I would like to see a rational discussion about education and school system (elementary and high schools), but I don’t know if it can be done on an international website. There are different rules in different countries, and often the devil is in the details—for example you might think about an improvement to the education system, only to find out that there is a local law prohibiting it. (I am trying to write this generally, but my experiences are based on Slovakia, eastern Europe. I guess other eastern European countries have a similar situation.)
I think that rational discussions about school systems are very difficult and mindkilling. Almost everyone has spent years of their lives in school, and this leads to a huge overconfidence about the topic. (Many people describe teachers’ job as only coming to a classroom and teaching a lesson—because this is the only part that pupils see every day.) Also people have strong emotions connected to this topic, because the years they spent at school were mostly dominated by emotions, not rational thinking. Adult people who have their own children at school, do not see directly what happens in the schools; they often rely on their childrens’ reports (not very reliable source) and their own memories of school days (which don’t reflect the changes in the recent decades).
Also there is a school-specific type of attribution error which works like this: Student usually attends the same class and has lessons with different teachers, so they distinguish between good and bad teachers. On the other hand, teachers teach in different classes, so they distinguish between good and bad classes. So after a horrible lesson students usually say it’s because they have a bad teacher (because they had better lessons with other teachers), and teacher says it was a bad class (because they had better lessons with other classes). Because of the informational assymetry, most public discussion is about quality of teachers, usually ignoring the differences between students (for this purpose they are supposed to be tabula rasa anyway).
Many people are willing to discuss education, but such discussions usually frustrate me a lot, because they mostly repeat the same myths and suggest the same solutions based on them. To say it simply, people usually imagine something like this: “Our schools are full of bright, disciplined and motivated children, curious about the world and eager to learn. Unfortunately the teaching positions are occupied by incompetent teachers who mostly choose this profession because they are too stupid to do anything else. There are a very few good teachers, but most teachers only ask children to memorize some obsolete nonsense and supress any creativity and discussion in the classroom. We should fire those bad teachers and give opportunity to the good ones. To ensure quality, we should let students manage the school, because it is their interest to learn, and they usually know better than the teachers.”
My opinion is more like this: “Many children have significant behavior problems, and it seems like most parents don’t care about them—at least if by caring we understand more than just giving them food and an internet connection. No, most of them don’t care about knowledge; they are frustrated that they had to leave their computer games for a few hours. Schools cannot do much about it, because they don’t have any punishment and reward system; even the grades are interpreted by many parents as a feedback on teacher’s quality, not student’s work. Those students who have good manners and work ethics are hindered by their classmates. It is a miracle that there are still people willing to work for a pathetic salary in a hostile environment with a lot of paperwork—most of them are not as bad as students describe, and even if we’d fire the bad ones, there is no volunteer to replace them; young teachers soon realize that it is still not too late for them to change profession. Even for a good teacher it is difficult to achieve good results in these conditions; and those who try hard, burn out soon.”
For more information I recommend blog “Scenes From The Battleground” written by a British teacher. Seems like in Britain the situation is currently much worse than in Slovakia, but that does not leave me at peace; in those articles I see the same forces at play, the same biases, so it feels like our school system is heading in the same direction. (Note: that blog is unusually rational; not exactly the LW standard, but significantly higher quality than an average text about education.)
How to fix this mess? First, people would have to realize their mistaken assumptions, but that would be painful—how many parents would say “oops, now I see it was my fault that my child has no work ethics” when it is easier to blame the incompetent teachers? Well, perhaps not all people have to realize this, only those who decide about the school system. But those have to choose politically acceptable solutions. So perhaps the school system should be more decentralized, so that at least some schools can try to reverse this trend? This is also politically unacceptable, because people fear that decentralization would even fasten the downfall. (And I don’t disagree; I would just kind of prefer a wide spectrum of quality to a monolitic slowly decaying block, because the second option gives me no hope.)
OK, I wrote enough, what is your opinion about this topic? (Any teachers here?)
