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Betsy DeVos doesn't know the difference between growth and proficiency

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K

Kevtones

Member
The lessons of Idiocracy need to be the required thesis from all American Middle Schoolers.

1. Watch it.
2. Why it shouldn't happen.



FUCK.
 
W

weekev

Banned
Man that was really uncomfortable. So are the new cabinet gonna get some kind of training in their new job? Cos by god they all need it. This is a cluster duck.
 
T

theJohann

Member
Hyperactivity said:
Nah, I enjoyrd explaining things to friends, talking it out. Hell, I learnt far better whenever I would explain things.
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I agree with this. Sometimes, the only way to know for certain that you know something is to try and explain it to someone else. Setting the context, laying out the key information, providing examples, answering their questions, working through their difficulties, are all ways to learn while you teach.
 
O

Orca

Member
weekev said:
Man that was really uncomfortable. So are the new cabinet gonna get some kind of training in their new job? Cos by god they all need it. This is a cluster duck.
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I'm kind of wondering who's going to be filling in at the National Nuclear Security Administration since they haven't been asked to stay on.
 
A

A Link to the Past

Banned
cpp_is_king said:
Sure. proficiency measures you against an absolute standard "if you can pass this test, you pass. otherwise you fail". growth measures against where you started from. "If you increase by X amount, you pass".

I think measuring growth is kind of stupid frankly, because if that's the case why even have grades (i.e. K-12) at all? The whole point of a grade is to define the absolute level of the material that is to be taught. What does 4th grade mean if anyone can be in 4th grade, and everyone is being taught something different because they're all at different levels?

Measure proficiency and then (GASP!) fail people if they don't pass. The problem with education today is that you can't fail people.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's the problem. Not "we don't have enough funding to properly educate, feed, and engage with students," it's that we are afraid to fail people.
 
UberTag

UberTag

Member
A Link to the Past said:
Yeah, that's the problem. Not "we don't have enough funding to properly educate, feed, and engage with students," it's that we are afraid to fail people.
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That's the thing, though. You ARE failing them by not giving them a kick in the ass when they're young and can still be salvaged with specialized teaching and assistance.

Giving them the help they need when they're young instead of churning them out until they're an illiterate, entitled voter who expects to be gifted a job without skills or training is the ultimate failure of the education process. And, what's more, you're failing everyone else along with them.

Because guess who they're going to be voting for on Election Day... it isn't going to be the party that treats them with respect. Oh no... it's going to be the party that promises the shiny nothing.
 
D

Deleted member 13876

Unconfirmed Member
She also donated tons of money to a think tank that wants to bring back child labor.
 
UberTag

UberTag

Member
Nils said:
She also donated tons of money to a think tank that wants to bring back child labor.
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Well, that would be one way to keep US companies from outsourcing their manufacturing jobs to China.
Set up some American sweatshops in Michigan so kids can assemble iPhones.
 
L

Lime

Member
DocSeuss said:
How do you come to that conclusion/where can I find similar information so I can filter out special interest stuff that crosses my feeds in the future?
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Beyond erasing concerns about her many possible financial conflicts, Ms. DeVos also faces a big challenge in explaining the damage she's done to public education in her home state, Michigan. She has poured money into charter schools advocacy, winning legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability. About 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated by for-profit companies, far higher than anywhere else. She has also argued for shutting down Detroit public schools, with the system turned over to charters or taxpayer money given out as vouchers for private schools. In that city, charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/opinion/big-worries-about-betsy-devos.html?_r=0

The DeVos influence is one reason that Michigan's charter sector is among the least regulated in the country. Roughly 80 percent of charters in Michigan are run by private companies, far more than in any other state. And state authorities have done little up to now to ensure that charter schools are effectively serving students, eliciting concern from current federal authorities.

