As someone with a PhD in education, anytime someone uses the phrase “real education” as an attack on new approaches to teaching and learning, it’s a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.
The "advice" coming from these professors of education to state governments should be what is giving you a giant red flag. Reducing quality of education by lowering standards, and lying about the data, shows that it is not driven by science.
My opinion on this: the "education" establishment in the US is driven by people looking for consulting fees, as shown by someone in this post linking to Dr Boaler's absurd consulting fees.
Math standards are being dropped in the US, and the fight is coming from your colleagues. Reading is taught incorrectly and has been for decades as shown by dropping phonics based education and using "whole word association". Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead of American education, and the professors and educators are debating on if they should make American students unable to take Algebra in middle school, despite numerous countries learning algebra years before that.
> Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead
My Chinese gf learned how to analyze simple electric circuits (Ohm's law, reading schematics, etc.) in middle school and was tested on it for high school entrance, even though she was an arts/humanities student. The standards here in NC for middle school science seem to only require knowing that circuits must be closed and insulators/conductors. That would be an (elective) HS or AP physics class. Also, there seems to be one set of standards and one test for all students in middle school and pre-university students. Instead of "detracking" by going down to the lowest common denominator, there are high expectations for all students.
In the UK and many other countries, what we call "advanced" AP Calculus BC is just "A-Level Math" and is the expected minimum for studying STEM fields in university. In America you can get into university (even a prestigious one) and start off at "College Algebra." People from other countries are shocked that law, medicine, etc. are graduate degrees requiring a different-field undergrad, because of how little a high school diploma actually means in America.
There is a massive state of under-education in America, and shockingly, it's become more and more popular to call education and degrees worthless. There's a lot to criticize about the out-of-pocket costs of college, but the education itself is invaluable. And weakening high school degrees even further is the last thing we need.
> In America you can get into university (even a prestigious one) and start off at "College Algebra."
It may be possible to get into any given University and start off with college algebra, although I'm not entirely sure about that. However is certainly not the case that you can get into any program at any University and start off at college algebra.
Admission requirements for majors are determined by departments responsible for those majors, and they can and do set their own standards for what is acceptable when declaring that major.
For example anything remotely related to Stem at any of the UC schools is going to expect that you have, prior to entering the program, already completed at least the equivalent of Calculus BC, and usually linear algebra as well, in order to be accepted into the program. If you're starting off at college algebra in one of those schools you will never complete the math sequence necessary to start one of these programs and still graduate within 4 years.
True for some universities. My university (Top 30 overall, public) does not consider intended majors as part of undergrad admissions, supposedly. Now, it would be practically challenging for a physics major to start at algebra and get up to calculus soon enough to start the physics classes, but no one would stop you. A few majors require an application in the second year, but those are specialities like journalism, business, library science, not regular STEM majors (except CS as of recently).
$40,000 billed at $5,000 an hour for 8 hours worked is not what I would call a small fee no matter how you split it. That's a very large fee divided by a very small number of hours worked.
I've been absolutely enraged at the approach to mathematics instruction my children (who have just finished 2nd and 5th grade) have had to-date. It is an absolutely mind-bogglingly inflexible system that seems designed to frustrate anyone gifted enough genetically or fortunate enough environmentally (e.g. parental/mentor instruction) to be beyond the concepts taught at a given level.
No my oldest’s school didn’t require that. I don’t recall that either, but I was in 4th grade in the mid-80s so my recollection may be off.
They do a fair bit of writing, but not as rigorous as what I had in 5th grade. We had to write legit 5-paragraph essays and reports (I remember this because I struggled with it), and my son’s longest compositions were only required to be 1- or 2-paragraph blurbs in a composition book.
It seems like they took the bottom 40% of learners as the baseline for their implementation of Common Core. If anything they should have at least taken the middle 40%, since that brackets the mean in a normal distribution.
But what do I know. I just have a PhD in physics and have forgotten more math and statistics than they ever learned, and don’t make use of those ridiculous algorithmic tricks they teach and force kids to use, instead of fundamentals.
As someone with a brain, anytime someone uses an appeal to authority as a blithe dismissal of a substantial article, it's a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.
As a former teacher, there have always been pressure to push “new” approaches towards teachers and students. These approaches usually failed completely as predicted. The cycle repeats every 10-20 years.
You can't get a promotion in the bureaucracy if you just "do things well". You must "innovate" and start an "initiative". Administrators also get a pay bump for completing degrees like a master's and a PhD, right? so you have to do something that pleases the advisory committee to get your pay bump. Individual incentives are really misaligned with helping kids learn math best.
It took me a while to realize that most people with "doctoral degrees in education" have EdDs, not PhDs. The people I know with the latter are quite bright; the people with the former are not necessarily.
One of the reasons for this is that schools typically pay teachers more if they have a masters or doctoral degree in education (but it doesn't matter what type of doctoral degree...so people flock to the less rigorous one).
I haven't seen anything serious in the field of education. Education can and should be a science. There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work. Instead, we have 5 different preschool pedagogies, 5 different elementary pedagogies, and 5 different secondary pedagogies, and nobody bothering to figure out what works at scale.
> There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work.
I think one of the problems is that a proper experiment takes ~ 12 years (or more, if your want, eg, impact in college or on writing life) which leads to many problems:
- how do you get the research funded?
- how do you get people to stick to your approach for that long?
- how do you justify the risk that your idea will not make things worse (for a whole 12 years...)?
You're right-ish, but... the problems of educational sciences are plenty, but most importantly the impossibility to run proper experiments, and the almost complete lack of fundamental, reliable knowledge about human cognition and learning. The bottom line is that they have no idea how learning works, nor how teaching works. Their findings should not be used as evidence. Only the largest effects could be cautiously used as guidelines for gradual and reversible change.
There's 200 countries to examine. Should be plenty of ways to get data to analyse. For some reason it seems to be minimal how much comparison we get. Whether comparisons we do get end up being a kind of contest, like PISA.
So we assign each difference to national differences. Or language. Or some other part of the environment.
If you could get say 50 countries to do a double blind experiment with two different teaching methods, you might make use of the scale. But even then you can only conclude something if all results have (more or less) the same effect size, and what do you win? Little. You can't even generalize over countries, since it wasn't a representative sample. And that's ignoring all the aforementioned factors, and the near certainty of a less than flawless execution that will definitely screw up the results.
So I don't think "200 countries" will work. Such approaches have been tried with other, easier manipulations, like dieting, and it frequently turns out that interpreting the data isn't straight-forward. It isn't physics.
I wouldn't say the bar isn't lower. There are so many more variables than in physics, and you have so much less control over them, yet we don't really want less reliable conclusions.
If you want a physics metaphor: it's like dark matter: no idea what it is, where to begin, contradicting theories all around. But this is right under your nose. You've taken part in it, and if you work at uni, you still do.
