This is an open thread, but I wanted to call attention to what I think is a smart and insightful take:
Teresa Thayer Snyder: What Shall We Do About the Children After the Pandemic?
When the children return to school, they will have returned with a new history that we will need to help them identify and make sense of. When the children return to school, we will need to listen to them. Let their stories be told. They have endured a year that has no parallel in modern times. There is no assessment that applies to who they are or what they have learned.
Remember, their brains did not go into hibernation during this year. Their brains may not have been focused on traditional school material, but they did not stop either. Their brains may have been focused on where their next meal is coming from, or how to care for a younger sibling, or how to deal with missing grandma, or how it feels to have to surrender a beloved pet, or how to deal with death. Our job is to welcome them back and help them write that history.
I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement and greet the children where they are, not where we think they “should be.” Greet them with art supplies and writing materials, and music and dance and so many other avenues to help them express what has happened to them in their lives during this horrific year. Greet them with stories and books that will help them make sense of an upside-down world. They missed you. They did not miss the test prep. They did not miss the worksheets. They did not miss the reading groups. They did not miss the homework. They missed you.
Use this thread to talk about whatever you want, but I encourage you to read the whole thing when you get a chance. The article is only a few paragraphs, but it’s totally worth your time.
Open thread.
Immanentize
My students miss the test prep.
debbie
Here, they’re fighting over standardized testing. Adminstrators want to have testing this spring to find out how far behind the students are and then adjust teaching, but parents and others are loudly objecting. One more thing to fight about, on top of reopening schools.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: Her writeup was so good, I had trouble choosing what to include. My impression was that she was talking about younger kids than college, but I suspect there is some truth to this for even college kids. Everyone needs help processing this year.
Starfish
Early on it was hardest on some of the kids who were old enough to realize their routine had changed but too young to understand why.
This article is acting like schools closed everywhere, or they stayed closed everywhere. They did not.
Learning at home was not working in areas with network connectivity issues so they were back in school quickly. Some people in remote areas that were not affected because people do not go there were back to normal fairly quickly.
We chose to stay home this year. With Biden supporting the standardized test this year, our child was supposed to go into a physical building to sit for the test so we opted out this year. We are in an area with a big opt out culture that we normally oppose, but this seems really dumb.
Starfish
@WaterGirl: Yes, Ravitch’s blog is focused on K-12 education.
Matt
I think this is a good idea, and I think that’s exactly why we’re going to do the EXACT OPPOSITE.
We’ve already seen folks trying to destroy teachers’ unions for refusing to go back until vaccinations happen; this crisis will be spun by the same people into an absolute tsunami of “OUR SKEWLS R FAILING” propaganda, with “all we need to do is hand more tax dollars over to the papist-kiddy-diddlers and the charter-vampires and our problems will vanish” at the heart of the message.
Starfish
@debbie: Does the standardized testing involve going and sitting in classrooms for the test?
Is there other district level testing that is also done? Do teachers do other student assessments in their districts beyond the state testing?
Right now, students are getting over tested. They are doing regular assessments in the classroom, taking state assessments in the spring, and so on.
The results of state assessment that is done in the spring usually do not come back soon enough for anyone to update their curriculum to do anything. Our department of education releases the results of the tests that are taken in the spring in August around the time school reopens so good luck tailoring curriculum after school has already started for the year.
StringOnAStick
I read this when it was first published, and it is quite wise. It only makes sense to meet kids where they are and help them process their experiences, and not try to shove them through a compressed catch up period. Covid happened and is still happening; to people who haven’t been alive that long, this is a huge chunk of their lives.
I read a book about the Spanish Flu pandemic and one of the things that struck me was how little it was talked about afterwards; it was so horrific that people just didn’t want to think about it anymore. Of course, the Great Depression hitting a decade later focused attention elsewhere too.
Lapassionara
@WaterGirl: I definitely think we all will need help processing this year.
Delk
On the brighter side, no more Betsy.
Cheryl Rofer
Ah, good. I’ve thought this since the complaints about Zoom schooling started. Meet the kids where they are. Put them in classes of similar ability/achievement without regard to age. Be flexible about next year, too. Some kids will make up all they’ve missed and others may fall farther behind. Don’t expect a “normal” age cohort to graduate until around 2034. And maybe we’ll find that “age cohort” doesn’t mean a whole lot.
I’ve waited for someone with expertise in the field to say it, though
ETA: The Greatest Generation were kids during the 1918 flu pandemic.
debbie
@Starfish:
They haven’t talked about how the testing would go and they’re not talking about conducting any other testing. This is mostly to get an idea of where students are right now.
Teaching hasn’t been a total success. Learning is at best blended, with most still learning remotely. They’re expecting all schools to reopen by mid-March, and this is the first thing they’re hit with. ?
Lyrebird
@Immanentize: You mean for LSATs yes?
Some of my students love the social distancing. Like Cole. But more of them are stressed puppies.
