Why is Middle School so hard? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Middle School so hard?

theatlantic.com

110 pointslaurex231 comments

In most US school systems, middle school marks a transition from students having one teacher and classroom for most of the day to having multiple (6 to 8) different teachers and classrooms during the day. So that is potentially a 5X multiplier on the number of different social interactions that each student will have to deal with each day. On top of that they have to learn each teacher's style and expectations in order to do well.

I used to think the difficulty was due to the onset of adolescence but I think if you forced most working adults through such a transition for a year they would not fare well. This is why most people hate service jobs.

I taught science in grades 3-8 in low income US schools. The main difference between 3-5 and 6-8 is puberty. These humans are undergoing the most radical shift in their hormones and behavioral regime in their entire life. They go from caring what their teacher thinks to caring what their peers think; the kids get louder, stronger, less respectful of authority, more likely to join gangs or do drugs. Everyone gets a lot more talkative and disruptive. Middle schoolers are simply the hardest age group to teach.

> Middle schoolers are simply the hardest age group to teach.

But how much of that might be structural?

Under ideal circumstances, a K-5 student has one teacher each year, in a class largely composed of students they were in a class with the previous year.

We throw them into 6th grade, now they have what, 5-6 teachers for 40-50 minutes each? In my district, two elementary schools feed each middle, so their grade size has doubled and even many of the students they shared an elementary school with will be unfamiliar.

That's a whole lot of social upheaval to subject 11 y/o kids to. Puberty is just icing on the cake.

I'll add, my partner's children enter middle school next year and thinking about all of this is concerning.

My partner points out that this is where children start to "slip through the cracks" -- teachers' ability to provide individualized attention is greatly reduced by the reduction in class time and increased number of students to educate. The difference in structure has a big impact on both sides.

You can look at areas where teaching varies. My experience at a Canadian school didn't have a different teacher per class until 9th grade at a new school

I remember before hitting Middle School (maybe in 5th or 6th grade?) my elementary school rotated the classes in groups of three throughout each day as a way to transition to Middle School's much larger un-grouped class transition.

By example: Teachers A, B, C, D, E, and F were teachers of that grade. Classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 were classes of that grade. Before lunch the teacher+class pairings were A1, B2, C3, D4, E5, F6. After lunch the pairings were A2, B3, C1, D5, E6, F4. After a break the pairings were A3, B1, C2, D6, E4, F5.

This allowed us to get used to the idea of rotating teachers and we interacted with the other classes in our group a bit during rotations and breaks. However, it only raised the number of teachers to interact with by two, and we didn't actually sit and learn with a larger class. It made for a great transition.

That school had a bunch of other really great opportunities to start giving children more responsibilities, too. It had an inter-school mail system run by the students, as well as a bookstore, snack stand, and a few other things. For context, this was in the USA in the early 2000s.

I think it goes both ways. If you know someone well, you can be a much better teacher to them. You can predict what they will have trouble with, what will make them happy, how and when to introduce things to them, etc.

Same as interacting with coworkers. And in management, really.

My elementary school age kids have had multiple teachers since kindergarten. Throughout the week, they go to separate classes for health and fitness (i.e. "PE"), music, art, and the library.

I don't think the transition to more separate specialized classes is a big part of it. It's mostly hormones and their brain powering up the social reasoning facilities and emotions without yet having the life experience to manage those feelings.

Middle school is right around the time that your social status and reputation — your image in the eyes of your peers — becomes an important part of your sense of self and self worth. But that status and reputation is heavily influenced by everyone around you. It's like all of a sudden these kids all wake up with giant targets floating above their heads and rocks in their hands.

By high school, they will have internalized some of the norms around how to not use the weapons they have — in large part because of their experiences now — but middle school is a time of experimentation and mistake-making, so there ends up being a lot of random collateral emotional damage.

I attended a small school system where there was one class per grade from Kindergarten through 5th grade. What they called junior high school consisted of three rooms, which were the home rooms for 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. Students moved around among these three rooms for classes from the three different teachers (English, science, and history/social science) and a visiting math teacher who might have had an office somewhere else but didn't have a homeroom.

This made an easier transition to high school, which had the full (6 to 8) different teachers and classrooms. There we had 3 different classrooms and 4 different teachers.

Interesting. If transitioning from amount of social interactions is difficult it might also explain someone having personal difficulty when going from say, an infrastructure gig to a software support gig.

Have you considered not combining "a place of learning" with "a violent, over controlled, over policed, oppressive bureaucratic autocracy, that replicates all the usual dynamics found in prisons"?

There's definitely some insane authoritarian teachers. I've always found it incredibly abusive and offensive that anyone is expected to ask permission to go to the restroom. Nobody appreciates being treated like a subhuman beast.

Based on my experience, nothing quite kills the joy for exploration and learning like school. It's brainwashing training: teaching you to uncritically accept facts from authority figures. This is probably most evident in propagandist history courses which carefully omit any inconvenient details.

>Based on my experience, nothing quite kills the joy for exploration and learning like school.

I thought I hated Math till I got to university. I had to take a bunch of remedial courses on high school level math but ultimately ended up with a math minor in addition to my CS major because I enjoyed the subject so much.

The K-12 school system is fundamentally broken but I don't know what the solution is.

School should be about discovery of things that may be interesting to study, not about passing tests and turning homework in on time.

Personally, I think we should:

- abolish most tests (especially standardized tests) until high school - encourage more electives - run classes like a democracy, not a dictatorship (students choose what to focus on next) - separate introverts from extroverts instead of forcing introverts to learn like extroverts - grade based on engagement, whatever that means for the student - pay teachers based on the number of students they can handle, and let students select their teachers

And to top it off, we should be encouraging and facilitating trades in high school so students that would prefer to go that route anyway can skip college.

We should also try to eliminate the private sector's obsession with degrees and instead find better ways for people to showcase their qualifications.

These are all fairly radical changes, though I think we need to fundamentally change how we think about schooling to improve it. At the very least, we should be encouraging experimentation by making it easier to run a charter school.

I had a similar experience. Ended up changing my major from English to Econ after discovering that math is actually pretty fun.

Montessori as an option is a good start.

I had some pretty authoritarian teachers at the Montessori school I went to. Maybe you could argue that they weren't really Montessori, but they were advertised as such and attracted families on that basis.

As somebody who's attended a North American public school in my life, this is roughly the slap in the face I feel when politicians talk about abolishing vouchers or charter schools, with no mention of the appalling baseline quality of public education, despite dramatically higher spending than most or all other developed nations. Meanwhile, those voucher systems and charter schools have been the thrust of almost all improvement of education in America.

At the end of the day, it is rich to hear from politicians who have literally never attended a public school about how we should send our kids to schools they've avoided. A greater proportion of public educators send their own kids to private schools than the general public, by a long shot.

Most politicians come from the middle class, so I'd wager most of them attended public school.

The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household income and parental educational attainment, so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality.

> Most politicians come from the middle class

I very seriously doubt this is true. It may have been at one time, but people in the middle class today are too busy making ends meet to have time for politics. Obama was a huge outlier in modern politics.

> ... so I'd wager most of them attended public school.

This is no guarantee either; suburban school districts are disproportionately wealthy relative to urban districts. And in every urban city center I’ve lived in, even middle class (white) people end up putting their kids in Catholic school (or something similar).

Congress is economically diverse to a point (https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/every-member-congress...)

I'd still wager a majority went to public school, which are still government-run even if they are in nice suburbs.

95% of them are millionaires, it is ludicrous to call that economically diverse or middle class. Even if they went to public schools they likely went to some of the nicest public schools in the country.

It's very reasonable for a well educated and hard working, but otherwise middle class and average, American to become a millionaire by the middle age or older politicians usually are.

I'm wondering also if we're all working off of different definitions of "middle class". Many people apply a much lower baseline income to the term than the accepted standard these days.

Being a millionaire later in life (most reps are 40+ yrs of age) doesn't imply that they grew up rich. Certainly there are the born and bred elite over-represented in there, but also getting elected to a congressional seat does involve some determination and that determination and smarts could also make one relatively wealthy.

The linked article says that only about half of them are millionaires. Do you have another source of information you're pulling from?

The source uses a rather disingenuous means of calculating net worth, such as counting home loans as debts but ignoring the value of their home as an asset. Resulting in for example a negative 17 million net worth for the owner of a dairy business.

The first non millionaire listed was ted cruse: https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/net-worth?cid=... However, that looks like a multimillionaire to me.

When people say "politicians", there really is a world of difference between local, county, state, and federal. Most locals are definitely the walk on team.

> The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household income and parental educational attainment

There is weak correlation with income & a stronger correlation with parental educational attainment. If you club them up & say "most predictive stat"...not such a good idea. The marginal Rsqs are quite different.

> so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality.

Heh heh. This doesn't follow. At all. Yes, high income inequality is recipe for all sorts of ill-will, and maybe education is affected as well. But maybe you should regress inequality with edu attainment & see what you get. You may be surprised.

Indeed. If you want to fix childrens' education, fix the parents' view of, and commitment to, education.

Depends on how you view fixing income inequality, I would imagine. For example, I don't think you could simply give the poor loads of money and suddenly their kids do well in school.

Personally, I view it as an education problem first and foremost. I think the incoming inequality is a red herring, and people are focusing on the wrong problem.

Yes, fixing income inequality is required. Yes, fixing income inequality would improve education to a degree - but my contention is that people merely having money won't help the broken education system. Not everyone can go to private schools. Furthermore, "giving people money" in college tuition has been part of the problem in driving prices unrealistically high and reinforcing predatory systems.

In my view, focus on education first. More educated people make smart financial decisions. Educated people make better decisions about their life, risk assessment, and quality of life. Educated people raise better children. Educated people are more difficult to fool in blind party politics and do-nothing politicians/systems.

