I’m not sure I buy into this narrative very much. If this were the case, one would expect that one would see similar educational problems in other countries. One could claim that that’s due to different gene pools but if that were the case, one would expect to see schools which have homogeneous populations to be similar to their home countries. But one doesn’t see this. For example, schools with predominantly Irish background don’t have data that looks like Irish schools.
As a matter of anecdote (I’ve done some teaching and a lot of math tutoring), there are a lot of stupid kids out there, but most of the kids I’ve tutored were able to get concepts fine if they were taught well.
Yes, we probably aren’t acknowledging nature enough in many respects. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t deep problems with our school system that are connected to who the teachers are, what their training is, and what the school environment it. That’s part of why for example there’s strong evidence that smaller classroom size really does help a lot with performance across a wide variety of subjects.
One could claim that that’s due to different gene pools but if that were the case, one would expect to see schools which have homogeneous populations to be similar to their home countries. But one doesn’t see this.
I don’t know if we see this for homogeneous schools or not, but I do know that on things like PISA scores when broken down by ethnicity, American students do reasonably well compared to the countries from which their ancestors came from.
Asian Americans outscored every Asian country, and lost out only to the city of Shanghai, China’s financial capital.
White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).
Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries.
African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country, if any had bothered to compete. The closest thing to a black country out of PISA’s 65 participants is the fairly prosperous oil-refining Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago, which is roughly evenly divided between blacks and South Asians. African Americans outscored Trinidadians by 25 points.
You might want to be careful about posting links to VDARE, lukeprog and some others here consider this crimethink.
I haven’t studied these issues, but I will note that Steve Sailor and VDARE.com are considered by many people to be racist bigots. Here, for example, is a VDARE article defending white supremacy:
One of the many reasons I have been spending less time on LessWrong (sic) recently.
Steve Sailer is not a racist or a bigot. I can’t speak for all of VDARE’s material, but all of Steve’s articles there are ok. Also I’ve seen lots of other posters mention him.
There used to be lots some familiar names here from the old gnxp site. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending the dudes with the genetic origin of Jewish intelligence hypothesis did a Q&A here. As long as we stick to the science of the thing and avoid the politics this should be a ok for rationalist to discuss, like we did here. I guess someone might stretch Steve to be inherently political because he advocates limits to immigration, so even when he isn’t directly discussing it he is still persona non grata.… but really? Really?? What if we applied the same sort of standard to Libertarian, Socialist or Liberal writers?
Are we really getting that brain-dead PC? I don’t use that term lightly mind you. Some posters I know have been complaining about the unwelcoming and stifling atmosphere with rules of no politics being selectively employed but I assumed this was just “old forum member thinks it used to be better” syndrome.
Speaking as someone who did upvote the comment because the data was interesting- there are serious issues here. I’ve seen stuff on VDARE which involved very poor presentation or evaluation of data, and the motivation for it was pretty apparent. The signal to noise ratio there is extremely bad, and there’s a lot that’s just out and out racism in the strong sense of thinking that members of minority groups are of less moral value.. The post you set was quite interesting. But frankly, whenever I see something from there I have to doublecheck the data to make sure they aren’t screwing up in some way. For simple matters of signaling, if I were to link there I’d include a note of the form “yes, this website is full of racists but in this case their summary data is pretty accurate.” Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn’t post stuff on such overtly racist locations.
Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn’t post stuff on such overtly racist locations.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was writing for respectable mainstream conservative papers. The trouble is, once you’ve written too openly about certain topics, you will be ostracised from the respectable media, and these limits of acceptability are getting ever stricter and narrower. And once you’ve been placed under such ostracism, unless you’re willing to restrict yourself to writing for free on your personal blog, you can only write for various disreputable outlets where you’ll have to share the URL or column space with less seemly people.
The fake data usually is the most interesting, in so much as ‘interesting’ is a measure of surprise or confirmation. Also before saying ‘it is pretty accuarete’, the actual accuracy (vs the sources etc, or vs whenever they did the study at all) got to be evaluated. Usually people say ‘pretty accurate’ about stuff like this whenever it simply looks plausible to them.
I’ve seen stuff on VDARE which involved very poor presentation or evaluation of data, and the motivation for it was pretty apparent. The signal to noise ratio there is extremely bad
I’m not sure you saw my point here. Yes VDARE is a politically oriented site, its goal being immigration restriction thus duh some people with racist attitudes are probably writing for it. Selectively applying such standards for the discussion of some policy issues seems like a bad idea. I can see your point if I was citing someone with a very poor reputation who happens to be right, but I don’t at all agree citing someone who is ok when it comes to data and its interpretation, who happens to have written for a magazine that sometimes isn’t ok.
VDARE is (somewhat) crimethink by my standards, much of their stuff not passing my Voigt-Kampf test if you know what I mean, but Sailer is anything but a racist. In fact, all the ethical flaws I might even begin to suspect him of are tied to his epistemic habits (such as thinking that his mainstream targets just Hate Truth), and generally he sounds like quite a decent person.
Amusingly, Razib’s post does not include the word “genetic”. I can’t tell if that was intentional, but in any case, when a trait is highly heritable, that doesn’t mean it’s genetic. One nice example is accent. It’s also a nice example of a trait that a teacher would find really hard to change, unles given huge authority over the kid’s entire life. Maybe basic math aptitude is similar.