Do you like Paul Campos’ Don’t Go To Law School (Unless)?
Lyrebird
Not sure I totally follow your main point.
Here at least, given how much time upper elem and secondary teachers have had to use wrangling with keeping masks on kids and dealing with totally changed lunch situations, I bet the in-school learning here has been affected.
Jinchi
We just got word that our kid’s schools will be opening up again in a couple of weeks. After a full year online. All the teachers who wanted to have been vaccinated and, fortunately, our town is pretty comfortable with following masking and distancing rules. About 30% of the parents prefer to continue online so they’ve split the days. Teachers will spend mornings teaching in-person classes and afternoons will be online with the rest. Fingers crossed that everything goes well,
Having overheard my fourth grader’s classroom sessions, it’s pretty obvious that many kids have had a hard time keeping focused and motivated. His teacher is great, but at best they’ve gotten about half the education they would have normally, and virtually none of the interpersonal development. My youngest is thrilled to be going back in person. My oldest is worried.
I’m curious what others have experienced with the return to school.
Starfish
@debbie: From what I understand, the federal department of education has said that the testing should happen. They have allowed some flexibility saying that the tests can be normal, online, and/or possibly even shortened.
Our state recently made it clear that it would be done in person in school. They made it clear because we are approaching the deadline for opting out.
There have been some people trying to bring legislation at the state level to waive testing for this year. However, when the federal guidance came out, that made the path a little more difficult.
Some states asked for testing waivers.
SiubhanDuinne
@Immanentize:
That made me laugh. Totally Baud-like (Baudish? Baudesque? Bauditudinous?)
Jinchi
I believe the correct term is Baudacious.
West of the Rockies
My daughter is 19. She grew up in Butte County, 18 miles from the Paradise Camp Fire. Even in our town, classes stopped for a month. We ended up with 15,000 new people overnight, many, many in shelters and homeless encampments. School plays and dances and such were terminated. It was a rough senior year.
Then halfway through her first year of college, Civil hit and classes are now online. She moved to Eugene to go to UofO late next year and establish residency as she finishes her AA online. She hoped to get a job, but, hooray, Covid.
She also is gender-nonconforming and bi. Got called all sorts of foul names for driving with a bi flag when a rolling Trump rally went by.
She is whip smart and strong, but I worry. At least we now have a president and VP who value people and science.
Cameron
So America is going to overcome the ravages of the plague and a dead economy by……making kids take meaningless tests that they can stress over. Not as stupid as getting outraged by the idea of a transgender plastic potato, but approaching that territory (yes, I have RWNJ friends who don’t give a rat’s ass about 500+ thousand dead people, but are apoplectic about non-cis spuds).
MomSense
@debbie:
It makes me crazy when I hear this “kids are falling behind” concern. We’ve been saying this as long as I can remember and all it really means is that we put all the pressure on kids to perform no matter how crappy a situation we provide to them.
We are in major denial about how poorly we are providing for our children.
Nicole
This is great advice to teachers, but I hope parents take it to heart, too. Schools would be best served by support being available to students once they are back in the buildings full time- psychological support, and Thayer’s advice to make resources available so kids can tell their stories through art really affected me. It’s very therapeutic. From my own limited experience as a parent in a school that is offering a combination of hybrid- and all-remote learning, with a pretty diverse body of students (racially, ethnically and economically), there is a small cohort of parents who are really up in arms about the amount of in-school time the kids are getting, and how the curriculum is being executed and the meetings about it always leave me depressed. Because I keep thinking, none of the things they’re obsessing over are what’s important. Half a million Americans dead is what’s important. This all sucks very, very, much, but, no matter how convinced some of them are that other schools are doing things “better,” in fact, we’re all trying to get through this the best we can. And I keep thinking, if there really was some simple solution to the problem, the schools would have found it.
What really grates at me is that some parents are not-explicitly-but-still-clearly saying that they’d be content with the kids losing some of the music, art, dance, etc., classes in order to catch up on math and oh my God, I can’t think of a worse thing to do to kids coming out of what they’ve gone through. There’s a reason those fields are called the humanities.
Anyway, I’m just glum about it, and I hope the kids do get the space to tell their stories when they return. They will be stories worth listening to.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Baudian.
Another Scott
@Cheryl Rofer: A good reminder about the kids of the pandemic. And there were kids who suffered through various depressions and crises in the 1800s. My HS cohort got to grow up with a weeks-long teachers strike and graduate just in time for gas prices to triple and the future to look bleak as the country tried to figure out the way forward.
Every generation is different, but humans can figure out how to overcome problems and move forward, given a fighting chance.
There aren’t going to be one-size-fits-all solutions. Adjustments are going to have to be made because of the (continuing!) pandemic, or lots of people are going to be unfairly kept back. The federal government has a role in ensuring that.
