Pay attention to Joel Klein, the outgoing chancellor of the New York City Department of Education’s, advice:
First, it is wrong to assert that students’ poverty and family circumstances severely limit their educational potential. It’s now proven that a child who does poorly with one teacher could have done very well with another. Take Harlem Success Academy, a charter school with all minority, mostly high-poverty students admitted by lottery. It performs as well as our gifted and talented schools that admit kids based solely on demanding tests. We also have many new small high schools that replaced large failing ones, and are now getting outsized results for poor children.
Second, traditional proposals for improving education—more money, better curriculum, smaller classes, etc.—aren’t going to get the job done. Public education is a service-delivery challenge, and it must be operated as such. Albert Shanker, the legendary teachers union head, was right when he said that education has to be, first and foremost, about accountability for “student outcomes.” This means there must be “consequences if children or adults don’t perform.”
The Harlem Success Academy requires parental involvement. Far too rare today. Wonder why the Chinese, Korean, and Indian students in our schools do so well? Family involvement.
However, there is one thing I’m curious about. The New York City Department of Education employs 135,000 people. I wonder how many of them are teachers in the classroom, the real “education barricades”? A key problem in public education is far too high a spear to tip ratio.
I agree totally about parental involvement, and I think it’s a big feedback loop for “quality schools.” Concerned parents flock together.
I also agree on spear & tip, and have a story about that. My dad worked as an administrator with a Famous Teacher (major motion picture). The Famous Teacher was great in the classroom, but like many didn’t like to take his turn in the noontime supervision rotation (for administration and teachers). So my dad had to hire a few people, and it cost. With the city employee cost structure, you can’t bring someone in for 1hr/day, pay them cash, and send them on their way. They become a long term part of that spear.
We talk about the growth of non-teachers in k-12 and colleges, but I’m afraid part of the story is that the role of “instructor” has been narrowed.
It’s good to know that we’re finally figuring out how to run a really good 19th century school.
The definition of good in this case is almost entirely about tests. Which test the acquisition (usually very temporary) of data of dubious value, all of which will be freely available to students online for the rest of their lives.
They are solving the wrong problem.
The idea of school still, today, is to cram little heads full of data. The teacher is presumed to have a monopoly on this data, spends his or her time imparting it to kids, who demonstrate the success of the system by regurgitating that data onto a standardized test form. Yay! Success! Problem solved!
But of course teachers (and the teacher’s textbook) no longer have a monopoly on data. Data is everywhere, all the time, and essentially free. So what is needed is not primarily the transmission of data from one brain to another, but the teaching of skills for using the fire hose of data that is all around us.
But it’s lovely to know that we have a pretty good handle on an almost completely irrelevant process.
Harlem Success is another case of selection bias in action. Ravitch claimed, and I have not seen otherwise, that no school has had sustained improvements w/o changing its population.
Steve
agree w/ Steve. I suspect if we took a group of schools, made one a magnet school w/lottery admission and changed nothing else, the magnet school would develop better scores solely due to selective entrance.
Also Harlem Select spends a lot more; more teachers, smaller class sizes, longer school days/year. Better building amenities and science labs.
Interesting to find that Harlem Success Acadamy has a higher non-teacher ratio on staff (50.9%) than neighboring traditional public schools (14.5%), though it’s not clear whether they are administrators, fundraisers, PR flacks, or people who actually provide instruction or services to kids.
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2010/06/more-on-steve-brills-imperviousness-to.html
What’s interesting in this small sample is that the teachers at HSA tend to have less qualifications and fewer years experience. I wonder if we adopted a sabermetric approach to teaching we would conclude that the first five or six years of teaching are the most productive and cost-efficient, and after that the school should release them?
Wonder why the Chinese, Korean, and Indian students in our schools do so well? Family involvement.
Prove it! In the paper “Asian American Educational Achievements: A Phenomenon in Search of an Explanation” the researchers discovered that the parenting styles and values found in East Asian-American homes tend to correlate with lower test scores when they are found in white homes.
It’s funny that you have to do a bit of searching in order to discover more about their methods. After reading about what they do at HSA I conclude that they’re little different than the KIPP schools.
