Get 2 the Point
Get 2 the Point
Addressing Problems with High School Education in the U.S.
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In this episode, I delve into the topic of High School education in the U.S., including more tape from my interview with Gary and Woody which I followed up on with further research. Areas discussed include: ramifications (or the lack thereof) for bad behavior, racial disparities in suspension rates, diploma versus certificate tracks, bullying, and parents moving to better areas (with better schools) than they may be able to reasonably afford.
I also share some thoughts about how our society looks at college versus trade school and what types of practical things we should be teaching more of.
And then I present my own theoretical solution to help incentivize kids to attend school and put enough effort in to avoid failing. It might be a great solution or it might be a terrible one... But the important thing is that I'm getting it out there so you can try to come up with a better one yourself.
All this in about 29.5 minutes total, so we get to all the points and don't waste your time!
Hi. One of the important topics that we covered in my interview of Gary and Woody in episode three was education. Specifically, we talked about public high school education, using how things are handled in Montgomery County, Maryland, as our frame of reference. We went into a lot more detail about education than I included before, so I'm going to start off this episode with some more from that interview. Here we go. We want to address the real issue. Like just anything in that general direction of getting to the point. Yeah. What do you have to do?
SPEAKER_01Education. You gotta get education, then you can take care of these things in an intelligent manner. Right. Which is too many people that they're just leaving left behind.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they just pass people through grades. Well, this is the time in the podcast where I have to say my wife is a high school teacher, and my views do not reflect hers or should reflect upon her. But I obviously have insight into the issue as a result. And I've heard stories where parents have said, My kid's failing every subject. I want you to hold him back.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02I want him to repeat seventh grade. We we you know he needs to learn this lesson that he can't skate by doing nothing. No, we won't do it. Right. They refuse to hold people back. Right. There's a child left behind. Well, that's that's ancient history now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I know it is, but that started that mess part of it.
SPEAKER_02It did, but some ch some children need to be left behind.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. To have them repeat a grade, is I don't call that being left behind. I call that putting them in the proper position to get to a point where they are better off for it.
SPEAKER_02Yes, exactly. You know, the what's wrong with some kid graduating high school in four and a half years versus four? Right, exactly. I mean, most people don't graduate college in four years. Right.
SPEAKER_01That's right.
SPEAKER_02So why is there this stigma that we have as a society that says you have to graduate in four years in high school? It's okay in college. And isn't the purpose of high school to get kids ready for college?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02Not it's not just to get kids to graduate from college, and there's so much of this, and and this is a product of No Child Left Behind. Is every kid has to graduate in four years? Well, no, they don't. Right. You're not hurting a kid emotionally because they have to repeat classes and graduate in four years. Like the school where my wife teaches, they have this um it's called high school plus where they have to use significant portion of their budget to pay teachers extra to have an additional class after school hours for kids who have failed classes in the regular school year. It's so kids don't have to go to summer school and don't have to summer school and don't have to take an extra half of a semester of school. That's what I did, summer school. I did too.
SPEAKER_01That's why you didn't you didn't get failed. You took classes during the summer, and you were able to go to the next school. Well, that's what I did too, Woody.
SPEAKER_02But nowadays there's kids that have to take three or four classes over the summer, and they have to take two high school plus classes every year. And look, this is a very wealthy county. Right. And we and they have the budget for this, but but the reason that some schools are more successful in this county than others, there's other schools that have zero high school plus. They might have to spend their budget on teachers teaching extra classes, they can spend it on lab supplies, they can spend it on whatever else that will benefit the school rather than having to keep teaching the same kids the same subject two, three times each.
SPEAKER_00Do you feel that issues like autism, ADHD, other things are do you feel like there is an increasing prevalence of that of those characteristics, or do you or is it just that we know about them now, so they're being diagnosed? And I think I might what I'm getting at with this is is it harder to teach kids than it was because of, say, like a greater prevalence of autism, for example?
