School also puts kids at the mercy of other kids who make fun of them or worse beat the shit out of them and break their glasses.
"Socialization", its like arguing people need food and then giving them dog food.
Given most modern school schedules, lack of recess, and lunch breaks being barely enough time to eat, I heard even what socialization does take place is being diminished.
School isn't the only and definitely not the best option for socialization.
At least in home school, they mostly learn socialization by and with adults, excluding extracurricular activities and co-ops.
Don't know whatever happened to those kids, but I hope they're in prison or dead, or just living shitty lives. I doubt they ever got better.
But I saw fights that were much worse, fights that ended in bleeding, cracked ribs and concussions, thankfully there was hospital across the road. This was in a rural region high school, in the 90s, I can only imagine what its like in places with actual gangs, today, etc.
The worse part about it is, you tell the teachers, they do nothing substantial, then you're a snitch. If you do the one thing likely to solve the problem, which is fight back, you're punished, and now the cops are called and you're likely arrested. Some kids eventually snap, and parents wonder why school shootings are a thing.
~Michael Malice
Lots of places don't, and are also doing fine.
That's because that particular feature is orthogonal to any real issue.
When the problems in Detroit and LA subside maybe I would be with you on this point.
There's so much room for improvement.
There is considerable reason to believe almost all variability in school performance is due to factors unrelated to the actual school itself (predominantly, the socioeconomic background and environment of the students and degree of parental involvement), which explains why limited scale efforts which require active parental choice to engage always perform better than the baseline, but scaling those up to be the baseline usually fails to have the same results. Better schools are just the schools attended by the students that would do best whatever school they were in.
So, if you aren't directing the solution at the things outside of schools that drive school outcomes, I don't expect you are going to solve any problem with the schools.
Like corrupt administrations that siphon funds needed to fix buildings teaming with cockroaches.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016...
We can postulate how a top down approach might work but these students will still be suffering while we sort and continually monitor (we won't) the system.
Involving market forces and allowing parents to have say in where their children will be educated puts the power in the most effective hands for change.
Just like remote learning, if I don't like K12, I can try another online school, same as I dump Netflix for Hulu. I'm not even geographically limited. If there is a teacher that specializes in teaching dyslexic students and I have a child that's dyslexic, I'm no longer limited that the teacher isn't in a school within 5-10 miles. The teacher can be in another state even technically as long as she's board certified in my state. There is also a geographic arbitrage advantage, if my school system doesn't pay teachers enough to live comfortably in my city, maybe the teachers can be hired where its cheaper to live. Or teach for NYC and live in rural NY state.
Public schools, are derived from the Prussian system, its optimized to create obedient workers, its the lowest common denominator in education.
Arguements of equality in public schools are out the window too when you compare the funding and quality between poor counties and wealthy ones.
Its especially unjust that parents paying for private education pay twice, for public and private.
Second, let's see what happens if we fund private and public schools equivalently. Class sizes of 10 don't happen by accident.
Paying for private education "twice" is just part of rich people paying for the society that enabled them to become and stay rich.
"Second, let's see what happens if we fund private and public schools equivalently."
Detroit get's $14k per student. Cost of living in Detroit is low and barely anyone who graduates is literate.
I don't think funding's the problem.
US Public schools blow everyone else out of the water if you shave off the bottom 10%. The US problem with schooling is more and more a problem of equity. People need to understand that helping other kids isn't going to hurt their kids.
US taxpayers would rather throw money at prisons and police instead of education and social workers. I don't mean schools when I say education, I mean outreach to families and help getting them what they need.
Who is "everyone else?"
"US taxpayers would rather throw money at prisons and police instead of education and social workers."
Agreed. End the war on drugs and personal freedom. End the wars, bring every troop home, from everywhere. Cut the military budget.
"I mean outreach to families and help getting them what they need."
In 2019, we spend $90,960 per family of 4 on welfare. The money's there. Unaccountable bureaucracies waste money. This will never change.
Where is yours for that $90k BS. Sounds like a serious argument for just giving poor people cash.
Again, I don't know who you're referring to by "everyone else."
"Where is yours for that $90k BS."
Enjoy!
Federal Breakdown 2019 in Billions:
$59: EITC Refundable Tax Credits - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/020-0906
$29: Child Tax Credit - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/020-0922
$64: SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Programs) - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/012-3505
$51: Housing Assistance - https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/CFO/documents/3%20-%20FY19C...
