education is primarily a barrier to entry: true or false

great thread tho, good convo

i want to make it clear that i disagree w/ the OP and i value the idea of a comprehensive liberal arts & sciences education for everyone, but that i also see (from the inside) that a lot of what is said and done in the name of (not only providing that education but also assessing it) is really counterproductive and based more in tradition and expedience than outcome

otmfm

I tried to write a post on how all this applies to law school, but I was boring the shit out of myself and had to stop.

Turn it into a law school entrance essay.

white-collar workplace rules taught in high school:

1) do what the boss says
2) don't get in fights on school (work) property
3) timeliness and neatness count
4) dress appropriately and speak with deference to your supposed "superiors"
5) etc, etc, etc.

i'd think that these are some of the Industrial Revolution-era skills that the guy in the cartoon was talking about (also responding to bells). And some white collar workplaces probably still operate in that way, but a lot of them have changed.

I guess at least to answer the question above, I don't think you actually get a significantly better legal education at a "top" law school than at some mid-range law school, like, IDK, Michigan as opposed to Rutgers. With the caveat that at a top law school you may find your fellow students tougher to compete with (after all, they competed harder than everyone else to get the top grades and LSAT scores that got them there in the first place) and there may be a certain professional advantage to being forged in that kind of fire. Neither reall train you to practice but i don't see how they could

i think i might fail all of those rules miserably tbh

i excelled at #5

true but #1-5 were also the aims of public education pretty much since french revolution times and the one-room log schoolhouse

the industrial revolution and the french revolution were fairly contemporaneous, weren't they?

its all connected imo

masons ran both

they want u to be dumb so they make $$$

i mean

have a lot of thoughts, will try to make sense
i also teach math.  my school is 98% latino, title I, one of the poorest districts in the state and has been for decades (in fact, parents from my district have been at the center of a seminal supreme court case that basically upheld that equitable resources for school districts is not the fed govt's problem)

is another way to look at this question "is education primarily a signaling device and not terribly predictive of what someone is capable of doing?"

i don't know.  i see lots of bright kids who are years behind their age peers in more affluent communities who are in an environment that doesn't stress that they are to be successful in school. and i see them entering a workforce with a tenuous grasp of formal english and being denied opportunities because of that.  if their environment placed a greater emphasis on their success in school, could they have the communication skills to succeed in the white collar workforce?

if they were as computationally fluent as their age peers, might they find engineering or upper level science coursework more accessible, as a challenge they can overcome rather than a sea of implausibly dense formulae and concepts?

i havent been teaching very long.  i love what i do.  i just don't know to what extent a teacher/school/education system can do to redress the economic disparity between my kids and their peers who expect to be successful in school.

I've frequently heard it argued that the essential cause of the disparity of resources is overrreliance on the property tax to fund school districts; rich neighborhoods get nice schools, poor neighborhoods get crap schools, and often districts aren't big enough to even out the natural disparities. Would be curious to hear feedback on that.

I think that secondary education is probably where it (generally, for non-technical careers) starts shifting from primarily a human capital thing to a social behavior + capability signal thing. like, I think that an upper-middle class kid from a family w/ smart people could probably drop out of high school at the end of his junior year, never go to college, and still be about as capable when it comes to writing / math / doing basic analytical things as a lot of people I know who did go to college. this also can depend wildly on the hs tho, as we don't really have as strong national standards for secondary education as some places.

that is true, with a lot of added historical political stuff in the mix, like white flight and sprawl etc. etc. it's also *interesting* that poor schools and rich schools are held to the same standards under no child left behind or whatever they call it now under obama, but the federal government doesn't cover the disparity in funding.

i pretty much always agree with m bison in these threads. i am invested in education being a real thing but i am not sure how to do it, and the culture of a lot of the schools i've been in testifies to what v4hid and matt p say itt.

xp

i should have said are supposed to be held to the same standards

totally a factor. you pay a pct of whatever your home is worth, if your property aint worth shit you pay v little ergo you rely more on federal and state money to compensate. your live a half million dollar home, your district gets hella funds plus your parents probably have enough $ to send you to washington DC for school trips or pay for private lessons for band or math tutors or lots of other "enrichment" outside the M-F school week.

xp

yeah and in the wealthier suburbs, parents have the leisure time and capital to directly raise money for the school even when property taxes aren't raised, etc.

also you're surrounded by kids w/ (generally) more stable families and parents who went to college

basically when i am king of texas i scrap the property tax altogether and replace it with a low progressive state income tax that is equitably distributed per student and theres a picture of me with two middle fangahs to any1 who complains.

property tax rates vary a lot though! And then there are special assessments and such that are earmarked for particular things. You could have a community with high property values that does not contribute very much to public education.

