How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind
sbnation.com
sbnation.com
- This school is a true public school and not a charter school. In Ohio a lot of charter schools can have some degree of selection in their students and kick out families which don't meet the requirements which leads to more at-risk students left to the public schools. This school is making a point of taking at-risk students.
- Longer school days, 3 meals, and a longer school year helps students stay focused. Unfortunately the home environment for a lot of kids makes it so hard for these kids to be able to focus at school. In my wife's elementary school classes some kids show up with just a hamburger bun for breakfast. Others fall asleep immediately at school since they live with 5+ siblings and there are literally no available beds at home. I am not trying to blame the parents in all the cases either, a lot of the time there are single parents just trying to get by and make ends meet and don't know what more they can do.
- Focussing on the teachers will also help. Teachers and unions have been vilified by Governor Kasich but they are not the main problem at all (it is the tragic home environments) with ridiculous review systems and standards, but then there is little support in challenging districts like in Akron/Cleveland. It is a lot easier to work in the suburbs where the kids would progress and learn even without teachers, so that is where everyone wants to go since a good rating is automatic. I think this problem occurs in just about every field where metrics dominate the review system (medicine, call centers, QA, etc). The turnover for teachers at local charter schools is terrible and only seems to attract early-career teachers who couldn't get a job at a public school.
- This doesn't seem to be a short term flashy project but has been years in the making. None of the features here are gimmicky, but just like many things in life it takes a lot of hard work!
- Adding the goal of college education shows a path forward which a lot of students don't think is possible.
I am super excited to be from Akron and I hope this model proves successful!
The middle one is absolutely true, the other two I really doubt e.g. in Finland or Germany, schoolday starts around 9AM and ends around 2PM, yielding 3h30 to 4h studies a day accounting for breaks, 5 days/week, with little homework (maybe 5h/week total). Afternoon is usually dedicated to clubs.
NSPCC recommend 1:6 ratio for 4-8 year olds doing activities.
I'd say max 1:3 if you want to give parent level care engaging with a child in activities the child is choosing in a meaningful way.
Of course, people haven't yet gotten the idea that we should try to accomplish sufficient learning with minimum classroom time.
There's really solid evidence that intellectual performance drops sharply long before 40h/week. Unless the "classroom time" you talk about includes a lot of off-time and non-butt-in-seat activities it seems you'll be deep into diminishing returns if not outright losing if you increase the length of the school day. My own memories of schools are that by late afternoon many students had stopped following altogether.
Finland is 21% less wealthy than America on a per capita basis.
Finland GDP per capita - $35,964.77
US GDP per capita - $45,759.46
-http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Finland/Uni...
This fact, combined with Finland's well-known social safety nets leads to the obvious conclusion that you would be hard pressed to find living conditions like those in the slums of Akron/Cleveland in Finland.
[1]https://data.oecd.org/finland.htm#profile-government [2]http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Finland/Uni...
Isn't it possible that Finland's well-known social safety net is at least partially responsible for the lower poverty, income inequality and violent crime rates?
I don't know this to be true or false, but is there any evidence of it? And is there any evidence that it has an effect on educational effectiveness? I wouldn't expect an effect; people learn to read, write and do math in K-12 all over the world.
- Maternity boxes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_package
- New child leave - Expecting mothers in Finland can start their maternity leave seven weeks before their estimated due date. After that the government covers 16 additional weeks of paid leave through a maternity grant, regardless of whether the mother is a student, unemployed, or self-employed. The country also offers eight weeks of paid paternity leave. - https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-with-best-parental...
- Partial Care Leave - After a child turns three, parents may take partial care leave, meaning, you can work fewer hours per day or week in order to spend more time with your child — and though you can’t take partial care leave at the same time, both the father and the mother can take the partial care leave at a different times. This innovative leave lasts until the end of the child’s second school year. - https://inhabitat.com/inhabitots/finlands-family-benefits-pr...
- Universal Healthcare - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Finland
To be honest, you don't even have to go as far as the US, there are very similar issues in European banlieues and the likes. Long school hours used to be a typical postwar demand of progressive worker-rights movements, because it freed parents (especially women) to pursue career advancement and focused kids on academic achievement. I am a product of that sort of system, myself: from the age of 6 to the age of 12, I would be in school from 8:30am to 4:30pm, 5 days a week - plus an optional extra hour at both ends because my parents couldn't pick me up sooner. Unfortunately, after the social regression of the last 20 years, that kind of system is slowly disappearing in Europe too, and for all the bad reasons (cost-cutting).
Bad schools are throughout the United States, especially in poor areas, of which predominantly African-American regions make up only one part.
Also, while the parent's claim is a common excuse for inaction and lack of funding, I have yet to see any basis for it. While every case is different, we can all learn from others.
That's a ridiculous generalization. Most developing countries have lower crime rates than some American inner cities. Heck, many developing countries are safer than some developed countries.
The entire point of the finnish model is that this doesn't happen, there is no homework and there is no suggestion or expectations of parental teaching. There is extensive support for both kids and their parents (including good free meals and teacher-provided tutoring), but all teaching is done by the teacher.
If that's the good public school of the area why wouldn't they?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1540200070126380... "Students at the late-starting school reported waking up over 1 hr later on school mornings and obtaining 50 min more sleep each night, less sleepiness, and fewer tardies than students at the early school."
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.3.3.62 "Results show that starting the school day 50 minutes later has a significant positive effect on student achievement, which is roughly equivalent to raising teacher quality by one standard deviation."
https://www.ohio.com/akron/news/education/i-promise-school-a...
>I Promise kids’ school days will start an hour later than their peers. They’ll also receive an additional hour after school every day called the “illumination period,” which will be a time for extra mentoring, studying or club activities.
Not only does the school day start an hour later, the extra time in the day comes from support of extracurricular activities.
Part of it is the assumption that kids can't get to school on their own. I was walking by myself to school when I was 6.
And in a lot of places the built environment is such that kids really can't get to school on their own. Schools are either far away, public transit isn't possible, or there just aren't sidewalks, crosswalks, or safe routes to walk.
Fortunately the densely built areas don't have most of those problems. As long as the neighborhood kids travel in groups they're fine. And the "I Promise" program gives them their own bicycles and free rides to and from school within 2 miles.
Nairobi would probably have questionable security compared to the US, but I’m guessing we are probably judged quite harsh here in US.
There was just this article other day where a woman faced jail time or massive fines because she left her “not-so-baby” baby in the car. My dad used to leave us in the car all the time with windows open.
I can’t do any of that. Mostly because I may end up in jail. That’s the reality of US.
-- Mr Holland's Opus
Also Ganztagsschulen (all-day schools) are getting very common (more than 60% and rising, see https://www.ganztagsschulen.org/de/19001.php). Kids stay there at until 4pm or so.
I don't know why you mention Germany in the first place, it's education system isn't top notch compared to Scandinavian schools.
In the context of at-risk kids, I think the idea is to maximize the amount of time the kids get to spend away from their toxic and stressful home environments.
I am a bit skeptical of the overall "minimize idle time" idea, though. They seem to be on board with giving the kids enough free time to do independent study and stuff, but whether that's any good will depend on how it's implemented.
It seems that everyone is recognizing this is the problem, but the solutions all revolve around school, when it really doesn't have anything to do with schools.
Edit: Or boarding schools.
who is going to fund that? wouldn't it be better to support the families as they are? help improve peoples lives instead of ripping families apart
Common Core specific: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulle...
> My findings suggest that on average, parents who are on the margin of incarceration are likely to reduce the amount of schooling their child attains if they instead remain in the household. This can be explained because the removal from the household of a violent parent or a negative role model can create a safer environment for a child (Johnson, 2008; Jaffee et al., 2003). Incarceration is also a mechanism that can limit the intergenerational transmission of violence, substance abuse, and crime to children. This result also relates to findings in other fields that conclude that See Kling (2006), Aizer and Doyle, 2013; Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2013), Mueller-Smith, 2015; and Bhuller et al., 2016, among others. For example, using data from Sweden, Hjalmarsson and Lindquist (2007) report significant father-son correlations in criminal activity that begin to appear between ages 7 and 12, and are 3 the positive effects of being raised by one’s parents depend on the quality of care they can provide (Jaffee et al., 2003).
