School isn't just about education. It's also a social service.
School gets children out of the home, in some cases dangerous homes. It provides supervision for children whose parents would not be capable or willing of doing so -- rich kids get nannies, poor kids get left alone all day. It provides opportunities for socialization and puts kids in contact with adults who can serve as role models and alert authorities in cases of abuse.
The loss of these important social services matters a lot more than letting kids slip behind in math class by a year.
At least the school district in the suburb near Seattle that I live in has signs in front of the schools mentioning the lunch program is still providing food for such families and students in need.
The one place most people will experience or witness violence at least once in their life is in a school. No one mentions all the people who feel safe at home, but suffer abuse and ostracization or ignored by teachers at school.
"Socialization", its like arguing people need food and then giving them dog food.
Given most modern school schedules, lack of recess, and lunch breaks being barely enough time to eat, I heard even what socialization does take place is being diminished.
School isn't the only and definitely not the best option for socialization.
At least in home school, they mostly learn socialization by and with adults, excluding extracurricular activities and co-ops.
That will just splinter society further into divisive religious and other ideological tribes who can’t understand each other or even get along. We have some of this now but vouchers make it worse and drain the budgets of public schools. The money has to come from somewhere and it ends up coming from taxpayers. So then less taxpayer money is available to do actual helpful things.
With your vouchers, is any school required to take a voucher required to take a student?
What if the student has a learning disability? In a smaller school, that will certainly take down the test scores - will three LD students ruin the school's reputation? How about people with down syndrome, for example?
What if the student requires major accommodations - for example, the student is quadriplegic? The big school systems currently take money from all students to help out with these expensive cases.
Will these private schools with vouchers be required to maintain the same standards as the public schools? For example, can a school discriminate via race or religion?
Most voucher advocates are really looking to take the easy students and dump the hard cases on a backstop underfunded public system. Then everyone will look at the public system and say, "see how much better the private system is!"
Because the private system does not take the hard cases.
You have a lot of questions. Denmark has money tied to the child and not the school district. Look into their system for more answers.
Everything is a process of improvement overtime. The reality is, we don't have all the answers ever. What matter's is how much things are improving overtime. I don't see that with public schools.
I could easily ask you a ton of questions on how to fix Detroit or LA schools.
There was an interesting issue with the voucher system- most specifically, in areas with the voucher system, private schools are not held to the same standards as public schools. Ie. They are not tested the same for quality and they are not expected to have the same programs for special needs children.
Cherry picking data can certainly show that private and home schooled kids do better on tests. It's easy to self select and paint a great picture.
US Public schools blow everyone else out of the water if you shave off the bottom 10%. The US problem with schooling is more and more a problem of equity. People need to understand that helping other kids isn't going to hurt their kids.
US taxpayers would rather throw money at prisons and police instead of education and social workers. I don't mean schools when I say education, I mean outreach to families and help getting them what they need.
Wow, just kind of threw the kitchen sink in there didn't you. Many if not most of those go to middle class and higher families. Pretty thanks for providing the details so we can all see how disingenuous this argument is.
Private and home schooled kids consistently outperform public schools by a GIANT margin. The quality of education, by say a Montessori school, compared to public is drastically different; from building self esteem, independence, critical thinking, creativity, socialization, etc.
Public schools, are derived from the Prussian system, its optimized to create obedient workers, its the lowest common denominator in education.
Arguements of equality in public schools are out the window too when you compare the funding and quality between poor counties and wealthy ones.
Its especially unjust that parents paying for private education pay twice, for public and private.
It's really too bad that the only way we can be sure rich folk pay their fair share is to charge them twice for private education. Otherwise, my mother may not have felt it necessary to work the overnight shift at the local factory for decades in order to provide us with the basic necessities and a private school education.
We live in western New York. My wife teaches in a private school and my daughter teaches in a charter school. The New York State Department of Education provides standards and direct support for high functioning special needs students and transportation to/from special classes for those with greater needs. The students in these two schools take the same standardized tests as those in the public schools. My wife teaches college level classes in Physics and Calculus to high school students with oversight from a local community college.
This is a great deal for the students because they enter the college of their choice with a better background than a typical student.
Yes, like I said, private schools are not held to the same standards. They get to use public services like support for high functioning special needs students while claiming more profit off those programs. Additionally they get to pick and choose people who attend these schools- I noticed you only specified "high functioning" for those schools. A public school doesn't get to choose between "high functioning" special needs students and "low functioning" ones.
Perhaps an increased voucher for special needs students is in order.
Society is disadvantaged when intelligent students aren't allowed to achieve their fullest potential. We need programs that allow students to independently work at their own pace. We'd have a ton more 15-16 year old's attending college.
This still doesn't allay the issue that private and charter schools have the ability to simply decline to take up students that are more difficult for them to teach.
That there is room for improvement does not prove that a particular method would cause the desired improvement.
There is considerable reason to believe almost all variability in school performance is due to factors unrelated to the actual school itself (predominantly, the socioeconomic background and environment of the students and degree of parental involvement), which explains why limited scale efforts which require active parental choice to engage always perform better than the baseline, but scaling those up to be the baseline usually fails to have the same results. Better schools are just the schools attended by the students that would do best whatever school they were in.
So, if you aren't directing the solution at the things outside of schools that drive school outcomes, I don't expect you are going to solve any problem with the schools.
The inflexibility of the current system is an issue, at least the ability to try different schools/home school options allows people to try everything until they find what works, more so they can find a school that works best for their child.
Just like remote learning, if I don't like K12, I can try another online school, same as I dump Netflix for Hulu. I'm not even geographically limited. If there is a teacher that specializes in teaching dyslexic students and I have a child that's dyslexic, I'm no longer limited that the teacher isn't in a school within 5-10 miles. The teacher can be in another state even technically as long as she's board certified in my state. There is also a geographic arbitrage advantage, if my school system doesn't pay teachers enough to live comfortably in my city, maybe the teachers can be hired where its cheaper to live. Or teach for NYC and live in rural NY state.
We can postulate how a top down approach might work but these students will still be suffering while we sort and continually monitor (we won't) the system.
Involving market forces and allowing parents to have say in where their children will be educated puts the power in the most effective hands for change.
Denmark proves that vouchers are not incompatible, when combined with the other conditions which exist in Denmark, with good outcomes, but the other places that don't do it and also have good outcomes show that it is not necessary for good outcomes.
Good points. We just don't have that vacuum to test as gov's differ.
Market forces improve conditions. Motivations are realigned to the incentive of the parent's satisfaction with their kid's education. Service improves when you have competition.
Middle school was probably the only really violent time in my life. Several occasions I got the shit beaten thoroughly out of me and I was too scared to tell anyone about it because the fuckers threatened to just show up at my house or bus stop and beat me up even harder. I believed it. I often fantasized about bringing a gun to school and blowing them away, but knew I could never do it. It was fun to think about though as a kid.
Don't know whatever happened to those kids, but I hope they're in prison or dead, or just living shitty lives. I doubt they ever got better.
For me it was late middle, and first two years of high school. I actually had a guy wait in the hallways for me to pass by to terrorize me for one particular class. Another one I had to deal with on the bus when it got to be too much and I guess the bus driver observed enough of the constant abuse by this other kid that when the fight was over (I won), they didn't turn me in.
But I saw fights that were much worse, fights that ended in bleeding, cracked ribs and concussions, thankfully there was hospital across the road. This was in a rural region high school, in the 90s, I can only imagine what its like in places with actual gangs, today, etc.
The worse part about it is, you tell the teachers, they do nothing substantial, then you're a snitch. If you do the one thing likely to solve the problem, which is fight back, you're punished, and now the cops are called and you're likely arrested. Some kids eventually snap, and parents wonder why school shootings are a thing.
Don’t look them up. I remember hearing about someone who basically had their life thrown into crisis when they looked up their main bully and found out that he was rich, married to a beautiful woman, had three perfect-seeming children, etc.
A kid who is smiling and well behaved in a Facebook photo. Basically, the guy worked at a grocery store, was single, wasn’t an unhappy guy, but always thought karma had caught up to his bully. When he discovered that karma doesn’t exist it sent him into depression and rage.
I still remember my first fight, it was at school in 2d grade in Seattle. I was a new kid, a jerk jumped me right in class for touching his chair. Luckily it was harmless. I was not bullied after probably because I was not small or completely friendless even though I was shy and quiet.
The next time was in 5th grade in Texas (new kid again -- I was the weirdo from Seattle). Also harmless. We didn't even get suspended or put on detention in those days.
The next time was in the Army defending someone who was being bullied by a racist. That was scary for me because I was so angry I could have really hurt someone. Luckily, cooler heads intervened.
Growing up, I heard stories from cousins that went to public school in the Chicago area. Major fights everyday. Though they managed to stay out of harms way.
Back in Seattle, my son got suspended for play fighting in middle school (zero tolerance) but otherwise he made it out without getting into any fights -- it helped that he was/is very tall and a popular athlete.
Onetime when I picked him up after a dance there was a horrible fight where a large girl was beating the shit out of a smaller girl with 100s of kids whooping it up around them. Crazy time.
Plenty of more stories from his time in bad schools in South Seattle. Scenes out of a movie bad. Most people can't imagine the out-control violent environment that exists in some US public schools. Even in cities like Seattle.
I can't imagine how bad it could be for kids forced to go to bad schools in big cities like Baltimore, Philly, Chicago, LA, DC, and such.
"In Finland, where substantial physical activity is part of the school day, rates of ADHD are also very low. Meanwhile, in the U.S. children are asked to sit still for the majority of the day. Elementary school students often get only 15-20 minutes of recess a day, a far cry from the 60-90 minutes their parents had. Coincidentally, ADHD rates in the U.S. have gone up over the last 15 years. "
A common joke in the home-school community is: "I was worried my kid was missing out on the socialization of public schools, so I beat him up and stole his lunch money".
People have very anachronistic views of home schooling. A generation ago it was fair to believe to was mostly ultra religious people wanting to shelter their children. These days, a large chunk of it is people that have no faith in public schools to educate their children, and people who want to avoid political influences that are creeping into public schools.
My belief is that public schools are part of the foundation of a community.
If you're not part of them you're not invested in improving them. And, I don't mean improving them for your child's specific sake, but overall.
And, if you're not, you're not really invested in your community.
Private schooling and homeschooling are options that I view as opting for the privilege to be above or separate from the community that I live in. My values prioritized equity, and yours may be different.
>Private schooling and homeschooling are options that I view as opting for the privilege to be above or separate from the community that I live in
I'd wager that you're speaking from the privilege of living in a community where you don't have to worry about your kid being knived, shot or raped at school, otherwise you might have a different opinion. Not everybody has the income to support living in a safe community, and for those who don't, private schools are the only option to ensure their child experiences a reasonable level of safety.
> I'd wager that you're speaking from the privilege of living in a community where you don't have to worry about your kid being knived, shot or raped at school, otherwise you might have a different opinion.
Not that it makes a huge difference, but I'd wager that, outside the USA, that's almost unheard of in the developed world .
I know that doesn't make a lick of difference to an American who is in that situation, but surely it's a reflection of American society and culture, not the concept of public schooling in general.
There is a lot of violence in public schools in developed countries outside of the US.
I went to a public school in Australia in a relatively wealthy area and saw multiple gang beatings. One guy beaten so badly that he was knocked out cold for over ten minutes with people jumping on his head.
I know for a fact it's worse in less wealthy areas.
Australian public schools don't have shootings but there is enough to fuck up kid's development. They always descend into honor culture violence. I'm speculating but I do wonder if it's significant part of the problem that poor Black communities in the US face. These young boys thrown into a pit in a status game where they have to prove themselves and become brutalized in the process.
One solution to that is private schools where the staff are accountable to paying customers who won't stand for this violence. Low tier bureaucrats who can't get fired in public schools just don't care or can't stop it.
There are exceptional public schools with no violence, often they're selective, but they're rare.
Maybe? Some criminals swap guns for knives in countries other than the US (though there's still plenty of criminals with guns too). The main difference is the culture though. Violent crimes are at least an order of magnitude less common in a lot of non-US countries. I'm all for gun laws but I don't think the weapon really changes the equation much.
Schools are the same. I don't think I've ever heard of someone being knifed in an Australian school. Even though theoretically anyone could do it. There's no security or anything, it just doesn't happen as often as in the US.
As an American, I think the tolerance for violence in American society is astonishingly high. I think that our high urban crime rates and our documented problems with police brutality are symptoms of the same disease. Certainly widespread gun ownership and latent racism are confounding factors, but I don't necessarily believe they're the driving force because they are a poor explanation for the violence we see in places like Baltimore and Chicago.