SPEAKER_02Well, someone who's teaching a subject, and and obviously I know the kid knows this in the in the case of my wife, obviously, but you know, she can't just have one lesson plan. Right. She has to be able to have a lesson plan for the on-level learners, and she has to have uh have something else for the certificate-level kids. Because the certificate level kids, if she's teaching, she's a physics teacher, so she's teaching to someone who's a college-bound kid who is gonna be able to get into an engineering program, she can't teach to that kid the same way that she's teaching to someone who's only gonna get a certificate. Right. Who the best they could do in a normal world where we didn't have the great inflation kind of things that we have going on would be maybe looking at getting a 40 in a class. How do you engage both of those kids in the same classroom at the same time?
SPEAKER_00Has this become a larger issue over the span of your wife's career in teaching, or is it something that wasn't dealt with properly before and is now being dealt with well or badly, but being dealt with?
SPEAKER_02That's that's a that's a big question. I'm gonna try to I'm gonna try to answer it as completely as I can and be brief. In education, there's there's lots of examples of some academic making a study that wouldn't pass muster as a true scientific study as it would in physics or chemistry or biology or something like that. Right. They come up with these parameters for a study, and these studies are inherently flawed from day one.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02But for whatever reason, they get this published by a journal, and some of the ones that I'm thinking of, and I'm not going to go into the details, but some of the ones I'm thinking of, they shouldn't have ever even been published. They were so bad, they were so badly written. Right. And they were so badly studied that they were ridiculous. But you get these studies written, and then everybody says, Oh, we have to do that. Look, this works. But but inclusion was this thing that really wasn't researched extremely thoroughly or extremely rigorously, like I said, in the way that like you would have a double-blind study in biology.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02It was, well, we took this group of kids in this one specific setting, these two or three schools in this one particular district, in this one particular state of the entire country, this is what we found.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02And instead of people saying, Oh, well, that worked because you had all these other factors, that's why this worked in this case, but this is why it won't work in the other cases, education will say, Oh, look, this worked in this case, we have to do it everywhere. Right. And there's there's many, many, many examples of this in education. Right. Where one person writes a study, it gets published, and it gets adopted as the norm, and it takes decades, sometimes 30 years, to get that thinking out of the mainstream. And that's that's one of the bigger problems in education, is you get people who are in the power positions. They're the they're on the board of education or they're the you know, the superintendent of schools, whose job it is to make these big decisions, but they don't have the time to look at these things in detail and say, hey, this isn't a good idea because we're not doing this. And that to me, if you want to talk about the problems with education, those are the major problems with education. Is you get people writing papers from this liberal arts standpoint rather than a scientific standpoint, and they make bad conclusions without mentioning the limiting factors. Like, you know, we did this in this situation with these type of kids, with this type of socioeconomic background, with these types of parents, and in a school that has this many kids, and etc. etc. They don't list all of these confounding factors that go into it and say, well, the reason it worked is because of all these confounding factors as well as the concept. Right. If you don't have all these confounding factors, it probably won't work.
SPEAKER_00It will work in a with certain specific parameters that are a certain way as a as a in a certain subset of the population, but then for whatever reason they presume that it'll apply to everyone. It's kind of like in psychology when you take a when you take a random survey of people, everybody, this is just like psychology 100. Everybody should have an equal probability of being included in that group. You can't just take a survey of college students and you just take them at the University of Maryland and you act like it's a survey of all college students. No, it's only a survey of University of Maryland students.
SPEAKER_02Exactly my point.
SPEAKER_00Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_02People are not applied, people are looking at a subset and they're it's simply people who don't have the the training. You know, there's nothing wrong with a liberal arts education, but trying to take principles that you learn in a liberal arts education, you have to understand and have a background in the scientific principles. And people don't understand how to write a proper research study. You know, when you have a bunch of kids who don't want to be in school, who who are only in school because their parents are making them be there, or or they're cutting class constantly, and one of the because there's no ramifications for bad behavior. It used to be like the the the the last thing that a school could do to to put you on notice where where things are going really bad is is you're suspended. Right. And they don't have that bull they don't have that tool in their toolbox anymore to use because you're not allowed to suspend kids for for almost anything. What happened to detention?
