Bill Gates Still Trying To Buy Some Common Core Testing Love 284
theodp writes: "Bill Gates famously spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, implement and promote the now controversial Common Core State Standards," reports the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss. "He hasn't stopped giving." In the last seven months, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured more than $10 million into implementation and parent support for the Core. Strauss adds: "Gates is the leader of education philanthropy in the United States, spending a few billion dollars over more than a decade to promote school reforms that he championed, including the Common Core, a small-schools initiative in New York City that he abandoned after deciding it wasn't working, and efforts to create new teacher evaluation systems that in part use a controversial method of assessment that uses student standardized test scores to determine the 'effectiveness' of educators. Such philanthropy has sparked a debate about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people who pour part of their fortunes into their pet projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — to such a degree that public policy and funding follow." If you're still on the fence about Common Core after viewing it, the Onion just came out with a nice list of the pros and cons of standardized testing that may help you decide.
Controversial because? (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted Common Core has some faults, for sure, but at least it is an attempt by someone to do something. So far we have seen lots of lip service on the education system in this country and very little action. I'd be more impressed with the arguments of those calling it "controversial" if they actually proposed a meaningful fix instead of just attacking the fix that we have.
Re:Controversial because? (Score:4, Insightful)
They do have a fix. It's called privatization.
In other words they want the system to keep failing so they can push private schools.
Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Funny)
Excuse me, Im looking for strawmen and someone told me this thread would be a great place to find them.
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Excuse me, Im looking for strawmen and someone told me this thread would be a great place to find them.
LordLimeCat, I see you have procured the strawmen, but don't forget the margarita salt.
Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Insightful)
The opposition to Common Core is easy to understand. Basically, the Republicans wanted testing to be controlled by the states, not the federal government. So they designed a system to do just that. The Democrats didn't like it at first, preferring something more centralized and bloated, but figured it was the best they could get, so they were eventually won over. Then the Republicans noticed that the Democrats no longer opposed their program, so they switched sides and decided if the Dems were for it, they needed to be against it. Rabid opposition to Common Core is now considered a rigorous requirement for Republican presidential candidates. Only Jeb has stood by it.
For another splendid example of "Republicans opposing their own ideas" see {Romney|Obama}care.
Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Informative)
The Common Core opposition isn't just coming from Republicans. My wife and I have been fighting over New York's horrible implementation of Common Core which includes scripts for teachers that they aren't allowed to deviate from, high stakes testing, and most recently tying said testing to teacher jobs. We're definitely not Republicans. Around 300,000 students refused the tests in NY. (Before someone says "well, they're just hard tests", the 6th grade tests had college level reading material on them.) Bill Gates, Pearson, and others are pushing this to make money off students - not to help students succeed.
Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Insightful)
About a decade ago I wrote science essay tests for them. I quit because they kept asking for dumbing down. Example: They insisted that an essay on hot air balloons tell the reader what a basket was and what it was for on the balloon. The what it was for was already described functionally in the text. They wanted an explicit, dictionary type description. It was very much worse on the non-technical essay tests. Enough so that so many writers stopped, Pearson used their own editors to write the essays.
Short of it is, those are the people producing the bulk of the terrible test examples you'll find in complaints; 'Indicate the box that is correctly shaded.' with none of the boxes shaded, 'Lincoln was a Democrat.' , etc.
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Not just producing horrible tests, but grading horribly. They employ near-minimum wage people to grade the exams and then tell them just how many of each grade they should get. Too many high scoring tests? You've just got to "see" that 5 out of 5 test as a 4 and that 4 out of 5 test as a 3.
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Your lack of understanding comes from a flawed premise. Common Core is not a Federal thing. It is being run by a coalition of states. They had educators create guidelines for what students should know at various grade levels. Educators (good ones, even) joined in on this effort (which contradicts your point) -- most teachers, since there's no recognition as you noted, genuinely care about teaching kids, and give a ton of their time freely in pursuit of that goal. This was just another place they could do th
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Exactly, the media, particularly the conservative media, has a hard time seperating that there are 3 independant things to common core, the standards, the implimentation and the testing.
