If we wanted to succeed here, we would likely need to invest more money to hire more or superior teachers that could work individually with these students that struggle to meet the requirements. The worst part would be that even with that investment it may not even be enough. Some portion of the students who don't achieve are not interested in excelling, and individual attention may not help much there.
In addition, for several reasons, teachers no longer control their classrooms. They have no authority.
You can’t let students get ahead, because equity, and you can’t give special help, because it looks like condescension.
Everyone’s a winner, everyone graduates.
Education starts at home and without a learning culture with displine these children are setup to fail.
I went to mostly black and poor public schools my entire childhood. Back then there were a few teachers who clearly didn't care and were never held accountable. Most of the teachers were pretty good though. It's increasingly shifted towards the opposite.
I was blown away by how pathetically run my children's public schools are here in Colorado so I put them both in private school. They get less than half the money per student that the public school system I live in gets, and are vastly more efficient. The operations, the instructors, it's all just run correctly.
When my daughter was still in a public elementary school I walked in one day to try to get her iPad fixed when they were doing full remote learning due to the pandemic. There was a large meeting taking place amongst all the staff. None of them had bothered to return my calls which is why I had to go in person. They looked like they were having a party because I didn't see any work getting done.
At the end of the day it's a government school. Name a single government agency that is efficient with their money. Name a government agency that's good at hiring, or keeping good talent.
We should just do a voucher system and let the private sector deal with this. As a taxpayer I'm deeply resentful of having my money get taken from me and given to unionized teachers who refused to work for a full year and then had the nerve to take summer vacation as if it had been a normal year. These were the same folks who were put at the front of the line for vaccinations independent of their age groups. And then they proceeded to act like they were still in danger and couldn't open schools.
NYC, for instance, regularly reports lead paint exposure in schools.
Harry Potter was pried from that little dusty cupboard closet beneath the stairs and sent to somewhere to reach success.
Send kids that don't have a good home life to someplace where the adults care and have the resources to see that they do succeed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02765...
Just one example of many.
Everybody's talking about the problems with schools, but the issue is the enormous gap in economic inequality that is just growing larger and larger. Parents who have to work 2-3 jobs to support their families don't have the time or energy to devote to supporting their children in their academic lives.
The vaccine wasn’t really available till a few months into 2021, and I can understand the hesitation on some to be the first to take a new vaccine.
Yes private schools might run better. Shockingly richer and generally two parent families are going to have children that been primed to respect learning and have less trauma so much easier to deal with. Public schools teachers don’t have this luxury.
There certainly could be improvements to public school, some of the curriculum is dumb, but again they have to serve all customers, private schools don’t.
I don’t begrudge public school teachers their vacation.
I also realize this past year+ has been extremely stressful on parents, especially those who can’t work from home
Rather, I think it was Hermione Granger that embodied the role model of the student from an underprivilged background who works hard to achieve academic success.
How about NASA?
I'm not a US citizen so apologies if I got that wrong but I figured NASA always had the goods, in terms of personel, even if they also had some bad apples in there.
Teaching at the rural school I grew up in really changed my perspective. I was very abnormal when growing up there, and all my friends were too (I can only think of one good friend who's parents were divorced, and her mom and remarried when she was fairly young), and I was super insulated from the realities of things there. Coming back as a teacher made me see how much worse it is, and it's a clear difference between the kids; even those kids whose parents want them to do well struggle if the parents can't be at home.
Exactly. OP acts as if it's such a great surprise they're run better. Obviously they would be, because they can pick and choose who they take and usually only get those kids who's families are well off enough to afford it; those kids already all have huge advantages when it comes to learning. It's exactly why the voucher system would do no good either -- it'd just make the public school worse as the private schools take those kids who are already borderline on affording it.
You can either afford to:
1. Pay out of pocket for private school
2. Afford to have 1 parent be responsible for participation in some type of home school education (group or otherwise)
3. Relocate your house to somewhere zoned for a “good school”
If you can’t afford any of those things, you don’t have a choice. That’s why people want vouchers.
So basically it goes from those 'with a lot of money hav[ing] a choice' to 'those with some money having a choice'. It doesn't fix the underlying problems at all, and would actually make them worse for those who are left behind.
