It's because of school privatization. Notice the sharpest declines in low performing students based on race and income. It's a disgrace. Idiocracy is booooooming.
Specifically the problem is tax vouchers. It's fine to send your kids to a private school, but that shouldn't have any bearing on where your tax dollars go.
I don't think there's a need to distinguish for those alive in USA. This has all happened in the past 10 years. It was accelerated with DeVos in DoEd ... which is literally the epitome of regulatory capture. Coincidentally, this push for privatization coincides with the time frames in the study. Correlation ... causation ... Who cares. Fuckem let's get rich.
I talk to many people who get excited about school choice and not having the state tell them how to educate their kids and totally gloss over the fact that your taxes are not for your kids, but for those of every other taxpayer, so I think it's an important callout.
There's room for private schools, but vouchers can't be a thing. I understand public schools can't accommodate every crazy religion, but public education is a necessity for a successful country.
Once people get enough first hand experience with schools being horrible, constantly closing, uneducated children, etc. They'll blame whatever their social media tells them to.
Inequality can't get much worse before there's a tipping point. People are reallllllly dumb now though so change won't be for better when it comes.
Assuming vouchers are enough to pay for each student, why is public education specifically necessary as opposed to universally funded education? It seems very non obvious that outcomes would be worse when private schools are currently considered a privilege of the rich.
Go speak to 10 new teachers at charter schools in poor neighborhoods. Get the fuck out of your own head.
The "charter schools" are scamming us for tax dollars. They hire fresh grads, tell them to make a lesson plan for the year, and that's about it. The schools often don't last more than a couple years.
People are greedy. We don't need to regulate a solution. KISSSSSSS
My sister went to a charter school until around 5th grade until IIRC she became too stressed out with the work load. I remember my mom telling me that when they switched to normal public school, it was essentially like moving 2-3 years back (which is pretty bad when you're only in elementary school), and she pretty much phoned it in from then on.
My experience with public k-12 was that AP chemistry was the only time I remember actually having to put in any effort at all, and I took almost all of the honors/AP classes I could.
So maybe some charters are a scam. Others are vastly more rigorous than their neighboring public schools. Some public schools offer essentially no education (are the public schools in those same poor neighborhoods any good?). Again, it's not obvious that giving parents some choice means outcomes must be worse. You could still hold charters to the same low bar public schools are held to for standardized tests.
Charters also select for more involved parents by nature of not being the default, so you would a priori expect them to outperform just from that.
They're both scams, just targeting different market segments. The ones in rich neighborhoods are trying to create this prestige/competition environment which excludes anybody who is going to be hard to teach. They're acting as a filter for latent talent / parents that are motivated to help teach. Perhaps some growth happens along the way, but that's not the goal.
By contrast, if you accept everybody then growth has to be a goal. You can't just push out the challenging students to improve your performance against whatever metrics you selected for yourself.
If you filter for kids that are able to learn at a faster pace, and then expect them to perform at a faster pace (as in you actually teach them more), I'm not seeing where the scam is. It sounds like they're serving a group of students that normal schools don't. It's also bizarre to characterize that as "some growth" incidentally happening; the schools challenge their kids more, and the kids grow more. It's very much an explicit reason people choose them. The alternative is those kids with latent talent/supportive parents sit in classes with other kids where they repeat the same material for 8+ years, and the only thing they grow is resentment for their peers and the adults that put them into that situation.
I'm not sure about that alternative. Once I ran out of science classes to take in-house my public school just sent me to college early and paid for the classes. This was 2004, not sure if that's a thing anymore.
The scam is that there's nothing at the end of the road. You get these students that are borderline suicidal because they absolutely must outperform their peers, but it's all just ladder climbing and performance for performance's sake. That takes a toll on a person. And for what? Nobody under that kind of pressure is capable of learning anything.
Then they get to college or industry and they have to work with their peers, or apply creativity in some way, but they can't do either of these things because they're either burned out or preoccupied with scoring points in a game that nobody else in the room is playing--or at least that has been my experience with the people who made me aware that they went to private school: too focused on value to be useful in achieving outcomes. Incapable of making the best of a situation that they feel they're too good for.
Admittedly, there may be people around me who came from that background and I just don't know. It's not like I question people on it. But if that's a blindness I have it's not one I can introspect my way out of. You don't know what you don't know. All I have is these anecdotes about folks who are a sort of walking ad for whatever prestigious rigmarole they managed to survive. Eager to establish some kind of pecking order wherever they go and not invited places because of it despite being otherwise pretty cool.
I don't know if charter schools do the same thing to people, but they appear to be trying--and they've found a way to make the rest of us pay for it despite it being exactly the opposite of the what we're ostensibly paying those taxes for.
I agree that pushing kids too hard to perform at a level that they're barely capable of is bad, and a lot of middle/upper-middle class parents seem to do that when it's totally unnecessary for them. I don't plan to pressure my own kids just for the sake of it.