You downplay the impact incompetent teachers have. I’m wondering why; if it’s because you think the teachers simply are competent in general and it’s very much not their fault that schools in general fail, then you are of course wrong; if you think it’s because, from an engineering standpoint, it would be too infeasible to change teachers’ behavior compared to changing student’s behavior, then you’re not obviously wrong but I still don’t see how that could be the case.
The way I see it, there are far more students than teachers, and students have to go to school anyway, so there’s not much you can offer them for doing better. The asymmetry means it would be easier to change teachers’ behavior for two reasons: 1) there are fewer; 2) they have to do what the unions and school boards say in order to get money.
But the real problem is that it’s incompetence all the way down. Incompetent lawmakers, incompetent school boards, incompetent teachers, incompetent students, and every step down the ladder you lose something. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the easiest way to reform education would be to manufacture a positive singularity.
Also, I think you should repost this in Discussion. Not as many people check the open threads as there, and you deserve better discourse than what I just gave.
There are too many incompetent teachers. I just consider this a consequence of the problem, not a cause. When you set up the environment so that the competent people want to leave, of course you end up with the incompetent ones.
I have seen teachers popular with students leave, because they started a family, and in this town with two teachers’ salaries you can’t get a mortgage. Most teachers financially depend on their partner’s income. (I would say that they subsidize the school system.) I have seen a good teacher leave because she was good at teaching but did not want to cope with too much paperwork. I have left too, because I refused to deal with the behavior of my students and a pressure to give them good grades for nothing. Of course when people like this leave… who stays? Often people who simply don’t have a choice. And a few self-sacrificing idealists, but there is only a limited supply of them.
With regard to unions—this is where the “different rules in different countries” starts to apply—as far as I know teachers’ unions in Slovakia virtually don’t exist. (They do exist, but never did anything, and I personally don’t know any person who is a member.) There are incompetent lawmakers, and the bureaucrats in the department of education who never worked in schools, but nonetheless insist on regulating everything. There is a system of financing that creates perverse incentives—how much money you get depends only on the number of students you have: so of course no one wants to fire students; and you have to give them better grades because otherwise they will go to another school that will give them good grades for nothing. Also you can’t threaten them about not getting to university, because also the universities are paid (though not exclusively) depending on the number of students, so everyone knows that everyone will get to the university.
I will probably post a longer version of this in Discussion, thanks for suggesting this.
Indeed, it is a positive feedback loop. Bad working conditions make competent people leave, so mostly incompetent people stay. Then the public decides that these incompetent people do not deserve better working conditions, and the debate ends here. Now the whole system is doomed.
But I wanted to say that this loop cannot be broken at the “incompetent teachers” point (and therefore we have to seek the solution elsewhere). Even if you would fire all teachers and replace them by a new generation of superheroes… unless the system changes, those superheroes would gradually leave the school system for better opportunities, and the schools would have to hire back the previously fired teachers. (Actually, I believe that this is already happening, because each year a new group of superheroes comes from universities. There are still people who didn’t get the message and try to become good teachers.)
I am not sure which other part of the loop would be a good place to break. Seems to me that a good start would be, at the same time: somewhat higher salaries, freedom in choosing textbooks and organizing classes, and possibility to remove disruptivestudents from the classroom. Problem is, in a short term it would also bring some bad consequences; the existing bad teachers would have more freedom and more money. But the point is that in the long term the profession would become attractive, and the schools could replace the bad teachers with good ones.
I also think it would be good to make an independent system to give grades to students. If the same person has to both teach students and evaluate them, it is a conflict of interests, because the person indirectly evaluates also the result of their own work. So it makes a pressure on teacher to give better grades. Students and parents will usually forgive you teaching bad, if you give good grades; but if you give bad grades, deserved or not, it makes people angry. (When parents complain about “bad teachers”, it is almost always the teachers who give bad grades.) Most parents don’t seem to think that good grades without adequate knowledge could hurt their children in the long term.