Common core is just a set of standards that says you need to know X before you move to the next grade.
Implimentaiton is how the teachers do it, however the books used, if any, while designed to teach that standard are not required. Teachers can use the books, develop their own lessons or any combiniation of the two. This is
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Every time the educational establishment has tried to "improve" education, they've fucked it up even more.
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Not every time, but frequently enough to cause one to wonder about their goals.
OTOH, if the parents don't respect education, there isn't going to be much that a teacher can do. But it should be possible for the teacher to get them out of class if they are disruptive as well as invincibly ignorant (which doesn't mean stupid, it means believing that education isn't worth the bother).
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Where do you get this from? Can you point a link to said standard?
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Where do you get this from? Can you point a link to said standard?
That's part of the problem. Where ARE the links? I'd like to look at them.
Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am 39, way too old for common core, however I have always been poor at spelling. Math and logic great, spelling poor. However you were able to read it just fine I am sure, and this is the best argument you could come up with.
Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Informative)
I have always been poor at spelling.
Pro-tip: Use a modern browser and look for the little red squiggles under words. That means they are misspelled. Use the right button on your mouse to click and choose the correct spelling. This will not only make your posts more readable, but also give you greater credibility.
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I typically do, but tried grammarly, and it failed to connect so everything seemed ok.
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that makes no sense, especially since the standards to not tell you how to teach things, although it may give examples.
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Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Informative)
Common core does not teach to the test, no child left behind does. Common core does not meantion in any way testing, or how a student must learn. Schools in my area do not buy any books, they make the common core lessons themselves.
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Again CC does not push a technique, at best it gives examples. You do not have to use copyrighted materials, you can make your own, and the standards themselves follow this license:
The NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) hereby grant a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to copy, publish, distribute, and display the Common Core State Standards for purposes that support the Common Core State Standards Initiative. These uses may involve th
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Don't forget, it's also a gravy train for legions of educators who (re)write the curriculum, text books, and tests.
It happens every time they change some standard, millions and millions are spent rewriting, repurchasing, etc. teaching materials.
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There's also no transparency. Pearson makes the test, owns the test, and anyone releasing questions from the test can get in big trouble. The questions that were leaked show that 3rd grade tests had 6th grade reading materials and 6th grade tests had college level materials. This also means that the tests were likely designed to fail the students. (Pearson can sell more to students who fail than to students who pass.)
John Oliver's take was spot on. It was somehow funny and sad at the same time.
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These tests aren't meant to spot the brightest students. They are (supposedly) meant to evaluate how much a child has learned that year. If that's the case, what child will be learning college level materials in 6th grade? If it's not the case, then people have been misled as to the purpose behind the exam. At best, the tests are just badly designed. At worst, Pearson is rigging the test to get the results that they want. Namely, that students are failing so that they can sell solutions to this "probl
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Not only that, but an excerpt for discussion purposes would certainly qualify as fair use. This whole "copyrighted test" complaint sounds like a giant smokescreen.
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Common Core appears to have become controversial primarily because the conservative media told us it is.
I love the way the summary frames it as "rich guys pushing crazy agendas vs. the public interest," when in fact this is much more a case of "rich guys pushing crazy agendas vs. another group of rich guys pushing different crazy agendas."
On one side you have Bill Gates pushing Common Core, on the other side you have the Koch Brothers pushing school vouchers so that people like them get a big tax rebate for sending their kids to schools where your commoner kids will never be allowed to go.
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Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Insightful)
The nice thing about the US is that the states should be independent of one another when it comes to education and most other things.
We've tried that, and it turns out that it doesn't really lead to independent states in education. Look at all the textbook debacles that start in Texas, for example. Why would textbooks in Texas matter if you live in a different state? They matter because the companies that publish textbooks don't want to publish different versions for each state, they want to publish for the largest states (population wise) first and then try to sell the same texts to other states.
This results in textbooks going in to non-nutter states that include discussions on intelligent design and other rampant bullshit. The states only have the flexibility to get textbooks of their own choosing if they exist (as few states have the time and money to go about preparing their own textbooks) so they end up with what the boards in Texas approve.
