oh good

Are countries that have surpassed us such as Japan, China, or the Nordic countries etc utilizing the methods to which you refer? From my understanding, old fashioned rote learning works just fine if the social pressure is there to achieve and not be disruptive.

hi, are you new to the N&D forum?

i was going to postbut it looks like you got this one covered

there's a lot to be said for instruction by example

that wasn't an argument. it was just a window into a dark place.

Our culture will not embrace education until there is a necessity to embrace education. Providing people with a modern comfortable living regardless of their input to society isn't about to encourage them to obtain an education.

my motivation to educate myself stems purely from my desire for conversational one-upmanship

Fascinating (but long) article on the latest Internet-based attempts at transforming education:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2012/features/_its_three_oclock_in039373.php?page=all

Neither Japan nor China includes Special Education students in its testing results, which is a huge skew (China's education system in general is something of a hot mess anyway, with their rural population almost totally kept out of the mix and a constant hum of corruption charges). The United States didn't test SPED students either, actually, until about 30-35 years ago (ironically, if you compare the scores of just the demographics that were tested back then to the same groups today, the scores have increased over the years). Middle and upper class American students, who are far more likely to have parental support, early education in regards to language and literacy, and to attend schools where constructivist designs are incorporated, outperform almost every other country in the world. Lower middle and poverty-level American students, obviously, do not. It's worth noting that America has the highest percentage of poverty-level students of ANY country in the top ten (20%, compared to 4% in Finland for example).

As to the Nordic countries, modern constructivist theory and research is actually MORE adhered to by places like Sweden and Finland than they are here....it was a huge component of Finland's redesign of their education system a while back, which saw them make incredibly huge gains. And either in spite of or because of their smaller poverty percentages, they do a better job of equalizing the access and quality of education for their low income families. And we have the highest discrepancy of any industrialized nation between our upper and lower class test scores.

I'm really getting tired of this "America has the highest child poverty" meme. Poverty in western nations is predicated on median incomes. Our median income is significantly higher than all western nations except for a small few. It's an inappropriate comparison.

The median income in France for a family four is only a couple thousand dollars more than America's poverty line for a family four.

Our education results in rural and urban areas are abysmal because the people who inhabit those communities do not give a shit about education. If you think these communities are putting for a meaningful effort to advance their lives and learn then you're not paying attention.

If money was the answer, if money was what led students to performing well, then Utah would have the worst performing schools in the country and Washington DC would have some of the best in the world.

of course the level of commitment is a very important factor. Quite possibly the single most important factor (I'll defer to others who know more on that). But of course there are innumerable and very powerful ways that poverty will affect commitment. Poverty is also more than just the amount of money you have. It also involves the quality of services available to you, the comparative robustness of public and private infrastructure, the attitudes of the people around you. Poorer people in wealthier areas are more likely to do well.

Is this accurate? The only thing I've ever read on it stated something to the effect of the poverty threshold being determined as the minimum income needed to achieve a satisfactory standard of living in a country...as such, one would assume it was probably influenced by a great deal more than median income. PPP?



France? I thought we were talking about countries that are successful on the topic of education....



What Stip said, especially his last point.



Nobody said money was the answer...it wasn't even the question. What was asked, really, was what the countries who are perceived as more successful than the US do differently with their schools. There's plenty to explore, but I was trying not to ramble and thus tried to pinpoint one or two key elements for each:

Japan: Does not include test scores for special education students. They're doing a lot to reform and rework their special needs programs, and they do test them, but it's mostly to help them determine what's working and what's not working as they move forward. They do not publish the results. This last part is typically true of the area (China has no uniform SPED laws or policies, and has been the subject of some corruption charges and human rights violations, and South Korea has a strong but almost completely separate system for special education services). Singapore, occasionally touted for its test scores, refused to sign the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and has no real Special Education system. Their Ministry of Education oversaw the building of some "Special Education Schools" a while back, but left them to welfare organizations to run. The results were bad enough to draw the ire of human rights organizations. Special Education numbers tend to represent 10-15% of a population, so each of these countries is providing data similar to if any other country simply looked at their test scores, went down the rows, and erased the bottom 10%.

Sweden: Interestingly, denies parents the right to home school. I don't think that's a component of their success, it's just...surprising. Their school system is highly constructivist in nature (this is true of Finland as well), which means less traditional homework or rote instruction and more exploration, artistic response, and student control. Constructivist learning was the backbone of Finland's restructuring a few years back, which is when they started to become a genuine and sudden success story in the realm of education.