The secret isn’t involved parents, it’s more time on task. School days run 9 hours long and the school year adds another month of instruction. Then, as Steve mentioned, there is the issue of selection bias. Every parent who enters the lottery is willing to meet the conditions of parental involvement and their child is also willing to submit to a more time-intensive school year.
As for parental involvement let’s just call it what it is, more time on task for the student. There is no magic involved in having a parent, say from Mainland China and who is English illiterate, help a child with their reading or schoolwork. The gain comes from the additional immersion that the child experiences from doing homework. If the school encouraged this time be spent with friends doing homework, then people would be raving about friend involvement being the miracle cure.
If a “normal” student achieves subject mastery in 6 hours then all that HSA is doing to match the success rate is subjecting their students to 9 hours of instruction and they’re providing supervision of the learning process to insure that the student doesn’t get distracted or choose to spend time on other activities.
What’s interesting in this small sample is that the teachers at HSA tend to have less qualifications and fewer years experience.
At similar schools the higher staff ratio is usually focused on helping the students to stay focused on the work. These students, in their experiences at public schools, most likely showed a lower threshold for concentration compared to other students. This additional staff works to keep the students focused. This is all well and good for performance measured in the immediate and it might be well and good if this form of concentration discipline can lead to behavioral change and greater student control of self-discipline, but if self-discipline has a high heritability component then we;ll see a reversion to old patterns as the student is weaned from high levels of adult supervision.
Keep in mind that most of the gains that we’re seeing are in young children or in a self-selected sample who’ve stayed with the program for a number of years while some of their classmates have dropped out. This is important because the program works by very rigidly controlling the environment of the children. Outcomes in life are a combination of students acting on their behavioral impulses and of external environmental forces. When children are young their behavioral impulses are more easily overruled by external environmental forces. Parents tell them when to eat, when to go to bed, when to stop watching tv, which friends they can see, which books to read, etc. When kids get older they start taking more control of their environment. HSA’s formula exploits the fact that they’re rigidly controlling the environment of these children – long school hours, longer school year, more direct supervision of the children during the school day, requirements that the parents implement more supervision of their children in the home by focusing on school work. This is easier to do when the kids are young than when they are older, so as kids mature and start exerting more control over their environment there will be more rebellion against strict supervision and a self-selection out of the program and back into a more relaxed public school environment. Those kids who stay are choosing to submit themselves to a rigid oversight regime and so they’re allowing environment to swamp the influence of their own natural inclinations and impulses.
As for the teachers themselves, it appears that HSA is following the model of similar schools, and if this is indeed so this means that the teachers, even though less trained and less often certified, are likely more intelligent than regular teachers. The high turnover is par for the course for Teach For America type programs. High achieving Ivy Leaguers with a desire to do social good go and teach in the ghetto for a few years and then burn out. This method can work for niche schools but it is not scalable for every troubled school in society.
Shorter version of TangoMan: they’re negroes and they’ll only appear to do well if kept under rigid control and in the end it’s just too darn expensive. Might as well move them straight from maternity hospital to prison.
That was just pathetic, Michael.
Drew:
Why do you suppose Tango is not at OTB any longer? He was banned from commenting there. You want to know why? Because I was right about him and you are wrong. Tango is not a misunderstood conservative, he’s a hardcore, committed racist.
Reynolds,
It’s interesting that you’re privy to the details of my banning at OTB when I’m unaware of them. I see that you’re still playing up your usual Savonarola schtick but your libels are seen by most everyone as a product of a sick mind than they are as references to reality. Why don’t you try to stick to substance and if you want to aim criticism at me then criticize the substance of my comments rather than the foaming at the mouth about the imagined devil your troubled mind paints me to be.
What points that I raised in my comments do you dispute?
It is kind of weird, Tango. Don’t your two long comments reduce to “success can be discounted?”
To what end? Simply to make the perfect the enemy of the good?
To what end? I think that understanding what is going on in the process helps us better understand the trade-offs involved and whether the methodology is scalable.
