[Link] Why the kids don’t know no algebra

how do I fit all the extra material in? This is not a rhetorical question!

Extra lessons for those who want to do it.

This means extra work for you, but you could try some strategy to reduce the work. For example make a list of Khan Academy videos related to the missing materials, put it on your web page, start your first lesson with a (not graded) background knowledge test, and recommend everyone to watch those videos. You could also make some additional exercises for voluntary homework. -- The general idea is to do something once and reuse it every year.

First, relax and realize you can't fix everything. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but you need to set realistic goals or you'll burn yourself out really quickly. The students really need more lesson time, and more practice time. If the student has resources you can refer them to one of the many tutoring centers designed to address this sort of thing. If they don't have resources, most attempts at solutions will involve a lot of your personal time, which will already be highly strained as a new teacher.

Ask the other highschool teachers you work with if they can recommend a good tutoring service to refer students to. Also, ask them how they attempt to solve these sort of problems? At one charter school, the math teachers set up an after school program attempting to mimic the structure of the chain tutoring centers (Sylvan learning center, etc). Not something to think about setting up your first year, but if you keep an eye towards the future...

A school district outside DC. Tthe district was hoping to implement metrics to gauge teacher quality to determine pay under the previous administration. The project was scrapped when the new chancellor of schools came in.

You should calm down Murray isn't reactionary he's just a smart and data conscious moderate conservative thinker. He wants to give poor people enough free money so they can live decently with or without a job. I mean he doesn't even think democracy is a bad idea! Weak sauce! ;)

Damn, if I had the patience and the time, I'd have put a liberal spin on those same ideas to see how it would look

We're on good terms and I know you said this with good intent and I hope you realize I was just citing a relevant well researched book (which I think you really should read before judging) not pushing an agenda. Also remember LessWrong readers are smart, tolerant and sane enough to read material written by people with different politics without risking spontaneous combustion. If they want liberal spin I'm sure they can do it for themselves. And if reading relevant research on stuff can turn them "non-liberal" on that issue... well aren't you ok with people discovering their informed preferences or changing their ideas about how the world works?

The reason I'm writing out this comment is because what your wrote unfortunately seems a lot like a purely political take. I don't think that's cool since we don't see this sort of stuff for moderately left wing leaning authors, why should we for moderately right wing ones? The reason why I think this isn't ok is that just by mentioning the guy is blue instead of green you've reduced the probability of green people reading him. Especially since you exaggerated his blueness. And you are smart enough to know this.

Remember LessWrong is 3% conservative and ~30% socialist and another ~30% "Liberal"! People say "Wow" when they see someone being socially conservative.

Do we really need majority ideological biases and group feelings reinforced and further privileged?

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IIRC, I was told in #lesswrong by a KA contractor or employee that they knew of SRS and some were thinking about how to integrate it.

Yeah, I meant that you can't say it outside of the school. If you do, a typical reaction is: "If you don't like children, you are not a good teacher." Because it is assumed that if you like children, you would never say anything with a negative connotation; and if you don't like them, you are a psychopath and should be kept far away from them.

So, either the children are perfect, which means that if they don't get good grades, you are a bad teacher; or you disagree that the children are perfect, which proves that you are a bad teacher. -- The only way to signal that you are a good teacher, is to give best grades to everyone. Some teachers use this strategy, knowingly or not.

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What, you never heard of a euphemism treadmill? Choose any "neutral term" you like as a synonym for "stupid"; there's no kid in the world so "genetically disadvantaged" that they won't realise what you actually meant to say. You do know that 'retarded' was once a perfectly neutral term, right? It literally just means "slower than the others". It acquired its modern connotations because changing the word doesn't change the phenomenon and doesn't change the way people react, either.

Instead, a neutral language such as "genetically disadvantaged" should be available for accurate and objective use

This is part of why euphemisms are so dangerous - they are often phrases which aren't accurate. Intelligence is not just genetic. Parasite load at an early age, nutrition, lead exposure, some aspects of parental care can all impact intelligence.