I guess I did point out the social equalization aspects as well...Sweden and Finland are among those countries that do a better job than we do of ensuring that all students have equal access to early literacy programs and the like, and Japan has perhaps the most comprehensive early education programs of any of the top performing countries, with very uniformly controlled equality of opportunity.

All of the memes I see floating around with these statistics use the common measure of "50% or less of the median income." Those measures are tabulated by calculating cost of living. At any rate, the MEDIAN wage for a family of four in France, again, I'll stress that this is the median, is 19,000 euros. That translates to about $24,000. Meaning that over half of their population is essentially living at the American poverty line. Only 10% of the population in France earns more than $75,000. I can earn that here in America two years removed from college (I could probably earn more if I really wanted).



Like which ones? Japan is sliding into recession. It will be stiff. We have 20-35% higher median wages than Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. The only nations that compete with us in median terms are Norway, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Three very different nations.



They prioritize education. They have stronger families. They're not afraid of factory work. They are cooperative. The pressure their family members and neighbors to contribute. They have a sense of unity. It's not an us versus them dichotomy, and what little us versus them mentality there is comes from extreme right wing nationalists in Denmark and Sweden. These are nations built upon self-respect. I always argue that even if places like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, didn't have an all encompassing social welfare state that it'd just be replaced by private philanthropy.

As to constructivist learning, in general I support it. But you have to crawl before you can walk, let alone run. There is NO WAY that you can institute constructivist cirriculum across the board in our urban schools. Teachers struggle just to maintain the peace and the must rudimentary control over their classrooms. They struggle just to get kids to show up. And rural schools? Good luck. You give them creative control and try to evoke some artistic response, and you'll do nothing get them lounging in the classroom. These are cultures that just don't care. And they never will unless they have to.

In my opinion this whole education thing shouldn't be about the resources it takes to make sure everyone has access to what the elites do. It's whether you have the resources to graduate and be a meaningful member of your community. It Utah can do it on about 5 grand a pupil, what the fuck is everyone else's problem? Are you really suggesting that schools like DC spending 20 grand per pupil don't have the resources to provide measurable opportunity? You start off saying that money wasn't the answer, but your last paragraph is sort of a backhanded way of saying that money's the answer.

Again, not really interested in France. However, a quick look around does seem to indicate that the poverty threshold in any given country is based on the minimum income needed to achieve an acceptable standard of living in that country.



I'm not sure I see what your point is. Are you equating a successful education system with higher wages?



I don't see any reason to disagree with any of this. I think if you'll hop back a few spaces you'll see that some element of this was discussed just before you hopped in.



This is not an uncommon predilection, even among teachers, but I think it's absolutely wrong. My first job was in a South Dakota town of less than a thousand, and my second one was in an urban school with greater than 75% students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, significant gang problems, and nearly 50% coming from homes where English was not the primary spoken language. I've always been a proponent of constructivist approaches, and applied it as heavily as possible in both settings. It always went incredibly well, and seemed to prevent a lot of the disengagement and negative behaviors that are considered "par for the course" in either setting (and were prevalent in the schools in general while I was there).



I can see why you would think that that was my point, but it's not. Before I clarify my stance, though, let me touch on one thing you mentioned up there: "per student spending" is calculated by total education budget divided by number of students. However, in America have structured a LOT more of our social spending through our schools than other countries. So let's say you have two school districts that each have 10,000 students. Each district, let's assume, is spending the equivalent of $3,500 per student in classroom and learning-specific expenditures (so $35 million dollars). District #1 is in a low income area, district #2 has a more solid middle class base. The result of this difference would be:

1. The percentage of special education students in urban areas is as much as double than in other locations, but let's shoot low and say it's 50% higher. Placing a student in Special Education effectively doubles the cost of their education, so if we aim low and assume 7% SPED in district 2 and 10% in district 1, then district two is adding about $2.5 million to its budget, while district 1 is adding $3.5 million. This doesn't include factors not part of the SPED budget, such as support materials, paraprofessionals, legal advisement (surprisingly important) and additional teacher training opportunities.

District #1's budget is now $38.5 million. District #2 is now $37.5.

2. Districts in low income areas spend 80% more on security and enforcement, and 90% more on repair and cleaning of facilities. Again, let's aim low and assume this is just a $1 million dollar difference. So district #1's budget is now $39.5 million. District #2 is still at $37.5.

