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There are four functions that I do as a teacher and various parts of society and education have an interest in them:
1) I watch teens en loco parentis--this is something I don't do at moment because of coronavirus--but we all know it is a crucial function of school since child care is so expensive in the US.
2) I educate according to "standards" which are cultural norms, generally middle-class cultural norms, that I teach kids to navigate implicitly.
3) I sort kids by their ability level. This is a crucial part of my job and despite all of the equity talk in education, we all know this is function and one that increases as students move up the chain. Most crucial skills are taught early and students can (but have little incentive to outside of school) do this.
4) I hope to teach the value of certain kinds of learning and have students be able to do without me.
Let's be honest, for all the equity talk, two and three are in a major function of the entire expensive educational complex: we don't teach the skills directly for employers but we do skills adjacent to it, and that why so much effort is pushed into it.
Furthermore, most teachers believe that students "earn" grades despite the fact we know that even best practices such as rubrics and standards and profiency-based grading because we are sorting them within a system. Equity is generally code for "meritocracy for those who are willing to comply."
I realize that we also do other things that really are to our student's benefit nor is the entirety of our job grading and thus sorting. But we have to admit that in our system, we are gate-keepers as well as skill- and meta-cognition teachers and mentors.
I honestly think this is why grade inflation happens even though it devalues ALL four functions of a teacher, although maybe not the fourth as much. We don't feel good about the disjunction between being a mission to increase equity between disadvantaged people and the fact we are deciding, but frankly politically adjudicated criterion, who gets a chance to try to climb the class ladder. And if we don't do that, we also fail our students because we are misleading them about the society they live in.
Thus grade inflation is a kind of bad faith way to deal with fact teachers have two contradictory missions in the four primary ones we all share. The latter three apply to professors too.
Businesses and college admin teams have an interest primarily in 3 and to lesser degree 2. Parents have an interest in 1 and 2, and to a lesser degree 4. Students may or may not have an interest in 2, 3, and 4.
1) I watch teens en loco parentis--this is something I don't do at moment because of coronavirus--but we all know it is a crucial function of school since child care is so expensive in the US.
2) I educate according to "standards" which are cultural norms, generally middle-class cultural norms, that I teach kids to navigate implicitly.
3) I sort kids by their ability level. This is a crucial part of my job and despite all of the equity talk in education, we all know this is function and one that increases as students move up the chain. Most crucial skills are taught early and students can (but have little incentive to outside of school) do this.
4) I hope to teach the value of certain kinds of learning and have students be able to do without me.
Let's be honest, for all the equity talk, two and three are in a major function of the entire expensive educational complex: we don't teach the skills directly for employers but we do skills adjacent to it, and that why so much effort is pushed into it.
Furthermore, most teachers believe that students "earn" grades despite the fact we know that even best practices such as rubrics and standards and profiency-based grading because we are sorting them within a system. Equity is generally code for "meritocracy for those who are willing to comply."
I realize that we also do other things that really are to our student's benefit nor is the entirety of our job grading and thus sorting. But we have to admit that in our system, we are gate-keepers as well as skill- and meta-cognition teachers and mentors.
I honestly think this is why grade inflation happens even though it devalues ALL four functions of a teacher, although maybe not the fourth as much. We don't feel good about the disjunction between being a mission to increase equity between disadvantaged people and the fact we are deciding, but frankly politically adjudicated criterion, who gets a chance to try to climb the class ladder. And if we don't do that, we also fail our students because we are misleading them about the society they live in.
Thus grade inflation is a kind of bad faith way to deal with fact teachers have two contradictory missions in the four primary ones we all share. The latter three apply to professors too.
Businesses and college admin teams have an interest primarily in 3 and to lesser degree 2. Parents have an interest in 1 and 2, and to a lesser degree 4. Students may or may not have an interest in 2, 3, and 4.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-09 02:23 am (UTC)From:Moreover, the school system in West Germany has made the ill turn somewhat in the 80s to not teach kids crucial skills (such as reading and writing e. g. ), but just to train them in the necessary skills needed to be able to function in the economy.
Which now slowly but surely shows how toxic that is not only to cognitive ability, but also somewhat to personality development.
People become unable to perform even simple life tasks or to raise children on their own because their egos are ill-shaped.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-09 02:48 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2020-05-09 03:25 pm (UTC)From:Abitur was reduced from 13 years to 12 years of time in my federal state (because education is subject of the respective federal states here), but the contents that had to be taught in that time remained pretty much the same as before (so a "less time for learning"-effect took place).
The amount of hours you were outside home just for school were not much less than normal work - and then you had homework to do and a lot of "jobs" besides. Like - reading a book here, preparing a lecture there, writing a complex text for subject X... All during your "free" time. Like there was possibly nothing else for you to do as soon as you get home.
Additionally, the usual learning for tests also was there.
Those really critical years (the last 2 mainly), they felt like "get yourself an USB-interface on the back of your head and always just insert the right stick with the right knowledge for the current subject".
It was just learn, eat, commute & sleep. (If you took it all a bit serious.)
(The general idea of restructuring the Abitur itself wasn't that bad because before you could partly acquire yourself one which was, in fact, not worth the paper it was written on because of the crucial school subjects you could skip in that system still.
But how they've done it and what they turned it into... In short you can say, they turned it from "welfare" into "sorting out like mad". From one extreme right into the other.)
The coming year already saw a couple of changes which were running towards "making it easier", or perhaps, as you could also call it "making a few adjustments that were suboptimal before".
That included: In the 10th year, you had to write no research paper in one of the "smaller" school subjects anymore.
Next year of graduates received a bilingual dictionary as aid for the exam in English. (My year prior to that only received an Oxford English-English dictionary.)
Don't know what they made easier after that, but I guess that wasn't the end.
One knows his pigs inside and out by the way they walk...