ETA: this comment is wrong by the technical definition of heritability, see Vladimir_M’s replies. I should have said something like “has high correlation between parents and children”.
The discussion of accent in that dialog is a neat rhetorical trick, but its main premise is false. If you were to examine the heritability of accent using the standard methods of behavioral genetics, it would turn out to be near zero. (Maybe some confounding factors would yield a small spurious heritability, but there’s no way you’d get a “highly heritable” result.)
Some of the other cited facts are also dubious or exaggerated. For example, while accent of adults is no longer as perfectly plastic as before adolescence, it’s obviously absurd to claim that “nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it.”
(Also, kids’ accent can be easily influenced if you can just place them into a peer group with the desired accent. No such simple solution exists for traits that are known to be heritable.)
If you were to examine the heritability of accent using the standard methods of behavioral genetics, it would turn out to be near zero.
Can you explain in more detail? I don’t know much about heritability, but would be pretty surprised if Shalizi turned out to be wrong on a question of fact.
You can take any of the usual lines of evidence for heritability, and the result will be negative. Unrelated kids growing up in the same linguistic environment end up with the same accent, while related kids, even identical twins, growing up in different linguistic environments end up with completely different accents—with no more similarity between them compared to the other randomly selected kids from these different environments.
In contrast, with IQ, you get dramatically different results. If you discover a lost twin brother who grew up in Hungary, his accent won’t be any more similar to yours than a random Hungarian’s—whereas his IQ test results would be similar to yours with much more than random chance.
(I am ignoring here some minor factors like e.g. speech impediments due to hereditary conditions. But clearly the context is normal linguistic variation.)
I don’t know that much about heritability, but would be pretty surprised if Shalizi turned out to be wrong on a question of fact.
When it comes to sheer intellectual ability, I admit that I’m not worthy to sharpen Shalizi’s pencils. Unfortunately, he is not reliable on ideologically charged topics; when discussing these, he will not use his abilities to clarify the matter, but rather to make the best lawyerly case for his favored side. I wish it were otherwise—I’d be delighted to see someone as smart as him try to make sense of these controversial and muddled topics—but that’s the way it is.
Thanks! It looks like you’re right. This is bizarre, Shalizi says accent is “highly heritable”, yet in another post he explains that estimated heritability of accent will be quite low if you measure it properly (see the section “Cultural transmission”). Edited my comment.
Shalizi’s usage seems perfectly reasonable to me. People use the phrase “highly heritable” to refer to the experiments they actually do, not to the theoretically best experiments they could do. Shalizi claims that performing the same experiments with accent would yield a conclusion of “heritable.” (though he backs off of “highly” and is generally evasive about quantity)
Also, kids’ accent can be easily influenced if you can just place them into a peer group with the desired accent.
AIUI, that’s where people’s accents are generally set, in school from about six to twelve. (You can self-modify afterwards, but that’s where people start.)
Yeah, the point that genetic != heritable is really important- religion is highly inherited but obviously there’s no gene for being Christian. Some of this inheritance may be due to cultural or socioeconomic effects, but at this point, the data with twin studies seems to suggest that a lot of the heritable differences in intelligence are genuinely genetic.
Yeah. Cultural problems are a tricky one. It’s repeatedly shown you can get 15 IQ points from non-genetic differences. So you do need to pay attention to the apparently stupid or shiftless kids so they can in fact be at least some of all they can be. But not neglect the bright ones.
I’ll note here as well: it’s bloody hard work being a teacher.
(Having met the kids in my daughter’s class, her teachers deserve a medal. And they’re pretty nice kids.)
For example, schools with predominantly Irish background don’t have data that looks like Irish schools.
there’s strong evidence that smaller classroom size really does help a lot with performance across a wide variety of subjects.
Could you point to this data?
As to your anecdote, how long-term were your tutoring relationships? The post Razib quotes is all about about how everyone fools themselves into thinking that they were much better than the students’ previous teachers. On the other hand, if the students could learn the material once, maybe there is a scenario in which they could retain it. So I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they did, but how do you assign credit to your having “taught well”? One difference between tutoring and school teaching is that some tutoring is for prerequisites that the student now has to use and has motivation to learn and gets a lot of practice on.
This is what I normally point to although more because they give a lot of good references and are online than because of their own research. Unfortunately, there are a lot of complicating factors here. In particular, suburban schools with generally white students from high income backgrounds are more likely to be in small class room environments, and school districts which try to keep class room sizes small are also very likely doing other things to also improve the learning environment. I can’t point to anyone who has corrected enough for all of those factors for my general satisfaction. I’d describe the data summarized in that link as strong but not conclusive.
I don’t unfortunately have that off-hand. There was a study a while ago that looked at schools where the students were primarily of different European group descents. Googling for it doesn’t turn up anything (unfortunately the obvious keywords are drowned out by many other articles looking at similar sorts of stuff for blacks and other groups). Glados linked to data below that if anything actually goes against this sort of claim a fair bit, so I’m going to withdraw it until I can find something.
everyone fools themselves into thinking that they were much better than the students’ previous teachers.
I’m friends with a couple of teachers—some of them are more excited about it than others, and those that are less excited aren’t fooling themselves. I’d guess there’s a large amount of sampling bias here, in that teachers who write about their problems and education policy tend to care more than teachers who don’t. I would guess that that would lead them both to be better teachers AND to be more motivated to convince themselves they were better.
