We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she’s a year away from graduating high school (!) and I’ve had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons
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The standardization of American education has produced all the downsides of standardization - a rigid, often suboptimal, one-size-fits-all system - without the benefits. With teachers across America teaching in lockstep, often from the same set texts (especially in the AP courses), there’s a massive opportunity for a #commons to go with the common core.
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For example, the AP English and History classes my kid takes use standard texts that are often centuries old and hard to puzzle out. I watched my kid struggle with texts for learning about “persuasive rhetoric” like 17th century pamphlets that inspired anti-indigenous pogroms with fictional accounts of “Indian atrocities.”
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It’s good for American schoolkids to learn about the use of these blood libels to excuse genocide, but these pamphlets are a slog. Even with glossaries in the textbooks, it’s a slow, word-by-word matter to parse these out. I can’t imagine anyone learning a single thing about how speech persuades people just by reading that text.
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But there’s nothing in the standardized curriculum that prevents teachers from adding more texts to the unit. We live in an unfortunate golden age for persuasive texts that inspire terrible deeds - for example, kids could also read core #Pizzagate texts and connect the guy who shot up the pizza parlor to the racists who formed a 17th century lynchmob.
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But teachers are incredibly time-constrained. For one thing, at least a third of the AP classroom time seems to be taken up with detailed instructions for writing stilted, stylized “essays” for the AP tests (these are terrible writing, but they’re easy to grade in a standardized way).
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr This is hugely debased compared to when I took AP English about 35 years ago (at the time it was one class and exam, predominantly English literature).
I know what the AP English rubric was then, because we had a couple practice exams graded by volunteers, and one of my parents was a volunteer reviewer for one AP English class at my school (not mine, so no conflicts of interest there).
That rubric emphasized making persuasive analysis of the chosen literature and giving good supporting details for your analysis. Essays did not have to follow a set format, except that they should flow logically and sensibly, clearly get to the point (so no filler or vague terms like “…is very important”), and be grammatically competent.
We definitely did not take 1/3 of the term drilling correct AP essay style. The practice exams (1 or 2) along with some class discussion were the sum total of in-school exam prep.
@dpnash@c.im @pluralistic@mamot.fr Wow, this is … something. I took the AP English course and exam a bit longer ago. The class never covered the exam at all, just American literature and “how” to write. No practice exams, no rubrics. Same for AP History, which focused on European history. I did well on both exams, mostly because of the “how” to write part.
@spbollin@mas.to @pluralistic@mamot.fr In all the AP classes I took (late '80s) there was some review for the exam that involved practices, but it was mostly just going over what sorts of topics tended to be covered, with practice exams mostly covering how the exam worked rather than hyper-specific methods of trying to optimize scores (e.g., for AP English, what a typical literary critique/analysis question would look like and what it would ask). The AP English rubric I mentioned was the actual College Board grading rubric from exams administered a year or two beforehand, rather than an in-class preparation, which is part of the reason it came to mind as such a big difference from Cory’s description of weeks upon weeks of fine-tuning essay style and format as part of AP English nowadays.
@spbollin@mas.to @pluralistic@mamot.fr And while we’re on the subject: I know for a fact that at no point in my high school or college “generic expository writing experience” (through the early '90s) did I ever have to adhere to something like the “five paragraph essay format” that seems to be what people nowadays think of as an “essay”, and which ChatGPT can regurgitate, with superficial content but absolutely perfect form. Of course, a lot of short essays I wrote would have been about 5 paragraphs long and would have followed a pattern of “intro, various supporting topics, conclusions”, but through a dozen or more classes in English, history, and social sciences, where this sort of writing was routine, what mattered was actually being able to support an argument. The specific structural details were a lot less important. I’d like to think that’s still very real at the college level; I’m rather less optimistic at the high school level in much of the US.
That’s where standardization could actually deliver some benefits. If just one teacher could produce some supplemental materials and accompanying curriculum, the existence of standards means that every other teacher could use it. What’s more, any adaptations that teachers make to that unit to make them suited to their kids would also work for the other teachers in the USA.
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And because the instruction is so rigidly standardized, all of these materials could be keyed to metadata that precisely identified the units they belonged to.
The closest thing we have to this are “marketplaces” where teachers can sell each other their supplementary materials.
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As far as I can tell, the only people making real money from these marketplaces are the grifters who built them and convinced teachers to paywall the instructional materials that could otherwise form a commons.
Like I said, I’ve got a completely overfull plate, but if I found myself at loose ends, trying to find a project to devote the rest of my life to, I’d be pitching funders on building a national, open access portal to build an educational commons.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr there are attempts at some sort of commons at least for college (which is another can of worms) and some attempts to get this to the schools. However with different states having all kinds of different standards (NGSS and other national standards notwithstanding), it’s tough - and pushes the onus on to teachers a lot. A lot of this is piecemeal supported by foundations
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It may be a lot to expect teachers to master the intricacies of peer-based co-production tools like #Git, but there’s already a system like this that K-8 teachers across the country have mastered: #Scratch. Scratch is a graphic programming environment for kids, and starting with 2019’s Scratch 3.0, the primary way to access it is via an in-browser version that’s hosted at scratch.mit.edu.
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