Luckily we can do both, education and inequality, but I don't think we can or should expect to ever fix income inequality without at least in tandem fixing education. We need capable humans, and education is the only way to do it; I think.

> I think the incoming inequality is a red herring, and people are focusing on the wrong problem.

I grew up moderately well-to-do and attended public school in a lower- to middle-class area. Most people's parents were doing "okay"; some obviously weren't. What has stuck out to me is that the folks who I am least surprised to see having a rough time of it as adults, twelve or so years on, are the people I distinctly remember coming to school in way-past-their-prime clothes or not having money for lunch at school.

Which is to say that the idea that it's a "red herring" may be well-meaning but is pretty clearly not true. We know that parental income and stability (and they are interrelated) factor heavily into both educational success and generational affluence. Kids don't learn when they're hungry and they don't learn when they're afraid everybody else is judging them for being poor and having shitty clothes.

Reducing income inequality has direct effects on education quality. Much of the public school budget is drawn from local funding. In short, impoverished areas beget impoverished schools and wealthier areas have well-funded schools. Parents working in precarious positions - part time jobs with shifting schedules, or _multiple_ part time jobs with shifting schedules - can struggle to find time to provide support like homework help or supervision to their children. Reducing income inequality increases the tax base & school funding while granting parents more opportunities to engage with their children's education. Many of these poor people are already making the best decisions anyone can in their position: taking the job(s) they can get for the paycheck(s) they can get so they can put food on the table and eke out another two weeks.

I was in a public school district that made public the funding received by each school. Because it was a large metro district, we had wealthy areas and impoverished ones.

The schools in worse areas were getting about 30% more money from the district, per student, than the wealthier ones. This was to balance out the superior amount of parental funding in the richer neighborhoods.

This is a related problem, but I think just changing the funding source to the state or national level, like many other developed nations, is a more direct solution.

"incoming inequality is a red herring"

Greater income inequality leads to less civil participation.

The Gini Coefficient and Democratic Index seem to line up quite nicely. Coincidence?

File under "believe but cannot yet prove", correlation != causation, blah, blah, blah.

Fixing income inequality != "giving people money", and great teachers still can't help a ton if the kids they're teaching have precarious backgrounds.

Regardless, as you mentioned, we need to do both; but based on the research out there and my intuition, my inclination is that lacking income strikes lower on Maslow's hierarchy, and as such probably takes a certain degree of precedence as a prerequisite for benefiting from a stronger education system; and that some classes of money problems can be addressed in more sweeping, efficient way than improving education, which involves a great deal of training and waiting.

There's another obvious way: simply remove the parents from the equation. All children become wards of the state and are fed, schooled, housed, and clothed by the same standard. Shuffle them around the nation frequently to get exposure to the varying cultural differences. May as well provide some military training as part of PE, why not.

No one seriously considers this of course, but it does have obvious advantages, even for parents. No one has to worry about supporting their child or sending it to college, managing care while working two jobs, or any of that. The children are raised by professional child-rearers instead of amateurs. Nepotism would cease to be a serious concern. There'd be a real shot at actual meritocracy.

And obviously there are some disadvantages, but I hardly need to spell those out. Like many things it is not so much a solution as a tradeoff between sets of problems. As a society, we have chosen our current set of problems over the alternative.

It’s an interesting hypothetical. Even in a world where people went for it, I’d worry about the implementation, though—for I don’t know of a single example of a country where wards of the state (i.e. children in orphanages or “in the foster system”) have even average educational attainment or lifetime salary growth. Governments—even the very nice ones that top the OCED indices—don’t seem to be very good at producing educated, productive wards.

(Which is strange, actually, because the outcomes are completely different for kids that go through most governments’ military academies. Maybe no government is held to a standard where it needs to take the civic education of wards seriously; but is motivated to train the members of its military regardless of extrinsic motivation?)

> Governments—even the very nice ones that top the OCED indices—don’t seem to be very good at producing educated, productive wards.

I think this is in large part due to the simultaneous existence of children raised in the traditional fashion, often by the politicians crafting the system for the wards. A generous imagination would suppose that when the entire society relies on the system and is itself a product of that system, there'd be higher incentive to make it effective.

Even with the most generous imagination to the incentive toward making the system effective, that doesn't mean that the results would be good.

What happens when your kid needs a hug? You give them a hug. What happens when a ward of the state needs a hug? In the age of "me too", of awareness of abuse of the helpless by those with power, the person in charge of the children may not be allowed to give them a hug. Even if they are, they may have 30 kids. Hugs will therefore be less frequent per kid, because the adult doesn't have the time to do that plus take care of the 30 kids in all the other ways that are needed.

Kids need to be loved. Bureaucrats don't love. Even day care workers don't love in the way that parents love.

But this much is true: If all the children were raised as wards of the state, then the children involved would have average educational attainment and lifetime salary growth, by definition. That doesn't mean that the outcome would be good, though.

Reality check: kids in orphanages were not lovingly hugged prior meetoo.

They were often abused, physically and verbally by both adults and other kids. They were also sexually abused.

Sparta did it. At age 7 children would live in the barracks until adulthood.

Sparta was effectively fascistic system. Not even some kind of super succesfull. Not really success overall if you care about peoples well being.

Communists took a lot of kids to institutions too and it was crap too.

Tribal civilizations were like that? At some point humanity discovered that making parents "compete" who can raise their own kids the best, generated the best outcome overall. "A dog with two masters will starve." OTOH the competition must be complemented with cooperation, because it is not good to be king of a devastated hill. People want their children to beat the average but the average should be also good.

Not sure about any "tribal civilization" like that, but there was a commune where this was tried, and IIRC almost everyone was depressed and jealous, and it was really horrible.

> ...sending it...

Gross.

Source? I haven’t heard that before. It’s certainly not true for anyone in congress or upwards.

Parental income and education are both heritable for the same reason height and hair colour are heritable. Grandparent is directionally correct although the effect of parental education on child education is almost entirely mediated by IQ and Conscientiousness. So people who were middle and upper class in their home country but come to richer countries have children who achieve similar success in their new country even if they end up owning a dry cleaners because they can’t really speak English.

> The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long

> Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores. > The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence

https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf

> Our findings confirmed positive associations between IQ and the facets of Competence and Dutifulness (ranging 0.11–0.27), with academic achievement showing correlations of 0.27 and 0.15 with these same facets and 0.15 with Deliberation. All conscientiousness facets were influenced by genes (broad sense heritabilities ranging 0.18–0.49) and unique environment, but common environment was judged unimportant.

I meant the claim that most politicians are middle class.

That being said... I’m no genetic expert but I’m pretty sure these papers are garbage. They keep referring to genetic influences but as far as I can tell, do not use any genome data. It’s true that twins share genes. That doesn’t mean that is the only thing they share. There’s incredible potential for confounding effects.

> They keep referring to genetic influences but as far as I can tell, do not use any genome data. It’s true that twins share genes. That doesn’t mean that is the only thing they share. There’s incredible potential for confounding effects.

The difference and similarities between fraternal and identical twins and non twin siblings are a huge part of why twin studies are so powerful for discerning heritability. Fraternal and identical twins differ by genes but not environment so you can get a decent estimate of heritability from that alone.

If you want polygenic risk scores for academic achievement it’s an active area of research.

> Predicting educational achievement from DNA

https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2016107?fbclid=IwAR2Hv8Epg...

> A genome-wide polygenic score (GPS), derived from a 2013 genome-wide association study (N=127,000), explained 2% of the variance in total years of education (EduYears). In a follow-up study (N=329,000), a new EduYears GPS explains up to 4%. Here, we tested the association between this latest EduYears GPS and educational achievement scores at ages 7, 12 and 16 in an independent sample of 5825 UK individuals. We found that EduYears GPS explained greater amounts of variance in educational achievement over time, up to 9% at age 16, accounting for 15% of the heritable variance. This is the strongest GPS prediction to date for quantitative behavioral traits. Individuals in the highest and lowest GPS septiles differed by a whole school grade at age 16. Furthermore, EduYears GPS was associated with general cognitive ability (~3.5%) and family socioeconomic status (~7%). There was no evidence of an interaction between EduYears GPS and family socioeconomic status on educational achievement or on general cognitive ability. These results are a harbinger of future widespread use of GPS to predict genetic risk and resilience in the social and behavioral sciences.

FWIW, most people in politics are in state and local government. Congress is a drop in the bucket.

It probably is, although I can’t quickly find a direct source. The “middle class” is extremely broad in the US, encompassing like 60-70% (or more) of the population, with the lower class taking up 20-30% and the upper class taking 1-10% (these things aren’t well defined). It would be shocking if most Congress critters were coming from such a small upper class.

Some evidence- since 1952, 5 presidents could be said to coming from the upper class (Kennedy, 2 bushes, Johnson, Trump) and 7 came from middle to lower class backgrounds.

I also saw an article (which I can't find right now) that while top private colleges were disproportionately represented in congress, the majority of members still did their undergrad at state schools or die not attain an undergrad degree.

you can google this

About 23% of senators/house went to a private high school. General population has about 10% in private school

https://www.privateschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-115th...

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-member...

I didn't say politicians generally, I'm talking about the qualified set of politicians who have not attended a public school. Barack Obama for example, who has responded authoritatively to questions on the matter despite clearly never having read the relevant literature (or maybe he was just lying, or maybe it was some combination of ignorance and deceit).

[PDF] Education and Wealth: Correlation Is Not Causation

In Sum: Education and Wealth Are Correlated But Causal Link May Be Weak

https://www.stlouisfed.org/.../emmonseducationandwealthsiuc-...

What is correlated is parental expectations regardless of socioeconomic status.

Yes let’s just base our policies on gross and highly inaccurate generalizations and then fix the remedy on a formula that confuses asset wealth with regular income.

