Thucides retweeted
“I just don’t believe, as many of the left seem to, that discipline, measurement, and academic ambition are somehow antithetical to social justice or the human spirit.”
Why Is the Left So Bad at Education? - by Ian Leslie ian-leslie.com/p/why-is-the-…
Thucides retweeted
Nikole Hannah Jones and others have long argued that in order to fix schools, we need to start by integrating them.
For Vox I wrote about how DC shows the opposite may be true: Fixing your schools can help integrate them. vox.com/policy/505269/washin…
Thucides retweeted
Parents,
If your kid comes home complaining a teacher of theirs is “too strict” or “mean,” take it seriously. Ask questions. Get specifics.
You may discover that your precious child has been asked to sit down and be quiet. Or worse, listen to the lesson.
If it turns out that this is the case, make sure to thank the teacher for keeping order in their classroom. It’s rarer than you may think.
Thucides retweeted
A parent complains about a teacher enforcing a school rule, and the administrator calls the teacher in to discuss what they could have done differently.
The kid broke the rule, but the teacher is told to improve.
The parent and kid now have the administration helping them make the teacher’s enforcement of the rule the problem.
Next time, that teacher has a good reason to let the behavior slide, and so does every teacher who knows what happened.
The administrator bought peace with one parent at the expense of order in everyone else’s classroom.
Thucides retweeted
It is common practice to blame Bush’s NCLB for many of today’s education woes, but Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter really fuels what is inarguably one of the worst problems facing teachers today: school discipline.
The threat of investigation for following even the most milquetoast policies providing consequences for misbehavior has run havoc on our ability to run orderly and safe schools, which are prerequisites for learning and for retaining staff.
It has been an unmitigated disaster.
Thucides retweeted
Nikole Hannah Jones intentionally enrolled her child in a “bad” school where students score far below grade level, in the name of “integration,” because a middle class kid is magically supposed to raise the outcomes of the students around her. It turns out her child learned little there and it made no difference.
She is now hosting a town hall with the DOE Chancellor on… wait for it… “integration”… because apparently her failing solution is what others don’t know we need.
Thucides retweeted
A man who was just trying to get home from work is dead after another unprovoked stabbing on the train.
@GovKathyHochul, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. New Yorkers are tired of promises while innocent people are attacked on their way home.
We need safe subways, real accountability, and consequences for violent criminals.
How many more New Yorkers have to become victims before you make public safety the priority it should be?
abc7ny.com/post/queens-subwa…
Thucides retweeted
Math needs a phonics-style reckoning. This is a fantastic article by @mattyglesias. Thank you for writing this piece on math and for the shout out. You've explained my position perfectly.
Drilling & mastering the basics isn't the enemy of understanding. It's a prerequisite!
open.substack.com/pub/matthe…
Thucides retweeted
Nothing new under the sun. @mattyglesias has been covering this since 2003. I wrote about it in 2005. (Excerpt below) Finally, people in ed are catching on. Maybe Ss are bad at math b/c they haven't been taught. @rastokke @RCsEvilTwin @ToddTruitt76508 @amandavande1
The phantom menace of “drill and kill” is leading educators away from the basics of how you teach almost anything to novices — deeper understanding has to follow from fluency in the fundamentals.
slowboring.com/p/math-needs-…
Thucides retweeted
If inquiry learning actually worked, the military would use it. But they know it doesn’t get the job done and use direct instruction instead.
Outside the school context, the overwhelmingly dominant mode of teaching people things is to use Direct Instruction — you literally show them what to do and make them practice it — but education theorists insist this is bad.
slowboring.com/p/math-needs-…
Thucides retweeted
Outside the school context, the overwhelmingly dominant mode of teaching people things is to use Direct Instruction — you literally show them what to do and make them practice it — but education theorists insist this is bad.
slowboring.com/p/math-needs-…
Thucides retweeted
Kumon and other successful after-school tutoring organizations always use traditional drill and practice to catch kids up in math.
I once attended a lecture by a well-known math ed guru, who was selling the "new way" to teach math.
My colleague asked her: "Why do you think places like Kumon always use traditional teaching - like math drills and worksheets? If your approach is so much better, why don't they use your approach?"
