[zozbot234]

> Second — this is another “secret” that I think covid made less of a secret — the main function of most lower level classes beyond basic literacy and numeracy in elementary school is state-supported child care.

I view this as a function of teacher quality and training, basically. My intuitive understanding is that the slowest non-special ed classes are not places that the "best", most effective teachers want to be involved with. So the incentives I pointed to in my previous comment are fully at work, and all the more so if you make the tracking more fine grained. Special ed actually helps by bringing better-trained (and more highly-paid) teachers into the picture in a way that's institutionally provided for.

You're right that a more vocational curriculum would also help some students, but that's hard to implement for the reasons you point out, and still doesn't address the underlying issues wrt. more "academic" subjects, which tend to suffer.

[csa]

> I view this as a function of teacher quality and training, basically. My intuitive understanding is that the slowest non-special ed classes are not places that the "best", most effective teachers want to be involved with.

I guess this is a chicken-and-egg problem. The best teachers don’t want to be there because there are few opportunities to teach, again mostly due to student and community ambivalence. There are positive examples like those seen in the movie Stand and Deliver, but those kinds of teachers are super rare, and often the powers-that-be stack the deck against them (administrators, community, peers, etc.).

Fwiw, one can see expert teaching in low-level non-special ed classes by looking at folks researching low SES education. Most of the outcomes are basically one level of classroom failure improving to a slightly different level of classroom failure (mostly due to relatively low time on task and general ambivalence in the student and community populations).

In general, the scope of what a good teacher can do is relatively limited unless a few conditions exist:

1. Students are relatively similar in terms of ability level — that is, no wide outliers. This is not an issue if each teacher has only 3-4 students, so basically each student will get tailored instruction.

2. The students and their communities value education.

3. Relatively low student-teacher ratios. Note that good teachers get better outcomes than bad teachers even when the student-teacher ratio is bad, but the overall impact is often significantly less.

Anyway, thanks for the comments. I haven’t stretched my mental legs on this topic in a while.