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I mean the a public school employees dozens t
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Re:Controversial because? (Score:4, Informative)
We've tried that, and it turns out that it doesn't really lead to independent states in education. Look at all the textbook debacles that start in Texas, for example. Why would textbooks in Texas matter if you live in a different state? They matter because the companies that publish textbooks don't want to publish different versions for each state, they want to publish for the largest states (population wise) first and then try to sell the same texts to other states.
This results in textbooks going in to non-nutter states that include discussions on intelligent design and other rampant bullshit. The states only have the flexibility to get textbooks of their own choosing if they exist (as few states have the time and money to go about preparing their own textbooks) so they end up with what the boards in Texas approve.
In my high school in downstate Illinois, several of my classes were taught using locally published material. Oh, we had the standard textbooks, but we were tested on the material in the local material. Chemistry was taught from a locally-written textbook, and my father (a research chemist) thought that home-brew textbook was better than some of the college textbooks on his shelf. This wasn't restricted to just one state: in Oklahoma we had a textbook written by an in-state college professor about the history of the Native Americans, from Columbus through to then-present day. I'm not aware of any Texas textbook that does more than scratch the surface about the "Trail of Tears." And the state didn't publish the textbook.
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What's wrong with polygamy? Just makes sure your wives don't live together, or their periods will synchronise. Talk about living Hell!
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Perhaps our federal education standards should put emphasis on teaching children about the politician's syllogism [wikipedia.org] so we don't just 'do something' even if doing something makes things worse.
Re:Controversial because? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to know why people think there is an education system problem?
I'm in Canada, so maybe the situation in the US is vastly different, but even in Canada we always have people trumping the education crises.
Over the past 30-40 years we've tossed money after money in the education system, reforming this and that, and can anyone say we've done any better that just having a teacher in a classroom doing their thing?
Heck, does anyone find the irony that people trump up Asian/Indian education, when many of these places don't really spend a lot on education or have 'advanced pedagogy'.
For all the gripes about education system, we somehow still manage to raise some brilliant people. We somehow manage to have people keep doing their jobs and life keeps going.
I would humbly suggest that most of the problems people are trying to solve via the 'academic education' system are the wrong place.
We do have a lot of problems with behavior/family... I experienced this when I was a teacher. Really, what do you do with a kid whose parents don't even answer the phone from the school. Is it any surprise the kid doesn't really care about school?
This is much better addressed through social services and policy changes like empowering teachers run their classes with some discipline.
In all honestly, and this is purely anecdotal, the only difference from when I was a student to when I was a teacher is we lowered the class discipline and became paranoid.
The kids aren't any smarter, they don't think more critically, our lesson plans are fancier, but the output is the same, if not worse. I'm being generous here to the current system :P Sure, math is my day was mainly taught via the textbook and problems. Today, they're almost taking the math out of math. But the new way is more 'advanced' and has more 'pedagogy'
Similarly, most of the workplace/industrial issues are much better dealt with outside of k-12. Training of workers, retention of knowledgeable workers, pursuing advanced degrees... all have little to do with k-12 education and more to do with industry issues.
Why we even concerned with bringing more people into STEM, when I've seen very good STEM people leave the field. Some have become lawyers. Others into project management. Ponder that.
Just what is the education crisis? I just don't see it. As I said, I don't think we've advanced more than have a teacher in a classroom.
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It's an invented crisis so that Pearson can sell more, Charter schools can push out more public schools, and politicians can get more power by blaming teachers and implementing "assessments" that don't really test anything.
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The big issue I think isn't what common core is, but how it was implemented.
New York implemented by stating all grade levels needed to start using common core. Not starting kindergarten and going up. So Highschool students who have been learning the old way needed to change their methodology.
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Doing "something" just for the sake of doing something is in no way good. The education system is broken, but I'd rather my kids breeze their way through a far-too-easy education system than fight to stay afloat in a stupid one that teach useless and sometimes outright wrong things. At least in the former case they can spend all the free time they have from not doing homework and test prep to play with legos, robotics kits, computers and doing other things that will actually prepare them to survive in the 2
Re:Controversial because? (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities? Cities that have been run top to bottom, city council to school district by liberals.