feel like the notion of education-as-not-v-useful-for-everyday-life trickles down to my kids and its an utterly toxic one

also you're surrounded by kids w/ (generally) more stable families and parents who went to college

― iatee, Thursday, March 15, 2012 11:01 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i am going to leave the stable family thing to the side for a second, but yeah, parents who are invested in and understand the whole world of not only secondary but higher education are huge. a lot of the kids at the city school i student taught at last year had parents who were, at best, suspicious of school, which i can only imagine was mindnumbing and overtly racist when they experienced it as opposed to the version their kids were getting which was mindnumbing and semi-covertly racist.

on the other hand there's the depreciation of the value of education generally in an uncertain economy. it made it even harder to convince kids what they were doing in my classes was important iirc.

i mean, it was often hard to convince myself, too

I've interviewed about 60-75 of my students this year, most have stable two-parent homes. i think it has everything to do with the parents unease with the work their kids do beyond a certain level (a lot of them have not completed beyond 8th or 9th grade education themselves).

the kids on my debate team/academic teams def see value in college, tho. its a chance for them to get out of their neighborhoods and have opportunities their parents never did. the economy has always been shitty when so many around you are doing p self-destructive things. but i don't think you'll be seeing them complaining about waiting tables in NYT quiddites pieces tho.

like, I think that an upper-middle class kid from a family w/ smart people could probably drop out of high school at the end of his junior year, never go to college, and still be about as capable when it comes to writing / math / doing basic analytical things as a lot of people I know who did go to college.

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

it certainly seems true to me considering teachers. i have known and worked with teachers from places like Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, etc even stanford and also a bunch of people from state schools and community colleges also working in the same environment and I wouldn't say we were exactly the same in our communication styles I saw no correlation is effectiveness and "educational prestige"

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

i'm inclined to think (nb this is me trying to dig out why ""we"" might think that, not my personal opinion) that this is coming back to the question of class--"people in positions of authority" are predisposed by our culture to expect "better" from people with a prestigious background and "less" from someone whose environment was less prestigious. that's how that kind of thinking replicates.

i guess one reason might be

1) not as likely to be passing state tests

2) state tests determine or predict competence post-college

i was awesome at all of these things at high school and completely useless at them in a white-collar workplace

in high school i was a total delinquent with a "bad attitude" and disrespect toward authority figures. now i'm attentive, helpful, diligent, and i usually respect my superiors' wishes. the high-school me would never recognize the adult me. i have no idea when this change came about. i'm such a suck-up now!

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

well people in other socioeconomic groups are statistically less likely to have been in the 'right' social/political/educational environments. it wouldn't be true for upper middle-class kids across the board either, but I was just using them as a group that's likely to have had 'the best education' an american can get up to that point.

what you're saying is true iatee but i wonder what it signifies when we say the "right" social / political / educational environment.

for example, ime hispanic working-class students have more responsibility at a younger age than their anglo middle-class peers. i don't have any research to back this up but i am pretty sure it is out there because it is something i have heard over and over again in california workshops on educational equity

so i wonder whether this would not also be an example of a "right" social environment - on the face of it, you would think giving them responsibility would give them a better affective make-up to do well in school.

and yet, the opposite seems to be true. hispanic students fail classes at something like 2x the average rate of anglo students, are disciplined more often, drop out more often, etc

so when we talk about the "right" environment, i wonder what we are talking about, and specifically how it affects cognition, skill development, knowledge base, etc

and how does that stuff impact how you do in a white-collar environment

re: communication skills

there are tens of thousands of tech workers in california who get along in complex technical fields w/ a limited grasp of english (think people from asia and europe on H1B visas)

there are also hundreds of thousands of non-tech-workers who speak worse english than my hispanic students and yet manage to run successful businesses

so what gives? why are those "poor communication skills" so much more debilitating in an academic setting? and why do we assume those academic difficulties are going to translate to difficulty at work?

I think a lot of the way we teach K-12 in the USA is aimed at training people to fill out & manage paperwork efficiently, & to a lesser degree to manage their time efficiently. The latter remains important but the former is now less so.

I also think that we're ill-served by the predominance of women in primary & secondary ed in the USA, since learning styles & attention levels & interests vary amongst genders & I think having more men involved in those levels of education would help recalibrate our attitudes to those. I also tend to think we should have a way smaller classes so that there could be more one-on-one teaching, less rote work, but that's the usual pro-ed line, throw money more at the problem. I think it's the right thing to do, though.

granted, those people have specialized knowledge that allows them to communicate with their peers.