She replied: "It's nostalgia. It makes parents feel good to see things being taught the way they were taught."
The real reason is that Kumon is a paid service. They will lose business if they do not deliver a product that works.
Public schools do not face such consequences. They can just keep doing whatever they want, listening to the gurus, and buying their products. And parents have to keep sending their kids.
This is the sad tragedy of public education.
@mattyglesias
Thucides retweeted
In 2019 Nikole Hannah Jones asked me "What are YOU willing to give up for Equality?" We were discussing the efforts to end the entrance exam to NYC's Specialized High Schools and other so-called equity reforms that she characterized as "desegregation." 1/7
Thucides retweeted
This is exactly right:
My takeaway from the NHJ discourse is that America continues to be unreasonably polarized between people who think the only thing that matters is the other students and the only thing that matters is funding.
Managing the school is important!
slowboring.com/p/why-i-send-…
Thucides retweeted
Nicole Hannah-Jones and @nytimes did not disclose that her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, sits on the. 24-member Panel for Educational Policy, and chairs the contracts commitee, which oversees millions of dollars spent by the city Department of Education.
schools.nyc.gov/get-involved…
Thucides retweeted
“A NYT reporter in a high-poverty school f-ing changes the school … I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately” - Nikole Hannah-Jones
Thucides retweeted
“Teachers constantly worked to refocus students and mitigate conflict. This is good educational practice.”
Nicole Hannah-Jones saw how this negatively affected her daughter’s education and still calls it good educational practice.
I don’t even know what to say.
Thucides retweeted
The throughline of her article is that segregation and inequity paired with poor teachers and school leaders caused the problems plaguing the school. NHJ wouldn't last a day as a teacher or even a lunch para at that school because she refuses to acknowledge the *actual* problem
Thucides retweeted
One really important problem with Nikole Hannah-Jones's approach to and values about education are right there in her headline:
She is "fighting for every black child." But there are no white parents who make their education decisions within a framework of "fighting for every white child" or Asian parents who are "fighting for every Asian child."
Rather, members of these groups understand their kids as competing with other white or Asian children for scarce opportunities for social advancement. Whites and Asians are competing for those scarce opportunities with whites and Asians from all over the country, so no matter how well their kid may be performing relative to the local cohort, they always need to push harder, move faster and do and be more.
In a setting where everyone is white and there are no race politics implicated, white people have absolutely no compunction about pulling the highest performers out of a class and putting them on a gifted track, and pulling the low performers out of the class and putting them on a special education track, and getting the discipline problems out of the classroom entirely. And then the special ed parents advocate for special ed, and the gifted parents advocate for gifted funding, because everybody is advocating for the resources they think their kid needs to compete against all the other kids.
Hannah-Jones believes whites and Asians favor academic tracking and sorting through standardized testing and selective admissions primarily as a ploy to separate their groups from blacks and Latinos, because she perceives all of politics as being about groups that practice internal solidarity lobbying for collective benefits over other groups.
She despises people who are not like her and limits her contact with them to the point that she does not understand them and has no theory of mind for them. She simply assumes they are a mirror of herself and therefore she assumes white people hate black people the way she hates white people. She thinks all the sorting of children whites and Asians do is actually a shell game that is just meant to keep people like her out. But the truth is, people like her aren't even part of the consideration, because kids like hers are not part of the competition.
This has historically worked out fine for children like her daughter, because affirmative action has historically meant kids like hers have seats reserved and don't have to outperform whites and Asians for a spot. As long as her kid was doing well among her cohort, she could go to any college she wanted. That is now less true since SFFA.
Najya perceived that the schools that weren't like hers were better than her school, and Nikole tries to blame that disparity on resources or on privilege or on systemic racism. But the truth is, it's about values and it's about the perception of school as a competition that brings about better outcomes. Nikole Hannah-Jones has a values system built around resentment and complacency.
She doesn't think in terms of trying to beat an Asian kid on a math test, instead she dismisses the test as an inaccurate instrument steeped in racist assumptions. But then it turned out her kid really couldn't do math.
And, like her daughter, she didn't learn anything.
