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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I'd still wager a majority went to public school, which are still government-run even if they are in nice suburbs.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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?)
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.
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.
They were often abused, physically and verbally by both adults and other kids. They were also sexually abused.
Communists took a lot of kids to institutions too and it was crap too.
Gross.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
In Sum: Education and Wealth Are Correlated But Causal Link May Be Weak
https://www.stlouisfed.org/.../emmonseducationandwealthsiuc-...
Ps, I absolutely hated middle school.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_school#Latin_America
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
But this is not even an option for what we're talking about.
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.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_216.30.a...