Most of the teachers I know have only been teachers for one year (I just finished my second year of grad school—some friends from undergrad got their credentials and just finished their first year of teaching) and I don’t talk to them about their students very much, so I don’t really have personal experience with longer term effects (or lack thereof).
I haven’t thought much about it because I find the underlying sentiment sort of skeevy (if I give myself time to reflect this effect is often diminished I think) but also because I’m busy and not interested in teaching below university level, at which point selection effects kick in.
As to your anecdote, how long-term were your tutoring relationships?
Varied, most were in the range of a semester to 2 years.
The post Razib quotes is all about about how everyone fools themselves into thinking that they were much better than the students’ previous teachers.
Yeah, this is obviously a problem. I suspect that in many cases I wasn’t better than the previous teachers in any substantial fashion, but a 1-1 setting will work better than almost any other setting, so even if the teacher is better at teaching, having a tutor will still likely work well.
One difference between tutoring and school teaching is that some tutoring is for prerequisites that the student now has to use and has motivation to learn and gets a lot of practice on.
This is definitely a problem. A lot of the students I tutored were students who were failing classes because they hadn’t mastered basic material from 2 or 3 years ago.
On the other hand, as long as were using anecdotal evidence (which frankly using to this extent makes me uncomfortable) I had one student who was very smart, possibly smarter than I am, and I started tutoring him when he was a junior in highschool and couldn’t do almost any math beyond about 7th grade (had trouble solving any equations more complicated than something like x+8=10). In his case it was very clearly an incredibly poor learning environment (although based on other data, it does seem like the the students were so disruptive that the teachers were spending most of their time just trying to control the students). I tutored him for about 1.5 years and he is he’s now a computer science major at a respected university, and doing quite well. He got an A in linear algebra two semesters ago and is now taking algorithms and some other similar classes. I obviously had some impact but the fact that his general intelligence was very high obviously helped in terms of success and long-term retention.
a 1-1 setting will work better than almost any other setting
I can see a lot of mechanisms that would allow tutoring to move faster or go further, but the original post claims that the students do quickly learn the material in the ordinary class, only to quickly forget it. I don’t see any mechanisms for tutoring to lead to better recall. Do you?
There might be. A 1-1 setting makes it easier to see if a student has a superficial understanding that is more likely to be forgotten. But the essential point you raise is definitely a valid one. I’m not aware of any studies that look at retention rates for tutoring.
there’s strong evidence that smaller classroom size really does help a lot with performance across a wide variety of subjects.
A smaller classroom contributes to better results, but how exactly?
Does it make easier to explain (to answer every student’s questions and check every student’s mistakes), or does it make easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)? I think both these effects are helpful, but what proportion do they have in the outcome?
In my opinion, the difficulty of explaining is not that different. It’s not like 2× more students will ask 2× more questions; many questions will be the same. And having more questions asked and answered could help better understanding. There is always a chance another student will come with an unexpected question and make an original mistake, but on the other hand, you can make a Khan Academy video for the whole planet and many people will get it.
The critical part is maintaining the order in the classroom. If there is too much noise, students can’t learn. If you have one disruptivestudent, that’s bad, but if you have two of them, that’s ten times worse because they will encourage each other. So with a larger classroom there is more noise and a higher chance of disruptive students.
If this analysis is correct, there seems to be an easy fix—just throw the disruptive students out of the classroom, and you can have rather good results with large classrooms too. Unless your population already contains too many disruptive students, in which case pretty much your only chance is to separate the other students in special classrooms and teach only them.
easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)? I think both these effects are helpful
I realize and confess that my sentiments are unusual, that my thinking on this subject is grossly distorted by ideology and therefore not to be trusted, and that I don’t myself know how to set up a learning environment that will actually work for actual children, but I must beg the community’s forgiveness, because I want to say this anyway: I think this ideal of “discipline” causes tremendous harm (which of course I understand is not to say that it doesn’t also have benefits, but those benefits are not the subject of this comment). I consider it a monstrous tragedy that so many millions of people grow up (as I grew up) without any conceptual distinction between learning important things and being enrolled in a school and obeying the commands of the designated “teacher”, with no idea of there being a difference between morality and obedience.
Personally, I’ve mostly recovered from this phenomenon to my satisfaction. I now have an explicit notion that it is morally righteous to learn great ideas and train useful skills, and some experience of the pleasures and satisfactions to be had from these endeavors—which is not to boast that I’m doing well; I would never be so delusionally arrogant as to think that I’m doing well—but I think I’m doing far better than I was before I learned these ideas. It certainly seems so when I contrast myself to my fellow undergraduate students. Last semester at community college, I witnessed a student passionately arguing with an instructor that surely his paper deserved an A- rather than a B+. (I’m given to understand this is not an uncommon occurrence.) I imagine there are many who would take such incidents as evidence that there’s not nearly enough discipline in “our” schools: how insolent of a mere student to argue with an instructor! I, however, draw a different moral. I wanted to cry out to the student: Don’t you see how silly this is? Your work, your creation is already good or already bad, no matter what letter the instructor writes on it afterwards! But perhaps it was I who was being silly. The student, of course, didn’t care about good writing; he just wanted to get into the University of California at Berkeley. That was the highest goal he had been trained to aspire to, from the days when his elementary-school caretakers rewarded him for being quiet and doing what all the other children were doing. Again, I do not claim that I know how society should be organized; any particular reform or revolution I might propose could very well just make things worse. But can I at least say that it’s sad to see entire generations of human minds systematically crippled in this way?---because it’s sad.
