The Illusion of Learning: Questioning the Value of School Education
The assertion that a significant portion of what is learned in school is ultimately a waste is a provocative one, prompting a deeper examination of the educational system's efficacy. This article explores this claim by analyzing student achievement, academic dishonesty, the impact of employment on academic outcomes, and the methods used to evaluate teacher effectiveness.
The Concerning Rise of Academic Dishonesty
One indicator of potential issues within the education system is the alarming increase in academic cheating. According to the Stanford Academic Cheating Fact Sheet, cheating among high school students has surged dramatically since the 1940s. While approximately 20% of college students admitted to cheating in high school during that era, today, that number has skyrocketed to 75-98%. This represents a four- to five-fold increase, a truly disturbing trend.
Stats from the Josephson Institute of Ethics also report that in 1996, 64% of high school students admitted to cheating, a number which increased to 70% in 1998. And for undergraduates, surveys show 68% admitted to dishonest behaviors in 2022, up from 60% in 2020. This suggests that academic dishonesty is not limited to struggling students; it has become a widespread phenomenon across the academic spectrum.
The Complex Relationship Between Employment and Academic Success
The impact of student employment on academic outcomes is another critical factor to consider. A study published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence examined the connection between employment intensity and dropout rates among adolescents using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009.
Past cohorts of teenagers who spent long hours in jobs were more likely to drop out of high school than those who worked moderate hours or did not work at all. Analyses reveal that a relatively small percentage of teenagers nowadays are characterized as either intensive workers or dropouts (around 11% each). For instance, studies reveal that the risk of leaving high school without a degree was about twice as likely among youth who work “intensively” (i.e., average more than 20 hours per week) during the school year than for students who do not work or who average less intensive hours.
Read also: Your Guide to Nursing Internships
The study acknowledges that the societal context of teenage employment has changed significantly over time. Broad changes in the labor force have lessened the demand for teen workers over the past several decades, reduced the employment prospects of those who do not complete high school, and greatly increased the wage returns to college degrees. As a result, the consequences of failure to complete high school have become increasingly dire for young people as they attempt to obtain stable work and economic self-sufficiency.
Teenagers are currently staying in school longer and spending less time in the workplace while attending secondary school. The percentage of young people who do not have a high school diploma or GED credential has declined from 14 percent in 1976 to 6.6 percent in 2012. During the same period, national data from the Monitoring the Future study reveal that, while over 75 percent of high school seniors worked during the school year from 1977 to 2001, the percentage dropped to only 40 percent in 2012.
Perspective 1: The Time Trade-Off and Precocious Maturity Hypotheses
One perspective suggests that high-intensity employment can harm academic outcomes due to the "time trade-off hypothesis." Compared to non-employed youth or those working moderate hours (i.e., 20 or fewer hours per week), youth who work intensively spend less time on homework, miss more classes, participate in fewer extracurricular activities, and give less effort to school. Intensive work hours in adolescence have also been associated with poor school grades, low achievement scores, and reduced odds of high school graduation, college matriculation, and acquisition of a four-year college degree.
The "precocious maturity hypothesis" offers another explanation. Teenagers who spend long hours on the job may grow increasingly dependent on their relatively high earnings from work, fostering a sense of premature affluence and disengagement from school. Intensive employment may also lead working youth to an older pool of potential intimate partners, encouraging precocious family formation that in turn may increase the risk of dropout. In addition, research shows positive links between intensive work hours in adolescence and school misconduct, truancy, suspensions, delinquency, and substance use.
Perspective 2: Changing Selection Influences
Another perspective posits that changes in the societal context of teenage employment may have altered the work intensity-school dropout association. These changes, coupled with large demographic shifts in the student population, may have transformed the process by which youth locate, obtain, and maintain after-school jobs, thereby altering the work intensity-school dropout association.
Read also: The Return of College Football Gaming
Furthermore, research has found that intensive work hours during the school year may not be as harmful to school achievement for Hispanic youth and non-Hispanic black youth as well as youth from disadvantaged SES backgrounds. There are three explanations for this pattern of findings. First, a higher percentage of low SES youth may be holding jobs to pay for school expenses or long-term educational goals, compared to more advantaged youth who use their earnings for leisure activities. Since high schoolers who save some of their earnings for college report high aspirations, grades, and educational attainment, differences in earnings use may be offsetting some of the negative effects of high work intensity among low SES teenagers. Second, because discrimination and poor local labor markets make it difficult for Hispanic and non-Hispanic black youth to obtain jobs during high school, youth who do find employment may be a more select group. In comparison to non-Hispanic white youth who do not encounter these obstacles and have more opportunities to gain work, Hispanic and non-Hispanic black teens may be less vulnerable to the academic and social risks of spending long hours on the job. Third, the process of greater selectivity into work for Hispanic, non-Hispanic black, and low SES youth may increase the chances that these youth find jobs that are higher quality and more adult-like (i.e., offer vocational development, opportunities to work with adults, skill development, and connection to school).