That said, I was incredibly bored in school with a bunch of AP classes, and still didn't feel much pressure with a double major in math and engineering in university. Like I would skip my real analysis lectures sometimes because they felt like a waste of time (in retrospect I probably should've talked to my advisor to see if I could take the graduate version instead, but oh well). Some kids need a faster pace, and it's good to have somewhere for them to go. The trend seems to be if anything (particularly in certain major west coast cities) that public schools are opting out of being that place. Especially when it comes to non-AP classes, you'd might as well let those kids go home and play video games. They might actually learn more.
We're in agreement about most of that. Except that I don't think that public schools are opting out so much as being forced out because charter schools are taking the funding and the easy students away and leaving them only with the difficult ones--many of whom also need a faster pace.
That was me. I wasn't bored in school because I occupied with other things like how to steal the projector (not that I needed one, but it was an adequately challenging target). It took some very patient and clever public school teachers to refocus that energy in an academic direction. The charter school solution would've been to make me someone else's problem.
You literally agreed with the assertion that rich schools "are trying to create this prestige/competition environment which excludes anybody who is going to be hard to teach". That's agreeing factually with what I'm saying; I'm just saying that that (separating out the kids that will learn at a higher pace and teaching them at an appropriate pace) is a totally reasonable thing to do.
"You're only able to teach kids more because they're the kids that will actually learn" isn't some gotcha. It's the point. Those kids are otherwise neglected. If public schools were still willing to hold kids to some standard, parents wouldn't be looking for alternatives.
And the point of charters or vouchers is to make that more accessible to lower income people, as opposed to today's system where private schools (which in general outperform public in almost every way) exclude most people based on cost rather than aptitude or work ethic. The school my sister went to is in a median-priced neighborhood, for example. Middle class people would like a high-quality education too.
This comment[0] had the statement I quoted. This comment[1] was you saying you completely agree. Admittedly I went to public school, so I might have trouble following, but it sure seems like you're at least conceding that charter schools in better areas are better than their neighboring public schools, and you just don't like the mechanism behind that fact. Or are you saying that a prestigious, competitive environment is a bad thing?
I have to say this is probably the first time I've ever seen someone argue that public schools have always worked and are proven, and that by contrast private schools are prone to have quality issues.
The more usual thing you hear is something like [0], which is something I can't personally attest to or anything, but I've seen it expressed on places like /r/teachers as well. If true and at all common, then that sounds to me like public schools have given up entirely.
> public education is a necessity for a successful country.
Every time it’s studied it’s really hard to tell whether the system has any learning effect. Of all my peers you could pretty much identify their academic ability at age 8.
When you push on this the answer is it’s actually for socialization and day care while parents work. That starts to sound like compliance training and seems like a weird thing to spend 40% of state budgets on in addition to local and federal funding.
> People are reallllllly dumb now
Is this the pro-democracy pro-public schooling take?
> Of all my peers you could pretty much identify their academic ability at age 8.
We're not funding education so that the talented ones can be identified and elevated. We're finding it so that the others can be helped to grow. Latent academic ability at age 8 is a pretty small slice of the task.
The ranking of academic performance at 8 years old remained stable for the next 10 years. Not just the top.
If teaching had a positive effect then why would that be stable? That implies that there was no difference caused by course choices, nurturing by a better teacher, etc. so where is the growth?
And that’s my anecdote. Some studies indicate you can probably skip a decade and show up to college and catch up to your peers in no time.
I don’t think I believe instruction cannot give you useful information, but that the 3rd-12th grade knowledge is thin, artificial, and non-transferable.
I see a lot of growth among high schoolers (my wife is a teacher and I volunteer in the math center at the public school where she works, so I have a lot of contact with them). I also experienced it myself. My shift from picking locks (with mischeif in mind) to an enthusiasm for math and science was mediated by four or five great teachers.
> Some studies indicate you can probably skip a decade and show up to college and catch up to your peers in no time.
That might be true, but it comes at a cost which is that the first two years of college are just high school again.
I've been taking college classes for the last 20 years (most of it far less than full time). It's a bit of a hobby. Every time I switch majors I have to slog through this barrier of classes full of things I already know before I can get on to the good stuff. It's a really stark transition, after which the instructors start treating you like you're there to learn instead of like you're there to score points in some status game.
I always end up with really close relationships with the instructors when I'm wading through highschool 2.0 because they're usually pretty happy to have somebody asking questions about the content and not about what's going to be on the test and when I talk to them about this problem they tell me that they've had to realign the curriculum downward because there's a bunch of stuff which they can no longer rely on high school to teach.
So yeah, is broken. But it didn't used to be broken. Do you really think the way to fix it is to further lower our expectations about what can be usefully done in k-12?
Exempting charter schools from curricular oversight and letting them figure it out (or not) amongst themselves is only going to make for an even wider band of preparedness among college freshmen, which correlates with an even longer slog through highschool 2.0 while the colleges now do even more of the level-setting work that the highschools used to do. That makes the classes more boring, which make college a less attractive option. Plus the taxpayers aren't getting what they're paying for. It's a lose lose scenario.
