An innovative
defense of the effectiveness of home-nonschooling in the COVID age:
Even the Democrat-led city government of San Francisco had enough with the board. It filed a lawsuit against both the SFUSD and its board in February 2021, accusing them of ” failing to come up with a reopening plan even as numerous other schools across the U.S. have reopened.” But SFUSD reopened only elementary schools last April and didn’t return to full-time in-person learning for all K-12 until fall 2021.
Board President López claimed the long delays didn’t cause any learning loss because children were “just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” and they learned more “about their families and cultures by staying home.”
I've wondered if some schools could actually make kids dumber.
9 comments:
Can the citizens of San Francisco ask for a tax refund since they're apparently doing the educating themselves?
School probably does. Every hour they aren’t teaching math it’s some kind of nonsense.
Music is probably OK too.
I wasn't thrilled with the math texts I reviewed twenty years ago--larded with "interesting applications" that seemed just as forced at the old word problems. I gather there was a fashion for integrating the various studies so science would reinforce math and history reinforce english etc. Cute idea, but the materials I saw left something to be desired, and I doubt the execution was better.
That's something you can do in home school, and we did.
Random assignment to condition for a large and representative n studied longitudinally shows kids who got pre-K do meaningfully worse than those who didn’t. (Results of a study of the TN pre-K program that followed over 2000 kids up to 6th grade, link to study in the post)
Another report on the same study.
I've wondered if some schools could actually make kids dumber.
They've plainly made a broad population of parents a whole lot smarter. And more educated about what teachers and school systems had been doing to their kids before the shutdowns.
I gather there was a fashion for integrating the various studies so science would reinforce math and history reinforce english etc.
It could work if the teachers cared enough to do their share of the work. My mother was a high school English teacher and when I had her--back in those days when teachers actually did teach--she and our history teacher actually dovetailed their teaching to an extent: the history teacher would assign actual papers on this or that aspect of history and grade them for history, then pass them to our English teacher to be graded for English. And Mom would assign papers on this or that bit of literature and grade them for English, then pass them to our history teacher for grading on the history involved. Mom never formally assigned Chaucer, though....
Eric Hines
Tex " wondered if some schools could actually make kids dumber.
Yes.
I know you are coming off a county commissioner's assignment. And I am usually of the philosophy that elected office OUGHT to be more like jury duty, a temporary service for a person selected from the community who expects to return to the community. A person who regards each elected position as a rung on a ladder to higher and higher levels of graft is not worthy of election - or re-election.
That said, if you choose to run for SCHOOL BOARD TRUSTEE in your district, let me know. I'll help, and donate to the campaign.
I've often thought of running for the school board, but several things stop me. One, I'd genuinely dismantle the public school system and go to a pure voucher system if I could, and it just doesn't seem right to serve on a school board with that attitude, even supposing people would ever vote for me if I said so honestly, as I would. As a County Commissioner, I tend to avoid talking about schools on the ground that it's not in my job description, but I couldn't do that as a school board candidate or member. Two, I have no children--not kids in school now, not kids in school ever, not locally, not anywhere. Three, my notions and experience of education are impossibly elitist. I have little to say that's useful for students who aren't pretty far out on the statistical tail, good at academics and highly motivated to pursue them. I have zero, zero, zero interest in the sports programs that most parents around here think are the most important thing.
There's a gulf between me and my constituents as it is, bridged uneasily by the fact that they like my constant reporting even if I've never really persuaded them that I mean what I say about the role of government. They seem to tune that part out as fast as I say it. "Oh, surely you don't mean you don't want the county to expand into THIS area, either?" Yeah, yeah, I do. At least I have an idea of the minimal core (courts, road, etc.) that the county government is supposed to be accomplishing for the entire population, not just 5-10% of it, so I can try to advocate that core equally for everyone. I would be at a loss for words on a school board.
" I would be at a loss for words on a school board."
Heh- Somehow that seems unlikely. Now the words themselves might not be what they want to hear....
The English teacher and history teacher where I work coordinate so the students read "Animal Farm" while studying the Russian Revolution and Stalin. Likewise "Night" and WWII and the Holocaust. But that's just common sense, not formal cross-curricular bells and whistles.
LittleRed1
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