We obviously use the word “discipline” to mean different things. For me it’s something like “stop talking loudly while the teacher is trying to explain a difficult concept to your classmates”.
As an illustration, here is a quote from my favourite blog about teaching:
A teacher in a British school is likely to be used to starting to do something, even something as simple as speaking, and having to stop what they are doing due to deliberate disobedience. If you are not a teacher it might be hard to imagine how frustrating this defiance is. I can only suggest that you imagine that feeling you get when you are in a traffic jam on an important journey. Now imagine how you feel when you think the traffic is starting to move on, only for it to grind to a halt a second later, and imagine that happening repeatedly for hours on end. Now imagine how you feel when you realise that the hold-up is not actually due to an accident ahead, or a busy road, but is in fact due to somebody (probably a caravan owner) deliberately driving at 10mph in front of you and not letting anyone overtake. Now imagine that you are trapped in this situation for two dozen hours a week. Finally, imagine that every so often your boss drives up to your window and tells you that if you are trapped in a traffic jam it must be because you are a crap driver. If you can imagine that, then you have some idea how frustrating it feels to be a teacher.
Are you familiar with the signaling theory of education? I think that, properly considered, it makes sense of a lot of the things you find so aggravating.
Sort of (if ability is hard to directly observe, but higher-ability people find it easier to obtain credentials, then there could be an equilibrium where one needs a credential in order to be taken seriously, even if the process of obtaining the credential doesn’t actually do anything), but not in any substantive detail. But really (notwithstanding a book I had daydreamed of writing), it’s probably better that I don’t look into it. As I keep telling myself (and keep neglecting to take my own advice), it’s much healthier to just focus on doing good intellectual work, rather than waste any more precious time and emotional energy continuing to feel pointlessly bitter and resentful that “society” (whatever that means) doesn’t care about the sorts of things I consider good work.
(Speaking of healthy working habits, I’m going to try taking out a $20 StickK contract and putting “127.0.0.1 lesswrong.com\n127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com\n127.0.0.1 reddit.com″ in my /etc/hosts for 14 days to see if I can remember what it feels like to not be constantly distracted; wish me luck.)
I teach writing at a community college (I began in January), and I agree with this.
I wouldn’t see that student as a sign of poor discipline. If the student was arguing solely about the grade, then like you, I would see it as a waste of time and emotional energy—his and mine.
Incidentally, one of the things I like about the class I’m teaching is that, even before I got there, the syllabus was set up to get students thinking about their purposes in writing the various essays they write, and the purposes the authors of the assigned readings had. Many of my students aren’t getting further than “the purpose is to inform” (argh!) yet, but at least I have an opportunity to teach the difference between instrumental goals and terminal goals.
(Meta-discourse note: some time after writing the parent, I worried that I had worded it far too harshly. I usually try to keep most of my comments here very close to being emotionally neutral, on the grounds it’s better to err on the side of being Spock-like than to risk letting my passion tempt me into saying something obviously wrong or harmful (which has happened a few times). But given the karma count and lack of disapproving replies to the parent, perhaps I didn’t actually do so poorly by making an exception this time? Maybe I should even update a little bit in the direction of thinking that it’s okay to express emotion sometimes, as long as you clearly explain what you’re doing? I’m not sure.)
[Edited to add: Actually, I still feel guilty about being non-nice, so I’ve edited out the two instances of cusswords, which, while entertaining, didn’t actually add any substantive content.]
If this analysis is correct, there seems to be an easy fix—just throw the disruptive students out of the classroom, and you can have rather good results with large classrooms too.
The reason this isn’t implemented is that children are forced to attend school. If they could get out of classes without consequent punishment, not just one or two ‘disruptives’ but many students might opt out. A school doesn’t have anywhere to keep such a group; classes are in large part make-work to occupy students.
On the other hand, if you punished disruptive students but did so outside of class, the habitual disruptives would spend a lot of time in punishment sessions, and would definitely not learn their lessons / pass end of year exams / etc. Schools in the US* prefer to have everyone barely pass exams, to 80% passing with high scores and 20% failing irretrievably. The failing students’ parents have too much political power over the schools.
I’m not from the US, but have seen enough people complaining about US schools on the ‘net. The Israeli public schools I went to in the 90s were the same. Every time teachers tried to set up separate classes for non-disruptive students who could be taught instead of disciplined, the non-eligible students’ parents complained.
Schools in the US prefer to have everyone barely pass exams, to 80% passing with high scores and 20% failing irretrievably. The failing students’ parents have too much political power over the schools.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before. The unwillingness to risk (localized or individual) failure is the strongest guarantee of mediocrity.
Does it? By many metrics the US does better with gifted and talented education than much of the world. For example, the US has some of the highest per a capita rates of Noble Prize winners and Fields Medal winners, more than Britain or France. If anything, the US is doing badly on the average case but is doing a lot better with the very smart students.
Edit: This claim is massively wrong, see Douglas’s remark below.
Someone a while ago told me this I think and I must have not bothered checking it. Yeah, this is unambiguously wrong as of right now. It is possible that this was true until some point quite a few years ago, but is clearly false today. Thanks for catching me on that.
