; stronger students reinforce what they're learning by forcing themselves to explain and teach.
Its the proper way of learning. Honestly, getting good test scores in high school is pretty darn easy with enough resources. I got in the top 5% of the state in the most difficult mathematics subject you could take and I literally did nothing but regurgitate steps I remembered from doing hundreds of practice exams.
Not learning how to learn definitely didn't help with me with thermodynamics!
There's a few things here.
One, there's a culture over there that education is actually very important. In the USA, this doesn't seem to be quite as important.
Two, China and Japan are heavy on rote learning and do shit like cram schools. Its time consuming, it isn't efficient, and a lot of students don't really get what they're doing. Studying at the University of Melbourne, where there are a lot of East Asian exchange students, a lot of them struggle with curve ball and worded questions because they don't entirely understand what they're doing.
Three, studying for tests is the easiest shit ever. If you forced US children to do practice tests day after day, I bet you they'd score well. As I said, I got in the top 5% of the state for maths because I knew the steps to any question they could give me. When I got to university, I failed first year Calculus 2. This wasn't due to a lack of effort. This was due to the fact I literally couldn't learn how to teach myself maths and there were insufficient practice materials for me to rote learn.
cpp_is_king
Member
At the same time, it reinforces the notion of personal responsibility, something currently generations are severely lacking (probably because there's always someone there to bail kids out of trouble nowadays so they never take a self esteem hit. And simultaneously it sets a good example for the rest of the kids in that class of how NOT to be, because nobody wants to be the old kid in the young classroom.
I'd take a healthy dose of personal responsibility for kids these days over improved academic scores any day of the week. Turns out one will then lead to the other
pirateluigi
Member
I'm friends with several dozen teachers here in Michigan. Most have masters degrees. Every single one of them is against charter schools and even more so against Devos. Now, I'm not an educator at all, but there has to be a reason they are so united against it? What's the cause of this big discrepancy? Because what you write sure seems reasonable.
How about instead of giving people a choice (that will only continue to deflect resources away from the public schools) we just fix the system that the majority of Americans are already using. You don't build a new road because one has potholes or to give people the choice of what road to go down. You can't present an argument as "for the people" when it severely undermines those already suffering from a lack of education and poor school districts. Investing in charter schools provides no benefit to anyone except for those running them. Just because some are successful also doesn't negate the fact that over a hundred have closed in Florida in the past decade.
As for religion I know what you're trying to say, and I respect the ideology and hope that it can give to those, especially young people. However that belongs to the community and to their family to bring them up in an environment where you are encouraged to learn more about it. Not the school system.
As for religion I know what you're trying to say, and I respect the ideology and hope that it can give to those, especially young people. However that belongs to the community and to their family to bring them up in an environment where you are encouraged to learn more about it. Not the school system.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...amily-amway-michigan-politics-religion-214631
Democrats by and large support charter schools. The problem is charter schools and public schools are not held to the same rules and regulations. Charters can be selective in who they let in and public schools have to take everyone. If charters had the same rules and regulations as traditional public schools I would be more on board. I don't dislike charter schools as a whole, but i think some of the procedures and policies they implement are unfair to traditional schools.
GhaleonQ
Member
Trying to be fair to them:
1. There are fixed costs in school districts. If there weren't, I would be viciously vocal against anyone who questioned school choice. EVEN IF half the students went to voucher or charter schools and you get let go because the money follows children, just...get hired at the other school. Like, New Orleans and DC had huge changes. The teachers didn't just move out. They switched schools.
Buildings, however, are fixed and, depending on circumstance, owned by the district or the city. They're paying for those whether they are filled or not.
You COULD sell them to the new schools, make your money back, and accept that you educate fewer students. But once you sell them, especially if they're good buildings or in good locations, you're not going to get them back. So, they are understandably hesitant.
My school in Milwaukee was in The Wall Street Journal and The Economist for us trying to do this exact thing and the mayor dicking us over.
2. Changing AWAY from the district as the main deliverer of public education to district/charter/voucher/online/home is a giant change, just as giant as the invention and formalization of districts and grade levels were when they came along.