Unfortunately, some sort of testing is probably going to be required because you cannot understand what you can’t objectively measure. It should not be high-stakes testing though – that invites gaming the results and spending too much time trying to do well on the test rather than finding out where everyone is.
I don’t envy the kids and families going through this now. Strength and good luck to you.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Jinchi: Baudalicious.
MomSense
@Nicole:
They’ve been cutting music, art, performing arts, and even recess out of schools for decades now. Test scores have not improved. Learning is supposed to be joyful and creative. I’m pretty jaded because I was teaching from a cart by my last year in public schools.
Suzanne
I kinda want to keep my kids home until they can be vaccinated. My 17-year-old will be able to get it this year, but the 10-year-old and 19-month-old? This is very hard.
J R in WV
@StringOnAStick:
It was so bad that as soon as it was safe to be in crowds again, the Roaring ’20s kicked off with huge partying with dance bands and booze and funny hats. THEN came the depression, after the party, almost like a hangover for the whole world.
Regarding the kids in school… I think we should expect all the kids to run a year late, we should act as if the past year didn’t count at all, and let the kids resume the grade they were in when the shit hit the fan last spring.
If it affects everyone the same way, it won’t matter that kids hit graduation a year late. I was always the youngest person in my class year, because I was born just 3 days before New Years day.
It wouldn’t have hurt me a bit to spend that year at home with mom and I reading together to be a year more mature when I hit grade school. Being the youngest kid was no fun at all.
TheflipPsyD
I read this letter on Diane Ravitch’s blog a few days ago — I have two kids in fourth grade and one in sixth grade, and I thinkt her overall point is excellent. Give the kids time to process everything that has happened, and recognize that current standards are arbitrary and probably don’t apply.
Delaware does state testing (I think the DOE here opted out of it, but I’m not sure). My school district also does something called MAP testing three times a year — the teachers get the results immediately. I know all of my kids’ scores dropped at least 10-20 points — and that was from fall to winter. The MAP testing was done online. I think it makes sense to do assessments to find out where the kids are and then tailor the curriculum for the kids. I can see the benefit of putting kids based on skill level rather than age level, but I think there will be so much push back, it will never happen. I think the most practical thing can be done is for the feds to back off the standards and focus on educational basics basics for each grade level, with a goal that by fifth, eighth and 12th grades, the kids have gained certain skills. The kids in these grades during the pandemic are at a disadvantage with that system, so schools have to figure out for those kids as well. An example, my sixth grader apparently missed a whole lesson long division last year after they went remote and there was no online instruction. He has always done exceedingly well at math (warning annoying parent-brag — he earned the excellence in math award last year). He enters sixth grade this year, gets placed in honors math, and practically fails the class. Took me until Decempher to figure out if it was poor attention, poor instruction, remote learning, etc. In December, after multiple phone calls with his teacher — who believed it was mostly the result of poor attention and having remote instruction, my son told me he didn’t understand long division and he missed much of the basic instruction that would have been done during the srping semester last year.
So, tl:dr, there needs to be an emphasis by administrators that flexibility is needed and schools should not be punished because students are not meeting academic standards that were developed for pre-pandemic times.
Jinchi
I agree, It might go over better if they rebranded it as an assessment to ensure parents aren’t concerned that the results will affect their child’s permanent record.
Jinchi
@J R in WV:
But that isn’t how kids work. A 6 year old isn’t the same as a 7 year old, whether they’ve been attending school last year or not. Neither is the 18 year old who planned on graduating this year. We can’t tell these kids that the work they’ve put in this last year doesn’t count at all. We have to adapt the system around where they’re at now.
dnfree
@Cheryl Rofer: I’m not sure the greatest generation were kids in 1918? Some of them, maybe. My dad was born in 1920 and was a pre-teen and teen during the depression, fought in World War II, and came home and helped produce the Baby Boom. His parents got married in 1917. I guess what surprises me in hindsight is that we never heard any family stories about either World War I or the flu.
My husband’s grandfather died in 1918 of the flu. His mother was a toddler, youngest of three children. We heard a lot about the suffering of that family after losing their father at age 29, but not any stories on a larger scale.
satby
There are entire generations of the children of poor and working poor who have gone through all of the above since forever. I guess we’re all worried about it now that it affects kids of middle and upper classes, huh?
Another Scott
ObOpenThread:
Elections have consequences. Legislation has consequences. I hope our good Senators in DC are paying attention.
Cheers,
Scott.
TheflipPsyD
@Jinchi: My three started hybrid in late January — the two youngest begged us to return, but the oldest was more hesitant. My husband and I have noticed significant improvements in their mood and their willingness to do the remote portions of the school work. Also, the teachers have gotten so much better at remote learning and we as parents have gotten so much better at it as well.
The past six months of experience has helped especially with communication. I also think everyone feels more comfortable with the various communication platforms — we use class dojo, schoology, and something called home access center. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to monitor my kids’ work because it was spread out over two or three systems. Now that we’ve been doing this for a while, I know which teachers use which systems to communicate and where in each system I can find the info I’m looking for.