$57: SSI (Disabled, blind or senior citizens) - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/028-0406
$31: Pell Grants - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/091-0200
$16: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/075-1552
$23: Child Nutrition - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/012-3539
$12: Head Start - https://www.acf.hhs.gov/about/budget
$5: Job Training - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/016-0174 , https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/016-0181
$5: WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/wi...
$5: Child Care - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/075-1550 , https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/075-1534 ,
$4: LIHEAP (Utility bill help) - https://liheapch.acf.hhs.gov/Funding/funding.htm
$1: Lifeline (phone payment help) - https://www.usac.org/wp-content/uploads/about/documents/annu... Page 8
$409: Medicade - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/075-0512
Total: $771 billion
People below the poverty line in 2019: 33.9 million - https://www.statista.com/statistics/233138/number-of-people-...
$771 billion / 33.9 million below poverty citizens = $22,743
$22,743 * Family of 4 = $90,972
THIS IS JUST FEDERAL SPENDING AND DOES NOT INCLUDE STATE AND LOCAL SPENDING!
This is a great deal for the students because they enter the college of their choice with a better background than a typical student.
Society is disadvantaged when intelligent students aren't allowed to achieve their fullest potential. We need programs that allow students to independently work at their own pace. We'd have a ton more 15-16 year old's attending college.
What if the student has a learning disability? In a smaller school, that will certainly take down the test scores - will three LD students ruin the school's reputation? How about people with down syndrome, for example?
What if the student requires major accommodations - for example, the student is quadriplegic? The big school systems currently take money from all students to help out with these expensive cases.
Will these private schools with vouchers be required to maintain the same standards as the public schools? For example, can a school discriminate via race or religion?
Most voucher advocates are really looking to take the easy students and dump the hard cases on a backstop underfunded public system. Then everyone will look at the public system and say, "see how much better the private system is!"
Because the private system does not take the hard cases.
Everything is a process of improvement overtime. The reality is, we don't have all the answers ever. What matter's is how much things are improving overtime. I don't see that with public schools.
I could easily ask you a ton of questions on how to fix Detroit or LA schools.
Allowing competition fixes a lot of problems.
This claim could desparately use evidence.
Market forces improve conditions. Motivations are realigned to the incentive of the parent's satisfaction with their kid's education. Service improves when you have competition.
The next time was in 5th grade in Texas (new kid again -- I was the weirdo from Seattle). Also harmless. We didn't even get suspended or put on detention in those days.
The next time was in the Army defending someone who was being bullied by a racist. That was scary for me because I was so angry I could have really hurt someone. Luckily, cooler heads intervened.
Growing up, I heard stories from cousins that went to public school in the Chicago area. Major fights everyday. Though they managed to stay out of harms way.
Back in Seattle, my son got suspended for play fighting in middle school (zero tolerance) but otherwise he made it out without getting into any fights -- it helped that he was/is very tall and a popular athlete.
Onetime when I picked him up after a dance there was a horrible fight where a large girl was beating the shit out of a smaller girl with 100s of kids whooping it up around them. Crazy time.
Plenty of more stories from his time in bad schools in South Seattle. Scenes out of a movie bad. Most people can't imagine the out-control violent environment that exists in some US public schools. Even in cities like Seattle.
I can't imagine how bad it could be for kids forced to go to bad schools in big cities like Baltimore, Philly, Chicago, LA, DC, and such.
"In Finland, where substantial physical activity is part of the school day, rates of ADHD are also very low. Meanwhile, in the U.S. children are asked to sit still for the majority of the day. Elementary school students often get only 15-20 minutes of recess a day, a far cry from the 60-90 minutes their parents had. Coincidentally, ADHD rates in the U.S. have gone up over the last 15 years. "
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisonescalante/2020/08/11/rese...
People have very anachronistic views of home schooling. A generation ago it was fair to believe to was mostly ultra religious people wanting to shelter their children. These days, a large chunk of it is people that have no faith in public schools to educate their children, and people who want to avoid political influences that are creeping into public schools.
Yeah, those people have never set foot in a public school in the bible belt. Separation of church and state my ass.
I've had one teacher tell my sister my mom was awful and was cheating on her taxes in front of the entire class humiliating her because my single mother, didn't get my sister a SS card, which at the time you didn't need until you paid into SS.