I’ve looked at the KIPP schools in a lot of detail and it looks like HSA is following a close template. The secret to their success is 50% more school time over a year. (KIPP also runs mandatory half-day classes on Saturday.) KIPP also has their teachers on-call where the students and parents can call them in the evening to help with homework issues. These teachers are chosen for high levels of enthusiasm and dedication but the flipside is that this total immersion environment leads to high burn-out rates.
If people think that the success of students is purchased just by having parents be involved, then they’re operating under a false impression of what’s going on. If such systems are duplicated imperfectly, such as doing away with the 50% more instruction time and just focusing on having parents read to their children, then the results won’t replicate. Same with teacher unions demanding that the work commitment of teachers not change under this new methodology. If the kids are there for longer days, and on Saturdays and for an extra full month, and they rely on communication with the teacher in the evening, then how are school boards going to create substitute systems to provide that teacher involvement while keeping teachers working in the modes that they’re currently working?
These education experiments are great as marginal players because they sweep up kids who are willing to sacrifice in order to reap the benefits who, absent such experiments, would have languished in an education-factory setting. These education experiments are not good as pilot projects though because I don’t believe that they are scalable. Demanding that educationally deficient children invest 50% more time in their schooling compared to non-deficient children is, I believe, something that will not fly in most communities. It becomes a political question and it really gets heated when you overlay race on the issue.
Lastly, I don’t like seeing comments like “Wonder why the Chinese, Korean, and Indian students in our schools do so well? Family involvement” unless they’re properly supported. If you read the Sue and Okazaki paper you see that they just falsified the claim that parenting style is the principal cause of Asian student success. What’s humorous about the paper is that they set out to answer the question in their title and all they do is falsify some hypotheses but come no closer to finding out why Asian students are so successful in school. Of course, they don’t broach the issue of genetics but that’s not a deal-killer for they still show that the common wisdom is without foundation in reality and that’s good enough for a research paper.
According to the Census Bureau children in America living in all-Asian households are significantly more more likely to be highly engaged with school than other groups. I’m open to explanations other than parental influence to explain this but I’m pretty skeptical that it can be explained by innate characteristics or being learned from their non-Asian classmates. Again, according to the Census Bureau about 80% of kids with Asian backgrounds live in households with both parents and many with grandparents.
My speculation would be that the study you cite is defining “parental involvment” in too limited a fashion. In high school and college I had a number of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean friends. My acknowledgely anecdotal experience is that these friends were subject to family pressures far beyond those my other friends and acquaintances experienced.
My dad, used to tell the story of a factory study. They repainted the walls green, and productivity increased, before tailing off. So they panted the walls gray, and productivity increased again. This despite gray being the original color.
There are two lessons possible. One is that the “green” change was illusory, th other is that “change works.”
I’m in the second camp, and more willing to accept changes and experiments that work. You can always change and experiment again, later.
Now that said, I’m not really seeing how reducing parental involvement to equivalent hours really helps us, in a practical sense. When we can get them, parental hours are free. That’s the best kind.
Are you suggesting that since hiring the same hours is equivalent in outcome, that should be preferred?
(My apocryphal story is that my friend, when answering phone calls from her nieces and nephews started with “is your homework done?” Show me a culture where uncles and aunts grill for homework, and I’ll show you a culture that learns.)
Late point of clarification. This statement by me:
“Also Harlem Select spends a lot more; more teachers, smaller class sizes, longer school days/year. Better building amenities and science labs.”
may not be correct. It was made based upon a different Harlem charter school. It appears from my link above that Harlem Success spends a lot of money on salaries compared with the public sector (though offset by lack of union safeguards), but class sizes might even be slightly larger and I didn’t see anything about facilities.
On the Asian question, it would be nice if the stats could break out children of first generation Americans. Immigration is a risky business — can’t let the children screw up.
One thing that stood out about the Census study Dave cites is that eating dinner at least five times a week with a parent is negatively correlated to achievement. I assume that is because achievement better correlates with sports, clubs, and religious activities and these activities put at risk dining plans.
