Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Don’t matter what you call it. Ricochetti are a passionate bunch, and sometimes the fighting spirit takes over. Our first guests are Andrew Gutmann (hosts of the essential Take Back Our Schools podcast) and Ricochet member Michele Kerr who’s had some strong criticisms of the fellas’ takes on public education over the years. For those of you who like a little scrappiness on the flagship podcast: this one’s for you!
Next we bring on our favorite doctor (the kind that doesn’t ask if the bruises are Covid related), Jay Bhattacharya! He explains how he became known as a fringey pseudoscientific quack and the ins and outs of Covid’s last gasp.
With Peter out, James and Rob steer the ship through a Musk-y hostile takeover, NYC’s newest madman and the latest in Ukraine. And mark your calendars so you can join Rob for the America’s Future pub crawl on May 14th! Members only: so sign up today!
Music from this week’s podcast: Adult Education by Hall and Oates
Subscribe to The Ricochet Podcast in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.
I may have missed some of her point, but a good deal of it seemed to be that while these things may be readily quantifiABLE, there are not actually being quantiFIED, at least not in useful wide-spread ways. Such as by only testing somewhat selected groups rather than the entire population. It’s easy to make it look like schools are doing well if you’re able to shift testing towards those who are doing well. Indeed, testing only students who are IN SCHOOL – which excludes those who have dropped out entirely, or may miss a lot of days including/especially testing days – is an early selection bias.
At 20:25, Andrew says “as a whole, we are not teaching students well in English, math, or history.”
To which Michele replies: “Define well.”
It seems the essential questions are: how should we measure the performance of schools and, given that metric, how are they performing? And what are we paying for that?
I’d have liked to get answers to those questions. But I understand that there are lots of points of contention here. Perhaps the hosts could bring Andrew back to talk about these issues.
He’s been a solo guest before, I think. And there’s also his separate podcast. He didn’t seem to get many words in edgewise, in this one.
Here are some questions to ask
Equity – that is, equal outcome rather than equal opportunity – is a bugaboo of the left, not of conservatives.
I think that began to fail when education became less formal and even by-rote, and teachers and administrators from school principals on up, started wanting to try out their own pet theories on what works.
I can’t seem to remember any conservatives supporting Common Core.
All the “new maths” are disasters.
(My newest iOS does not let me select quote)
On #s 2 and 6, I don’t think anyone on Ricochet disputes getting all groups in a heterodox country to 100% is impossible. We have discussed those here before. I don’t know about the “Diversity is our Strength” crowd that maybe infects your interviewers, but it isn’t in the comments so you can stop with those straw men.
First, I could care less about conservatives when they differ from the GOP itself. I’m not conservative. I’m a Republican. And Republicans absolutely pushed equity in the form of NCLB and Common Core for close to 15 years. They were the force behind NCLB, which was all about equality of results. Not until Obama took credit for Common Core did they back away from it. Most Republican governors adopted Common Core.
Moreover, whether or not Republicans value equal outcome, courts hold schools responsible for disparate impact. If Republicans are ready to fight an educational disparate impact lawsuit, great. I’ve seen no sign of it.
You haven’t understood much of what I’ve written for a week, so your current incomprehension comes as no surprise, so focus hard: I’m not pushing for equal outcomes. I’m just a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than you are about what the courts will do to educational policies that don’t handle disparate impact, and how afraid Republicans are of running into it.
As I said, no comprehension. I suspect you don’t know that a) there was no “new math” in Nation at Risk and b) Nation at Risk was produced by conservatives in the Reagan administration and c) the original New Math was in 1962.
Again, focus hard: I bring this point up to support my argument that schools in the past weren’t some fabulous place of learning. Until 1983, very few kids made it past Algebra 2. A lot of kids never made it to Algebra 1. Therefore, by definition, our kids today–even learning watered down courses, which they are–are learning more than in the past. Before WWII, “college level” math was algebra, not calculus.
Yes, well, use your own opinion less and research more. Because education has been changing dramatically for a century or more, and teachers and principals have been trying their own pet theories for that long. And if your point is that education was never any good before 1900, well, just a fraction of the population made it to high school.
Actually, I do challenge the assertion but that wasn’t the point. Rob spent the entire conversation telling me I was attacking the customer, then Andrew up and attacks the customer. The whole point of the Rob’s argument was that EVERYONE was fed up with schools, that people *hate* schools, that everyone thinks parents are failing. Then Andrew says, well, most parents don’t care about education.
So schools *are* respecting the customer, but Andrew isn’t? Or parents aren’t the customer so schools shouldn’t listen to them?