People who inherited or "won" more intelligence early on should NOT be raised atop the goddamn miserable status heap by the sole "virtue" of said intelligence

Are they though? This has a lot to do with what one means by status. If anything we have the opposite problem. Look at how many people use "I could never do math" or similar statements as a status raiser.

This is just one incident of many that convince me that the anti-PC crowd is low-status largely not because they tell inconvenient truths (although the brightest among them sure do), but because they are unwilling to learn basic social skills.

If you think the "anti-PC crowd" is low status that may say more about who you spend time with than anything else. In much of the US, even in fairly left-wing areas, self-identifying as not PC can be quite effective as a status raiser. People who go out of their way to be "anti-PC" might be low status but that's more because that often involves high degrees of obnoxiousness, is often a cover for genuine bigotry (e.g.someone claiming that their use of the word "kike" is because of their refusal to be be PC), and are defining themselves as against something else. It is very hard to be high status when one is defined in terms of one's opposition. But that's all distinct from being blunt and saying "stupid" when one means some form of "intelligence substantially below the average or the level generally necessary to function in society".

And because they have a number of... ethically shaky aspects about their thought.

What is ethically shaky here? That there are genuinely stupid people? That we should acknowledge it? That some of that is genetic?

You just shouldn't say it at all. Unless they really are 100% 0 variance, not one in a million people with their brains will learn it trying their hardest you shouldn't say this in public because it might damage their chances. Stupid is especially bad because it's more general than you need to be. If someone has a brain that has some poor cognitive abilities, but others that are normal or good (specifically, I am talking about almost everyone) they shouldn't be told they are stupid for doing below average in some area because stupid is a general term.. "Stupidness" is often limited to a particular area.

When is it an advantage to the person being talked about to hear that they are fundamentally incapable of doing something over hearing that it is not worth their trying to do it?

Also, stupid and genetically disadvantaged are not synonyms.

What makes you think the anti-PC crowd is low-status? That doesn't ring a bell. I have no strong belief either way.

also, do you really think this is an accurate reflection of reality? "because they are unwilling to learn basic social skills." It's fine if you just wanted to have a go, but X is experiencing negative outcome Y "because they are unwilling to learn" is much more often claimed than is true. It's just so convenient and just world-ey. Also, "social skills" may in this case actually consist solely of deference to majority opinion.

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1. Is there a simple explanation of how they estimated the "teacher quality" variable? The paper is written in a very complicated and abstruse way, and I don't have time to wade through it, but surely the basic idea, if valid, should be explicable in a paragraph of plain English.

One of the main points of the paper is that typical measures (teacher experience, education, etc.) are not good predictors of quality. The authors spend a lot of time developing a phenomenological model of teacher quality based on comparing student achievement within a school, to reduce the impact of greater variation in populations between schools. From the paper:

3. THE IDENTIFICATION OF TEACHER EFFECTS In this section we develop an estimator of the variance of teacher quality that avoids problems of student selection and administrator discretion that potentially have biased prior attempts. This estimator is based upon patterns of within-school differences in achievement gains and ignores variations in teacher quality across schools, because such variation cannot readily be disentangled from student differences and the contributions of other school factors. This strategy yields a lower bound estimator for the importance of teacher quality that relies upon minimal maintained assumptions about the underlying achievement process. Importantly, we do not focus solely on measurable characteristics of teachers or schools as is typically done in this literature but instead rely on student outcomes to assess the magnitude of total teacher effects, regardless of our ability to identify andmeasure any specific components. This semiparametric approach provides both an estimate of the role of teacher quality in the determination of academic achievement and information on the degree to which specific factors often used in determining compensation and hiring explain differences in teacher effectiveness.

2. Even if we take the findings of the paper at face value, the "$100 trillion" estimate is a complete non sequitur. Can the entire effect really be purely because better teachers impart greater wealth-producing skills? Or could it be, at least partly, because they impart advantages in zero-sum signaling and rent-seeking games?

This claim is developed in a different paper (linked in the first link I posted), which draws from the paper I linked to discuss teacher quality. Unfortunately, that paper is paywalled, but I have extracted the relevant part, section 4.2, as a pdf (only 2 pages).

