I’m going to stay at a controversial stuff today. I’m going to relay an antidote that is related to the discussion about reading.
About 15 years ago, I was stationed in South Carolina. I had a lot of kids.
Two of my kids were in third grade I believe. And one was maybe in ninth grade, and she was struggling with Algebra 1. I have more kids but they are not germane to the story.
Anyway, my 14-year-old, Was spending every night crying at the dinner table about algebra, as parents were getting frustrated, her grades were bad, it was just a bad situation.
At random, I happened to read this article in the LA Times that floated this hypothesis that the reason so many kids struggle with algebra is because they do not learn their multiplication facts to mastery.
That day, I went home and I actually gave my ninth grader a multiplication fact test. I sat there and watched her struggle with the multiplication facts. I watched her use all these finger tricks, and count by fives, and all these other strategies.
Remember my 2 3rd-graders. Coincidentally at this time they were learning their multiplication facts. I started talking to them, and sure enough they were learning all the same little tricks and short cuts. There was very little memorization.
that night, I ordered this multiplication fact flashcards set from online. It had something like 144 cards. Every multiplication fact from 0 to 12.
When it came, I drilled the fuck out of my kids. Yes, including the ninth grader. It became a game. We would have competitions. We started with the ones and twos, and then went all the way through the deck. Within about four weeks my kids could spit out multiplication facts like nobodies business.
I then started doing reverse multiplication facts with them. I would show them the answer, and have them tell me every combination that multiply to be that number.
See, I had started researching algebra, which I realized was basically all predicated on factoring, which was basically predicated on knowing your multiplication facts the opposite direction as well.
There is a happy ending. My ninth grader ended up getting an a minus in that class.
Every single one of my kids has kicked ass in math since then.
Especially algebra.
For a while I got into educational blogging. In fact my blog is still out there.
I read so much about phonics, and teaching math, and educational theory.
The biggest problem with these fuzzy instructional methods is that middle class kids I have parents that can basically supplement help or a job the schools do. Parents will sort of naturally give phonics lessons at home. Parents will buy math flashcards.
But other kids, who don’t have the same resources at home will struggle, and these critical skills are the backgrounds to education for the rest of their lives.
It’s made me pretty skeptical about the field of education. Go read about the largest educational study ever conducted, called project follow through.
They tested a bunch of teaching methods, and literally only one method showed significant positive affects. I’m not even going to tell you.
Anyway, if you have kids I suggest you buy a good pack of flashcards, and make sure that your kids learn those multiplication facts to mastery.
My kids favorite game was war. You give them half a second to answer the flash card, they get to keep it if they get it right, you keep it if they get it wrong. Then make a big deal about when you lose. Kids love that. The day that they win all those cards, you should see how proud they are.
OK, I got a head to the airport I’m heading to Des Moines Iowa today. Goodbye El Paso.
Yes I dictated this, my eyes don’t work well in the morning so please forgive any grammatical errors.
As a lawyer, the pipeline problem looms huge because firms get beaten up over their racial demographics, but at the end of the day there's very little firms can do to fix it at their end of things because the "pipeline" is so long -- to be a lawyer in most states you have to have passed the bar exam (black and Hispanic law students have lower bar pass rates), to take the bar exam in most states you have to have graduated from law school (black and Hispanic law students have lower graduation rates), to attend a law school you generally have to have graduated from college (black and Hispanic college students have lower graduation rates), and to attend college you generally have to have graduated from high school (black and Hispanic high school students have lower graduation rates).
So, you get proposals to do things like abolish the bar exam or convert law schools to one-year plus apprenticeship type programs, but realistically that isn't going to change the total numbers all that much because you need to significantly boost the numbers coming up from college, which in turn requires boosting the numbers coming up from high school.
Matt's defense of ethnic studies is based on the premise that these departments exist due to student demand. But this is not true, as far as I can tell. I do not have systematic statistics to back this claim up, but at the two large state flagship universities I know well, enrollment in these courses is driven overwhelmingly by distributional mandates.