I've come to believe that there is something very wrong with our attitude towards violence, and yet it's not clear to me why we are different or how we got here, let alone what policy changes could address it.
It is and it isn't, it varies heavily on where you live. Most people never see or experience violence outside of schools. For all the talk on the news, I've never seen or met someone whose encountered violence lately.
It's certainly less common in Europe as well but not unheard of. I feel like we're slowly going towards the US, with the UK leading the way, but we're still quite far away.
Where is this level of brutal violence the expectation of public school? That sounds far more like an 80s movie.
At risk of oversharing and personalizing, we attend school in Brooklyn, at a school that prioritizes inclusion of non-native English speakers and kids on food assistance. A large percentage of our classroom's kids live in public housing. It's a safe room and building.
And, please don't kid yourself about private school buying your way out of the potential for traumatic experiences. Elite boarding schools don't have the best histories wrt sexual assault.
Raising good kids and protecting their mental health is contributing to the community. Throwing them to the wolves so they can become messed up is not.
Even if I accept this conclusion without questioning, not being invested in your community is perfectly OK. Some people are not particularly 'communal' by nature, some hold views very different from the local standard etc.
Imagine that you are a pacifist in a community that holds militaristic views and they seep into the local school system.
I would agree with most of that. I'm not a collectivist, and have no interest in sacrificing my children's well-being for collectivist goals. I will do everything in my power to give them an advantage in life, equity is explicitly not my goal.
Interestingly, people involved in homeschooling tend to be very involved in volunteering. I myself volunteer more hours than I care to think about. However, they tend to be involved in sub-communities, not the public community as a whole. Based entirely on anecdotal experience, I would bet that they do more for their own communities than the general public on average, it's just focused outside the public sphere.
> If you're not part of them you're not invested in improving them.
You have little to no way to improve them. When the environment you live in is shit, the best way is to move, not to spend your life fighting to change your neighbors.
This kind of closed minded, judgemental stuff is why people don't even bother trying to explain themselves and do what's right for them be it private or home schools.
Yeah, that's actually a great argument, and no matter what school you're kid is going to be exposed to the personal crackpot values, politics, and theories of any teacher, the more likely a teacher is to share their personal values the more likely they're not something. They often forget their job is purely to deliver content based on the curriculum and there is a boundary there they need to respect. i generally respect teachers, but I don't trust someone who got a 4 year degree and certification to take an underpaying job making less than an average college educated salary, and often requiring a breadwining spouse to live comfortably, to think rationally about something including their value systems. Yes, they may have done it for other reasons, but that's still an indicator of making major life decisions on emotional thinking and further contributes to the issue of underpaid teachers (they're not going to pay you more if there are plenty of teachers willing to work for that salary). I'm dubious and sceptical of the kind of person who reads The Secret, or relates everything in life to Harry Potter, but says all religion is dumb.
I've had one teacher tell my sister my mom was awful and was cheating on her taxes in front of the entire class humiliating her because my single mother, didn't get my sister a SS card, which at the time you didn't need until you paid into SS.
You don't have to like every parent, but ultimately the child is their responsiblity, the values of a child are up to a parent to pass on. Not the teacher's or the government's role. Outside of something that is actually inflicting harm, and you can hate religion but its not the worst thing in and of itself and bad parents don't need religion to mess a kid up.
I am a teacher. Would you trust me more if you viewed my underpaid work as a charitable donation to the society in which I live?
Would you pay 60% marginal tax to see class sizes halved, salaries doubled, but maybe also remove any sense of public duty from the role?
(One more: would you like to see complete commercialization of eduction, with real salary competition driving up wages, but with the state rather than the parent picking up the bill. Compare this with college education, where student loan companies pick up the bill — you can see where I’m going with that analogy.)
Not the OP, but I would be happy with teachers earning twice as much IF it went hand to hand with removing the worst teachers from the system. Unions will fight that with tooth and claw.
It is my experience that the worst 2-3 per cent of people can ruin entire institutions if left unchecked.
Ideally you'd let the kids choose, but their brains are unformed and probably bad on average at long term planning. So I will say parents choice - they are the people most likely to be making good decisions on the child's behalf.
Also - if it is impossible to detect bad teachers, then it is impossible to hire good teachers and therefore they are hiring at random. And parental choice can't be worse than random or that would be a signal we could use to pick the best teachers.
It's extremely easy to detect bad teachers if you're a child or a parent (or another teacher). It's hard to detect bad teachers if you're a beurocrat looking at grade tables.
I had a chemistry teacher who loved the school athletes and was confrontational to the nerds. So the first set of parents thought she was great and the second didn’t.
I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.
> I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.
Unless teachers happen to spend their days sitting around in other teachers' classrooms, I highly doubt that's the case.
Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break.
They do, however, have a pretty good idea of which other teachers they personally don't like.
> Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break.
This feels like an assumption to me.
My wife is a public school teacher. There has always been heavy collaboration between her and her colleagues, even more so now with remote learning. There are certainly unmotivated and lazy teachers and the other teachers know who they are.
Is the social contract that they are allowed to disagree with you, but you get to decide what their children think? I'd bet a dollar they didn't realise they signed up for that.
Parents are on average stupid. So are government officials. Centralising the power just means that when there is a bad official, everyone suffers. Just because the best alternative is still bad doesn't mean there is a great option here. All the choices have drawbacks.
I agree all choices have drawbacks. I'm merely pointing out that using parents to judge the quality of educators due to the political leanings of educators implies parents themselves aren't politically led. I don't know if an apolitical education is possible- how does one teach history or social studies?
That is a hard question, yes. There is no universal metric that would tell you that.
That said, it is not unique to schooling alone. Bosses around the world have to address this problem as well. IDK how Elon Musk runs his "no assholes policy" in SpaceX, but he seems to be successful. Ofc, maybe his approach isn't scalable, who knows.
Parental review sounds like the perfect way to judge teachers. Parents are the most invested and least affected by nepotism within the institution. They're also way more likely to be concerned about the outcome for the kids.
In general though parents should be the ones making decisions about their children. Teachers being judged by arbitrary beurocrats i.e. what we have now sounds obviously worse to me.
The whole political argument seems weak to me. I think most parents probably care about academics more than that to begin with, but if political homogeneity is important to a particular parent, why shouldn't that influence their vote?
Least affected by nepotism within the institution, sure, but obviously affected by their relationship with their kids. Surely that would create a bias in favor of teachers who are likely to give students good grades?
If the education is subpar, the particular skills and knowledge that were missed can probably be picked up later as needed, but poor grades can alter the trajectory of your life in ways that are harder to recover from. So I'd expect parents who care more about the best possible outcome for their children more than being conscientious (which I honestly assume is a majority) to prefer those.
That emotional passion for charity fades, it becomes another job, then you have burn out. Most professions that pay well, when the passion fades, you at least get paid enough to pursue other things in your free time to fill that lack of fulfilment.
The best teachers IME have always been retired professionals who are doing it kind of like a Walmart greeter, that to me is a great time to give back your time. But they seem to be better teachers because they've been something other than a teacher and also know their subject matter outside of theory assuming they teach in the same field they practiced professionally.
There's already enough money, and each additional tax I pay towards education, gets redirected a few years later. This is what happened with lottery money. Any additional taxes for education need to come with the caveat the taxes I'm already paying that going towards education now, don't get reassigned in the next budget and the money going towards education remains the same, and it was really a backdoor way to raise taxes for other things under the guise of "education".
Personally, I think we need to buy less bombs or pay less taxes on the federal level and more on the local level, pay teachers more but make it easier to fire the bad ones, the problem will solve itself. But most additional money seems to find its way going to the administration in public schools and universities, so I'd probably start by taking money away from administration.
All my best teachers, including college, had practiced in the field. Actually your scenario is exactly what I was thinking about doing in old age given my CS teacher was math teacher that had done punch cards once in college. By the end of the class, I knew the programming language better than she did and was the one going around helping students with debugging.
I think if teachers were paid more they would feel a stronger sense of public duty. I don't think being paid less makes people feel more duty to their work.
Then again, people who homeschool do like to paint the schools in worst way possible. They do like to think school is the worsets of the worst, even when it is not.
That is called having an opinion. It is not as if people homeschool for shits and giggles. Homeschooling costs a lot of time and energy, it would be easier not to do it.
Yeah and that opinion is heavily motivated and not necessary fair assessment of school nor attempt to fairly asses the school. Whether by wish to feel that you do the right thing or by religion or politics or whatever.
The comment I responded to was literally about common joke in home schooling community that is literally that. It is not even opinion, it is exaggeration meant to paint the schools as much worst that they are. The schools have issues with bullying, it does exist. But, very realistically, "the socialization in schools consist of kids beating each other and stealing lunches" is over the top.
It is over the top, but worst experiences tend to overshadow the rest. If someone beats you, odds are you won't forget that humiliation for a long time. Ideally, people should not get beaten in school at all, much like we do not tolerate the same in a regular workplace.
Some schools manage to prevent that, good for them. Those that cannot or are unwilling to do so, will end up as bad examples in conversations.
Yes. But again, people who push for homeschooling were not all beaten not witnessed traumatic things. Quite often it is religious or political. Or living in group where it is normal.
Or sometimes having special needs kids - but these people don't need schools to be awful. They have that special need and tend to focus on that.
If we want to use the worst examples as the example to measure schooling by then I think the worst examples of home schooling should really be emphasized here. Wasn’t there a case recently where a white mother of adopted black children took and homeschooled her children after teachers tried to report possible abuse- and then the mother later went and killed her children and then herself? I believe that was the background to a popular image of a black child hugging a cop and looking into the camera with tears in his(the child’s) eyes.
I think you have causation backwards. Homeschooling is a huge burden on a family, people take that on because they have a low opinion of public schools, generally.
Every time school is mentioned on HN it is all how hell holes schools are. And how pandemic shown school is just about childcare (and childcare is bad thing).
Meanwhile, back here in real world, my kids were super happy to return back to school. Their friends were super happy to return back to school. They look forward friends and they also prefer learning in school over learning at home.
Meanwhile, I as parent found out that school teaches kids better then I did, that the lessons were about more then I realized when looking at them.
And it is not like our local school was super top heavily praised one. It is one of those ordinary average ones in system that objectively struggles.
HN demographics lean pretty heavily towards the lower end of the school pecking order. See also pg's essay on the topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Yeah, but I work as programmer in company where almost all employees are programmers. Quite a few are also the "I am technically technical type who is passionate" kind of people. Based on discussions I have, they dont have such trauma from school. Except one they dont recall about being bullied and that one studied humanities and worked in mostly non-technical position originally. He also never claimed his issues stemmed from being too smart (I wont repeat his analysis of why here, but he thinks reasons were different).
To large extend, even that essay does not strike me as something describing people I know or my experience. But it strikes me as very populist writing targeted at those who identify as outsiders. Something written by person who was obsessed by popularity and social position himself quite a lot. In our school, kids with good grades were not unpopular or hated. Good results in programming or math or literary competition did not made you outsider. I never perceived such abilities as social liability.
There was something like "unpopular" kid in our class, someone who don't have many friends. Not that everyone was friend with everyone. And I think that guys did to one what would be called verbal bullying now in one period. But in neither case it was really not because he was smarter then everyone. And none of these ended up in tech work and none was interested in tech.
The very concept of 'popularity' is completely foreign to my experience. I don't think there was a thing such as a popular kid when I was at school or high school.
I personally enjoyed a lot going to school because I could spend time with my friends. I have never witnessed any violence apart from fights form time to time between two malse wanting to show who the strongest was. I was not in a privileged school.
Went to mostly private schools in America and my home country and none of them were anything like this. I've seen some violence back home but not physical. Alcohol, drugs, general bad behavior etc were a much bigger problem and definitely the worst at one public school I briefly went to.
In every school I'd say like people hung out with like people. So the "popularity" would be limited to that in-group. Most of people who PG would call "nerds" had a clique of their own as far as I could tell.
Some people might have been broadly disliked though.
it's not just a US specific thing, it's a generation specific thing.
The scenarios described in the GP link is a very late 70s-80s (Gen X) thing. 90s and early 00s high-schoolers had somewhat different experiences, but they know the trope since that's what was in movies. Schools today have a different concept of a "pecking order" - it's not that nerds aren't at the bottom anymore, it's that the whole concept changed.
That is your kids experience but it's demeaning to call it the "real world" given so many other kids have a completely different experience. My time in school was also hell on earth and I believe it did do some psychological damage.
