Fake because it was not designed to work - it was designed to require essentially no new funds.
Solutions to school problems exist, are known and were not chosen.
Raise teacher pay, make teaching a desirable career. Provide good school food, provide homework assistance, provide school buildings with low noise levels, provide working ventilation to lower classroom CO2 levels, make sure buildings are not fungus-infected ... the list goes on and on.
Any reason to believe any of this helps, other than 'common sense'?
The problem with the achievement gap is trying to pretend there's no inborn ability. There's always going to be an achievement gap. The schools should focus on marginal improvement, not average stats.
The meta-problem with schools is you have amateur policy makers (aka Politicians) making decisions based on voting outcomes, rather than expert policy makers making decisions based on student outcomes.
There isn't always going to be an achievement gap. Look at japan's literacy stats...
LMGTFY?
> The problem with the achievement gap is trying to pretend there's no inborn ability. There's always going to be an achievement gap. The schools should focus on marginal improvement, not average stats.
I don't think anyone is pretending that there is no natural variation in ability - however, the natural variation seems like a poor excuse for bad food and fungus-ridden schools?
You made the claim. Do you have anything to support it?
It seems you expect me to spend 20 minutes validating each of your claims for you. I'm not going to produce your argument for you; if it's only your cached thought then just say so, it's fair enough. If you actually have studies backing your belief, it shouldn't be that hard for you to cite them.
1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629611... 2. https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2009-...
Not kidding; from experience.
There are a number of studies showing the physical activity and good nutrition improve school performance. You can start here for nutrition studies (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18336680); the citations are also informative, as usual.
Pretending there is no inborn ability gap is unnecessary when we have conclusively demonstrated that we can create gaps through environment. (Just put a poor kid in a rich school and their performance goes up dramatically, and put a middle-class kid in a poor school and their performance goes down.) It is irresponsible and not scientifically or rationally defensible to just throw up your hands and say poor kids are born dumb, so it's reasonable to have a 62% high school graduation rate in DC and an 85% rate in Massachusetts [1]. Average stats are a fine place to start to identify blatant differences in outcome. We're not at the point where inborn ability is making a big difference, honestly.
[1] http://www.governing.com/gov-data/high-school-graduation-rat...
I'm sure the answer is complicated.
People keep saying this, but they leave out the fact that it's not spent equally in all places. In poor neighborhoods, the schools there do NOT get the same amount of funding as they do in wealthier American nieghborhoods.
A friend of mine taught in a poor nieghborhood. She and I had to buy books and supplies for the kids because the damn school was so underfunded.
One major example is special-needs: a single kid who needs an aid or therapist drives up the average massively but that spending doesn't benefit their classmates at all, and urban districts tend to have more of them for various reasons. (This is also an interesting factor in the charter school debate: few of the accusations about cherry-picking students note that some cities don't give the charters the same extra funding for support services, creating a massive penalty for admitting each student)
E.g., some private high schools (for the rich-rich) charge up to $30k and more, that's less than a lot of really good universities for goodness sake.
[1] http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/stud...
Also, The Education Law Center has found that low-income public schools overall spend $3,000 less per student than their wealthier counterparts, amounting to $75,000 less per 25-student classroom, yet low-income districts contain many more students likely to have higher needs due to poverty, English Language Learner status, or disability.
[2] http://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ELC_schoolf...
In other words, I'm sure the right-wing can cherry-pick anomalies (like they do with climate change, etc. and look like fools throwing snowballs on the Senate floor [3]) while disingenuously attempting to prop anomalies as "the norm", but the greater reality is that low-income areas tend to get less funding for students overall -- and, it's a problem.
[3] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-jim-inhofe-throws-snowbal...
Or, to take it further, it's quite likely a Veblen good: because only families that can shrug at $30,000 a year for private school will be going there, your kid will only associate with other rich kids, creating valuable romantic and professional networks.
It's hard to follow your jumbled sentence. However, it appears you're implying low income areas get the most funding.
That's a right-wing myth that's spewed from places like the Heritage Foundation when they attempt to profitably indoctrinate the public into privatizing schools, etc.
The truth of the matter is The Education Law Center has found that low-income public schools spend $3,000 less per student than their wealthier counterparts, amounting to $75,000 less per 25-student classroom, yet low-income districts contain many more students likely to have higher needs due to poverty, English Language Learner status, or disability.
http://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ELC_schoolf...
So, if we are to examine the realities of the situation, we find that the kids with special needs who desperately need more funding -- often get less.
Also, if you've ever had personal experience within schools located in low-income neighborhoods as many teachers and myself have had, you'd know this very directly.
You can certainly find anomalies, but to prop up anomalies as the norm reeks of agenda instead of truth-seeking.
I should also mention that I agree that funding alone certainly isn't the only issue. How the funding is applied is very important as well. However, when funding is woefully short in the first place and kids don't have the materials and supplies they need for a proper education, we have a core problem there.
Finland requires a graduate degree and (I think) a couple of years of on-the-job training in order to be allowed to teach at schools. In America, applying the same standards would mean that the prospective teacher not only has a significant amount of student debt, but would then also be pretty slow about paying it off. In that situation, why not aim for a better-paying job to begin with? It's not that teacher pay is low relative to the average wage in the US, it's low relative to what a college degree can get you.