"Conservatives" are also for school choice, charter schools, school vouchers, all of which are designed to empower parents in those failing inner city districts some hope.
Now, I've kinda lambasted the liberal city government here, but their intentions aren't all bad. However, this is not a "throw money at" sort of problem.
I'll agree that Common Core has been combined with other items in order to criticize it. Common Standards are a "good thing", in fact we need to pull the standards back up from the constant lowering of them that has happened over time. I completely support this at the state level, from whence Common Core originated.
However, certain entrenched forces in the education community, and federal regulators glommed on to Common Core with the intent to have it drive curriculum and content. This was, and is, a mistake. The KISS principle should have driven the Common Standards, but they complicated it with federal mandates and absurd curriculum.
The "new" math they are trying to teach under the banner of Common Core makes me fear that we will end up with an upcoming generation that does't have the math skills to undertake a College Education in Engineering and Science.
Standards and levels of understanding are good. Demanding that everyone teach via the same methods (unproven ones at that) is not.
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There were no federal mandates on common core. This is an outright lie by conspiricy theorists.
The curriculum is developed at the state/local/school level, with most of it at the school level. My bother, who teaches math2, helped develop them for his school and the surrounding schools. There is nothing that mandates a curreculum in common core or at the federal level, again out right lies.
The "new" math skills being taught are in general the most efficiant way to do math, particularly when a calculator, or
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It doesn't help when state officials claim the Feds are mandating certain tests and when Federal officials say that they might need to take "action" if there are too many test refusals in a state.
That and poverty. When a child is poor - to the degree that he/she is worried about whether they'
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Exactly, the feds aren't "mandating" tests per se, but they are tying actions to funding levels, which is a huge lever with the individual schools.
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As for innnercity schools that seems to be more of an issue with lack of parental oversight...
How about just the lack of parents, in the plural? How many of those inner city schools have significant populations of single-parent children? Particularly children without fathers?
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So kids are only awake for 11 hours out of the day? They sleep for 13? Schools also have very limited ability to discipline students. How do you make a group responsible when they have little or no control over what they are responsible for?
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You need to readjust your math there bud...
School is in session from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM 5 days a week with 180 education days a year in my state. That is 1080 hours they are in school. Compare that to the time they are h
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Read these articles, written by one of the CC authors, designed to help teachers teach the common core standards, and then re-think your claim that "Common Core makes me fear that we will end up with an upcoming generation that doesn't have the math skills to undertake a College Education in Engineering and Science":
https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CCSS-Geometry_1.pdf
https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CCSS-Fractions_1.pdf
More here: https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/
As a math teacher, I have learned more about what I t
Re:Controversial because? (Score:5, Insightful)
Explaining that is so simple:
1. Parents either don't have the skills or the time to assist their kids in succeeding.
2. Less resources in inner-city schools.
3. Poor attitudes towards learning amongst the kids (see item 1).
4. Poor teachers: Because teachers in these inner-city areas do not get paid more than their colleagues in good districts, only the worst teachers will teach there. Also, as a teacher, where pay is determined by test results, would you work in an area where the dice are stacked against you (see items 1, 2 and 3 above)?
Actually, it is. Want better teachers? Increase pay and better teachers will enter the profession.
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To get rid of tenure, teacher pay would need to be increased.
Apparently you did not benefit from education as much as you think you did...
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Yes, but if you get rid of tenure first you can start increasing teacher pay for the BEST teachers instead of the ones who have been there the longest.
That said, I have seen instances where the oldest teachers are the best, my son's 2nd grade teacher was IMHO literally worth her weight in gold, but has since retired. However, his pre-calculus teacher in high school was the worst teacher I'd ever seen at any level, and also had the most seniority, thankfully he finally retired too.
Ripping children from their homes? Seriously? (Score:3)
Bluntly, then they shouldn't have kids -- but I don't think that's the issue.
