Thanks! Hey, it's eeeeeeeeli and ledocs! Awesome. Too bad I'm at work and can't watch until later. I'm looking forward to this! Update: Wow! 78 minutes! Even better! Remember when these things were supposed to be short? (I hate short diavlogs.)

Excellent dvlog!

Great to see and listen to both of you discussing such an important topic. It was a thoughtful, well informed conversation by two very intelligent and knowledgeable people. I commend eeeeeeeli's dedication to his population of kids. I have, and still work with a similar population in the mental health field. As he very well articulated, so many times the task of the day is to put out fires, that longer term educational planning seems to be always elusive. There may be a time when teachers working in such difficult conditions burn out and need a break for a while, working in less stressful districts. In the public school system this isn't always possible since they would lose seniority by changing districts. Ledocs was thoughtful in his questions and lead eeeeeeeli through different topics with candor. Perhaps next time we can hear a bit more about his experience and apparent disappointment with higher education. Thank you both for a wonderful discussion.

We're screwed huh? If we think that addressing the problems of education in the U.S. can be easily fixed. Well there's always hope and the efforts of dedicated teachers like Eli is part of the solution. Thanks to both for providing insight and considered opinion. I wish ledocs had closed out with a guitar solo. Maybe next time.

Quoting graz: I wish ledocs had closed out with a guitar solo. Maybe next time.

That would have been grand.

Kudos to both you and ledocs for an excellent discussion. I have a question: About 59 minutes in, you criticize the sort rote forms of instruction that the push for standardized tests in schools ends up fostering "as lower order thinking." Although in the abstract, I sympathize with your position, I wonder what you make of places like Korea, Japan and Singapore, where there is a heavy, heavy emphasis on just that--and yet kids consistently outscore their American counterparts in math, reading, and science. Here in Japan, I talk to people all the time who spent a year or two in the States in "good high schools" who, to a person, say what their American counterparts were studying in, say, 10th grade, they were learning in 7th and 8th. Uniformly, they say the math and science courses they took in the U.S. were absurdly easy. And despite claiming to be "poor at math," for example, aced those classes with no effort whatsoever. Is it not the case that drilling, and rote memorization and such actually work? My general sense is that the U.S. education system is great for the extremely gifted kids, and those with special educational needs (e.g., handicapped students), but that we fail the vast

Quoting rfrobison: Kudos to both you and ledocs for an excellent discussion. I have a question: About 59 minutes in, you criticize the sort rote forms of instruction that the push for standardized tests in schools ends up fostering "as lower order thinking."

Although in the abstract, I sympathize with your position, I wonder what you make of places like Korea, Japan and Singapore, where there is a heavy, heavy emphasis on just that--and yet kids consistently outscore their American counterparts in math, reading, and science.

Here in Japan, I talk to people all the time who spent a year or two in the States in "good high schools" who, to a person, say what their American counterparts were studying in, say, 10th grade, they were learning in 7th and 8th. Uniformly, they say the math and science courses they took in the U.S. were absurdly easy. And despite claiming to be "poor at math," for example, aced those classes with no effort whatsoever.

Is it not the case that drilling, and wrote memorization and such actually work? My general sense is that the U.S. education system is great for the extremely gifted kids, and those with special educational needs (e.g., handicapped students), but that we fail the vast

Quoting rfrobison: Kudos to both you and ledocs for an excellent discussion. I have a question: About 59 minutes in, you criticize the sort rote forms of instruction that the push for standardized tests in schools ends up fostering "as lower order thinking."

Although in the abstract, I sympathize with your position, I wonder what you make of places like Korea, Japan and Singapore, where there is a heavy, heavy emphasis on just that--and yet kids consistently outscore their American counterparts in math, reading, and science.

Here in Japan, I talk to people all the time who spent a year or two in the States in "good high schools" who, to a person, say what their American counterparts were studying in, say, 10th grade, they were learning in 7th and 8th. Uniformly, they say the math and science courses they took in the U.S. were absurdly easy. And despite claiming to be "poor at math," for example, aced those classes with no effort whatsoever.

Is it not the case that drilling, and wrote memorization and such actually work? My general sense is that the U.S. education system is great for the extremely gifted kids, and those with special educational needs (e.g., handicapped students), but that we fail the vast

This was a very informative diavlog, and I hope both will return to complete their discussion. As for the question of the direction of reform, I think there's another debate Americans need before they tackle schools. First, though, before both, Americans need to decide how to pay for teachers. Conservatives are lambasting unions for blowing holes in state budgets, but Kevin Drum argues that the problem is lost revenue due to the recession. On one hand, I recall what a professor said: "If you want to make money, become a bricklayer. Learn a trade. If you love learning, go to college." OTOH, education isn't about learning so much as it's a credential. If one wants to make things, apprenticeship might be a wiser course. Universities, I think, are idea factories. America seems to be becoming more of an idea factory than a manufacturer. I see South Koreans and I see younger people much better educated to be engineers than Americans. Unfortunately, the task for Americans is to create the next kind of economy and let South Koreans do the making. When Americans have decided what the next step is, then educators can figure out how to teach what society needs. Of course, there's the opinion, too, that learning is

Quoting Baltimoron: Firstly, I'd like to hear more about "kumon" from Unit. I'm not aware of the methodology by name, but perhaps I've seen it practiced in Busan as well.