For similar reasons, France can pay its doctors less than America and still have them be happier with the system.
In short, the US needs to spend more to pay people in high-skill professions because of higher inequality; also, other countries spend money on things that are not accounted for under primary and secondary education (such as free tuition), but later help with keeping down costs.
I'll note that education spending does not in and of itself fix the problem. There are plenty of affluent countries that perform poorly on the PISA. Attracting qualified teachers is only part of any solution. If you can't attract them through pay (which in principle is possible, not everybody wants to be rich), then the job needs to have perks to make up for it; but the soul-destroying bureaucracy of NCLB is pretty much the opposite.
Isn't this policy a federal intervention? If school funding is an issue, why not increase it at state or local level?
> Known solutions to school problems exist,
You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane!
Yes, why not? However, as a federal intervention - it was not designed to work.
> You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane!
Evidence contradict your claim. Finland has strong teacher unions. And the measures I mentioned are largely orthogonal to teacher unions.
Finland has been falling on the PISA tests and on other rankings does not do that well.
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-fo...
The answer is clear from the international results. If you want a high performing school have big classes, high stakes tests and loads of repetition like the high performing Asian schools do.
Or you could ponder why with such great schools why developed Asian countries like Korea and Japan don't run rings around the US in, say, software development and if, in the end, average school rankings don't really matter that much.
How about instead of beating people up mentally the whole time we instead focus on actually increasing their levels of job satisfaction and see if this doesn't lead to them improving at their jobs?
Or maybe continuing training for teachers?
Or instead we could just make everyone really easy to fire because this clearly leads to excellence and a real diligence in so many jobs. E.g. see the fast food industry or banking (where vast pay deals are needed to offset the essentially rubbish working environment).
The answer to an educational poverty gap is to remove the ability for teachers to gain support for professional development and to find easy legal representation?
Most teachers have a very strong moral underpin to their desire to teach - they want to help students to attain the best possible outcomes (not necessarily financial wealth); unionisation helps them to voice that desire, as well as avoid unfair employment practices and buy in to a system of professional development.
http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/NEA_Vision_Mission_and_Values... is the "Vision, Mission and Values" of the NEA, the largest labour union (if Wikipedia is right!) in the USA.
If you look at the NEA's website you'll see one of their key issues being addressed is achievement gaps, http://www.nea.org/home/AchievementGaps.html.
I fail to see how preventing professionals from working together helps the situation.
Re tenure in particular; is preventing legislatures from firing teachers without a just cause really going to help? You can fire teachers for failing to perform efficiently in their role, for "action unbecoming" of their position; you just can't fire them and not provide sufficient grounds. That doesn't sound insane if you're wanting to provide a stable environment in which to build a professional workforce.
First, if you think that teacher performance isn't evaluated, you're simply too uninformed to be participating in this discussion. Not only is there constant testing, in many districts pay is heavily linked to it. For example, where I live in DC the performance bonus for an exceptional teacher is nearly half of their annual salary!
This has a number of problems: the most obvious being that there are many factors outside of the teacher's control – poverty, attendance problems, untreated medical conditions, etc. – and the most damaging being the fact that you're talking about small sample sizes which means that from one year to the next a teacher's performance will “change” entirely due to the fact that last year they were randomly given better prepared/motivated students than this year. Cathy O'Neill was looking into these numbers for NYC and concluded that nearly 600 teachers a year are likely to be unfairly punished for random variations: http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/03/how-many-nyc-are-arbitrarily-...
Moving on to the questions of unions, again you need to learn more about the field before evaluating anyone's claims for how to fix it. Too commonly people on HN assume that teaching should work just like our high-demand, high-pay programming jobs and that mistake steers everything else badly astray.
Consider what happens in each scenario if you disagree with your boss, and ask yourself why there might be a stronger need for a union to protect workers’ rights in the second case:
Programmer in an at-will employment situation: 1. “We're not doing this right” / “You're fired” 2. Call a friend / actually reply to a recruiter 3. Interview tomorrow, start a new job in a week or two unless you decide to take a break
Teacher in an at-will employment situation: 1. “We're not doing this right” / “You're fired” 2. Since positions rarely open up during the school year, sit around for the next 6 months wondering how to pay your rent. 3. If you don't work in a major city, your former employer is probably the only employer in the same county so you either need to move or your commute just became much longer. Hope you don't have any family to make that complicated… 4. Be prepared to explain why you left, which is quite unusual and disruptive for the students, which is not your fault but will often be held against you. 5. If you do get an offer, remember that since turnover is low in good schools, unless you live an area with rapid population growth most of the positions which open any given year are probably going to be in the more stressful schools
Throw more money at this problem we've been ineffectively throwing money at for decades[1]. If we just spent a little more money on education, it would work. It's the perfect unfalsifiable position. If you say "spend money and it will fix things," and it doesn't fix things, you can simply say, "oh, you didn't spend enough, or you spent money on the wrong things. You spent money on these issues, but you should have spent it here instead. Try again."
This is not a problem that will be solved by "more money." It will require social and institutional upheaval.
1. http://www.objectobot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/cato_an...
And fixing them will fix rashes and fungus induced problem, will fix CO2-induced drowsyness, will fix excessive bloodsugar variability.
It may not bring world peace, and fix global warming, but why invent excuses to not fix fixable things?