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5664c583e4b0c0bb910ce...
The poster you are responding to didn't even suggest a course of action. He mearly provided evidence that the "obvious" course of action might not be so obviously correct. You are free to (as another poster did) question the relevence, interperatation, or quality of the evidence, or provide other evidence or arguments to disagree with what the poster was presenting. But you should not attack someone for trying to have an evidence based discussion.
Even if he turns out to be completely wrong, figuring out how he is wrong will likely be far more enlightening than simply asserting that he is wrong on moral grounds.
I don't see how that isn't a suggestion of a course of action -- one that that is a blatant misuse of a study (with small effects only measured over a small time period) toward ideological ends, i.e. supporting the seizure of children of disadvantaged parents.
Moreover, I refuse to have an evidence-based discussion about whether certain people deserve human rights. That shifts the Overton window to present such ideas as acceptable, when in a civilized society they should not be.
Returning to the meta discussion. Let us trace the course of the conversation in question:
neuland: ...focus on building a better foster / adoption system and encouraging people to use it
house9-2: wouldn't it be better to support the families as they are? help improve peoples lives instead of ripping families apart
textor: For what it's worth, children from at-risk families achieve better education when the father ends up incarcerated. So we can absolutely make a case for "ripping families apart" and against supporting "families as they are".
The only proposal being made here is a voluntary foster/adoption system with encouragement. This is then framed as "ripping families apart". While this framing is arguably unfair, it is within the bounds of reason so, giving it the most charitable interpretation possible, textor responds to "ripping families apart" in the context in which it was introduced and provided evidence that keeping blood families together is not inherently the best course of action. To be clear, at this point the conversation is about how much we should be supporting voluntary adoption; and textor is arguing that the idea is not as inherantly bad as house9-2 seems to be assuming.
Stepping up a level of meta:
>I refuse to have an evidence-based discussion about whether certain people deserve human rights.
This is what political correctness looks like. Literally. You are interested in what is politically correct, evidence be dammed. Further, no one in this discussion has argued for denying people human rights. Even further, every society on the planet accepts that we can violate "human rights" in some sense for the greater good. Eg. prisons deny people their human right of freedom; taxes partially deny the right of personal property.
At risk of entering into the merits of the original discussion, leaving children in poor home environment arguably denies them their human rights, including their right to: education security of person, and food.
How do we balance these conflicting goals? With evidence to inform us what our options are and what effects they will have with regards to our goals.
Going meta again:
> one that that is a blatant misuse of a study ...
It is not a blatant misuse; it is extrapolating beyond the facts of the original study. The first step of evidence based inquiry is to work with the evidence you have. This informs the questions you can ask, so you can look for the evidence you want to have [0]. Once you've done that, you can move onto making the evidence you want to have [1]. Each step of this process provides a foundation to build the next step.
And yes, the process is not as simple as I lay out. You need theory crafting. And once your theory starts to develop holes, it may be time to revisit an earlier step until you have enough of a foundation to make the later steps worthwhile (either because your foundation is strong, is the lower tiers are short of relevant evidence)
> ... toward ideological ends,
Please take a moment to rethink who is arguing towards ideological ends. In my experience, it is generally the person arguing against the concept of evidence; not the one trying to ground themselves in evidence.
>That shifts the Overton window to present such ideas as acceptable
And what about the overton window you are moving towards. Where it is accatable to blatantly argue that evidence should be ignored. Where the very concept of introducing evidence is morally abhorant. Is that the window you want us to live in?
>when in a civilized society they should not be.
Are you arguing that the very concept of seperating children from their parents has no place in civilized society? Child Protective Services might disagree with you. They do place strong emphasis on keeping families together where possible; but they acknowledge that sometimes conditions are so bad that it is unacceptable to leave a child in that situation. Where is the line that determines what warrents CPS to remove children from their families? Again, evidence is the best approach to find it, unless you want to remove children unnecessarily while leaving others in bad situations that they would be far better off out of.
Going meta again:
The discussion is not simply two extremes. Even if we agreed that one (or both) extremes was morally untenable, by seriously exploring the benifits of it, we can look for ways to obtain those same benifits by other means: such as turning school into a 'second home', as this the content of the original article, or voluntary foster care with active involvment of the birth parents in a non-primary-guardian capacity.
[0] And by want to have, I mean the evidence that answers the questions you want to ask; not the evidence that supports the conclusion you want to reach
[1] Again, in the sense of the evidence that answers the questions you want answered.
The one study you’re citing here might suggest your summary statement if “parents on the margin of incarceration” was equivalent to “children from at-risk families”. But those are very different concepts.
You can have an at risk family just by being low-income. Certainly many low-income families are drawn into crime, but by no means all, or even a majority, of low-income families, have a parent who is at the margin of incarceration.
I think the only thing you can reasonably conclude from this study is that leniency in the judicial system towards parents just because they’re parents may be misguided.
They are overlapping. Moreover, "parents on the margin of incarceration" are an extremely significant group of parents for whom the discussion of "supporting families as is" vs. "ripping apart" is meaningful at all. For most poor families it's irrelevant as there's no grounds for dissolution.
I believe you can't deny that it's much more common and publicly acceptable to claim that such a criminal parent should be shown leniency when possible, because having no parent at all is horrible. Yet we have evidence to the contrary.
I concede that this may be inapplicable for some other cases (or at least that we have no proof that it would be applicable yet). However, I personally think that those "at risk families" where parents create an atmosphere that's detrimental for stydying (by being aggressive, anti-intellectual etc.) may well be worse than outright criminal ones, and I believe it'd be proven in due time.
For most non-violent crimes, this study was unconvincing (generally speaking I’d like to see incarceration alternatives for non-violent crime, why send people to crime school at tax-payer expense?).
I agree that for these groups, there’s an elevated chance that the parent is actively harming their family. I just don’t think it would be statistically justified to separate families that aren’t criminal.
And, of course, it would be deeply inhumane.
Because the prospect of forcibly separating kids from their parents based on the decisions of aloof and poorly managed bureaucrats is a political and ethical nightmare.
The solution revolves around schools because schools are considered a legitimate area of public concern while individuals' family-lives (barring some extreme circumstances) are not.
Also, this program provides job training and counseling services for the parents of the kids too.
Boarding schools don't work for poor communities because the kids are often relied upon to do work for the family. This can mean helping with the family enterprise or it can mean older kids taking care of younger kids, elderly family members, or just helping out around the house.
That's not at all what was being suggested.
I fail to see how fixing broken homes (which we don't have a ready-made solution for) is an easier solution than making school more helpful to kids (one solution to which is what this article is about), so I don't think the parent's argument is made in good faith.
Or we could just try to fix th social problems that produce the toxic home environments rather than ripping apart the families that society has already failed.
Also, all too often accurate of their physical environment, and the two aren't completely unrelated.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed here, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of your politics; it's destructive of what this site exists for. Please stop doing that and use HN as intended, in the spirit of intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. We'd appreciate it.
For example: With Children that have a rich home environment, plenty of interactions that stimulate them, keeping them at school longer may hamper development.
On the flip side you have an environment where this is not the case. Examples include socio-economic factors like parents/care givers working long hours.
I recently did research into this exact problem in South Africa. What are the factors that impact on education in communities that have socio-economic challenges?
The challenges are numerous and as this article says. The environment around the children just makes it extremely difficult for them to break out of the cycle of poverty.
These factors include:
being hungry,
crime,
lack of sanitation-this is a problem in South Africa they get sick more often then their counterparts in other areas.This results in them missing more school which puts them behind.,
Parents working long hours, travelling distances to get to work
Lack of resources in schools or support
There really is a multitude of problems each impacting the other creating a self perpetuating cycle of poverty.
Out of the research into the problems I developed a concept for a social enterprise that could solve some of these problems.
Trying to identify some funding sources as traditional vc will not be suitable. Maybe impact investors?
If the above sounds interesting, you are keen to explore leveraging education for social change or exploring alternative educational models mail me. Email is in profile
[1] http://www.feedingamerica.org/our-work/hunger-relief-program...
They had a really good after-school program for me and the other 30 or so kids whose parents had to work long hours with no flexibility. We were supervised by an adult to make sure we didn't kill each other but it was mostly about having free-time to do homework, read books, and play pick-up soccer or whatever.
