Can all the goals of a 3rd grade education system be reduced to a purely mechanical list of stuff?
Yes, I would hope that a multi-million dollar enterprise can clearly define their goals.
What are the goals? To get children to read individual words? Or to get children to read a sentence, and obtain meaning from it?
I don't know off the top of my head whether the latter should be learned by 3rd grade. Ultimately setting the goals of our educational system is up to the various bureaucrats in the school system.
However, regardless of what the goal is, you still haven't given an way to game the system apart from "teach kids to read [words/sentences]".
While schools may not have stopped teaching students to read they have cut out other parts of the curriculum to focus on what's being tested.
Indeed - if the school system is not achieving their primary goals, they should cut secondary goals and focus on the primary ones. That's a good thing.
Do you spend extra time and money on the few strugglers (some of whom are going to fail whatever you do), or do you concentrate on the majority (and get most of them through the test and thus look good)?
This depends on what the goals of the school system are. If you want to ignore the strugglers, set the goal to be maximizing this function:
student_scores.max()
If you want to help the strugglers and ignore the strivers, choose this one:
student_scores.min()
Choose this one if helping a struggler is equally important with helping a striver:
student_scores.mean()
This one is like the previous, but strugglers get a bit of extra weight:
log(student_scores).mean()
Setting a goal merely forces you to acknowledge possible tradeoffs and decide which ones should be made (if the need arises).
> However, regardless of what the goal is, you still haven't given an way to game the system apart from "teach kids to read [words/sentences]".
Sure I have. You ignore everything that is not tested. This gets you children that pass the tests. But it ignores all the other work that schools should be doing, and it reduces education to the worst, least inspiring, mechanical drudge work.
> I don't know off the top of my head whether the latter should be learned by 3rd grade. Ultimately setting the goals of our educational system is up to the various bureaucrats in the school system.
They can't agree. That's why I listed nonsense words in one of the requirements. There's an argument about whether phonics or whole-word approaches are better, even though we have good research showing that phonics is better. And so when you look at phonics methods (include nonsense words in the tests), you get disagreement in the phonics camp, and you also have all the non-phonics people piling on.
But this should be easy to discover, right? We have millions of children learning to read each year. We randomise them, we set up a control group, we give other groups different methods. Then we test. (assuming we can get agreement on what and how to test.)
But it ignores all the other work that schools should be doing...
Such as?
But this should be easy to discover, right?
No. Choosing your goals is about subjective value choices. If nonsense words are intrinsically valuable, they should be included, otherwise they should be excluded.
You are conflating the setting of goals with the method used to achieve them. If phonics is superior (I agree with you that it is), it will achieve higher scores. If teaching children nonsense words helps them understand real words, then teachers wishing to maximize their score will teach them.
Regarding stating goals clearly: The problem is that the real goal is something like "maximize future student happiness" or perhaps "maximize future student income", and any set of test goals is therefore necessarily an approximation. I think that if you want to make this argument, and it seems like a reasonable one, the thing that actually needs to be shown is that some specific set of easy to write down test scores does a reasonable job as an approximation, or at least could in principle if one could just find the correct test.
...the thing that actually needs to be shown is that some specific set of easy to write down test scores does a reasonable job as an approximation...
All we really need is to believe that it's a better approximation than the alternative, which is currently something along the lines of 0.5 x Principal's Opinion + 0.5 x Union Seniority (at best).
Yes, I would hope that a multi-million dollar enterprise can clearly define their goals.
What are the goals? To get children to read individual words? Or to get children to read a sentence, and obtain meaning from it?
I don't know off the top of my head whether the latter should be learned by 3rd grade. Ultimately setting the goals of our educational system is up to the various bureaucrats in the school system.
However, regardless of what the goal is, you still haven't given an way to game the system apart from "teach kids to read [words/sentences]".
While schools may not have stopped teaching students to read they have cut out other parts of the curriculum to focus on what's being tested.
Indeed - if the school system is not achieving their primary goals, they should cut secondary goals and focus on the primary ones. That's a good thing.
Do you spend extra time and money on the few strugglers (some of whom are going to fail whatever you do), or do you concentrate on the majority (and get most of them through the test and thus look good)?
This depends on what the goals of the school system are. If you want to ignore the strugglers, set the goal to be maximizing this function:
If you want to help the strugglers and ignore the strivers, choose this one: Choose this one if helping a struggler is equally important with helping a striver: This one is like the previous, but strugglers get a bit of extra weight: Setting a goal merely forces you to acknowledge possible tradeoffs and decide which ones should be made (if the need arises).