People who have a mostly pleasant experience in school are unlikely to comment about it. I don't doubt some people had a god-awful experience, but you're hearing from the left tail of the distribution and not the hump.
The effects you list are accurate, but they don't really enforce your main point. Just because public schools do mobilize kids out of their bad homes (by making it a parent's legal responsibility) doesn't mean it exists for this purpose.
Schools are a place for kids to learn. It's not a place to get a meal, nor a solution to a bad home life. We ensure we provide these outcomes in schools today but that's only because society/govt has failed to get these things accomplished in a more appropriate manner.
The expansion of the scope of public schooling to include mitigating a broad range of social problems reminds me of how US police have been forced to deal with social issues that they are not really equipped to handle, such as, mental health, child welfare, drug addiction, other poverty adjacent problems, or the like.
There should be another agency directed to dealing with these out-of-scope issues. Because actual education efforts and funding gets diverted to dealing with the social issues rather than providing education.
This is called "benign neglect" and for me at least, it was an _essential_ part of my upbringing. I got to pursue stuff without interference. Nobody forced me to do sports, join clubs, study anything. After I came home from school I was completely on my own and did whatever the heck I wanted, from a very early age. Want to spend an afternoon soldering something? Fine. Fixing a moped? Go right ahead. Not doing anything at all? That's fine too.
> puts kids in contact with adults who can serve as role models
Do you have kids that attend public schools? God help us all if kids treat 80% of their teachers as "role models". One in five teachers my son is in contact with even remotely passes as a role model. Older guy, leads the school band. Everyone else couldn't give less of a shit even if they tried. And why give a shit? You can't be fired for not giving it anyway.
This was a part of my childhood too - mostly due to necessity of the fact that my Mom was a single Mom and if she wasn't at work, we didn't eat or have a roof over our heads. But I never felt like I was lacking for anything... I learned to manage my own boredom, find things to do that inspired me of my own doing. It forced me to forge my own destiny to a large extent.
I realize that this was largely left to chance and that not many kids are self motivated to do much and fall in with circles of friends that lead them down a bad path, but I guess I lucked out.
I don’t think it’s luck. Look at the Andy Griffith show for a glimpse of how children used to be treated close to a century ago. Look at small villages in many parts of the world. Children are basically given free reign to go and do what they want outside of specific times (school and nighttime).
When you give a child freedom, they generally explore, learn, and exercise. Sometimes they do stupid things, but I’d be surprised if heavily structured days for children is good for children.
When I was still in school, all the homeschooled kids I met were incredibly weird and I thought the same thing. Then later I had a friend whose little sister was homeschooled and they did it right.
She was a part of some homeschooling group where the kids would get together frequently and the parents would takes turns leading different activities, often leveraging different parents' professions or special expertise. She was both well-socialized and had much more deep and engaging experiences than you can get in school.
Though you still end up with the problem of when and how to rejoin the normal world since you're so far ahead.
The other thing about this stereotype everyone remembers the one weird kid from home school. But its not like weird kids with socialization issues and social anxiety don't come out of public schools. Also no one factors that maybe the kid is being home schooled because they're weird. It's also possible they just have weird parents, and they're weird as a result, and school isn't going to save them from that.
There is probably a bias of people who choose to home school. The home schooled person I know was home schooled because their parents were deeply religious and didn't want a school teaching their child unapproved content but they also didn't have the skill or time to properly educate on things like math so they ended up far behind others.
How many people that homeschool are actually knowledgeable enough and have the free time to replace full time teachers.
I'm thinking that even if you are a competent "home teacher" you would still fall behind in areas that are outside your expertise. You'd need a collective of home teachers at which point all the perceived benefits of homeschooling disappear because you're handing your child to those weird teachers who aren't you.
At the elementary level, most people don't need child development courses to understand their own kids, its only needed to manage classrooms. So its not hard. But two college educated parents can run circles around professional teachers when you factor in the individualized focus given.
One of the major problems of homeschooling is that there is undue influence by a single perspective of the parent teaching. There is no balanced opinion. I've known quite a few homeschooled kids that believe that their opinion, preached to them by their parent is the one true opinion, or fact. That's quite a problem when there's no oversight.
That said, having spent quite some time following families on the internet that have done this with their kids - including the Bucket List Family...
I have to say there are quite some advantages if it is done right, but not everyone is fortunate enough or has the background or passion to pursue this kind of schooling with their kids. It takes the kind of commitment that not many parents have.
The problem is that homeschooling so often has lack oversight (as do private schools). There isn't always someone there making sure the kids are learning what they should be learning nor that they are getting together with other kids.
And you wind up with a few kids that do really well and others that struggle with science and still others that just don't get the help they need with stuff. It is easy to overlook a learning disability at a young age when you aren't trained to look for it.
We don't even have a program to test parents on the material they are teaching. In a perfect world, parents would have to pass testing a level or two ahead of their lessons and we'd have more short, standardized tests to make sure kids were learning what they should (no skipping out on sex education or evolution, for example).
Short, meaning once or twice a month for 15-60 minutes, depending on a child's age in addition to something akin to finals for older students.
I was home schooled all the way through high school. I often say my mom taught me to read and books taught me everything. I was a voracious reader of fiction and real books as a kid. Taught myself to program at 14. Taught myself enough to write an accounting program for my lawn care business from scratch to QBasic. I did graduate from a school-for-home-schoolers that the parents organized and got accepted to every college I applied to, choosing to go to the Georgia Institute of Technology for both a BS and MS. I had a fantastic experience. It wasn't until while at GA Tech that I first even heard a glimpse of this home schoolers are weird and mis-educated line.
Anyway, looking back I am sure that the outcome is based on what the student puts into it. My experience may not be common, but I do personally know many people from my homeschooler groups who have gone on to be very successful adults, engineers, parents, and more.
> I am sure that the outcome is based on what the student puts into it.
I strongly disagree with the idea that the outcome of child education depends on "what the student puts into it." A quality education shapes a child, instills a growth mindset, nurtures curiosity, encourages grit and perseverance, and meets the child where they're at. A barren garden is not the fault of the seeds.
This hits close to home for me as I am working with a child now who has been written off by his school and teachers as a "bad student." There is no such thing. He needs some extra support and coaching to learn some meta-strategies like asking for help when needed, planning, organization, and yes, diligence, but ultimately he wants to succeed and is capable of it, just like any other child. Children don't fail school. School fails children.
I appreciate your perspective as the father of an under 1 year old. She is our first and I have a lot of learning to do.
I was commenting on that my homeschooling experience was great. However, I have a small direct sample of myself and my siblings and some homeschooling group friends.
because a lot of public schools are horrible. All you need to know about my neighbourhood's elementary school (Bay Area, 20 min by bicycle from Apple's new campus) is that it has metal detector on entrance.
Why? Gang activity. In freaking elementary school. School rating is 4/10 if you are curious.
Can't they just suspend and subsequently expel all the students involved in gang activity and gang culture? What is the problem preventing people from fixing gang activity in elementary schools such as that one?
That would just institutionalize gang culture. Do you really think gangs really care about education? They care more about having active and indoctrinated members. You can be more active and can be easily manipulated if you don't go to school.
Very often homeschool families collaborate to provide social activities. Or they put their kids in community sports programs or other group activities. Homeshooling doesn't mean the kids never leave the house.
Not to mention co-ops, flexibility (a parent is traveling some where for business, etc, take the kid and use it as a teaching opportunity, or its a nice day, nature walk this afternoon).
The amazing part is how much of a child (and the teacher's time) is wasted, especially as class sizes grow and resources are strained (https://greensboro.com/opinion/columns/christie-murphy-why-i...). Home schooling usually takes half the day to get through all the required curriculum, because of all the time saved not getting 30 students to be quiet, lack of interruptions, etc. So little is getting done now in schools kids are coming home with hours of homework. Not good at explaining a subject, or the kid is having trouble groking it from the material, pull up a video on Khan Academy, or Kurzgesagt, or even a presentation by an Ivy League professor (like CS50) or someone who is foremost in the field. Have a fellow homeschool parent whose an expert in a field, let them teach help. Want to teach your kid financial planning, investing, and how to do taxes, you can. One style or mode of learning isn't working, try another like Montessori, direct instruction, don't need to run it through an administration, school board, and state officials. In a school, few if any breaks are given with no concern for attention spans, or mental burnout, you have to DO THIS THING AT THIS TIME. If the kid wants to do his lesson in a fun way, like dress up as Batman, he can, as long as they're doing their lessons, etc.
Are their parents who half ass it and their kid barely learns anything sure, but compared to the literacy rates most schools are producing they don't get to say much.
So true. I would even add that these social activities include kids of wide age ranges which is a much better way to prepare children to real life. Life is not composed of groups of people of similar ages.
My wife was homeschooled, I went to public school. She decided to home school our three kids. I was skeptical at first.
I was absolutely shocked at how quickly they cover all their subjects, homework, etc. every week. My kids get 10x the amount of play time I got at their age. It's great. Makes me regret all those years I spent in public school.
Down-vote me if you’d like, but the opposite is also true, in many regards:
Where I come from (Germany), (public) schooling is seen as a way to indoctrinate children to their government’s political agenda (call it a religion if you like).
So as always, it depends: good parents, good home schooling. Bad parents, bad home schooling. Replace “parents” with “government” and you get the same message.
Edit: As a German myself I’d like to add that your question reflects an attitude of the socialist/communist German Democratic Republic (you also know it as “DDR”): family is nothing, government is all. You leave all thinking and your responsibilities to the political agenda and world view of your political “leaders”. Is that a world you’d like to live in (again)?
For the record, I've seen you reference your username before and I still don't entirely understand what the word means, though I did look it up at one point.
Anarcho-capitalism is a similar ideology to libertarianism, only more extreme. Proponents are called Anarcho-capitalists or "ancaps" for short. The idea seems to involve being able to start a private alternative to government (with your own private police force enforcing your own laws, etc.)
Imagine your police force is just a bunch of robots controlled via AI. The AI control problem is generally applicable to anything with the authority to project force. How do you make sure you build an AI that won't harm you?
Now think about swapping the AIs with humans. How do you make sure you build a private police force that won't harm you? You cannot earn trust with money because a private police force can just point their guns at you and take your money.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist as well. For me, there is nothing that could make the case that it's morally wrong because the premises are entirely moral and correct in my world-view. It basically starts with very few solid premises that (I think) most people would agree on, and builds an entire moral framework of rules on-top of those to define how human interaction should go.
The Non-Aggression Principle(NAP) is what it all boils down to. I would argue that a lot of the laws we have are just re-iterations or complex versions of the NAP.
This does mean some things "slip through" that we're used to as being laws/rules in our society, but I think that in the such a society, we would organize and solve them to a satisfactory degree using means that don't violate the basic rules as set down. There are huge volumes of people trying to solve them without violating the NAP and I think it's possible if we built a society slowly over time on such a framework that it would work.
Pragmatically, however, I know we won't be able to achieve it in the near future (or ever) without a "reset" or a "fresh start" that allows the idea to practice, be fleshed out, and hopefully flourish. It can't just be "slapped onto" our current society and hope things work out, that'll result in chaos and put us in apocalypse territory. This is also why I'm very disappointed with all the "outer-space" related laws and treaties that are basically disallowing the possibility for new societies to form without the old ways of doing things.
I would feel very sad, and I would want to do something about it. But I would do so without breaking the NAP. Which means not taking other people's money/labor and letting some third-party spend it as they see fit under the guise of "reducing suffering", even though the goal is noble. I would spend my own money to the degree with which I'm comfortable and how strongly I feel.
This doesn't mean it's a "less moral" system. As a counter-example: Would putting surveillance cameras inside every house to prevent domestic violence be a "more moral" system just because it reduces more suffering? Where do we draw the line for which rights we're okay with violating in order to stop suffering? I just put it at a very non-arbitrary spot, which is the NAP.
Another one that confuses me to no end is how anarcho-capitalism isn't a paradox? Capitalism is inherently authoritarian while anarchism is libertarian. They are opposite ends of the same spectrum.
Capitalism isn’t the most precise term to use, honestly - it’s an economic system, not a social system.
Capitalism is not in any way “inherently authoritarian”. That assertion is false on its face - it basically boils down to private ownership of property and voluntary exchange. The means through which those things are ensured is outside the scope of an economic system.
I may differ from most ancaps in this respect, but I don’t think so - I don’t expect that we could flip a switch tomorrow, eliminate the state, and live in peace. In most places, it would be violent chaos.
The key thing to implement a stateless society is to change the root expectation that a central authority is a necessity. That happens over generations, piece by piece.
I don’t want to overthrow governments - I want them to wither away due to lack of interest.