I would like to see a rational discussion about education and school system (elementary and high schools), but I don’t know if it can be done on an international website. There are different rules in different countries, and often the devil is in the details—for example you might think about an improvement to the education system, only to find out that there is a local law prohibiting it. (I am trying to write this generally, but my experiences are based on Slovakia, eastern Europe. I guess other eastern European countries have a similar situation.)
I think that rational discussions about school systems are very difficult and mindkilling. Almost everyone has spent years of their lives in school, and this leads to a huge overconfidence about the topic. (Many people describe teachers’ job as only coming to a classroom and teaching a lesson—because this is the only part that pupils see every day.) Also people have strong emotions connected to this topic, because the years they spent at school were mostly dominated by emotions, not rational thinking. Adult people who have their own children at school, do not see directly what happens in the schools; they often rely on their childrens’ reports (not very reliable source) and their own memories of school days (which don’t reflect the changes in the recent decades).
Also there is a school-specific type of attribution error which works like this: Student usually attends the same class and has lessons with different teachers, so they distinguish between good and bad teachers. On the other hand, teachers teach in different classes, so they distinguish between good and bad classes. So after a horrible lesson students usually say it’s because they have a bad teacher (because they had better lessons with other teachers), and teacher says it was a bad class (because they had better lessons with other classes). Because of the informational assymetry, most public discussion is about quality of teachers, usually ignoring the differences between students (for this purpose they are supposed to be tabula rasa anyway).
Many people are willing to discuss education, but such discussions usually frustrate me a lot, because they mostly repeat the same myths and suggest the same solutions based on them. To say it simply, people usually imagine something like this: “Our schools are full of bright, disciplined and motivated children, curious about the world and eager to learn. Unfortunately the teaching positions are occupied by incompetent teachers who mostly choose this profession because they are too stupid to do anything else. There are a very few good teachers, but most teachers only ask children to memorize some obsolete nonsense and supress any creativity and discussion in the classroom. We should fire those bad teachers and give opportunity to the good ones. To ensure quality, we should let students manage the school, because it is their interest to learn, and they usually know better than the teachers.”
My opinion is more like this: “Many children have significant behavior problems, and it seems like most parents don’t care about them—at least if by caring we understand more than just giving them food and an internet connection. No, most of them don’t care about knowledge; they are frustrated that they had to leave their computer games for a few hours. Schools cannot do much about it, because they don’t have any punishment and reward system; even the grades are interpreted by many parents as a feedback on teacher’s quality, not student’s work. Those students who have good manners and work ethics are hindered by their classmates. It is a miracle that there are still people willing to work for a pathetic salary in a hostile environment with a lot of paperwork—most of them are not as bad as students describe, and even if we’d fire the bad ones, there is no volunteer to replace them; young teachers soon realize that it is still not too late for them to change profession. Even for a good teacher it is difficult to achieve good results in these conditions; and those who try hard, burn out soon.”
For more information I recommend blog “Scenes From The Battleground” written by a British teacher. Seems like in Britain the situation is currently much worse than in Slovakia, but that does not leave me at peace; in those articles I see the same forces at play, the same biases, so it feels like our school system is heading in the same direction. (Note: that blog is unusually rational; not exactly the LW standard, but significantly higher quality than an average text about education.)
How to fix this mess? First, people would have to realize their mistaken assumptions, but that would be painful—how many parents would say “oops, now I see it was my fault that my child has no work ethics” when it is easier to blame the incompetent teachers? Well, perhaps not all people have to realize this, only those who decide about the school system. But those have to choose politically acceptable solutions. So perhaps the school system should be more decentralized, so that at least some schools can try to reverse this trend? This is also politically unacceptable, because people fear that decentralization would even fasten the downfall. (And I don’t disagree; I would just kind of prefer a wide spectrum of quality to a monolitic slowly decaying block, because the second option gives me no hope.)
OK, I wrote enough, what is your opinion about this topic? (Any teachers here?)