Let me elaborate on one anecdote, because I think it is telling. At one university, we conducted a review of distributional requirements. Part of the motivation was that the current system at the time made it unusually difficult to do a double major, and that many STEM students and faculty wanted to decrease the number of mandated non STEM courses. The main defense of the current system came from the departments whose enrollment numbers were artificially inflated, primarily ethnic studies, but also some other humanities programs. The instructions that came from on down was that the review was to take the concerns of the humanities departments seriously, but that it could be under consideration to let them take a hit. However, the option of decreasing the ethnic studies "quota" was absolutely not on the table.
Generally speaking, I find it very reasonable that as the US gets more diverse, the social sciences and humanities should broaden their perspective. However, this should have been done within the existing disciplines of history, literature, music, arts, what have you. The idea to create new departments that cover all of these diverse fields was strange, as the ways we evaluate scholarship in them are very different. Many people warned that it would not be possible for such heterogeneous departments to develop a reasonable culture of quality control. In my opinion, these warnings have proven fully validated. (It is important to know here that for a senior academic, a hugely important part of the job is quality control - you evaluate other people's papers, their grant applications, their promotion cases, their job applications, their applications to fellowships, and on and on and on.)
The other problem is that these departments are deeply, profoundly, ideological and political. This makes it basically impossible for them to conduct research that anybody else trusts. It is true that academics in general lean left, but it certainly is possible for somebody with orthodox ideas to make a career in say political science or economics. It is harder in English, but still possible. But as far as I can tell, it is outright impossible in ethnic studies. Which is a real shame, because many of the questions addressed in these fields are very important. But if you know that the people who conduct the research are firmly committed to one set of answers, then clearly it gets very difficult for them to convince anybody who does not already agree with them.
I don’t have any problem with making curricula more culturally relevant but I’m skeptical that will actually move the needle much. Asian kids seem to do great with (as far as I know) close to zero culturally relevant material handed off to them. Again, it’s probably not going to hurt anything but I doubt this item specifically will do all that much. Hope I’m wrong.
I’m pretty sure MY understands just how quickly the Hispanic kids and families who make up the majority of the other half are acculturating/assimilating.
Only the demography is destiny grifters and their poor dupes on both sides of the aisle don’t.
About the ethnic studies content: I think Matt was talking more about studies of specific ethnic groups in American history (unless I misunderstood), but it raises another issue that I find concerning. I often see pundits proposing that we teach people more literature from non-Western cultures (e.g. African, Asian, etc.). I'm all for this in general -- it's good for people to have a broader understanding of literature.
But the *reasoning* behind these proposals seems to be the idea that a Black American should feel a stronger connection with an African author, and an Asian-American should feel a stronger connection with an Asian author, than either would feel with a white American author. To me, this is disturbing. It seems like a capitulation to tribalism by people who are left of center. Can we teach a left-wing version of shared American identity instead?
“I truly cannot emphasize how much more correct early-reading instruction matters than whether or not kids read the 1619 project.” Best sentence in the article but also maybe the most disheartening? I think this sentiment is totally counter to the prevailing strongly held progressive stuff I am hearing and convincing people of this sets u against teachers unions, progressive activists and a host of others. The idea that standardized testing should be an anchor to guide true accountability and improvement for poor, minority, and poorly performing students and also to find the talented students that might be missed in unlikely places to get them even better resources and outcomes is clear as day to me but just not what people seem to want to hear on the left. I don’t see them flipping on it soon but maybe that is my version of edu-pessimism.
Yep. That last paragraph says it all really. I watched a disastrous experiment in education called the Whole Language Approach play out in Ontario. It was very popular with the teachers I must say. You don't have to teach spelling or grammar you see. This will be acquired naturally as students progress through their grades. Man, did that ever not happen.
