Three Unexpected Data Points Describe Elementary School Quality 343
garthsundem writes with a link to his story in Wired, according to which "Test scores and student/teacher ratio are nearly meaningless. But three new numbers do describe school quality: 1. (Test Scores/Parent Education): How do scores outpace expectations? 2. Test Score Growth: Any single score can be socioeconomics, but growth is due to the school. 3. (Teacher Salary*%Highly Qualified/Teacher Age): The best teachers will become highly qualified early, and will gravitate toward the best paying jobs." These factors seem to be at least interesting starting points; if you've shopped around for elementary schools, what else did you consider?
ceteris paribus (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Test Score Growth: Any single score can be socioeconomics, but growth is due to the school.
... if you can keep all other factors constant by freeze-framing the rest of the world.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you are being funny I think enhancing in-school education with some homeschooling is the best option. Parents sitting down with their children and going over their homework with them can make up for almost any crappy school. Assuming, of course, that the parents aren't less-knowledgeable about a subject than their children.
S/T Ratio DOES matter (Score:5, Insightful)
As a teacher, I agree with the bulk of this article. However, I absolutely disagree with student/teacher ratio not being a factor in quality education. When I started teaching, a mere seven years ago, my average class size was 23:1 with one "giant" class of 32. My average class size now is 40:1. It is impossible to offer the same quality of teaching and one-on-one to a large group. However, good teaching is still good teaching, and we muddle along to advanced scores; but it is much for difficult to help those who are truly struggling.
On another note, the factor of growth being the key metric is essential to understand. Lousy teachers can have great test scores depending on what community they are in (socio-economic), but it takes a truly skilled and effective teacher to be able to help students grow.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:1, Insightful)
Home schooling misses the entire point of sending children to school. Sure they are there to learn a broad spectrum of topics to have a basic understanding of the world. and sure IF you are a good teacher, and you dam well better be one cause otherwise it will be pointless, you could accomplish that. However sending them to school give the child much needed social expierence, yes even being bullied is important to a degree. With out this expierence you end up with fairly inteligent 20 year old children that noone wants to hire or work with.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Homeschooling is a good option if you have parents that are up for the challenge. My wife plans on homeschooling our kids, as she was home schooled herself (along with her 2 sisters). Homeschooling has gotten a bad rap because it is portraid by either the crazy people or ultra religious people. There are plenty of normal families that homeschool their kids and they turn out just fine, don't be distracted by the crazies.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention covering the huge gaps public education tends to leave out... personal finance in particular. I graduated high school six years ago and the closest we got to personal finance was a lesson on how to balance a checkbook... nothing about making decisions, weighing options, etc. Fortunately, my parents have been pretty money savvy, so I'm doing much better in overall quality of life than most of the people I graduated with - even those in much higher paying fields.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Parents sitting down with their children over their homework has 10x the effect on the overall education and outlook of the children than the quality of the school itself. Even *if* the parents are less knowledgeable than their children - putting a value on education is what is important.
The common thread with every overachieving nerd I've known is that they were taught from an early age to enjoy learning, and that knowledge was important - long before they actually got to elementary school.
Re:There is never a magic bullet (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/policyblog/detail/teacher-qualifications-vs-teacher-effectiveness
http://medwelljournals.com/abstract/?doi=pjssci.2007.599.604
http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000002/00000214.asp
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
I really want to believe you, and maybe as homeschooling becomes more of a normal thing, it will happen.. but I've volunteered with homeschool groups and had many classmates who were home schooled for their earlier education... and I've never met one that I'd say was well-adjusted. It could be that given their parents, they would be poorly adjusted nerds anyway - but as much as I am tempted, it makes me really scared to try it with my children (or are likely to be on the nerdy end of the spectrum to begin with).
The best results I've seen are my neighbor's kids, who interact very well with adults, but who seem like they will get eaten alive when they go off to college and have to deal with people who aren't inherently nice, logical, and having their best interests at heart.
New Parents Perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most kids need new parents. Or at least parents that care and take responsibility. Parents that read to their children, help them pick up the basics, teach good study habits and make sure their children do their homework, will have students who do well in any school.
If Johnny can not read, it is mom and dads job to teach Johnny or to find someone who can. For any parent who is literate, the fact that they can have a child hit middle school who cant read is a sign of laziness. You pay taxes so that your city will provide primary education for your child. However you cant just put a sandwich in a lunch bag and send them out the door every morning for 12 years and expect that someone who is paid to show up for 8 hours a day at a union job will do a better job at loving your child and teaching them than you will.
I have 3 adult children. I am a high school dropout. Most of their lives we lived at or near the poverty level. Two of my three kids manage to get scholarships that pay for 90% of all their college expenses. They were all students who received good grades. Sometimes it was a lot of work for us. If a kid has a different learning style than how a teacher teaches, it was up to us to turn the TV off and spend time with our offspring and help them to learn.
I have worked 10 hours, driven another hour home, and then sat down and helped one child with math and read to another child. Face it, teachers are like any other group. Only 10% of them graduated in the top 10% of their class. College only required them to be right 70% of the time. That is right. Your child may be taught by someone who gets 30% of the material wrong, and that is before they perform a poor job at communicating what they DO know.