Ps, I absolutely hated middle school.

> [...] this is roughly the slap in the face I feel when politicians talk about abolishing vouchers or charter schools [...]

I'm not from the US and I'm unfamiliar with the concept of charter schools. If I understand Wikipedia correctly, these are privately owned and operated schools which receive public funding, is that right? If so, in which way would they help or improve any of the hardships associated with Middle School?

There is a popular theory (with some statistical backing) that the main purpose of charter schools is to continue-increase segregation. The history of the USA is marked by the original sin of slavery- it’s in our founding documents and has powerful influence on politics even today. Schools for under 18 is publicly funded but private schools are nominally not publicly funded, so they do not have to obey a lot of strings attached to federal assistance. Charter schools are used in some areas as a work around to get segregation publicly funded.(where poor people are excluded and it turns out surprise - a lot of those people are not white.) of course there are exceptions or charter schools in urban areas that are majority Minority but even 20 years ago when I lived in Texas charter schools were transparent segregation to exclude minorities. Public schools have to take everyone. A school that doesn’t allow everyone in can eliminate low performing kids and juke the stats so it looks like a great school on paper.

This rings true, and the reason you will see some charters with minorities is that it is classist as well as racist.

When deciding to send our child to public school, suddenly people around us were feeding us with this really cloudy liberal version of classism/racism. Which was basically that: "While we love underprivileged people, if your child is in a school full of underprivileged people, they might not thrive as well as if they were in fancy charter school X." Prefaced by a few sentences started by the wonderful pseudo-scientific canard, "studies have shown...!"

I have come to the belief that this country is ultimately not culturally committed to the notion that equal opportunity comes from education, and that every child should actually get equal opportunity. Even for the most 'liberal' people, it's wrapped up in so much existential fear around their child succeeding in an increasingly competitive rat race that requires absolute educational and developmental perfection until they get into a prestigious university. The recent celebrity college admission scandals are a symbol of this kind of thing, especially given that the families involved were already wealthy enough to support their children into adulthood.

I hope I am wrong.

Wow. It's not just your country, it's like you're talking about mine! In my country the same conversations take place, only it's "public school" vs "private schools". And public schools used to be top notch here, but thanks to decades of lowering budgets and teacher salaries they are now in critical condition :( This of course reinforces this notion that they are ok for underprivileged people, but if you have the money you should send your kids to a private school :(

It's also a way for religious communities to get away with starting their own publicly funded schools.

The parent comment complained about operating schools like prisons. Charters can't assume attendance, so they often perform better from the perspective of standardized testing and student approval.

Charters tend to do better because of the crushing regulation and lack of meaningful accountability of the public schools (if you're British: what you'd call state schools).

Some people are under the mistaken impression that charters perform better due to larger budgets, but typically the well-performing ones cost the state less than state schools, and cost the parents nothing.

> Charters tend to do better because of the crushing regulation and lack of meaningful accountability of the public schools

No, they tend to “do better” because and to the extent they cherry-pick students, either by more restrictive admissions, by being more free to remove students that being their aggregate results down, by not having mandates to serve special needs students, or by selecting for students with parents who are higher socioeconomic status and more involved and place higher priority on education, which they often do simply by being a non-default choice requiring active choice that is less conveniently located than the default-by-residence-location public school.

Charters (which can be publicly or privately operated) have strictly less accountability than regular, non-charter public schools.

> No, they tend to “do better” because and to the extent they cherry-pick students, either by more restrictive admissions, by being more free to remove students that being their aggregate results down.

This is another common misconception (thank public union messaging). AFAIK Most charters do admissions by lottery, and the applicants do not tend to differ too much demographically from the nearby public schools.

Now, there is some selection bias in that only parents who are paying enough attention to know what school their kid is enrolling in would even think to enroll, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their home life is more conducive to education.

They generally have a lottery system that is completely random, and have to provide all services for special needs students that public school does. However, some of their differences in test scores could be attributed to simply requiring a bare minimum or effort from parents to research and apply for their children.

Not from the US here: what is a publicly operated charter school? I'm very confused now :(

Or is any school outside the official educational program a "charter school"?

> Or is any school outside the official educational program a "charter school"?

Charter schools are schools within the official public education system (whether operated by the public authority or some other entity) which possess a charter exempting them from some of the otherwise-applicable provisions of that system.

There are also private (both for- and non-profit) schools outside the official public education system (in some jurisdictions, these may get partial public subsidies for students via vouchers.)

I'm not British but from a country where public schools == state schools. I know in the US "public" means something else, but I often end up confusing myself.

This is what I don't understand (correct me where I'm wrong):

- Public schools are allegedly too regulated / lack accountability (or so I understood from your comment). They receive public funding.

- Charter schools are less regulated (is this a good thing?) and more accountable (to whom?). They also receive public funding. Are charter schools operated for profit?

I agree more accountability is a good thing, bit I'm seriously unconvinced about less regulation. But even then, if these traits are positive, why not handle public schools like this and get rid of charter schools?

Education is both a right and a strategic asset of any country. If a way of doing regulations/accountability is shown to be the best, why not use this in public education?

> Charter schools are less regulated (is this a good thing?) and more accountable (to whom?).

They are definitely less regulated (that is literally what the “charter” refers to: they are publicly-funded schools with charters granting exemptions from the usual requirements for such schools), but are less accountable as a direct result of being less regulated.

> Are charter schools operated for profit?

Often, but not always. Charters may be private for-profit, private non-profit, or public.

> But even then, if these traits are positive, why not handle public schools like this and get rid of charter schools?

Sure, the idea of charter schools (well, the idea for those that don't oppose public education and see it as a tool to dismantle it) is to enable experimentation, identify things that work, and then apply them more generally. Scaling up things done in “successful” charter schools (whether in wider charter implementations or by copying things that seem to work in public schools) never seems to work, and the fairly obvious reason is that (like most other variation in school outcomes) the “success” of charter schools that seem to be getting good results has nothing to do with teaching, and everything to do with student selection.

Thanks for the explanation (this and your other comment explaining public/private/charter). It clarifies a lot of things.

It seems charter schools are something I would oppose in my country (and they exist in some form, now that I think about it). I come from a country where while public/state education is under attack from the usual suspects, it's historically one of our core values, one we feel strongly about.

> I come from a country where while public/state education is under attack from the usual suspects, it's historically one of our core values, one we feel strongly about.

Charter schools are public education, even private schools that take vouchers are public education.

If your local government isn't particularly good at administrating schools efficiently, then a more private or corporate school which is directly accountable to the students' guardians is likely to have better outcomes. It's that simple.

If your local government does a spectacular job of directly administrating schools, then who would bother? but public education is a qualitative goal, not a specific type of institution.

The goal of public education is to educate the public, but the administrative reality of state schools in many regions is that they tend to enrich public sector unions and their senior members more than the public at large.

> but the administrative reality of state schools in many regions is that they tend to enrich public sector unions and their senior members more than the public at large

State schools must mean something different in your country than in mine. In mine, they aren't for profit, are always struggling for money, and both teachers and principals are paid low wages. Teacher's unions are very low in power (there's a concerted campaign to attack them as public enemy #1) and they don't have a lot of money either. So nobody is getting rich and your remark is very puzzling to me. "State school" must mean something very different where you're from. Is it the US?

It's my national government, and it's publicly funded state schools. Sorry for the confusion: I'm not from the US, and in the non-English-speaking world we tend to mean something different by "public" [1]. I addressed this confusion in another of my comments.

> If your local government isn't particularly good at administrating schools efficiently, then a more private or corporate school which is directly accountable to the students' guardians is likely to have better outcomes. It's that simple.

Strongly disagreed.

----

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_school#Latin_America

> Strongly disagreed.

Well, I strongly ask why you think that. My logic is that if your government is below average at administering schools, then assuming people perform rather averagely, any other institution or organization has a better chance of providing better schooling than the government. Of course, it is always possible that your private market is even more corrupt and useless than your corrupt and useless government, in which case you probably have bigger fish to fry.

> Well, I strongly ask why you think that. My logic is that if your government is below average at administering schools, then assuming people perform rather averagely, any other institution or organization has a better chance of providing better schooling than the government.

If your people supply a government that is below average at administering schools, there is no reason to assume that your people would be average or better at administering schools through any other mechanism, and there are clear reason to expect that education does not have the features that allow some real markets to approximate the performance of ideal markets; particularly the utilities are temporally distant from the purchase decision, not easily clearly associated with the purchase decision, and not received by the purchaser.

Well, I think education is both a right and a key strategic asset of any state, and is way too important to be left to the private sector and to the whim of market forces, and that people with more money don't deserve better education. I also think market forces tend to optimize for undemocratic goals.

By the way, in my experience government corruption and private sector corruption go hand in hand and it's very unlikely that only one of the two is present but the other isn't. It's almost always a perverse symbiosis.

I'm not sure why we're talking about corruption though, and why you introduced this angle into the conversation...

A sibling comment describes charters as "less accountable", and that's sometimes true from the perspective of the government.

I meant that they are more accountable to the students and their guardians, which to me seems more likely to have a positive impact. The government has an incentive to misrepresent the performance of state schools.

What matters is the state, not the government. The government is only a part of the state.

Direct accountability limited only to the students and their guardians is not necessarily a good thing. For example, a school which excluded certain socioeconomic classes of students may be totally accountable to the students it did accept -- but it wouldn't be right or democratic.

> For example, a school which excluded certain socioeconomic classes of students.

But this is not even an option for what we're talking about.

They don't, they just get a lot larger budgets thanks to wealthy parents. In some states, they also get state funding on top of that.

I'm not sure if it's still the case now, but there was a time when public funding for schools in Arizona would transfer to a charter school with a student, but if a student left, the funding would not transfer back to the public school system. So the money flowed one way and simply acted to drain funding from public schools.