You shouldn’t reason from Nobel Prize per capita all the way back to gifted & talented education without bringing in many other factors to your regression.
The US is the wealthiest economy in the world with the best elite higher education establishment with some of the largest investments in STEM or R&D in general, with the largest Jewish population outside Israel (which, IIRC, beats the US on per capita measures), and as wedrifid pointed out, for all these factors attracts the best students from across the world. Just off the top of my head.
This means that our G&T programs could easily be underperforming and a simple gross observation of per capita Nobelists not make this instantly obvious. A better approach would be to simply look for experiments, natural or otherwise, on funding for G&T programs and seeing how they do.
If anything, the US is doing badly on the average case but is doing a lot better with the very smart students.
Either that or they are doing well at acquiring very smart students (either by immigration or the genetic inheritance from historic immigration patterns.)
Does it make easier to explain (to answer every student’s questions and check every student’s mistakes), or does it make easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)?
Your disjunction isn’t complete there: it could be something else, like how many questions are asked. We LWers are of course familiar with the testing effect, but not so familiar with Bloom’s 2 Sigma problem. Alas, I cannot seem to find the reference now, but I recall reading that in tutoring, students are asked 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more questions than in ordinary classrooms.
I’m not sure I buy into this narrative very much. If this were the case, one would expect that one would see similar educational problems in other countries. One could claim that that’s due to different gene pools but if that were the case, one would expect to see schools which have homogeneous populations to be similar to their home countries. But one doesn’t see this. For example, schools with predominantly Irish background don’t have data that looks like Irish schools.
As a matter of anecdote (I’ve done some teaching and a lot of math tutoring), there are a lot of stupid kids out there, but most of the kids I’ve tutored were able to get concepts fine if they were taught well.
Yes, we probably aren’t acknowledging nature enough in many respects. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t deep problems with our school system that are connected to who the teachers are, what their training is, and what the school environment it. That’s part of why for example there’s strong evidence that smaller classroom size really does help a lot with performance across a wide variety of subjects.
I don’t know if we see this for homogeneous schools or not, but I do know that on things like PISA scores when broken down by ethnicity, American students do reasonably well compared to the countries from which their ancestors came from.
You might want to be careful about posting links to VDARE, lukeprog and some others here consider this crimethink.
One of the many reasons I have been spending less time on LessWrong (sic) recently.
Steve Sailer is not a racist or a bigot. I can’t speak for all of VDARE’s material, but all of Steve’s articles there are ok. Also I’ve seen lots of other posters mention him.
There used to be lots some familiar names here from the old gnxp site. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending the dudes with the genetic origin of Jewish intelligence hypothesis did a Q&A here. As long as we stick to the science of the thing and avoid the politics this should be a ok for rationalist to discuss, like we did here. I guess someone might stretch Steve to be inherently political because he advocates limits to immigration, so even when he isn’t directly discussing it he is still persona non grata.… but really? Really?? What if we applied the same sort of standard to Libertarian, Socialist or Liberal writers?
Are we really getting that brain-dead PC? I don’t use that term lightly mind you. Some posters I know have been complaining about the unwelcoming and stifling atmosphere with rules of no politics being selectively employed but I assumed this was just “old forum member thinks it used to be better” syndrome.
(;_;)
Speaking as someone who did upvote the comment because the data was interesting- there are serious issues here. I’ve seen stuff on VDARE which involved very poor presentation or evaluation of data, and the motivation for it was pretty apparent. The signal to noise ratio there is extremely bad, and there’s a lot that’s just out and out racism in the strong sense of thinking that members of minority groups are of less moral value.. The post you set was quite interesting. But frankly, whenever I see something from there I have to doublecheck the data to make sure they aren’t screwing up in some way. For simple matters of signaling, if I were to link there I’d include a note of the form “yes, this website is full of racists but in this case their summary data is pretty accurate.” Steve himself seems to be pretty tonedeaf- I suspect a lot more people would listen to him if he didn’t post stuff on such overtly racist locations.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was writing for respectable mainstream conservative papers. The trouble is, once you’ve written too openly about certain topics, you will be ostracised from the respectable media, and these limits of acceptability are getting ever stricter and narrower. And once you’ve been placed under such ostracism, unless you’re willing to restrict yourself to writing for free on your personal blog, you can only write for various disreputable outlets where you’ll have to share the URL or column space with less seemly people.
The fake data usually is the most interesting, in so much as ‘interesting’ is a measure of surprise or confirmation. Also before saying ‘it is pretty accuarete’, the actual accuracy (vs the sources etc, or vs whenever they did the study at all) got to be evaluated. Usually people say ‘pretty accurate’ about stuff like this whenever it simply looks plausible to them.
I’m not sure you saw my point here. Yes VDARE is a politically oriented site, its goal being immigration restriction thus duh some people with racist attitudes are probably writing for it. Selectively applying such standards for the discussion of some policy issues seems like a bad idea. I can see your point if I was citing someone with a very poor reputation who happens to be right, but I don’t at all agree citing someone who is ok when it comes to data and its interpretation, who happens to have written for a magazine that sometimes isn’t ok.