Whether they should or should not have children is irrelevant. The fact is that they do and that child needs to be educated.
It's very difficult for a diligent single parent to 'assist their kids in succeeding', never mind one who's more apathetic.
The difficulty or lack thereof is again irrelevant. The child needs to be educated and simply dismissing the problem because of some apathetic parents is dodging the issue. Yes parental involvement matters but sometimes it doesn't happen so what do we do about that? It takes a pretty cold person to just dismiss the problem as unsolvable and blame the parents for everything.
Schools have become "food" programs where kids get 2 of their meals a day. Many are open over the summer just to provide food.
Did it o
Re:Controversial because? (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities?
All of these epically failing schools are the result of underfunded school districts. Even the privatized programs pushed inside the public school system end up more expensive that just allowing the school system to handle it with public employees, furthering the funding issues. Every single GOP sponsored 'conservative' program seems to be detrimental for public schools. Privatization is all I've seen from the conservative politicians that isn't from the religious part of the conservative education policy making. Why do you think schools are underfunded in the first place? Conservative policy makers.
Outside of your nonsense that depicts this is a political issue and blames liberals while ignoring the larger, actual issues of funding, I do somewhat agree with you on the common core view related to new math, but I also understand that it has an intentional design. I have a 6 and a 13 year old in the midst of this new strategy which, if you were to actually experience the flow of it, seems more functionally useful and builds on particular logic, instead of just memorization and acceptance of formulas without a particular basis of understanding built from other pieces. That said, not teaching kids about long division still drives me crazy. I feel a lot like this is a test being performed on my children's generation and it could really go either way, so I encourage learning outside of school provided methods to keep their minds open.
To summarize, conservatives aren't evil, just more full of shit, and even a broken clock is right twice a day. ;)
Re:Controversial because? (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities? Cities that have been run top to bottom, city council to school district by liberals.
"Conservatives" are also for school choice, charter schools, school vouchers, all of which are designed to empower parents in those failing inner city districts some hope.
Wow, I am impressed by the doublespeak there! I can't speak for all charter school programs, but the one in Milwaukee I am familiar with. In that city, Charter schools have the ability to refuse students with special needs or with behavioral problems. It shouldn't be a big surprise, then, that they fill up with very teachable students, leaving the difficult cases to the public school system. The public school system then has to spend more of their budget on children who are more expensive. This makes their numbers look bad, which causes any parent of a problem-free child to jump ship to the charter schools. It's a death spiral caused by the charter schools and the rules they are allowed to run under. Conservatives love it because they get proof that the charter schools perform "better". But the student population is not at all comparable.
If I was allowed to shift the most troublesome 25% of my job to someone else, I would appear to be a better employee. But that would have everything to do with the situation and nothing to do with my own personal performance.
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Oh please. Charter schools and vouchers are by any objective analysis a means of creating a two tiered school system, one for the rich and one for the poor.
Are you going to ignore the conservative push in states like Texas to teach Intelligent Design instead of evolution? Or the massive anti-intellectualism of the Republican party platform?
I can't believe you were modded +5 informative. So many conservatives who live in cognitive dissonance.
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Of course at this point I should point out how much of a staunch conservative Governor Cuomo is....
As a parent I don't view this (especially at the local level) as a conservative vs. liberal issue. I think that detracts from the issue.
I personally think that charters are an interesting way to set up schools, a friend of mine (quite liberal himself BTW) raves about the charter school that his daughter is going to. Although I agree that we haven't figured out how to best utilize them and arrange them.
I kno
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You're missing the real point here. I don't think anyone here is seriously against raising standards or having common standards as a principle in itself. ... Or even worse... to put the responsibility for defining the actual content of lessons, and the criteria by which students get lablelled for the rest of their lives, into the hands of a businessman who's priorty is continually p
The actual issue is, do you really want to continue with something that even Gates himself has admitted is a failed experiment?