Charter schools are not for the wealthy. In fact, they enroll a significantly greater proportion of underprivileged and ethnic minority children than do traditional public schools.[0] Their outcomes are mixed, but unlike public schools, underperforming charter schools face consequences for failing their students. That’s why many lower-SES parents are beating down the door to get their kids in.

[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_216.30.a...

Do charter schools actually get funding from parents? I thought they only used the fraction of the government funding that transferred over from public school, and generally got much better results than public schools using this.

They actually vary hugely by state, because each state created them under a new law. You have to specify a state to have a good discussion.

That's totally fair. My perspective is from the North Carolina system, where they can hold fundraisers like any public school but mostly start off building their facilities through bonds.

It provides competition. The charter schools must attract students to apply as they get a certain dollar amount per student, and that amount is a fraction of what public schools receive per student. Even with this funding handicap, the education is so overwhelmingly better in that at least in my area all but the worst of charter schools have a lottery system for admission and a long waiting list.

Weirdly, middle school was one of the high-points of grade school for me. It saw the initiation of nearly every important interest and passion that I have (mostly by coincidence, but still):

- Middle school band introduced me to music - both listening and playing - which was life-changing for me. Band remained the best thing in my life through the rest of gradeschool, and music still is.

- I learned to play guitar for the first time, joining a wonderful freeform after-school club for it

- I discovered Tolkien, JRPGs, and Morrowind (and their respective music), all of which seeded my imaginative life in ways that are still felt today

- I tried programming for the first time (over a summer), awakening another passion and putting me on a trajectory for my future career

Socially, middle-school was rough. But that was true for pretty much all of grade school. And inwardly, middle school was amazing. I still look back on it fondly.

Yeah my time in middle school was very cherished.

I got to do so many cool extracurricular activities, and finally had enough know-how to start teaching myself stuff.

I learned to play chess from a high ranked player, I started teaching myself python, I learned 3D drafting basics, played soccer, learned to skate, etc etc.

I was finally given enough leash to do those things, and to hangout with friends outside of school, including overnight.

I got to go on soccer trips and stuff with my traveling team. My parents never went on those trips so I'd always be driven/housed by someone else and got to see what normal people were actually like.

I finally realized how off my parents were, and how verbally and emotionally abusive and unfair they could be, so I started seeking out extracurriculars at every opportunity which was awesome.

For some reason, hardly any of the guys were actually talking to the girls, so I had free reign and no competition flirting and cutting my teeth on male-female relationships.

There were also plenty of opportunities to learn to deal with bullies and stuff. I even look back on those fondly. ("Cool-kid" bully once sucker-punched me straight in the jaw as hard as he could in front of a bunch of people, and instead of reacting how he wanted I just calmly looked at him like he'd tapped me on the shoulder said "Can I help you, Travis?". He backed down in a hurry.)

I don't know man, but I loved middle school. I just hated how I was treated by my parents, but I didn't realize until later that they had a lot of unresolved mental health problems, and that it wasn't my fault.

Also, I don't look fondly on the random boners. I had to wear suit pants all the time for band performances and let me tell you, those don't hide anything.

Weirdly I relate to some of your experiences in a lot of ways.

- Middle school was really the only time in my life i had the free time to learn instruments. I played a lot of guitar and even played with friends. Never had the time after.

- Morrowind. I loved this game even though I was too young to really know what I was doing.

- My passion for math and science was ignited at this time which led me on the great path of focusing on math/physic in High school. Double majoring CS math in College and programming today.

- Was able to compete in chess tournaments regularly, never have had time since.

Socially, I had some friends, but they were nerds too. Honestly I'm glad I wasn't "popular". The kids I know who were became just boring popular people who started drinking and doing drugs way too early, obsessing about sports that they'll never play again, and never advanced their lives in fulfilling ways (in my opinion, though i think getting distracted by over socializing early in school [ie partying] distracts one from the good grades/drive needed to achieve good a good career).

Being popular and good at sports in middle school is a curse! Nerds ftw!!

It seemed like it was an interesting mid-point between elementary and high school: they start giving you some real extracurricular activities and electives and such to start exploring, but you don't yet have the highschool pressures of more difficult classes and preparation for college. Maybe that sweet spot is why it's a renaissance for some people.

It's even analogous to college, a midpoint between grade school and adult life; a sudden increase in experiences without a proportionate increase in responsibilities.

Up through 5th grade I felt self-sufficient, powered by an internal radiant contentment and warmth. I was reading Orson Scott Card and Eoin Colfer, watching Code Lyoko, learning PHP/MySQL, world-building in my imagination. I had a rich internal life and just wasn't that interested in my classmates.

At the onset of middle school, social/emotional needs appeared out of nowhere, all at once. It was like getting hit by a truck.

I tend to think that's just growing up, but an it's an interesting thought that the institution plays a role.

That’s awesome—for me it was pretty much the opposite. I spent middle school hanging out with the ‘popular kids’ despite really having nothing in common with them. While I was more or less accepted, I pretended to be someone I wasn’t and it was miserable. All my energy went into trying to fit in and improve my status instead of anything fulfilling or useful. Thankfully by high school I realized I was way happier being my real self with other nerds. Looking back, I admire the kids like you that knew who they were and never succumbed to that pressure.

I wouldn't say I had some sort of enlightened perspective; I really wanted to fit in with the cool kids, it's more just that I'd dealt with rejection for so long that in some ways I'd kind of given up/I didn't have enough social skills to even know how to change that. It didn't even have much to do with my interests; there were people around that I had things in common with, some of whom I became acquainted with, but I just didn't really know how to make real friends.

Put differently: I felt like a pariah until the very tail end of high school; it just happened that in middle school I had several unrelated good things happening too.

Middle school is hard because it's the point at which parents are cut out of the educational system, either by virtue of their not being able to be helpful (e.g., they can't do algebra or speak French either!), or by the child (through mis-directed rebellion or overzealous DIYishness).

At some point, parents have to be cut out. A child wanting to handle things more independently from parents is not a bad thing - learning to do it independently is important. What you call "mis-directed rebellion or overzealous DIYishness" is them reaching developmental milestones.

A school system that requires extensive parental help is bad system.

You’re right, of course, but ImaTiger wasn’t saying that parents need to be there forever, just (I think) partly (and, I think, correctly) answering the question of why MS is hard. Some things that are good for you are hard.

>A school system that requires extensive parental help is bad system.

Although I think I agree with the thrust of this (children need independence), I suspect the original intent was not so much direct help as cultivating an environment conducive to independent success. Like the difference between trying to grow a flower and trying to build a flower.

Of course, children eventually also need to be able to do this independently, but speaking for myself at least I didn't really appreciate this facet of education (nor was I in a position to do it for myself) in middle school.

Most 7-12 grade teachers I know would be much happier if the parents weren't involved at all in the kids education. All of the dozen or so secondary teachers I've talked to who left the educational field gave the exact same reason: "The parents."

You are making an unwarranted conclusion from this comment. Is it merely that the parents are there or not there? Could the parents be there in a more helpful capacity? Clearly just “the parents” is not a reason for anything.

An observable consequence of such dependencies is the degree to which income and academic achievement are "inherited", in the sense that kids with richer or better educated parents have more than a leg up.

Academic achievement is inherited like height, not like religion.

> The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long

> The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence

https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf

In my opinion, the inheritability of intelligence and any other mental factors is largely exaggerated. It's impossible to differentiate between genetic and environmental factors in Human populations, mainly because people with the same genetic background tend to have the same environment. And yes, if you compare twins, raised apart, but in the same nation, maybe even city, probably same social class, same health and educational system, then you are left with a genetic influence of, for example 75%.

While academic achievement western societies still isn't as much determined by individual skill as many people would like to believe, it's worse in the countries the immigrants come from, and additional factors like language barriers and discrimination (intentional, structural or even accidental) render the idea of inheritability quite useless.

Another problem is that studies have identified environmental factors which influence intelligence much more than any known individual genetic factors. For example infections with Malaria or other parasites, but also the duration and quality of school attendance.

You will notice that none of the "twins raised apart" studies include such factors, because virtually no children in western societies have these problems.

And that's why the impact of the education system and socioeconomic factors on academic achievement are vastly underestimated, especially because people keep bringing up these inheritability studies.

On the one hand it sounds great to let parents participate in their children's academic education, but in reality such participation is a hard requirement for success.

And that, in turn, disadvantages students with working parents, or with parents that don't have the skill or experience to guide them to higher achievement.

It may sound awful to trust "the state" to handle education independently, but the alternatives are usually worse.

Or, frankly, parents that can't be bothered.

One of the most important epiphanies in my life was realizing that some parents don't care at all about their kids, some are jealous of them and actively sabotage them and that some systematically abuse them for entertainment.

It is also why I'm get angry when people push others to have children; many people should not raise children.

I'm really careful with such judgments. Humans generally love their children. If it doesn't look like that, there are other factors involved, usually alcoholism, other substance abuse and mental illness.

Meaning: They would care more for their children if they had the energy and power to do so. And some of those will also rationalize their inability to spend the energy as not wanting to do it.

And in many cases, parents are fully aware the homework that requires their help did not had to be at all and has zero educational value. Parents know said homework exists only to force them to "be involved" and resent it. As much as you try to pretend you are enthusiastic yadda yadda, the afternoon evening was killed with crappy project that really does not look like having educational value.

Is that a thing? There is homework where parents should be involved by the design of the task?

Are you confident that parents spending time with their children like that is not valuable? Especially now in the era of 6hr/day YouTube and fortnite?

Parents spending time with their children is valuable. Parents modeling compliance to pointless busywork with minimal effects on educational achievement is not.

Absolutely it is not valuable.

Parents spending time with kids over activities that are mutually pleasant or just talking or doing needed activities are valuable. Third party organized nonsense that just needs to be done has no intrinsic "time together" value.

