Here is an example: in the current system, K12 students are randomly assigned a subject-specific teacher-grader by their local government. These teacher-graders are tasked with both imparting either background knowledge or skills, such as history, and also giving students personally built examinations designed to determine whether or not they understand the subject. In university, the situation is even worse (from the perspective of the hypothetical person who cares that young adults learn about the subjects they take in university). There, students select their teacher-graders and so systematically migrate to the ones most likely to give them good grades.
If schools were actually invested in children and adults learning the subject of history, they wouldn’t have the person charged with teaching students be the same person tasked with deciding whether or not the students were taught, because that’s insane. There would be a second organization, not embedded inside the school, verifying that in fact students know the things that the school was aiming for them to know, that year and at least several years afterwards. The marks students receive that are supposed to indicate successful learning would be certified by that second party, not from their tutor. The reason that schools have the existing system instead isn’t because school administrators are stupid, it’s because they do not actually care that children learn the things they say they’re trying to teach.
“Have a third party verify that the thing you want to happen is happening” is the sort of reasoning that is natural to people earnestly trying to accomplish a goal and unnatural to bureaucracies like the ones that manage our school system. Creating a better system would mean actually figuring out what it is that schools want children to learn, and an administrator would have to expend large amounts of political capital to assert that for little professional gain, so they don’t do it. In this fantasy universe where school districts did have a specific interest in making sure kids learned socially positive skills, there would be third parties measuring such skills acquisition, and not just yearly standardized tests organized by another bureaucracy of the province which don’t have any impact on a student’s actual marks.
It is kind of ironic that in my local culture the stance is more that by not focusing on testing school and teachers have room to care about learning.
This is not the kind of “stance” that people have when thinking about subjects in near mode instead of far mode. Imagine a doctor who told you that his policy was not to focus on diagnostics so that he could have more room to care about treating patients, or a hedge fund manager who said that by not focusing on returns he has more room to care about making good trades. It doesn’t even make sense. You create and “focus on” the best measurements you have of health/returns/learning if you care about those things, you don’t if you don’t.
To be clear, there is a sense in which not caring about testing does make children’s lives easier, because most of what we force children to do is learn socially and personally useless skills and subjects and perform busywork, and there’s a strong case to be made that if you added consistent and effective testing to the system it would increase their suffering. Perhaps the people in your local culture understand this on an intuitive level and so don’t want to measure progress. But the fact that there is no consistent and effective testing at all—never mind the uselessness of the process in the first place—the fact that people hold stances like “tests get in the way of learning”, is painfully indicative of how ridiculous the existing system is.
When I was watching the serier Wire there was a depiction of school circumnstances and one of the points seemed to be that the teacher was frustrated with the conditions. It seemed odd that is was supposed to be commenting on real world conditions.
The problem (depicted and what I understand) is not that the supervising examinaations woudl be added paperwork and prepartion angst for the students. Rather it is that the teacher is supposed to teach so much in so little time that there is only room for the most route skim on everything. It is teaching to the test, every student barely passes the test (out of those that do). Minimized time budjet and maximised content expectation from school toward the teacher. No slack at all, constantly teetering on the edge of it being possible at all.
I guess the argument is that the current state is that we care so little about the effect of teaching that no effect is a acceptable outcome. And therefore caring to test that there is more effect than no effect would be an improvement. I feel like the essential part of that is the lack of care.
If you have the expectation that the thing wil not be done if you do not check for it, that is a very low trust attitude. In case you have trust you only need to start monitoring when you lose that trust. If you have to tease and pressure the agent to do the principals bidding you are only going to get exactly what you ask for. Empowering the agent you might get stuff that was not previously tested for. You can’t get Goodharted so bad if you do not micromanage while throwing more resources at it will get you more.
It is quite easy to think of a doctor that is tired and hurries up the patient in order to get enough patients served for that day, looking at X-rays while not listening to pain descriptions. Difference between 10 and 15 patients served is easy to verify. Misdiagnoses or missed depression diagnosis are hard to verify and to pin the causal pathway.
I am also sure that (some) hedge fund managers can appriciate not killing their gold egg laying geese. Or that in data analysis working smart instead of hard might be quite essential. Or that spending some networking time with billoinares is quite an acceptable excuse to be making only 50% volume of trades that day.
There would be a second organization, not embedded inside the school, verifying that in fact students know the things that the school was aiming for them to know, that year and at least several years afterwards.
How would this second organization go about verifying that?