VDARE is (somewhat) crimethink by my standards, much of their stuff not passing my Voigt-Kampf test if you know what I mean, but Sailer is anything but a racist. In fact, all the ethical flaws I might even begin to suspect him of are tied to his epistemic habits (such as thinking that his mainstream targets just Hate Truth), and generally he sounds like quite a decent person.
Amusingly, Razib’s post does not include the word “genetic”. I can’t tell if that was intentional, but in any case, when a trait is highly heritable, that doesn’t mean it’s genetic. One nice example is accent. It’s also a nice example of a trait that a teacher would find really hard to change, unles given huge authority over the kid’s entire life. Maybe basic math aptitude is similar.
ETA: this comment is wrong by the technical definition of heritability, see Vladimir_M’s replies. I should have said something like “has high correlation between parents and children”.
The discussion of accent in that dialog is a neat rhetorical trick, but its main premise is false. If you were to examine the heritability of accent using the standard methods of behavioral genetics, it would turn out to be near zero. (Maybe some confounding factors would yield a small spurious heritability, but there’s no way you’d get a “highly heritable” result.)
Some of the other cited facts are also dubious or exaggerated. For example, while accent of adults is no longer as perfectly plastic as before adolescence, it’s obviously absurd to claim that “nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it.”
(Also, kids’ accent can be easily influenced if you can just place them into a peer group with the desired accent. No such simple solution exists for traits that are known to be heritable.)
Can you explain in more detail? I don’t know much about heritability, but would be pretty surprised if Shalizi turned out to be wrong on a question of fact.
You can take any of the usual lines of evidence for heritability, and the result will be negative. Unrelated kids growing up in the same linguistic environment end up with the same accent, while related kids, even identical twins, growing up in different linguistic environments end up with completely different accents—with no more similarity between them compared to the other randomly selected kids from these different environments.
In contrast, with IQ, you get dramatically different results. If you discover a lost twin brother who grew up in Hungary, his accent won’t be any more similar to yours than a random Hungarian’s—whereas his IQ test results would be similar to yours with much more than random chance.
(I am ignoring here some minor factors like e.g. speech impediments due to hereditary conditions. But clearly the context is normal linguistic variation.)
When it comes to sheer intellectual ability, I admit that I’m not worthy to sharpen Shalizi’s pencils. Unfortunately, he is not reliable on ideologically charged topics; when discussing these, he will not use his abilities to clarify the matter, but rather to make the best lawyerly case for his favored side. I wish it were otherwise—I’d be delighted to see someone as smart as him try to make sense of these controversial and muddled topics—but that’s the way it is.
Thanks! It looks like you’re right. This is bizarre, Shalizi says accent is “highly heritable”, yet in another post he explains that estimated heritability of accent will be quite low if you measure it properly (see the section “Cultural transmission”). Edited my comment.
Shalizi’s usage seems perfectly reasonable to me. People use the phrase “highly heritable” to refer to the experiments they actually do, not to the theoretically best experiments they could do. Shalizi claims that performing the same experiments with accent would yield a conclusion of “heritable.” (though he backs off of “highly” and is generally evasive about quantity)
AIUI, that’s where people’s accents are generally set, in school from about six to twelve. (You can self-modify afterwards, but that’s where people start.)
Yeah, the point that genetic != heritable is really important- religion is highly inherited but obviously there’s no gene for being Christian. Some of this inheritance may be due to cultural or socioeconomic effects, but at this point, the data with twin studies seems to suggest that a lot of the heritable differences in intelligence are genuinely genetic.
Interestingly, how seriously people take religion appears to be genetic.
Yeah. Cultural problems are a tricky one. It’s repeatedly shown you can get 15 IQ points from non-genetic differences. So you do need to pay attention to the apparently stupid or shiftless kids so they can in fact be at least some of all they can be. But not neglect the bright ones.
I’ll note here as well: it’s bloody hard work being a teacher.
(Having met the kids in my daughter’s class, her teachers deserve a medal. And they’re pretty nice kids.)
Could you point to this data?
As to your anecdote, how long-term were your tutoring relationships? The post Razib quotes is all about about how everyone fools themselves into thinking that they were much better than the students’ previous teachers. On the other hand, if the students could learn the material once, maybe there is a scenario in which they could retain it. So I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they did, but how do you assign credit to your having “taught well”? One difference between tutoring and school teaching is that some tutoring is for prerequisites that the student now has to use and has motivation to learn and gets a lot of practice on.
This is what I normally point to although more because they give a lot of good references and are online than because of their own research. Unfortunately, there are a lot of complicating factors here. In particular, suburban schools with generally white students from high income backgrounds are more likely to be in small class room environments, and school districts which try to keep class room sizes small are also very likely doing other things to also improve the learning environment. I can’t point to anyone who has corrected enough for all of those factors for my general satisfaction. I’d describe the data summarized in that link as strong but not conclusive.
Thanks!
How about data on the Irish-Americans you mentioned?
I don’t unfortunately have that off-hand. There was a study a while ago that looked at schools where the students were primarily of different European group descents. Googling for it doesn’t turn up anything (unfortunately the obvious keywords are drowned out by many other articles looking at similar sorts of stuff for blacks and other groups). Glados linked to data below that if anything actually goes against this sort of claim a fair bit, so I’m going to withdraw it until I can find something.