And in case of bad parents, it puts the kid at mercy of bad parent even more.

This claim is way too general. I do not know your definition of success or higher achievement, but I'd say I was quite successful with zero involvement from my parents and saw numerous cases of the same.

If the state is going to be inserting itself, I'd rather the state stay away from Harrison Bergeron forcing rich people to be less educated and productive, and focus on taxing excess wealth to redistribute to children and poor adults who want to work.

What if public school is awful, and the only reason it looks decent is that some parents are picking up the slack? What would happen if you cut those parents out of the system?

My father still gave me a ride when I was in 8th grade (14(

People who have been out of the school system for a while should watch Bo Burnham's "Eighth Grade". It's an incredibly accurate take on what being in middle school is like, especially today where your self-worth can fluctuate based on the amount of likes your last Instagram post got.

> especially today where your self-worth can fluctuate based on the amount of likes your last Instagram post got.

Simple solution: delete your Instagram account.

That's indistinguishable from the number of likes being zero.

It certainly isn't. If you are active on social media and post something you care about only for it to get no likes the majority of people would feel significantly worse than simply enjoying something and not posting it on the internet for praise/approval from strangers and acquaintances. I'm very happy to have not had instagram, twitter, facebook, etc. for the majority of my early education

Me too, but for that to be possible requires friends who don't demand that one uses them to voluntarily associate.

Most kids in middle school don't have careers, property, deep responsibilities, or most other things adults focus on. They just have phones, a handful of friends, and some sort of position in an arbitrary social hierarchy, and so they put most of their focus into getting social approval. Grades matter only to the extent that they get social approval from adults.

Telling a middle schooler to just quit social media is like telling an adult in a capitalist society to just not worry about money. It isn't that easy to opt-out of the thing most of your world is based on.

Popularity has always been important. Social media makes it slightly easier to quantify, but it was always there. Deleting an account does not make popularity less important.

All I remember in middle school was the sheer amount of bullying. There was almost no bullying in my high school.

Yeah it was pretty similar for me. Unfortunately, there were times in middle school, where I was the bully as well. Once I got to high school though, everyone was mostly cool, never had any of the issues I had in the past years.

Bullying was not prevalent in my school. But I did notice an abrupt change from elementary school. Before middle school grades were meaningless. Middle school was when kids started to be grouped into advanced and not advanced groups and your grades started to matter (not really but it felt like they did at the time). A large problem for me was the sudden collective understanding from kids and parents that most of them weren’t as special, smart, or talented as they thought. Middle school was the first time kids had to internalize that they were not particularly good at things and likely never would be.

Agreed. I remember waiting outside a middle school, for my son's elementary-school orchestra practice to end (they met at the middle school). Every middle school student that walked by, had a recognizable emotional/psychological problem. Tics, staring at the ground and not looking anyone in the eye, startling at the approach of other students, and on and on. It was shocking.

This isn't necessarily true - my elementary school had "advanced" classrooms - one for 4th, and then one for 5th and 6th.

Apart from the US, where else has middle schools? Here in Scotland there is (Optionally) nursery, primary school (5-12) and then secondary school (12-16/18), no middle.

In France we have them. There's "école primaire" from 6 to 10 (5 years), "collège" from 11 to 14 (4 years) and "lycée" from 15 to 17 (3 years). Anecdotally, most people I spoke to felt that middle school years were the hardest: figuring themselves out, low popularity but high-stakes social games. High school was somewhat easier, people have found their cliques and the pressure from the harder work and longer hours left less time to play social games.

Off-topic but I have to get it off my chest: the years from middle school onwards have the dumbest names in France. They're named by counting backwards to the end of high school. So you start at "sixième" (sixth), go up to "cinquième" (fifth)... all the way to "première" (first), which is the before-last year! The last year is, of course, "terminale" (last, as in 'last in a series'). I'd love to convert to a sane naming scheme.

That's similar to the ranking of cadets in US service academies. Think of it not as progressing through grades, but rising through ranks: 4th class, 3rd, 2nd, and finally 1st class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Academy...

Something something four-twenties...

Oh yeah, the Swiss French way is a lot less confusing.

In Germany it's worse. We don't have a distinct middle school as such, but we have three parallel tiers after four years of elementary school. One is only until grade 9, one until grade 10, the third is up to 13 years.

I'm leaving out a lot of details here, but basically students have to choose one track after elementary school. And upgrading is hard, especially because the lower tracks are "optimized for slower learners". Side-Note: As you might have guessed, the track selection has become more and more based on ethnicity.

Studies have shown that such a tracked system is worse in every imaginable way. But it is extremely attractive to conservative academics.

After a long discussion with little alternatives, my little cousin went to a Realschule mit Förderstufe. The problem with the school has less to do with ethnicity as i can see it but the fact that large parts of her class dont speak German good enough to be educated in it. And that they are not grouped up by language to help them catch up in their first language. Pair that with the "slower learner" approach and all of those kids are simply left behind. I dont think its an issue of racism but simply abandoning anyone who, for what ever reason, cant hold the pace. Simply no parent wants their kid to be in such a class with two multilingual teachers to at least partially cover multiple languages to try to communicate with the kids in their class. They have to deal with the consequences of not thought trough political maneuvers. And the kids who suffer from that are generally those that already live in precarious situations. Painting it as a problem of racism, misses the point entirely from what i have seen and I think framing it this way is deeply counterproductive when it comes to these fundamental issues of our education system.

It's not so much intentionally racist as it is classist.

When I was ready for secondary education, it was clear to me that Gymnasium or ("at least") Gesamtschule was where you went if you were later going to study in a university, Realschule was for trades and Hauptschule was for "stupid" (or "troubled") kids. Needless to say, it was clear to me that I had to go to Gymnasium and then university because both of my parents had attended university.

Of course those were unfair generalisations but when I was in university I met many people who retained exactly the same perception of those differences.

I think it only got worse. What you describe was also point of view when i had to decide between Realschule and Gymnasium. Its not so easy to justify sending your kid to a Realschule anymore. Most people are aware that its likely a dead end for their kid. On the other hand, Gymnasium got also a lot more stressful for kids with the change from G9 to G8 (reduction from 13 years school in total to 12). Either way, i can just feel extremely lucky that i didnt have to go through that. I doubt it would have turned as good as it did for me today.

You are kidding yourself if you think that system isn't also driven by racism. A few decades ago it was virtually impossible for Turkish children to attend Gymnasium, regardless of the grades.

It is hard to quantify, but the attitudes of teachers, in elementary school and beyond, does shape this process. If they don't believe those children can catch up, they won't...

The point is that the division pre-dates the racist impact it has now. Racism and classism go hand in hand in this case the same way they do in many others.

I don't think the multi-tiered system would be salvageable even if there was no racism involved. Whether you doom children to economic failure based on their ethnicity (or lack of fluency in German, which is often abused as a shorthand for "low intelligence") or because of their social status (manifesting in various ways that ultimately lead to "poor performance") doesn't make this system any fairer.

I didn't say it's necessarily racism, just that the division is increasingly determined by ethnicity. Just as black children in the US often can't attend the better schools because they live in different areas.

However, this is indeed structural discrimination, because those children don't get neither the resources nor the opportunity to catch up.

I dont think the comparison with the black population of the US is warranted. I might be lucky enough that i didnt get into contact with what you describe, but the main problem as I see it, is different to the US the difference in first language. The problem in my cousins class isnt that she is the only one with a German last name, but that she is the only native speaker. You dont have a level field if you dont speak the language to a useable degree and if your language level is below A2, you dont have much chances for playing along in the first place. I am not going to disagree, that dumping kids with lacking German knowledge into the Realschule is horrible, but i dont think thats racism. Differently put, you are not going to end up in Realschule because you are the son or daughter of a Turkish migrant, you end up there because your German is lacking due to it not being your first language. Thats not fair either, but there is a difference between being discriminated for your language skills and your ethnicity.

Your language skills are a function of your ethnicity, and so the "language skills" are easily substituted for racial stereotypes. Also, children at that age are naturally less skilled at any language. But in non-native speakers, due to the clear accent, it's blamed on the different ethnicity and quite often on a perceived lack of effort.

Children can reach A2 proficiency in a couple of months, given proper instruction. Who is supposed to give that to them but the teachers in a school?

Do you think your cousin is somehow more entitled to the help of those teachers than the immigrants? Would you prefer those children be deported into a country where they have to fear for their lives and their future? Would you approve the use of force and violence against the children to bring them there (because otherwise they won't go)?

The schools with the highest proportion of non-native speakers will often have the worst teachers. Often because they don't have the choice of the best applicants. And other resources seem to be lacking, on top of higher needs.

Language skills are also a function of economic status. Wealthier migrants are more likely to have the option to attend language classes.

There are free language classes offered to people living on social security (Hartz 4 in Germany).

Yes that's true, but poorer people are more likely to prioritise working over attending class.

I think your critique is one of the reasons why the system is as it is.

>Your language skills are a function of your ethnicity, and so the "language skills" are easily substituted for racial stereotypes.

Just no. This is nonsense, every last word. The language you speak is an essential prerequisite to get a degree in that language. I cant get an Japanese degree without speaking Japanese. You cant have a German school degree without speaking the language. There is also a clear distinction between not speaking the language and having an accent. An accent doesnt matter to communicate and understand new information. I am stating here, that you are unlikely to get a passing grade on your German literary analysis in grade 5 if you dont speak the language. If you are speaking on an A2 proficiency, you are unlikely to pass the bar for the German course for native speakers in an Gymnasium. Not a radical concept. The question should be how we can teach those kids the language if they want a German school degree. The way we are currently doing it, hoping they will just catch up to the normal curriculum is absurd. Realschule isnt meant for people who dont speak the language, its for those that cant keep pace with the tempo in a Gymnasium. Its not a language school, the teachers arent competent enough for this. That if you dont speak the language, you have higher chances to learn the stuff if its tought slower is a side effect. If you dont speak the language, its still torture at a slower pace.