Edit: To be honest, it's probably a better environment that we would have gotten at home, even with caring, attentive parents. We had access to the whole school library and our adult supervision actually knew our curricula so they could help us with the homework better than our parents could. Home computers weren't really a thing yet, so being able to use the shelf of encyclopedias was huge.
for example, school could open at 6am for parents who work early, but not start until 9am. the intermediary time could be nap time, unstuctured play, or guided exploration (gardening, science experiments, even animal husbandry in rural areas). between structured classroom time, they could have more breaks for more naps, play or exploration. school could end later so parents can pick them up after work, and have shorter and more frequent vacations so kids don't forget so much in-between.
you could even have morning or evening joint learning times, where parents join in to learn how to teach and encourage their kids (such programs seem to help break the cycle of poverty).
Both those countries are also very prosperous and innovative. It seems the people or culture are what makes them do so well not the amount of school hours.
For all we know parents in those countries are far more supportive of their children. And may also be intelligent enough to assist their children with the homework. By intelligent I mean they are able to teach their children well I don't mean to be able to understand what a six year-old is learning (if not there is a far bigger problem!).
Where does an inner city African American kid go after school if both parents (or single parent) are working? Who pays for that?
In countries with adequate social services, this is less of an issue.
My kids (4th and 7th) attend a school with a year-round schedule, and we (kids and parents) love it:
* They are less stressed because there is more breaks throughout the year. Teachers seem less stressed, too, because they don't have to pack so much in.
* They retain more in the summer.
* Outside of academics: it's really nice to have the option to take longer vacations outside of spring break and summer break.
I'd love to see more schools move to it... 3 months off in summer seems very antiquated in hindsight.
But what about those of us who need the extra hands to help with the harvest!?
I know that the 3-month summer break stems from historical harvest/planting schedules... but when there's 20 inches of snow outside and the wind chill is -10 F, I'll take 3 months of summer vacay over 6 weeks of summer and 6 weeks of winter breaks any day.
I don't think the alternative is 6/6. I think it's more like 3 in winter, 3 in summer, 3 in spring, and 3 in fall. Or even more spread out.
I'd have to actually check though, been a while.
At some point, though, personal responsibility has to come into play. Having 5+ children when you have no resources... this is the true elephant in the room. It seems talking about it gets labels thrown around. I guess it's a conversation we can't have right now, though.
That is hardly the only problem. Society isn't at fault for all of the ills of low income areas.
This mentality is pervasive in the elementary and middle schools that my kids attend and it's unfortunate that adults haven't grown out of it. Thank you for your comment.
True leadership says that we need to work toward fixing the problem, while selfish ambition says, "not my fault, not my problem."
The sad reality is that in the other hand, thanks to the ever present tragedy of the commons, there are selfish people that take advantage of this thinking "someone will fix it, doesn't matter if I contribute to the problem for my own benefit".
[edit]typo: "doing" -> "going"
Our federal and local governments often make it harder for these people, and I'm all for fixing that (with my notion of what a "fix" looks like of course.) That's not the entire story though; how do you make fathers stick around? How do you solve for poverty? You don't, at least, we have never been able to do so, and now you get into philosophical territory about whether or not that's even possible.
My issue is that I have no idea how to fix it. Pumping more money into low income schools is not a cure-all. Don't get me wrong, it can help, but we have many cases where it made little to no difference because teachers and iPads can't do it all.
Anyways, that's a lot of rambling. My point is that I don't think the sentiment of "these people are oppressed" (which is what I assume most mean when they say it's "society's fault") is correct. It's far more complicated than that.
My wife works in a low income school, largest and poorest in the area (a relatively large city.) Pumping more money in does not help. More after school problems does not help much. As far as academic achievement is concerned, these kids are completely stuck because they have what we would consider terrible situations at home.
Sometimes the parents just don't care, sometimes they just don't have the time (multiple jobs). More often than not there is only one parent at home. There's only so much a teacher/school can do if the parent is picking up the ball when the kid gets home.
I feel personally insulted when people say we shouldn't fund these afterschool programs because they don't feel they are working.
BTW, one data point holds more value than zero.
Having a good plan and the resources to execute is what works.
I know it sounds like I'm talking about a minor difference, but I think it's a lot bigger than that. You can add more money to a lot of the broken systems in the US. It helps, but it doesn't fix core problems and the systems are still incredibly inefficient.
Only if you're looking to blame something so you can feel smugly superior to them. If you're looking to actually provide services or improve conditions, that's not something worth talking about, because it doesn't change conditions now.
EDIT: And especially not when we're talking about Ohio, which is one of the states looking to outright ban abortion.
In other parts of society we'd say "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."
I know this is a very unpopular opinion the world over right now, but: This applies loosely to sex as well (Don't have sex if you can't afford to have kids).
The fact is the child has no control over their home environment, and you're effectively damning them to a life of lower achievement based on the fact that their parents can't afford enough bedding. Is that really the kind of world you want to live in?
A parents lack of self/impulse control shouldn't be the child's responsibility. And we should strive as much as possible to prevent people from doing something that might cause that to be the case. Obviously once a child is born we need to work on making sure they have a bright and fulfilling future, but why not stop it at the source?
because it's a ridiculous opinion that ignores human nature and provides awful advice.
It doesn't ignore human nature, it asks that you embrace your humanity. Until recently people would have argued that "unwanted advances" were "human nature." NO! As an adult human you're better than that. Control yourself.
I'm not really understanding why it provides "awful advice"? Why should your children bear the responsibilities of your lack of self control?
We are truly lost as a society.
What, besides providing extra resources to underpriveleged children so they are not punished for their parents mistakes, can be done?
Are you suggesting we make their parents "pay" somehow? Or a program to prevent the parents from having 5+ kids when they don't have the resources?
You don't punish the problem away, you help people avoid it themselves.
Even better would be free birth-control medication or IUD's, as these put the birth control in the hands of women, while condoms especially might not be used in the face of social pressure.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here.
Out of curiosity, what have the sociologists concluded from China’s one-child policy?
Unintended consequences. I believe it is generally accepted that the policies in the 70's led to the destruction (dismantling?) of the urban/poor family (yes, predominately African American).
Also, we've seen that this issue has significantly fueled the rise of people like our current POTUS.
It's a hard problem. I don't know what the solution is.
These problems existed long before then. For example, a famous and controversial report from 1965:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...
The problems are largely due to systematic oppression of African-American people for generations, denying them access to adequate housing, education, income, credit, access to legal protections, and exposing them to risks of violence by the state and by white people.
Which policies of the 70s and 80s contributed and where is evidence of that? I ask because I try to be careful to distinguish between oft-repeated narratives and hypotheses with actual evidence.
Due to the way government assistance is structured it encourages parents to 1) not get married, 2) have more kids, 3) not begin working if they don't already work.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents getting married that would help reduce fatherlessness and all of the negatives that come with that.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to have less children they would be better able to take care of the ones they have.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to work it would reduce the number of people who grow up on government assistance and live on it their whole lives. This would have long term positive consequences.
That's not really a good idea. I know my godson's parents, and if they getting assistance was reliant on getting married, they would end up killing each other.
"If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to have less children they would be better able to take care of the ones they have."
How, exactly would you do this? And do it without punishing the kids by leaving their parents with even fewer resources?
I don't have as good of an answer for reducing children. It would probably be best to work on reducing the number of children by providing easier access to birth control.
You're completely and utterly ignoring the fact that raising children, especially multiple ones, is an extremely difficult task, even for two people. I know of very few people who would opt to do it themselves, even if the financial incentives to do so were worth it (they aren't even close).
I just want to point out there are a lot of poor women raising significant numbers of children. The woman next to my mom has 5-7 (it's hard to tell, and she just had a new one). They father (of some of them) is around a little, but mostly not around. And it looks like there are several fathers. Yes, raising children well is hard, but I would not describe what this woman does as difficult. Older kids are raising the younger ones, etc, etc.
So, I would definitely disagree with your assertion.
There's a great scene from a Michael Winterbottom movie called Jude where --spoiler-- a child asks his parents why they had him if they could not afford him and his siblings. The child doesn't like the answer and ends up hanging himself and his siblings.
