Why aren’t America’s students showing up?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It’s some mix of the following:
- Great engaged teachers
- Overworked and under staffed administrators
- Totally clueless substitutes
- Increasingly impressive mental health focus
- Standardized testing focus
- Increasingly invasive spyware and “security” systems
All of these are the result of the schools trying to balance:
1. Keeping parents not mad (as opposed to happy)
2. staying in line with district and state guidance
3. Graduating and matriculating the student body out of the school safely and “on time” for their peer groups
The challenge is that there’s no super-structure that is measuring or interested in long term outcomes so it’s haphazard and leads to a chaotic system with decreasing utility to the modern world.
My ex wife is an admistrator and previously a teacher and I don’t envy anyone who has to try and work in such a system
Let's find someone/something to blame, and insist on shoveling massive sums of cash into a new football field. That will fix this horrible, horrible improvement to their personal lives.
It blows my mind that people still don’t realize the teenagers are biologically wired to go to bed significantly later than everyone else. Just the other week I was at a combo preschool/parent education thing and they were talking about sleep. The educator complained about her teenagers not wanting to go bed at 9pm and blamed it on screens.
That’s like telling adults they need to be in bed at 5pm or earlier. Can you force yourself to adapt? Kind of. Is it anywhere near ideal? Hell no.
I do think that there should be a certain kind of need to learn how to wake up early when needed, but in my opinion, learning that skill is not something that should be insisted upon on a daily basis throughout an adolescents life. That goes doubly when the primary reasoning comes down to, "Well I did it when I was their age, so they should have to do it too!"
There are other practical reasons that could even be helpful in this regard, too: Imagine for a moment a case where there are fewer school buses on the road (due to at least an option to Learn From Home (LFH)), and when they are on the road, it's not during peak commuter times. It's something that could help with things like emissions, and the overall safety of students and drivers. The idea of both morning commuters and school buses traveling around at the same peak hours reminds me a lot of how Moving Day [1] in NYC used to work, a breathtakingly stupid tradition, which apparently was only finally culled due to a mixture of labor shortage due to WWII, rent control, and a shortage of housing.
I do realize that part of the reason why schools start as early as they do is to try and avoid some amount of that commuter traffic, but if that is the primary reason, it then raises the even stranger question, "Why then, are we putting the ease of commuters above a sane sleep schedule of the youth, when their physical presence in an antiquated building is on shaky grounds in the first place...?"
Heck, we could take it a step further and ask even more pointed questions, "What sense does it make for children to be transferred to the care of complete strangers, who then are legally obligated to care for their safety on a short-term basis, when that same child could instead remain at home in the care of their own parents?" It just seems like there's plenty of reasons why children should be able to avoid this dogs breakfast of an in-person educational system, when there are glaring and obvious alternatives.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(New_York_City)
There's also a cohort that fell behind in pandemic lockdowns, and just has never caught back up. Those kids may decide to exit the school-system entirely.
Peak COVID with everyone working and schooling from home. If you don't put them on a bus and put them around other kids of course they're going to fuck off and do other stuff.
High school is an extremely cruel place.
When I was a kid, my parents would have me skip school on Saturdays (we had 6 day/week classes) to go to the beach, or, go to an important cultural event (day my dad has a business trip to Florence, or Vienna).
My teachers knew we were getting good grades and that my parents weren't having us play video games while absent. Whatever it was we were doing was as enriching as school.
I believe the teachers have a duty to the weaker kids, but they shouldn't impose those kids controls on the others.
I think they're not showing up because they don't want to be in school. And I think that's because school isn't a healthy place for teenagers. I don't think teenagers should be spending their entire day in a government administered environment, and they seem to feel the same way.
These are all solvable with parents and policy which should not cost any more money.
America is a diverse nation and the people entering it right now don't value the Prussian style education system we have or more aptly don't see the value in it.
Couple that with public school administrative politics (as in office politics) and you see why high performing teachers flee out of those districts and into more highly rated ones.
Education starts at home and if that isn't there for whatever reason then the whole system falls apart.
What's even worse is devaluing an education to get failing students out the door.
Whether intentional or not the implications are the same. You now have a massive under educated poverty class that can be cajoled by populatists and others into votes. This is how democracy dies.
If you look around you and see nothing but carnival barkers being elevated through the ranks of society, then why would you value doing anything other than learning to do that?