I’m friends with a couple of teachers—some of them are more excited about it than others, and those that are less excited aren’t fooling themselves. I’d guess there’s a large amount of sampling bias here, in that teachers who write about their problems and education policy tend to care more than teachers who don’t. I would guess that that would lead them both to be better teachers AND to be more motivated to convince themselves they were better.
Did you read the original post? Does it match what you observe?
Most of the teachers I know have only been teachers for one year (I just finished my second year of grad school—some friends from undergrad got their credentials and just finished their first year of teaching) and I don’t talk to them about their students very much, so I don’t really have personal experience with longer term effects (or lack thereof).
I haven’t thought much about it because I find the underlying sentiment sort of skeevy (if I give myself time to reflect this effect is often diminished I think) but also because I’m busy and not interested in teaching below university level, at which point selection effects kick in.
Varied, most were in the range of a semester to 2 years.
Yeah, this is obviously a problem. I suspect that in many cases I wasn’t better than the previous teachers in any substantial fashion, but a 1-1 setting will work better than almost any other setting, so even if the teacher is better at teaching, having a tutor will still likely work well.
This is definitely a problem. A lot of the students I tutored were students who were failing classes because they hadn’t mastered basic material from 2 or 3 years ago.
On the other hand, as long as were using anecdotal evidence (which frankly using to this extent makes me uncomfortable) I had one student who was very smart, possibly smarter than I am, and I started tutoring him when he was a junior in highschool and couldn’t do almost any math beyond about 7th grade (had trouble solving any equations more complicated than something like x+8=10). In his case it was very clearly an incredibly poor learning environment (although based on other data, it does seem like the the students were so disruptive that the teachers were spending most of their time just trying to control the students). I tutored him for about 1.5 years and he is he’s now a computer science major at a respected university, and doing quite well. He got an A in linear algebra two semesters ago and is now taking algorithms and some other similar classes. I obviously had some impact but the fact that his general intelligence was very high obviously helped in terms of success and long-term retention.
I can see a lot of mechanisms that would allow tutoring to move faster or go further, but the original post claims that the students do quickly learn the material in the ordinary class, only to quickly forget it. I don’t see any mechanisms for tutoring to lead to better recall. Do you?
There might be. A 1-1 setting makes it easier to see if a student has a superficial understanding that is more likely to be forgotten. But the essential point you raise is definitely a valid one. I’m not aware of any studies that look at retention rates for tutoring.
A smaller classroom contributes to better results, but how exactly?
Does it make easier to explain (to answer every student’s questions and check every student’s mistakes), or does it make easier to maintain discipline (to keep the class quiet and make sure everyone is really doing the exercises)? I think both these effects are helpful, but what proportion do they have in the outcome?
In my opinion, the difficulty of explaining is not that different. It’s not like 2× more students will ask 2× more questions; many questions will be the same. And having more questions asked and answered could help better understanding. There is always a chance another student will come with an unexpected question and make an original mistake, but on the other hand, you can make a Khan Academy video for the whole planet and many people will get it.
The critical part is maintaining the order in the classroom. If there is too much noise, students can’t learn. If you have one disruptive student, that’s bad, but if you have two of them, that’s ten times worse because they will encourage each other. So with a larger classroom there is more noise and a higher chance of disruptive students.
If this analysis is correct, there seems to be an easy fix—just throw the disruptive students out of the classroom, and you can have rather good results with large classrooms too. Unless your population already contains too many disruptive students, in which case pretty much your only chance is to separate the other students in special classrooms and teach only them.
I realize and confess that my sentiments are unusual, that my thinking on this subject is grossly distorted by ideology and therefore not to be trusted, and that I don’t myself know how to set up a learning environment that will actually work for actual children, but I must beg the community’s forgiveness, because I want to say this anyway: I think this ideal of “discipline” causes tremendous harm (which of course I understand is not to say that it doesn’t also have benefits, but those benefits are not the subject of this comment). I consider it a monstrous tragedy that so many millions of people grow up (as I grew up) without any conceptual distinction between learning important things and being enrolled in a school and obeying the commands of the designated “teacher”, with no idea of there being a difference between morality and obedience.
Personally, I’ve mostly recovered from this phenomenon to my satisfaction. I now have an explicit notion that it is morally righteous to learn great ideas and train useful skills, and some experience of the pleasures and satisfactions to be had from these endeavors—which is not to boast that I’m doing well; I would never be so delusionally arrogant as to think that I’m doing well—but I think I’m doing far better than I was before I learned these ideas. It certainly seems so when I contrast myself to my fellow undergraduate students. Last semester at community college, I witnessed a student passionately arguing with an instructor that surely his paper deserved an A- rather than a B+. (I’m given to understand this is not an uncommon occurrence.) I imagine there are many who would take such incidents as evidence that there’s not nearly enough discipline in “our” schools: how insolent of a mere student to argue with an instructor! I, however, draw a different moral. I wanted to cry out to the student: Don’t you see how silly this is? Your work, your creation is already good or already bad, no matter what letter the instructor writes on it afterwards! But perhaps it was I who was being silly. The student, of course, didn’t care about good writing; he just wanted to get into the University of California at Berkeley. That was the highest goal he had been trained to aspire to, from the days when his elementary-school caretakers rewarded him for being quiet and doing what all the other children were doing. Again, I do not claim that I know how society should be organized; any particular reform or revolution I might propose could very well just make things worse. But can I at least say that it’s sad to see entire generations of human minds systematically crippled in this way?---because it’s sad.