Many private schools spend half as much as public schools do per student yet the children learn far better? Why is this? Maybe because someone who is taxed for public schools and then still ponies up money for a private insinuation cares enough about their child's education to be involved and make sure that the succeed no matter what.
if you care about your kids. it is YOUR job to make sure they know the things they need to know. Passing it off on someone else and then acting powerless when your child is in 3rd grade has problems and wringing your hands for the next 9 years that nothing can be done is a cop out.
Re:There is never a magic bullet (Score:5, Insightful)
As a result my daughter never learned to write in cursive
... and nothing of value was lost? I, nor anyone I know, has had any use for knowing this "skill."
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:3, Insightful)
yup. Books in the home is another interesting metric. If the parents live by an example of valuing knowledge and information then that may actually be picked up on by the kids.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
100% homeschooled children will never gain the life-skills they need.
Sure they can. Parents can be responsible for socializing their children as well. School is not the only way that children can learn socialization skills.
I can tell you though that getting out of public school in many cases is the only way they are going to learn math.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad you've come out and said it: that public schools aren't for teaching our best and brightest, but instead are for some kind of malthusian social conditioning; conditioning our most gifted children to understand that their lives will be controlled by mouth breathing masochists.
No thanks. I won't dump that lie on my kids.
Today, I work for an employer where there are no stupid people and nobody who mistreats me. And I never interact with any human being unless it is on my terms. I carry a gun most places I go because I can, and because when I insist I'd rather not deal with someone, I plan on _meaning_ it.
I consider the idea that a sick and broken world might consider me "mal-adjusted" or "anti-social" a mark of excellence. To be judged normal or sane by a detestable malady of garbage would be a tremendously hurtful insult.
Your social conditoining doesn't interest me.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't about making friends. It's actually the opposite - making enemies and dealing with having to work with them on projects. Unless, of course, homeschooling parents force their kids to do project with kids they don't like. That would be pretty open minded of them.
Also, most likely they will socialize with kids from similar backgrounds and belief systems. They won't have the experience of meeting and accepting people who are different from them.
Re:The Obvious Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Learning from an early age that workplaces are diverse in competencies, both at the worker, and managerial levels is hugely important. You learn that in a classroom. Recognizing what diversity means is something you get in a classroom, and recognizing that some people just get screwed by 'the man' so to speak is something you learn in a classroom. Learning to deal with good and bad coworkers, learning to identify them, learning to communicate with all of them is enormously important.
There's also a lot to be said for being taught what everyone else is, so you know what everyone else is taught, and so wherever you go that mommy and daddy can't hand hold you gets a certain known quantity. You can, and should augment what a child learns, and picking the learning environment (school) they go to is enormously influential in how much they get out of it, and their own sanity, that's just like finding a good job. I'd work just about anywhere that was willing to increase my salary by a factor of 5, but if you want to offer me a 500 dollar, or even 5000 dollar a year bump over what I currently have, it has to come with a work environment I'd enjoy more than where I am. And where I am lets me post on /. whenever I want.
I'll give an example from when I was in university. The first years had an 'enrichment' programme of some sort, where they pulled about 50 students out of a science student body of about 2000. In second year we all merged back up again. In my programme (physics) about a third of the class had been from this enrichment. So we get to our first set of assignments and exams, and it turns out, the kids in 'enrichment' had no f'n clue how to do a lot of things the rest of us had been taught. It wasn't 'hard' it just wasn't taught to them, so they didn't know. And they didn't know they didn't know. And now the university was stuck trying to run our programme with a major portion of the class being unprepared for somethings and super well prepared for others (as we discovered later, they'd done a lot more set theory, and ODE's than we had in the regular programme). Which just hurt the education experience for everyone. That's homeschooling. It matters a lot in life that you have a similar background to everyone else, you can augment that on your own, but if kids in public school learn history of slavery as an exercise in human cruelty, whereas a homeschooled kid goes through the technicalities of dred vs scott, the kansas -nebraska act and abolition and the banning of the slave trade in the UK and how it impacted the US, you're getting a very different take on the same thing. And it's really important when communicating with other people to know what they know and try and frame things in a way they would understand. Which on /. is impossible, but in the real world you have to deal with people around you.
Both the US and Canada would be much better served with single federal coherent standards for what is to be covered in schools. That is enormously unpopular is some circles, and I see why. But those kids go to universities and colleges after they finish public education largely. It's hard enough managing students from all over the bloody world, but when we can't count on students from within canada (or within the US if you're there) to all have a reasonably consistent experience you're just wasting time and money getting them all on the same page. And it's a lot of time and a lot of money that could be spent on things that might be productive. Being homeschooled is like intentionally making everything else in life a little bit harder for yourself. If you're stuck in an isolated community, or if your school system largely teaches things which are 'not intended to be a factual statement' well then you may have to give up and homeschool. But that's a sad commentary on the state of education if it has come to that.
Best predicter of an excellent elem school... (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to know the best predictor of elem school success? You have to promise not to tell anyone, but it's parental involvement. Find a school where most of the parents are engaged with their kids, and regularly volunteer at the school, and you'll find a great learning environment. Everything else - money, test score changes over time, administration, etc. are really secondary. They get your kids for 5 hours a day 180 days a year, and you have them for 19 hours on those days and 24 on the other 185.
The biggest problem with elementary schools isn't money or bad teachers or inefficient administration - it's parents that don't give a shit.