You downplay the impact incompetent teachers have. I’m wondering why; if it’s because you think the teachers simply are competent in general and it’s very much not their fault that schools in general fail, then you are of course wrong; if you think it’s because, from an engineering standpoint, it would be too infeasible to change teachers’ behavior compared to changing student’s behavior, then you’re not obviously wrong but I still don’t see how that could be the case.
The way I see it, there are far more students than teachers, and students have to go to school anyway, so there’s not much you can offer them for doing better. The asymmetry means it would be easier to change teachers’ behavior for two reasons: 1) there are fewer; 2) they have to do what the unions and school boards say in order to get money.
But the real problem is that it’s incompetence all the way down. Incompetent lawmakers, incompetent school boards, incompetent teachers, incompetent students, and every step down the ladder you lose something. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the easiest way to reform education would be to manufacture a positive singularity.
Also, I think you should repost this in Discussion. Not as many people check the open threads as there, and you deserve better discourse than what I just gave.
There are too many incompetent teachers. I just consider this a consequence of the problem, not a cause. When you set up the environment so that the competent people want to leave, of course you end up with the incompetent ones.
I have seen teachers popular with students leave, because they started a family, and in this town with two teachers’ salaries you can’t get a mortgage. Most teachers financially depend on their partner’s income. (I would say that they subsidize the school system.) I have seen a good teacher leave because she was good at teaching but did not want to cope with too much paperwork. I have left too, because I refused to deal with the behavior of my students and a pressure to give them good grades for nothing. Of course when people like this leave… who stays? Often people who simply don’t have a choice. And a few self-sacrificing idealists, but there is only a limited supply of them.
With regard to unions—this is where the “different rules in different countries” starts to apply—as far as I know teachers’ unions in Slovakia virtually don’t exist. (They do exist, but never did anything, and I personally don’t know any person who is a member.) There are incompetent lawmakers, and the bureaucrats in the department of education who never worked in schools, but nonetheless insist on regulating everything. There is a system of financing that creates perverse incentives—how much money you get depends only on the number of students you have: so of course no one wants to fire students; and you have to give them better grades because otherwise they will go to another school that will give them good grades for nothing. Also you can’t threaten them about not getting to university, because also the universities are paid (though not exclusively) depending on the number of students, so everyone knows that everyone will get to the university.
I will probably post a longer version of this in Discussion, thanks for suggesting this.
I don’t think we disagree. This is one of those positive feedback loops where a thing’s consequence is also its cause.
Indeed, it is a positive feedback loop. Bad working conditions make competent people leave, so mostly incompetent people stay. Then the public decides that these incompetent people do not deserve better working conditions, and the debate ends here. Now the whole system is doomed.
But I wanted to say that this loop cannot be broken at the “incompetent teachers” point (and therefore we have to seek the solution elsewhere). Even if you would fire all teachers and replace them by a new generation of superheroes… unless the system changes, those superheroes would gradually leave the school system for better opportunities, and the schools would have to hire back the previously fired teachers. (Actually, I believe that this is already happening, because each year a new group of superheroes comes from universities. There are still people who didn’t get the message and try to become good teachers.)
I am not sure which other part of the loop would be a good place to break. Seems to me that a good start would be, at the same time: somewhat higher salaries, freedom in choosing textbooks and organizing classes, and possibility to remove disruptive students from the classroom. Problem is, in a short term it would also bring some bad consequences; the existing bad teachers would have more freedom and more money. But the point is that in the long term the profession would become attractive, and the schools could replace the bad teachers with good ones.
I also think it would be good to make an independent system to give grades to students. If the same person has to both teach students and evaluate them, it is a conflict of interests, because the person indirectly evaluates also the result of their own work. So it makes a pressure on teacher to give better grades. Students and parents will usually forgive you teaching bad, if you give good grades; but if you give bad grades, deserved or not, it makes people angry. (When parents complain about “bad teachers”, it is almost always the teachers who give bad grades.) Most parents don’t seem to think that good grades without adequate knowledge could hurt their children in the long term.