You don't have to like every parent, but ultimately the child is their responsiblity, the values of a child are up to a parent to pass on. Not the teacher's or the government's role. Outside of something that is actually inflicting harm, and you can hate religion but its not the worst thing in and of itself and bad parents don't need religion to mess a kid up.
Would you pay 60% marginal tax to see class sizes halved, salaries doubled, but maybe also remove any sense of public duty from the role?
(One more: would you like to see complete commercialization of eduction, with real salary competition driving up wages, but with the state rather than the parent picking up the bill. Compare this with college education, where student loan companies pick up the bill — you can see where I’m going with that analogy.)
It is my experience that the worst 2-3 per cent of people can ruin entire institutions if left unchecked.
How will we decide who is the worst teacher? Peer review? Student review? Ask the parents which teacher's politics they dislike more?
I'm not saying it can't be done, but I am saying that it's unlikely to be done right.
That said, it is not unique to schooling alone. Bosses around the world have to address this problem as well. IDK how Elon Musk runs his "no assholes policy" in SpaceX, but he seems to be successful. Ofc, maybe his approach isn't scalable, who knows.
In general though parents should be the ones making decisions about their children. Teachers being judged by arbitrary beurocrats i.e. what we have now sounds obviously worse to me.
The whole political argument seems weak to me. I think most parents probably care about academics more than that to begin with, but if political homogeneity is important to a particular parent, why shouldn't that influence their vote?
If the education is subpar, the particular skills and knowledge that were missed can probably be picked up later as needed, but poor grades can alter the trajectory of your life in ways that are harder to recover from. So I'd expect parents who care more about the best possible outcome for their children more than being conscientious (which I honestly assume is a majority) to prefer those.
Also - if it is impossible to detect bad teachers, then it is impossible to hire good teachers and therefore they are hiring at random. And parental choice can't be worse than random or that would be a signal we could use to pick the best teachers.
I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.
Unless teachers happen to spend their days sitting around in other teachers' classrooms, I highly doubt that's the case.
Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break.
They do, however, have a pretty good idea of which other teachers they personally don't like.
This feels like an assumption to me.
My wife is a public school teacher. There has always been heavy collaboration between her and her colleagues, even more so now with remote learning. There are certainly unmotivated and lazy teachers and the other teachers know who they are.
Parents are on average stupid. So are government officials. Centralising the power just means that when there is a bad official, everyone suffers. Just because the best alternative is still bad doesn't mean there is a great option here. All the choices have drawbacks.
The best teachers IME have always been retired professionals who are doing it kind of like a Walmart greeter, that to me is a great time to give back your time. But they seem to be better teachers because they've been something other than a teacher and also know their subject matter outside of theory assuming they teach in the same field they practiced professionally.
There's already enough money, and each additional tax I pay towards education, gets redirected a few years later. This is what happened with lottery money. Any additional taxes for education need to come with the caveat the taxes I'm already paying that going towards education now, don't get reassigned in the next budget and the money going towards education remains the same, and it was really a backdoor way to raise taxes for other things under the guise of "education".
Personally, I think we need to buy less bombs or pay less taxes on the federal level and more on the local level, pay teachers more but make it easier to fire the bad ones, the problem will solve itself. But most additional money seems to find its way going to the administration in public schools and universities, so I'd probably start by taking money away from administration.
(I‘m “old”. I have a masters in CS, was a SWE for 15 years, took early retirement, then came out of retirement to teach.)
If you're not part of them you're not invested in improving them. And, I don't mean improving them for your child's specific sake, but overall.
And, if you're not, you're not really invested in your community.
Private schooling and homeschooling are options that I view as opting for the privilege to be above or separate from the community that I live in. My values prioritized equity, and yours may be different.
I'd wager that you're speaking from the privilege of living in a community where you don't have to worry about your kid being knived, shot or raped at school, otherwise you might have a different opinion. Not everybody has the income to support living in a safe community, and for those who don't, private schools are the only option to ensure their child experiences a reasonable level of safety.
Not that it makes a huge difference, but I'd wager that, outside the USA, that's almost unheard of in the developed world .
I know that doesn't make a lick of difference to an American who is in that situation, but surely it's a reflection of American society and culture, not the concept of public schooling in general.
Raped or shot, probably. Knives tend to get more common in Europe too, at least in the very diverse urban centers.
Schools are the same. I don't think I've ever heard of someone being knifed in an Australian school. Even though theoretically anyone could do it. There's no security or anything, it just doesn't happen as often as in the US.