It's a differentiator from "pure" anarchy (which is opposed to hierarchy in relationships) and the other more specific subsets like anarchy-communism (which rejects private property).
The idea that is shared is that individuals own themselves, and therefore own the product of themselves.
Why do you feel so strongly about it that you have to derail the discussion with a cheap/petty jab that adds very little to the conversation? At least in this thread it was mostly civil and borne out of curiosity on the topic.
It's akin to me saying "Oh, such a lovely well-functioning government and society you have there that allows X-thousands of people to die of treatable medical issues every year and Y-thousands of people to be living on the streets homeless and without any assistance, and watches idly as millions die of malaria and hunger across the ocean".
I expect it - it always happens in public discussion of extreme ideas. I either ignore it or use it as an opportunity to clarify my own thoughts on the subject and to share them with others who are reading the thread.
If I’m correct, my conviction is that my ideas will win in the end. That will require them to be spread to a public as a whole, and “cheap/petty jabs” draw eyes. This discussion honestly rather unlikely to change any minds, but if it does, I doubt it it will happen through throwing insults.
The fact that you yourself call it an extreme idea should be a dead giveaway that it probably isn't tenable. When designing a system always be sure to design from the perspective of the losers as well as the winners. Being a loser in an ancap world would be one of the shittiest lives one could imagine.
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
“Extreme” only means that it’s outside what is currently in place and what is generally accepted. I’ve arrived at an extreme political position because that’s where logic has lead me, not because it is extreme. It gives me pause, but my position has been only reinforced by introspection and discussion with others.
> When designing a system always be sure to design from the perspective of the losers as well as the winners. Being a loser in an ancap world would be one of the shittiest lives one could imagine
I don’t disagree - but I would also point out that being a loser in our current system is no walk in the park, and that being poor isn’t the only way to lose. At least in the system I envision, there’s recourse against the dominant powers in more cases than there is today. If you have a serious dispute with the state... you’re pretty much out of luck.
I also find schools a good place to meet different people. However ask your parents if your teachers (even if not pro-DDR) were able to speak freely? Would you like to have teachers who speak through a mental/political filter?
Yeah, people are quick to point out extreme cases, but ignore the kids who come out of schools with socialization issues. Bad parenting is bad parenting. There are also just as many if not more students who come out of public schools undereducated, and struggle in life. It's weird how even though test scores are better with home school students, and its even seen as superior by Ivy leagues because it often produces the kind of qualities they seek.
People post here all the time interesting new studies about child brain development, they put kids all in the same grade but studies show the brain develops vastly in 3-6 months at a young age and surprise, the kids that are born at the right time so they're the oldest in their class perform better on average. There are studies about the need for more sleep in adolescents, etc. Has schools adjusted to this new knowledge, assigning less homework, no, they run the same schedule they did 100 years ago.
Instead of socializing in a Lord of the Flies environment, they're mostly socialized by and with adults. They've also become authoritarian environments closer to prisons.
Anecdotally, this stereotype seems to exist in the United States as well.
When it comes to data, the 2016 National Household Education Survey by the National Center for Education Statistics shows that 51% of parents selected "A desire to provide religious instruction" as an "important" reason for homeschooling their children, and 67% selected "A desire to provide moral instruction" as an "important" reason for homeschooling [0, in bar plot form; 1, original data].
"Don't do drugs."
"Sex is great, but you need to wait until you're ready to handle it because it has serious emotional and physical consequences as well. If you do though, use a condom."
"Don't treat people that way."
Its disingenuous that state run schools don't have their own moral instruction as well. Although I can't find it but I remember a post where a student got in an argument because the teacher failed them for saying ethics and morality were two different things and the teacher argued it was the same. So I don't exactly trust them to do it either. Ultimately it is up to the parents to teach kids their values, not the state's.
The parents have the most influence on a child's values anyway, short of removing them from the home, not much changes there.
> Its disingenuous that state run schools don't have their own moral instruction as well.
No one is saying otherwise. The survey says that parents have a desire to provide moral instruction.
> Although I can't find it but I remember a post where a student got in an argument because the teacher failed them for saying ethics and morality were two different things and the teacher argued it was the same. So I don't exactly trust them to do it either.
Why generalize from what seems to be a single anecdote?
It definitely happens, without question from my perspective.
Personally, I don’t think it’s something government should try to “solve” - of _course_ parents want their children to share their views.
From a practical standpoint, it’s been difficult for us to find homeschooling communities that aren’t one of two extremes: new age/“hippie” or fundamentalist Christian. While my wife and I are Christian, it’s important to us for our children to get a thorough and well-rounded education. That entirely rules out a lot of resources for us, and we end up picking and choosing quite a bit. For instance, we’re using the Abeka math curriculum at the moment, but their science curriculum isn’t at all acceptable.
Czech here. Guess who outlawed homeschooling in Germany (Reichsschulpflichtgesetz). Yes, it was him. No children outside state control. Unfortunately the modern German state likes this idea too.
We have homeschooling in CZ. Not many people use this option, but those who do usually do so because they see schools as inefficient. When I was a kid, at least a third, sometimes more than a half of every lesson was spent on various logistics, individual examination of pupils by the board, or simply disciplining the class. This is a very wasteful use of time, our most restricted life asset. In individual training, you can teach all the necessary stuff in three hours and then, for example, go for a hike.
In my experience homeschooled children are the most fit ones. They move around a lot, not being forced to sit (the worst position for a human body) for endless hours.
Coming from a similar socialist state, I don't see that time (logistics, individual examinations etc.) as wasted: I read lots of comic books under the table and played various individual/group games during that time :)
That's a very old ignorant view. It probably was more true for a time, many parents didn't wanted their kids thinking Jesus rode dinosaurs, etc. But ultimately even then, in a few cases that didn't hold them back, they usually got into adult hood figured out their parents were likely full of crap in college, but because they also learned math and reading, and did often better, which is actually something needed practically and were successful as a result.
Many modern home school curriculums are secular are taken from the same ones or follow the same standards/guidelines schools use. Majority of home schoolers I know are secular, and want better options, especially those to meet the learning needs or styles of learning they themselves or their kids thrived in. They don't believe either because their own experience or what they've seen with their kid that kids learn best in a very rigid, sit down, and be quiet and listen model of instruction that was designed for factory workers and has barely changed in 100 years.
Also, there's nothing stopping a parent from putting a kid a private Catholic/Jewish/Orthodox/etc school, etc that will do the same. Parents can indoctrinate their kids, home school or not, into a religion, they have them on evenings and weekends where the ultra religious just take the kids to their religious institution 4-5 times a week.
Right, it barely matters, if anything the sheltering shocks the person so much when they are finally exposed, they question everything and usually end up distrusting or taking issues with the parent.
As opposed to having the school do it? To their belief system that maybe isn’t “religion” but is still based on a certain type of faith and moral opinion. Public schools are littered with teaching kids _what_ to think, not _how_ to think.
I get your point and in particular I understand Germany’s caution. But what is wrong with a parent teaching their child their morality through religion? Why is having the state control this less dangerous? Why is religion bad?
Take a look around this planet and oppression done in the name of religious superstition, but for a more charitable argument, even if religion is good, children deserve to have a diverse and secular upbringing if we care about the religious freedom of the child.
I'm also German, and here children are essentially mini-citizens, not some sort of property of their parents, with about as much autonomy as a mule. It's not about whether religion is good, it's about whether children have the right to be brought up, from an early age, in an impartial, dvierse and social environment, rather than being indoctrinated by their parents.
the US system doesn't treat children like citizens with autonomy and rights in their own right, but leaves them to the whim of their parents, regardless of what quality of education or values they can provide. That is incomprehensible to me,and I'd argue it actually harms the freedoms and rights of children and their autonomy. It's outright medieval to me to be honest.
>Take a look around this planet and oppression done in the name of religious superstition
I've sure you've heard the argument, but last century over a hundred million people were killed by atheist movements (Maoism, Stalinism), way more than were killed by any religion. And this century the most repressive governments (China, North Korea) are atheist too.
I'm not sure how a totalitarian regime is atheist. It simply replaces gods with the supreme leader, who is like a god, but worse, since the supreme leader exists. Soviet communism was a religion 100%.
Prussian's realized when most conscripts were faced with war, they would pee their pants and run away.
"The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed."
This horrifies me. More so that we do it here in the United States.
Let me put it another way, for the purposes of illustrating the principle: “Of course we should have a shared culture. Here it is - _my_ culture. If it’s in conflict with yours, too bad, we’re going to make sure your children are indoctrinated into it from an early age by taking them out of the home for eight hours each day, five days per week.”
As a half German living in Germany my impression is the government make the people far too reliant on the it and the people mostly just go along with it. It’s the biggest criticism I have of the country. So many people I’ve met abdicate personal responsibilities because of the system.
While I’m definitely in the camp of “it’s none of the state’s business”, stating that and expecting it to change minds is... not a very well-informed approach.
Studies are almost unanimous. Homeschooled kids are more successful in college, get almost an entire extra point of GPA on average and earn more money than other kids.
I'm aware anecdotes don't hold up to data, but I'd like to share mine.
I attended a charter STEM higher school which I toured in its first year of operation and entered as a first year during its second year of operation where there weren't yet any students in the 12th grade. A lot of the students who were part of the first batch and even the second batch were formerly homeschooled and were involved at hearings to provide arguments for why the school should get its charter. I myself was coming from a gap year as I saw that I wasn't learning anything beneficial by continuing my education at my district's middle school. Maybe it's because it was specifically a STEM school, but nobody was any worse because they were homeschooled. I'd argue that's why students were more driven to pursue their projects.
Tangent that I edited out:
As the school's reputation grew and began intaking more students from traditional backgrounds, I must admit that many alumni feel like the quality of the students went down. It seems like those weird home schooled kids who were weird enough to pursue their interests were the key to building the school's reputation, and that kids who had gone to traditional schools where disrespectful behavior existed were bringing that behavior with them. At my high school every teacher, even if they were phds, was referred to by their first names. We had no detention, as we didn't have any bad actors. We were trusted to spend 20% of our school hours collaborating on moonshot projects and went out to restaurants and businesses everyday during our hour long lunch breaks to learn to behave with our community. I took for granted my 4 years there as I didn't realize how unique of an experience it is to be part of a school startup.
The data seems to be a data set of 74 homeschoolers. Not super compelling.
And yes I agree that being able to homeschool your kids is definitely a privilege, unfortunately.
Maybe we can at least meet half way and say that homeschooling absolutely doesn't create these mythical, supposedly antisocial weirdos then, and it is completely possible to have healthy well functioning homeschoolers.
That is a meta study, the example with 74 homeschoolers was just one of the studies. Next time don't just read until you find a line you can attack and instantly stop there. Here is a more comprehensive excerpt:
> Frost and Morris (1988) found in a study of 74 Illinois homeschoolers that, controlling for family background variables, homeschoolers scored above average in all subjects but math. Wartes, similarly, found that homeschoolers in Washington state scored well above average in reading and vocabulary but slightly below average in math computation (Ray & Wartes, 1991). The HSLDA-sponsored studies also found that homeschoolers do comparatively less well in math than in language-based subjects (Ray, 1997a; Rudner, 1999). Likewise Belfield (2005), in a well-designed study that controlled for family background variables, found that homeschooled seniors taking the SAT scored slightly better than predicted on the SAT verbal and slightly worse on the SAT math. A similar study of ACT mathematics scores likewise found a slight mathematical disadvantage for homeschoolers (Quaqish, 2007). Given this persistent corroboration across two decades we might conclude, tentatively, that there may be at least a modest homeschooling effect on academic achievement—namely that it tends to improve students’ verbal and weaken their math capacities.
Most notably, look at the last sentence:
> Given this persistent corroboration across two decades we might conclude, tentatively, that there may be at least a modest homeschooling effect on academic achievement—namely that it tends to improve students’ verbal and weaken their math capacities.
This kind of info is not actually useful when weighing it up.
The homeschooling is only as good as you want to make it and are capable of making it. You can teach math and care about it? Might go great for your kids. You can't add but think it's ok if you just pray lots? Not so much. So many hard-to-identify confounding factors. Randomised trials these are not.
The correlations here just don't inform your decision.
You want something like: Probability of some particular kind of success given your reasons for doing it, resources and ability. This is an elusive thing to estimate even if the data were very much higher quality.
The other thing worth noting about these studies is they're old. 2007 is /ancient/ compared to the resources you have at your disposal now. The Khan Academy problem bank alone is likely to assist homeshcooling math score averages significantly. That one thing alone is a hell of a resource for homeschool teachers to learn what they need and for students. There are a stack of others too. Darwinian selection will likely pick a few winners that are just great too.
