A friend sends his children to the much-vaunted Lexington, Massachusetts public schools. He denies being a tiger parent but has a PhD, is Asian-American, and the kids seem to be doing a lot of extracurricular activities. Are the schools as great as Boston-area parents think? “Most of the teachers are bad; my daughter had a terrible math teacher last year,” he responded. “There are a few good ones, especially in the AP classes. Lexington probably has more good teachers than other school systems.”
A few hours after this conversation I ran into a non-teacher employee of the Newton, Massachusetts public school system, another supposedly top choice. She said “Most schools with a great reputation are riding on something that they were doing 10 years earlier. That’s certainly true of Newton.”
What about Lexington school system insiders? I recently met a teacher in the school system who characterized the evaluation process for already-hired teachers as demanding and said that there was no job security for bad teachers. In his opinion it was easy (too easy!) for a teacher, even one with tenure, to be fired for poor performance. (See also this posting about teacher hiring and firing in a neighboring school system.)
Related:
In my city all the test scores for all schools for all grades are available online. Interestingly, the very top schools are segregated by gender (ie: “all girls” or “all boys” schools). Maybe sexual discrimination is the simple key to academic success?
Sadly, I just realized my 3rd grade daughter’s math teacher has never heard of the Pythagorean Theorem. She’s in the ‘highest’ math class at an ‘award-winning’ school in a ‘great’ school district.
The problem came up in the context of perimeter and area where, according to her/the common core curriculum, a square of side length one has a diagonal also of length one.
Before I realized she had no clue, I mentioned this to a math PhD friend with (depressing) experience teaching math ed classes. His response was, “she probably doesn’t know it”, which I dismissed. Turns out the joke’s on me, or rather, my daughter.
My daughter goes to a supposedly good public school (rated 10 by greatschools.com even before the ratings of a lot of schools around us were bumped up a few months ago) and when she was in 3rd grade her teacher also proved to us she was unable to correctly answer her own questions in a math test. If I remember correctly she was asking about the surface area of a cube and marked as incorrect my daughter’s answer because she (the teacher) though the right way to calculate it would be by using the formula to calculate the volume of the cube (maybe it was the other way around, I don’t remember any more).
It didn’t bother me too much that the teacher didn’t know how to answer the question correctly because I don’t expect 3rd grade general education teachers to be very good at math. But what I did find surprising and worrying is that, even after pointing out the issue and directing her to a webpage that was very clearly explaining how to calculate both volume and surface area of a cube, she was still unwilling and/or unable to recognize and admit her mistake.
The extracurricular activities are not a sign of exceptional parenting, they are rational self-defense. Given most universities practice quotas against Asians, and have repurposed highly subjective admissions criteria originally designed to exclude Jews from the Ivy League, it takes a huge amount of effort for an Asian kid just to compensate for the handicap (in the golfing sense of the term).
I don’t know if it is a new phenomenon, though. Just read Richard Feynman’s memoirs when he was asked to review California high school physics textbooks.
I suspect the “good schools” simply offer an environment that does not actively hinder learning the way bad schools do, whether through violence, bullying, the irruption of all sorts of social problems or horrendously shoddy facilities. The motivated students that flock to such schools are able to learn independently of any instruction allegedly provided by the teachers.
Turns out I was too cynical. Against the advice of my friend I informed my daughter’s teacher of the mistake, but didn’t think it would change anything. Instead, her teacher quickly acknowledged the error, and promised to correct her teaching of the material.
wally, I am not aware of such things as third grade math teachers. Elementary school teachers are supposed to teach everything from ABC to tie your shows and don’t bite your classmates.