When deciding where to live find a neighborhood that values education and takes pride in its school district. Unfortunately this may come at the cost of higher real estate values, but fundamentally the school your child attends will be one of the most defining aspects of their childhood. The local public schools here compensate their teachers significantly more than the private schools in the area. Furthermore, their average test scores are about a percentage less across all standardized tests while allowing of all backgrounds instead of having the ability to choose their student body like the private schools.
I attended a public school but had many close friends in some of the private schools around me. In terms of college outcomes my friends from school and friends from the private schools attended similar pretentious schools. However, I feel that had I attended a private school I would have spent all my formative years in the same bubble of snobby traditions and deciding where to summer. My high school had plenty of astonishingly wealthy students but our culture was much more actively unimpressed when peers bought an s-class for their 16th or took their race car to school.
* First, there's enormous variation in private schools. A whole lot of sectarian schools are utter crap and worse than public schools when you control for the neighborhoods they're in.
* But there are also a lot of private schools with significant structural advantages: students who want to be there with systemic support from all families and faculty who just want to see how far they can run in a supportive environment.
* I teach in a crazily idyllic environment. There's been no fights in literally decades. It's cool to be a nerd or a jock. It's happy and green. I am sad that this is such an exception and not the rule.
* I have the utmost respect for public school teachers. I'm well aware, in many ways, that my job is "easy mode" for education. I think it's great that we have a diverse system, and having the public system exist and able to provide a quality education to people of all backgrounds is an essential public good.
* My children are mathy, somewhat introverted kids. Being able to pick an educational environment where they're expected to present often, do drama and the arts, etc, has made them grow into much broader individuals than they would in other places. This kind of choice doesn't often exist in the public school system.
In high school I described my public school as faux-public given that the school district was dependent on local property values (yes, definition of public school) while support from the state was negligible to the overall budget.
In the four years I was there we had maybe a fight (more of a tussle) about once a year, our football team won a game about every two years, and our science olympiad or other extra curriculum program placed nationally every year. If students were working on projects it wasn't surprising if the teacher left to make photocopies or do other things while we worked. In terms of outcomes, in my math/hard sciences about 75% attended ivies. There are many great private schools in the area but given that they have the same test scores (while being able to choose their student body) and same college outcomes I would not recommend discrediting a school simply because it is public
https://www.brookings.edu/research/housing-costs-zoning-and-... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/propert...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/realestate/your-address-a...
https://www.econlib.org/emergency-homeschooling-a-how-to-gui...
As Caplan mentions in the above post, he's troubled by unschoolers' subpar math skills, linking to a post citing a study. I don't think the blog post you cited addresses that point (among other points).
is it childcare, a fear that you don't know how to teach, how to get started, worries about social learning? A lot of families are doing homeschooling, modular learning, microschooling...
Also as someone who has taught in public and private schools, I will tell you that even the most elite private schools are not that much better. It's still a group of kids in one class doing way too much homework and very little freedom to pursue their own interests.
Just as public school students are being indoctrinated, so are private school students. Indoctrinated, perhaps into different systems. The elite want to keep their kids elite, so maybe they are being indoctrinated into becoming the future leaders of wall Street and tech companies - and the government wants to control its citizens (there are some good reasons of course, for that, but a lot of bad reasons). Oddly, a lot of public school systems like bells and desks are designed to prepare kids to work for jobs in factories, so I'm not even sure this indoctrination is successful because it's a bit antiquated. Just hard to change.
I work full time and my wife uses the time the kids are at school to manage activities, the home, etc.
Home school would be explored if we had a live in nanny and perhaps someone to help design a curriculum.
I'm a teacher. I really don't want to catch COVID from a kid and bring it to my immunocompromised dad. So, irrespective of the risk to students (which is not high but I would not characterize it as low either), there are additionally risks to students' families and faculty.
And, anecdote: I'm at a school with windows open & masking. We have a fair amount of mandated testing, and there's been no transmission at school detected despite several primary cases. Compare to other schools with a lot of transmission detected.
I don't financially need to work. I find teaching rewarding, but I'm not willing to kill my dad for it, kthx. I'm glad to be at a school which is making a reasonable compromise in this area.
Re: risk, I think that is a completely reasonable position for you to take. I also think it is reasonable for parents to prefer an environment that they feel is optimized for their kids needs.
[1] https://www.sfusd.edu/covid-19-response-updates-and-resource...