They used data comparing performance on math and science tests to economic growth for different countries. They then calculated the improvement in economic growth due to an improvement in student performance from replacing lower-quality teachers with higher-quality teachers. Obviously there is a simplifying assumption of linearity being made for the correlation of test performance and economic growth, and test performance as a measure can fall afoul of Campbell's Law.

Well, better downvotes than the alternatives. Razib perma-banned me a few days ago.

More generally, people don't even agree what education is for. It could be:

• preparing people for their future jobs;
• preserving the knowledge of humankind, maintaining culture;
• improving people mentally, creating better neighbors and citizen.

Generally, all these goals are considered good, but sometimes they are in conflict, if you try to optimize for one of them too much. For example the first rule, in extreme, would require learning only details related to one's future job, nothing more; but students could learn more details, and have more practice when they finish the school. The second rule, in extreme, would require teaching everyone everything. The third rule requires a value judgement what makes a person good citizen, and in extreme, it would require focusing on those skills and ignoring everything else.

In many discussions about education, one of these ideas is assumed implicitly, and then there is a suggestion how to get closer to this goal... usually at the expense of the remaining goals, which is why other people protest against the suggestion.

Thanks.

I was surprised by that too -- is the growth mindset not that helpful for smart children?

I suspect that somehow the message "the other kids will catch up with you" got across, and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or the lessons were focused on the parts where the slower kids could catch up, ignoring the parts where the faster kids could get further ahead.

That's a good point, I'm not sure that any research shows long-term convergence among students. I may have overstated the point. I guess what I was thinking was that in the long run, all students would improve so much as to make any initial differences unimportant (which may or may not be the case, but it can't be assumed)

Edit: yeah, I can't seem to fix the link, the bracket at the end seems to be screwing it up. Anyone know how to fix it?

No, and it's child abuse when schools put enormous pressure on low IQ children to learn this kind of stuff.

I mean people who have low aptitude for math, and whose general intelligence (IQ) may well be above average.

For example, were singing mandatory for graduation, I would have had trouble finishing school, because I cannot hold a tune if my life depended on it. Well, as I said, I could have probably learned it with 1000x the time/effort/investment of your average person, but it would be silly to require that.

You might want to be careful about posting links to VDARE, lukeprog and some others here consider this crimethink.

I haven't studied these issues, but I will note that Steve Sailor and VDARE.com are considered by many people to be racist bigots. Here, for example, is a VDARE article defending white supremacy:

One of the many reasons I have been spending less time on LessWrong (sic) recently.

The discussion of accent in that dialog is a neat rhetorical trick, but its main premise is false. If you were to examine the heritability of accent using the standard methods of behavioral genetics, it would turn out to be near zero. (Maybe some confounding factors would yield a small spurious heritability, but there's no way you'd get a "highly heritable" result.)

Some of the other cited facts are also dubious or exaggerated. For example, while accent of adults is no longer as perfectly plastic as before adolescence, it's obviously absurd to claim that "nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it."

(Also, kids' accent can be easily influenced if you can just place them into a peer group with the desired accent. No such simple solution exists for traits that are known to be heritable.)

Yeah, the point that genetic != heritable is really important- religion is highly inherited but obviously there's no gene for being Christian. Some of this inheritance may be due to cultural or socioeconomic effects, but at this point, the data with twin studies seems to suggest that a lot of the heritable differences in intelligence are genuinely genetic.

Could you point to this data?

This is what I normally point to although more because they give a lot of good references and are online than because of their own research. Unfortunately, there are a lot of complicating factors here. In particular, suburban schools with generally white students from high income backgrounds are more likely to be in small class room environments, and school districts which try to keep class room sizes small are also very likely doing other things to also improve the learning environment. I can't point to anyone who has corrected enough for all of those factors for my general satisfaction. I'd describe the data summarized in that link as strong but not conclusive.

everyone fools themselves into thinking that they were much better than the students' previous teachers.

I'm friends with a couple of teachers--some of them are more excited about it than others, and those that are less excited aren't fooling themselves. I'd guess there's a large amount of sampling bias here, in that teachers who write about their problems and education policy tend to care more than teachers who don't. I would guess that that would lead them both to be better teachers AND to be more motivated to convince themselves they were better.