The truth is the pipeline ends somewhere. For things like STEM degrees it ends at a very solid wall. If you wish to undertake such a course of study it does not matter what social or cultural impediments stood in your way of acquiring the math and reading skills you must have to do this. And we very much need every mind we can get prepped and engaged and ready to go. Global warming will not be solved by social justice warriors of any stripe. It will be solved by scientists and engineers. Frankly I don't give a damn what other college faculties do.
As a millennial, I’m always shocked to hear that there’s any controversy at all around phonics. It’s how I learned to read in the late 80s and I just assumed it was how everyone learned to read. Hooked on Phonics, right? Id be curious to hear if there is any correlation between a school/district’s approach to teaching reading and their long term student outcomes… maybe it’s in one of Matt’s links.
Second the pipeline problem. It’s certainly an issue in STEM, one that (white male) colleagues are quick to bring up when racial/gender disparities in the workforce are brought up as a problem for us to own. We certainly invest a lot of employee effort into outreach- STEM programs at schools and with clubs to help get more kids interested in STEM. “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it” is a common refrain to encourage women and minorities in STEM to participate in the outreach. But it’s fair to also say, “if you can’t read, you can’t be it.”
"The kids who are not good at school, meanwhile, are not paying close attention to the content of history classes." I think this is far too glib. The most obvious rejoinder is that there are probably a lot of in-between students who would benefit, even slightly, from a more holistic view of American history. By ceding the ground too easily to the racists, a ready opportunity to improve the holistic worldview of the citizenry is lost.
Imagine if this was about the debates about teaching evolution in classrooms: who cares? The smart kids will seek out info on evolution, and the dumb kids won't care.
I remember that McWhorter episode. In fact, he listed three ideas for advancing racial equity. The third was making long-acting reversible birth control cheap and widely available for teenagers. (Not relevant to this piece, of course.)
Thank you for this post. I would like to take evidentiary issue with one claim:
"There could absolutely be more Black engineers at Google...but they’d have to be coming from some other institution or field that employs people with technical skills. Either that or you need to increase the population of people who obtain those technical skills."
My grad-school classmate Chelsea Barabas wrote her master's thesis on this: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97992. She persuasively argues that it is not the latter thing, but instead a product of 1) myopic hiring/recruitment practices and 2) inadequate commitment to job-specific training for those who already have the foundational skills. Both her ethnographic work with tech founders/people ops, as well as analyses of public records and school research, support these conclusions.
I would like to quote at length from one relevant section of chapter 2:
"The more I discussed hiring practices with tech company leaders, the more I realized how imprecise their metrics for competence and talent actually were, particularly for candidates with limited prior work experience. Although many of the founders and CEOs I spoke with expressed frustration with these methods, few of them critically reflected on the role that they played in creating and perpetuating a homogenous workforce in tech. Rather, they assumed that there was a general scarcity of technical talent, particularly for individuals from underrepresented groups. Because their search methods yielded very few women or people of color, they assumed that the problem stemmed from leaks in the education pipeline for STEM careers..."
However, she points out that if you look at data from the American Society for Engineering Education, you will see that *more* Black/Latine students, *in absolute terms,* graduate with IT-related degrees in the United States than white/Asian students. The problem is that they disproportionately attend schools like UC-Riverside or North Carolina A&T or the University of Texas El-Paso, and tech companies do not recruit at these schools.
Now, you could maybe say "well, UC-Riverside doesn't train students to be SWEs at Google as well as MIT or CMU or Stanford." I'd contest that premise, but even if you grant it, that still doesn't make it a pipeline problem, it makes it a *job training* problem. The point of a bachelor's degree in computer science is not to train someone to be an SWE at Google, it's to provide a computing education sufficient to meet the standards of the educators guild, which should lay a foundation on which other people can build with additional training.
Besides, other parts of Chelsea's thesis show that, as you say in your journalism example, most of this in the tech industry seems to be driven by the idea that companies hire mostly through personal referrals or prestige-driven recruitment only at elite universities.
