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Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

TLDR : American public schools suck but there is an increasing number of extracurricular math programs that help talented kids learn advanced problem solving skills. Mostly only well-educated and well-off parents get their kids into these programs. That kind of sucks, and there are marginal efforts to reach out to poorer students. But the real story right now is, if you have kids in public school, their math education sucks and you might want to look into extracurricular options -- there are lots out there.

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The difference between "good schools" and "bad schools" is much more about the kids that go there than anything about the school itself. You're seeing this starkly in D.C. where gentrification in certain neighborhoods is shifting the student demographics from 90% low-income to 20% low-income over just 4-5 years. Test scores are shooting up, but it's not like they fired all the teachers and hired new staff at twice the salary.

American schools are fine. Our problems are social. For example, the U.S. has the second-highest rate of single-parent families along with one of the highest gaps in PISA scores between single-parent and two-parent households: http://educationnext.org/international-look-single-parent-fa....

The U.S. also has a larger fraction of children in the lowest income distribution than comparable countries: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin.... Accounting for that eliminates a lot of the supposed gap in U.S. student performance:

> If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.

> Test scores are shooting up, but it's not like they fired all the teachers and hired new staff at twice the salary.

Why are you assuming that the schools are responsible for the higher test scores? In my immigrant, upper-middle class community, there's nearly universal use of after-school test prep and tutoring from companies like Kumon. I'd argue that's the reason you're seeing test scores "shoot up" once only few low-income families are left in a neighborhood.

You are violently agreeing with him.

This a really great, insightful and useful comment.

I think a lot of well-educated (or self-educated) tech folks think that if only we could fix our education system, poverty and income inequality would disappear under a massive rise in productivity and innovation. I know that I am guilty of thinking this way.

But you're right: family and socioeconomic status are highly predictive of education outcomes. So we need to directly address both schools and poverty at the same time in order to create a virtuous cycle of social improvement.

Aren't schools financed by local property taxes in US. And the rich parents pay more in taxes and there is more resources in the system.

Also well off parents could help school in other ways.

teachers in bad / poor areas in the states aren't paid less than teachers in the "good" areas. cps for instance, chicago public school teachers are among the best paid and worst performing in the country.

I didn't know the teachers were the ones earning the grades. See the posts above that cite what happens to re-gentrified areas, where the social-economic make-up of a school changes but the teacher make-up does not.

You're implying teacher quality and school financing are irrelevant, and yet every conversation about public schooling in the US brings those arguments up.

It's not as simple as that. There are a lot of rural areas where teachers make almost nothing. Chicago can afford to spend a lot of money (since it has rich areas it can tax). So they spend a lot on schools in poor areas of the city.

And then educational outcomes of the poor rural and poor (but expensive) urban schools aren't different.

That is general rule of thumb, but there are variations in this law at state and local level. In Texas, there is Robin Hood, basically a portion of a rich neighborhood taxes are used to subsidize poor ISDs.

Accounting for local, state, and federal spending, most states spend more money per student in their poorest districts than in their most affluent ones: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2.... In California, the poorest school districts receive almost 14% more money than the richest ones.

That doesn't seem too surprising. In rich areas, kids are off going to their private tutors and private after school activities. In poor areas, the kids need the extra push that a significant portion of them aren't getting at home.

Plus, in the case of NYC, rich PTAs more than make up the difference between what the state provides and what the students receive.

http://www.thenewyorkworld.com/2014/08/06/pta-2/

In most states education funding is local. California (and probably others) redistributes across the state.

In California, districts supplement state funding with local bond measures.

http://www.bondbuyer.com/news/regionalnews/california-school...

Unfortunately, the other kids variable is something that you can only control by moving away. I had to do that in the east bay, California, when the schools started taking more inner-county transfers and running busses. The greatschools score went from ~7.5 to 4 in 2 years. The test scores plunged and they pulled money from the school because it wasn't performing. Like that helps.

You can try to work with the school, the teacher, the principal, but you can't really work with the other parents. I can't even imagine how you'd begin that conversation. "Hey, little Johnny acts like a complete asshole and disrupts the class to the point that they are spending their heads down on their desk for half an hour a day. Can you step up and do something about his behavior?" Obviously I'm never going to be a politician, but how can that ever be phrased in a neutral way?!

Private school or some sort of shared homeschooling association are the alternatives. Not great alternatives :/

This is a huge problem, yes, and probably far more important than what I'm about to say. But even in the best public schools, in places which lack economic and social problems, math education is still egregiously behind the types of learning and teaching described in the article.