I can’t tell you because I have absolutely no idea what skills and information elementary, middle, and high school students are intended to absorb in the current regime and why. No one does, by design. But an answer to how to verify such learning would come naturally to someone who had a specific reason for compelling children to learn about a subject, and thus knew what those children were supposed to be able to do by the end of the year with that knowledge.
As an example, one possible exception to my “current school curriculums are useless” brush is literacy. I see a case for compelling chiildren to learn that skill (as opposed to skills that are only personally beneficial, and which could be handled by school vouchers), because communication protocols have beneficial network effects. It’s obvious to everyone how a third party could verify literacy, since we know why kids should be able to read and under what circumstances they’d do that. It would work to give children grade-level appropriate manuals, mall maps, technical documentation, essays, etc. - things they might like to read in real life—and just then ask them questions.
Notice that you could say to a tutor “teach this kid how to read” and there’s not much confusion with regard to what the child is supposed to be able to do, because it’s common knowledge what that means and there’s an obvious reason why you want the child to be able to do it.
On the other hand, if I tell the tutor “teach this kid about ancient egypt”, the test could be fucking anything because there’s actually no economic justification for compelling children to do so. I would have to write eight more paragraphs either specifying exactly what information I was going to need the kid to memorize by the end of the semester, or drop hints to the tutor as to what was going to be on the test, in order for the tutor to feel comfortable staking his professional reputation on successfully teaching the child.
Why are economic justifications the important justifications? If I give an instruction of “teach this kid about separation of powers”, the civic justifications are quite clear, while the economic justifications would be quite nebolous and I think the criteria would not be that up in the air.
Also a list of memorized facts is not the main way you would enable a citizen to reject goverment overreach. I am a bit surprised that the teacher would be scared of a low outcome. I guess it makes somewhat sense if it is a PvP ranking game among students and among teachers. But for building actual capabilities some is always in addition and very rarely backwards. I would also imagine that where egypt knowledge would actually be used in the actor would still actively fill in details they need in their specific function. Then it doesn’t matter so much whether you were teached A and had to pick up B or whether you were teached B and had to pick up A. And having feel and context for egypt is largely ambivalent about what specific things you know (so that when you encounter a timeline placing egypt, rome and america you are not completely bewildered and can relate).
Why are economic justifications the important justifications? If I give an instruction of “teach this kid about separation of powers”, the civic justifications are quite clear, while the economic justifications would be quite nebolous and I think the criteria would not be that up in the air.
If you say so. I hope you don’t mind if we also do a follow up survey to examine whether or not the kid remembers that information when he’s old enough to vote, and trial the class on a random half of the students to see whether or not it makes a difference on political opinions 10y down the line as well. I prefer economic justifications because all of the other types of justifications people make seem to be pulled out of thin air, and they don’t seem too enthusiastic about proving their existence, but if you’re one of the rare other people, sure, we can try out the civics classes with the goal of doing science to figure out if these benefits actually manifest themselves in practice.
I am a bit surprised that the teacher would be scared of a low outcome. I guess it makes somewhat sense if it is a PvP ranking game among students and among teachers.
I absolutely never said that. The tutor in my scenario simply wants to know what it is he is expected to teach and how such learning will be measured, just like any contractor. There’s no PvP dynamic here because student learning on an objective skill like “basic literacy” can be measured by a fixed bar. Everyone gets a ‘Pass’ on a literacy test if they are able to pass that bar, and the bar for such a test would not move up or down based on the increasing or decreasing aptitude of students.
Contrast this with the situation we have now, where schools that give students high marks on average are accused of “grade inflation” by the other schools, because grades are actually a PvP ranking game between students and are valued not as indicators of learning but as signals important in only relative terms for getting admitted to high ranking colleges.
Voting behaviour would very weakly test for that bit. I am imagining a test of hypotheticals and calssifying as “yes” or “no” on whether the scenario is consistent with the role. Voting against someone because of influence of hate adds is hard to separate from voting against somebody for transgressions against political organization.
Having solely economic justifications has the danger of narrowing education to only vocational education. But I guess having just some measure that does not get instantly warped doesn’t particularly care what flavour it is.
I know that some people have a mindset that everything should be measured but it is not intuitive to me why this would be universal. I get that there should not be disagreement on what is the performance and what would be a breach. But that it can always be understood as a quantity and never a duty or a quality is not immidietly obvious to me.
I know that other countries have high monetary involment in colleges and colleges are more used for class distinguishment which I understand if it boosts the signal side of it. To me it would be more natural for colleges to complain to high schools that the opening college courses need to be more extensive as the previous stage was slacking. That kind of dynamic does not particularly care about grade distribution among the students. But if it is about particular students getting to particular colleges then I understand that gets shadowed. It seems to me the role of “low end” tetriary education is somewhat different. Having a system where it makes sense to play even if you “lose” is very different from a game where if you “lose” then it is almost as good as if you did nothing.