SPEAKER_01That's what I'm gonna say. You don't have to suspend them, you keep them after class, too. Yeah, that's crazy. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02There are again, and I I I can only talk about my personal experiences in this county where my wife teaches, there are close to zero ramifications to bad behavior. My wife has kids who have skipped 10, 15, 20 times in 30 days. 30 school days. What is she supposed to do about that?
SPEAKER_00I that's a good question.
SPEAKER_02So I guess the question is You know, when there's no ramification for the kid missing class, why should the kid come to class?
SPEAKER_00So that there is a boot camp. So there is a question in there in terms of pondering of root causes of problems. There is definitely a question in there of what's causing the problems. Are these things getting worse? Do we have to change how we do education to handle these better? And I might I might parents. I might do an episode on that.
SPEAKER_02It's not always parents, it's one parent. And they're working all the time. Yeah, Montgomery County is a perfect example of that. You're right. What will happen is you will get a parent who has to work a hundred hours a week at a relatively menial hourly job to afford to live in this county, right? But they want to live here so they can get their kid a better education, but by doing that, their kid has no oversight during the day, and they can get away with doing whatever they want and they don't get a better education. Where in some cases, it might be better to live in a poorer area, make less money, but only work 40 hours a week, and be able to spend time with your kid and make sure you're overseeing things, make sure they're doing their homework and doing things like that. Again, I don't have the answers, but I'm saying that in some cases, that very well could be a better option than a single parent working the hundred hours a week to try to live in this environment that has quote unquote better schools.
SPEAKER_00And that's the end of the interview segment. So now we have a solid perspective of some of the biggest problems with public high schools in Montgomery County, Maryland. But I wanted to bring a second perspective into the mix. So I also did some research into how things work in public high schools in Howard County, Maryland. So let's talk about Howard County schools in comparison to what you just heard about Montgomery County schools. In Howard County, kids are automatically passed through to the next grade in middle school, but they aren't in high school. Legally, a student can remain in high school until age 21 if need be. Though teachers try to keep parents aware of what's going on, ninth grade is often a year of rude awakening for many parents and students. For example, if you're going to get a high school diploma, you have to be able to write a paper in English. Students who aren't going to be able to complete requirements like that are put on the certificate track rather than the diploma track. In the cases of certificate students, the high school has to play the bad guy and break this news to the parents. At the state level, there's still a lot of pressure put on schools to pass kids through. So there are a lot of after school programs, summer school programs, and so forth. This looks to be like the high school plus classes from Montgomery County. There was a Baltimore city scandal that came to light within the last couple of years where kids were being passed through high school who hadn't set foot in the school building at all. This was before COVID, to be clear. I presume it wouldn't have been a big scandal if it had been okay to pass kids through regardless of performance. Another difference to note is that detention is still present in Howard County schools. There's lunch detention, after school detention, and even night detention. That said, suspension is not as clear cut. Sometimes schools want to avoid suspending students because, quote, we can't have our numbers look bad, unquote. There is a level of concern with students ending up on the school-to-prison track. In fact, when people are trying to figure out where to build new prison facilities and how big those facilities will need to be, they use suspension stats. It seems rather callous. I mean, these are teenagers, you really don't want to just assume the worst for them. But that said, if a large number of teenagers do end up in prison, then you certainly want to have the space you need for them. There are also concerns that African American kids are suspended at a higher rate than white and Asian kids. It's possible that Asian kids are more often taught to be disciplined and deferential to authority than white kids are, which would lead to less suspensions. But perhaps racial biases against them counteract that. Regardless of the causes, we end up with a situation where white kids and Asian kids are suspended at about the same rates. Obviously, this gets rather political rather quickly. The point I want to make here is that these are real concerns and educators are well aware of them. A lot of unexcused absence issues arise with the ESL, English as a second language community. Often the kid is the best English speaker in the family. So, for example, the parent may need to sign a bunch of important documents at a bank, so they bring their kit with them to help translate. There was a newcomer program in place for ESL students, which helped them adapt to schooling as they learned English, but this was ended with no warning as part of the state level efforts to put students through in four years. Non-diploma