Exactly this, as schools in SF have begun to experience re-gentrification, back from empty nesters and influx of poor immigrants, the new gentrification has anecdotally resulted in improving schools at the elementary school level, and as they grow (and if their patents remain in the city) middle and high would likely improve too.

One of the stark differences between improving and flagging schools is parent involvement and support, in addition to a culture of education and learning.

It's what I saw growing up, kids from blue collar families saw school as a reluctant obligation through which they had to pass. Kids whose patents were professionals took a different view of education and saw it as a station on the path to a richer [both meanings] life.

So, it's more than money or wages, it's a way of thinking, how the parents think of school, how the kids think of school, attitude towards academic achievement (over sports, for example), etc.

Now that I think about it, public education is great training for a future of working in open-offices. You learn to accept that you have to wake up at an arbitrary time, spend eight hours getting very little productive done, whilst being bombarded with noise, interruptions, and politics, then if you want to make any real progress, you have to do it afterwards on your own time, outside the school/work day.

One can make the case that, in California, the higher education system was purposefully, consciously stratified along career and status tiers, as you described.

Community college system = workers in the practical trades

Cal State system = office workers

UC system = technologists, scientists, managers

Big name, elite, private universities = executives and high level politicians, the people who actually run society and its institutions

And, if you look at the architecture on the various campuses, it more or less reflects that.

Also, all of the community colleges, and an awful lot of the Cal State schools are commuter campuses. You come and you go. It's not your home. You're a renter. The place shuts down around 10 pm. (Get out of here, kids.)

By contrast, the elite private schools have sufficient dorm/house space to allow most of the students to live on-site: the students have a lot more access to buildings and more or less "own" the place while they're there.

Having attended school in California at a community college, UC, and finally an elite, private university I couldn't more agree with your characterization. I don't know how much I would agree with the claim that the stratification was purposefully constructed (I'd argue it's more of a reflection of American society writ large - i.e. successful parents have more resources to ensure their kids are successful), but otherwise this rings very true.

"Mostly only well-educated and well-off parents get their kids into these programs. That kind of sucks,"

It's really important not to let 201x social concerns get in the way of this stuff. The good stuff always starts out with the rich. Always. It is virtually structurally impossible for it to happen any other way. (Not quite, but very much the exception rather than the rule.) Rather than complaining that only the rich have the thing it is far more important to work out how to get it improved and shared more widely; complaining about the rich having the thing doesn't help that and in the modern political environment runs the risk of strangling the improvement in the crib. It is always easier to bring "equality" by cutting off the top than bring up the bottom, and you have to be very wary of that, because people will propose that in various subtle ways if you fall for the "class inequality" memeset too hard.

It's easy to want to simply to steal from the rich, as you point out.

But that's not our current style of failure, it's "hey poor district, you're not up to snuff compared to the rich district. We're going to fire all the teachers, gut your union, and generally make your life hell. That's sure to make you do better".

Poor management by the government is hardly a surprise. Systems have to be constructed to deal with that as a reality. Or we need to stop hiring managers based on how popular they are.

I wasn't talking about "styles of failure". I'm talking about this very thread, where people are popping up, looking at a program demonstrating success in mathematical education, a thing proved to be difficult by well-funded repeated and repeated and repeated failure, and all they've got to say about it is complaints about how it's not fair that it's just going to rich people.

This is not the time to be worried about fairness. This is the time to figure out what works. When you have that, then worry about fairness. Demanding that all the experiments be done equally to everybody at scale produces total paralysis, and is in no small part responsible for the total paralysis we witness in school reformation right now. You simply can't do anything that way.

I am not sure why you are seeing so many downvotes.

I have worked in a poorly funded chicago public school that had just that year become a "turnaround school". That's just a very cute euphemism for "we fired everyone, hired whatever assholes would work for the least amount of money (Yo!), more or less eliminated any budgets you would be working with, and are making no other real changes". I guess the logic is that if we were going to be set up for failure, we might as well do it on the cheap.

Then, a few years later, they wonder why the students who went to those schools are so far behind the rest of the students in the city.

I should also mention that many of the students going to these schools were already saddled with the disadvantages of being poor and black in Chicago, before having their entire educational world replaced with an even shittier and more dysfunctional one.

The funny thing is that I agree with both your cynicism in practice, and the parent commenter's optimism in theory.

At what point do you have to consider yourself an irresponsible parent if you leave your kid in public school while being able to afford homeschooling ? Are we rapidly approaching the point as a society where our public education feels more like daycare ? If that's not the case how do we measure it and where do we draw the line.

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