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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

What's the alternative? Should failing schools be given more money and discretion? Should we not have some kind of objective measures to aim for?

Because if the alternative is just vibes or through money at the problem and pray for the best, then I'm not on board.

I personally think school choice works best. If schools are bad, parents are the best to judge. And they should be allowed to send their kids elsewhere, new schools should open and bad ones should close. You know, how basically every other market system works

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If the school is bad because some of the children have a terrible home life, closing the poor performing schools to open new ones is just playing musical chairs with the issue at hand.

Evidence that they would perform just as well as kids from “good homes” if they had good homes?

The kids from good homes perform better.

Huh, it is pretty much settled that kids from "good homes" have better school results then the ones from "bad homes". The kids themselves are under less stres, they eat better, they sleep more, they have someone who cares about their school results. The parents have more resources (time, ability, inclination) to intervene when things go badly regardless of what school does.

The Gates Foundation documented that underperforming students tend to actually gain on the average throughout the school year.

The problem is that those same students lose terribly over the summer break. Students from better socioeconomic strata gain over the summer break while those of lower socioeconomic strata do not. Thus, when the school year begins again, any gains made over the school year have been more than cancelled out over the summer.

This is one of the big arguments for year-round school.

how does that work? they forget everything they learned in the past year if they don't go to school for two months? i can understand setbacks, increase of behavioral issues, but completely cancelling out?

Over 3 months it's easy to forget something that you probably only had a tenuous grasp on. My father was a high school teacher and loathed Christmas break. "I spend 4 months pouring information in, and it's gone in 4 days."

In addition, higher socioeconomic status children keep making progress during the summer.

You have relative standards. Basically test the kids at the beginning, then at the end. See how much they improved.

These are the kids you can least afford to fail. It's like having a fast progressing cancer. You have to try a lot of things because the alternative is so bad.

They're also the kids that are least likely to improve despite any number of things that might happen in the school, including basically unlimited educational funding.

The solution to improving the outcomes for these kids doesn't start at school, it has to start at home.

> They're also the kids that are least likely to improve despite any number of things that might happen in the school, including basically unlimited educational funding.

This is not true.

The Gates Foundation, whom I generally dislike quite intensely for being busybody carpetbaggers who muck things up and disappear, documented this all very well. 2 teachers and 15 students per class works. Period. Every single program that did this showed significant improvements with the most improvement in the lowest performers.

The biggest problem, of course, is that when you ask for money for 2 teachers per 15 students everybody loses their minds (except the rich, of course, who understand the correlation perfectly). Every single one of the programs that the Gates Foundation documented as working were eventually shut down because of lack of funding.

People only say they want better education. Their actions say otherwise.

You can’t even get this at a 20k a year private school. They still do 20 kids and 1 teacher. You probably won’t see this till the 50-60k level

You say this like it would be a bad thing for us to seriously consider as a nation suitably aligning our schools with more funding to provide would be unachievable.

The US is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we can figure this out.

Only because "profit" is in the way. $20K a year with 20 students is $400K per year which is more than enough for two teachers and the infrastructure and then some.

While this is fine in elementary and early middle school (which is where the Gates foudnation documented), this probably breaks down as you enter high school where teachers need to be specialized and you need to have a pool of teachers to cover all subjects.

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