Education Usually Fails: Lapham's Quarterly 14-4.

 Lapham’s Quarterly 14-4: Education (2022) Every society ever known has some method of passing on its culture, its values, customs, knowledge etc to the next generation. All societies also mark the transition from childhood to adulthood, and well as other changes in status. However, the new generation doesn’t grow up in the same environment as their parents, and so the transfer of culture is always incomplete and variable. Stories and instructions will not have the same meaning and force for the children as they had for the parents. I take it as a given that raising one’s children is one of the main drivers of cultural change. For no matter how hard we try, something is always lost in translation.

     This collection focuses more on the process, and mostly on formalised institutional education, which began with literacy in Sumer. Literacy’s great advantage is that it enables people to record and reflect on their experience. That’s also its great disadvantage. People who feel it’s important to write about education, especially if it’s their own, usually have an axe to grind. In fact, literature generally is one long wail of complaints. Even fantasy, which implicitly complains that real life lacks its intensity. Much of the evidence in this collection explicitly or implicitly complains that education, especially formal education or schooling, not only fails to achieve its ostensible goals but is more or less actively hostile to them. 

     Depressing. 

     For the record, I often felt frustrated by my work as a teacher. When I reflect on my career, I have only one serious regret, that I didn’t agitate for the abolition of the grading system. We group students by age range, so that in a typical class there is about a one year range in chronological age, and as often as not more than that in developmental age. To expect them all to be capable of arriving at the same place after a course of study is a kind of delusion. That’s bad enough, but focusing on a good grade as the purpose of learning doesn’t encourage students to actually learn anything. What they actually learn is how to ace the test, not how to understand material they have studied. Worse, grades encourage invidious comparisons. 

     The above paragraph is not too far off the most common tone of the selections in this compilation. So I’ll try to strike a positive note: Students do want to have a pleasant experience of school, and any teacher who tries to provide it will be rewarded by seeing their charges grow and develop as persons, and achieve insights and accomplishments that delight them.

     The student-teacher nexus is one of the most intense personal relationships, which no doubt explains that everyone has strong feelings about their schooling. We use the verbs “teach” and “learn” as if they were transitive verbs denoting independent processes. As if teaching a student was like painting a wall. As if learning a subject was like eating a meal. In fact, teaching and learning denote the same reality. Neither can occur without the other. It’s a reciprocal process: the teacher and student both teach and both learn. Each changes the other. I’m grateful to the many students who taught me what I needed to learn.

     Another recommended compilation. ****

Why grades and scores are bad incentives

 

An edited letter to the New York Times in 2019. The paper had run a story about Alfie J Kohn’s campaign against standardised testing.

Alfie Kohn [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/fighting-the-tests/] is right. "People respond to incentives" is true, but when the incentive is a letter or number in a little box on a report card, the incentive is unlikely to produce learners.

Anecdote: Early in my career, one of my students achieved 19/20 on a short-answer test. I saw this student in the hall, and explained the incorrect answer. The student's eyes glazed over, the first time I'd ever seen that cliche operate in real life. The student didn't care about knowing the right answer, they cared only about the score. 19/10 = 95%, that's A+, that's all that mattered. I found out later that too many of my "best" students had exactly the same attitude.

Tests and exams are at best diagnostic. For the student and teacher, they may tell how far the student has come since the last test, and may provide guidance for future learning. For other people, such as college admissions officers, they provide some data (mostly over-rated and misunderstood) about the odds that the student will continue learning.

You might as well grade students on their height. Tall ones worked hard to add an inch or two, the lazy ones just sat around and shrunk. Silly? Sure, but that's how people too often think about students. In a typical class, there's about a one year range in chronological age, and usually much more than that in psychological age, which includes cognition. We humans develop at different rates, and development is never uniform. To expect grades to show that some students are "better" than others is asinine.

The supporters of grading, significantly I think, are mostly academics, whose working life consists of grading students. It's difficult to accept that a tool you've been using all your working life is not fit for purpose.

Unfortunately, people treat grades as rankings. They look on them like scores in a game. Winners score high, losers score low. That is no way to incentivise learning.

The only real regret I have about my teaching career is that I didn’t oppose the misuse of tests and exams.

 

Innumeracy rampant: Suppose average class size were 25

Innumeracy 2: If average class size were 25 students

Let’s suppose the Ontario Secondary Teachers took the Ford government at its word, and negotiated an average class size of 25 students. (1)

Given a high school of 1120 students (the number I used in Innumeracy 1).
Number of classes would be 1120/25, or 44.8, or 45 in round numbers. So we would need 45 teachers for those classes.

But in any one period, 1 in 5 teachers has a prep period (also used for “standby”, or emergency supervision). So we would need 45 x 1.25 = 56.25 teachers to cover a full timetable. We would also need a principal, a vice-principal, and three guidance counsellors. (2)

That comes to a total of 61.25 teaching staff. (The 0.25 teacher would be one hired to teach one class.)

