gt.dad
@gtdad
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You know school is holding back your child, but you don’t know how much. @gtschool
Joined March 2025
Seeing Like a School. • ❈ •. A useful perspective to have on schools, over and above their various benefits and deficiencies, is that they are altogether rather strange.
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Really good essay from Dan Willingham that is nominally about the science of reading but is actually about the wider issue of how to conceptualize education research.
New substack: What is the science of reading? And why the definition matters.
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The sheer number of forces that erode mastery standards boggles the mind.
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Ensuring children have mastery of prior material before moving on to more advanced material is the bedrock of quality education. It’s both braindead obvious and consistently validated by learning science. If we get rid of STAAR, we get rid of mastery.
During the Special Session beginning Monday, Legislators have the opportunity to END the STAAR test in public schools. Do it.
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100% on Texas STAAR is a decent check for “grade level“ mastery, itself a very imperfect but serviceable construct. It’s considerably better to use the check than it is to not. Suspicious of the desire to eliminate it.
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Why is this good?. STAAR is a grade level assessment pegged to Texas state curriculum standards. Do Texas state standards not matter to Texas? Is the STAAR being replaced by something that better checks those standards? Rather strange. Our students literally ace these tests btw.
During the Special Session beginning Monday, Legislators have the opportunity to END the STAAR test in public schools. Do it.
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> The strangest thing about the ability group conversation – which is everywhere lately. Major advance in the theatre of discourse.
The strangest thing about the ability group conversation – which is everywhere lately – is that it ignores the prevalence of ability grouping (based on reading level), which was the norm for elementary reading instruction in the Balanced Literacy era (~2002-2022ish).
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A fuller writeup from @AustinScholar, with a bunch of fun AI analysis of the MAP summary, and a narrative analysis of how the platform works and why it is so effective.
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We’ll be switching our assessment paradigm for GT School to be less MAP-centric (other than setting “see how fast you can get max out the MAP math at 300” as a fun goal). NAEP until 8th grade mastery, then PSAT/SAT/ISEE.
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The GT School data summary doesn’t work especially well, partly because there are only 10 students, but mostly because MAP isn’t suitable for them. Too much precision loss at the top. The students are all 99% growth and are an average of 5 grade levels ahead across subjects.
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Alpha NWEA MAP data for the year. 97% to 99% growth; average student is around 2 to 3 grade levels ahead; top 1% to 2% of national performance.
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RT @turing_hamster: why don’t all private school publish academic results? do any have comparable results to this?. 99th achievement percen….
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Obviously it doesn’t help that the academics you get in most schools is heavily diluted and impersonally sprayed at the students, but even abstracting away from that, it’s a time overdose and it’s poison.
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“The dose makes the poison” is also why many people are wrong about school. Most school is overdose on academic time. So people think “structured, deliberate practice with academics” is “6 hours of classes daily for 12 years”.
@cremieuxrecueil "The dose makes the poison" is almost universally the reason that people are wrong about anything to do with substances or foodstuffs having impacts on health. People just don't have a slot in their minds for "dose". They only have room for "yes/no", but in reality dose is.
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The exception is amongst people who have a certain sort of (usually implicitly) pro-work-ethic, academics-centric view. Immigrants who adopt a human capital view of education, parents who are technical or academic in an old school way, parents of obviously gifted children, etc.
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1. This is true: rigor in education is unpopular, including amongst thoughtful parents. 2. This is downstream of people not really believing in the moral or cognitive value of education. If there’s no point beyond credentialing or signaling, why incur the costs of rigor?.
No one actually likes rigorous education. It's so much easier for everyone--parents, teachers, students, admin--to just give everyone an A and shuffle them along to the next grade.
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RT @tracewoodgrains: "Trace, why are you making such a big deal out of something everybody already agrees with?". because the people we tru….
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The pressure to degrade mastery-learning standards is constant, like weather erosion.
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