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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.

If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.

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Seattle schools have that issue. After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs. When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things. The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world. SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers. WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.

This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.

This might have been our experience from our bubble, but are these examples representative of the overall pattern? I suspect for every 1 kid pulled out of public school because of academic reasons like gifted programs, there are 10 pulled out due to religious reasons or vaccines or the gamut of anti-government reasons.

People are allowed to pull their kids out for religious reasons.

Nobody's saying they shouldn't be allowed to. We're just speculating about the reasons and I don't know if there's really any hard data showing which reasons are more prevalent.

But that number used to be 0.25 to 10 or something.

It's clearly a growth not led by religious people, but by people who are charred from their experiences with public school systems

This is why I didn't move back to Seattle, but stayed in the nearby communities.

I feel this pain. I grew up in what I thought were great public schools and am a big believer that public school is a fundamental institution that should raise the floor for society. Now I'm raising kids in Seattle and it's a constant struggle to get the kinds of educational programs and opportunities for my kids that I took for granted when I was in public school and just assumed would still be around when I was an adult. For lack of a better way to phrase it, I feel like I am exactly the kind of parent SPS should want to keep in its system - a strong believer in public education with the means to support the schools, yet sometimes I feel like they are actively driving families like mine out of school system with their decisions.

The evidence shows that the gifted program is just racist. It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science, canonical western literature. "Gifted" is an apt name. They are students that have been gifted cultural knowledge before others so they can pretend to be special.

I'd argue that most "gifted" students are inherently dumber since they uncritically believe and internalize whatever BS their parents feed them. It's understandable that parents have desire to how power over their children, but at some point the state needs to step in and recognize child abuse for what it is.

If this is true, and I’m not saying it isn’t or that there isn’t an element of truth to it, how do you explain how heavily Asian children are featured in gifted child programs?

So, math and science are racist now?

Also, asians do best in those programs, not European descendants.

Projecting a bit much are we? It would be nice if you let your racism out of the discussion.

I do get it if gifted kid programs in music only does Classical, but no jazz (especially in US would consider this a bit odd), but Maths and Science are purely European cultural inventions now, WTF? Is this a troll? You go blaming others from racist just ending up saying something incredibly racist yourself?

Honesrly, read on some history of mathematics and science. We ”Europeans” did not invent them. No single culture did.

> It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science

Granted, our current global math and science traditions are European, but math and science in and of themselves are absolutely not European. They are universal. As in, you could literally be raised on a different planet by a different species and math would still be math, physics would still be physics.

> then there should be more introspection going on

This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.

“Disapprove of tolerance” is such a ridiculous straw man is genuinely quite amusing.

Most of the homeschoolers I know in Austin were basically hippies who found the public schools to be too authoritarian and intolerant of diversity (for example, banning dyed hair). I don't know which homeschoolers you were seeing, but it doesn't match what I saw here.

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