I don't know if there is a solution. People want to have kids, even if they can't - in my opinion - afford them. Some religions encourage having lots of children - it's a big thing in the catholic community, at least where I grew up.
Anecdote: My cousin is married to a catholic latina, he's already struggling to make ends meet taking care of the one kid they have. He lives with her grandparents and cousins in a tiny apartment in a low income neighborhood. There is no way I could talk him out of having another child, even though I know it's fiscally irresponsible in my opinion.
I think it's a conversation worth having but I just don't know how it can go anywhere, and I have struggled to come up with an answer that isn't just me being upset with the parents.
It actually doesn't. Everyone is a responsible as they're capable of being, given their genetics and their environment. If you're a very responsible person it's because you were fortunate to have your particular genetics and/or environment.
Some people are born into terrible environments but have the genetic luck to be highly responsible. Some people are born into great environments but have the genetic misfortune to be highly irresponsible.
No one chooses to be responsible or irresponsible.
The onus is on the genetically/environmentally lucky people to help the unlucky ones. There's absolutely no shame in being unlucky and no pride in being lucky. There isn't much the lucky people can do to improve genetics (yet) but there's a lot that can be done to improve environments.
Really? Everyone's level of responsibility is purely based on a genetic lottery and have nothing to do with one's own willpower?
edit: I can understand environment having an effect
And behavior isn't necessarily a static thing. This same person might read a good book (which would become part environment) which might move them to be more empathetic.
you seem to assume a lot about people "having 5+ children when you have no resources". even the idea of "no resources" has a number of in-built assumptions. what are they? do you work with populations of people like this? do you personally know people in this situation? are they truly hopeless?
certainly we can have an adult conversation, but don't beat around the bush. start the conversation with an earnest and reasoned argument, rather than an inscrutable lament.
[1]: http://review.chicagobooth.edu/behavioral-science/2018/artic...
Isn't that surprising; globally, number of children goes down with both prosperity and, even controlling for prosperity, strength of social safety nets (a common explanation for the latter being that with no or weak public safety net, your children are your old-age social safety net.)
The US has been proudly dismantling it's social safety net since the 1990s, and it already was notoriously weak for the developed world. Simultaneously, access to birth control and abortion is also under perennial assault, and even where access is maintained, well-funded shame campaigns are directed against both.
Strangely, the people backing all of those efforts are also the ones that complain the most about poor people having too many kids. And do so under the banner of “personal responsibility”, without any hint of intentional irony.
What makes you say that's an actual problem that has a significant impact on American education?
If there is a household with one parent, 5+ children, and not enough beds for them, the problem has occurred long before. One cannot blame the parent for "that day", but certainly the adult bears some responsibility for creating such a household. Having 5 kids without planning for beds, or income, or stability, is a decision SOMEONE made. It doesn't just "happen" like weather. There is human responsibility here.
In my view, "I Promise" is making up for those mistakes. Its a good thing, but let's be clear about why it's valuable.
Schools don't have to tell kids that birth control exists, let alone show them how to properly use a condom (which is a non-trivial skill: condoms are 98% effective when put on properly but 85% effective in real life)
Schools don't have to tell kids abortion exists. Even if kids did know, their parents can block them from getting an abortion. Also, getting an abortion requires traveling to a clinic, which often requires a car.
And you can be completely fine and have plenty of resources for all 5 kids until your wife gets cancer and you drop 1 million dollars of medical expenses into that money pit and then she dies anyway. Now you have 5 kids, single income, and way less than no money.
Strangers on the internet say it’s your fault.
Enjoy
Well I guess it’s your fault for having kids in a country with scant social safety nets. So you’re kinda right
This realization does not have to incur any sort of "well you deserve this outcome and sucks to be you" sort of logic, however. It is the parent's fault for creating the situation, but society can choose to bail one out for poor decision making.
My situation is probably drastically determined by some stranger 200 years ago who decided hopping in a pile of potatoes on barge headed for the US was a good idea. Thank you distant relative, that was a genius idea!
The point isn't to act like people aren't responsible for their own actions, of course they are. The point is to be realistic about how much of our situations are attributable to our personal decision making. People don't exist in small vacuums where they control everything.
Some things actually do just "happen", like weather.
If we just pray a little harder, people will stop having kids! Teenagers will stop having sex! Condoms will stop breaking!
Yes, perhaps the husband/wife that was the single/primary earner in the family happened to die and thus the family found itself in hard times.
I mean, hell, I have an extremely stable job at an extremely stable company. And I still fear losing my job, and the effect that would have on my family!
Ohio (where this school is) lacks quality sex education and access to abortion. Ohio law doesn't require teaching at all about contraception. Ohio law allows parents to block their kids from having an abortion. Ohio law doesn't require teaching students about consent.
So there is a huge swath of people in Ohio schools who are totally uneducated about sex. Certainly SOME of the blame should go to the decision of the Ohio legislature to withhold information about birth control from students.
It's valuable because the American Right has been making a sustained and successful attack on the integrity, stability, and viability of poor families for at least three decades (and other powerful forces, whose modern incarnation is also part of the American Right, has been doing so to families of color, who are disproportionately poor, since America was colonized.)
It is true that addressing that cause is useful in thinking about more complete, comprehensive long-term solutions.
a) is it really accurate that a smart person can't legitimately learn and be sensitive to life experiences from others or b) why can't they hire people to advise them while still managing the project themselves?
This sounds like a solvable problem by promoting being sympathetic and deferential, rather than replacing people outright from the process simply because they aren't 'from' that group. It's just as likely the people with the life experience don't have the other skills for managing or running a project as well.
Everyone is acting like this project is already a success when it has just launched...Id wait a couple years before calling LeBron a hero.
Although I agree with your general point, I don't see the problem with praising people that is trying hard at changing the lives of others for the better.
There's are a lot of subtleties that lived experience can reveal. Even the smartest person might miss some knock-on effect, etc.
> b) why can't they hire people to advise them while still managing the project themselves?
So, you're saying... diversity of thought might be useful?
What should matter first is the team members skill/talent relevant to the project. While also hiring sympathic people who go out in the field to get feedback and interview subjects to determine the problems needing solving,+gýg environment factors, attitudes, etc.
Throwing money at a project without strong, involved leadership can be ineffective and fail, or for a variety of other reasons, regardless of his or the members diversity.
It's a magnet school.
I just see a lot of people using the "public school" line as a cudgel to bash charter schools, but charter schools are exactly the mechanism to accomplish something like this for people who aren't revered/rich enough to exercise the kind of influence over their hometown that LeBron did to get them to agree to incorporate novel facilities and practices directly into their district.
Then I see the consequences of bad law in other states, and I just cringe.
Ultimately, the public school system has to serve students who have been excluded from more selective schools, otherwise you end up as a society where the most basic education is a privilege instead of a right.
However, they often do exclude those who don't have parents actively demanding more for their children, those who perform poorly on standardized tests due to adverse home factors rather than innate ability, or those with special needs such schools aren't equipped to support.
I have no idea what the effectiveness is in my state, whether success is contagious to underperforming students or not. Either way it will be interesting to see how this inverted philosophy of magnet schools performs in comparison.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-york-school-desegre...
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/10980856/new-york-city-schools...
RAND found that "With minor exceptions, by 2014–2015, student achievement, access to effective teaching, and dropout rates were not dramatically better than they were for similar sites that did not participate".
It's refreshing to see a holistic approach to helping at-risk students, instead of assuming that teachers are the most important component. Good nutrition, safe transport to school, and support for parents all seem like ideas that should be more experimented with.
Then you throw in all the pressure he had as a youth to be the next big thing and then going to the NBA and succeeding immediately in terms of personal ability.
Yes, he had that PR blunder when he left Cleveland but he had good reason to - he just took bad advice and went about it wrong. But he proved his point and then came back home and helped win a championship for his hometown team.
All this while remaining super charismatic, not falling into bad habits or getting involved in scandals. Being a good father and marrying his high school sweetheart whom he has 3 children with.
Doing things for the community that aren't vapid or short term PR grabs. But really trying to make a difference.
All the while coming from a very disadvantaged place economically and without his father around.
