Mike Bannister

@rpondiscio More pay could mean more status and respect for the profession, better candidates, and eventually a more talented generation of teachers. Cheaper solutions include fixing the perverse incentives faced by administrators, which cause many of the most effective teachers to quit.

I’m in favor of raising teacher pay. But I’m unclear how this will “fix” education: is it that teachers are not working hard but will for a raise? Or that higher salaries will lure capable people from law, medicine, tech, etc.?

@TrueAimEdu @flowidealism The high school where I work does everything in their power to funnel even functionally illiterate graduates into the local state university, which gives nearly all of them them full scholarships. A bachelors degree the new high school diploma.

@flowidealism Yes! Adolescence was totally made up to extend school! Children only went to school from age 7-12, because 13yr olds were considered adults. Give the state an inch, and they will take a mile. Soon they will recommend gov school from age 3 to 21!

There's a whole book called The Case Against Adolescence. Adolescence was created as a category in the 20th century. Prior to the 20th century, we didn't even have the category of adolescence. Andrew Carnegie, Ben Franklin, John Muir, and Thomas Edison all began their professional careers at 13. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries in the U.S. and in much of the world, teenagers had pretty much adult-level responsibilities and started their lives. One of the biggest flaws in our society is the infantilization of adolescence. Teen suicides have increased three times since the 1950s. I think education, traditional school, is humiliating for many kids who don't happen to be good at school. The goal is for every TSE student to be doing adult-level professional work or better by the age of 18. I've had students start companies and write novels. I had one who was a day trader, somebody else who did a website for the American Idol finalist, had a student who did a music festival in Austin, a three-day music festival, 80,000 budget.

@ClayHorshimer13 @senagles @teachthemx3 My school district serves over 500K students. What I describe is extremely common— perhaps even the norm—in urban American high schools.

@0p3nHand @senagles @teachthemx3 That's a cool anecdote. How does it apply to the other 100,000 schools in the USA?

When you hear, “99.9% of our students graduate,” this is what it often means: Schools put students on credit recovery courses, usually in Edgenuity. The program is multiple choice with unlimited attempts. And if the student can’t read, no worries, it reads the questions to them. So they guess their way through it? Not always. Sometimes they pay their friends to do it for them. Students can get through 26 courses in a week. At this point, the bar isn’t on the floor. It’s in the grave, and we have to dig it back up.

@ClayHorshimer13 @senagles @teachthemx3 Where I work, attendance is around 55% and it ~10% of seniors graduate without attending at all. They ARE just selling diplomas: 72k each, paid by the citizens of California, whether or not anything is learned or the student even shows up.

@senagles @teachthemx3 If it's 1-2 students a year, quit using hyperbole like "we should just sell diplomas". This isn't affecting the overwhelming majority of students.

@esquiregee @teachthemx3 Not at all! These kids know they don’t need to attend in order to graduate.

@teachthemx3 Graduation grades for about the bottom 30% is basically just an attendance mark

@jacobawells @b17405808 @XFreeze The safety issue is solvable but the noise issue may not be.

@b17405808 @XFreeze Automation will solve that.

Elon Musk on why tunnels became reality: “Everyone thought it was a joke. We made it a company” The idea behind The Boring Company is actually simple physics and geometry: Cities are becoming vertically 3D with massive skyscrapers and dense urban centers, yet transportation systems are still mostly trapped in 2D surface streets That mismatch creates unavoidable congestion A fully 3D transport network with tunnels running beneath cities could theoretically scale to almost any traffic level while dramatically reducing surface congestion Elon says there’s still enormous opportunity in tunneling and surprisingly only few companies taking it seriously

@nueva_yoi @nytimes I haven’t taught in NY, but my experience with paras has been that they mostly don’t do anything. They are employed so the school can say they are supporting students with disabilities.

@nytimes And nyc paraprofessionals are making 30k a year educating children and young adults with special needs. But of course @nytimes would never write an article about NYC paras.

The average pay of housekeepers in New York City hotels will increase to more than $100,000 a year as part of a contract settlement between an industry trade group and a powerful union. nyti.ms/4dPdsTw

@rodjnaquin AI has already transformed schools. Kids are using it on virtually everything.

Greg Ashman doubts AI will transform schools, despite using it himself. He compares AI learning programs like Alpha School to past tech that promised revolution but failed. The real problem: kids aren't naturally motivated to learn reading, writing, or math—these skills are too new in human evolution. When given the choice, students often avoid AI tutors anyway. Real teachers may still be needed to motivate students through the hard work of learning. open.substack.com/pub/fillingthe…

@RichardHanania Less than 10% of Italian 20-somethings are married?

Imagine being 29 and living with your parents. Southern Europeans countries have adjusted much worse to modernity than Northern Europeans.

@cremieuxrecueil @C_Hendrick Many school districts push trainings expressly designed to lower standards, in an effort to reduce the failure rates that embarrass the leadership. Null to negative results sounds about right.

Teachers who've undergone professional development training programs seem to have higher-performing students. So, should we train up all the teachers? Hold on! This is due to confounding! When we control for students' earlier performance, the estimated effects go negative!

@acaguy I work in a high school where the school leaders definitely want to pretend. The principal congratulated us when standardized test scores went up, but the improvements are obviously due to Google adding Gemini to Chrome and kids started googling all the answers.

@0p3nHand I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. We are in the middle of a big shift. New forms of assessment are happening. Oral exams can work in some circumstances. They are more difficult in others. The problem is there is no silver bullet. I don’t think folks want to pretend.

