"Everyone is mathematically smart as a result of living in the world."
This quote resonates. The problem is that some kids have "lived" more than others. I work in a very economically diverse schools, and one immediate example I can think of is when I use estimation 180 for students to estimate the distance between cities on a map. The students whose families have been on long trips or travelled more have estimates are much more accurate. These lived experiences extend to all sorts of problems and tasks that we use in the classroom. I'll be ruminating on this quote for a while. For more food for thought, read "The Knowledge Gap" by Natalie Wexler through the lens of a math teacher.
Whoa, what a ride. I found the first 2 thirds really challenging, but the last third helped me better understand my agitation. Gut response to all of the research was “but these things matter even if they are not drastically re-ordering the student group outcomes!!!”, which he got to in that last third.
I REALLY struggled with the stuff on the variability of student ability for lots of reasons (mostly considering what this idea has historically led to in education), but he pushed my thinking with his contention that stratification is mainly a problem because it is a determinant of who has access to a life of dignity. Found the predictive stuff in the essay most depressing because if you’re working in settings where you can see the gaps clearly, you will eventually start to come to these conclusions on your own and they are hard realities to work under. Like, this part is a gut punch for the hope-seeking crowd:
“Dramatically moving students around in the quantitative performance spectrum cannot be achieved. It has never been achieved.”
But the prospect of decoupling (or weakening the connection between) school success and positive life outcomes is actually a really radical and hopeful idea. I let out a huge sigh of relief at this part:
“Does that mean that the conditions under which our children learned didn’t matter? Of course not. It mattered because students and teachers are human beings and we should strive to make their lives at school more comfortable, fulfilling, and safe. […] A more humane social contract with greater redistribution and a schooling system that prizes humanistic values rather than quantitative metrics and which helps students who are not academically inclined to find a career niche can all be achieved.”
Wish there was more of this in the essay, but I get why so much time and effort needed to be expended challenging the school fixes. We can’t get to the reimagining and restructuring if we are still sold on the band-aids. Again, what a ride.
Right there with you on the ride. Here's the excerpt that nags me most days lately:
"Why do you think those billionaires keep pouring absurd amounts of money into school reform, despite decade after decade of failure? Because they know the alternative is to take some of their money and give it away."
Policy failures from top to bottom have enabled people to accrue unthinkable sums of money. So it serves those plutocrats really well to promote the idea—through marketing, movies like Waiting for Superman, philanthropy, lobbying, etc—that education and educators can solve economic inequality if only they'd do a more effective job.
And it isn't uncommon for teachers to collaborate with billionaires, however unwittingly, believing and acting on the belief that we can remedy these massive policy failures. We really need to agree not to try to solve problems for which we don't have any responsibility or any power to solve!
"We really need to agree not to try to solve problems for which we don't have any responsibility or any power to solve."
!!!
This statement is like the antithesis of teacher culture. If pandemic schooling has taught us anything it's that schools + teachers are tasked with all manner of things that the state could do, should do, but actively decides not to do. I've been having this conversation about letting things fail & not saving broken systems on and off all year - and it's a hard sell for many teachers (including me, until recently). Teacher culture is making impossible, unreasonable things work and being called a hero if you're lucky.
Also, to be clear, it's not that teachers made this dynamic, it's a broader social, ideological script. But the script exists and we're all expected to follow it -> it becomes the culture of the profession.
I really have no idea how to think about the bigger questions of social mobility and inequality.
What I find useful about Freddie's argument is also what I find exhausting about it: I'm convinced you can never solve economic inequities with education. But then what should society do? And how do you do it? How do all the pieces fit together?
I am not a socialist, but I am open to vastly increased redistribution. I'm lower-c conservative, so I want to make sure redistributive policies are monitored and tested, as plausible political ideas often fail badly. (See, ed reform.)
As I've been reading more about college, it seems to me that increasing access to college and supporting more students through there is very likely to increase social mobility and reduce inequality. Contra ed reform, you can't do this with accountability and testing and charters. You need a policy that pushes a lot of low income kids into college and then supports them throughout. But contra(?) Freddie, I think this would help a lot.
(Will there come a day when access to the middle class runs through an MA program? I suppose so, and in that case perhaps we'd want to support people through even more education. Or perhaps not, I don't know.)
As we lose faith in the ability to improve anything at all by test-based accountability, I hope we do think about other educational variables besides "learning." There's no excuse for putting the nation's kids in buildings with no windows, with dirty bathrooms and unsafe classrooms. (I taught in a place where the windows regularly guillotined fingers. Freddie's not interested in that sort of guillotining.)
I vote for: safe and clean facilities, better access to art and music, increased course options in middle and high school, universal broadband and access to well-taught advanced courses, field trips and kindness. If test scores aren't god, then let's make every other aspect of school better for children.
But we have more arrows in our quiver than just the dignity conferred by clean buildings and respectful activities. We have all *experienced* the fact that some of the "weakest" students can blossom under the right conditions. And the heartbreaking aspect of being an experienced teacher is that you get pretty good at figuring what conditions most kids would need. But your ability to provide those conditions doesn't expand as dramatically as your ability to identify what's needed.
Freddy's argument is, "Supposing you discovered a way to provide exactly what each kid needs, there's no way to keep that discovery from rich families. So it wouldn't help in the aggregate." True. In the aggregate. But that means nothing when you're with an individual kid who feels stupid and you know that if you listen your ass off, they won't feel that way anymore.
We're stuck in an arms race we didn't ask for. I'm certainly not trying to provide political cover for billionaires. I simply have no idea how much time and heart to give, because the forces at work operate at such an inconceivable scale and such a personal scale, at once.
"Everyone is mathematically smart as a result of living in the world."
