We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she’s a year away from graduating high school (!) and I’ve had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons
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Think of the EU’s requirement for USB-C charger tips on all devices. There’s a lot of reasons that manufacturers prefer different charger tips for different gadgets. Some of those reasons are bad (gouging you on replacement chargers), but some are good (unique form-factor, specific smart-charging needs).
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USB-C is a very flexible standard (indeed, it’s so flexible that some people complain that it’s not a standard at all!) but there are some applications where the optimal solution is outside its parameters.
And still, I think that the standardization on USB-C is a force for good. I have drawers full of gadgets that need proprietary charger tips, and other drawers full of chargers with proprietary tips, and damned if I can make half of them match up.
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We’ve continued our pandemic lockdown tradition of my wife cutting my hair in the back yard, and just tracking the three different charger tips for the three clippers she uses is an ongoing source of frustration. I’d happily trade slightly sub-optimal charging for just being able to plug any of those clippers into the same cable I charge my headphones, phone, tablet and laptop on.
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The standardization of American education has produced all the downsides of standardization - a rigid, often suboptimal, one-size-fits-all system - without the benefits. With teachers across America teaching in lockstep, often from the same set texts (especially in the AP courses), there’s a massive opportunity for a #commons to go with the common core.
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For example, the AP English and History classes my kid takes use standard texts that are often centuries old and hard to puzzle out. I watched my kid struggle with texts for learning about “persuasive rhetoric” like 17th century pamphlets that inspired anti-indigenous pogroms with fictional accounts of “Indian atrocities.”
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It’s good for American schoolkids to learn about the use of these blood libels to excuse genocide, but these pamphlets are a slog. Even with glossaries in the textbooks, it’s a slow, word-by-word matter to parse these out. I can’t imagine anyone learning a single thing about how speech persuades people just by reading that text.
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But there’s nothing in the standardized curriculum that prevents teachers from adding more texts to the unit. We live in an unfortunate golden age for persuasive texts that inspire terrible deeds - for example, kids could also read core #Pizzagate texts and connect the guy who shot up the pizza parlor to the racists who formed a 17th century lynchmob.
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But teachers are incredibly time-constrained. For one thing, at least a third of the AP classroom time seems to be taken up with detailed instructions for writing stilted, stylized “essays” for the AP tests (these are terrible writing, but they’re easy to grade in a standardized way).
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That’s where standardization could actually deliver some benefits. If just one teacher could produce some supplemental materials and accompanying curriculum, the existence of standards means that every other teacher could use it. What’s more, any adaptations that teachers make to that unit to make them suited to their kids would also work for the other teachers in the USA.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr This is hugely debased compared to when I took AP English about 35 years ago (at the time it was one class and exam, predominantly English literature).
I know what the AP English rubric was then, because we had a couple practice exams graded by volunteers, and one of my parents was a volunteer reviewer for one AP English class at my school (not mine, so no conflicts of interest there).
That rubric emphasized making persuasive analysis of the chosen literature and giving good supporting details for your analysis. Essays did not have to follow a set format, except that they should flow logically and sensibly, clearly get to the point (so no filler or vague terms like “…is very important”), and be grammatically competent.
We definitely did not take 1/3 of the term drilling correct AP essay style. The practice exams (1 or 2) along with some class discussion were the sum total of in-school exam prep.