Naturally, it’s difficult to determine the causative factors for educational success with any precision. I doubt there is one factor “to rule them all” that can bring about a substantial positive change, so I’ll simply add a couple of factors that I think most people underrate:
1. Peers. I still remember the effects of my peers during high school. I’m starting to see the effects of peers on my own kids in grade school. When it comes to factors, I think peers are probably more important than teachers. See also this famous and controversial paper.
2. Culture. This is anecdotal, but I have several 1st, second and third generation Asians in my family (Japanese and Korean). They push education too much IMO – if it’s not straight A’s then the kid isn’t trying hard enough. The pressure is enormous.
3. Genetics. I don’t have the links at the moment, but some studies on adopted children and twins show that a child’s educational achievement more closely follows the genetic parents than the adoptive parents. So, while parenting is obviously important, is may be much more important to not be a bad parent than it is to be a good parent. IOW, parents can wreck a child through abuse or neglect, but the difference between an average parent and a great parent probably isn’t all that great and are likely trumped by genetics and other factors.
According to the Census Bureau children in America living in all-Asian households are significantly more more likely to be highly engaged with school than other groups.
From the study you cite:
How would you fit a line to that graph and derive a formula for the line. Whites are at 59% and blacks are at 54% and yet the disparity in outcomes is significant. Asians are at 71% but their gain over whites is not as large as the Black-White gap.
I’m open to explanations other than parental influence to explain this but I’m pretty skeptical that it can be explained by innate characteristics or being learned from their non-Asian classmates.
Look at the Korean Adoption studies where young Korean babies were randomly assigned to white parents in the US (parents didn’t get to chose the babies and the parents came from across the socioeconomic spectrum.) The outcomes for the Korean adoptees diverged from those of the biological children in the same families and converged to a Korean-American mean on many metrics. If family environment is so important then why weren’t the Korean adoptees performing similarly to their siblings, the biological children of their parents, and why weren’t the Korean adoptees performing in line with socioeconomic expectations associated with their families?
Again, according to the Census Bureau about 80% of kids with Asian backgrounds live in households with both parents and many with grandparents.
I’m not discounting this effect, but that’s a different point than the one that you raised, which was that it was the customs unique to Chinese, Korean and Indian families that were responsible for better school performance. If it was simply a matter of children being raised in two parent households then we should expect that black children raised in two parent households will perform on par with Chinese-American children raised in two parent households.
My speculation would be that the study you cite is defining “parental involvment†in too limited a fashion.
Focus on education, very high expectations placed on the children, strict discipline, respect for parents, etc. The factors which shape the Asian student to exhibit behaviors towards study and school which don’t rely on constant parental haranguing. If the model is that parental practices and expectations towards children’s education yields better educational outcomes in the children, then we should expect that the same behaviors resulted in the same outcomes irrespective of the race of the children. That model fails.
Andy raises some very good points. The effect of peers has been documented very well by Judith Rich Harris in two groundbreaking books and she devastates a number of cherished educational models.
The culture of academic achievement and it’s often monomaniacal nature in Asian households yields worse outcomes when applied in white households. Why? If the process of applying pressure to children yields good outcomes why does it work in one set of families but not another set of families?
Back to the census study. I gave it a closer look.
School engagement, 12-17 year olds:
Blacks = 51.8%
Non-Hispanic Whites = 50.6%
Hispanics = 54.8%
Asian = 67.7%
Correlate school achievement against school engagement and you’re going to get a very weak correlation.
I get frustrated by these conversations — even setting aside Tango’s inevitable wedging of race into the conversation — because they start from an assumption I believe is unfounded: that school is education.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, all college drop-outs.
Louis Armstrong, Will Rogers, Bogie, Bono and Brando, Quentin Tarantino, Doc Watson, Neil Young, Charlie Parker, BB King, George Bernard Shaw for God’s sake, all high school drop-outs.
By contrast, Mengele was an MD.
Okay, that was a little unfair.
But the lists go on and on. Equating school attendance with education or accomplishment is a mistake. Tell me how many years of college and how many standardized test scores it takes to teach someone what Charlie Parker knows about the sax or Spielberg knows about film. Or tell me how many average college MBA’s it takes to equal one Steve Jobs.
