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.
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.