>Do you think your cousin is somehow more entitled to the help of those teachers than the immigrants? Would you prefer those children be deported into a country where they have to fear for their lives and their future? Would you approve the use of force and violence against the children to bring them there (because otherwise they won't go)?

Do you eat kids? If not, why do do you disagree with me? Are you evil by any chance? Excuse the exaggeration, but it seems to be necessary. Your post has nothing to do with a a civil discussion on the topic. I said nothing of the sort and I am implying nothing of the sorts.

I am making a very simple point. Every kid in a class is entitled to be tought and learn what the curriculum has planed for that year. For that a certain bar has to be met from them. They have to have passing grades and in return, the school as to provide them with the information that they should know. That is how the school system is supposed to work. One approach which works for every kid due to standardized requirements and learning. If you are the only person speaking German in a German class on a native level, or hey lets say on a level above B2, what are your guesses how far the teacher will get with the planed material. If they have two teachers there speaking multiple languages to communicate even on a basic level with their students? You cant teach B2 or C1 material to people who havent reached A2 yet, its nonsense and a product of seeing critique of the language level as racist. Realschule isnt there to teach kids an A2 level of German. Its not even meant to teach German as a second language. Thats additional effort that someone has to be planed for and financed.

Our system just isnt designed for the case, that a kid not speaking German has compulsory education German, As i see it, the current system is just a "fuck it" because noone can be bothered to change the system. We have a certain time budget for certain tasks and we cant just add other tasks, kids are overwhelmed as they are. IF people want to get a degree in German and dont speak the language, we should give them every additional help to learn the language so that they can partake in the education in German. In addition to their degree, otherwise you are just cannibalizing the time they should use to learn something else. The curriculum of a Realschule doesnt have that additional needed time planed anywhere. This might take them longer, as the curriculum gets added another course, or even a completely separate curriculum to learn at least enough German to communicate in that language before trying to learn other basics in a language you dont speak. But all of that is skipping the question IF they should try to get a German Realschulabschluss? Do they plan on staying in Germany using their degree? If not, and for example they are refugees who wont be allowed to stay here, putting them a year into a normal school is just nonsense, cruel and useless. Its not benefiting them in any way to learn German, they are going to get deported if you and I like it or not and German isnt that usefull of a skill. That is what is going to happen unless you topple the government overnight and implement a new refugee policy. Its also not a crazy scenario, exactly this is happening every day and it has for decades. I had a kid from Afghanistan in my class in elementary school who spoke zero German and was deported after a year after he learned the basics to understand what the teacher was talking about. I think it would make more sense if we allowed for basic education in either their native language or something more acceptable universally like English. Because all the while they are trying to learn German, they are missing the content they should learn at their age.

We dont invest in 13 years of school just to pass the time till kids grew up, there is a rather compact curriculum for every year. It needs so much time to teach the content. It doesnt have enough time allocated for kids to achieve this in a second language they dont speak yet. You will have to prolong that time for people who cant speak German yet and this is going to cost time.

None of that is a problem, we just have to do it. Closing our eyes from reality and sticking to ideal plans of how it should be doesnt help if we dont give practical plans on how to improve the situation

>Do they plan on staying in Germany using their degree?

Ah - you betray yourself here. I thought you said it was just that they didn't speak the language, not that they were foreigners in a precarious situation, to be undeserving of a certain education. I guess I'm lucky that I live in the U.S. where we've had to deal with integration of various peoples from the start and have made peace with the fact that policies that end up excluding a certain group can indeed be called racist if the effect is so. Despite its contrition over the past perhaps Germany still has some growing to do.

I would recommend reading again what i wrote, its not that i view anyone as undeserving but that a German crashcouse doesnt benefit you if you are back in Afghanistan in a year. German is not a valuable skill. Speaking English or you know, Pashto, is.

The system simply assumes people will be staying, reality looks different. If entering the German school system is something you want to do, the current system is still nonsense. It assumes people will be able to learn a second language overnight and comprehend the course material in a language they dont speak in the same time as people whos first language this is. For that more time is simply needed.

You fail to understand that those children are equal in all of their rights to native children. It's not possible for the state to act as if their forced deportation into hopelessness or early death is already predetermined.

There is extreme reluctance to put children into "special schools" or classes. For one thing, they don't exist. For another, such separation is almost impossible without putting those children at a disadvantage, even if there is no intention to somehow keep them away from natives.

And then that's also the connection to the US situation, where they actually had segregated schools and decided that this is impossible.

> connection to the US situation

Tenuous at best. That was a different place and a different time. Different circumstances, different timelines, different politics, and even different differences.

Brown vs Board of Education was decided based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was specifically enacted after the Civil War to deal with the emancipation of slaves. Meanwhile during that same timeframe (1890s) governments of former confederate states sought to impose segregation laws clearly designed to oppress and disenfranchise blacks. The legal justification for these racially discriminatory laws was the "Separate but Equal" doctrine laid out by Plessy vs Ferguson.

So by the time of Brown v Board you had a substantial black population who spoke English and had been in the US for over a century(The 1790 census reported 17.8% of the US population was enslaved). You had a history of state governments enacting discriminatory laws clearly motivated by racism. You had legally mandated segregation in all aspects of life, not just schools.

It was not a case of sudden mass migration over a span of less than 10 years. And while you did have some ethnic differences, there wasn't a major language barrier. Furthermore, many of what you might call ethnic differences at the time (such as lower literacy levels) were substantially a consequence of slavery and discriminatory laws in the first place.

The connection I was referring to is that we exactly don't want to produce "special" schools.

Also there is a long history of "expecting" lower performance from certain ethnic minorities in Germany, putting them into the "special needs" category extremely easily.

I suspect that parallels to the situation in the US go a lot deeper still. But people aren't paying close enough attention yet and somehow believe that with our constitution discrimination is impossible and so all disadvantages must be the immigrants' fault by default.

You fail to understand that i dont want to infringe on anyones opportunity. I am saying plain and simply, if a kid is staying a year in this country during the asylum process, trying to integrate them into a system that doesnt benefit them in any way, and doing that on the cost of their education, is just not fair towards the children. This is not an abstract concept, like the kid from my elementary class this is happening already all the time. That kid was pressured from his parents to make the best of the school but he, naturally had to learn the language first. No one ever asked of that 8 year old would not be better off today if he had learned Pashto or English in that year. Thats what we currently do to those kids. Its not racism, its just being horrible. We are in my option not providing adequate education with kids stuck in the asylum process. Instead they, and every other kid whos first language isnt German are thrown in a "one system fits all" system that is grinding them down because they are starting at a major deficit due to the language barrier. And that is insane. Switching the language of you education midway through means in reality either delaying the education, (which is not a problem in Germany where you finish by passing the grade, but it is in Afgahnistan where you are expected to work from a certain age) or forcing more content on children then they can handle. I cant repeat it enough, but our school system is designed in a way to teach kids all you can teach them in that timespan. Everything additional, is putting stress on those kids.

>There is extreme reluctance to put children into "special schools" or classes.

https://sportsmediachallenge.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/...

Where the difference in view might come from, i do care about the people stuck in that horrible system instead of the way it is framed. I dont know what another perspective then "what aid can we offer the people stuck in that situation" really helps anyone but your ego. How anyone can construct an addition schoolyear to learn the language as racism is really beyond me.

An extra school year to learn a language sounds indeed harmless. But we don't have the schools or the teachers for that. We don't have the legal framework, so all of it would need to be voluntary.

It's completely ridiculous and impractical for the state to teach Pashtu to Afghan children in Germany. For English it is almost as bad. Also, learning German does help you learn English, and exposure to different languages does actually make subsequent language learning easier. Multilingualism is not a zero-sum game.

School education is not like a downloadable Database. If it were, it would be more efficient to teach them all the 13 years of stuff at age 18, because that's when they learn fastest. If it were all about usable knowledge (or skills) we should not teach arts, gymn, philosophy or music. Biology and History would also be on the brink for most children.

But it isn't. And yes, it would be nice to help them more specifically, but that's easier said than done. Since we can't recruit a few thousand non-existing experts on the fly, the existing teachers have to deal with it.

Tl;Dr;

I find it repugnant to neglect children because they may (or may not) be somewhere else a couple of years down the road.

Studies actually have not shown that segregation is bad in every imaginable way. It really depends on what you want to optimize for. Segregation is excellent for letting intelligent kids reach their full potential. It's terribly for helping the children that struggle most.

There were studies made in India that showed otherwise. Without segregation the teachers were teaching to the level of the smartest students in the class, so the slower students were being left behind and became unmotivated. With segregation, the teachers were still teaching to the level of the smarter students in the class, but that level was much closer to the level of the slower students so they could catch up.

Keep in mind the actual reality of the situation might be different in each country, so it's not like one set of studies was necessarily wrong. Maybe teachers in the US teach to the level of the average student, so the results would be different there.

The assumption there is that the ordering of the students by performance is stationary, particularly in the first few years. Regardless of personal situation.

If a child catches a flu at the wrong moment, it will get stuck way below its level for all its career.

Khanacademy data has shown that students in a math class will progress at different speeds at different times and that their "ranking" can invert multiple times over a school year or beyond. It's not exactly the same, but their system makes sure students don't stay stuck.

That's really interesting. Do you perchance have something that might help me find those studies?

I found them on a book called "Poor Economics". The authors also teach an online class on development economics where among other things they talk about education in poor countries.

https://www.edx.org/node/92491

Is there any evidence that segregation is actually better for more intelligent students? And to what degree at what cost?