I have only pandemic homeschooled children. I have some reasons you don't care about for not doing it. People considering going that way can probably take a mountain of salt to the claim "Homeschooling is really bad for STEM..." made by username90. When dudul points out "The data ... [is] not super compelling" That seems like a very fair observation to me.
But nobody here is getting papers published, citatation metrics enhanced and so on.
In the absence of clear and compelling data, your prejudice about decisions concerning your family are better than those of some random stranger regardless of the robes of authority they wear.
I think everyone would have to admit that homeschooling can produce healthy well functioning adults, there are plenty of examples to point to. I think you'd also have to admit that it can produce antisocial weirdos.
I wouldn't admit either of those things, actually. Both are possible but neither certain and could also be false.
Perhaps the healthy, well functioning adults would have been so regardless of schooling. Perhaps the weirdos would have been so regardless of schooling. Perhaps schooling makes the difference for a proportion less than 100% of the students? How much less? Under what circumstances? Who could know with any confidence?
I honestly don't know how you could get clear evidence to say one way or the other as to schooling contribution to the causation of "weirdo-ness"
A school system produces the people who go through it. How much impact the school system had on them is obviously unclear. Whether they came out of it, however, is unambiguous. Therefore, since it is true that the school systems have produced at least one person of these types, it is also true that they can do so.
I love my children, but I dont want to stay at home homeschooling them. I really dont, I am very sure I would be quite unhappy with that. And I am very sure about that, because I did stayed home for some time why they were small and it was most depressive period of my life.
It is not just about money. Majority of guys here talking about home school as being money issue would not volunteered to leave their job to be stay at home parent long term. They just want somebody else to do it.
In good old times if a student told teacher to fuck off a teacher would've given a student a cuff on the nape and the conflict would've been resolved.
These days? Nope. You're not allowed to touch children. You're not allowed to yell at children. You can call parents at school and have another "he didn't do nothing" conversation.
So what you do? You introduce zero tolerance rules. You call the police. You turn school into prison where the same set of extremely strict rules is applied to each and every student.
And all of that could have been prevented by just one gentle slap!
When I was in school 35-40 years ago (in the south) they would literally beat you in the butt with a board. One coach had a whole collection of different shaped paddles hanging on the wall which he would point out the first day of class.
It wasn't a joke either, I remember a guy showing me his butt with a big nasty purple bruise on it the shape of a board. I got paddled once but the teacher took it pretty easy and I just had a little red. He was a weird old guy and I think he mostly liked hitting bent over young boys with boards.
They could pretty much do it for any reason and some kids not popular with teachers were paddled pretty regularly. Shortly after my time this was discontinued and I was not at all sorry to see the practice go, but now we have gone too far the other way in my opinion. Calling the police on kids for minor infractions is way over the top. But some semblance of order has to be enforced or no one can learn.
I feel like you learned more about life back then (maybe in sort of a "Lord Of The Flies" way to be fair). Most everyone could do what they wanted after school without worrying about stranger danger and having adults hovering over them the whole time and there was a lot of freedom to explore. If you fucked up though, you got paddled and you might get beat up by a fellow kid without a lot of recourse to authorities. It was just a rougher time, but more free as well which probably sort of describes the history of humanity also come to think of it.
I don't know which is worse, then or now. It seems kids were more self confident and self reliant and less neurotic back then. But there were a lot more physical fights and odd kids had a really tough time and kids who came from rough situations often really got beat down by the system. Literally.
There's a pretty wide spectrum between: "Can't discipline kids that act up" and "Beating kids"
Kids need boundaries. It's literally what they spend a good portion of their time testing for. If you aren't allowed to provide boundaries for them, then they will flounder, which turns into a self-reinforcing cycle.
The only tool I remember teachers or schools having the ability to wield against students when I was in school was suspension or expulsion. Are US schools not allowed to suspend kids?
I've heard from some teacher acquaintances that it's highly discouraged because the parents tend to complain a lot and the kids view it as a free vacation from school.
It sounds like "try to ignore them" is basically the only recourse teachers have in some districts against disruptive or worse students.
My dad was a public school teacher and his last year got a class of “sweat hogs.” Three students were extremely disruptive, regularly. He went to the principal and said he wanted all three out of his class or he’d quit. Next day two were suspended but the third wasn’t. He told the office he’s stay until noon to find a sub. Later that week, the third student was arrested for stealing an 18 wheeler and driving it across the state.
There's also detention and "in-school suspension" (which is basically a big detention).
I think these punishments are commonly decided by administrators, not teachers. The teacher just reports them up the chain for misbehavior.
Suspension and expulsion are becoming embroiled in the anti-racism crusade due to some high-profile incidents, so blunt laws are being written to outlaw them altogether.
That sounds more like daycare than school. Children don't need daycare. They should go to school to learn and at other times be out playing with other children. Teachers are supposed to be good at teaching, not good at looking after children. That's what the parents are for.
I've really re-evaluated my views of public vs. private schools during this crisis. I like a lot about our local public schools, but the district is strapped for cash and we are wondering if our kids will be back this school year.
Meanwhile I'm browsing private schools websites and starting to notice all the opportunities my kids are missing. Private schools can offer so much more and I'm not sure why we never seriously looked into them. They cost, sure, but we could put the money together if we wanted to.
There's been a steady outflow of parents from public to private around here and I don't think those kids are coming back. I don't know where this ends, but I don't think it ends well for public schools.
The real pity is that your local public school is likely spending a similar amount per student as the private schools![1]
Our public school system spends a ton and seems to not get a good value for that spending.
You can believe in government funded education without believing in government run education. After all, we have a food stamp program but few would argue for a government grocery store chain instead of food stamps.
Why is it that the cities in America have such great restaurants but such poor schools?
The pity is that public schools are now the backstop for real social services that have already failed. Much like police being used to combat drug addiction and mental illness. It's a burden/cost that private schools don't have to deal with.
The solution isn't to go all-in on private or charter schools. It's to get real social programs back up and running so that public schools can just be schools.
> Our public school system spends a ton and seems to not get a good value for that spending.
Our public school systems spends a ton to support low income students and special ed. I don't blame them for being broke but I suppose at some point my egalitarian principles aren't enough and I should do what's best for my kids rather than what's best for our city.
I agree with your concerns, but my motivation would be slightly different. The brightest kids. They will be running this country in twenty years. They will be designing bridges, doing surgeries and writing our laws. We want to invest in them.
I strongly believe that a lot of our brightest kids are languishing in bad schools due to poor family circumstances and I think it should be a source of national shame.
I vote both hands for AP programs in poor schools.
I'm just saying that if we can only retain one of "special needs" and "advanced", I'd pick advanced in a blink of an eye due to the reason explained above.
> I vote both hands for AP programs in poor schools.
Everyone I have ever met who took AP classes in high school treated them as "get college credit without having to actually learn anything." They seem like a joke to me.
Nobody remembers stuff they don't use. It's more like "get college credits without paying". Having a semester out of the way is an instant 12.5% discount. If you go to a school that has asinine requirements with regard to freshman and on-campus housing it could be effectively a much larger discount.
I thought most of the funding comes from local property taxes. That means there are little or no cross subsidies. I image special ed is a huge cost, specially for kids that need to be home schooled. But even that is unlikely to explain the high cost of public schools, and it definitely does not explain the increasing costs.
> Why is it that the cities in America have such great restaurants but such poor schools?
This isn't really accurate, is it?
Food options for the poor in America are pretty notably terrible.
Nutrition-wise, it's not great for most of the middle class either.
If you have a lot of money, you can find people to help you in America, which is true for both food and school. But I'd much rather be poor in a public school - I went to one - than be poor and have to rely on the bottom of the barrel of the US restaurant and food system.
I haven't seen evidence that the private or public school system is particularly GOOD at overcoming a lot of the challenges that many kids face with poverty, but I also haven't seen the free market in the US be good at providing the poor with quality options in other areas.
(Note also that there are many many countries with much more socialized government programs that also have good restaurants too! Ones that might sneer at the chain-heavy state of American restaurants in most US cities!)
> Food options for the poor in America are pretty notably terrible.
If you have middle class taste this is true. But the poor don’t have middle class taste. The market provides them with what they want. In areas where the poor are recent immigrant communities that’s cheap decent quality materials to cook at home including fresh produce. Where the poor have been in the US for multiple generations it’ll include a great deal more McDonald’s, KFC and highly processed convenience food.
> The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States
> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.
Yes I lived in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood when I was in college, and there was the cheapest supermarket in town there, and great Mexican food joints that were open 24 hours and extremely cheap. I never understood why people line up at McDonalds at lunchtime when there's so much better food around.
Mostly, i think, because when you see the mcdonald's sign you know immediately what is available there, what it tastes like, and how long it will take to get your food.
If you live in a neighborhood, you'll probably get to know all the local joints, but if you're not familiar and you have things to do, McDonalds is probably the safest bet.
Most people spend most of their time at or near home or at or near work. Everyone except tourists and those traveling for work knows the local joints. McDonald’s isn’t popular for lack of alternatives or uncertainty. People genuinely like it.
Families with kids at charter schools choose to put their kids there. Kids left in bad public schools may have less parent support. So there may be some selection bias involved that can't be overcome with any amount of money.
That is addressed in the book(this counter argument was my first reaction as well). Charter schools get kids from lottery(demand FAR outstrips supply) well they did research and tracked kids who were in lottery and did not get in. Their outcomes were far worse than those who got in.
My own conclusion from reading it is that few things really make difference:
1. Charters have strict discipline, violence etc is not tolerated in any form. Public school in bad areas are chaos
2. Schools can easily fire teachers who do not perform well. In public school system you need to rape or murder someone to get fired.
3. Shitty charter schools lose their charter and go out of business
>My own conclusion from reading it is that few things really make difference: 1. Charters have strict discipline, violence etc is not tolerated in any form. Public school in bad areas are chaos 2. Schools can easily fire teachers who do not perform well. In public school system you need to rape or murder someone to get fired. 3. Shitty charter schools lose their charter and go out of business
Basically all the same reasons that rent-a-cop type security places never have problems with hot headed jerks the way municipal police departments do.
I have a hypothesis that most of the students causing problems at today's public schools are the result of problems at home; be that a lack of resources, parents whom society hasn't given the time to be parents, or a lack of knowledge about how to be a good parent.
Better social safety nets and support for everyone should be an real investment in the future for everyone.
My SO has taught in some rough schools and home issues are part of the picture.
It also seems like especially disruptive kids need to be moved into classes with increasingly smaller numbers of students. That way teachers can more fairly provide for the needs of everyone.
Of course this would all be more expensive. So as a society we'd have to agree such solutions are worth investing in at a scale that will make a significant difference.
our two kids (elementary school and pre-school) go to a private school in Bay Area and we are very happy now. They have in-person classes with very strict high covid-related guideliness. When they were required to close they offered an excellent online classes and lowered tuition 35%.
On the other hand, a lot of our friends with kids of similar age are super unhappy about their public schools.
The quality of education and online classes is very, very low and they can't re-open in person due to class sizes. I now know several families who basically ran away from public schools to either do homeschooling (with other parents) or private school. Very sad situation to watch
I'm genuinely curious what "excellent online classes" look like, especially for early elementary school. My second grader in Seattle Public Schools isn't learning a thing (except for how to troubleshoot MS Teams).
for pre-K: music - singing songs with her class, also dancing/gymnastics (project to a bigger screen). story-time after lunch.
for kindergarten: actually a lot of classes: art, second language (most kids in school are bi-lingual En+Ru), basic reading and math, also music, dance, gymnastics (again bigger screen helps here).
I would say it was actually pretty good and easy on us (parents) for kindergaten. But, yes, it is still tough for pre-K kid as she needed much more attention from us.
What we have right now is partially privatized schooling with a public back-up. The private schools don't have to deal with the problem of capacity in general, and in the geographic distribution of capacity in particular. They don't have to provide capacity for special needs kids.
You can choose a prime location to build a private school for 100 kids, and be reasonably assured that it will be filled with 100 kids. If not, it shuts down and the kids go elsewhere or back to the public schools. This happens sometimes.
And while the training of teachers is certainly a worthy matter of debate, the hiring of teachers by public schools is coupled with a standardization of teacher training and a guarantee of reasonable wages thanks to the union.
I predict where it ends is a small number of companies form an oligopoly of private school operators that are perpetually bailed out by the government. I also predict the emergence of local or even regional "school deserts" where families have no school options.