3. Low income areas more than triple the amount of money spend on the care and welfare of students. For example, the school district is in charge of identifying which families may not be able to afford to effectively feed their children, provide and process the paperwork for giving the student access to free lunch, and providing that lunch. Additional funding becomes available to them to do that. In urban districts, 50% reduced lunch is not uncommon. So let's say the school feeds 5,000 students every day, at the cost of another million dollars. That's easily shortchanging the expense, because we're only talking about the food itself. So district #1's budget is now $40.5 million, while district #2 is still at $37.5.

So now, even though we haven't touched on some of the most cost-heavy components of maintaining a district in a low income area (early reading programs, providing student materials, filtering of humanities project money (this is usually huge all by itself), increased legal expenses related to truancy, violence, and destruction of property, lower teacher retention, etc etc etc), we've already created a difference in the budgets of these two districts. Now, we've already established that in terms of actual classroom spending, they are equal, but when the per student spending of each district was reported...JUST from the three additions we made...it would appear like this:

District one is supposedly spending $4,050 per student, while district two is spending just $3,750. And yet the suburban school is going to have much higher test scores. So when you point to two districts and say "this one is spending a fortune, and sucking it up, while this one is doing the opposite," keep in mind that 90% or more of the difference in supposed "per student spending" is related to social programs and circumstance-related non-classroom spending.

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Okay, so now...to clarify. In spite of this, my point is not that we need to spend more money on our schools. My point is that as we look to our possible future education system, we need to make sure that we do not risk choosing one that might increase the already-wide gap between the type of education a middle class suburban student receives, and the type that a low income student receives. It will only exacerbate the largest underlying problem with education in America today.

McP, what do you mean by a constructivist approach?

Defining terms is overrated Stip.

LW, the Scandinavian countries you mentioned (as well as Japan) also are much more homogenous in terms of culture than the US, which I definitely think makes a huge difference. My high school had at least five distinct socio-cultural "groups" that I could describe, whereas I highly doubt that is the case for most schools in Sweden.

http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/19477877/gaithersburg-elementary-school-abolishes-homework

Gaithersburg Elementary School abolishes homework
GAITHERSBURG, Md.

Gaithersburg Elementary School has abolished homework. Instead, students are being asked to read a book for about 30 minutes a night.

When Stephanie Brant came aboard as principal two years ago, she and her staff conducted a review of homework assignments.

"We really started evaluating the work that we sent students home with," explained Principal Brant. "We started looking, and really, it was a lot of worksheets. And the worksheets didn't match what we were doing instructionally in the classroom. It was just: we were giving students something because we felt we had to give them something."

So, Brant got permission from the school district to implement a radical experiment: the only homework assigned here is reading.

Fifth grader Ann Urrutia got regular homework here as a second-grader; then it went away. We asked her if she misses doing those math problems at home.

"We do [the math problems] in school," she explained.

Urrutia estimates she reads about 30 minutes a night.

That's the principal's goal: 30 minutes a night of reading for every student. Parents appear to be generally supportive of the abolition of traditional homework.

"When [my son] comes home, he has relaxing time. And I think kids need that relaxing time," said Luz Gomez, a parent of a third-grader at the school.

Principal Brant believes the generalized order to read something every night is sparking maturation and motivation among many students.

Parent Angela Atherton, who has a third grade daughter at Gaithersburg, said, last year, "She actually came home with a calendar. And so every night she would check off that she had done her reading homework."

In most elementary schools, the class (as a group) goes to the library once a week. Each kid picks out about two books. The kids tend to finish the books in the first night or two, and then the books spend the rest of the week in the child's backpack waiting for the next class trip to the library.

At Gaithersburg Elementary, students are allowed hall passes to go to the library every day, and they wind up reading many more books.

Principal Brant knows this "reading only" homework policy runs a risk, but so far, the standardized test scores remain solid. In the most recent round of Maryland proficiency exams (2010-2011), fifth graders at Gaithersburg Elementary School scored about 72 percent proficiency in math and about 81 percent proficiency in reading.

What makes those scores particularly impressive is the student body at Gaithersburg Elementary is largely poor and comes from homes where English is not the primary language. About 70 percent of the students come from non-English speaking homes. And 82 percent of the students come from homes where family income is so low that the students are eligible for a free or subsidized lunch.


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So let me get this straight, ace reporter guy, a year ago they abolished homework and that had no effect on test scores from two years ago? Thank Allah I moved out of Gaithersburg.