One major problem for my fourth graders is that they weren’t doing their specials (art, music, gym, library, SEL) and I didn’t know how to monitor and their homeroom teachers didn’t have any access to the info to know to tell the students to complete their work. For the second half, the homeroom teachers are meeting remotely with students on Wednesday for small groups (this is the cleaning day at school). Also, the specials teachers are adding ELA and math instruction to their lessons to pump up the kids’ skills. Apparently, with the hybrid/remote schedule, the kids are losing at least 90 minutes of instructional time a week.
I’ve decided I can’t worry about achievement at this point. I know the kids are doing so much better — mentally and psychologically — in school. COVID testing is so easy now, that once a week we get tested as a family. The whole process (including tracel time) takes no more than 20 minutes, and we get the results within 24 hours. The kids and the school are phenomenal with mask wearing and safety. I’m blessed to live in an area where the majority of people are pro-mask and pro-safety.
ETA: readability
Haroldo
@SiubhanDuinne:
Baudy
Immanentize
@WaterGirl: I know, my poor students are suffering so. One of my con law students is living with her father who has dementia. He got ahold of a knife and cut her. She spent a day in the emergency room. Another student, retired Navy guy (ship engineer who was on aircraft carriers) got Covid from his health care worker wife, it seems. Not too bad a case but sloooow recovery. This would not happen in a normal year. Let alone just the isolation.
zhena gogolia
@Immanentize:
Last semester my students really didn’t want to talk about the pandemic. They wanted to learn stuff. Granted, they’re 18-21, not children.
zhena gogolia
@MomSense:
This country needs to invest in public education big time.
Immanentize
@Lyrebird: Actually my students fear test prep — i.e. for the bar exam. Paul Compost makes me slightly crazy. He is at Colorado U. Law, which is pretty snooty. And like another guy, Tamanaha, he developed a little cottage industries running down law schools. Especially non-elite law schools (but their schools are of course fine). I find these critiques to be more about wanting to get rid of competition than much else. And most law professors, remember, never practiced law. Lots of complaints and warnings, etc. But few suggestions for legal education overhaul that might just effect them.
Right now I think the best advice to a student wanting to go to law school is: If you don’t get into one of the top five or ten schools, just go to the one that is least expensive. The quality of the learning and the opportunities are pretty much the same outside of the most prestigious institution — which are not really great at legal education — but they do sell professional access.
debbie
@MomSense:
I worry about their futures. I can’t imagine how the past year has affected them (all of them) and will impact their futures (not just work-wise).
Immanentize
@MomSense: This is the key. We love live love the children. We worry about them so!!! But we won’t spend a buffalo nickel to improve their actual lives and lots.
Kent
Teacher here and parent of two HS students who have been doing virtual learning since last March but who are scheduled to start hybrid learning next week (2 days in-school, 3 at home in cohorts).
First of all, standardized testing has AWAYS been complete and utter bullshit from a teaching point of view. It is an enormous revenue stream for companies like Pearson. But has always been basically useless for actual teachers. I teach HS science. I can look at incoming student’s 8th grade standardized science or math scores (when they exist depending on the state and year) and basically get a sense of which kids are the bright ones. But the scores tell me NOTHING about what they learned and didn’t learn the previous year.
If you want to do benchmark testing to help teachers then fine. Teachers can construct those tests themselves and give them next fall. If I am teaching 9th grade physical science and want to know what kind of algebra skills my incoming students have, that is an easy enough benchmark test to construct. Maybe 10-20 questions we can toss at them the first week of school to see where we are at. No high stakes at all, just a bit of diagnostic testing to help plan the upcoming curriculum. But it is not something that statewide standardized testing will ever help with in the slightest. Trust me.
As for the upcoming school year? The best solution in my mind is to just triage and move on. Don’t hold kids back a year and “penalize” them for the pandemic. Don’t try to jam them through summer school because they missed a unit on Westward Expansion in history, or are weak on trig. Every child is always weak on some things and strong on others regardless of pandemics. Teachers in the fall of 2021 are just going to have to do their best to triage the past year. Write off things that are not that important. Spend some remedial time on things that might be foundational for future learning (like basic algebra for the sciences). And then move on. Most of what is contained in curriculum standards is somewhat arbitrary to begin with.
And that process is going to be different for every school, every classroom, and every student. No possible way to standardize it at all. And even if you could the results would be meaningless and useless.
Standardized tests are always WAY over-interpreted by so-called experts who don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. I spent 10 years of my life working with and interpreting standardized science testing and results in Texas for the TAKS and STAAR tests. Here is what happens.