”There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters," current U.S. Secretary of Education John King told Chalkbeat about Michigan last month.
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http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2...-tell-us-about-donald-trumps-education-plans/

One recent vignette captures the DeVos working method: In an effort to shape up Detroit's scandalously under-regulated, poorly performing charter schools and rectify a shortage of school places in the city's neediest neighborhoods, a coalition including some charter school advocates, business and labor representatives, Republicans, and Democrats proposed a nonpartisan oversight body to be called the Detroit Education Commission (DEC). With Republican Governor Rick Snyder's endorsement, the Republican-controlled state senate approved the DEC in March 2016 as part of a Detroit emergency funding bill. When the Republican-controlled House took up the bill in May, the charter school lobby (generously funded by the DeVos family) launched a massive offensive to quash the DEC. Oversight, they argued, only adds another unnecessary level of bureaucracy. The House Republicans acquiesced on May 5. When the bill returned to the Senate for reconciliation, the question remained: would the Senate gut its own bill by killing the DEC? Under threats from major donors, the Republicans caved on June 8. While the senate was still considering the bill, DeVos money began pouring in. In the fifty-six days between June 2 and July 28, nine DeVos family members contributed a total of $1.45 million to Michigan Republican Party organizations and candidates.

”[A] filthy, moneyed kiss to the charter school industry at the expense of the kids who've been victimized by those schools' unaccountable inconsistency," concluded an editor at the Detroit Free Press in September.
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https://www.dissentmagazine.org/onl...ilton-friedman-public-education-privatization

And then there's the hearing that this thread refers to that shows how incompetent and heartless she can be, just look at her idea about gun regulation in school, her opinion on access for disabled children, and her lack of understanding of growth vs proficiency:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...g_showed_she_s_either_underprepared_or_a.html

How you arrive at her being successful and fit for the job I have no idea.
 
F

Funky Papa

FUNK-Y-PPA-4
weekev said:
Man that was really uncomfortable. So are the new cabinet gonna get some kind of training in their new job? Cos by god they all need it. This is a cluster duck.
Click to expand...

I'm sure the Heritage Foundation will provide whatever materials and training courses they need to bring them up to speed.
 
A

A Link to the Past

Banned
UberTag said:
That's the thing, though. You ARE failing them by not giving them a kick in the ass when they're young and can still be salvaged with specialized teaching and assistance.

Giving them the help they need when they're young instead of churning them out until they're an illiterate, entitled voter who expects to be gifted a job without skills or training is the ultimate failure of the education process. And, what's more, you're failing everyone else along with them.

Because guess who they're going to be voting for on Election Day... it isn't going to be the party that treats them with respect. Oh no... it's going to be the party that promises the shiny nothing.
Click to expand...

But no one is proposing that we should give them inadequate education. In fact, pushing kids out the door is explicitly an end result of poor funding, staffing, and wages - all things proposed by Republicans. The Democrats aren't the ones trying to push them out the door, it's the Republicans - which is the point I was making to cpp.
 
G

gaugebozo

Member
Oof- that Elizabeth Warren video is particularly painful. She's got no idea how this stuff works, so her answers are all, "I'll do my best to make sure I do a good job," instead of actual policies or ideas.
 
T

The Jackdog

Member
weekev said:
Man that was really uncomfortable. So are the new cabinet gonna get some kind of training in their new job? Cos by god they all need it. This is a cluster duck.
Click to expand...

lol no.

this is the job you get when youve already been trained for it your whole career.

or if you have an orange billionaire friend
 
C

Carpe Libertatem

Member
The way cpp is posting in this thread is one of the biggest problems with education in the U.S. Someone with no experience or training in education who thinks they know how to solve the problem in this country. I mean, sending a student back to a younger grade level if they don't meet proficiency? Insane.

Look for them to be nominated for Secretary of Education by the next Republican president.
 
T

The Jackdog

Member
Carpe Libertatem said:
The way cpp is posting in this thread is one of the biggest problems with education in the U.S. Someone with no experience or training in education who thinks they know how to solve the problem in this country. I mean, sending a student back to a younger grade level if they don't meet proficiency? Insane.

Look for them to be nominated for Secretary of Education by the next Republican president.
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this is a real american issue i think. Parents fucking ADORE blaming teachers for their childs failures.

I worked with schools for awhile. Its amazing. Parents who have literally no idea if their child is even AT THE SCHOOL let alone knowing where they are at all, complaining about how their kids should be taught.

America demonizes teachers, for it can never be the fault of parents that your kid is shitty, it HAS to be the education they are getting.
 