He's by all accounts a savvy and smart businessman and hasn't blown it like so many people with rags to riches stories. He has kept his good friends around and integrated them into his businesses in ways that make sense. He appears to show true loyalty to those that were with him before he became what he is today.
He's well spoken and thoughtful on top of it all.
I don't follow his sport much but he is a person who appears to just be exceptional in many ways. He just seems so genuine and without the veneer that other stars really suffer from. Granted he has a massive PR team and marketing team but it would have been so easy to have a slip-up. It would have been easy to make bad business decisions and it would have been easy to find new "friends" and women and all the other things that are short term. But he has a goal larger than being an NBA star and he's stuck with it.
With John Taylor Gatto (NYS Teacher of the year and also schooling critic) https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev... "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Maybe LeBron should invest into the property around the school to reap some of the benefits and use them to finance the school. Holistic property development.
The question is who benefits.
Good or bad school districts only change the relative prices. It doesn't alter the total amount of housing per population.
In other words, anyone moving to a house in a good school district leaves an empty house in a worse one.
"The Vanishing Middle Class" (2007) is a good book.
Her academic career in that field is very impressive, but that has nothing to with an understanding of the science of Economics, which is notoriously full of counterintuitive and misunderstood truths.
The poster doesn't understand economics at all if they think changes in relative housing prices don't affect housing supply.
(I'm not familiar enough with Ms. Warren's background to have a substantiated opinion either way, though I certainly don't doubt her intelligence.)
BurningFrog is arguing that that is not correct because Senator Warren is not an authority in the first place.
You could still argue that she is correct; but (assuming BurningFrog's judgements on her qualifications), that arguement must be on the merits of her arguements, not her qualifications.
In it, Nokinside claimed that Warren is an expert in Economics due to her academic career. That's what I'm arguing against.
I of course agree that people from any background, including Warren's, can make claims about Economics that should be discussed on their merits, not dismissed (or accepted...) because of the speaker's academic background.
I don't think that she is a bad person, but I do believe that she is bad for American politics right now.
Moving leftwards is absolutely the best thing the democrats could possibly do. further left policies are popular. Further left policies address the massive amount of voters who don't give a shit because neither party represents anything but corporations.
America could use 50 more senators that were willing to start moving much further left.
This is true in my neck of the woods.
Also, there's first time homebuyers and deaths or people leaving the country/country to consider. People enter and exit the market all the time, it's not a perfect 1:1 swap all the time.
I think it's a valid point that county/state/national economic growth is rarely uniform.
Exactly. More demand for a fixed supply in the "good" school district, reduced demand for a fixed supply in the "bad" one. Property taxes are in some part based on the demand for houses as reflected in the assessment price. So even assuming that the market keeps those houses occupied by owners, long term the trend will be towards larger tax revenues for the good district, which drives a larger budget for education, which in turn attracts more demand for the homes.
In Alberta the conservative government in the 1990s controversially consolidated county school districts into much larger ones and pooled property taxes. This basically resulted in the same dollars being spent per student regardless of where they lived. I recall a lot of limousine liberals complaining about how their schools canceled their dance programs due to the mean old conservatives, but it was a profoundly liberal move, and it resulted in an influx of resources into poorer districts. At the same time it emphasized the conservative positions of local accountability and choice.
It’s worth noting that Alberta compares favorably with Finland for math and science scores[1], and has the lowest private school enrollment in Canada. There are other factors that contribute to this, but the tax reforms in the 1990s stand out as a big factor, contributing to the provincial economy and its increasing profile in academic research.
The districts had a lot of room to experiment, and Edmonton went the furthest by basically eliminating catchment areas and making schools first-come, first-served (most parent still choose schools close to them for convenience especially in elementary, high school kids could also get free city transit passes iirc). If a school’s enrollment dropped too low it could be closed and the building would be made available for a new standard or charter school to use. They also allowed for a plethora of public charter schools based on parents and principals making proposals for empty or underutilized buildings and proving they could get enrollment. This included a school that focused on hockey, one that had a focus on cadets and Canadian history, and a high school that dispensed of organized sports in favor of excellent arts facilities. None of these schools could discriminate on enrollment (except two cases I’m aware of that got an exemption, an all-girls jr high developed to test the idea that girls would do better in STEM classes without boys present, and a school for First Nations kids that focused on their culture).
I’m always puzzled that I do rarely see governors and mayors pushing through similar proposals.
[1] https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2006/09/21/clever-red...
The actual point you make:
> anyone moving to a house in a good school district leaves an empty house in a worse one.
This is correct only if you consider hosing availability. When the housing contains additional value (value of education) the value of housing can increase in absolute. Include the added value from education and you see the point.
Example:
(value of housing) + (value of public education in the district) = combined value of the property
Year 1997:
District A: 100 + 20 = 120
District B: 100 + 20 = 120
Year 2007:
District A: 90 + 20 = 110
District B: 110 + 40 = 150It is a scarcity, after all. Scarcities can have net different economic consequences.
Her basic assertion was that the simple accumulation of that much wealth is itself evil. They could do many things like build schools and since they choose not to they are evil.
I mentioned to her that they can’t sell their stock without ceding control, so it might make sense to wait to spend the money. But mostly I was just interested in absorbing her point.
There was also a secondary claim about an imperative to use one’s social media platform to correct abuses. But I believe that was a secondary point.
Anyway, I’ve just been tossing that over in my head. Does it say something about someone’s heart if they aren’t building schools and hospitals the moment they obtain enough wealth to do so comfortably?
This is, essentially, a debased version of the standard leftist argument that economic systems that permit this sort of concentration of resources are fundamentally broken.
Since people have to personalize everything into morality plays, the idea that the existence of such people is symptomatic of something broken in society turns into these people are why society is broken.
Granted, since they DO have the resources to fix a lot of issues and choose not to still doesn't say anything good about them. There is something to the adage that if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem. And if you're directly profiting off the problems, potentially spending money on lobbyists and political donations that prolong the problems, and bidding for contracts with groups that are directly responsible for the problems. . . it starts to get a bit dicey.
The way the economy is, it is extremely doubtful that anyone can accrue that kind of wealth without having their fingers in at least a few morally questionable pies. Like, if you were a steel magnate in Nazi Germany, you were definitely involved in making the holocaust happen regardless of your personal feelings on the matter. If you didn't, someone else would have though, so how much are you really obligated to address?
The extent at which this happens is where some ethical issues lie. If you keep wages low while making large profit there is a point of view that you are ripping off your workers and this can be seen as unethical.
Cooperatives are designed to address this by making all workers joint owners. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
There is also the argument that large corporations that legally avoid paying tax and lobby to keep the loopholes open are making money by utilising public resources and not paying for them. These public resources support their workers and help the company to succeed. Bezos for example is particularly successful at avoiding tax and lobbying to keep it that way. Despite it being legal it could be considered ethically dubious as he is not contributing back to a system that helped him succeed.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/2/16842876/google-double-iri...
Bezos in particular chooses to actively avoid making profit and hide profits to deliberately avoid paying tax. When Amazon makes a profit they still don't pay tax:
https://splinternews.com/amazon-made-5-6-billion-in-profits-...
He's not doing it innocently, it's tactical. They lobby to keep the loopholes open. Although its not illegal, it could be considered unethical which I believe is the context of the original discussion.
This kind of sums it up:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/03/bezos_billions_spac...
He has a lot of power to do more for other humans on this planet and doesn't.
Who said it was?
> A cooperative selling the same products and services as, say, Amazon might not make the same profit.
It might make more. It might make less because it's paying it's workers more fairly.
> Coherent vision and leadership can contribute a lot to the value creation process.
Yes, this is also labour and should receive a fair value. Everyone in the company is a worker but "unless the owners are adding billions in value by themselves they are paying people less than the true value of their work".
There aren't that many billionaires. So are you saying they aren't the worst of the billionaire class? That's really the only way I can see the phrase working.
> I mentioned to her that they can’t sell their stock without ceding control
What about changing voting schemes?
> Does it say something about someone’s heart if they aren’t building schools and hospitals the moment they obtain enough wealth to do so comfortably?
I think it says something about their heart if they are able to get that wealthy, with rare exceptions.