Test questions on any standardized test vary both in topic but in difficulty. But testing companies have a great deal of trouble actually gauging the difficulty of test questions. Teachers are actually much better at it than the test writers. So, for example, they always had a 9th grade science test question on heat transfer (convection, conduction, radiation) which is usually something simple. One year the test question was an odd example about heat transfer through the earth’s mantle (showing convection currents within the earth’s mantle) which is not an example used in any textbook, worksheet or curriculum ever. A ton of students got the question wrong simply because they didn’t understand it. And so school districts were saying we need to spend more time teaching heat transfer as the kids are weak on it when no, nothing changed at all. You just had a really shitty and difficult test question on that topic that one year. Next year there will be a shitty question about evolution that will confuse a lot of kids and then you’ll panic about that.
In 20 years of teaching I have never found standardized testing to be of the slightest use in the classroom. It basically tells me which kids are smart and which are not. But nothing more. For example, the kids who score in the top 2% of the English standardized tests are most likely going to ace my biology class. And the kids who score in the bottom 5% are most likely going to struggle. And none of that has anything to do with what science they learned or didn’t learn in middle school.
Nicole
@MomSense:
Oh yeah, and it shreds me, because the school my kid is in does a pretty good job providing those things to the kids, and continuing those classes, even remotely (the school provides musical instruments to the kids, even, making it possible for the ones who can’t afford to buy an instrument to learn to play). And I see the reason education as a whole doesn’t value these things is because we as a society don’t value them. Probably because the arts teach kids how to think critically and WE DON’T WANT THAT. ;)
I’m sorry to hear about your experience, and it made me think of something one parent had complained about, demanding to know why the kids couldn’t just have Art outside in a tent and, I don’t know, make things with leaves and sticks. rather than having it at home remotely. And I thought, the kids’ Art teacher has a Masters’ in their field, and puts a lot of time and thought into the curriculum and that’s not something you can just flip on a dime and drag outdoors to do under a tent. It was such a disrespectful way to talk about what the humanities teachers do.
The majority of the parents raising a stink are the well-off ones, and I swear, I don’t understand why they don’t just hire extra math tutors for their own kids if they’re freaking out so much. In their heads, I guess, they figure they’ll pay for extra art and dance and music for their own kids, and it doesn’t occur to them that the less economically blessed families at the school don’t have that option.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@West of the Rockies: Boy that’s tough. I feel for these kids.
Kent
As a teacher I would also point out that the biggest problem right now in public education is the number of children who have simply disappeared from the system.
In a normal non-pandemic year there are millions of families who are largely transient. Either because they are homeless or home-insecure. Or the kids are bouncing between different families. Or the parents are moving from job to job. In a normal setting there is ALWAYS some neighborhood school where the kids can show up to and enroll because there is no patch of earth anywhere in the US that doesn’t pertain to some school district. So kids can show up, get their subsidized breakfasts and lunches, and have a safe space to spend the day even if the rest of their lives are in chaos.
With schools largely closed across much of the country there are millions of these kids who have just fallen through the cracks and disappeared. School districts don’t know they even exist because they might have moved into the area but never registered. Or they might have known they existed last year but don’t know where they vanished to when they didn’t register this year. Did that child who disappeared from your 4th grade class actually move back to Mexico or another state? Or is she still sitting at home without internet and just not engaging anymore because she is taking care of her baby brothers full time? No one knows.
Nationwide we are talking about millions of kids who have just vanished. That is the real problem. And the one few are really talking about. The upper class white parents are all obsessed about PSAT testing and advanced math pathways and such. But no one seems to be paying attention to the millions of kids at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder who have simply disappeared.
Getting those kids back into public education post-Pandemic is going to be an absolutely Herculean task. But if we don’t do it we are going to have a lost generation that reverberates through our culture and society forever.
Richard Guhl
Lately, I’ve noticed on Facebook that the wingnut Wurlitzer is whipping up hysteria about the rise of gasoline prices that have occurred, with the stated intent of blaming President Biden. But if you dig into the sources of the outrage, you discover outfits like the American Energy Alliance, which, surprise, surprise is funded by oil and gas industry giants such as ExxonMobil and Koch Industries.
Now, you have to ask yourself why that industry would complain about higher prices for the stuff they sell?
You’d think that they’d be popping the corks off the champagne bottles celebrating. Increased profits! Higher dividends! Rising stock prices!
So, what’s the real motivation?
Tender hearted concern for American consumers?
Oh, please!
No, what’s driving this is their terror that, should we transition to an economy based on renewable sources, all those billions of barrels of oil they brag about as reserves in their annual stockholder reports would become worthless.
Immanentize
I need to go write a recommendation for one of my great students who is in the final round of a competition for a 10K scholarship for future LGBTQ+ leaders. She will be such a leader and she really needs the $$$ support. I feel pressure.
Yutsano
@SiubhanDuinne:
Baudesque. I’m going with Baudesque. Because I’m a frog.
Since the thread be open: saw Willie Nelson was trending on Twitter. Naturally I thought the worst. Turns out he’s dropping a new album. At 87. Wow.
