(2024-04-17) Zvim Childhood And Education Roundup5
Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education Roundup #5. Bullying: Why do those who defend themselves against bullies so often get in more trouble than bullies? This is also true in other contexts but especially true in school.
A lot of it is that a bully has experience and practice, they know how to work the system, they know what will cause a response, and they are picking the time and place to do something.
My worry, as usual, is that the controls are inadequate. Yes, there are some attempts here, but bullying is largely a function of how one responds to it, and one’s social status within the school, in ways that outside base factors will not account for properly.
Bullying sucks and should not be tolerated, but also bullies target ‘losers’ in various senses, so them having worse overall outcomes is not obviously due to the bullying. Causation is both common and cuts both ways.
Ever since Covid-19, schools have had to deal with lots of absenteeism and truancy.
What we should not do is accept a new norm of non-enforcement purely because we are against enforcing rules.
The past version, however, had quite the obsession with attendance, escalating quickly to ‘threaten to ruin your life’ even if nothing was actually wrong. That does not make sense either.
I think the correct solution is that attendance is insurance. If you attend most of the classes and are non-disruptive, and are plausibly trying during that time, then we cut you a lot of slack and make it very hard to fail
Against Active Shooter Drills
New York State is set to pass S6537, a long overdue bill summarized as follows: Decreases the frequency of lock-down drills in schools
A study on what books are actually banned. A school library is much smaller than the set of books, or the set of age-appropriate reasonable-to-stock books. So any given library will ‘ban’ most books. The important question is what kinds of books are more likely to be stocked, not whether efforts conspicuously remove certain books sometimes
Then again, if your book was not that interesting or popular, so we don’t care, that’s not a ban either. And of course, if no one checks the book out either way, it did not matter if you stocked it.
The organization is literally named Woke Kindergarden.
Carl: Woke Kindergarten is a real organization that sells their services to schools. Their mission is teach kids we can abolish work, landlords, Israel, and borders! One Bay Area school paid them $250k and watched student scores drop
(that 250k was over three years.)
Tracking
Matthew Yglesias calls for improving student tracking. He points out some obvious things I doubt anyone reading this fails to understand, that different kids that are the same age need different lessons and if you don’t do this many kids will be lost or bored, neither of which leads to learning
He says that without standardized tests you can’t tell where to put different kids without risking huge bias. I think that is not true. There is a very simple way to do this, which is to let families choose, if they can pass the most recent test in the advanced class
I do not think this addresses anyone’s true objection, because I believe the true objection is that tracking is unequal
There is the Bryan Caplan case against formal education, saying it fails to educate people and is mostly signaling, and there are better ways to learn. I largely buy that.
Then there is the case against education that says that kids learning things is bad.
Emily Mills: Here’s a slide deck from Mentava, a company Garry Tan is invested in with his Network State bros where they claim they’re gonna have kids done with Algebra 2 in fourth grade. It’s called Mentava and is selling itself as cheaper than private school.
And why do these folks want kids learning math so fast? They want their labor and productivity to “accelerate human achievement.”
I looked at the slide deck and this all looks awesome, actually. Devil of course is in the details
Rachel Bowman: Seattle closes gifted and talented (TAG) schools because they had too many white and Asian students, with consultants branding black parents who complained about the move ‘tokenized.’
What surprises me is how much the additional home schooling has stuck so far.I would have expected a huge peak in 2020-22, to roughly this level, with the pandemic making schools a different level of dystopian nightmare than usual, then most people throwing in the towel. That was what we did.
Instead it looks like 80% of the increase stuck around for 2022-23.
Despair
Yes, it does seem like girls outshine boys in essentially all media now, and there are tons of pro-girl messages but almost no pro-boy messages or good boy role models. And girls seem to be crushing boys in school more every year, as you would expect given how schools increasingly work
Matt Grossmann: Depression & anxiety have been increasing, especially among young girls; increasing social media & smartphone use are likely an important factor. ((2023-03-08) ZviM The Kids Are Not Okay)
I totally buy reporting and stigma as confounders. We definitely need to correct for those.