Brown certificate students are taught life skill classes. There's generally not a great deal of overlap where those students are in the same classes as diploma brown students are, so Howard County teachers don't need to actually prepare two different lessons plans for the same classes. The overlap that does occur tends to be in, say, art classes. Regarding ongoing experiments with education, one important thing to note is that education is cyclical. New grade ideas come into fashion and go out of fashion. It's also worth noting that it's really difficult to do studies with human beings. For example, if you give a bunch of students a test and they understand that it's not related to their grades, then they aren't necessarily incentivized to do well on it. Sure, some students will probably still work hard on it, but there's no way that the final results are going to accurately reflect the class overall. Another thing worth noting about Howard County schools is that each discipline has its own council of teachers, and teachers are able to write articles for the council overall. Also, Howard County gives teachers a lot of leeway for nonscripted curricula, thus allowing creativity and lesson planning. So it's hard to feel like external studies are causing too many problems with this type of flexibility in place. It's also important to note that the autistic spectrum is much more well understood now than it was before, as is ADHD, so great improvements have been made for teaching those students in recent decades. I also looked into how bullying is addressed and how people more likely to be bullied are helped out. Trans students are quite often targets of bullying. Some accommodations that are made for them include having some unisex bathrooms available to them. There's also a Unity Week, and certificate students are taught to respect everyone as part of their academic life skills classes. In October 2013, the state of Maryland enacted Grace's Law, which makes misuse of interactive computer systems a criminal offense. In other words, a student can be fined or even sent to jail for cyberbullying. Maryland also has positive behavioral interventions and supports, or PBIS, which is a collaborative effort between school systems and other organizations in Maryland. It's designed to prevent youth violence. This has been in place in Maryland since 1999 and is now implemented in 44 states. It's designed mostly for younger kids. Kids are rewarded for positive behavior and are taught about restorative justice and cultural differences. As for that trend of parents moving to more expensive areas with better school districts where they need to work far more than forty hours a week in order to afford them, this is a big issue in Howard County as well. When you're enrolling your children in a school, you have to specifically provide them evidence that you live in the appropriate district, such as an electric bill that was mailed to you at your house in the past month. There are actually a good number of homeless students who go to high school as well. For them, high schools are assigned according to where they were living before they were out on the street. So, though a lot of these issues that apply to Montgomery County Schools are somewhat mitigated for Howard County schools, there's still another big problem which we haven't already addressed here. If you were following the Virginia gubernatorial election in fall 2021, you may have seen this. The issue is that there has been a significant cultural shift in how the authority of teachers is viewed. Previously, teachers would get upset when parents undermined them, but society tended to decide with the teacher. Nowadays that has switched. Yes, teachers are not supposed to share their own point of view, rather, they're just supposed to share a variety of perspectives. But there's still an open question about how much say parents should have and not have when their kids are taught. So that covers the major issues that tend to come to the forefront in two different school systems. This is an area of the country that is generally considered to have very good schooling. So if these types of problems arise here, then there very well may be prominent and perhaps even worse problems in other parts of the country. That said, it's also important to note that Maryland has a very diverse population in general, so there are many problems tied to racial prejudices, conscious and unconscious, that wouldn't tend to arise in much more racially homogenous areas of the country. That said, diversity throughout America is certainly increasing over time, so one would expect these problems and solutions to apply to more and more of a country over time. Okay, so now let's boil this down and try to find the root causes of these issues. Doing that should get us closer to suggesting solutions. Interestingly enough, it sounds like a lot of the problems of great concern in Montgomery County Schools have already been addressed in Howard County schools. While obviously none of these solutions should be thought of as a quote, one size fits all, unquote, it sounds like it would be well worth Montgomery County strongly considering Howard County's policies. Students in high schools shouldn't simply be passed through to the next grade regardless of performance or attendance. Detention should be reintroduced. Teachers should be given leeway to adapt their teaching styles to the type of students that they have and apply creativity in their approaches, as long as certain tangible metrics are still achieved, of course. Let's talk about parents moving to