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| Re: ARTICLE: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta (807344) | |||
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Re: ARTICLE: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta |
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Posted by JayMan on Sun Jul 10 00:20:50 2011, in response to Re: ARTICLE: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta, posted by Scorpio7 on Sat Jul 9 17:36:13 2011. As a teacher, I don't expect you to warm up to this right away, since after all I am saying you play a significantly smaller role in the development of your students than you probably think you do. I will note that I have nothing against educators. Indeed, my girlfriend just got her Ph. D. in education. But our preconceived notions have no effect on the facts, which are true regardless what we want to believe. Indeed, as conveyors of knowledge and skills, teachers are phenomenally important, even if they aren't creating some sort of gift in their students' minds; they are merely feeding it."education cannot make people smarter, it can only make people more knowledgeable." I don't think anybody has claimed otherwise, Yet that's exactly what you're saying. You're saying the way education is structured can improve or degrade the performance of students en masse. While this is technically true, this is true only because course work can be made easier or harder. The less conceptually challenging and less laborious the work is (not to mention the less lifestyle concessions it demands), the better students do. You can't change how much students actually learn (beyond their optimal pace, anyway) and certainly not what they can understand. That said, I will note that some studies have noted tiny effects of intervention on school performance, so I'm not completely discounting small variances one way or the other in terms of student performance that is affected by teachers. No doubt some of that is a factor in the non-genetic component of performance. But let us not fool ourselves into thinking we can lift any classroom of students far beyond their grade level relative to their peers (without compromising the material). How much knowledge and skills a student has at the end of his or her education determines how high the level of education is. And that is determined by the person's IQ, determination, and chance. Mostly by IQ. Being a teacher myself, I personally see how the level of teaching, and the way in which students are guided affects their performance. IQ and personality tells you what their POTENTIAL is, not how they will actually perform. What you're probably seeing is the effect of IQ and the struggle schools ask student to make at play. School demands a certain level of effort and commitment (i.e., it is a test of conscientiousness and other personality traits). People vary in their ability to submit to such demands. The external difficulties one experiences (which, itself, is related to IQ) affect people accordingly; more conscientious (and less neurotic) individuals are better able to overcome such things. Chance affects the size and severity of such hurdles, and to the extent that the educational apparatus affects such things, we see the results on individual students. To illustrate the effect of cognitive ability, some people can understand a concept easily and without much effort. Some people can understand a concept if they put in enough effort. Others will never understand a concept no matter how hard they work at it. It is IQ that distinguishes these types of people. You have no doubt encountered all these types of students, and have been with them as this process played out (technically every day in class). "Adjusting standards up or down has the sole effect of changing the pass/fail rate on any given population" Incorrect. If it is accompanied by thorough changes in the way classes are organised and taught, that does not need to be the case. Pass / fail rates, at least over here, are determined based not on smarts, but on knowledge and skills. The things that are learned in school. But knowledge and skills are determined in large part by smarts. That's the key point you're missing. Any measure of academic performance is affected by IQ. Indeed, IQ is to education very much like evolution is to biology; nothing makes sense without it. "we could do away with much of the educational apparatus and still have much the same results." And yet, we haven't. Anywhere. Could that possibly be because things aren't as simple as you're trying to present them? We could curb global warming by not emitting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, yet we haven't. In both cases, as Charlton suggests, there are rather large vested interests in preventing that from happening. But the case for IQ and its role in academic, and life performance is far more solid, being abundantly demonstrated by the evidence. I can see how this is resisted; I mean, we are saying that the evidence shows that we could replace most schooling with IQ tests, content-only focused courses, and perhaps work-study operations to serve as demonstration of work ethic, and achieve the results the Ivy Leagues do in terms of selection of quality candidates. A tough pill to accept to be sure; the only real challenge being how to devise a test of work-ethic that is representative of the demands asked of people in the working world, but considering that school and its many often unnecessary tasks serve as just that, this would probably not be too difficult. |
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