Simply: we don't demand the best from our kids anymore.
Studies have shown that good schools and good educators do matter, but what they all highlight, bold and underscore, is that parents and culture matter so, so much more. 'Good homes' and 'good parents' absolutely dwarf the effect that 'good schools' and 'good teachers' have.
And we're just running out of 'good homes' and 'good parents' that care about the results. We've retained a ritual of schooling, but increasingly we just don't give a shit about the outcome. And we're just reaping what we've sown.
I think we can fiddle around with the details but until we actually open up some sort of market and competition the problem will simply never be fixed. Centralized management doesn't work; schools aren't an exception.
Doesn't mean that I want everyone to have to pay for schools. Vouchers are at least a decent idea, even if they still distort the market and raise prices. But without some ability for parents to use the tools of the market to beat low performing schools, possibly unto them going out of business and letting other schools start, we're not going to see improvement. All incentives right now are aligned towards looking like they are improving, not actually improving, and that is the only possible result you're going to get from mandates from above.
That's precisely backwards. Parents expectations are the only thing you can 'do'. And it's the one thing that studies consistently re-affirm as the most important component. Demand more. Help more. Impart a love for learning and exploring. An appreciate for work.
Yes, if the school sucks, maybe you have to work harder with your kid. And if the community sucks, maybe you have to work even harder still. But that work will bear fruit.
As opposed to signing your kid up at the school across town and staying just as disinterested as before. Thinking that 'shopping' schools is helping is precisely the wrong approach.
> "no matter what you put in, you get the same output."
And that's demonstrably false. The families that put in more, get more. The students that put in more, get more. Parent interest and effort and child interest and effort are the most important factors; more important than economic stability, more important than school quality or teacher quality.
The question of why we're getting a certain class of person when they hit 18 is a different question from what the schools are doing and how well they are doing it, and if you want to actually improve schools it's important to stay focused on that task. If the only solution to "improving schools" is to improve parental involvement then I for one seriously question what the schools are bringing to that process at all, and if they are to be intended for merely augmenting a parent-directed education they are grotesquely ill-suited for that right now.
(I say this as someone actually planning very seriously on home schooling my kids, so that's how I look at schools. In fact they can provide a couple of services and as I understand it they are legally obligated to do so, but if you actually want a parent-directed education they are still almost useless.)
Based on your message I don't think you understand the theory behind school choice, either (and I'm explicitly labeling it a "theory", though at this point I think it's a pretty safe one). The important thing about shopping schools, and indeed the important thing about capitalism in general, is the second-order effects of the policy. (This is why so many people have such a fundamentally hard time wrapping their head around the concept of a free market. The far more viscerally appealing but fatally flawed first-order theories would be dead by now if it weren't for this, instead of hanging around wrecking up the global economy as they do now.) The point is not that you can move your child from one crappy school of today to another crappy school of today. The point is that you can actually drive crappy schools out of business, while meanwhile another good school can actually start up and succeed if they are good. It's a second-order effect of creating a highly competitive selection process that produces a pool of schools that are better in general, not merely the right to send your kid to a slightly-better school.
Yeah, and my argument is that is the part that has really changed in the last few generations. In the school, at least in my area, is all but frozen in time since I went through the public schools. Yet the test scores are dropping. I guess it's possible the teachers have all gotten worse, but what sticks out to me is the attitudes of students and parents.
> "Based on your message I don't think you understand the theory behind school choice"
No, I get it. But what I also understand is how little the school and the teacher matter, comparatively.
Put it this way: say we're updating a house to use less energy during the winter months. You're saying we could hang better insulation all around the house and goose up efficiency 8-10%. I don't disagree at all.
I'm saying maybe we should focus on the windows, since they're the biggest problem areas. And with a lot less money, effort and potential for collateral problems, we could boost efficiency around 40+%. You don't say you disagree either.
But where we're not seeing eye to eye, is where you want to start taking down the siding first.
Addressing the cultural problem is lower risk, lower cost and higher return. And if we don't do it, we're still going to have an educational problem when we're done rolling out school choice.
Second-order effects, second-order effects, second-order effects. When schools actually respond to more effort and it has some sort of visible effect on a child's education, more people will care. Incentives matter. The current system absorbs all of a parent's care and hammers it flat into the same basic mediocre product, suppressing it instead of amplifying it. A caring parent may do better than an uncaring one, but nowhere near enough better. Unfortunately, not investing a lot into the system at that point is perfectly locally rational.
How do you propose to fix the culture problem? The same-old, same-old first order solution where you appropriate some money and run some ads exhorting people to care more about schooling? New programs with the sweet, sweet intentions and nobody even examining the question of whether do anything because everybody's too busy feeling good about themselves? Paying people to care more, perhaps by incentivizing good grades? We've tried all those and more. It's not like "it's a culture problem" is exactly a new idea, and it's an easy one for "the system" to deal with because it does involve just what I said (money and government programs, for better and for worse not hard to push through), a solution very easy for the system to deploy. It won't work until schools actually magnify efforts instead of squashing them, and no amount of central mandating is going to get us there.
Cultural issues like schools aren't houses. That's first-order thinking. They're life forms, second order and so on. They react to your decisions, they do not passively consume them. With those sorts of systems it's actually quite common for the straightest path from here to there to be anything but simply striking out in what is most obviously the direction of the goal and pushing as hard as you can. If it were that easy, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place!
Of course, parents choose schools that they can get their children to, so it will probably be nearby.
Not sure what other states do.
That said, they aren't a magical panacea by any means - I've worked with a few of them professionally and haven't seen any amazing benefit over public or private schools.
Personal anecdote: I grew up in a small town in ND where there are not a lot of socioeconomic disparities. Almost everybody was lower-middle class, with a few very poor. Everybody went to the same school and had the same teachers. It should not come as a shock that those who did well in school also had parents that were supportive and themselves educated. Those who did poorly were generally children of uneducated blue collar and farm workers. While poor teacher quality may have some effect on student achievement, I suspect factors outside of schools' control play a much larger role.