As to your anecdote, how long-term were your tutoring relationships?

Varied, most were in the range of a semester to 2 years.

The post Razib quotes is all about about how everyone fools themselves into thinking that they were much better than the students' previous teachers.

Yeah, this is obviously a problem. I suspect that in many cases I wasn't better than the previous teachers in any substantial fashion, but a 1-1 setting will work better than almost any other setting, so even if the teacher is better at teaching, having a tutor will still likely work well.

One difference between tutoring and school teaching is that some tutoring is for prerequisites that the student now has to use and has motivation to learn and gets a lot of practice on.

This is definitely a problem. A lot of the students I tutored were students who were failing classes because they hadn't mastered basic material from 2 or 3 years ago.

On the other hand, as long as were using anecdotal evidence (which frankly using to this extent makes me uncomfortable) I had one student who was very smart, possibly smarter than I am, and I started tutoring him when he was a junior in highschool and couldn't do almost any math beyond about 7th grade (had trouble solving any equations more complicated than something like x+8=10). In his case it was very clearly an incredibly poor learning environment (although based on other data, it does seem like the the students were so disruptive that the teachers were spending most of their time just trying to control the students). I tutored him for about 1.5 years and he is he's now a computer science major at a respected university, and doing quite well. He got an A in linear algebra two semesters ago and is now taking algorithms and some other similar classes. I obviously had some impact but the fact that his general intelligence was very high obviously helped in terms of success and long-term retention.

easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)? I think both these effects are helpful

I realize and confess that my sentiments are unusual, that my thinking on this subject is grossly distorted by ideology and therefore not to be trusted, and that I don't myself know how to set up a learning environment that will actually work for actual children, but I must beg the community's forgiveness, because I want to say this anyway: I think this ideal of "discipline" causes tremendous harm (which of course I understand is not to say that it doesn't also have benefits, but those benefits are not the subject of this comment). I consider it a monstrous tragedy that so many millions of people grow up (as I grew up) without any conceptual distinction between learning important things and being enrolled in a school and obeying the commands of the designated "teacher", with no idea of there being a difference between morality and obedience.

Personally, I've mostly recovered from this phenomenon to my satisfaction. I now have an explicit notion that it is morally righteous to learn great ideas and train useful skills, and some experience of the pleasures and satisfactions to be had from these endeavors---which is not to boast that I'm doing well; I would never be so delusionally arrogant as to think that I'm doing well---but I think I'm doing far better than I was before I learned these ideas. It certainly seems so when I contrast myself to my fellow undergraduate students. Last semester at community college, I witnessed a student passionately arguing with an instructor that surely his paper deserved an A- rather than a B+. (I'm given to understand this is not an uncommon occurrence.) I imagine there are many who would take such incidents as evidence that there's not nearly enough discipline in "our" schools: how insolent of a mere student to argue with an instructor! I, however, draw a different moral. I wanted to cry out to the student: Don't you see how silly this is? Your work, your creation is already good or already bad, no matter what letter the instructor writes on it afterwards! But perhaps it was I who was being silly. The student, of course, didn't care about good writing; he just wanted to get into the University of California at Berkeley. That was the highest goal he had been trained to aspire to, from the days when his elementary-school caretakers rewarded him for being quiet and doing what all the other children were doing. Again, I do not claim that I know how society should be organized; any particular reform or revolution I might propose could very well just make things worse. But can I at least say that it's sad to see entire generations of human minds systematically crippled in this way?---because it's sad.

[Slightly edited from original version]

If this analysis is correct, there seems to be an easy fix -- just throw the disruptive students out of the classroom, and you can have rather good results with large classrooms too.

The reason this isn't implemented is that children are forced to attend school. If they could get out of classes without consequent punishment, not just one or two 'disruptives' but many students might opt out. A school doesn't have anywhere to keep such a group; classes are in large part make-work to occupy students.

On the other hand, if you punished disruptive students but did so outside of class, the habitual disruptives would spend a lot of time in punishment sessions, and would definitely not learn their lessons / pass end of year exams / etc. Schools in the US* prefer to have everyone barely pass exams, to 80% passing with high scores and 20% failing irretrievably. The failing students' parents have too much political power over the schools.

