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What changes to you foresee post-Covid? Both good and bad.

It should be noted that the majority of states don’t have powerful teachers unions. Right to work states rule the day. It’s not 1950. Utah doesn’t have any unions.
 
The Thriller said:
Many schools are offering additional reading and writing programs over the summer. Some of it comes from left over Covid funds that weren’t included in last session’s tax cuts. We await the results of these programs.

There’s always chatter about changing secondary start times to be later. But that really clashes with extra curricular parents. No one wants sportsball practices to go late. And honestly, supervising late games in the spring when it’s still cold sucks. But seriously, if you want to see some gains in secondary? Get rid of the 2.5 month break over summer and start school 1 hr later. All the research I’ve seen supports this… the public probably won’t… but meh.

I also think we should boost the trade schools. Most secondary schools already have some programs. All your major districts along the Wasatch front have trade schools. I think we’ve gone overboard with college preparedness. One can make a great living being an electrician. Why go to 4 years of college and incur massive debt when you could knock out a bunch of your education at a trade school in high school?

Btw, if we really want to improve education, we need to stop giving handouts to private and charter schools. These schools for the most part, perform far worse than your median public school. I did some work early in the grading system in utah. Our top 20 schools? Majority public. Our bottom 20? Majority charter/private. There was one in particular that was a Mormon fundamentalist school in Davis County. *Shocked* that they sucked big time at science, math, and reading/writing
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Giving credit where credit is due. This was a constructive post.
 
The Thriller said:
It should be noted that the majority of states don’t have powerful teachers unions. Right to work states rule the day. It’s not 1950. Utah doesn’t have any unions.
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Yes, and how is the learning loss in Utah? Without strong teacher's unions, did the Utah kids fair better or worse on-average as compared to the nation as a whole?
 
Al-O-Meter said:
Yes, and how is the learning loss in Utah? Without strong teacher's unions, did the Utah kids fair better or worse on-average as compared to the nation as a whole?
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What’s learning loss? What does that mean? Can we look inside a student’s head and see what they know? What’s your metric here? NAEP, the test pro voucher folks are promoting right now is a test administered to a small group of students nationally (they know that the NAEP doesn’t break down enough to see how poorly voucher kids are doing in the same test). Are we going to use state tests, like RISE and ASPIRE as our metrics? But now we’re not comparing apples to apples. Should we just look at ACT scores? But those often skew towards demographics that are slated to be college bound and receive ACT training throughout their 11th and 12th grade years. Plus, not every state uses the ACT, some use the SAT.

The closest “metric” we have in Utah would be the RISE and ASPIRE testing. By law, those two Utah tests cannot be used in grading. So how serious are students taking that testing? By show of hands, how many here would take an 3+ hr test and try their hardest if they knew it had zero impact on their grade or future prospects? In addition to not being allowed in grade configurations, they allow for parents to opt their students out of taking it. This usually impacts higher achieving students. I don’t think the effect is significant (but it can depend on the community and school). From experience, I had parents back when RISE was called the SAGE test of parents opting kids out of testing and taking a two week long vacation. I couldn’t blame them. Why waste two weeks for standardized testing that impacts them zero when you could go out and enjoy the world?

Utah’s (white) populations tested okay when looking at last year’s data compared to the nation. Not so great when minority and poorer populations were included. But again, it’s not apples to apples. NAEP is administered to small groups of students nationally in the fall ( a reflection of the previous teacher’s work and student’s memory loss over the summer) while RISE and ASPIRE are administered to large groups of students in the spring (sort of a reflection of the teacher’s efforts for the current year but if kids don’t care about the test because it doesn’t count, then can we trust the results?). It should also be noted that no students over 10th grade take the RISE or ASPIRE tests as the only standardized testing they’d take at those advanced grade levels (11th and 12th) would be ACT/AP testing.

Utah is always unique. We have natural networks through the dominant religion that impact things, usually for the better. One time we had a family move into our boundaries (this was back when I was a teacher). The husband abandoned the family. The local ward found out and assisted the in ways that the state couldn’t (they were undocumented). We did our best as educators to help but I’m guessing that the daughter’s SAGE score (only in English) probably didn’t reflect accurately what she knew or our efforts at helping her to learn.

We have lower levels of poverty and lose (but growing) minority populations than many other states. So a more accurate analysis would be comparing us not to the national average but to a state with similar demographics. But now you’re back to what are we using as “the test.” RISE and ASPIRE aren’t national tests. So what is “learning?” Standardized tests? NAEP tests? RISE and ASPIRE? PISA? ACT? Grades and GPA?

Issues are:
1. What does learning gains/losses mean?
2. What is this test that shows this? Are we going off current proficiency or gains/losses over the year? Why use this test?
3. What can teachers do to intervene? Admins? What can the public do?
4. Takeaways, how successful was this among various demo groups? can this be reproduced?