People are afraid of change and uncertainty, and often rightly so. The change could go disastrously. Stuff like No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top give them no confidence.
Teachers are burned out by change, because they, probably more than private employees or other public employees, have to deal with shifting goals FAR more often than anyone else. "This percent proficiency, this much growth, a parent's pissed about remediation, oops, we're not focused on reading, we need to focus on math, new state test, new MAP test," and so on. I feel bad for them.
3. Politics, partisanship, union membership, or entitlement (like they are OWED a certain amount of kids in their building). No offense, boo hoo to them.
4. They feel like they are unfairly competing with them, and it enrages them. They often have false information about what they are allowed to do or how accountable they really are. (Again, you can't cream the best kids and leave the rest, you have to take disabled kids that you're capable of educating, and so on.)
If they did then then how would their rich friends that run the charter networks make money?
#4 is highly variable. One of my friends is a principal at a charter and they have a meeting with parents and the student about that student's background. If the student is SPED and want to transfer after the beginning of the school year she rejects them. This is part of the problem I have with charters is you could NEVER do that at a traditional public school. I just wish charters and traditional schools had all of the same requirements.
PHOENIXZERO
Member
Her father was a billionaire industrialist and she married Dick DeVos which is another family of billionaires who are responsible for the multi-level marketing (aka pyramid scheme) scam that is Amway and made billions from it.
Charter schools promote segregation, treat their educators poorly, and are not held accountable to state standards in the same way that public schools are. They're run by businesses instead of community school boards, which leads to a race to the bottom. They suck the money and community members out of public schools, leaving only poorly maintained and poorly funded resources behind.
In my view teachers' unions are good things (I say this as a teacher at what is effectively a charter school and not in a union). They ensure that teachers are not worked too thin covering shit they aren't qualified to do just because the school doesn't want to hire an additional staff member. They ensure that teachers receive professional development so that the school becomes better over time. They hold administrators accountable for bad management decisions.
There are some problems with some unions, like allowing senior teachers to completely opt out of teaching the lower levels, but by and large they're working for better schools in their communities, not simply putting butts in seats.
GhaleonQ
Member
I mean, the point of a charter school is that they do not have the same requirements. I get what you mean, though, and I should have acknowledged that that is a variable. Mid-year transfers rules are pretty loose in many places, as is parent recourse for discipline.
Those are 2 that stand out. I don't even think that they are wrong, necessarily, but you're right in that district schools cannot do that.
I vociferously disagree, but I would accept that my argument would be useless in a country where we had an adaptive and high-quality district education system. I would be with you!
But we've waited 50 YEARS for quality change, and instead we've ended up with unpaid liabilities, uneducated children, and social disaster. I am sorry for good teachers in bad schools, but I am more sorry for good children in bad schools.
In the end, you are telling that 8-year old, "Just wait another decade, and I PROMISE that things will change. Oh, whoops, you graduated. Or didn't."
So, I think urgency is a truly overwhelming argument. The political incentives to help the poor will never align to create change, and, again, if it did happen, the answer is always more money, not all of which goes to the classroom and which has no correlation with achievement, anyway. Choice schools NEED accountability. Some of these states are chaos, not frontiers. But there are high-performing schools that can serve children now, and that's a trump card to me and many low-income families.
Thank you for being intellectually generous. I really do appreciate it.
Again, that's easy to say, but a single mom working 2 jobs is probably not equipped or able to do the job that you would like to see. As a practical matter, I think we trust schools with that job, whether it's "character" or religion, at least for below-middle-income kids.
EDIT: ANYWAY, that it is all to say that I wish there was a bulletproof advocate for Education Secretary.
whyamihere
Banned
One of the reasons why Democrats are wary of the ways that Republicans talk about charter schools is because there's no discussion of actually improving the school system we have. It appears that Republicans would prefer to ruin the public education program and move all children to private charter schools with vouchers in their ideal scenario. Sort of like what the Tories are doing with the NHS.
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