C

CSX

Member
Carpe Libertatem said:
The way cpp is posting in this thread is one of the biggest problems with education in the U.S. Someone with no experience or training in education who thinks they know how to solve the problem in this country. I mean, sending a student back to a younger grade level if they don't meet proficiency? Insane.

Look for them to be nominated for Secretary of Education by the next Republican president.
Click to expand...
To add on to what the OP is saying, this is also one of the first things you learn as an educator (as in why we don't do this)

I was seen as an asshat when I asked why we didn't hold back students as a beginning teacher who didn't know shit.

That's also right when I learned about growth vs proficiency. Seeing Devos not even knowing these two education terms that are drilled into first year teachers is frightening...
 
C

CarpeDeezNutz

Member
Carpe Libertatem said:
The way cpp is posting in this thread is one of the biggest problems with education in the U.S. Someone with no experience or training in education who thinks they know how to solve the problem in this country. I mean, sending a student back to a younger grade level if they don't meet proficiency? Insane.

Look for them to be nominated for Secretary of Education by the next Republican president.
Click to expand...

You can tell who the educators are and who the "just know how it's supposed to go" people are ITT.
 
A

Arkeband

Banned
The Jackdog said:
this is a real american issue i think. Parents fucking ADORE blaming teachers for their childs failures.

I worked with schools for awhile. Its amazing. Parents who have literally no idea if their child is even AT THE SCHOOL let alone knowing where they are at all, complaining about how their kids should be taught.

America demonizes teachers, for it can never be the fault of parents that your kid is shitty, it HAS to be the education they are getting.
Click to expand...

Having been a student, a good 30% of my teachers were terrible. One would have us walk into the classroom, in the dark, every single day, and we'd just copy down notes from an overhead projector and have a quiz on Friday while she read books at her desk. She couldn't be fired because she was so tenured. We basically taught ourselves.

There's also the awful way in which teachers utterly rely on workbooks and guides and can't teach outside of the lesson plan. This is one of the reasons Common Core fails, especially in math, because none of these teachers were ever taught the (completely correct) methodologies shown, and they help those same stupid parents you're demonizing by pushing garbage Facebook memes about how Common Core wants you to think 2+2=5.

So in reality, parents can be fucking idiots at the same time as our teaching industry can be rotten. There is no single string to pull to fix this problem.
 
K

kaskade

Member
My girlfriend just started teaching and I remember that being the first thing she learned in grad school. They shouldn't vote her in just based on incompetence, that goes beyond even party ideologies.
 
G

GreenMonkey

Member
GhaleonQ said:
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.”

...(snip)
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Replace Lutheran schools with Muslim schools. Replace "God" with Allah.

Add an argument about the long-standing deep relationship Muslim counties have with Mathematics. I could make a few more.

Are you still OK with it? Think about places like Dearborn where there is a large Muslim population. It's totally plausible. You're talking spending tax dollars to find conservative Muslim schools for kids.

Public tax dollars should not be sent to religious schools to fund religious education. Whatever it is. See the above argument. To me funding Christian schools is no different than funding Muslim schools. They're both equally nonsense to me.

I don't even like how funding and people are funneled to AA and other twelve-step programs for substance abuse, but there at least there isn't a lot of choice to be had.
 
C

cpp_is_king

Member
Carpe Libertatem said:
The way cpp is posting in this thread is one of the biggest problems with education in the U.S. Someone with no experience or training in education who thinks they know how to solve the problem in this country. I mean, sending a student back to a younger grade level if they don't meet proficiency? Insane.

Look for them to be nominated for Secretary of Education by the next Republican president.
Click to expand...

They shouldn't need to be "sent back" because they should have failed the earlier grade the first time around instead of being passed so that the parents didn't come in screaming anout how damaged their child's self esteem would be
 
T

The Jackdog

Member
Arkeband said:
Having been a student, a good 30% of my teachers were terrible. One would have us walk into the classroom, in the dark, every single day, and we'd just copy down notes from an overhead projector and have a quiz on Friday while she read books at her desk. She couldn't be fired because she was so tenured. We basically taught ourselves.

There's also the awful way in which teachers utterly rely on workbooks and guides and can't teach outside of the lesson plan. This is one of the reasons Common Core fails, especially in math, because none of these teachers were ever taught the (completely correct) methodologies shown, and they help those same stupid parents you're demonizing by pushing garbage Facebook memes about how Common Core wants you to think 2+2=5.

