Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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 :/

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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...

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