Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What's the Point? Busted meritocracy?

Let's not.

Absolutely nothing confused me.

The fact that they lost what they apparently learned in just 10 weeks leads me to conclude that they cannot have actually learned it.

I'm going with: they just didn't have any learning activities all summer.

Link

... I don't know.


I have another hypothesis about that. I suspect that being operant conditioning subjects with a good capacity for learning, they have learned that it is inefficient to retain material that isn't being rotated through their lives at the moment...

after all, they'll see it again soon enough.

Without the reinforcement, what IS the loss rate for primate conditioned responses when removed from the Skinner box?




Just a hypothesis, mind.

Jon,
Glen Seaborg (Seaborgium is named after him) was a graduate of David Starr HS, not a great school now or then.
Teacher salary is not the whole issue. SES does matter overall, what you live is what you learn. The entire public system as a whole needs work. There are bright spots out there and some incredible teachers and administrators. I see the biggest issue is lack of competition. There is no perfect fix, but having no real accountability that involves parental input takes the responsibility off of parents and places it on the state. Parents (overall) need to have the ability to choose the best school based upon the merit of the school. Money will still buy a so called better education, but money in each persons hand rather than this is the school you must attend, will drive the schools to perform better. Public schools will always have a problem because they must serve all students, this is a tough one. If it was based upon misbehavior perhaps an easier dilemma, but what of special needs, of 2E. Not so easy, costs are higher and results can be lower. A 100% economic model does not work so well. No answers hear, I just know what we are currently doing is not working well.

+1

In all seriousness, my more-than-slightly-snarky hypothesis does basically suggest the same thing that Dude's more formal analysis does.

Higher SES kids get continuous reinforcement...

and the low SES kids don't.

But it's entirely consistent with madeinuk's observation that they didn't really "learn" anything. Neither did the higher SES kids, but that is masked by the continuous reinforcement of the conditioned responses, so it appears that they retain it all.

It's not really about retained learning. It's about non-extinguished operant conditioning.

Which is what NCLB has given us.

Maybe I am alone in this but I loved having summers off from the tedium of school. I could work to earn money once old enough, I could fish, I could spend the entire day reading whatever I wanted for as long as I wanted - the list goes on. And I never, just on principle ever completed any make work projects that were assigned to me over the summer.

I would hate to see kids losing their summers off - perhaps I am the only one here that feels this way, so be it ( shrug).

I feel the same way. My kids spend the summer running around in the sun and swimming, as I did. I see a lot of value in these activities.

Maybe this is where that long term memory skill Zen Scanner was mentioning comes in? My kids don't get much "re-enforcing" in the summer, and don't back slide. But they have memories like elephants, especially miss working-memory-impaired. The stuff she's going to lose she loses fast (while school is in session)... The stuff she keeps is THERE.