If you have a class full of "good" students, it's a lot easier to work and teach, than with a class where 1/3 is almost illiterate, 1/3 doesn't care at all, and only 1/3 actually wants to learn.

I attended a talk about this topic that used the PISA dataset to show this (well it showed that in countries with segregated schools the performance of students had fatter tails on both sides of the mean iirc). I think the data should be available online somewhere.

Yes. It appears that the more stratified educational systems are, the more variance in outcomes there is. e.g. [1] Which makes intuitive sense. While there's an intellectual argument for everyone benefiting from diversity of a student body, I'm not sure I'd expect to see a benefit in strictly measurable educational outcomes at least.

And it's fairly obvious some of the ways that motivated and high achievement students could benefit from more customized and self-paced study while it's also obvious why a group of students lumped together as low achievers will do less well.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/Vol4Ch2.pdf

I'd imagine the only reason it isn't so obvious as to need no justification is because children self-segregate by intelligence in schools anyway.

I went to a highscool where there were about 20-30 International Baccalaureate Diploma candidates and about 1200 students in regular, honors, and a handful of AP classes. My junior and senior year I was in all IB classes, but freshman and junior year I had to take a handful of the regular, honors, and an AP class and they were all absurdly slow and easy to be successful in to the point that I would entirely disengage. Had I not been in such a rigorous program I think I would have almost certainly made worse choices in relation to my education and life outside of school.

Similar in Switzerland.

Years 1-6 are for everyone. Then either:

- 3 years of Realschule

- 3 years of Sekundarschule

- 6 years of Gymnasium (where one earns the possibility to go to Uni)

Though it is quite normal to upgrade from Sek to Gymi 2 years in.

The first two options are then followed by an apprenticeship (3-4y) during or after which one can also earn the ability to go to Uni, with some limitations. These limitations can be removed by upgrading that piece of paper, which takes a year.

Complicated and I’m sure I forgot a few things. Point is that there are many paths and upgrading is quite possible.

Also having a large part of the population trained in a trade Is fantastic.

At least they can keep going to school after this system ends.

I know a bunch of people who either did Abitur (the requirement to study at a university) after going to Hauptschule or Realschule, or simply studied without Abitur, because the university simply made a test with them and lookd directly if they're smart enough.

I really liked the tracked system in the Netherlands. I feel like it really let the higher tier learn at a faster rate. Do you have links to the studies?

A minor addendum: in Berlin & Brandenburg it's 6/6 years rather than 4/8.

Finland's got them - you've got 6 years of elementary school (7-12), 3 years of middle school (12-15), and then 3 years of high school, vocational school, or "business" school (15-18). You've also got the mandatory conscription for men, which usually happens after high school.

In the ex Soviet countries its main school 9 yrs that is obligatory, then gymnasium for another 3 years that in theory voluntary but everyone does as it's also necessary for university etc.

Wat? In USSR a middle school was 7 years in 1922-1958 and 8 years since 1958 and that was called an incomplete middle grade. It was mandatory in towns and working camps. The complete grade was always 10 years.

Gymnasiums and lyceums differed from usual schools by having a altered program in some way. There always were schools which provided a complete middle grade.

There was also a specialized middle grade after completing both middle and vocational school and it covered the entrance barrier as well as a free pass of 1-2 years in higher education if it was on the same course.

> then gymnasium for another 3 years that in theory voluntary but everyone does as it's also necessary for university etc.

Most people don't go to university nor gymnasium in ex Soviet countries. It might have been among your social circles, but not everyone does it.

They do, when you go to trade school gymnasium is in it, just not that high level as one would expect to from a person preparing for uni.

No it is not. Trade schools are if two kinds. One does not even give the degree necessary for college. Plenty of kids go there. Other has such degree, but it is not gymnasium. Plus most absolvents don't go to college, are limited to easy colleges and have trouble to finish.

> then gymnasium for another 3 years that in theory voluntary but everyone does as it's also necessary for university etc.

Doubtful that "everyone does" as not "everyone" in USSR went to university (nor anywhere else in the world, for that matter).

You can have a "Realschulabschluss" in Germany after year 10 of school. So primary 1-4 middle school in 5-10 and upper secondary education 11-13. In practice most will however not go directly to one of those middle schools but have their secondary education from grade 5 to 13 in the same school ("Gymnasium"). "Realschule" is as such for people who know in grade 4 that they will not go for a higher education but learn a trade after year 10. However, i should add that the 3 way school System, there is also "Hauptschule" where you leave after grade 9, is deeply broken when it comes to acceptance of these people in the economy.

Yes, it is (or was) Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium, but many states didn't have a Hauptschule or abolished it.

Now, you go to something like the Realschule and leave it after 9 years to get a Hauptschulabschluss (lowest leven of highschool "degree")

Also, while it sounds harsh that kids have to decide if they want to study with 18 when they're just 10 years old, it's possible to keep going to school after the 10 years of Realschule.

The normal ways could look like this:

Elementary School(1-4) -> Gynmasium(5-13) -> University(14-...)

or like that:

Elementary School(1-4) -> Realschule(5-10) -> Apprenticeship(11-13)

But there are many different variations of that.

I, for example, did it like that:

Elementary School(1-4) -> Förderstufe(5-6) -> Realschule(7-10) -> Fachoberschule(11-12) -> University(13-17)

The "Förderstufe" was two years of education where I was put into courses of different difficults to see in which system (Hauptschule, Realschule or Gynasium) I would do better, allowing me to decide when I was 12 (normally you had to decide when you were 10)

Also, the "Fachoberschule" was two years I did after Realschule to get access to university.

So I never went to a Gymnasium and still got to study computer science in the end.

Many school districts in the US don't have middle schools. Elementary schools going up to 8th grade are fairly common as are combined Jr/Sr high schools (7-12 grade, occasionally 6-12 grade).

Some areas of the UK have them. (State schools in those areas anyway.) I believe as a deliberately modelled-on-America experiment some time ago that stuck in those locales but didn't expand.

Some parts of the UK still have middle schools (it's done on a Local Education Authority level), although they're gradually disappearing.

Japan.

6 years of shōgakkō [lit. "small school"], followed by 3 years of chūgaku [short for chūgakkō, lit. "middle school"], and then 3 years of kōkō [short for kōtōgakkō, lit. "advanced school"]. Years actually reset when you go from one school to another, so for example, nobody says "seventh grade" but rather "middle school first grade" [chūgaku ichi-nensei] (as a side note, I personally find such translations awkward and would always translate chūgaku ichi-nensei as "seventh grade").

Interestingly enough, while chūgaku literally means "middle school", it's more analogous to the American junior high model because it's years 7-9 (but again, nobody calls them that) and not 6-8 (and as such I prefer to translate chūgaku as "junior high school", though part of that is informed by growing up in a part of the US that uses the junior high model so translating it as such has more verisimilitude to me).

In Japan, after the first six years of primary school come three years of middle school and three years of high school.

England has it in some areas [1].

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_school#The_three-tier_mo...

In canada, its common in a lot of places, but not universal. When I was growing up, we had K-8 in one school, and then 9-12 as high school, although I think my home town now has a middle school system.

That's also true of the US. I did the same as you: K-8 followed by 9-12.

The UK varies some areas have Three tier some Two, and when I went through the system there was four Primary, Junior, Middle and Upper.

Japan.

I’m in high school. The education system’s only saving grace is the small group of exceptional teachers and administrators that dare to defy what’s expected of them by the government-approved programs and curricula.

It seems inherently wrong to place energetic, lively people like teachers and curious, high-potential kids in such a strangely restricting and oppressive environment.

Unfortunately it’s also daycare for the unwashed masses and unmotivated.

Public schools are literal prisons for children and for most people is the only place they'll experience violence first hand. Middle school is the age in which children's awareness of these facts start to become more clear in their minds, even if they lack the ability to articulate them so clearly.

Almost everyone is going through puberty at the same time for one thing.

That seems to be the only basis this article presents at all for the claim that "middle school is hard".

> After all, middle schoolers are “kind of the best people on Earth,” says Mayra Cruz, the principal of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, a public middle school in Washington, D.C.

She appears to be at a very different middle school than I went to. Or is painfully oblivious as to how cruel children of that age can be to each other.

3 children had to leave our grade because they got mercilessly bullied. One of them once attacked one of his bullies with scissors. There was the, at least, bi-weekly garbage king crowning where a kid would be put in the garbage bin.

As the part time class clown I could survive mostly unscathed, but children from other grades were bullying me. I came to school 90 minutes early, so I could get in as one of the first children so I would not have to walk past them.

Referencing the person I was responding to, the point I wanted to make is: Cruelty and sadism is inherently human. Sometimes, even elementary school children show it. Once the hormones of puberty rush in, the issue gets worse. Young age does not protect one from being a monster.

The little bullying I have seen among adults is laughable compared to school.

I wouldn't call them cruel, but they're certainly not the best people on Earth…

I hear this on the Internet all the time but in middle school everyone was nice to me and I was nice to everyone. There was some banter and we sometimes accidentally injured each other because we're clumsy and sometimes we fought, but 'cruel'? I don't recall anyone being cruel.

In fact, I remember seeing this right after I finished high school too. The Internet was always "Kids are so cruel to each other" and now I wonder to myself if this isn't just the culture you guys have built where you live.

Of course we had uniforms and nearly everyone came in on public buses unless they were rich or lived close to the rich kids.

Start with crowding and go from there. If your school was small and everyone knew everyone, that's a vast difference.

It takes just a few bullies (or worse, criminals), who get a bunch of sycophants, to ruin the atmosphere. If you cannot remove them, nobody knows how to control it.

Middle schoolers are as cruel as any people, just less sophisticated, so it's much more obvious.

They form tribal social groups which fight, cut out people they dislike or judge, explicitly. Trying to remove that bit is nearly impossible. They do respect teacher authority, so an oblivious enough teacher can think everything is fine - or they normalized deviance.