Neither are going to happen. He might toss around a bit of money to try and buy a better reputation, but he's still the worlds richest man by standing on the backs of the very people who's kids need better education.
I've never really understood why this is usually considered difficult or impossible for such a project.
Also, with 25-30 kids per class, $10k works to $250k-300k per year which seems sufficient for a teacher, aide, facilities and support.
Average class room size is 21.6 for elementary schools that are self-contained (26 for departmentalized). https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s... I think the desire is for 20 or less. When you're dealing with children, a lot of teachers are required.
So let's say LeBron is going for 20:1. Then it's now $200k per class. Let's say half of that goes to the teacher due to competitive pay and payroll tax + healthcare + benefits. You're looking at $5k/student for 3 healthy meals a day, facilities, and everything else.
Doesn't seem like very much anymore. You could dock teacher pay more but it won't probably be enough to outweigh the cons.
One could also try to up the ratio of students:teachers but then you're just going to give the kids a worse education and the teachers a much worse teaching environment. I think having a small classroom size is pretty important for kids who are struggling as they need more attention. And this school is literally for struggling kids - so there's gonna be a lot of competition for attention.
[0]: https://www.sbnation.com/2018/7/31/17634370/lebron-james-sch...
Foundations arose as a way for parents to ensure proper funding in districts that were lucky enough to have the donors. So, thank goodness that some districts haven't fallen through the floor, but we're back in the unequal situation we were in before.
Since that 2003 report, charter schools and an update to the funding policy called the "Local Control Funding Formula" have tried to address some of the shortcomings of the equal-across-the-board policy (namely, woefully inadequate funding for districts with greater low-income and english-learning challenges), but our state still funds in the low middle of the pack or at the dirt bottom of state spending per pupil, depending on whether you take cost of living into account.
LBJ's foundation would seem to have arisen along similar lines: like CA, the state is not doing nearly enough to support its public schools, so private citizens have to try to fill the gap through philanthropy. This is great for the children of Akron, but the limitations are clear: it's one school in one corner of the state! I hope this is a shot across the bow that convinces people that raising taxes to fund education properly is not the end-all boondoggle that so many people seem to think it is. A superstar per school doesn't sound scalable to me.
British public schools are run by members of the public for any members of the public (who can pay and pass the exam).
American public schools are run by local government only for people the local government wants to admit (based on where you live etc).
Eh? Everyone is admitted to public schools in America. You often don't get the choose the specific school, but everyone has the right to a place in a school.
In the same school system, some of the schools are out-of-this-world, while others are zoos.
If I had the choice between sending my kids to some of the schools I went to growing up, or letting them stay home and watch cartoons all day, I'd choose the latter. At least they're not going to get shivved watching Adventure Time.
Britain's railway signalling is crazy because Britain's railways pre-date railway signalling. If you build a brand new railway you definitely shouldn't repeat mistakes from the 19th century.
Britain drives on the Left. Should you drive on the left too? Only if your neighbors do.
But on the other hand Britain decided to buy up all the doctors and hospitals and stuff to give everybody healthcare and that's worked out pretty well.
I guess maybe they would stop it if the bikes were just ending up at a scrap yard?
Getting some folks to realize that it's providing freedom rather than fast cash is going to be an accomplishment. Perhaps this will even produce a positive cultural shift.
How long can the Nobel Prize continue? Rhodes Scholarships?
Maybe the model itself proves something on a national level, and the government decides this is the 'future' and earmarks more money for schools like this...
Or maybe they just get more donations from wealthy people who want to help. Either way, I'm sure there are ways to offset the costs and keep it going long-term.
Thus defeating the entire purpose of this school. Gentrifying will result in the school being surrounded by housing that the students parents can't afford.
Obviously the longer you stay at a place and the smaller the place the more shares you'd have in the place. Shares could also = voting rights on properties/etc... More votes = louder voice.
Think of it as privatized (not government-ran) socialism in the real estate market.
How about trying to strongarm the government into actually giving out the damn funding.
> Parents can use the institution’s job and family services, study through its GED program, or design meals at the on-site food bank to cook at home.
This solution seems way more holistic. It might totally fall on its face, but I'm really interested to see how it turns out.
If more celebreties put their money to work like James has done, the world would be a much better place. Kudos!
Second: Even if this school has good results, it seems unlikely that it will scale well, because it's relying on more money (from outside donors, etc.). You can't throw more money at a problem, then declare you've come up with a general solution.
From Larry Summers talking with Tyler Cowen:
COWEN: And this is K–12.
SUMMERS: Yeah. That’s likely to be the most effective thing that you can do, but that you need to be very careful not to succeed by cannibalization. Many, too many, philanthropists interested in education decide they’re going to set up a charter school. Only their charter school is only going to admit highly motivated kids with highly motivated parents.
Their charter school’s going to pay 20 percent more than the regular schools and cherry-pick the best teachers out of the regular schools. Then they’re going to be really thrilled about how they have better achievement than the regular public schools when it’s clear from the nature of their model, selecting the kids and cherry-picking the teachers, that it is supremely nonreplicable.
I would say impose a replicability constraint on yourself and innovate in the area of education. My general view has been that a lot of the way successful innovation happens is alongside big systems.
(Link: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-larr...)
Sometimes charter schools are there to do exactly what's been described there: create at least one good school. Because the public system is largely underfunded/broken. To defy this impulse because it isn't replicable, is to deny the part the govt plays in creating the broken public schools.
If I am taking the good teachers from the other schools, I am not fixing anything, I am just transferring social capital from someone else kids to mine.
Charter schools do not share that motivation. If they find a teaching method that works better their objective is not to share to but instead use it to capitalize and enrich themselves.
Finally, charter schools are publicly funded. If they are taking tax-payer money the results should absolutely be replicable.
Mostly, charter schools select for the best students by, even if no other filters apply, selecting the students whose parents are engaged enough to select a non-default school.
There are mounds of evidence that “good schools” in the US—whether traditional private, traditional public, public-subsidized private charter, or public charter—are a product of getting the right student population rather than substantive differences between schools.
> Because the public system is largely underfunded/broken.
That's really not the problem.
The problem is that American society is largely broken, and we expect the public schools to perform as if it weren't (or to magically make up for it.)
OTOH, the schools are an easy scapegoat and distraction, and because the problem isn't fundamentally there, there is no risk that changes there will ever relieve the outcome problems enough for it to stop being a useful distraction.
I think a lot of this comes down to the metrics used for gauging good schools. Which are usually test scores, graduation rates, and discipline rates.
Assuming that the test scores measure something worthwile, test scores is always reported as a point in time measurement -- but really a progression would be more informative. What I really want to know is will my kid go up or down or stay the same in test scores if they attend school X, it's not super important what the average score is ; especially since the progression may vary significantly based on the input score.
Graduation rates could be low because of many factors outside of school, or could be high because the standards are low, and are often reported only at the high school level but kids who don't graduate high school were often not well prepared at other levels, etc.
Discipline rates can be meaningful, but if one school doesn't expel anybody because all the children are angels, and one school doesn't expel anybody because they haven't noticed the large numbers of murders during recess, the numbers look the same.
I think any town not named Sunnydale would notice the dwindling class sizes in the latter case.
Sunnydale noticed it, too.
I'd much prefer the school to have fun morning activities before class (games in the computer lab, for example, bonus points if you can tie that into learning without the kids realising it) while having an official starting time that is late in the day. This covers kids that have to wake up early due to their parents schedule, but lets kids that can sleep, well, sleep. If the days are going to be longer, is there more recess? More downtime? More art and music and otherwise "fun" stuff? These things help with learning. Same for after school, honestly.
A great bonus that is included is support for schoolwork that is missing at home. I'd rather have a no-homework school in lower grades as it makes more sense, but this is the next best thing.
I might also mention that these are 2nd and 3rd graders. I don't know if they are the sorts that are actually susceptible to gang violence outside of what happens around them. They do, however, have the issues poverty brings up, which is what the school seems more geared towards. Food banks, job help, GED help, and free counselors for those that have endured trauma, which comes in many different forms outside of gang violence - poverty is one predictor of having it.
Yes you absolutely can!
It’s to make you used to being overworked and have almost no vacation for the rest of your life :-)
Source (linked in the OP): https://www.ohio.com/akron/news/education/i-promise-school-a...