It has nothing to do with not having enough tax money. They get more and more every year and waste it on admin positions and useless teacher training.
Additionally, they geared mostly towards girls and how they learn and not boys. By the time kids get near high school age they realize pretty quickly they're just in a daycare that's not really teaching them much at all.
I'll state upfront that I'm politically right of center, but nothing crazy. I'm live and let live. I probably would have been considered a moderate 20 years ago.
Public schools have been on a downward trajectory my entire adult life (I'm 52). Most of the parents I know have been alarmed at the trend for a while (decades), but as progressive ideology has taken hold over most of our public institutions, the parents I know feel that their concerns and talking points are usually dismissed offhand. Maybe they feel ignored because they're "priveleged" and other more diverse voices need to be heard, or maybe it's because their "conservative values" are simply seen as part of the problem. I don't know. My point is that there are a lot of people who feel ignored and are tired of this.
As a result, I've noticed that slowly, over the last twenty years or so, those that can have been pulling their kids (and themselves) "out" of the public system. We personally homeschooled our kids until 6th grade, then they went to public school. Many in my circle disagreed at the time with our decision to homeschool, but in time have come around as public schools continue to deteriorate.
Those that can afford it (or are willing to sacrifice time/energy/$$$ in order to afford it) have been putting their kids in private school, where they have more say with an administration that's willing to engage the parents that are directly paying for the schooling.
Point being is that more and more people don't feel the public system is meeting their children's needs, are tired of trying to engage the system while getting nowhere, and so have taken matters into their own hands. As parents find public schools administrations continuing to double down on ideas and ideologies that run counter to their own values, many are now more than willing to pull their kids out and go their own way.
These are parents that are deeply concerned for their kids, and are putting a lot of time/money/energy to give their kids a better chance at success in an increasingly confusing and uncertain world.
As parents with initiative pull their kids out of the public system, schools face an increasing percentage of kids from families that are not as committed/concerned/willing to getting involved in their children's education. This is creating a negative feedback loop. Less parental involvement means the bar is lowered for the performance of the average kid in public school. Worse, it also means less parental pushback on the administration, and so public schools continue to double down on failing strategies, all while patting themselves on the back for being so progressive. It leads to a monoculture, where everyone believes they're doing the right thing, so it can't be their fault, the problem must lie elsewhere. It's a big experiment on our kids, the impact of which is accelerating.
The fact is that people are slowly checking out of the institutions we've built, hedging their bets against the future we're being forced into so to speak. Unfortunately this means that we're somewhat bi-furcating the future generation we're in the process of educating. Kids whose parents are involved will work to see their kids get a better education than what public school offers, and should therefore have a better than average chance of success at life. The kids that remain in the system continue to suffer as those with means/ability abandon it. It's not a pretty picture, but this is what things look like when our state institutions start failing us.
It's slowly becoming "every-man-for-themselves". People don't want to engage, they want to argue, to blame, to point fingers, and cover their own ass. Few are concerned about the public good, they'd rather just feel good. So, those that can have given up trying to fix things, and are going their own way. The schools may be failing our kids, but as parents we can still help them.
I don't think what's happening can be stopped at this point. I'm concerned that the rot has taken too deep of a hold at all levels of local and state administration, and academia. It's probably going to get much more dire before things bottom out and start getting better.
Probably has something to do with, or is a symptom of, the coming "Fourth Turning" etc.
I mean the teacher's unions have been screaming about smaller class sizes for decades, let's give it to them.
Private schools in the US look artificially good in terms of both finances and performance because they end up selecting the more privileged students to start with.
You don't improve if you aren't answering to anyone. If they're threatened with money loss you better believe they're going to start doing something to make their school more attractive and that's how it should be. Right now they can be absolutely abysmal at educating anyone and still receive tax dollars.
Maybe i could even alternate every year so they are "well rounded".
And someone's probably going to respond "but muh socialization!" In what other real-life scenario are you going to end up with a bunch of people who are almost identical in age, with little to no responsibilities, regurgitating shit with no incentive other than that you have to be there, or else? You don't. After that, it's off to either real school (university) where people are all at various stages of their education throughout their life, chasing education in fields that actually benefit them and the rest of society; or they work a job where there's even more diversity and generally less interaction with people.
Lower school is an alien place to be, and always has been.
Unsurprisingly this means schools with a lot of wealthy students already attract other wealthy students due to their successes largely brought about by funding, and poorer schools get even poorer as the few remaining people try their best to leave, because the school sucks.