Kumon is an extreme drill-based program, in part remedial, but also for just skill-honing. Our daughter tried it out for a semester, not that she was having a hard time, but to see what it was all about. She did OK but it was extremely repetitious. I'm afraid that such monotonicity can be bad for someone who is already spontaneously attracted to learning. On the other hand, it could work for someone who has no good reason to study but would like to achieve some practical results.

Quoting rfrobison: Kudos to both you and ledocs for an excellent discussion. I have a question: About 59 minutes in, you criticize the sort rote forms of instruction that the push for standardized tests in schools ends up fostering "as lower order thinking."

Although in the abstract, I sympathize with your position, I wonder what you make of places like Korea, Japan and Singapore, where there is a heavy, heavy emphasis on just that--and yet kids consistently outscore their American counterparts in math, reading, and science.

Here in Japan, I talk to people all the time who spent a year or two in the States in "good high schools" who, to a person, say what their American counterparts were studying in, say, 10th grade, they were learning in 7th and 8th. Uniformly, they say the math and science courses they took in the U.S. were absurdly easy. And despite claiming to be "poor at math," for example, aced those classes with no effort whatsoever.

Is it not the case that drilling, and wrote memorization and such actually work? My general sense is that the U.S. education system is great for the extremely gifted kids, and those with special educational needs (e.g., handicapped students), but that we fail the vast

I do not remember exactly what was said 59:00 minutes in, or by whom, but I suspect that the criticism of rote learning was not of drill and memorization per se but of teaching to the standardized tests, which are themselves dumbed down. I had to do a lot of rote learning at an advanced age in order to learn languages, so I have nothing against rote learning. It can even be fun. Something that did not come up in the diavlog, though, is that my own experience with math and science teaching in high school was that it relied far too much on drill and rote learning and was not theoretical enough. In particular, I think if my math and science teachers had known anything about the history of their subjects, I might have become more interested in those subjects. As I was saying recently to my wife, no one ever told me what the practical applications of a theoretical knowledge of the mathematics of conic sections might be. I went to one of the best public high schools in the country, Lowell High in San Francisco, Stephen Breyer is a graduate, I was in the "advanced

Quoting rfrobison: My general sense is that the U.S. education system is great for the extremely gifted kids, and those with special educational needs (e.g., handicapped students), but that we fail the vast middle by expecting too little of them in terms of being able to do actual tasks, partially because the educational theorists who train teachers find the Asian pedagogical approach old-fashioned, authoritarian, and dull.

gifted kids are not treated well in the american schools I am familiar with. It was a constant battle with boredom for me and is the same for my children. both my son and daughter have been identified by the "tag" (talented and gifted) program which is supposed to be a way to make school more interesting for smart kids, but the program is not funded and absolutely no actions have resulted from being involved with the program. So, at least in poorer areas, the schools definitely do not serve gifted kids any better, and probably worse than the average student. we are looking at allowing our son to skip the last two years of high school and get an AA at a community college instead, and transfer into university after that.

That they outscore us on criterion they specifically train for is unsurprising. I question if this dominance on entry level STEM standardized tests is meaningful. I've known a number of bright foreign students that had Jr level STEM university classes nearly bring them to a near nervous breakdown because all of a sudden they can't get by with "Problem type I, use algorithm A. Problem type II, use algorithm B. ..." type thinking. I'm really not impressed if someone gets a 1550 on their SAT but can't tell me me why factoring (or is that foiling?) to get (x-A)(x+B)=0 lets them figure out x's two values.

Quoting popcorn_karate: gifted kids are not treated well in the american schools I am familiar with. It was a constant battle with boredom for me and is the same for my children. both my son and daughter have been identified by the "tag" (talented and gifted) program which is supposed to be a way to make school more interesting for smart kids, but the program is not funded and absolutely no actions have resulted from being involved with the program.

So, at least in poorer areas, the schools definitely do not serve gifted kids any better, and probably worse than the average student. we are looking at allowing our son to skip the last two years of high school and get an AA at a community college instead, and transfer into university after that.

I don't have the slightest idea how representative my case is, but I had a very good experience with the gifted program in my local public school system. There were three tiers of the gifted program, which began in the 3rd grade and ended when kids got to high school. You had normal classes, you had the gifted program, in

Quoting Don Zeko: I don't have the slightest idea how representative my case is, but I had a very good experience with the gifted program in my local public school system. There were three tiers of the gifted program, which began in the 3rd grade and ended when kids got to high school. You had normal classes, you had the gifted program, in which kids went to advanced math and science classes but regular English and history classes, and then you had the highly gifted program, which consisted of about 150-200 kids per grade in a county with a population of about 300,000 (It's a post-integration city-county school district). The program was concentrated in one school, which made the logistics pretty challenging, but allowed students to be in advanced classes for all four core academic subjects.