I'd also point out this is consonant with Krugman's long-held thesis that there is no skills gap, there is only a training gap.
Has anyone else noticed that liberals seem to hear racists dog whistling better than anyone? They will bend themselves into pretzels to hear a racists dog whistle. A liberal listening to a non-liberal talk about race is like someone getting a hearing tests. They know the beep is coming…but when…what ear…oh no…I’ve got to click button…it must have beeped! Dog whistle…dog whistle…!
The dog whistle charge is so powerful in woke liberal circles they will level it even if someone just says straight up racists shit! No that wasn’t a dog whistle…that was just simple spoken racism.
I'm completely on board with these posts, but I think that's because I started out already on your side.
I think if you're going to call out "dangerous attack[s] on efforts to measure learning" in your subheader, it'd be worthwhile to engage the actual viewpoint being put forward by the edu-left. Why do they think measurement embodies white supremacy? You can partially answer this by pointing to Kendi's views on disparate outcomes = racism, but I do think the claim is deeper than that. I know you've sort of addressed it elsewhere, but in a two-post deep dive I'd have hoped to have seen this taken more seriously.
“…students learn less on hot days, and this heat effect can be fully mitigated by installing air conditioning…”
I can also remember this from school growing up, and 1000% agree. I can remember classes that I took in “hot” parts of the building, and how miserable they were. This seems like such a good and obvious intervention I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before. Implementation is incredibly straightforward, and you could easily measure success, as defined by cooler rooms, with remote thermometers.
I vote you should do an article dedicated solely to this topic. Just like…. Lay out a roadmap for exactly how to address this problem, a suggested funding mechanism, etc. Or, this could be a good opportunity for you to empower a guest poster that knows the topic well.
This seems like such an obvious win from all angles; technocratically, politically, practically.
I’m going to stay at a controversial stuff today. I’m going to relay an antidote that is related to the discussion about reading.
About 15 years ago, I was stationed in South Carolina. I had a lot of kids.
Two of my kids were in third grade I believe. And one was maybe in ninth grade, and she was struggling with Algebra 1. I have more kids but they are not germane to the story.
Anyway, my 14-year-old, Was spending every night crying at the dinner table about algebra, as parents were getting frustrated, her grades were bad, it was just a bad situation.
At random, I happened to read this article in the LA Times that floated this hypothesis that the reason so many kids struggle with algebra is because they do not learn their multiplication facts to mastery.
That day, I went home and I actually gave my ninth grader a multiplication fact test. I sat there and watched her struggle with the multiplication facts. I watched her use all these finger tricks, and count by fives, and all these other strategies.
Remember my 2 3rd-graders. Coincidentally at this time they were learning their multiplication facts. I started talking to them, and sure enough they were learning all the same little tricks and short cuts. There was very little memorization.
that night, I ordered this multiplication fact flashcards set from online. It had something like 144 cards. Every multiplication fact from 0 to 12.
When it came, I drilled the fuck out of my kids. Yes, including the ninth grader. It became a game. We would have competitions. We started with the ones and twos, and then went all the way through the deck. Within about four weeks my kids could spit out multiplication facts like nobodies business.
I then started doing reverse multiplication facts with them. I would show them the answer, and have them tell me every combination that multiply to be that number.
See, I had started researching algebra, which I realized was basically all predicated on factoring, which was basically predicated on knowing your multiplication facts the opposite direction as well.
There is a happy ending. My ninth grader ended up getting an a minus in that class.
Every single one of my kids has kicked ass in math since then.
Especially algebra.
For a while I got into educational blogging. In fact my blog is still out there.
I read so much about phonics, and teaching math, and educational theory.
The biggest problem with these fuzzy instructional methods is that middle class kids I have parents that can basically supplement help or a job the schools do. Parents will sort of naturally give phonics lessons at home. Parents will buy math flashcards.