As I've gotten older I've become incredibly skeptical at the almost knee-jerk reaction to "give people choice and let them self select." What if the choice is difficult? What if it requires knowledge most people don't have? What if people don't need to live with the consequences of the choice? What if the choice affects not only them, but others who have no choice?
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1304.pdf
In California, property tax revenue has been increasing steadily YoY... a $3.2Bn increase in 2020 alone.
What percentage of their wealth do they pay? What are their effective tax rates compared to the working class? Why are capital gains taxes so much less than most income taxes? Why does our "progressive" tax rate stop growing in the 150k range or so? Which one of those groups can afford lawyers to structure their incomes to pay even less?
The rich are not paying their fair share and generally have been paying less and taking more for decades, I don't know what you are on about.
I believe it actually stops at around 700k for married couples and 575k for singles.
They didn't say sending kids to private school was a way to actively defund public education just that wealthy parents do both which is true. What's your motivation to vote and support politicians that advocate for better funded public schools when it doesn't effect your kids but raises your taxes?
People are all different and their motivations are complex. Not everyone is angling for ultimate personal advantage and maximum externalization of downside, even amongst the wealthy.
School vouchers offer the potential to poor that money into a system that is working instead. Maybe that richer parent is trying to help not hinder other parents. Public schools appear to be fundamentally broken in many communities. More money won't fix that brokenness. Firing a bunch of teachers and administrators might work but good luck getting that to happen with the current state of education unions. Enabling parents to put their money into systems that aren't broken is a reasonable alternative to that.
There is already a live experiment where education unions are totally neutered, and it didn't fix anything. Private schools "work" because they get to expel anyone who doesn't pay enough money to outbalance any problems they cause. Public schools obviously cannot do this.
Private schools "work" because they get to expel anyone who doesn't pay enough money to outbalance any problems they cause. Public schools obviously cannot do this.
Because the main purpose of the public school system isn't to provide the best education for the most capable, it's to provide an acceptable education for the average student to eventually work a basic labor job, to provide daycare for working class parents, and to keep teenagers mostly busy so that they commit less crimes.
Expelling every problem student would totally fail at these goals, and would create an underclass of problem teenagers who have mostly nothing to do but commit crimes and get eachother pregnant. This would be a massive failure and much more expensive than public school. It would worsen the lives of the millions who would have otherwise grown out of these negative tendencies.
Further, it's not the only secret to private schools success, only one reason. Other reasons are costing money and therefore disqualifying poor people, parents who pay money for their children's school are more likely to be invested and involved in their child's education, and private school teachers are paid much more money than public school teachers. All of these factors contribute. I just listed a one, since the only reason you listed was unions.
A more interesting comparison is between public schools and charter schools which are not allowed to use selective admissions (must admit by lottery etc.), which is much closer to the public school system. My understanding is that they do a little bit better on average at the cost of more outliers. And even they avoid the most checked-out parents who couldn't be bothered or are actively hostile to filling a free application for a school.
Oh - and you said you didn't only blame unions, but the only other targets in your post are teachers and administrators, which private schools also have. Can you expand on this?
Parents are making this choice to give their kids a better education, and anyone with the same opportunity would do it too.
Diverting resources, whether those resources are students, tax dollars, or parental volunteer time, away from public education harms the students who attend public education and harms our society.
Rather than put the time and energy into building a proper community, those with means instead prefer to wall themselves off from the rest of society, which harms everyone.
I'm a comparatively wealthy parent, I've bothered to look at the data, and I'm sending my kids to public schools.
I really don't believe it's about giving their kids a better education, because the studies pretty consistently show that public schools have superior outcomes when you adjust for socioeconomic status of individual students and special needs. The private schools of course don't accept these students. It's about exclusivity.
No, they wouldn’t. Schools have extremely small effects on student learning, if that[1]. Private schools buy a safer, more class homogeneous environment which is worth a lot but you can get the same effect by living in the right suburbs.
[1] Education and Intelligence: Pity the Poor Teacher because Student Characteristics are more Significant than Teachers or Schools
Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-p...
