I appreciate the UK being a guinea pig and providing more concrete data for future researchers to understand just how bad protectionist acts like Brexit are. While economists could simulate how bad things would be, that would never be as good as studying the real thing.
Unfortunately now my country, the US, will be giving even more data points showing the same thing a decade from now.
Oh, I don't disagree with that at all. My state is a bit of an outlier, in that our teachers ARE more lowly paid than national averages, but then my locality is one of the higher paying supplements to teacher pay.
Why do I say pay is a problem? I've seen what happens to many good teachers. They get burned out from having to deal with trouble maker kids who if they get disciplined or get bad grades the parents go ape shit with allegations of racism, sexism, abuse, whatever. They get burned out from dealing with helicopter parents. They get burned out from, in most parts of the country, being governed by elected shitty school boards. They get burned out because some miscreant has an IEP and a 504 plan and so his stealing from classmates and being constantly disrupted is considered a manifestation of his disability and everyone else just has to deal with it.
Good teachers have job flexibility. I've seen multiple _great_ teachers go to work for companies like IXL where their starting salaries are always higher than what they were making as seasoned teachers. Others go the administrator route and become principals, superintendents, etc. Others go to teach at private schools where the pay is often better.
What I would propose is basically 3 things:
1. Get rid of habitually low performing teachers--every year get rid of your worst teachers
2. Increase pay for high performing teachers
3. And the kicker that I have no idea how to do--allow schools and teachers to apply standards and discipline without fear of lawsuits.
A lot of people would like AI assist.
*Citation needed.
"I like things simple. I really don't deal with milage, or all the other things I consider minutiae. I deal with simple numbers. What this means is not filling out milage reports and the other stuff that clutters up to work. Perhaps I'm eccentric. But I like simple because my actual work is quite complex."
As is my work -- however, my mileage report isn't "minutiae". It' averages $300-$500 every two weeks (I do a lot of driving --- particularly for projects). And the process isn't complicated. Basically a date, destination and total miles per line. In a text file. No clutter -- just a review of my travel calendar for 5 mins every two weeks and another 2-5 mins to transfer that to my expense report. Automagically appears in my pay check 8 days later.
Whoever signed up for that list should get perma banned from running Firefox.
I think that plays into it too. In many--most--school districts, teachers effectively have tenure--it takes serious malfeasance or illegality to get fired.
Years of bad performance isn't enough.
I think part of the solution has to be dramatically increasing teacher pay but you also have to make the working environment better.
By weeding out the non-performers you can provide the (few?) others who can do the work and learn with an opportunity to do just that.
There is basically no, or very little, support for this position, and even stating it publicly would get you called a racist.
I just don't see a solution.
If you've looked at US PISA scores broken down by ethnic group you know that the US scores near the top compared to countries of primarily that ethnic group. So the whole hand-wringing about US schools being worse than other places in toto is not true.
Pretty much all of the US ethnic groups do better than those from the "origin" countries do. US Asians outperform East Asian Asians. US Euros outperform Europeans. US Africans outperform African Africans (though there is a less data for the continent).
The apparent problem is that the ratios of people at that level does not match the distribution in the general population. asians will be over represented. lacks will be underrepresented (by quite a bit).
The real problem is the expectation that those ratios should match, and that their NOT matching is an indication of "racism" (personal, systemic, whatever).
You chose to post this anonymously. I don't blame you. Even discussing the possibility of this is a hard thing to discuss. I don't see a societal solution.
Actually most of those house are now occupied. The "train stations to nowhere", supposedly an indicator of the imminent collapse of their economy, are now surrounded by industries and towns.
No they're not. You're exaggerating. The majority of these developments are still empty. China's declining birth rates coupled with the increased mortality from COVID have thrown in a monkey wrench into their planning. Up to 80 million units are still empty, with slim prospects for ever being bought or even used as social housing. Most of them are just crumbling ruins at this point. Even where people have moved in (often with heavy government subsidies, essentially turning units into an eastern Section 8 housing project), occupancy is still under 10%. They simply built too many units, and there aren't enough people to live in them. Some developments are being reclaimed for agriculture, with farmers grazing livestock and plowing fields on the strips of land between crumbing concrete structures.