richer places with better schools, even though they have to work a hundred hours a week to maintain that lifestyle. Firstly, I think the desire to live in richer higher class areas transcends just being in a place where the schools are better. Having wealth and being able to feel wealthy are very powerful motivators. One thing prevalent in Latino culture especially is the value of hard work. It's interesting to note that a sizable percentage of Latinos were Trump supporters in 2020. And in polling, they said that they supported him partly because of the machismo, but also because they figured they'd be making enough money pretty soon for his tax cuts to apply to them too. So I don't think that better schools is necessarily everything. If the parents are working 100 hours a week and the kid is more motivated to do other stuff than go to school, then it doesn't matter how good the school is. The kid isn't going there anyway. So it's a situation that looks good on paper but easily falls apart in practice. Also, if the kids keep getting passed through regardless, do the parents necessarily even hear about how their kid's doing? A lot of kids obviously aren't thinking in terms of the big picture. Work hard in high school, work hard in college or trade school, and then make a lot more money and be pretty well set for life. The human ability to rationalize things is amazing. Like, I'll just become a professional basketball player, or I'll win the lottery, or this or that get rich quick ski makes a ton of sense. So anyway, yes. If people were more okay with foregoing all that luxury and status when in all honesty they really can't afford it, then they'd probably be a lot happier just working 40 hours a week, being able to spend more time with their kids, and probably getting the kids to go to school more. So in terms of education, though part of me does really like the idea of everyone having somewhat of a common baseline education through the end of high school, I think we need to really ask ourselves how well what we are teaching our children is going to apply to their lives. For example, when it comes to the subject of math, each level generally builds off of what comes before it. People generally tend to progress in it for some length of time and then they hit a wall. Unless we can find better techniques to help different types of people better engage in and learn math, we're probably not going to make a lot of headway in teaching logarithms or trigonometry to many people. However, there are other facets of math that come before most people's walls which are still well worth teaching. For one example, finances, and for another example, the stock market. Learning how credit and debit work is incredibly. Useful to virtually anyone operating as an adult in U.S. society. Also, though people don't inherently need to get involved in the stock market, understanding what's going on in their retirement counts, even if they're fortunate enough that their employer sets one up for them, is very valuable as well. The key is that we want to be open to looking at different realms in which different people can best apply their talents and understandings in ways that they can use to support themselves, if not also others. It's also important to note that our society puts a great deal of emphasis on college educations and whether or not a given person has a college degree. Though having a college degree provides potential employers some form of tangible proof of competence, so to speak, there are certainly many people without college degrees who have managed to learn a lot of relevant skills outside the box rather than within it. And ultimately, those can very well be far more productive employees than people who skated by and got a degree that might sound impressive, but really isn't. It's also important to note that trade schools are very valuable. People who apply a trade for many years do develop a great deal of understanding and expertise as well. We need to give these types of jobs more respect, and we need to treat all workers with dignity regardless of what jobs they have. So what types of solutions do we have here? Well, first off, all those policies that I mentioned that are being applied in Howard County but not in Montgomery County are well worth trying out more extensively. Maybe some of this could be instituted at the Secretary of Education level. One very important thing that I've learned from Free Conomics is that people respond to incentives. So as a general rule, we should think in terms of incentivizing kids to pass their classes. Specifically, we have to consider what the carrots could be if they succeed and what the sticks could be if they fail. Well, I can't resist proposing my own possible solution. Given that you can't really do good research on teenagers in a school environment, I suppose my own theoretical ideas are at least as good as some of the ones Montgomery County is trying out now. So what the heck, right? To start, I'm thinking that maybe if a kid who should be on the diploma track fails for the year two times over the course of high school, you send them off to a repurposed juvenile attention facility. Get them doing hard labor for very low salaries all day by default, but give them the opportunity to study hard as well so that they can catch back up and go back to school instead. The idea is that we want to show them what their lives could be like while they still have a great deal of opportunity to turn them around. People might complain about freedom, but they shouldn't forget that, you know, we had a draft as recently as about fifty