There’s an argument to be made here if you start with Andrew’s premise and it goes something like this: Parents are mostly idiots, schools should ignore them completely, do what government and taxpayers think is best because they want money spent effectively and parents mostly don’t care about education so god knows they can’t be trusted with the money.
That’s an argument, but I don’t advise the Republicans making it and it’s contrary to every other argument Andrew and Rob made. In fact, that’s actually what Democrats think. And you can’t simultaneously argue that most parents don’t give a [REDACTED] about education while also demanding parents get the money to do what they want with it because they know what’s best for their kids.
Sorry, missed this.
It’s hard to fire any government employee. It’s particularly hard to fire a mediocre teacher because by definition, this means the teacher is meeting the job criteria: show up on time, take attendance, turn in grades, do additional duties. (it’s pretty easy to fire teachers who don’t get that done). That’s all the stuff in the contract. For most of history, nowhere in the contract does it say “raise achievement by X”. And there’s no agreement on what makes a good teacher. Many subjects don’t have an achievement level per se.
So when a few states and regions tried to “raise achievement by X” they ran into hurdles for the untested subjects. Either they graded teachers in those subjects by school level of achievement, which is absurd, or they start testing kids in every single subject, which pisses off parents.
Moreover, it was clear that principals were very unhappy with the notion of firing teachers based on student achievement. So after billions of dollars spent, in most states the teachers were all being ranked the same level they were before the billions of dollars, because if a teacher had low achievement the principal just juked the stats. And the one state that did, New Mexico, the parents and voters were unhappy and after the Republican governor that instituted this left her job, they voted in candidates who expressly promised to undo it.
Finally, this premise is wrong: “. If retention of mediocre teachers contributes to the high rate of poorly educated high school graduates in educationally challenged areas,”
There is no scalable evidence at all showing that retention of mediocre teachers contributes to high rat3e of poorly educated high school graduates. In fact, there’s very little evidence that firing mediocre teachers contributes to better results in any scalable way. Probably the best evidence comes out of DC, only for fourth grade, and it showed no evidence in reading and very little in math, and even then it didn’t account for demographic change during the period. (https://hechingerreport.org/new-study-shows-that-firing-bad-teachers-works/) That is, the score rise could have been because there were more white kids in the classroom. And that’s the *best* evidence.
There’s a teacher shortage. Making it easier for principals to fire “bad” teachers only leads to more teacher openings, where kids don’t have any teacher at all.
How disappointing that you feel the need to be so pejorative: “You haven’t understood much of what I’ve written for a week”; “I’m just a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than you are”; “As I said, no comprehension.”; and “Again, focus hard:”. If you have a desire to persuade others, might I suggest you try a different tone?
As a parent that moved 10 minutes away to get away from a “Diversity is our Strength” school district where history and writing were next to not taught and the middle and high schools were Fight Clubs for Teens, the voucher system to move districts would have been nice.
But my issue was a county issue. They bus students to make every school have the same racial profile. They put all the magnet programs in the schools with the biggest problems. Does my voucher allow me to cross county lines? I doubt it. It helps open up private schools, but that’s almost exclusively all there is to vouchers.
I agree, they aren’t going to solve all the issues you think parents complain about. But it does help get their kids into a school where fights aren’t breaking out in the hallways and where your classmates are more likely to interact with police than the teacher.
There is an order of deterioration in schools that always seems to be the law:
1) Low income housing in nice districts to diversify the population
2) Crime goes up, school violence goes up
3) Education drops, school ratings deteriorate
4) Housing values drop to nothing
Parents want to get their kids out of these districts. Vouchers help with that.
I didn’t hear Andrew as saying quite what you did. Regardless of whether he is being consistent (I haven’t followed his advocacy very closely), his point may still be correct–the more engaged parents are in their children’s education, the more dissatisfied they are with the product their children are receiving. It may also be true that a large percentage of parents are disengaged from their children’s education, and as a result, when asked if they are satisfied with the education, what else would we expect them to say. Sort of, no news is good news.
None of this proves who is correct, and it’s undoubtedly true that hyperbolic language is no stranger to the education debate. So it’s possibly true that most parents are satisfied with their children’s education. But that doesn’t prove whether they’re correct. It’s certainly possible that those parents who care most and have looked most carefully what their children are learning (or not learning) have the better side of the argument.
Vouchers are more about escaping social dysfunction for the highly motivated than it is about education, but the social dysfunction influences the direction of resources applied to education and leads to poorer education outcomes. Not because of curriculum but because of social dysfunction.