I've come to believe that there is something very wrong with our attitude towards violence, and yet it's not clear to me why we are different or how we got here, let alone what policy changes could address it.
I went to a public school in Australia in a relatively wealthy area and saw multiple gang beatings. One guy beaten so badly that he was knocked out cold for over ten minutes with people jumping on his head.
I know for a fact it's worse in less wealthy areas.
Australian public schools don't have shootings but there is enough to fuck up kid's development. They always descend into honor culture violence. I'm speculating but I do wonder if it's significant part of the problem that poor Black communities in the US face. These young boys thrown into a pit in a status game where they have to prove themselves and become brutalized in the process.
One solution to that is private schools where the staff are accountable to paying customers who won't stand for this violence. Low tier bureaucrats who can't get fired in public schools just don't care or can't stop it.
There are exceptional public schools with no violence, often they're selective, but they're rare.
At risk of oversharing and personalizing, we attend school in Brooklyn, at a school that prioritizes inclusion of non-native English speakers and kids on food assistance. A large percentage of our classroom's kids live in public housing. It's a safe room and building.
And, please don't kid yourself about private school buying your way out of the potential for traumatic experiences. Elite boarding schools don't have the best histories wrt sexual assault.
Even if I accept this conclusion without questioning, not being invested in your community is perfectly OK. Some people are not particularly 'communal' by nature, some hold views very different from the local standard etc.
Imagine that you are a pacifist in a community that holds militaristic views and they seep into the local school system.
I'll happily not be part of your community.
You have little to no way to improve them. When the environment you live in is shit, the best way is to move, not to spend your life fighting to change your neighbors.
Interestingly, people involved in homeschooling tend to be very involved in volunteering. I myself volunteer more hours than I care to think about. However, they tend to be involved in sub-communities, not the public community as a whole. Based entirely on anecdotal experience, I would bet that they do more for their own communities than the general public on average, it's just focused outside the public sphere.
The comment I responded to was literally about common joke in home schooling community that is literally that. It is not even opinion, it is exaggeration meant to paint the schools as much worst that they are. The schools have issues with bullying, it does exist. But, very realistically, "the socialization in schools consist of kids beating each other and stealing lunches" is over the top.
Some schools manage to prevent that, good for them. Those that cannot or are unwilling to do so, will end up as bad examples in conversations.
Or sometimes having special needs kids - but these people don't need schools to be awful. They have that special need and tend to focus on that.
Meanwhile, back here in real world, my kids were super happy to return back to school. Their friends were super happy to return back to school. They look forward friends and they also prefer learning in school over learning at home.
Meanwhile, I as parent found out that school teaches kids better then I did, that the lessons were about more then I realized when looking at them.
And it is not like our local school was super top heavily praised one. It is one of those ordinary average ones in system that objectively struggles.
The very concept of 'popularity' is completely foreign to my experience. I don't think there was a thing such as a popular kid when I was at school or high school.
I personally enjoyed a lot going to school because I could spend time with my friends. I have never witnessed any violence apart from fights form time to time between two malse wanting to show who the strongest was. I was not in a privileged school.
The scenarios described in the GP link is a very late 70s-80s (Gen X) thing. 90s and early 00s high-schoolers had somewhat different experiences, but they know the trope since that's what was in movies. Schools today have a different concept of a "pecking order" - it's not that nerds aren't at the bottom anymore, it's that the whole concept changed.
This is just judging from my own experience, and my kids have a very different set of circumstances then I did.
In every school I'd say like people hung out with like people. So the "popularity" would be limited to that in-group. Most of people who PG would call "nerds" had a clique of their own as far as I could tell.
Some people might have been broadly disliked though.
To large extend, even that essay does not strike me as something describing people I know or my experience. But it strikes me as very populist writing targeted at those who identify as outsiders. Something written by person who was obsessed by popularity and social position himself quite a lot. In our school, kids with good grades were not unpopular or hated. Good results in programming or math or literary competition did not made you outsider. I never perceived such abilities as social liability.
There was something like "unpopular" kid in our class, someone who don't have many friends. Not that everyone was friend with everyone. And I think that guys did to one what would be called verbal bullying now in one period. But in neither case it was really not because he was smarter then everyone. And none of these ended up in tech work and none was interested in tech.
It's almost as if not everyone on earth has the same experience, wow, fancy that.
Glad I learned about bullies before I hit the workforce, where I had to deal with narcissistic sociopaths—- adult versions of bullies.