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The minimum you can teach in Beverly Hills is going to be vastly different than the minimum you can teach in Santa Ana. In my experience, it isn't diversity, ethnic, economic, or religious. It's the amount of English the students speak.
While I agree, they should not get an easier version of chemistry and still call it chemistry. There could be levels to each class type. Maybe they can't teach the higher ones. However, if we define the lower ones, we know what they've been taught and it will be the same as someone taking that course elsewhere.
My school has a lower track chemistry class where students do not learn everything they do in the upper one. It goes by a different name. We call it Consumer chemistry. It's a non college bound class. However, we are not declaring students taking this class college ready (though research shows that kids taking such a course don't score that much below their peers who take the college prep version in college.).
Yes it is. Education is not a right in other countries. It's a privlidge that is earned. If you don't keep up, you get kicked out. They also don't attempt to educate all students to college readiness. By high school, many students have been tech tracked. There are major differences in how school is structured here and abroad. Abroad, my student who wants to sleep in my class would not be in my class. He would not have earned the right to be there.
In Japan, for example, it's expected that students will respect their teachers, pay attention in class and do whatever it takes to succeed. I'll take classes with 50 students like that over the 28 I get now any day of the week. In my class of 28, I can count on, at least, a few who just don't want to be there. They know that it is the teacher, not them, who will be blamed if they fail. They also know the school has a vested interest in them graduating in 4 years and that the school will give them chance after chance to pass. Unfortunately, passing doesn't have the same meaning here it has abroad either.
You can disagree all you like, but it makes your statement no more scientific. You stated an assertion, assumed it was correct, and went from there. That's not science, because you didn't test your hypothesis before applying it.
What you did, though, in that post was, by a sleight of hand, replace "child" with "culture" without noting any difference. When you bring up other countries and how education is earned, that has little to do with the specific child and almost everything to do with cultural norms. That is, the specific culture places pressure to "win" on the child, and the child responds.
It is worth it to note, however, that the education systems "in other countries" are built to create highly educated individuals. That is, even if you transplanted the students from there to here, there is no guarantee they would do as well in a different system (language barriers notwithstanding).
You can disagree all you like, but it makes your statement no more scientific. You stated an assertion, assumed it was correct, and went from there. That's not science, because you didn't test your hypothesis before applying it.
What you did, though, in that post was, by a sleight of hand, replace "child" with "culture" without noting any difference. When you bring up other countries and how education is earned, that has little to do with the specific child and almost everything to do with cultural norms. That is, the specific culture places pressure to "win" on the child, and the child responds.
It is worth it to note, however, that the education systems "in other countries" are built to create highly educated individuals. That is, even if you transplanted the students from there to here, there is no guarantee they would do as well in a different system (language barriers notwithstanding).
It's common knowledge that one thing that is different here is we educate ALL of our children while other countries do not. THAT makes it a different playing field. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
Regarding national standards, there are the "Common Core Standards" which have been adopted by 45 states. Also, we have long had a de-facto common curriculum in the US for decades.
It's common knowledge that one thing that is different here is we educate ALL of our children while other countries do not. THAT makes it a different playing field. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
It's common knowledge that virtually all first world countries and most developing coutries have universal education systems.
Note that the best-performing education nations deliberately set out to compare themselves against international benchmarks - learning from each other and constantly asking what is required to help all children do better.
Almost every nation that outperforms us - and there are many - has a national curriculum.
England (first to introduce the Curriculum 1988)
Wales
Northern Ireland
Jordan
Singapore
China
New Zealand
France
Hungary
Italy,
Japan
Korea
the Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
Bears noting: standards are not the same thing as curriculum.
Yes, I totally agree. When I was taking classes and tutoring I was given a set of TEKS (Texas standards) but it was written to such high level generic terms I still had no details on what was being taught in each grade for Math (6-7-8).
Here's an example (this is in 6, 7 and 8th standards):
It's common knowledge that one thing that is different here is we educate ALL of our children while other countries do not. THAT makes it a different playing field. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
"Apples to oranges" suggests two items are incomparable. In economics, nothing is incomparable, because everything has a price we are willing to pay to get it. Behavioral sciences suggests we're really bad at rationally making these comparisons and often get the answer wrong. But, we can still make the comparison as long as you have enough of the relevant data. It doesn't matter if we are comparing apples to apples, airbags to Snickers bars, or free time to work.
In the case of education, data would include working hours by teachers (we all know a teacher's day is not the school day), student's time spent in school and on school work, dollars (or Yen, euro, etc.) per pupil, parent involvement in school, etc., etc. That's all very boring. Lots of time in Excel spreadsheets. But, it means the systems can be compared.