TheflipPsyD
@Kent: This is so true and so sad. I work with kids in the juvenile justice system. Many of the kids I see have large gaps in their school history. I can’t tell you how many 14 and 15 year olds I’ve seen who are currently in sixth grade. And often the reason they are still in sixth grade is because they weren’t able to attend school because of unstable housing. I’ve evaluated kids who have never spent one full school year in the same school. The horrible part of it is that often these students have never been identified for special education services. These kids then don’t get the protections associated with being in special ed and schools are all too willing to move them to alternative schools because of their behavior. Without the special education status, schools can remove them from neighborhood schools. And once they end up in the alternative school programs, they lose more instructional time. It is really frustrating and my colleagues and I often feel so helpless because we can see the correlation between all the psychosocial factors, the poor attendance, and the inability to perform at school.
Yutsano
@Immanentize:
I have this mad idea (at my age) to do an MBA/JD. The problem is so few schools offer it and no elite school does. Maybe Yale but I would have to look again. I don’t mind doing the tests and all that. Coming up with the loans at my income level? Yeah that gonna be hard.
Another Scott
@TheflipPsyD: Relatedly, ICYMI – Wonkette:
Nobody is safe until everyone is safe. We have to fight the monsters every single day.
Thanks for the work you do. Hang in there.
Cheers,
Scott.
Cathie from Canada
What makes COVID 19 and 2020 unique is that there has never before been a time in the entire history of humanity when everyone in the world went through the same thing, experienced the same challenges, during the same time period. I don’t know what the impact of this will be, but it will be profound and lasting.
For one thing, I think people generally now have more sympathy for each other – the Floyd protests last June were only the first example of world-wide action about shared concerns. I don’t know what other impacts we will see in the coming years, but I do hope I live long enough to find out.
otmar
My kids are 12 and 14. School right now is two days per week in-person with a split group and Fridays distance only (or major revisions on-site).
They’re coping fine, I don’t expect them show a measurable drop in knowledge acquired. Yes, we’re a privileged position: enough IT, space and bandwidth at home, two dedicated parents who know the subjects (my wife is just at this moment doing Latin prep with kid2).
We had weeks of purely distance learning this year. After the official teams sessions, the kids use the system to stay connected to their friends. The kid’s room has been virtually liked to the room of friends for hours each day.
We’re lucky that both kids are now able to resume sports training. The government allows competitive teams to train if they tests weekly. That really helps keeping them sane.
(Schools also test weekly using self-tests of questionable quality. )
Another Scott
From the nobody could have predicted file, … AlJazeera:
Cockfights should be banned [and the bans should be enforced]. But beyond that, maybe one shouldn’t attach knives to live fighting chickens??!
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Scott:
I’m rooting for the cock.
Kent
That isn’t some Indian thing. Cockfighting everywhere in the world involves attaching metal blades to the feet of the fighting cocks. That’s how they actually kill each other. Otherwise not much would actually ever happen in a cockfight and no one would watch or bet money.
Cockfighting is HUGE in Central America, for example. Some small rural towns in Guatemala actually have municipal cockfighting arenas. But I don’t recall ever hearing about the owners getting their own throats slit. Maybe they use different kinds of blades or something.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Murder most fowl.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
P-h-r-a-s-i-n-g!
:)
Baud
@Immanentize:
That’s Baudtastic!
James E Powell
@Kent:
Fifteen years of teaching, same conclusions. What’s more, I don’t know a single teacher – anecdata, I know – who has found a use for the testing results.
One of the darkly comic experiences is when one’s teaching colleagues who admit this become administrators. Suddenly, those tests become the very reason we exist. It’s positively Soviet
ETA – I agree with every word of your comment.
Starfish
@Lyrebird: The struggles of the kids who have been in school much of this time and the ones who have been at home are going to be different.
Starfish
@Nicole:
Same, there was a friend who was creating so much drama about being excluded from a pod or not having school on Monday’s, and it is like “This year is not a standard year. Go get your kid some remote music class or something so it does not suck and get on with life.”
Another Scott
@James E Powell: Devil’s advocate time.
Doesn’t national education policy have some interest in knowing how the country as a whole is doing in public education, so that policies can be created and resources allocated to address them? And don’t we have an interest in knowing how we are doing in relation to our international peers?
I agree that teachers know what works best in the classrooms with their particular students. But that’s a different question. Or at least it should be, IMHO.
I think there are several baseline purposes of public education:
Testing isn’t an be-all and end-all, and there’s far too much grifting in public education and high-stakes testing that’s counter-productive. I think we all agree with that. But it has a place in setting national policy.
(Our history has an example that might be relevant – the very early days of the space race, and Sputnik.)