That just says those supplies will be available. They're available at my workplace, too.
This is the one thing that we've de-emphasized this year:
> Staff will clean and disinfect frequently touched surfaces like door handles, desks, countertops, phones, keyboards, light switches, handles, toilets and faucets at least once daily.
OTOH, I do run a lab and now wipe down the frequently used tools a couple of times per day. It may or may not make a difference for COVID, but it probably will reduce the transmission of stomach bugs and influenza.
Welp, students in my classes wearing their masks is a big part of how I'm still able to see my dad and not kill him.
> Instead, everyone has to wear some kind of cloth mask to show that "wearing is caring".
Because it's one of the most effective measures we have. Research (both observational and based on aerosol modeling) implies that surgical/cloth masks and getting windows open each reduces risk of infection about 4-5x, and they stack on top of each other for a ~20x total reduction. That's enough, with vaccination, to make me comfortable seeing my dad (masked).
> The risk to children is absurdly low.
About 70k kids hospitalized in the US so far-- so that's not absurdly low. And, again, the risk to children's families and faculty (and faculty families) counts too.
Rachel says, "research shows we downplay long-term effects of Covid on children" https://twitter.com/math_rachel/status/1454242957259800578 https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1420981223535517696
My personal belief is that COVID-19 and influenza are probably similar in children. But even that is more risk than people generally realize: a whole lot of permanent impact happens from influenza in children, but we just accept it and shrug it off as inevitable.
And, of course, while the average risk to kids may be moderate, there's also the much higher risk of cases communicated by children to their family, faculty, and the community at large.
Yes, the risk to kids is low, but they are unvaccinated so outbreaks can and do happen. Substitutes are hard to get right now in most school districts and if you have an outbreak and even 5 percent of the teachers are home sick it is a very real possibility there won’t be a substitute to cover. In my local school district principals and administrators are covering classrooms for sick teachers because there are not enough subs. Teachers would traditionally just go to school sick, because they don’t get much sick time and even if they are sick they have to write a lesson plan for the sub, but now what do you do? Do you go to school even though you have a cold that could be covid? Do you write sub plans for a sub that might not be there?
Bus drivers are also opting out because many are elderly and at high risk and the pay sucks so the risk reward isn’t there even if they are vaccinated. Same with lunch ladies, janitors, you name it. There is a staffing crisis in education right now. Teachers are burned out and those that can retire are at a higher rate than before. It is a mess.
So no, children, even unvaccinated, aren’t likely to have complications from Covid, but wearing masks in schools might help just enough to keep schools open and operating.
> wearing masks in schools might help just enough to keep schools open and operating
I think those are great points and I often try to look at it from the perspective of my child's teacher, not to mention the regulatory nightmares the administration goes through. I am friends and family with many public school teachers. I also think that's the point of the article though. It's hard to get a sub because teachers are quitting, not because of being out sick.
The US Teachers union causes a LOT of problems. But mask, distancing, and sanitation are not one of them.
You wouldn’t like living in Asia. Here it’s the norm. The only people who get upset are westerners. But atleast I feel like my daughter is safe, and my in laws are safe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/us/schools-closed-fridays...
As a sidenote, teachers in my state start at $35k... for a profession that requires a degree and special training, that is pathetic and deserves to be a national shame.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student... [1]https://apps.urban.org/features/education-funding-trends/
It was a very painful decision for my family as we largely believe in public school as a policy directive but submitting my kid to the idiocy for another year, and asking me to deal with it as well, was just untenable.
The final straw was the school districts covid protocols for the 2021/2022 school year which made it obvious that they weren’t optimizing for student health, student learning or parent convenience. Instead it was some mix of federal guidelines, school district convenience & teachers union edict.
Those things might be the most important thing for public policy but as a privileged participant I could opt out.
My daughter (2nd grade) managed to memorize literally every capital city and flag. When I asked her who her geography teacher was, she said "We didn't have geography this year. I learned it from YouTube." Ironically, no classes made her more interested in the topic.
But you have to have class to have no classes. The kids were begging to go to school by the end of 2021, but didn't want to go early on. The absence of school made them want to learn even more. So I'm not sure if full home schooling is effective.
Maryland has one school system per county. In Montgomery County the schools are very different between the more prosperous and less prosperous areas. Years ago there was an eye-opening chart of the percentage grade needed get an A in algebra at various high schools.
Where is this list of big ideas?