But other kids, who don’t have the same resources at home will struggle, and these critical skills are the backgrounds to education for the rest of their lives.
It’s made me pretty skeptical about the field of education. Go read about the largest educational study ever conducted, called project follow through.
They tested a bunch of teaching methods, and literally only one method showed significant positive affects. I’m not even going to tell you.
Anyway, if you have kids I suggest you buy a good pack of flashcards, and make sure that your kids learn those multiplication facts to mastery.
My kids favorite game was war. You give them half a second to answer the flash card, they get to keep it if they get it right, you keep it if they get it wrong. Then make a big deal about when you lose. Kids love that. The day that they win all those cards, you should see how proud they are.
OK, I got a head to the airport I’m heading to Des Moines Iowa today. Goodbye El Paso.
Yes I dictated this, my eyes don’t work well in the morning so please forgive any grammatical errors.
As a lawyer, the pipeline problem looms huge because firms get beaten up over their racial demographics, but at the end of the day there's very little firms can do to fix it at their end of things because the "pipeline" is so long -- to be a lawyer in most states you have to have passed the bar exam (black and Hispanic law students have lower bar pass rates), to take the bar exam in most states you have to have graduated from law school (black and Hispanic law students have lower graduation rates), to attend a law school you generally have to have graduated from college (black and Hispanic college students have lower graduation rates), and to attend college you generally have to have graduated from high school (black and Hispanic high school students have lower graduation rates).
So, you get proposals to do things like abolish the bar exam or convert law schools to one-year plus apprenticeship type programs, but realistically that isn't going to change the total numbers all that much because you need to significantly boost the numbers coming up from college, which in turn requires boosting the numbers coming up from high school.
Matt's defense of ethnic studies is based on the premise that these departments exist due to student demand. But this is not true, as far as I can tell. I do not have systematic statistics to back this claim up, but at the two large state flagship universities I know well, enrollment in these courses is driven overwhelmingly by distributional mandates.
Let me elaborate on one anecdote, because I think it is telling. At one university, we conducted a review of distributional requirements. Part of the motivation was that the current system at the time made it unusually difficult to do a double major, and that many STEM students and faculty wanted to decrease the number of mandated non STEM courses. The main defense of the current system came from the departments whose enrollment numbers were artificially inflated, primarily ethnic studies, but also some other humanities programs. The instructions that came from on down was that the review was to take the concerns of the humanities departments seriously, but that it could be under consideration to let them take a hit. However, the option of decreasing the ethnic studies "quota" was absolutely not on the table.
Generally speaking, I find it very reasonable that as the US gets more diverse, the social sciences and humanities should broaden their perspective. However, this should have been done within the existing disciplines of history, literature, music, arts, what have you. The idea to create new departments that cover all of these diverse fields was strange, as the ways we evaluate scholarship in them are very different. Many people warned that it would not be possible for such heterogeneous departments to develop a reasonable culture of quality control. In my opinion, these warnings have proven fully validated. (It is important to know here that for a senior academic, a hugely important part of the job is quality control - you evaluate other people's papers, their grant applications, their promotion cases, their job applications, their applications to fellowships, and on and on and on.)
The other problem is that these departments are deeply, profoundly, ideological and political. This makes it basically impossible for them to conduct research that anybody else trusts. It is true that academics in general lean left, but it certainly is possible for somebody with orthodox ideas to make a career in say political science or economics. It is harder in English, but still possible. But as far as I can tell, it is outright impossible in ethnic studies. Which is a real shame, because many of the questions addressed in these fields are very important. But if you know that the people who conduct the research are firmly committed to one set of answers, then clearly it gets very difficult for them to convince anybody who does not already agree with them.
I don’t have any problem with making curricula more culturally relevant but I’m skeptical that will actually move the needle much. Asian kids seem to do great with (as far as I know) close to zero culturally relevant material handed off to them. Again, it’s probably not going to hurt anything but I doubt this item specifically will do all that much. Hope I’m wrong.
