Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

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My sister went to a charter school until around 5th grade until IIRC she became too stressed out with the work load. I remember my mom telling me that when they switched to normal public school, it was essentially like moving 2-3 years back (which is pretty bad when you're only in elementary school), and she pretty much phoned it in from then on.

My experience with public k-12 was that AP chemistry was the only time I remember actually having to put in any effort at all, and I took almost all of the honors/AP classes I could.

So maybe some charters are a scam. Others are vastly more rigorous than their neighboring public schools. Some public schools offer essentially no education (are the public schools in those same poor neighborhoods any good?). Again, it's not obvious that giving parents some choice means outcomes must be worse. You could still hold charters to the same low bar public schools are held to for standardized tests.

Charters also select for more involved parents by nature of not being the default, so you would a priori expect them to outperform just from that.

i suggested you investigate charter schools in poor neighborhoods. they're the scams.

They're both scams, just targeting different market segments. The ones in rich neighborhoods are trying to create this prestige/competition environment which excludes anybody who is going to be hard to teach. They're acting as a filter for latent talent / parents that are motivated to help teach. Perhaps some growth happens along the way, but that's not the goal.

By contrast, if you accept everybody then growth has to be a goal. You can't just push out the challenging students to improve your performance against whatever metrics you selected for yourself.

I completely agree, but silver spoon idiots don't get it and need hand holding.

If you filter for kids that are able to learn at a faster pace, and then expect them to perform at a faster pace (as in you actually teach them more), I'm not seeing where the scam is. It sounds like they're serving a group of students that normal schools don't. It's also bizarre to characterize that as "some growth" incidentally happening; the schools challenge their kids more, and the kids grow more. It's very much an explicit reason people choose them. The alternative is those kids with latent talent/supportive parents sit in classes with other kids where they repeat the same material for 8+ years, and the only thing they grow is resentment for their peers and the adults that put them into that situation.

You're literally just pulling shit from your ass. There's no data only anecdotes.

You literally agreed with the assertion that rich schools "are trying to create this prestige/competition environment which excludes anybody who is going to be hard to teach". That's agreeing factually with what I'm saying; I'm just saying that that (separating out the kids that will learn at a higher pace and teaching them at an appropriate pace) is a totally reasonable thing to do.

"You're only able to teach kids more because they're the kids that will actually learn" isn't some gotcha. It's the point. Those kids are otherwise neglected. If public schools were still willing to hold kids to some standard, parents wouldn't be looking for alternatives.

And the point of charters or vouchers is to make that more accessible to lower income people, as opposed to today's system where private schools (which in general outperform public in almost every way) exclude most people based on cost rather than aptitude or work ethic. The school my sister went to is in a median-priced neighborhood, for example. Middle class people would like a high-quality education too.

I did not. You're replying to multiple people. Enjoy Idiocracy.

This comment[0] had the statement I quoted. This comment[1] was you saying you completely agree. Admittedly I went to public school, so I might have trouble following, but it sure seems like you're at least conceding that charter schools in better areas are better than their neighboring public schools, and you just don't like the mechanism behind that fact. Or are you saying that a prestigious, competitive environment is a bad thing?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385712

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42386794

I'm not sure about that alternative. Once I ran out of science classes to take in-house my public school just sent me to college early and paid for the classes. This was 2004, not sure if that's a thing anymore.

The scam is that there's nothing at the end of the road. You get these students that are borderline suicidal because they absolutely must outperform their peers, but it's all just ladder climbing and performance for performance's sake. That takes a toll on a person. And for what? Nobody under that kind of pressure is capable of learning anything.

Then they get to college or industry and they have to work with their peers, or apply creativity in some way, but they can't do either of these things because they're either burned out or preoccupied with scoring points in a game that nobody else in the room is playing--or at least that has been my experience with the people who made me aware that they went to private school: too focused on value to be useful in achieving outcomes. Incapable of making the best of a situation that they feel they're too good for.

Admittedly, there may be people around me who came from that background and I just don't know. It's not like I question people on it. But if that's a blindness I have it's not one I can introspect my way out of. You don't know what you don't know. All I have is these anecdotes about folks who are a sort of walking ad for whatever prestigious rigmarole they managed to survive. Eager to establish some kind of pecking order wherever they go and not invited places because of it despite being otherwise pretty cool.

I don't know if charter schools do the same thing to people, but they appear to be trying--and they've found a way to make the rest of us pay for it despite it being exactly the opposite of the what we're ostensibly paying those taxes for.

Does it really not feel like a scam to you?

I agree that pushing kids too hard to perform at a level that they're barely capable of is bad, and a lot of middle/upper-middle class parents seem to do that when it's totally unnecessary for them. I don't plan to pressure my own kids just for the sake of it.

That said, I was incredibly bored in school with a bunch of AP classes, and still didn't feel much pressure with a double major in math and engineering in university. Like I would skip my real analysis lectures sometimes because they felt like a waste of time (in retrospect I probably should've talked to my advisor to see if I could take the graduate version instead, but oh well). Some kids need a faster pace, and it's good to have somewhere for them to go. The trend seems to be if anything (particularly in certain major west coast cities) that public schools are opting out of being that place. Especially when it comes to non-AP classes, you'd might as well let those kids go home and play video games. They might actually learn more.

We're in agreement about most of that. Except that I don't think that public schools are opting out so much as being forced out because charter schools are taking the funding and the easy students away and leaving them only with the difficult ones--many of whom also need a faster pace.

That was me. I wasn't bored in school because I occupied with other things like how to steal the projector (not that I needed one, but it was an adequately challenging target). It took some very patient and clever public school teachers to refocus that energy in an academic direction. The charter school solution would've been to make me someone else's problem.

Consider this:

If we try to reinvent it like with charter schools, then we need endless regulations to prevent scams because people are greedy and act in bad faith.

Rather than make government huge and try to prevent tax grift, we could just have what's always worked and is proven.

Why are we shifting toward private schools? Because of regulatory capture.

I have to say this is probably the first time I've ever seen someone argue that public schools have always worked and are proven, and that by contrast private schools are prone to have quality issues.

The more usual thing you hear is something like [0], which is something I can't personally attest to or anything, but I've seen it expressed on places like /r/teachers as well. If true and at all common, then that sounds to me like public schools have given up entirely.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389598

I'm dumbfounded. Our country has always primarily educated people in public schools just as our contemporary first world countries do.

The problems with public education started with "no child left behind" and the odd system of giving less money to under performing schools.

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