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. Or even worse... to put the responsibility for defining the actual content of lessons, and the criteria by which students get lablelled for the rest of their lives, into the hands of a businessman who's priorty is continually proven to be corporate profit and social engineering to that end (regardless of how well he hides it behind a facade of charity)
Common core does not do that.
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Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities?
How deep is your head in the sand? Christ almighty, school funding is based on property taxes. These poor-er schools are filled with poor-er teachers and poor-er students--oh yes, this is all obviously the fault of the liberals! Why, it was obviously the liberals who insisted on the geographic school zoning policies that (while obviously sensible from a busing standpoint) prevent strata mixing and perpetuate the stigma of the decaying schools you speak of, making it harder to attract either decent teachers
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Inner city schools do have access to federal and state funding to address this.
See here: http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyo... [coyoteblog.com]
Agree with you completely on the anti-gentrification and anti-development comments those activities are not helping.
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Bingo!
It's also better for making people develop an interest in math.
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So when your electrician screws up and your breakers trips every time you run the toaster nobody is qualified to judge the work faulty unless they also fix the problem? The point being that it doesn't take an expert, nor does it require the ability to devise a solution to know when something's been done incorrectly.
You almost created an argument there, too bad you posted AC which will prevent us from being able to tell if the person who posted it ever returns to see the response.
Nevertheless, it does warrant some exploration. The point I was after is that merely saying something doesn't work is not at all the same as actually doing something about it. Your electrician example is pretty good for this; just about anyone can tell when they have plugged something in to a faulty outlet, but not everyone is capable o
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"Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done."
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No, these are parents with a tentative, at best grasp on the subjects themselves and lashing out. The biggest one I have seen
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/0... [ijreview.com]
Of course this dad, who apparently has an EE degree, and the vast majority of the readers fail to actually READ the assignment. The math does not work, and that was the point of the assignment, to find the error in how the student did the work, not try and solve it in the incorrect way the student used. BTW, the student did not separate the 1s and the
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Some readers may fail to actually read the assignment. But whether you read exactly what the assignment requests or not, the parent is right in his statement that the problem used an overly complex method to teach students.
I had never even heard of a "number line" until a saw the problem shown in your link. After taking a moment, I can see how it could be used to determine an answer. However it is overly complex and takes the students in a direction that shouldn't be used because number lines cannot be us
The Onion? (Score:3, Funny)
Let me be the first to point out... the Onion?
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Let me be the first to point out... the Onion?
It actually has some good points to it. For example, one of the Cons is "There are easier ways to measure parents’ income". Students of wealthier families tend to do better due to a number of factors such as access to tutors, parents home more often(dont work 2 jobs/work normal business hours/etc), and just generally more stable family life. A "Pro" is the exact mirror of this: "Only biased against kids who couldn’t afford college anyway". Poorer kids (who would be less likely to afford to go
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Students of wealthier families tend to do better
Also, and perhaps more important, families who do better in school tend to end up wealthier.
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If a student starts the year at the 30th percentile and ends the year at the 40th percentile, then the teacher was probably pretty effective, even though the student is still under-performing.
If students from wealthy families score better than students from poor families, then that will be reflected in the evaluation at the beginning of the year, so this "value-added" methodology corrects for family backgrounds.
So we can glean some useful information about teacher effectiveness from student test scores.
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If a student starts the year at the 30th percentile and ends the year at the 40th percentile, then the teacher was probably pretty effective, even though the student is still under-performing.
If students from wealthy families score better than students from poor families, then that will be reflected in the evaluation at the beginning of the year, so this "value-added" methodology corrects for family backgrounds.
So we can glean some useful information about teacher effectiveness from student test scores.
But how to you discern whether that 10% improvement is due to the work of the teacher or due to the work of a paid tutor outside the class? The poor kid might be stuck at home by himself watching tv and eating a McDonalds value meal while his single mom is working her 2nd shift job; meanwhile the rich kid is getting facts crammed into his head for 3 hours a day after school while his parents' personal chef is cooking a scientifically designed, nutritionally balanced dinner. It is pointless to base teacher
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If one student improves by 10% due to the addition of a paid tutor, and another student regresses by 10% by dropping a paid tutor, they cancel each other out. If all students got paid tutors, then their percentiles would not change.
