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Just a couple disruptive kids per class can ruin an entire generation of students for a grade level. And there were far more than just a couple. Not to mention kids who had no business being in those classes - when the class is half full of low-performers they drag the rest of the kids down with them as the environment completely changes.
The focus these public school districts have put on the low performing and low achievers at the expense of those there to learn is astounding and perhaps civilization-ending if it continues. More resources should be spent on those there to help themselves vs. trying to shovel ever-more resources at people that will never provide a return on that investment.
At this point the local district here spends magnitudes more on special education and catering to IEP students than they do any AP level classes or other high performer programs. In fact they continue to destroy any advanced track segmentation in the favor of equity, and the teachers union nearly killed public magnet schools off entirely recently. They will try again until they are successful.
It's an obviously bad strategy, and apparently results don't matter. Dragging everyone down is not a plan for success.
This is the single political hill I will die on. Removing the ability for poor but high functioning families to give their kids a chance to get out of their circumstances because it raises uncomfortable questions is downright evil.
Other western countries everyone loves to champion so much have this figured out. Student tracks are a good thing. Put high achievers on an advanced track earlier than later and get them out of the general population of students before it's too late for them.
And yes, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been to a decent number of different types of schools that the only thing that truly matters is the other students (read: parents) that go there. Anything else is a rounding error.
As bad as it was 30 years ago when I was going to school, it's infinitely worse now from watching nieces and nephews attending their local public schools. Until they were able to transfer out to magnets at least.
Like you said, 99% of what makes a "good" school good is the quality of the other kids who go there. Since there's absolutely no political will for expelling the troublemakers (even in most conservative districts), the only remaining option is to build more lifeboats.
Being able to kick out disruptive students has a pretty big influence on the remaining students.
How do you distinguish between underperforming-non-disruptive students and under-performing-disruptive students, especially as the almost all the disruptive students are going to be underperforming anyway.
What I was getting to WRT to the GP's post about how charter schools kick out under performing students in order to "prove" that the public school system is inferior.
I'm trying to determine how he distinguishes between kids that are kicked out to make the school look better and kids that are kicked out because they are disruptive.
I already know how to do that (cameras, etc), I'm just wondering why he doesn't consider that school that kicks kids out might be kicking out disruptive kids.
Also, while I don't think students should be pushed out of charter schools purely for bad performance (if they are putting in the effort), I do think that poor minority parents should have the right to send their kids to schools that don't force students to share classrooms with disruptive or way-behind-grade-level students. When educational outcomes under the local public school system are really bad I think school-choice just makes a lot of sense as a way of figuring out what policies are popular/effective/unpopular/harmful.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
E.g. Lowell Heights in SF gets less than the average funding, and Stuyvesant in NYC gets the average amount.
Heape-Johnson, A., McGee, J. B., Wolf, P. J., May, J. F., & Maloney, L. D. (August 2023). Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City. School Choice Demonstration Project.
In some states and cities the difference is more extreme than in others.
Charter schools are I think a direct response to figuring out how to fix low performing, big school districts in the US. So while I have no idea if private or public schools do better in the Netherlands, I think we'd need to find something more like the Baltimore public school system in another country to make the right comparison.
> A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts
I find this hard to address because it's not really a matter of policy but of ulterior motives or conspiracy. I personally have no secret plan to make public education even worse by posting about charter schools on hacker news. To me it's just about giving students the option to get educated by an independent institution rather than be forced to attend some of the worst public school systems in the country.
https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/neo...
Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left. That's actually one of the big problems I was trying to point out: people have extremely strong opinions on educational policy because of these ideological left vs right things rather than on what students actually need!
So my general impression is that the republican party, nationally, note I am distinguishing the republican party form political right in the USA, has not been supportive of education in terms of financing or in promoting the necessary environment to ensure high quality and consistent education.
My general impression is that the republican party is for charter schools.
An argument that says trust/invest in the system promoted by the party that has been undermining/unsupportive of the current system does not invoke my trust/sympathy.
This is not a topic I have done rigorous investigations on, but what little I have done normally shows a lack of hard evidence and apples to apples between charter schools and traditional public schools.
They were registered as an online charter school, which is why the Ohio DOE got involved at all. They wouldn’t have investigated an individual homeschooler. (Many “homeschool networks” or the like do this because it makes it easier for their clientele to prove they’ve met the meager legal requirements of homeschooling. Justifies the price tag, yknow?)
> Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left
You’ve imagined a whole backstory and character arc for me, which is sadly more interesting than the truth. I think charter schools are repugnant because they operate under little to no oversight and, around these parts, have a reputation for abusing students (see reason one).
You seemed to imply earlier that the right wing connection was irrelevant or unimportant to the concept of a charter school. It isn’t, really. It’s an essential feature of the system, and why they’ve become so popular as of late after decades of failed leftist attempts at the same thing.
Then we also have the pure frauds, no education to the students until the finally gets shut down 5-10 years later when all inspections are done. etc etc.
Why on earth willingly let in the profit motive into this? It was introduced right wingers in Sweden too ofc, boat loads of profit to their supporters.
Now it’s also very hard to get rid of when state capacity has been reduced over the years.