This quote resonates. The problem is that some kids have "lived" more than others. I work in a very economically diverse schools, and one immediate example I can think of is when I use estimation 180 for students to estimate the distance between cities on a map. The students whose families have been on long trips or travelled more have estimates are much more accurate. These lived experiences extend to all sorts of problems and tasks that we use in the classroom. I'll be ruminating on this quote for a while. For more food for thought, read "The Knowledge Gap" by Natalie Wexler through the lens of a math teacher.
Re: Education Doesn’t Work
Whoa, what a ride. I found the first 2 thirds really challenging, but the last third helped me better understand my agitation. Gut response to all of the research was “but these things matter even if they are not drastically re-ordering the student group outcomes!!!”, which he got to in that last third.
I REALLY struggled with the stuff on the variability of student ability for lots of reasons (mostly considering what this idea has historically led to in education), but he pushed my thinking with his contention that stratification is mainly a problem because it is a determinant of who has access to a life of dignity. Found the predictive stuff in the essay most depressing because if you’re working in settings where you can see the gaps clearly, you will eventually start to come to these conclusions on your own and they are hard realities to work under. Like, this part is a gut punch for the hope-seeking crowd:
“Dramatically moving students around in the quantitative performance spectrum cannot be achieved. It has never been achieved.”
But the prospect of decoupling (or weakening the connection between) school success and positive life outcomes is actually a really radical and hopeful idea. I let out a huge sigh of relief at this part:
“Does that mean that the conditions under which our children learned didn’t matter? Of course not. It mattered because students and teachers are human beings and we should strive to make their lives at school more comfortable, fulfilling, and safe. […] A more humane social contract with greater redistribution and a schooling system that prizes humanistic values rather than quantitative metrics and which helps students who are not academically inclined to find a career niche can all be achieved.”
Wish there was more of this in the essay, but I get why so much time and effort needed to be expended challenging the school fixes. We can’t get to the reimagining and restructuring if we are still sold on the band-aids. Again, what a ride.
Right there with you on the ride. Here's the excerpt that nags me most days lately:
"Why do you think those billionaires keep pouring absurd amounts of money into school reform, despite decade after decade of failure? Because they know the alternative is to take some of their money and give it away."
Policy failures from top to bottom have enabled people to accrue unthinkable sums of money. So it serves those plutocrats really well to promote the idea—through marketing, movies like Waiting for Superman, philanthropy, lobbying, etc—that education and educators can solve economic inequality if only they'd do a more effective job.
And it isn't uncommon for teachers to collaborate with billionaires, however unwittingly, believing and acting on the belief that we can remedy these massive policy failures. We really need to agree not to try to solve problems for which we don't have any responsibility or any power to solve!
"We really need to agree not to try to solve problems for which we don't have any responsibility or any power to solve."
!!!
This statement is like the antithesis of teacher culture. If pandemic schooling has taught us anything it's that schools + teachers are tasked with all manner of things that the state could do, should do, but actively decides not to do. I've been having this conversation about letting things fail & not saving broken systems on and off all year - and it's a hard sell for many teachers (including me, until recently). Teacher culture is making impossible, unreasonable things work and being called a hero if you're lucky.
Also, to be clear, it's not that teachers made this dynamic, it's a broader social, ideological script. But the script exists and we're all expected to follow it -> it becomes the culture of the profession.
I really have no idea how to think about the bigger questions of social mobility and inequality.
What I find useful about Freddie's argument is also what I find exhausting about it: I'm convinced you can never solve economic inequities with education. But then what should society do? And how do you do it? How do all the pieces fit together?
I am not a socialist, but I am open to vastly increased redistribution. I'm lower-c conservative, so I want to make sure redistributive policies are monitored and tested, as plausible political ideas often fail badly. (See, ed reform.)
As I've been reading more about college, it seems to me that increasing access to college and supporting more students through there is very likely to increase social mobility and reduce inequality. Contra ed reform, you can't do this with accountability and testing and charters. You need a policy that pushes a lot of low income kids into college and then supports them throughout. But contra(?) Freddie, I think this would help a lot.
(Will there come a day when access to the middle class runs through an MA program? I suppose so, and in that case perhaps we'd want to support people through even more education. Or perhaps not, I don't know.)
As we lose faith in the ability to improve anything at all by test-based accountability, I hope we do think about other educational variables besides "learning." There's no excuse for putting the nation's kids in buildings with no windows, with dirty bathrooms and unsafe classrooms. (I taught in a place where the windows regularly guillotined fingers. Freddie's not interested in that sort of guillotining.)
I vote for: safe and clean facilities, better access to art and music, increased course options in middle and high school, universal broadband and access to well-taught advanced courses, field trips and kindness. If test scores aren't god, then let's make every other aspect of school better for children.
But we have more arrows in our quiver than just the dignity conferred by clean buildings and respectful activities. We have all *experienced* the fact that some of the "weakest" students can blossom under the right conditions. And the heartbreaking aspect of being an experienced teacher is that you get pretty good at figuring what conditions most kids would need. But your ability to provide those conditions doesn't expand as dramatically as your ability to identify what's needed.
Freddy's argument is, "Supposing you discovered a way to provide exactly what each kid needs, there's no way to keep that discovery from rich families. So it wouldn't help in the aggregate." True. In the aggregate. But that means nothing when you're with an individual kid who feels stupid and you know that if you listen your ass off, they won't feel that way anymore.
We're stuck in an arms race we didn't ask for. I'm certainly not trying to provide political cover for billionaires. I simply have no idea how much time and heart to give, because the forces at work operate at such an inconceivable scale and such a personal scale, at once.
One more thing, because this broke my brain a bit.
Education as the fix for economic inequality seems to reinforce the idea that humans must earn the right to live dignified lives, which...yikes.
Rough night for me, a proponent of education as a means to address economic inequality.