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Which is why studies have shown people who watched The Daily Show and Colbert Report were, on the whole, more informed about world events than those who watched Fox.
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Because other news outlets are less bias?
"He hasn't stopped giving." (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, fuck him and his charitable pursuits of providing accessible healthcare, education and reducing poverty for millions!
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Validate that it was charitable (Score:2)
charitable pursuits of providing accessible healthcare, education and reducing poverty for millions!
Prove any one of these to actually have been first successful and then validate that it was charitable.
With great respect for the place of civil debate and mutual respect in our society, I ask, "What the flying fuck is wrong with you?"
I mean, maybe you just rolled out of bed, but the next time someone drops tens of billions trying to fix some of the biggest and most complicated problems in the world, please don't act like they're a first-year coder who forgot to run a test suite on strcmp().
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There are worse things he could be doing with his money than philanthropy. Standardized testing may (or may not) be counterproductive, but I'm not going to fault someone for making a good faith effort, and the Gates Foundation has done a lot of other great work. It's more than can be said for Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, or the late Steve Jobs. There are plenty of billionaires who don't do shit except hoard huge piles of cash. There are plenty of things not to like about Bill Gates, but philanthropy is n
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I bet Gates has read dozens of biographies on John D Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the like. That explains how he built up Microsoft in the '80s and '90s. Many of those men became philanthropists and used their fortunes for public benefit, and incidentally, to perpetuate their names in a good light.
The only immortality man is likely to see any time soon is by putting your name on history or great things. You can fight for it like Lee, Washington, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, etc. You can earn it through infamy: Hitler, Stalin, Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette. You can earn it through government like countless monarch, Churchill, Roosevelt. Or you can buy it like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, or anyone elected to a US national goverment office since the year 2000.
Standardized Testing (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting Fact (Score:3)
The Common Core Standards Initiative method has been copyrighted.
BillG Look-Alike Kid in Pro-Common Core Ad (Score:3)
The presence of a BillG look-alike kid [staticflickr.com] in the pro-Common Core ad [youtube.com] made by recent $3.7M Gates Foundation awardee [gatesfoundation.org] the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation is a nice touch!
Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core (Score:5, Insightful)
My state (New York) which had semi-decent education standards to begin with, recently switched to the Common Core curriculum and it's really stirring up a mess. Partially, it's the mandatory testing that parents are opting their children out of, but it's also being tied to a bunch of other things. For example, teachers now have to deal with the same BS performance evaluations that corporate employees do, and a huge chunk of their rating is based on these test scores. They were evaluated in the past, but it was understood that there was no objective way to evaluate teacher performance with variable student performance. Now, new teachers will lose their jobs if their classes don't do well on these tests, with no regard for whether the teacher has a bunch of losers or geniuses in their class. I'm not a teacher, but I'm definitely on the teachers' side in this case. I would hate to spend the time to get a teacher certification (not impossible, but harder in NY than many states) and have my job be at risk due to factors I can't control. For example, most new teachers can't get jobs in the nice affluent school districts because there are tons more qualified applicants who want to work there, so they usually have to start off teaching in a crappy school district. Crappy districts tend to have kids who have crappy parents. (And yes, affluent districts have helicopter parents that make teachers' lives miserable, but that's another story.) If you have a class full of students who have bad home lives, parents who don't care, or have been socially promoted for years, they're going to do badly on these standardized tests and your performance rate will suffer through no fault of your own.
The other thing I've seen is that the material used to teach the common core curriculum is really different from stuff we saw in earlier times. I think that's another big thing -- parents feel they can't help their kids with homework. However, it's the material, not the curriculum itself. Blame the educational publishers for that, not the standards.