I live just over the county line from Boulder (I can get to Pearl Street in 13 minutes), and the BVSD is very overrated. They were closed for far longer than other districts were last year. They have a lot of money, but also a ton of wealthy students with overly permissive parents who bring drugs into the schools. (I know the vice principal of Fairview High in Boulder, and the incidence of drug use in the school is mind-blowing, all courtesy of rich kids with rich hippie parents who give them allowances of hundreds a week that they buy drugs with.)
One issue prevalent in all public school systems, but particularly bad in BVSD, is the number of students being falsely classified as learning disabled. Many kids with highly inattentive parents, who are essentially babysat by iPads and video games when at home, are labelled as LD/ADHD/etc when the reality is nobody makes them do their homework or study at home. They are then, due to the disability diagnosis, allocated disproportionate resources and staff to try to bring them up to average level. These resources come at the expense of gifted programs which have fewer seats available than they otherwise would for advanced students with good parents. At the end of the day, most public school systems in the US are investing vastly more resources into bringing poor performers to average than helping gifted students reach their actual potential by actually challenging them.
I view them as institutions which are, at a functional level, primarily incentivized to serve the needs of their employees over those of their students. They are a massive source of union jobs, and these unions are the largest funders of politicians who then increase the budgets that then fund the unions via wages to members. I'm a huge fan of unions in non-monopolized industries, but like FDR, I vehemently oppose unions for public sector employees for this very reason. I pay these idiots whether I want to or not. And my wife and I were emotionally crushed when we saw the horrific, and frankly sloppy, remote learning that was taking place. The curriculum was terrible, the teachers were not engaged, and it just felt like too many were taking advantage of the WFH to fuck off and indulge their hobbies and personal lives. This was a universal sentiment amongst the parents (and hilariously, the middle school students) in my daughter's school. There was not a single remote learning lesson I witnessed that was remotely as effective as a Khan Academy course. We know this because we ended up supplementing her lessons with Khan, and she was very emphatic that she liked them a million times better.
I know many on HN will disagree with my sentiment, but I've noticed that the people in my friend group who don't share my view are disproportionately childless. People with kids in school tend to be pretty frustrated with the structural deficiencies of the fossilized, mid-20th century institutions that are US public schools.
The point being, there is no excuse. The stats on this school district are public, and it's very wealthy.
You don't have kids in school, do you? It amazes me how many people with absolutely no skin in the game comment on this stuff.
Reminds me of the Key & Peele sketch 'If We Treated Teachers Like Pro Athletes' [0]
And sometimes (many times?) the financial calculus is such that _leaving your job/career_ is the cheaper of the two options. Daycare is already more than our mortgage with 2 and the private school elementary age prices that I've seen in my area are _more_ expensive.
That was a private company, btw. I think large companies have problems with personel like that, whether public or private. They have problems, in that their understanding of the labour market has stayed in the 1930's. Anyway I think the same thing that happened with me happened to your friend in NASA.
Most people hear vouchers and they think "the other large public school across town or the existing private school". The real goal is many more small schools.
Enabling "educational entrepreneurship" so somebody who has an idea that thinks will work really well for certain types of kids can start a school teaching exactly that way...and parents can sign up if they think it's best for their child. I want creative teachers to create schools to solve the problems that they see without all of the red tape that makes everyone feel like change is hopeless.
Even with larger schools and bus routes, the solution is to create hubs where you can get off one one bus and hop on the one that goes to your school.
It's certainly different, but it can absolutely be done.
That's not what will happen, though. What'll happen is you'll get big players owning most the schools, all teaching the same way and same stuff (and if there's no oversight, they can also teach anything, even creationism). Capitalism won't allow this to happen.
> Even with larger schools and bus routes, the solution is to create hubs where you can get off one one bus and hop on the one that goes to your school.
This sounds awful, and absolutely won't work for rural areas. I worked at a school where we already had kids on the bus for two hours each way. They had to wake up before 5 sometimes to prep for school. Imagine expanding this so kids can get to their hub and then to another school. That sounds awful.
Really, the only ones who benefit from this system, still, are those who's parents are already borderline being able to send them to private schools or move. It doesn't help the lower socioeconomic groups at all, and, again, will make things worse for them.