In high school you didn't have that explicit tier system, but honors classes and a sort of honors+ seminar course were available all four years. Starting in junior year for most students, AP courses were concentrated at a central location that students would commute to from their home schools, so if the logistics could be managed one could take

Quoting popcorn_karate: you obviously didn't go to school in a poor area, but I'm happy to hear that some middle class kids have a lot more opportunities than my kids do. the tag program had some minimal funding when i was in school but that is now gone in my district.

As far as I know, in my experience as a parent in the US, the Gifted and talented programs vary a lot from state to state and even district to district. I've seen "enrichment" classes, which are a couple of hours a week in elementary school, to special, pull out programs, honor classes, and in some districts access to entirely different specialized programs. The one aspect that became clear to me was that all of them require students to be high achievers. If you have highly intelligent, divergent thinker, non conformist, or with (paradoxically) learning disabilities, there are no appropriate programs. I would suggest that you look into your own home enrichment, if your kids are receptive, and/or weekend or summer programs for gifted kids. Those can be a good supplement.

Quoting Ocean:
I would suggest that you look into your own home enrichment, if your kids are receptive, and/or weekend or summer programs for gifted kids. Those can be a good supplement.

thanks for the advice, thats what we do, self-reliant rural folk that we are. taking the kids and the dogs on a five mile hike out the back door is a kind of enrichment that i think is priceless. But i also shell out for more structured activities. the original point of my comment was that american schools (in poor areas) are no better for high achievers than for low achievers - catering to anything but the median costs money. I brought up the tag program to point out that if you live in a poor district, the "existence" of a program doesn't mean anything, its just a way to sweep the problem under the rug and allows for some hand-wavey feel good rhetoric for a principal or superintendent to spout to the uninformed or report to higher-ups that they "have a program". clearly the lack of services for high achievers is a lesser problem than the lack

Quoting popcorn_karate: thanks for the advice, thats what we do, self-reliant rural folk that we are. taking the kids and the dogs on a five mile hike out the back door is a kind of enrichment that i think is priceless. But i also shell out for more structured activities.

the original point of my comment was that american schools (in poor areas) are no better for high achievers than for low achievers - catering to anything but the median costs money.

I brought up the tag program to point out that if you live in a poor district, the "existence" of a program doesn't mean anything, its just a way to sweep the problem under the rug and allows for some hand-wavey feel good rhetoric for a principal or superintendent to spout to the uninformed or report to higher-ups that they "have a program".

clearly the lack of services for high achievers is a lesser problem than the lack of services for low achievers, but it sure would be nice to have schools that weren't abject failures for anybody.

I agree with pretty much all you're saying. I'm

I want to mention something that came up while I was doing background reading for this education discussion, because it is relevant here and does not come up in the diavlog. It has to do with this hypothetical equivalence of left and right in US politics, equivalence as to tactics, good faith, and respect for truth, or "opportunism," to put things in the terms of the recent Loury-Althouse diavlog: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/33634 I came across the following policy analysis paper, written under the auspices of the Cato Institute, by one of their affiliated scholars, Adam Schaeffer. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa662.pdf There are about 25 tables in this paper, in which the author purports to show that public school districts are greatly understating the actual costs of public education. But nowhere in the paper does the the author give a single example of how he gets from the publicly reported and available cost per pupil column to his "Real Cost per Pupil" column in these tables. I wrote to the author in an attempt to get one or two properly sourced example adjusting calculations and did not hear back. The author does provide labyrinthine URL's to the websites of public school

Since ledocs retired to France and the topic at hand is education, let me share this video about newly formed intervention teams of elite educators who are supposed to help out teachers in difficult schools. Quartier Général - Violence à l'école : l'engrenage The head of the intervention team in Marseilles even looks like an action movie actor, whose name escapes me at the moment.

Quoting dieter: Since ledocs retired to France and the topic at hand is education, let me share this video about newly formed intervention teams of elite educators who are supposed to help out teachers in difficult schools.

Quartier Général - Violence à l'école : l'engrenage

The head of the intervention team in Marseilles even looks like an action movie actor, whose name escapes me at the moment.

Ah... if only I spoke French! I did a google translate and pulled out this:
"At 12, Nicolas is the fifth student in the Paris region. He has been expelled from his institution for hitting another child of his age. Nicolas is now supported by a specialized team.... Finally, Headquarters followed the new emergency teams against violence at school. Special units that leave the mind calm after serious incidents. These experts of violence will they manage to restore calm to school?" Sounds intriguing. The continuation environment (high school) where I work is actually much better for troubled kids in many ways then mainstreamed classrooms. Many drop-out, and many do little work and are mainly interested only in sex, drugs and violence. But they're out of the teacher's hair, and with the individualized attention we

ED Kain, a blogger from Balloon Juice and The League of Ordinary Gentleman, has started a new [strike]True/Slant[/strike] Forbes blog that concentrates on education policy. Announcement here.

Nice. Good to see Forbes keeping it real.