[Slightly edited from original version]
We obviously use the word “discipline” to mean different things. For me it’s something like “stop talking loudly while the teacher is trying to explain a difficult concept to your classmates”.
As an illustration, here is a quote from my favourite blog about teaching:
Are you familiar with the signaling theory of education? I think that, properly considered, it makes sense of a lot of the things you find so aggravating.
Sort of (if ability is hard to directly observe, but higher-ability people find it easier to obtain credentials, then there could be an equilibrium where one needs a credential in order to be taken seriously, even if the process of obtaining the credential doesn’t actually do anything), but not in any substantive detail. But really (notwithstanding a book I had daydreamed of writing), it’s probably better that I don’t look into it. As I keep telling myself (and keep neglecting to take my own advice), it’s much healthier to just focus on doing good intellectual work, rather than waste any more precious time and emotional energy continuing to feel pointlessly bitter and resentful that “society” (whatever that means) doesn’t care about the sorts of things I consider good work.
(Speaking of healthy working habits, I’m going to try taking out a $20 StickK contract and putting “127.0.0.1 lesswrong.com\n127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com\n127.0.0.1 reddit.com″ in my /etc/hosts for 14 days to see if I can remember what it feels like to not be constantly distracted; wish me luck.)
I teach writing at a community college (I began in January), and I agree with this.
I wouldn’t see that student as a sign of poor discipline. If the student was arguing solely about the grade, then like you, I would see it as a waste of time and emotional energy—his and mine.
Incidentally, one of the things I like about the class I’m teaching is that, even before I got there, the syllabus was set up to get students thinking about their purposes in writing the various essays they write, and the purposes the authors of the assigned readings had. Many of my students aren’t getting further than “the purpose is to inform” (argh!) yet, but at least I have an opportunity to teach the difference between instrumental goals and terminal goals.
Fully agreed!
(Meta-discourse note: some time after writing the parent, I worried that I had worded it far too harshly. I usually try to keep most of my comments here very close to being emotionally neutral, on the grounds it’s better to err on the side of being Spock-like than to risk letting my passion tempt me into saying something obviously wrong or harmful (which has happened a few times). But given the karma count and lack of disapproving replies to the parent, perhaps I didn’t actually do so poorly by making an exception this time? Maybe I should even update a little bit in the direction of thinking that it’s okay to express emotion sometimes, as long as you clearly explain what you’re doing? I’m not sure.)
[Edited to add: Actually, I still feel guilty about being non-nice, so I’ve edited out the two instances of cusswords, which, while entertaining, didn’t actually add any substantive content.]
The reason this isn’t implemented is that children are forced to attend school. If they could get out of classes without consequent punishment, not just one or two ‘disruptives’ but many students might opt out. A school doesn’t have anywhere to keep such a group; classes are in large part make-work to occupy students.
On the other hand, if you punished disruptive students but did so outside of class, the habitual disruptives would spend a lot of time in punishment sessions, and would definitely not learn their lessons / pass end of year exams / etc. Schools in the US* prefer to have everyone barely pass exams, to 80% passing with high scores and 20% failing irretrievably. The failing students’ parents have too much political power over the schools.
I’m not from the US, but have seen enough people complaining about US schools on the ‘net. The Israeli public schools I went to in the 90s were the same. Every time teachers tried to set up separate classes for non-disruptive students who could be taught instead of disciplined, the non-eligible students’ parents complained.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before. The unwillingness to risk (localized or individual) failure is the strongest guarantee of mediocrity.
It also explains the state of gifted & talented education, incidentally.
Does it? By many metrics the US does better with gifted and talented education than much of the world. For example, the US has some of the highest per a capita rates of Noble Prize winners and Fields Medal winners, more than Britain or France. If anything, the US is doing badly on the average case but is doing a lot better with the very smart students.
Edit: This claim is massively wrong, see Douglas’s remark below.
What is your source for per capita rates?
France has 4x Fields medalists per capita as the US. (and the UK is the geometric mean). (or try wikipedia) For science Nobels, the UK beats the US, which beats France.
Someone a while ago told me this I think and I must have not bothered checking it. Yeah, this is unambiguously wrong as of right now. It is possible that this was true until some point quite a few years ago, but is clearly false today. Thanks for catching me on that.
You shouldn’t reason from Nobel Prize per capita all the way back to gifted & talented education without bringing in many other factors to your regression.
The US is the wealthiest economy in the world with the best elite higher education establishment with some of the largest investments in STEM or R&D in general, with the largest Jewish population outside Israel (which, IIRC, beats the US on per capita measures), and as wedrifid pointed out, for all these factors attracts the best students from across the world. Just off the top of my head.
This means that our G&T programs could easily be underperforming and a simple gross observation of per capita Nobelists not make this instantly obvious. A better approach would be to simply look for experiments, natural or otherwise, on funding for G&T programs and seeing how they do.
Either that or they are doing well at acquiring very smart students (either by immigration or the genetic inheritance from historic immigration patterns.)
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Your disjunction isn’t complete there: it could be something else, like how many questions are asked. We LWers are of course familiar with the testing effect, but not so familiar with Bloom’s 2 Sigma problem. Alas, I cannot seem to find the reference now, but I recall reading that in tutoring, students are asked 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more questions than in ordinary classrooms.