An earnest reply because this is a good question: 1. Large universities with enormous class sizes do not have the labor or resources for oral exams. 2. Even universities with smaller class sizes will struggle. Once you eclipse 20 students in a class, the logistics are tough. 🧵

@wil_da_beast630 New baby and a two year-old? Definitely. Kids are in school? Definitely not.

There's an obvious follow-up question here, reading the comments: Do you VIEW home management as an honorable, important, sometimes difficult job or job equivalent - involving 40+ hours weekly of cooking, money management, cleaning, childcare, etc?

Hot take (for my bro audience): divorce CLEARLY SHOULD include splitting the family assets - as well as alimony for some period for real (ex) home-makers. Your wife, on average, did 45-55% of the stuff that made the home, investments, social calendar, etc work while you loved each other. The compensation for that, in almost literally every healthy marriage, is that she has full access to joint checking etc DESPITE NOT conventionally working. Saying wifey made a 0% contribution to what all this produced is batshit insane. But, it's also a negative incentive - that would make saying home and doing what's still the normal thing above working-class an insane risk.

@seanthomas85 @wil_da_beast630 The recent popularization of quintile grade scales (20% for a D) is part of a deliberate campaign to lower standards. In Los Angeles unified PD materials they call it “grading for equity”.

@seanthomas85 @wil_da_beast630 Sounds like you work in a good school. In many US classrooms, some kids read at a 4th grade level and others at 12th. No criteria are both achievable and challenging to all students, so effort grades are often used to avoid failing the functionally illiterate half of the class.

Wait: an "A" is now 83.5%?

@jeffreytee @LuizaJarovsky It’s tragic, but that is really all we have left.

@LuizaJarovsky What's wrong with in-class paper tests and essay writing? No phones or computers allowed.

🚨 University professors have been saying AI is completely destroying learning and that we'll soon have an AI-powered, semi-illiterate workforce. Here's a glimpse into the educational apocalypse: "Sarah, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, said she first used ChatGPT to cheat during the spring semester of her final year of high school. (...) After getting acquainted with the chatbot, Sarah used it for all her classes: Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries. “My grades were amazing,” she said. “It changed my life.” Sarah continued to use AI when she started college this past fall. Why wouldn’t she? Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.” - "By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones. “Every time I brought it up with the professor, I got the sense he was underestimating the power of ChatGPT, and the departmental stance was, ‘Well, it’s a slippery slope, and we can’t really prove they’re using AI,’” Williams said. “I was told to grade based on what the essay would’ve gotten if it were a ‘true attempt at a paper.’ So I was grading people on their ability to use ChatGPT.” - AI in education is a serious topic, and many schools and universities are blindly jumping into the "AI-first" wave without considering short and long-term consequences. It would be great to hear more from teachers and educators to understand potential solutions. This might be a great opportunity for rethinking the education system and how students are assessed. - 👉 Link to the full article below. 👉 To learn more about AI's legal and ethical challenges, join my newsletter's 94,700+ subscribers (link below).

@fischermichael0 @jeffreytee @LuizaJarovsky It is no longer possible to require lengthy research papers in the traditional manner. That era is over.

@jeffreytee @LuizaJarovsky Timed, in class writing is a good way to fight AI use, but it prevents students from writing actual research papers that they need to sit with and write over the course of days, weeks, etc.

@seanthomas85 @wil_da_beast630 It’s the percent of work completed. Teachers unions prevent principals from overoverruling teachers’ grades. So they try to save face by lowering standards in other ways, like promoting easier grading scales.

No. Stop. You're too smart for this, Wilfred. 83.5% of what? Grade scales are only as good as how points are awarded. A lenient teacher can give away A's and B's like candy with a 0-60-70-80-90 scale, and a harsh teacher can fail droves of students with a 0-20-40-60-80 scale. This "OMG THAT GRADE SCALE IS DIFFERENT!" hand-wringing is always silly.

@TalaHanSolo @XFreeze When people say that Elon is a billionaire, they are talking about the value of his companies. It’s not a hoard: value is literally just the opinions of other people.

any person that wants to horde 10 trillion dollars to get to mars while 75 percent of americans cant afford basic needs like food and shelter is no hero. theres only 2.4 trillion dollars in circulation. Im no socialist but one person hording all the countries wealth so we all end up in the lower class isnt a great option either.

Most people misunderstand Elon's ultimate goal He is trying to make our entire civilization win. To view it as anything less is just shortsighted Elon winning means humanity winning While most people are stuck in a zero-sum mentality, he operates with a "grow-the-pie" mindset You can see all the things he built till now and also his future plans He started working on things long before it was popular or considered possible: • Zip2 & payment systems • Electric vehicles & batteries • Pure vision self-driving • Humanoid robots • Starlink Internet • AI (OpenAI) • Neuralink • The Boring Company And the future is even bigger: 1TW compute clusters, space datacenters, lunar bases, mass drivers on the Moon, and making life multi-planetary... basically driving humanity toward becoming a star-faring civilization He consistently takes on the world’s hardest problems to push our civilization forward... He freakin makes sci-fi real

@sunnylohmann @wil_da_beast630 Ironically, the way to increase their quality is to make the profession desirable to people with better options—and that will require teaching to become a higher-status profession.

@wil_da_beast630 Something must be done about the teachers. 1) they must be knocked off their high horse in the public’s perception 2) we have to increase the quality

That much of our elite hates the country, for farcially false reasons taught to them by ~traitors ("The Comanche riders were PEACEFUL, before we told them of war!!!") Is a very serious problem. No punch line. This has to be changed entirely.