So for instance 55% of the control group ended up being arrested 5+ times by age 40, while 'only' 36% of the experiment group did. I think the thing this demonstrates is that intervention can help, but is also insufficient alone. Students who are in a sufficiently high risk scenario need ongoing support and treatment that they're not going to receive at a normal public institution. And not only that but they will remain disproportionately disruptive to other student's educations at normal institutions, even with years of ongoing care.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighScope (overview)
[1] - https://highscope.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/perry-presc... (detailed paper)
There are way more metrics in there, including more crime stats. The one somenameforme chose to highlight has a ton of ambiguity, leaving it open to the reader to guess that maybe all the program participants were arrested merely four times by age 40, so in fact this program sucks (plus somenameforme's scare-quotes on "only"), but the paper itself contains far more information and paints a clear picture of outstanding success for a relatively small intervention. Somenameforme's characterization of the study doesn't match the contents.
If that's the evidence a person's citing, the evidence they've cited is screaming "this works great", not the opposite, as implied. It may still not be true, but if so... cite different evidence to support that, because this study says this intervention was wildly successful.
But read further down on the details and that difference disappeared almost immediately after the end of the intervention. It follows in line with a well known fact that childhood IQ is primarily driven by environmental factors whereas adolescent and especially adult IQ is primarily driven by the IQ of your parents - paradoxically, strengths or deficiencies in earlier life notwithstanding.
And their decision to set the baseline for arrests at 5+ is obviously doing something akin to p-hacking. It makes it clear that near 100% of the entire sample (males at least) ended up in prison, likely multiple times. The ROI from the program had nothing to do with increased productivity - it was driven almost entirely by less time spent in prison. It led to the interesting fact that 93% of the ROI came from males, precisely because the females had a much lower baseline criminality rate.
In a nutshell, the main benefit of the program was reducing the criminality rate of the experimental group to a level that is still orders of magnitude higher than for society at large. That is a good thing, but it also emphasizes that something like this would only be the beginning of special care needed to try to ensure these sort of people could live remotely decent lives.
One clever way this is measured is twin studies, which also are not what most people, particularly those who prefer to write more than read, think. You don't search for twins separated at birth, but instead compare the differences in a trait between identical and non-identical twins. If the variation is greater, then the trait is generally significantly heritable. So for example - height would be an obvious one. By contrast the variation in accent between identical and non-identical twins would be zero.
Direct genetic causality is not the only mechanism through which genes select for phenotypical traits. Genes also select and interact with the environment.
Unlike the individuals you have cited, James Watson is a geneticist, spent his entire life studying and working on genetics, and in fact was even the person who discovered the structure of DNA. But because of his views on the genetic aspects of IQ (which inherently becomes intertwined into race, as race is just shared genetic ancestry), he was completely demonized, his career destroyed, and various honors revoked. Higher profile people speaking on these topics publicly know this all too well, so it mostly just turns into cheap virtue signaling as opposed to adding some genuine insight.
In your case, the examples they've offered are simply wrong, as would be immediately apparent with the most typical method of measuring heritability!
This is a "not even wrong" situation. Is cognitive ability significantly genetically determined? Maybe, maybe not. A broad heritability statistic from a twin study isn't going to resolve the question.
Here's a good link for you:
http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html
I promise, the author has studied and thought more carefully about the question than we have.
Fair warning: you would not be happier if I cited a molecular geneticist on this subject. Your argument gets even harder to sustain once you bring GWAS into the picture.
It'd be akin to arguing to somebody who wants to claim the Moon landing was faked, and after the rather straight forward rebuttal of their argument links to some blog in the tens of thousands of words from some statistician they claim is "very smart." It's silly.
If the group-splitting decisions are made by humans, it inevitably introduces a systematic bias. That bias then will show up in the outcomes, and confound the very data you got out of your way to gather.
The easiest way to avoid that is to split the groups randomly.
Obviously we need effective justice.
But since we are on the topic of ineffective schooling, there is an argument to be made that US prisons are more effective at punishment than rehabilitation. Which seems to please some people, but just adds another undertow to society.
A loss for criminal inmates, and everyone they impact, family or stranger, after they are released.
Education is worth looking at with respect to an entire culture, with many important contexts beyond/outside school. From before school age (huge), onward.
He realises that the simplest and easiest intervention is to stop the violent crime happening in the first place, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is to intervene in the future murderers childhood. The specific example he gives is a client with a schizophrenic mother who needed more support.
Every one of us could have been kicked out of school at one time or another if we had fallen under the microscope looking for an excuse.
I expected it to be an example of how the school changes their rules to target a student, but it was just a case of school that is very strict.
Moreover, some charter schools require things like parental time volunteering, which eliminates more kids, or introductory essays - they don’t score the essays! They just require it to be done! By horrible coincidence this eliminates more cough lower performing children, who simply never submit a completed application for the lottery, so sad. This definitely happens in multiple states but here’s one specific example:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-charter-app...
If it's not scored it can't possibly eliminate low-performing children on that unconflated characteristic alone - a motivated underperformer will still get in.
It eliminates the unmotivated, which correlates obviously with underperforming. While it can be a vicious circle, I'd say no-motivation -> underperformance is of much greater relevance than underperformance -> no-motivation.
The obvious hint is how it tests the parents too. sure. maybe they are very motivated but just work so much they cannot volunteer or spare any time, but doesn't that also somewhat render their 'motivation' moot as well?
It's a lofty ideal, don't you think?
And no, I don't think that the advanced education is essential. General education is, but not advanced courses. And of course, everyone absolutely deserves a fair _chance_ to get the best possible education.