But even all of that is in reference to a system that is now obsolete and which I believe actively harms children. I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that in my line of work — writing — school is destroying potential writers. When I can get away with it I tell kids to scrape by in their writing classes to keep their parents happy and then to forget absolutely everything they’ve been taught.
We’re debating how best to pump life into an obsolete system that harms kids, all in the service of a goal which no one can clearly define.
The school engagement finding in that report strikes me as weak, they asked parents whether their child 1) is interested in school work, (2) works hard in school, and (3) likes school.
IOW, we have a report of what parents tell third parties about their kids.
even setting aside Tango’s inevitable wedging of race into the conversation
Dude, go back and reread Dave’s post and see if you spot anything.
Equating school attendance with education or accomplishment is a mistake.
Your point has some validity but the validity is found mostly in the reciprocal of the correlation between schooling and education. We know that schooling doesn’t perfectly correlate with education or accomplishment and it doesn’t correlate perfectly because there are people who achieve great things in life and who exhibit great intelligence who didn’t develop these attributes in school. That however doesn’t invalidate the very significant correlation of years of schooling with exhibits of intelligence and with accomplishment.
You’re making perfect the enemy of the good. I seem to recall that you’re a proponent of unschooling for your children. That process probably works well for your kids because of the qualities that your children possess which allows them to accumulate knowledge and achieve mastery in subjects without engaging in the process of standardized schooling. I think you make a significant error in believing that what works for your children will work for everyone’s children.
TangoMan:
Well, my kids are, respectively, a quarter-Jewish caucasian, and a Chinese. One is a poor student with a good work ethic, and impressive social and athletic skills. The other is a genius with no social or athletic skills whatsoever.
One attends school by choice, one is self-taught. The birth parents of one of these kids are a half-Jewish caucasian and a WASP. The birth parents of the other were most likely impoverished residents of a poor region in the interior of China.
Later I’ll be sure to consult the VDare guide to race-based child-rearing and make sure we’re doing everything right.
You’re the one who is bringing the racial background of your children into the discussion. All I said was that your unschooling process works because of what’s going on at your home and because your kids, or kid, respond well to the process.
My point is that your experience is not generalizable, which is what I inferred you were advocating by the nature of your criticism. If the existing paradigm is bad, if you’ve discovered a system which works for your child, then it seems that the implication is that the system be replaced with what you’ve discovered. If you believe that a wholesale revolution should take place with regards to educational philosophy and the process of educating children, then explain to us what should replace the reigning paradigm.
I have no problem with you experimenting on your own children but I seriously object to your vision gaining currency with respect to the education system for it looks just like another liberal cockamamie whackdoodle scheme that sounds pretty in the abstract but which is a disaster when rolled out into the real world.
I’m not interested in generalizing from my own experience as a parent, although that’s part of my data set. I’m saying that the “round ’em all up by chronological age, sit ’em in rows, teach ’em just enough to beat the tests,” model is asinine.
The current model is based on this faulty premise: teacher has data, will transfer that data to student. Education as a sort of flash drive. Click on file, move from teacher to student.
The reality is: data is everywhere, all the time, and for free. The teacher has no monopoly. The student should be taught to use that massive data flow, analyze it and contextualize it.
The reality is that schools are still teaching cursive. They’re teaching dates without context, disconnected events, randomly selected bits of information that don’t mean a goddamned thing to kids. They are inflicting ludicrous time-wasting projects the whole purpose of which is to say, “Look! We’re teaching!” The vast bulk of the curriculum means nothing, is learned only until the test is completed, and promptly forgotten.
School is to education as the TSA’s security theater is to safety. It’s a show with only a slight connection to actual education.
And it’s damaging kids in the process. Schools have to assign massive amounts of homework. Why? To educate? No, to put on a show of doing something, and to beat tests. The result is kids getting 5 hours of sleep — a condition that basically ensures poor retention.
It is dumb show. It is fraud. It’s a huge money pit of “let’s pretend.”
And by the way, the obstacle to improving education is not teachers or their unions. It’s parents.