So in reality, parents can be fucking idiots at the same time as our teaching industry can be rotten. There is no single string to pull to fix this problem.
Click to expand...

100% agree, really. In those cases i think it comes back to what this thread is kinda about: how we evaluate teachers.

I mean kids in PA, in a month, will be doing standardized testing for a month.

a month.

think about that.

a fucking MONTH. Then theyll get a week break, and take another week long test. All of this so some fucks in harrisburg can watch a line graph move up and down. Teachers are TERRIFIED to teach anything but how to take this test, because at the end of the year, thats how they are gonna be judged. Which is crazy.

So we have parents blaming teachers, teachers who are so boxed in to teaching a certain way that they cant actually teach, and this lady having zero clue about how any of it works and is about to be in charge of all of it.
 
T

The Jackdog

Member
GhaleonQ said:
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.
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I hear you, but your evidence is not only anecdotal it isnt world wide. Catholic school does not equal quality school. there are plenty of trash ones. And i get your point about religion being a good thing for a kid, but really, who gives a shit if the education is poor?

Plus, replacing everything you said with a muslim school, im thinking america collectively loses its mind.
 
C

Carpe Libertatem

Member
cpp_is_king said:
They shouldn't need to be "sent back" because they should have failed the earlier grade the first time around instead of being passed so that the parents didn't come in screaming anout how damaged their child's self esteem would be
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Doubling down :lol

If you don't understand why we shouldn't hold students back then youre showing you haven't taken a basic education class and aren't involved with education on a daily basis

Do you also tell your doctor how to do their job? Or a lawyer? Or any other profession?
 
C

cpp_is_king

Member
Carpe Libertatem said:
Doubling down :lol

If you don't understand why we shouldn't hold students back then youre showing you haven't taken a basic education class and aren't involved with education on a daily basis

Do you also tell your doctor how to do their job? Or a lawyer? Or any other profession?
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Doctors haven't been failing me for years.

By the way, Betsy DeVos is an educator, i guess everything she says is gospel to you since she apparently has the only qualification that matters to you?

If you don't understand why we shouldn't teach kids that it's ok to half-ass their way through life because they'll be successful regardless then you're showing that you haven't really been paying attention
 
A

Arkeband

Banned
cpp_is_king said:
Doctors haven't been failing me for years.

By the way, Betsy DeVos is an educator, i guess everything she says is gospel to you since she apparently has the only qualification that matters to you?

If you don't understand why we shouldn't teach kids that it's ok to half-ass their way through life because they'll be successful regardless then you're showing that you haven't really been paying attention
Click to expand...

You seem to have molded your entire worldview around this bootstraps horseshit. Were you maimed and killed by an actual participation trophy in a past life?
 
C

Carpe Libertatem

Member
cpp_is_king said:
Doctors haven't been failing me for years.

By the way, Betsy DeVos is an educator, i guess everything she says is gospel to you since she apparently has the only qualification that matters to you?

If you don't understand why we shouldn't teach kids that it's ok to half-ass their way through life because they'll be successful regardless then you're showing that you haven't really been paying attention
Click to expand...

Betsy DeVos is an educator? News to me. Where did she get her degree in education, where is she licensed to teach, where did she practice, etc?
 
T

The Jackdog

Member
cpp_is_king said:
Doctors haven't been failing me for years.

By the way, Betsy DeVos is an educator, i guess everything she says is gospel to you since she apparently has the only qualification that matters to you?

If you don't understand why we shouldn't teach kids that it's ok to half-ass their way through life because they'll be successful regardless then you're showing that you haven't really been paying attention
Click to expand...

Betsy DeVos spent more time in that hearing yesterday than she ever spent teaching students. where are you getting your information from?

youre literally right now showing you arent paying attention lol
 
UberTag

UberTag

Member
BlitzKeeg said:
That's their plan and it's been working for decades.
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That's the fundamental flaw at the root of this issue. One of your two political parties has a fundamental interest in keeping your children stupid and ignorant.
Unless you're rich. In which case, you can probably buy your children something better than the public schools are offering.

Then again, why would you bother doing that? You're rich. Money means you don't need to be smart to get by. In fact, one day you might become president.
 
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