Availability will dictate choice to a large extent unless there is a fair amount of overcapacity. What if there are no schools with available capacity within, say, 40 miles? What if a large region has exactly one company operating schools? What if that company goes out of business during the school year?
Why aren't other countries lining up to try voucher schools? Let's see some success stories.
What are the choice criteria that parents are supposed to sort out when trying to get their kid into an available seat?
Of course the Prussian cabal has been secretly controlling our schools for as long as Prussia has been a country, but effectively? And I don't see voucher schools in my state offering radically different education, but rather, just doing the same thing with better discipline and fewer special needs kids.
Most children in Denmark attend public schools. They have a limited number of private schools, backed up by the public school system, just like I described above.
"Of course the Prussian cabal has been secretly controlling our schools for as long as Prussia has been a country, but effectively?"
Prussia set the model. Our country uses it for our country's indoctrination. Not a hard concept.
"And I don't see voucher schools in my state offering radically different education, but rather, just doing the same thing with better discipline and fewer special needs kids."
Why?
"Most children in Denmark attend public schools."
But the funds are tied to the children, not the school district. Doing so would create more competition in existing public schools.
I was thinking "God will provide," equally hypothetical.
>>>> Prussia set the model. Our country uses it for our country's indoctrination. Not a hard concept.
But effectively? Prove that our schools are actually carrying out indoctrination. It's not even measured. How would we know? The origins and even structural similarities don't prove the intention or outcome of contemporary education. You have to show that what you're claiming is actually happening.
>>>> Why?
Ask them. Probably because of parental demand, and it's an easy formula. If charter schools are loosely modeled on the public school formula, it's easier to move kids in and out, and to hire teachers.
>>>> But the funds are tied to the children, not the school district. Doing so would create more competition in existing public schools.
You have to prove an actual effect on competition. Without overcapacity, slotting kids into schools is a zero sum game. The system may be quite stable over time, which might suggest that something other than competition is driving quality.
Capitalism is not hypothetical and we have evidence of it. The wall falling in 1980's Germany and seeing the stark difference in quality of life being one of the more dramatic examples.
"Prove that our schools are actually carrying out indoctrination."
Well, if the crown jewels of capitalism and Prussian indoctrination are a government run voucher school program in a socialist country, and the Pledge of Allegiance, then you've certainly got me. ;-)
That's certainly what I've seen. Friends were appalled when they moved their kid from private to public and saw how much more support she was getting for her dyslexia in the public school. The private school just wasn't interested in doing much about it.
Public school support is uneven though. Some districts are great. Others are just great at seeming busy with services. Some are just bureaucratic nightmares.
The size of public school districts tends to be an advantage when it comes to special ed, IME. A private school isn't going to hire 3 therapists for the one child with autism. Maybe they find someone to come in for a few hours a week at most.
Public school districts can hire full time therapists and send them around to schools as needed. They also have the legal obligations of IEPs and cannot deny services to students without running up against federal law. They tend to have a lot better staff with a lot more training with a lot more hours they can devote to the kids.
That is a blanket statement and it just isn’t true. There are kids in my kids’ private school that have learning disabilities and our school not only has an on staff psychologist but also works with outside consultants to help on the more difficult cases. The school is extremely supportive. And there are plenty of public schools with abysmal special ed. My point is that such blanket statements aren’t true.
It's broadly true. It's not feasible for private schools to provide special ed services. It costs about 3x as much per student than general ed.
There is a strong incentive to keep special ed populations small or nonexistent at every private school. Both to save money and improve the overall "success" rate of their students.
I don't think so. If you want to meaningfully drag down everyone in class then ask lots of pointless questions about minute details. Keep the conversation going for 5 minutes. Then do this three times per class. If you have 3 people like that in your class then expect to learn nothing.
Students with physical disabilities are usually very expensive to accommodate but not stupid or annoying. They might "ruin" their own education but not anyone else's.
Except that the blanket statement literally is true: public schools are legally responsible for providing education in the least restrictive way to those with an IEP, while private schools are not.
Top public high schools are often better than private high schools. The public school can offer a greater variety of classes and extracurricular activities because they have more students. Private high schools have a much narrower view so are not a great fit for everyone.
Right, but the difference is that you can only send your kids to a top public school if you live in the right district (barring irregular exceptions like charter schools). You can send your kid to any private school you want within driving distance of your home, if you can afford it.
It's difficult for random people on the Internet to know what's right for you and your children, but I hope everyone tells you your heart is in the right place and naturally enrichment is something they'll come to appreciate as much as many other things.
The simple reality of it is if your kids have a natural aptitude for taking standardized tests well with little studying, they are sort of wasting their time in normal schools. Like how else are they going to be evaluated, or the quality objectively measured, if not tests? And then, if your kids just test well, without studying, they have this true gift for whatever idiosyncratic reason...
Why not go to a "cultural expedition" to Malaysia every month?
Why do 4 hours of homework instead of 30 minutes? Why read 1 chapter or fewer of many books, instead of 1 book you really enjoy? Why not spend all day reading 1 book every day, instead of taking 9 classes, 8 of which you don't enjoy?
Why do this structure designed for maximizing SAT scores and common app competitiveness? That is why you can get away with reading almost no books in high school and get an A in English, why you can take 10 classes and 4 extracurriculars and seemingly excel at all of them. It's not designed for anything earnest - of course it is impossible for a kid to excel at everything, of course there's something broken with the way naturally good test takers are evaluated.
Why not, as one mom put it to me, "pet fluffy animals" the whole day one day a week?
A lot of schooling, public or private, is stuck in a feedback loop where they are good at making the average student excel at test taking - recall, the only objective measure of performance - attracting more average students, thereby making their focus on improving test performance even more intense.
So many families are stuck in this trap, a relentless focus on making average students test well. Testing well - at once totally useless and also sometimes just given to some kids, by some gift.
If you're affluent and have such a child, listen they're not going to celebrate the homework, the cramming, the well-roundedness, the being-forced-to-do-shit. It will not ever be relevant in their life. If they have the natural aptitude for testing, it is impossible for the prevailing social order from distinguishing them from someone without that natural aptitude who studies 10x as hard.
This is the future of remote learning. Unlocking happiness for the small number of deeply misallocated children. Not helping the average student. Testing is the culprit for their misery, not remote learning, and tell me, what alternative is there?
You realize by then, those places will likely be like IBM by then. You'll be the same as a parent wanting their kid to get a job with the local factory, because its what did you so well all these years, and arguing with the kid when they want to do something different, then the factory shuts down in 5 years. What you want is your kid to be versatile enough to go to whatever is the thing by then, and it might not even be a "tech" company. At least not in the traditional sense because at some point all companies are tech companies, especially as time goes on. Even Walmart is a tech company since they only require humans to man the stores to put things on the shelves and drive the trucks at this point.
This is one problem I think remote learning could solve, like geographic arbitrage.
Just like before Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ etc you had one cable provider in your location, the package gave you some of the channels you wanted but never everything, and a lot of channels you didn't now you can do what you want, and your provider isn't based on your geographic location.
Remote learning allows you to choose a school, or even a teacher based on your kids needs. Pick one that has the teaching method you want, say you have a kid with dyslexia but none of the teachers in your local school have experience with it. You can now go to the "school" or class with the teacher that specializes in teaching kids with dyslexia. Your school system doesn't pay enough to hire and keep good teachers or at least live comfortably in your area? Say 40-60k in your city doesn't go far enough there, but the teacher could be in a cheaper city or state as long as they're board certified in your state. The inverse could be true, a really good teacher could work for NYC schools making good money, but live in NY State. Some rural communities are hiring teachers out of the Philippines because they can't find good teachers willing to live in those areas, remote learning may also help solve this need.
Remote learning doesn't fix the secondary concern of American education. Child care. Millions of families are SOL since they can't work as many hours without someone watching the kids.
This is assuming I was advocating for eliminating that option either. All solutions have pros and cons. It solves a problem for some, and creates a problem for others. You're presenting a con, but there's also nothing saying a kid can't go to a local school to attend a remote class. Same as I sit in an office and my team works entirely elsewhere, and people in my office work in for teams that aren't entirely located on site.
In one part of LA theirs basically a small city completely surrounded by LA called Culver City. Culver City allowed for low income housing to be built , but then didn't allow those low income families to attend Culver City schools. Pretty overt classism( along with some other isms )
District lines are funny things. Our neighborhood could certainly be called 'affluent' and our schools are probably the best in the district. What I'm realizing is how little that counts for.
We could have chosen a cheaper neighborhood in a 'nicer' district but 9 years ago it didn't seem like such a big deal.
Yes, it would be cheaper in the long run. The problem is the housing cost differential can be several hundred K, and you may not be able to get a mortgage approved or find a low end home in the affluent area.
The market always prevails over the state. Private schools can only charge as much as the demonstrated quality of their product while the state as the default option is not accountable to anyone because those who can afford better can escape them.
> Private schools can only charge as much as the demonstrated quality of their product
Part of my aversion to private schools has been about what constitutes 'quality'. For a lot of wealthy parents, 'quality' seems to mean that their kids get straight As without putting in much effort. Money corrupts. Private schools aren't going to easily give up on $30k a year.
I went to a private school for 2 years in HS and it was far more challenging academically than public school, was also harder to get A's so I distrust your statement. Most private schools also have waiting lists to get in so doubt the schools care.
That’s not been my experience. A strong statement like that needs to be backed up by data not an anecdote though. Can you share a study showing private schools are less academically rigorous than public schools and/or give easier As?
If you’ve read my posts here I am not a bleeding heart lefty, but hear me out.
Ban private schools (or pay-for schools) while also banning teachers unions. It sounds horrible and is probably unconstitutional. But I believe it would make for a better future.
If the affluent were forced to use the public school system you could be damn sure it would have unbelievable funding either through taxes or really successful brownie sales. By forcing society to learn together we cut the bullshit and actually create this so called “equity” by ensuring schools are truly funded and more importantly looked after by the people that care. And either see the value in or have the time/resources to see to it the schools are successful.
By banning the unions we remove the politics from it all. Teachers become well paid on a performance basis. Independent, local, citizen committees are in charge of evaluating curriculum and ensuring teachers are not incompetent or activists.
In essence, largely remove government oversight from schools. Let the community make the curriculum. Everyone has to use it.
There’s probably a million problems here. But I think it’s a massive improvement over the current situation.
Palo Alto, one of the wealthiest (and liberal!) places in America is shutting its high school down because everyone is rich enough to send their kids to private school. Insane.
>If the affluent were forced to use the public school system you could be damn sure it would have unbelievable funding either through taxes or really successful brownie sales.
It doesn't work this way. Affluent people congregate together and push up the price of housing in a commmunity to drive out "undesirables", then the "undesirables" all end up living in a poor part of town, with shitty schools. But now it's even harder for the "undesirables" to get a good education for their kids, as renting/buying a house in the affluent communities is even more expensive than private school would be.
Have we considered not tying school funding to property tax? What if all the property tax was (sort of) evenly distributed among schools? Similar to Canada [1] (and I bet other countries).
If that's true then make it so you can't pick the school your children go to, instead they are assigned random one (between reasonable limits, e.g. not farther away than 1 hour conmute)
Some people disagree that busing didn't work [0] as well as there is research showing that and I quote "results show that a higher percentage of Black schoolmates has a strong adverse effect on achievement of Blacks" [1]
> If the affluent were forced to use the public school system you could be damn sure it would have unbelievable funding
That's actually one of the things I value most about the school systems here in semi-rural Iowa.
Nobody is Silicon Valley "affluent", but there are no private schools, so the kids from well-off families are in the same classes as the poor kids.
In most of the bigger suburbs / cities, there are multiple schools that you go to based on where you live. It basically means the schools are income-segregated, which seems like a great disservice to everyone in my opinion.
Most of the kids I met in college who went to those "good schools" had vastly overinflated opinions of themselves.
Never met many kids from the "bad schools" because they were too poorly run for the kids to make it to college anyway.
If the affluent are forced to use the public school system, the schools in their neighborhoods would be awesome and the schools down the road in the less affluent part of town will remain just as bad as they are now.
Look at Saratoga High School and Lynbrook High School, in Silicon Valley not far from Palo Alto. Huge funding. Donations of equipment from local tech companies. Fundraisers run by rich parents. Great facilities.
Yet schools 20 minutes away in the less nice parts of the Bay Area are still terrible.
I'm not affluent by any means, but, if in any case I see my kids' schools are degrading quality wise including seeing his peers as some people that I (or my wife) see as "undesirables" (such a bad word here, but I really mean some kids that would have bad influence on my kids) we'd sacrifice one of career and income and just teach our kids at home.