Parents set the ground rules: you must warehouse our children for at least 7 hours a day so we can go to work. You must have high test score because that translates into a good rating on GreatSchools and that in turn means property values stay high. You must hammer our kids incessantly so they can make it into Harvard and be credentialed.
The unions are nothing next to the parents.
The current model is based on this faulty premise: teacher has data, will transfer that data to student. Education as a sort of flash drive. Click on file, move from teacher to student.
The reality is: data is everywhere, all the time, and for free. The teacher has no monopoly. The student should be taught to use that massive data flow, analyze it and contextualize it.
What you write sounds fine until we delve into the details. Then it begins to look like the Gnomes Underpants Strategy:
Step 1: Collect underpants.
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit.
How precisely do you teach students to use the knowledge that abounds in the world? How do students even begin to become aware of what they don’t even know exists?
What you’re advocating is really quite en vogue in education theory right now. They even have a cute saying for it. The teacher is not the sage on the stage, the teacher is the guide on the side. They are doing their damnedest to get kids to discover knowledge for themselves. To invent their own ways of doing math. These pedagogic experiments reveal some interesting truths. Intelligent kids basically teach themselves and teacher input yields little student gain. Average and below average kids sink.
The reality is that schools are still teaching cursive. They’re teaching dates without context, disconnected events, randomly selected bits of information that don’t mean a goddamned thing to kids. They are inflicting ludicrous time-wasting projects the whole purpose of which is to say, “Look! We’re teaching!†The vast bulk of the curriculum means nothing, is learned only until the test is completed, and promptly forgotten.
That’s mostly an argument against content, not philosophy. If knowledge that is taught must meet the condition of having relevance to kids, then that’s a hard criterion to meet because the experience and scope of understanding for most children is limited.
As for the vast bulk of the curriculum meaning nothing that’s not as bad as it sounds. The curriculum serves multiple purposes. You’re focusing on knowledge must have meaning. There is also the point of knowledge being a stepping stone and an agent of reinforcement. When kids are developing their language skills the fact that they have to read about history and write essays on obscure historical events gives them opportunities to hone their language skills, write about new situations, put themselves in the place and time of historical figures, etc. All of these processes develop thinking skills, they develop writing skills, and if the kid soon forgets about the obscure historical figure, that’s not really of great consequence for they’ve still practiced other, more transferable skills.
You’re a writer. Don’t some of your colleagues advise newcomers to the profession to engage in writing just for the sake of writing. Write a journal, write on blogs, in order to get used to writing, to allow the words to flow and then they can get into the groove and write the story that is bursting to get out of them.
School is to education as the TSA’s security theater is to safety. It’s a show with only a slight connection to actual education.
For the intelligent kids, yes, school is not really that effective an institution, especially now that peer tutoring is the fad of the day. For other kids though, the rigid structures are actually quite beneficial. There is a significant body of research which shows that the constructivist mode of instruction, which seems like something that you are an advocate for, does more harm to students of middle to low intelligence while didactic pedagogy, which teachers are bored with, actually boost both knowledge and achievement in middle and lower ability students.
Schools have to assign massive amounts of homework. Why? To educate? No, to put on a show of doing something, and to beat tests.
Actually, homework is the new teaching fad. Look, teachers are some of the stupidest professionals we have. Not every teacher certainly, but as a group, they’re pretty dim bulbs and the history of fads in education is a depressing one.
As Rumsfeld noted, you go to war with the army you have, and in this case, we have to educate our children with the teacher corps we have.
Parents set the ground rules: you must warehouse our children for at least 7 hours a day so we can go to work. You must have high test score because that translates into a good rating on GreatSchools and that in turn means property values stay high. You must hammer our kids incessantly so they can make it into Harvard and be credentialed.
The unions are nothing next to the parents.
I agree with you. Mostly. The parents are trying to navigate in a society with convoluted rules. Credentialism is a condition that is imposed on society and parents are responding to that environment.
I’m pretty sure I spend more time in actual schools than you do. First, I have young kids. Second, I’m a kidbook writer and just came from visiting something on the order of 100 schools in the US, UK and ANZ. Which doesn’t make me an expert but makes me knowledgeable enough to laugh at your theory-driven, politically-motivated understanding of schools.
