Man. Now you've got me all curious...
I dunno. if it was easy it wouldn't be a problem. There are lots of dials to turn. As you say, qualification levels of teachers is is one, frequency of testing is another. I think the least effort improvement is just smaller classes.
From personal experience, my child goes to a public school and his classroom is about 25 students with a teacher and 2 assistant teachers, around 8 kids per. instructor.
There seems to be differing research on class size anyway, with even the most liberal interpretation of results pointing to smaller class sizes only helping "troubled" children. Also, most of the countries that have larger average class sizes than the US do better than us in rankings.[2] The definition of "troubled" seems to range from poor to lower IQ.
The US seems to do about as well as Latvia and Russia in education, and not much higher than Mexico, Turkey, and Thailand, despite spending more on education per student than nearly anyone else in the world. I wonder if we might just study (with an open mind) what other countries are doing and incorporate those findings, rather than guessing and just blowing cash hand-over-fist.
[1] http://www.nea.org/home/rankings-and-estimates-2013-2014.htm... [2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/class-size-arou...
Public schools have to service all of these students, until they graduate, drop out, or age out.
I remember two kids from primary school seemed to have disappeared and then reappeared a few months down the line from school year start. They didn't make the cut like their siblings. I think one of those kids, thinking back, was the son of the managing director of the company that is now TalkTalk pre-acquisition.
My son had funding for a time for nursery and was moved into the prep school. It was like seeing a foreign school. Class sizes were naturally smaller and I noted things such as their morning 'prayer', which went along the lines of "I vow to work hard today in everything I do", where as my morning prayer in an RC school was the Our Father.
I also saw kids in my sons class who, at 3 years old, were able to compute divisions in their head and articulate in a way that I've never seen a child that age speak.
These places are optimised for kids who have a lot of money backing them up and the brain power to boot. In some respects, their parents ability to simply hire help to ensure their kids do well academically must be noted too.
Plus the research shows private schools don't actually help you educationally, so they (like charter schools) must actually be worse at their jobs once you factor in the head start that selection gives them.
>allow schools to suspend/expel students who are repeatedly disruptive or violent in class
I think education and patience are helpful in teaching kids to vent their frustrations in more productive ways, so depriving them of those things seems likely to make it a vicious cycle.
The key point is that the current approach is failing at this. It's possible that by giving up on the really hard cases and focusing more on the average cases, it would be possible to educate more children than the current approach achieves. Better to reach for a good outcome and succeed than to reach for a perfect outcome and fail, so to speak.
>I think education and patience are helpful in teaching kids to vent their frustrations in more productive ways, so depriving them of those things seems likely to make it a vicious cycle.
The problem is that spending time in school doesn't necessarily equal education, especially for the most difficult students. As a hypothetical, if it could be known that a particular student is 99% likely not to gain anything from being forced to spend the next 3 years in a classroom, and it's also known that this student harasses other students, reducing their ability to benefit from learning, would the benefit of keeping this student in class on the 1% chance they'd gain something outweigh the downsides?
This wouldn't be a case with something like a basic income system. Or, the alternative more politically palatable to conservatives: make-work programs. Where people are paid to do work that, while not necessarily economically productive, nevertheless gives them the psychological satisfaction of feeling like they're working and contributing to society, and possibly helps them develop the discipline required to pursue further education in future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#P...
> The US Census declared that in 2010 15.1% of the general population lived in poverty: 22% of all people under age 18 13.7% of all people 19–21 and 9% of all people ages 65 and older.
Only to people who haven't actually looked at them. US welfare programs are certainly adequate to ensure nobody goes hungry. If children are going hungry it means their parents are spending money earmarked for food on something else.
That, and they get free meals at the schools themselves.
If you want to use such excuses for disruptive students, then you have to actually fix the real problem. Vote for it. Petition for it. Protest. Call for a referendum.
Source: I was a public school student once.
"Just" the facts of very interested parents, investment from nearby Intel and HP, and massive spending on technology programs were enough to set this school apart. Sometimes the simple answer is the right one.
One of the differentiators, I think, is that only parents who actually care about education spend >$10k/year on something they could get for free. Most of the children attending have significant support from their parents and come from stable homes.
Additionally, they can get tutored as I just mentioned. Related to that are all the test preps and extra-curricular activities that can be supported with money, etc. These additional resources enrich what students can bring to the classroom.
It is hard, however, to ascertain whether their outcomes are better because of anything to do with the school. They have more resources, family connections, and connecting to each other who also have other resources.
Fundamentally, my belief is that one should focus on grooming intelligence, not knowledge. The question then becomes how does one help a person become more intelligent? Programming them with knowledge does not help; it just creates miserable robots.
Instead, allowing them to be free, moving, interacting, socializing, making a mess out of exploring reality, this is what grows the brain, IMO.
I work for a Sudbury school and this is what we focus on making happen. Demonstrative anecdote: we had a student who was with us from age 5 to age 12. He never had any formal instruction. He wanted to go to a different school to join their baseball team. It is a highly respected private school in the area. They interviewed him and were impressed and let him in. In his first weeks of school, he did not know about parts of speech or that a dot meant multiplication of numbers. He quickly learned all of that (pretty simple, after all) and got 90's on his first tests. Intelligence is hard to acquire and it requires freedom to explore, freedom to move, freedom to socialize. Knowledge is relatively straightforward to acquire when the brain is ready for it.
Also from what I was told, teachers usually are payed better so a lot of them come from better universities and also it seems that they are better updated on current technologies.
Of course this will depend on school and I also think even private schools get some crappy teachers/bad syllabus, but in general I think it boils down to having either better material stuff or better trained teachers or both.
Edit: Forgot to add that these two improved areas seem to combine to give much better learning experience which in the end seems to somewhat correlate to student success.
I was talking about Mexico in this case.
I'm not saying there aren't shitty private schools in Mexico. There are a lot of everything. You can find some of the best high schools and colleges from the public side, as well as from the private.
But in general I found that here most private schools had at least nicer infrastructure. Maybe teachers were a mixed bag since you can also have old school catholic/religious institutions that would have really retrograde teachers, but again, at least in the infrastructure side money did seem to buy much better things.
That might also have to do with the fact that taxes in Mexico are not prioritized for education and so most public schools are really lacking in pretty much everything. Students and teachers basically put a significant part of the expense in school materials as well as things like paint for the buildings, repairing broken bathrooms, etc. It's a really dire situation that gets worse every day.
Under this context then, a private institution that can raise a significant amount of money from parents, will usually manage to make a very big difference.
We are talking about the difference between having a public college where most bathrooms were non functional, had no toiler paper or soap (so pretty much only running water if that) vs a private college where there is a Starbucks inside campus and other such amenities (like fully functional bathrooms and plenty of them, etc). Same thing for labs and of course the students capacity to buy newer (or even any kind) of laptops, etc.
Same thing for high schools where there is no space to play sports vs having a fully stocked gymnasium with a soccer field, showers, etc.
I guess that was my view at least.