Goals
snav: I remember seeing a 100 year old ad for a university targeted at parents, where the selling point was that a humanities education would prepare your child for taking over executive leadership of your business.
(())if you are rich and your kid is spending their childhood working towards a generic job they have no passion for, I feel like you messed up.**
Taking the Developing World to School
Is our children learning? In developing nations, they got 5.4 years of schooling in 2000, versus 1.6 years in 1960
On any given day, nearly a quarter of teachers in rural India simply do not show up. (heh truancy)
World Bank report found that even when Kenyan teachers were present, they were absent from their classrooms 42% of the time.
In Kenya, one in ten students skips school on any given day; in India, it’s one in three; in Mozambique, it’s over half. And there’s a very real chance these numbers are underestimates
in Rwanda, English is the official language of instruction across all grade levels. Yet just 38% of teachers have a working command of the language
But then, were reading, writing and arithmetic ever the point?
Policymakers in developing countries tend to believe the primary purpose of schooling is none of these. Instead of focusing on either economic returns or personal development, they would prefer schools to create dutiful citizens.
This may sound like an odd set of priorities, but both European and Latin American countries had similar priorities when they expanded their education systems to serve more than a small elite around the turn of the 20th century
In 1899, the U.S. commissioner of education, William T. Harris, said exactly this. He wished U.S. schools had the “appearance of a machine,” one where the goal was to teach students “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”
The first goal of such school is obedience. The second goal of such school is more school. The third goal is literacy.
even the author steps back from the obvious implications.
In the developed world, it almost goes without saying that you go to school in order to learn academic skills
This very much does not go without saying. Or rather, it does, except that is a bad thing, because the statement is false. Yes, cognitive skills are rewarded in the job market, but that is entirely compatible with school being about other things.
If you did want to teach students to read and write, there are known highly effective techniques to do that, that work at scale, relative to current efforts of going through fixed motions:
Targeting lessons to what students know — rather than what their official grade level is — is considerably more effective. This has been shown to be successful at scale in India. In one case, students learned as much in a 10-day Teaching at the Right Level “learning camp” as they would have in four years of “regular school.” (tracking)
you get two orders of magnitude more learning. I am not sympathetic to this being ‘hard to implement.’
Marina Medvin: Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. As state spending per student goes up in Illinois, student performance goes down. Why is that? Most of the problematic schools are in Chicago.
one can only conclude that our schools, too, are not about learning.
130 million adults in the USA, 54% of the population, lack proficiency in literacy, meaning sixth grade level reading skills
By contrast, The National Center for Education Statistics in 2019 estimated only 43 million adults possess ‘low literacy skills,’ but even in that much better case, that’s still 21% of the population.
So while this is still a vast, vast improvement over historical literacy rates when you take the sufficiently long view, it is not exactly what you love to see.
Guessing the Teacher’s Password
Patrick McKenzie: It occurs to me that I have explicitly explained to my children that teachers respond well to guessing their password and that a rule of the game is you aren’t supposed to explicitly say that is what you are doing. “Remember this is just game, not all games have the same rules.” (game rule)
Correcting the Teacher’s Incentives
Wisconsin passed Act 10, discontinuing teachers’ collective bargaining over salary schedules, allowing institution of flexible pay schedules
the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement.
Mathematics
Let Kids Be Kids
Etienne: this is strangely heartwarming: the canadian pediatrics association now recommends that children engage in risky play—”thrilling and exciting forms of free play that involve uncertainty of outcome and a possibility of physical injury”—because of benefits e.g. to mental health
Lenore Skenazy: Child development much?
A “top” school in NC enforces silent lunch because admins “found that 15 minutes was not enough time to eat if the children were allowed to talk.”
Less talking = more instruction time! Better test scores! All that matters!
Mandatory Work We Encourage
What is the net impact of ‘enrichment activities’ that we enable or often force children to do, including homework?
the net effect of enrichment on cognitive skills is small and indistinguishable from zero and that the net effect of enrichment on non-cognitive skills is quite negative and significant
No doubt some of them are net positive, others are net negative. It also matters what other activities are being displaced. These results still clearly suggest we overschedule and overburden children in general.