That is the unspoken truth of vouchers.
The curriculum stuff and educational achievement is a separate issue to vouchers, but voucher proponents use it as a shield against claims of racism.
And Republicans clearly repudiated Jeb Bush and NCLB. So R support of NCLB is questionable.
I’m not sure this argument is logically correct. Suppose for the sake of argument that most parents don’t care about their children’s education (say 75%). Let’s say then that another 10% does care, but they like the current arrangement. Finally, let’s say the final 15% cares and is dissatisfied. So let’s play out what happens with the vouchers.
The 10% who care, but are satisfied, accept the voucher and use it in their home district. The 15% who care, but are dissatisfied, use the voucher to go somewhere else. Finally, most of the 75% uncritically use the voucher in their home district, but it also may prompt a few to re-evaluate their options and take the money elsewhere.
What is so objectionable about that prospect?
Michele, again, kudos for being so engaged here.
That would be a caricature, of course. Parents needn’t be idiots, merely trusting and largely disengaged from, and perhaps intimidated by, the educational process. Why would they be disengaged and intimidated? In part because they’ve come to believe — mistakenly, in my opinion — that educating children is difficult and requires a lot of specialized education; in part because curricula have evolved in ways that make parents less able to engage with the material; and in part because schools have become administratively bloated, and so intimidating to parents.
Of course parents value education, but “value” covers a lot of ground. How many parents value it enough to take the time to evaluate the education their children are receiving, to be involved in the process of educating their children, and to be engaged with the school? As the barriers to that kind of participation have risen, the degree to which one must “value” education must be concomitantly higher in order to justify the effort required to be an engaged parent.
Assuring that their children are educated is ultimately the responsibility of parents, and parents have dropped the ball. They’ve allowed schools to become bloated with endless mandates, dominated by administrators, insular and overly credentialed, too often undisciplined and dangerous, and unaccountable and unresponsive to parents. The obvious solution is a shift to vouchers and private education.
Kerfuffle or Brouhaha? I propose a tertium quid: a quagmire.
Heh.
But no. Rather, I think it was a too-quick dip into a topic about which people hold widely divergent views, without an initial effort to summarize opposing viewpoints and identify points of contention. I suspect there’s a lot of room for fruitful discussion here, but that it will take a significant effort to define the terms and agree about metrics.
And that would be beyond the scope of the flagship podcast.
In the words of Ed McMahon, “You are correct, sir!”
Don’t forget the “Yes!” to start it out.
Loved Johnny and Ed.
For public schools, the taxpayer is the customer. Taxpayers count on parents to direct schools in the correct direction. Where the interest of the taxpayer diverges from the parent, we count on politicians to resolve the difference.
I am a teacher. I did not say all teachers are stupid, but mediocrity from teachers is absolutely tolerated in the American system as standards are quite low to enter the profession, and pretty much every good teacher that I know accepts this as fact.
(Here I do not mean, by the way, that teachers don’t have hoops through which they must jump, but many of these credentialing hoops are not demanding outside of costing money and taking time. Even with those barriers, it still easy for people who will not be good teachers to enter into the profession.)
You ask just about any person who has been educated in public schools in the US to name their truly outstanding teachers and then come up with some truly incompetent ones. They’ll have more either who were absolutely forgettable or in the second group.
Next, I remember learning about Finland when I was in graduate school, but it took me about ten seconds to find this:
“With such selective admissions — it was harder to gain entry to the University of Helsinki’s teacher education program (6.8 percent acceptance rate) than the law program (8.3 percent acceptance rate) or the medical school (7.3 percent acceptance rate) in 2016 — and rigorous preparation, one might expect Finland to suffer teacher shortages not unlike those seen in the U.S. But this is not the case. A major reason for this is that teaching profession is seen as desirable. We are, again, trusted and appreciated. We have the freedom to choose among a wide range of high-quality learning materials, our salaries are competitive and the work calendar is attractive. We are not subject to accountability systems based on student test scores but instead are encouraged to develop our work and collaborate with others.” Sari Muhonen, The Hechinger Report.
Your supposition about Finland’s job market being so poor that this is the only reason top people apply to teach makes me think you don’t have a lot of respect for educators. I certainly didn’t choose to teach because I didn’t have other options in the US. If I lived in Finland, I’d want to teach because I love being a teacher. I’d work hard to get into the correct program to make that happen.
I have never taught in a state with a strong union, though I absolutely remember getting into a debate with a good friend of mine who thought that Georgia should have a strong teachers’ union like the one that existed in her home state… California. (I taught high school, and she taught elementary school in the Atlanta area.)