Well, it’s not obvious to me for one. In particular I am not sure what the alternative you propose would look like.
Here is an example: in the current system, K12 students are randomly assigned a subject-specific teacher-grader by their local government. These teacher-graders are tasked with both imparting either background knowledge or skills, such as history, and also giving students personally built examinations designed to determine whether or not they understand the subject. In university, the situation is even worse (from the perspective of the hypothetical person who cares that young adults learn about the subjects they take in university). There, students select their teacher-graders and so systematically migrate to the ones most likely to give them good grades.
If schools were actually invested in children and adults learning the subject of history, they wouldn’t have the person charged with teaching students be the same person tasked with deciding whether or not the students were taught, because that’s insane. There would be a second organization, not embedded inside the school, verifying that in fact students know the things that the school was aiming for them to know, that year and at least several years afterwards. The marks students receive that are supposed to indicate successful learning would be certified by that second party, not from their tutor. The reason that schools have the existing system instead isn’t because school administrators are stupid, it’s because they do not actually care that children learn the things they say they’re trying to teach.
“Have a third party verify that the thing you want to happen is happening” is the sort of reasoning that is natural to people earnestly trying to accomplish a goal and unnatural to bureaucracies like the ones that manage our school system. Creating a better system would mean actually figuring out what it is that schools want children to learn, and an administrator would have to expend large amounts of political capital to assert that for little professional gain, so they don’t do it. In this fantasy universe where school districts did have a specific interest in making sure kids learned socially positive skills, there would be third parties measuring such skills acquisition, and not just yearly standardized tests organized by another bureaucracy of the province which don’t have any impact on a student’s actual marks.
It is kind of ironic that in my local culture the stance is more that by not focusing on testing school and teachers have room to care about learning.
“they do not actually care” seems to not describe my local reality.
This is not the kind of “stance” that people have when thinking about subjects in near mode instead of far mode. Imagine a doctor who told you that his policy was not to focus on diagnostics so that he could have more room to care about treating patients, or a hedge fund manager who said that by not focusing on returns he has more room to care about making good trades. It doesn’t even make sense. You create and “focus on” the best measurements you have of health/returns/learning if you care about those things, you don’t if you don’t.
To be clear, there is a sense in which not caring about testing does make children’s lives easier, because most of what we force children to do is learn socially and personally useless skills and subjects and perform busywork, and there’s a strong case to be made that if you added consistent and effective testing to the system it would increase their suffering. Perhaps the people in your local culture understand this on an intuitive level and so don’t want to measure progress. But the fact that there is no consistent and effective testing at all—never mind the uselessness of the process in the first place—the fact that people hold stances like “tests get in the way of learning”, is painfully indicative of how ridiculous the existing system is.
When I was watching the serier Wire there was a depiction of school circumnstances and one of the points seemed to be that the teacher was frustrated with the conditions. It seemed odd that is was supposed to be commenting on real world conditions.
The problem (depicted and what I understand) is not that the supervising examinaations woudl be added paperwork and prepartion angst for the students. Rather it is that the teacher is supposed to teach so much in so little time that there is only room for the most route skim on everything. It is teaching to the test, every student barely passes the test (out of those that do). Minimized time budjet and maximised content expectation from school toward the teacher. No slack at all, constantly teetering on the edge of it being possible at all.
I guess the argument is that the current state is that we care so little about the effect of teaching that no effect is a acceptable outcome. And therefore caring to test that there is more effect than no effect would be an improvement. I feel like the essential part of that is the lack of care.
If you have the expectation that the thing wil not be done if you do not check for it, that is a very low trust attitude. In case you have trust you only need to start monitoring when you lose that trust. If you have to tease and pressure the agent to do the principals bidding you are only going to get exactly what you ask for. Empowering the agent you might get stuff that was not previously tested for. You can’t get Goodharted so bad if you do not micromanage while throwing more resources at it will get you more.
It is quite easy to think of a doctor that is tired and hurries up the patient in order to get enough patients served for that day, looking at X-rays while not listening to pain descriptions. Difference between 10 and 15 patients served is easy to verify. Misdiagnoses or missed depression diagnosis are hard to verify and to pin the causal pathway.
I am also sure that (some) hedge fund managers can appriciate not killing their gold egg laying geese. Or that in data analysis working smart instead of hard might be quite essential. Or that spending some networking time with billoinares is quite an acceptable excuse to be making only 50% volume of trades that day.