One thing I definitely don't agree with Bill Gates on is his love of charter schools. These just suck more money away from the public system and funnel it into corporate interests' pockets, making the public system weaker. What Gates or anyone doesn't understand is that education won't improve until it's valued by everyone. The reason China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. are ahead of us in test performance isn't the curriculum -- they push their students like crazy from both directions (teachers and parents.) Kids in these countries spend many more hours in school than US kids, and have information drilled into their heads. That's what needs to happen if we want to compete with these countries in the future. In the case of India and China, school performance is basically some kids' only ticket to a better life given the population and structure of society. Things might be a little different if students in the US who didn't excel in school were permanently doomed to a life of poverty...I think the parents might care a little more.
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Parents can't help with homework? I took trig, calculus, physics, chemistry and biology in high school. My parents couldn't help me with any of it. You can't limit teaching to what your parents know. The world won't progress.
I am assuming the problem is the one you ALWAYS have--that they change the terms and it's pretty ridiculous. Back in the 80s every math book for grade school made up lots of terms that no parents would know, so you had to learn a whole new language if you wanted to teach your kids. But at the end of the day it's just math and those definitions usually hurt more than they help. They could easily pick one set of definitions and stick with them--ideally a set that is empirically verified as the one that stu
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From what I've seen, especially with math, the terms have changed but the entire way it's presented has also changed. For example, I have always been a poor math student unless what I'm learning can be applied to something real-world -- I have more of an engineer's brain than a mathematician's. All the algebra, trig, etc. that was force-fed into my brain in high school only started making sense when I started struggling through my college chemistry curriculum and finding out that it was actually useful for
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An issue with CC was they took the opportunity to go in a new direction. Having a 5th grader I can tell you math is not about getting it right anymore but the process in the CC that my sons school uses. They use some very dubious methods lots of guess and check that they teach and are pushed to grade to. Problem is that process looks nothing like what we remember.
Supply and Demand (Score:2)
One thing I definitely don't agree with Bill Gates on is his love of charter schools. These just suck more money away from the public system and funnel it into corporate interests' pockets, making the public system weaker.
Supply and demand. We would probably be better making the public schools open to all certified teachers to teach their subject--more of a community learning center. But charter schools are another market-based solution that makes more sense than the current system. Subsidizing a supplier is just a bad idea from an economics perspective and prevents *choice* from shaping better education. The public schools are so terrified of lawsuits anyway that they really don't bring a lot more to the table, it's jus
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I'm from NY too and agree with you on all of this. We've refused the tests for our oldest for three years now. Our youngest will have his first refusal next year. Meanwhile, Cuomo has come out saying that the tests mean nothing for the kids but will be used to evaluate teachers. Do you really think kids are going to try hard on difficult exams that "mean nothing" to them?!!! Just because their teachers' jobs might be at stake?
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"parents feel they can't help their kids with homework."
That's true, but also a bit by design from what I've seen. The cc methods tend to take multiple approaches, realizing that not every child learns the same way and, in a way, shotgunning the approach in hopes of finding a method for everyone. Some of the math - the stuff which has be severely ridiculed by (mostly) politically conservative groups - happens to be exactly the way I do math very quickly in my head. It's not any method that's typically taugh
Common Core as failed SW project. (Score:2)
Put on your developer hats and think about it like a software project:
The problem with common core is the requirements were written by people who have no idea about requirements development. Not only didn't they know how to write the requirements that had no input from any stakeholders, or users.
These fatally flawed requirements were then implemented by publishers of curriculum that do not know how to do a requi
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Hey now, I give him credit for QBasic. It was my first exposure to programming, pre-internet, using nothing but its superlative help file.
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The rich and poor alike get exactly one vote each. That is the cornerstone of a democracy. Of course, almost all political matters in the US are decided not via a democracy but via a representative democracy (most notable exceptions being initiatives in those jurisdictions that have them).
If the poor choose not to vote or understand who/what they are voting for, that's hardly the fault of successful people.
If a voter is swayed by political advertising (which, generally, does cost money, some of which comes
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Indeed, this is like a modern day Rockefeller/Dewey socialist indoctrination agenda to homogenize worker bees on the playground while only allowing just enough actual individual education as possible so as to arouse the notice of those who might question the motives. If anyone thinks this sounds too tinfoil hatty...look into the background and ideology of these two pathetic social tyrants, especially John Dewey.