In short: you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You read tendentious political papers and twist them to suit your racist agenda. I sit down and have heart-to-heart talks with librarians and teachers and kids. The average age of my 1600 or so Facebook “friends” is probably 14. I make a nice living communicating with actual children and have done so for more than 20 years.
No, schools are not “doing their damnedest to get kids to discover knowledge for themselves.” No. No doubt in a school somewhere in some school system, sure. In schools generally? It’s as laughable as the rest of your pretended knowledge of education.
You literally cannot escape the trap of the standardized test, Brimelow. You’re so devoted to its importance as a tool of your VDare, scientific racist obsession that you go around and around in circles using test scores to justify the success of tests which are proven to be useful by tests which are taught by teachers who have to hit high numbers on tests. The test proves the test of the test. Unless a test comes along that shows something good about negroes. Then it would be a flawed test.
You’re as limited as the educational establishment. It’s a common problem with even intelligent people who enslave their minds to ideology, particularly ideologies of hate.
Poor Tango. Thinks he’s so smart. You know the test problem you missed? Here it is:
I say: Later I’ll be sure to consult the VDare guide to race-based child-rearing and make sure we’re doing everything right.
And the right answer would have been, “What the hell is VDare?”
You do this all the time. You aren’t imaginative enough to know how to fill the null spaces. Don’t feel bad: lack of imagination is characteristic of conservative minds. It’s why liberals do all the creative work in this world.
By the way, I left another of those little null space clues up above. Can you spot it?
Oh, and so sorry VDare is having financial problems and you were booted off GNXP.com just when it started to succeed. Added to Joyner’s banning of you it must be frustrating.
No, schools are not “doing their damnedest to get kids to discover knowledge for themselves.â€
Yes, I can see that your speaking with librarians would give you an intimate knowledge of education theory. Next time you speak to a librarian ask if they have any book on constructivist theory:
Then ask about discovery learning:
Youtube is filled with videos of parents and critics railing against constructivist math and constructivist pedagogy in science and history classes. Textbooks are written based on constructivist pedagogy. Mathematicians protesting against constructivist math:
Parents are up in arms about the roll out of constructivist pedagogy and writing petitions to their school boards:
Reynolds, you’re an embarrassment to humanity. You’re a walking testament to the maxim that a little knowledge is dangerous. You compound your idiocy by making up facts and believing them. I, nor anyone of the other authors at Gene Expression, got booted off. Most of us just got tired of blogging, Razib became an Unz fellow and is building a fine career and reputation, now at Discover Magazine. That must burn dudes like you.
When you’re inclined to bluff about matters about which you know jack squat, other than what you’ve picked up from listening to your marxist friends, you should think twice about mouthing off because you’re simply going to have your idiocy exposed to all.
Oh, my God, your brain really doesn’t work very well, does it? We’re talking about actual practice in actual schools, and this is your retort:
Yes, I can see that your speaking with librarians would give you an intimate knowledge of education theory. Next time you speak to a librarian ask if they have any book on constructivist theory:
Um, yeah, because “education theory” has ever so much to do with what is happening in the real world in real schools. You just made my case for me.
By the way, you also confirmed your association with VDare which, for those readers who don’t know it, is an oficial white supremacist hate group.
Thanks for playing.
We’re talking about actual practice in actual schools, and this is your retort
It’s a good thing that you make your living writing to the intelligence of children because the reasoning skills you display when you’re amongst adults would put you in the poor house. Your direct criticism was “No, schools are not “doing their damnedest to get kids to discover knowledge for themselves.â€
Nobel laureates, professors of mathematics, citizens activists and countless parents are protesting school reforms that have real impact on the children. You’re completely oblivious to all of this because you speak to librarians on your book promotion tours.
You really have a few screws loose and you should see if you could get some medication to help you deal with your propensity to engage in conspiracy theories and making up “facts.”
Tango:
Dude, you’ve given me everything I wanted from you. I’m done with you now.