Why? Because, even if the systems are dis-similar, we're looking at a common characteristic: outcomes/success, however you define that term. All the characteristics which make the systems different are simply values of independent variables.
I felt like we were way off topic by this point, but, when I went back and looked at your opening post, I realized we're still circling around a difference on how students fit in to the bigger picture. I say students are but one part of a complex puzzle, while you hold that students are the whole of the puzzle.
"Apples to oranges" suggests two items are incomparable. In economics, nothing is incomparable, because everything has a price we are willing to pay to get it. Behavioral sciences suggests we're really bad at rationally making these comparisons and often get the answer wrong. But, we can still make the comparison as long as you have enough of the relevant data. It doesn't matter if we are comparing apples to apples, airbags to Snickers bars, or free time to work.
In the case of education, data would include working hours by teachers (we all know a teacher's day is not the school day), student's time spent in school and on school work, dollars (or Yen, euro, etc.) per pupil, parent involvement in school, etc., etc. That's all very boring. Lots of time in Excel spreadsheets. But, it means the systems can be compared.
Why? Because, even if the systems are dis-similar, we're looking at a common characteristic: outcomes/success, however you define that term. All the characteristics which make the systems different are simply values of independent variables.
I felt like we were way off topic by this point, but, when I went back and looked at your opening post, I realized we're still circling around a difference on how students fit in to the bigger picture. I say students are but one part of a complex puzzle, while you hold that students are the whole of the puzzle.
The UNCOMMON characteristic is the student's attitude towards education. As long as that is different, we cannot copy their system and expect their success. It is the way we view education that differs. We see it as an entitlement. They see it as something earned. That makes all the difference in the world WRT outcomes. That's why countries like Sweden and Norway can assign less homework, spend less time in school and still deliver superior results. Their students accept the responsibility to learn the material presented by the teacher. They don't wait for osmosis to deliver the material to their brains or expect it to be repeated over and over until they get it. You should see the looks on my students faces when I say, repeatedly throughout the year, you should remember this from physical science and then don't review the material. They're stunned. Unfortunately, if I reteach physical science, I won't have time to teach chemistry so they're just held to knowing what they were suposed to know before they set foot in my class (here again I get students who will inform me that they didn't take physical science (some kids skip it to be on a faster science track) and then stand there like I'm supposed to fix that..).
Teachers push ropes. Their students pick up the rope and pull, ours do not. If you give me students who will pick up that rope, take responsibility for their learning and work to keep up, you can give me classes of 50 and I'll deliver their results even without copying their system. It's not how we teach that is different. It's how our students learn/don't learn. Until our students are willing to put in the effort their students put in, we will not see their results. (What's really interesting here is that because their students just do it and know they're supposed to remember it beyond the test, they actually spend LESS time working to learn.)
I don't know if this is still true, but 10 years ago it was, the top 10% of our students compare favorably to the top 10% world wide but the remaining 90% are well below average for the bottom 90% worldwide. I find my top, the real top, students are willing to work to learn the material and the sooner the better. They don't like not understanding and the sooner they clear that up the better. (In my school, this is more like the top 20% - it's just demographics) but the bottom 80% sit and wait for me to spoon feed them. If I could get them to even meet me half way I could teach more, teach deeper and pace faster. However, they don't want more, deeper and faster. They want less, shallower and slower.
I don't know if it's accurate to say they are lazy. I think it goes deeper than that. I think they've been conditioned to believe that their education just isn't their job. It's the school's job, their teacher's job and even their parent's job but not their job. They view education as something that is done to them not something they participate in. If they get behind, they expect the teacher to fix that. I have no fewer than a dozen incidents a year (one on the FINAL this year) where a student will come up to me during an exam, point to a problem, and say "I wasn't here when we learned this. What should I do?". When I tell them they are responsible for the material whether they are here or not, they repeat "I wasn't here when we learned this" as if I didn't hear them the first time and I repeat that they are responsible for the material they miss when they are absent. About half the time, this is followed up by a phone call from mom telling me that her percious snowflake was not present when I taught the material and should not be held accountable for that.
I don't think my students are lazy, I think they are entitled. Entitled to have someone else make sure they learn what they were supposed to...entitled to have someone else make sure they get their work turned in on time (another pet peeve of mine is a student will come up to me after grades are in for an assignment and tell me they were absent the day it was due to which I'll ask "Why didn't you turn it in the next day?" and the'll tell me I didn't remind them it was due. ). It's everyone's fault but thiers that they didn't learn something or didn't turn in an assigment. They just don't accept their education as their responsibility. We've conditioned them for this.
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THAT makes it a different playing field. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