I don’t understand. school budgets are based on the number of pupils. It’s pretty clearly something that can be divided. Of course there is some fixed costs, but those can be subtracted out of the pool before dividing which voucher policies do.
I pay taxes so that education will be available for the kids growing up in my community. Part of that deal is establishing a set of standards which their education must meet and periodically checking to see whether those standards are being met. It's got flaws, but there is at least some oversight over what that money is being spent on--oversight which is directed by elected officials which I get to vote for. You know, taxation + representation... democracy and all that.
If an organization wants that tax money, it should have to do the work for the community that the tax exists to pay for. The most important part of that work is accepting students of all stripes. If a charter school is trying to set up some kind of exclusive k-12 ivy league then they're not doing the work and they therefore shouldn't be paid for it. And even if they aren't being exclusive, they still should only be paid if they submit to the same degree of oversight--something that charter schools don't do.
None of this has any bearing on where the taxpayers decide to send their kids--the tax obligation is not individually about each taxpayer's kids. That's called tuition, pay it separately if you want. Those of us without kids are on the hook for making the system work for everybody, those with kids should be too, regardless of where their kids go.
This is kind of just a list of school related ideas where each paragraph doesn’t build on the next. Is this a bot post?
> I pay taxes so that education will be available for the kids growing up in my community
Vouchers give money to education for all kids.
> a set of standards which their education must meet
Voucher qualified schools meet the same state test standard and exceed public school performance on those metrics. That’s true of home school.
Inb4 selection effects. Thats a good thing.
If you know anything about metrics in large organizations you probably know that whether those standards mean anything is also questionable.
> elected officials which I get to vote for
Who did you vote for in the department of education? How many people did you vote for in your district? When was the last time one of these people found and corrected poor spending?
> is accepting students of all stripe
Your own public school doesn’t do this. What’s the difference between internal segregation and external, except external does more to keep them physically safe.
And your phrasing implies it’s discriminating on something other than academic aptitude, or at least reasonable participation.
> the tax obligation is not individually about each taxpayer's kids
Yes it is. There is a fixed number of kids in the system. That’s how the budget is set. Let me repeat. If you subtract out the fixed cost from the pool before dividing by student number, than you get a voucher amount which should have no impact on the public schools funding. Because by removing your child you are only reducing the variable cost spent on them.
We want schools to be good for everyone in the country. The only reason we're seeing change now is because of regulatory capture. If we continue to privatize schools, everyone is going to be really stupid.
Voucher schools should be free to exist and collect tuition. It's absurd to give our tax dollars to them.
If you only want certain people to be educated, then we should have private charter schools with tax payer dollars. Given that model, I'm opposed to my tax money funding education because it's for profit MBA nonsense that ruins everything good.
Public education is fundamental infrastructure like roads. We should fund it and have the best in the world. If our schools are lacking, we should correct it. If we leave education to the market, that's pretty brutal gambling with the future. I'd like everyone to have an opportunity.
I also consider jobs and benefits for my neighbors a good thing. It benefit me greatly and it's insane to pull up the ladder on these kids and future generations. You're disgusting.
No, it's really just a single idea about what constitutes corruption and what constitutes doing the work of the people. I don't know how to put it more clearly: If we pay for the solution to a problem, people who aren't addressing that problem shouldn't end up with the money.
> Voucher qualified schools meet the same state test standard and exceed public school performance on those metrics.
>> A charter school has flexibility through waivers; however, in exchange for this flexibility, the charter school is bound by contract to be held accountable for meeting the performance-based objectives specified in the charter.
They only have to meet goals that they set for themselves, not the state's goals.
> And your phrasing implies it’s discriminating on something other than academic aptitude, or at least reasonable participation.
It was not trying to imply that something like racial discrimination was going on. My objection is to publicly funded institutions selecting students by academic aptitude (or how well they speak english, or whether they have health problems that will interrupt with the school day. As it turns out, those things correlate with skin color around here, but that's a separate conversation).
I mean, by all means be selective, just don't expect to get tax money for it. What the public is paying for is the educator of last resort. We're not paying taxes so that your A student can go to Harvard, we're paying taxes so that your D student has a shot at community college. One of those is cheap to teach, the other is expensive. Charter schools scoop up the cheap ones and pocket the extra, leaving public schools without the resources to handle the difficult ones. That's why this isn't the case:
> Vouchers give money to education for all kids.
Public schools do things like vision and hearing tests or free lunch so that all of their students have an equal shot at basic things like being able to see the board and study without being hungry. That's not a model that works if you just allocate the same dollar amount to each student and make policies that act like kids are fungible.
Doing so would be like funding the 911 call center such that each citizen gets one call per quarter, and you get cut off once you run out of calls. This whole every-man-an-island perspective just isn't effective at solving any of the problems we have.
There is also the loosening of education standards since covid. I think literally anybody can just say they're a teacher in Florida now. That might be an exaggeration, but slightly.