• I'm not from the US, but have seen enough people complaining about US schools on the 'net. The Israeli public schools I went to in the 90s were the same. Every time teachers tried to set up separate classes for non-disruptive students who could be taught instead of disciplined, the non-eligible students' parents complained.

Does it make easier to explain (to answer every student's questions and check every student's mistakes), or does it make easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)?

Your disjunction isn't complete there: it could be something else, like how many questions are asked. We LWers are of course familiar with the testing effect, but not so familiar with Bloom's 2 Sigma problem. Alas, I cannot seem to find the reference now, but I recall reading that in tutoring, students are asked 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more questions than in ordinary classrooms.

Yeah, I goofed. Fixed now.

Unless you give the kids a pass for being kids.

edit: which I think is inconsistent. There's no schelling point, but it seems to be the normal attitude.

Having done some research, I find that you are correct, at least as regards to parenting and genetics. My 'cached' opinion was based on misleading information absorbed for what I though was good reason, but, on reflection, was just blindly following authority. Retracted.

Weren't learning styles type ideas mostly debunked or rather turned out to be something for which very little evidence existed?

I don't know. But the converse is that there's one style that's optimal for nearly everybody. Yet many different styles are used in practice around the world. Which style is supposed to be best?

ETA: retracted, my bad. I thought you were talking about "teaching styles" not "learning styles".

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I want to support the idea of learning styles for two reasons. First, it seems unlikely to me to think that everyone learns the same way - even that the majority of people learn the same way. Secondly, we know specific ways in which people understand and handle such basic operations as counting fundamentally differently (see this Feynman passage "It's as Simple as One, Two, Three..." for an amusing anecdote about this). My prior says that learning styles are very likely.

If studies are saying that 'learning styles' don't matter, then I would say that the problem is that we haven't figured out what the real learning styles are and how to target those, not that there are no learning styles. The ones teachers talked about during school struck me as naive - but I bet there are some real ones out there.

So while some specific details of this might be an "Americal obsession", there is definitely a general trend beyond USA.

Yep, that's a good point.

From a selfish cost:benefit analysis -- the more advanced civilization, the more is there to learn, but you have a higher quality of life even if you learn nothing. So depending on one's priorities, ignoring education could be a rational choice. Maybe when you are an average person, it does not make much sense to learn, because an average educated person will not make so much money anyway. It makes more sense to learn if the ability to learn is your competitive advantage.

My point was more on the disparity. For me, being qualified boosts my pay from the typical wage of Eastern Europe to good qualified labourer wage of the richest country, if I am actually good. For those born with more privilege in the today's world, the non-educated pay is several times larger but the ceiling is the same (and is much more reachable without having to actually put work into studying).

From a society point of view -- educated people are a positive externality to a society they live in. Most of the benefit of your education does not end in your pockets, but improves the lives of people around you, whether in positive sense (you invent or produce something they can use, you are a smart employee they can employ cheaply) or just in negative sense (you avoid some stupid choices which would have negative effects on people around you).

But is society capable of having a point of view and promoting it? I don't think that is working.

And that is the attitude towards education issue.The necessity of actual motivation and work is ignored. There is that vague belief in the ideal self that is held back by something which you can easily fix by attending some sort of ritual self improvement, and a plenty of people offering (scientology, nxivm, etc), and at the much grander scale, the ineffective higher education which sells tokens of endorsement in forms of increasingly meaningless diplomas.

The cultural attitude is vaguely anti-intellectual (The young physicists are people into star trek and videogames, wanting to but entirely unable to date a woman several steps below them on the social ladder, is the premise of a popular comedy show, for instance. This is very ridiculous). And that is, to some extent, a phenomena in all developed countries. It's not even so much that it is anti-intellectual as, well, who would want to be mr. Bean? What do you get if the science characters are the stock mr Bean of comedies? Humans are social creatures, and being laughed at is something most humans instinctively avoid. It's bad enough that the education takes time and there are more and more shinier distractions everywhere; it's bad enough that if you want to study you would have to not go to parties as much as the other kids; but to add to it the low status on the laughing ladder?