An obvious counterpoint is that at least some of the Nordic countries (apparently) have public education systems with no (or little) testing and students spend much of their time playing and doing what they are interested in rather than specific rigid requirements. And they do great. So other models can work, at lest in countries with high incomes and robust public spending. But changing models is a decades long process…
More money in US public education is obviously needed, especially in economically disadvantaged areas, also too.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
It has more to do with real estate values and state bureaucrats being able to rank schools and school districts than anything to do with education. And bullshit like how you decide which principals and administrators to promote, because testing metrics get written into their performance plans. And honestly, we can pretty much replicate the state school rankings in any state to within about 95% accuracy simply by using measures of per-capita income and diversity without looking at a single test score.
satby
@TheflipPsyD: That was pretty much my (snotty, yes) point. School as everyone hopes to go back to only better in some magical way has been an abject failure for thousands of kids each year for decades. Add in the families who “homeschool” with bullshit curriculum, especially in red states where there’s no check on quality at all, and honestly a generation of kids was already lost before the pandemic. But those kids were invisible to the average middle or upper class person. And there won’t be any substantial change, because that would be very threatening to those suburban enclaves with good schools funded by their own local taxes. Schooling in this country today reinforces the caste system we’ve created.
Kent
All of which can be accomplished by MUCH more limited baseline testing using modern statistical sampling techniques. You don’t need to test every kid every damn year in multiple subjects. You could test less than1% of students nationwide and come up with valid results to be used for the purposes for which you suggest. In fact that is exactly how the PISA tests are conducted, which is the only recognized international comparison between countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment They randomly sample about 5000 students within each country to test. Not the entire population.
That is what we do in every other area of research. We don’t require universal trials on 100% of the American population in order to determine vaccine efficacy, for example. We test the vaccine on a miniscule portion of the public and extrapolate. The problem with the educational testing industrial complex is that they are utterly ignorant and incompetent when it comes to statistics. And deliberately so, because using actual statistical techniques would cut into their profit margins.
Starfish
@TheflipPsyD: One of my friends moved back to rural Mississippi. She is a speech therapist. She had at least one patient who was about seven and non-verbal who had never been evaluated to determine the needs.
Starfish
@Another Scott: The international comparison of tests are even worse than comparing the tests within the country. If some country is only testing their best and brightest, their scores will be higher. Countries like ours who do not have a basic social safety net and are expecting schools to solve all of society’s ills are not going to do well. Giving the states more money may or may not resolve this. This lady was running specialty schools for autistic kids where no one working at the schools had any background to be working with autistic kids. She scammed a whole lot of money out of the state education system.
Kent
It is tremendously based on the socioeconomics of the family.
As a teacher I have had dozens and dozens of students from affluent families with deep files full of SpEd or 504 accommodations for various learning disorders and such. In many cases the kid was just and ordinary kid who had no actual need for any of it. But the parents were seeking some advantage. Or turning ordinary teen inattention and lack of motivation into things like documented ADHD and so forth.
At the same time I have encountered dozens and dozens of kids from much lower socio-economic backgrounds who might have truly benefited from systematic evaluations for disabilities and learning disorders and such. But for which none of that has ever happened because the parents don’t know or care and the kid has just slipped through the cracks of the school system.
Lyrebird
Thanks, I really appreciate your whole review. I know you might not see this, but replying in case you do. Most of my pre law students, not that it’s so many, have already been convinced to go into hock to get their bachelor’s in the first place. Not at a door-opening prestigious school. So I feel protective of them. Glad to have some advice from a trusted source. LGM is awesome but all of them are unrealistic at times.
Lyrebird
Please add one more possibility that might not relate to your school but I have seen it alot: some parents in low-income areas do know that for many kids in the struggling schools, going to that resource room means you never get considered college material, you get put in a figurative box with a label. They’re scared to get their kids tested or labeled. I wish that they were wrong, but sometimes they are not.
dnfree
@Kent: My brother and his wife were teachers and I was on the school board in a different district, decades ago. There was a time when standardized testing was useful. During that time, teachers got individualized feedback. My brother might be told exactly which math or reading concepts his class had done worse on than the classes of his fellow sixth-grade teachers. The district could find out that, compared to other districts in the state, or to similar districts, their students knew less about the Civil War, or more about reading maps. I knew teachers who specifically said they appreciated the feedback and what areas they needed to improve.
Now that there’s a suggested Common Core curriculum, constructing tests that give useful information should be a priority. Every article I read indicates that standardized tests aren’t being designed well currently, and I don’t know why. Aggregate numbers and percentages aren’t as useful as specific information.
Kent
@Lyrebird: That could be true too. Although in my case we are talking about students who are in mainstream classes as is the trend in education and the only question is whether they get any special accommodations or modifications from the classroom teacher. Not whether they get sent to the “resource room” which at the schools I teach at is only something that the truly severely disabled students attend. What we call “life skills” students.
Kent
@dnfree: In real life it doesn’t tend to work like that.
At my last school I taught HS physics to pretty much mainstream 11th grade students. Next door to me was the department chair who taught AP Physics to mostly juniors. Across the hall was a woman who had mostly remedial students and she spent a lot of time going back over basic math skills before she could even start doing any kind of numerical physic problems that were not just 5th grade conceptual stuff.