I went to an integrated primary to higher secondary school with a nearby kindergarten. 50 kids a class.

It depends a lot on luck, school teachers and parents in local area.

The level of bullying other describe here is not possible without enabling from adults. Likewise, seeing how it plays with my kid, teachers who cares and know what to do can really make difference in how kids treat each other.

Not cruel, but self-centered. Infancy seems to me like a progression from complete self-centerness (if I'm not pleased, I'll cry until I turn blue) to become functional, socially. Adolescence is part of that process of gauging how much to conform to society vs stand up for yourself, until (ideally) you reach a mature state in which the interaction with other human beings is healthy.

I'm no psychologist so please take my input with a grain of salt.

My point is, kids aren't cruel in the sense that we use to refer to adults. They, instead, are socially inept, and can't fully grasp the consequence of their actions.

It's always helpful to keep Hanlon's razor in mind: assume stupidity before malice.

If you spend time with babies you will find they are actually very sociable and giving. Indeed when they are worms they can only scream. But once they can interact they often love sharing and contributing.

They don't develop a theory of self until they are 3 or 4 so they can't anticipate what your needs are and that they are different than their needs, but they will try to share what they like with you.

They also go out of way to help when you do house work. They are not really useful, but really wants to be. They will "clean", "wash" and what not and are super happy when you thank them.

> My point is, kids aren't cruel in the sense that we use to refer to adults. They, instead, are socially inept, and can't fully grasp the consequence of their actions.

They can be cruel very intentionally fully knowing what is going on well before adolescence. You teach them not to.

> I wonder to myself if this isn't just the culture you guys have built where you live.

A lot of this is simply a culture of poverty and CERTAINLY not developed by the kids suffering in it

I’m glad you had a good experience. I and many others did not. There are several bullies that I really wish I’d had the courage to send home with a bloody nose.

I understand and sympathize. I'm saying it isn't naturally this way. Your administrators were not capable of doing their jobs. Which is what I suspect of most of American schools: teachers and administrators have poor competency. I'm not sure what this stems from but it seems fairly true.

My teachers weren't great. But for most kids you don't need teachers explicitly. You just need a safe classroom environment that values learning.

Until late high school, grades were pretty isolated from each other. There were some really awkward structured mentorship programs, and some extracurriculars like theater that had less of a Varsity / JV bifurcation, but your social circle was still pretty much grade level peers. Sometimes their siblings. I can’t imagine the set of grade levels sharing an institution being a major part of the story.

In primary school, most American students have one main teacher and one class. In middle school, most American students walk from class to class, each less than 1 hour long and with a different teacher, and are with different students in each class. Often many primary schools feed into one middle school, so the school can be bigger and has less familiar students. The students and teachers don’t know each-other and have a harder time getting to know each-other. The school is often more formal and the schoolwork is often less enjoyable. There is significantly more homework.

Students (often strangers to each-other) end up very quickly establishing a new social hierarchy in a context with less oversight and less adult support. It can get pretty brutal.

It can simply be that, the middle school aggregates several elementary school populations under one roof.

Wherever you were on the spectrum in your (small) elementary school, put you in a bigger population and you will likely move toward the mean. Which is humbling for many.

Disclosure: I did not read the article.

It's because middle school-aged kids are awful, evil people.

Every bad social trait comes out at that age without any of the adult filters.

From my experience part of what sucked about middle school was all of the responsibilities with none of the privledges and a seeming determination to make things suck as much as possible.

Also exacerbated by things like overcrowded halls, air conditioning only in the library the faculty office, and a goddamn obsession with collective punishment.

From my personal experience, it's hard because of all the hormones.

Also the prefrontal cortex is not yet developed enough to keep the hormones in check.

(for those that don't know, the prefrontal cortex is one of the centers of the brain. It's responsible for 'planning'. Think about the last middle schooler you saw that had a cunning plan and I'm sure you'll agree their brain wasn't fully formed either.)

I also think Middle School is hard because elementary school is so easy.

Middle school (well, Junior High) was the first time I couldn't understand a concept the first time it was explained. I'd had almost no experience of that K-6 so I had no idea what to do and thought something had gone wrong with my brain. Seriously. It was especially bad in math where "understanding concepts" plus some memorization is basically the whole deal, at least for most of K-12 education. I'd gone from among the best at math (with zero effort, because I probably should have been moving through the curriculum 2-3x as fast as I had been) to barely holding on somewhere in the middle, in a matter of months.

you were lucky to hit that point in middle school. i am in high school currently and am struggling due to not ever learning proper study skills. everything before was too easy for me which ended up hurting me in the long run.

Looking back, can you please think of somethings that could have helped you and share here?

> Why is Middle School so hard?

Because it's mandatory, and you are forced to be around lots of people you don't really want to be with. You are forced to learn things you are not interested in at all, while being punished for not performing well. And all that, while your body goes through a major transformation sexually. There can only be very few people enjoying that. For most it is a horrible way to end their childhood.

And we (parents, governments) think it is beneficial, until the kids come from middle school and cannot find a job that easily, often ending up doing completely stupid work like cashier or whatever else for the rest of their lives.

"until the kids come from middle school and cannot find a job that easily, often ending up doing completely stupid work like cashier or whatever else for the rest of their lives."

Your comment took a strange turn there at the end. I don't know even a single person that went from middle school to the job market. And if someone does, the job market probably won't be very good, that's common sense.

Isn't that illegal in most places? In the US, High School is compulsory until you're 18 (so most people at least get 3 full years).

Nah, definitely not illegal in the US, like 30%-40%+ of my high school dropped out at the day they turned 16 (or maybe 15... forgot exactly which one they let you drop out at).

Also... I graduated before I was 18.

EDIT: I was in high school two decades ago, so it might have changed since then.

Compulsory until 16 or diploma, mostly.

https://education.findlaw.com/education-options/compulsory-e...

Its never been federal officially although theres substantial funding bribery over the years (like drinking age enforcement), age has changed wildly over the years, vast increase over the last two or three generations, and wide variance in religious vs non-religious reasons, parental consent vs no parental consent required, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_school_leaving_age#...

Excuse me for the misunderstanding, I live in Europe where middle and high school are one. It is not compulsory anymore after reaching 18yrs old or after getting a diploma.

Still then, having a high school diploma doesn't make any difference at all in the job market, it's a worthless paper most people never need. Almost everything learned in middle and high school is worth 0$, while in real life pretty much only the dollars count. When people come to my company looking for a job I only hire them when they have the skill and are nice persons to be around, I'm not interested in whatever diploma or certificates.

> When people come to my company looking for a job I only hire them when they have the skill and are nice persons to be around, I'm not interested in whatever diploma or certificates.

I don't own or run a company, so my comments need to be taken with that in mind.

The point of taking into account certs and other similar notions in the matter of who to hire, provided those items were not done in a compulsory manner, is to help determine if a person has what it takes to stick to something long-term.

I can understand not caring about a high school diploma, to an extent. I would certainly want to know if the person can communicate well, both verbally and in writing (I wouldn't trust to get either of those indicators from a resume, either). I would want to know if they had a good command of the commonly spoken language. I would also want to know if they could do basic arithmetic, and higher math if the job required it. I would want to know if they understood hierarchies and sorting, as well as searching (manually - you know, skills you learn from research in a physical library of physical books). Do they know how to properly file things (physically or virtually) - or do they just dump everything in a single spot (which might be ok for a single person, but in a company could cause chaos)?

These (and others) are all skills which could be indicated by knowing they graduated high school, and what their GPA was during that time.

However, again that is all compulsory. It doesn't tell you if they really stick with tasks - though usually someone with a low GPA (but still graduated) may tend to have poor skills at staying on-task (especially if that task bores them, or they feel they are doing poorly at it).

That is where having those other certs - ones they have taken and (usually) paid for - provided they are legit of course. Someone who had paid for a course, taken it in full, and completed it with a certificate to show such (or a diploma or similar from a University, College, or other post-secondary training/learning) - shows that they stayed and finished the job, through thick or thin, whatever the adversity.

I would want to know this as a business owner hiring a person, personally. It would mean that I wouldn't likely be hiring someone who is just going to learn some things then bail on me 6 months later. Or someone who, when I give them a challenging task, won't just flail around aimlessly and then quit because they couldn't get it done. I wouldn't be looking for a "know-it-all" - in fact, I'd rather have someone who asked questions when challenged, as it would show curiosity and interest in learning. But I would want someone who will keep going, even when things get tough, awkward, or the light seems dim at the end of the tunnel.

Now - not everyone can afford to get such certificates, and they shouldn't be used as a proxy (you can gain similar ideas by seeing how long they stayed in past positions of similar nature - hopefully that's reflected on their resume/cv and what you learn from them in the interview). But those who can show such paperwork would have a leg-up in that area of hiring decisions.

Someone who didn't have that paperwork? Well - they would have to prove in some other manner that they will stick to something when the going gets tough. If they have that capability, they should be able to do that in some manner, I would hope.

Again - those are just my thoughts. Since I don't own a business, nor have I ever, nor run one - well, maybe they bear merit. After all, if I were so smart, I should have my own business by now at 46, right?

I've never heard anyone complain about mandatory middle school until now.

Like...if someone doesn't have a middle school education, they're basically going to be at the bottom of the labor pool for the rest of their lives.

I don't think that's really what we are discussing here.

Right now we have everyone except fringe dropouts going to middle school. That is, there are 2 options: middle school education or no education.

What's more interesting is if we could take people that would be successful in middle school and see if they could achieve increased success by participating in a different model.

There's nothing wrong with the average American middle school that can't be fixed with evacuation and controlled demolition.

Please don't do this here.

OK. How about I suggest scrapping mandatory attendance instead?

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