So after my interesting time last night meeting blog people - I was at Clintons apartment and noticed a headline in a journal in his bathroom (something like "American Mathmatical Society notes") that read "Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More Mathematics" - This seemed like a very interesting concept and got me thinking about the idea of education reform and what that should look like. In my opinion the project of education reform seems vastly more complicated and ambiguous than health care reform. For one thing we already spend *vast* sums of money on health care sums which are growing absurdly fast every year - eventually there is going to develop some sort of natural political pressure/coallition that will do something about health care. Furthermore there are a lot of obvious ways that we can both improve quality of care and of people's experiences with navigating the health care system that can even reduce or control costs. Making sure everyone has access to health care is one example especially access to a primary care physician. Another obvious measure is electronic health records + mechanisms to ensure that the information is not used against you (in our current system there are some things in your medical record that maybe you would want to get lost along the way so as not to be excluded from coverage) The federal government is already administering the largest health plan in the country (quite efficiently i might add) in Medicare so there is a model/precedent for the federal government getting involved. While the current political realities prevent many common sense health care policies from being seriously considered - there at least are a lot of reasonable ones out there.
On the other hand education policy in the US seems like an incredible sprawling monster. It's pretty much a tragedy how little math and science elementary and secondary school teachers know. The funding arrangements, standards, credentialing requirements vary so much by state. Providing a high quality education is hard, very hard. Things that I see as essential:
-small class sizes
-high curriculum standards
-creative and competent teachers
-programs that help mitigate socio-economic disadvantages (subsidized school meals, family friendly work policies, i'm sure there are more that i'm missing.
My experience with schooling was not that typical though. 1. Both my parents are academics/teachers which was enormously beneficial to me. 2. I went mostly to a private christian elementary school which was quite mediocre (and somewhat terrifying to look back on all the time spent on Jesus/Bible crap) 3. My experiences with public schools were very good - in third grade I went to a public school in Lexington MA - Fiske Elementary School. They had a pretty good curriculum even with an ok teacher - but it was a very good experience for me in that I was exposed to a lot more cultural diversity and historical context. 4. I was also homeschooled in 5th grade by my mother primarily but also with some other kids and by father for math. This was not always the easiest experience as my mother and I had some pretty intense power struggles/personality conflicts - it was nice to have a curriculum that was flexible and uniquely tailored around me!
5. My middle school experience was actually really good (at a public magnet school in downtown Grand Rapids MI - City High Middle School.) It was a "gifted" magnet school and as the name might suggest was 7-12th grade. The school itself was fairly small and having a high school there with my middle school allowed me to take advanced math classes with no problems at all and have it fit nicely into my schedule (also the fact that the 9th grade boys that the 7th grade girls had crushes on were in my Geometry class made me seem that much cooler) The teachers I had were not bad either - there was an awful lot of reliance on multiple choice tests but i still had to do some writing and a decent amount of homework for being in middle school. We all had to take a foreign language as well - I took french and managed to learn enough in my 2 years of middle school to be placed in second year french in high school. Not too shabby considering finally the educational experience which took it to a whole other level of intensity... 6. I went to boarding school - full on east coast prep school (Andover) for high school. I had a pretty decent education up until i went to Andover but in terms of educational rigor - I definitely learned more, and worked more at Andover than ever before and ever since. I took a solid rigorous load of courses all the way through. The classes were small, the teachers gave a lot of homework, and demanded a lot in participation and understanding of material. I took very advanced math and science courses (AP Calculus and Physics as a sophmore) but I actually learned a lot about many different disciplines. I naturally had an affinity for math and science but I also had really amazing classes/teachers in history/philosophy/economics that gave me a reasonable glimpse into the way those disciplines function.
My personal educational hobbyhorse is exposing kids to math and science concepts and thought very early - before they are "ready". This requires having elementary school teachers that actually understand math and science at a level that is more than superficial and this seems to be a quality that most (even most people in general) are lacking. In my experience a lot of the problems that people have with math and science (particularly more mathy science like physics) is that they have this impression that those subjects are very foreign and hard. If we were mentioning derivatives or velocity vs. acceleration in 2nd or 3rd grade by the time kids began to really delve into those subjects with rigor, they would already have some common sense/intuitive familiarity. Confidence is a big part of the process. Math has to be about more than memorizing algorithms by rote!