That said, teachers are government employees. Think about them like that. How hard is it to fire anyone from a government position? As Michelle says, teachers absolutely do get fired for clear malfeasance, but after three years or so, they can stick around even if they are mediocre, especially if working in a challenging district.
I also think that Michelle is great to take up a certain side of the debate here. This is not a simple topic, and I am afraid there are no easy answers to fix this. This is one reason that teachers get defensive. (And they do. Oh my. Sooooo defensive.)
Personally, I would like to stop the lie that all kids need to go to college to be good/successful citizens, though I think we can–and absolutely should–improve education across the board for all students who want to learn. To do this, we need to talk about some of the harder social/legal issues at play, and that is difficult except in small segments.
After all, I totally agreed with the intentions of No Child Left Behind, but we learned a bit about how good intentions can’t solve a ton of issues.
For example, I remember pushing into a chemistry class some years ago with ELL kids in my charge. A young lady marched into the classroom late. She pulled her shirt up, flashing the entire class her bra, but what she wanted the teacher to see were the giant bruises up and down her torso. Her stepdad had beaten the ever loving **** out of her, and she was standing there being angry and defiant with her lip pushed out and her fists curled up and her whole tone daring the world to give her a zero for missing a quiz on electrical charges or whatever it was….
That teacher was my friend, and she was kind, compassionate, dedicated, and stoic. She stepped in front of the girl to shield her from view before moving on as best she could. She described working at that school to me once like being a frog in boiling water, as the environment continued to degrade year after year, but she didn’t leave the pot. We both knew she wasn’t going to teach that one girl much, but there were other kids, too…. And that one girl? Dude. How could we help her? (Stepdad went to jail for a day or two, I think.)
Finally, while I absolutely believe many parents don’t care as much about education as they do about their kids simply getting certain grades to get into certain institutions, I think this is complicated, too. And most parents just want the best for their children.
Michelle’s biggest point–if I understand her correctly–is that we can’t just paint all schools/all teachers/all educational experiences/all parents with one broad brush. We have to talk with a bit more nuance. Constructive criticism is more appropriate than simple scorn? And to solve “the issues” we need to agree on terms from the get-go, or we simply talk past each other.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Oh! While I also think school choice is a fine notion, I wanted to add that when I lived in the UK, I discovered some issues that are not often discussed here because they had a form of “school choice” where we lived there.
This was not a voucher system that allowed you to apply money to a private school, but you could choose the highest performing school within a particular framework.
What happened was that the best schools were “oversubscribed” because there is nothing unlimited in life. This threw you into a weird point system to try to get your kid enrolled, and this meant that you–in some ways–thus had less control to “choose schools” than in the US.
I mean, you could move next door to a certain school that was oversubscribed and have to go somewhere else!!!!
Also, there was less of a sense of community around schools, though this is in part related to how they do Sixth Form and conduct sports in ways that would look rather… uh… foreign :) to anyone educated in the US.
There really is no free lunch. Every system has trade-offs.
Sadly, this was my experience during the 8 years I taught. Most took criticism of the school system personally. I never understood why that had to be the case. Seemed we ought generally to have tougher skin about these things. It’s not like we’d have gotten fired over it! ;-)
I kid, I kid.
Vouchers could also get parents who currently don’t care – because there’s little or nothing they can do anyway – more involved.
Well put.
Lot’s of good points here. Also, I too am glad she has participated in the discussion.
Oh, please. He’s been insulting me the entire week. Read back.
I have no idea what this means. If I hazard a guess, you appear to be saying that I am bleating about diversity when it’s unneeded but since I’m not, I can’t figure it out.
I absolutely agree! But in the conversation, it’s pretty clear that both Andrew and Rob–and Republicans generally–make their case that *parents* are the customers. I’m with you–taxpayers are the customers. However, since they were saying that parents were unhappyand parents were the customers, I pointed out that if that’s true, then parents are happy so try again.
Except the Finnish teachers stuff, I sign on to pretty much all of your posts on this page.
I’d point out that most teachers are feelings-oriented, particularly elementary school teachers, so they take things personally. I’d also point out that there are 4 million teachers and the vast majority of people never hear from any of them. The heritage foundation survey I linked in is a much better guide.
On Finnish teachers: The Fins need far, far fewer teachers than the US does. US secondary school teachers are above the average SAT score for college graduates (not all takers). Teachers don’t need to be brilliant. Basically, I’d say that elementary school teachers on average are smarter than most school haters think,and secondary academic teachers are a *lot* smarter.