“Only half of kids are non-Hispanic whites”
I’m pretty sure MY understands just how quickly the Hispanic kids and families who make up the majority of the other half are acculturating/assimilating.
Only the demography is destiny grifters and their poor dupes on both sides of the aisle don’t.
About the ethnic studies content: I think Matt was talking more about studies of specific ethnic groups in American history (unless I misunderstood), but it raises another issue that I find concerning. I often see pundits proposing that we teach people more literature from non-Western cultures (e.g. African, Asian, etc.). I'm all for this in general -- it's good for people to have a broader understanding of literature.
But the *reasoning* behind these proposals seems to be the idea that a Black American should feel a stronger connection with an African author, and an Asian-American should feel a stronger connection with an Asian author, than either would feel with a white American author. To me, this is disturbing. It seems like a capitulation to tribalism by people who are left of center. Can we teach a left-wing version of shared American identity instead?
"people tend to be more interested in stuff that is about people like them than in stuff that feels alien."
Taking race as a reliable index of 'who is like you' and 'who is alien' is bad. It's the kind of thing education should overcome, not reinscribe.
“I truly cannot emphasize how much more correct early-reading instruction matters than whether or not kids read the 1619 project.” Best sentence in the article but also maybe the most disheartening? I think this sentiment is totally counter to the prevailing strongly held progressive stuff I am hearing and convincing people of this sets u against teachers unions, progressive activists and a host of others. The idea that standardized testing should be an anchor to guide true accountability and improvement for poor, minority, and poorly performing students and also to find the talented students that might be missed in unlikely places to get them even better resources and outcomes is clear as day to me but just not what people seem to want to hear on the left. I don’t see them flipping on it soon but maybe that is my version of edu-pessimism.
Yep. That last paragraph says it all really. I watched a disastrous experiment in education called the Whole Language Approach play out in Ontario. It was very popular with the teachers I must say. You don't have to teach spelling or grammar you see. This will be acquired naturally as students progress through their grades. Man, did that ever not happen.
The truth is the pipeline ends somewhere. For things like STEM degrees it ends at a very solid wall. If you wish to undertake such a course of study it does not matter what social or cultural impediments stood in your way of acquiring the math and reading skills you must have to do this. And we very much need every mind we can get prepped and engaged and ready to go. Global warming will not be solved by social justice warriors of any stripe. It will be solved by scientists and engineers. Frankly I don't give a damn what other college faculties do.
As a millennial, I’m always shocked to hear that there’s any controversy at all around phonics. It’s how I learned to read in the late 80s and I just assumed it was how everyone learned to read. Hooked on Phonics, right? Id be curious to hear if there is any correlation between a school/district’s approach to teaching reading and their long term student outcomes… maybe it’s in one of Matt’s links.
Second the pipeline problem. It’s certainly an issue in STEM, one that (white male) colleagues are quick to bring up when racial/gender disparities in the workforce are brought up as a problem for us to own. We certainly invest a lot of employee effort into outreach- STEM programs at schools and with clubs to help get more kids interested in STEM. “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it” is a common refrain to encourage women and minorities in STEM to participate in the outreach. But it’s fair to also say, “if you can’t read, you can’t be it.”
"The kids who are not good at school, meanwhile, are not paying close attention to the content of history classes." I think this is far too glib. The most obvious rejoinder is that there are probably a lot of in-between students who would benefit, even slightly, from a more holistic view of American history. By ceding the ground too easily to the racists, a ready opportunity to improve the holistic worldview of the citizenry is lost.
Imagine if this was about the debates about teaching evolution in classrooms: who cares? The smart kids will seek out info on evolution, and the dumb kids won't care.
I remember that McWhorter episode. In fact, he listed three ideas for advancing racial equity. The third was making long-acting reversible birth control cheap and widely available for teenagers. (Not relevant to this piece, of course.)
