Thanks to George W Bush, we now have an imperfect measurement system for our primary and secondary schools. It could use some work but it’s better than what came before.

Our very best schools get their heads handed to them on international education competitions, a sad state of affairs that has persisted for decades. We make up for that poor education in having superiority in other areas but those other areas only get you so far. The hierarchy of educational results counts too.

Our children are being robbed. They are being robbed of better jobs and a better life.

The people in the community are paying for that robbery.

This is evil.

This is unfixable from the inside.

I had a friend, a professional political operative. He ran for school board, got a slate in so he had a majority to back him. He informed the teachers that the days of fat raises for mediocre performance were over. The board stuck firm even after the union surrounded the school with tens of thousands of chanting teachers. The teachers union pulled in resources from all across the state to defeat him. He survived but he lost his majority after one term.

Unless you have a coordinated campaign of tens of boards all rising up at the same time, any state union is going to be able to put down any reform effort. Very unfortunate, but it’s true.

The only solution is escape, education, and when the alternate system is sufficiently robust, defunding. Private schools are an escape for the wealthy, tutoring for the upper middle but for the middle and below, it’s rough going. We need a radically cheaper solution.

When the task is getting something done cheaply, it means an online solution. This is doable and very likely there will eventually be an open courseware solution to provide the curriculum. There is a worldwide open courseware consortium that is handling higher education but it’s of limited use if the foundations are not there.

Eventually, those in higher education will “get it” and add in materials for the lower grades and we will have a solution. All that can be done in the meantime is to fight for our own children and to assist where we can in limiting the damage.

Here is an article about teachers selling lesson plans and tools/ideas they use to cause children to learn. It doesn’t turn bad teachers into great teachers but it does make the better teachers. It seems there are some bad teachers who want to get better. The only people who are opposed are the politicians and the union leaders.

I’ve had to do that lately too but can’t remember why. Job-related, b/c I was sitting at my desk at work.

David, I use them all the time on my job. One way that you can test the purity of a solvent is to make solutions with varying concentrations of your analyte, then inject them on the GC (or whatever) and plot concentration against response. The closer your best-fit curve is to going through the origin – that is, the closer the y-intercept is to zero – the purer your solvent is. Also, if you use the standard-addition method of analysis, you find the best-fit curve and then the result is the negative x-intercept. (I love Excel, by the way. Used to have to do this stuff by hand on graph paper, or with HP calculators and the weird RPN or whatever it was.)

I also used them to explain to my daughter why she traveled through elementary school always the size of the kids two grades behind her. It’s your growth curve, I told her – your slope is good, but your y-intercept is off.

Not only is teaching a relatively low-paying job for someone who understands math well, it comes with a lot of other drawbacks: it often requires a (relative content-free, if you’re used to studying things like math) education degree, comes with a lack of creative and intellectual control over your own work, and requires putting up with a great deal of administrative nonsense on a daily basis.

Small wonder they can’t get qualified applicants, and depend heavily on the altruism of the ones they do get.

If qualified math & science teachers are scarcer (because they have more job alternative, for one thing) and they *don’t* get paid more, then they are *automatically* going to be in short supply.

She had not taught in 30 years at that time. She was appalled at what she found after 30 years. The teachers were contemptuous of the kids. It was a middle class area but they would make fun of the kids when they were in the teachers’ room. She complimented a second grade teacher on the job she did with reading. The woman burst into tears. No one had ever told her she was doing a good job. This is a national collapse of education training. They are the bottom of their college classes and they are not motivated to do a good job. Some still try but do not get reenforcement. In the 1960s, lots of smart young women went into teaching because that and nursing were the careers for women. No more.

She was always very pro-public school when our kids were growing up but she told me she would home school them now.

This has got to get fixed early or we will lose a generation of kids. Larry Elder used to talk on his radio show about the library in Hollywood near his home. Outside on the sidewalk, minority kids were doing skate board tricks. Inside, Korean kids were studying with their mothers standing over them. The economic status of those kids was no different. I agree about math but this is much more than math.

Instead, leftist today use “intellectual” in a manner very close to that of the Communist. For Communist, an “intellectual” was someone with the proper ideological indoctrination. For leftist, to “think” is to conform to the tenets of the ideology. The same fate has befallen the concept of “education” itself.

This is why so many people in the education field believe themselves intellectuals, believe they think and believe they are educated. They’ve change the meanings of the words without telling the rest of us.

My own experience with math education with my children was horrible. My daughter had a teacher who panicked if my daughter did algebra problems the way I taught her instead of the exact method the teacher used. After talking to the teacher, I realized she simply didn’t understand how to do the math and was instead relying on rote.

I am all in favor of making subjects interesting in ways which are reasonably integral to the subject: math, for instance, is probably much more interesting to most people when taught with reference to actual applications. (I was helping a nephew with linear equations (which required a little refreshing my part) and he asked if there were actually any uses for these things. Why in the world wouldn’t the textbook/teacher say something about this?) But many of the attempts by the education establishment to make subjects “relevant” remind me of the stuff one gets in the mail from frantically incompetent direct-mail people (IMPORTANT! DO NOT DISCARD! SERIAL NUMBER 3143431432)

I’m probably using “anti-intellectual” in a different way than it is typically used.

On this point, I strongly recommend an old classic that people ought to dust off: Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963). Three chapters focus on education in particular: “The appearance within professional education of an influential anti-intellectualist movement is one of the striking features of American thought.”

I think many of the problems in math education have to do with academic fads (student centered learning – I always want to ask, but how is the student to know best?) and the fact that the teachers themselves may not have mastered the material. The second point is key, I think, well, that’s what my math professor father thinks, anyway. He deals, occasionally, with the problem when he teaches undergraduate classes. A certain percentage of students who will go on to teach math, among other subjects, at the K1-12 level, and don’t have a mastery of the subject. To be blunt: they don’t do well in his classes.Isn’t the KIPP program based on teaching teachers, and helping them so that they can better transmit information? I know, I know, transmit information is so old-school. I also know I am painting with a broad brush, but I do think poor education of the educator is a part of the problem.

Hmm, you have given me an idea for a new post…