Sucks that they did that to you. Utter garbage.... but yeah, waste is what big orgs do.
I was one of those kids. My mother was a drug addict, I spent a large portion of my childhood in a trailer park. There was nothing a teacher could do without me having a structured home life. She would frequently interrupt me when I tried to do my homework, and then yell at me 2 hours later for not having it done. She undermined my teachers at every turn, and when they called to complain about my behavior, she took my side instead of theirs. Once I was provided this structured home life (courtesy of the courts finally giving my father custody of me and my siblings and getting us away from our psycho mother) suddenly I was able to focus on school. If I disrespected a teacher, one phone call to my dad, and I was faced with a terrifying man who made my life hell. This was a powerful incentive to behave for the teachers, and do my homework as well. Bad behavior at school resulted in consequences for me at home.
The current public school system isn't capable of fixing this problem. You are just throwing good money after bad, and dragging the kids who would do well in a better school down with the kids whose homes make it impossible for school to do any good.
Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone is an example of a model that works. He keeps the kids at school for very long hours, and minimizes the time they are at home.
Public schools were not designed or intended to replace the role of functioning families. Trying to force them into that role is a bad idea, and very ineffective and wasteful. Society has changed, an increasingly large percentage of kids across all ethnic groups (except for Asian Americans) are living in single parent homes. You were a teacher, so I think you are aware of. the fact that they are going back to homes where they are entertained by screens all night. The parents frequently throw their hands in the air, and ask "how can I keep him off video games?" seemingly unaware of the fact that they can take the controllers/phone/laptop whatever away and god forbid take the TV out of the kid's room. The point is that teachers can't fix this.
Teacher's unions and public school districts are incentivized to pretend they are capable of addressing the problem, provided they get more money. That's what institutions and organizations do, after all. They always want to expand their scope, get more personnel, do more, and get paid for it. It's dumb in this case.
Big players owning the schools also becomes a huge risk since parents can easily just go elsewhere. Those big players would have to be doing a very good job to keep everybody, compared with the current situation where most people seem to do it because they have no choice.
Where in the world are you seeing a school bus route that goes 2 hours each way? Ideally, the creation of schools a lot closer to those kids would become possible.
And a transport hub is perfectly normal and even reasonable. It simplifies the entire pickup and drop off process. Who knows, maybe UPS can show us how it’s done?
You seem to keep assuming this, but it's just not true. Parents with means can go elsewhere, and even then to a limit. But all that does is leave the schools and kids that are left behind even worse off. And the big schools can keep buying up the other schools. There's only so many places within a range where parents can take their kids, not to mention there'd need to be a minimum amount of kids to even justify keeping one open.
> Those big players would have to be doing a very good job to keep everybody, compared with the current situation where most people seem to do it because they have no choice.
No they really don't. We see this all the time with other big companies. I fail to see how privatizing education makes it any different than every other private enterprise out there.
> Where in the world are you seeing a school bus route that goes 2 hours each way?
Rural United States. I had students literally have to be on the bus at 5:30 in order to get to school at 7.30. They also didn't get home until 5:30 or later at night, depending on weather.
> Ideally, the creation of schools a lot closer to those kids would become possible.
Population dynamics prevent it.
> And a transport hub is perfectly normal and even reasonable. It simplifies the entire pickup and drop off process. Who knows, maybe UPS can show us how it’s done?
Sure, if you're willing to have kids commute multiple hours a day, and have to switch buses (maybe several times?) and somehow expect that to not impact their success.
Basically, to fix this problem, we need to fix the societal issues in the country, not the schools. That's something I entirely agree with. My disagreement is that I think switching to a voucher system and things like that only makes matters worse for those who can't take advantage of just moving for whatever reason.
USGS!! The amount of benefit they give to the public and the data they make available for free, used by every weather station, civil engineer, surveyor, geologist, etc. etc. relative to their budget is insane! And so much of it is mission critical life-and-death stuff.
It's amazing to me. The updates to mapping alone are mind-boggling since they came from the pre-satellite and drone days.
... though I might change my mind if I'm 60 and one needs my COBOL SKILL$$ :P