How would this second organization go about verifying that?
I can’t tell you because I have absolutely no idea what skills and information elementary, middle, and high school students are intended to absorb in the current regime and why. No one does, by design. But an answer to how to verify such learning would come naturally to someone who had a specific reason for compelling children to learn about a subject, and thus knew what those children were supposed to be able to do by the end of the year with that knowledge.
As an example, one possible exception to my “current school curriculums are useless” brush is literacy. I see a case for compelling chiildren to learn that skill (as opposed to skills that are only personally beneficial, and which could be handled by school vouchers), because communication protocols have beneficial network effects. It’s obvious to everyone how a third party could verify literacy, since we know why kids should be able to read and under what circumstances they’d do that. It would work to give children grade-level appropriate manuals, mall maps, technical documentation, essays, etc. - things they might like to read in real life—and just then ask them questions.
Notice that you could say to a tutor “teach this kid how to read” and there’s not much confusion with regard to what the child is supposed to be able to do, because it’s common knowledge what that means and there’s an obvious reason why you want the child to be able to do it.
On the other hand, if I tell the tutor “teach this kid about ancient egypt”, the test could be fucking anything because there’s actually no economic justification for compelling children to do so. I would have to write eight more paragraphs either specifying exactly what information I was going to need the kid to memorize by the end of the semester, or drop hints to the tutor as to what was going to be on the test, in order for the tutor to feel comfortable staking his professional reputation on successfully teaching the child.
Why are economic justifications the important justifications? If I give an instruction of “teach this kid about separation of powers”, the civic justifications are quite clear, while the economic justifications would be quite nebolous and I think the criteria would not be that up in the air.
Also a list of memorized facts is not the main way you would enable a citizen to reject goverment overreach. I am a bit surprised that the teacher would be scared of a low outcome. I guess it makes somewhat sense if it is a PvP ranking game among students and among teachers. But for building actual capabilities some is always in addition and very rarely backwards. I would also imagine that where egypt knowledge would actually be used in the actor would still actively fill in details they need in their specific function. Then it doesn’t matter so much whether you were teached A and had to pick up B or whether you were teached B and had to pick up A. And having feel and context for egypt is largely ambivalent about what specific things you know (so that when you encounter a timeline placing egypt, rome and america you are not completely bewildered and can relate).
If you say so. I hope you don’t mind if we also do a follow up survey to examine whether or not the kid remembers that information when he’s old enough to vote, and trial the class on a random half of the students to see whether or not it makes a difference on political opinions 10y down the line as well. I prefer economic justifications because all of the other types of justifications people make seem to be pulled out of thin air, and they don’t seem too enthusiastic about proving their existence, but if you’re one of the rare other people, sure, we can try out the civics classes with the goal of doing science to figure out if these benefits actually manifest themselves in practice.
I absolutely never said that. The tutor in my scenario simply wants to know what it is he is expected to teach and how such learning will be measured, just like any contractor. There’s no PvP dynamic here because student learning on an objective skill like “basic literacy” can be measured by a fixed bar. Everyone gets a ‘Pass’ on a literacy test if they are able to pass that bar, and the bar for such a test would not move up or down based on the increasing or decreasing aptitude of students.
Contrast this with the situation we have now, where schools that give students high marks on average are accused of “grade inflation” by the other schools, because grades are actually a PvP ranking game between students and are valued not as indicators of learning but as signals important in only relative terms for getting admitted to high ranking colleges.
Voting behaviour would very weakly test for that bit. I am imagining a test of hypotheticals and calssifying as “yes” or “no” on whether the scenario is consistent with the role. Voting against someone because of influence of hate adds is hard to separate from voting against somebody for transgressions against political organization.
Having solely economic justifications has the danger of narrowing education to only vocational education. But I guess having just some measure that does not get instantly warped doesn’t particularly care what flavour it is.
I know that some people have a mindset that everything should be measured but it is not intuitive to me why this would be universal. I get that there should not be disagreement on what is the performance and what would be a breach. But that it can always be understood as a quantity and never a duty or a quality is not immidietly obvious to me.
I know that other countries have high monetary involment in colleges and colleges are more used for class distinguishment which I understand if it boosts the signal side of it. To me it would be more natural for colleges to complain to high schools that the opening college courses need to be more extensive as the previous stage was slacking. That kind of dynamic does not particularly care about grade distribution among the students. But if it is about particular students getting to particular colleges then I understand that gets shadowed. It seems to me the role of “low end” tetriary education is somewhat different. Having a system where it makes sense to play even if you “lose” is very different from a game where if you “lose” then it is almost as good as if you did nothing.