At any rate, I've seen that data and think it's perfectly applicable to what I was saying. My argument wasn't really about the spend on "the school" per se, but more that the resources could be better spent on the behalf of students if it wasn't directed to a private school, whether that's spend on the community environment or specifically on the students themselves (like with tutoring, or sponsoring a club). Directing money towards a private school is counterproductive to both the individual and the wellbeing of your own community. This does assume day-schools. Boarding schools are an entirely separate beast, and I don't have a strong sense of why parents choose them, despite having taught at one for a few years. Mastery learning can be applied in any setting. The thing that remains is, do you teach your student how the world is, or how act in order to be enculturated into an elite "in" group? I would argue that the former can confer the benefits of the later, but that the reverse is much harder.
You also mention community over and over as if every community in the US is similar in demographics or culture which is also not the case. All Muslim people I know, for example, send their children to private school, some driving nearly 50 miles both ways twice a day (200 miles!) just to do it after getting a taste of what the local public school system had to offer!
My own children all went to public school and if I had a chance to do it over again I would have put them in private school.
Be the one to break the cycle. Be educated, educate your children to the best of your ability with the fundamentals, and show them how to want to learn more. That's how to set your kid up for success.
This is so provably false that I'm amazed anyone could have this opinion. The US spends huge amounts on education. More than almost any country. Neither education spending nor property taxes have declined.
Government current expenditures: Education
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G160291A027NBEA
Personal Current Tax Receipts: State and Local Government: Property Taxes
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/S210400
US education spending is one of the highest in the world, and is also increasing 2010-2019 faster than almost any country:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
FTFY
https://www.aaastateofplay.com/school-districts-ranked-by-th...
Especially in inner cities, many of the better performing school districts spend far less than the places serving poor communities. Camden NJ is one of the highest spenders, so are a lot of city schools in Illinois. Famously "good" schools, like Stuyvesant which spends about $17,000 per student, don't even make the list. It's far below the average for NY!
https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/most-stat... The question is not really is it increasing — but how much it has increased and whether that actually affords a quality education. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...
(Hint: it probably has to do with the fact teaching makes very little $ in most places and is not treated as a good career in the states)
It's a frequent talking point in the US that underperforming schools are simply underfunded because they're in poor areas and thus don't get enough property taxes, but that's not what the data actually shows. For example, you may have heard of the mass-failure of Baltimore public schools, where not a single student in 23 of the district's schools exhibited even minimal math competency.
It's the third highest-funded large school district in the US. Last year, the district was funded at 21k/student, compared with the OECD average of 12k.
America spends enormous sums of money on education and gets less bang for the buck than probably any country in the world.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/update-balti...
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-r.... https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
- Bloated school administrations and the employment of all kinds of semi-professionals that were not needed or did not even exist in the past, and which are not common outside of the US.
- Excessive credentialist requirements that sometimes actively harm learning outcomes: for example, not only do degreed teachers not produce better learning outcomes, much education science is bunk that actively harms learning outcomes. If you employ only more expensive Master's in Education teachers who you have teaching three-cueing, you end up with worse results.
- Grift and graft where various school contracts are awarded to enrich particular people; there was a video going around of an extremely nice school with a swimming pool, large auditorium etc compared to an absolute junkyard of a school elsewhere, but the nice school was actually built for much less money than the junk school.
- Endless interventions that serve to do nothing but set money on fire, like the fads around filling classrooms with iPads and Chromebooks. All of my children's math education and homework takes places exclusively on computers. There was actually another recent story where Baltimore schools are buying every student a Chromebook. Lots of educators have a sort of cargo cult belief that handing kids computers makes them tech-literate and prepares them to be a SV programmer.
- Discipline. Unfortunately there are some uncomfortable truths that people don't want to address and take serious action to remediate. A few dozen really bad students in a school can absolutely destroy learning. You can find myriads of videos of classrooms where teachers have been forced to totally give up. The only day they even bother to give a lesson is if the worst actors decided to take the day off. Relatedly, in many places, policy is to do everything possible to not hold students back, which compounds issues over the years.
I am very sure there are many more items we could add to the list. Some items will apply much more to some areas than others. Unfortunately there is no one silver bullet solution. The point is that adding more money does not do anything to solve the real problems with American education. You just end up handing more money out for graft and waste to enrich people are not actually making a difference educationally.