Not trying to bring race/culture into this discussion, but I believe most Asians will think like this (we are Asians). On the other hand, we value harmony and homogeneity than diversity. It doesn't mean we don't value diversity. It just means we have harmony first as priority and diversity second. As soon as diversity starts to degrade harmony, then we gonna cut the diversity part. So if the school kids are good, we are happy, but if not, we gonna take our kids out of it.
And if this is so offensive, why are you using a throwaway? I'll reply anyway for people to read (because I know you will read anyway, from your safe space, lol)
Notice I didn't say I am against diversity. Diversity is good, even I'd rather see Samba performed by Brazilian than Japanese Brazilians in the streets of Tokyo. Also diversity can mean a lot of things, not just race, but economy as well, actually this was more in line with what in my mind, because of my upbringing in Asia where racial diversity is miniscule but mostly socio-economic diversity.
Priorities, that's the word here. Can I work 80hrs a week? Sure, but my family and mental health takes priority. Do I want diversity? Of course, but harmony takes priority. When I send my kids to school, I want them to be educated in an educative environment, and nothing else. I don't want them to do bad stuffs, I don't want them to skip class. I don't want to go home after work noticing my kids are not getting the education that they get but something else.
Simple.
EDIT: I guess you mistaken the race/culture into a thing where you assume I think race/culture are closely associated to economic performance? Lol you are mistaken, but I see why you would assume that based on my grammar?
What I meant was, as Asian (this is the race/culture that I meant), we inclined to think in harmony first, because in our culture, harmony is more important. Do you get it? If not, I don't know how to properly explain it, English is not my first language, sorry.
There are many reasons someone may wish to remain anonymous on the internet. Sorry if my anonymity triggers you.
I didn't say you were against diversity, I said you created an inverse relationship between diversity and harmony. You could have had that whole discussion about optimizing for harmony without discussing diversity at all (there are many things that might affect your harmony including curriculum changes or standardized testing). The fact that you placed diversity in opposition to harmony is why I said what I said.
Perhaps it's just the fact that you're not a native english speaker, but the fact that you're now making assumptions about economics (who said anything about that?) and brought up diversity in the context of a comment about "undesirables" affecting your kids lead me to believe that you just don't like diversity.
Oh yes, as if just using a random account, not being labelled "throwaway" is not anonymous enough :) There are many reasons, of course, one of them is trolling without having to get the repercussions of having your background inspected for inconsistencies in your belief while teaching people on how they should be :)
Alright anonymous stranger with throwaway account who are so wise in the ways of diversity, can you help me, a gullible peasant to like more diversity, according to your definition of liking diversity? Or is it better for me to go back to my country? Or my country has too much diversity maybe I should go back to my city? Or maybe even that is too much diversity I should just go back to my family? That's also too much, maybe I should just be in my own room with myself.
Most states top up funding for poorer districts from state funds. Federal funding then comes in on top to pay for programs that directly target poor students. I think the issue is similar to college funding: There’s money, but it’s not reaching the instructional budget.
I’m not sure it’s about the money 100% here. I think my main point is what happens if wealthy people who can afford to take very good care of their kids have to mix with everyone else? Can we get their values and ethics imbued? You can be assured they wouldn’t let the place rot.
My question is: are the upper middle class which are statistically very liberal willing to agree to send their kids to the same schools as the kids they claim to fight for?
I think not but if so I do think our society would be better as they’d make sure the schools are good.
Busing is used to desegregate schools in some areas. Turns out people don't like that. Wouldn't want little Jimmy to mix with the wrong crowd, getting in fights or scoring drugs:
"If you’ve read my posts here I am not a bleeding heart lefty, but hear me out."
Even if you are one, it's not a bad or anything. Putting the community before individual and looking out for one another isn't a bad thing. Being in community, as a social animal that we are, is what keeps us going.
Myself being a left leaning person, just for the sake of argument or as a thought experiment, if every man is for himself, let the families that can afford education, be it offline or online, send their kids to study. When food and a roof over the head is not a right, then why should education be looked at any different?
You also need to disconnect school funding from local taxes. Currently schools in the US are primarily funded by local property tax, which means there are rich districts where the people are well-off, the property is valuable, and the schools are well-funded. Then there are poor districts where the people are poor, the property not worth much, and the schools badly funded. To get equity that funding setup has to change.
Also you need to address poverty. Public schools are challenged with educating every child, but for the poorest the biggest barriers to education have nothing to do with what happens in the classroom. Without adequate food, good sleep, consistent home environment for study, school outcomes for the poor will always lag far behind. In many international measures where it appears the US has a schooling problem the underlying truth is the US has a poverty problem.
> Teachers become well paid on a performance basis. Independent, local, citizen committees are in charge of evaluating curriculum and ensuring teachers are not incompetent or activists.
I've had the opportunity to lend my software/IT skills to my local school district during COVID for the past 6 months to help with virtual learning.
What I have learned is:
1. Lesson planning to meet the various requirements from the local district, the government (like a state-level education agency) and any other pertinent requirements from various disability related laws is difficult. I doubt as you say "local, citizen committees" being in charge would have any benefit. Many parents I have observed over Zoom are clueless about subject matter we are teaching. So no I would not have citizen committees evaluating curriculum. That is not something the public can do.
2. Curriculum is often developed by teachers in a collaborative manner (within the school, cross grade level, within the school system/district, and across the state), and consultants are paid to help design curriculum. While I have seen some consultants more akin to snake oil salesmen many have PhD's and >30 years of experience teaching. They know the pitfalls involved in curriculum design.
3. Teachers are put under a lot of stress- again from regulatory/compliance within the public school system, their state and federal requirements, along with teaching, lesson planning, dealing with parents. They are already severely underpaid. Many teachers I know in my district are working >80 hours week and making around 50-60k. So you should be careful what you say.
4. "Well paid on performance basis" With what money? Performance currently (right or wrong) is defined as growth in test scores on the same subject matter over time usually as checkpoints throughout the year with state-level testing at the end. I don't think this is an accurate method of determining a teachers worth. I've observed really good teachers (give clear engaging lessons) but student performance on quizzes/homework is bad- simply because the support structure at home is not there. So tying an already underpaid teacher to "performance" reviews is an antipattern. Teachers are already stressed- and I know- they stress on these checkpoint growth tests- and while they are stressing they are not able to do good work in terms of teaching and lesson planning.
5. Teaching is very difficult- you need to be able to manage students behavioral issues, be knowledgeable on the subject and able to present the subject in a digestible manner that keeps students engaged.
6. "ensuring teachers are not incompetent or activists." This is an HR problem, that can be solved with good hiring practices. Perhaps whiteboarding teacher interviews? Just kidding. Many schools recruit graduates as "student teachers" where teaching ability can be judged but also taught. Student teachers have an opportunity to learn what the job really entails and can be mentored. Kind of like residency for nurses/doctors. I don't think the public is educated enough to be a good judge of that. I think you live (Palo Alto?) in a bubble of other highly educated people so your definition of the "public" is just that, but in many other places this is not the case. Now I do agree there are internal politics (I've witnessed a lot of this good and bad), but again the public is not equipped to handle that.
> In essence, largely remove government oversight from schools.
I do agree somewhat with this. I have observed teachers to spend 5-10h/week on government imposed regulatory activities such as moving paperwork around on arcane poorly built state-purchased or internally developed IT tools. Other than paperwork I don't think there is a lot of government oversight on schools as you seem to think there is.
> Curriculum is often developed by teachers in a collaborative manner
Which has the hilarious (in a sad sort of way) effect of meaning you can move 5mi, cross a state line, still be living among similar people and yet have totally different history/science curriculum because the state on average is very politically different so the committee agrees on a different subset of history/science that need not be taught.
It wouldn't be Constitutional to prohibit voluntary associations of teachers. However there is no Constitutional requirement to allow collective bargaining.
Or heavily tax private schools and eliminate the local housing development vetoes that allow wealthy enclaves to form and persist. Without housing reform, public schools in wealthy areas become pseudo private schools. Optionally, also mandate open enrollment for public schools.
I'm not sure if this is a funding problem. US public schools spend almost the same amount per student ~10k. I find it more likely that there's a difference in how resources are allocated in public vs private institutions.
Palo Alto has two high schools, and I have not heard that either is being shut down due to low enrollment. Instead, they are so overenrolled that interdistrict transfers into the district are denied.
My biggest issue with that is I don’t think it helps. Putting people in places they can’t compete doesn’t work.
I’d even claim it a national security threat in that its vital our smartest kids get the best advanced training as it should benefit us all. Letting average or above average kids into places meant for the best of the best doesn’t help.
Covid response is drastically increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and I see no prospect of it being addressed. At some point we're going to ask when the price being paid by large swathes of society is worth it.
I think we're past the point of being worth it, and it's now devolved into a political game that's hurting people more than the virus ever could. I can't help but to ponder how differently things would be handled, were this not an election year. It's a sad state of affairs to be sure.
It sounds like the system was already failing these kids, that they were teetering on the brink of being left behind already. That's the actual tragedy here.
1. How are those two things mutually exclusive? Re-opening plans were inadequate and also remote learning leaves students behind. There's "No Silver Bullet" in software, and educating the country's children in a pandemic is infinitely more complicated than most software projects. (And, BTW, re-opening schools also isn't an either/or... but hard-line partisans on both sides are giving school district admins hell about any attempt at a hybrid approach)
2. Even if you think those two things are mutually exclusive, which they're not, why can't the New Yorker publish two different pieces on two different perspectives written by two different people (Alec MacGillis and Amy Davidson Sorkin)? It's a magazine, not a party platform.
This is such a common misunderstanding it might be time to consider labels or an explanation somewhere about the difference between reporting, commentary, and advocacy (among other categories).
The New Yorker is particulary tricky because they blend all of the above along with fiction and satire.
FWIW, the isolation can be a source of opportunity as you are freed from ordinary distractions. Many years ago I read a bunch of the great works of literature during a long winter of discontent. None of the books were "assigned" or "required" as it was just me saying "OK, War and Peace, let's see what all the fuss is about." And some of those books are still some of my absolute favorites to this day. YMMV
Hey man, please feel free to email me at me at focalPoint49 (at) protonmail (dot) com and/or look for counseling online. I'm not a counselor but at least I can be someone to talk to so you don't feel as alone.
Hey friend, here are some random ideas for you to fend off loneliness. I’ve been doing all of these myself:
- Have a quasi-solo dance party (quasi because you’re still dancing with these people, albeit in a different slice of space time): https://youtu.be/VZClzm3K__4
- Join a teamwork oriented MMO (WoW classic?)
- Do a virtual happy hour with your family or friend(s)
- Go for walks in the nearest nature area (you’ll probably run into people) or post up in a local park
- Join a dating site like OKC, even just to browse or chat (and even setting your location to a faraway city)
Seconded. You're going to get rejected, it's just par for the course, but it can be hard to handle if you're in a bad place. I personally only try to date when I feel emotionally stable. Can try something like chatroulette or omegle though.
You can always approach it as “just dipping your toes in the water”, and tune your expectations accordingly. There is really no correct way to use an online dating platform, though there are some wrong ways—e.g. harming yourself or others).
Yes, going into it with a healthy and open mindset is essential. But being depression-free is not a necessary condition, and I’d caution people against establishing that type of artificial gateway for themselves. My belief is that every human is of infinite value, and nothing that happens in the online dating realm can subtract from that (“you don’t do arithmetic with infinity”, so said my calculus professor).
I have two kids in private school and one in public school. My kids in private school are now going in person 5 days a week and have about 5 hours per day of school work. My kid in public school does everything remotely and may at some point go back for two half-days per week, she has about 3 hours school work per day (and has yet to be challenged by any of the work).
They were all home doing school remotely for a few weeks, that was really difficult for everyone.
By reading this article I can assume that most of us are privileged enough to have a decent cellphone/internet connection and most likely good education. Is important to put ourselves in the shoes of parents and kids which find in school a refugee and an opportunity to grow, learn and socialize
This does not look like a problem we can solve with technology. I do not think we can get pricing down through tech improvements to the point where each child can receive services and devices to be hooked up to a remote learning service.
No, that's what I mean. I can't do anything about this. I can't make tools that fit into what's left after they spend all their money. They have to do something else somewhere else. I can't help.
There are two core issues with public schools in USA:
(a) the funding is based on property taxes from school's neighborhood. This just fuels inequality loop: bad schools -> low property values -> low funding. Instead, the state should collect property taxes, not counties and distribute funding proportionally to students' population
(b) It is close to impossible to evaluate (and fire bad) teachers in public schools
Until (a) and (b) are addressed a very tiny fraction of public schools can be of acceptable quality. The pandemic just amplifies things and makes problems more urgent to address.