Do you see how this is more complicated than those on social media pretend it is?


gardner.utah.edu

Blog: Pandemic Learning Loss: Diving Deeper into the Data - Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute

By: Andrea Thomas Brandley Note: The opinions expressed are those …
gardner.utah.edu gardner.utah.edu
 
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Al-O-Meter said:
Teachers have an impact on students that extends beyond the classroom especially for students from poorer families where parents can't step in to fill any gaps. Making teachers into images on a screen, as the teacher's unions accomplished, is simply less effective and that includes diminished learning habits at home.
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Reading for pleasure is not a learning habit, and now that kids are back in school, that effect would have been reversed anyhow. Try again.
 
The Thriller said:
Nice!

Do they also give her A-F grades too? Or has it completely changed to the Standards-Based grades? Has it been helpful to you? What was the learning curve like?
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No A-F grades. It is a little more helpful imo. She is really really smart so for her the learning curve is easy (I credit Upstart computer program for this). She is an amazing reader. They were having her leave her 1st grade classroom to go to a 4th grade classroom for reading.
She is also way above her classmates in math. We have been referred to move her to a different school next year that is for gifted students. They also have an accelerated class thing at her current school that they recommended. We are undecided at this point but are leaning to keeping her in her current school which we like.
 
I think reading for pleasure only happens if there isn't some stimulus to provide the same or more pleasure at less of a cost (e.g. time spent, effort, etc.). So the smart phone is the reason children don't read any more. Same stimulation, or better, with zero effort and at any time for any small piece of time they have available. TikTok is the worst. You can fill any 30 second span with a tiktok. It is literally rotting brains, and there is scientific evidence that is true. Scary as **** if you ask me. I even have to force myself to drop the cell phone for 2 hours before I go to bed. The addiction factor is on par with illicit drugs. Meth and heroin got nothing on facebook, twitter, and tiktok. Huge bane on society.
 
fishonjazz said:
No A-F grades. It is a little more helpful imo. She is really really smart so for her the learning curve is easy (I credit Upstart computer program for this). She is an amazing reader. They were having her leave her 1st grade classroom to go to a 4th grade classroom for reading.
She is also way above her classmates in math. We have been referred to move her to a different school next year that is for gifted students. They also have an accelerated class thing at her current school that they recommended. We are undecided at this point but are leaning to keeping her in her current school which we like.
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That’s awesome! Smart kid, must take after her parents!
 
LogGrad98 said:
I think reading for pleasure only happens if there isn't some stimulus to provide the same or more pleasure at less of a cost (e.g. time spent, effort, etc.). So the smart phone is the reason children don't read any more. Same stimulation, or better, with zero effort and at any time for any small piece of time they have available. TikTok is the worst. You can fill any 30 second span with a tiktok. It is literally rotting brains, and there is scientific evidence that is true. Scary as **** if you ask me. I even have to force myself to drop the cell phone for 2 hours before I go to bed. The addiction factor is on par with illicit drugs. Meth and heroin got nothing on facebook, twitter, and tiktok. Huge bane on society.
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This so much.

It’s destroying attention spans and ruining critical thinking. One of my major issues with AI (and I know we can’t put it back into the bottle, I get it) is that it’ll ruin the long tedious but necessary process of thinking about a subject, formulating pts, and presenting them in a coherent way. That process will be lost.

So will teachers see better writing? Absolutely, they’re going to see better writing (from the AI). But getting students to turn in writing projects isn’t the pt. The point is getting them to engage. getting them to think. Getting them to formulate arguments and write them down. That entire process will be lost.
 
Al-O-Meter said:
Clearly that is not true or NEAP wouldn't have been tracking it.
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I would think that they might track anything that helps educational achievement. Eating breakfast is not a learning habit, but it helps people learn, so many districts offer breakfasts to kids who need them.

Al-O-Meter said:
I know that is what teacher's unions wanted to believe but the damage done has large and lasting impacts as evidenced in the NEAP report.
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I will wait for you to connect the covid19 response to reading for pleasure in a meaningful way. Just making a declaration is not meaningful.
 
LogGrad98 said:
I think reading for pleasure only happens if there isn't some stimulus to provide the same or more pleasure at less of a cost (e.g. time spent, effort, etc.). So the smart phone is the reason children don't read any more. Same stimulation, or better, with zero effort and at any time for any small piece of time they have available. TikTok is the worst. You can fill any 30 second span with a tiktok. It is literally rotting brains, and there is scientific evidence that is true. Scary as **** if you ask me. I even have to force myself to drop the cell phone for 2 hours before I go to bed. The addiction factor is on par with illicit drugs. Meth and heroin got nothing on facebook, twitter, and tiktok. Huge bane on society.
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I blame the teachers' unions for the prevalence of TikTok.
 
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