You can if "not enough money" was the problem in the first place. And for public schools in low income areas of America, that might end up being a big part of the problem.
LeBron grew up in Akron. He knows the problems these kids are facing, and he's going out of his way to solve it specifically for them.
That kind of local leadership combined with updating the school day and curriculum for kids with specific problems that are best understood at the local level can't be replicable.
How that is applied to apportionment is an open question. Vouchers always seemed like the best solution to me, but I'm not expert on this subject.
First: Oh boy, what a deal breaker. If we can't solve waking up early, why bother, right?
Second: It's a neighborhood school; not a charter, not private.
Third: This is a genuinely-good and well-thought-out act of philanthropy that will make people's lives better.
I agree in general that throwing money at a problem by itself is rarely useful. However, I think your statement sets up a false dichotomy. Is the answer to give every school 10 billion dollars? No. Is the answer to fund schools enough that they can give free meals to students and pay teachers enough to stay? Maybe.
It really enforces to me that most people don’t let their lack of knowledge or interest in an area stop them from passing judgements.
In the case of education I do agree more money is needed.
For something like health care, massive reforms are needed.
Given this country has immense financial resources, if it turns out that we're just not spending enough to start, it seems like it could be one.
These people are professional educators, so maybe we shouldn't assume they don't know what they are doing.
fantastic.
Why are charter schools demonized?
My local area HATES them, and I'm not sure if its politics or worthwhile.
EDIT: Why did I get 5 downvotes?
Pretty good summary of the common criticisms.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/...
--------
short answer, is that a lot of them tend to be run by scammers trying to turn a buck
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Long answer, is that education is actually a weird product, with a lot of information asymmetries baked in, and where a lot of time the quality people are actually hoping to buy is the signal around the product, instead of the product itself
And the signal is often elusive if that's what you're actually hoping to buy
- Charter schools take money away from neighborhood public schools. Most schools are funded per-capita, so fewer students means less money. But many costs are fixed/discrete (e.g. school nurse costs N thousand dollars).
- Charter schools have inflated performance metrics. Often charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
- Corporatization is evil. Charter schools often run more like a business than a socialized institution. Some even pay kids for good grades. Often, the success of a charter school depends on marketing, and successful marketing depends on performing well on metrics. Charter schools are then incentivized to "teach to the test" and potentially force out students who don't perform well. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Thats an interesting way of saying that charter schools get better results.
> charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
But when taken to an extreme, this leads to exclusive areas and excluded people.
But the question of "where should I send _my_ kids" should be considered separately from "how should education in this country as a whole be structured."
You have to distinguish between the macro and micro. Another example is college. If my nephew asked me whether he should go to college, I'd say, definitely do that, if you can afford it. But on a macro level, college in the US has kind of become scam and we have to do something about it.
Automation will have decimated many industries, what will be left is up in the air, and when he graduates will those jobs still be there?
Unless in the future college is more of an extra-curricular boredom thing because post-scarcity society and all (wishful thinking).
"better results" should mean given a similar set of students. If you cherry-pick the inputs don't expect comparing outputs to be the same.
There's an attitude that everybody should do poorly together, and that's better than anybody succeeding. Like a bucket of crabs, each clawing at the others trying to get out and pulling them back in that keeps the poor, doing poorly. And well-meaning ivory-tower types fuel the culture with idealistic 'fairness' arguments.
Charter schools like elite colleges gain 90% of their reputation from rejecting average or below students. There is variation among school quality adjusting for incoming students, however that exists for both normal and charter schools with many charter schools preforming worse than expected and many public schools preforming far above expectations.
However, if you want to support the value of some institution or approach it's really easy to ignore this fact and create biased research.
Recent research on statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana has found that public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools. https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vo...
Or do you want the actual research papers?
Charter schools are about - whatever each is constituted to be about. Like you can't go to a hardware store and grab a random tool and rate it on how well it drills holes. You shouldn't rate charter schools on your favorite metric. Some are about upper-class folk raising their kids with better music and art appreciation. Others are about escaping backward school boards. Sometimes they are in areas so backward, that the charter school still underperforms the national average. But if its an improvement for that area, its an improvement.
It's perfectly reasonable to look at the magnet school model as a good thing. However, you now have to defend the associated sacrifices.
I personally feel K-12 is to early to specialize so improvements at the cost of general achievement is a poor use of taxpayer funds.
For example for me specialization couldn't come too early. Specializing even at age 12 would have been fine. Everything else could have fallen by the wayside, I only was interested in and good at exactly one thing and only at University did I finally meet anybody who actually challenged me, only there did I find specialisations within the specialisation that were all attractive. In some ways the last 3-4 years of school were just waiting.
For plenty of other kids they got all the way to an undergraduate degree in some general subject area they didn't care about, still with no clear idea what they were about, no real direction, forcing them to specialize earlier would have hurt them severely by cutting off options.
Without fairly intensive Chemistry (and preferably some Biology) by age sixteen, you are not going to become a good medical doctor. Without putting many hours a week into mathematics (not just enough to grasp a vaguely analytical subject like engineering, serious fundamental mathematics) by age eighteen you are never going to become a serious mathematician. And sucks to be you if, aged twenty-five, you at last find out you are a natural with a basketball, or at soccer, or dozens of other sports which require peak physical performance that's unattainable in middle age.
All our options here suck, somewhere a kid will be betrayed by whatever happens, if they're able to specialise, some of them will pick wrong and regret it. No fault to them, just bad luck. If they can't specialise the mandatory general achievement will prevent some of the most talented in specific fields from ever achieving what was possible.
I have no recommendation here, just commiserations.
That said, you have a good point that some fields really do require a lot of early work. I just think they should be added as supplement not simply replacing the foundations of a good education.
Either that, or it is simply a follow on of the fact that parents with money, free time, and high levels of education tend to have students that do well in school. The school may make no difference at all if the kids learn a lot at home.
- Charter schools expand choice for low-income families. If your public school sucks and your family is doing well, you can always move elsewhere or go to private school. If you're from a poor family, charter schools are your only escape valve
- Maybe it's bad for the public school, but it's good for the high performing students themselves, who are no longer dragged down by disruptive/disengaged classmates.
- The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit. The people running and funding a charter school are just as motivated by good intentions, as those in public schools. They just happen to experiment with different approaches and methods, while giving students/parents the final say on where they want to go.
- Metrics can be gamed, but a complete lack of metrics can also be exploited by underperforming/incompetent/disengaged organizations. Tracking a reasonably good metric is better than tracking no metric at all - something seen in how most successful organizations operate.
According to this article [1], schools can technically be registered as a non-profit, but contract out day to day operations to a for-profit management company owned by the same people who run the non-profit.
This setup allows the school to take in tax free donations, but it means that from a profit motive standpoint it's identical to a for-profit school.
I have no idea how common this is, but it does mean that it's not quite as simple as saying that the vast majority are non-profit.
1. https://ourfuture.org/20170615/are-nonprofit-charter-schools...
Only if charter schools are not permitted to pick and choose who attends.
"Maybe it's bad for the public school, but it's good for the high performing students themselves, who are no longer dragged down by disruptive/disengaged classmates."
This kinda boils down to "fuck you, I've got mine." It's why no one likes libertarians.
"The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit."
Citation needed. And a citation that they're actually non-profit, and not a non-profit in the same way the NFL is a non-profit.
"They just happen to experiment with different approaches and methods, while giving students/parents the final say on where they want to go."
Yeah, but many times those "experiments" have to do with just breaking unions.
There is a charter coming to the highest population area of the county and people are excited simply because it's managed by a state level school board instead of the county.
What's the impediment to voting out those people? Do they represent areas that are mostly retirement communities or something?
Such a lie/distortion
[0] http://www.uaedreform.org/downloads/2014/07/the-productivity...
Because they don't have to serve all the students, and they don't have to serve special needs students. Not mentioning that is quite dishonest.
There are many benefits and drawbacks to charter schools. The conditions in my area are not universal to other parts of the country.
There seems to be a prevailing notion that they are enclaves for scared white parents, but the reality is a bit more complex than that.
Maybe blowing up the whole thing is the solution to bad management (which is the case in many school systems), but doing it circuitously sucks.