years ago. The quote unquote stick is the reality of having to live in a somewhat cushy version of prison, but the quote unquote carrot is that they are the masters of their own fate and that they are free to study and learn. Give them the choice. If you want to get it out of an hour of hard labor, you can replace it with four hours of studying instead. That covers the very bottom, kids who failed two years. Next, you want to look at the tier of kids who might work just hard enough to avoid that lower threshold. For those situations, you have to look at less severe consequences. Like I said, you certainly need to have detention in place. Of course, if detention is staying there by itself as a form of punishment, kids might be more motivated not to show up at all. So the next thing to think about is tracking attendance. Almost everyone has a cell phone nowadays that can receive text messages. What you do is you call role at randomly generated classes throughout the day, could be once, could be three times. No one knows if role will be called during the last period or not until they're there in the last period. Then, if a student isn't there, a text gets sent to the student's parent alerting them of that. It's an oversight mechanism that works largely based on the concern that the student might be caught skipping class. Obviously, if the kid is at home sick, then the parent will know why they're getting the alert, and in fact, the parent may gain increased faith in the system by seeing that these notifications are being sent out. Oh, and detention should always have a roll call with alerts sent out. I'm sure teachers can put the names of kids they're setting to detention that day on a central online list so that it at detention they each can be marked present or absent. Okay, so what if the teacher makes a mistake or decides to act maliciously, saying a kid isn't in class or detention when the kid is actually there? Well, cell phones are able to record where people are at various times. So if the parent wants to contest that, then they can release the kid's cell phone tracking data to prove where the kid was at the time in question. The point is you can track where kids are if you really want to. You can use these cell phones that they have already anyway. Yes, many kids will be very responsible and really won't need to be tracked, but hey, even they can sit through the occasional roll call. They're there in class anyway. Then I'll say this is just one theoretical approach for how to handle these issues. Yes, they should try it out, but they also need to keep an eye on how well it's actually working. If loopholes are being exploited, the people need to make note of them. You have to be willing to get rid of systems that don't work and try out new ones that might work better. There could be some degree of competition among neighboring school districts. You can incentivize teachers with carrots too. I don't think teachers need to be incentivized with sticks, they have it pretty bad already. The point is that it's very important to try new approaches and to be open to new ideas. You could do a great deal of all this with a phone app that you'd only have to develop once that almost every teacher and student could use. When you're applying different philosophies and approaches to different schools and school systems, realize that a one size fits all approach doesn't work. The best way to try to address the difficulties of a given school is to see if you can find similar schools anywhere in the country who have tried systems that have been successful. Don't just look at schools that are two miles away. Maybe a school in the middle of a very rural part of the country is using an approach that would also work very well for a particular school in an urban part of the country. Keep an open mind and be willing to think outside the box. There's one issue left I didn't really address here, namely that nowadays parents quite often think they know best and that the expertise of the teachers is often disregarded. Well, I think that touches on a much deeper issue we have in our society nowadays, that people are picking and choosing what news sources and authority figures they want to listen to and believe in, and that news and media politicians are quite often catering to what their audience wanted to hear rather than being more focused on facts and presenting different sides of the story. But that's a really big issue, and it's certainly outside the scope of education. So we'll get to the point about all that in the next episode. In conclusion, education is a very complex topic with a great many facets to it. Obviously, if two counties right next to each other in one state are operating this differently and are having totally different types of problems, then you can imagine that we're only scratching the surface here when we're thinking about the whole country. So I can't really give you a verdict and a ruling on this one. All I had was one theoretical approach that may or may not be any good. Since you're the appeals court judge here, you have a great deal of leeway to study other facets of education, to identify other problems that need to be solved, and perhaps even to come up with your own theoretical approach. Regardless, the important thing in this case is really just to get the discussion going. Learning about problems at hand helps. Raising awareness helps. Getting new ideas to people who can implement change and try to make improvements even better. We did quote unquote get to the point on this one, but I think we did about as well as we could. So we are out.