That results in a student-teacher ratio of 1120/61.25, or 18.3:1. That’s well below the 22.5:1 that the Ford government decided to raise to 28:1. (3)

Footnotes

(1) In the past, school boards have resisted average class size numbers. They did the arithmetic, and understood what it actually meant.

(2) Some school boards would add a half-time vice-principal, which would bring the staffing total to 61.75, and a student teacher ratio of 18.2.

(3) Because some classes will be capped around 22 to 24 because of safety or limited facilities, the larger classes would be over 30.

Innumeracy rampant: Student-teacher ratio and average class size

Innumeracy 1: Why the Student-Teacher ratio is not the Average Class Size.

The Toronto Star and the CBC constantly use “average class size” when reporting education news. For example, the Toronto Star recently reported that the Ontario Minister of Education was offering to reduce the average class size from 28 to 25. He did no such thing. He offered to reduce the student-teacher ratio, which is something quite different.

Here’s an example showing the difference, using the 28:1 ratio that the Ford government initially mandated.

Given: A high school of 1120 students.

At 28:1, this school will be assigned 1120/28, or 40 teachers.

Of these 40 teachers, one is a principal, one is a vice-principal, three are guidance counsellors (1).

Thus there are 35 teachers available for classroom teaching. A teacher is assigned 4 teaching periods in a 5-period day. Therefore at any given time, 28 teachers are in class, and 7 have a preparation period (2). This means that the average class size is 1120/28, which is 40 students per class, not 28. (3) (4).

The 22.5:1 ratio that existed prior or the Ford government’s changes came about because of attempts to keep average class sizes below 30. Even so, class sizes above 30 were common.

Footnotes:

(1) The Provincial average is 396 students per guidance counsellor. In larger schools, there will be two vice-principals.

(2) If an emergency absence occurs, a teacher may have to do a “standby” during a prep period.

(3) Special education classes are capped at 20 students. Safety regulations limit lab and shop classes, generally around 24. Some other classes (music, arts) are limited by the available space and supplies, generally also around 24. Thus, the remaining classes will be well above 40 students per class.

(4) Senior students may qualify for “spares”, but these days most opt for taking additional courses instead, so as to be better perpared for university or college.

Error corrected 20191102

Some ruminations about school

People who find school easy (roughly the top 10%) often have trouble at college and university, even if they've had to do homework. I was one such (in high school, I did all my math homework between classes), and had to take a year off after my 2nd University year. That also gave me some time to reflect on what I really wanted to do. It would have been better to have taken that year immediately after high school.

School is easy for some people because (even when the program is "streamed" by ability) the curriculum has to be aimed at the average student. But there is huge variation in both age (hence cognitive development), and innate and acquired abilities. In addition, human development is not a nice steady progress. It's extremely variable, both over time and in physical, cognitive, and emotional qualities. What a kid cannot learn in February, they may well have been able to learn in September, and vice versa. Not to mention that family life, socioeconomic environment, random crises, etc increase already existing differences among students.

The surprising thing is that the schools do as good a job as they do. In my experience that has more to do with the student-teacher relationship than anything else. If you like kids, like teaching, and like your subject, the students will co-operate with you and learn as well as they can.

Politically, the biggest problem IMO is that people seem to think "teach" is a transitive verb, like "paint". It ain't. If you paint a wall, it's painted, and it stays painted. If you teach a kid, they may or may not learn, and will probably forget most of what they've learned anyhow.

IOW, "teach" is what a teacher does and "learn" is what a student does. These two verbs together describe a complementary, symbiotic almost, relationship. If that relationship fails in some way, you have a problem. However, the critics of schools apparently want some kind of people-proof method, that, if applied correctly, will turn out the widgets, er, sorry, _graduates_ they want.

Based on a Usenet post 20190908; edited 20190910 and 20191015

1950s Teachers' aids

     Velma MacKay, ed. Arts and Activities (March 1950, Vol.27 No.2) A magazine for elementary and middle school teachers, very interesting as a historical document. Most of the contributors are teachers describing activities and teaching aids. The magazine is clearly aimed at teachers with limited budgets and supplies. the publishers promote other titles aimed at other subject areas. The ads promote everything from hectograph masters of arithmetic and spelling exercise sheets, to film strips “centered around a new activity program” with and without recordings, and art supplies.
     I have no idea how the magazine was received, but the whole thing has the air of making do. There's an article about how to use papier mache, a discussion of sand paintings, instructions for making kites, and so on. This magazine is for teachers eager to widen and enrich their pupils’ school experience beyond the 3Rs, which in 1950 was still an ambition not so much discouraged as benignly disregarded. Nevertheless, the assumption motivating the magazine and its advertisers is that these teachers have a great deal of freedom in devising lessons and “activity programs” within the guidelines of the curricula. The horrors of objective testing and narrowly defined learning outcomes were still in the future.
    I found the contents variable. But as information about teaching and learning in mid-20th century America it was well worth the time spent reading it.