This means a greater burden on the non charter schools with the same budget (charter school students don't pay more) - and special needs kids aren't paid by federal funds (where I live it's mostly local tax).
Also they statistically perform equally or more poorly compared to public schools.
Charter schools (usually) do not have unionized teachers that are part of the larger teacher's unions. That means they have their own standards for hiring and firing teachers that they can do in response to poor performing teachers.
The counter argument is that charter schools take money away from public school systems, further leading to their collapse as it's a vicious cycle. Parent pulls child from crappy school, school loses funding, school gets worse, more parents pull their kids, etc.
The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes.
Maybe there's more to improving student education than isolating individual teachers as a cause.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less...
Did you actually read the article to which you linked? Some choice quotes (emphasis mine):
> The reforms demanded too much time. The evaluations required an enormous amount of time and paperwork, and were frequently seen as a burden and distraction by teachers and school leaders alike.
> Principals tended to rate teachers highly, and scores inflated over time. It turns out that principals generally don’t like to give negative evaluations to their teachers, especially when they don’t really trust that poor performers will be removed. If principals expect that teachers will stick around regardless, they’d rather be on good terms and avoid alienating their staff.
> None of this means that teacher evaluation “doesn’t work.”
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less....
The problem isn't that rating and firing teachers doesn't work. It's that rating without the ability to fire is pointless and whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous. I blame both of those on teacher's unions which are, IMHO, one of the worst forms of public sector unions.
> rating without the ability to fire is pointless
A fair point.
> whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous.
All measurement systems come at a cost. Picking the unions to blame without looking at what the researchers or the funders required seems premature.
You don't like unions. Finland, where education reform has worked, has teachers unions. It might serve you well to investigate further if you want to achieve education reform here.
> A near-exclusive focus on TE might be insufficient to dramatically improve student outcomes. Many other factors might need to be addressed, ranging from early childhood education, to students' social and emotional competencies, to the school learning environment, to family support. Dramatic improvement in outcomes, particularly for LIM students, will likely require attention to many of these factors as well.
It vastly oversimplifies things to focus on teacher evaluation (and consequences) as a solution, and further oversimplifies things to blame unions.
> 5. None of this means that teacher evaluation "doesn’t work." Rather, the point is that it’s much more complicated and much harder to do well than advocates, the Gates Foundation, or these districts initially anticipated.
There is clearly more to 'improving student education than isolating individual teachers as a cause', but average effectiveness of the faculty of a program is going to be a fairly defining metric.
What if we focus on evaluating the technique rather than the teacher to take a little bit of the vindictiveness out of the discussion and more properly equip those that are entering the field? Today new K12 teachers in the US are given basic skills around classroom management, building student relationships and the technical substrate required to teach the material. From there, young teachers learn on the fly from the staff they work with (usually the first problem), their own intuition and whatever resources and experiences are available to them.
Clearly there is some kind of spectrum, Richard Feynman vs Ben Stein in Ferris Beuller's Day Off, how do you decompose those differences in a way that you can measure their component contribution to overall effectiveness and build the most important ones up in those that are just entering the field. Maybe there are different 'roles' in teaching that could be aligned to personality types...the 'inspirers' and the 'questioners' and the 'fortifiers' and the 'ass kickers'.
I don't know the answer. I do know there are good teachers and great teachers and ones that are ten years overdue for a different career and I feel that it's worth continued time and energy sorting out what makes it that way.
Once they start operating, they are intensely focused on minimizing cost. That translates into alot of student displacement as children who are disruptive or have various disabilities get tossed back, and increases the costs and operational challenges.
They are also disruptive to orderly and efficient operations of school districts. Kids and bureaucracies don't accept change well -- bouncing these kids creates problems.
In the small city I live in, charters appeared like locusts, and led the city district to close and sell a couple of schools. As the charters attrit troublesome students and get shut down for poor performance, hundreds of kids get "dumped". That results in overcrowded and high churn schools. My local elementary school lost it's music room, half of the library and has two outdoor classrooms as additional space that had to be cleared out to accomodate disabled students and handle growing class sizes.
They're stuck in a catch-22 -- their budgets are out of wack because they need proportionally more special ed teachers, and it's hard to know true capacity and more charters open and close.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions-i...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charter-schools-special...
As soon as there were social issues between my daughter and her teachers or her and other students (bullying by other students), the staff quickly turned against us. We met with the principal several times about specific students bullying her but all they wanted to talk about was how she wasn't showing up often enough to school (she often faked being sick to avoid her bullies).
We quickly realized that the school was only concerned about losing funding because of attendance metrics and we pulled her out. It was a horrible experience for us.
In some states/districts, they're basically public schools that have an external partner. I taught at such a school in Baltimore. In other places, they're more or less completely independent of the district that funds them. Anywhere on that spectrum, you can cherry-pick successes and disasters.
But certainly, they have introduced a great deal more complexity and ambiguity in the discourse of education. Much of the negativity towards charters comes from a skepticism that is difficult to fully inform. So people are forced to take the shortcut of deciding whether they are for or against "charter schools", broadly speaking. Fact is, not everyone has time to become an expert, in order to hold more nuanced opinions.
I prefer to frame the debate around the "school choice" movement, which is broader idea that districts should work more like marketplaces or laboratories for education. I'm very skeptical. For one thing, the "choice" that results isn't free and isn't equally distributed. For another, it tends to centralize the blame for poor outcomes on poor performers in the district, rather than systemic issues. Yet, most of the poor performers are the very schools that have the highest risk students, because these are the same students unlikely to have the agency and social capital to effectively exercise their choice.
At first I just thought it was a schoolroom drama, but then I realized it was a full on anti-charter school propaganda piece. Like, mustache twisting, “if I can only get rid of this pesky teaching thing, I can get rich!” villains.
It struck me as bizzarre. Not because I disagree with their position... maybe that’s in fact happening in the Bay. I just didn’t understand who is enjoying such an overt propaganda piece. Where’s the joy in being beaten over the head with a political message?
And what are the producers thinking? People are too dumb to be informed or to form their own conclusions so we need to trick them into hating charter schools?
"Per the state of Ohio, Akron’s schools were given just $10,028 in state and local funds per student in 2016 — more than the statewide average, but still a relatively low figure for a city of a little under 200,000."
Relative to what? You've already told us it was higher than the state average. To call it relatively lower means that there are some who receive more, but we're in the dark as to who they are.
To other cities of it's size? It's pretty clear what it means.
According to Google, it's below the U.S. average, and N.Y. cities spend 20.000 or more per student (up to 60.000 in one case).
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/09/28/cities-spend...
We can drop all the regulation around testing results and simply let people choose which public school they go to. Some schools will be great and have a lot of demand. Some schools will be crap and will have little demand and they should get a reset.
The big challenge will be getting kids to the schools, but this can be done in conjunction with public transit using rideshare type shuttles to create custom routes
The next biggest factor is demand from students themselves. Making education exciting like sports could work. Create academic contests that can be televised, have small prizes at the school level (thousands of dollars), tens of thousands at the regional level, and millions at the state or national level.
Televise the competitions and have a variety like debates, math, science, etc.
There are absolutely socioeconomic factors that played into this, and "letting bad schools fail" is only going to hurt the students that are already hurting.
I struggle a lot when it comes to education because "teaching to a test" is the bane of teachers everywhere, but if we don't set a standard, how will we measure success?
Part of the question is who sets the standard and what do they optimize for?
My experience with most of these NCLB tests is that they're optimized for ease of grading more than actually measuring anything worthwhile about comprehension of development.
then, improving competition would help parents pick the right schools for their kids, improving educational outcomes.
However, 1 and 2 are definitely not true, and I think 3 is not true as well (higher salaries attract good teachers.)
If you want to improve education outcomes in the US, you must improve funding for schools in poor areas, increase incomes for parents (possibly with a child allowance), reduce discriminatory law enforcement that disproportionately targets poor and minority parents, and much more.
That's not universally true. There are places where the neighborhood public school is in "competition" with charter schools, however, the charter schools aren't required to play by the same rules (get to select which students attend, don't have to cater to special needs students, etc). The public school receives less funding, and thus is stretched much thinner due to what it has to provide.