Hi Matt —
Thank you for this post. I would like to take evidentiary issue with one claim:
"There could absolutely be more Black engineers at Google...but they’d have to be coming from some other institution or field that employs people with technical skills. Either that or you need to increase the population of people who obtain those technical skills."
My grad-school classmate Chelsea Barabas wrote her master's thesis on this: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97992. She persuasively argues that it is not the latter thing, but instead a product of 1) myopic hiring/recruitment practices and 2) inadequate commitment to job-specific training for those who already have the foundational skills. Both her ethnographic work with tech founders/people ops, as well as analyses of public records and school research, support these conclusions.
I would like to quote at length from one relevant section of chapter 2:
"The more I discussed hiring practices with tech company leaders, the more I realized how imprecise their metrics for competence and talent actually were, particularly for candidates with limited prior work experience. Although many of the founders and CEOs I spoke with expressed frustration with these methods, few of them critically reflected on the role that they played in creating and perpetuating a homogenous workforce in tech. Rather, they assumed that there was a general scarcity of technical talent, particularly for individuals from underrepresented groups. Because their search methods yielded very few women or people of color, they assumed that the problem stemmed from leaks in the education pipeline for STEM careers..."
However, she points out that if you look at data from the American Society for Engineering Education, you will see that *more* Black/Latine students, *in absolute terms,* graduate with IT-related degrees in the United States than white/Asian students. The problem is that they disproportionately attend schools like UC-Riverside or North Carolina A&T or the University of Texas El-Paso, and tech companies do not recruit at these schools.
Now, you could maybe say "well, UC-Riverside doesn't train students to be SWEs at Google as well as MIT or CMU or Stanford." I'd contest that premise, but even if you grant it, that still doesn't make it a pipeline problem, it makes it a *job training* problem. The point of a bachelor's degree in computer science is not to train someone to be an SWE at Google, it's to provide a computing education sufficient to meet the standards of the educators guild, which should lay a foundation on which other people can build with additional training.
Besides, other parts of Chelsea's thesis show that, as you say in your journalism example, most of this in the tech industry seems to be driven by the idea that companies hire mostly through personal referrals or prestige-driven recruitment only at elite universities.
I'd also point out this is consonant with Krugman's long-held thesis that there is no skills gap, there is only a training gap.
Has anyone else noticed that liberals seem to hear racists dog whistling better than anyone? They will bend themselves into pretzels to hear a racists dog whistle. A liberal listening to a non-liberal talk about race is like someone getting a hearing tests. They know the beep is coming…but when…what ear…oh no…I’ve got to click button…it must have beeped! Dog whistle…dog whistle…!
The dog whistle charge is so powerful in woke liberal circles they will level it even if someone just says straight up racists shit! No that wasn’t a dog whistle…that was just simple spoken racism.
I'm completely on board with these posts, but I think that's because I started out already on your side.
I think if you're going to call out "dangerous attack[s] on efforts to measure learning" in your subheader, it'd be worthwhile to engage the actual viewpoint being put forward by the edu-left. Why do they think measurement embodies white supremacy? You can partially answer this by pointing to Kendi's views on disparate outcomes = racism, but I do think the claim is deeper than that. I know you've sort of addressed it elsewhere, but in a two-post deep dive I'd have hoped to have seen this taken more seriously.
“…students learn less on hot days, and this heat effect can be fully mitigated by installing air conditioning…”
I can also remember this from school growing up, and 1000% agree. I can remember classes that I took in “hot” parts of the building, and how miserable they were. This seems like such a good and obvious intervention I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before. Implementation is incredibly straightforward, and you could easily measure success, as defined by cooler rooms, with remote thermometers.
I vote you should do an article dedicated solely to this topic. Just like…. Lay out a roadmap for exactly how to address this problem, a suggested funding mechanism, etc. Or, this could be a good opportunity for you to empower a guest poster that knows the topic well.
This seems like such an obvious win from all angles; technocratically, politically, practically.