> Instead, the state should collect property taxes, not counties and distribute funding proportionally to students' population
This was done in Kansas. Here's what happens:
1. Taxes are driven into the ground (...why would wealthy suburbs vote to tax themselves if that $ is just going to be redistributed away from their schools?).
2. Districts in wealthy suburbs run fundraisers that haul in six figures for breakfast (literally, and regularly). Those donations then pay for additional instructional staff, materials, books, etc.
3. Schools that can't make six figures on charity brunches for the band, golf house galas for the football team, and dinner parties for the STEM teacher are screwed.
This isn't a systems problem, it's a values/morality problem. If you change the system and don't change people's values then they will find a way to route around your system.
> It is close to impossible to evaluate (and fire bad) teachers in public schools
It's possible to fire bad teachers. Harder than it should be, but absolutely 100% possible. Evaluation is the more difficult problem, but I'm not sure source of funding has anything to do with that.
They should have Universal School Funding where each student gets a Student Education Account that follows the student. In cases where local schools are all abysmal, using that money on accredited online or at home educational opportunities should be possible. Seems like we're already doing ad hoc ill considered online schools whipped up by local school districts. Might as well let people innovate in the space and do it properly. If parents want to try it. Some do.
Source of funding absolutely has everything to do with it. Schools only indirectly lose funding for bad teachers. If you get a bad barber, you go to a different barbershop. Schools don't have the same economic pressures. They have political and bureaucratic pressure, mainly.
The hybrid public/private market in higher education is a good warning of the perils of such a system. Many of the pathological incentives for voters, legislatures, and institutions that lead to horribly expensive higher ed would also exist in the "Student Education Account" scheme you propose.
If we go this route, I promise you'll be seeing "I can't retire because I spent $100K on my kid's K12 schooling" in 20 years.
Also -- and I admit this is personal preference -- I don't want my tax dollars redistributed to the local branch of the Catholic or Mormon church. Which is absolutely what would happen.
School is already horribly expensive, both in per student costs and in property values in successful school districts. The irony is all that money being thrown around doesn't end up paying for qualified STEM faculty.
As for funding religious schools, that's part of civil life. Others will object to funding atheism or critical race theory. Should we (forever) fight it out politically or should we find ways to disagree in the spirit of compromise?
> As for funding religious schools, that's part of civil life.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
My tax dollars pay for a Church I am no part of is what was meant by Establishment.
This is not true in every civil society, but it has always literally been Rule #1 in this civil society.
> but it has always literally been Rule #1 in this civil society.
It literally has not; first, because it wasn’t even a rule that bound the states until after the 14th Amendment, and second, because even federally the 1st Amendment wasn't in place from day one of the Constitutional order, being ratified 3 years after the Constitution; the First Congress under the Constitution was not bound by it at all, since it was ratified during the term of the Second Congress.
It really was not what was meant. Religious expression was more prevalent at the time that was ratified, if anything (such as prayers lead by officials).
In this case, legislative bodies would be establishing a funding solution. No particular choice about religion (or lack thereof!) is made there. That would be up to household responsible for the relevant children.
Trying to change peoples mind on something so fundamental as wanting the best for their children is almost as futile as trying to change the laws of physics. If you look at history one of the solution of social problems in communism was to change peoples mind (create the new men) mostly through methods like criticism and selfcriticism and education from early age on. While I believe this changed the character of the people to a certain extends it didnt really work. What my takeaway is, you shouldnt work against (or shouldnt rely on changing) human nature if you want to achieve solutions.
(Not picking specifically on communism here, was looking for examples. What works of course is raising peoples awareness about things they didnt know and support change, like palm oil or recycling)
K12 education is not zero-sum. In many ways it's positive-sum. Even private schools and "good" high schools in the USA are mediocre at best. Raise the median quality and the best schools will also get better.
1. Sorry for the confusing grammar. In that sentence, the golf house is the location at which the gala for the football team is held. Not a resource for the school. (E.g., because the gold house is owned by a country club whose members are the parents of many of the football players.)
2. Band, sports teams, and other extra curricular are:
a) often not de facto optional (the poorest districts in the country will scrape together the money for a football team), and
b) actually serve an important social + educational function. There’s lots of data correlating long-term life outcomes with participation in after-school extra-curricular activities.
3. These districts also both directly and indirectly subsidize their educational offerings with charitable donations.
> is close to impossible to evaluate (and fire bad) teachers in public schools
It is harder to hire new (good) teachers than it is to fire bad teachers.
My first teaching job paid $29,000 a year in 2004 and I had a CS degree. My classmate who I went to high school with, same college, same major, same minor, and moved back to the same town.. his starting salary was $80,000 and they paid for him to get his mba. He works at Google now.
16 years later and I make $60,000 teaching (because I moved to a much wealthier district). Next week I start a new job programming for $80,000.
Who is going to teach cs in my place? Who is going to turn down $80,000 - $100,000 for a $50,000 teaching job... In a school with 3000+ students, during a pandemic?
The chemistry, history, or anything teachers wouldn't get the 2500 stipend or the industry experience bump (even if they were a professional chemist for 20 years!), so would only make $60,000 after 30 years of teaching (at which point they would max out the ladder)
0 years experience, 45,000. 30 years experience, 60,000 (in my district) Do you have a phd? You get +$2000 a year.
The head football coach makes $100,000+. The band director makes $100,000+.
Everyone knows the answers, but why would a good CS teacher make so little? Seems like demand for high school level CS education is through the roof and the talent doesn't come cheap.
No one would design our educational system this way from scratch.
Teachers are not paid based on supply and demand. We all get paid the same amount (by district) based purely on years of teaching experience. With little perks for masters degrees ($1000 per year on my district) or teaching a CTE class like computer science ($2500 per year but 5 extra work days), and I even got a few extra steps on the ladder for industry experience (9 years experience for me, about $5000 up the ladder)
Some districts are doing a Pay For Performance situation, where "good teachers" can earn lots more... But I have a feeling the average teacher wage is lower in those districts and is highly dependent on what classes and mix of students your administrators give you (the AP calc teacher is going to have higher achieving students than the class full of seniors that are just taking algebra 1) it all depends on how "performance" is measured..
> Teachers are not paid based on supply and demand.
Actually, they are. There's just lots of crappy supply.
Pennsylvania got wonderfully hosed by this. Back in the late 1990s(?) Pennsylvania put up a real teacher's test. The problem was that almost half the teachers and would-be teachers failed the test. When Pennsylvania was about to have to face the reality of supply and demand (lots of money to pull in teachers who could actually pass the test), they simply scrapped the testing plan instead.
People only care about education quality until they have to pay for it.
It's worth noting that the private sector doesn't have performance based pay figured out either. But it has a lot less ability to utterly deny pressure from the supply of labor or the demand for services.
At any rate, it's a shame. And folks will blame systemic educational failures on a lot of things, but this basically boils down to an entrenched bureaucratic culture that really has a regressive outcome. Rich parents, parents in university towns, and parents who are engineers will get their children access.
I was surprised to find that (a) is not correct in many school districts. First, many poor schools are heavily subsidized by the state. Second, somehow there are tons of awful schools with decent funding.
Just click through [1] for example. The very first school on the list [2] has funding of $14k per student. This is way above national average. And that's NM - not the most expensive state in the world.
As for (b) - wouldn't it apply equally to both good and bad schools?
> The very first school on the list [2] has funding of $14k per student.
The problem is that, according to the Gates Foundation, $14K is about the minimum point at which you start to have a functional classroom (and that study was about 10 years ago, now, so the number is higher)
> The desire to protect children may put their long-term well-being at stake.
The virus barely affects children. It's never been about the children, only about protecting the welfare of old people at all costs, the youth be damned.
They said "to protect the children" instead of "to protect the teachers". They lied. People don't have to come with that rebuttal every time someone corrects the lie that we do this to protect the children.
This is what's becoming worrisome to me. It would be horrible to lose so many of our elders. But is that as bad as wrecking our young? Someone from LessWrong needs to step in and run the cold-hearted utilitarian calculus on this.
Mostly it's driven by the teacher's unions. If we wanted to we could find ways to open the schools. It's just the people who feel the effects of the policy making are not the ones with a voice.
> Mostly it's driven by the teacher's unions. If we wanted to we could find ways to open the schools. It's just the people who feel the effects of the policy making are not the ones with a voice.
No, the problem you are complaining of here is that the people that feel the effects of the policy making have too much of a voice.
I mean, unless you are have a convincing argument that teachers are somehow unaffected by policy regarding the manner in which teaching is conducted.
Teachers unions represent the best interests of teachers, not students or parents. That’s just a fact, but people often defer to the teachers’ unions on “what’s best.” An excellent bit of marketing on the part of the unions.
A common teacher complaint, IME, is an expectation that they should be ready and willing to sacrifice anything because of their love of the students. Teachers have every right to have their own interests represented.
Much as I'd like to see our schools re-open, I wouldn't sign up to be the school nurse for anything. Every single kid with every slight Covid symptom is going to come to my office with their poorly fitting badly worn masks. What a nightmare.
There is some initial evidence that teacher unions may influence school openings. From the abstract:
Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semi-parametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, and a further disaggregation to the county level. We also do not find evidence to suggest that measures of COVID-19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions.
All those other countries that have way better educational outcomes than the USA also have teacher's unions, and their teacher's unions are at least as strong.
If unions were really the fundamental problem it would be hard to explain why those other educational systems can be so much better than the USA's.
> The desire to protect children may put their long-term well-being at stake.
It's a good article but this is a needlessly click-baity thesis. The content of the article itself doesn't agree with it. The "desire to protect children" isn't the cause of the problem, it is the lack of internet and home/food security among kids in so many of these communities, as the article describes very well. They were never well served by the public school system even before the pandemic.
Teachers unions were right to be wary of school reopening plans, especially since they are being driven by political needs and shouted out in rallies. Meanwhile the government is denying funding for PPE for teachers.
And something else the article frustratingly ignores is that safety of children is dependent on the safety of their caregivers, who are often elderly and have more underlying health conditions in disadvantaged communities.
These kids’ primary challenge isn’t a lack of Internet. It’s a lack of parents willing and able to keep them safe and well fed. This problem is highly exacerbated when the public school these children would escape to 5 days a week—where they would be safe, fed, and educated—gets shut down.
School, for example, is where they will meet caring adults that possibly will build up enough of a rapport with them that they might even disclose the abuse they could be subjected to at home. Child abuse reports have dropped precipitously since COVID lockdowns began.
While there may be a small number of districts which can’t provide a half-dozen reusable masks and some hand sanitizer to each teacher, PPE is by and large not the issue causing teachers to protest returning to classrooms. Many teachers desperately want to return to classrooms where they can actually teach and interact with the students they adore, versus the mind numbing insanity of trying to corral 20-30 elementary school students over a Zoom call.
The “safety of children” cannot be measured on a single axis. There is no one measure which is ethically dominant of all others. This is the “train-switch” dilemma writ large.
It’s important to discuss and research the prevalence and magnitude of the myriad destructive and deadly consequences of closing schools. Most importantly, while a minority of students may live with high-risk family members, the vast majority do not and the people in the position to make the delicate and deliberate decision of whether their children should attend in-person classes are the parents/guardians of each family.
This varies greatly by district, and even school within a district. I'm a high school teacher, and I know something like 45% of our students live with their grandparents or other elderly guardians; and that's not counting those who have parents or others at home who are high-risk. It's a ridiculously high number. We're also in a high poverty area (20%+ poverty rate) which happens to be extremely rural. Meaning that internet companies just don't service some parts of the county, and the only access kids can get is satellite internet, if at all.
Granted, I'll admit it's highly different for high school as opposed to elementary school, but there's so much variation between districts there's never going to be a good one-size-fits-all plan.
Also, I had a student last year who lives with his mom, who is considered high risk, and was debating on whether he should come back. He didn't want to, as he didn't feel it was safe, but he was on an accelerated track and the only way he could stay on that accelerated pathway was by coming in person. Sometimes kids just can't make the best choice for their future while also making the best choice for their family due to other circumstances.
School gets children out of the home, in some cases dangerous homes. It provides supervision for children whose parents would not be capable or willing of doing so -- rich kids get nannies, poor kids get left alone all day. It provides opportunities for socialization and puts kids in contact with adults who can serve as role models and alert authorities in cases of abuse.
The loss of these important social services matters a lot more than letting kids slip behind in math class by a year.