And Ford received nearly triple BYD https://www.cbtnews.com/ford-s...
What's your point?
I know another guy in the process of fucking up the global economy.
I have been at parent teacher nights where teachers are proud of their incompetence. The grade 5, 6 and 7 teachers were laughing that they didn't understand the math curriculum, and one of them made a joke (paraphrased) “word problems are difficult to understand, so I get together with other teachers, and try to understand them.” Why? This is primary school math, there is no excuse for any adult to struggle with any of it. If by grade 4, you can't compute 1×1 12×12 in under 1-minute, on a test sheet, you're falling behind, by grade 8, you should be comfortably performing simple variable algebra in your head, without a calculator.
I attended a (public) middle school teacher meeting about two years ago. The 8th grade math teacher said "I am supposed to be teaching XYZ for the 8th grade statewide standardized math test. I can't do it. Around 1/3 of my students can't multiply two numbers. They don't know." (She went on in this vein--it wasn't laughing or flippant, it was a cry for help)
She didn't say 1/3 of her students struggled with some of their multiplication tables, or algebraic concepts, it was that they literally didn't know how multiplication works.
I used to quiz my kids every morning with short "head math" problems starting in K and 1st grade. I started simple "2+2"
One of my kids ended up being an academic high flyer. The other still, to this day, struggles with math. He somehow worked his way into an advanced math class, but he has to work his ass of in there for Bs and Cs.
I am very sympathetic to people who aren't mathematically inclined, but these problems are embarassingly easy.
UC San Diego has a good reputation. Not Harvard good, but it is one of the best public educations in the US. I am seriously surprised, especially considering their average Math SAT is 700.
It makes you wonder what the student distribution looks like. Presumably not a remotely normal distribution if the avg SAT is 700 and "one in eight" freshman need this remedial math class.
The main one is that they took fewer kids from good high schools and more kids from bad ones. What makes a high school good or bad? The attitudes and abilities of the students, which are strongly correlated with the wealth of their parents. These also fall generally along racial lines, but then America sets income opportunities, from above and below, largely along racial lines.
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Musk is a Nazi: salutes, dog whistles, nationalist beliefs, natalism, history revisionism. Looks, talks, and quacks.
So I have a serious question for you (this comes on the heels of me doing a deep dive on PISA testing results, and it honestly has been weighing heavily on my mind lately).
I 100% believe that socioeconomic factors are probably the single biggest factor in academic success.
Is there any possibility that average population-wide genetics play a role in academic success? (I very much do NOT want to use the word "race" because I think it's basically meaningless). Is it possible that, on average, Americans with a large Far East Asian genetic component perform academically better than, on average, American students with primarily Western European backgrounds? What about those with large sub-Saharan African genetic components? Etc.
The question really is--is it _possible_?
My answer is that yes, I think it's possible. I don't think academic achievement is the most important thing out there, but it's important.
And, if it's possible? What the heck do we, in a free and democratic society do about it?
It's bleak and dystopian to think about!
My oldest son goes to a high school on the other side of the country. It has an award winning Engineering magnet program. Every year multiple students from this school go to Ivies and other top 25 schools.
Simultaneously, ~55% of the school is poverty level, ~45% is low English proficiency, and about 30% of the students are considered habitually absent (meaning a minimum of 10 _unexcused_ absences).
My son is taking APs, very intensive engineering classes, and participating in multiple extracurricular activities.
In the same school building, more than half of the students regularly rank in less than the 30th percentile on both math and English end of grade tests.
What I commonly hear from teachers and administrators--if you're a teacher teaching classes of the poverty level non-English speakers, what good does it do to fail them? They're just going to drop out anyway. Maybe if you encourage the kids along, a few will get something out of it?
It's an awful situation to be in. The school has at least a dozen ELL teachers. The school offers pretty much all the standard freshman courses (English, US History, etc) in both Spanish and English versions. This drains so many resources from other parts of the school. The arts program operates on a shoestring and all the arts programs are constantly fundraising to keep the lights on.
The soccer team is damn good, though..
"You can have my Unix system when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers." -- Cal Keegan