Mandatory Work We Discourage
On the flip side, I strongly endorse that it is good for children to be able to do modest amounts of real work. It is good to learn what that is like and what is expected of workers, screw up when the price of doing so is still low, develop responsibility and good habits and earn some cash.
There is of course a limit where it turns abusive and quite bad, but the correct amount of economically useful labor for a child to do is very obviously not zero. The craziest of course is babysitting, where not only do we let an 11-year-old babysit, we actively require a babysitter for them in turn. Which, in most cases, is nuts.
Air Quality Matters
Paper finds that spending more on basic school infrastructure like HVACs and removing pollutants raises test scores but not home prices, whereas spending on things like athletic facilities raises home prices but not test scores. Thus, house prices are responding to the impression of the school, not to the quality of the education, on the margin, counting on the correlation to make that reasonable. (CO2)
This implies that, if you are paying close attention, you can do arbitrage.
If you want to argue against school choice then at minimum you need to ensure all the schools meet the minimum standard of ‘a child who goes here might learn something.’
There is literally no value in criticizing charter schools or private schools or homeschooling or anything else so long as fewer than 1% of the students at my local high school are proficient in math.
Notorious S.E.B.: I don’t like charter schools, but there is a massive blind spot on the left about the apocalyptic state of public schooling in most cities. It goes almost completely un-talked about,
If you do not have reading and mathematics ‘proficiency’ you should not graduate until such time as you do. Period. The threat of choice and competition seems like the only reasonable option, if things reach this level.
Full Access to Smartphones Is Not Good For Children
This was the main topic of a recent CWT with Jonathan Haidt, which I cover here. I covered Tyler’s additional thoughts with the section Antisocial Media in AI #59, along with additional thoughts from Matt Yglesias and Sean Patrick Hughes. ((2024-04-06) ZviM On The 2nd CWT With Jonathan Haidt)
One should remember these graphs (note the y-axes do not start at 0):
I would also note the dramatically difference between socializing in 10th grade versus 12th grade, which I was not previously aware of. Wow.
Eric Levitz: In truth, it’s not entirely clear that there even is an international decline in teen mental health that requires explanation.
That’s a bold strategy. The case is laid out in the first section of the case against the case.
It seems highly disingenuous to look at this graph and say young people in America do not have a suicide problem? I notice I am confused by this claim?
The third counterargument is to argue against Haidt’s specific experimental evidence, and perhaps they are right that it was weak, but I wasn’t relying on this particular evidence at all and had forgotten it existed
The fourth counterargument is that Haidt’s natural experiments are contradicted by better data. They claim that changes in broadband subscriptions in areas in 202 countries over 19 years did not predict teen mental health outcomes. I agree that is some evidence.
*Then the section concludes with a classic Law of No Evidence invocation.
“There’s nothing here that isn’t present in any of the past panics about video games, Dungeons & Dragons, or silent movies,” Przybylski told Vox*
If you cannot differentiate this from Dungeons & Dragons panic, which was only played by a few million kids, typically for only a few hours a week, was a niche business and involved spending time with other kids in person doing play?
Whereas for television (TV), by 1961 the average child ages 3-12 was watching 21 hours a week. And to those who say that turned out fine and was a false alarm, I would ask: Did it? Was it? I am not at all convinced. I think the alarm case there as basically correct, we simply paid the price, and the price was high but not existential.
Could this turn out to mostly be one big moral panic in the end? I suppose this is possible
Andrej Karpathy warns against ‘learn this in 10 minutes’ videos, advises getting your entertainment and education separately and deciding which one you want now. (edutainment)
Ethan Mollick: Classes that actively involved students upped test scores in a Harvard class by 33%… but students thought they were learning more from non-active lectures. The paradox; being challenged results in learning, but it also shows us how little we know, which makes us feel ignorant
That is one theory. My theory has always been that ‘active learning’ is typically obnoxious and terrible as implemented in classrooms, especially ‘group work,’ and students therefore hate it. Lectures are also obnoxious and terrible as implemented in classrooms, but in a passive way that lets students dodge when desired
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