[turingcompeteme]

My sister is a teacher, and had been recognized as "high performing". She was even given some type of award. She always taught in pretty well off areas where students came from supportive families.

A few years ago she moved to a school on the edge of a native reserve. She is now officially a "low performing" teacher. She insists she works twice as hard as before and has much more positive impact on the lives of her students. She's been robbed and beat up by students. Yet she now devotes her life to these kids, and would probably be fired in this type of experiment.

My guess is that the 'good' and 'bad' teachers in the study were almost totally dependent on the kids they had.

[muzani]

Yeah, it sounds more like they didn't find a way to gauge performance.

It seems similar to how a "bad doctor" might be the one who is taking the difficult to save cases and having higher fail rates. Difficult children make it difficult for the teachers, but the mediocre ones won't want to bother with them.

[jackfraser]

This sort of research is amusing in a sad way. IQ studies on large populations have revealed data for nearly a century that would easily have predicted the outcome of your sister's efforts. The scores for teachers have to be normalized against the best available data for the demographic composition of their classroom, if we're going to bother with it at all.

Unfortunately, people don't like what the IQ scores show, and so instead the Gates Foundation has to spend millions on a grand experiment that "teaches us nothing" as Mother Jones would put it, mostly because they refuse to acknowledge just how precisely it confirms the uncomfortable things we already know.

[turingcompeteme]

The parents and grandparents of the children in her class were taken away from their families and put in residential schools where they were abused and mistreated their entire lives. They were then released back into the world with a very poor education, and obvious mistrust for the government.

Friend of hers have taught in schools where a cycle of poverty inflicts the population. Most children are raised by single mothers because the father is in jail. When the father is released he has no opportunity to make a honest living for himself and the cycle continues.

The uncomfortable things we already know have nothing to do with IQ. It has everything to do with centuries of mistreatment of groups of people.

[dogma1138]

I don’t think that the GP was insinuating anything regarding the root causes of the issue.

However “IQ” at least as how we measure it, has clear demographic corollarion, this does not mean it’s “genetic” at least not in a racial manner. However it does seem to be hereditary even if through nurture and environmental factors alone.

The sad truth is that until we as a society come to terms with that there likely won’t be an effective solution.

Time and time again various charities and governmental programs discovered that trying to uplift the least privileged through a new coat of paint doesn’t work, even the gates foundation does not target the “weakest” schools as those are essentially beyond hope at least at this point.

I also don’t think that the GP’s point of rating teachers relative to the current potential of their pupils rather than using local, state and national averages is inherently wrong or discriminatory, if anything proposing that all of only those at risk and underprivileged youth would have new textbooks and cleaner class rooms that they would perform just as well as privileged kids who go to private schools or to private in all but tution public schools.

And while forcing children away from their families and putting them in schools where they would be abused is terrible one thing that does seem to work is just that minus the abuse and the forcing as children with less means that get into good schools through either scholarships or voucher based programs tend to perform extremely well.

That said the most important factors as far as underprivileged youth goes seem to be missing from the study. Test scores are not the most or even an important factor for such social programs that seek to change the future outlook of these kids for the better. Teacher or well “educators” can have and should have an impact far greater than pure academic success and that is they should imprint positive social character and personality traits.

So while the scores were not improving has the well being of the kids improved? Has underaged crime rates dropped? Drug and alcohol use? Violence? Was there psychometric collected to see if kids developed traits that would increase the likelihood of them succeeding in life? Are their happier? That is the data I would expect to be collected and in my matter much more than their scores on some standardized tests.

[jackfraser]

> The parents and grandparents of the children in her class were taken away from their families and put in residential schools where they were abused and mistreated their entire lives.

Let's keep in mind that residential schools were absolutely the most progressive thing going at the time. Let's reach out to these poor beleaguered people and give them the benefit of our modern school system! You can see how easily the story could be sold to people as a very moral act before the actual results of the way it was handled were known, generations later.

> The uncomfortable things we already know have nothing to do with IQ.

Why establish a false dichotomy here? You've obviously pointed out an uncomfortable truth which I was already well aware of. There's no reason we can't also be aware of the implications of IQ and any number of other factors determining school performance of any intersectional cohort against standardized metrics.

[roywiggins]

It's one thing to teach people, it's another thing to beat their native language out of them, which is what these schools were designed to do from the beginning. The whole point was to forcibly Christianize them and exterminate their culture.

> The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded by the US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 at a former military installation, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man." Pratt professed "assimilation through total immersion." He conducted a "social experiment" on Apache prisoners of war at a fort in Florida. He cut their long hair, put them in uniforms, forced them to learn English, and subjected them to strict military protocols.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_sch...

[jackfraser]

So does this unfortunate and regrettable historical event mean that we can't use research, demographics, and psychometrics to determine likely outcomes and inform policy decisions?