Regardless of how good or bad of teachers we were, my kids were always going to score in the middle. The AP classes with lots of kids bound for Ivy or near Ivy STEM programs were going to be off the charts. They could have all aced the standardized science tests on day 1 before they even took physics. And the remedial classes across the hall were always going to struggle with standardized tests no matter how much effort the teacher put in.
You don’t ever get a high school where you have say 3 physics teachers instructing the same exact mixed demographic of students in identical blended classrooms because the parents and students would never put up with it. Nor should they. You always have sorting by ability. That is actually what AP classes are.
Now things may be different at the elementary level. But my experience is all at the HS level where administrators try to use standardized testing to parse teacher performance when the teachers in question are actually teaching widely disparate groups of students that are not remotely comparable.
Brachiator
@Kent:
You should still be able to evaluate teacher performance. It is not that each physics teacher deliver future potential Nobel laureates. It is that each teacher serves their students well and help them achieve to the best of their ability.
Kent
Of course. You do that through classroom observations and a whole lot of other criteria that are commonly used by administrators. Teacher evaluations are as old as the teaching profession itself.
What you can’t do is use standardized test scores which are not remotely appropriate for that purpose in most instances.
James E Powell
@Another Scott:
Yes, but the standardized test results do not show how the country as a whole is doing. They don’t even show how a particular district, school, or student is doing. The one thing they consistently show is the socio-economic status of the student’s parents.
No disrespect, but I just can’t abide the “competition with other nations” frame. It’s a much longer conversation, but note that data points from other nations are usually flown into arguments without context to address completely American situations
ETA – I see others have addressed these points. I do not want it to look like we are piling on. I am just slower and less articulate than others.
James E Powell
@Kent:
The Los Angeles Unified School District expressly rejects this. In the name of equity and access, students who can barely read are in AP English Comp & AP English Lit.
dnfree
@Kent: I would not expect comparison between AP classes and “regular” physics classes. But in some large districts you might have several different individuals teaching the same material.
As a school board member, I attended statewide conventions. One of the larger high schools in Illinois presented one year on their method. Their biology teachers, for instance, all had the same curriculum and took the same tests over material, developed by the teachers. They were able to see areas where one or another teacher was able to get the material across better, and the teachers could compare notes and learn from each other. It wasn’t a competition.
Speaking of physics, that was my minor and I dearly love it. I had an excellent teacher in a small high school. I specifically did not have my children take physics in a similarly small high school, because it was being taught by someone certified but not knowledgeable in the subject, and lazy besides. I didn’t want the subject ruined for my kids. Standardized testing doesn’t help resolve that kind of issue.
Brachiator
@dnfree:
I don’t know how easy it was for you to do due diligence in evaluating this teacher. Not every parent can take the steps necessary to do this.
As students, we would sometimes spread the word about a good or bad teacher, but sometimes we just put up with it.
Another Scott
@James E Powell: I don’t think everyone is piling on – not at all. I appreciate the information.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
Yes, most schools and districts actually do that sort of thing all the time. They do it with ordinary unit tests, midterms, and final exams that are developed by the teachers and shared across classes. I sat through many many departmental faculty meetings where we cross-compared our test scores on a unit-by-unit basis. That is ordinary good teaching.
But universal standardized state-mandated testing does NONE of that. You are testing all 10th graders in the state on some basic science competency test that has no relation to what class they might be in, and for which teachers don’t even see the scores until the following school year.
The issue isn’t testing. Schools do testing all the time. The issue is state-mandated standardized testing. That is what is largely useless from a teaching perspective.
Mayken
@Jinchi: Same here. ETR is March 15, right after we change to DST. Sigh! I am… not excited. My son, 11, is torn as he wants to see his friends but he really enjoys being at home. The schedule has been so relaxing, TBH. No rushing around in the morning to get ready, no school parking lot crush, completing the online assignments when he’s feeling focused etc. I’m kinda gonna miss it.
Mayken
@J R in WV: My son has the opposite issue: he missed the new CA cut off by ONE day. He’s the oldest in his class every single year. He hates it because he worries it makes him look stupid. He already would have been 3 months shy of his 19th birthday if he was to graduate on time. I think it may be really hard to convince any of us that being a 19 year old Senior is a Good Idea. I’d probably help him get a GED and go on to community college before I make him do that
ETA: my older brother was in the same boat as my son and getting him to finish HS was a battle for my parents. The only thing that kept him there was my father would have literally kicked him out of the house if he hadn’t. SMDH. I have no desire to do that to my kiddo.
TBH I really think it was a Bad Idea to make 18 the age of majority. Mixing “adults’ and children in K-12 schools is pretty clearly a recipe for disaster. 18 year old Juniors 19 year old Seniors? Very Bad Idea.
I think we need to consider completely changing the model for HS for this generation of kids, but I know that’s never gonna happen.