1. Your own child get's a good education.
2. Other people's children also have the opportunity to get a good education?
Your options for solving #1 are in many ways more achievable than the options for #2 requiring only a certain level of sacrifice on your part. Your options for #2 require political action against: School administrators and Education Unions, as well as having conversations like this. Allowing a parent to use the public education funding to choose where their child get's educated is a useful safety valve that opens up the same choices that a wealthier parent has while also adding a useful incentive to a school district to get their act together. If a school district's response is that they need money and you are hurting their ability to improve when more money has not in fact improved their performance in the past then maybe it's time to stop believing them.
The other point is none of the issues need money to solve them: The advent of remote learning during the pandemic altered students’ routines and led many to conclude that in-person attendance was optional. School districts have eased grading policies that penalized students for missing class or turning assignments in late, further reducing incentives to attend. After years of Covid quarantines, parents are more inclined to keep kids home for minor illnesses or mental-health issues. Technology isn’t helping: There’s evidence that absenteeism had already begun rising in the years before the pandemic, coinciding with the explosion of smartphone and social-media use among children — which increased distractions and weakened students’ connection to school. Those problems only worsened while schools and other activities were shut down.
Thye probably just don't want to be there.
>The pandemic showed students that adults treat them and other adults as chattel.
Exactly more than ever.
>draining education in order to have lower property taxes.
Not exactly this. There is no lower property taxes. They are trying, not very successfully, to keep property taxes from increasing as exorbitantly as they would otherwise.
- There are no real mental health services for students, especially those with extreme mental health concerns. (and even if you as a child, or your own children, don't need those services, you'll be lumped in with other kids who desperately do need it)
- Schools themselves are chronically mismanaged, generally due to funding issues. (some still don't have Air Conditioning, despite rampant global warming. Some still don't have any ventilation, despite being on year-three of a global pandemic, etc)
- Teachers have some of the lowest wages of any white-collar profession. (average pay here is $55k/yr). Teachers are so underpaid, they often can't even afford basic housing in the school districts within which they teach.
- Because of the last point, some of the teachers still willing to tolerate all-of-the-above are not necessarily folks who should be teaching. Some districts are heavily using/abusing substitute teachers as in-fill, which reduces the quality (and staff wages) even further. (google: Florida Teacher Shortage, and their plans to use unqualified military staff, as some kind of insane stop-gap plan)
- School boards have become weaponized, such that right-wing-extremists are taking control of them via poorly-noticed elections, in an attempt to destroy public schooling and make life miserable for all teachers and students. (google: Ottawa Impact or Moms for Liberty, as some examples)
- Right-wing extremists have demonized teaching as a profession, actively operate and fund hate campaigns against all public schooling, (and libraries, apparently), and they openly issue death threats or terrorism threats to any teacher who is kind to students. (see "Libs Of TikTok" and related)
It is absolutely no shocker that kids who aren't forced to go, wouldn't want to go. Why would any reasonable person want to deal with all of this?
Schools have MORE than enough money, they're just run by morons that don't spend it wisely and instead bolster admin pay and waste it on stupid seminars by grifters like Ibram Kendi.
https://www.newsweek.com/public-schools-have-spent-21m-diver...
Just because a social media account posted what they were doing and people got justifiably angry about it doesn't mean it's "right wing extremism".
You seem to be having a bit of cognitive dissonance going on. You're pointing out that public schools are a failure while simultaneously saying anyone questioning how they're run is obviously a "right wing extremist". How about placing the blame on the actual people running the schools instead of the people who are telling you why they suck.
I agree with you on that? I never advocated for raising taxes, I said "Schools themselves are chronically mismanaged" and that "teachers are underpaid" and they poorly fund their services.
> while simultaneously saying anyone questioning how they're run is obviously a "right wing extremist"
No, I'm saying the people who are running for school boards so they can openly hate all minorities and setup christian-nationalist views are "right wing extremists" -- https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4086179-six-reasons-wh...
These people are not "questioning how they are run" in good faith. They're trying to make schools hell for children to experience (and, frankly, their efforts are working)
Except this isn't happening. This is gaslighting to paint anyone who questions how schools are pushing racial curriculum as far right extremists. It's always the same argument with the left. Everything you disagree with is not racist.
Lastly, the idea that if you don't like schools telling kids that if they're a certain color they're victims incapable of ever having a good life, or they're literal slave owning devils that are given an unfair advantage.... well that's pure racist garbage. It's not "hateful" to want that to go away.
I'm aware. The opinion piece is missing a lot of the major issues schools and kids are facing right now, major issues that play into why students aren't showing up for school.
Hence, my comment above.