for example, i may not be able to talk philosophy with teaching colleagues from israel (this is a specific example in my life, we do some professional collaboration w/ people in israel, egypt, mexico) but i can talk *teaching* philosophy very easily

and similarly i may have trouble talking about traveling abroad w/ my indian drycleaner or the banh mi shop owner or the mexican guys at the taco shop, but we have no trouble talking about my drycleaning or the banh mi or the taco i want (this is a specific thing i have done w/ all these people)

so i wonder whether or not teenagers (hispanic, black, asian, white, green purple i don't care) might not have things in common that would give them enough common ground to communicate and develop thinking skills along more equitable lines

it reminds of that old education debate between john dewey and that other guy

the other guy said that childhood education should be a preparation for adult life

john dewey said "education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself"

if we treat high school science class as preparation for being a professional engineer, then kids like me who have engineer parents will have a natural leg up (thinking about age eight, when i was trying to siphon water out of a fishtank using mouth and tube, my dad explained to me the idea of "hydraulic lock")

on the other hand, if we treat high school science class as an opportunity to learn science in a way where the kids have a more level playing field - making it not about learning specialized vocabulary and memorizing the names of the parts of the cell, but instead making it about "what do you notice about the world around you" and "how can we think about systems of things and categorizing things and making conclusions that are repeatable and confirmable" then maybe this is something that would help

i don't know, the problem is that the second type of science class i describe is in the "pie in the sky" stage, and if you back off of rote / procedural learning for a second in this current political climate you immediately open yourself up to accusations of not preparing our kids to compete w/ china or something like that

sorry, not responding to euler, just trying to explain my thoughts there

I don't have any data, either, but that jibes w my experience p well re: Latino working class kids. a lot of my students are reponsible for child or elder care or have jobs bc they have to. but I think it correlates some w their lack of success in school bc it's like, I have a type of job now that most of the ppl around me have so it's not a big deal if I cheese off school bc now I'm at least getting paid and contributing to my household and not wasting my time struggling at school

xp

yeah that rings true for me ... you can definitely see a difference between students w/ working-class parents who have made up their minds to go to college and those who haven't

xp re: communication skills

would u say those on h1b visas have a well-developed native language which facilitates their abilities to grasp the complexities of engineering or programming or what have you? thats my greater concern is that my students will leave school without ANY formal academic language proficiency.

but more to your point, i think if we want our education sys to produce citizens who can adapt to many employment environments, i think having the ability to communicate well is p paramount. im not sure comparing native US citizens with conversational fluency in two languages (or perhaps just one) to visa workers who have specialized academic training is nec apt. but i don't know enough abt "the typical h1b visa worker" to make an informed call on that.

that's a good point about the "well-developed native language"

on the other hand i wonder whether the complexities of engineering or programming are much more cognitively demanding than the complexities of landscaping, auto repair, construction, and many other "trades"

it is an old argument whether the professions we think of as "demanding" are really that "demanding", but my favorite take on it is an old one, howard beckers "a school is a lousy place to learn anything in", which contrasts the cognitive demands of high school w/ the cognitive demands of learning to be on a construction site.

www.bedspce.org.uk/mod2/BECKER2.pdf

I think what you're looking for as far as language is the idea of restricted and elaborated codes:

Not only that, but because it draws on a store of shared meanings and background knowledge, a restricted code carries a social message of inclusion, of implicitly acknowledging that the person addressed is "one of us". It takes one form within a family or a friendship group, and another with the use of occupational jargon within a work group. Its essential feature is that it works within, and is tuned to, a restricted community. Everyone uses restricted code communication some of the time. It would be a very peculiar and cold family which did not have its own language.

... in restricted code usage there is an expectation that others will indeed know what you are getting at, from a few key words ... Elaborated code spells everything out: not because it is better, but because it is necessary so that everyone can understand it. It has to elaborate because the circumstances do not allow speakers to condense. ("Condensed" might have been a better label for the restricted code.)

Restricted/condensed code is therefore great for shared, established and static meanings (and values): but if you want to break out to say something new, particularly something which questions the received wisdom, you are going to have to use an elaborated code. Bernstein's research argued that working-class students had access to their restricted code(s) - but middle-class students had access to both restricted and elaborated codes, because the middle classes were more geographically, socially and culturally mobile. I do not know of any recent research which attempts to check whether this is still true.

Because schools and colleges are:

* concerned with the introduction of new knowledge which goes beyond existing shared meanings

* relatively anonymous institutions which may not share many taken-for-granted meanings in their formal structures (although quite a lot in their informal structures within the staff and student groups)

- they need to use elaborated code. The bottom line is that if you can't handle elaborated code, you are not going to succeed in the educational system.

http://www.doceo.co.uk/background/language_codes.htm

YES. its that ability to code-switch that i am wanting my students to have, to be able to swing between foul-mouthed casualness and formal academic language.

^^^ this is a model for the use of literacy for me as well

AH GAH that sounds like the most fucked up classist idea though

"middle class students are capable of making new meanings and questioning received wisdom but working class students are not"

WTF

yeah i don't like the code-switching lingo because it seems like a really limited account of the language students speak with each other/at home.