The Disconnect Between Teacher Evaluations and Student Achievement
Another area of concern lies in the discrepancy between teacher evaluations and student achievement. Fundamental information that is the basis for evaluating the performance of our K-12 education system is sending different signals. Measures of student achievement point to low levels and meager improvement. Measures of teaching indicate nearly every teacher is effective. What is amiss is that the information is not based on equally sound measurements. Student achievement is soundly measured; teacher effectiveness is not.
Recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that most of America’s fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students are not proficient in math and reading. Results from testing in 2015 showed that 60 percent of fourth graders, 57 percent of eighth graders, and 75 percent of twelfth graders are not proficient in math. Not much has changed in the last decade. The story is about the same for reading. It is uncomfortable that even today nearly 40 percent of high school seniors do not meet its basic level.
In stark contrast, measures of teacher effectiveness vary state by state but results are consistent-nearly every teacher is effective. This consistency was named the ‘widget effect’ in a 2009 report (all widgets are the same). A number of states implemented new teacher evaluation systems in the last ten years, and there is still a widget effect. In Florida, 98 percent of teachers are effective; New York: 95 percent; Tennessee: 98 percent; Michigan: 98 percent. New Jersey implemented a new evaluation system in 2014 and 97 percent of teachers were ‘effective’ or ’highly effective.’ That 3 percent of teachers were rated as ineffective was a significant increase from the evaluation system it replaced, which had rated 0.8 percent of teachers as ineffective.
Effective is defined as “producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect.” Education is cumulative in nature, so, a twelfth grader who is not achieving at the basic level has had a dozen or more teachers contributing to their education. Nearly all of them will have been rated as effective. Most students are not proficient in reading and math, but teachers are teaching effectively.
Read also: Transfer pathways after community college
Teacher rating systems are more of an issue. The bulk of the rating, typically more than 50 percent of it, is based on observing teachers in classrooms. Other factors that may be considered include student test scores, growth of scores, collegiality or professionalism, or findings from surveys of students. Observations are straightforward. A principal (or district administrator) comes into a teacher’s classroom with a measurement tool in hand (now more often on a laptop), and checks off whether he or she observes various things in the classroom. For example, does the teacher demonstrate knowledge of the curriculum? Does the teacher ask open-ended questions that cause students to think at a higher level in formulating answers? But what principals observe is whether teachers are teaching. The crucial question is whether students are learning. To answer that, we need some measure of learning: a test.
Teacher observation scores and student test scores show little correlation. This evidence was recently reviewed by the Institute of Education Sciences, which concluded that “teacher knowledge and practice, as measured in existing studies, do not appear to be strongly and consistently related to student achievement.” The Measures of Effective Teaching study found that overall observation scores had small and mostly insignificant correlations with test scores, and correlations with scores on individual observation items likewise were small. Another study investigated correlations between observations of math instruction and math achievement. Alternately stated, evidence about teacher knowledge and practice is weakly and inconsistently related to student achievement. Observations are fundamentally about teacher practice.
In addition to not being correlated with test scores or measures of soft skills, teacher observations costs money. Suppose school administrators spend 10 hours a year to observe each teacher. This includes their time in training to conduct observations, doing the observations, writing up the results, meeting with teachers to debrief, and revising the observation if need be. In 2015 there were 3.1 million K-12 public school teachers, which means 31 million hours spent annually on observations. The average school principal salary is $45 an hour. Applying this hourly rate to the number of hours, the system is spending $1.4 billion a year to observe teachers.
We have invested massively in measuring student achievement. We have not invested anywhere near as much to understand effective teaching and to measure teacher effectiveness. We need more research to identify teaching practices that link directly to learning, rather than using notions of what effective teachers should be doing.
The observation component could be structured more as checks that teachers have their classrooms under control and are teaching in a responsible way. This kind of minimal observation-analogous to car inspections-would be less taxing but still yield useful information. Teachers would not be labeled ‘effective,’ because these kinds of observations would not purport to assess effectiveness. New teacher evaluation systems were spurred by the Obama “Race to The Top” grant programs and by requirements imposed on states to receive federal waivers to No Child Left Behind. In terms of evidence, the cart may have been in front of the horse that new teacher-evaluation systems combining observation scores and student test scores would improve teaching and learning. Instead, we ended up in the same place, with systems that rate nearly all teachers as effective, and test scores about where they were ten years ago. But now we have more research telling us that what we are looking for in teaching doesn’t matter for student achievement anyway.
Evaluation systems that tell us all teachers are effective are misleading. We need a more solid research and measurement foundation about what aspects of teaching improve learning.
tags: #is #98 #percent #of #what #you
